MENCIUS\u27 JUN-ZI, ARISTOTLE\u27S MEGALOPSUCHOS, & MORAL DEMANDS TO HELP THE GLOBAL POOR

It is commonly believed that impartial utilitarian moral theories have significant demands that we help the global poor, and that the partial virtue ethics of Mencius and Aristotle do not. This ethical partiality found in these virtue ethicists has been criticized, and some have suggested that the partialistic virtue ethics of Mencius and Aristotle are parochial (i.e., overly narrow in their scope of concern). I believe, however, that the ethics of Mencius and Aristotle are both more cosmopolitan than many presume and also are very demanding. In this paper, I argue that the ethical requirements to help the poor and starving are very demanding for the quintessentially virtuous person in Mencius and Aristotle. The ethical demands to help even the global poor are demanding for Mencius jun-zi (君子chön-tzu / junzi) and Aristotle\u27s megalopsuchos. I argue that both the jun-zi and megalopsuchos have a wide scope of concern for the suffering of poor people. I argue that the relevant virtues of the jun-zi and megalopsuchos are also achievable for many people. The moral views of Mencius and Aristotle come with strong demands for many of us to work harder to alleviate global poverty

The Strength of Abstraction with Predicative Comprehension

Frege's theorem says that second-order Peano arithmetic is interpretable in Hume's Principle and full impredicative comprehension. Hume's Principle is one example of an abstraction principle, while another paradigmatic example is Basic Law V from Frege's Grundgesetze. In this paper we study the strength of abstraction principles in the presence of predicative restrictions on the comprehension schema, and in particular we study a predicative Fregean theory which contains all the abstraction principles whose underlying equivalence relations can be proven to be equivalence relations in a weak background second-order logic. We show that this predicative Fregean theory interprets second-order Peano arithmetic.Comment: Forthcoming in Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. Slight change in title from previous version, at request of referee

James Coupe: today, too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days

Exhibition review article

The image makeover of Learning Resources at Chester College of Higher Education

This is a PDF version of an article published in SCONUL newsletter© 2002. SCONUL newsletter is available online at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publications/newsletterIn 2002, Learning Resources re-developed its user education materials. The library webpages were reorganised and updated, user education guides were updated to a common format and design, and a new logo was developed. The guides were promoted to students at the annual freshers fair. Difficulties with the project and future developments are discussed

Metrics of positive scalar curvature and generalised Morse functions, part II

The surgery technique of Gromov and Lawson may be used to construct families of positive scalar curvature metrics which are parameterised by Morse functions. This has played an important role in the study of the space of metrics of positive scalar curvature on a smooth manifold and its corresponding moduli spaces. In this paper, we extend this technique to work for families of generalised Morse functions, i.e. smooth functions with both Morse and birth-death singularities.Comment: 49 pages, 36 figures. This is a substantial revision of the previous version, containing a number of new result