Secular culture often advocates for the liberation of human libido and views Christian morality as a source of damaging restrictions. However, closer examination of Church teaching reveals a depth of understanding of human nature not found in contemporary secular culture. One Church father in particular, St. Augustine, offers a keen understanding of human sexuality and its importance not only as a means of promulgating the human race but also as a means of fostering the sort of spousal unity that (...) improves life in general. Studies of neurochemistry seem to confirm much of what Augustine claimed about human sexuality over fifteen hundred years ago. (shrink)

Resumen: El objeto de estudio es mostrar la relevancia de la paciencia en el pensamiento kierkegaardiano. Abordaremos, en primer lugar, los textos fundamentales donde Kierkegaard la analiza. Mostraremos seguidamente la idea que tiene sobre la paciencia el paradigma clásico de San Agustín y Santo Tomás para valorar la peculiaridad del pensamiento de Kierkegaard. Explicaremos, en tercer lugar, las características de la paciencia en relación con el tiempo, el bien, el sufrimiento, la libertad y Dios en el pensador danés. Esto nos (...) permitirá valorar su aporte y la actualidad del tema.: The purpose of the study is to show the relevance of patience in kierkegaardian thought. First of all, we will deal with the fundamental texts where Kierkegaard analyses it. We will then show the idea that the classical paradigm of St. Augustine and St. Thomas has about patience in order to assess the peculiarity of Kierkegaard's thought. Thirdly, we will explain the characteristics of patience in relation to time, good, suffering, freedom and God in the Danish thinker. This will enable us to assess his contribution and the topicality of the subject. (shrink)

References to the good angels in the works of Augustine are legion, and angels also play a central role in some of his major works, such as City of God and the opening of On the Trinity. Despite Augustine's interest in angels, however, little scholarly work has appeared on the topic. In this book, Elizabeth Klein gives the first comprehensive account of Augustine's theology of the angels and its importance for his thought more generally. Offering a close (...) textual analysis of the reference to angels in Augustine's corpus, the volume explores Augustine's angelology in relationship with his understanding of creation, of community, of salvation history and of spiritual warfare. By examining Augustine's angelology, we glimpse his understanding of time and eternity, as well as the meaning and perfection of created life. Klein's book is foundational for a proper understanding of Augustine's angelology and has far-reaching implications not only for Augustinian studies, but also the broader history of Christian angelology. (shrink)

Augustine and Anselm form a common tradition in mediæval thought about angelic sin, a tradition rooted in patristic thought and centred on their attempts to give a philosophically coherent account of moral choice. Augustine concentrates on the reasons and causes of angelic sin, especially in reference to free will; Anselm adopts Augustine’s analysis and extends it to issues about the rationality of sinful choice. Each takes Lucifer’s primal sin to be the paradigm case. Lucifer, undistracted by bodily (...) desires and unencumbered by history, committed the first moral misdeed in an entirely good universe newly created by an entirely good God. The challenge is to give a philosophical account that permits us to understand how the best and brightest of all angels nevertheless made a sinful choice in such uniformly positive circumstances. (shrink)

Angels play a central role for Augustine in the Bible and, consequently, in the doctrine of salvation. In his works, he seeks to design a structure to explain the ontological position of angels in order to introduce them as important elements of the theology of salvation. Belief in angels as the helpers of Christ, and Christ himself as the agent of salvation, raises a fundamental question in Augustine's thought: how can the functional role of angels in the process (...) of salvation be considered in the context of the Bible in view of Christ as the Savior of mankind. The authors believe that Augustine interprets the Bible in three stages to solve this dilemma: first, he offers a new interpretation of the theology of the Bible in order to give a different color to the incarnation, and to maintain Christ's superiority over the angels; Second, it describes the role of angels in mediating salvation in view of Christ's saving dignity, and third, it outlines a system of spiritual battle. However, studies show that he did not succeed in this goal. In this study, we aim to consider the basics of the theology of salvation according to the role of angels in Augustine's thought and how it is combined with the place of Christ's salvation, relying on works such as Genesis and commentaries on the Holy Trinity, Psalms and the City of God and his other works. Examine with interpretive-analytical method. (shrink)

Augustine on select metaphysical topics: hylomorphism vs. dualism, theories of God, angels.

Augustine asserted that demons (and angels) have material bodies, while Aquinas denied demonic corporeality, upholding that demons are separated, incorporeal, intelligible substances. Augustine’s conception of demons as composite substances possessing an immaterial soul and an aerial body is insufficient, in Thomas’s view, to account for certain empirical phenomena observed in demoniacs. However, Thomas, while providing more detailed accounts of demonic possession according to his development of Aristotelian psychology, does not avail of this demonic incorporeal eminence when analysing demonic (...) attacks: demonic agency is still confined to the material body. Aquinas’s account of demonic possession need not, on the face of it, require an immaterial cause. In his renouncement of the strong Christian tradition affirming demonic corporeality, Aquinas either conflates the need for a demonic agent with a requirement for a super corporeal one, or subordinates his demonology and angelology to a deeper, more fundamental Dionysian metaphysical principle of creative diffusion to which these adhere in a secondary way. (shrink)

Augustine distinguished apparent evil, conflict and corruption among bodies from true evil, the self-initiated corruption of created spirits. Angels and humans fail to maintain the perfection of knowledge and love given by God and then turn to themselves as the focus of attention and appreciation. The original failures of both demons and humans were neither provoked nor persuaded by any outside bodily or spiritual force: each was an autonomous and self-initiated sin of pride. This fundamental evil underlies and gives (...) rise to every other sin among humans and angels. (shrink)

This book studies medieval theories of angelology insofar as they made groundbreaking contributions to medieval philosophy. -/- The discussion of angels, made famous by the humanist caricature of ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’, was nevertheless a crucial one in medieval philosophical debates. All scholastic masters pronounced themselves on angelology, if only in their Sentence commentaries. The questions concerning angelic cognition, speech, free decision, movement, etc. were springboards for profound philosophical discussions that have to do (...) with anthropology and metaphysics no less than with angelology. Angels qua separate substances were of central importance in medieval metaphysics (with questions on universal hylomorphism, the esse- essentia composition of creatures, and those regarding individuation of material and immaterial substances). The doctrine of angels has not been the subject of much study in the history of medieval thought, and the volume fills an important gap in the literature. The chapters offer a well-rounded, if not encyclopedic discussion in the chronological or doctrinal sense. They cover the history of debate from Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius until the later middle ages, but instead of an author-by-author approach, focus rather on seminal ideas with demonstrable relevance to “secular” and modern philosophical concerns. (shrink)

The problem of evil is an obstacle to justified belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God . According to Saint Augustine’s free will theodicy , moral evil attends free will. Might something like AFWT also be used to account for natural evil? After all, it is possible that calamities such as famines, earthquakes, and floods are the effects of the sinful willing of certain persons, viz., ‘fallen angels.’ Working to destroy our faith, Satan and his cohorts could be (...) responsible for the natural disasters that bring us to grief. Here, I develop this account alongside AFWT. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 125 oped the theory of the swerve and applied it to the problem of voluntary action, also made use of it in his defense of moral responsibility" (l ~9-3o). The distinction Englert has in mind is between to hekousion and to eph' heroin, a distinction he had emphasized in his long chapter 5 on Aristotle, and insisted was important to Epicurus as well. But the promise is (...) not realized; we are told only that to eph' heroin is saved just as is to hekousion, by insisting that the swerve marks a causal break (135). The book then ends with some undigested matters: David Sedley's work on Epicurus 's On Nature and Don Fowler's suggestion that the mind's act of focus (epibole)might constitute a swerve. There is more to be said for their views. And more against. The last word on the subject has yet to be written. JEFFREY S. PURINTON Princeton University Gerard O'Daly. Augustine's Phzlosophy of Mind. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 241. $35.00. Paul Rigby. Original Sin in Augustine's "Confessions." Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987. Pp. 137. Paper, $17.95. Augustine's philosophy of the human person is one of the most neuralgic points in his thought, and the neuralgic soreness spreads to almost every other compartment of his thinking. Since there is still much to learn in this troubled area, one can only welcome the publication of these two studies. O'Daly's book aspires to deal with the entire list of questions involved in the ancient world's Platonic tractatus De anima, whereas Rigby focuses on a single issue, critically evaluating (and largely refuting) the contention put forth by Athanase Sage in two classic articles: that the Augustine who wrote the Confessions had not yet come to think of humanity as guilty of original sin. The breadth of O'Daly's focus also betrays a distinctly confident attitude toward the wide array of matters he must discuss; he seems to view the Augustinian field as relatively trouble free. The central chapters of his book originated as a Habilitation thesis for the University of Heidelberg: hence the generous display of German scholarship, but also a greater serenity toward the difficulties non-German students might perhaps raise against some of his conclusions. He moves from Augustine's general theory of the soul, through claapters on the soul's "lower" activities (sense-perception, imagination, and memory), to that peculiar Augustinian preoccupation with the soul's measurement of time; he then concludes with the psychology of what Augustine would term "knowledge" in the higher (i.e., intellectual) sense of the term. The atmosphere throughout is encyclopedic, but then so is the impressive scale of O'Daly's learning; at the end, though, the reader is especially grateful for the two valuable indices---one topical the other an Index locorum--which help in retrieving the multitude both of texts and topics O'Daly handles. O'Daly is confident that Augustine's views on most of these matters solidified early on, so he feels entitled tojump about from early to late works and back again. Those who 126 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 199o find Augustine's thought more fluid will question this methodology, even find it circular ; it supposes a continuity of thought which ought rather to be proven. But this nondevelopmental approach results in another loss--the living sense of context, the controlled excitement that invariably marks Augustine's own thinking, has mostly drained off. This is all the more disappointing since O'Daly writes a pleasing prose style. But that judgment may only reflect the preferential conviction that we still have more exciting things to learn about Augustine's philosophy of human nature than O'Daly is willing to admit. Is this, one wonders, the reason why he ignores the many relevant insights contained in Oliver DuRoy's massive study? He is particularly adamant on the question of the soul's origin, yet one is at liberty to doubt that forty-four years of Augustine's thinking on this gnawing issue can be treated adequately in a... (shrink)

This paper explores Augustine’s ideal of just society, as developed in books XII, XIV and XIX of the City of God, and its rehabilitation of the notion of civitas peregrina. Bringing to maturity the classical notion of community (according to Aristotle and Cicero’s definitions), Augustine investigates how, in the Christian view, the different kinds of societies, which arise on earth, are dependent on the acceptance or refusal of the relation between man and his transcendental origin. This connection between (...) metaphysics and history allows for an alternative reading of the City of God, by which man’s spiritual life and its public and social dimensions escape dichotomist views and the confinement to a purely philosophical or religious discourse. (shrink)

In this book Tobias Hoffmann studies the medieval free will debate during its liveliest period, from the 1220s to the 1320s, and clarifies its background in Aristotle, Augustine, and earlier medieval thinkers. Among the wide range of authors he examines are not only well-known thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, but also a number of authors who were just as important in their time and deserve to be rediscovered today. To shed further light on (...) their theories of free will, Hoffmann also explores their competing philosophical explanations of the fall of the angels, that is, the hypothesis of an evil choice made by rational beings under optimal psychological conditions. As he shows, this test case imposed limits on tracing free choices to cognition. His book provides a comprehensive account of a debate that was central to medieval philosophy and continues to occupy philosophers today. (shrink)

Augustine’s two-stage explanation of the creation of the universe provided a basis for understanding the divine operations that activated the potentialities of angels and humans by which they attained stable beatitude. God caused their activities of knowing and loving rather than endowing them with natural capacities for the divine. In this context, Augustine’s analysis of the success of the angels as well as the failure of the demons and the first humans clarified the limits of the agency of (...) spiritual creatures and specified the occurrence of sin as its defective exercise. Against this background, he distinguished the divine operations that moved and sustained Christians in faith and charity from the divine governance that insured the fidelity of the elect at the end of their lives and thus brought them to salvation. At the same time, he distinguished the final beatitude that made the angels and saints incapable of failure from the gifts of both charity and perseverance. Preserving the elect did not require a strengthening or expansion of the internal gifts attributed to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the agency of the elect living under the gift of perseverance was distinguished from that of Christians who failed to reach salvation only by its success. (shrink)

The future state of the redeemed human being in heaven is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down in this life. Nevertheless, Augustine and Anselm speculate on the heavenly life of the human being, proceeding from certain theological premises gathered from Scripture, and their arguments often both mirror and complement one another. Because Anselm and Augustine hold the premise that human beings in heaven are “equal to the angels” (Luke 20:36), our understanding of the heavenly condition of the (...) human can be illuminated by angelology, and vice-versa; each reveals the nature of the other. The paper examines aspects of the positions of Augustine and Anselm on the original state of the angels, their fall, and their confirmation, and then explores the condition of prelapsarian Adam and the transformation of the elect in order to illuminate how these figures conceive the afterlife. The angelologies (and demonologies) of Augustine and Anselm help one to understand the heavenly goal of human life, how the redeemed state of human beings differs from their original condition in Eden, and why there is no redemption for the fallen angels. (shrink)

Peter Lombard lamented the abandonment of Augustine’s position affirming the materiality of demons and the demonic body, since by his time (some 700 years after Augustine), under the influence of the Pseudo-Dionysius, it was generally agreed within the Christian tradition that demons (and angels) are intelligible, disembodied substances. The principles that the cosmos is spatially and materially divided and stratified and that demons share ontologically in the nature of the part that they inhabit allowed figures such as Apuleius, (...) Porphyry, and Augustine to account for various aspects of demonic nature and activity that seemed to follow from reason, revelation, and practical experience. The material body of the demon and its relation to the pneuma, or vehicle of the soul, is often invoked to explain demonic agency and the extent of demonic knowledge and to distinguish between evil and good demons (or angels). The following paper weighs in on and clarifies Augustine’s demonic ontology. Although scholars generally recognise Augustine’s position maintaining that demons possess aerial bodies, nevertheless, the ambiguity surrounding Augustine’s opinion, attested to even by Peter Lombard, is overlooked, and Augustine’s conviction is often taken for granted and supported by citing the prominent City of God, the very work in which Augustine’s own views are suspect. This paper provides support to the assessment of Augustine’s doctrine of the demonic body by examining his cosmology, particularly his spatial and elemental division of the cosmos, and exhibits his adherence to the spatio-material principle according to which a creature’s bodily constitution is cognate with the elemental composition of the physical stratum of the cosmos in which they dwell. The paper concludes by indicating how Augustine’s explanations of demonic agency, far from being ambiguous on the nature of the demonic body, are in fact premised on their aerial corporeality, thereby demonstrating more definitively his conviction that demons possess material bodies. (shrink)

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably (...) reliable, elegantly readable presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

There is something appropriate about Lyotard’s last printed work being his most intimate and revealing. Best known for The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard died in the April of 1998, leaving his Confession d’Augustin, as Dolorès Lyotard tells us in her “Forewarning,” “scarcely half” finished. Although his New York Times obituary claimed that “awaiting publication is his final book about the ‘Confessions’ of St. Augustine”, this work is less a book about the Confessions as it is an (...) insight into a twentieth century philosopher at the end of his life. Revealed here is a philosopher struggling with the perennial themes of Augustine’s own odyssey: confession as praise and contrition. Perhaps it was Lyotard’s own battle with leukemia and his growing sense of mortality that gave him such insights into Augustine’s early fallacy of thinking of God as encircling and filling all things throughout space that he is able to write, “Such is flesh visited, co-penetrated by your space-time, disturbed and confused with this blow, but steeped in infinity, impregnated and pregnant with your overabundant liquid: the waters of the heavens” ; and regarding the relationship between time and immunity, Lyotard understands that, “God only sees himself in God. Compared with the incomparable brightness, all is night, and speech is noise after the silence of lauds. In the sky of skies, the heaven of heavens, wisdom celebrates its glory. The intelligence with which the angelic creatures are infused is not co-eternal with their creator, but it is exempt from becoming”. Passages like these not only present Augustine in a new light, but invite readers to see themselves in this light as well. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between mental health and emotional intelligence among senior high school students in a public school. Thus, the study employed a correlational design to measure the relationship between mental health and emotional intelligence among 152 Grade 12 senior high school students in a public school. Hence, to measure the study’s variables - Mental Health Inventory and Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) were utilized. Based on the inferential statistics, the r coefficient of 0.32 indicates a low positive correlation (...) between the variables and a p-value of 0.00, indicating a significant relationship between the respondents' mental health and emotional intelligence. Implications and recommendations were discussed in the study. (shrink)

The Midewiwin is the traditional religious belief system central to the world view of Ojibwa in Canada and the US. It is a highly complex and rich series of sacred teachings and narratives whose preservation enabled the Ojibwa to withstand severe challenges to their entire social fabric throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It remains an important living and spiritual tradition for many Aboriginal people today. The rituals of the Midewiwin were observed by many 19th century Euro-Americans, most of whom (...) approached these ceremonies with hostility and suspicion. As a result, although there were many accounts of the Midewiwin published in the 19th century, they were often riddled with misinterpretations and inaccuracies. Historian Michael Angel compares the early texts written about the Midewiwin, and identifies major, common misconceptions in these accounts. In his explanation of the historical role played by the Midewiwin, he provides alternative viewpoints and explanations of the significance of the ceremonies, while respecting the sacred and symbolic nature of the Midewiwin rituals, songs, and scrolls. (shrink)

There has been longstanding interest in the consistency of decisions made by research ethics committees in the UK, but most of the evidence has come from single studies submitted to multiple committees. A systematic comparison was carried out of the decisions made on 18 purposively selected applications, each of which was reviewed independently by three different RECs in a single strategic health authority. Decisions on 11 applications were consistent, but disparities were found among RECs on decisions on seven applications. An (...) analysis of the agreement between decisions of RECs yielded an overall measure of agreement of κ = 0.286 , indicating a level of agreement that, although probably better than chance, may be described as “slight”. The small sample size limits the robustness of these findings. Further research on reasons for inconsistencies in decision making between RECs, and on the importance of such inconsistencies for a range of arguments, is needed. (shrink)

The apparent contradiction between subjective and objective approaches to time in Augustine can be resolved if it is understood that he regarded cosmic time and the finite things it engenders as being of itself, in some sense, both psychic and self-recording. This interpretation holds whether or not Augustine affirms a world soul. It is justifiable in terms of the continued applicability of his earlier liberal-arts writings to his later texts and his blending of Plotinian vitalism, Porphyrian spiritualism, and (...) his own ‘theurgism’ (especially in his commentary on the Psalms), which is parallel to that of Iamblichus. Augustine’s ‘musical ontology’, which is also a metaphysics of number, word, and seminal reason, leads him to develop a theory of time and memory that anticipates more the spiritual realism of Bergson than it does idealist and phenomenological philosophies. However, for Augustine, time as an image of eternity remains aporetic, and its aporia is ‘resolved’ only by the Incarnation and its sustaining as the liturgical and political community of the Church. Through Christological, and not just angelic, mediation, our memories and expectations truly reach to past and future realities, just as our intentions reach to really located things, but only because all of these are both inherently psychic/intellectual and sustained by the divine eternity. (shrink)

In this book, Augustine Brannigan provides a critical examination of the major theories which have been devised to account for discoveries and innovations in ...

This is a sequel to Augustine Shutte's previous book Philosophy for Africa. In that book he engages with some concepts central to traditional African thinking about human nature and society. In this book he offers a new interpretation of the chief ethical idea in African thought, Ubuntu. He argues that it complements the central European ethical notion of individual freedom, and shows how the two ideas can be combined to form an ethic based on a richer understanding of our (...) humanity. He then applies this ethic to different spheres of life: gender relations, sex and family life, education, health care, work, politics and religion. In each sphere he tries to show how an ethic of Ubuntu can provide concrete guidance for our continuing struggle to make a multi-cultural South Africa a truly humane society. (shrink)

Recently, some philosophers have defended the idea that knowledge is an interest-relative notion. According to this thesis, whether an agent knows P may depend on the practical costs of her being wrong about P. This perspective marks a radical departure from traditional accounts that take knowledge to be a purely intellectual concept. I think there is much to say on behalf of the interest-relative notion. In this paper, I report on some new evidence which strongly suggests that ordinary people’s attributions (...) of knowledge are in fact sensitive to practical interests. This is noteworthy because recent experiments have been interpreted by many to support the opposite conclusion. I also argue that the new results support an invariantist but interest-relativist account of knowledge, a thesis known as Interest Relative Invariantism (IRI). I do not make the case here that IRI gives us the very best explanation of the results presented here. Any such attempt would require an in-depth survey of the last few decades of work in epistemology. I only want to argue here that IRI gives us a simple and elegant explanation of the new data, and that the same cannot be said about traditional contextualism, a leading competitor to IRI. (shrink)

The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to potential past events that might have determined them. Superdeterminism refers to the view that a local, and determinist, account of Bell inequalities violations is possible, by rejecting this assumption of statistical independence. We examine and clarify various problems with superdeterminism, looking in particular at its (...) consequences on the nature of scientific laws and scientific reasoning. We argue that the view requires a neo-Humean account of at least some laws, and creates a significant problem for the use of statistical independence in other parts of physics and science more generally. (shrink)

Big Data evangelists often argue that algorithms make decision-making more informed and objective—a promise hotly contested by critics of these technologies. Yet, to date, most of the debate has focused on the instruments themselves, rather than on how they are used. This article addresses this lack by examining the actual practices surrounding algorithmic technologies. Specifically, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic data, I compare how algorithms are used and interpreted in two institutional contexts with markedly different characteristics: web journalism and criminal justice. (...) I find that there are surprising similarities in how web journalists and legal professionals use algorithms in their work. In both cases, I document a gap between the intended and actual effects of algorithms—a process I analyze as “decoupling.” Second, I identify a gamut of buffering strategies used by both web journalists and legal professionals to minimize the impact of algorithms in their daily work. Those include foot-dragging, gaming, and open critique. Of course, these similarities do not exhaust the differences between the two cases, which are explored in the discussion section. I conclude with a call for further ethnographic work on algorithms in practice as an important empirical check against the dominant rhetoric of algorithmic power. (shrink)

The production of good sound generation in the violin is a complex task that requires coordination and spatiotemporal control of bowing gestures. The use of motion-capture technologies to improve performance or reduce injury risks in the area of kinesiology is becoming widespread. The combination of motion accuracy and sound quality feedback has the potential of becoming an important aid in violin learning. In this study, we evaluate motion-capture and sound-quality analysis technologies developed inside the context of the TELMI, a technology-enhanced (...) music learning project. We analyzed the sound and bow motion of 50 participants with no prior violin experience while learning to produce a stable sound in the violin. Participants were divided into two groups: the experimental group received real-time visual feedback both on kinematics and sound quality, while participants in the control group practiced without any type of external help. An additional third group of violin experts performed the same task for comparative purposes. After the practice session, all groups were evaluated in a transfer phase without feedback. At the practice phase, the experimental group improved their bowing kinematics in comparison to the control group, but this was at the expense of impairing the sound quality of their performance. At the retention phase, the experimental group showed better results in sound quality, especially concerning control of sound dynamics. Besides, we found that the expert group improved the stability of their sound while using the technology. All in all, these results emphasize the importance of feedback technologies in learning complex tasks, such as musical instrument learning. (shrink)

Research Ethics Committees (RECs) are frequently a focus of complaints from researchers, but evidence about the operation and decisions of RECs tends to be anecdotal. We conducted a systematic study to identify and compare the ethical issues raised in 54 letters to researchers about the same 18 applications submitted to three RECs over one year. The most common type of ethical trouble identified in REC letters related to informed consent, followed by scientific design and conduct, care and protection of research (...) participants, confidentiality, recruitment and documentation. Community considerations were least frequently raised. There was evidence of variability in the ethical troubles identified and the remedies recommended. This analysis suggests that some principles may be more institutionalized than others, and offers some evidence of inconsistency between RECs. Inconsistency is often treated as evidence of incompetence and caprice, but a more sophisticated understanding of the role of RECs and their functioning is required. (shrink)

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, procrastination has become commonplace due to changes in teaching and learning, which trigger students' academic burnout. As a result, it has increased the intensity of procrastination among students who are enrolled in online learning programs. As a result, students have difficulty as a result of the rapid change from in-person learning to online learning. The study investigates the relationship between academic burnout and procrastination among 150 grade 12 senior high school students. Hence, this study employed (...) a correlational design. Based on the inferential analysis, the r coefficient of 0.71 indicates a high positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between academic burnout and academic procrastination among grade 12 senior high school students. (shrink)

Two prevailing accounts of the structure of the mind have been provided, respectively, by the Dual System Theory and by the Massive Modularity Hypothesis. It has been claimed, however, that they cannot both be true at the same time, i.e., that they are incompatible and, thus, that one of them must be abandoned. I will offer some arguments to challenge this claim. I will show that a plausible understanding of each theory makes it possible for them both to be true (...) at the same time. Moreover, I will argue that by appealing to each other they can offer a more complete and detailed account of the architecture of the mind. (shrink)

Sometimes two expressions in a discourse can be about the same thing in a way that makes that very fact evident to the participants. Consider, for example, 'he' and 'John' in 'John went to the store and he bought some milk'. Let us call this 'de jure' coreference. Other times, coreference is 'de facto' as with 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' in a sincere use of 'Mark Twain is not Samuel Clemens'. Here, agents can understand the speech without knowing that (...) the names refer to the same person. After surveying many available linguistic and pragmatic tools (intentions to corefer, presuppositions, meanings, indexing, discourse referents, binding etc.) I conclude that we must posit a new semantic primitive to account for de jure coreference. (shrink)

There is little doubt that a second-order axiomatization of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory plus the axiom of choice (ZFC) is desirable. One advantage of such an axiomatization is that it permits us to express the principles underlying the first-order schemata of separation and replacement. Another is its almost-categoricity: M is a model of second-order ZFC if and only if it is isomorphic to a model of the form Vκ, ∈ ∩ (Vκ × Vκ) , for κ a strongly inaccessible ordinal.

In this new translation the brilliant and impassioned descriptions of Augustine's colourful early life are conveyed to the English reader with accuracy and art. Augustine tells of his wrestlings to master his sexual drive, his rare ascent from a humble Algerian farm to the edge of the corridors of high power at the imperial court of Milan, and his renunciation of secular ambition and marriage as he recovered the faith that his mother had taught him. It was in (...) a Milan garden that Augustine finally achieved the act of will to Christian conversion, which he compared to a lazy man in bed finally deciding it is time to get up and face the day. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

A common theme in social science studies of algorithms is that they are profoundly opaque and function as “black boxes.” Scholars have developed several methodological approaches in order to address algorithmic opacity. Here I argue that we can explicitly enroll algorithms in ethnographic research, which can shed light on unexpected aspects of algorithmic systems—including their opacity. I delineate three meso-level strategies for algorithmic ethnography. The first, algorithmic refraction, examines the reconfigurations that take place when computational software, people, and institutions interact. (...) The second strategy, algorithmic comparison, relies on a similarity-and-difference approach to identify the instruments’ unique features. The third strategy, algorithmic triangulation, enrolls algorithms to help gather rich qualitative data. I conclude by discussing the implications of this toolkit for the study of algorithms and future of ethnographic fieldwork. (shrink)

Has philosophy anything of value to offer Africa? Has Africa anything of value to offer contemporary philosophy? This text answers yes to both of these questions and deals with the question of human freedom and the problem of liberation in the context of postcolonial contemporary Africa.