Criticism of a Javanese story; includes transliterated text in Javanese.

In his posthumously published Living Up to Death Paul Ricoeur left an impressive testimony on what it means to live at a high old age with death approaching. In this article I present him as a teacher who reminds us of valuable lessons taught by patients in palliative care and their caretakers who accompany them on their way to death, and also as a guide in our search for a modern ars moriendi, after—what many at least experience as—the breakdown of (...) traditional religious belief in a personal afterlife. These lessons can be summarized in the following theses. ‘Living up to death, one cannot experience one’s own death. Therefore, never consider someone dying as moribund’. ‘Though everybody is alone in dying, nobody should die alone.’ ‘The preparation for death is an affirmation of life’. ‘Life experienced as a gift can be given up’. The plausibility of the last thesis, however, may go beyond the confines of austere philosophical thinking. (shrink)

Rev MJ Goddefroy and Christian-National educationProfessor CH Rautenbach can be honoured as an excellent exponent of the principle of Christian-national education, based on the same views as the Nederduitsch Hervormde Church. In a tribute to him the purpose of this paper is to look into the matter of the Rev MJ Goddefroy and Christian-national education. Goddefroy came to South Africa exactly one hundred years ago in 1887 to become a minister in the Nederduitsch Hervormde Church and he on his part (...) could be seen as one of the earlier exponents of the same principle. (shrink)

Lewis argues convincingly that a DS approach to emotion theory will be fruitful. He also appears to hold that there are DS principles that constitute a theory or are substantial empirical claims. I argue that this latter move is a mistake.

The spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has stimulated eschatological speculation. To the environmentalist and liberal diagnostician that had already been warning about the Anthropocene and the breakdown of post-Cold War global harmony, an alarm has now been added that in its worst prognosis estimates that, in 2020, we only started witnessing the beginning of a staggered health debacle. The idea of the world, as conceptual support for an imaginary community with global reach, has become a crisis. The world, an object (...) often invoked by theoretical speculation over the last 30 years, has been now decreed finished. However, infectious diseases, in their epidemic and pandemic form, have devastated different societies at different times. This paper parallels two historical scenarios and a series of texts dealing with contagious diseases to shed light on the idea of (the end of) the world. The analysis centres on documents that bear witness to the importation of smallpox and other diseases into America and its spread during the European invasion and colonization. By recovering the concept of Pachakuti, a radical turnaround that can be understood as “end of one world”, this paper shows that the chronicles reporting on the outbreaks of smallpox in America document a material end of the world for subjects who were not protagonists of history. The current end of the world is, on the contrary, that which would correspond to the protagonist of our phase of globalization and, eventually, to _his_ world—which makes it more resonant and absolute. (shrink)

Increasing market competitiveness has brought about changes in enterprise management. There was a demand for an increase in the quality and quantity of information needed for operational and strategic management procedures. With the increasing demand for the desired cross-section of information necessary for an accounting system, in addition to the financial accounting responsible for generating financial information, management accounting was established. The purpose of this article is to seek answers to the question about how the professional ethics of management accountants (...) are related to the nature and specifics of carrying out their professional duties. (shrink)

This article proposes an Analytic Hierarchy Process Dempster-Shafer and similarity-based network selection algorithm for the scenario of dynamic changes in user requirements and network environment; combines machine learning with network selection and proposes a decision tree-based network selection algorithm; combines multiattribute decision-making and genetic algorithm to propose a weighted Gray Relation Analysis and genetic algorithm-based network access decision algorithm. Firstly, the training data is obtained from the collaborative algorithm, and it is used as the training set, and the network attributes (...) are used as the attribute set, and the continuous attributes are discretized by dichotomization, and the attribute that can make the greatest information gain is selected as the division feature, and a decision tree with strong generalization ability is finally obtained, which is used as the decision basis for network access selection. The simulation results show that the algorithm proposed in this thesis can effectively improve user service quality under three services, and the algorithm is simple and effective with low complexity. It first uses AHP-DS hierarchical analysis to establish a recursive hierarchy for the network selection problem and obtains the subjective weights of network attributes through the judgment matrix. Then, it uses a genetic algorithm to adjust the subjective weight, defines the fitness function in the genetic algorithm-based on gray correlation analysis, adjusts the weights of the selection operator, crossover operator, and variation operator in the genetic algorithm, and gets the network with the largest fitness as the target network, which can effectively improve the user service quality. (shrink)