This study focuses on ecofeminist ethical theory. A first aim is to clarify ecofeminist views on five central issues in the field of environmental ethics. These issues are: (1) Views of nature, (2) social constructivism and nature, (3) values of nature, (4) ethical contextualism, and (5) ethical pluralism. A second aim is to compare ecofeminist standpoints with certain standpoints within nonfeminist environmental ethical theory. A third aim is to critically discuss some of the main standpoints in ecofeminism. The analysis focuses on the works of Karen Warren, Sallie McFague, Chris Cuomo, and Carolyn Merchant. Other important sources are the environmental philosophers and ethicists J. Baird Callicott, Paul Taylor, Irene Klaver, Bryan G. Norton, Christopher Stone, Eugene Hargrove, Holmes Rolston III, Per Ariansen, Don E. Marietta, and Bruno Latour. The result of this study is that there are no main differences between ecofeminism and nonfeminist environmental ethics regarding the main standpoints on the five issues. Rather, the significant differences are found within these main standpoints. In addition, one important characteristic of ecofeminist ethics is its "double nature," that is, the fact that it is rooted in feminism and environmentalism. The double nature of ecofeminism results in a foundation out of which ecofeminism as an environmental philosophy has a unique potential to handle some of the theoretical tensions that environmental ethics creates. From the perspective that environmental problems consist of complex clusters of natureculture- discourse and that environmental ethical theory ought to be action guiding, it is argued that ecofeminist ethical theory has an advantage compared to nonfeminist environmental ethics. This standpoint is explained by the fact that ecofeminism holds a variety of views of nature, kinds of social constructivism and contextualism, and conceptions of values and of the self, and from the presumption that this variety reflects the reality of environmental problems. However, in order for ecofeminist ethical theory to fulfill its promise as an acceptable environmental ethical theory, its theoretical standpoints ought to be explicated and further clarified.

The purpose of this thesis is to apply a name user perspective to the street names of Stockholm, with a focus on knowledge and views about names among the city’s inhabitants. On the basis of interview surveys, a picture is presented of the knowledge and views of Stockholmers regarding their city’s street names and the semantic or thematic name categories to which many of them belong; that is, the study seeks to identify general features of the ways in which the people of the city relate to their street names. Surveys were carried out in seven districts: Hedvig Eleonora parish, Hjorthagen, Fredhäll, Norra Ängby, Årsta, Fruängen and Akalla. A separate survey studied the range and associative properties of street names among Stockholmers not living in the vicinity of the streets in question. General findings emerging from the surveys are that people are very familiar with the names in their local area; that knowledge about these names contributes to their well-being and sense of identity and belonging; that name categories are appreciated and considered to have an orientating function; that names which are seen as elegant or distinguished are regarded as enhancing the image and perceptions of the environment in which they occur; that long names and those made up of several words may be regarded as unwieldy in practical use; and that people need and create names for more limited park and recreational areas, while formally adopted names for larger green spaces are not used or are felt to be unclear in their reference.

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Pattern matching approaches in reverse engineering aim to incorporate domain knowledge and system documentation in the software architecture extraction process, hence provide a user/tool collaborative environment for architectural design recovery. This thesis presents a model and an environment for recovering the high level design of legacy software systems based on user defined architectural patterns and graph matching techniques. In the proposed model, a high-level view of a software system in terms of the system components and their interactions is represented as a query, using a description language. A query is mapped onto a pattern-graph, where a module and its interactions with other modules are represented as a group of graph-nodes and a group of graph-edges, respectively. Interaction constraints can be modeled by the description language as a part of the query. Such a pattern-graph is applied against an entity-relation graph that represents the information extracted from the source code of the software system. An approximate graph matching process performs a series of graph edit operations (i. e. , node/edge insertion/deletion) on the pattern-graph and uses a ranking mechanism based on data mining association to obtain a sub-optimal solution. The obtained solution corresponds to an extracted architecture that complies with the given query. An interactive prototype toolkit implemented as part of this thesis provides an environment for architecture recovery in two levels. First the system is decomposed into a number of subsystems of files. Second each subsystem can be decomposed into a number of modules of functions, datatypes, and variables.

Pattern matching approaches in reverse engineering aim to incorporate domain knowledge and system documentation in the software architecture extraction process, hence provide a user/tool collaborative environment for architectural design recovery. This thesis presents a model and an environment for recovering the high level design of legacy software systems based on user defined architectural patterns and graph matching techniques. In the proposed model, a high-level view of a software system in terms of the system components and their interactions is represented as a query, using a description language. A query is mapped onto a pattern-graph, where a module and its interactions with other modules are represented as a group of graph-nodes and a group of graph-edges, respectively. Interaction constraints can be modeled by the description language as a part of the query. Such a pattern-graph is applied against an entity-relation graph that represents the information extracted from the source code of the software system. An approximate graph matching process performs a series of graph edit operations (i. e. , node/edge insertion/deletion) on the pattern-graph and uses a ranking mechanism based on data mining association to obtain a sub-optimal solution. The obtained solution corresponds to an extracted architecture that complies with the given query. An interactive prototype toolkit implemented as part of this thesis provides an environment for architecture recovery in two levels. First the system is decomposed into a number of subsystems of files. Second each subsystem can be decomposed into a number of modules of functions, datatypes, and variables.

This dissertation re-examines a set of long-standing problems that arise from Aristotle’s defense of kingship in the Politics. Scholars have argued for over a century that Aristotle’s endorsement of sole rule by an individual of outstanding excellence is incompatible with his theory of distributive justice and his very conception of a political community. Previous attempts to resolve this apparent contradiction have failed to ease the deeper tensions between the idea of the polis as a community of free and equal citizens sharing in ruling and being ruled and the vision of absolute kingship in which one man rules over others who are merely ruled. I argue that the so-called “paradox of monarchy” emerges from misconceptions and insufficiently nuanced interpretations of kingship itself and of the more fundamental concepts of community, rule, authority, and citizenship. Properly understood, Aristotelian kingship is not a form of government that concentrates power in the hands of a single individual, but an arrangement in which free citizens willingly invest that individual with a position of supreme authority without themselves ceasing to share in rule. Rather than a muddled appendage tacked on to the Politics out of deference to Macedon or an uncritical adoption of Platonic utopianism, Aristotle’s defense of kingship is a piece of ideal theory that serves in part to undermine the pretensions of actual or would-be monarchs, whether warrior- or philosopher-kings. / text

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