SAS-SPACE
Institute of Historical Research Annual Report 2001-2
Get PDFThe IHR produces a report each year outlining its main activities and achievements. This is the report for academic year 2001-
Mulheres do morro: The Representation of Women in Brazilian Funk
Get PDFDissertation for the MA Area Studies (Latin America) submitted September 2008. Supervisor: David Treele
Globalisation and the English Judiciary
Get PDFChapter by Professor Avrom Sherr, Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies as Woolf Chair in Legal Education
Towards a Nominalist Empiricism
Get PDFThe paper deals with our ability to classify objects as being of a certain kind on the basis of information provided by the senses (empirical classification) and to ascribe empirical predicates to objects on the basis of these classificatory verdicts (empirical predication). I consider, first, the project of construing the episodes in which this ability is exercised as involving universals. I argue that this construal faces epistemological problems concerning our access to the universals that it invokes. I present the empiricist strategy for dealing with these problems by appeal to sensory qualities, and argue that it rests on a mistake. Then I turn to sketching an account of our faculty of empirical classification and predication which doesn't invoke universals. The account takes as its starting point the nominalist construal of sense experience to be found in the work of C. I. Lewis and Nelson Goodman. I argue that this construal has the resources for explaining some of the central features of the practice of empirical predication.Articl
Does God Believe in Human Rights?
Get PDFThis paper considers similarities between types of religious obligation and obligations to observe or address human rights. The paper asks if there are any developing themes or rules to help us to know which, of religion or human rights, trumps the other and if so when? The paper addresses such issues from the background of an Orthodox Jewish approach to human rights. Human rights appear to be cultural rather than rationalist since they are not universal. Since no right is absolute and therefore all rights are relative what happens when religious duties clash with human rights or when the right to practise a religion clashes with some other human right? Three problematic areas of Jewish religious practice are considered: circumcision, kosher treatment and slaughter of animals and the get divorce in which the man has to give the woman the divorce. The law of the State is the one which must be obeyed as a principle of Jewish law. If we are in the world of competing rights or balancing rights then Dworkin has much to say. Cultural and religious dress and traditions are causing problems on the European continent, arranged marriages might be right, but forced marriages wrong. The paper ends with the balanced rights of a Canadian Charter case on a Québecois Succa. Paper delivered by Professor Avrom Sherr, Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at Colloqium on Religion and Human Rights, February 28th 2005, Institute of Commonwealth Studies
Logical Content & Empirical Significance
Get PDFThis paper investigates the possibility of completing a Positivist style account of empirical significance. This is central to the positivists’ core project of demarcating science from metaphysics/the non-cognitively significant/ nonsense. After reviewing various reasons why the quest for a demarcation criterion has long been abandoned, it is argued that none of the traditional objections are compelling. In particular, it is shown that holism, the most widely cited ground for dismissing the possibility of a demarcation criterion, is perfectly compatible with a criterion of empirical significance. What is needed is an account that explains how a claim can be empirically significant within a given theory. It is shown that new research in logic; in particular the account of content developed in Gemes (1994) and (1996) provides machinery that solves the longstanding technical problems faced by Positivists’ attempts to formulate a holistic account of empirical significance.Articl
The banana as icon: Orientalism, violence, and the problem of memory in Fallas's 'Mamita Yunai', Reyes-Manzo's photography and the cultural imagery
Get PDFA dissertation submitted in part-fulfilment of the requirements of the MA in Cultural Memory at the IGRS, 2008-9