Sir Edmund Leach argues that doctors in the modern world, fortified by the traditional concept that the life of the sick person must at all costs be preserved, are to some extent guilty of the false antitheses current today between youth and age. Moreover youth means health, age illness and senility. Until this imbalance is corrected society will be in danger of `a kind of civil war between the generations'. Society must be taught again that mortality cannot be avoided (...) or conquered by medical science, and at the same time that `health' is not enshrined in the young alone. (shrink)

In 1987, Sir Edmund Leach, the most influential British social anthropologist of his generation, startled a conference in Norwich of the Association of Social Anthropologists by declaring that ethnographic monographs were essentially fictions, expressing the personality of the author. When asked what should be the goal of the anthropologist, he replied, ‘To write another War and Peace’. This and some similar papers were published by him and have come in for much criticism: for instance, from a leading anthropologist of (...) the next generation, Adam Kuper, who has regretted that Leach made such a concession to fashionable post-modernism, the ‘literary turn’ in anthropology, shortly before his death (Kuper, 1999: 15-35). (shrink)

Is the aim of medicine to avert death at all costs? Are doctors there to prescribe cough drops or to clamp wires on our heads? Should there be abortion on demand? What is medicine for? Vitally important decisions are today being left to an exclusive few- the Biocrats. Gerald Leach believes that there is a need now for wider discussion- informed, accurate and sensible discussion. Here he provides a survey, which has been specially updated for this Pelican edition, of (...) such fields as birth and population control, 'test-tube reproduction', eugenics and genetic engineering, mind drugs, transplants, life-propping machines.... all the fantastic realities made possible by modern bio-medicine. The author brings social, personal and legal considerations to his study and concludes by discussing which alternatives we can afford to pursue. (shrink)

Weak enough relevant logics are often closed under depth substitutions. To determine the breadth of logics with this feature, we show there is a largest sublogic of R closed under depth substitutions and that this logic can be recursively axiomatized.

Māori (Indigenous people of New Zealand (NZ)) suffer food insecurity disproportionately in New Zealand. Some research suggests that Māori value mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge) when it comes to the collection, preparation and eating of kai (food). This study explores the connections between mātauranga Māori and kai in regional NZ schools for potential pathways to impact food security for children. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with five primary school principals in the Hawke’s Bay region. Principals were purposively selected on commitments to (...) proactively incorporating mātauranga Māori into their school environment. Reflective thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Three main themes were identified: teaching and learning around mātauranga Māori and kai; environmental sustainability and the sustainability of kai initiatives; and school values. A strong emphasis was placed on the learning of traditional Māori values around kai and the whenua (land) and the sustainability of teaching programs. School values were invariably bound in Te Ao Māori (a Māori worldview) however, schools felt challenged in aligning their values and their mātauranga Māori-bound teaching practices with the current food provision programme in their schools (Ka Ora, Ka Ako). The programme’s strict nutritional guidelines appeared to challenge traditional Māori approaches to kai. Schools remain an ideal environment for the incorporation of mātauranga Māori to support food security and food education, and future work should explore a demonstration project that incorporates the knowledge gained in this study and ways to integrate mātauranga Māori into Ka Ora, Ka Ako. (shrink)

There are approximately 60 codes of ethics developed by national and regional psychological associations around the world, and there is wide variability in their structures, formats, lengths, and d...

Originally published in 1948, and derived from the fifth annual lecture of the National book league in 1947, this text by classist and university administrator Sir Richard Livingstone affirms the importance of universities as centres of higher learning, but also critiques their shortcomings and examines the various forces then shaping undergraduate education. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education, and university education in particular.

This paper presents an overview of Carnap, a free and open framework for the development of formal reasoning applications. Carnap’s design emphasizes flexibility, extensibility, and rapid prototyping. Carnap-based applications are written in Haskell, but can be compiled to JavaScript to run in standard web browsers. This combination of features makes Carnap ideally suited for educational applications, where ease-of-use is crucial for students and adaptability to different teaching strategies and classroom needs is crucial for instructors. The paper describes Carnap’s implementation, along (...) with its current and projected pedagogical applications. (shrink)

In a recent paper , Urbaniak and Cieśliński describe an analogue of the Yablo Paradox, in the domain of formal provability. Just as the infinite sequence of Yablo sentences inherit the paradoxical behavior of the liar sentence, an infinite sequence of sentences can be constructed that inherit the distinctive behavior of the Gödel sentence. This phenomenon—the transfer of the properties of self-referential sentences of formal mathematics to their “unwindings” into infinite sequences of sentences—suggests a number of interesting logical questions. The (...) purpose of this paper is to give a precise statement of a conjecture from Cieśliński and Urbaniak regarding the unwinding of the Rosser sentence, and to demonstrate that this precise statement is false. We begin with some preliminary motivation, introduce the conjecture against the background of some related results, and finally, in the last section, move on to the proof, which adapts a method used by Solovay and Guaspari. (shrink)

Susan has been profoundly deaf since childhood. She is a hearing aid wearer, and likes to use the induction loops built into some public spaces, such as theaters and cinemas, to help cut down the background noise that can make hearing speech very difficult. But this depends on the building having an induction loop fitted and properly maintained. Like many other induction loop users, Susan frequently finds that the advertised loop system is either working poorly or not working at all. (...) Almost as often, she then has the experience of making a complaint about it only to have the problem denied. If she persists, she is often then met... (shrink)

Leach asks, what would Collingwood have thought of archaeological theory, a sub-discipline of archaeology that has developed since the 1960s? He argues that Collingwood would have welcomed it for it has developed out of respect for the principle that in any investigation, in examining the evidence, one must always have some question in mind. Nonetheless, although Collingwood would have welcomed recent developments in archaeological theory, and would have urged metaphysicians to take notice of such developments, he is not himself (...) an archaeological theorist: he is, primarily, a metaphysician. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a class of ‘structural’ abstraction principles, and describe how they are suggested by some features of Cantor's and Dedekind's approach to abstraction. Structural abstraction is a promising source of mathematically tractable new axioms for the neo-logicist. I illustrate this by showing, first, how a theorem of Shelah gives a sufficient condition for consistency in the structural setting, solving what neo-logicists call the ‘bad company’ problem for structural abstraction. Second, I show how, in the structural setting, (...) we can measure the logical strength of abstraction principles using categories of interpretations between theories. (shrink)

The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers reveals how great philosophers of the past sought to answer the question of the meaning of life. This edited collection includes thirty-five chapters which each focus on a major figure, from Confucius to Rorty, and that imaginatively engage with the topic from their perspective. This volume also contains a Postscript on the historical origins and original significance of the phrase 'the meaning of life'.

In a radical attempt to explore and restructure the presuppositions in any philosophy of language. Edouard Morot-Sir examines such current concepts as "natural languages," "linguistic necessity," and "implicite, explicite." Challenging such thinkers as Bergson, Heidegger, Chomsky, and Rorty, he argues that reference is the fundamental act by which signs and referents exist and make sense, and that "any linguistic expression belongs to the experience of reference." As such, he writes, reference is the center of human cultural existence. All value judgments (...) - whether religious, scientific, moral, or artistic - should be conceived of as positive or negative reference. He considers this work the necessary first step for a new form of criticism he proposes to call "reference criticism.". (shrink)

In American universities, even Asian Philosophy is still often taught following methods adapted from European universities of the nineteenth century. Whether or not this approach is well-suited to philosophy as it was conceived in that era, it is inadequate if the aim is to develop a deep appreciation of Japanese philosophy. To limit what we consider Japanese philosophy to only what bears a distinct resemblance to academic Western philosophy, and accordingly to approach Japanese philosophy purely theoretically, is to risk missing (...) the greater part. Much of Japanese philosophy is applied philosophy, or in other words, what Pierre Hadot calls a “way of life,” and to appropriate it meaningfully requires practice rather than mere intellectual study alone. Thus, I contend that a proper means for introducing Western students is a more holistic method grounded in practicing traditional arts, such as composing haiku. I argue that the seventeenth century poet Matsuo Bashō can serve as a valuable resource in this process. I conclude with a description of the methods that I use in my efforts at teaching Japanese philosophy to undergraduate university students in South Texas. (shrink)

In Philosophy in a Technological World Tartaglia argues that humanity can decide its own future, or at least try to, but that this distinctive...

In “Developing a Reflexive, Anticipatory, and Deliberative Approach to Unanticipated Discoveries: Ethical Lessons from iBlastoids,” we proposed a RAD approach to meet the challenging issues...