The research literature on parenting support typically focuses on English-speaking countries, such as England, the United States and Australia. This article draws on a review, commissioned by the English government, which examined policies and services to support parenting in five European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and considered the evidence for effectiveness. In exploring differences between the five countries, and with England, this article raises questions about the way in which understandings of ?what works? can inform the (...) ways in which support for parents and families is designed and delivered. An emphasis on formal outcome evaluations, as in England, favours the use of standardised parenting programmes, which are more amenable to evaluation of effectiveness using quasi-experimental research designs. In some other European countries, support for parents and families is embedded in universal service provision, rather than a discrete, time-limited ?intervention?, and hence evaluation is more likely to involve assessment of individual progress (is this working for this family?) rather than assessment of the overall efficiency of a standardised programme. (shrink)
Aaron Cotnoir does all sorts of interesting things in his contribution to this volume. He makes a helpful distinction between syntactic and semantic objections to the thesis that composition is identity, and outlines some empirical points relevant to the syntactic issue. But the centrepiece is his development of a formal framework for addressing the semantic objections.
We analyse and assess the qualified majority (QM) decision rule for the Council of Ministers of the EU, adopted at the Council of the European Union, Brussels, 23 June 2007. This rule is essentially the same as that adopted at the Inter-Governmental Conference, Brussels, 18 June 2004. We compare this rule with the QM rule prescribed in the Treaty of Nice, and the scientifically-based rule known as the ‘Jagelonian Compromise’.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing, SAT 2005, held in St Andrews, Scotland in June 2005. The 26 revised full papers presented together with 16 revised short papers presented as posters during the technical programme were carefully selected from 73 submissions. The whole spectrum of research in propositional and quantified Boolean formula satisfiability testing is covered including proof systems, search techniques, probabilistic analysis of algorithms and their properties, (...) problem encodings, industrial applications, specific tools, case studies, and empirical results. (shrink)
In Memoriam: Vonne Lund (July 4th 1955–June 3rd 2009) Content Type Journal Article Pages 101-103 DOI 10.1007/s10806-010-9275-1 Authors Helena Rocklinsberg, Department of Animal Environment and Health; Ethics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Box 7068, 750 07 Uppsala, Sweden Mickey Gjerris, Danish Centre for Bioethics and Risk Assessment, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 25, 1958 Frederiksberg C, Denmark Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863 Journal Volume Volume 24 Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 2.
We analyse and evaluate the qualified majority (QM) decision rule for the Council of Ministers of the EU adopted at the EU Inter-Governmental Conference, Brussels, 18 June 2004 [1]. We compare this rule with the QM rule prescribed in the Treaty of Nice, and the rule included in the original draft Constitution proposed by the European Convention in July 2003. We use a method similar to the one we used in [3] and [4].
This twelfth volume of Correspondence contains authoritative and fully annotated texts of all known letters sent both to and from Bentham between July 1824 and June 1828. The 301 letters, most of which have never before been published, have been collected from archives, public and private, in Britain, the United States of America, Switzerland, France, Japan, and elsewhere, as well as from the major collections of Bentham Papers at University College London Library and the British Library. -/- In mid-1824 (...) Bentham was still preoccupied with the Greek struggle for independence against Turkey, though his active involvement waned as he became disenchanted with the behaviour of the deputies sent to London by the Greek National Assembly. His international reputation was reflected in his continuing contact with Simón Bolívar and Bernardino Rivadavia in South America, and with John Quincy Adams, John Neal, Henry Wheaton, and others in the United States, and his forging of new contacts in Guatemala, India, and Egypt. In the autumn of 1825 he visited France, where he stayed with Jean Baptiste Say and La Fayette, and was fêted by the French liberals. -/- Bentham made considerable progress drafting material for his pannomion, or complete code of laws, and in particular for his Constitutional and Procedure Codes, while John Stuart Mill edited the massive Rationale of Judicial Evidence. Bentham became increasingly active in the cause of law reform, and exchanged a series of letters on the subject with Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, and Henry Brougham. He maintained his friendships with John and Sarah Austin, George and Harriet Grote, James and John Stuart Mill, John Bowring, Joseph Hume, Francis Burdett, Francis Place, and Joseph Parkes, re-established contact with the third Marquis of Lansdowne, son of his old friend the first Marquis, and made new acquaintances in James Humphreys, Sutton Sharpe, and Albany Fonblanque. (shrink)
Maximizing act consequentialism holds that actions are morally permissible if and only if they maximize the value of consequences—if and only if, that is, no alternative action in the given choice situation has more valuable consequences.[i] It is subject to two main objections. One is that it fails to recognize that morality imposes certain constraints on how we may promote value. Maximizing act consequentialism fails to recognize, I shall argue, that the ends do not always justify the means. Actions with (...) maximally valuable consequences are not always permissible. The second main objection to maximizing act consequentialism is that it mistakenly holds that morality requires us to maximize value. Morality, I shall argue, only requires that we satisfice (promote sufficiently) value, and thus leaves us a greater range of options than maximizing act consequentialism recognizes. (shrink)
I begin with a personal confession. Philosophical discussions of existence have always bored me. When they occur, my eyes glaze over and my attention falters. Basically ontological questions often seem best decided by banging on the table--rocks exist, fairies do not. Argument can appear long-winded and miss the point. Sometimes a quick distinction resolves any apparent difficulty. Does a falling tree in an earless forest make noise, ie does the noise exist? Well, if noise means that an ear must be (...) there to hear it, then the answer to the question is evidently "no." But if noise means that, if there were (counterfactually) someone there, then he would hear it, then just as obviously, the answer becomes "yes.". (shrink)
The point of departure for this panel is a somewhat controversial paper that I published in the American Mathematical Monthly under the title “Does mathematics need new axioms?” [4]. The paper itself was based on a lecture that I gave in 1997 to a joint session of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and it was thus written for a general mathematical audience. Basically, it was intended as an assessment of Gödel’s program for new axioms that (...) he had advanced most prominently in his 1947 paper for the Monthly, entitled “What is Cantor’s continuum problem?” [7]. My paper aimed to be an assessment of that program in the light of research in mathematical logic in the intervening years, beginning in the 1960s, but especially in more recent years. (shrink)
This paper is intended as a critical examination of the question of when the use of computer simulations is beneficial to scientific explanations. This objective is pursued in two steps: First, I try to establish clear criteria that simulations must meet in order to be explanatory. Basically, a simulation has explanatory power only if it includes all causally relevant factors of a given empirical configuration and if the simulation delivers stable results within the measurement inaccuracies of the input parameters. If (...) a simulation is not explanatory, it can still be meaningful for exploratory purposes, but only under very restricted conditions. In the second step, I examine a few examples of Axelrod-style simulations as they have been used to understand the evolution of cooperation (Axelrod, Schüßler) and the evolution of the social contract (Skyrms). These simulations do not meet the criteria for explanatory validity and it can be shown, as I believe, that they lead us astray from the scientific problems they have been addressed to solve and at the same time bar our imagination against more conventional but still better approaches. (shrink)
More than a billion people now live on less than the purchasing-power equivalent, in their own country, of what can be bought in the United States for $1. In the year 2000, Americans made private donations for foreign aid of all kinds totaling about $4 per person, or roughly $20 per family. Through their government, they gave an additional $10 per person, or $50 per family. That makes a total of $70 per family.
My pleasure in being here, at the Studiecentrum Soeterbeeck, to discuss the book Roger Scruton wrote on beauty, is twofold. It so happens that I am finishing a book on facial expression and facial beauty, and the chapter I sent to Roger to request his comments, resurfaced unopened in my own mail box, last week. Apparently something went wrong in the mail. Today I might get some of those comments. Secondly, reading Roger’s book, an impression of a kindred spirit has (...) stuck with me throughout.1) Sometimes, though, something like an ungrounded preference surfaces, which for Roger, clearly has intuitive force, maybe even the force of a conclusion, but for me this doesn’t always ring true. I only mention two instances where my own preferences would be different. One is, where after rightly criticising the reverence allotted to Duchamp’s Fountain, in a single sentence (on p. 98) both Radiohead and Brahms are mentioned, in an obvious effort to disqualify the former. The other is where he defends film as an art by comparing it to traditional art, by pointing to shots from an Ingmar Bergman movie, which “would sit on your wall like an engraving, resonant, engaging and composed.” (p. 102). What the incidental surfacing of such preferences makes available to us is that doing aesthetics is not a merely technical philosophical endeavour, but involves art criticism, from time to time. If you don’t love art or its core values, how could you do aesthetics? And there is a deeper thought behind this in Roger’s writings: that the use of taste belongs to the good life.2) All this, also, indicates my predicament, here and now. I feel most inclined.. (shrink)
Ever since August 2001, when President Bush announced his shaky compromise policy on federal funding for research on stem cells, American scientists have been charging that the policy severely impedes progress in this promising new area. Bush's policy allowed federal funding only for research using stem cell lines that were in existence on the date of his speech. Thus, he maintained, such funding would not encourage anyone to destroy human embryos to obtain stem cells, because if they did so, the (...) newly created stem cell lines could not be developed or studied with federal funding. (shrink)
: For many of us, entry into motherhood involves an ambiguous visibility and intelligibility, where our acceptance into mainstream spaces as mothers entails a loss of lesbian difference. Mann explores this loss using the work of two philosophers of lesbian difference, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She argues that the figure of the lesbian mother is deployed on a broad cultural scale to reinvigorate and renaturalize the myth of the happy, natural, heterosexual mother.
[164] As is well known, over the last decade some of the younger generation of German philosophers have been gravitating with ever increasing speed toward philosophical anthropology. Currently Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of life, a new form of anthropology, exercises a great deal of influence. But even the so-called "phenomenological movement" has got caught up in this new trend, which alleges that the true foundation of philosophy lies in human being alone, and more specifically in a doctrine of the essence of (...) human being's concrete worldly Dasein. Some view this as a necessary reform of the original constitutive phenomenology, one that for the very first time would supposedly permit phenomenology to attain the level of authentic philosophy. All of this constitutes a complete reversal of phenomenology's fundamental standpoint. Original phenomenology, which has matured into transcendental phenomenology, denies to any science of human being, whatever its form, a share in laying the foundations for philosophy, and opposes all related attempts at foundation-laying as being anthropologism or psychologism. Nowadays, however, the exact opposite is supposed to hold. Phenomenological philosophy is supposedly now to be constructed entirely anew from out of human Dasein. (shrink)
English translation by Glenn H. Shepard Jr. Revision by Matthew MeyerThis article reports on the recent “International Congress of Traditional Medicine, Interculturality, and Mental Health” held by the Takiwasi Center in Tarapoto in the Peruvian Amazon. The event united 218 researchers and indigenous and religious representatives from 22 countries to present results of scientific discussions and engage in political and ethical debates surrounding the increasingly globalized, transnational, and biomedicalized reach of indigenous medical practices, especially ayahuasca-based therapy and religious practice. The (...) author interviewed several key researchers and representatives present at the event, and presents several important controversies in the field of ayahuasca and traditional medicine. She also reports on the colorful and eclectic nonacademic sessions at the event which included Inca chiropractics, ayahuasca sessions, and various forms of indigenous medicine. The text also reflects on the tragic events that unfolded in nearby Bagua, Peru, on the evening of the meeting, bringing a special urgency to the event's focus on indigenous cultural heritage. (shrink)
George W. Bush is not only America’s president, but also its most prominent moralist. No other president in living memory has spoken so often about good and evil, right and wrong. His inaugural address was a call to build “a single nation of justice and opportunity.†A year later, he famously proclaimed North Korea, Iran and Iraq to be an “axis of evil,†and in contrast, he called the United States “a moral nation.†He defends his tax policy in (...) moral terms, saying that it is fair, and gives back to taxpayers what is rightfully theirs. The case he makes for free trade is “not just monetary, but moral.†Open trade is a “moral imperative.†Another “moral imperative,†he says, is alleviating hunger and poverty throughout the world. He has said that “America’s greatest economic need is higher ethical standards.†In setting out the “Bush doctrine,†which defends preemptive strikes against those who might threaten America with weapons of mass destruction, he asserted: “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place.†But in what moral truths does the president believe? Considering how much the president says about ethics, it is surprising how little serious discussion there has been of the moral philosophy of George W. Bush. (shrink)
In this address, Mumia Abu-Jamal argues that a sustained commitment to revolutionary activity is no accident, that it depends upon an initial and irrevocable choice to change intolerable social conditions. The individual who makes such a choice, Abu-Jamal recognizes, is often aware of the suffering that his or her decision may entail. Citing the deliberately led lives of several revolutionaries, including Huey Newton, John Brown, and Ramona Africa, the author hopes that young people will draw inspiration from these examples by (...) understanding the importance and continued possibility of such a choice. (shrink)
The LNCS series reports state-of-the-art results in computer science research, development, and education, at a high level and in both printed and electronic form.
This conference was devoted to the 80 years of the Copenhagen Interpretation, and to the question of the relevance of the Copenhagen interpretation for the present understanding of quantum mechanics. It is in this framework that fundamental questions raised by quantum mechanics, especially in information theory, were discussed throughout the conference. As has become customary in our series of conference in Växjö, we were glad to welcome a fruitful assembly of theoretical physicists, experimentalists, mathematicians and even philosophers interested in the (...) foundations of probability and physics. The nature of quantum fluctuations---in the form of Stochastic Electrodynamics or in other approaches to stochastic quantum mechanics---was also a central topic discussed during the conference, especially during debates. We should also mention talks on the completeness or incompleteness of quantum mechanics; on macroscopic quantum systems; on Bell's inequality, entanglement and experiments on quantum nonlocality (and locality); on Bohmian mechanics; on the connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity; on quantum probability; on quantum computing, quantum teleportation and quantum cryptography technologies; and more generally on the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics and on the philosophical problems raised by its interpretations. (shrink)
This Växjö conference was devoted to the reconsideration of quantum foundations. Due to increasing research in quantum information theory, especially on quantum computing and cryptography, many questions regarding the foundations of quantum mechanics, which have long been considered to be exclusively of philosophical interest, nowadays play an important role in theoretical and experimental quantum physics.
These letters - the vast majority of which have never been published before - illustrate many aspects of Bentham's public and private life. The composition, editing, printing, publishing, and reception of several of his writings are discussed, while the correspondence with his secretary and protégé John Herbert Koe gives a unique insight into Bentham's working methods. The proposed Chrestomathic School is the subject of many of the letters of 1820, though even in that year Bentham's involvement in the world of (...) radical politics emerges clearly. The volume also testifies to his burgeoning international reputation, and to his interest in reform in North and South America, Russia, Spain, France, and Geneva. (shrink)
These notes are meant to continue from the paper on Consistency, in proving number-theoretic theorems from the second-order arithmetical system called FFFF. Its ultimate target is Quadratic Reciprocity, although it introduces and proves some facts about the least common multiple at the start.
Outline: The reality of Catholicism; The question of the development of science; Historical outlook at some transitional moments; When dogma meets science; Contemporary physics and the worldview of Catholicism; Awaiting a 'Grand Narrative' and the final vision of harmony.
