Difficulties of Simplicity

This paper attempts to show that the doctrine of divine simplicity suffers from difficulties which undermine its plausibility. The main difficulties explored are Plantinga’s problem of double identification, Pruss’ multiple attributes problem, and Schmitt’s co-specificity problem. In more recent years, defenders of the doctrine have offered a way out of these problems by interpreting it in light of a truthmaker account of predication. This paper analyzes this recent defense, among others, and attempts to show that this new interpretation of divine simplicity still has problems which undermine the plausibility of the doctrine

The Genetic, Social, & Behavioral Factors That Motivate Parents to Abuse their Children

This paper examines the influence of economic, genetic, behavioral, and social factors on the parental choice to abuse one’s child. I derive a choice model for the parents based on McFadden’s (1974) conditional logit model. Within society, the parent or parents not only bear the responsibility for their child’s well being, but also for ensuring the child will grow up to be an educated, productive member of society. Through the examination of individual parent and child behavior patterns, as well as numerous social and economic factors from the Physical Violence in American Families Survey of 1985, I show that after a child behaves in a certain manner, the parent chooses to abuse based on numerous social, economic, and genetic variables. Child abuse is a social problem that has not been examined heavily in the field of economics, but with the help of econometric analysis I examine how behavior and social trends can increase the probability of child abuse. Hopefully this analysis will lead to suggestions on how to remedy this problem. [excerpt

A q-analog of Euler's decomposition formula for the double zeta function

The double zeta function was first studied by Euler in response to a letter from Goldbach in 1742. One of Euler's results for this function is a decomposition formula, which expresses the product of two values of the Riemann zeta function as a finite sum of double zeta values involving binomial coefficients. In this note, we establish a q-analog of Euler's decomposition formula. More specifically, we show that Euler's decomposition formula can be extended to what might be referred to as a ``double q-zeta function'' in such a way that Euler's formula is recovered in the limit as q tends to 1.Comment: 6 page

Strategies of Political Institutions and Civil Society Actors in the Post-3/11 Era: The Case of Japan

Japan is at a crossroads of public administration and disaster management, especially in the aftermath of the catastrophic events of March 11, 2011: a major earthquake near Tōhoku, and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility. There have been advocates for more top-down governance to handle such crises (and the ongoing residuals of such crises), while others have touted more decentralization—that is, more governance at the local level. Nevertheless, Japan still faced myriad public policy challenges three years after the catastrophic events. This article investigates the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Japan’s local governance in the aftermath of March 11, 2011, addressing broadly the theme of disaster management and, more specifically, the impact (or lack thereof) of NGOs (nonprofits) on the local governance processes in Japan in the midst of the debates regarding top-down and bottom-up approaches to disaster management