Publication date: 29 September 2016 Source: Author: Golnar Ghalekhani, Leila Fatemi Bushehri Sacrifice is a ritual with an antiquity as long as history in all the areas of human civilization and it is a guide for understanding the ancient ideology of all millennia. This study is an attempt to illustrate a general scheme of sacrifice and its generative thoughts throughout old cultural eras of Iran. This paper tries to identify sacrifice in Iran by considering every details mentioned (...) in religious texts. Due to the fact that Iran has been a land of coexistence of different tribes and cultures in history, and that the Iranian religion is a combination of native Iranian tribes, Elamite, Indo-European, Magus and Mazdeism beliefs it seems impracticable to segregate rituals to specific nations and epochs. Nevertheless, single Gnosticism finds a very unique and distinct position in Iranian religion. This research aims not only to collect the viewpoints, examples and Iranian religion documents about sacrifice but to be a manifestation of the dynamics of Iranian thought. (shrink)

This article explores Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage, and Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, A Daughter of Isis, and Walking Through Fire. It contrasts their works and argues that location and genderawareness play an important role in the writing of autobiographies. The focus is on showing how El Saadawi’s positioning as a feminist activist in Egypt and Ahmed’s location in the USA determine the texts’ themes and shape the construction of the autobiographical “I.”.

In The Phenomenological Psychology of Mindfulness, Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi draws on the latest scholarly findings in Langerian psychology and examines their implications in clinical and social psychology.

Professional integrity is a fundamental principle of the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants Code of Ethics. This does not apply directly to members of a particular professional body, but rather member organizations from around the globe are required to adopt a code no less stringent than the principles in the IESBA Code. Hence, all professional accountants are required to possess integrity as a core ethical principle. In the USA, certified public accountants must, in addition, also adhere to the principle (...) of client advocacy in relation to their tax clients. Despite extensive prior literature on accounting ethics, firm culture, and ethical codes, no prior research has tested whether the communication of an Integrity ethical standard actually affects practitioners’ actual judgments and decisions. In this study, we use brief interventions to determine whether a prime of two ethical professional standards affects tax practitioners’ recommendations to their clients. One implication for professionalism in tax practice is our finding that a brief intervention of professional standards can directly impact on practitioners’ judgments. Most notably, a joint presentation of Advocacy and Integrity leads to contrasting results that depend on the order of the intervention. In sum, when the Integrity standard was presented before the Advocacy standard, tax practitioners were significantly less likely to choose a tax-favorable outcome. That is, the order of professional ethical standard intervention significantly affects tax practitioners’ judgments. (shrink)

BPA Production and Associated Health Risks Bisphenol A is a chemical agent found in many everyday products, including canned goods and plastic food containers. BPA exposure is linked to a variety of adverse health effects, such as obesity and diabetes. To protect the public's health — especially the health of vulnerable fetuses, infants, children, and pregnant women — BPA regulations should encompass products intended specifically for these populations. Even with tremendous public outcry against the use of BPA, current federal restrictions (...) do not reach far enough. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently banned the use of BPA in children's sippy cups and baby bottles, but failed to address its inclusion in canned infant formula or plastic tableware.BPA production began in the 1950s to make epoxy resins and was later employed to create polycarbonate plastic products. (shrink)

Since Xi Jinping has taken office in 2012, China’s political repression has only but intensified so that the regime is definitively turning away from the 1990s legal reforms and the many expectations that followed in terms of rule of law and other rights fostering. In replacing these recent developments in a larger perspective including that of a “socialist harmonious society”, which had already shaded a particular light on Chinese reforms, this article proposes to envisage contemporary Chinese legal culture in an (...) evolutionary and theoretical framework. In doing so, it stresses the tensions between a language of rights now fully integrated by the Chinese citizens and the politics of law used, in a last legal ditch struggle, by the Chinese Communist Party as a tool for social stability in disciplining the people by all means including by the threat of its very legal creations. It then concludes in reflecting upon the legal culture emerging out of this great divide between the people and the State. (shrink)

In The Phenomenological Psychology of Mindfulness, Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi draws on the latest scholarly findings in Langerian psychology and examines their implications in clinical and social psychology.

The process of agricultural unification will dominate the German scene for the next few years. At this stage, however, analysis and forecasts are hampered by the considerable problem concerning the viability of East German agriculture in a market economy and by the absence of reliable data in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This can only be understood in terms of the agricultural situation in the GDR before unification, which is discussed in the first section. The political and economic incentives for (...) German unification are described in the next section of this paper, focusing especially on the integration of the GDR into CAP. The third section considers some critical structural, legal, social, and economic constraints in the process of integrating the two agricultural systems. Finally, the implications for German agriculture as well as the challenges for the CAP will be addressed. Data were collected from interviews with key agricultural policy makers, farm organizations, commodity groups, consumer groups, and agricultural experts, as well as interviewing East German farmers. Additional data were compiled from government statistics, EC publications, and press reports. The conclusions reached in this research show the urgent need for the German government to reconsider the objectives and rationale for structural policies in agriculture, and point out that the new Germany, itself full of paradoxes and uncertainty, stands at the center of European agricultural disorder. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn most historical accounts, eugenic doctrines and Christian beliefs are assumed to be adversaries. Such a perspective is too narrow, however, for while many prominent eugenicists were indeed religious skeptics, others sought to reconcile eugenics with Christianity. Various American Protestant social reformers tried to synthesize new biological theories with older biblical ideas about the meaning of a good inheritance. Such syntheses played an important role in disseminating eugenic doctrines into America's deeply Protestant heartland.

This edited volume presents a comprehensive history of modern logic from the Middle Ages through the end of the twentieth century.

As artificial intelligence technologies become increasingly prominent in our daily lives, media coverage of the ethical considerations of these technologies has followed suit. Since previous research has shown that media coverage can drive public discourse about novel technologies, studying how the ethical issues of AI are portrayed in the media may lead to greater insight into the potential ramifications of this public discourse, particularly with regard to development and regulation of AI. This paper expands upon previous research by systematically analyzing (...) and categorizing the media portrayal of the ethical issues of AI to better understand how media coverage of these issues may shape public debate about AI. Our results suggest that the media has a fairly realistic and practical focus in its coverage of the ethics of AI, but that the coverage is still shallow. A multifaceted approach to handling the social, ethical and policy issues of AI technology is needed, including increasing the accessibility of correct information to the public in the form of fact sheets and ethical value statements on trusted webpages, collaboration and inclusion of ethics and AI experts in both research and public debate, and consistent government policies or regulatory frameworks for AI technology. (shrink)

... which is merely intensional frosting on a more important extensional L. Haaparanta and J. Hintikka (eds.), Frege Synthesized, 3—8. O 1986 byD. ...

Iran is the only Muslim country that has legislation on embryo donation, adopted in 2003. With an estimated 10–15% of couples in the country that are infertile, there are not any legal or religious barriers that prohibit an infertile couple from taking advantage of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs). Although all forms of ARTs available in Iran have been legitimized by religious authorities, there is a lack of legislation in all ARTs except embryo donation. By highlighting ethical issues in embryo donation, (...) the paper presents a critical review of the Act of Embryo Donation in Iran. The paper argues that the Act does not provide enough safeguards for the future child and assurance for the safety of the donated embryos. It also does not restrict embryo donation to surplus embryos from infertile couples and is silent about the number of embryos that could be donated by each couple as well as the number of recipients for donated embryos by a couple. The Act is also silent about the issues of genetic linkage (nasab) and heritage which are challenging issues, especially in a conservative Islamic society. As a result, the future child may not inherit from their birth parents, as it is not required by the Act, or from the genetically related parents under the anonymity policy. Finally there is no standard national protocol or guidelines to evaluate the safety of the donated embryos. The paper concludes that despite its benefits, the Act lacks clarity, and it is subject to misunderstanding and confusion. (shrink)

This paper investigates when two abstract logic-based argumentation systems are equivalent. It defines various equivalence criteria, investigates the links between them, and identifies cases where two systems are equivalent with respect to each of the proposed criteria. In particular, it shows that under some reasonable conditions on the logic underlying an argumentation system, the latter has an equivalent finite subsystem, called core. This core constitutes a threshold under which arguments of the system have not yet attained their final status and (...) consequently adding a new argument may result in status change. From that threshold, the statuses of all arguments become stable. (shrink)

This paper discusses recent changes to state legal frameworks for mandatory vaccination in the context of school and healthcare worker vaccination. It then discusses state laws that allow pharmacists the authority to vaccinate.

Drawing on Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, this article aims, firstly, to consolidate our understanding of Foucault’s engagement with law by fleshing out his approach to law and by clarifying that he distinguishes between different kinds of law on the basis of the objectives that law serves and the regime of truth that it embodies. Secondly, using this understanding, the article proceeds to illustrate how the objectives and the regime of truth of the EU internal market law (...) have been displaced in the last few decades. It is argued that this body of law has increasingly come to perform the tasks of law in neoliberal government as pointed out by Foucault in these lectures, namely of expanding the domain of market values and mechanisms, and of restricting the exercise of legitimate government by opposing the rule of law to planning. In this regard, particular attention is paid to the way in which justiciable rights function as a technology of neoliberal rule within the internal market. (shrink)

Sterilisation is the most desired method of contraception worldwide. In 1996, the Brazilian Congress approved a family planning law that legitimised female and male sterilisation, but forbade sterilisation during childbirth. As a result of this law, procedures currently occur in a clandestine nature upon payment. Despite the law, sterilisations continue to be performed during caesarean sections. The permanence of the method is an important consideration; therefore, information about other methods must be made available. Tubal sterilisation must not be the only (...) choice. We argue that review of this restriction will not contribute to the increase in caesarean sections but will allow for greater sterilisation choice for men and women. (shrink)

This chapter gives a survey of the field of philosophy where the philosophical foundations of modern logic were discussed and where such themes of logic were discussed that were on the borderline between logic and other branches of the philosophical enterprise, such as metaphysics and epistemology. The contributions made by Gottlob Frege and Charles Peirce are included since their work in logic is closely related to and also strongly motivated by their philosophical views and interests. In addition, the chapter pays (...) attention to a few philosophers to whom logic amounted to traditional Aristotelian logic and to those who commented on the nature of logic from a philosophical perspective without making any significant contribution to the development of formal logic. (shrink)

Dung’s (1995) argumentation framework takes as input two abstract entities: a set of arguments and a binary relation encoding attacks between these arguments. It returns acceptable sets of arguments, called extensions, w.r.t. a given semantics. While the abstract nature of this setting is seen as a great advantage, it induces a big gap with the application that it is used to. This raises some questions about the compatibility of the setting with a logical formalism (i.e., whether it is possible to (...) instantiate it properly from a logical knowledge base), and about the significance of the various semantics in the application context. In this paper we tackle the above questions. We first propose to fill in the previous gap by extending Dung’s (1995) framework. The idea is to consider all the ingredients involved in an argumentation process. We start with the notion of an abstract monotonic logic which consists of a language (defining the formulas) and a consequence operator. We show how to build, in a systematic way, arguments from a knowledge base formalised in such a logic. We then recall some basic postulates that any instantiation should satisfy. We study how to choose an attack relation so that the instantiation satisfies the postulates. We show that symmetric attack relations are generally not suitable. However, we identify at least one ‘appropriate’ attack relation. Next, we investigate under stable, semi-stable, preferred, grounded and ideal semantics the outputs of logic-based instantiations that satisfy the postulates. For each semantics, we delimit the number of extensions an argumentation system may have, characterise the extensions in terms of subsets of the knowledge base, and finally characterise the set of conclusions that are drawn from the knowledge base. The study reveals that stable, semi-stable and preferred semantics either lead to counter-intuitive results or provide no added value w.r.t. naive semantics. Besides, naive semantics either leads to arbitrary results or generalises the coherence-based approach initially developed by Rescher and Manor (1970). Ideal and grounded semantics either coincide and generalise the free consequence relation developed by Benferhat, Dubois, and Prade (1997), or return arbitrary results. Consequently, Dung’s (1995) framework seems problematic when applied over deductive logical formalisms. (shrink)

It is difficult to understand the meaning of ‘dignity’ in human rights, bioethics and nursing literature because the word is used so vaguely. Unless dignity’s meaning is spelt out it can disappear beneath more tangible priorities. In this article we define dignity and show how this can help health workers to maintain the dignity of people in their care.

Finland is internationally known as one of the leading centers of twentieth century analytic philosophy. This volume offers for the first time an overall survey of the Finnish analytic school. The rise of this trend is illustrated by original articles of Edward Westermarck, Eino Kaila, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. Contributions of Finnish philosophers are then systematically discussed in the fields of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, ethics and social philosophy. Metaphilosophical reflections on (...) the nature of philosophy are highlighted by the Finnish dialogue between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory. (shrink)

À l'ère du fondamentalisme islamiste et du jihâdisme international, fondés notamment sur des postulats anhistoriques sacralisés, l'œuvre de Mohammed Arkoun, qui postule une approche critique et historicisée de la pensée islamique, est d'une importance majeure tant au niveau académique que politique. Tout au long de sa carrière universitaire, en qualité d'intellectuel humaniste engagé, il s'attelle à la déconstruction des axiomes médiévaux divinisés de l'orthodoxie sunnite dominante auxquels se réfèrent les acteurs islamistes, dans une optique idéologique totalisante, tout en défendant l'idée (...) d'une reconstruction de la pensée islamique dans une perspective moderne et humaniste. Ce livre met en lumière les apports conceptuels, théoriques et programmatiques de son œuvre dans le traitement de sujets nodaux relatifs au statut théologique du Coran, à la violence sacralisée (jihâd), à ladite loi divine (charîʻa), au califat et à l'enjeu humaniste du vivre-ensemble, à l'échelle locale et mondiale, dans une perspective soustendue par le concept de 'ruptures épistémologiques' qui permettrait, selon Mohammed Arkoun dans une optique religieuse, le passage de l'exercice de la pensée islamique d'une épistémè médiévale à une épistémè moderne. (shrink)

Background: Compassionate care is an international priority of healthcare professionals. There is little understanding about how workplace issues impact provision of compassionate care in nursing practice. Therefore, it is important to address the workplace issues and organizational factors which may hinder compassionate care delivery within nursing practice. Objective: The aim of this study was to explore workplace and organizational barriers to compassionate care from the nurses’ perspective. Research design: The study used a qualitative exploratory design, and data were analyzed by (...) conventional content analysis. Participants and research context: A total of 15 nurses working in different fields of nursing were recruited from four hospitals at northwest of Iran. Participants were selected by purposive sampling. Semistructured interviews were conducted for data collection. Ethical consideration: Ethical approval of this study was gained from the Ethical Review Board of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. Findings: The main theme which emerged from data analysis was “unsupportive organizational culture.” This theme had two main categories including “excessive workload alongside inadequate staffing” and “the lack of value on compassionate care.” Discussion: Organizational barriers to development of compassionate in clinical practice were identified in this study. A closer examination of these barriers is required to move compassionate practice from an individual responsibility to a collective responsibility that is owned and shared by organizations. Conclusion: For compassionate care to flourish, policy makers, managers, and healthcare providers must foster an organizational atmosphere conducive to compassionate care. (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda la pregunta por la filosofía, las ideas y la verdad en el pensamiento spinoziano, así como el camino para acceder a ellas. Para esto, trazamos un recorrido histórico que comprende una serie de cartas y comentarios que incluyen a Burgh, Steno y Leibniz. Esto nos permitirá, por un lado, mostrar la relevancia histórico-filosófica del debate y, por otro, sostener nuestra hipótesis, según la cual Spinoza consideraría su filosofía como verdadera porque parte de una concepción sobre la (...) naturaleza misma de las ideas que no otorga un estatuto de realidad al error en cuanto tal, dado que en la inmanencia spinoziana no hay ideas completamente inadecuadas o falsas. (shrink)

This edited volume is a comprehensive presentation of views on the relations between metaphysics and logic from Aristotle through twentieth century philosophers who contributed to the return of metaphysics in the analytic tradition. The collection combines interest in logic and its history with interest in analytical metaphysics and the history of metaphysical thought. By so doing, it adds both to the historical understanding of metaphysical problems and to contemporary research in the field. Throughout the volume, essays focus on metaphysica generalis, (...) or the systematic study of the most general categories of being. Beginning with Aristotle and his Categories , the volume goes on to trace metaphyscis and logic through the late ancient and Arabic traditions, examining the views of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham. Moving into the early modern period, contributors engage with Leibniz's metaphysics, Kant's critique of metaphysics, the relation between logic and ontology in Hegel, and Bolzano's views. Subsequent chapters address: Charles S. Peirce's logic and metaphysics; the relevance of set-theory to metaphysics; Meinong's theory of objects; Husserl's formal ontology; early analytic philosophy; C.I. Lewis and his relation to Russell; and the relations between Frege, Carnap, and Heidegger. Surveying metaphysics through to the contemporary age, essays explore W.V. Quine's attitude towards metaphysics; Wilfrid Sellars's relation to antidescriptivism as it connects to Kripke's; the views of Putnam and Kaplan; Peter F. Strawson's and David M. Armstrong's metaphysics; Trope theory; and its relation to Popper's conception of three worlds. The volume ends with a chapter on transcendental philosophy as ontology. In each chapter, contributors approach their topics not merely in an historical and exegetical fashion, but also engage critically with the thought of the philosophers whose work they discuss, offering synthesis and original philosophical thought in the volume, in addition to very extensive and well-informed analysis and interpretation of important philosophical texts. The volume will serve as an essential reference for scholars of metaphysics and logic. (shrink)

Trataremos aquí sobre la relación entre Spinoza y Butler en lo que respecta a la constitución afectiva de todo cuerpo. Veremos cómo para Butler vida del individuo se presenta en condiciones de precariedad y vulnerabilidad y, para Spinoza, en un estado constante de fluctuación anímica en el que las causas externas nos afectan de una manera que muchas veces pueden implicar nuestra propia descomposición. Veremos cómo ambas filosofías convergen en este punto. Asimismo, atenderemos a la interpretación butleriana del concepto de (...) conatus y “deseo” spinoziano entendido como la naturaleza propia de todo individuo humano. (shrink)