Child-rearing With Minimal Domination: A Republican Account

Parenting involves an extraordinary degree of power over children. Republicans are concerned about domination, which, on one view, is the holding of power that fails to track the interests of those over whom it is exercised. On this account, parenting as we know it is dominating due to the low standards necessary for acquiring and retaining parental rights and the extent of parental power. Domination cannot be fully eliminated from child-rearing without unacceptable loss of value. Most likely, republicanism requires that we minimise children’s domination. I examine alternative models of child-rearing that are immune to republican criticism

Children's Vulnerability and Legitimate Authority Over Children

Children's vulnerability gives rise to duties of justice towards children and determines when authority over them is legitimately exercised. I argue for two claims. First, children's general vulnerability to objectionable dependency on their caregivers entails that they have a right not to be subject to monopolies of care, and therefore determines the structure of legitimate authority over them. Second, children's vulnerability to the loss of some special goods of childhood determines the content of legitimate authority over them. My interest is in the so-far little-discussed goods of engaging in world discovery, artistic creation, philosophical pursuits and experimentation with one's self. I call these ‘special goods of childhood’ because individuals, in general, only have full access to them during childhood and they make a distinctive and weighty contribution to wellbeing. Therefore, they are part of the metric of justice towards children. The overall conclusion is that we ought to make good institutional care part of every child's upbringing

Psychic embedding — vision and delusion

The paper introduces the idea that the human brain may apply complex mathematical modules in order to process and understand the world. We speculate that the substrate of what appears outwardly as intuition, or prophetic power, may be a mathematical apparatus such as time-delay embedding. In this context, predictive accuracy may be the reflection of an appropriate choice of the embedding parameters. We further put this in the perspective of mental illness, and search for the possible differences between good intuition and delusive ideation. We speculate that the task at which delusional schizophrenic patients falter is not necessarily of perception, but rather of model selection. Failure of the psychotic patient to correctly choose the embedding parameters may readily lead to misinterpretation of an accurate perception through an altered reconstructed of the object perceived

Parental Leave Provision in Romania between Inherited Tendencies and Legislative Adjustments

This article seeks to identify and analyse the most significant changes regarding parental leave provision in post-communist Romania, as well as the extent to which its legal adjustments that took place after 1990 reveal both old trends inherited from the former political regime as well as new tendencies influenced by EU norms and directives. Consequently, this article has a twofold structure. First, a brief overview of the main concepts and theoretical approaches to parental leave will allow us to proceed to a proper understanding of the epistemological tools underpinning this research object. Second, this article tackles the numerous legislative changes concerning parental leave that occurred after the fall of the communist regime. Although limited to a single category of research sources, this inquiry is indispensable for analysing the extent to which childcare and the gendered division of parental responsibilities have become real political struggles within the post-communist public agenda in Romania

Twisted Poincar\'e Symmetry and Some Implications on Noncommutative Quantum Field Theory

The concept of twisted Poincar\'e symmetry, as well as some implications, are reviewed. The spin-statistics relation and the nonlocality of NC QFT are discussed in the light of this quantum symmetry. The possibility of a twisted symmetry principle for quantum field and gauge theories formulated on a noncommutative space-time is also explored.Comment: Talk given at the 21st Nishinomiya-Yukawa Memorial Symposium on Theoretical Physics "Noncommutative Geometry and Quantum Space-Time in Physics", Nishinomiya-Kyoto, Japan, 11-15 November 200