This critique engages with the article titled "The Question of the Nature of God from the African Place," by L. Uchenna OGBONNAYA published in Vol. 11. No.1 of this journal. This critique will employ a focused argumentative methodology to assess its contributions to the discourse on African Philosophy of Religion. It will also evaluate the article's strengths and weaknesses, emphasizing the articulation and support of key arguments. Through a systematic examination of the presented evidence and methodological approach, the critique aims (...) to shed light on the nuanced perspectives on the nature of God within the African philosophical framework. Further, this assessment will provide a comprehensive understanding of the article's implications for contemporary religious studies and intercultural dialogue, contributing to the ongoing conversation surrounding diverse perspectives on divinity. (shrink)

This essay explores a tragic event that happened in China, which garnered much attention, the Li case: a young woman who was nine months pregnant and her baby died as a result of the failure to receive a medically necessary c-section due to the hospital having failed to secure her family's consent for the c-section. Differing from some critiques, this essay argues that the Li case should not be used to blame the Confucian family-determination model that has been applied in (...) Chinese society for thousands of years. Based on summarizing the reasons supporting the model, this essay indicates that it is an integral part of the model that, in emergency or special cases, the physician must take medical action to save the patient, without the need to secure the consent of a family member. In order to prevent tragic cases like the Li case from happening, we recommend that relevant Chinese laws be further developed and specified and that, most importantly, Chinese physicians must cultivate the Confucian virtue of benevolence in their practice of taking care of patients in a virtuous way, along with patients’ families. (shrink)

The quantitative problem of old evidence is the problem of how to measure the degree to which e confirms h for agent A at time t when A regards e as justified at t. Existing attempts to solve this problem have applied the e-difference approach, which compares A's probability for h at t with what probability A would assign h if A did not regard e as justified at t. The quantitative problem has been widely regarded as unsolvable primarily on (...) the grounds that the e-difference approach suffers from intractable problems. Various philosophers have proposed that 'Bayesianism' should be rejected as a research strategy in confirmation theory in part because of the unsolvability of this problem. I develop a version of the e-difference approach which overcomes these problems and possesses various advantages (but also certain limitations). I develop an alternative 'theistic' approach which handles many cases that my development of the e-difference approach does not handle. I conclude with an assessment of the significance of the quantitative problem for Bayesianism and argue that this problem is misunderstood in so far as it is regarded as unsolvable, and in so far as it is regarded as a problem only for Bayesians. (shrink)

The December 2008 White Paper (WP) on “Brain Death” published by the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE) reaffirmed its support for the traditional neurological criteria for human death. It spends considerable time explaining and critiquing what it takes to be the most challenging recent argument opposing the neurological criteria formulated by D. Alan Shewmon, a leading critic of the “whole brain death” standard. The purpose of this essay is to evaluate and critique the PCBE’s argument. The essay begins with a (...) brief background on the history of the neurological criteria in the United States and on the preparation of the 2008 WP. After introducing the WP’s contents, the essay sets forth Shewmon’s challenge to the traditional neurological criteria and the PCBE’s reply to Shewmon. The essay concludes by critiquing the WP’s novel justification for reaffirming the traditional conclusion, a justification the essay finds wanting. (shrink)

David Ricardo was a hugely influential British political economist and stock trader. This volume, first published in 1923, contains five important pamphlets published by him, edited and with an overarching introductory essay by E. C. K. Gonner. Each essay relates either to monetary and financial subjects - including the high price of Bullion, monetary theory and the position of the Bank of England - or to the agricultural conditions of Britain and proposed solutions to the problems discussed. This is a (...) fascinating and detailed work, which will be of great value to those with an interest in Ricardo’s theories and British economic history. (shrink)

Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...) are framed by an interventionist causal framework, it is clearer what the H. pylori explanation achieves and where its explanatory strengths lie. After assessing this ‘simple’, single-microbe case, we apply the interventionist framework to two key areas of microbiome research, in which obesity and mental health states are purportedly explained by microbiomes. Despite the experimental data available, interventionist criteria for explanation show that many of the causal claims generated by microbiome research are weak or misleading. We focus on the stability, specificity and proportionality of proposed microbiome causal explanations, and evaluate how effectively these dimensions of causal explanation are achieved in some promising avenues of research. We suggest some conceptual and explanatory strategies to improve how causal claims about microbiomes are made. (shrink)

Most authors who work with moral status automatically dismiss the possibility that plants are the kinds of entities that have moral status. This dismissal coheres with our intuitions about common-sense morality: if plants do not have moral status then we do not have any direct moral obligations to plant life. An implication of such a view is that any suggestion otherwise commits one to be in favour of an absurd conclusion. However, given the recent literature and empirical evidence on plant (...) minds, there are reasons to accept a different perspective that finds the absurd conclusion plausible. (shrink)

The Dirac generator formalism for relativistic Hamiltonian dynamics is reviewed along with its extension to constraint formalism. In these theories evolution is with respect to a dynamically defined parameter, and thus time evolution involves an eleventh generator. These formulations evade the No-Interaction Theorem. But the incorporation of separability reopens the question, and together with the World Line Condition leads to a second no-interaction theorem for systems of three or more particles. Proofs are omitted, but the results of recent research in (...) this area is highlighted. (shrink)

The healthcare crisis that has developed in the last two decades during China's economic reform has caused healthcare and hospital financing reforms to be largely experienced by patients as a crisis in the patient–healthcare professional relationship (PPR) at the bedside. The nature and magnitude of this crisis were epitomized by the "Harbin Scandal"—an incident that took place in August 2005 in a Harbin teaching hospital in which the family of an elderly patient hospitalized in the intensive care unit (ICU) for (...) 66 days paid over RMB ¥6 million. The news was publicized globally and ended in the firing of six top hospital administrators including the hospital president and the ICU director. This paper seeks to show that the Chinese healthcare crisis is ultimately linked to a conflict of interests between patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs), which is inherent in the reformed healthcare system of China. Hence the crisis is, at its core, a crisis of fidelity and confidence that must be restored to the PPR. At the "macro" level, it is simplistic to blame the crisis on the failure of the market system, and at the "micro" level, it is naïve to expect that a contractual understanding of the PPR will effectively restore the confidence of patients. This paper will show that the fiduciary relationship and medical professionalism share similar attributes, with fidelity being the core value of both. It concludes that the loss of medical fidelity implies the dissolution of the PPR and the demise of the medical profession and challenges Chinese HCPs to keep their fidelity as a means to both protect their patients’ interests and to preserve their profession's survival. (shrink)

Wetenschappelijke bezinning op de betekenis van de ethiek van de humanistische psycholoog (1900-1980) o.a. door vergelijking met de ethiek van Marx en de existentiefilosofie.