This paper examines the use of tablet personal computers and how they interfere with Nigerian undergraduates reading culture and love for educational books. The study adopts a descriptive research design. The University of Ilorin undergraduates constitute the population for this study while 200 level students of three faculties across the university constitute the target population. Stratified sampling technique was used to sample the needed respondents. A researchers’ designed questionnaire was use for data collection. The collected data was analysed using descriptive (...) statistics. The findings revealed that access to tablet computer influence the undergraduate reading culture. Also, 55.7% of 200 level undergraduates read more electronic materials on their tablet computer than printed texts. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that students should be encouraged to visit the library and read textbooks since there is certain fundamental knowledge that might not be accessible on the net. (shrink)

Las observaciones que Kant formula en sus obras críticas acerca de la existencia de la cosa en sí han dado lugar a importantes objeciones y agudas discusiones entre los intérpretes. En este trabajo proponemos una reflexión acerca de la posibilidad de establecer el estatus epistemológico correspondiente a dichas observaciones, haciendo uso del concepto kantiano de creencia doctrinal.

La naturaleza - La vida - El hombre - Homo Sapiens - Homo Sapiens : lo bello, el sexo y el amor - La sociedad : ética y política - Los dioses.

According to some, the combatant-noncombatant distinction has lost its relevance in today’s world. I examine two arguments to this effect. The first states that the distinction has become irrelevant when it categorizes children as combatants. I reply that the distinction has nothing to do with innocence or guilt, but with the degree to which a violent group poses a threat to others, even when it does so legitimately. The second argues that every civilian can be construed as a kind of (...) combatant, thus obliterating the distinction. My answer notes an error: states are representatives of citizens, not the other way around.My position in this paper is that individuals take on legitimate combatancy as a function of membership in an organization with legitimate combatancy. This paper attempts to construct a concept of the fighting organization that will allow us to determine the legitimate combatancy of such organizations. The three combatancy criteria I offer are military command structure, observance of the war convention, and representativeness. The first is a requirement for legitimate combatancy because it facilitates the prevention of ius in bello violations of the war convention and can enable the transition from war to diplomacy. My second criterion, the observance of the war convention, too, must be retained as a condition for legitimate combatancy: targeting noncombatants as a means of fighting the war certainly disqualifies organizations from potential POW status, and other ius in bello infractions might, as well. My third condition, representativeness, requires that fighters serve as moral proxies for a geographically contiguous, politically viable people in order to retain legitimate combatancy. If a fighting organization does not represent such a people, then it is a group of criminals rather than soldiers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CHARITY LOST: TBE SECtJLA'.RIZATfON OF THE PRINCIPLE OF DOUBLE EFFECT IN THE JUST-WAR TRADITION TIMOTHY M. RENICK Georgia State University Atlanta, Georgia 0 N AUGUST 12, 1945, the city of Hiroshima still smoldered, and President Harry Truman addressed the American people : We have used [the atomic bomb] against those who have attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American (...) prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war.1 Truman and his military advisers had made a calculation. Japan was preparing for a last-ditch defense of the Japanese Islands. The prospect was ominous, to say the least. The United States had suffered eighty thousand casualties in the taking of the smaller and less protected Okinawa just two months earlier; 120,000 Japanese soldiers had been killed (and only ten-thousand taken prisoner). Strategists estimated that losses, both military and civilian, from a full scale battle for Japan itself would exceed one million. Surely the tens of thousands killed by exploding a bomb over Hiroshima was the lesser evil. Surely this was a proportionate act : fifty thousand lives traded for a million. As Winston Churchill wrote in support of Truman's decision: "To avert a vast, indefinite butchery... at the cost of a few explosions seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance." 2 1 Michael Walzer, lust and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p.164. 2 Ibid., pp. 266-267. 441 442 TIMOTHY M. RENICK From an ethical perspective, however, the act was anything but a deliverance. I am not alone in this assessment. Advocates of the just-war tradition including Elizabeth Anscombe, Paul Ramsey, George Kennan, John Langan, and Michael Walzer have condemned the bombing of Hiroshima by means of a shared just-war argument.8 The argument goes as follows, and it is a good one. In times of war, many actions are likely to have both good and evil effects. One destroys an enemy's munitions factory (good effect) but kills an innocent child in the process (evil effect). The jus in bello of the just-war tradition, however, stipulates that an action which has a " double effect " is permissible if and only if: ( 1) it is discriminate (i.e., the actor aims only at the good effect and does not intend the evil effect, nor is the evil effect a means to the end, however good); and (2) it is proportionate (i.e., the good created by the act outweighs the bad).4 Now, the argument continues, Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima failed the first criterion. It was not a discriminate act because the evil effect (the killing of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians) was not unintended. In fact, the evil was the very means to the good end. Although Truman himself claimed to have selected Hiroshima as a target because it was "a war s See, for example, G. E. M. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman's Decision," in Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 1981); M. Walzer "Supreme Emergency," in Just and Unjust Wars; and John Langan, "The American Hierarchy and Nuclear Weapons," Theological Studies 43 (1982) : 447-467. ' I utilize here a helpful shorthand version of the principle of double effect introduced by Paul Ramsey in War and the Christian Conscience (Durham, North Carolina: Duke, 1961). More frequently, the principle is rendered by means of four criteria: It is permissible to perform an act likely to have evil consequences if and only if (I) the act is good in itself or at least indifferent; (2) the direct effect is morally justified; (3) the actor aims only at the acceptable effect and does not intend the evil effect, nor is the evil effect a means to the end, however good ; and (4) there is in the good effect a proportionately grave reason for permitting the evil effect. The shortened version of the theory captures all components essential to my discussion and enhances clarity. I thus will make use of it throughout this essay. CHARITY AND... (shrink)

I M M Gregory, R G Woods; Indoctrination, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 4, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 77–105, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

Nihilism has been a most characteristic feature of the psychology and world-view of several generations of young people in capitalist society. A rejection of traditional religion, of the dominant ideology and morality; a disdain for all authorities; a demand for total emancipation of the spirit, going so far as denial of cultural values and established life-style - all are to a greater or lesser extent characteristic of the outlook of both the "lost generation" that emerged from World War I with (...) the single conviction that it had been cruelly misled and of the "beatniks" of the 1950s, the followers of the apostles of "moral and sexual rebellion." An obvious lack of positive ideas and value orientations impels them to mass-scale "retreat from society," to suicide, to terrorist actions, or to demonstrations of a mutinous nature. Nihilism in all its manifestations of protest and desperation has become a cause of concern to governments and a source of stupid hatred on the part of Philistines, and is under serious discussion by figures in all political parties. Quests for a way out of the cul-de-sac of the nihilist outlook are the inspiration for the work of many twentieth-century writers and philosophers. (shrink)