« Réfléchir aux similarités entre des répertoires très éloignés dans le temps et l’espace permet parfois de repenser à nouveaux frais les oppositions catégorielles qui nous servent à appréhender les genres musicaux. C’est ce qu’avait fait Simha Arom dans un article sur les parentés inattendues entre polyphonies africaines et polyphonies médiévales. En décal(qu)ant ce rapprochement avec la musique techno née à Detroit dans les années 1980-1990, on propose de montrer que l’opposition entre musiques savantes, traditionnelles et populaires, opérante dans le (...) monde occidental depuis le début du xix e siècle, gagne à être enrichie par d’autres grilles d’analyse pour complexifier la cartographie des objets musicaux qui peuplent le monde de la musique aujourd’hui. ». (shrink)

Les espaces de rencontre enfants-parents sont des dispositifs qui ont émergé il y a plusieurs décennies en Europe occidentale avec des modalités de fonctionnement en partie convergentes. Cet article s’intéresse aux analogies de fonctionnement entre les différents dispositifs européens à partir des discours professionnels ou institutionnels. Les auteurs font l’hypothèse que ces derniers sont soutenus, en partie, par des métacadres culturels communs. Afin de traiter de cette problématique, l’article s’inscrit, sur le plan méthodologique, dans une double perspective : synchronique (les (...) témoignages des professionnels et des représentants institutionnels des différents pays concernés) et diachronique (les écrits des psychothérapeutes fondateurs des espaces de rencontre en France). Les métacadres culturels repérés sont observés selon trois axes : celui du maintien du lien parents-enfants, celui des rapports entre générations en termes de droit et d’autorité, enfin celui des rapports de genre dans le couple parental. (shrink)

The enrolment of children and adolescents in health research requires that attention to be paid to specific assent and consent requirements such as the age range for seeking assent; conditions for parental consent (and waivers); the age group required to provide written assent; content of assent forms; if separate assent and parental consent forms should be used, consent from emancipated young adults; reconsent at the age of adulthood when a waiver of assent requirements may be appropriate and the conditions for (...) waiving assent requirements. There is however very little available information for researchers and ethics committees on how to navigate these different issues. To provide guidance to research initiatives, the SickleInAfrica consortium conducted a thematic analysis of a sample of research ethics guidelines and procedures in African countries, to identify guidance for assent requirements in health research. The thematic analysis revealed that 12 of 24 African countries specified the age group for which assent is required. The minimum age for written assent varied across the countries. Five countries, Algeria, Botswana, Cameroon, Nigeria and The Democratic Republic of Congo require consent from both parents/family council in certain circumstances. Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda have specific assent/consent requirements for research with emancipated minors. South Africa and Algeria requires re-consent at onset of adulthood. Five countries (Botswana, Cameroon, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania) specified conditions for waiving assent requirements. The CIOMS and the ICH-GCP guidelines had the most comprehensive information on assent requirements compared to other international guidelines. An interactive map with assent requirements for different African countries is provided. The results show a major gap in national regulations for the inclusion of minors in health research. The SickleInAfrica experience in setting up a multi-country SCD registry in Africa highlights the need for developing and harmonising national and international guidelines on assent and consent requirements for research involving minors. Harmonisation of assent requirements will help facilitate collaborative research across countries. (shrink)

La prévalence des situations de maltraitance sur enfants demeure importante, celles-ci intervenant habituellement dans le cadre familier de la jeune victime. Si de nombreux aspects théoriques et cliniques des formes de maltraitance sont aujourd’hui étudiés, peu de travaux se centrent sur les questions spécifiques des transgressions commises par les grands-parents. À partir d’une vignette clinique, l’auteur montre l’utilité d’une prise en charge s’appuyant sur les temps successifs que constituent l’évaluation et le traitement. Tenir un cadre et évaluer, c’est-à-dire faire émerger (...) d’un côté les ressources, de l’autre les défaillances, représente par essence un temps constructif. Quatre catégories principales de fonctionnement psychique des grands-parents maltraitants sont retrouvées. Comme la plupart de ceux-ci relèvent de soins individuels et familiaux, on gagne en efficacité par une diffraction des tâches via un travail en réseau. (shrink)

Peu de travaux explorent les liens grands-parents/petits-enfants en contexte homoparental. Ces travaux montrent une attitude différenciée des grands-parents selon l’acceptation ou non de l’homosexualité de leur enfant devenu parent et un engagement spécifique selon la lignée et/ou le statut légal de parent. La recherche sur laquelle s’appuie cet article porte sur une vingtaine de couples lesboparentaux français (questionnaires et entretiens) avec des enfants nés en 2011 ou 2012, mariés ou non depuis, qui se différencient selon le type de (...) maternité mis en œuvre et le statut du donneur. Les résultats mettent en évidence que plus le couple lesbien se rapproche du modèle bioconjugal, ou plus exactement du modèle conjugo-parental, plus les relations entre petits-enfants et grands-parents sont facilitées des deux côtés des branches maternelles et ceci selon les enjeux intergénérationnels et relationnels de la transmission. (shrink)

In our view, the ability to impose moral values which may be, to some extent, either shared or conflictual, influences the strategy adopted when writing argumentative texts. Our hypothesis is that the greater the socio-moral distance between the writers’ representations (the writers in this case being children) and those of the recipients (here the parents), the more likely it is that writing will be successful. Three topics derived from a preliminary experiment and corresponding to significant differences in opinion between children (...) and parents were tested in a population of 11-year-old pupils. The pupils had to write a letter designed to convince their parents about one of these topics. We analyzed the texts in order to identify the different configurations in the frequencies of use of the pronouns (frequencies of Je (I), Tu (You), Il (He), On (One/We)) and adverbs. These frequencies differed depending on the topic that was being written about (the moral context that is mobilized). (shrink)

The health and human rights movement (HHR) shows obvious signs of maturation both internally and externally. Yet there are still many questions to be addressed. These issues include the movement’s epistemological status and its perspectives of development. This paper discusses critically the conditions of emergence of HHR, its identity, its dominant schools of thought, its epistemological postures and its methodological issues. Our analysis shows that: (a) the epistemological status of HHR is ambiguous; (b) its identity is uncertain in the absence (...) of a validated definition: is it an action movement, an interdisciplinary field, a domain, an approach, a setting or a scientific discipline? (c) its main schools of thoughts are defined as “advocacists”, “ethicists”, “interventionists”, “normativists”; (d) the movement is in the maturation process as a discipline in which “interface”, “distance”, “interference” and “fusion” epistemological postures represent the fundamental steps; (e) parent disciplines (health sciences and law) competences, logics and cultures introduce duality and difficulties in knowledge production, validation and diffusion; (f) there is need to re-write the history of the HHR movement by inscribing it not only into the humanitarian or public health perspectives but also into the evolution of sciences and its social, political and economical conditions of emergence. The ambiguous epistemological status of this field, the need to re-write its history, the methodological duality in its research, the question of the competence of the knowledge validation, as well as the impact of HHR practice on national and international health governance are the challenges of its future development. To meet those challenges; we call for the creation and implementation of an international research agenda, the exploration of new research topics and the evaluation of the movement’s contribution to the national and global public health and human rights governance. (shrink)

On rencontre en consultation en cmpp ou en pédopsychiatrie des enfants qui, dès la crèche, inquiètent leur environnement du fait de conduites témoignant souvent de traumas interactifs qui sidèrent toute tentative d’élaboration et complexifient tous les projets de soin. Pour ces enfants pour qui l’élaboration en consultation de type classique est difficilement accessible, il s’agit de travailler autour des liens parents/enfants les problématiques qui renvoient aux premières expériences d’attachement et d’appropriation subjective. À partir d’une consultation parents/enfant avec une petite fille (...) de 3 ans, les auteurs, psychologues cliniciens, mettent en perspective ce travail où il est question de cheminer avec les parents et l’enfant pour progressivement scénariser et historiciser les recouvrements traumatiques. Il devient possible alors de se figurer un vécu jusqu’alors informe ouvrant petit à petit la voie à une symbolisation et donc à des changements dans les liens parents/enfant. (shrink)

On rencontre en consultation en cmpp ou en pédopsychiatrie des enfants qui, dès la crèche, inquiètent leur environnement du fait de conduites témoignant souvent de traumas interactifs qui sidèrent toute tentative d’élaboration et complexifient tous les projets de soin. Pour ces enfants pour qui l’élaboration en consultation de type classique est difficilement accessible, il s’agit de travailler autour des liens parents/enfants les problématiques qui renvoient aux premières expériences d’attachement et d’appropriation subjective. À partir d’une consultation parents/enfant avec une petite fille (...) de 3 ans, les auteurs, psychologues cliniciens, mettent en perspective ce travail où il est question de cheminer avec les parents et l’enfant pour progressivement scénariser et historiciser les recouvrements traumatiques. Il devient possible alors de se figurer un vécu jusqu’alors informe ouvrant petit à petit la voie à une symbolisation et donc à des changements dans les liens parents/enfant. (shrink)

Cet article fait le point sur la notion très polysémique de « parentalité ». Il part d’une définition tridimensionnelle de la parentalité (exercice, pratique et expérience) avancée en 1998 par Didier Houzel, car c’est un moment charnière dans la société française. Avant, dans les années 1970-1980, l’introduction de ce terme par la psychologie clinique (avec celui de « dysparentalité » de René Clément) signe une nouvelle considération de la place des parents par les professionnels, notamment ceux de la protection de (...) l’enfance. Parallèlement, à partir des années 1970, le terme de « monoparentalité » apparaît en sociologie et il s’est divulgué depuis, dans les années 1990, pour amorcer toutes les déclinaisons ultérieures de la « pluriparentalité » traduisant ainsi l’évolution de la famille avec les distinctions du biologique, du domestique et du social (Irène Théry). Depuis, les relations entre les parents, la coparentalité, l’identité même du parent et les enjeux de la parenté donnent lieu à des développements pluridisciplinaires qui devraient se préciser pour limiter l’emploi inflationniste de ce terme. (shrink)

L'article met en valeur le fait que le système pronominal est un excellent indicateur en termes de valeurs véhiculées au sein des écrits argumentatifs des jeunes élèves. A partir d'une tâche rodée en psychologie cognitive, plusieurs thèmes contrastés et significativement testés pour être différents (pro- ou contre attitudes, ce, en lien avec les représentations croisées des enfants versus des parents) les écrits des élèves sont analysés. Le nombre de pronoms employés ne se distribue pas au hasard selon les thèmes. Chaque (...) pronom, je, tu, il(s), on, nous/vous est situé dans l'espace dialogique au regard de cette distribution. (shrink)

Cet article fait le point sur la notion très polysémique de « parentalité ». Il part d’une définition tridimensionnelle de la parentalité (exercice, pratique et expérience) avancée en 1998 par Didier Houzel, car c’est un moment charnière dans la société française. Avant, dans les années 1970-1980, l’introduction de ce terme par la psychologie clinique (avec celui de « dysparentalité » de René Clément) signe une nouvelle considération de la place des parents par les professionnels, notamment ceux de la protection de (...) l’enfance. Parallèlement, à partir des années 1970, le terme de « monoparentalité » apparaît en sociologie et il s’est divulgué depuis, dans les années 1990, pour amorcer toutes les déclinaisons ultérieures de la « pluriparentalité » traduisant ainsi l’évolution de la famille avec les distinctions du biologique, du domestique et du social (Irène Théry). Depuis, les relations entre les parents, la coparentalité, l’identité même du parent et les enjeux de la parenté donnent lieu à des développements pluridisciplinaires qui devraient se préciser pour limiter l’emploi inflationniste de ce terme. (shrink)

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant‐directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult‐directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: hyperarticulation, which makes the categories more separable, and variability, which makes the generalization more robust. Here, we test the separability and robustness of vowel category learning on acoustic representations of speech uttered by Japanese adults in ADS, IDS (addressed to 18‐ to 24‐month olds), or (...) read speech (RS). Separability is determined by means of a distance measure computed between the five short vowel categories of Japanese, while robustness is assessed by testing the ability of six different machine learning algorithms trained to classify vowels to generalize on stimuli spoken by a novel speaker in ADS. Using two different speech representations, we find that hyperarticulated speech, in the case of RS, can yield better separability, and that increased between‐speaker variability in ADS can yield, for some algorithms, more robust categories. However, these conclusions do not apply to IDS, which turned out to yield neither more separable nor more robust categories compared to ADS inputs. We discuss the usefulness of machine learning algorithms run on real data to test hypotheses about the functional role of IDS. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 1, Page 13-23, January 2022. School-based research presents ethical challenges, especially with respect to informed consent. The manner in which pupils and their parents respond to an invitation to participate in research is likely to depend on several factors, including the level of trust between them and the researchers. This paper describes our recruitment and consent process for a school-based eye study in Nigeria. In the course of our study, a particular governmental incident helped to (...) fuel public mistrust in governmental programs and posed a potential threat to our recruitment efforts. The recruitment and consent process included series of advocacy visits to stakeholders in the education sector, highly interactive briefing and health talk sessions in schools, use of telephone services as a medium for information dissemination, age-appropriate study information, parental consent, and pupil assent. Of the 6598 pupils provided with study information, 5723 returned parental consent forms. There were 69 cases of pupils who dissented despite having parental consent. The two leading concerns for the parents/guardians were the rumors regarding a military/governmental-sponsored health campaign and the side-effects of the dilating eye-drops. Nevertheless, our high level of recruitment suggests our recruitment and consent process was successful in assuaging fears for the vast majority of pupils and their parents. (shrink)

L’ouvrage de Beate Collet et Emmanuelle Santelli vient combler un manque qui pendant de longues années a freiné l’avancement des connaissances sur les populations françaises d’ascendance étrangère. Mieux encore, il fait le lien avec l’ensemble du corps social, montrant à la fois sur quels points les réalités de ces populations rejoignent celles de la société globale, et dans quels domaines elles se différencient. Cet ouvrage ambitieux nous livre une sociologie de la famille qui s’attaque à ce..

The controversial case of Terri Schiavo came to a close on March 31, 2005, with her death following the removal of a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. This event followed years of controversy and social upheaval. Voices from across the entire political and cultural spectrums filled the airwaves and op-ed pages of major newspapers. Protests ensued outside of Ms. Schiavo’s care facility. Ms. Schiavo’s parents published videos of their daughter on the internet in an effort to prove that she was not (...) in a vegetative state and could potentially recover. There is a certain mystery to the entire controversy given the fact that, legally, it was largely a matter of settled law. Precedent cases and legal statutes clearly set out the proper procedures and decisions to be followed in this case. Nonetheless, powerful challenges and virulent opposition to these standards arose. Through an investigation of this case as well as a comparative study of the case of Dax Cowart (in particular, the documentary depictions of Dax Cowart’s case) and of a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, I plan to investigate the source of these social upheavals and hypothesize that they were largely the result of a phenomenological reaction to the human face. (shrink)

Levinas is a thinker for the future, concerned with the future. He inverts the priority of the declaration of the French Revolution "Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood", by designating "brotherhood" first among modern European society's most cherished values. Levinas sees brotherhood as the fundamental condition of our shared humanity and as the foundation of freedom and equality. Thus, he presents himself as a Western thinker who sets modern thought on its head and at the same time enriches it. His radical view of (...) the other, responsibility, subjectivity and the Infinite remains a challenge, today more than ever. Calling out to both religious and secular seekers alike, Levinas asks for an alert and critical dialogue of the ethical and metaphysical meaning of our inter-human and social relationships. In this work, a new generation of philosophers, ethicists and theologians embark on a conversation with Levians, with due appreciation for his genius and uninhibitedness in their questioning. The intermediaries in this provocative dialogue are: Hannah Arendt, Henri Bergson, Anders Nygren, Paul Ricoeur and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The following themes are thus treated: - ethics as liberation and redemption beyond the self - time, duration and alterity - freedom, society and politics - desire between eros and agape - 'good enough' parenting and family ethics - conversational processes and pastoral counselling - asymmetry and reciprocity between the self and the other - modern humanism vs. post-modern anti-humanism as an inspiration for a renewed secular humanism - suffering, death and euthanasia - perspectives and boundaries of interreligious dialogue - the (im)possibility of a Christian interpretation of Levinas' Jewish-inspired thought - a new Christian theology of Trinitarian praxis. This volume likewise includes contributions by: Roger Burggraeve, W. Wolf Diedrich, Annemie Dillen, Thomas Folens, Glen Morrison, Marianne Moyaert, Marina Riemslagh, Anya Topolski, Emilie Van Daele, Jean Vanheessen, Sophie Veulemans and Torben Wolfs. In this book Levinas is presented as an 'extra-ordinary' other who awakes into vigilance the conscience of not only the contributors, but the readers as well: one speaks and the other responds differently. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabela normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar a crítica levinasiana à identificaçáo da subjetividade com a consciência, assim como sua concepçáo de subjetividade de origem anárquica. Para tanto, iniciaremos com a crítica de Levinas ao conceito de Eu, pensado em grande parte da filosofia ocidental e as noções de (...) Ideia do Infinito e Desejo Metafísico como primeiros passos para ruptura desse pensamento. Em seguida, apresentaremos o Rosto como questionador da soberania do Eu e exigência de resposta. Como último momento e objetivo central deste artigo, apresentaremos a anarquia do Eu, ou seja, o Eu sem origem, em recorrência, fora da consciência e destituído de si mesmo. Estes momentos sáo importantes para a construçáo do pensamento ético de Levinas. (shrink)

This book develops an account of the parent–child relationship in order to articulate the essential structure of intersubjectivity as fundamentally ethically-oriented, dialogical, and mutually dynamic. Drawing on the philosophical projects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as recent research in cognitive neuroscience and child development research, this work will be of interest to those working in the fields of continental philosophy, embodied cognition, philosophy of childhood, psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy for children, and education.

As of this writing, twenty‐one states have passed laws barring transgender youth‐athletes from competing on public‐school sports teams in accordance with their gender identity. Proponents of these regulations claim that transgender females in particular have inherent physiological advantages that threaten a “level playing field” for their cisgender competitors. Existing evidence is limited but does not support these restrictions. Gathering more robust data will require allowing transgender youth to compete (rather than preemptively barring them), but even if trans females are shown (...) to retain some advantage, this would not have greater moral significance than the many other “fair” physical and economic advantages found across sports. These regulations deprive transgender youth, an exceptionally vulnerable population, from the vast physical, mental, and social benefits of sports. While we advocate for transgender inclusion under our current, gender‐segregated model of sport, we propose changes to the overarching structure that would promote a more inclusive and fairer athletic environment. (shrink)

Do you know who you are? If the question seems unclear, it might owe to the notion of ‘knowing-wh’ (knowing-who, knowing-what, knowing-when, etc.). Such knowledge contrasts with ‘knowing-that’, the more familiar topic of epistemologists. But these days, knowing-wh is receiving more attention than ever, and here we will survey three current debates on the nature of knowing-wh. These debates concern, respectively, (1) whether all knowing-wh is reducible to knowing-that (‘generalized intellectualism’), (2) whether all knowing-wh is relativized to a contrast proposition (...) (‘contrastivism about knowing-wh’), and (3) whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is a semantic or purely pragmatic phenomenon (‘contextualism vs. invariantism about knowing-wh’). (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine stakeholder identification and prioritization by managers using the power, legitimacy, and urgency framework of Mitchell et al. (Academy of Management Review 22, 853–886; 1997). We use a multi-method, comparative case study of two large-scale sporting event organizing committees, with a particular focus on interviews with managers at three hierarchical levels. We support the positive relationship between number of stakeholder attributes and perceived stakeholder salience. Managers’ hierarchical level and role have direct and moderating (...) effects on stakeholder identification and perceived salience. We also found that most stakeholders were definitive, dominant, or dormant types – the other five types were rare. Power has the most important effect on salience, followed by urgency and legitimacy. Based on our case study, we offer several ways to advance the theory of stakeholder identification and salience. (shrink)

_Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_ attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. Psychological studies indicate not just that we are bad at detecting our own "ego-threatening" thoughts; they also suggest that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts. However, self-reflection presupposes an ability to know one’s own thoughts. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? While admitting the psychological data, this book argues that we are infallible in a limited range of self-discerning judgments—that in some (...) cases, these judgments are self-fulfilling or self-verifying. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and the author does not wish to provide a "foundation" for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible. The book will be of interest to scholars working on the issue of self-reflection across a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Spirituality connotes praxis informed by religious or faith convictions. This can transform the individual and society at large. Christian spirituality is centered on how a person’s relationship with the God of Jesus Christ informs and directs one’s approach to existence and engagement with the world. The ecosystem concerns humanity and relationship with it is invariably influenced by faith or religious informed praxis. The reality of climate change is convincing many people that humankind’s common homeland needs to be treated with care (...) and respect if created beings are to have a congenial habitat now and in the future. This article avers that Christian spirituality can contribute to eco-friendly behavior through re-formation of the behavior of people and emboldening their goodwill as regards the responsibility of all towards the care of the earth. Finally, this research proffers a three-fold model of eco-spirituality - scriptural, selfcontrol, and sacramental approaches to the earth – as a contribution towards stemming the tide of ecological assaults on creation. Textual analysis is the method used in this research. (shrink)

As the USA contends with another surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals may soon need to answer the unresolved question of who lives and dies when ventilator demand exceeds supply. Although most triage policies in the USA have seemingly converged on the use of clinical need and benefit as primary criteria for prioritisation, significant differences exist between institutions in how to assign priority to patients with identical medical prognoses: the so-called ‘tie-breaker’ situations. In particular, one’s status as a frontline healthcare worker (...) has been a proposed criterion for prioritisation in the event of a tie. This article outlines two major grounds for reconsidering HCW prioritisation. The first recognises trust as an indispensable element of clinical care and mistrust as a hindrance to any public health strategy against the virus, thus raising concerns about the outward appearance of favouritism. The second considers the ways in which proponents of HCW prioritisation deviate from the very ‘ethics frameworks’ that often preface triage policies and serve to guide resource allocation—a rhetorical strategy that may undermine the very ethical foundations on which triage policies stand. By appealing to trust and consistency, we re-examine existing arguments in favour of HCW prioritisation and provide a more tenable justification for adjudicating on tie-breaker events during crisis standards of care. (shrink)

Entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A summary of the literature on whether externalism about thought content precludes non-empirical knowledge of one's own thoughts.

Over 115 000 people are waiting for life-saving organ transplants, of whom a small fraction will receive transplants and many others will die while waiting. Existing efforts to expand the number of available organs, including increasing the number of registered donors and procuring organs in uncontrolled environments, are crucial but unlikely to address the shortage in the near future and will not improve donor/recipient compatibility or organ quality. If successful, organ bioengineering can solve the shortage and improve functional outcomes. Studying (...) manufactured organs in animal models has produced valuable data, but is not sufficient to understand viability in humans. Before risking manufactured organ experimentation in living humans, study of bioengineered organs in recently deceased humans would facilitate evaluation of the function of engineered tissues and the complex interactions between the host and the transplanted tissue. Although such studies do not pose risk to human subjects, they pose unique ethical challenges concerning the previous wishes of the deceased, rights of surviving family members, effective operation and fair distribution of medical services, and public transparency. This article investigates the ethical, legal and social considerations in performing engineered organ research on the recently deceased. (shrink)

Contemporary Nigerian society is in its doldrums as regards the culture of violence and distrust among peoples from various ethnic groups that make-up this nation. To an extent, religio-political reasons are fueling this culture of violence and distrust. The thrust of this paper is that: Christian military chaplains are stakeholders as promoters of peace and mutual co-existence in Nigeria with regard to controlling the culture of violence and disunity. The core of this thesis remains Jesus’ convictions concerning non-resistance to the (...) evil one as documented in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: 38-42, and His life as the Peace-Builder. Therefore, contemporary Nigerian context calls for Christian military chaplains to be more conscious that being messengers of peace and promoters of peaceful coexistence in our country, they have ethical responsibility to build bridges to harmony. Since Christ (God) is love, the chaplains should rediscover the poetics of testimony as a principle for building and reconstructing paths that lead to mutual co-existence in view of encouraging the reign of justice, unity, and peace in Nigeria. (shrink)

Here I explore the prospects for fictionalism about the mental, modeled after fictionalism about possible worlds. Mental fictionalism holds that the mental states posited by folk psychology do not exist, yet that some sentences of folk psychological discourse are true. This is accomplished by construing truths of folk psychology as “truths according to the mentalistic fiction.” After formulating the view, I identify five ways that the view appears self-refuting. Moreover, I argue that this cannot be fixed by semantic ascent or (...) by a kind of primitivism. Even so, I also show that the “self-refutation” charges are subtly question-begging. Nevertheless, the reply reveals that a mental fictionalist ought to be a kind of quietist. (shrink)

In “Does Controlled Donation after Circulatory Death Violate the Dead Donor Rule?” the authors maintain that compliance with the dead donor rule (DDR) does not require a valid determination of deat...

A key consequence of globalisation is the integrative approach to reality whereby emphasis is placed on interdependence. Religion being an expression of human culture is equally affected by this cultural revolution. The main objective of this paper is to examine how religious affiliation, among Christians, influences attitudes towards the application of psychological sciences to the assuagement of human suffering. The sociological theory of structural functionalism was deployed to explain attitudinal appraisal. Ethnographic methodology, through quantitative analysis of administered questionnaire, was also (...) used. The study reveals that religious tenets largely shape attitudinal appraisal and redefine the borders of globalisation’s metanarratives. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument suggests that linguistic understanding does not consist in knowing interpretations, whereas Kripkenstein’s version suggests that meaning cannot be metaphysically fixed by interpretations. In the present paper, rule-following considerations are used to suggest that certain ontological questions cannot be answered by interpretations. Specifically, if the aim is to specify the ontology of a language, an interpretation cannot answer what object an expression of L denotes, if the interpretations are themselves L-expressions. Briefly, that’s because the ontology of such interpretations (...) would naturally be in question as much as the expressions they interpret. So in order to settle the question of ontology, the interpretations themselves would need to be interpreted, and thus a regress. I conclude that knowing the answer to what ontology underlies L cannot be a matter of knowing interpretations. The paper ends with a quietist conclusion; the slogan is that empirical science is ontology enough, or rather, it is about all the ontology one should expect. (shrink)

This paper reports completeness results for dyadic deontic logics in the tradition of Hansson’s systems. There are two ways to understand the core notion of best antecedent-worlds, which underpins such systems. One is in terms of maximality, and the other in terms of optimality. Depending on the choice being made, one gets different evaluation rules for the deontic modalities, but also different versions of the so-called limit assumption. Four of them are disentangled, and compared. The main observation of this paper (...) is that, even in the partial order case, the contrast between maximality and optimality is not as significant as one could expect, because the logic remains the same whatever notion of best is used. This is established by showing that, given analogous properties for the betterness relation, the same system is sound and complete with respect to its intended modelling. The chief result of this paper concerns Åqvist’s system F supplemented with the principle of cautious monotony. It is established that, under the maximality rule, F + is sound and complete with respect to the class of models in which the betterness relation is required be reflexive and smooth . From this, a number of spin-off results are obtained. First and foremost, it is shown that a similar determination result holds for optimality; that is, under the optimality rule, F + is also sound and complete with respect to the class of models in which the betterness relation is reflexive and smooth . Other spin-off results concern classes of models in which further constraints are placed on the betterness relation, like totalness and transitivity. (shrink)

This article sketches the broad outlines of Matthew's ironic portrayal of children, examining first the 'lower level' of the narrative and then the 'upper level' of the narrative. When viewed from the 'lower level' of Matthew's narrative, the everyday circumstances of children reflect the nurture of their parents as well as significant challenges: debilitating physical conditions, serious illnesses, military violence and premature childhood death. In addition, children occupy the lowest rung on the 1st-century Mediterranean social ladder, a status they share (...) with slaves. But on the 'upper level' of his narrative, from the 'God's-eye' perspective, Matthew turns everyday reality for children on its head in ironic fashion. Emmanuel, the 'God who is with us', appears as a 'child' who has just 'been born' and who exhibits all the powerlessness and vulnerability of such a 'child'. In a violent showdown between 'King Herod' and the one 'who has been born king of the Jews', it is Herod, the powerful ruler, who dies, while the vulnerable 'child' ends up safely in Nazareth. Throughout his ministry, Jesus heals children along with adults. To the apparent chagrin of his disciples, Jesus lays hands on children in an act of blessing. He commends the messianic praises of children, in contrast to the outrage of the Jewish leadership. Moreover, Jesus proclaims that it is 'to such as these [children] that the kingdom of heaven belongs'. (shrink)

For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with Deleuzian categories. (...) While both Simondon and Deleuze have made crucial contributions towards a theory of differential individuation that significantly diverges from other authors associated with French poststructuralism insofar as they insist on the dynamic and vital dimension of difference, they also differ on crucial points. Whereas Simondon sees the process of becoming as transductive amplification, Deleuze theorizes it as intensifying involution, leading to two notably distinct concepts of difference. (shrink)

Descartes held the view that a subject has infallible beliefs about the contents of her thoughts. Here, I first examine a popular contermporary defense of this claim, given by Burge, and find it lacking. I then offer my own defense appealing to a minimal thesis about the compositionality of thoughts. The argument has the virtue of refraining from claims about whether thoughts are “in the head;” thus, it is congenial to both internalists and externalists. The considerations here also illuminate how (...) a subject may have epistemicially priviledged and a priori beliefs about her own thoughts. (shrink)

This paper attacks the modal ontological argument, as advocated by Plantinga among others. Whereas other criticisms in the literature reject one of its premises, the present line is that the argument is invalid. This becomes apparent once we run the argument assuming fictionalism about possible worlds. Broadly speaking, the problem is that if one defines “x” as something that exists, it does not follow that there is anything satisfying the definition. Yet unlike non-modal ontological arguments, the modal argument commits this (...) “existential fallacy” not in relation to the definition of ‘God’. Rather, it occurs in relation to the modal facts quantified over within a Kripkean modal logic. In brief, we can describe the modal facts by whichever logic we prefer—yet it does not follow that there are genuine modal facts, as opposed to mere facts-according-to-the-fiction. A broader consequence of the discussion is that the existential fallacy is an issue for many projects in “armchair metaphysics.”. (shrink)

It is a consequence of Quine’s confirmation holism that the logical laws are in principle revisable. Some have worried this is at odds with another dictum in Quine, viz., that any translation which construes speakers as systematically illogical is ipso facto inadequate. In this paper, I try to formulate exactly what the problem is here, and offer a solution to it by (1) disambiguating the term ‘logic,’ and (2) appealing to a Quinean understanding of ‘necessity.’ The result is that the (...) different theses in Quine’s philosophy of logic are to be situated within different contexts of inquiry. (shrink)

In this essay I advance major criticisms of recent work on the concept of liberty by, Among others, I berlin, G maccallum, H j mccluskey, S I benn, And f oppenheim. Emerging from these critical analyses is a new definition of 'liberty, In the spirit of negative liberalism', Which differentiates it from the related but distinct goods of human autonomy, Opportunity, Ability, Power, And self-Development.