In recent years there has been increasing concern about the various forms of abuse faced by birthing patients during labour and childbirth. Common examples include being scolded, slapped, pinched, stabbed with scissors or struck with a ruler or other instruments. This mistreatment is collectively termed obstetric violence.A growing body of literature examines legal responses to obstetric violence including the potential use of the criminal law. The present article explores whether, in South Africa, common-law crimes or statutory offences could be used (...) to prosecute healthcare workers for the range of harms falling within the broad definition of obstetric violence. It does not question whether criminal law is an appropriate response in this instance.The article concludes that existing crimes are sufficient to address obstetric violence. It is clear that the common-law crimes of crimen iniuria, assault, assault with intention to commit grievous bodily harm and the statutory offence of involuntary sterilisation, could be used to address both physical and emotional forms of obstetric violence. It is submitted that they cater adequately for the broad range of conduct that potentially falls into the definition of obstetric violence. Further research is required in this area and it may mean that prosecutorial guidelines are needed. (shrink)

The present commentary on it greatly contributes to the understanding of thisvery important work. In fact, it is a good expositary commentary, lucidly explaning the knotty points. It evinces deep study and understanding of Navya-Nyaya and its methodology.yhus, the sukhabodhika Tippanika represents a positive and distinctive contribution to the vast commercial literature on the Tattvacimtamani.

The ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) demands that those participating nations, adopt the aims of the convention as state responsibilities toward their child citizens. The central premise of the convention is clear: that it is the right of all children to develop to their full potential. The authors propose six basic interdependent developmental requirements if the child is to reach ‘full potential’. Without prioritising any one need, but instead concentrating on the facilitation (...) of complete care of the child, the paper aims to examine how the UNCRC may finally be realised. This is achieved by highlighting several key situations and associated factors, which contribute to deficient care. Whilst the factors leading to the creation of such situations are often culturally specific, the consequences for the child, and the implications for care providers (parents, aid agencies, and policy makers), are often very similar within and between continents. (shrink)

Louis Frédéric Ancillon was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres whose imagined dialogue between Berkeley and Hume was read to the Academy in 1796 and published in 1799. It is important as an indicator of the reception of Hume and Berkeley in francophone philosophical circles in late eighteenth-century Prussia. Our introduction is followed by an English translation with notes.

Rights have two properties which prima facie appear to be inconsistent. The first is that they are conditional in the sense that one some occasions it is always justifiable for someone to act in a way which appears to be inconsistent with someone else's rights, such as when the defence of necessity applies. The second is that rights are indefeasible in the sense that they are not subject to being defeated our outweighed by utilitarian or policy considerations. If we view (...) rules and the rights which they establish as being subject to a ceteris paribus clause, the form of which generates out the exceptions, the conditionality of rights becomes reconcilable with their nondefeasibility. Such a view of rules and rights would entail that the goals of the law and their orderings be considered as a part of the law. When so viewed, propositions about goals and their orderings become legitimate premises for legal reasoning, furnishing solutions to hard cases in the law of torts, without resort to balancing of interests or judicial discretion. (shrink)

One of the most extensive yet least conclusive methodological debates within religious studies revolves around the question of what, precisely, the phenomenology of religion is and what contribution it can make to the study of religion. I do not intend to answer this important question here. To do so satisfactorily would require a range of historical, philosophical and methodological inquiry which would go quite beyond the bounds of a single article. My intention in this paper is, by comparison, unambitious. It (...) is to take one view of what phenomenology of religion is and to consider an area outside that usually explored by students of religion which can, nonetheless, shed some light on how religions might be studied in a way which is in accordance with the phenomenology of religion so understood. What follows will offer an answer to the question of what contribution one particular understanding of phenomenology might make to the study of religion, but no attempt will be made to establish whether or not this particular understanding ought to be regarded as normative. (shrink)

§1. The origins of recursion theory. In dedicating a book to Steve Kleene, I referred to him as the person who made recursion theory into a theory. Recursion theory was begun by Kleene's teacher at Princeton, Alonzo Church, who first defined the class of recursive functions; first maintained that this class was the class of computable functions ; and first used this fact to solve negatively some classical problems on the existence of algorithms. However, it was Kleene who, in his (...) thesis and in his subsequent attempts to convince himself of Church's Thesis, developed a general theory of the behavior of the recursive functions. He continued to develop this theory and extend it to new situations throughout his mathematical career. Indeed, all of the research which he did had a close relationship to recursive functions.Church's Thesis arose in an accidental way. In his investigations of a system of logic which he had invented, Church became interested in a class of functions which he called the λ-definable functions. Initially, Church knew that the successor function and the addition function were λ-definable, but not much else. During 1932, Kleene gradually showed1 that this class of functions was quite extensive; and these results became an important part of his thesis 1935a. (shrink)

Interpretations, or generalizations, of quantum theory that are applicable to cosmology are of interest because they must display and resolve the "paradoxes" directly. The Everett interpretation is reexamined and compared with two alternatives. Its "metaphysical" connotations can be removed, after which it is found to be more acceptable than a theory which incorporates collapse, while retaining some unsatisfactory features.

Horace addresses Torquatus again in Carm. 4.7. There the poet distinguishes three cardinal qualities: Torquatus's genus, his facundia, and hispietas. Since Horace distinguishes them they were no doubt qualities on which Torquatus prided himself, but they are, in any case, the key by which Torquatus slips into Horace's lyric. I suggest that we can use the same key to open up the Epistle, and that by taking up these qualities we have ready access to the wit of the poem, carefully (...) predicated upon its addressee. (shrink)

In a discussion-note in Mind, Father P. M. Farrell, O.P., gave an account, in what he admitted to be an embarrassingly brief compass, of the Thomist doctrine concerning evil. There is one sentence in this discussion which at first glance appears paradoxical. Father Farrell has been arguing that a universe containing ‘corruptible good’ as well as incorruptible is better than one containing ‘incorruptible good’ only. He continues: ‘If, however, they are to manifest this corruptible good, they must be corruptible and (...) they must sometimes corrupt.’ The final words, despite Father Farrell's italics, strike one as expressing, not a self-evident truth, but a non sequitur. The fact that I am capable of committing murder does not entail that I will at some time commit it. It is not immediately obvious that a similar entailment holds in the case of corruption and corruptibility. (shrink)

Scholars have long seen that Horace's treatment of Homer in this Epistle demands to be read in the tradition of moral allegory in which Ulysses becomes the type of the ‘man of virtue’ : on such a reading, Circe becomes an allegory of foolish passion ‘to which Ulysses’ companions give in through their stultitia, and because of which they lose their reason and become no better than animals. Antisthenes, from whose writings such an allegorising approach probably developed, was regarded as (...) an early Cynic, and the idea became the special province of Cynic-Stoic philosophy; scholars have therefore felt justified in seeing this epistle as a criticism of Epicureanism, represented by the sponsi Penelopae, nebulones, Alcinoique … iuventus, from the point of view of a Cynic or a syncretistic Stoic. (shrink)