Older adults in the United States have been the age group hardest hit by the Covid pandemic. They have suffered a disproportionate number of deaths; Covid patients eighty years or older on ventilators had fatality rates higher than 90 percent. How could we have better protected older adults? Both the popular press and government entities blamed nursing homes, labeling them “snake pits” and imposing harsh fines and arduous new regulations. We argue that this approach is unlikely to improve protections (...) for older adults. Rather than focusing exclusively on acute and critical resources, including ventilators, a plan that respected the best interests of older adults would have also supported nursing homes, a critical part of the health care system. Better access to protective equipment for staff members, early testing of staff members and patients, and enhanced means of communication with families were what was needed. These preventive measures would have offered greater benefit to the oldest members of our population than the exclusive focus on acute care. (shrink)

The Christian tradition teaches that some people will suffer eternally in hell. But why? Doesn't an all-powerful God have the ability to prevent this from happening to anyone? Wouldn't a perfectly good and loving God want to prevent it? And doesn't the traditional teaching about hell function as a threat, coercing those who truly believe it? These questions convey the problem of hell, the most disturbing of all theological problems and one of the most difficult to solve. Thinking Through the (...) Problem of Hell is a rigorous yet accessible treatment of the issue. The solution that it develops, called the divine presence model, is that heaven and hell are the various ways that the righteous and the wicked experience the presence of God after the final judgment. In its fully developed form, the divine presence model addresses a whole host of theological issues: the purpose of suffering, the meaning of salvation, the nature of free will and self-deception, and the reason that God remains partially hidden in this life, even to those who earnestly seek Him. This is a book for those who refuse pat, simplistic answers to the hardest questions of the Christian faith. (shrink)

Meet the God Who Is Greater Than Your Biggest Questions. The Bible never shies away from seeming contradictions. We are told both to resist our enemies and to love them, and that our all-knowing God can sometimes forget. Unable to reconcile such biblical paradoxes, some people abandon Christianity, while others pretend that the seeming contradictions don’t exist–preferring to believe in an uncomplicated, easy-to-comprehend God. Yet countless others are hungry for new insight into the God behind the Bible’s mysterious paradoxes. Responding (...) to this spiritual hunger, James Lucas delves into the mysteries of Scripture, demonstrating that biblical “contradictions” are actually exquisite paradoxes that enlarge our understanding of God. With this book as your guide, you can embrace the paradoxes of Scripture and pursue honest answers to your hardest questions. The study of biblical paradox leads to greater devotion to the majestic God who makes himself known even while he surpasses human understanding. Today, you can begin Knowing the Unknowable God. (shrink)

Cesario argues that experiments cannot illuminate real group disparities because they leave out factors that operate in ordinary life. But what Cesario calls flaws are, in fact, the point of the experimental method. Of all the topics in science, we have to wonder why racial discrimination would be uniquely unsuited for investigating with experiments. The argument to give up the most powerful scientific method to study one of the hardest problems we confront is laughable.

The combination problem is still one of the hardest problems for a panexperientialist ontology. Prominently, among others, Philip Goff wrote two papers in 2009 arguing that panexperientialists cannot get around the combination problem. We will argue that Goff 's attack is only relevant if parsimony is the only methodological principle for evaluating and comparing ontologies. Our second approach will sketch a version of panexperientialism for which the combination problem does not arise at all. Panexperiential holism is the theory that (...) the universe as a whole is one big experiential matter of fact. What we normally believe to be independent centres of conscious subjectivity are merely long-lived structural features of this big experience. The notion of 'personal identity' entailed by panexperiential holism is essentially vague and may lead us into something like Derek Parfit's relation R . Therefore, persons are not merely series of experiences, but exemplify the common denominator of these experiences. In this sense, a person is what has experiences, or the subject of experiences. We will argue that this concept fits nicely into some frameworks of personal identity put forth by Peter Simons and Godehard Brüntrup. (shrink)

Cook and Reckhow [5] pointed out that $\mathcal {N}\mathcal {P} \neq co\mathcal {N}\mathcal {P}$ iff there is no propositional proof system that admits polynomial size proofs of all tautologies. The theory of proof complexity generators aims at constructing sets of tautologies hard for strong and possibly for all proof systems. We focus on a conjecture from [16] in foundations of the theory that there is a proof complexity generator hard for all proof systems. This can be equivalently formulated (for p-time (...) generators) without a reference to proof complexity notions as follows:•There exists a p-time function g stretching each input by one bit such that its range $rng(g)$ intersects all infinite $\mathcal {N}\mathcal {P}$ sets.We consider several facets of this conjecture, including its links to bounded arithmetic (witnessing and independence results), to time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity, to feasible disjunction property of propositional proof systems and to complexity of proof search. We argue that a specific gadget generator from [18] is a good candidate for g. We define a new hardness property of generators, the $\bigvee $ -hardness, and show that one specific gadget generator is the $\bigvee $ -hardest (w.r.t. any sufficiently strong proof system). We define the class of feasibly infinite $\mathcal {N}\mathcal {P}$ sets and show, assuming a hypothesis from circuit complexity, that the conjecture holds for all feasibly infinite $\mathcal {N}\mathcal {P}$ sets. (shrink)

Spiritual Theology's journey through these last decades shows an itinerary of development, the fruit of which is an ever more solid identity. This book seeks to present a perspective in that itinerary and in tune with the signs of our times: on one hand, militant secularism and, on the other, a widespread, concrete resurgence of experiences of transcendence. In this sense, the author is presenting a path of study organized around five concepts: presence, mystery, transcendence, lived experience, and transformation. In (...) effect, the inner transformation worked by the Presence of Mystery leaves a new knowing, in which the relationship with reality is renewed, since it has expanded and dilated beyond sensible perception, opening the subject up to an unlimited and real horizon of transcendence. The awareness of perceiving a 'greater reality' within reality leaves an emotional resonance that teaches a new way of feeling and reacting in the face of sensibly perceived reality. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 72-103, Winter 2019.

It is argued that the so-called fitting attitude- or buck-passing pattern of analysis may be applied to personal values too if the analysans is fine-tuned in the following way: An object has personal value for a person a, if and only if there is reason to favour it for a’s sake. One benefit with it is its wide range: different kinds of values are analysable by the same general formula. Moreover, by situating the distinguishing quality in the attitude rather than (...) the reason part, the analysis admits that personal value is recognizable as a value not only by the person for whom it has personal value, but for everyone else too. We thereby avoid facing two completely different notions of value, viz., one pertaining to impersonal value, and another to personal value. The analysis also elucidates why we are justified in our concern for objects that are valuable for us; if value just is, as it is suggested, the existence of reasons for such a concern, the justification is immediately forthcoming. (shrink)

This book focuses upon the perennial question of the existence and nature of an obligation to obey the law. Leading writers have, at one time or another, emphasized considerations such as gratitude, 'divine ordering, ' prudence, contract, autonomy, and utility in seeking to justify, or to deny any justification for, some sort of obligation to obey the positive law. The book provides relevant selections from a sampling of the historical approaches to legal obligation taken by writers such as Plato, Augustine, (...) Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Thoreau, Bentham, Marx and Engels, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These classical discussions are augmented by critical questions and commentary, by independent discussions of the question of legal obligation by a wide range of contemporary writers, and by relevant judicial cases discussing matters such as conscientious objection and civil disobedience. (shrink)

ᅟThe comment discusses M. Slote's view on empathy as presented in his paper “The Many Faces of Empathy”. It is asked whether three forms of empathy he portrays are three separable concepts or three variants of the same concept of empathy.

Regarded as a revisionist historian in the West, Patricia Crone, who wrote many books and articles on various subjects of early Islamic history, was a prolific researcher. The place and role of mawālī, in the Umayyad and Abbāsid society, has been one of the special topics she has been interested in since the very beginning of her academic life. Her works with a revisionist perspective have been faced many criticisms by colleagues, especially the western ones, because of her biased view (...) of the sources written by Muslim authors, her methodology, and her results. However, it is obvious that Crone’s studies on mawālī have positively or negatively affected the Eastern and Western academics in Islamic studies. This article’s main purpose is to reveal Crone’s views on mawālī in Isla-mic society and draw an outline without comment as much as possible. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part, Crone’s revisionist perspective and her works on mawālī have been explained. In the second part, her distinctive views on the mawālī and its origin have been discussed. Finally, in the third part, her findings of the position of mawālī in social, political, military, and economic life during the Rāshidun Caliphs, the Umayyads, and the Abbāsids have been introduced. This study, which tackles Crone’s views on mawālī, aims to encourage the further studies on this subject. (shrink)

The notion of anaphoric conservativity, that is a property of specific functions taking sets and binary relations as arguments is studied. Such functions are denotations of anaphoric determiners forming nominal anaphors. It is shown that anaphoric conservativity is strictly stronger that ordinary conservativity of this type of functions. In consequence some novel semantic descriptions of reflexive and reciprocal pronouns are provided and a semantic universal stating that reflexive and reciprocal non-possessive determiners denote anaphorically conservative functions is proposed.

Chemical structures are among the trademarks of our profession, as surely chemical as flasks, beakers and distillation columns. When someone sees one of us busily scribbling formulas or structures, he or she has no trouble identifying a chemist. Yet these familiar objects, which accompany our work from start to end, from the initial doodlings (Fig. I) to the final polished artwork in a publication (Fig. II), are deceptively simple. They raise interesting and difficult questions about representation. It is the intent (...) of this article to reflect upon molecular graphics. (shrink)