Depuis quelques années, une secte chinoise appelée Falun Gong met l'accent sur un ensemble d'exercices physiques qui serait la clé de la bonne santé physique et du progrès spirituel. Cependant, dans le contexte actuel en République populaire de Chine, ces exercices ont revêtu une signification correspondant à une forme de contestation politique, intolérable pour l'État. Cette organisation de citoyens de classe moyenne qui se rassemblaient dans les jardins publics dans toute la Chine pour y pratiquer des exercices physiques avait pris (...) des allures de menace terrifiante pour l'État. Pourtant, la répression officielle semble avoir inspiré encore plus de résistance et de persistance. Il est tentant de se demander si l'exercice physique ritualisé n'est pas un véhicule particulièrement efficace pour les sensibilités religieuses qui s'opèrent à l'intérieur des contraintes sociales actuelles de la République populaire. Il est même tentant de se demander si l'exercice ritualisé n'est pas un moyen particulièrement efficace, en ce début du XXI siècle, d'articuler en même temps les aspirations personnelles et une vision commune.In recent years, Chinese sect called Falun Gong emphasizes a set of exercises that would be the key to good physical health and spiritual progress. However, in the current People's Republic of China, these exercises have taken on a meaning corresponding to a form of political protest, intolerable state. This organization of middle-class citizens who gathered in public parks across China to practice physical exercises had the appearance of a terrifying threat to the state. However, official repression seems to have inspired even more strength and persistence. It is tempting to ask whether the exercise ritual is not a particularly effective vehicle for religious sensibilities that operate within the constraints of the current social Republic. It is even tempting to ask whether the exercise ritual is not a particularly effective at the beginning of the 21st century, articulate at the same time personal aspirations and a common vision. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Forgiveness seems especially apt in cases where the wrongdoer first performs some act of reparation. Suppose Valerie betrays Madison's trust out of careerist self-interest. The betrayal is serious, no excusing or exempting conditions obtain, and Madison responds with justified resentment. In one world, Valerie never acknowledges the impropriety of her past act and continues on as before. In another world, Valerie apologizes and sends Madison a beautiful bouquet of flowers. All else being equal, forgiveness seems called for or apt in (...) the second case in a way that it does not in the first. Reparative activities have a certain power, and forgiving in response to the wrongdoer's reparation strikes many as especially apt. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Impaired control over drug use is a defining characteristic of addiction in the major diagnostic systems. However there is significant debate about the extent of this impairment. This qualitative study examines the extent to which leading Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians believe that addicted individuals have control over their drug use and are responsible for their behaviour. One hour semi-structured interviews were conducted during 2009 and 2010 with 31 Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians (10 females and 21 males; 16 with (...) clinical experience and 15 with no clinical experience). Although many addiction neuroscientists and clinicians described uncontrolled or compulsive drug use as characteristic of addiction, most were ambivalent about whether or not addicted people could be said to have no control of their drug use. Most believed that addicted individuals have fluctuating levels of impaired control over their drug use but they nonetheless believed that addicted persons were responsible for their behaviour, including criminal behaviour engaged in to fund their drug use. Addiction was not seen as exculpating criminal behaviour but as a mitigating factor. (shrink)

I show the inadequacy of whitrow's recent argument ("british journal for the philosophy of science", Volume 29, Pages 39-45) against the possibility of an infinite past. I argue that it is impossible to prove "a priori" the non-Existence of an infinite past or future.

This chapter contains section titled: Natural Religion in EHU The Critique of the Design Argument in DNR The Problem of Evil Part 12 and the Interpretation of DNR Conclusion References Further Reading.

The opioid epidemic has claimed the lives of more than 183,000 individuals since 1999 and is now the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Meanwhile, rates of incarceration have quadrupled in recent decades, and drug use is the leading cause of incarceration. Medication-assisted treatment or MAT is the gold standard for treatment of opioid use disorder. Incarcerated individuals with opioid use disorder treated with methadone or buprenorphine have a lower risk of overdose, lower rates of hepatitis C (...) transmission, and lower rates of re-incarceration. Despite evidence of improved outcomes, many jails and prisons do not offer MAT to individuals with opioid use disorder. This seems partly due to a scientifically unjustified preference for an abstinence-only treatment approach. The absence of MAT in prisons and jails results in poor outcomes for individuals and poses a public health threat to communities. Furthermore, it disproportionately harms poor communities and communities of color. Health care providers in prisons and jails have an ethical obligation to offer MAT to individuals with opioid use disorder to mitigate risk of infectious diseases, opioid overdose and health disparities associated with incarceration. (shrink)

Retrofit is a rising area of concern for Science and Technology Studies scholars of infrastructure. This paper sits at the junction between applied and theoretical approaches by using STS to support interventions in urban infrastructure systems and expand STS critique of retrofit. It discusses findings from a multidisciplinary project piloting retrofit possibilities to positively impact the way water, energy, and food resources were consumed in a London housing estate. Through qualitative research, we found that residents were making social and material (...) interventions in infrastructure systems to manage the way resources were consumed at home, driven by a commonly held motivation to avoid wastefulness. We then mapped the social and material factors that helped or hindered these individual ambitions and used them to inform our codesign process. We found it helpful to think of the residents as an infrastructural community; a group of residents that share a material connection that can help mobilize collective action on shared consumption. We suggest this concept is useful for interventions and critiques of infrastructure retrofit, particularly in cities in the Global North where retrofit programs aim to rescale national systems to neighborhood levels. The concept highlights the possibilities for participation that emerge from bottom-up retrofit. (shrink)

Local perceptions of protected areas are important for conservation and the sustainability of protected areas. We undertook qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork to explore relationships between people and protected areas in the Blouberg mountain range, South Africa. The history of land use and current relationships with protected areas reveal legacies of marginalisation and immiseration, giving credence to a theory of traumatic nature. The impacts of traumatic nature manifest themselves in local discourses and narratives of nature, protected areas and conservation.

In May 2009 the World Health Assembly passed a resolution on reducing health inequities through action on the social determinants of health, based on the work of the global Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2005–2008. The Commission's genesis and findings raise some important questions for global health governance. We draw out some of the essential elements, themes, and mechanisms that shaped the Commission. We start by examining the evolving nature of global health and the Commission's foundational inspiration – the (...) universal pattern of health inequity and the imperative, driven by a sense of social justice, to make better and more equal health a global goal. We look at how the Commission was established, how it was structured internally, and how it developed external relationships – with the World Health Organization, with global networks of academics and practitioners, with country governments eager to spearhead action on health equity, and with civil society. We outline the Commission's recommendations as they relate to the architecture of global health governance. Finally, we look at how the Commission is catalyzing a movement to bring social determinants of health to the forefront of international and national policy discourse. (shrink)

Full proofs of the Gödel incompleteness theorems are highly intricate affairs. Much of the intricacy lies in the details of setting up and checking the properties of a coding system representing the syntax of an object language within that same language. These details are seldom illuminating and tend to obscure the core of the argument. For this reason a number of efforts have been made to present the essentials of the proofs of Gödel's theorems without getting mired in syntactic or (...) computational details. One of the most important of these efforts was made by Löb [8] in connection with his analysis of sentences asserting their own provability. Löb formulated three conditions, on the provability predicate in a formal system which are jointly sufficient to yield the Gödel's second incompleteness theorem for it. A key role in Löb's analysis is played by what later became known as the diagonalization or fixed point property of formal systems, a property which had already, in essence, been exploited by Gödel in his original proofs of the incompleteness theorems. The fixed point property plays a central role in Lawvere's [7] category-theoretic account of incompleteness phenomena. (shrink)

This article focuses on Edmund Husserl’s first and most enduring interaction with pragmatism, on the conception of habit. This began a decade before Husserl’s first writings on phenomenology, and continued throughout the time he invented and developed his new phenomenological method. Husserl first encountered pragmatic habit from the founder of pragmatism Charles S. Peirce around 1890. Husserl then further interacted with the pragmatic theory of habit through the work of William James and Josiah Royce, two scholars deeply influenced by Peirce. (...) This article explores how the theory of habit mutually influenced pragmatism and phenomenology at their origins, and how this dialogue can inform philosophy today. (shrink)

Two important assumptions of behavioral momentum theory are contradicted by existing data. Resistance to change is not due simply to the Pavlovian contingency between a discriminative stimulus and the rate of reinforcement in its presence, because variations in the response-reinforcer contingency, independent of the stimulus-reinforcer contingency, produce differential resistance to change. Resistance to change is also not clearly related to measures of preference, in that several experiments show the two measures to dissociate.

With an upsurge of interest and investment in new legal technologies comes consideration of who is making them and whether these individuals or entities should be subject to regulation. This article looks at how such regulation might function in light of the existing regulatory regimes governing lawyers and the capacities of legal regulators. It considers the ramifications both of maintaining the existing system, or in extending some form of regulation to these new entrants to the legal services market.