This research aims to open the insight of Christian believers and leaders in Indonesia regarding (YAHWEH), the name of the Biblical God or Elohim, whom Christianity has forgotten in Indonesia. Whereas הוהי(YAHWEH) is the Omnipresent God of the Covenant. He is present not only in the New Testament but also in the Old Testament. The fact of His omnipresence is written in the Old Testament Scriptures through several of His self-revelations, which are the same or similar to the self-revelation uttered (...) by YESHUA HaMashiakh. This study was conducted based on Jeremiah 23:23–24, which contains an incident where YAHWEH as the proper name of the God of Israel/Judah, was forgotten by the people of Israel/Judah because of the actions of their prophets at that time who planned to make YAHWEH’s people forget the name of YAHWEH through their leadership. Their dreams lie, just as their ancestors forgot the Name of YAHWEH because of Baal. The text of Jeremiah 23:23–32 was deliberately chosen and used as primary data by researchers because the cases contained in it are similar to what is a reality in the life of faith of Indonesian Christians today. It is hoped that the selection of the text of Jeremiah 23:23–24 is truly relevant to obtain findings that will be very useful for transforming the worship of a truly Biblical God. In this qualitative literature study, the methods used by researchers are exegesis, interpretation, and comparison both with primary data from Jeremiah 23:23–32 and with several secondary data in the form of literature and texts considered parallel. It is hoped that the research results and their implications can be implemented in the faith life of Christians in Indonesia who still use the Name of Allah so that in the future it is hoped that the Bible will truly contain the name YAHWEH. YAHWEH is no longer replaced by the title LORD or the name ALLAH. Also, the terms Elohim (~yhla) in the Old Testament and Theos (Qeoj) in the original New Testament are no longer translated as the Name of God. (shrink)

Although the main responsibility for informed consent of medical procedures rests with doctors, nurses’ roles are also important, especially as patient advocates. Nurses’ preparation for this role in settings with a hierarchical and communal culture has received little attention. We explored the views of hospital managers and nurses regarding the roles of nurses in informed consent and factors influencing these roles. We conducted a qualitative study in a private, multispecialty hospital in Indonesia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven managers. Two (...) rounds of focus group discussions with nurses (n = 27) were conducted. Constant comparative approach was used in the analysis. Nurses can act as manager, witness, information giver, and advocate in the informed consent process. These roles are influenced by nurses’ preparedness, hospital culture and policy, patients’ understanding, family involvement, and cost-related issues. In preparation for these tasks, nurses should acquire communication skills, clinical knowledge, and legal and ethical knowledge. (shrink)

Although the main responsibility for informed consent of medical procedures rests with doctors, nurses’ roles are also important, especially as patient advocates. Nurses’ preparation for this role in settings with a hierarchical and communal culture has received little attention. We explored the views of hospital managers and nurses regarding the roles of nurses in informed consent and factors influencing these roles. We conducted a qualitative study in a private, multispecialty hospital in Indonesia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven managers. Two (...) rounds of focus group discussions with nurses (n = 27) were conducted. Constant comparative approach was used in the analysis. Nurses can act as manager, witness, information giver, and advocate in the informed consent process. These roles are influenced by nurses’ preparedness, hospital culture and policy, patients’ understanding, family involvement, and cost-related issues. In preparation for these tasks, nurses should acquire communication skills, clinical knowledge, and legal and ethical knowledge. (shrink)

Background: In Southeast Asia, the process of obtaining informed consent is influenced by both culture and policy at the hospital and national level. Both physicians and nurses play vital roles in this process, but physicians influence the roles of nurses. Objectives: Since the physicians and nurses often have different perspectives, it is important to investigate their views about the informed consent process and nurses’ roles therein and whether there is a difference between ideal and experienced practice (reality), and whether this (...) differs across hospitals. Methods: A questionnaire was developed and a survey was conducted among physicians and nurses. Using exploratory factor analysis a three factor structure was determined: ‘nurses’ roles’, ‘barriers in informed consent’, and ‘adequacy of information’. Non-parametric tests were applied to compare nurses and physicians, and hospital setting. Participants and research context: Responses were obtained from 129 physicians and 616 nurses from two Indonesian hospitals. Those hospitals differ in ownership, location, and size. Ethical consideration: The study was reviewed by the hospital ethical committee. Participation was voluntary and confidentiality was ensured by keeping the responses anonymous. Findings: Physicians and nurses differ significantly on all three factors. The scores reflecting disparity between ideal and reality regarding nurses’ roles varied across professions, while barriers in informed consent differed between hospitals. Discussion: The differences between ideal and reality indicated that improvement in the informed consent process and nurses’ roles therein is called for. Varying views between physicians and nurses on nurses’ roles may hinder collaboration. The differences between hospital settings showed interventions may have to be customized for different settings. Conclusion: Views on nurses’ roles vary across professions. Views on barriers in informed consent vary across hospitals. Therefore interprofessional education is needed to promote interprofessional collaboration and intervention to improve informed consent practice should be tailored to the hospital context. (shrink)

Transaction costs and inefficient market channels lead to a diminished share for farmers, rendering merchants more profitable with a higher percentage than that received by farmers. The purpose of this study is to determine the Salt farming transaction costs, market channel and farmer's share. This qualitative research acquires data through in-depth interviews, observations, and questionnaires to precisely characterize the socio-economic behavior of salt farmers, then conducts a precise and objective data analysis. The data is then identified for exact, accurate, and (...) objective analysis. According to the research findings, there are two (two) market pathways connecting manufacturers and industries with salt farmers. Channel 1 is longer than market channel 2; nonetheless, both market channels 1 and 2 offer identical prices to salt farmers in Jepara Regency, Central Java. The farmer's share in salt production in Jepara Regency is 40% for low-quality salt, 42% for medium-quality salt, and 43% for high-quality salt. The transaction cost per hectare for each salt season cycle is Rp. 9,510,000, comprising information cost 29.97%, negotiation cost 4.05%, coordination cost 0.53%, transportation cost 18.93%, implementation cost 39.70%, and monitoring cost 6.83%. (shrink)

As a result of the shortcomings that accompany the enforcement of institutional measures and sanctions on perpetrators of criminal offences, a system of community-based sanctions and measures has emerged. These are intended to relieve the criminal and penal system, maximize the principle of individualization, improve the reintegration of offenders into society, reduce recidivism, and protect society. The organizational units that implement such measures and sanctions are known as probation services. This paper analyses international standards, the emergence and development of probation, (...) a comparative analysis, and the establishment of probation under the Law on Probation in the Republic of North Macedonia, as well as perspectives for the full and effective functioning of the probation service. The probation service is a special organizational unit formed within the Administration for the Execution of Sanctions under the Ministry of Justice. The probation service is tasked with implementing community-based penalties, including measures such as suspended sentences under supervision, community work, and home confinement. It also follows the enforcement of conditional release decisions issued by the courts. Through its activities, the service assists offenders in their social reintegration and rehabilitation, contributing to public safety and the reduction of the prison population. In addition, the service prepares assessments of the risk level of defendants during ongoing criminal cases and provides the court with recommendations regarding the appropriate form of sanction. (shrink)

Sound is one of the types of waves that can be felt by the sense of hearing (ears). In physics, the definition of sound is something that is produced from objects that vibrate. Objects that produce sound are called sound sources. The sound source that vibrates will vibrate the molecules into the air around it. Sound is mechanical compression or longitudinal waves that propagate through the medium. This medium or intermediate agent can be liquid, solid, gas. So, sound waves can (...) propagate for example in water, coal, or air. Most sounds are a combination of various vibratory signals composed of harmonic waves, but pure sound can theoretically be explained by oscillating vibrational speed or frequency measured in Hertz (Hz) vibration units and amplitude or loudness of sound with measurements in decibels (dB). The effect sounds can have on us humans is simply astounding. While everyday life becomes stressful, overcrowded and increasingly hectic, we seek ways for inner peace and balance. The power of music, felt through overtone-rich sound therapy and sound massage, can be a solution. No matter how much scientific explanation is behind it, healing through music remains fascinating, even magical. This paper introduces a new field called cymatics and sound healing with their plausible impact to spirituality and consciousness research. (shrink)

A critical edition of "Tahdhīb Al-Akhlāq", a treatise ascribed to the Jacobite theologian, logician, and translator in Abbasid period, Yahya ibn Adi.

A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the (...) mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's philosophy is the description of the structure and behavior of human consciousness. Adi Shmüeli reconstructs that philosophy by showing that it always reflects the structure in question, and thus provides a useful key to Kierkegaard's work. Mr. Shmüeli approaches his task by analyzing first the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of life as successive steps in the gradual awakening of consciousness. He then describes the alienation of consciousness, of which Kierkegaard speaks in all his works, and discusses Kierkegaard's theory (...) of indirect communication, philosophical action whose aim is to awaken consciousness in order to rescue it from alienation. Studying Kierkegaard's observations on Christianity as indirect communication, Professor Shmüeli deals also with his reflections on the philosophical problem of truth. His concluding chapter discusses the temporality and historicity of human consciousness. Quotations, taken primarily from accessible English translations, are generously provided to put the reader in direct contact with Kierkegaard's own words. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The stability theory of first order theories was initiated by Saharon Shelah in 1969. The classification of abstract elementary classes was initiated by Shelah, too. In several papers, he introduced non-forking relations. Later, Shelah [17, II] introduced the good non-forking frame, an axiomatization of the non-forking notion.We improve results of Shelah on good non-forking frames, mainly by weakening the stability hypothesis in several important theorems, replacing it by the almost λ-stability hypothesis: The number of types over a model of cardinality (...) λ is at most λ+.We present conditions on Kλ, that imply the existence of a model in Kλ+n for all n. We do this by providing sufficiently strong conditions on Kλ, that they are inherited by a properly chosen subclass of Kλ+. What are these conditions? We assume that there is a ‘non-forking’ relation which satisfies the properties of the non-forking relation on superstable first order theories. Note that here we deal with models of a fixed cardinality, λ.While in Shelah [17, II] we assume stability in λ, so we can use brimmed models, here we assume almost stability only, but we add an assumption: The conjugation property.In the context of elementary classes, the superstability assumption gives the existence of types with well-defined dimension and the ω-stability assumption gives the existence and uniqueness of models prime over sets. In our context, the local character assumption is an analog to superstability and the density of the class of uniqueness triples with respect to the relation ≼bs is the analog to ω-stability. (shrink)

This article puts forth a novel framework for understanding conceptions of disability using six models of disability: the “Social,” “Medical,” “Tragedy,” “Affirmative,” “Minority” and “Universal” models. It analyzes these models as three opposed pairs, each pertaining to a distinct aspect of the multifaceted experience of disability: (1) the cause of disabled people’s social disadvantage and exclusion; (2) the effect of impairment on individuals’ quality of life and well-being; (3) the dichotomy or lack thereof between disabled and nondisabled people. The article (...) argues that although each model is incompatible with its opposed pair, it is compatible with the remaining four models, in the sense that there is no contradiction in holding the views associated with these models at the same time. It therefore concludes that conceptions of disability are best understood as clusters of views on disability that are associated with compatible models. (shrink)

Although random mutation is central to models of evolutionary change, a lack of clarity remains regarding the conceptual possibilities for thinking about the nature and role of mutation in evolution. We distinguish several claims at the intersection of mutation, evolution, and directionality and then characterize a previously unrecognized category: complex conditioned mutation. Empirical evidence in support of this category suggests that the historically famous fluctuation test should be revisited, and new experiments should be undertaken with emerging experimental techniques to facilitate (...) detecting mutation rates within specific loci at an ultra‐high, individual base pair resolution. (shrink)

The ArgumentMontaigne'sEssayswere an exercise in self-knowledge carried out for more than twenty years in Montaigne's private library located in his mansion near Bordeaux. The library was a place of solitude as well as a place of knowledge, a kind ofheterotopiain which two sets of spatial relations coexisted and interacted: the social and the epistemic. The spatial demarcation and arrangement of the site – in both the physical and the symbolic sense – were necessary elements of the constitution of Montaigne's self (...) as an object of knowledge and as a subject of discourse. The spatial setting of the library made possible and constrained certain discursive patterns through which words were systematically linked to things, authority was correlated with access and visibility, and the epistemological was coordinated with the social. In this sense, Montaigne's library resembled other places of empirical knowledge of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which subjects of knowledge were constituted, objects were posited in their proper phenomenal fields and the entire structure of intellectual activity was reproduced through various cultural mechanisms. But the initial similarity is only apparent. The private library never became a culturally recognized place for knowledge of the self; its heterotopic structure could not have been reproduced without the concrete presence of an author and of a self, while Montaigne's skepticism systematically undermined the possibility of the author's position and of the identity of the self. (shrink)

In their cognitive theory of emotion, Schachter and Singer proposed that feelings are separable from what they are about. As a test, they induced feelings of arousal by injecting epinephrine and then molded them into different emotions. They illuminated how feelings in one moment lead into the next to form a stream of conscious experience. We examine the construction of emotion in a similar spirit. We use the sensory integration process to understand how the brain combines disparate sources of information (...) to construct both perceptual and emotional models of the world even as the world continues to change. We emphasize two processes: affect segmentation (isolating the felt component of an emotion) and affect integration (recombining this feeling with its object). (shrink)

What remains of moral judgment when truth itself is mistrusted, when the validity of every belief system depends on its context, when power and knowledge are inextricably entangled? Is a viable moral theory still possible in the wake of the postmodern criticism of modern philosophy? The Order of Evils responds directly to these questions and dilemmas with one simple and brilliant change of focus. Rather than concentrating on the age-old themes of justice and freedom, Adi Ophir offers a moral theory (...) that emphasizes the existential and political nature of evil. Ophir's main contention is that evil is neither a diabolical element residing in the hearts of men nor a meaningless absence of the good. Rather, it is the socially structured order of "superfluous evils." Evils, like pain, suffering, loss, and humiliation, are superfluous when they could have been -- but were not -- prevented. Through close analysis of seminal works by modern and postmodern philosophers -- from Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Sartre, and Arendt to Foucault, Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard -- Ophir forges a new perspective for thinking about what it means to be a moral being: to be moral, he argues, is to care for others, and to be committed to preventing, at all costs, their suffering and distress.A theoretically sophisticated work, The Order of Evils also bears the traces of Ophir's own political and personal experiences as an Israeli philosopher and activist. Two major events in recent Jewish history have profoundly influenced his thinking: the Holocaust and the prolonged Israeli domination of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Ophir does not compare the two events. Instead, he introduces a typology of disasters that allows them to be located within the wide spectrum of humanly generated calamities whose specificity and general patterns emerge clearly and distinctly as what they are and are not. (shrink)

SAT's most recent publication, this English translation from the original Sankrit by Adi Sankara is a very clear, aphoristic explanation of what the self is and the Knowledge that reveals.

This is the first book-length examination of the impact Leo Strauss’ immigration to the United States had on this thinking. Adi Armon weaves together a close reading of unpublished seminars Strauss taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s with an interpretation of his later works, all of which were of course written against the backdrop of the Cold War. First, the book describes the intellectual environment that shaped the young Strauss’ worldview in the Weimar Republic, tracing (...) those aspects of his thought that changed and others that remained consistent up until his immigration to America. Armon then goes on to explore the centrality of Karl Marx to Strauss’s intellectual biography. By analyzing an unpublished seminar Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey at the University of Chicago in 1960, Armon shows how Strauss’ fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the important role that Marxism actually played as an intellectual challenge to his later political thinking. Finally, the book explores the manifestations of Straussian doctrine in postwar America through reading Strauss’ The City and Man as a representative of his political teaching. (shrink)

The notion $J$ is independent in $(M,M_0,N)$ was established by Shelah, for an AEC (abstract elementary class) which is stable in some cardinal $\lambda$ and has a non-forking relation, satisfying the good $\lambda$-frame axioms and some additional hypotheses. Shelah uses independence to define dimension. Here, we show the connection between the continuity property and dimension: if a non-forking satisfies natural conditions and the continuity property, then the dimension is well-behaved. As a corollary, we weaken the stability hypothesis and two additional (...) hypotheses, that appear in Shelah's theorem. (shrink)

This book offers an original and detailed reading of Plato's _Republic_, one of the most influential philosophical works in the emergence of Western philosophy. The author discusses the _Republic_ in terms of discursive events and political acts. Plato's act is placed in the context of a politico-discursive crisis in Athens at the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth century B.C that gave rise to the dialogue's primary question, that of justice. The originality of Dr. Ophir lies (...) in the way he reconstructs the _Republic's_ different spatial settings - utopian, mythical, dramatic and discursive - using them as the main thread of his interpretation. Against the background of Plato's critique of the organisation of civic-space in the Greek _polis_, the author relates the spatial settings in the Plato text to each other. This provides a basis for a re-examination of the relationship between philosophy and politics, which Plato's work advocates, and which it actually enacted. (shrink)

Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity; and Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity PoliticsK. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of RaceKimberly Hutchings, Kant: Critique and Politics.

The charged debate on the ‘C‐S‐R‐ization’ of organizational practices seems to have produced two opposing and seemingly incompatible explanations for why organizations should engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR): one, the normative rationale based on an appeal to ethics; and the other, the instrumental rationale, based on an appeal to business pragmatism. This paper argues that a missing link in this debate is the failure to recognize that the normative and instrumental approaches to corporate social responsibility are underpinned by substantively, (...) differentiating, relative logics of emotional rationalism on the one hand, and instrumental rationalism on the other. The paper makes a case that for CSR as a management practice to be practicable and actionable within a sustainable business agenda, it will need to be stripped of its current normative undertone and reconstructed in the instrumentally, pragmatic (utlish) language of business. Otherwise, the whole concept of CSR may continue to dwell in the realm of abstract theorizing without yielding many beneficial and practicable outcomes. The paper concludes that such an approach that situates CSR within a pragmatic business lingua, rather than a non‐business lingua, will help in legitimizing CSR as a ‘neutral’ management practice. (shrink)

The impossible task of navigating ethical dilemmas and challenges as teachers, students, and persons leaves us vulnerable. Susan B. Dion coined the term “perfect stranger” to describe the ways in which teachers and students protect themselves from this ethical vulnerability. Yet, there is no protection or resolution to be found in an ethical relation. According to Emmanuel Levinas, we are never capable of meeting the ethical demands that the other places upon us. A Levinasian metaphysical lens reveals two ontological problematics (...) of position of perfect stranger: objectivity and innocence. These two problematics go beyond Dion’s pedagogical and political critique. By articulating the metaphysical — and ethical — difficulties of this position that takes refuge in distance and refuses responsibility, the mythology of the perfect stranger is further broken apart by Levinas’ notion of infinite responsibility. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s road to skepticism differed from that of many skeptics who preceded him. His skepticism did not arise from the view that it is impossible to bridge the gap between subjective impressions and the objective world. Comparison with Hume will serve to clarify this point. Hume’s skepticism was based on several basic assumptions amongst which of central importance was the assumption that the only immediate data of consciousness are "impressions and ideas." He was led to skepticism by his belief that (...) the transition from the realm of subjective impressions to an objective ordered world of physical substances could not be rationally justified. Thus, when in his skeptical frame of mind, Hume would say that knowledge of the material world is unattainable. However, he never doubted that we know our own here and now impressions, for he assumed that they are directly given to consciousness. (shrink)

The history of the Philosophy of Education Society’s Committee on Gender, Sexuality, and the Status of Women (CGSSW, formerly COSW) offers many interesting pathways into the field of philosophy of education and its related disciplines, from the most specific aspects of scholarship on education and gender to the most expansive debates about what defines philosophy of education in the first place. In this timeline, I hope to offer an incomplete entryway into some of the documents, records, and literature that may (...) establish reference points for future work. Referring to published accounts and unpublished materials that were available to me, and frequently stitched together from different sources, I attempt to plot out the major events in the committee’s history and include references to the extensive work produced by committee members over the last 50 years. (shrink)

Frankly, I have never given much thought to trees. My acquaintance with trees was no more developed than that of an educated teenager – roots, rings, foliage for some, evergreen for others, edible fruits in some… I know that they turn into furniture, tools, and paper of all kinds, how important they are for absorbing CO2 and other pollutants, and also something about their frightening, excessive extraction in the rain forests. I have always appreciated their presence in the hot seasons (...) in the region where I grew up and lived most of my life. I preferred the evergreen hills of Judea or the Galilee mountains to the more yellowish plains and the dry, dusty deserts. I loved walking along Tel Aviv's shadowed boulevards.... Read More. (shrink)

Many young people, especially in high schools in Canada and the United States, are exposed to a dangerously simplistic “make a difference” narrative that often unravels in the face of very real and complex crises. This essay begins in the moment of social justice education (or indeed any education oriented toward political action) where students learn enough about injustice to ask: “now what?” The paralysis that may emerge from a rupture of that narrative is one of the reasons that the (...) starry-eyed optimism of youth falls away so quickly upon entering into the world, which on a pragmatic level is a barrier to organizing political action. I argue that this question poses a challenge for the teacher, who must decide if and how they will guide the student through the incredible difficulty, complexity, and risk of political action. By drawing on Hannah Arendt’s work, in particular The Human Condition, I will show how Arendt’s account of action can help teachers respond authentically to the “now what?” question and prepare students for “the task of renewing the common world.” The “answers” that Arendt provides to the “now what?” question may seem plain but they are not simple and they do not counteract the enormity of the task before us. In some ways, The Human Condition is itself the “now what?” question; it is the pause required “to think what we are doing” – and what we will do. Arendt’s understanding of action reveals the stakes at hand. (shrink)

Recent changes in conceptions of disability pose a challenge for tort law theory, which amounts to making sense of this area of law without reinforcing outdated negative views about disabled people. This article takes up this challenge by critically engaging with Gregory Keating’s recent book Reasonableness and Risk: Right and Responsibility in the Law of Torts (2022). Drawing on social conceptions of disability and impairment, it criticizes Keating’s characterization of physical injury as a harm-based tort, one that diminishes people’s capacity (...) for agency. By contrast, it suggests that physical injury is a sovereignty-based tort, which Keating defines as an unjust interference with people’s protected zones of discretion. This article argues that reconceptualizing physical injury like so provides a sound theoretical basis for tort law doctrine, including its prioritization of safety. It also better aligns with disabled people’s lived experiences and can reduce negative stereotypes of disabled people perpetuated by current tort law practice. (shrink)

The ideas of freedom, justice, democracy and secularism are the main themes in the study of political philosophy. This article attempts to explain Abdolkarim Soroush's political philosophy with the boundaries of themes regarding freedom, justice, secluralism and democracy. Abolkarim Soroush is a thinker in the contemporary Islamic world.

The enforcement mechanisms of anti-discrimination law manifest a puzzle: while the dominant view is that discrimination is a wrongdoing against individuals, which suggests that discriminatees should have the power to vindicate their rights, legal provisions sometimes authorise public officials to file claims against alleged discriminators, regardless of discriminatees’ preferences. Seeking to make sense of this puzzle, this article draws on theories of state enforcement under criminal law to explore the justification of public enforcement under anti-discrimination law and reflect on the (...) nature of discrimination more broadly. It claims that an instrumental justification of public enforcement of anti-discrimination law is left wanting. Instead, it argues that public enforcement in this domain is warranted because discrimination is not only a private wrong against individuals, but is also a public wrong, namely a wrong against the community as a whole. (shrink)

One of the central arguments against redistribution through private law is its inefficiency due to the double-distortion phenomenon that accompanies it. I argue that in a subset of cases—in which there is uncertainty regarding the fairness principle that should be accepted in the realm of private law—it may be required to take into account redistributive considerations even if one generally accepts the double-distortion argument. I assert that while side-constraints may apply to direct redistribution, they do not apply to the role (...) of redistributive considerations in determining which of the fairness principles should be accepted in the realm of private law. As a consequence, some distributive patterns could be achieved only by taking into account redistributive considerations in the realm of private law. I argue that redistributive considerations may tilt the scales toward accepting the fairness principle with the lower credence of being true. (shrink)

This chapter is primarily based on an unpublished seminar entitled “The Political Philosophy of Karl Marx,” which Leo Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey in 1960 at the University of Chicago. The seminar sheds new light both on Strauss’ attitude to Marx and on his own classroom teaching. It reveals how Strauss’ fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the important role that Marxism played as an intellectual challenge to his later political thinking, exposing little-known sides of Strauss’ approach to (...) teaching the history of political philosophy. Marx occupies a key place in Strauss’ description of the crisis of modernity, and is located in the last phase of the second wave of modernity. (shrink)

The question of what role sex plays in evolution is still open despite decades of research. It has often been assumed that sex should facilitate the increase in fitness. Hence, the fact that it may break down highly favorable genetic combinations has been seen as a problem. Here, we consider an alternative approach. We define a measure that represents the ability of alleles to perform well across different combinations and, using numerical iterations within a classical population-genetic framework, show that selection (...) in the presence of sex favors this ability in a highly robust manner. We also show that the mechanism responsible for this effect has been out of the purview of previous theory, because it operates during the evolutionary transient, and that the breaking down of favorable genetic combinations is an integral part of it. Implications of these results and more to evolutionary theory are discussed. (shrink)

The City and Man (1964) is examined as representative of Leo Strauss’ teaching. Read from a Cold War perspective, The City and Man offers a window into Strauss’ teaching in its purest form: no less than an anti-utopian political manifesto intended to bolster the West against the Communist enemy and urge the free world to mend its ways. Strauss’ interpretations of Aristotelian politics, the concept of justice in Plato’s Republic, and the idea of war in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian (...) War are prominent examples. It is in this text that Strauss the teacher emerges in all his glory; here, the complexities of his development from Weimar to America visibly converge. (shrink)

A number of recently published studies by reformist-minded Muslim scholars have both questioned the normative nature of and emphasized the need to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions and interpretational models governing traditional Islamic legal theories and ethics. As part of this process they have emphasized the need to develop novel Islamic hermeneutics. One major element in this emergence of novel Islamic hermeneutics is the production of an increased number of what I term ‘gender equality affirmative scholarship on Islam’. What (...) is particularly interesting, if not intriguing, from the perspective of the author of this article is that the scholarship on gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam is theorized by reformist-minded Muslim male scholars at historically unprecedented levels which is what this study seeks to highlight. This article examines the arguments employed by three prominent contemporary Muslim male reformist scholars, both Shī’ī and Sunnī, in developing gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam – Nasr Abu Zayd, Mohsen Kadivar, and Khaled Abou El Fadl. The focus on male scholars in this article is intentional and seeks to highlight the most fundamental point and indeed the raison d’être behind it, namely to underscore the historically unprecedented support Muslim male scholars are providing to the development of feminist interpretations of Islam. (shrink)