This volume reflects the late Norman Calder's own interests and contributions. It includes articles by scholars who are already renowned, like Calder, for their sophisticated and challenging approaches to Arabic and Islamic texts. The papers are on a variety of topics of interest to people in the field of Middle Eastern cultures, and similar in nature to other collections, conference volumes and Festschriften. Also represented are his former students colleagues working in the field of Rabbinic Studies, which (...) informed his own work. Topics include: Transformations of Jewish Traditions in Early Islam: The case of Enoch/Idris, Narrative and Doctrine in the First Story of Rumi's Masnavi, Fiqh for beginners: an Anatolian text on jihad, Research Muslim Minorities: some reflections on fieldwork in Britain, Defective marriages in classical Hanafi law, and Can rights co-exist with religion? (shrink)

This volume reflects the late Norman Calder's own interests and contributions. It includes articles by scholars who are similarly renowned for their sophisticated and challenging approaches to Arabic and Islamic texts. Also represented are his former students and colleagues working in the field of Rabbinic Studies, which informed his own work.

This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: “What is fair?” In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.

This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: “What is fair?” In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.

ABSTRACT:Like most egalitarian political philosophers, John Rawls believes that a just society will rely on markets and business firms for much of its economic activity—despite acknowledging that market systems will tend to create very unequal distributions of goods, opportunities, power, and status. Rawls himself remains one of the few contemporary political philosophers to explore at any length the way an egalitarian theory of justice might deal with fundamental options in political economy. This article examines his arguments and conclusions on these (...) topics. It argues that contemporary Rawlsians will reach different conclusions if they take more seriously than Rawls himself did: (1) the implications, for the political culture and the democratic regulatory state, of large firms competing in adversarial markets characterized by the inevitable “fact of market failure,” and (2) the relevance of ownership and governance relationships involving different kinds of business firms. And with respect to the second point, Rawlsians and other egalitarians have much to learn from contemporary economic, legal, and sociological theories of the firm, and the role of these theories in the structure of and rationale for corporate law. This is the kind of social theory that Rawls believes is relevant to the justification and application of theories of justice, but he himself did not appeal to it in his writings on political economy. Contemporary egalitarians can and should appeal to it now, and in doing so correct errors and omissions in Rawls’s analysis. But taking seriously the two points mentioned above will also force egalitarians who support efficient markets to face difficult dilemmas or compromises of their own. (shrink)

Although there may be many questions about the meaning of life that will ultimately prove intractable, I think that there are some questions that can be answered. Furthermore, I think that progress towards answering them can be made through work that has and will be done in moral philosophy. In support of this I shall articulate a set of questions that I think are often at issue when people ask about the meaningfulness of life. These questions give rise to a (...) set of conditions that a fully adequate answer must satisfy. Among other things, these conditions explain why a familiar theological answer to the meaningfulness of life seems so attractive. However, they also create problems for this answer, as well as for an answer that has appeared attractive to a number of contemporary philosophers, that the meaning of life is created by the choices that people make and the desires that they have. I shall suggest that work in moral philosophy may provide an answer that falls between these two camps – that a moral life is a meaningful life. I shall sketch a theory of morality that satisfies the conditions that have been set out. H this sketch can be filled out, then a moral life will be at least part of what can make a life meaningful. Whether this account of the moral life leaves out anything important for the meaningfulness of life will be the subject of some concluding remarks. (shrink)

It is well known that Bayes’ theorem (with likelihood ratios) can be used to calculate the impact of evidence, such as a ‘match’ of some feature of a person. Typically the feature of interest is the DNA profile, but the method applies in principle to any feature of a person or object, including not just DNA, fingerprints, or footprints, but also more basic features such as skin colour, height, hair colour or even name. Notwithstanding concerns about the extensiveness of databases (...) of such features, a serious challenge to the use of Bayes in such legal contexts is that its standard formulaic representations are not readily understandable to non-statisticians. Attempts to get round this problem usually involve representations based around some variation of an event tree. While this approach works well in explaining the most trivial instance of Bayes’ theorem (involving a single hypothesis and a single piece of evidence) it does not scale up to realistic situations. In particular, even with a single piece of match evidence, if we wish to incorporate the possibility that there are potential errors (both false positives and false negatives) introduced at any stage in the investigative process, matters become very complex. As a result we have observed expert witnesses (in different areas of speciality) routinely ignore the possibility of errors when presenting their evidence. To counter this, we produce what we believe is the first full probabilistic solution of the simple case of generic match evidence incorporating both classes of testing errors. Unfortunately, the resultant event tree solution is too complex for intuitive comprehension. And, crucially, the event tree also fails to represent the causal information that underpins the argument. In contrast, we also present a simple-to-construct graphical Bayesian Network (BN) solution that automatically performs the calculations and may also be intuitively simpler to understand. Although there have been multiple previous applications of BNs for analysing forensic evidence—including very detailed models for the DNA matching problem, these models have not widely penetrated the expert witness community. Nor have they addressed the basic generic match problem incorporating the two types of testing error. Hence we believe our basic BN solution provides an important mechanism for convincing experts—and eventually the legal community—that it is possible to rigorously analyse and communicate the full impact of match evidence on a case, in the presence of possible errors. (shrink)

This paper is an account of the conference titled Kanade, di goldene medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes, which took place in Łódź in April, 2014 as a result of collaboration between the University of Łódź and Concordia University. As a venue for discussing Canadian Jewish identity and its links with Poland, the conference supported a dialogue between Canadians, Polish Canadianists, and European scholars from further afield. Established and young (...) scholars attended from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Canada, in addition to many Polish participants. The presence of scholars such as Goldie Morgentaler or Sherry Simon as well as curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett contributed to an examination of both past and present Canadian and Polish Jewish life and led to an examination of Polish and Canadian literature and history from a highly personal perspective. Conference-goers took advantage of the opportunity to get to know Łódź, via walking tours and a visit to the Łódź Jewish community’s Lauder-funded centre on Narutowicza. The paper aims, as well, to investigate how the history of Jewish Łódź is conveyed in the novels of Joseph Roth and Chava Rosenfarb. (shrink)

The rise of Canadian national identity in the 1960s contributed to a flourishing small press movement across the country. One of the most impressive, long-standing and influential presses of this era was Coach House Press, located near the University of Toronto. Book design, creative forms of editing, collaborative and community-oriented work all became a focus of idealism in the Coach House context, as its founders borrowed from earlier international models, but relied, too, on the Canadian moment to devise new ways (...) to disseminate and create literary culture. More recently, a similar idealistic model in publishing and press work has appeared in Nova Scotia at Kentville’s Gaspereau Press. Gaspereau’s founders, like those at Coach House, have searched for an alternative plan and method- through an in-house dedication to the craft of design and bookmaking- that is unlike that applied by mainstream publishers. One could argue that the two outfits represent a counter-tradition in Canadian cultural life, a dedication to artisanal work, as well as to forms of collaborative editing and design. With the publishing and bookselling industry under great pressure in Canada from shifts in technology and government support, counter-traditional models like Gaspereau Press present the possibility of unique forms of cultural output and marketing. Behind such efforts we recognize philosophies and notions of cultural community that run counter to major trends. This paper examines the history of both presses, specific publications, and the impact of such work on the broader Canadian literary scene. (shrink)

Evaluative processes have their roots in early evolutionary history, as survival is dependent on an organism’s ability to identify and respond appropriately to positive, rewarding or otherwise salubrious stimuli as well as to negative, noxious, or injurious stimuli. Consequently, evaluative processes are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom and are represented at multiple levels of the nervous system, including the lowest levels of the neuraxis. While evolution has sculpted higher level evaluative systems into complex and sophisticated information-processing networks, they do not (...) come to replace, but rather to interact with more primitive lower level representations. Indeed, there are basic features of the underlying neuroarchitectural plan for evaluative processes that are common across levels of organization—including that of evaluative bivalence. (shrink)

Discusses Anglo-American capitalism, exemplified by the commercial and financial systems of Wall Street and the City of London and including the ethics of the stock market, the morality of takeovers, and the problem of business and the environment.

Recent discussions about moral enhancement presuppose and recommend sets of values that relate to both the Western tradition of moral philosophy and contemporary empirical results of natural and social sciences, including moral psychology. It is argued here that this is a typology of thought that requires a fundamental interrogation. Proponents of moral enhancement do not account for important critical analyses of moral discourse, beginning with that of Friedrich Nietzsche and continuing with more prominent twentieth century thinkers such as the poststructuralist (...) Michel Foucault, the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, and the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. In this paper, such analyses are taken into account to highlight the need for more fundamental philosophical interrogation of the project of moral enhancement. (shrink)

This paper is an account of the conference titled Kanade, di goldene medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes, which took place in Łódź in April, 2014 as a result of collaboration between the University of Łódź and Concordia University. As a venue for discussing Canadian Jewish identity and its links with Poland, the conference supported a dialogue between Canadians, Polish Canadianists, and European scholars from further afield. Established and young (...) scholars attended from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Canada, in addition to many Polish participants. The presence of scholars such as Goldie Morgentaler or Sherry Simon as well as curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett contributed to an examination of both past and present Canadian and Polish Jewish life and led to an examination of Polish and Canadian literature and history from a highly personal perspective. Conference-goers took advantage of the opportunity to get to know Łódź, via walking tours and a visit to the Łódź Jewish community’s Lauder-funded centre on Narutowicza. The paper aims, as well, to investigate how the history of Jewish Łódź is conveyed in the novels of Joseph Roth and Chava Rosenfarb. (shrink)