Mythopoesis must rescue Israel from its colonial crisis. YHWH and prophet achieve textual existence via multi-voiced figural realism. A poetics of voice lends them efficacious illusion and resilient generative appeal.

Isolated habitats can be compared and ranked by comparing their interior-to-edge ratio (I/E). We would like to show here that results based on ranking by I/E ratio sometimes contradict Diamond's rule, which ranks the most rounded habitat (i.e. most compact) as the best one. The reason for this contradiction is the frequently overlooked size dependence of the I/E. Being the interior-to-edge ratio size dependent, from a given set of habitats of different sizes, compact shaped (rounded) habitats might have worse (...) I/E ratios than elongated or irregular ones. (shrink)

Reform of the federal income tax system has become a perennial item on the domestic policy agenda of the United States, although there is considerable uncertainty over specifics. Indeed the recent report of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform recommended not one but two divergent policy directions. In Fundamental Tax Reform, top experts in tax policy discuss a wide range of issues raised by the prospect of significant tax reform, identifying the most critical questions and considering whether the (...) answers are known, unknown--or unknowable. The debates over tax reform usually concern the advantages and disadvantages of income-based taxation as opposed to any of the several alternative forms of consumption-based taxation. The book opens with chapters that discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and political feasibility of these options. Other chapters consider the effect of tax reform on businesses, especially their investment behavior, and include a discussion of possible problems in any transition to a consumption-based tax; international taxation issues arising in an era of globalization; and individual behavioral response to tax reform, including a view of the topic from the perspective of the relatively new field of behavioral economics. ContributorsRosanne Altshuler, Alan J. Auerbach, John W. Diamond, Harry Grubert, Arnold C. Harberger, Kevin A. Hassett, Thomas J. Kniesner, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Edward J. McCaffery, Kathryn Newmark, David Rapson, Daniel Shaviro, Joel Slemrod, James P. Ziliak, George R. ZodrowDiscussants James Alm, Henry J. Aaron, Charles L. Ballard, Leonard E. Burman, Robert S. Chirinko, Robert D. Dietz, Malcolm Gillis, Roger H. Gordon, Jane G. Gravelle, Timothy S. Gunning, James M. Poterba, Thomas S. Neubig, Alan Viard, George Yin John W. Diamond is Edward and Hermena Kelly Fellow in Tax Policy and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University. George R. Zodrow is Professor of Economics and Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute and International Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University. (shrink)

A survey of the 37 psychology departments offering courses accredited by the Australian Psychological Society yielded a 92% response rate. Sixty-eight percent of departments employed students as research subjects, with larger departments being more likely to do so. Most of these departments drew their student subject pools from introductory courses. Student research participation was strictly voluntary in 57% of these departments, whereas 43% of the departments have failed to comply with normally accepted ethical standards. It is of great concern that (...) institutional ethics committees apparently continue to condone, or fail to act against, unethical research practices. Although these committees have a duty of care to all subjects, the final responsibility for conducting research in an ethical manner lies with the individual researcher. (shrink)

Prior studies have shown a general preference among citizens for juries over judges. Researchers, however, have not considered whether race and ethnicity modify this preference. We hypothesized that minorities (African-Americans, Hispanics), who generally express less trust in the legal system, may also express less trust in juries than non-Hispanic whites. We asked a representative sample of 1,465 residents of Texas to state whether they would prefer a jury or a judge to be the decision maker in four hypothetical circumstances. Consistent (...) with expectations, non-Hispanic whites favored juries over judges, particularly if they imagined themselves as a defendant in a criminal trial. By comparison, although African-Americans and some Hispanics generally favored juries, they showed a much weaker set of jury preferences. African Americans had markedly lower support for the civil jury, but support was higher among minorities with prior jury service. Among Hispanics, respondents who took the survey in Spanish typically preferred a judge to make legal decisions. We consider the implications of our findings for trust in the jury system and trust in community members as decision makers. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Studies on why small and medium enterprises engage in pro-environmental behavior suggest that managers’ environmental responsibility plays a relatively greater role than competitiveness and legitimacy-seeking. These categories of drivers are mostly considered independent of each other. Using survey data and comparative case studies of wine firms in South Africa, this study finds that managers’ environmental responsibility is indeed the key driver in a context where state regulation hardly plays any role in regulating dispersed, rural firms. However, especially proactive firms are (...) also characterized by expectations of competitiveness gains. The authors thus emphasize the role of institutional context and potential interaction effects between these drivers in explaining the reasons why SMEs engage in pro-environmental behavior in developing countries. (shrink)

PurposeTo evaluate the relationship between intraocular straylight perception and: (i) contrast sensitivity (CS), (ii) halo size, and (iii) hazard recognition distance, in the presence and absence of glare.Subjects and methodsParticipants were 15 (5 female) ophthalmologically healthy adults, aged 54.6–80.6 (median: 67.2) years. Intraocular straylight (log s) was measured using a straylight meter (C-Quant; Oculus GmbH, Wetzlar, Germany). CS with glare was measured clinically using the Optovist I device (Vistec Inc., Olching, Germany) and also within a driving simulator using Landolt Cs. (...) These were presented under both static or dynamic viewing conditions, and either with or without glare. Hazard detection distance was measured for simulated obstacles of varying contrast. For this, the participant was required to maintain a speed of 60 km/h within a custom-built nighttime driving simulator. Glare was simulated by LED arrays, moved by cable robots to mimic an oncoming car’s headlights. Halo size (“halometry”) was measured by moving Landolt Cs outward originating from the center of a static glare source. The outcome measure from “halometry” was the radius of the halo (angular extent, in degrees visual angle).ResultsThe correlation between intraocular straylight perception, log s, and hazard recognition distance under glare was poor for the low contrast obstacles (leading/subdominant eye: r = 0.27/r = 0.34). Conversely, log CS measured with glare strongly predicted hazard recognition distances under glare. This was true both when log CS was measured using a clinical device (Optovist I: r = 0.93) and within the driving simulator, under static (r = 0.69) and dynamic (r = 0.61) conditions, and also with “halometry” (r = 0.70). Glare reduced log CS and hazard recognition distance for almost all visual function parameters.ConclusionIntraocular straylight was a poor predictor of visual function and driving performance within this experiment. Conversely, CS was a strong predictor of both hazard recognition and halo extent. The presence of glare and motion lead to a degradation of CS in a driving simulator. Future studies are necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of all above-mentioned vision-related parameters for predicting fitness to drive under real-life conditions. (shrink)

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 her 1988 paper, “Losing Your Concepts,” Cora Diamond explores the interplay and overlap among different forms of conceptual loss. Diamond’s discussion emphasizes the difficulty of measuring the effect of conceptual loss, owing in part to the difficulty of determining the extent of a concept’s entanglement with other aspects of the life where that concept has its home. Diamond’s remarks are instructive for gathering and assessing Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on the concept of hope and the questions he (...) raises regarding what it would mean to lack the concept of hope altogether. The problem Wittgenstein’s remarks reveal is the instability between the notion of a life without hope and the putatively different notion of a life without the concept of hope. I argue in the paper that the case of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus provides a vivid illustration of this instability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deep Listening and Virtuous Friendship:Spiritual Care in the Context of Religious MultiplicityDuane R. BidwellA monk asked Zen master Yunmen: “What is the teaching of the Buddha’s entire lifetime?” Yunmen answered:“An appropriate response.”1In a pivotal scene from the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda, con artist Wanda Gershwitz is fed up—finally—with her partner, Otto West. When his jealousy and ersatz intellectualism repeatedly jeopardize their attempts to steal $20 million in (...) diamonds, Wanda yells: “Now let me correct you on a few things, okay? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not ‘Every Man for Himself.’ And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto, I looked them up.”2 It’s a funny moment, of course. But Otto’s (mis)understanding of Gautama’s teaching demonstrates a challenge in translating a spiritual-religious tradition from one cultural setting to another. Too often, and usually without intention, we are like Otto; we colonize and domesticate unfamiliar ideas, assimilating them into our existing worldview instead of experiencing and accommodating their challenging differences. Otto’s facile appropriation of Buddhism confirms rather than confronts his pre-critical, individualistic, and perhaps Darwinist worldview. A Buddhist caregiver might say that Otto was not “listening deeply” to the myriad voices that shaped his perspective.Similar hazards face someone writing about deep listening in relation to religious multiplicity.3 Deep listening, as a caring practice, “belongs” to the emerging field of Buddhist contemplative care,4 in which it has a technical (although perhaps undertheorized) usage richly informed by Buddhist thought and practice. But when I reflect as a pastoral theologian and spiritual caregiver trained in the Christian traditions of cura animarum, the cure or care of souls, deep listening can become unmoored from its origins. Someone marinated in the discourses and practices of Christian care can easily and perhaps unintentionally conflate deep listening with classic Christian [End Page 3] concepts of care such as the ministry of presence, the practice of unconditional positive regard,5 and the giving of oneself to God for the sake of the care seeker. Although I identify as a Buddhist Christian, habitual Christian views shape my thinking the way a canyon or streambed shapes the flow of water; unless I am attentive to the ways that Buddhist thought and practice seek fissures and carve new channels through the sediment of Christian spiritual care, I risk appropriating or erasing the practices that Buddhist caregivers call deep listening.Mindful of these waters, I want to immerse myself and readers in a particular question: In the context of spiritual care, what happens at the confluence of deep listening and a practitioner’s multiple religious voices? In responding to this question I have three aims: to describe deep listening, to provide a theoretical and experiential account of deep listening in the context of religious multiplicity, and to suggest an image from the Pāli canon that can help practitioners engage religious multiplicity in ways that minimize harm, increase compassion, and realize wisdom. A particular moment in spiritually integrative psychotherapy serves as a touchstone for my reflection; thus, I begin where the canyon creates a slender and fast-moving channel for deep listening: psychotherapy with Julie.6violence, karma, and compassionAt twenty-seven years of age, Julie was a soft-spoken, biracial graduate student who radiated mindful presence. She identifies as Asian American, and with her shaved head and tendency to wear dark colors and dramatic scarves, she might seem a typical LA hipster to other passengers on the commuter train she rode to and from our appointments. One year before our psychotherapeutic work, Julie had been beaten and raped by a boyfriend; subsequent thoughts of suicide led to a brief hospitalization. At that time she was assigned diagnoses of bipolar II and post-traumatic stress disorders. Daily, she swallowed a powerful mood stabilizer; monthly, she visited a psychiatrist. The symptoms of bipolar disorder, substance abuse, addiction, schizophrenia, depression, and suicide were present in her extended family. Julie sought counseling because of tension between what she called her “Buddhist identity” and the mental health diagnoses assigned to her. She said she... (shrink)

The theories of inclusive fitness and multilevel selection provide alternative perspectives on social evolution. The question of whether these perspectives are of equal generality remains a divisive issue. In an analysis based on the Price equation, Queller argued (by means of a principle he called the separation condition) that the two approaches are subject to the same limitations, arising from their fundamentally quantitative-genetical character. Recently, van Veelen et al. have challenged Queller’s results, using this as the basis for a broader (...) critique of the Price equation, the separation condition, and the very notion of inclusive fitness. Here we show that the van Veelen et al. model, when analyzed in the way Queller intended, confirms rather than refutes his original conclusions. We thereby confirm (i) that Queller’s separation condition remains a legitimate theoretical principle and (ii) that the standard inclusive fitness and multilevel approaches are indeed subject to the same limitations. (shrink)

What if you could, like a diamond forged through heat and pressure, transform every painful, scary, and stressful experience in your life into one that is meaningful, courageous, and inspiring? What if you were provided with the tools that allow you to tap and manifest the true power that exists within you--the power to shine? Are you ready to discover your path to peace? In this fascinating book, Dr. Darren Weissman shares ancient spiritual wisdom fused with a modern-day understanding (...) of the mind's relationship to biology and behavior that has implications not only for your health, but for the well-being of the entire planet. You'll learn how to use The LifeLine Technique Ô --a philosophy and technology for awakening your infinite potential for healing and wholeness--and share the experiences of scores of people whose lives have been forever changed as a result. Conscious visionaries pronounced more than 40 years ago that the road to peace is paved with the power of love. Dr. Weissman's book provides the steps you can use to learn to walk that path, and it will help you understand why it is your moral imperative to choose love over fear. (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume to honor Ernest Nagel reflect his wide interest in all topics relating philosophy to the natural and social sciences. The essays, written by distinguished philosophers and scientists form a mixed bag, but most of them are very good. The first part, "Science and Inquiry" begins with notes taken by Patrick Suppes of Nagel's lectures on Dewey's logic delivered in 1947. It follows with essays on knowledge by Stuart Hampshire, on intensions and the law of (...) inverse variation by R. M. Martin, and four essays on problems of induction and confirmation which contribute markedly to this well-worn field. The eleven essays of the second part, "Structure of Science" range from discussions of physics and ontology, mechanism and evolution to essays on functionalism in anthropology and ethics and legal theory. In between there are very good essays by C. Hempel on reduction, S. Morgenbesser on the realist-instrumentalist controversy, essays on the identity thesis, extensive measurement, causation and action, philosophy of language, and the differences between the natural and social sciences. Part three contains six essays on the role of values in various settings, e.g., ethical theory, the social sciences, legal theory and existentialism. The fourth and final part contains a variety of historical studies: Clagett on the quadrature of lunes in medieval science, I. Bernard Cohen on Newton, A. Koslow on the law of inertia, Charles Parsons on Kant's philosophy of arithmetic, Philip Wiener on a Soviet view of Peirce's pragmatism and S. Diamond on John D. Rockefeller and the historians.--R. H. K. (shrink)