The Role of Existential Beliefs Within the Relation of Centenarians’ Health and Well-Being

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of existential beliefs in mediating the influence of health on centenarians’ well-being. A total of 80 centenarians (mean age 101.1; SD = 1.3; 81.3 % women) with no/minor cognitive impairment were included. The OARS questionnaire for diseases and functional capacity (ADL, IADL), the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and the existential beliefs subscale were used for data collection. The findings suggest that existential resources are a crucial element for mitigating the impact of health constraints in subjective well-being in this population. Appropriate models of intervention for very old age that recognize the importance of religion, spirituality, and meaning of life are to be considered.     

The Incoherence of the Patriotic State: A Critique of ‘Constitutional Patriotism’

Habermas proposes a new solution to the problematic relation between republican values and democracy. He asserts that a new model of social cohesion is needed and he suggests that the sense of community in a democratic society should be founded exclusively on the acceptance and support of a system of constitutionally established rules which are the logical result of the historical evolution of constitution-making. He argues that an account of the constitutional process which led to the formation of the modern republican state should provide the criteria for a rational set of norms which will exclude nationalism from the political arena. In this article, I point out the democratic hazards and the internal incoherence of Habermass alternative to the national state and I argue that a theoretical substitute should consider the existence of national identities as one of the aspects of modern pluralistic society.I should like to thank Zenon Bankowski, Bob Brecher, Emilios Christodoulidis, Alasdair Fay, Peter Fitzpatrick, Stefania Morandini, Rick Mohr and Res Publicas anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.     

Meta-Regulation and Nanotechnologies: The Challenge of Responsibilisation Within the European Commission’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies Research

This paper focuses on the contribution of meta-regulation in responding to the regulatory needs of a field beset by significant uncertainties concerning risks, benefits and development trajectories and characterised by fast development. Meta-regulation allows regulators to address problems when they lack the resources or information needed to develop sound “discretion-limiting rules”; meta-regulators exploit the information advantages of those actors to be regulated by leveraging them into the task of regulating itself. The contribution of meta-regulation to the governance of nanotechnologies is assessed in terms of responsibilisation. Responsibilisation is regarded as a pre -requisite for regulatory actors to internalise social values (such as consumer safety and occupational health) and to ensure that these values are built into regulatory practice. In order to explore the potential of responsibilisation, the Code of Conduct for Responsible Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies Research launched by the European Commission in 2008 is evaluated. The Code is a good case of meta-regulation that aims to steer the self-regulation of nanotechnological business and research organisations. The paper concludes that, while efforts were made on the part of meta-regulators and self-regulators to contribute to responsibilisation, important opportunities for responsibilisation such as dissemination and promotion of the Code, trust-building activities, and failure to provide rewards, incentives and stakeholder guidance were not taken up. In order to foster responsibilisation within the meta-regulatory instrument of the EC Code, a number of crucial activities to be undertaken by meta-regulators are recommended.     

Prior’s defence of Hintikka’s theorem. A discussion of Prior’s ‘The logic of obligation and the obligations of the logician’

In his paper, The logic of obligation and the obligations of the logician, A.N. Prior considers Hintikka??s theorem, according to which a statement cannot be both impossible and permissible. This theorem has been seen as problematic for the very idea of a logic of obligation. However, Prior rejects the view that the logic of obligation cannot be formalised. He sees this resistance against such a view as an important part of what could be called the obligation of the logician. Prior argues that Hintikka??s theorem should not be seen as something paradoxical. On the contrary, it should be seen as a fully acceptable consequence of a basic and reasonable assumption in deontic logic, namely Hintikka??s rule.     

The poet’s school and the parrot’s cage: the educational spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel laureate, was a man of myriad gifts, but he sought to articulate a single global vision. He believed that for our flourishing we must strive towards ‘the other and the beyond’. In so doing we discover that, as we seek, we are ourselves being sought. Tagore believed that we find our meaning and fulfilment relationally; in our relationships one with another, to be sure, but fundamentally in our kinship with all that is. We must be liberated, Tagore believed, from the bounds of our separateness and so discover a wholeness larger than our individual well‐being. That wholeness is ultimately realised in our union with the eternal Divine Spirit. In the establishment of his ‘poet’s school’ at Shantiniketan Tagore sought to make his ideals come true. This paper will focus on Tagore’s understanding of childhood and on the pattern of education by which, he believed, the spirit of the child may be nurtured. It will also enter a plea that we return to someone whose neglect in the West has been much to its loss.     

The Crimes and Punishments of the ‘Enemies of the Church’ and the Nature of Russia’s Desecularising Regime1

Following a longstanding sociological tradition, this paper looks at reactions to nonconformity in order to understand the nature of social norms. In particular, it explores the patterns and scope of intolerance towards the perceived ‘enemies of the Church’ in order to understand social norms emerging in post-atheist Russia. Utilising the ‘social drama’ approach, the paper offers a comparative case study of increasingly repressive reactions by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and state to two art exhibitions at the Sakharov Museum and anti-clerical publications by a blogger in Karelia, along with an in-depth analysis of the recent (2012) Pussy Riot action at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow and the resulting trial and punishment of three of the band’s members, as well as of a variety of events that have followed this initial action. We then utilise national and cross-national representative survey data to suggest that these repressive reactions were congruent with an intolerant public sentiment towards opponents of the ROC. Ultimately, we draw on Durkheim’s dialectic of norm and deviance, work on disciplinary modalities of power by Foucault and Agamben, desecularisation analysis and social identity theory to argue that the severe punishment of the perceived ‘enemies of the Church’ and the popular support for it reflect the crystallisation of a new normative system brought about by the desecularising regime in Russia, a regime which is characterised by a symbiosis of the ROC and the state.     

The Thought Experiment of Maxwell’s Demon and the Origin of Irreversibility

The problem of the irreversibility’s origin in thermodynamic processes occupies a distinguished place among many and lasting attempts by researchers to derive irreversibility from molecular-mechanical principles. However, this problem is still open and no universally accepted solution may be given during any course. In this paper, I shall try to show that the examining of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment may provide insight into the difficulties that emerge, looking for this origin because: (i) it is connected with the notion of irreversibility, and (ii) one of its functions is that of the “reversibility objection.” In order to illustrate this point, I study Boltzmann’s approach to the problem of a molecular-mechanical interpretation of irreversibility and I show that an auxiliary assumption (the selected direction of time) is responsible for producing irreversibility. But this result is accordant with the predictions of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment: the assumptions of this kind are not dictated by molecular-mechanical principles but are separate input in the model-systems used.

The Significance of Fallibilism Within Gettier’s Challenge: A Case Study

Taking his conceptual cue from Ernest Sosa, John Turri has offered a putative conceptual solution to the Gettier problem: Knowledge is cognitively adept belief, and no Gettiered belief is cognitively adept. At the core of such adeptness is a relation of manifestation. Yet to require that relation within knowing is to reach for what amounts to an infallibilist conception of knowledge. And this clashes with the spirit behind the fallibilism articulated by Gettier when stating his challenge. So, Turri??s form of response is irrelevant to that challenge, which was intended to pose a conceptual problem within fallibilist conceptions of knowledge. (And that failure on Turri??s part needs to be highlighted to remind epistemologists of the need to assess Gettier cases by a fallibilist standard. Although that need was described earlier by Robert Almeder, apparently his advice is being overlooked. This paper develops it anew, in a more general form.)     

Al-Ghazali’s Position on the ‘Second Proof’ of the ‘Philosophers’ for the Eternity of the World,in the First Discussion of the Incoherence of the Philosophers

In the Incoherence of the Philosophers, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) raised objections against the doctrine of the ‘philosophers’ (represented chiefly by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina) on 20 specific points. In the first, and longest discussion, he examines and rebuts four of their proofs of the pre-eternity of the world—that is, that the universe as a whole had no beginning but extends perpetually into the past. Al-Ghazali rejects that doctrine. But his own position on the issue does not become clear until he discusses the philosophers’ ‘second proof.’ In this paper, I will examine the relevant text of the Incoherence of the Philosophers, in order to clarify the nature of Al-Ghazali’s position in relation to the second proof. I will explain why Al-Ghazali cannot adopt what I refer to as the ‘naïve’ theological position, according to which God temporally preceded the world. Instead, Al-Ghazali concurs with the philosophers that time is the measure of motion, but he asserts that time was created with the world, both having a beginning before which there was no time. God, on the other hand, is not temporally prior to the world, but neither is he simultaneous, as the second proof supposes. As timelessly eternal, God bears no temporal relation to the world at all. In conclusion, I describe what I refer to as a naïve philosophical position, which is entailed by the second proof, but distinct from both Al-Ghazali’s position and that adopted by Ibn Rushd in his critique of Al-Ghazali in the Incoherence of the Incoherence. I argue that this naïve philosophical position (and thus, the second proof) is incoherent.     

A Community’s Response to Suicide Through Public Art: Stakeholder Perspectives from the Finding the Light Within Project

Suicide is a preventable public health problem and a leading cause of death in the United States. Despite recognized need for community-based strategies for suicide prevention, most suicide prevention programs focus on individual-level change. This article presents seven first person accounts of Finding the Light Within, a community mobilization initiative to reduce the stigma associated with suicide through public arts participation that took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 2011 through 2012. The stigma associated with suicide is a major challenge to suicide prevention, erecting social barriers to effective prevention and treatment and enhancing risk factors for people struggling with suicidal ideation and recovery after losing a loved one to suicide. This project engaged a large and diverse audience and built a new community around suicide prevention through participatory public art, including community design and production of a large public mural about suicide, storytelling and art workshops, and a storytelling website. We present this project as a model for how arts participation can address suicide on multiple fronts—from raising awareness and reducing stigma, to promoting community recovery, to providing healing for people and communities in need.     

Roots of the Pavlovian Society’s missions of the past and present: The Pavlov dimension

This paper offers an interpretation of the relation between Pavlov’s life and work and the missions of the Pavlovian Society, both past (“observation and observation”) and present (“interdisciplinary research on the integrated organism”). I begin with an acount of Pavlov's life and his influence on contemporary thought. I then indicate the relation of some of Pavlov's attitudes (e.g., his motto, his epistemological stance) to the Society's past mission. In the concluding and most controversial section, I argue for six guiding principles derived from Pavlov, to be applied to the Society’s mission. These are: (a) a confident methodological behaviorism; (b) a significant role assigned to both physiological and psychological factors in the prediction and control of the integrated organism; (c) approximately equal taxonomic precision of physiological and psychological explanatory concepts; (d) distrust of toleological explanatory concepts; (e) rejection of psychology’s instrumentalist “cognitive paradigm shift”; and (f) rejection of the representational theory of knowledge.     

The visuo-haptic and haptic exploration of letters increases the kindergarten-children’s understanding of the alphabetic principle

This study examined the effect of incorporating a visuo-haptic and haptic (tactual-kinaesthetic) exploration of letters in a training designed to develop phonemic awareness, knowledge of letters and letter/sound correspondences, on 5-year-old children’s understanding and use of the alphabetic principle. Three interventions, which differed in the work on letters identity, were assessed. The letters were explored visually and haptically in “HVAM” training (haptic-visual-auditory-metaphonological), only visually in “VAM” training (visual-auditory-metaphonological) and visually but in a sequential way in “VAM-sequential” training. The three interventions made use of the same phonological exercises. The results revealed that the improvement in the pseudo-word decoding task was higher after HVAM training than after both VAM training and VAM-sequential training (which did not differ). The sequential exploration of the letters (independently of perceptual modalities involved) was not to be sufficient alone for explaining these results. Moreover, similar improvements in the letter recognition test and in the phonological awareness tests were observed after the three interventions. Taken together, the results show that incorporating the visuo-haptic and haptic exploration of letters makes the connections between the orthographic representation of letters and the phonological representation of the corresponding sounds easier, thus improving the decoding skills of young children.     

The place and understanding of the doctrine of God in Heinrich Bullinger’s theology

Abstract

The article examines the place of, and the main emphases in, the doctrine of God in Bullinger’s theology. In comprehensive presentations of his theology, the doctrine of God generally follows that of the Word of God. He usually begins with God as one (against the role of creatures such as the saints and images) and God as three. The other main elements (besides the knowledge of God) are God as creator, his providence and his predestination, usually in that order. Underlying all of them is the stress on God’s goodness. Highlighted is Bullinger’s appeal throughout to the Bible and Church Fathers, often identifying the views of his opponents with early Church heresies. This appeal also supports his claim to orthodoxy and catholicity, as do the creeds in his prefaces to The Decades and to The Second Helvetic Confession. His underlying pastoral and practical concerns are evident.     

The Intervention of Robot Caregivers and the Cultivation of Children’s Capability to Play

In this article, the authors examine whether and how robot caregivers can contribute to the welfare of children with various cognitive and physical impairments by expanding recreational opportunities for these children. The capabilities approach is used as a basis for informing the relevant discussion. Though important in its own right, having the opportunity to play is essential to the development of other capabilities central to human flourishing. Drawing from empirical studies, the authors show that the use of various types of robots has already helped some children with impairments. Recognizing the potential ethical pitfalls of robot caregiver intervention, however, the authors examine these concerns and conclude that an appropriately designed robot caregiver has the potential to contribute positively to the development of the capability to play while also enhancing the ability of human caregivers to understand and interact with care recipients.     

The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ Argument, and The Prospects for the Theory of Denoting Concepts

Russell’s new theory of denoting phrases introduced in “On Denoting” in Mind 1905 is now a paradigm of analytic philosophy. The main argument for Russell’s new theory is the so-called ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument, which purports to show that the theory of denoting concepts (analogous to Frege’s theory of senses) promoted by Russell in the 1903 Principles of Mathematics is incoherent. The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument rests on the premise that if a denoting concept occurs in a proposition, then the proposition is not about the concept. I argue that the premise is false. The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument does not exhaust Russell’s ammunition against the theory of denoting concepts. Another reason Russell rejects the theory is, as he says, that it cannot provide an adequate account of non-uniquely denoting concepts. In the last section of the paper, I argue that even though Russell was right in thinking that the theory of denoting concepts cannot provide an adequate account of non-uniquely denoting concepts, Russell’s new theory does not succeed in eliminating the occurrence of all denoting concepts, as it requires a commitment to the existence of variables that indirectly denote their values. However, the view that variables are denoting concepts is unproblematic once the ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument is blocked.     

The Animal as Agent of the Sublime in Rembrandt’s Rape Narratives and Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Philosophia - In this article I will explore the relationship between man and animal as presented by Ovid in some of his rape stories narrated in the Metamorphoses. The stories I will discuss are...     

The ethical implications of Sengzhao’s concept of the Sage

This paper is an exploration of the ethical significance of Sengzhao’s concept of the sage as exhibited through a Buddhist practitioner’s expanded understanding and cognition of reality. From a philosophical point of view, I aim to show that the ethical significance of his concept of the sage comprises a shift first from ontology to epistemology, and then from epistemology to ethics. I firstly define Sengzhao’s concept of the sage and present a preliminary account of this concept before elaborating on its philosophical aspects. Next, I attempt to illustrate how ethical implications can be derived from Sengzhao’s ethical shift, and lastly, I shed light on the value and significance of this philosophical standpoint within Buddhist philosophy.