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.”.

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. ...

S’appuyant sur les biographies de sœur Jacinta – responsable de la fondation du premier couvent carmélite féminin de l’Amérique portugaise – et sur les lettres intimes qu’elle écrivit à ses confesseurs, cette étude examine la manière dont son image de religieuse exemplaire a été construite selon le modèle féminin de sainteté catholique qui dominait au XVIIIe siècle. On souligne aussi les différents procédés propres à l’hagiographie décelables dans ces écrits, ce qui suggère que les auteurs ont tenté de construire une (...) aura de sainteté autour de Jacinta. (shrink)

The Hebrew Bible: glimpses of immortality -- Early post-biblical literature: gateways to heaven and hell -- The mishnah: who will merit the world to come? -- The Talmud: what happens in the next world? -- Medieval Jewish philosophy: faith and reason -- Mysticism: reincarnation in Kabbalah -- Modernity: what do we believe? -- The Messiah: the eternal thread of hope.

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)

Cet article traite des images de la femme dans quelques contes marocains. Il s'agit de saisir les représentations sociales véhiculées par la littérature orale et les attitudes sous-jacentes exprimées par les relations de rôles des personnages féminins dans le cadre d'une démarche de type sociolinguistique.

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)

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.

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)

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

This article discusses findings from a mixed method literature review that investigated cancer patients’ perceptions of what constitutes a good nurse. To find pertinent articles, we conducted a systematic key word search of five journal databases (1998—2008). The application of carefully constructed inclusion criteria and critical appraisal identified 12 relevant articles. According to the patients, good nurses were shown to be characterized by specific, but inter-related, attitudes, skills and knowledge; they engage in person-to-person relationships, respect the uniqueness of patients, and (...) provide support. Professional and trained skills as well as broad and specific nursing and non-nursing knowledge are important. The analysis revealed that these characteristics nurtured patient well-being, which manifests as optimism, trust, hope, support, confirmation, safety and comfort. Cancer patients’ perceptions of what constitutes a good nurse represent an important source of knowledge that will enable the development of more comprehensive and practice-based views on good nursing care for such patients. These perceptions help us to understand how nurses effectively make a difference in cancer patient care. (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.

Beginning with one of the most remarkable characteristics of cyber art, ‘interactivity’, in a context of generalized hybridization of the procedures and technological devices available in the current hyper-technological era, this article will highlight the festive dimension within contemporary artistic practices, especially in its technological and digital components. In order to take both its ‘creationist’ and ‘reflexionist’ aspects into consideration, the proposed interpretation will adopt as its starting point the questions introduced by classical anthropology about festivity: What establishes community in (...) cyber art? Which kind of community is established there and what is sacrificed in digital or cybernetic art? These questions are articulated with the discussion proposed by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Richard Schechner about the task of building the reflexive play that is found in the work of art as such. The purpose is to gradually present, throughout the article, the peculiarity of the experience of ‘the festive’ in computing and numerical arts. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity can be syntactic if it involves more than one grammatical category for a single word, or semantic if more than one meaning can be associated with a word. In this article we discuss the application of a Bayesian‐network model in the resolution of lexical ambiguities of both types. The network we propose comprises a parsing subnetwork, which can be constructed automatically for any context‐free grammar, and a subnetwork for semantic analysis, which, in the spirit of Fillmore's (1968) case (...) grammars, seeks to fulfill the required cases of all candidates for verb of the sentence. Solving for the highest joint probability of the variables conditioned upon the evidences to the network yields the most likely candidate with its meaning, along with its cases and respective meanings. This is achieved by fixing the values of all evidence nodes concurrently, and then performing a stochastic simulation in which the remaining nodes are updated probabilistically with a high degree of parallelism. The process of disambiguation is directed neither by the syntax nor the semantics, but rather by the interrelation between the two subnetworks. The use of a Bayesian‐network model allows us to express this interrelation between the two subnetworks and among their constituents in a rather direct and rigorous way that, in connection with the convergence properties of the stochastic simulation, reveals a very robust model. (shrink)

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 aim of this note is to delineate some new systems of logic which govern the interconnections between two kinds of obligation: moral obligation and legal obligation . In consequence, we shall have in such a logic two kinds of forbideness of premission, and of indifference, but obviously definable in terms of the two obligation operators and negation.

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)

Background: It is essential to pay attention to and respect the dignity of nurses to maintain them in their profession while they deliver skilled nursing care. Little is known, however, about how a sense of dignity influences the practitioner. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to describe nurses’ experiences of threats to their dignity occurring within clinical settings, which generates an intention to leave clinical practice. Research design and method: The study was performed using qualitative content analysis. The participants (...) were 21 clinical nurses with work experience who were employed across a range of clinical posts. Data obtained from the semi-structured interviews were analyzed and interpreted using a content analysis approach. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences and was guided by the ethical principles of voluntary enrolment, anonymity, privacy, and confidentiality. Findings: Within data analysis, three main themes and nine categories were extracted as follows: (1) lack of professional pride (physician’s dominance, intangible nature of nursing, and negative attitude toward clinical nurses); (2) oppressive work environment (high workload, disrespect, discrimination, and lack of support); and (3) suppression of progressivism (lack of appreciation and attention to meritocracy). Discussion: Almost all of the participants have experienced some degree of disrespect and violation of dignity. In general, attempts made by the participants to show their objection to the threats and to support and protect their dignity have not been effective and in fact made them more inclined to leave the clinical work. Conclusion: According to the views of nurses themselves, identification of the factors threatening nurses’ dignity can be one of the appropriate solutions for the broader and deeper investigation of this phenomenon and can help promote and support nurses’ dignity and their retention within the profession. (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)

Whereas the concept of "socialist rule of law" punctuated political discourse in the late 1990s, the idea of a "socialist harmonious society" is today casting a strange light on Chinese legal reform. Is there a Confucian vision of China's marketing law and practice? To what extent have China's norms for marketing, mainly intellectual property and advertising law, been challenged by the new government policy toward a harmonious society? In the post World Trade Organization accession period, the theoretical framework of the (...) "socialist harmonious society" has turned law into a disciplinary principle given over to society's moral construction. If law is seen as an instrument for legitimizing power, it remains implicitly bound primarily to ensure the regime's durability. Although more and more ordinary citizens and foreign companies are seizing hold of normative tools being put at their disposal, this does not necessarily mean that Chinese law is implemented in a uniform and timely manner throughout China's territory. China still suffers from a lack of coherence and political will in the drafting of a legal reform that aims mainly at preserving the current fragile political balance. Contradictory forces are indeed at work in this legal construction that is torn between liberal leanings and socialist authoritarianism. Without a deep change in perspective, one can expect only relatively slow progress in protecting the intellectual property rights of the many Chinese and foreign goods and services that can be found on the Chinese market. (shrink)

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)

Many organizations must adjust their supply chains and business environments to remain competitive and retain market share. However, despite the benefits of such developments for organizations, they can lead to supply chain disruptions in many cases. An essential aspect of modern organizations is closed-loop supply chain management, which reduces risk by coordinating processes. This paper presents a mathematical model of a closed-loop green supply chain under uncertain conditions. A detailed description of the model and current assumptions for a specific industry (...) are provided. Consequently, the model is developed with several relevant objectives for the design of the network. Our proposed model has the following characteristics: being multiobjective, multiproduct, and multiperiodic. Our analysis indicates that the applied model can be used both to increase profitability and to reduce environmental damage. The problem was made more uncertain using fuzzy logic. Torabi and Hassini method is combined with Jiménez’s proposed method to solve the problem. (shrink)

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the concept of logic, focusing on Aristotelian logic and symbolic logic. It then discusses the concept of modern logic, and the uses of the terms “logic,”, “philosophical logic”, and “philosophy of logic.”.