Forests are a significant component of integrated agriculture-based livelihood systems, such as those found in many parts of Asia. Women and the poor are often relatively dependent on, and vulnerable to changes in, forests and forest access. And yet, these same actors are frequently marginalized within local forest governance. This article draws on multi-year, multi-case research in Nepal that sought to investigate and address this marginalization. Specifically, the article analyzes the influence of adaptive collaborative governance on the engagement of women (...) and the poor in community forestry decision making. A description of adjustments to governance processes and arrangements is followed by the consequent changes in engagement observed, in terms of: efforts made by female and poor members to be involved, express views and exercise rights; leadership roles played by female and poor members; and the extent to which the user groups’ priorities and actions reflect the marginalized members’ interests and needs. The main finding is that the engagement of women and the poor increased across sites with the shift from the status quo to adaptive collaborative governance, although not without challenges. The article explores interconnected factors underlying the changes, then considers these through the lens of the “three-gap analysis of effective participation.” This leads to specific insights concerning the conceptualization and strengthening of engagement in community forestry including the central roles of power and learning. (shrink)

This treatise on aesthetics criticizes various psychological theories of art, offers new theories and interpretations, and draws important inferences concerning ...

I am interested in extending modal calculi by adding propositional quantifiers, given by the rules for quantifier introduction: provided that p does not occur free in A.

this article is based on a paper that I presented during the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, as a keynote speaker in the Coss Dialogue sessions. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that most participants of SAAP use the term "American" in its continental, rather than in the US-centric sense. I am glad that many of the philosophers of this community of knowledge have opened their dialogues to the voices and experiences south of the (...) Río Bravo. We are living during very difficult times in which cultures and practices of violence, as well as aggressive exclusion and intolerance, are affecting our communities on both sides of the border. In this context of multiple... (shrink)

We discuss five kinds of representations of rationales and provide a formal account of how they can alter disputation. The formal model of disputation is derived from recent work in argument. The five kinds of rationales are compilation rationales, which can be represented without assuming domain-knowledge (such as utilities) beyond that normally required for argument. The principal thesis is that such rationales can be analyzed in a framework of argument not too different from what AI already has. The result is (...) a formal understanding of rationales, a partial taxonomy, and a foundation for computer programs that represent and reason with rationales.The five kinds of rationales are as follows: (c)ompression and (s)pecialization, which yield rules, and (d)isputation, which yields a decision. These are modeled as potentially changing the focus of the dispute. Then there are (f)it, a rationale for rules, and (r)esolution, a rationale for decisions. These cannot be modeled as simply; they force disputation to a meta-level, at least temporarily. (shrink)

R K Elliott; Aestheticism, Imagination and Schooling: a reply to Ruby Meager, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 33–42.

It is a common complaint against moral philosophers that their abstract theorising bears little relation to the practical problems of everyday life. Professor Braithwaite believes that this criticism need not be inevitable. With the help of the Theory of Games he shows how arbitration is possible between two neighbours, a jazz trumpeter and a classical pianist, whose performances are a source of mutual discord. The solution of the problem in the lecture is geometrical, and is based on the formal analogy (...) between the logic of the situation and the geometry of a parabola. But an appendix provides the alternative algebraic treatment of a general two-person collaboration situation. (shrink)

R S Peters; Education and the Educated Man, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 4, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 5–20, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

A collection of critical essays by English and American scholars, including such controversial academic political theorists as Gutmann, Barry and Nussbaum, that raises questions about the current theoretical reassessment of political liberalism.

What kind of knowledge is medical knowledge? Can medicine be explained scientifically? Is disease a scientific concept, or do explanations of disease depend on values? What is ‘evidence-based’ medicine? Are advances in neuroscience bringing us closer to a scientific understanding of the mind? The nature of medicine raises fundamental questions about explanation, causation, knowledge and ontology – questions that are central to philosophy as well as medicine. In this book Paul R. Thompson and Ross E. G. Upshur introduce the fundamental (...) issues in philosophy of medicine for those coming to the subject for the first time. They introduce and explain the following key topics: Understanding the physician-patient relationship: the phenomenology of the medical encounter. Models and theories in biology and medicine: what role do theories play in medicine? Are they similar to scientific theories? Randomised controlled trials: can scientific experiments be replicated in clinical medicine? What are the philosophical criticisms levelled at RCTs? The concept of evidence in medical research: what do we mean by ‘Evidence-based medicine?’ Should all medicine be based on evidence? Causation in medicine What do advances in neuroscience reveal about the relationship between mind and body? Defining health and disease: are explanations of disease objective or do they depend on values? Evolutionary medicine: what is the role of evolutionary biology in understanding medicine? Is it relevant? Extensive use of empirical examples and case studies is made throughout the book. These include debates about smoking and cancer, the use of placebos in randomised controlled trials and controversies about research into the causes of HIV and autism. This is an indispendable introduction to those teaching philosophy of medicine and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 71-73.

This is a review of those aspects of the theory of varieties of Boolean algebras with operators that emphasise connections with modal logic and structural properties that are related to natural properties of logical systems.It begins with a survey of the duality that exists between BAO's and relational structures, focusing on the notions of bounded morphisms, inner substructures, disjoint and bounded unions, and canonical extensions of structures that originate in the study of validity-preserving operations on Kripke frames. This duality is (...) then applied to polymodal propositional logics having finitary intensional connectives that generalise the Box and Diamond connectives of unary modal logic. Issues discussed include validity in canonical structures, completeness under the relational semantics, and characterisations of logics by elementary classes of structures and by finite structures.It turns out that a logic is strongly complete for the relational semantics if the variety of algebras it defines is complex, which means that every algebra in the variety is embeddable into a full powerset algebras that is also in the variety. A hitherto unpublished formulation and proof of this is given that applies to quasi-varieties. This is followed by an algebraic demonstration that the temporal logic of Dedekind complete linear orderings defines a complex variety, adapting Gabbay's model-theoretic proof that this logic is strongly complete. (shrink)

In this paper we mainly deal with first-order languages without equality and introduce a weak form of equality predicate, the so-called Leibniz equality. This equality is characterized algebraically by means of a natural concept of congruence; in any structure, it turns out to be the maximum congruence of the structure. We show that first-order logic without equality has two distinct complete semantics (fll semantics and reduced semantics) related by the reduction operator. The last and main part of the paper contains (...) a series of Birkhoff-style theorems characterizing certain classes of structures defined without equality, not only full classes but also reduced ones. (shrink)

In this paper, the Helmholtz equation with quadratic damping themes is used for modeling the dynamics of a simple prey-predator system also called a simple Lotka–Volterra system. From the Helmholtz equation with quadratic damping themes obtained after modeling, the equilibrium points have been found, and their stability has been analyzed. Subsequently, the harmonic oscillations have been studied by the harmonic balance method, and the phenomena of resonance and hysteresis are observed. The primary and secondary resonances have been researched by the (...) multiple-scale method, and the conditions of stability of the amplitudes of oscillations are determined. Chaos is detected analytically by the Melnikov method and numerically using the basin of attraction, the bifurcation diagram, the Lyapunov exponent, the phase portrait, and the Poincaré section. The effects of all the parameters of the system are analyzed in detail, and special emphasis is placed on the new parameters. Through this analysis, the complex phenomena such as hysteresis, bistability, amplitude jump, resonances, and chaos have been obtained. The control of the parameters and the necessary conditions to control the aforementioned phenomena have been found. (shrink)

Education happens all the time, in all places, and during all our lives. We all know that. However, the moment we hear the word “education,” our minds wander back to school. Schools and other educational institutions offer formal education and thus formalize the concept, turning it into a quasi-technical term that goes well with “policy,” “criteria,” “evaluation forms,” and all the rest of the modern educational vocabulary. The growing formalization of concepts is in line with a verificationist ideology that thrives (...) in formal education: methods and outcomes need to be tested; we need a scientific language that measures what students learn in a scientific way; science is a priority anyway, for it informs us of what lies beyond our ordinary conception of the world. Among the goals of education after all is to teach us a more accurate way to describe the world, leaving vulgar common sense behind. Drawing from Wittgenstein's arguments on rule following, I will argue against such temptations to attack common sense. (shrink)

In Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, R. Zachary Manis examines in detail the several facets of the problem of hell, considers the reasons why the usual responses to the problem are unsatisfying, and suggests how an adequate solution to the problem can be constructed.

This collection of original essays, by some of the best known contemporary criminal law theorists, tackles a range of issues about the criminal law's 'special part' - the part of the criminal law that defines specific offences. One of its aims is to show the importance, for theory as well as for practice, of focusing on the special part as well as on the general part which usually receives much more theoretical attention. Some of the issues covered concern the proper (...) scope of the criminal law, for example how far should it include offences of possession, or endangerment? If it should punish only wrongful conduct, how can it justly include so-called 'mala prohibita', which are often said to involve conduct that is not wrongful prior to its legal prohibition? Other issues concern the ways in which crimes should be classified. Can we make plausible sense, for instance, of the orthodox distinction between crimes of basic and general intent? Should domestic violence be defined as a distinct offence, distinguished from other kinds of personal violence? Also examined are the ways in which specific offences should be defined, to what extent those definitions should identify distinctive types of wrongs, and the light that such definitional questions throw on the grounds and structures of criminal liability. Such issues are discussed in relation not only to such crimes as murder, rape, theft and other property offences, but also in relation to offences such as bribery, endangerment and possession that have not traditionally been subjects for in depth theoretical analysis. (shrink)

This unique textbook--the first to offer balanced, comprehensive coverage of all major perspectives on the rational justification of religious belief--includes twenty-four key papers by some of the world's leading philosophers of religion. Arranged in six sections, each representing a major approach to religious epistemology, the book begins with papers by noted atheists, setting the stage for the main theistic responses--Wittgensteinian Fideism, Reformed epistemology, natural theology, prudential accounts of religious beliefs, and rational belief based in religious experience--in each case offering a (...) representative sample of papers by leading exponents, a critical paper, and a substantial bibliography. A comprehensive introductory essay and ample cross-references help students to contrast and evaluate the different approaches, while the overall arrangement encourages them to assess the full range of philosophical positions on the issue. Carefully selected to provide both a comprehensive overview of current work and a series of modern perspectives on many classic sources--Swinburne's detailed discussion of Hume's critique of the design argument, for example, as well as an entire section evaluating and extending Pascal's famous Wager--the essays also provide a uniquely readable survey that will be useful in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of religion and epistemology. (shrink)

Arrian's enthusiasm for Ptolemy's account of Alexander has often been echoed in modern times. With much justification it is generally agreed that Arrian's account of Alexander, through its reliance on the works of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, is our best and, on the whole, most reliable account of Alexander. Recent work, however, has illuminated Ptolemy's weaknesses, and we can no longer regard Ptolemy as utterly reliable in every important respect. His version of the Alexander story is centred on Alexander, therefore Alexander (...) is depicted out of the close context of the Macedonian court. It is only through the information preserved in other writers—traditionally, but undiscriminatingly, considered unreliable—that, for instance, the picture of Alexander's struggle with his Macedonian nobles has begun to emerge. And in matters of this kind Ptolemy's version is so much the court ‘official’ version that it cannot be regarded as trustworthy. (shrink)

Kelâm âlimleri “mûcize” kavramını iki farklı şekilde tarif etmişlerdir. Bunlardan ilkinde mûcize “Peygamber olduğunu ileri süren kimsenin elinde, onun doğruluğunu kanıtlamak için meydana gelen hârikulâde olay” şeklinde tanımlanmıştır. İkinci tarife göre ise mûcize: “Peygamberlik iddia eden bir zâtın elinde, inkârcılara meydan okuduğu bir sırada, kendisini doğrular mâhiyette, başkalarının benzerini yapamadıkları, Allah tarafından yaratılan, olağanüstü olay”lara verilen addır. Tanımlardan da anlaşılacağı üzere “mûcize” kelimesiyle genel olarak “hissî mûcize”lere işaret edilmektedir. Zaten “mûcize” teriminin kelâmî metinlerde yer almaya başladığı IV. yy. dan itibaren (...) genelde Hz. Peygamber’in (s) hissî mucizelerinin bulunup bulunmağı temelinde tartışmalar yaşanmıştır. Hatta Kur’ân’da yer verilen geçmiş peygamberlere ait hissî mucize örneklerinden hareketle mesele zaman zaman peygamberlerin hissî mucizelerinin birbiriyle yarıştırılması boyutuna kadar taşınmıştır. Tüm bu tartışma safahatında geçmişte ve günümüzde ihmal edilen, gözden kaçırılan ya da yeteri kadar değer verilmeyen -bizce en önemli ve bugün de gözle görülür, dost, düşman, insaf sahibi herkesin takdirle karşıladığı- mûcize örneği ise Hz. Peygamber’in topyekûn dinî ve siyasî alanda sergilediği insanları dönüştürme kabiliyetidir. Kaldı ki Hz. Peygamber’in bu türden sergilediği mûcize örnekleri geçmişte bir noktada yaşanmış ve misyonunu tamamlayarak tarihin dehlizlerinde kaybolmuş da değildir. Aksine bu dönüştürme ameliyesi nebevî prensiplerin ikâmesi ile asr-ı saadette ve sonrasında olduğu gibi günümüzde ve kıyamete kadar devam edecek olan zaman dilimlerinde de örnekliğini sürdürmeye ve fonksiyonunu icra etmeye devam edecektir. Hz. Peygamber’in başta Bedir Savaşı ve Hudeybiye Antlaşması olmak üzere birçok siyasî alanda yine bireysel ve toplumsal olarak içinde yaşadığı toplumun yüceltilip yükseltilmesinde olağanüstü bir başarı sağladığı yadsınamaz bir gerçektir. Elde ettiği başarıların kendisini hiçbir şekilde asıl hedefinden, tevhid merkezli yaşantısından uzaklaştırmaması, günün sonunda yine “rabbine şükreden bir kul” vasfını koruması onun şahsî kemâlinin ve vahye muhatap oluşunun en büyük göstergelerindendir. John William Draper (ö. 1882) gibi Batılı bilim insanlarına şu türden cümleleri kurduran en mühim sâik de kuşkusuz Hz. Peygamber’in sözünü ettiğimiz o eşsiz dönüştürme kabiliyetidir: “Tüm insanlar arasında, insan ırkına en fazla tesir eden kişi, Justinianus'un ölümünden dört yıl sonra Mekke’de, Arabistan'da doğan kişidir. Pek çok imparatorluğun manevî ve dinî lideri olmak, insan ırkının üçte birinin günlük hayatını yönlendirmek, belki de ‘Allah'ın Elçisi’ unvanının gerçek olduğunun delilidir.” İşte “Bir Mûcize Örneği Olarak Hz. Peygamber’in İnsanları Dönüştürme Kabiliyeti” başlığını taşıyan bu makale, müslüman toplumun kendi ekseninde yükselmesi ve yücelmesi adına hayatî önemi hâiz, günümüz insanının hayat felsefesine yön vermesi açısından da son derece kıymetli ve yol gösterici olan Son Elçi’nin bireyi, toplumu ve insanlığı dönüştürme kabiliyetini onun vahye muhatap kimliği ve tevhid eksenli hayatı çerçevesinde ortaya koymayı hedeflemektedir. (shrink)

İ‘câzü’l-Kur’ân literatürüne bakıldığında ilim adamlarının i‘câzın ne anlama geldiği, tehaddînin mâhiyeti ve bu olgunun ne şekilde tahakkuk ettiği konusunda birtakım çözüm yolları bulmaya çalıştıkları; bu konuyu nazm, fesâhat ve belâgatla ilişkilendirerek çok sayıda teori ortaya koydukları görülmektedir. Bu bağlamda Kur’ân metninin ne kadarının mu‘ciz olduğu, muârızlarına müteveccih tehaddînin asgari miktarı meselesinde serdedilen görüşlerden biri, Kur’ân’ın iç düzenin en küçük birimi olan âyetle tehaddîdir. İslâm düşünce tarihinin klasik ve modern dönemlerinde savunucusu bulunan bu yaklaşıma göre Kur’ân’ın en küçük birimi olan âyet (...) veya âyet eczâsı, mu‘ciz olmakta ve muarızlara bunlarla meydan okunmaktadır. Konuya ilişkin daha önce bir çalışmanın yapılmamış olmasından hareketle i‘câzü’l-Kur’ân literatürüne katkı sunmayı amaçlayan bu çalışmada, tehaddînin âyetle tahakkuk ettiğini belirten ilim adamlarının istidlâl yöntemleri önce deskriptif bir üslupla aktarılmakta, akabinde bunlar analitik bir bakış açısıyla irdelenmektedir. Son olarak da âyetle tehaddî teorisinin Kur’ân’ın bütünlüğüne riayet ilkesine uyup uymadığı test edilmekte ve bu bağlamda i‘câz olgusunun mâhiyeti incelenmektedir. Sonuç olarak mezkûr ilke esas alındığında fesâhat ve belâgat yönlerinin her âyette eşit düzeyde tahakkuk ettiğini söylemek mümkün gözükmemektedir. Zira Kur’ân’da iki harften ya da tek kelimeden oluşan âyetlerin tehaddîye veya mu‘cizeye konu olduğunu aklen ileri sürmek mümkün değildir. Bu durumda tehaddînin kısa veya uzun olmasına bakılmaksızın âyet veya âyet parçacıklarında değil de her bir sûrenin bütünlüğünde gerçekleştiğini savunmanın daha isabetli bir yaklaşım olduğu kanaatine ulaşılmaktadır. (shrink)

The following three papers (by R.G.A. Dolby, R.N.D. Martin, and A. Thomson) were presented to the Science & Religion Forum at its annual meeting in Liverpool, Britain, in March 1988, under the general theme of Tradition & Authority in Science and Religion. An abbreviated version of the fourth paper given at that meeting re-entitled STS Perspective: Value Systems, by W.F. Williams, is printed on pp. 219-221 of this volume (Vol. 9, No. 4). A copy of the full version is available (...) from either the author or the editorial office. (shrink)

The paper reviews criteria which have been used to distinguish science from nonscience and from pseudo–science, and it examines the extent to which they can usefully be applied to “creation science.” These criteria do not force a clear decision, especially as creation science resembles important eighteenth–century forms of orthodox science. Nevertheless, the proponents of creation science may be accused of pious fraud in failing to concede in their political battles that their “science” is tentative and tendentious and will continue to (...) be so while it remains archaic and poorly integrated into the rest of science. (shrink)

Char et al. describe an interesting and useful approach in their paper, “Identifying ethical considerations for machine learning healthcare applications.” Their proposed framework, which see...

R W K Paterson; Towards an Axiology of Knowledge, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 91–100, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1.

The problem that confronts us when we try to compare the structure of discourse and explanation in different domains of knowledge is that no one is an insider in more than one field, and insider information is essential. An observer who is not immersed in the practice of a particular scholarship and who wants to understand it is at the mercy of the practitioners. Yet those practitioners are themselves mystified by a largely unexamined communal myth of how scholarship is carried (...) on. R. G. Collingwood, although primarily a philosopher, was immersed in the community of historians and understood how history is done, so that he has had an immense influence on our ideas about historiography. Every historian knows The Idea of History.1 He was also a metaphysician, yet his influence on scientists’ understanding of nature, and of science, has been nil, and it is a rare scientist indeed who has ever heard of Collingwood or read The Idea of Nature.2 Collingwood’s views of the structure of science had to be constructed in large part from the elaborate fictions created by scientists and by an earlier generation of philosophers and historians of science who participated in the Baconian myth of the hypothetical-deductive scheme. 1. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History .2. See Collingwood, The Idea of Nature . R. C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor at Harvard University. He is an experimental and theoretical evolutionary geneticist who has also worked extensively on epistemological issues in biology. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and, with Richard Levins, of The Dialectical Biologist . His current research concerns the nature of genetic variation among individuals within species. (shrink)