Research and policymaking on positive mental health and well-being have increased within the last decade, partly fueled by decreasing levels of well-being in the general population and among at-risk groups. However, measurement of well-being often takes place in the absence of reflection on the underlying theoretical conceptualization of well-being. This disguises the fact that different rating scales of well-being often measure very different phenomena because rating scales are based on different philosophical assumptions, which represent radically different foundational views about the (...) nature of well-being. The aim of this paper is to examine the philosophical foundation of the Satisfaction with Life Scale in order to clarify the underlying normative commitments and the psychometric compromises involved in the translation of theory into practice. SWLS is widely used by psychologists, public health professionals, economists, and is popular in national and international surveys of well-being. This paper introduces the philosophical theory of life satisfaction and explores how three central discussions within life satisfaction theory are reflected in the construction of the SWLS; Whether we should be equally satisfied with our past, present and future, Whether we should be satisfied with all the various domains of our lives, and How to avoid the trap of “false consciousness”, i.e. that people fail to recognize the injustice or misfortune of their lives. In the end, life satisfaction theory is contrasted with affective foundational theories of well-being, to explore the magnitude and limits of SWLS as a rating scale based on life satisfaction theory. (shrink)

The legacy of colonial rule has permeated into all aspects of life and contributed to healthcare inequity. In response to the increased interest in social justice, medical educators are thinking of ways to decolonise education and produce doctors who can meet the complex needs of diverse populations. This paper aims to explore decolonising ideas of healing within medical education following recent events including the University College London Medical School’s Decolonising the Medical Curriculum public engagement event, the Wellcome Collection ’s Ayurvedic (...) Man: Encounters with Indian Medicine exhibition and its symposium on Decolonising Health, SOAS University of London’s Applying a Decolonial Lens to Research Structures, Norms and Practices in Higher Education Institutions and University College London Anthropology Department’s Flourishing Diversity Series. We investigate implications of ‘recentring’ displaced indigenous healing systems, medical pluralism and highlight the concept of cultural humility in medical training, which while challenging, may benefit patients. From a global health perspective, climate change debates and associated civil protests around the issues resonate with indigenous ideas of planetary health, which focus on the harmonious interconnection of the planet, the environment and human beings. Finally, we look further at its implications in clinical practice, addressing the background of inequality in healthcare among the BAME populations, intersectionality and an increasing recognition of the role of inter-generational trauma originating from the legacy of slavery. By analysing these theories and conversations that challenge the biomedical view of health, we conclude that encouraging healthcare educators and professionals to adopt a ‘ decolonising attitude ’ can address the complex power imbalances in health and further improve person-centred care. (shrink)

Disproportional morbidity and mortality experienced by ethnic minorities in the UK have been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has exposed structural racism’s contribution to these health inequities. ‘Cultural Safety’, an antiracist, decolonising and educational innovation originating in New Zealand, has been adopted in Australia. Cultural Safety aims to dismantle barriers faced by colonised Indigenous peoples in mainstream healthcare by addressing systemic racism.This paper explores what it means to be ‘culturally safe’. The ways in which New (...) Zealand and Australia are incorporating Cultural Safety into educating healthcare professionals and in day-to-day practice in medicine are highlighted. We consider the ‘nuts and bolts’ of translating Cultural Safety into the UK to reduce racism within healthcare. Listening to the voices of black, Asian and minority ethnic National Health Service (NHS) consumers, education in reflexivity, both personal and organisational within the NHS are key. By listening to Indigenous colonised peoples, the ex-Empire may find solutions to health inequity. A decolonising feedback loop is required; however, we should take care not to culturally appropriate this valuable reverse innovation. (shrink)

This paper examines the use of tablet personal computers and how they interfere with Nigerian undergraduates reading culture and love for educational books. The study adopts a descriptive research design. The University of Ilorin undergraduates constitute the population for this study while 200 level students of three faculties across the university constitute the target population. Stratified sampling technique was used to sample the needed respondents. A researchers’ designed questionnaire was use for data collection. The collected data was analysed using descriptive (...) statistics. The findings revealed that access to tablet computer influence the undergraduate reading culture. Also, 55.7% of 200 level undergraduates read more electronic materials on their tablet computer than printed texts. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that students should be encouraged to visit the library and read textbooks since there is certain fundamental knowledge that might not be accessible on the net. (shrink)

The design and reporting of data-driven studies seeking to measure misinformation are patchy and inconsistent, and these studies rarely measure associations with, or effects on, behaviour. The consequence is that data-driven misinformation studies are not yet useful as an empirical basis for guiding when to act on emerging misinformation threats, or for deciding when it is more appropriate to do nothing to avoid inadvertently amplifying misinformation. In a narrative review focused on examples of health-related misinformation, we take a critical perspective (...) of data-driven misinformation studies. To address this problem, we propose a curated and open library of misinformation examples and describe its structure and how it might be used to support actionable surveillance. We draw on experiences with other curated repositories to speculate on the likely challenges related to achieving critical mass and maintaining data consistency. We conclude that an open library of misinformation could help improve the consistency of data-driven misinformation study design and reporting, as well as provide an empirical basis from which to make decisions about how to act on new and emerging misinformation threats. (shrink)

_A Preliminary Exploration of the Inner History of Capitalism_ This chapter will examine an important transition in the history of emotions which illuminates how Americans came to embrace capitalistic feelings they once considered sinful. A central shift occurred when they stopped regarding their feelings as moral and cognitive traits and instead came to see them as neurological, non-volitional, physical impulses. When this occurred, once forbidden feelings became far less morally troubling. My history fits with a larger pattern that a number (...) of historians of the emotions have traced. Their respective works have illustrated that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a revolution in the descriptions and conceptions of inner life emerged in Europe and America. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 21 Heft: 2 Seiten: 400-418.

Excerptions from the lives of Shiite Imams as a model of Islamic ethics.

Twenty two treatises on Islamic ethics by eminent personalities in early Islam.

In the Hanafī madhab (school law), al-hukm al-taklifī have been determined in different categories, taking into account that the relevant evidence is conjecture-conclusive in terms of certitude-dalāla and whether the request is binding or not. In general terms, it is stated in the usūlworks that the orders and prohibitions that are fixed with definite evidence are fard and haram, and the binding provisions in which there is suspicion and doubt in their evidence are wājib and tahrīman makrūh. However, some “fards” (...) have been identified, which have stronger effects than “wājib” in the Hanafi fiqh doctrine, and which are subject to suspicion and doubt in their evidence, and therefore there is disagreement about their ruling among fiqh scholars. The Hanafī jurists of the later period adopted the concept of “al-fard al-amalī (al-zannī)” for such judgments. In addition, while examining the propositional provisions in the Hanafī Usūl literature, the wājib is generally compared with the fard. However, in some of the later usūl works and in many other issues in fiqh, wājib is compared with sunnah, and its connection with sunnah or its distinction from sunnah is considered as an important issue. In this article, it is aimed to clarify the nature of the “al-fard al-amalī”, which expresses an intermediate category in the classification of propositional provisions in the Hanafī school, and similarly, attention is drawn to the existence of some “haram” in the Hanafī school of which there is doubt. Some of the evaluations made by Hanafi jurists regarding the distinction between wajib and sunnah, taking into account the quality of the evidence, have been discussed and it has been tried to determine what is the ruling of abandoning the muakkad sunnah, which is often not explicitly included in the proposed judgment classifications made depending on the nature of the relevant evidence. In this study, it has been tried to make a comparative and chronological reading between the usūl and furū works in Hanafī school. (shrink)

In 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft's travels to Scandinavian cities gave her new perspectives on the English and Continental bourgeois cultures with which she was acquainted. Her notions of the city as a source of inspiration for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are echoed in the epistolary writings of the Norwegian author Camilla Collett (1813–1895) and the novels of her countrywoman Amalie Skram (1846–1905). Collett and Skram were both frequent visitors to different European capital cities, and incorporated their impressions and (...) experiences of these cities. This resulted in innovative texts, with the individual in a new, modern environment, the city, as one of the central themes. For Collett, who can be regarded as a city correspondent avant la lettre, the city was also a yardstick for cultural progress. In her novels, Skram used the European city as a sort of laboratory of the modern era. Nevertheless, Collett's and Skram's ‘city texts’ are not the ones that have ensured that these two authors found their way into the literary canon. Collett became famous as the author of the first Norwegian feminist novel, whereas Skram is known as a Norwegian naturalist. Until recently, the prose texts in which Collett and Skram processed their urban experiences were either not discussed in Norwegian literary historiography, or were labelled as contributions to the morality debate that raged in Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth century. In this article, I shall propose that Collett and Skram contribute to a distinctive yet unrecognized genre – female urban prose – which proffers new modes of thinking and writing about women's experience of contemporaneous bourgeois culture. (shrink)

Al-Mu'jam Al-muḫtaṣ of Murtadā Al-Zabīdī (d. 1205/1791) in which a scholar recorded his teachers, the books that he obtained the right to narrate during his education life and the chain of transmission from his teachers to the author, is one of the important representatives of the mu'jam genres in 12th/18th century. It can be said that the mu'jam that Zabīdī wrote to record the important people in his life, goes beyond the standard mu'jam with its compilation style, sources, diversity of (...) biographers and anecdotes about the writing activity of the period. Based on Zabīdī's teachers, students and contemporaries, their origins, specialization and profession, the dates of their deaths, the dates of his encounters with them, the extent of his friendships, the dated rihle route, the lecture places and the books he taught, a panorama about the mu'jam will be drawn. The mu’jam, which includes 635 biographies, has a wide range of written and oral sources, especially ijazat and samā sources. Zabīdī's correspondence with scholars from different regions, taqrīz/appreciation written for his famous books and poems belonging to scholars of the period are among these sources. Numerous taqrīzs on his Tāj al-ʿArūs and Sharḥ Al-Iḥyā's point to their fame at that time, while Mu’jam, which has the appearance of an independent poetry anthology due to the poems that reach tens of pages, reveals his unknown poetic side. On the other hand, some couplets recorded in Persian and Turkish show his knowledge of these languages. Zabīdī is a versatile personality who lived in different geographies such as India, Yemen and Egypt and met many scholars there. Rihles in different regions of Yemen such as Zabid, Moravıa and Mocha, as well as inside Egypt, including Damietta, Raşıt, Fuwwah and Asyut, show that Zabīdī traveled frequently for the sake of knowledge. Egypt, where he went in 1167 (1753) with the advice of his teacher al-Aydarūs and spent thirty-eight years of his life, has an important place in his scientific adventure. Recording sufis, merchants and janitors as well as famous people from different fields such as poets, jurists and muhaddis in biographies reflects Zabīdī's extensive contact reaching various segments of society through the aforementioned rihles. While Zabīdī was obtaining knowledge through both these journeys and ijazat, he also gave ratification/ijazat to the students who came to him. While he prefers ijazat of al-musalsal bil awwaliyyah and Al-Awail Ṣaḥīḥ/al-Kutub al-Sittah for those who come to him for short periods of time on the occasion of pilgrimage, but on the other hand he gaves ijazat of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhari, Shamail Tirmidhi, Sharḥ Al-Iḥyā and Al-Amali for his long-term students. Lessons, both open to the public in mosques and with more private groups at home, were held in informal rather than systematic/formal style like in the madrasah. The books that Zabīdī received the right to transmit through his rihles are listed below under the "textbooks" heading. When a book is mentioned in whichever biography, it can be implicitly considered the person has the elevated chain of transmission of the book. Similarly, it can be revealed in which region and by whom tranmits the short chain of a book. This reveals the unknown aspects of regional and temporal writing style. On the other hand, it is possible to find other traces of the background of writing and representation/taqrir through the mu'jam. For instance, a book was sometimes typed as a result of the students' compilation of lecture notes of their masters, sometimes when a person obtained a book he needed and he abbreviated important parts and copied a special copy for himself or a student could only get permission for giving lectures after he had written a book. The mu’jam includes besides of Zabīdī's books, the books written by the biographers in the form of "he has many books" or by mentioning the name directly. Even the recording of details such as the reason for writing, date and content information reveals the unknown aspects of the book writing style of the period. Ultimately, the importance of mu’jam, which was written as the result of a life spent with learning, although it is not well known in terms of genre; is to mention the biographical information collected from many different secondary sources, compiled as a result of long effort, such as history and tabaqat-tarajim about the scientific life of the author together with their evidences. Therefore, these kinds of books, that are mostly written by the author himself or his close student, in which the teacher constitutes its main element, is a primary source in the determination of the biographical information of the author, as well as the book and isnad, deserve to be examined separately because of their potential to shed light on the unknown aspects of the hadith history and literature of the later period. (shrink)

The note reinterprets an important epigraphic testimony of the Ostrogoth age, published for the first time by Giovanni Battista de Rossi in 1894. It is a polymetric funeral eulogy commissioned among the Amali royal family, perhaps dedicated by Flavia Amala Amalafrida Theodenanda to one or more relatives, unless one wishes to identify her with one of the dedicatees of the eulogy. After a presentation of supportive material and a new edition of the text, the history of the discovery of the (...) inscription is retraced, involving leading figures of the 19th century political and ecclesiastical culture including cardinal Vincenzo Vannutelli and H. Stevenson Jr., a pupil of de Rossi. The contribution dates the artifact between the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th; it studies the hypothesis of identifying Amalafrida with one of the princesses in the family circle of King Theodoric and with the Ostrogothic wife of Flavius Maximus; it illustrates a hypothesis of the intended use of the epigraph for a funeral monument in the cemetery area of the Martyrial Basilica of S. Secondino on the Praenestina. (shrink)

When my grandfather, David Oppenheim, and my grandmother, Amalie Pollak, decided to marry, my grandfather's parents doubted the wisdom of their son's decision to marry a woman three years older than he was.