Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 77-79.

Reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes are fundamental principles in global health. Environmental justice remains underrecognized and undervalued as a key driver of health dispar...

We use the path integral form of quantum electrodynamics to show that a causal classical limit to QED can be derived by functionally integrating over the photon coordinates, starting from an initial photon vacuum and ending in a final coherent radiation state driven by the anticipated classical charged particle trajectories. The resulting charged particle transition amplitude depends only on particle coordinates. When the \ limit is taken, only those particle paths that are not constrained by the final radiation state are (...) varied. These results demonstrate that the collapse from an infinity of charged particle paths, a path integral description, to causally interacting classical trajectories, a stationary-action description, is critically dependent on including final coherent state radiation and maintaining the distinction between particle paths that are free to vary and those trajectories that can be monitored by the final state radiation. (shrink)

In the move from a teleological notion of history to one ruled by the logic of the symptom, Žižek is pushed to theorize the notion of the Act. Bringing together Marxism and psychoanalysis at the level of surplus, revolution and the end of analysis merge. What Žižek provides is a picture of change permeated with contingencies: a hysterical ‘acting out’ can become the Act proper; a violent outburst can become revolution. This can only be accomplished with the help of the (...) party-cum-analyst, which Zizek asserts serves to ensure that spontaneity becomes politicized. This paper serves as an attempt to trace the beginnings of the theoretical contours of Žižek’s development of the Act, and ends by opening towards the investigation of the importance of Pascal’s wager in Žižek’s theoretical corpus. (shrink)

Explores the relation between religion, philosophy and literature.

Searching for God draws upon the traditional categories of systematic theology as it guides readers through the Catholic theological thought process involved in the search for God. At each step we examine the work of a past thinker from the time of the early church up to the early twentieth century, and a present thinker whose works are often required reading in theology courses. Not only do readers have the opportunity to critically evaluate several important theological works in the Catholic (...) tradition, they can also enter into dialogue with those works as they engage in their own search for God. Among the ten categories represented are: Bible: Hearing God--Past: Hugh of St. Victor, Noah's Ark (ca. 1130) Present: Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text (1999) Christ II: Understanding God (Dogmatic Approach)--Past: Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ (429) Present: Roger Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God (1999) Religions of the World: Listening for God Past: Jean Daniélou, The Salvation of the Nations (1946) Present: Raimon Panikkar, The Experience of God (2006) +. (shrink)

Contemporary tort theory is dominated by a debate between legal economists and corrective-justice theorists. Legal economists suppose that tortfeasors and tortious wrongs are false targets for cheapest cost-avoiders and avoidable future losses. Corrective-justice theorists argue powerfully that the economic account of tort as search for cheapest cost-avoiders with respect to future accidents does not capture the most fundamental fact about tort adjudication, namely, that the reason we hold defendants liable in tort is that they have wronged their victims and should (...) therefore repair the harm they have done. Deterring cheapest cost-avoiders from committing future harms no more justifies imposing liability in tort than deterring future crime justifies hanging the innocent. This is a powerful critique of the economic theory of tort, but it overshoots the mark. As an account of tort law, corrective justice puts the cart before the horse Tort is a law of wrongs, not just a law of redress for wrongs. Repairing harm wrongly done is the next best way of complying with an obligation not to do harm wrongly in the first place. Rights and remedies form a unity in which rights have priority. Corrective justice is thus an essential but subordinate aspect of tort. This paper develops this line of criticism of corrective-justice theory and offers an alternative account of tort that places primary norms of harm avoidance and respect for rights at its center. On this conception, tort isa law of wrongs, but its distinctiveness lies in the content and character of the wrongs with which it is concerned. At its core, tort is concerned with protecting essential conditions of individual agency. (shrink)

Cas9/guide RNA (gRNA)‐based gene drive systems are expected to play a transformative role in malaria elimination efforts., whether through population modification, in which the drive system contains parasite‐refractory genes, or population suppression, in which the drive system induces a severe fitness load resulting in population decline or extinction. DNA sequence polymorphisms representing alternate alleles at gRNA target sites may confer a drive‐resistant phenotype in individuals carrying them. Modeling predicts that, for observed levels of SGV at potential target sites and observed (...) rates of de novo DRA formation, population modification strategies are uniquely resilient to DRAs. We conclude that gene drives can succeed when fitness costs incurred by drive‐carrying mosquitoes are low enough to prevent strong positive selection for DRAs produced de novo or as part of the SGV and that population modification strategies are less prone to failure due to drive resistance. (shrink)

Adam Slavny's Wrongs, Harms, and Compensation: Paying for Our Mistakes (OUP, 2023) is predicated on a break with a foundational assumption of most contemporary tort theory. It renounces all aspirat...

While he develops three different aspects of Lacan's “Real,” Slavoj Žižek does so only partially, in the end leaving an inconsistent and contradictory account. Here these three versions of the Real are outlined and clarified by showing their relation to Marx's account of capitalist exchange and socialist politics. This leads to a discussion of two other aspects of the Real that appear in Žižek's work: the pre-Symbolic Real and the “Sinthome.” Where the former is simultaneously the fear of a unified (...) working class and the fantasy of a world of “total enjoyment” without conflict, the latter is discussed here in terms of political struggle that takes on not only the form of a means to an end but also that of an end in itself. (shrink)

This article investigates teachings from diverse mystical traditions and the quantum physicist, David Bohm. After a brief background on the traditions, a dialogue follows their teachings regarding these questions: How is infinite truth described? How does the phenomenal world relate to infinite truth? How do humans experience the infinite within the phenomenal world? The metaphors from quantum physics proposed by David Bohm poetically intertwine topics of emptiness, innermost awareness, sparks and relationships, storehouses and the heart, roots and souls, resurrection and (...) the truth body, and perceiving truth. (shrink)

The tort law of negligence is one of our principal forms of protection against accidental physical injury. But it is underspecified in one respect and incomplete in another. The common law of negligence is underspecified in that its norm of reasonable care does not register clearly enough the fact that it is reasonable to take greater precautions against some kinds of physical injuries — severe and irreparable ones — than it is against other kinds — mild and fully repairable ones. (...) The common law of negligence is incomplete in that it relies on the award of money damages to induce prospective injurers to exercise reasonable care prospectively, yet does not so much as attempt to fully monetize the harm done by unreasonable risks that result in death. (shrink)

Blair proposes that fluid intelligence, working memory, and executive function form a unitary construct: fluid cognition. Recently, our group has utilized a combined correlational–experimental cognitive neuroscience approach, which we argue is beneficial for investigating relationships among these individual differences in terms of neural mechanisms underlying them. Our data do not completely support Blair's strong position. (Published Online April 5 2006).

_Beyond the Pleasure Principle_ is Freud’s most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces the fundamental concepts of the “repetition compulsion” and the “death drive,” according to which a perverse, repetitive, self-destructive impulse opposes and even trumps the creative drive, or Eros. The work is one of Freud’s most intensely debated, and raises important questions that have been discussed by philosophers and psychoanalysts since its first publication in 1920. The (...) text is presented here in a contemporary new translation by Gregory C. Richter. Appendices trace the work’s antecedents and the many responses to it, including texts by Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among many others. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, declared that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis in his famous work of 1927, _The Future of an Illusion_. This work provoked immediate controversy and has continued to be an important reference for anyone interested in the intersection of philosophy, psychology, religion, and culture. Included in this volume is Oskar Pfister’s critical engagement with Freud’s views on religion. Pfister, a Swiss pastor and lay analyst, defends mature religion from Freud’s “scientism.” Freud’s and Pfister’s texts (...) have been updated in Gregory C. Richter’s translations from the original German. (shrink)

Flesh of My Flesh is a collection of articles by today's most respected scientists, philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, and law professors about whether we should allow human cloning. It includes historical pieces to provide background for the current debate. Religious, philosophical, and legal points of view are all represented.