Le propos de cette étude est d’explorer l’interface entre religion traditionnelle africaine et christianisme à l’aide d’une catégorie particulière de sources: les témoignages oraux d’un groupe de femmes chrétiennes de Sobantu, un township sud-africain. Peut-on adhérer à la religion chrétienne sans trahir son identité africaine? Souvent, mais pas toujours, en référence à la position de leur Église respective, chacune de ces femmes se forme une opinion sur cette question difficile.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Heavy TrafficDenis DuttonIt was the Reverend Sidney Smith who said, “I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.” Thirty years ago that remark was still a joke. These days, it’s a downright plausible idea, one with a distinctly postmodern ring. If the objects of experience are nothing but constructions, inventions of our cultures and mind-sets, that must go as well for all the books (...) we read—including those books which urge this fact on us. To read them is to construct them, to write them for yourself. But wait—that can’t be a fact, because facts are just prejudices too. Takes your breath away to realize how far scholarship has come.These thoughts drifted through my mind reading The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, edited by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (University of California Press, $48.00 cloth, $17.95 paper). It comprises a long introduction plus eleven chapters which “explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation, and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and the ways they give value to cultural form—in short, a “‘traffic’ in culture.” It is not easy to make out a consistent thread in the essays themselves. Carol Vance offers a fine discussion in the form of four small essays on censorship, the NEA, Jesse Helms, and so forth. There is no discernible connection with anthropology, and I cannot see why these pieces are included. Nancy Sullivan, described as a Ph.D. candidate in Fred R. Myers’s NYU anthropology department, struggles with her cumbersome account of the artworld in the last generation. Again, I can detect no hint of how anthropology has helped her understand the artworld. Hal Foster makes a cameo appearance of only a few pages, a kind of postmodern arabesque with lots of big words. Christopher B. Steiner revisits material [End Page 283] presented in his book, African Art in Transit, which is squarely in the field, and Steven Feld agonizes about appropriation of world music into commercial music business while telling some interesting tales about a radio program he produced of music from Papua New Guinea. The feminist Judith L. Goldstein does a late-capitalist, “late-postmodernist” job on women’s makeup, with much reliance on Fredric Jameson but no anthropology I can discern, despite the fact that she gave a version of it at an American Anthropological Association conference. If we really have reached “late-postmodernism” we can only be thankful. Molly H. Mullin’s account of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century enthusiasm for American Indian artifacts, on the other hand, may begin with clichés about “élite responses to the rise of consumer capitalism,” but it soon settles down to a solid account of the people and problems of trying to achieve recognition of Indian handicrafts as art. This was made possible, we learn, by much devoted work from people who were multiculturalists before the word existed, white Americans whose actions were based on a love of Indian cultures and arts, rather than postcolonial theory and the school of resentment. All the issues of art vs. craft, the relation of tourism to artistic development, authenticity, and so on, were raised in the 1920s and 30s, with sophistication not often seen today.But to figure out how it all is supposed to tie together, we have to turn to the book’s explanatory introduction. This is so turgidly vague that when I was done I felt like invoicing the authors for my time. These pages are peppered with half-assertions I’d half want to dispute if their meaning were plainer, and a few that are plain enough to be flat-out wrong. Among many examples: “Ironically, the very category of ‘art’—as opposed to ‘the arts’—goes unexamined in its own hierarchies of sense, so that various forms of popular performance, in which disinterested contemplation does not necessarily reign supreme, are excluded.” Excluded? Notice that irritating passive voice: who, I’d like to know, has left popular performance unexamined and excluded? What are “hierarchies of sense”? The sentence carries no reference. In... (shrink)

Les Prolegomenes a la Philosophie de Platon sont un manuel d'ecole neoplatonicien. Il s'inspire d'un modele dont Proclus a du etre l'auteur, mais l'origine de ce texte est presque surement alexandrine et doit dater de la premiere moitie du Vle siecle. Cette oeuvre est essentielle pour comprendre comment etait diffuse l'enseignement platonicien, et pour mieux saisir le mouvement des idees de l'Antiquite finissante. Dans une importante introduction, L. O. Westerink a retrace l'histoire de l'ecole d'Alexandrie et celle du genre litteraire (...) de ces introductions a Platon et a Aristote. (shrink)

Over the past fifteen years there has been a considerable amount of debate concerning what theoretical population dynamic models tell us about the nature of natural selection and drift. On the causal interpretation, these models describe the causes of population change. On the statistical interpretation, the models of population dynamics models specify statistical parameters that explain, predict, and quantify changes in population structure, without identifying the causes of those changes. Selection and drift are part of a statistical description of population (...) change; they are not discrete, apportionable causes. Our objective here is to provide a definitive statement of the statistical position, so as to allay some confusions in the current literature. We outline four commitments that are central to statisticalism. They are: 1. Natural Selection is a higher order effect; 2. Trait fitness is primitive; 3. Modern Synthesis (MS)-models are substrate neutral; 4. MS-selection and drift are model-relative. (shrink)

In evolutionary biology changes in population structure are explained by citing trait fitness distribution. I distinguish three interpretations of fitness explanations—the Two‐Factor Model, the Single‐Factor Model, and the Statistical Interpretation—and argue for the last of these. These interpretations differ in their degrees of causal commitment. The first two hold that trait fitness distribution causes population change. Trait fitness explanations, according to these interpretations, are causal explanations. The last maintains that trait fitness distribution correlates with population change but does not cause (...) it. My defense of the Statistical Interpretation relies on a distinctive feature of causation. Causes conform to the Sure Thing Principle. Trait fitness distributions, I argue, do not. *Received July 2009; revised October 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy/Institute for the History, Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7, Canada; e‐mail: denis[email protected]. (shrink)

Psychological individualism is motivated by two taxonomic principles: (i) that psychological states are individuated by their causal powers, and (ii) that causal powers supervene upon intrinsic physiological state. I distinguish two interpretations of individualism--the 'orthodox' and the 'alternative'--each of which is consistent with these motivating principles. I argue that the alternative interpretation is legitimately individualistic on the grounds that it accurately reflects the actual taxonomic practices of bona fide individualistic sciences. The classification of homeobox genes in developmental genetics provides an (...) illustration. When applied to the taxonomy of psychological kinds, alternative individualism has some surprising consequences. In particular, externalist taxonomies of thought are consistent with the alternative interpretation, and hence consistent with individualism. I conclude, on this basis, that the individualism/externalism dispute which has long preoccupied philosophy of psychology is an empty one. (shrink)

According to a prominent view of evolutionary theory, natural selection and the processes of development compete for explanatory relevance. Natural selection theory explains the evolution of biological form insofar as it is adaptive. Development is relevant to the explanation of form only insofar as it constrains the adaptation-promoting effects of selection. I argue that this view of evolutionary theory is erroneous. I outline an alternative, according to which natural selection explains adaptive evolution by appeal to the statistical structure of populations, (...) and development explains the causes of adaptive evolution at the level of individuals. Only together can a statistical theory of selection and a mechanical theory of development explain why populations of organisms comprise individuals that are adapted to their conditions of existence. (shrink)

The passage of a spin-1/2neutral particle through a region of uniform magnetic field and the corresponding precession mechanism is analyzed from the viewpoint of scattering theory, with particular consideration of the role of the field boundaries.

Technology and Ethics. A European Quest for Responsible Engineering, edited by B. Heriard Dubreuil and his team (University Lille) is in many regards an innovative publication. It is the first fully European contribution to the field of engineering ethics and the result of an intensive cooperation between ethicists and engineers from all the member countries of the European Union. The basic structure of the book is both the distinction and interaction between three levels of analysis: personal responsibility of engineers, the (...) institutional level (business organisations) and the impact of technology on society and culture. On the personal level, the book deals with problems such as the role of professional codes and the fact that engineers must cope with flexibility, shorter lines of decision and erosion of the boundaries between private and professional life. On the meso level, the book deals with different aspects of decision making in the context of business organizations, such as quality management, technology assessment procedures, business ethics committees etc... On the macro level, the authors focus on the power of technology. Together with the influences from other social, economic and political actors, the decisions of engineers change the world in a way which is of moral significance. (shrink)

We investigate two formalizations of Optimality Theory, a successful paradigm in linguistics.We first give an order-theoretic counterpart for the data and processinvolved in candidate evaluation.Basically, we represent each constraint as a function that assigns every candidate a degree of violation.As for the second formalization, we define (after Samek-Lodovici and Prince) constraints as operations that select the best candidates out of a set of candidates.We prove that these two formalizations are equivalent (accordingly, there is no loss of generality with using violation (...) marks and dispensing with them is only apparent).Importantly, we show that the second formalization is equivalent with a class of operations over sets of formulas in a given logical language.As a result, we prove that Optimality Theory can be characterized by certain cumulative logics.So, applying Optimality Theory is shown to be reasoning by the rules of cumulative logics. (shrink)

Standard quantum theory is inadequate to explain the mechanisms by which potential becomes actual. It is inadequate and therefore unable to describe generation of events. Niels Bohr emphasized long ago that the classical part of the world is necessary. John Bell stressed the same point: that “measurement≓ cannot even be defined within the standard quantum theory, and he sought a solution within hidden variable theories and his concept of “beables.≓Today it is customary to try to explain emergence of the classical (...) world through a decoherence mechanism due to “environment.≓ But, we believe, as it was with the concept of measurement, “environment≓ itself cannot be defined within the standard quantum theory.We have proposed a semiphenomenological solution to this problem by introducing explicitly, from the very beginning, classical degrees of freedom, and by coupling these degrees of freedom, through a Lindblad type coupling, to the quantum world. The resulting theory, we call “event-enhanced quantum theory.≓ EEQT allows us to describe an event-generating mechanism for individual quantum systems under continuous observation. The objections of John Bell are met and precise definitions of an “experiment≓ and of a “measurement≓ have been given within EEQT. However EEQT is, essentially, a nonrelativistic theory.In the present paper we extend the ideas of L. P. Horwitz and C. Piron and we propose a relativistic version of EEQT, with an event-generating algorithm for spin one-half particle detectors. The algorithm is based on proper time formulation of the relalivistic quantum theory. Although we use indefinite metric, all the probabilities controlling the random process of the detector clicks are nonnegative. (shrink)

Dogmatic Metaphysics and Tschirnhaus's M ethodology MARTIN SCHONFELD ACCORDING TO STANDARD COMMENTARIES, Tschirnhaus's main work, Medicina mentis, ~ supposedly furnished the methodological basis for the Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics. ~ Christian Wolff and his disciples, at any rate, preferred to think so. Wolff taught classes on Tschirnhaus and claimed that he had developed his own tenets on the basis of Tschirnhaus's ideas; Johann Christoph Gottsched praised the Medicina mentis as the basic methodology of the Wolffian enlightenment.3 Mirroring these views, W. Wundt and (...) H. J. de Vleeschauwer saw in Tschirnhaus the inventor of the "geometric method" adopted by the School Philosophers.4 According to M. ' Medicina Mentis, sive Tentamen genuinae Logicae, in qua disseritur de Methodo detegendi incoKaitas veritates, Amsterdam, 1687. Second and revised edition, Medicina Mentis, sive Artis inveniendi Praecepta generalia, Leipzig, 1695. ~For example, cf. Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte der Philosophie, 3~o-33 and 356; Friedrich Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, III: ~95-97, 3 x~ 34o-43; A. Robert Caponigri, A History of Western Philosophy (Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame.. (shrink)

The Court of Appeals of New York held, in Council of the City of New York u. Giuliani, slip op. 02634, 1999 WL 179257, that New York City may not privatize a public city hospital without state statutory authorization. The court found invalid a sublease of a municipal hospital operated by a public benefit corporation to a private, for-profit entity. The court reasoned that the controlling statute prescribed the operation of a municipal hospital as a government function that must be (...) fulfilled by the public benefit corporation as long as it exists, and nothing short of legislative action could put an end to the corporation's existence.In 1969, the New York State legislature enacted the Health and Hospitals Corporation Act, establishing the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation as an attempt to improve the New York City public health system. Thirty years later, on a renewed perception that the public health system was once again lacking, the city administration approved a sublease of Coney Island Hospital from HHC to PHS New York, Inc., a private, for-profit entity. (shrink)

(1968). L'ENCYCLIQUE HUMANAE VITAE ET L'ENSEIGNEMENT DE VATICAN II SUR LE MARIAGE ET LA FAMILLE (GAUDIUM ET SPES) Bijdragen: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 351-368.

Trees architectural study shows gradients in the meristematic activity. This activity is described by the number of internodes per growth unit, which is considered as the output of a dynamic random process. Several species were observed, which led us to propose and then estimate some mathematical models. Computing the functioning of a tree in a given environment therefore involves finding the probability function of the meristems and following the evolution of the parameters of this law along the botanical gradients (order, (...) trend, acrotony) within its architecture. (shrink)