Should environmental, social, and economic sustainability be of primary concern to engineers? Should social justice be among these concerns? Although the deterioration of our natural environment and the increase in social injustices are among today’s most pressing and important issues, engineering codes of ethics and their paramountcy clause, which contains those values most important to engineering and to what it means to be an engineer, do not yet put either concept on a par with the safety, health, and welfare of (...) the public. This paper addresses a recent proposal by Michelfelder and Jones (2011) to include sustainability in the paramountcy clause as a way of rectifying the current disregard for social justice issues in the engineering codes. That proposal builds on a certain notion of sustainability that includes social justice as one of its dimensions and claims that social justice is a necessary condition for sustainability, not vice versa. The relationship between these concepts is discussed, and the original proposal is rejected. Drawing on insights developed throughout the paper, some suggestions are made as to how one should address the different requirements that theory and practice demand of the value taxonomy of professional codes of ethics. (shrink)

Coping with a relative with a learning disability could be a stressful experience for family members. The present study is aimed at exploring the coping strategies adopted by families in trying to make meaning of their situation. A qualitative study design using focus group discussions was adopted. Ten FGD sessions were held with family members of persons with a learning disability. Findings revealed patterns of family coping to include problem-focused, emotion-focused, and spiritual/religious-focused. Also, coping responses to a learning disability varied (...) based on the level of information available to families about the condition of their relative. In some cases, interspousal relationship was strained due to stress. It was recommended that families of persons with a learning disability need social support and professional help from social workers to facilitate the adoption of more positive-oriented coping strategies by family members. (shrink)

Bioethics has now become a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of scholarly investigation which has in the past decades migrated from bedside consultations to public policy debates and wider cultural and social consultations that privilege all discourse about everyday life issues. It has made exponential progress in addressing moral issues in science, technology and medicine in the world. In spite of this progress, core bioethics issues, approaches and values are still exclusively Western dominated and largely foreign to most African societies. Although medical (...) ethics has existed since the time of Hippocrates, in Africa, there is a noted sluggish growth and low prestige of ethics education as bioethics is not taught in most higher educational systems of learning, low understanding of its processes as researchers manifest a general lack of appreciation for bioethics and general ignorance characterize those involved in research about ethical practices. This is unfortunate, considering that various research that aim at finding solutions to the multiple problems affecting African societies and the need to address and assess these problems in ethical terms are of crucial importance to Africans. In this work, I argue that Africa lacks human, institutional, infrastructural capacities and a real African authenticity in bioethics. Additionally, African views on bioethics are neither sufficiently developed nor heard. Africans need to confront these current challenges of bioethics to their lives and communities and to develop African conceptions to incorporate African specificities and approaches. (shrink)

Bioethics has now become a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of scholarly investigation which has in the past decades migrated from bedside consultations to public policy debates and wider cultural and social consultations that privilege all discourse about everyday life issues. It has made exponential progress in addressing moral issues in science, technology and medicine in the world. In spite of this progress, core bioethics issues, approaches and values are still exclusively Western dominated and largely foreign to most African societies. Although medical (...) ethics has existed since the time of Hippocrates, in Africa, there is a noted sluggish growth and low prestige of ethics education as bioethics is not taught in most higher educational systems of learning, low understanding of its processes as researchers manifest a general lack of appreciation for bioethics and general ignorance characterize those involved in research about ethical practices. This is unfortunate, considering that various research that aim at finding solutions to the multiple problems affecting African societies and the need to address and assess these problems in ethical terms are of crucial importance to Africans. In this work, I argue that Africa lacks human, institutional, infrastructural capacities and a real African authenticity in bioethics. Additionally, African views on bioethics are neither sufficiently developed nor heard. Africans need to confront these current challenges of bioethics to their lives and communities and to develop African conceptions to incorporate African specificities and approaches. (shrink)

Biomedical research has made tremendous advances during the last decade in improving human health and well being. In spite of these advances, research has encountered serious emerging challenges as it moves across boarders and confronts different societies with different cultural practices, beliefs, moral thoughts and different values. A pervasive and perplexing issue affecting the current advances in research is the perception that research might end up exploiting populations unless it is conducted in the context of a strong ethical framework. Furthermore, (...) informed consent has increasingly become a thorny area for researchers when considering what should be done when introducing the process into a community, especially if the process might destroy the traditional value system and customs of the community. In this paper, I argue that community consent is an unethical process which should be subverted for community dialogue and community education in research in Africa. (shrink)

African countries can at best be said to be underdeveloped. Graciously, however, they are said to be developing countries. But the indices of underdevelopment far outweigh the ones that designate them as developing. Compared to the developed world, African countries appear to be retrogressing by the day. This is worrisome. And many have wondered aloud the source of this precarious and parlous situation in which the Africans have found themselves. Some have identified it as a lack of true and committed (...) leadership; for others, it is the faulty constitutions, lack of respect for the rule of law, corruption, etc. Some solutions have been proffered on how to burst the shackles of African underdevelopment. But the more fundamental question is to ask whether there is anything in African man that resists development. Is the nature of the African man different from the rest of humanity? This paper reflects critically and analytically on human nature. It notes that Africans do not possess anything less of all that make up the contents of human nature. They simply have to begin their development process through the use of their indigenous economic model, just like the rest of the developed world did. (shrink)

Although there are several provisions within the Nigerian legal framework that, however, address the issue of church attack, the state capacity to implement effective constitutional sanctioning on perpetrators of this heinous crime has always been found wanting or completely absent, leading to countless religious attacks on churches with seeming state consent. This study employs semi-structured interviews to draw data from affected families from Benue and Enugu States, Nigeria. The article explored their experiences. The study participants were recruited through snowball sampling (...) technique, and data were analysed thematically. The respondents stated that church killings or killing of Christians is rising because of the fact that perpetrators stand lower risk of detection and apprehension than other crimes. Also respondents interrogated that justification for the crime is land acquisition and religious intolerance. On the persistence of the challenge, all the 13 respondents stated that the crime seems to have state approval that has made it seemly impossible to tackle. The article calls for continuous inter-religious dialogue and intentional governmental responsibility in protecting lives of all persons living within the geographical enclave of Nigeria which is necessary for the common good. Closer understanding of other faiths and religions will help build bridges of peace and tolerance. The article also calls for the need to promote African traditional values, such as the value of sacredness of life, human respect and good neighbourliness.Contribution: This study initiated the discussions that will help the public understand the reason for continuous church attacks in Nigeria, what church crime connotes in the Nigerian context and its uniqueness from other crimes. These discussions sit quite well within the transdisciplinary religious perspective of this journal. (shrink)

Although there are several provisions within the Nigerian legal framework that, however, address the issue of church attack, the state capacity to implement effective constitutional sanctioning on perpetrators of this heinous crime has always been found wanting or completely absent, leading to countless religious attacks on churches with seeming state consent. This study employs semi-structured interviews to draw data from affected families from Benue and Enugu States, Nigeria. The article explored their experiences. The study participants were recruited through snowball sampling (...) technique, and data were analysed thematically. The respondents stated that church killings or killing of Christians is rising because of the fact that perpetrators stand lower risk of detection and apprehension than other crimes. Also respondents interrogated that justification for the crime is land acquisition and religious intolerance. On the persistence of the challenge, all the 13 respondents stated that the crime seems to have state approval that has made it seemly impossible to tackle. The article calls for continuous inter-religious dialogue and intentional governmental responsibility in protecting lives of all persons living within the geographical enclave of Nigeria which is necessary for the common good. Closer understanding of other faiths and religions will help build bridges of peace and tolerance. The article also calls for the need to promote African traditional values, such as the value of sacredness of life, human respect and good neighbourliness. Contribution: This study initiated the discussions that will help the public understand the reason for continuous church attacks in Nigeria, what church crime connotes in the Nigerian context and its uniqueness from other crimes. These discussions sit quite well within the transdisciplinary religious perspective of this journal. (shrink)

Исследование посвящено философскому осознанию природы духовности человека. Автор рассматривает духовность внутреннего мира человека как единство высших чувств души и нравственного сознания. Для специалистов в области философии, методологии науки.

Exclusionary defeat is Joseph Raz’s proposal for understanding the more complex, layered structure of practical reasoning. Exclusionary reasons are widely appealed to in legal theory and consistently arise in many other areas of philosophy. They have also been subject to a variety of challenges. I propose a new account of exclusionary reasons based on their justificatory role, rejecting Raz’s motivational account and especially contrasting exclusion with undercutting defeat. I explain the appeal and coherence of exclusionary reasons by appeal to commonsense (...) value pluralism and the intermediate space of public policies, social roles, and organizations. We often want our choices to have a certain character or instantiate a certain value and in order to do so, that choice can only be based on a restricted set of reasons. Exclusion explains how pro tanto practical reasons can be disqualified from counting towards a choice of a particular kind without being outweighed or undercut. (shrink)

Political legitimacy is best understood as one type of a broader notion, which I call institutional legitimacy. An institution is legitimate in my sense when it has the right to function. The right to function correlates to a duty of non-interference. Understanding legitimacy in this way favorably contrasts with legitimacy understood in the traditional way, as the right to rule correlating to a duty of obedience. It helps unify our discourses of legitimacy across a wider range of practices, especially including (...) the many evaluations we increasingly make of international institutions of various sorts, but also including domestic institutions. (shrink)

CONTENIDO: Kant y la pedagogía - De la objetividad a la objetivación - De la tensión entre el investigador y el método - Interdisciplinariedad e investigación cualitativa en educación - Formación y subjetividad: epistemología, lenguaje y pedagogía - La pedagogía ante la tecnología como estructura del mundo de la vida - Alcances y limitaciones de la inteligencia artificial en pedagogía - A propósito de la informática en el mundo de la pedagogía y de la educación - La representación del conocimiento (...) y la inteligencia artificial - La lógica de las ciencias como didáctica: ¿un bastión de modernidad? - La educación del futuro como futuro de la educación - De la epistemología de la pedagogía a la filosofía de la educación. (shrink)

As we move around in our environment, and interact with it, many of the most important problems we face involve the processing of spatial information. We have to be able to navigate by perceiving and remembering the locations and orientations of the objects around us relative to ourself; we have to sense and act upon these objects; and we need to move through space to position ourselves in favourable locations or to avoid dangerous ones. While this appears so simple that (...) we don't even think about it, the difficulty of solving these problems has been shown in the repeated failure of artificial systems to perform these kinds of tasks efficiently. In contrast, humans and other animals routinely overcome these problems every single day. This book examines some of the neural substrates and mechanisms that support these remarkable abilities. The hippocampus and the parietal cortex have been implicated in various core spatial behaviours, such as the ability to localise an object and navigate to it. Damage to these areas in humans and animals leads to impairment of these spatial functions. This collection of papers, written by internationally recognized experts in the field, reviews the evidence that each area is involved in spatial cognition, examines the mechanisms underlying the generation of spatial behaviours, and considers the relative roles of the parietal and hippocampal areas, including how each interacts with the other. The papers integrate a wide range of theoretical and experimental approaches, and touch on broader issues relating to memory and imagery. As such, this book represents the state of the art of current research into the neural basis of spatial cognition. It should be of interest to anyone - researchers or graduate students - working in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and cognition generally. (shrink)

Introduction -- Unintended consequences -- The origin of money -- Segregation -- The invisible hand -- The origin of money reconsidered -- Models and representation -- Game theory and conventions -- Conclusion.

Smysl zhizni -- Statʹi raznykh let : Staryĭ i novyĭ nat︠s︡ionalʹnyĭ messianizm. Umozrenie v kraskakh. Dva mira v drevnerusskoĭ ikonopisi. "Inoe t︠s︡arstvo" i ego iskateli v russkoĭ narodnoĭ skazke.