The Execution of the Innocent

Radelet and Bedau discuss the continuing and regular incidence of American trial courts sentencing innocent defendants to death, which was one of the problems that gave rise to the ABA\u27s moratorium on capital punishment

A Retributive Theory of the Pardoning Power?

During the past two decades; the retributive theory of punishment has made remarkable strides in recapturing the affections of penologists. The story has been told elsewhere and need not be reviewed here. For philosophers, if not for others interested in the theory and practice of punishment, a retributive approach holds a double attraction

The philosophical doctrines in Tertullian's De Anima.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityThis thesis is an attempt to examine the treatise De Anima written by Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus circa A. D. 210. Special attention is paid to the sources for his doctrines, both Christian and non-Christian, as well as the influences this treatise had on later medieval thought. The systematic presentation of Tertullian's views is not construed to mean that Tertullian produced a really systematic philosophy in De Anima. One thread runs continuously through the thesis, namely, the problem of faith and intellect, revelation and reason, which occurs in every context and influences the actual philosophical positions adopted by Tertullian. [TRUNCATED

The Precarious Sovereignty of Rights

This paper argues that the typical theory of human rights is both defective and misleading. It is misleading insofar as the rights that these theories generate are not the powerful moral swords and shields that their advocates take them to be. It is defective insofar as it fails to confront the chief sources of trouble for theories of rights. In sum, rights do not have the finality in human affairs that is often claimed for them

Multivariate Granger Causality and Generalized Variance

Granger causality analysis is a popular method for inference on directed interactions in complex systems of many variables. A shortcoming of the standard framework for Granger causality is that it only allows for examination of interactions between single (univariate) variables within a system, perhaps conditioned on other variables. However, interactions do not necessarily take place between single variables, but may occur among groups, or "ensembles", of variables. In this study we establish a principled framework for Granger causality in the context of causal interactions among two or more multivariate sets of variables. Building on Geweke's seminal 1982 work, we offer new justifications for one particular form of multivariate Granger causality based on the generalized variances of residual errors. Taken together, our results support a comprehensive and theoretically consistent extension of Granger causality to the multivariate case. Treated individually, they highlight several specific advantages of the generalized variance measure, which we illustrate using applications in neuroscience as an example. We further show how the measure can be used to define "partial" Granger causality in the multivariate context and we also motivate reformulations of "causal density" and "Granger autonomy". Our results are directly applicable to experimental data and promise to reveal new types of functional relations in complex systems, neural and otherwise.Comment: added 1 reference, minor change to discussion, typos corrected; 28 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, LaTe