Many philosophers and theologians have thought that God's omniscience entails the truth of strict determinism. Many others, including most of the Scholastics, held that arguments for this view confused necessitas consequential and necessitas consequentis. I think the Scholastics were right. What I am primarily concerned to argue in this paper is that nonetheless great difficulties remain concerning the relation between God's knowledge and the fact that there are contingent events.

It is unfortunate for the philosophical community generally, and for those philosophers who pursue various versions of idealism in particular, that a logician of Kurt Goedel’s genius published very little of non-mathematical philosophical interest. Amongst his unpublished papers at Princeton there are, however, several versions of a paper he wrote on the relevance of contemporary relativity to the philosophy of Kant. The purpose of the present paper is to give a partial exposition and defence of Goedel’s view that contemporary relativity (...) supports a neo-Kantian idealistic position with regard to time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Body Hidden WithinTara ChapmanBeing “fat” was not a choice. It was my life and it slowly happened over time. Being obese is a disease that I have struggled with my entire life. I am 36 years old, nearing 37.I might not have eaten the right foods, but I didn’t overeat. I grew up eating typical American food and continued to cook that way into my adult life. I (...) ate eggs and toast for breakfast, sandwiches, chips and a few cookies for lunch, or leftovers, and some kind of meat and potatoes or pasta for dinner, with a canned vegetable. I very seldom ate fresh vegetables, but I did like summer fruits. However, those are filled with natural sugar and are only in season for a few months out of the year. I didn’t eat out, other than having my daily Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino on the way to work five days a week. I didn’t load my plate up with food. I ate less than my brother, sister and parents who are smaller than me. I took exercise and fitness classes all through college and knew what I was supposed to do. I exercised over the years, only to quit because I never lost weight and got discouraged. I would feel [End Page 93] better physically; however, I just kept packing on the pounds, which took a toll emotionally.By November 2012, I topped the scale at 291 pounds and could barely fit into my size 22 jeans and 3xl tops. I would sweat uncontrollably because of all the extra weight I was carrying around and could barely make it up the ramp at work or a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing. Because I would sweat profusely, my wardrobe consisted of white or black shirts. I had to hide the sweat stains. I had high blood pressure and cholesterol. I was on medication for both. My insulin levels were all over the boards. I knew that when I was shaky and my levels were high, it was time to eat. I would control my type II diabetes by eating a small piece of candy, which would instantly control my shakes. I would follow the candy up with a meal. My diet and exercise habits were causing me to have terrible headaches. In my early 20’s, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). Besides having ovarian cysts and unbalanced hormones, the major issue with PSOC is unexplained weight gain and not being able to lose it. My health was spinning out of control and I secretly knew it. I just didn’t know how to fix it or what to do.I had to do something and I needed help. I didn’t want to die by the time I was 40; and the path that I was on was leading me to an early grave. I could hear it in my mom’s voice every time I talked to her. She knew something was wrong; she would try to talk to me about it and tell me I was going to have a heart attack. She would tell me how worried my dad was. I wouldn’t listen. I began to sleep more and more every day after work and on weekends. I had to take naps almost daily because I was so exhausted and had no energy. I didn’t know what to do. I was depressed and felt like I was alone. Nobody in my family understood and my friends couldn’t relate to what I was going through. I was fat and they weren’t.I heard about a special clinic that focused on women’s health issues from a co–worker. Under the close watch of the clinic’s doctor and her medical staff, I began a therapeutic lifestyle change on February 27, 2013. I had no expectations because I had always been obese. I had never lost weight, so why would this be any different? This lifestyle change includes committing to a healthy diet of high protein, vitamins and supplements, balancing hormones for PCOS and exercising. However, before I could begin changing my eating habits... (shrink)

For a place that is so familiar, home is peculiarly difficult to define and to research. Based on an extended review of recent literature on home, the article shows that there is no place like `home' because people construct its image in memory and imagination. Home, it is argued, is imaged on many different levels. At a surface level, home is known in terms of its location, fabric, decoration, furnishing and amenity - it is a place that is known intimately. (...) At a deeper level, home is defined in terms of the kinds of relationships people have, or would like to have, with others inside and outside of the home. Deeper still, home is a representation of cultural identity and provides a collective sense of social permanency and security. People rarely think about home at this level, it is argued, unless reappraisal is forced upon them by a significant life event like migration between cultures or because of cultural invasion from without. The article argues for an intensification of research that starts from the domestic sphere is order to explore how home life both shapes and reflects wider social continuities and changes. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore certain problems about the idea of time which lead to the conclusion that the concept is really contradictory. If this is so, then the idealists were correct in making the paradoxical claim that time is unreal. Following McTaggart the phrase “A-temporal determinations” will refer to the temporal “properties” of being past, present, or future, and “B-determinations” to the temporal relations of being before, after, or between.

All organisms live in close association with microbes. However, not all such associations are meaningful in an evolutionary context. Current debate concerns whether hosts and microbes are best described as communities of individuals or as holobionts (selective units of hosts plus their microbes). Recent reports that assortative mating of hosts by diet can be mediated by commensal gut microbes have attracted interest as a potential route to host reproductive isolation (RI). Here, the authors discuss logical problems with this line of (...) argument. The authors briefly review how microbes can affect host mating preferences and evaluate recent findings from fruitflies. Endosymbionts can potentially influence host RI given stable and recurrent co‐association of hosts and microbes over evolutionary time. However, observations of co‐occurrence of microbes and hosts are ripe for misinterpretation and such associations will rarely represent a meaningful holobiont. A framework in which hosts and their microbes are independent evolutionary units provides the only satisfactory explanation for the observed range of effects and associations. (shrink)

This book is intended as an exposition of a particular theory of time in the sense of an interrelated set of attempted solutions to philosophical problems about it. Generally speaking there are two views about time held by philosophers and some scientists interested in philosophical issues. The first called the A-theory (after McTaggart's expression A-determinations for the properties of being past, present or future) is often thought to be closer to our commonsense view of time or to the concept of (...) time presupposed by ordinary language. It includes at least the following theses, (a) Logic ought really to include tensed quantifiers for existence on one of its important usages means, present existence. More generally, we can't reduce all tensed locutions to tenseless ones. (b) The distinction between past, present and future is an objective one. It is not, for example, dependent on our consciousness of change; some A-theorists hold also, that the distinction, in effect, is an absolute one. (shrink)