Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 187-190.

The past 15 years of exceptionally severe water scarcity in the Islamic Republic of Iran have resulted in the desertification and salinity of formerly arable lands, drying out of Iranian lakes and rivers, and quickly shrinking groundwater resources, while water demand has risen, along with the size of the Iranian population, of which over 70% lives in urban areas now. We have aimed to discover the causes of water scarcity in the IR Iran and evaluated its social and economic impacts. (...) First, we computed the Weighted Anomaly Standardized Precipitation (WASP) Index for the period of 1979-2014. To illustrate the social impact of water scarcity, we analyzed the current water risk for the twenty most populous Iranian cities, by employing the composite index approach to translate hydrological data into comprehensible indicators of water related risks, and made a projection for 2020-2030, by modeling potential changes in the future demand and supply of water. To demonstrate the economic impact of water scarcity, we evaluated the overall agricultural contribution to the IR Iran GDP. We have found that the 1999 severe drought in the IR Iran commenced a period of unusually dry conditions that is still ongoing. The rapidly growing Iranian urban populations presently experience a medium to extremely high overall water risk, with extremely high baseline water stress that, in part, is due to the lack of upstream protected lands. The relationship between baseline water stress and drought severity has been determined as weak, confirming that other factors than drought are equally or more important contributors to the existing water risk. Our projection calculations indicate that Iranian urban populations will continue to experience an extremely high water stress for the coming decade. Due to the fast growth of these populations as well as considerable rise of value added to the IR Iran GDP by other sectors of the national economy, the contribution of agricultural production to the national GDP has declined from about 25% to under 10% (although its total yield has risen considerably) during the past 30 years. This decrease has been directly proportional to the increased foreign food imports, dependency on the IR Iran oil exports and reduction in the non-oil exports. The main causes of water scarcity in the IR Iran appear to be due to climatic factors, insufficient environmental protection, and over-exploitation and mismanagement of water resources, especially by the agricultural sector. In conclusion, our study proposes anti-wasting water management action plan that recommends shifting the IR Iran government response to water scarcity from reactive survival strategies to proactive crisis prevention, with emphasis on safeguarding, monitoring, early warning, and effective step-by-step preparedness and readiness, and by laterally integrating water management between all levels of the IR Iran government, including local, regional and national, for a sustainable, resilient and prosperous economy of the Islamic Republic of Iran now and in the future. (shrink)

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have to this land and its First Peoples. We put out a call to colleagues whose work has been concerned with (...) the pedagogies of professional ethics, the ethical burdens of institutional injustice, and the application of ethical theory to education’s applied fields. In the responses we received it can be seen that ethical concerns in education are broad ranging, covering terrain varying from the preparation of preservice teachers, ethics in higher education, early childhood and care, educational leadership, relational and communicative ethics. Perhaps it could also be argued that this paper demonstrates Gibbon’s observation that ‘Assumptions about the particularity of this time as new and ripe with opportunity to make a difference through philosophy of education are not new and there’s much to learn from the persistence of wanting to imagine that they are’. However, while the field of ethics is perennially concerned with human relations and pedagogical interventions to improve these, the responses collected here show that educational ethics is far from static. Educational ethics is a field that continues to develop in response to changing contexts. (shrink)

This research examines the most important historical, political, economic, social, cultural, and religious factors before, during, and after the reign of Communism in Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 2021 and their effect on the extreme increase in atheism and decrease in Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, in the present-day Czech Republic. It devotes special attention to the role of the Clandestine Catholic Church (Ecclesia Silentii) and the changing policies of the Holy See vis-à-vis this Church, examining these policies' impact on the continuing (...) decline of Roman Catholicism in the Czech Republic after the collapse of Communism. The article also deals with Pope Pius XII's Secret Mandates of 1948-1950, the Second Vatican Council, and the Holy See's Ostpolitik. Scholars, who previously relied only on the views of the Czechs, blame the unprecedented drop in Christianity, the near-total destruction of the Catholic Church, and the rise in atheism on the Czechoslovak communist government's four decades of totalitarianism. Although the increase in atheism and decrease in Christianity were substantial during the era of Communism from 1948 to 1989, our data indicate that the decline in Christianity, particularly the historically predominating Roman Catholicism, did not commence with the 1948 communist coup d’état but traces its origins to the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the conclusion of WWI and the establishment of Czechoslovakia on October 28, 1918. What's more, this research shows that the most significant and unprecedented steep deterioration of the Christian Faith, namely Roman Catholicism, did not occur during the era of Communism but only after the Czechoslovak communist government collapsed in 1989. This massive decay did not happen even during the most extraordinary communist persecution of the Catholic Church during the era of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. This research further finds that the Holy See's ill-advised policies and systematic, sustained, and prevalent failures in leadership, guidance, and teachings are responsible for the near destruction of the Roman Catholic Church and especially the end destruction of the Clandestine Catholic Church (Ecclesia Silentii), in the Czech and Slovak Republics after the fall of Communism. These failures furthermore contributed to the Czech Republic, the historical lands of Bohemia and Moravia that once were in the center of Christendom, degenerating into the most atheist country in Europe and the world today. (shrink)

Justice will once take the place which the Magians are keeping now, for it is they who lord it over the world.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, assert that rejecting the use nudges is ‘pointless’ because ‘[i]n many cases, some kind of nudge is inevitable’. Schlomo Cohen makes a similar claim. He asserts that in certain situations surgeons cannot avoid nudging patients either toward or away from consenting to surgical interventions. Cohen concludes that in these situations, nudging patients toward consenting to surgical interventions is uncriticizable or morally permissible. I call this argument: The (...) Unavoidability Argument. In this essay, I will respond to Cohen's use of the unavoidability argument in support of using nudges during the process of informed consent. Specifically, I argue that many so-called ‘unavoidable nudges’ are, in fact, avoidable. Although my argument is directed toward Cohen's use of the unavoidability argument, it is applicable to the unavoidability argument more generally. (shrink)

This essay strives to bring together the institutional history of phenomenological psychology within the American academy from the middle of the 20th century to the current moment. Although phenomenological psychology has always been a dynamically international and interdisciplinary movement, the scope of this essay is limited to the different ways in which this new field expressed itself in certain psychology departments and educational institutions across the United States. After presenting this institutional history, and some individual contributors, a brief commentary is (...) offered. (shrink)

Freedom of speech long has been regarded as one of the “preferred freedoms” in the United States: one of the freedoms the U.S. Supreme Court deems “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” However, what freedom of speech does—and should—mean is a highly charged question in American constitutional law. I will explore this question by examining how several prominent constitutional theorists have proposed particular approaches to free speech law in order to further their political objectives. I will examine the free (...) speech theories of the nation's leading feminist legal theorist , critical race theorists , libertarian , and legal republican . I also will discuss the principal criticisms of each of these theories, whether the courts have been influenced by any of them, and, in conclusion, whether it is possible to advance a nonpolitical theory of free speech. (shrink)

In this essay, I suggest that a slightly modified version of Freedman’s formulation of the clinical equipoise requirement is justified. I begin this essay with a brief discussion of the equipoise r...

Article III of the U.S. Constitution establishes an independent federal judiciary: federal courts constitute a separate branch of the national government, federal judges enjoy tenure during good behavior, and their salaries cannot be diminished while they hold office. The framers who drafted Article III in 1787 were not working from whole cloth. Rather, they were familiar with the preceding colonial and state practices, including those from New York. This essay provides a case study of New York's judicial history: the Dutch (...) period, 1621-1664; the Ducal proprietary period, 1664-1685; the Royal period, 1685-1776; and the early state period. As will be seen, New York—among the most significant of the original thirteen states—was a state groping towards a new ideal of judicial independence: an ideal that became a reality a decade after its own constitution was enacted in 1777 and at a different level of government. Significantly, the uncertain status of New York's judiciary had profound consequences for the ultimate expression of judicial independence, judicial review. (shrink)

This article examines the thoughts and works of Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and evangelical philosopher Norman Geisler in light of their understanding of Thomas Aquinas’s view of faith and reason.

Ronald Reagan, in his inaugural address as the Governor of California on January 5th, 1967, poignantly stated the following on the fragility of freedom: -/- "Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a (...) people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again." -/- These words ring as true today as they did when they were first uttered. And yet, over 55 years later, the majority of countries throughout the world and the majority of people living in them have been quick to relinquish their rights and freedoms under the pretext of “health safety.” Since March 2020, the world has been brought to its knees by what I would argue are unscientific and unethical mandates related to the COVID-19 crisis. These mandates have had a tremendously negative impact on the world economy and the lives of countless individuals. The ‘cure’ that has been offered. (shrink)

The ultimate challenge for psychology as a human science inheres in accessing the experience of the other. In general, the field of psychology has perpetuated the epistemological dualism of distinguishing between the realm accessible by external perception and the realm accessible by inner perception, and hence between the subjective and the objective , regarding the "first person" perspective as a legitimate means of access only to one's own private experience, while insisting that all others' experience must be observed from a (...) neutral "third person" perspective. By reflecting on his participant-observational encounters with the animal other of the Bonobo, the author attempts to demonstrate in this paper the possibility of a third approach between the antinomy of methodological subjectivism and methodological objectivism as a way out of the dilemmas posed by epistemological dualism. The alternative proposed is the "second person" framework of observation, which, by invoking empathic seeing as its means of accessing the private space of the other and creating the space of the "in between", allows for intersubjective engagement in an experiential gestalt consisting of "myself and the other", and offers the possibility of testing one's ‘own' experience of an intersubjective moment in dialogue with the other. In so far as it infers the focusing of consciousness on embodied experience and expression, and the synthesis of receptive and proprioceptive consciousness in "experiaction" , the "second person" perspective restores inner reality to the realm of the observable, and thus reclaims observation as the method of psychology, and behaviour as its subject matter. The notion of empathy and intuition as a reliable and valid mode of access to the psychological life of others is substantiated theoretically with reference to inter alia Husserl's concepts of "coupling" and "co-constitution", Merleau-Ponty's notions of "inter-corporeality" or "carnal intersubjectivity" and of "the intertwining and the chiasm" of the "Ineinander" as constitutive of the "flesh of the world", Laing's postulation of the possibility of "interexperience", and the sense of union with the object of perception implied by Scheler's term "Einsfühlung" as the essence of intersubjective encounter. (shrink)

Many different aspects of science intersect with Christian spirituality. Some of these points of intersection are apparent in astronomy, cosmology, quantum physics, genetics, neuroscience, organic evolution, chemical evolution, technological advances, and environmental science. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between organic evolution and Christian spirituality. It is important to note that Christian spirituality has varying significances throughout Christendom. For the purpose of this paper, I will treat Christian spirituality as the study of the experience of Christian (...) faith and discipleship. This definition will be helpful because it is specific enough to make direct correlations with how one can understand science from a Christian spiritual (faith) perspective. (shrink)

This critical review focuses on Smith's recent revision of his 1988 book: Teilhard and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Curiously, both the revised and original works have been largely ignored. Unfortunately, sometimes the best way to silence critics is to ignore them. This work will look into some of the primary concepts of Teilhard's "scientific theology" and assess Smith's evaluation, including: evolution, the law of complexity and consciousness, the Creative Union, and (...) the Omega Point. (shrink)

We present a general cognitive architecture that tightly integrates symbolic, spatial, and visual representations. A key means to achieving this integration is allowing cognition to move freely between these modes, using mental imagery. The specific components and their integration are motivated by results from psychology, as well as the need for developing a functional and efficient implementation. We discuss functional benefits that result from the combination of multiple content-based representations and the specialized processing units associated with them. Instantiating this theory, (...) we then discuss the architectural components and processes, and illustrate the resulting functional advantages in two spatially and visually rich domains. The theory is then compared to other prominent approaches in the area. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to reflect upon the insistence on the use of gender neutral language and its implications for freedom of speech in Canada. There has been much controversy in Canada over recent legislation that adds gender expression and gender identity as protected grounds under the Canada Human Rights Act- i.e. Bill C-16, Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has expressed his dissatisfaction with Bill C-16 and its implications for free speech. Peterson argues (...) that free speech is the mechanism by which democracies have survived over the centuries! He has further argued that the imposition of language on people can have devastating effects. For example, there is a clear distinction between legislation concerning What one ought not to say, such as screaming "fire!" in a crowded cinema and mandating speech about what one must say, such as compelling the use of gender-neutral pronouns. In order to understand the background behind Bill C-16, and in order to gather insights as to what is motivating certain cultural trends and what is at stake, I will examine two distinct philosophical approaches. First, will examine the thought of Jordan Peterson, who I would dub the "defender of objectivity." Second, I will present some of the views of the postmodern epistemologist, Jacques Derrida, Derrida can be dubbed the "wishful mortician of the absolute" for his methodology of deconstructionism. Through examining these distinct approaches, I wish to put a clearer finger on the complex issues surrounding Bill C-16, political correctness, and free speech. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss a novel engineering ethics class that has the potential to significantly decrease the likelihood that students will inadvertently or unintentionally act unethically in the future. This class is different from standard engineering ethics classes in that it focuses on the issue of why people act unethically and how students can avoid a variety of hurdles to ethical behavior. I do not deny that it is important for students to develop cogent moral reasoning and ethical decision-making (...) as taught in traditional college-level ethics classes, but as an educator, I aim to help students apply moral reasoning in specific, real-life situations so they are able to make ethical decisions and act ethically in their academic careers and after they graduate. Research in moral psychology provides evidence that many seemingly irrelevant situational factors affect the moral judgment of most moral agents and frequently lead agents to unintentionally or inadvertently act wrongly. I argue that, in addition to teaching college students moral reasoning and ethical decision-making, it is important to: 1. Teach students about psychological and situational factors that affect people’s ethical judgments/behaviors in the sometimes stressful, emotion-laden environment of the workplace; 2. Guide students to engage in critical reflection about the sorts of situations they personally might find ethically challenging before they encounter those situations; and 3. Provide students with strategies to help them avoid future unethical behavior when they encounter these situations in school and in the workplace. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose five principles to make U.S. nuclear deterrence policy more just and effective in the future: sever the link between the mass killing of innocent civilians and nuclear deterrence by focusing targeting on adversaries’ military power and senior political leadership, not their population; never use or plan to use a nuclear weapon against any target that could be destroyed or neutralized by conventional weapons; reject “belligerent reprisal” threats against civilians even in response to enemy attacks on (...) one's own or allied civilians; replace nuclear “calculated ambiguity” threats against biological or cyberattacks with “deterrence by denial” strategies; and work in good faith toward eventual nuclear disarmament. (shrink)

Phenomenology has remained a sheltering place for those who would seek to understand not only their own “first person” experiences but also the first person experiences of others. Recent publications by renowned scholars within the field have clarified and extended our possibilities of access to “first person” experience by means of perception (Lingis, 2007) and reflection (Zahavi, 2005). Teaching phenomenology remains a challenge, however, because one must find ways of communicating to the student how to embody it as a process (...) rather than simply to learn about it as a content area. Another challenge issues from the fact that most writings on applied phenomenology emphasize individual subjectivity as the central focus, while offering only indirect access to the subjectivity of others (for example, by way of analyzing written descriptions provided by the individual under study). While one finds in the literature of psychotherapy plentiful elucidations of the “we-experience” within which therapists form impressions of their clients’ experience, there is still need for a more thoughtful clarification of our rather special personal modes of access to the experience of others in everyday life. This paper will present “second person perspectivity” as a mode of resonating with the expressions of others and will describe class activities that can bring students closer to a lived understanding of what it means to be doing phenomenology in the face of the other. (shrink)

This is a reply to Don Marquis’‘Why Abortion is Immoral.‘ Marquis, who asserts that abortion is morally wrong, bases his argument on the following premise: Killing a being is morally wrong if that being is the sort of being who has a valuable future. I argue that this premise is false. I then assert that if I am correct about this premise being false, Marquis is faced with a dilemma. If he does not alter the premise in a way that (...) makes it true, his argument is unsound. However, if he does make such an alteration, he must also alter a second premise in his argument, and this second change opens him to the charge of question begging. In addition, I conclude that such an alteration requires Marquis to adopt a position much like that taken by Judith J. Thompson in ‘A Defense of Abortion,‘ a position he initially states is indefensible. (shrink)

Have you ever thought about how self-consciousness (self-awareness) originated in the universe? Understanding consciousness is one of the toughest "nuts to crack." In recent years, scientists and philosophers have attempted to provide an answer to this mystery. The reason for this is simply because it cannot be confined to solely a materialistic interpretation of the world. Some scientific materialists have suggested that consciousness is merely an illusion in order to insulate their worldviews. Yet, consciousness is the most fundamental thing we (...) know, even more so than the external world since we require it to perceive or think about anything. Without it, reasoning would be impossible. Dr. Scott Ventureyra, in this ground-breaking book, explores the idea of the Christian God and Creation in order to tackle this most difficult question. He demonstrates that theology has something significant to offer in reflection of how consciousness originated in the universe. He also makes a modest claim that the Christian conception of God and Creation provide a plausible account for the origin of self-consciousness. He integrates philosophy, theology, and science in an innovative way to embark on this exploration. (shrink)

1. Introduction. In recent years Brand Blanshard’s formulation of the coherence theory of truth, as he articulated it in The Nature of Thought, has come under formidable attack by Professor Nicholas Rescher of the University of Pittsburgh. In his otherwise excellent book, The Coherence Theory of Truth, later excerpted for P. A. Schilpp’s Library of Living Philosophers volume on Professor Blanshard, he criticizes Blanshard on two main counts.

In “Nudging, Bullshitting, and the Meta-Nudge”, the author responds to William Simkulet’s claim that nudging is bullshitting (according to Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of bullshit and bullshitting), and therefore nudging during the process of informed consent renders consent invalid. The author argues that nudging is not necessarily bullshitting and then explains that although this issue is philosophically interesting, practically speaking, even if nudging is bullshitting, it does not follow that nudging necessarily renders informed consent invalid. This is obviously true in those (...) situations in which nudging during the process of informed consent is unavoidable. The author concludes with a discussion of the meta-nudge and suggests that physicians can use the meta-nudge to eliminate or decrease the power of inappropriate, problematic, or undesirable nudges. (shrink)

We are currently developing a short, online ethics course that attempts to teach students why well-intentioned people act unethically and what students can do to decrease the likelihood that they will find themselves in the middle of an ethical crisis in the future. Most of the well-known case studies in professional ethics textbooks concern ethical failures that do not involve difficult ethical choices. When our students read these case studies, it is not difficult for them to determine what went wrong (...) or what the players in the cases ought to have done. And students don’t need to read Kant or Mill to make these determinations. Importantly, the agents who acted wrongly usually seem to be ethical people. Rarely do cases involve moral monsters. In a similar vein, most cases of research misconduct are cut-and-dry, and most of our students who plagiarize did not enroll in the course intending to plagiarize. Rather, something went wrong. Professional ethics classes neglect to address an important practical question: Why do well-intentioned people find themselves in the middle of ethical crises and how can our students decrease the likelihood that they will find themselves in an ethical crisis in the future? We are developing a course that answers this question. Our course is built around the findings of John Dorris and other situationists. After teaching our students about situationism, we teach them a two-level theory of cognition that may help them avoid acting unethically. (shrink)

This paper explores the apologetic nature of Augustine’s Confessions. It first takes a brief look at Augustine’s intricate view of the relationship between faith and reason, in order to provide a background to his employment of apologetic elements throughout Confessions. Both positive and negative apologetic elements are examined throughout the paper. Some positive apologetic elements include Augustine’s presentation of the implied ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the argument from the experience of beauty, and the demonstration of the (...) coherence of the Christian conception of God (including his explorations with time and creation). His negative apologetic elements include dealing with detractors from the Christian faith such as the Manichees and their objections. Although studies in recent years have focused on the autobiographical and religious experiential dimensions of Confessions, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the apologetic dimension is also foundational to Augustine’s text. It is important to realize that the apologetic nature of Confessions does not detract from its other natures (autobiographical and religious-experiential) since objects, ideas and persons can have more than one nature – as is true with the case of Christ and a number line. It is my hope to revive a forgotten aspect of Confessions that is quite pertinent to the Church today. (shrink)

Reviews the special issue of The Humanistic Psychologist, Psychotherapy for freedom: The daseinsanalytic way in psychology and psychotherapy edited by Erik Craig . The editor brings together a uniquely developed collection of essays, seminars, and interviews delving into foundational as well as clinically-oriented issues regarding the application of Martin Heidegger's philosophy to the fields of psychiatry and psychotherapy. Craig's edition exhibits a cohesiveness not often found in edited volumes, and it manages to be inspiring to the more advanced reader while (...) remaining accessible to the introductory student. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In their contributions to the symposium “Just War and Unjust Soldiers,” Michael Walzer, Jeff McMahan, and Robert O. Keohane add greatly to our understanding of how best to study and apply just war doctrine to real-world conflicts. We argue, however, that they underestimate both the degree to which the American public seeks revenge, rather than just reciprocity, and the extent of popular acceptance of violations of noncombatant immunity by soldiers perceived to be fighting for a just cause. We call on (...) empirical political scientists, lawyers, psychologists, and historians to engage with moral philosophers and political theorists in debates about the influence of just war theory and the laws of armed conflict. (shrink)

:In this essay I begin with Foucault's theorization of the convulsive body of the possessed as a site of struggle. Next, I amend this perspective with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion that “the concept is not object but territory” 101). That is, rather than looking at convulsive bodies as objects through which actors struggle, I approach convulsions as evidencing acts of territorialization. Instead of a corporeal object over which actors struggle for ownership, this perspective reframes convulsions as a process (...) of space-making that is constitutive of the space-makers. Amending Foucault's take on convulsions with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of territory allows for analysis of “techno-horror” popular entertainments as constitutive processes in the unfolding of new reproductive masculine subjectivities. (shrink)

This paper will explore the evolution of the conceptions of Satan (the devil), and demons throughout the past 3,000 years, in light of an in-depth study of St. Anselm of Canterbury’s medieval text, The Fall of Satan (De Casu Diaboli). Anselm’s brilliant work, De Casu Diaboli, has inspired much reflection into not just the nature of angels and demons but also into our own. It is worth noting that, it is impossible to exhaustively cover a 3,000-year period on such a (...) major topic, but a brief overview of the significant periods will be provided before focusing on De Casu Diaboli. (shrink)