In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Changing Human Nature: Ecology, Ethics, Genes, and God by James C. PetersonDolores L. ChristieChanging Human Nature: Ecology, Ethics, Genes, and God James C. Peterson Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 259 pp. $18.00Grounding himself in the Christian tradition, James Peterson argues for the moral efficacy of human genetic manipulation. Interpreting intentional intervention as part of human stewardship rather than as a wrongful interference with some divine plan, he takes (...) on the sticky questions, making critical distinctions, for example, between cure and enhancement or welcoming children as they come and making them “better.” Not neglecting future implications of current tinkering with human biology, even in such taboo areas as gamete selection, he contends that engineering a baby free of harmful genes (for example, Tay-Sachs or Down syndrome) not only makes that person better, but it also eliminates an ongoing burden to family, to society, and perhaps to future generations. Treading gingerly among the sacred cows of some Christian ethicists, he advocates the implanting of selected embryos free of unwanted genes; in his view, embryos are not yet persons.Peterson considers serious concerns such as eugenics projects and racial bias but offers standards to address them. He contends that intentionally increasing choices for our children is not only acceptable but also praiseworthy. What parents would not optimize the educational and social opportunities for their child, even without the child’s consent? Interventions should be safe, offer genuine improvement, increase the recipient’s capacity, and make the best use of limited resources. Peterson is not so naive that he does not recognize that technology does not always make us better. He recognizes, too, that his standards do not eliminate risk.Fair enough, but the issue of what “improvement” may mean to the individual as well as to the greater community remains somewhat ambiguous. Peterson suggests that broadening the decision making among a variety of professional and individual cohorts would help, but his argument is not totally persuasive. In sum, Peterson’s treatment falls short of offering a totally satisfying standard for determining which characteristics should be manipulated and which should be accepted. Nor does he demonstrate definitively how a [End Page 187] Christian perspective would contribute to sorting out possible choices. Does the deaf parents’ desire for their child to be deaf like them constitute an instance where intervention should not be attempted? Can the disparate cohorts he suggests as arbiters rise above their own biases? Does Christianity and its belief system offer answers? Readers—even readers who call themselves Christian—will likely be persuaded that genetic intervention is a good, and even compatible with their religious perspective. Nonetheless, they will harbor lingering doubts about how the questions can best be solved, who should solve them, and how Christian belief helps sort among the possibilities. In his closing comments Peterson appears to agree.The book is rich in research and in provocative ideas. It is an exciting book. It is a readable and enlightened contribution to the professional conversation on gene therapy. Peterson’s research is extensive, his argumentation balanced. His attempt to locate the question within the Christian tradition is laudable. Happily, Peterson eschews a creationist approach to world and human origins. Unhappily, his approach to the scriptural text is not always nuanced. His assertion that Jesus himself was different biologically from other human beings (132) seems a stretch. If one takes the passages of Jesus’s biological origins literally, as apparently does the author, what happens to the assertion that Jesus is like other human beings “in all things but sin”? And where did Jesus get the Y chromosomes? While he persuades the reader that genetic intervention is compatible with a Christian worldview, Peterson does not offer—at least in this reviewer’s view—an adequate criterion for navigating this new world of the possible.Dolores L. ChristieJohn Carroll UniversityCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

As suicide rates increase worldwide, the mental health industry has reached an impasse in attempts to assess patients, predict risk, and prevent suicide. Traditional assessment tools are no more accurate than chance, prompting the need to explore new avenues in artificial intelligence (AI). Early studies into these tools show potential with higher accuracy rates than previous methods alone. Medical researchers, computer scientists, and social media companies are exploring these avenues. While Facebook leads the pack, its efforts stem from scrutiny following (...) suicides and suicide attempts broadcasted on Facebook Live. The company continues to face scrutiny for ethical, privacy, and safety concerns associated with the quick rollout of proprietary AI technology that seems more focused on the optics of the company than the protection of its billions of users. This paper explores some of these issues, including a lack of transparency, questionable data practices, escalation to law enforcement, little to no regulation, potential for bias, increased viewership of troubling content, and worsening thoughts of suicide among vulnerable Facebook users. Despite AI tools showing promise in improving the accuracy of suicide risk predictions over traditional methods, without regulation, external review, and increased protection of users and data, these tools have the potential to cause more harm than good in the hands of powerful companies like Facebook. (shrink)

According to Levinas, the philosophy of being is essentially violent because being is identified with its own negation. The Hegelian Absolute Subject is the perfect expression of the philosophy of Identity and represents the greatest violence. Levinas develops a philosophy of asymmetric inter-subjectivity as a space where difference is possible, offering an alternative to the modern subject.

Graphical AbstractThe culture of chefs from the world's best restaurants is substituted by new trends paradigmatically epitomized by the TV program Masterchef. The authors feel that a similar transformation affects modern research. Recent scientific policies constrict the design of research grants with the aim of short-term maximization of the monetary value generated by the researcher.

The acceptance of causal closure has had a profoundly limiting effect on the philosophical treatment of sui generis mental causation in recent decades. Philosophical treatments of special divine action have been likewise hampered by a widespread commitment to closure. If fundamental reality is as closure tells us it is, then nonphysical minds—human and divine— are either causally impotent or redundant. In this paper, I reject this limitation as baseless. Specifically, I will show how Hempel’s dilemma poses a far greater challenge (...) when applied to a causal closure principle than it did to the task of defining physicalism. Reponses to the dilemma can be used to disambiguate closure, but not without significant cost. In light of Hempel’s dilemma, there is no conception of closure that can do all of the following: rule out sui generis mental causation, have a reasonable chance of being true, and avoid problematic circularity. At the end of the day, I maintain that closure, properly understood, is, or ought to be, just one methodological stance among many. If this is correct, it is a stance that a theist can freely reject. (shrink)

In this study, we investigated the relationship between mothers' psychological lexicon and children's cognitive and socio-emotive development as assessed through conceptual and semantic understanding tasks, in addition to the traditional tasks of theory of mind. Currently, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the frequency of mothers' mental state words used in mother-child picture-book reading is linked with children's theory of mind skills. Furthermore, mothers' use of cognitive terms is more strongly related to children's theory of mind performances than the (...) mothers' references to other mental states, such as desires or emotions (Rollo and Buttiglieri, 2009 ). Current literature has established that early maternal input is related to later child mental state understanding; however it has not yet clarified which maternal terms are most useful for the socio-emotional and cognitive development of the child, and which aspect of the cognitive development benefits from the mother-child interaction. The present study addresses this issue and focuses on the relationship between mothers' mental state talk and children's behavior in conceptual and semantic tasks, and in a theory of mind task. In this study fifty pairs consisting of mothers and their 3 to 6-year-old children participated in two sessions: (1) The mothers read a picture book to their children. To assess the maternal psychological lexicon, their narrative was codified according to the categories of mental state references used in literature: perceptual, emotional, volitional, cognitive, moral, and communicative. (2) After a few days, the conceptual and semantic skills of the children (tasks of contextualization and classification, memory, and definition of words) and their psychological lexicon were assessed. The results suggest close links between the frequency and variety of mothers' mental state words and some semantic and conceptual skills of children. (shrink)

Christie is a member of the Department of Religious Studies at Baldwin-Wallace College, Cleveland, Ohio (U.S.A.).

I trace the principles known as the indiscernibility of identicals, "Leibniz's Law", and the principle of substitutivity, beginning with Aristotle, through Leibniz, Frege, and Russell, and culminating in Quine. I argue that the indiscernibility of identicals is an ontological principle and the principle of substitutivity is a linguistic principle. I discuss the relations and conflations of the principles and various attempts to defend the principle of substitutivity from apparent counter-examples, focussing on Quine's attempt to use the principle as a criterion (...) for referential and non-referential occurrences of singular terms. I find Quine's acount ambivalent and counter-intuitive, yet I think his insight that pronouns or variables are paradigmatic of reference is significant. With that as a cue, I suggest an analysis of all singular terms into a counting device and an identifying component. I argue, finally, that the principle of substitutivity holds fundamentally for the counting element, and only "by courtesy" for unanalyzed singular terms. (shrink)

Que la población mayor está bien ajustada emocionalmente es algo bien constatado en la investigación gerontológico. Este dato, puesto en relación con otros, genera una curiosa consecuencia: la denominada "Paradoja del bienestar en la vejez". Con la edad, junto al aumento de circunstancias relativas a pérdidas (de parientes, amigos, funcionamiento físico y roles sociales) se da una estabilidad en las puntuaciones de diversos indicadores de bienestar psicológico (expresión de emociones positivas, prevalencia de trastornos depresivos o ansiedad). Los aspectos explicativos que (...) se esgrimen para despejar esta paradoja son, entre otros, la mejora de mecanismos de autorregulación emocional y el carácter gradual y normativo de dichas pérdidas (Márquez-González, 2008 y Fernández-Ballesteros, 2009). (shrink)

This article discusses the Australian government’s immigration policies in the context of the global refugee crisis in the years 2015–2016, as reflected and dramatised through the polemical novel b...

Women's equality claims have occupied the forefront of the European debate on face-veil bans; most claims have been denounced as mere manipulation for anti-Islamic and/or anti-immigrant political agendas, and the dilemma between anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles has been argued to be false. This article examines how opportunistic manipulation of gender equality claims and the ‘ethnicisation’ of sexism have been assessed and confronted in the scholarly debate opposing the bans, as well as the impact that this debate has had on women's (...) equality claims and the intersectionality issue. I argue that the women's oppression argument has not been fully considered, because it would have disrupted the anti-racist struggle due to unresolved problems with understanding intersectionality. (shrink)

Wheeler's contribution in this unique partnership gives a woman's consciousness to the philosophy of sexual equality.

En este artículo tratamos de abordar un problema de difícil solución: la forma de tra-ducir el término mawlá, cuyo significado no es el mismo en todas las regiones y etapas históricas. Estudiamos el uso que de este vocablo y de su plural se hizo en al-Andalus desde la época de la conquista hasta la caída de califato de Córdoba, sumando observa-ciones personales relativas a los tipos de walaŽ que se establecieron, al papel desempe-ñado por el grupo social denominado "los mawali" (...) y a factores muy diversos que ayu-dan a interpretar correctamente dicho nombre. ABSTRACT In this paper we address a problem with no easy solution: the translation of the term mawlá, whose meaning differs from region to region and is subject to change over time. We study the use of this word in al-Andalus from the period of the Conquest to the fall of the Caliphate of Cordova, adding some personal observations concerning the types of wald', the role played by the social group called "the mawali" and many other factors that help to establish the correct interpretation of this word. (shrink)

En este artículo tratamos de demostrar que el término español haza procede del árabe Faḥṣ 'campo' y no del latín Fascia 'banda, tira', tesis admitida de manera unánime. Para conseguir nuestro propósito hemos reconstruido la historia de este vocablo a través del estudio de fuentes documentales y textos literarios. Como resultado de ello demostramos que haza, en su forma arcaica faza, aparece en Castilla en el siglo IX; ponemos de manifiesto que en un principio asumió los significados del étimo árabe, (...) para desarrollar más tarde nuevos sentidos y finalmente, explicamos la evolución fonética experimentada por faḥṣ hasta convertirse en haza. (shrink)

Research traditions on cognition and depression focus on relatively unconnected aspects of cognitive functioning. On one hand, the neuropsychological perspective has concentrated on cognitive control difficulties as a prominent feature of this condition. On the other hand, the clinical psychology perspective has focused on cognitive biases and repetitive negative patterns of thinking for emotional information. A review of the literature from both fields reveals that difficulties are more evident for mood-congruent materials, suggesting that cognitive control difficulties interact with cognitive biases (...) to hinder cognitive switching, working memory updating, and inhibition of irrelevant information. Connecting research from these two traditions, we propose a novel integrative cognitive model of depression in which the interplay between mood-congruent cognitive control difficulties, cognitive biases, and rumination may ultimately lead to ineffective emotion-regulation strategies to downregulate negative mood and upregulate positive mood. (shrink)

Believing Philosophy Video Lectures introduces Christians to the tools and resources of philosophy, helping them understand, articulate, and defend their faith in an age of unbelief. Dolores G. Morris first explains why Christians should read and study philosophy. She begins by introducing learners to the long tradition of Christian philosophy and then explains the basic resources of philosophical reasoning: the role and aim of reason; distinctions between truth, reason, and provability; learning to read like a philosopher; and the fundamentals of (...) philosophical arguments. In the remaining sessions, Morris explores a sampling of philosophical topics relevant to the Christian faith. These lessons focus on the problem of evil and the moral argument for the existence of God. The problem of evil is often invoked as an argument for atheism. In response, the moral argument considers the reality not only of evil but also of moral values in general as evidence for the existence of God. In evaluating these arguments, Morris introduces students to a variety of Christian philosophical positions, including skeptical theism, the free will defense, Reformed epistemology, Christian ethical theories, and a number of theodicies and defenses of the faith. (shrink)

Mathematics educators suggest that students of all ages need to participate in productive forms of mathematical argument (NCTM, 2000). Accordingly, we developed two complementary frameworks for analyzing the emergence of mathematical argumentation in one second‐grade classroom. Children attempted to resolve contesting claims about the “space covered” by three different‐looking rectangles of equal area measure. Our first analysis renders the topology of the semantic structure of the classroom conversation as a directed graph. The graph affords clear “at a glance” visualization of (...) how various senses of mathematics—as imagined, as performed, and as historically rooted—were interrelated. The graph represents the emergence and intercoordination between conceptual and procedural knowledge in the ebb and flow of classroom conversation. The graph has not just descriptive, but also predictive power: Interconnectedness among the nodes of the graph representing the first 40 min of conversation predicted the structure of recall in the final ten minutes by children who had played little overt role in the conversation up to that point. The second, complementary framework draws upon Goffman's expanded repertoire of roles in speech to demonstrate how the teacher orchestrated this classroom conversation to establish coherent argument. In this second analysis, we establish how the teacher mediated between the everyday talk of her students and the discourse of mathematics. Her revoicing of student talk created interstices for identity and participation in the formation of the argument. Together, the two forms of analysis illuminate the emergence of mathematical argument at two levels: as collective structure and concurrently, as individual activity. (shrink)

The authoress questions the historiographic dogma that, tracing back to F.W. Maitland, gave the pure «Englishry» of English law for granted, thus building its history on its exceptionality with respect to European tradition, from which it would not have been contaminated at all. The Anglo-Saxon historiographical analysis of the most important English constitutional document aims at answering to the provocative question: how English is Magna Carta? What role did jus commune play in its drafting? What is its relationship with contemporary (...) Roman Canon law? Through the examination of its cultural roots, the essay shows not only the substantial influence of Roman Canon law on Magna Carta, but also, more generally, the affinities and the common elements that characterize in principle the relationship between English juridical tradition and the continental one. (shrink)

En este trabajo, se analizan los modos en que se define, vivencia y valoriza el trabajo en experiencias de organización colectiva de la economía popular. Partimos de poner en diálogo resultados de dos investigaciones etnográficas desarrolladas junto a dos organizaciones nucleadas en la Confederación/Unión de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular. Mientras que los estudios sobre estas experiencias señalaron que la apelación a un sujeto trabajador constituyó la base del proceso de formulación de demandas por derechos hacia el Estado, aquí buscaremos (...) dar cuenta del modo en que la construcción de una definición ampliada del trabajo permea las prácticas cotidianas de quienes integran las organizaciones. Recuperando perspectivas antropológicas que propusieron repensar el trabajo más allá de modelos económicos hegemónicos y aportes de la economía feminista, buscaremos mostrar que tanto las prácticas desarrolladas en las unidades productivas como sus modos de interactuar con el Estado evidencian la imbricación de lo que habitualmente se conceptualiza como productivo y reproductivo, laboral y comunitario, y dan lugar a una reinvención de aquello que se entiende como “trabajo” y en particular como trabajos que valen o son considerados “productivos”. Sostenemos que estas formas de valorizar, jerarquizar y disputar qué es trabajo y qué trabajos son socialmente relevantes constituye la base de la reivindicación del valor de quienes los llevan adelante en su lucha por el reconocimiento de sus derechos. (shrink)

Erik Wielenberg recently invoked the parent-child analogy in an argument against Christian theism. The argument relies on the claim that a loving parent would never allow her child to feel abandoned in the midst of what feels like gratuitous suffering. In this paper, I offer three clear counterexamples to Wielenberg’s central premise. At the same time, a successful counterexample does not a robust theology of suffering make. To that end, and with a careful eye towards anti-theodical concerns, I defend the (...) need for a more proactive Christian philosophical examination of the role of suffering in a meaningful life. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss were contemporary with each other; they shared courses, readings and taught at the same universities. Their lives were also affected by the same historical events, both tried to understand the crisis of Modernity, and the same thinkers and philosophical ideas influenced their works. However, their conclusions differ completely and understanding both their coincidences and their differences can illuminate not only the specificities of two of the most important works of political thought of last century, but (...) also some of the political and theoretical alternatives of our time. Thus, this work aims to show some of the most significant coincidences and differences of Arendt and Strauss, particularly those related to their understandings of the crisis of their time and its consequences. (shrink)

En relación con los derechos humanos de las mujeres y con la finalidad de poder alcanzar sociedades más justas, pacíficas e inclusivas, el acceso a la justicia, la igualdad y la paz, se presentan como metas importantes en la Agenda 2030 sobre Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) de Naciones Unidas. Para la consecución de estos objetivos y para evitar la discriminación que todavía su­fren las mujeres en el disfrute de sus derechos en los conflictos armados con la utilización de los (...) métodos tradicionales de justicia, la mediación se presenta como método idóneo en el que ellas pueden mostrar sus saberes y habilidades y construir, junto con los hombres, una convivencia más armónica y en paz. (shrink)