Par sa couverture particulièrement intense au début, la presse américaine a donné beaucoup d'importance aux attentats de Madrid. Le cadrage dominant est un parallèle avec le 11 septembre, justifiant une approche faite d'empathie et un sentiment fort de solidarité dans l'épreuve. Mais, après les résultats des élections législatives espagnoles, quand il est devenu évident que la population espagnole a élu un chef ouvertement hostile à la participation de son pays à la guerre en Irak, la couverture change. La presse américaine (...) passe de la solidarité à la censure. Surtout dans le New York Post, la victoire de Zapatero est présentée comme la preuve que les terroristes ont réussi. Cette orientation anti-Zapatero est justifiée par un cadrage patriotique articulant de façon indissociable la lutte globale contre le terrorisme et la guerre menée par les États-Unis en Irak, conformément à la doctrine de l'administration Bush. Néanmoins, les autres journaux laissent s'exprimer des critiques contre la rhétorique simpliste de Bush.By its cover especially intense at the beginning, the American press has given much importance to the Madrid bombings. The dominant framing is parallel with the September 11, justifying an approach made empathy and a strong sense of solidarity in the event. But after the results of the Spanish elections, when it became clear that the Spanish population has elected a leader openly hostile to the country's participation in the war in Iraq, the coverage changes. The American press passes solidarity censorship. Especially in the New York Post, the victory of Zapatero is presented as evidence that the terrorists have succeeded. This orientation anti-Zapatero is justified by framing patriotic inextricably linking the global fight against terrorism and the war waged by the U.S. in Iraq, according to the doctrine of the Bush administration. However, other newspapers leave to express criticism against the simplistic rhetoric of Bush. (shrink)

Through engaging interviews, testimonials, and anecdotes from photographers, curators, printers, and colleagues, Object Lesson: On the Influence of Richard Benson pays homage to a legendary figure whose name is synonymous with the evolving history and philosophy of photographic reproduction. From making platinum prints for Paul Strand and books with Lee Friedlander to his own experiments with inkjet and digital offset processes, and as a teacher and dean of the Yale School of Art, by the time of his death in (...) 2017, Benson had inspired over three decades of students and artisans through his mentorship and work. In words and images, Object Lesson stands as a testament to Benson's wit, wisdom, and incomparable obsession with how photographic images render and connect us to the world. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity (...) producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporateeverything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments. (shrink)

The challenge that confronts corporate decision-makers in connection with global labor conditions is often in identifying the standardsby which they should govern themselves. In an effort to provide greater direction in the face of possible global cultural conflicts, ethicistsThomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee draw on social contract theory to develop a method for identifying basic human rights: Integrated Social Contract Theory (ISCT). In this paper, we apply ISCT to the challenge of global labor standards, attempting to identify labor rights that (...) could serve as guides for corporations producing or outsourcing outside of their home country. In addition to identifying areas of universal agreement, we also examine whether ISCT is, in fact, a sufficient basis for determining worker rights; we seek to define the parameters of the “sweatshop” problem; we include the application and results of our ISCT analysis as applied to labor standards: the global labor rights hypernorms; and conclude that ISCT is sufficient only for rights that are universal. We also discuss whether market-driven decisions can identify the boundaries of labor rights, or at least assure that market outcomes are compatible with maintaining labor rights, in order to respond to the shortcomings of ISCT. We conclude with some comments on directions of analysis for labor rights determination. (shrink)

The title of this book was inspired by a passage in Charles Sherrington's Man on his Nature.

This is an exciting time for brain science. Recent progress has been such that it now seems realistic to look toward an explanation of mind in terms of the brain's anatomy and physiology. Models based on artificially symmetrical arrays of idealized neurons are now being superseded by ones which properly take into account the brain's actual circuitry. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of brain modeling, containing contributions from many leading researchers in this field. It will (...) be of interest not only to researchers in the fields of brain science and neurobiology, but also to psychologists and those involved in the study of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

A study of Pyrrhonean scepticism, consisting of a new translation of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism, accompanied by an analytic introduction and an in-depth, section-by-section commentary - the first of its kind available.

"Written in a racy, persuasive style, the book impresses the reader as a work of significant scholarship...I encourage students of comparative religions- and especially those of Islamic economics- to read it with great care."&$151; Islamic Studies The worlds of economics and theology rarely intersect. The former appears occupied exclusively with the concrete equations of supply and demand, while the latter revolves largely around the less tangible concerns of the soul and spirit. Intended as an interfaith clarification of the relationship between (...) the material and the spiritual worlds, this volume first inspects secular beliefs about the relationship between economics and ethics. Exploring the differences and similarities between the treatment of economic issues in each of the great monotheistic religions, Rodney Wilson reveals how each tradition considers such subjects as individual wealth, lending, economic regulation, usury, insurance capitalism, socialism, and banking. He concludes with an intriguing epilogue on the rapidly expanding field of business ethics. (shrink)

The world’s oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the planet’s surface and contain 97 per cent of the water on planet Earth. Saltwater connects with freshwater with the outflow of every river and creek or from the drift of thunderstorms across islands to form new oceans. With a shared theme of water, recent projects are discussed as case studies for their focus on ecosystem awareness, cultural knowledge, arts and science and working collaboratively. Water is an essential element and (...) connector of ecosystems, species and spirituality – of life. The ability of water to change forms from liquid to solid to gas offers insights into acknowledging that changeability and adaptability are core to species survival on the planet Earth. It is proposed that by respecting the knowledge that is embedded in the element of water that greater wisdom can be shared which can benefit all life on this planet. With this aspiration in mind, the term OneWater is used to explore the relational aspect of water to consider its connective quality, between watersheds and species. This concept is used to shift views of anthropogenic impacts and embrace a fuller recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems and the role they play in evolving our understanding of the OneWater. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of the place of martial arts in a Christian response to violence. In light of René Girard’s mimetic theory, how can, or should a person of faith consider the practice of martial arts for the purposes of self-protection? This paper will respond to the question by showing that, Girard’s theory situates humanity in the realm of an intermediary process awaiting the consummation of the kingdom of God. We shall discover that we are ‘on the (...) horn of a dilemma’ in having to contend with the excesses of unremitting violence and the deficiencies of cowardice. A surprising compliment to Christian ethical behaviour can be found in the Eastern martial arts, which will be more closely observed through the traditions of Japanese samurai culture. We shall discover that virtue can be found in self-defence through a balance of Christian principle and martial art practice, which promotes peace and harmony in a sin-riddled world. (shrink)

Improving the Odds: Raising the Class is a book aimed at legislators, school administrators, home school advocates, and college and university professors which examines the education system and provides a paradigm for improvement. The aim of this book is to find simple ways to approach improving the school system in America based on a belief that we need to build a system that has improvement built into the process of training and educating both teacher and students.

The metaphors by which we live, derivative of religious perspectives, shape the ways in which we are engaged with the world around us. This is particularly evident in matters pertaining to consumption and population, factors in the calculus of global sustainability. Increasing concern over the past quarter century with environmental degradation has been paralleled by interest in the relation of religion to a developing environmental ethic. Such interest has called for sensitivity to the religious perspectives of all people, an interest (...) that is promoting involvement in inter-religious dialogue. The significance of this for public policy comes in three areas: growing interest in patterns of social relationships, ecojustice or the way in which we live out social relationships, and growing reflection on the essential nature of religion for value formation in public life. (shrink)

This book offers a critical account of the fundamental elements of Leibniz's philosophy, as they manifest themselves in his metaphysics and philosophy of language. Emphasis is placed upon his hitherto neglected doctrine of nominalism, which states that only concrete individuals exist and that there are no such things as abstract entities – no numbers, geometrical figures or other mathematical objects, nor any abstractions such as space, time, heat, light, justice, goodness, or beauty. Using this doctrine as a basis, the book (...) considers the core of Leibniz's metaphysics and philosophy of language, including the well‐known principles of Contradiction, Sufficient Reason, Continuity and Individuation, and the concepts of Possible World, Individual Substance, Truth, and Necessity. (shrink)

Syme, Rodney Palliative care, founded by Cicely Saunders, a devout Christian, has grown from a single London hospice to a world-wide specialty with strong government support. It is one of the most important developments in modern medicine. It aims to provide compassionate and holistic care for the terminally ill. Nevertheless opposition on religious grounds to assisted-dying or hastening of death has been a core principle of palliative care from its origin, and persists today.

The first book in English on Gadamer's relationship to Heidegger, this study illustrates the philosophical power Gadamer's thinking has achieved by departing from Heidegger's at certain crucial moments.

In this paper I shall outline the approach to consciousness adopted by ethnomethodology and its `associate'conversation analysis. I shall attempt to do this by taking a minimalist stance, namely a basic formulation of the elements of these approaches, trying to strip away the ornate superstructures which have been erected upon that basis. I shall proceed in two ways. First, I shall seek to define ethnomethodology and conversation analysis by contrasting them to varying degrees with a variety of other approaches: symbolic (...) interactionism and, derivatively, the work of Goffman, the -social psychology of Rom Harre and his associates and with Norbert Wiley. Secondly, I shall give some examples of the use of the notion of `self'held by ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts that take a definitive turn towards a non-ironic, non-mentalist, non-essentialist and non-cognitivist approach to knowledge, consciousness and self. (shrink)

This book is an important contribution to the philosophy of music. Whereas most books in this field focus on the creation and reproduction of music, Bruce Benson's concern is the phenomenology of music making as an activity. He offers the radical thesis that it is improvisation that is primary in the moment of music making. Succinct and lucid, the book brings together a wide range of musical examples from classical music, jazz, early music and other genres. It offers a (...) rich tapestry incorporating both analytic and continental philosophy, musicology and performance-practice issues. It will be a provocative read for philosophers of art and musicologists and, because it eschews technicality, should appeal to general readers, especially those who perform. (shrink)

The universe appears fine-tuned for life. Bayesian confirmation theory is utilized to examine two competing explanations for this fine-tuning, namely design (theism) and the existence of many universes, in comparison with the ’null’ hypothesis that just one universe exists as a brute fact. Some authors have invoked the so-called ’inverse gambler’s fallacy’ to argue that the many-universes hypothesis does not explain the fine-tuning of ’this’ universe, but flaws in this argument are exposed. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of design, being simpler, is (...) arguably of higher prior probability and, therefore, to be preferred. The hypothesis of the single brute-fact universe is disconfirmed. (shrink)

“Daddy, is God real or is he a part of people's imagination?” The brain constructs reality by bottom‐up, genetically programmed mechanisms. Nature selected the human holistic, symbolically thinking, aesthetic brain using a mechanism of brain‐language coevolution. Our religious nature and moral capabilities are rooted in this brain, and in the real images it constructs.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dracula and Carmilla:Monsters and the MindBenson Saler and Charles A. ZieglerFollowing the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897, vampire narratives proliferated in Britain and the United States.1 While many twentieth century short stories, novels, plays, and films in both countries depart from Dracula in various ways, it is our impression that that workand its close derivatives retain pride of place in the popular imagination. Yet Dracula was but (...) one of several well-known vampire stories published in English during the nineteenth century, and scholars deem certain of the other tales to be of literary merit.In noting that, we raise this question: What is it about the plot and the characterization of vampires in Dracula that make it the most famous example of vampires in English fiction? Why, in particular, has it been more influential than Le Fanu's Carmilla which preceded it in time and is of equal or perhaps greater literary distinction?2 We address that question, and by doing so we hope to gain some insight into the attraction and persistence of vampire tales across time and cultures.We begin by sketching our approach to conceptualizing the category "vampire." Nina Auerbach, a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that "There is no such creature as 'The Vampire'; there are only vampires."3 That declaration is in keeping with her demonstration that in nineteenth and twentieth century British and American vampire novels, short stories, plays, and films, vampires vary greatly in behavior, in apparent motivation, and in cultural significance. Different social orders and different culturally supported sensibilities [End Page 218] and sensitivities, she persuasively argues, find expression in different sorts of vampires.We deem Auerbach's literary nominalism preferable to an essentialism that would govern vampiric class inclusion by insisting on some conjunction of necessary features or conditions. At the same time, however, we think that there is a better way of allowing for differences in conceptualizing vampires and in understanding their multi-faceted significance in British and American imaginings of the last two centuries. That way combines the recognition of family resemblances with insights derived from prototype theory in the cognitive sciences.A family resemblance approach can be quite liberal in what it includes as instantiations of the category "vampire." It can encompass not only such familiar (albeit different) figures as Ruthven, Varney, Carmilla, Dracula, and Lestat, but also others, including so-called "psychic vampires," who flourish not by sucking blood but by draining vitality, will, and even experience from their victims. Some may ask, does this not create a category that is so promiscuous in what it includes as to render the category analytically useless? No, we reply, once you couple family resemblance with insights from prototype theory.Prototype theory, narrowly described, attempts to account for "prototype effects." These "effects" are differences in the judgments that people render about how well different instances of a category exemplify the category. Thus, for instance, some people may judge apples and oranges to be clearer or better exemplars of the category "fruit" than olives. Similarly, some may judge robins and sparrows to be clearer or better exemplars of the category "bird" than penguins. Judgments can be explicitly given, or they can be inferred from the order of examples that people give or from their responses to lists of examples furnished by others. Prototype theorists call the adjudged clearest or "best" examples of categories "prototypes" or "the most prototypical exemplars."4 This approach celebrates centrality and periphery rather than essence and boundary in conceptualizing categories.5 It allows that some instantiations of a category may be deemed more central to the category than others. Thus in the case of vampires, Dracula is more central to the category than, say, the shape-shifting space alien who extracts salt from victims in an episode of Star Trek, First Generation. Auerbach recognizes that centrality when she refers to "Dracula's dominance in our century" (p. 111). We contend, moreover, that while Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire Carmilla is more prototypical—that is, an adjudged better exemplar of the category—than vampiric space aliens [End Page 219] and legions of psychic vampires, she is less... (shrink)

Most animals have significant behavioral expertise built in without having to explicitly learn it all from scratch. This expertise is a product of evolution of the organism; it can be viewed as a very long term form of learning which provides a structured system within which individuals might learn more specialized skills or abilities. This paper suggests one possible mechanism for analagous robot evolution by describing a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous (...) one, which control a six legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented. the robot’s performance and behavior repetoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they may provide a hint as to the requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence of reality is maintained and that no critical disabling problems have been ignored. (shrink)

Applications of learning to autonomous agents (simulated or real) have often been restricted to learning a mapping from perceived state of the world to the next action to take. Often this is couched in terms of learning from no previous knowledge. This general case for real autonomous robots is very difficult. In any case, when building a real robot there is usually a lot of a priori knowledge (e.g., from the engineering that went into its design) which doesn’t need to (...) be learned. We describe the behavior-based approach to autonomous robots, and then examine four classes of learning problems associated with such robots. (shrink)

There has been increasing research into the COVID-19 pandemic and the theological responses to it. However, not much research has been done on the COVID-19 and how women, particularly in Africa, utilised spiritual resources to respond to the pandemic. This article sought to bridge this gap. The article utilised both descriptive and analytical methods, and argued that many African women were more concerned about the health of the community than their male counterparts who concentrated more on arguments about the pandemic. (...) Gleaning from our ethnographic data carried out from the Christ Apostolic Church and the Spirit and Life Family Bible Church in Nigeria, the article used Galen Watts’ theory of ‘spirituality of and for’ to analyse how African Christian women deployed their spirituality and resources to address the existential challenges the pandemic posed. It argued that the African Christian women shunned the ‘spirituality of’ argument that relates with discursive functions of being spiritual, which does not correspond to its practical application, and adopted ‘spirituality for’ which resonates with how spiritual resources are deployed to (re)solve existential challenges towards human flourishing. This, it argued, aligns much with the theology of The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians.Contribution: The article concluded that most women were accentuated towards ‘spirituality for’ because it is compassion-driven and responds to the existential quest for the health of the community. (shrink)