There is no doubt that custard apple diseases are among the important reasons that destroy the Custard Apple plant and its agricultural crops. This leads to obvious damage to these plants and they become inedible. Discovering these diseases is a good step to provide the appropriate and correct treatment. Determining the treatment with high accuracy depends on the method used to correctly diagnose the disease, expert systems can greatly help in avoiding damage to these plants. The expert system correctly diagnoses (...) Custard Apple disease to make it easier for farmers to find the right treatment based on the appropriate diagnosis. Objectives: A specialized syllable language system was established for the diagnosis of Custard Apple plant disease. (shrink)

Du Bois regarded social reform as a legitimate object for the scientist. He gave a place to non-epistemic values in scientific reasoning and, to counter the effects of scientific racism, he constructed his approach around the belief that scientists must adopt an assumption or scientific hypothesis that African Americans are human. His engagement in scientific research was a way to reform the society in which he lived, which in turn, led him to defend the faithfulness to fact as his conception (...) of scientific objectivity. This essay examines his sophisticated theory of facts, account of the difference between the natural and human sciences, and unique pragmatist theory of truth. (shrink)

This essay interprets Butler’s distinction between identity in the loose and popular sense and in the strict and philosophical sense. Suppose there are different standards for counting the same things. Then what are two distinct things counting strictly may be one and the same thing counting loosely. Within a given standard identity is one-one. But across standards it is many-one. An alternative interpretation using the parts-whole relation fails, because that relation should be understood as many-one identity. Another alternative making identity (...) relative to sort fails, because whole and parts can be of the same sort. (shrink)

After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...) evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront. (shrink)

Nothing was more important for W. E. B. Du Bois than to promote the upward mobility of African Americans. This essay revisits his “The Conversation of Races” to demonstrate its general philosophical importance. Ultimately, Du Bois’s three motivations for giving the address reveal his view of the nature of philosophical inquiry: to critique earlier phenotypic conceptions of race, to show the essentiality of history, and to promote a reflexive practice. Commentators have been unduly invested in the hermeneutic readings and as (...) a result have misunderstood it as a philosophical text. Du Bois did more than introduce the concept of race into the purview of philosophy, he provided a method for philosophical inquiry into a concept that is notoriously difficult to approach with precision. My goal here is to show why no introduction to philosophy and no discussion about the nature of philosophical inquiry is complete without consideration of “Conservation.” Certainly, it is a text about race, but it is also an important philosophical text in general. (shrink)

Construing the instantiation of a universal by a particular in terms of my theory of aspects resolves the basic mystery of this "non-relational tie", and gives theoretical unity to the four characteristics of instantiation discerned by Armstrong. Taking aspects as distinct in a way akin to Scotus's formal distinction, I suggest that instantiation is the sharing of an aspect by a universal and a particular--a kind of partial identity. This approach allows me to address Plato's multiple location and One over (...) Many problems, Bradley's problem concerning the instantiation of relations, and the problem of change. (shrink)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and relationship types. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current state of UFO, presenting a formalization of the ontology, along with the analysis of a number of cases to illustrate the application of (...) UFO and facilitate its comparison with other foundational ontologies in this special issue. (The cases originate from the First FOUST Workshop – the Foundational Stance, an international forum dedicated to Foundational Ontology research.). (shrink)

Moral and political forms of constructivism accord to people strong, “constitutive” forms of discursive standing and so build on, or express, a commitment to discursive respect. The paper explores dimensions of discursive respect, i.e., depth, scope, and purchase; it addresses tenuous interdependencies between them; on this basis, it identifies limitations of the idea of discursive respect and of constructivism. The task of locating discursive respect in the normative space defined by its three dimensions is partly, and importantly, an ethical task (...) that is beyond constructivism. Interdependencies between these dimensions call into question the possibility of a plausible and coherent form of discursive respect that is deep, inclusive in scope, and rich in purchase. This does not mean that we should reject discursive respect, or constructivism, for that matter. But it suggests that the task of reconciling the dimensions of discursive respect may not allow for widely shareable results. This task needs to be addressed on non-constructivist grounds. Accordingly, we have reasons to concede that constitutive forms of discursive standing are less fundamental in the order of justification than weaker, “derivative” forms, and this is so especially if we take constitutive standing to mark an important good. (shrink)

How is it possible for David Hume to be both withering skeptic and constructive theorist? I recommend an answer like the Pyrrhonian answer to the question how it is possible to suspend all judgment yet engage in active daily life. Sextus Empiricus distinguishes two kinds of assent: one suspended across the board and one involved with daily living. The first is an act of will based on appreciation of reasons; the second is a causal effect of appearances. Hume makes the (...) same distinction, only he extends the sort of assent involved in daily life to theoretical matters as well. He is a skeptic both in finding no reason to grant the first sort of assent and in being subject to the second. (shrink)

I argue via examples that there are cases in which things that are not two distinct things qualitatively differ without contradiction. In other words, there are cases in which something differs from itself. Standard responses to such cases are to divide the thing into distinct parts, or to conceive of the thing under different descriptions, or to appeal to different times, or to deny that the property had is the property lacked. I show these responses to be unsatisfactory. I then (...) gather and systematize available ways of talking about such cases with phrases like ‘insofar as’, ‘qua’, ‘to the extent that’, ‘in some respect’, etc., while paying special attention to the scope of ‘not’ when used with these phrases. This allows me to show how we can speak of self-differing without contradiction. (shrink)

Important advances in biomedical and behavioral research ethics have occurred over the past few decades, many of them centered on identifying and eliminating significant harms to human subjects of research. Comprehensive attention has not been paid to the totality of harms experienced by animal subjects, although scientific and moral progress require explicit appraisal of these harms. Science is a public good and the prioritizing within, conduct of, generation of, and application of research must soundly address questions about which research is (...) morally defensible and valuable enough to support through funding, publication, tenure, and promotion. Likewise, educational pathways of re-imagined science are critical. (shrink)

According to the “internal” conception (Quong), political liberalism aims to be publicly justifiable only to people who are reasonable in a special sense specified and advocated by political liberalism itself. One advantage of the internal conception allegedly is that it enables liberalism to avoid perfectionism. The paper takes issue with this view. It argues that once the internal conception is duly pitched at its fundamental, metatheoretical level and placed in its proper discursive context, it emerges that it comes at the (...) cost of public dogma. The paper examines this problem and argues that a plausible response to this problem is to go beyond the internal conception and adopt a more inclusive, dynamic conception. But this calls for a form of perfectionism. Thus, the internal conception of political liberalism, far from showing how liberalism can be had without perfectionism, effectively calls for perfectionism as a remedy for its problems. (shrink)

The paper challenges the view that public justification sits well with emancipatory and egalitarian intuitions. I distinguish between the depth, scope and the purchase of the discursive standing that such justification allocates, and situate within this matrix Rawls’s view of public justification. A standard objection to this view is that public justification should be more inclusive in scope. This is both plausible and problematic in emancipatory and egalitarian terms. If inclusive public justification allocates discursive standing that is rich in purchase, (...) as seems desirable in emancipatory terms, it may be unable to allocate equal standing to all relevant people. And if it is to allocate equal standing, then the equality of that standing should be construed in terms that allow for unequal discursive purchase. (shrink)

The paper advances a non-orthodox reading of political liberalism’s view of political legitimacy, the view of public political justification that comes with it, and the idea of the reasonable at the heart of these views. Political liberalism entails that full discursive standing should be accorded only to people who are reasonable in a substantive sense. As the paper argues, this renders political liberalism dogmatic and exclusivist at the level of arguments for or against normative theories of justice. Against that background, (...) the paper considers aspects of a more plausible, deeper and more inclusive idea of public political justification that builds on a thinner, potentially cosmopolitan idea of the reasonable. The paper considers what content such an idea may have, and identifies a method of inclusive abstraction through which it may be enriched in content to render it fruitful for the purposes of a justification of principles of political justice. But the move toward more depth and inclusiveness faces constructivism with two challenges. First, inclusivism about the scope of political justification might not be able to avoid dogmatism unless it invokes perfectionist considerations. And second, the authority and appeal of a fruitfully rich idea of the reasonable depends on whether the addressees of political justification already value wide acceptability. (shrink)

Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist’s responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist’s – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist’s ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist. In the first part of this article, I extend the evil-god challenge by (...) showing that additional theist replies to the problem of evil (more theodicies, the privation view of evil, and others) also may be appropriated, with just as much plausibility, in support of the diabolist position. In the second part of the article, I defend the evil-god challenge against several objections. (shrink)

Hume discusses the distinction of reason to explain how we distinguish things inseparable, and so identical, e.g., the color and figure of a white globe. He says we note the respect in which the globe is similar to a white cube and dissimilar to a black sphere, and the respect in which it is dissimilar to the first and similar to the second. Unfortunately, Hume takes these differing respects of resemblance to be identical with the white globe itself. Contradiction results, (...) undermining his theory of abstraction. The way out is apparently to admit an intrinsic complexity in even simple things. (shrink)

Sleep onset is associated with marked changes in behavioral, physiological, and subjective phenomena. In daily life though subjective experience is the main criterion in terms of which we identify it. But very few studies have focused on these experiences. This study seeks to identify the subjective variables that reflect sleep onset. Twenty young subjects took an afternoon nap in the laboratory while polysomnographic recordings were made. They were awakened four times in order to assess subjective experiences that correlate with the (...) (1) appearance of slow eye movement, (2) initiation of stage 1 sleep, (3) initiation of stage 2 sleep, and (4) 5 min after the start of stage 2 sleep. A logistic regression identified control over and logic of thought as the two variables that predict the perception of having fallen asleep. For sleep perception, these two variables accurately classified 91.7% of the cases; for the waking state, 84.1%. (shrink)

This project was provoked by the almost nonexistent pushback from the Democratic liberal establishment to the (2020) exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse, despite his acknowledged killing of two Black Lives Matters protesters against the police murder of George Floyd. It builds on three prior articles arguing for the revival of ancient Dionysian practice, Haitian Vodou, and Indigenous South American shamanism to empower leftist revolution. In essence, I propose an assemblage of spiritual practices that are accessible today for the neo-colonized 99% of (...) the global population, by synthesizing and reconstructing three democratic, lower-SES, Indigenous religions, all of which share a militant defiance of their respective tyrannical plutocracies. To avoid cultural appropriation, I center these reconstructed spiritual practices on the figure of the “mage,” a psychosocial healer loosely analogous to a shaman. And the mage’s signature activity, “magic,” I redefine naturalistically as free interpersonal performative action, practiced using two theoretical disciplines (philosophy and psychology) and two practical disciplines chosen by each mage. More precisely, Spirit/Dance channels the “spirits” of dead ancestors, historical figures, legendary heroes, mythical beings, and fictional characters, into the three ultimate objectives of “mindfulness” for psyches/souls, “liberation” for mindful bodies, and “social justice” for liberated communities, indirectly empowering long-term revolution. (shrink)

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.

Ordinary usage gives a way to think of identity through time: the Pittsburgh of 1946 was the same city as the Pittsburgh of today is--namely Pittsburgh. Problem: The Pittsburgh of 1946 does not exist; Pittsburgh still does. How can they have been identical? I reject the temporal parts view on which they were not but we may speak as though they were. Rather I argue that claiming their identity is not contradictory. I interpret ‘the Pittsburgh of 1946’ as ‘Pittsburgh as (...) it was in 1946’ and suggest that the apparent contradiction results from an ambiguity in the scope of ‘as’. (shrink)

This paper argues for a conception of the natural rights of non-human animals grounded in Kant’s explanation of the foundation of human rights. The rights in question are rights that are in the first instance held against humanity collectively speaking—against our species conceived as an organized body capable of collective action. The argument proceeds by first developing a similar case for the right of every human individual who is in need of aid to get it, and then showing why the (...) situation of animals is similar. I first review some of the reasons why people are resistant to the idea that animals might have rights. I then explain Kant’s conception of natural rights. I challenge the idea that duties of aid and duties of kindness to animals fit the traditional category of “imperfect duties” and argue that they are instead cases of “imperfect right.” I explain how you can hold a right against a group, and why it is legitimate to conceive of humanity as such a group. I then argue that Kant’s account of the foundation of property rights is grounded in a conception of the common possession of the Earth that grounds a right to aid and the rights of animals to be treated in ways that are consistent with their good. Finally, I return to the objections to the idea that animals have rights and offer some responses to them. (shrink)

Types are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being an essential construct in all major modeling languages in these fields. Despite that, from an ontological and cognitive point of view, there has been a lack of theoretical support for precisely defining a consensual view on types. As a consequence, there has been a lack of precise methodological support for users when choosing the best way to model general terms representing types that appear in a domain, and for building sound (...) taxonomic structures involving them. For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. At the core of this enterprise, there has been a theory of types specially designed to address these issues. This theory is ontologically well- founded, psychologically informed, and formally characterized. These results have led to the development of a Conceptual Modelling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed on conceptual model design in a variety of domains including academic, industrial, and governmental settings. These experiences exposed improvement opportunities for both the OntoUML language and its underlying theory, UFO. In this paper, we revise the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of OntoUML’s meta-types (e.g. kind, role, phase, mixin) should be considered not as restricted to substantial types but instead should be applied to model endurant types in general, including relator types, quality types, and mode types. We also contribute with a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a new metamodel for OntoUML (termed OntoUML 2). To demonstrate that the benefits of this approach are extended beyond OntoUML, the proposed formal theory is then employed to support the definition of UFO-based lightweight Semantic Web ontologies with ontological constraint checking in OWL. Additionally, we report on empirical evidence from the literature, mainly from cognitive psychology but also from linguistics, supporting some of the key claims made by this theory. Finally, we propose a computational support for this updated metamodel. (shrink)

To the question whether Hume believed in mind-independent physical objects (or as he would put it, bodies), the answer is Yes and No. It is Yes when Hume writes “We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but ’tis in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.” However the answer is No after inquiring into the causes of (...) that belief, when he writes, “What then can we look for from this confusion of groundless and extraordinary opinions but error and falsehood? And how can we justify to ourselves any belief we repose in them?” My view is that Hume’s Yes and No answers can best be accounted for by seeing him as a Pyrrhonian skeptic in the tradition of Sextus Empiricus. This interpretation, while finding considerable truth in the various positions canvassed, is closest to those of Norton, Fogelin, and especially Popkin. (shrink)

Global challenges such as climate change, food security, or public health have become dominant concerns in research and innovation policy. This article examines how responses to these challenges are addressed by governance actors. We argue that appeals to global challenges can give rise to a ‘solution strategy' that presents responses of dominant actors as solutions and a ‘negotiation strategy' that highlights the availability of heterogeneous and often conflicting responses. On the basis of interviews and document analyses, the study identifies both (...) strategies across local, national, and European levels. While our results demonstrate the co-existence of both strategies, we find that global challenges are most commonly highlighted together with the solutions offered by dominant actors. Global challenges are ‘wicked problems' that often become misframed as ‘tame problems’ in governance practice and thereby legitimise dominant responses. (shrink)

This paper discusses ethical issues surrounding Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) of the economic effects of climate change, and how climate economists acting as policy advisors ought to represent the uncertain possibility of catastrophe. Some climate economists, especially Martin Weitzman, have argued for a precautionary approach where avoiding catastrophe should structure climate economists’ welfare analysis. This paper details ethical arguments that justify this approach, showing how Weitzman’s “fat tail” probabilities of climate catastrophe pose ethical problems for widely used IAMs. The main (...) claim is that economists who ignore or downplay catastrophic risks in their representations of uncertainty likely fall afoul of ethical constraints on scientists acting as policy advisors. Such scientists have duties to honestly articulate uncertainties and manage (some) inductive risks, or the risks of being wrong in different ways. (shrink)

One of the advantages of my account in the essay “Instantiation as Partial Identity” was capturing the contingency of instantiation—something David Armstrong gave up in his experiment with a similar view. What made the contingency possible for me was my own non-standard account of identity, complete with the apparatus of counts and aspects. The need remains to lift some obscurity from the account in order to display its virtues to greater advantage. To that end, I propose to respond to those (...) who have grappled with it in print. There are various criticisms by commentators: that it is rendered absurd by the transitivity of identity, that it makes instantiation necessary instead of contingent, that it is unclear what counts are, that aspects are simply tropes, that my view does not capture multiple location, that I make an unclear reference to a theory of composition as identity, that the account suffers from problems with polyadicity, and that it is not a realist account of universals after all. I give responses to these objections. (shrink)

The paper argues that applications of the principle that “ought” implies “can” (OIC) depend on normative considerations even if the link between “ought” and “can” is logical in nature. Thus, we should reject a common, “factualist” conception of OIC and endorse weak “normativism”. Even if we use OIC as the rule ““cannot” therefore “not ought””, applying OIC is not a mere matter of facts and logic, as factualists claim, but often draws on “proto-ideals” of moral agency.

Hume's Treatise arguments concerning space, time, and geometry, especially ones involving his denial of infinite divisibility; have suffered harsh criticism. I show that in the section "Of the ideas of space and time," Hume gives important characterizations of his skeptical approach, in some respects Pyrrhonian, that will be developed in the rest of the Treatise. When that approach is better understood, the force of Hume's arguments can be appreciated, and the influential criticisms of them can be seen to miss the (...) mark. (shrink)

In Michel de Certeau’s Invention of the Everyday, improvisational community dance function as a catalyst for the subversive art of the oppressed, via its ancient Greek virtue/power of mētis, being “foxlike.” And in de Certeau’s The Possession of Loudun, this foxlike dance moves to the stage, as an improv chorus that disrupts the events at Loudon when reimagined as a tetralogy of plays at City Dionysia. More precisely, Loudun’s tetralogy could be interpreted as a series of three tragedies and one (...) comedy, the latter of which involves the chorine nuns’ channeling of anomie into a proto-feminist transfiguration. More precisely, the tactical prowess of the nuns’ chorus leader, namely the prioress Jeanne des Anges, elevates her to the status of an angelic prophet, which in de Certeau’s theatrical dancing critique makes her the Loudun tetralogy’s Dionysian, foxlike mage. In conclusion, this analysis suggests de Certeau’s relevance for revolutionary social justice today. (shrink)

Rainer Forst’s constructivism argues that a right to justification provides a reasonably non-rejectable foundation of justice. With an exemplary focus on his attempt to ground human rights, I argue that this right cannot provide such a foundation. To accord to others such a right is to include them in the scope of discursive respect. But it is reasonably contested whether we should accord to others equal discursive respect. It follows that Forst’s constructivism cannot ground human rights, or justice, categorically. At (...) best, it can ground them hypothetically. This opens the door wide for ethical foundations of human rights. (shrink)

Cognitive categories in the geographic realm appear to manifest certain special features as contrasted with categories for objects at surveyable scales. We have argued that these features reflect specific ontological characteristics of geographic objects. This paper presents hypotheses as to the nature of the features mentioned, reviews previous empirical work on geographic categories, and presents the results of pilot experiments that used English-speaking subjects to test our hypotheses. Our experiments show geographic categories to be similar to their non-geographic counterparts in (...) the ways in which they generate instances of different relative frequencies at different levels. Other tests, however, provide preliminary evidence for the existence of important differences in subjects’ categorizations of geographic and non-geographic objects, and suggest further experimental work especially with regard to the role in cognitive categorization of different types of object-boundaries at different scales. (shrink)

Until recently, psychologists have conceptualised and studied trust in God (TIG) largely in isolation from contemporary work in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies that has examined the topic with increasing clarity. In this article, we first review the primary ways that psychologists have conceptualised and measured TIG. Then, we draw on conceptualizations of TIG outside the psychology of religion to provide a conceptual map for how TIG might be related to theorised predictors and outcomes. Finally, we provide a research (...) agenda for future empirical work in this area, as well as practical applications for counsellors and religious leaders. (shrink)

Bestrewn with relics of subjugation, the frameworks that hinge on social progress have failed to appraise the plight of the marginalized in the democratic discourse. This is the case in the Philippines, as in other fringed spaces caught in hegemonic world-building. In this setup, emancipation is anchored in salvific attempts – salvaging the marginalized from a messianic standpoint. This tends to produce a pejorative image of the marginalized as incapable of self-determination. I argue in a three-part discussion: (1) reexamine the (...) locus of the margin in critical theorizing; (2) retrace the act of recognition vis-à-vis the emancipative struggle; (3) present that the lifeworld of the marginalized offers redemptive alternatives for emancipation. Further, I argue that this offers a foremost framework in critical theorizing at the margin since their situatedness affords a stance that has not formed a patina of the West but is primarily informed by their rich local periphery. (shrink)

The study aimed at measuring the dominant pattern of leadership and its relation to the performance of the administrative staff in the Palestinian universities. The study community consists of all the administrative staff from Al-Azhar University and the Islamic University, and through the census of the study society it was found to consist of (655) administrative staff. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers used the method of random sample in the study, and the study was (...) conducted on a sample of (221) administrative staff of the surveyed universities and the response rate was (82.35%). The study found that there is a high degree of satisfaction with the Dominant Pattern of Leadership in the Palestinian universities in Gaza Strip from the point of view of the administrative staff, which reached (71.67%). There is a high level of performance from the point of view of administrative staff, with a percentage of (82.53%). There is a direct correlation between the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff, the absence of differences between the sample according to the gender variable in their perception of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the age variable. There are differences of statistical significance according to the variable of scientific qualification in the Dominant Pattern of Leadership, while there were no differences in performance, the differences in the dominant pattern of leadership according to the scientific qualification were in favor of those who obtained the diploma degree compared to other practical qualifications, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the variable years of service, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the variable level of career (Director, Head of Department, and Administrative Officer). There were differences in the perception of workers to the dominant pattern of leadership depending on the variable of the workplace, where there were differences in favor of workers in deanships and colleges compared with the workers in the technical departments. While there were no differences in job performance according to the workplace variable, the existence of differences in the perception of workers to the dominant pattern of leadership depending on the university in which they work in favor of the Islamic University and the absence of differences in performance between the Islamic University and Al-Azhar University. The study reached a number of recommendations, the most important of which is that the interest of the managements of the Palestinian universities in improving the dominant pattern of leadership, to give universities the opportunity to participate in decision-making, the continued administration of universities interest and continuous improvement of the performance of its employees, enhance the periodic evaluation of job performance and to inform employees and express their opinion, solving workers' problems and giving them the opportunity to contribute to solving their own problems, the use of the staff rotation method periodically and strengthening the democratic the dominant pattern of leadership and empowering university staff. -/- . (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between mental health and emotional intelligence among senior high school students in a public school. Thus, the study employed a correlational design to measure the relationship between mental health and emotional intelligence among 152 Grade 12 senior high school students in a public school. Hence, to measure the study’s variables - Mental Health Inventory and Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) were utilized. Based on the inferential statistics, the r coefficient of 0.32 indicates a low positive correlation (...) between the variables and a p-value of 0.00, indicating a significant relationship between the respondents' mental health and emotional intelligence. Implications and recommendations were discussed in the study. (shrink)

(In German.) The book addresses Rawls's post-1985 political liberalism. His justification of political liberalism -- as reflected in his arguments from overlapping consensus -- faces the problem that liberal content can be justified as reciprocally acceptable only if the addressees of such a justification already endorse points of view that suitably support liberal ideas. Rawls responds to this legitimacy-theoretical problem by restricting public justification's scope to include reasonable people only, while implicitly defining reasonableness as a substantive liberal virtue. But this (...) virtue-ethical grounding of political liberalism is itself unreasonable. The phenomenon of disharmony of practical reason gives the reasonable reasons to take it that political legitimacy does not obtain if and where moral-political principles are acceptable from their point of view only. (shrink)

Understanding Hume’s theory of space and time requires suspending our own. When theorizing, we think of space as one huge array of locations, which external objects might or might not occupy. Time adds another dimension to this vast array. For Hume, in contrast, space is extension in general, where being extended is having parts arranged one right next to the other like the pearls on a necklace. Time is duration in general, where having duration is having parts occurring one aft (...) er another like the notes of a song. Hume’s diff erent view stems from his empiricism, his reliance on experience and observation as the foundation of our concepts. Nothing in our experience suggests a single vast array of locations. Rather, we simply notice that bodies are similar insofar as they have lengths that can be compared. Likewise, nothing in our experience suggests a single dimension of time. Rather, we simply notice that diff erent successions are similar insofar as they have durations that can be compared. Th eorizing that these observations show there to be a single multidimensional array goes well beyond the evidence for Hume. As a skeptic, he fi nds himself unable to assent to theories that stray too far beyond the deliverances of the senses. For Hume, the ideas of space and time are each a general idea of simple—partless— objects arrayed in a certain manner. He argues that the structures of the ideas of space and time refl ect the structures of space and time. Th erefore, space and time are not infi - nitely divisible, and they are ways simple objects are arrayed. Consequently, there is no such thing as empty space nor time without change. (shrink)

The dissertation defends that the often-assumed link between constructivism and universalism builds on non-constructivist, perfectionist grounds. To this end, I argue that an exemplary form of universalist constructivism – i.e., O’Neill’s Kantian constructivism – can defend its universalist commitments against an influential particularist form of constructivism – i.e., political liberalism as advanced by Rawls, Macedo, and Larmore – only if it invokes a perfectionist view of the good. (En route, I show why political liberalism is a form of particularism and (...) reconstruct the role of its conception of public justification, its implied contextualism about justified belief, its conceptions of toleration, neutrality, good reasons, and legitimacy, and, not least, its justification-constitutive conception of reasonableness.) Contrary to what is often assumed, then, at the level of a vindication of the very project of a universalist constructivism, universalist constructivists should construe perfectionists not as their opponents, but as partial, though uneasy, allies. (shrink)

Two decades ago, Rolf Landauer (1991) argued that “information is physical” and ought to have a role in the scientific analysis of reality comparable to that of matter, energy, space and time. This would also help to bridge the gap between biology and mathematics and physics. Although it can be argued that we are living in the ‘golden age’ of biology, both because of the great challenges posed by medicine and the environment and the significant advances that have been made—especially (...) in genetics and molecular and cell biology—we feel that information as an essential aspect of life has been neglected, or at least misunderstood. We therefore summon Maxwell’s Demon and its distant relative the ratchet, and apply these to biology. (shrink)

Comparative religion scholar Thomas Berry’s influential concept of “Earth jurisprudence” has been helpfully elaborated in three principal books. My first section identifies four of their common themes, deriving therefrom an implicit narrative: (1) the basis of ecology is autopoiesis, which (2) originally generated human communities and Indigenous vernacular laws, which were (3) later reasserted by forest defenders who fought to create the Magna Carta’s “Charter of the Forest,” which is (4) now championed globally by the Indian physicist and eco-activist Vandana (...) Shiva’s Earth Democracy movement. My next three sections identify mutually exclusive elements of the three books, deriving the following alternative narrative: self-conscious new dancing rituals (Cullinan) could empower an historically informed reconstruction of private property (Burdon) via commons-based vernacular law (Weston and Bollier). And my conclusion offers one template for such a strategy, namely a new environmental variation on my dancing-poetic conception of legal justice, christened “emerald star-law.”. (shrink)

In the present article, the first section recapitulates my “figuration” philosophy of dance, the “dancing-with” interpretive method derived therefrom, and my previous application of figuration to salsa dance as a decolonizing gestural discourse. The second section deepens and modifies this analysis through a reinterpretation of Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau’s concept of hegemony and his dance-resonant interpretations of Derrida. And the final section offers a template for this hegemonic dancing-with in the Birmingham, Alabama Latin dance troupe, Corazon de Alabama (Heart of (...) Alabama), as a new strategy for decolonizing and reconstructing social justice. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has motivated medical ethicists and several task forces to revisit or issue new guidelines on allocating scarce medical resources. Such guidelines are relevant for the allocation of scarce therapeutics and vaccines and for allocation of ICU beds, ventilators, and other life-sustaining treatments or potentially scarce interventions. Principles underlying these guidelines, like saving the most lives, mitigating disparities, reciprocity to those who assume additional risk (eg, essential workers and clinical trial participants), and equal access may (...) compete with one another. We propose the use of a “categorized priority system” (also known as a “reserve system”) as an improvement over existing allocation methods, particularly because it may be able to achieve disparity mitigation better than other methods. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of that phenomenon. I argue further (...) that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the development of well-founded conceptual models for Service Management, Accounting Information Systems and Financial Reporting. Economic ex- changes are a central notion in these areas and they occupy a prominent position in frameworks such as the Resource-Event Action (REA) ISO Standard, service core ontologies (e.g., UFO-S) as well as financial stan- dards (e.g. OMG’s Financial Industry Business Ontology - FIBO). We present a core ontology for economic exchanges inspired by a (...) recent view on this phenomenon. According to this view, economic exchanges are based on an agreement on the actions that the agents are committed to perform. This view enables a unified treatment of economic exchanges, regardless the object of the transaction. We ground our core ontology on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), discussing its formal and conceptual aspects, instantiating it as a reusable OntoUML model, and confronting it with the REA standard and the UFO-S service ontology. (shrink)

To fully respond to the demands of multiculturalism, a view of toleration would need to duly respect diversity both at the level of the application of principles of toleration and at the level of the justificatory foundations that a view of toleration may appeal to. The paper examines Rainer Forst’s post-Rawlsian, ‘reason-based’ attempt to provide a view of toleration that succeeds at these two levels and so allows us to tolerate tolerantly. His account turns on the view that a constructivist (...) requirement of generality and reciprocity provides a suitable criterion of toleration since a commitment to this requirement is part of what defines people as reasonable. But it is neither plausible nor coherent to build such a requirement into an idea of reasonableness from which an account of toleration starts. Thus, constructivism cannot provide a tolerant criterion of toleration, if such criterion, in order to overcome the ‘paradox’ of intolerant toleration, must escape reasonable disagreement. (shrink)

This essay is part of larger project in which I attempt to show that Western formal logic, from its inception in Aristotle onward, has both been partially constituted by, and partially constitutive of, what has become known as racism. More specifically, (a) racist/quasi-racist/proto-racist political forces were part of the impetus for logic’s attempt to classify the world into mutually exclusive, hierarchically-valued categories in the first place; and (b) these classifications, in turn, have been deployed throughout history to justify and empower (...) racism/quasi-racism/proto-racism. In other words, (a) an important part of the chaos and messiness that so troubles logic has been the natural bio-cultural diversity of human beings as described by concepts such as race and ethnicity; and (b) once these concepts were historically in place, taken for granted, buttressed with pseudo-science, and had their origins forgotten, they became tools for the oppression of diverse human groups. The central thesis of this essay is that close readings of a variety of Leibniz’s writings (including several essays and one letter) will reveal a pattern of mutual dependency and creation in regard to logic and racism in Leibniz. My conclusion will be that there is a meaningful connection between logic and racism (or at least between logic and politics in general) in Leibniz such that one should be skeptical of his logic’s claim to offer transparent and neutral descriptions of the world as well as imperatives for action. Put differently, I want to ask the following specific question: how do Leibniz’s own racially-informed political goals, along with the emergence of race-centric European colonialism, both invest and disguise themselves within Leibniz’s mathematizing of logic? (shrink)

Allies are extremely important to LGBT rights. Though we don’t often enumerate what tasks we expect allies to do, a fairly common conception is that allies “support the LGBT community.” In the first section I introduce three difficulties for this position that collectively suggest it is conceptually insufficient. I then develop a positive account by starting with whom allies are allied to instead of what allies are supposed to do. We might obviously say here that allies are allied to the (...) LGBT community, but I will argue that this community is better thought of as a loose coalition because there are often intersectional issues and conflicting interests that challenge any unified sense of community. I argue that people typically become allies because a friend or family member is experiencing some kind of specific harm; if that harm or discrimination is what causally explains why people become allies, then allies are required to do more than we commonly think. Although allies have a prima facie obligation to honor what members of a subcommunity identify as a harm, this obligation is defeasible if an ally believes fulfilling the obligation would be harmful. I conclude by looking at how we can understand what an ally is in terms of a larger discussion about moral obligations. If people already have these obligations, whatever they are, because morality requires it, then the status “ally” is redundant. I conclude by showing that certain social statuses can not only transform or reprioritize prior moral commitments, but can also introduce new kinds of responsibility that an agent did not have before. (shrink)

Addiction theorists have often utilized the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant to illustrate the complex nature of addiction and the varied methodological approaches to studying it. A common purported upshot is skeptical in nature: due to these complexities, it is not possible to offer a unifying account of addiction. I think that this is a mistake. The elephant is real–there is a _there_ there. Here, I defend a dispositionalist account of addiction as _the systematic disposition to fail (...) to control one’s desires to engage in certain types of behaviors_. I explain this position, defend the inclusion of desires and impaired control, and flesh out the notion of _systematicity_ central to my account. I then illustrate how my dispositionalist framework can unify the disparate and seemingly incompatible accounts of addiction (and their respective methodological approaches). I close with a brief plan to extend and implement my account. (shrink)