In early 2020, a number of countries developed and published intensive care triage guidelines for the pandemic. Several of those guidelines, especially in the UK, encouraged the explicit assessment...

Sex differences in reproductive strategy and the sexual division of labor resulted in selection for and maintenance of sexual dimorphism across a wide range of characteristics, including body size, hormonal physiology, behavior, and perhaps spatial abilities. In laboratory tasks among undergraduates there is a general male advantage for navigational and mental-rotation tasks, whereas studies find female advantage for remembering item locations in complex arrays and the locations of plant foods. Adaptive explanations of sex differences in these spatial abilities have focused (...) on patterns of differential mate search and routine participation in distinct subsistence behaviors. The few studies to date of spatial ability in nonindustrial populations practicing subsistence lifestyles, or across a wider age range, find inconsistent results. Here we examine sex- and age-based variation in one kind of spatial ability related to navigation, dead-reckoning, among Tsimane forager horticulturalists living in lowland Bolivia. Seventy-three participants (38 male) aged 6–82 years pointed a handheld global positioning system (GPS) unit toward the two nearest communities and the more distant market town. We find no evidence of sex differences in dead reckoning (p = 0.47), nor do we find any evidence of age-related decline in dead-reckoning accuracy (p = 0.28). Participants were significantly more accurate at pointing toward the market town than toward the two nearest villages despite its being significantly farther away than the two nearest communities. Although Tsimane do show sexual dimorphism in foraging tasks, Tsimane women have extensive daily and lifetime travel, and the local environment lacks directional cues that typically enhance male navigation. This study raises the possibility that greater similarity in mobility patterns because of overlapping subsistence strategies and activities may result in convergence of some male and female navigation abilities. (shrink)

Imagine that we are considering whether our healthcare system (or insurer) should fund treatment or procedure X. One factor that may be cited is that of so-called ‘medical necessity’. The claim would be that treatment X should be eligible for funding if it is medically necessary, but ineligible if this does not apply. Similarly, (and relevant to the debates in this special issue), if considering whether a particular treatment should be ethically and/or legally permitted, we may wish to distinguish between (...) cases where the treatment is medically necessary, and those were it is not. But what do we mean by this concept? Here I will propose and briefly defend one plausible and practical definition. (shrink)

The debate about positive and negative claims of conscience is, in large part, about ethical consistency. In this commentary I argue that there can be differences between conscientious provision of treatment and conscientious nonprovision of treatment that are ethically relevant. However, in many cases, including those described in this commentary, there is not sufficient ethical reason to treat them differently. This means that asymmetrical conscientious objection policies are potentially unjustified.

This paper is partly to get rid of some irritation which I have felt at the quite common tendency of philosophers to elucidate (for example) ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looks red’. For a relatively recent example see, for example, Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, ‘An Objectivist′s Guide to Subjectivism about Colour’. However rather than try to make a long list of references, I would rather say ‘No names, no pack drill’. I have even been disturbed to find the use (...) of the words ‘looks red’ that I am opposing ascribed to me by Keith Campbell in his useful article ‘David Armstrong and Realism about Colour’. I am not saying that such talk is necessarily wrong. Talk of ‘looks red’ may be a way of harmlessly referring to the behavioural discriminations with respect to colour of a human percipient. Where it is dangerous, at least to those of us who wish to argue for a broadly physicalist account of the mind, is that it may have concealed overtones of reference to epiphenomenal and irreducibly psychic properties of experiences. Moreover even if it does not do so it may be fence sitting on this issue and liable to misinterpretation. (shrink)

We study logical systems for reasoning about equations involving recursive definitions. In particular, we are interested in "propositional" fragments of the functional language of recursion FLR [18, 17], i.e., without the value passing or abstraction allowed in FLR. The "pure," propositional fragment FLR$_0$ turns out to coincide with the iteration theories of [1]. Our main focus here concerns the sharp contrast between the simple class of valid identities and the very complex consequence relation over several natural classes of models.

Messianic peacemakers: Intertextual relationships between Zechariah 9-14 and the Gospel of Matthew. This article deals with images of war, violence and peace and with the role of messianic leaders in Deutero-Zechariah and the way in which texts from Zechariah 9–14 have been interpreted in the Gospel of Matthew. The first section describes the lines of meaning in Zechariah 9–14 on the basis of word fields related to violence and universal peace. The second section discusses Deutero-Zechariah’s own position in the development (...) of messianic expectations in Old Testament texts. In the third section, the question is asked how the meaning of texts from Zechariah 9–14 about messianic leaders has been influenced by earlier prophetic texts, and how these texts in their turn have been transformed and updated in the Gospel of Matthew, which contains explicit quotations from Deutero-Zechariah in 21:5; 26:15; 26:31 and 27:9–10. The fourth section summarises some interesting semantic shifts appearing in Matthew’s gospel compared to Deutero-Zechariah. Moreover, some critical comments are presented against the idea defended in some recent studies that there is a sharp tension between Jesus’s role in Matthew as the bringer of a peaceful ethical message, and his violent and vindictive role at the final judgement. At the end of this article, the burning question is raised whether Zechariah’s and Matthew’s messages, both of which are characterised by a certain degree of exclusivity, can play a constructive role in modern multi-religious discussions about common roads leading to global peace. (shrink)

Can metaphysics yield the consolations of philosophy? One possibility, defended by Derek Parfit, is that reflection on the nature of identity and time could diminish both fear of death and grief. In this paper, I assess the prospect of such consolation, focussing especially on attempts to console a grieving third party. A shift to a reductionist view of personal identity might mean that death is less threatening. However, there is some evidence to suggest that such a shift does not necessarily (...) translate into less death anxiety. Moreover, applied to grief at loss of another, such a perspective may be misdirected. A temporally neutral perspective offers a theoretically powerful way of reducing the sense of loss at being separated in time from a loved one. However, it is unclear whether it is psychologically possible to achieve. Even if it were possible, it may not diminish the pain of separation.I identify a serious challenge to philosophical consolation for grief. The greater the consolation that is offered, the greater the risk of losing important attachments and the less it may be psychologically accessible. (shrink)

Orthologic is defined by weakening the axioms and rules of inference of the classical propositional calculus. The resulting Lindenbaum-Tarski quotient algebra is an orthoimplication algebra which generalizes the author's implication algebra. The associated order structure is a semi-orthomodular lattice. The theory of orthomodular lattices is obtained by adjoining a falsity symbol to the underlying orthologic or a least element to the orthoimplication algebra.

Originally published in 1944, this book was originally intended as a continuation of the 1943 publication Nautical Mathematics, which is also reissued in this series. In it, the principles set out in Nautical Mathematics are given practical applications, and the text is supplied with exercises to test and clarify the lessons. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education in the forces during WWII.

According to Mark 6:14–29, John the Baptist was beheaded by the order of Herod Antipas. This dramatic event became inevitable after a cunning interplay between Herodias and her daughter, who remains nameless in the New Testament. According to Flavius Josephus, she was called Salome ( Jewish Antiquities XVIII, 5.4 § 136–137), and under that name, she went down in history. For the sake of convenience, I also call her ‘Salome’ in this article. Salome is the Greek form of the Hebrew (...) name Shlomith, which was very popular in early Judaic times and means ‘she who brings peace and tranquillity’. Unlike the faithful women elsewhere in Mark’s gospel (5:21–43; 7:24–30; 14:3–9), Herodias and her daughter are not exactly models of virtue. Yet, it is questionable as to whether they are both thoroughly bad and whether they are both equally responsible for the murder of John. This article does not provide a historical reconstruction of what exactly happened at the court of Herod Antipas, but it contains a narrative analysis of what happened in the court of Herod Antipas. This narrative analysis is followed by an intertextual approach in the second part of this article. Firstly, I will compare Mark’s story with what Flavius Josephus tells about the beheading of John. Thereafter, I will highlight the roles of Herodias and Salome in the play Salome by Oscar Wilde from 1894, which, in turn, forms the basis of the libretto for the opera Salome by Richard Strauss from 1905. Do we encounter in these modern artistic recreations (Neuschöpfungen) only transformations of Mark’s story, or also transgressions in which Wilde and Strauss have largely replaced the original meaning of the story with new meaning? (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show the relationship between the normative outlook and political philoso- phy of traditional societies on the one hand, and the crises of governance and leadership in contemporary African Societies, particularly subSaharan states, on the other. Although there are quite some differences in the quality of leadership and governance among sub-Saharan African states because of the different political and economic circumstances, this part of the globe taken as a whole remains underdeveloped in terms of (...) having the will to institute and maintain stable polities with responsive, responsible and efficient governance. (shrink)

We present here a direct elementary construction of continuous utility functions on perfectly separable totally preordered sets that does not make use of the well-known Debreu’s open gap lemma. This new construction leans on the concept of a separating countable decreasing scale. Starting from a perfectly separable totally ordered structure, we give an explicit construction of a separating countable decreasing scale, from which we show how to get a continuous utility map.

This paper examines the role of ideology in the emergence of the empirical sciences and the evolution of philosophy. It argues that the orientation of the religious ideology, Christianity, at the epistemological and ontological levels was very instrumental in the emergence of the empirical sciences in the area dominated by the culture of the Western (Latin) church. This claim is demonstrated by an analysis of the theoretical and methodological orientation of pre-Christian Europe, the epistemological and other philo- sophical values sponsored (...) by Christianity, as well as a comparative analysis of other cultural regions where such philosophical values did not exist. The paper then explores the evolution of philosophy after the emergence of the empirical sciences. It points out that the progress of philosophy along rational lines and the generation of knowledge thereof is not equivalent to embracing the method of the empirical sciences (scientism), but rather is a rediscovery of the rational attitude bearing in mind the context in which it has to operate. (shrink)

In this paper weak utilities are obtained for acyclic binary relations satisfying a condition weaker than semicontinuity on second countable topological spaces. In fact, in any subset of such a space we obtain a weak utility that characterizes the maximal elements as maxima of the function. The addition of separability of the relation yields the existence of semicontinuous representations. This property of the utility provides a result of existence of maximal elements for a class of spaces that include compact spaces. (...) However, we offer a negative result that continuity may not be reached under such hypotheses. (shrink)