Theories of Natural Law in the Culture of Advanced Modernity

En este artículo, MacIntyre describe algunos problemas relevantes de la Modernidad Avanzada, incluyendo la falta de bienes compartidos y algunos puntos discutibles de algunas de las principales teorías del derecho natural. MacIntyre discute las doctrinas de Hart, MacCormick, Weinreb, Moore, Finnis, Grisez y Maritain. MacIntyre presenta su propia teoría como una reformulación de la visión tomística de Maritain.In this article MacIntyre describes some relevant problems of the Advanced Modernity, including the lack of shared goods and some inconveniences of the main doctrines of Natural Law. MacIntyre discusses the doctrines of Hart, MacCormick, Weinreb, Moore, Finnis, Grisez and Maritain. Finally, MacIntyre presents his own theory as a reformulation of the thomistic vision of Maritain

What Has Ethics To Learn From Medical Ethics?

SUNY BrockportPhilosophic Exchang

Spectres in the studio : Time, memory and the artist's haunted imagination

I spent a week in a haunted house and that is what inspired this project. I then discovered hauntology. Hauntology is a concept that was developed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida and articulated in his 1993 lecture Specters of Marx. Hauntology is a theory reliant on time, where the historical past and the envisaged future bleed in to the present moment. A concept that recognises the ghosts of the past that are bound to return again and again to haunt the mind, as well as spectres that represent expectant futures that did not eventuate. While hauntology (also known as spectral studies) has been used as a thematic device in the fields of music and literature as both a creative and a critical tool, it has not been utilised to the same degree in the visual arts. This PhD by creative project aims to correct that by using hauntology as a framework through which to explore my own visual art practice. To do this I have made a body of work that reflects my own life experience and memories as read through a hauntological sensibility. By beginning with an overview of hauntology and then reflecting on the recursive nature of memory evidenced throughout my previous artworks, I suggest in this thesis that hauntology is an interesting and revealing framework through which to better understand the nature of both my art practice and contemporary art practice in general. In my discussion, I examine the parallel themes of memory and collapsed time, as well as motifs such as the ‘white-sheet ghost’ and abandoned domestic spaces. Inspired by this research, I have created a body of work using hauntology as my visual framework, exploring my own haunted memories and moments in time from my own past (that I have never attempted to do previously). One of my aims was to address certain incidents and moments from my own life that have stayed with me, and how my haunted imagination can inform my art practice. The creation of artworks about these past events neither dulls nor exorcises the memories but allows the artist to better comprehend the range and depth of human experience and the way it contributes to, haunts, our subjectivity both in the present and, probably, in the future. The final body of work was exhibited on the Australian Catholic University campus in Brisbane to complete this project

Pathfinder cells provide a novel therapeutic intervention for acute kidney injury

Pathfinder cells (PCs) are a novel class of adult-derived cells that facilitate functional repair of host tissue. We used rat PCs to demonstrate that they enable the functional mitigation of ischemia reperfusion (I/R) injury in a mouse model of renal damage. Female C57BL/6 mice were subjected to 30 min of renal ischemia and treated with intravenous (i.v.) injection of saline (control) or male rat pancreas-derived PCs in blinded experimentation. Kidney function was assessed 14 days after treatment by measuring serum creatinine (SC) levels. Kidney tissue was assessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) for markers of cellular damage, proliferation, and senescence (TUNEL, Ki67, p16ink4a, p21). Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) was performed to determine the presence of any rat (i.e., pathfinder) cells in the mouse tissue. PC-treated animals demonstrated superior renal function at day 14 post-I/R, in comparison to saline-treated controls, as measured by SC levels (0.13 mg/dL vs. 0.23 mg/dL, p<0.001). PC-treated kidney tissue expressed significantly lower levels of p16ink4a in comparison to the control group (p=0.009). FISH analysis demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of repaired kidney tissue was mouse in origin. Rat PCs were only detected at a frequency of 0.02%. These data confirm that PCs have the ability to mitigate functional damage to kidney tissue following I/R injury. Kidneys of PC-treated animals showed evidence of improved function and reduced expression of damage markers. The PCs appear to act in a paracrine fashion, stimulating the host tissue to recover functionally, rather than by differentiating into renal cells. This study demonstrates that pancreatic-derived PCs from the adult rat can enable functional repair of renal damage in mice. It validates the use of PCs to regenerate damaged tissues and also offers a novel therapeutic intervention for repair of solid organ damage in situ

Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief – in contexts where it becomes an identity marker – is bound up with relational practices of belief, such that distinctions between “belief in” and “belief that” are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals