This article contributes empirical findings and sociological theoretical perspectives to discussions of the role of community lay health workers, including in improving the health of individuals and communities. We focus on the role of the Health Trainer (HT), at its inception described as one of the most innovative developments in UK Public Health policy. As lay health workers, HTs are tasked with reducing health inequalities in disadvantaged communities by supporting clients to engage in healthier lifestyles. HTs are currently sociologically under-researched, (...) particularly in relation to occupational identity work, and the boundary work undertaken inter-occupationally with other health workers. To address this research lacuna, a qualitative study was undertaken with 25 HTs based in the Midlands region of the UK. In theorising our findings, we employ a novel combination of symbolic interactionist conceptualisation of 1) identity work, and of 2) boundary work. The article advances knowledge in the field of health and exercise by investigating and theorising how HTs construct, work at, manage, and communicate about professional/occupational boundaries, in order to provide personalised support to their clients in achieving and sustaining healthy behaviour change within the constraints of clients’ lifeworlds. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 7, July 2024, Page 6-12.

This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the South, (...) where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower. (shrink)

This essay, one of the last that Frankena wrote, provides a scrupulously detailed exploration of the various possible meanings of one of Sidgwick's most famous footnotes in the Methods Long intrigued by what Sidgwick had in mind when he said that he would explain how it came about that for moderns it is not tautologous to claim that one's own good is one's only reasonable ultimate end, Frankena uses this note as a point of departure for a penetrating review of (...) Sidgwick's insights and ambiguities on the differences between ancient and modern ethics. (shrink)

I begin with a note about moral goodness as a quality, disposition, or trait of a person or human being. This has at least two different senses, one wider and one narrower. Aristotle remarked that the Greek term we translate as justice sometimes meant simply virtue or goodness as applied to a person and sometimes meant only a certain virtue or kind of goodness. The same thing is true of our word “goodness.” Sometimes being a good person means having all (...) the virtues, or at least all the moral ones; then goodness equals the whole of virtue. But sometimes, being a good person has a narrower meaning, namely, being kind, generous, and so forth. Thus, my OED sometimes equates goodness with moral excellence as a whole and sometimes with a particular moral excellence, viz., kindness, beneficence, or benevolence; and the Bible, when it speaks of God as being good sometimes means that God has all the virtues and sometimes only that he is kind, mereiful, or benevolent. When Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good: None is good, save one, that is God,” he seems to be speaking of goodness in the inclusive sense, but when the writer of Exodus has God himself say that he is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” God is using “goodness” in the narrower sense in which it means benevolence, for he goes on to make it clear that he is also just and severe. Similarly, “good will” may mean either “morally good will” in general, as it does in Kant, or it may mean only “benevolent will,” as it usually does; in “men of good will” it is perhaps ambiguous. (shrink)

Taking reduction in the traditional deductive sense, the programmatic claim that most of genetics can be reduced by molecular genetics is defended as feasible and significant. Arguments by Ruse and Hull that either the relationship is replacement or at best a weaker form of reduction are shown to rest on a mixture of historical and logical confusions about the nature of the theories involved.

This paper analyzes in some detail what an ethics of love would be like if interpreted rigorously as an ethics of being rather than of doing. It delineates the metaethical structure of such an ethics and suggests the characteristics of love appropriate to the structure. The author then indicates some problems that arise for such an ethical theory.

It is well known that Sidgwick finished his examination of “the methods of ethics” in some difficulty. Just what that difficulty was and how he came to be in it, we shall see in due course. This paper is written in the conviction that what he was doing is worth looking at again in the context of contemporary discussion.

Although numerical systems have been regarded as static models of a symbolic system and treated as mythological behavior, it is postulated that these systems are more profitably analyzed as dynamic models, better understood as ritual behavior. As ritual, numerical systems, limited in number and expressive of rhythmicity, contribute to the biogenetic structuralist's notion of “equilibration” between the central nervous system and the environment.The relationship between concrete and abstract numeration is also examined, showing that counting behavior, requiring asymmetrical use of the (...) hands, may contribute to understanding the relationships between handedness and brain hemisphericity, as well as enumeration and memorization. (shrink)

The fundamental result of Lanczos is used in a new type of quadratic variational principle whose field equations are the Einstein field equations together with the Yang-Mills type equations for the Riemann curvature. Additionally, a spin-2 theory of gravity for the special case of the Einstein vacuum is discussed.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1961, given by William K. Frankena, an American philosopher.

In response to Hauerwas, Frankena explores the nature of a moral virtue and the relation between virtue and obligation. He argues that those notions are not related in all the ways Hauerwas suggests and that the ties that do link them can be understood on the basis of an ethical analysis that gives primacy to moral obligation. In response to both Hauerwas and Carney, he examines the relation between morality and religion and argues that his analysis of the concept of (...) morality allows an adequate understanding of both systems of thought. (shrink)

An expansion of 3 lectures presented by the author in 1978 at the University of Michigan.

The Carus Lectures appear above in the form in which they were read, but with the addition of a number of passages, some longer and some shorter, which were omitted in the reading. I think that my presentation of Clause 3 is the only other important change made in the printed version. Except for this change, the lectures as here printed stand essentially as they were written in 1973. The manuscript has been out of my hands since 1974 and would (...) not satisfy me now, even apart from the faults pointed out by my three critics. My lectures need to be both clarified and corrected. They were written in a state of some excitement, not only because I had been invited to give the Carus Lectures, but also because I thought I had hit upon certain interesting newish questions and answers. I was a bit carried away by this, and hence was not so clear or rigorous as I should have been. I therefore welcome this opportunity to rethink what I said and to make some of the needed clarifications and corrections. Because of the nature of this occasion, however, I shall limit myself almost wholly to dealing with points raised by my critics, without going on to revise what I said about Anscombe, Foot, Taylor, or others, in the ways in which I would now wish to. To the three critics I am especially grateful for their willingness to take what I said as seriously as they do. I am not so sure that I can defend my line of thought as I was six years ago, but I shall still try to say what I can about and for it, being not yet quite convinced that I should give it up. (shrink)

First steps are taken toward a formulation of quantum mechanics which avoids the use of probability amplitudes and is expressed entirely in terms of observable probabilities. Quantum states are represented not by state vectors or density matrices but by “probability tables,” which contain only the probabilities of the outcomes of certain special measurements. The rule for computing transition probabilities, normally given by the squared modulus of the inner product of two state vectors, is re-expressed in terms of probability tables. The (...) new version of the rule is surprisingly simple, especially when one considers that the notion of complex phases, so crucial in the evaluation of inner products, is entirely absent from the representation of states used here. (shrink)

The limitation on the sharing of entanglement is a basic feature of quantum theory. For example, if two qubits are completely entangled with each other, neither of them can be at all entangled with any other object. In this paper we show, at least for a certain standard definition of entanglement, that this feature is lost when one replaces the usual complex vector space of quantum states with a real vector space. Moreover, the difference between the two theories is extreme: (...) in the real-vector-space theory, there exist states of arbitrarily many binary objects, “rebits,” in which every rebit in the system is maximally entangled with each of the other rebits. (shrink)

I critically examine an argument, due to howard wettstein, purporting to show that sentences containing definite descriptions are semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive readings. Wettstein argues that many sentences containing nonidentifying descriptions--descriptions that apply to more than one object--cannot be given a Russellian analysis, and that the descriptions in these sentences should be understood as directly referential terms. But because Wettstein does not justify treating referential uses of nonidentifying descriptions differently than attributive uses of nonidentifying descriptions, his argument fails.

This paper provides an analytical overview of the apostolic networks in Britain. There are several ways to understand the success of the apostolic networks. They can be seen as an extreme answer to an extreme problem an answer to a profound secularisation leading to declining church attendance and influence within society. The apostolic networks appear to fit into post-modern society better than conventional denominational structures. In terms of their organization, despite appearances, these networks are however hierarchical like the denominational structures (...) which they challenge. The difference is in the characteristic informality with which these networks can collaborate with each other even when they grow. (shrink)