Taking Soundings

Shadow Sophia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Celia E. Deane-Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Current Literature ◽  
Moral Evil ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Natural Evil ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
The Common ◽  
Distorted Form ◽  
Early Human ◽  
Evolutionary Explanations

This chapter introduces themes that are important throughout this work. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin continues to hold sway for many theologians and the chapter briefly discusses recent works that have taken his thinking seriously in the light of evolution. The chapter also begins to map the relationships between sin, evil, natural evil, and moral evil. This blurring between natural and moral evil represents the most recent example of why an adequate understanding of sin that takes account of humanity’s embedded relationship with the natural world is so important. The chapter begins with a very brief discussion of shame, conscience, and evolutionary explanations of religion in early human societies. Following this is a brief review of Western theological explanations for the persistence of evil through a review of current literature on original sin. The chapter then argues, following traditional sources, that sin is worth exploring in order to understand virtue; in other words, an exploration of vices helps to elucidate the meaning of virtues. The chapter then comments on the common dichotomy between natural and moral evil and argues for a much greater blurring of that boundary in thinking through the biocultural origins of sin and guilt. J.M. Coetze’s novel Disgrace captures the complex and ambiguous interlacing of human sin and animality. The rest of the present volume intends to show more clearly what that blurring signifies as well as the distinctive nature of human sin and its symbolic character, which has semiotic properties amounting to a grossly distorted form of wisdom, shadow sophia.

The Decision Support System in Selecting The Characteristics of Coffee By Using Analytic Hierarcy Process Method

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-63
Author(s):  
Novrini Hasti ◽  
Riswan Fitriyandi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Support ◽  
Decision Support System ◽  
Support System ◽  
System Application ◽  
Ahp Method ◽  
Analytic Hierarchy ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
The Common ◽  
Hierarchy Process ◽  
Process Method

This study is to determine whether the characteristics of coffee flavor can be implemented into a decision support system. In this study, the problem is the difficulty in finding coffee experts with adequate understanding and knowledge of coffee. The purpose is to implement Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to determine the characteristics of coffee flavor and to transfer the knowledge about the taste of coffee to coffee lovers. The expected results are to assist in making a decision support system application in selecting the characteristics of coffee, so that it can provide the advice to the common consumers who want to enjoy and the knowledge about the coffee itself as well.

Critical drivers (CDs) of value management adoption in the Nigerian construction industry

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 250-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lekan Damilola Ojo ◽  
Deji Rufus Ogunsemi
Keyword(s):  
Construction Industry ◽  
Delphi Study ◽  
Survey Method ◽  
Value Management ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
Coefficient Of Concordance ◽  
Concordance Test ◽  
The Common

Purpose This paper aims to assess the drivers of value management (VM) in the Nigerian construction industry with a view to identify the critical ones through Delphi study. Design/methodology/approach A team of 15 carefully selected experts in VM were engaged in two rounds of Delphi survey, and the responses of the survey were analyzed with descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation and mode). Kendall’s coefficient of concordance test and Chi-square (χ2) test were also used to test the level of consensus amongst the respondents at the two rounds of the survey to draw inference. Interrater agreement analysis and significant level analysis were further used to determine the criticality of critical drivers. Findings The critical drivers to VM adoption are adequate understanding of the benefits of VM, higher/postgraduate programme that teaches VM technique, professional’s previous experience with VM, collaboration of all construction professional bodies in Nigeria and VM training. Originality/value This paper used opinions of VM experts only to achieve the aim of this study as against the common survey method in which respondents who are not knowledgeable in the area of research might fill the questionnaire.

Integrity Protection of Mobile Agent Data

2009 ◽  
pp. 2715-2724
Author(s):  
Sheng-Uei Guan
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Current Literature ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Data Integrity ◽  
Data Encryption ◽  
Agent Technology ◽  
Session Key ◽  
The Common ◽  
Malicious Host

One hindrance to the widespread adoption of mobile-agent technology is the lack of security. Security will be the issue that has to be addressed carefully if mobile agents are to be used in the field of electronic commerce. SAFER (secure agent fabrication, evolution and roaming) is a mobile-agent framework that is specially designed for the purpose of electronic commerce (Guan & Hua, 2003; Guan, Zhu, & Maung, 2004; Zhu, Guan, Yang, & Ko, 2000). Security has been a prime concern from the first day of our research (Guan & Yang, 2002; Yang & Guan, 2000). By building strong and efficient security mechanisms, SAFER aims to provide a trustworthy framework for mobile agents to assist users in conducting mobile or electronic-commerce transactions. Agent integrity is one such area crucial to the success of agent technology (Wang, Guan, & Chan, 2002). Despite the various attempts in the literature, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of data integrity so far. Some of the common weaknesses of the current schemes are vulnerabilities to revisit attacks, when an agent visits two or more collaborating malicious hosts during one roaming session, and illegal modifi- cation (deletion or insertion) of agent data. The agent monitoring protocol (AMP; Chionh, Guan, & Yang, 2001), an earlier proposal under SAFER to address agent data integrity, does address some of the weaknesses in the current literature. Unfortunately, the extensive use of PKI (public-key infrastructure) technology introduces too much overhead to the protocol. Also, AMP requires the agent to deposit its data collected to the agent owner or butler before it roams to another host. While this is a viable and secure approach, the proposed approach, Secure Agent Data Integrity Shield (SADIS), will provide an alternative by allowing the agent to carry the data by itself without depositing them (or the data hash) onto the butler. Besides addressing the common vulnerabilities of current literature (revisit attacks and data-modification attacks), SADIS also strives to achieve maximum efficiency without compromising security. It minimizes the use of PKI technology and relies on symmetric key encryption as much as possible. Moreover, the data encryption key and the communication session key are both derivable from a key seed that is unique to the agent’s roaming session in the current host. As a result, the butler can derive the communication session key and data encryption key directly. Another feature in SADIS is strong security. Most of the existing research works focus on detecting integrity compromise (Esparza, Muñoz, Soriano, & Fomé, 2006) or bypassing integrity attacks by requiring the existence of a cooperating agent that is carried out within a trusted platform (Ouardani, Pierre, & Boucheneb, 2006). However, these works neglect the need to identify the malicious host. With SADIS, the agent butler will not only be able to detect any compromise to data integrity, but will identify the malicious host effectively.

THE POLITICAL NEEDS OF A TOOLMAKING ANIMAL: MADISON, HAMILTON, LOCKE, AND THE QUESTION OF PROPERTY

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Paul A. Rahe
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Common

When Benjamin Franklin suggested that man is by nature a tool-making animal, he summed up what was for his fellow Americans the common sense of the matter. It is not, then, surprising that, when Britain's colonists in North America broke with the mother country over the issue of an unrepresentative parliament's right to tax and govern the colonies, they defended their right to the property they owned on the ground that it was in a most thorough-going sense an extension of themselves: the fruits of their own labor. This understanding they learned from John Locke, who based the argument of his Two Treatises of Government on the unorthodox account of providence and of man's place within the natural world that Sir Francis Bacon had been the first to articulate. All of this helps explain why the framers of the American constitution included within it a clause giving sanction to property in ideas of practical use.

Geoffrey Hill’s Poetic Incarnational Theology

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 110-131
Author(s):  
Jesse Russell
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
Existential Choice ◽  
Incarnational Theology

Abstract Geoffrey Hill’s poems are saturated with the cluttered bleakness of the nihilistic view of the natural world, but in Hill’s own Christian incarnational theology it is precisely this filthy world into which Christ was incarnated in order to redeem humans from Original Sin. Fortified with but also rattled by the Incarnation and the doctrine of Original Sin, in his poems Hill is faced with the profound, agonizing existential choice to embrace Christ or reject Christianity as a farce, and it is this perilous pose that serves as the theological grounding of the oeuvre the man who now, sadly, was the greatest contemporary Christian poet.

scholarly journals A strawberry, an animal cry and a human subject: Where existential semiotics, biosemiotics and relational metaphysics seem to meet one another

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3/4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Machtyl
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Common Space ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Common

The article discus ses some semiotic approaches to the relation between nature and culture. Starting with outlining the structuralistic approach to this issue, especially the ideas of Juri Lotman and Algirdas Julien Greimas, the author finds parallels between different views on the relation between the natural world and human beings. First, the juxtaposition of Eero Tarasti’s existential semiotics with selected concepts of biosemiotics is discussed. The following part of the paper is dedicated to Bruno Latour’s ideas on nature–culture relation, hybrids and mediations. Then the author refers to Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere as the common space for all living and inanimate elements. Closing the paper with a return to biosemiotics, the author comes back to Tarasti’s ideas and compares these with some ideas in biosemiotics, paying special attention to the concepts of unpredictability, choice and dynamics. The comparison shows that some intuitions, assumptions and theses of these different scholars turn out to be surprisingly convergent. The author believes that the outlined parallels between Tarasti’s view, Latour’s and Lotman’s concepts, and biosemiotics may be promising for further research, inviting detailed study.

scholarly journals Climate as a Concern or a Heritage? Addressing the legal structural roots of climate emergency

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-134
Author(s):  
Paulo Magalhães
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Governance System ◽  
Paper Briefly ◽  
Common Concern ◽  
Structural Roots ◽  
The Common

When, in the 1980s, climate change entered into the UN agenda, the first question raised was: "What is the climate from a legal point of view?" After the Maltese proposal of 1988 to recognize “Climate as Common Heritage of Humankind”, the adopted UN resolution considered climate as “common concern of humanity”. The concern approach has transformed the positive approach of the Maltese initiative on “the heritage” into a negative approach of a damage containment and sharing system with an undefined obligation to cooperate. This fact makes it technically impossible to build an economy capable of producing positive impacts to recover a well-functioning of the Earth System, and consequently a stable climate. The fact is it fails to build an economic and governance system around the maintenance in a favorable condition of a common good that although intangible exists in natural world and is the very support of life. This paper briefly explores the legal origin of the climate negotiating deadlock resulting from the common concern approach, and the economic and social consequences of the legal non-existence of climate, i.e. a well-functioning Earth System, and points out to the concept of heritage as a way to overcome the obstacles that have prevented collective action.

Why Cooperate?

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas N. Sherratt ◽  
David M. Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Kin Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Selfish Gene ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
Vampire Bats ◽  
The Common

An altruistic act is one in which an individual incurs a cost that results in a benefit to others. Giving money or time to those less fortunate than ourselves is one example, as is giving up one’s seat on a bus. At first, one might consider such behaviour hopelessly naive in a world in which natural selection seemingly rewards selfishness in the competitive struggle for existence. As the saying goes, ‘nice guys finish last’. Yet examples of apparent altruism are commonplace. Meerkats will spend hours in the baking sun keeping lookout for predators that might attack their colony mates. Vampire bats will regurgitate blood to feed their starving roost fellows, while baboons will take the time and effort to groom other baboons. Some individuals, such as honeybee workers, forego their own reproduction to help their queen and will even die in her defence. The common gut bacterium Escherichia coli commits suicide when it is infected by a bacteriophage, thereby protecting its clones from being infected. If helping incurs a cost, then surely an individual that accepts a cooperative act yet gives nothing in return would do better than cooperators? What, then, allows these cases of apparent altruism to persist? In his last presidential address to the Royal Society of London in November 2005, Robert M. May argued, ‘The most important unanswered question in evolutionary biology, and more generally in the social sciences, is how cooperative behaviour evolved and can be maintained’. In this chapter, we document a number of examples of cooperation in the natural world and ask how it is maintained despite the obvious evolutionary pressure to ‘cheat’. We will see that, while it is tempting to see societies as some form of higher organism, to fully understand cooperation, it helps to take a more reductionist view of the world, frequently a gene-centred perspective. Indeed, thinking about altruism has led to one of the greatest triumphs of the ‘selfish gene’ approach, namely the theory of kin selection. Ultimately, as the quote from Mandeville indicates, we will see that cooperation frequently arises simply out of pure self-interest—it just so happens that individuals (or, more precisely, genes) in the business of helping themselves sometimes help others.

Tokens of Love

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-421
Author(s):  
Yaakov A. Mascetti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
The Third ◽  
De Doctrina Christiana ◽  
The Common ◽  
Political Radicalism

Abstract The third and final installment of this book-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation” treats two further writers in seventeenth-century England whose work is not representative of any stance or discourse that contextualist historians have recognized as available in that era. In Aemelia Lanyer's poetry, we find a resistance to established perspectives that is related to her sense that divine signification is always incomplete and that, therefore, the diffidence of female cognition is superior, when approaching religious texts, to the assertive mentality that she associates with men. Despite his sex, however, and his reputation for theological and political radicalism, Milton too explicitly contends that the interpretation of scripture should always be “non-committal” because its signification is always incomplete. The “very magnitude” of the “great mystery” of the Incarnation, Milton argues in De Doctrina Christiana, should encourage the reader's mind to stand on “guard from the outset” against the tendency to make “rash or hasty assertions.” The urge to tamper with, pry into, add to, or hasten to understand the signifiers of divine meaning is shown, in Paradise Lost, to be the original sin of the first human couple. As much as for Lanyer, then, sex is for Milton bound up with hermeneutics—and, for both poets, the individual's relationship with God is a consuming passion, about which one may report a phenomenology of affects but can offer no contentions or arguments.

scholarly journals The possibility of a free-will defence for the problem of natural evil

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. J. MAWSON
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Evil ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Natural Evil ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Natural Means ◽  
The Way

In this paper, I consider various arguments to the effect that natural evils are necessary for there to be created agents with free will of the sort that the traditional free-will defence for the problem of moral evil suggests we enjoy – arguments based on the idea that evil-doing requires the doer to use natural means in their agency. I conclude that, despite prima facie plausibility, these arguments do not, in fact, work. I provide my own argument for there being no possible world in which creatures enjoying this sort of freedom exist yet suffer no natural evil, and conclude that the way is thus open for extending the free-will defence to the problem of natural evil.

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