Absolute Principles Research Articles

Tümevarım Meselesi -İbn Sînâ Merkezli Yeni Bir Okuma-

The purpose of philosophy is to achieve happiness. Logic is just like a key leading man towards this joy in philosophy. Logic helps us to reach knowledge on a standart of rationality and coherence by following path of individual to universal and known through unknown. An exact correspondence between thoughts and words occur only with correct principles of reasoning. Therefore, logic plays a great role in philosophy. The scientific method ‘induction’ in new age philosophy was brought to agenda by Bacon but later it was refuted by many philosophers like Hume and Popper. Before Bacon, philosopher was Ibni Sina who developed the as a method of scientific researches. In this paper, Ibn Sina’s view of induction is discussed. I begin with a brief look at Aristotelian induction and its critique. I present Ibn Sina’s view of induction with a support of experimentation (tacruba). I analysed how induction and experimentation would be conditional as opposed to absolute principles of natural sciences. To sum up, Ibn-i Sina developed a method of induction and experimentation as a means for scientific inquiry. He thought that natural scientist could use experimentation to discover “conditional” principles. The study concludes with some brief comments about refutation of induction by some thinkers in history of science and philosophy.

A review on role of prakriti in aging

Ayurveda is an eternal science with absolute principles, and prakriti is one of these. It plays an important role in the selection and establishment of every factor for which a person is going to interact from conception till death, e.g. lifestyle, diet planning, etc. Prakriti stands for nature of the body in terms of dosha and is decided at the time of conception according to the predominance of dosha. It does not change during the whole life and is responsible for the physical and mental characteristics of an individual. This prakriti is of seven types according to tridosha. The individuals of specific prakriti exhibit biological variations in terms of structure, function, behavior, individual response to internal and external environmental stimuli, susceptibility to different diseases, etc. Aging is a process of decaying and included in natural diseases. In our body, Pitta or Agni is responsible for the various types of pathological conditions. Although aging is a natural pathological condition, Pitta plays an important role in its causation like other pathological conditions. It is clearly indicated in Charak samhita that persons having Pitta predominance personality tend to suffer early with decaying process and other changes of aging. Through this article, we have made an attempt to reevaluate the interrelationships between prakriti and aging.

Managed truth: The great danger to our republic

French social critic Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850) once said, “The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.”[1] During much of the history of our republic, our intellectuals and those who digest these ideas for consumption by the general public did a poor job of defending the basic foundations of our freedom. Until the 60s, it was taken for granted that private property, absolute moral principles, and free enterprise were desirable. But while these things were based on a foregone conclusion, few were adequately prepared to defend these ideas against the modern liberal intellectual assault. Those intellectuals, such as Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, John East and Russell Kirk, who had an intimate understanding of human freedom, did not have access to the popular media or most university curricula. The left saw this as a great weakness to be exploited primarily by attacking these institutions in the universities and colleges, knowing it would capture the imaginations of our youth during their formative years. Parents trusted these institutions to inculcate these basic ideas of freedom – they were betrayed by these institutions of learning. But two events allowed the left to instill serious questions in our youth's minds concerning these foundations: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Both of these events were couched in terms not to correct social evils or perceived errors in our leaders’ judgment, but rather they were designed to attack the whole fabric of our social organization, especially our moral foundations, our economic system, and the rule of law based on natural law. As we shall see, this did not begin in the 60s, but in fact, began over two centuries before.

The Constitutional Status of Human Dignity in Germany and Israel

This article applies comparative law tools to portray eight significant aspects of the constitutional right to human dignity in Germany and Israel. The elements considered are: the constitutional status of human dignity; the nature of the right; its effect on other constitutional rights; its scope and definition; waiver of human dignity; human dignity after death; negative and positive aspects of the right; and the right to asylum. The textual foundations of the respective constitutional guarantees are as different as human dignity's core meaning. In Germany, such guarantees are held to be absolute, immune to restriction, and therefore quite narrow in scope. In Israel, the scope of the right is much broader, but it is subject to limitations when placed against the public interest. Still, based on the findings of our comprehensive comparison, similar dynamics can be identified in Germany and Israel The constitutional coverage of both absolute and relative principles is broad, as are the constitutional lacunas, which are those dimensions of constitutional law neglected by the written constitution.

Ética na pesquisa em Educação Física

The objective here is to point out ethics in Physical Education research against a backdrop of individual and collective human conduct. Since Plato, the question of ethics in the Western world has been an incessant search for the virtues to harmonize personal and social wellbeing and for the absolute principles of conduct: Autonomy, Beneficence and Justice. Physical Education cannot exempt itself from these and its countless areas of research. In addition to the moral education that develops and solidifies within social groups, the characteristic of which is action on an individual level, we must also consider ethical principles such as those defended by the Physical Education World Manifesto and those that regulate the professional activities of Physical Education professionals. Irrespective of the area investigated, Research in Physical Education will always clash with institutionalized ethical principles enforced by ethics committees, councils and the values accepted by the researchers. Committees strive to preserve the integrity and dignity of the people enrolled on research studies while the researchers challenge the limits of knowledge at an uncomfortable frontier between the acceptable and the unacceptable within a given context of academic vision and needs.

Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life (review)

Reviewed by: Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life Phyllis Lassner Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life. Jennifer Birkett. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 441. $49.95 (cloth). Despite mounting research that confirms the importance of hitherto neglected twentieth century British women writers, finding publishers and audiences remains a daunting challenge. We must therefore be grateful for the steady stream of biographies whose historical and cultural contexts inflect compelling psychological and social insights that inform and encourage literary study of these writers. A biography of Margaret Storm Jameson is a welcome addition, adding important political and cultural perspectives to ongoing modernist, middlebrow, and other mid-century literary histories and interpretation. Born in 1891, Margaret Storm Jameson was a contemporary of Rebecca West, Phyllis Bottome, and Naomi Mitchison, and similarly invested her political passions in all her writing. In effect, like West and Bottome, Jameson risked her personal and professional reputations in politicizing her writing with anti-fascist plots and working to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Serious recognition of the significance of Storm Jameson’s life and work is long overdue and Jennifer Birkett is to be applauded for illuminating the life and times of this prodigiously significant writer. As President of British PEN from 1938–1944, in the face of appeasement, fascist aligned members, and world war, Storm Jameson ensured that literature made a difference. Despite her relentless self-criticism and ambivalences about motherhood, marriage, and work, and her often dire economic straits, Jameson wrote novels, radio, and television plays, and polemical journalism on the fate of nations and nationalism as they wreaked havoc in the lives of men and women struggling to preserve their individual humanity. [End Page 441] Interwoven with her expansive canvas of political and social concerns, Jameson’s forty-five novels investigate the nature of narrative itself, as she translated forms of Proust and Stendhal into her own voices and styles. From her first novel in 1919 to her last, in 1973, her settings range from a gritty workaday London to an unnamed colonial outpost, shaped by various experiments with realism and subjects, including women’s personal and professional conflicts in Three Kingdoms (1926), economic and cultural critique in the Mirror in Darkness trilogy (1934–36), anti-fascist dystopias, In the Second Year (1936) and And Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942), experiments with interiority in The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945), and anti-colonial debate in Last Score (1961). Her novels of World War II are riveting and confront us with the ethical angst born of relentless destruction in conflict with this war’s necessity and ambiguous aftermath. They also challenge modernism’s romantic privileging of interiority by representing the invasion of consciousness by threats of world conquest that question the ethics of national identity and loyalty. Her essays from the 1930s through World War II should be required reading for scholars of fascism, and as an activist response to Virginia Woolf’s theoretical polemic, Three Guineas. Like Woolf and Naomi Mitchison, Jameson visited Berlin in the early 1930s and with lacerating despair, saw the necessity of abandoning pacifism to defeat what she already recognized as Hitler’s plans for world conquest and extermination of anyone considered an untermensch. No British cultural history of these years can be complete or even comprehensible without reading Storm Jameson. In her laudable efforts to piece together the fascinating strands and contexts of Jameson’s life and writing, Birkett’s devotion to detail sometimes overwhelms her subject. Much of her contextual material and its details highlight the inconsequential rather than the significant events and people that shaped Jameson’s personal and political obsessions and that expand our cultural and historical knowledge. Short shrift is given to Jameson’s agonizing decision to abandon her pacifist convictions in the face of Hitler’s conquests. Birkett welcomes Jameson’s honest vacillations, but then worries that “it could make her seem duplicitous and shallow, in comparison with contemporaries who built their pacifist careers on the profession of more absolute principles” (121). In contrast to this tendentious doleur, the evidence for Jameson’s profoundly complex political thinking is readily available in her 300 letters to Vera Brittain and housed at...

Research ethics in physical education

The objective here is to point out ethics in Physical Education research against a backdrop of individual and collective human conduct. Since Plato, the question of ethics in the Western world has been an incessant search for the virtues to harmonize personal and social wellbeing and for the absolute principles of conduct: Autonomy, Beneficence and Justice. Physical Education cannot exempt itself from these and its countless areas of research. In addition to the moral education that develops and solidifies within social groups, the characteristic of which is action on an individual level, we must also consider ethical principles such as those defended by the Physical Education World Manifesto and those that regulate the professional activities of Physical Education professionals. Irrespective of the area investigated, Research in Physical Education will always clash with institutionalized ethical principles enforced by ethics committees, councils and the values accepted by the researchers. Committees strive to preserve the integrity and dignity of the people enrolled on research studies while the researchers challenge the limits of knowledge at an uncomfortable frontier between the acceptable and the unacceptable within a given context of academic vision and needs.

Morality, self-interest, and leaders in international affairs

Critics of the morality associated with transforming leadership have begun to note the qualities of transactional and strategic leaders. The case of international affairs highlights the role transactional leaders play in providing structure and moral substance in an environment that lacks both. This study takes note of the competing schools of thought in international relations, the concept of a rational basis for cooperation, and four approaches to resolving moral disputes in political theory. In sum, this study shows how the pursuit of mutual self-interest over the long-term and not absolute moral principles has usually provided an effective and morally sound international system that serves the greater good.

The Caring Approach and Social Issues in Management Education

Most of the conversation, in both research and teaching circles, regarding stakeholder theory has been conducted in the language of absolute principles, of outcomes, and of responding to stakeholders to achieve organizational outcomes. More recently, conversations have occurred that have a different perspective on social issues in management topics—a caring perspective. Using the case of Merck & Co., Inc., and river blindness as an example, the authors show why they believe that these conversations have great potential to increase the quality of management education in the 21st century.

Astride a long-dead horse: Mainstream outdoor education theory and the central curriculum problem

In 1859 Herbert Spencer recognised that the key curriculum issue was not what to include but what to leave out. ‘What to leave out’ marked a shift in curriculum discourse from a search for universal approaches and absolute principles towards curriculum questions understood as only resolvable relative to particular social contexts. Yet outdoor education is frequently explained and justified in universal, absolute terms that are incapable of resolving the question of outdoor education’s educational worth in any particular situation. The first part of this study outlines some necessary links between curriculum discourse and outdoor education theory. The second uses outdoor education textbooks to investigate how context-free rationales for outdoor education have been framed. It found textbooks used one or more rhetorical devices: (1) treating education as personal development, with only limited acknowledgment of the social functions and contexts of education, (2) omitting the outdoors from aims and purposes, or treating the outdoors as monolithic, and (3) describing aims and purposes in broad and abstract terms. Adopting any or all of these positions drastically reduced the capacities of the proffered theories to (a) help determine if any given program was necessary or (b) help determine what programs were necessary. The article concludes that the evident flaws in textbooks indicate a more widespread failure in the outdoor education literature to comprehend curriculum questions.

Scientific Methodologies in Medieval Islam

The present study considers Ibn S�n�'s (Lat. Avicenna) account of induction (istiqra') and experimentation (tajriba). For Ibn S�n� induction purportedly provided the absolute, necessary and certain first principles of a science. Ibn S�n� criticized induction, arguing that it can neither guarantee the necessity nor provide the primitiveness required of first principles. In it place, Ibn S�n� developed a theory of experimentation, which avoids the pitfalls of induction by not providing absolute, but conditional, necessary and certain first principles. The theory of experimentation that emerges though not modern, does have elements that are similar to a modern conception of scientific method.

As fronteiras da pesquisa antropológica: Ética, Autonomia e Tráfico de Órgãos. Um comentário a The Global Traffic in Human Organs, de Nancy Scheper-Hughes

The bioethical debate over the commercialization of the human body has intensified in recent years. This article discusses the principles of ethics and autonomy in the most important ethnography on international traffic in human organs, coordinated by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes. The author discusses how defending the ethics of non-commercialization of the human body entails absolute ethical principles pertaining to human life, a political premise whose legitimacy is not recognized by relativist anthropologists.

Absolute-energy-minimum principles for linear-scaling electronic-structure calculations

Two absolute energy minimum principles are developed for first-principle linear-scaling electronic structure calculations. One is with a normalization constraint and the other without any constraint. The density matrix is represented by a set of nonorthogonal localized orbitals and an auxiliary matrix which at the minimum becomes a generalized inverse of the overlap matrix of the localized orbitals. The number of localized orbitals is allowed to exceed the number of occupied orbitals. Comparison with other variational principles is made and numerical tests presented. @S0163-1829~97!01939-5# Most electronic structure calculations are based on a oneelectron Hamiltonian, either within semiempirical approaches such as tight-binding and semiempirical quantum chemical models, or within first-principle approaches such as the density functional and Hartree-Fock-based method. The one-electron Hamiltonian provides building blocks for the construction of the electronic wave function or the electron density. Conventional direct and iterative diagonalization algorithms for obtaining eigenvalues require an overall computational effort which grows as the cubic of the number of atoms. This has been a major limiting factor for the application of the electronic structure methods to large systems. The possibility of obtaining the sum of eigenvalues in electronic structure calculations with effort scaling linearly with the size of the system was first demonstrated in the

Our Vocabularies, Our Selves

David Rothman has noted that at least some of success of bioethics movement this country can be attributed to fortuitous timing. In an age of great concern with civil rights, bioethicists had much in common with new roster of rights agitators who were appearing on American scene.(1) It is, therefore, no surprise that rights talk should have dominated bioethics world, but such an emphasis has problems and dangers. In a powerful attack on uses to which rights language is put our society, Mary Ann Glendon has written that its simple American form [by contrast, she means, with rights language Western European societies], language of rights is language of no compromise. The winner takes all and loser has to get out of town. The conversation is over.(2) Glendon is only one of a number of thinkers who have argued recent years that we have mistakenly isolated rights from responsibilities, to detriment of our common life. I, at least, would not deny that they have a legitimate concern. When our moral language shirvels and narrows to point where we can discuss disputed issues only language of rights, we are impoverished important ways. However essential that language may be, it is insufficient for everything we need to say. That I have a right to do something does not mean that it is right thing to do, nor even that I have any good reason to do it. To Judith Jarvis Thomson's now famous distinction between what a pregnant woman has a right to do and what it would be decent of her to do, Philip Abbott quite properly responded: Who would want to live a society which everyone was positively indecent to another and at same time positively scrupulous respecting another's rights?(3) And, although bioethicists have seldom mused about connections, it is striking that commitment within bioethical community to language of rights and autonomy has taken place over two decades which political theorists--who are more inclined to remember that language of rights West was first developed to discuss way unlimited rights are given up by those who enter civil society--have debated whether American founding is best characterized as liberal or republican.(4) We can recognize truth communitarian critiques of rights talk, however, without denying that such talk plays an essential role bioethical reflection. Thus, for example, Beauchamp and Childress distinguish between of autonomous person and principle of for autonomy. We may need principle even if we think ideal a mistaken understanding of our humanity. And, fact, when a principle of respect for autonomy is criticized by those who prefer to balance and weigh different values search of social harmony or consensus, we lose much of bite of moral reflection as we transform bioethics into public policy. Stephen Toulmin, for instance, wants us to avoid the cult of absolute principles, which cult expresses, evidently, not our concern for wellbeing of others but our immature quest for certainty. He argues that ethics is not well served by appeal to principle. Moral wisdom is exercised not by those who stick by a single principle come what may, absolutely and without exception, but rather by those who understand that, long run, no principle--however absolute--can avoid running up against another equally absolute principle; and by those who have experience and discrimination needed to balance conflicting considerations most humane way. The best we can hope for is that good-hearted, clear-headed will triangulate their way across complex terrain of moral life and problems.(5) Alas, good-hearted people sometimes find themselves standing at selection ramps balancing conflicting considerations, and [a]ny account of morality which does not allow for fact that my death may be required of me at any moment is thereby an inadequate account. …

Value added taxation and the third sector

During the last decades, value added taxation (VAT) has become widely used. Introducing or widening VAT may have important consequences for third sector organisations. There is no consistent, widely-accepted theory regarding the treatment of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) under VAT. International comparisons are difficult to make. The general scope of VAT, what goods and especially what services are included in the tax base, may be more important to NGOs than the direct concessions granted them. To comprehend how VAT may affect NGOs, it is necessary to understand the general mechanism and some of the technical details of VAT, such as registration thresholds and accounting requirements. There is a tendency for the legislature to widen the tax base and make VAT as general as possible. Tax administrative considerations may acquire the character of absolute principles. When VAT is introduced or widened, it may be important for NGOs to demonstrate how their tax bill has been changed as a possible unintended side-effect due to the administrative need to make VAT as comprehensive as possible.

Current status of liver transplantation (LT) in France and specificities of French ethical attitudes concerning LT

The authors report first on the current status of liver transplantation in France and underline its exponential development. The main indications for this procedure are outlined for adults as well as for children. The modalities of distribution of livers harvested by strictly controlled university teams are also briefly described. The specificities of French ethical attitudes towards liver transplantation are discussed. They concern the donor, the recipient and the society. Legal dispositions stipulating the presumed consent of the donor and accrediting the notion of "cerebral death" have eased the development of liver transplantation in France. Despite these measures shortage in liver available for grafts results in still too large waiting list and fosters nation-wide campaign to encourage organ donation. There is, in France, a strong consensus for a strict sticking to the absolute principles of gratuity of organ donation and non-marketing of excised organs available for graft. As stated recently by Thomas Starzl, liver transplantation has become the second most commonly performed solid organ transplant after kidney transplant. In the latin Europe, the idea of organ transplantation is in the mind of people for a long time as illustrated from paintings or carvings that can still be seen in several roman catholic churches of the Middle Age. Although, liver transplantation in man developed only after the pioneer work of Thomas Starzl in Pittsburg, it is fair to recall that Alexis Carrel (1908, Noble Prize), from France, opened the way to organ transplantation by performing in animals the first vascular sutures and organ auto- or homografts.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Paradoxical Effects in Political Systems

Paradoxical effects often complicate public policy, contrary to expectation or intent. Some are unavoidable; effective actions require constructs that simplify the more complex, and what is omitted often yields unexpected effects. This exclusion of information is increased by shared societal self-deceptions and further heightened by large scale traumatization. Risk of negative paradox can be lessened by modified causal reasoning, e.g. replacing absolute principles with presumptions that respect opposing forces. Several vital dilemmas emerge: defining collective identity in the face of uncertainty; confronting the myths that worsen paradox but foster social cohesion; and paradoxes inherent in social cooperation and the containment of human evil.

Multiple phonemic stress levels in Kinyambo

I have argued that a prohibition on multiple phonemic stress levels cannot be made to follow from (46a) and/or (46b), as neither are absolute principles cross-linguistically. I have also suggested that while (46c) may be a strong cross-linguistic tendency, it does not follow from any deeper theory-internal principles, but rather, must be stipulated. Thus, the claim that Kinyambo has multiple phonemic stress levels necessitates no substantive change in standard grid theory, but merely represents one member of the typology of cases inherently predicted by the basic tenets of the theory.

Perelman a tradycja racjonalizmu

The philosophical thought of Perelman is characterized with criticism of all philosophies seeking the first, unshakable and absolute principles. Such philosophies are trying to attain their aim among others through referring to obviousness. The trends of this kind are characteristic for classical rationalism (e.g. Cartesian philosophy). R. Descartes thinks that cognizance worthy of being called "knowledge" should be such cognizance, which is characterized with perfection and homogeneousness. Perelman rejects existence of absolute criteria and emphasizes that a cognizing mind is shaped by the intellectual tradition and education. Philosophical cognizance is able to improve and change itself continually when it is supported by certain reasons. The Belgian philosopher's thought resembles, in many respects, the concepts of the so-called new rationalism (F. Gonseth, G. Bachelard, J. Piaget). Simultaneously, however, Perelman stresses the fact of irreducibility of philosophy to science as philosophical problems are characterized with constant contestability, controversial character, and openness to new solutions. Generally speaking, the philosophical thought in question may be called "antiabsolutist" and "pluralistic".

Isocrates and Plato: Relativism vs. Idealism

This paper is a comparative analysis of the philosophical and rhetorical positions of Isocrates and Plato. Isocrates and his rhetoric have often been referred to, in the pejorative sense, as relativistic. Following the Sophistic tradition of his era, Isocrates does reject the possibility of discovering absolute principles of behavior upon which to conduct human affairs. However, his rhetoric is not opportunistic nor exploitative. Plato's commendation of Isocrates in the Phaedrus suggests that he saw some merit in the program established by Isocrates. Since Plato is a major source of criticism against Sophism and, by extension, Isocrates, a comparison between Isocrates’ relativism and Plato's idealism provides an illuminating insight into the merits of each.