Genuine Causes Research Articles

Causes in Plato’s Phaedo

As Socrates recounts his search for causes (aitiai) in the Phaedo, he identifies the following as genuine causes: intelligence (nous), seeming best, choice of the best, and the forms. I argue that these causes should be understood as norms prescribing the conditions their effects must meet if those effects are to be produced. Thus, my account both explains what Socrates’ causes are and the way in which they cause what they cause.

8.D. Workshop: Population ageing: societal triumph or end of the welfare state?

Abstract Longer, healthier lives are a triumph in human history, but their implications for health systems, economies, and societies are still up for debate. Many observers and policymakers, in fact, view societal ageing as a problem. For them, an ageing population entails higher health care costs, slower economic growth, and fewer tax revenues, all of which is compounded if people age in poor health. Taken together, many policymakers may conclude that the only solution is to clamp down on the welfare state. This belief in the inevitability of an age-related fiscal crisis often coincides with and contributes to intergenerational conflict, as generations struggle over public spending priorities. But are the adverse consequences of population ageing really inevitable, or is there scope for policy intervention? The purpose of this workshop is to present new evidence on the implications of population ageing for health and health systems and to consider policy options. Research indicates that the extent that population ageing creates difficulties for economies, public finances, and health systems is complex and, importantly, conditional on a host of modifiable factors. Indeed, while some consequences of ageing are unlikely to be very bad even without policy interventions, some genuine causes for concern can be better managed with effective interventions. Furthermore, a focus on intergenerational conflict distracts us from other, important, inequalities within generations, which is a much more urgent policy challenge to address. This workshop is based on findings from the European Observatory's “Economics of Healthy and Active Ageing” series which brings together research on why population ageing is often (erroneously) viewed negatively from a health financing perspective, and reviews relevant policies that may improve health system financial sustainability. The workshop will have 4 presentations followed by a brief debate on how to better use this type of evidence for policymaking. Presentation #1 sets out the main challenges and presents a new simulator tool for assessing the health financing sustainability gap attributable to population ageing. Presentation #2 explores in detail the role of proximity to death as a driver of health expenditures and considers policy options to improve and rationalize end-of-life care. Presentation #3 will use time use survey data to consider what it means to age in good health by reviewing the daily lives of older people and comparing those in good health to those in poor health. Lastly, Presentation #4 will consider what drives ageing-related policymaking and what is needed to get more lifecourse policies in place. A debate including audience members will be facilitated by an expert associated with the Observatory. Key messages The way societies address the challenges of ageing is a policy choice – there are a multitude of interventions to ensure that people age in good health without damaging fiscal sustainability. Beyond the intrinsic value of good health, there are a wide range of benefits of supporting healthy ageing over the life course.

Breaking Beyond the Borders of the Brain: Self-Control as a Situated Ability.

“I just couldn’t control myself” are the infamous last words of a person that did something that they knew they should not have done. Consistent self-control is difficult to achieve, but it is also instrumental in achieving ambitious goals. Traditionally, the key to self-control has been assumed to reside in the brain. Recently, an alternative has come to light through the emergence of situated theories of self-control, which emphasize the causal role of specific situated factors in producing successful self-control. Some clinical interventions for motivational or impulse control disorders also incorporate certain situated factors in therapeutic practices. Despite remaining a minority, situated views and practices based on these theories have planted the seeds of a paradigm shift in the self-control literature, moving away from the idea that self-control is an ability limited to the borders of the brain. The goal of this paper is to further motivate this paradigm shift by arguing that certain situated factors show strong promise as genuine causes of successful self-control, but this potential role is too often neglected by theorists and empirical researchers. I will present empirical evidence which suggests that three specific situated factors – clenched muscles, calming or anxiety-inducing environmental cues, and social trust – exhibit a specialized effect of increasing the likelihood of successful self-control. Adopting this situated view of the ability to regulate oneself works to reinforce and emphasize the emerging trend to design therapies based on situated cognition, makes self-control more accessible and less overwhelming for laypeople and those who struggle with impulse control disorders, and opens a new avenue of empirical investigation.

A Critical Reflection on the Rights and Exploitation of Non-Humans in Omo-river Valley (Gibe-III) Areas

The paper explores the critical reflection of the exploitation of the natural environment, specifically forest in Omo-river valley areas. Forests and trees have been destructed and cut down of trees, for charcoal business to fulfill their personal financial/economic interest. The researchers also disclosed the multiple impacts of the cut down of trees and forests for charcoal trade. Hence, the researchers attempts to critically understand and analyze such over exploitation of land and natural environment. In this paper, the researchers explained the genuine causes of the charcoal production beyond the immediate benefit they could get. Accordingly, the researchers found both the anthropocentric and divine approaches of environment problematic and factors for the exploitation of the natural environment. In this paper, the central emphasis is the unwise utilization of the environment for different purpose (which we can call it violation of rights of the non-human creatures from the view point of the biocentrism perspective; the diversified species who live in the area and the destruction of the forest coverage for the sake of temporary economic gain) Generally, to solve the problem the researchers came up with Aldo Leopold’s new environmental argument of the “land ethic” and other apparatuses of environmental conversation. With this regard Leopold’s argument of “land ethic” argued that, our approach towards the land, and natural environment should be those are the environment friendly strategies and holistic reforms to be taken by the government and specifically optional energy sources for the society.

Biases in feature selection with missing data

Feature selection is of great importance for two possible scenarios: (1) prediction, i.e., improving (or minimally degrading) the predictions of a target variable while discarding redundant or uninformative features and (2) discovery, i.e., identifying features that are truly dependent on the target and may be genuine causes to be determined in experimental verifications (for example for the task of drug target discovery in genomics). In both cases, if variables have a large number of missing values, imputing them may lead to false positives; features that are not associated with the target become dependent as a result of imputation. In the first scenario, this may not harm prediction, but in the second one, it will erroneously select irrelevant features. In this paper, we study the risk/benefit trade-off of missing value imputation in the context of feature selection, using causal graphs to characterize when structural bias arises. Our aim is also to investigate situations in which imputing missing values may be beneficial to reduce false negatives, a situation that might arise when there is a dependency between feature and target, but the dependency is below the significance level when only complete cases are considered. However, the benefits of reducing false negatives must be balanced against the increased number of false positives. In the case of binary target variable and continuous features, the t-test is often used for univariate feature selection. In this paper, we also introduce a de-biased version of the t-test allowing us to reap the benefits of imputation, while not incurring the penalty of increasing the number of false positives.

Security sector reform, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of militias: the challenges for state building in Libya

Even though the rebels, later turned ‘revolutionaries’, actually had an insignificant role as combatants in the violent downfall of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011, they became involved in acts of war in many parts of the country in what came to resemble a civil war. Their militias flourished thanks to the lucrative financial handouts that governments paid to them. To complicate matters, additional militias sprang up in the absence of any sort of viable state/institutional control on the part of the nascent ‘state’ or an inability to restrict and monopolize the use of force. Therefore, disarmament, demobilization, reintegration and security sector reform have not been possible, and the Libyan case demonstrates the failure to emulate international best practices, thus hindering any state-building. This paper seeks to analyse the Libyan case and provide an approach and framework for dealing with the genuine causes of the current situation in order help put the appropriate disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) and security sector reform (SSR) policy in place, while simultaneously not ignoring other major, contributing factors. This study suggests that the case of Libya is unique and likely to prove challenging to both established and evolving theoretical approaches to both DDR and SSR. Experiments in the country that have ignored the holistic security sector reform will be examined and its programmes analysed to ascertain whether these have produced any effective state-run structures and mechanisms, norms and procedures, or whether they have only served to reinforce the de facto roles of militias. The article argues that unless the state-building approach is revitalized and national reconciliation made a top priority, Libya’s current debacle and instability is most likely to continue.

The sensory basis of the epistemic gap: an alternative to phenomenal concepts

The phenomenal character of conscious experience has long been regarded as the major problem for physicalist accounts of consciousness. In recent years, defenders of physicalism have typically been relying on the so-called Phenomenal Concept Strategy (PCS) to avoid dualism. In this paper, we argue with PCS that cognitive-physicalistic explanations can account for the peculiarities of phenomenal character. However, we think that the conceptual features PCS investigates are not the genuine causes of the special characteristics of phenomenal consciousness but only symptoms, which can themselves be explained in terms of the features of the sensory-perceptual representations underlying conscious experiences, namely that some, but not all, of these states are representationally unstructured.

Specific versus relational factors in addiction treatment: the forest and the trees, or just more trees?

Miller & Moyers’ paper, ‘The Forest and the Trees: Relational and Specific Factors in Addiction Treatment’, argues that, currently, a focus on the ‘trees’ (specific factors, i.e. specific treatment content) acts to the detriment of examining the ‘forest’ (relational factors, i.e. the larger interpersonal context in which treatment is delivered) 1. The title chosen by the authors evokes the proverbial challenge of not being able to see the forest for the trees, but the authors suggest some additions to existing methodology that would enable researchers to look at both types of variable. In particular, they make the case for specifying and studying these ‘non-specific’ or relational factors. However, from an alternative perspective, specifying ‘non-specific’ factors in the way that Miller & Moyers suggest may actually be creating more trees, instead of enabling a ‘forest’ view. Factors such as therapist interpersonal skills and treatment fidelity, which the authors highlight as modifiable relational factors, have, to date, been targeted through a mechanism very similar to that used for ‘specific content’, e.g. through therapist training [2-4]. In other words, as soon the non-specific factors are specified and practitioners trained accordingly, they can be treated in the same way as specific factors, hence becoming more ‘trees’. Miller & Moyers conclude: ‘as relational influences on outcome come to be better understood, they can be specified, measured, implemented in treatment, tested, and incorporated into the training of the next generation of addiction professionals’. Would this require a fundamental shift in research methods? Arguably not. Observational analyses in existing clinical trials could be used to generate hypotheses regarding these relational factors. Once identified, presumably the next step would be their implementation in treatment, testing via trials, and then incorporation in meta-analyses. However, Miller & Moyers argue that: ‘aggregation of findings—whether across participants in a study, sites within a multisite trial, or trials within a meta-analysis—masks variability in outcomes that may hold important clues to underlying mechanisms’. Such a statement risks painting a false dichotomy between aggregated findings and the investigation of relational factors. In meta-analyses some variation will always exist, whether due to chance or to differences in trial context or content 5, 6. On its own, variance in a meta-analysis does not de-legitimize that meta-analysis, nor does it necessarily mask key causes of variation. Indeed, once these relational factors are specified, measured and tested in the same way in which specific factors are currently dealt with, meta-analyses of the trials of these new tests would still be subject to variation in outcome due to remaining unspecified factors. Miller & Moyers are right to point out that, in focusing exclusively on specific factors related to treatment content, research into addiction treatments may be overlooking important relational factors and their associated effects. However, in acknowledging genuine and measurable causes of variation—more trees, arguably—it is important that a true forest view is not obscured. Using existing methodology, findings can be aggregated without masking the impact of underlying mechanisms, as long as these potential mechanisms are identified in advance. Relational factors that can be measured empirically and in which therapists can be trained can be tested in randomized controlled trials, as has recently been done with empathy in the context of physician training 7, 8. Such trials could then be aggregated in meta-analyses. Even where not tested directly, the contribution of these relational factors could be examined in systematic reviews through meta-regression, as has already been performed with specific factors 9, 10. The trees and the forest can both be taken into account, but it is important not to lose sight of which is which. None. J.H.-B. receives funding from the National Institute for Health Research School for Primary Care Research (NIHR SPCR). The views expressed in this research are those of the author and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health.

Drift beyond Wright–Fisher

Several recent arguments by philosophers of biology have challenged the traditional view that evolutionary factors, such as drift and selection, are genuine causes of evolutionary outcomes. In the case of drift, advocates of the statistical theory argue that drift is merely the sampling error inherent in the other stochastic processes of evolution and thus denotes a mathematical, rather than causal, feature of populations. This debate has largely centered around one particular model of drift, the Wright–Fisher model, and this has contributed to the plausibility of the statisticalists’ arguments. However, an examination of alternative, predictively inequivalent models shows that drift is a genuine cause that can be manipulated to change population outcomes. This case study illustrates the influence of methodological assumptions on ontological judgments, particularly the pernicious effect of focusing on a particular model at the expense of others and confusing its assumptions and idealizations for true claims about the phenomena being modeled.

PS-030 Congenital Heart Disease And Microcephaly At Birth: A Danish Population-based Cohort Study Of Children With Down Syndrome

Background and aims Neurodevelopmental disorders are common in children with congenital heart disease (CHD) and largely ascribed to prenatal factors such as impaired cerebral growth. It remains to be established whether this is due to impaired intrauterine cerebral blood flow or genuine genetic causes. Down syndrome (DS) is a known cause of CHD, neurodevelopmental disorders and microcephaly. Hence, studies on DS may provide insight into the causes of impaired cerebral growth in CHD. We aimed to assess the risk of microcephaly in children with DS and CHD compared to children with DS and no CHD. Methods Children with DS (n = 389) and specific birth characteristics were identified in national registries. Head circumference and the risk of microcephaly (head circumference Results There was no difference in head circumference between the groups, 0.0 cm (95% CI -0.4–0.4). Adjustment did not significantly alter the results. The risk of microcephaly was slightly higher in newborns with CHD, OR 1.4 (95% CI 0.8–2.6). Adjustment did not significantly alter the results. Conclusions We did not find indications of impaired head growth in children with DS and concomitant CHD. There might be a slight increase in the risk of microcephaly. We suggest that the most common types of CHD in DS i.e. atrioventricular septal defects, ventricular septal defects and atrial septal defects do not impair prenatal cerebral growth in children with DS.

The ‘Empty Amusement’ of Willing: Berkeley on Agent Causation

Some aspects of Berkeley’s view of volitional causation would be unobjectionable to his contemporaries. That minds are efficient causes and that their causal power consists in volition would be troubling to neither Descartes nor Locke, since both recognized that through the power of will, minds could create ideas. But Berkeley’s view is not that agent causation is one kind of causal power, it is that it is the only kind, and few of his contemporaries would have found that claim acceptable. Malebranche is an exception: he also thought agent causation the only genuine causation. Many commentators link Berkeley with Malebranche in supposing that both treated necessary connection as the defining feature of causation. I argue that this is mistaken: a “true cause” for Berkeley, is not, as it is for Malebranche, such that the mind perceives a necessary connection between it and its effects. A true cause is a volitional cause. This is a claim about what causation is, not a claim about where necessary connections are located (in the will rather than in the world). Berkeley’s view of agent causation offers an alternative to causation understood as necessary connection; it does not provide an alternative place for necessary connections to occur. This reading of Berkeley permits him to hold that both an infinite spirit and finite spirits are genuine causes.

Interventions on causal exclusion

Two strains of interventionist responses to the causal exclusion argument are reviewed and critically assessed. On the one hand, one can argue that manipulating supervenient mental states is an effective strategy for manipulating the subvenient physical states, and hence should count as genuine causes to the subvenient physical states. But unless the supervenient and subvenient states manifest some difference in their manipulability conditions, there is no reason to treat them as distinct, which in turn goes against the basic assumption of nonreductive physicalism. On the other hand, one can preserve the distinction between the two by introducing asymmetric manipulability conditions that the supervenience thesis entails. But this response can be used to argue that mental causes never have physical effects. However, this argumentation can also be used to show that mental causes can have mental effects.

Adolescente con dolor precordial: la importancia de la sospecha clínica

Introduction. Chest pain is a common complaint in children visiting the emergency department and is mostly associated with benign conditions. Although genuine cardiac causes are uncommon, potentially life threatening conditions such as the pulmonary embolism should be suspected by clinical symptoms such as dyspnoea, chest pain and syncope, either singly or in combination. The authors report a case of a pulmonary embolism with deep venous thrombosis following immobilization in a 15- year-old adolescent with limb fracture. This case illustrates the importance of considering pulmonary embolism in the differential diagnosis of a patient who presents at a paediatric emergency department with sudden onset of chest pain and dyspnoea.

Childism: Confronting Prejudice against Children by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (review)

Reviewed by: Childism: Confronting Prejudice against Children by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Susan Honeyman (bio) Childism: Confronting Prejudice against Children. By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. In 1975, two psychiatrists, Chester M. Pierce and Gail B. Allen, identified and [End Page 126] defined "childism" as "the automatic presumption of superiority of any adult over any child; it results in the adult's needs, desires, hopes, and fears taking unquestioned precedence over those of the child," qualifying that "[i]t goes beyond the biologic necessity that requires adults to sustain the species by means of authoritative, unilateral decisions" (15). Now, psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has resuscitated the term, arguing strongly for greater recognition of adult prejudice against children as a first step in rethinking treatment, parenting, and political policy affecting the young. She acknowledges that the term has been occasionally used in the opposite sense of "child-centered," but seems aware that only one meaning can ultimately stick, and so her purpose seems to be to make it stick in a useful manner. Though her work mentions literature only occasionally in passing (e.g., Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sartre, Anthony Burgess), the book should be of interest to scholars in children's literature, especially those focusing on works from the 1960s to the present in the U.S., and those invested in psychoanalysis, traumatology, or children's rights. First, as Young-Bruehl insists in her introduction, language is key to enabling the reconceptualization of adult-child relations and the mobilization of pro-child advocates to productively focus on the genuine causes of a prejudice that, she argues, "is built into the very way children are imagined" (5). As a specialist in the field of prejudice studies, Young-Bruehl continues in the tradition of Pierce and Allen, arguing that the first prejudice most people suffer from is childism—maltreatment due to small size and young age—and that in the child victim of childism, all other prejudices develop through socially expressed personal vengeance, into racism, sexism, or any bigotry toward others with less power (44-45, 146, 175, 227). Labeling and understanding this cycle is essential to stopping it. In her first chapter, "Anatomy of a Prejudice," Young-Bruehl explains the process and why it goes particularly uninvestigated: "The natural dependency of children has been one of the key reasons for the prejudice against them not being recognized as such or its being so easily rationalized" (55). In chapter two, Young-Bruehl describes "Three Forms of Childism" that she will identify throughout the book—narcissistic self-erasing, obsessional eliminative, and hysterical role-manipulative—and introduces a lengthy case study of "Anna," a victim of all three. Chapters three through five discuss the establishment of U.S. policy against child abuse (requiring the reporting of incidents) as well as the intrinsically flawed logic of defining and dealing with abuse as a public health matter. Foremost among the mistakes Young-Bruehl recounts in shaping a cultural response to abuse (an expression of childism) is the diversionary tactic of treating it "as a disease of the child. Not a disease of the abuser that is manifested on the child" (106; original emphasis). The history of child abuse and neglect research and policy is troubled by the unwillingness of adults to blame other adults in defense of children; as a result, Young-Bruehl joins others in arguing [End Page 127] that "an anti-child political elite inspired by Richard Nixon and then led by Ronald Reagan had defeated or rolled back every concrete pro-child program generated since Head Start began in the 1960s" (141). Complicating such shifts was the growing misperception among Americans that defending child rights interfered with parental rights and so-called family values. In providing a critical perspective on policies affecting children in the US, this book should be of interest to those wanting greater political understanding of the historical context behind literary study. Chapter six, "Forms of Childism in Families," offers a more complicated explanation of how the various forms of childism manifest and develop in family dynamics. Whereas Young-Bruehl's description of Anna in chapter two sets a concrete example of extreme abuse, this chapter...

<i>The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: The Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: The Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics Daniel McArthur (bio) Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: The Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics. New York: Routledge, 2011. 288 pp. ISBN13: 978-0-415-77627-1. $35.00 (pbk.) Book reviews in this journal usually proceed by considering the value of the book in question for Dewey scholarship. In this case I would rather say that this book is of interest to Dewey scholars. Jackson’s general project is heavily informed by Dewey’s pluralistic brand of pragmatism. As Jackson notes “Dewey’s Logic . . . stand[s] firmly in the tradition leading to this book” (216). Dewey scholars will greet Jackson’s extension of this approach to the study of international relations warmly. Over the last thirty years, international relations specialists have debated the merits of a variety of methodological and philosophical options while at the same time a dominant theme has been to make the field as “scientific” as possible. Philosophers will, of course, find much in this debate familiar as it mirrors many of the controversies that have taken place in the philosophy of science over the same period. International Relations (IR) theorists find themselves disputing, along with their philosophical counterparts, the nature of the scientific method and the merits of scientific realism versus its empiricist, historicist, and social constructivist rivals. Jackson’s project is a worthwhile attempt not only to trace out the philosophical disputes that are of importance to IR scholars, but also to learn from the debates and to provide a coherent approach to methodological questions. I think IR theorists will find Jackson’s book a useful place to start when approaching the [End Page 97] philosophical issues in their field, and they will find Jackson’s recommendations congenial. Jackson’s most important conclusion is that no single methodology or philosophical understanding of the scientific method ought to dominate the field. The goals of the particular IR study in question and the context of the research need to be considered when deciding on the appropriate approach. In this Jackson proposes that competing methodological proposals be considered and negotiated in a pluralistic philosophical context. To help the IR theorist do this, much of Jackson’s book takes up the task of laying out a neat (if sometimes controversial) taxonomy of the various options, each one associated with various philosophical traditions, ontological commitments and epistemological proposals. Jackson proposes four main categories: neopositivism, critical realism, analyticism and reflexivity. Neopositivism, according to Jackson, is the dominant approach but it is faced by lively rivals. Neopositivism has its origins in empiricist philosophy stretching back to Hume and before, leading through Compte to the logical positivists of the twentieth century. In IR, this school of thought seeks to discover covering laws that cover cases of international relations (an example is the hypothesis that genuinely democratic states do not resort to warfare in settling disputes). Since experiments are impossible, similar cases are compared against one another (varying only in the key variables under study, such as the presence of democracy). This is done in order to determine if the cases obey postulated laws. Neopositivism is associated with ontological commitments to an objective reality, a strongly empiricist epistemology and an aversion to theoretical posits or entities that cannot be observed. Critical realism reflects the recent postpositivist philosophies of science that have been critical of the antimetaphysical attitude of positivism. It seeks not just covariant laws but the genuine causes of phenomena as well. While similar in many respects to neopositivism in her commitment to empirical methods and a mind independent reality, the realist wants to go beyond the directly observable. While a positivist might agree that salt dissolves in water, a realist will want to claim that salt always has the unobservable disposition of solubility, even when it is sitting dry on the table. Reference to such dispositions becomes important in realist IR case studies. Analiticity and reflexivity have their origins in idealist and various other non-empiricist philosophical traditions. Key features include their rejection of dualist distinctions between mind...

Yemen’s last Zaydī Imām: the shabāb al-muʾmin, the Malāzim, and ‘hizb allāh’ in the thought of Ḥusayn Badr al-Dīn al-Ḥūthī

Excerpted from the manuscript of a forthcoming book project, this article provides essential English-language source material on Ḥusayn Badr al-Dῑn al- Ḥῡthῑ and an alternative framework to that of the mainstream media for exploring what are likely the genuine causes and nature of the wars against Ṣaꜥdah, Yemen, undertaken with backing and technical assistance from the United States, if not direct complicity in the name of then President George W. Bush’s administration’s ‘war on terror’. In addition to shedding light on the voluminous Malāzim of Ḥusayn Badr al-Dῑn and providing analysis of its various influences including Khomeini and Lebanon’s Ḥizb Allāh, while at the same time demonstrating a lack of evidence for direct support by either Ḥizb Allaāh or Iran, the article examines the distinct Jārῡdῑ Zaydῑ nature of the only contemporary Zaydῑ political discourse and formulation of its kind, which is distinct from Twelver Shῑꜥism and antithetical to the ‘wilaāyat al-faqῑ h’ in Iran. The article examines the origins of the Lebanese group known as al-Shabā b al-Muࣿmin that would later evolve into Ḥizb Allāh and the history of Yemen’s Tanẓῑm al-Shabāb al-Muࣿmin from which al-Hῡthῑ would draw his core group of supporters, and it aims to decipher the nature of the relation between al-Hῡthῑ’s thought and Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran as well as its grounding in the Jārῡdῑ Zaydῑ sect and the Zaydῑyah at large. The article includes excerpts from an interview with Ayatollah Mu ḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlallah on the subject, new statements from the Office of Abd al-Mālik al- Hῡthῑ in Ṣaꜥdah, and in-depth analysis of the Malāzim with exhaustive citations in translation – all never before published – all of which provide essential reading for understanding the objective historical conditions as well as the political, cultural, tribal, ideological, and sectarian dimensions of the wars against Ṣaꜥdah.

Epicurus on Freedom (review)

Reviewed by: Epicurus on Freedom Mi-Kyoung Lee Tim O’Keefe. Epicurus on Freedom. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. x + 175. Cloth, $70.00. Epicurus is usually credited with being the first to recognize, and disavow, determinism as a threat to freedom of the will (see Pamela Huby, “The First Discovery of the Freewill Problem,” Philosophy 42 [1967]: 353–62). This common assumption has recently come under attack by Susanne Bobzien (“Did Epicurus Discover the Free Will Problem?”, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 19 [2000], 287–337; see also David Furley, “Aristotle and Epicurus on Voluntary Action,” Two Studies in Greek Atomism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967]), and now also by Tim O’Keefe, who, in this rigorously argued but eminently readable book, examines the extant evidence for Epicurus’ views, and concludes that Epicurus was not concerned with the “modern” problem of free will at all. On the traditional picture, Epicurus recognized that freedom of the will is incompatible with determinism: if the agent’s will is free, then her decisions and choices cannot be fully determined by preceding causes—it must be genuinely open to her to do otherwise than she does. But determinism tells us that every decision and choice is fully determined by preceding causes, which form an uninterrupted causal chain with other factors in the environment and past history of the agent. Hence, determinism and freedom of the will are incompatible. O’Keefe agrees with Bobzien’s contention that although Epicurus rejected the thesis of determinism, it was not because he thought it presented a challenge to freedom of the will—that is, the freedom to decide whether to do or not to do some action, which Bobzien calls “two-sided freedom of the will.” O’Keefe largely agrees with Bobzien’s argument that Epicurus, as well as Aristotle and his other contemporaries, held a conception of agency and moral responsibility which does not require two-sided freedom of the will. Epicurus did not espouse what Bobzien calls the “independent-decision-faculty model of agency,” which sharply distinguishes the deciding self from all factors, both internal and external, which could potentially determine one’s action. On this model, the “free” agent is completely undetermined by all internal and external causal factors. By contrast, Epicurus, like Aristotle, held the “whole-person model of agency,” according to which the agent is identified with the whole person, including her beliefs, memories, character dispositions, desires, and emotions. On this model, it is a necessary condition of my volitions being mine that they be fully caused by me as an agent and determined by the disposition of my mind. We aspire not to be free of any causally determining factors, but rather to act in such a way that our actions are fully determined by the right internal factors, i.e., by reason (note that there is nothing incompatible with determinism in the story so far). As O’Keefe puts it, “it is both much more plausible and more charitable to ascribe to Epicurus a concern to defend rational agency rather than libertarian free will” (8). Epicurus does go on to reject determinism because of the threat it poses to rational agency; he was worried, according to O’Keefe, about the fatalism which he thought results from logical determinism, in the form of the Principle of Bivalence, according to which every proposition, even propositions about the future, is either true or false. Thus, O’Keefe stresses the parallels between Aristotle’s discussion of bivalence in De Interpretatione, 9 and Cicero’s discussion of Epicurus in his De fato. Epicurus thought that the Principle of Bivalence implies, given an Interentailment Thesis—namely, a bridge thesis between logical [End Page 315] and causal determinism—that future propositions are true, and true in virtue of some facts about the present that are sufficient conditions for that future proposition’s being true. Hence, there are facts now that are sufficient to make that future proposition true. But this implies fatalism: our decisions will not make any difference to what happens, we will not be genuine causes of what happens, and our reasoning will not be causally efficacious (see chapter 3 for discussion...

Genetic structure and diversity of European flint maize populations determined with SSR analyses of individuals and bulks

Landraces of maize represent a valuable genetic resource for breeding and genetic studies. Using simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers, we analysed five flint maize populations from Central Europe that had played an important role in the pre-hybrid era in Germany. Our objectives were to (1) investigate the molecular genetic diversity within and among the populations based on the SSR analysis of individuals, (2) compare these results of the SSR analysis based on individuals with those based on bulks, (3) examine genotype frequencies for deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) at individual loci, and (4) test for linkage disequilibrium (LD) between pairs of loci within populations. Thirty individuals and their bulked DNA per population were fingerprinted with 55 SSR markers. Across all populations, 46.7% of the SSR markers deviated significantly from HWE, with an excess of homozygosity in 97% of the cases. This excess of homozygosity can largely be explained by experimental errors during the amplification of SSRs apart from genuine genetic causes. Allele frequencies of the SSR analyses of individuals and bulks were significantly correlated (r=0.85, P< 0.01), suggesting that SSR analysis of bulks is very cost-effective for large-scale molecular characterisation of germ plasm collections. No evidence for genome-wide LD among pairs of loci was observed, indicating that the populations are well suited for high resolution association mapping studies.

On mosques and malls: Understanding Khomeinism as a source of counter-hegemonic resistance to the spread of global consumer culture

Recent work on globalisation, in particular that of Leslie Sklair, has identified the culture-ideology of consumerism as the life-blood of global capitalism. As such, the most significant challenge to the hegemony of globalisation would be a political movement characterised by an anti-consumerist ethos. While many look to the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement for such a counter-hegemonic force, I argue that this movement is too disparate, and does not enjoy any meaningful focus on the genuine causes and social infrastructure of consumerism. Thus, I suggest we must look elsewhere if we are interested in identifying a truly counter-hegemonic anti-consumerist political movement. My main assertion is that some forms of contemporary radical Islam represent such a challenge. To support this assertion, I discursively explore the key cultural-historical themes and aspects of Shi'ism, ideological discourses in twentieth-century Iran, and the rhetoric and policies of the Khomeinist state, in an attempt to illustrate their anti-consumerist tenets and consequences.

Knowing causes: Descartes on the world of matter

In this essay, we discuss how Descartes arrive s a t his mature vi ew of material caus ation. Descartes’ position changes over time in some very radical ways. The last section spells out his final position as to how causation works in the world of material objects. When considering Descartes’ causal theories, it is useful to distinguish between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ causation. The vertical perspective addresses God’s relation to creation. God is essential being, and every being other than God depends upon God in order to exist and to continue in existence .Thus, from the vertical perspective, the act of creating and fact of coming into existence are co-extensive notions. This metaphy sical/theological framework is the basis of Descartes’ commitment to three interrelated notions: that genuine causes and effects occur simultaneously; that causing is appropriately the case only when the cause is acting; and the view that God is the efficient, total, and continuous cause of everything that exists and every action that occurs. So from the vertical perspective, things are nothing without God’s continuous creation, and there is a problem in articulating how they are said to have independent being and causal efficacy. It is in terms of these commitments that Descartes’ views on horizontal, or material, causation must be approached. We will make apparent the radical extent to which his account of intra-worldly causation abandons his earlier and more traditional views about material causation. To this end we discuss Desca rtes’ jou rney to his mature position by emphasizing the gr owing epistemic limitations of his philosophy, which culminate in wh at we call his epistemic stance.