“Taking Religion Seriously”? Human Rights and Hijab in Europe— Some Problems of Adjudication

Taking religion seriously.

In the beginning, religion was the central concern of social scientists, who came to a remarkable consensus about the key elements of religion with the notable exceptions of Adam Smith,1 and to lesser extents, Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch.2 Social scientists aimed to explain the persistence of irrational beliefs in the face of modernity. Eventually, the accumulation of unconvincing theories pr...

Taking Rights Seriously

1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a...

Indigenous Law and Gender in South Africa: Taking Human Rights and Cultural Diversity Seriously

Taking tissue seriously means taking communities seriously

BACKGROUND Health research is increasingly being conducted on a global scale, particularly in the developing world to address leading causes of morbidity and mortality. While research interest has increased, building scientific capacity in the developing world has not kept pace. This often leads to the export of human tissue (defined broadly) from the developing to the developed world for analy...

The cognitive revolution in Europe: taking the developmental perspective seriously.

The seeds of the formalization of thought were sown by the French philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century [2]. Descartes argued that thinking is reasoning, and that reason is a chain of simple ideas, linked by applying strict rules of logic. With his ‘cogito ergo sum’, Descartes was the first precursor of cognitive science (even if he was wrong about the dualism of mind and brain). Then,...