This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and (...) reproductive rights. (shrink)

The globalization in business and tourism becomes crucial more and more for the economical sustainability of local communities. In the presence of an epidemic outbreak, there must be such a decision on the policy by the host community as whether to accept visitors or not, the number of acceptable visitors, or the condition for acceptable visitors. Making use of an SIRI type of mathematical model, we consider the influence of visitors on the spread of a reinfectious disease in a community, (...) especially assuming that a certain proportion of accepted visitors are immune. The reinfectivity of disease here means that the immunity gained by either vaccination or recovery is imperfect. With the mathematical results obtained by our analysis on the model for such an epidemic dynamics of resident and visitor populations, we find that the acceptance of visitors could have a significant influence on the disease’s endemicity in the community, either suppressive or supportive. (shrink)

Sociology has largely followed Durkheim’s lead in ignoring the question: why do people die by suicide? This negation prioritizes a positivist, structuralist approach and stymies sociology’s contribution by closing off a wide range of tools sociologists might employ. An interpretivist turn in suicide studies accompanied by the growing adoption of qualitative methodology has opened up an array of opportunities to produce insights lost in a Durkheimian approach, but has yet to confront their own weaknesses. This paper shows we need not (...) abandon either tradition, advocating for a third path that integrates the strengths of both approaches. (shrink)

This is an investigation of Aristotle's conception of accidental compounds (or "kooky objects," as Gareth Matthews has called them)—entities such as the pale man and the musical man. I begin with Matthews's pioneering work into kooky objects, and argue that they are not so far removed from our ordinary thinking as is commonly supposed. I go on to assess their utility in solving some familiar puzzles involving substitutivity in epistemic contexts, and compare the kooky object approach to more modern approaches (...) involving the notion of referential opacity. I conclude by proposing that Aristotle provides an implicit role for kooky objects in such metaphysical contexts as the Categories and Metaphysics. (shrink)

Learning and development are well established as concepts in educational psychology. Gert Biesta has used terms such as “learnification” and “developmentalism” to describe a tendency that, in his view, removes existential qualities from teaching and education. Although important in the right contexts, the concepts do not represent the core of what education should be about, he claims. Jostein Sæther notes that in many ways he shares Biesta's view on the most fundamental quality of education, i.e., helping young people exist as (...) independent subjects in confrontation with their own will, responsibility, and freedom. In this paper, he addresses the overarching question of whether it is possible and desirable to think educationally about psychology in educational theory, specifically through relating Biesta's critique to selected handbooks, reviews, and metaliterature. Sæther does not propose integrating educational psychology into Biesta's existential theory but rather hopes to open a dialogue on different points of view that challenge each other in fruitful ways. The process of discussing certain principles, problems, and examples should yield a certain kind of “unclean” educational psychology, one that is relevant to “subjectification.” There are problems related to eclecticism and the tension between essence and existence, yet, in this context, Sæther sees a dialogical project as the only way forward. (shrink)

In the Ukrainian-Russian relations, especially in pre-revolutionary times, the religious component played an important role. The attitude of the Russian authorities toward Southwest Russia was shaped by the influence of several conceptions made in the church circles, which also significantly influenced the formation of Russian national identity.

This paper discusses Wittgenstein's take on the problem of other minds. In opposition to certain widespread views that I collect under the heading of the “No Problem Interpretation,” I argue that Wittgenstein does address some problem of other minds. However, Wittgenstein's problem is not the traditional epistemological problem of other minds; rather, it is more reminiscent of the issue of intersubjectivity as it emerges in the writings of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. This is one sense in which (...) Wittgenstein's perspective on other minds might be called “phenomenological.” Yet there is another sense as well, in that Wittgenstein's positive views on this issue resemble the views defended by phenomenologists. The key to a proper philosophical grasp of intersubjectivity, on both views, lies in rethinking the mind. If we conceive of minds as essentially embodied we can understand how intersubjectivity is possible. (shrink)

This essay seeks to clarify Gandhi's logic of self-suffering. Its inner accents have not received the attention they deserve. So I propose to emphasize them, though the context of such suffering and its impact on men too must be given due regard.

Any great new theoretical framework has an epistemological and an ontological aspect to its philosophy as well as an axiological one, and one needs to understand all three aspects in order to grasp the deep aspiration and idea of the theoretical framework. Presently, there is a widespread effort to understand C. S. Peirce's (1837–1914) pragmaticistic semeiotics, and to develop it by integrating the results of modern science and evolutionary thinking; first, producing a biosemiotics and, second, by integrating it with the (...) progress in cybernetics, information science, and system theory to create a cybersemiotics. In this paper, we focus on the understanding of the evolution of the universe that Peirce produced as an alternative to the mechanistic view underlying classical physics and try to place man in an evolving universe as a creative, aesthetical agent. It is true that modern non-equilibrium physics has made a modern foundation for a profound physical understanding of the basic evolutionary processes in the universe. But science still has not produced a theory that can explain how the creativity of the universe could produce signification, interpretation, and first-person consciousness. To this end, Peirce's thoughts on agapastic evolution coupled with the aesthetically influence of the growth of ideas and reasonableness on man could make a contribution. (shrink)

In 1896 William James published an essay entitled The Will to Believe, in which he defended the legitimacy of religious faith against the attacks of such champions of scientific method as W.K. Clifford and Thomas Huxley. James's work quickly became one of the most important writings in the philosophy of religious belief. James Wernham analyses James's arguments, discusses his relation to Pascal and Renouvier, and considers the interpretations, and misinterpretations, of James's major critics. Wernham shows convincingly that James was unaware (...) of many destructive ambiguitities in his own doctrines and arguments, although clear and consistent in his view that our obligation to believe in theism is not a moral but a prudential obligation -- a foolish-not-to-believe doctrine, rather than a not-immoral-to-believe one. Wernham also shows that the doctrine is best read as affirming the wisdom of gambling that God exists, a notion which James failed to distinguish from believing and which, among other things, he explicitly identified with faith. James's pragmatism, a theory concerning the meaning of truth, is shown to be quite distinct from the doctrine of The Will to Believe. In concentrating on a careful analysis of this doctrine of the will-to-believe, Wernham not only makes a major contribution to understanding James's philosophy, but also clarifies issues in the philosophy of religion and in the analysis of belief and faith. (shrink)