Grotius' Latin poetry is typical for its manifold reminiscences of examples from Roman antiquity. His favourite Latin poets were Lucan, Manilius, Statius and Claudian. Especially the influence of the first-mentioned poet is prominent. It is shown here by some examples from the Genealogia Nassaviorum , the Silva in Annales Borrhii and other poems in what way Grotius made use of Lucan.

Governments and other food system actors from the private sector, civil society, research and education institutions are being called upon to work together to enhance the sustainability, resilience and inclusiveness of food systems. The analysis presented in this study provides an insight into the process and direction of food system transformation, and the key capabilities required. It portrays the interplay of different internal and external dynamics combined with the capacity of food system actors to connect, forge alliances and commit to (...) specific actions that has enabled countries to move towards a more sustainable food system. (shrink)

Introduction In 2007, a national review committee was instituted in The Netherlands to review cases of active ending of life for newborns. It was expected that 15–20 cases would be reported. To date, however, only one case has been reported to this committee. Reporting is essential to obtain societal control and transparency; the possible explanations for this lack of reporting were therefore explored. Methods Data on end-of-life decision-making were scrutinised from Dutch nation-wide studies (1995, 2001 and 2005), before institution of (...) the committee. Physicians received a questionnaire about their medical decision-making for stratified samples of deceased infants up to 1 year, drawn from the central death registry. Results In 2005, 58% of all deaths were preceded by an end-of-life decision, compared with 68% in 2001 and 62% in 1995. The use of drugs with a possible life-shortening effect tended to be lower. In 2005, all four cases in the study in which an infants' life was actively ended were preceded by a decision to forego life-prolonging treatment. In three cases, the infant's life expectancy was short; one case involved a longer life expectancy. Discussion The expected number of cases is probably an overestimation due to changes in medical practice such as the tendency to attribute less life-shortening effects to opioids. The lack of reports is probably also associated with requirements in the regulation; it may be difficult to fulfil them due either to time constraints or the nature of the suffering that is addressed. If societal control of active ending of life is considered useful, changes in the regulation may be needed. (shrink)

The use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in environmental decision-making and the contingent valuation (CV) technique as input into traditional CBA to elicit environmental values in monetary terms has stimulated an extensive debate. Critics have questioned the appropriateness of both the method and the technique. Some alternative suggestions for the elicitation of environmental values are based on a social process of deliberation. However, just like traditional economic theory, these alternative approaches may be questioned on their implicit value judgements regarding the legitimacy (...) of the social-political organisation of the process of value elicitation. Instead of making assumptions a priori, research efforts should be focused on the processes by which actual public attitudes and preferences towards the environment can best be elicited and fed into environmental or other public policy decision-making. In the study presented in this paper, support was found for both the individual WTP based approach and a participatory social deliberation approach to inform the environmental decision-making process, suggesting that a combination of both approaches is most appropriate. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has traditionally focused on a defense of the intrinsic value of animals and wild habitats. However, this ethical project needs to be supplemented by a consideration of the kind of culture that can take such an ethical point of view seriously. This essay argues that one component of an environmentally responsible culture is its domesticated environment. How we construct the domesticated environment has an impact on our perception of our own identities and our relations to wild nature. If (...) we care about wild nature, we must also care about the domesticated environment in which we live our lives. This essay contributes to an ethical reflection on the need to overcome the traditional dualism between domesticated and wild, built and natural that permeates environmental ethical thinking. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has traditionally focused on a defense of the intrinsic value of animals and wild habitats. However, this ethical project needs to be supplemented by a consideration of the kind of culture that can take such an ethical point of view seriously. This essay argues that one component of an environmentally responsible culture is its domesticated environment. How we construct the domesticated environment has an impact on our perception of our own identities and our relations to wild nature. If (...) we care about wild nature, we must also care about the domesticated environment in which we live our lives. This essay contributes to an ethical reflection on the need to overcome the traditional dualism between domesticated and wild, built and natural that permeates environmental ethical thinking. (shrink)

The standard Brouwer–Zadeh poset Σ(H) is the poset of all effect operators on a Hilbert space H, naturally equipped with two types of orthocomplementation. In developing the theory, the question occured if (when) Σ(H) fulfils the de Morgan property with respect to both orthocomplementation operations. In Ref.3 the authors proved that it is the case provided dimH<∞, and they conjectured that if dimH=∞, then the answer is in the negative. In this note, we first give a somewhat simpler proof of (...) the known result for dimH<∞, and then we give a proof to the conjecture: We show that if dimH=∞, then the de Morgan property is not valid. (shrink)

All commentators on these lines make two assumptions about the first clause, that means ‘sitting in judgement’, ‘punishing’, or the like, that the which is its subject as well as that of is the second in a series of two: the subsequent slaying punishes or sits in judgement on the previous; thus the slaying of Cly taemnestra herself will sit in judgement upon that of Agamemnon, just as that had sat in judgement upon the of Iphigenia. Then opinions differ as (...) to whether is to be taken as the object of both verbs, or of one but not the other. (shrink)

Barrett finds lines 1010–15 difficult. He says that ‘hovers between “an heiress as my wife” and “marriage with an heiress”’, that ‘a Greek heiress did not inherit property as her own: it passed not to her but with her, to her husband and ultimately to her children.—In Attic law a widow was never : a man's property went to his legitimate children.

I argue that in a classical universe, all the events that ever happen are encoded in each of the universe's parts. This conflicts with a statement which is widely believed to lie at the basis of relativity theory: that the events in a space-time region R determine only the events in R's domain of dependence but not those in other space-time regions. I show how, from this understanding, a new prediction method (which I call the &unknown;Smoothness Method&unknown;) can be obtained (...) which allows us to predict future events on the basis of local observational data. Like traditional prediction methods, this method makes use of so-called &unknown;ceteris paribus clauses&unknown;, i.e. assumptions about the unobserved parts of the universe. However, these assumptions are used in a way which enables us to predict the behaviour of open systems with arbitrary accuracy, regardless of the influence of their environment--which has not been achieved by traditional methods. In a sequel to this paper (Schmidt, 1998), I will prove the Uniqueness and Predictability Theorems on which the Smoothness Method is based, and comment in more detail on its mathematical properties. (shrink)