In his sermon to the directors of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in London in 1840, in ‘othering’ the Batswana (Africans), Moffat engages in biblical discourse. He uses biblical descriptions to ‘other’ them and the land they occupied. This article analyses the 1840 sermon by Moffat, and in it I will argue that through his sermon, Moffat engaged in biblical discourse and performed epistemic privilege in his exposition of the Batswana to his audience, namely the directors of the LMS. At (...) the same time, he used biblical texts and imagery to create in the mind of his listeners an image of heathenism and uncivility. In doing so, I argue that he further located the Batswana within the realm of the ‘damnés’. In the article, I apply two analytical lenses, namely decoloniality and critical race theory, as hermeneutical tools. Contribution: It is argued in this article that in doing so, Moffat further located the Batswana within the realm of the damnés. (shrink)

The 1840 gospel of Luke as translated by Moffat presents us with the cultural and imperial surveillance performed by a patriarchal system through the institutionalisation of motherhood and womanhood (bosadi). Motherhood or womanhood (bosadi) as a patriarchal institution has been a space in which patriarchal discursive practices have been realised through an act of politicising motherhood or womanhood. At the centre of this act of politicisation of motherhood or womanhood (bosadi) is the ability to carry and bear children (pelegi). The (...) institution of motherhood or womanhood has facilitated a binary between motherhood (bosadi) and bareness (moopa). The womb/popelo as a symbol of fertility becomes the space of mothering women, of labelling, categorising and naming women that the system locates as moopa or barren. The article seeks to reread the narrative on childbearing in the 1840 gospel of Luke from a decolonial framework. I will argue that childbearing, as a patriarchal institution, has been a space in which the gaze of patriarchy has been produced to subjugate women through cultural and imperial masculinist gaze. I will also argue that there is a need to decolonise and liberate such a space (womb) as not a determinant of motherhood. (shrink)

Ngwao ya Setswana [tradition and customs] has two dimensions: tumelo [belief system] and thuto [education]; it is found in cultural practices and observances such as bogwera [the rite of initiation], letsemma [ploughing], dikgafela [harvesting], bongaka [diviner-healers] and botsetsi ba ntlha le botsetsi jwa bobedi [first menses and first experience of childbirth] to name but a few. These practices were observed through the slaughtering of animals, usually cows, and sheep and were condemned and regarded by missionaries as hindrances to Christianity. Letters (...) to Mahoko a Becwana, a 1883–1896 newspaper, points to the use of biblical scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 10:1–33 by the missionaries to condemn these practices. The 1840 English-Setswana New Testament is a colonial product. Texts such as 1 Corinthians 10:21–22 point to the discursive practice employed by the translator for the purpose of foreignising Setswana cultural concepts, re-domesticating these cultural concepts as new concepts separate from their original meaning and domesticating anglicised concepts. At the centre of the discursive practice, I would argue, are foreignisation, redomestication and domestication. This version of the Bible depicts the impact of colonialism on the cultural practices of the Batswana. The debates in the letters to Mahoko a Becwana, point to the dichotomy of those Batswana who converted to Western colonial Christianity. The debates further depict the choices made by the Batswana when accepting the Christian practices expressed in Western culture, and renouncing all that made them a Motswana. The argument in this article is that in his translation of the Bible into Setswana, Moffat uses ideological strategy as a discursive tool to foreignise and redomesticate the concept of Badimo as a Badimoni [devil] and to domesticate the Western colonial Christian concept of heathen into Setswana vocabulary as baeteni, thus producing a dichotomy within the Batswana. Decolonial and post-colonial translation theories are used as the theoretical framework for this article. (shrink)

In her article on ‘translating ngaka’ (diviner-healer), Musa Dube argues that in the writings of Robert Moffat and subsequently in his translation of the Bible into Setswana, the person of the ngaka, rather than being portrayed as occupying a central and positive role in Setswana culture, is relegated to a marginal position and is even depicted as evil and an imposter. The article seeks to argue that firstly, there is a fundamental connection between ngaka and bogwera in Setswana tradition. This (...) is because ngaka performed the rite of initiation and was a central figure in the circumcision (rupa) of those undergoing the rite of imitation. Secondly, in his 1857 English–Setswana Bible Moffat alters the word bogwera in Luke 2:21. In representing and translating bogwera as circumcision in Luke 2:21 Moffat rewrites and reorders the political, economic and religious beliefs of Batswana. It is in the transmogrification of bogwera in Luke 2:21 that an act of hybridisation and creolisation takes place through the ordering of the Batswana cosmology and culture. I would further argue that not only did this marginalisation colour the perceptions of the Batswana regarding bogwera, but also that the translated text was used as a tool to disrupt, marginalise, replace, subvert and colonise the spiritual spaces of the Batswana. Furthermore, the article attempts to critically engage with the translated text from an ideological criticism within postcolonial theory, engaging with the fundamental question: why did Moffat translate and alter bogwera as circumcision rather than using the proper word which is rupa (circumcision)? Selected letters published in the newspaper Mahoko a Becwana (Words of Batswana) are quoted and discussed, as it is in these letters that we are confronted with an act of hybridisation and creolisation. The letters also point to the effects of such a translation and transmogrification as a discursive tool to reorder and to pervert the Batswana cosmology and culture. In translating and altering circumcision as bogwera Moffat performs an act of mutation of meaning. It is in this morphing of bogwera into something that is charged with negativity in order to reorder and rewrite through an exercise of transmutation that Moffat attempts to subvert and to indoctrinate, resulting in the subversion of the spiritual spaces of Batswana. (shrink)

Large companies must increasingly satisfy not only the conditions of their formal licences, but also the concerns and expectations of host communities and broader society. This has led to the emergence, particularly in the minerals industry, of the notion of “social licence”, an interdiscursive term whose meaning is rarely interrogated. We use textual analysis to critically investigate the construction of social licence discourse in minerals companies’ sustainable development reports and at a recent industry conference. We find that the texts mystify (...) the nature of agency, and privilege processes that maintain existing power relations. Through their partial accommodation of heterogeneous discourses, the texts downplay tensions and conflicts. We conclude that there is a need to reconceptualise the nature of company–stakeholder relationships through a more collaborative, dialogic and reflexive process, avoiding the binary state implied by the term licence. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

The past two decades have seen an outpouring of work in legal theory that is self-consciously critical of aspects of American law and the institutions of the liberal state. In this lively volume, eminent scholars in philosophy, law, and political science respond to this recent scholarship by exploring what constitutes a "radical" critique of the law, examining such theories as critical legal studies, feminist theory and theories of "difference," and critical race theory. The authors consider whether the critiques advanced in (...) recent legal theory can truly be called radical and what form a radical critique of American law should take. Writing at the cutting edge of the critique of critical legal theory, they offer insights first on critical legal scholarship, then on feminist political and legal theory. A third group of contributions questions the radicalness of these approaches in light of their failure to challenge fundamental aspects of liberalism, while a final section focuses on current issues of legal reform through critical views on criminal punishment, including observations on rape and hate speech. Each major essay describes the underlying principles in the development of a radical legal theory and addresses unresolved questions relating to it, while accompanying commentaries present conflicting views. The resulting dialogue explores wide-ranging issues like equity, value relativism, adversarial and empathic legal advocacy, communitarianism and the social contract, impartiality and contingency, "natural" law, and corrective justice. A common thread for many of the articles is a focus on the social dimension of society and law, which finds the individualism of prevailing liberal theories too limiting. Radical Critiques of the Law is particularly unique in presenting critical and feminist approaches in one volume-along with skeptical commentary about just how radical some critiques really are. Proposing alternative critiques that embody considerably greater promise of being truly radical, it offers provocative reading for both philosophers and legal scholars by showing that many claims to radicalism are highly problematic at best. (shrink)

The authors explore the history of experiments in economics, provide examples of different types of experiments and show that the growing use of experimental methods is transforming economics into an empirical science.

Lexical Semantics is about the meaning of words. Although obviously a central concern of linguistics, the semantic behaviour of words has been unduly neglected in the current literature, which has tended to emphasize sentential semantics and its relation to formal systems of logic. In this textbook D. A. Cruse establishes in a principled and disciplined way the descriptive and generalizable facts about lexical relations that any formal theory of semantics will have to encompass. Among the topics covered in depth are (...) idiomaticity, lexical ambiguity, synonymy, hierarchical relations such as hyponymy and meronymy, and various types of oppositeness. Syntagmatic relations are also treated in some detail. The discussions are richly illustrated by examples drawn almost entirely from English. Although a familiarity with traditional grammar is assumed, readers with no technical linguistic background will find the exposition always accessible. All readers with an interest in semantics will find in this original text not only essential background but a stimulating new perspective on the field. (shrink)

Moffat, Sue Review of: Celebrating with children: Volume 1 resources, volume 2 readings, by Robert Borg, Gerard Kelly, Brian Lucas,, pp.302 + 188, $29.95, $24.95.

A record of the words and teachings of Confucius, _The Analects_ is considered the most reliable expression of Confucian thought. However, the original meaning of Confucius's teachings have been filtered and interpreted by the commentaries of Confucianists of later ages, particularly the Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty, not altogether without distortion.In this monumental translation by Professor D. C. Lau, an attempt has been made to interpret the sayings as they stand. The corpus of the sayings is taken as an organic (...) whole and the final test of the interpretation rests on the internal consistency it exhibits. In other words, _The Analects_ is read in the light of _The Analects._This results in a truer understanding of Confucius' thought than the traditional interpretation and paves the way for a re-assessment of its importance in the history of Chinese thought and its relevance to the present day world.This volume also contains an introduction to the life and teachings of Confucius, and three appendices on the events in the life of Confucius, on his disciples, and on the composition of _The Analects._. (shrink)

My response to BøhlerUniversal recommendations for some weaning practices do make senseA Biocultural Investigation of the Weanling (Moffat, 2001), the second on the larger issue of biomedical approaches to maternal–child health education.

At the beginning of his essay on the phrases þing gehegan and seonoþ gehegan in Beowulf and Phoenix, Eric Stanley makes the following pessimistic statement about the fundamental uncertainties facing literary critics of Old English verse:After a century and a half of serious and informed Beowulf scholarship we have our orthodoxies of understanding and may even feel safe enough for literary criticism of points of detail requiring a familiarity with the overtones of the original which, I believe, we lack. The (...) study of the other long poems is less well developed, and the notes and commentaries on them are less full. Even so, for them too literary interpretations are advanced with hope of success, which would be courage if the exercise were dangerous. I wish to test the ice at two places; at one of them we have for a long time executed our more daring figurative skating, though I expect to find the ice thin; and the other place is similar to it, but less frequented.Stanley's argument has to do with our inability to perceive the stylistic nuances of such a distant time. The ice appears inviting but may not sustain us. In what follows I want to examine another area of fundamental uncertainty facing the modern critic of Old English verse: scribal performance. (shrink)

The mathematical formulation of the nonsymmetric gravitation theory (NGT) as a geometrical structure is developed in a higher-dimensional space. The reduction of the geometrical scheme to a dynamical theory of gravitation in four-dimensional space-time is investigated and the basic physical laws of the theory are reviewed in detail.

Is incivility in the U.S. increasing? Certainly, there is a widespread perception that it is. In this paper, I examine the extent of that perception in a variety of settings. Of necessity, almost all of the evidence is anecdotal in nature. Equally inconclusive is the analysis of that evidence, since it consists almost entirely of interpretations. However, the reader may become persuaded that incivility seems to be an indicator of deleterious social psychological effects. More specifically, I suggest that Emile Durkheim's (...) anomie theory provides insight into the relation between apparently superficial incivility and more deep-seated social pathologies, so that it becomes plausible to see incivility as a barometer of underlying societal decay. (shrink)

The local Lorentz and diffeomorphism symmetries of Einstein's gravitational theory are spontaneously broken by a Higgs mechanism by invoking a phase transition in the early universe, at a critical temperature Tc below which the symmetry is restored. The spontaneous breakdown of the vacuum state generates an external time, and the wave function of the universe satisfies a time-dependent Schrödinger equation, which reduces to the Wheeler-deWitt equation in the classical regime for T (...) The conservation of energy is spontaneously violated for T>Tc, and matter is created fractions of seconds after the big bang, generating the matter in the Universe. The time direction of the vacuum expectation value of the scalar Higgs field generates a time asymmetry, which defines the cosmological arrow of time and the direction of increasing entropy as the Lorentz symmetry is restored at low temperatures. (shrink)

"By combining recent advances in the physical sciences with some of the novel ideas, techniques, and data of modern biology, this book attempts to achieve a new and different kind of evolutionary synthesis. I found it to be challenging, fascinating, infuriating, and provocative, but certainly not dull."--James H, Brown, University of New Mexico "This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."--Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour , review of the first (...) edition "An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."--R.Gessink, TAXON. (shrink)

This work presents the concepts of translation and conservative translation between logics. By using algebraic semantics we introduce several conservative translations involving the classical propositional calculus and the many-valued calculi of Post and Lukasiewicz.

BackgroundHIV prevention research in resource-limited countries is associated with a variety of ethical dilemmas. Key amongst these is the question of what constitutes an appropriate standard of health care (SoC) for participants in HIV prevention trials. This paper describes a community-focused approach to develop a locally-appropriate SoC in the context of a phase III vaginal microbicide trial in Mwanza City, northwest Tanzania.MethodsA mobile community-based sexual and reproductive health service for women working as informal food vendors or in traditional and modern (...) bars, restaurants, hotels and guesthouses has been established in 10 city wards. Wards were divided into geographical clusters and community representatives elected at cluster and ward level. A city-level Community Advisory Committee (CAC) with representatives from each ward has been established. Workshops and community meetings at ward and city-level have explored project-related concerns using tools adapted from participatory learning and action techniques e.g. chapati diagrams, pair-wise ranking. Secondary stakeholders representing local public-sector and non-governmental health and social care providers have formed a trial Stakeholders' Advisory Group (SAG), which includes two CAC representatives.ResultsKey recommendations from participatory community workshops, CAC and SAG meetings conducted in the first year of the trial relate to the quality and range of clinic services provided at study clinics as well as broader standard of care issues. Recommendations have included streamlining clinic services to reduce waiting times, expanding services to include the children and spouses of participants and providing care for common local conditions such as malaria. Participants, community representatives and stakeholders felt there was an ethical obligation to ensure effective access to antiretroviral drugs and to provide supportive community-based care for women identified as HIV positive during the trial. This obligation includes ensuring sustainable, post-trial access to these services. Post-trial access to an effective vaginal microbicide was also felt to be a moral imperative.ConclusionParticipatory methodologies enabled effective partnerships between researchers, participant representatives and community stakeholders to be developed and facilitated local dialogue and consensus on what constitutes a locally-appropriate standard of care in the context of a vaginal microbicide trial in this setting.Trial registrationCurrent Controlled Trials ISRCTN64716212. (shrink)

Leading philosopher of religion D. Z. Phillips argues that intellectuals need not see their task as being for or against religion, but as one of understanding it. What stands in the way of this task are certain methodological assumptions about what enquiry into religion must be. Beginning with Bernard Williams on Greek gods, Phillips goes on to examine these assumptions in the work of Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer, Tylor, Marett, Freud, Durkheim, Le;vy-Bruhl, Berger and Winch. The result exposes confusion, but (...) also gives logical space to religious belief without advocating personal acceptance of that belief, and shows how the academic study of religion may return to the contemplative task of doing conceptual justice to the world. Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation extends in important ways D. Z. Phillips' seminal 1976 book Religion Without Explanation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and theology. (shrink)

Introduction What is the point of studying Aristotle's theory of moral virtue? In the first place, many interesting questions are raised, in metaphysics, ...

RésuméLa croyance que l'on est (ou pas) dans un état de douleur est singulière en ceci qu'elle semble pouvoir être qualifiée d'infaillibilité ou d'incorrigibilité logique, de même que le cogito. Mais comment se peut-il que l'existence d'une croyance (vraie) et l'existence du fait qui est l'objet de cette croyance puisssent constituer la même existence? Je propose ici une réponse à cette question. Parfois, une croyance peut être un désir.

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.