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Thesis (MA (Philosophy))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / A brief introduction to the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics is based on the Other/other. He argues that we are in an asymmetrical relationship with our neighbour that pre-destines us with ethical responsibility even before consciousness or choice. In the face-to-face encounter an infinity and alterity about our neighbour is revealed, which is irreducible to my ontological grasp and thereby compels me to respond to him. It is also through this relation that our humanity is released as our solipsistic all-for-myself becomes a being-for-the-other. Furthermore, the I is irreplaceable, thereby making each of us ethically responsible for our neighbour to the point of responsibility for his material misery. This paper introduces this stance with the aim to underscore it. A brief discussion on the priority of ethics before ontology in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas The incessant theme of Levinas’ writing over 25 years has been “Ethics as First Philosophy,” which is synonymous with “The Subject’s Ethical Responsibility for his Neighbour.” This paper is a short discussion of this theme of the origin of ethics. Levinas’ arguments on pre-original time, the Infinite, language and human corporeality by which he establishes a subjectivity that is not fundamentally determined by intentionality and self-sameness, but by the proximity of our neighbour, will be considered. For Levinas it is this relation to the Other that answers the question of the meaning of being and is also the first word of words. First Philosophy is accordingly to be found in the face-to-face which is a subordination of knowledge to a mode of meaning beyond totality.

H παρούσα διδακτορική διατριβή σχεδιάστηκε με σκοπό τον έλεγχο του μέτρου της μείωσης της απασχόλησης στη γενική κυβέρνηση κατά τουλάχιστον 150.000 την περίοδο 2012 – 2016. Στόχος αυτής της διδακτορικής διατριβής είναι ο εντοπισμός και η αξιολόγηση των επιδράσεων του συγκεκριμένου μέτρου στην περιουσία του φορέα συνταξιοδότησης των δημοσίων υπαλλήλων, στα δημόσια οικονομικά μεσοπρόθεσμα, καθώς και, στην ύπαρξη και επιβίωση της κοινωνικής ασφάλισης μέσα σε ένα περιβάλλον οικονομικής ύφεσης, στην Ελλάδα. Ο έλεγχος του μέτρου βασίστηκε στην εκπόνηση αναλογιστικής μελέτης η οποία είναι απόλυτα βασισμένη στους νόμους και στα επίσημα στοιχεία του κράτους με ημερομηνία υπολογισμού τον 12/2012. Για τις ανάγκες της δημιουργήθηκε ένα νέο αρχείο δεδομένων με περίπου 120.000 δημοσίους υπαλλήλους από την επεξεργασία δύο διαφορετικών βάσεων δεδομένων καθώς και τη κατάλληλη υπόθεση εργασίας. Χρησιμοποιήθηκαν οι Ελβετικοί αναλογιστικοί πίνακες EVK 2000 σύμφωνα με τις κείμενες δημοσιοϋπαλληλικές διατάξεις συνταξιοδότησης σε συνάρτηση με τον αναλυτικό χάρτη υπηρετούντων δημοσίων υπαλλήλων στις 2.11.2012 και τεχνικό επιτόκιο 3,8% βάσει των αναμενόμενων αποδόσεων των αποθεματικών. Για την αποτίμηση επιλέχθηκε και χρησιμοποιήθηκε η μέθοδος της Προβεβλημένης Πιστούμενης Μονάδας (Projected Unit Credit Method, PUC) γνωστής και ως μέθοδος των δεδουλευμένων παροχών. Σύμφωνα με τη μέθοδο της Προβεβλημένης Πιστούμενης Μονάδας ο τρέχων μισθός του ασφαλισμένου προβάλλεται στην ημερομηνία συνταξιοδότησης του. Για τον έλεγχο της σχέσης δημοσιονομικής πολιτικής και ανάπτυξης χρησιμοποιήθηκε ο δημοσιονομικός πολλαπλασιαστής 2,35 και ποσοστό εσόδων της γενικής κυβέρνησης σαν ποσοστό του Α.Ε.Π το 44,7% σύμφωνα με την Ευρωπαϊκή Επιτροπή για το 2012. Με βάση τις παραδοχές που αναφέρθηκαν, το αποτέλεσμα της αναλογιστικής μελέτης απέδειξε ότι οι επιπτώσεις της μείωσης της απασχόλησης στη γενική κυβέρνηση, εντοπίζονται κυρίως στο ΑΕΠ - δημόσια έσοδα, στην ανεργία – απολύσεις, και στη Κοινωνική Ασφάλιση. Πιο ειδικά, το μέτρο θέτει σε άμεσο κίνδυνο τη βιωσιμότητά Οργανισμών Κοινωνικής Ασφάλιση λόγω της ιδιαίτερα μεγάλης μείωσης των εσόδων τους από ασφαλιστικές εισφορές και από την αύξηση κατά 1,1% του δείκτη ανεργίας με αντίκρισμα την ελάφρυνση των εξόδων του Κρατικού Προϋπολογισμού. Το οικονομικό αποτέλεσμα είναι ότι ελαφρύνει μεν τις δημόσιες δαπάνες κατά 6.337,6 εκ. € με πρόσθετη όμως επιβάρυνση του ΑΕΠ με ποσό της τάξεως των -13.619,2 εκ. €. Αυτό το αποτέλεσμα μπορεί να μεταφραστεί και σε μία σημαντική μείωση των άμεσων εσόδων του Κράτους, χωρίς να υπολογίσουμε τυχόν άλλες επιπτώσεις, για παράδειγμα στην υγεία, στην ανεργία κ.ά. Το τελικό οικονομικό αποτέλεσμα του μέτρου ως κρατικό έσοδο είναι της τάξεως των 249,8 εκ. € το οποίο δεν είναι δυνατόν να αντισταθμίσει το κοινωνικοοικονομικό κόστος της ανεργίας/απόλυσης σε περιβάλλον ύφεσης και ανεργίας με ταυτόχρονο άμεσο κίνδυνο της βιωσιμότητας Οργανισμών Κοινωνικής Ασφάλισης. Από τη μελέτη αποδεικνύεται ότι, το μέτρο υλοποιείται χωρίς τον απαραίτητο σχεδιασμό για το αναμενόμενο αποτέλεσμα στο ΑΕΠ, στα δημόσια έσοδα, στην ανεργία μέσω των απολύσεων, στη Κοινωνική Ασφάλιση. Ακόμα τα μέτρα αυτά βρίσκονται σε ευθεία αντίθεση με τις προτάσεις του ΔΝΤ και του ΟΟΣΑ για την οικονομία και τις συντάξεις. / This thesis was designed in order to examine the measure of employment reduction in the general government by at least 150,000, in the period 2012 – 2016. The aim of this thesis is to detect and assess the effects of this measure on the civil servants pension body property, on the public finance, in the medium term, as well as on the existence and survival of social security in an environment of economic recession, in Greece. The examination of the measure was based on an actuarial study which is totally based on the laws and state official data, with the calculation date of 12/2012. For its needs, a new data archive was created, with approximately 120,000 civil servants, from the process of two different databases, as well as the proper case study. The Swiss EVK 2000 actuarial tables were used, according to the effective provisions on civil servants’ pension, in relation to the detailed charter of civil servants on active service on 2.11.2012, and 3.8% technical interest rate, based on the expected returns of the reserves. For the calculation, the Projected Unit Credit Method (PUC) was selected and used, also known as accrued benefits method. According to the Projected Unit Credit Method, the current salary of the insured person is projected on his/her retirement date. In order to examine the relationship of the civil servant policy and the development, the 2.35 fiscal multiplier was used, and the percentage of the general government income as a GDP percentage was considered 44.7%, according to the European Commission, for 2012. Based on the aforementioned admissions, the result of the actuarial study proved that the effects of the employment reduction in the general government are mainly detected on the GDP – public income, the unemployment – dismissals, and the Social Security. More specifically, the measure directly endangers the sustainability of the Social Security Organizations, due to the particularly large decrease in their income from insurance contributions, and due to the 1.1% increase of the unemployment rate, which results in a decrease in the expenditures of the State Budget. The financial result is that it decreases the public expenditures by 6,337.6 m. €, but it burdens the GDP with an amount of approximately -13,619.2 m. €. This result can also be translated into a significant decrease in the direct income of the State, without calculating any other effects, for example on health, unemployment etc. The final financial result of the measure as public income is approximately 249.8 m. €, which cannot compensate the socio-economic cost of unemployment/dismissal in a recession and unemployment environment, while, at the same time, the sustainability of the Social Security Organizations is endangered. The study proves that the measure is applied without the necessary planning for the expected result on the GDP, the public income, the unemployment through dismissals, and the Social Security. In addition, these measures are in direct contrast to the IMF and OECD proposals on economy and pensions.

Kant believed that the moral law is a law that the rational will legislates. This thesis examines this claim and its broader implications for Kant’s moral theory. Many are drawn to Kantian ethics because of its emphasis on the dignity and legislative authority of the rational being. The attractiveness of this emphasis on the special standing and capacities of the self grounds a recent tendency to interpret Kantian autonomy as a doctrine according to which individual agents create binding moral norms. Where this line is taken, however, its advocates face deep questions concerning the compatibility of autonomy and the conception of moral requirement to which Kant is also certainly committed – one which conceives of the moral law as a strictly universal and necessary imperative. This thesis has two main aims. In the first half, I offer an interpretation of Kantian autonomy that both accommodates the universality and necessity of moral constraint and takes seriously the notion that the rational will is a legislator of moral law. As a means of developing and securing my preferred view, I argue that recent popular interpretations of Kantian autonomy fail to resolve the tensions that seem at first glance to plague the concept of self-legislation, where what is at stake is the legislation of a categorical imperative. In the second half of this thesis, I examine the connections between my preferred interpretation of self-legislation and Kant’s dichotomisation of reason and our sensuous nature. I argue that some of the more harsh and seemingly unreasonable aspects of Kant’s moral philosophy can be defended by bringing to light the ways in which they are connected to his commitment both to the autonomy of the will and to developing a genuinely normative ethics.

The aim of the current study was to highlight the social service work with domestic violence against women. In this study, we examined whether there was a difference in the way the social service works and if their effort differ in terms of domestic violence. Moreover, this study investigated how social workers work to prevent future violence against victims also what method they use to find out the causes behind men’s violence against women. A total of four administrative officers were interviewed from two different municipalities. All four officers were actively working with questions concerning domestic violence against women. The content analysis methodology was used as a basis for our questioner which contained twenty questions. This method was chosen because of violence is the basis of social service work. In conclusion, social services in the two municipalities that were studied in this study offer abused women different types of contributions. The type of effort provided depends on women’s individual situations. There are however, no major differences between the ways social services are dealing with domestic violence compared with honor-related violence. In those cases that were received to the two social offices, the underlying causes of violence against women varied. This may possibly include alcohol-related violence and mental illness. Future actions concerns the need of social assistance to work more on developing new methods to mainly protect women from domestic violence also to provide information to women about the social service interventions.

To the author's knowledge, this is the first systematic study of the concept of enmity in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Examining this important category does not only elucidate the concept itself, but also provides an opportunity to reconnect fragments of Hobbes's thought that are increasingly being treated as disparate subjects. It is suggested that the notion of enmity can shed further light on related aspects of his political philosophy, including human competitiveness, the roles of fear and trust, the evil of violent death, the status of rebels, and his theory of international relations. In addition, the subject invites a rethinking of Hobbes's place in the history of political thought. It is argued that he was among the first to make enmity a central subject of political philosophy. This seems to be related to Hobbes's break with the traditional notion of natural sociability, as a consequence of which he describes the natural condition of mankind as a war of all against all. Although Hobbes depicts human beings as natural enemies, he holds that enmity does not exclude the possibility of reconciliation; individuals can supposedly overcome their hostility through subjection to a sovereign. These views give rise to a dynamic distinction between public and private enmity, according to which outright hostility can be transformed into private rivalry if human beings renounce their natural right of war. Conversely, subjects become public enemies if they rebel against the sovereign. Hobbes's views on natural enmity and reconciliation also have important implications for his theory of international relations. This thesis particularly highlights the possibility that states can be decomposed and reassembled after a foreign invasion, which precludes wars of annihilation.

Private philanthropy is important in America. In 1985, philanthropy totaled almost 80 billion dollars. Philanthropy is partially a function of price. Absent a tax benefit, the price of charitable giving is unity. When tax benefits are available, the price of cash giving is one minus the marginal tax rate of the donor. Philanthropy is not evenly distributed among all classes of organizations. Changes in tax cost bring about changes in the distribution of gifts among organizations. Predictions have been made of a six to twelve billion dollar decline in individual giving as a result of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The question is, "Whose ox gets gored?" In 1962, the Internal Revenue Service collected data directly linking itemized charitable contributions to class of donee organization. Prior works by Taussig, Schwartz, Feldstein, and Clotfelter have been principally based on this data. Their works document differing elasticities of price on charitable giving. The current research gathered 1985 data on the relationships between income, price, and charitable donee for 298 Dallas County, Texas, taxpayers. Data was obtained from selected certified public accountants in Dallas County who prepared income tax returns for individuals as part of their practice. Two hundred fifty usable responses reflected charitable gifts. The data collected permitted the tax benefit resulting from charitable gifts to be calculated. Income levels and marginal tax rates on those gifts were then correlated with donee organizations using multiple regression analysis. The main effects of price and income on giving were masked by multicollinearity. The interaction effects of price and other independent variables showed little price effect on giving. Only when coupled with the income variable at income levels of $50,000 was the price effect significant.

The goal of this work is the analysis of current legal regulation of the process of increasing and decreasing the registered capital of a limited liability company. Registered capital belongs among the most important institutes characterizing capital companies. Limited liability company, as a capital company, has the liability to create registered capital and maintain it at least in the minimum amount required by law for the entire time of its existence (registered capital preservation principle). As a consequence of changes of economic conditions and other facts, which may arise inside or outside of a company, a need to alter the amount of the registered capital may arise, but always only in certain limits determined by law, and through rather formalized process regulated by provisions of the Commercial Code. The legal regulation of the Commercial Code and this work focus on the process of changes of registered capital itself and on protection provided to creditors of the company and members of the company within this process. That is, the amount of the registered capital may have significant influence on external relations with business partners and financing companies and may bring significant changes within the company as well. However, the main issue is the change in the arrangement and the...

This thesis is concerned with developing methodologies that enable existing models to be effectively reused. Results of this thesis are presented in the framework of Quantitative Structural-Activity Relationship (QSAR) models, but their application is much more general. QSAR models relate chemical structures with their biological, chemical or environmental activity. There are many applications that offer an environment to build and store predictive models. Unfortunately, they do not provide advanced functionalities that allow for efficient model selection and for interpretation of model predictions for new data. This thesis aims to address these issues and proposes methodologies for dealing with three research problems: model governance (management), model identification (selection), and interpretation of model predictions. The combination of these methodologies can be employed to build more efficient systems for model reuse in QSAR modelling and other areas. The first part of this study investigates toxicity data and model formats and reviews some of the existing toxicity systems in the context of model development and reuse. Based on the findings of this review and the principles of data governance, a novel concept of model governance is defined. Model governance comprises model representation and model governance processes. These processes are designed and presented in the context of model management. As an application, minimum information requirements and an XML representation for QSAR models are proposed. Once a collection of validated, accepted and well annotated models is available within a model governance framework, they can be applied for new data. It may happen that there is more than one model available for the same endpoint. Which one to chose? The second part of this thesis proposes a theoretical framework and algorithms that enable automated identification of the most reliable model for new data from the collection of existing models. The main idea is based on partitioning of the search space into groups and assigning a single model to each group. The construction of this partitioning is difficult because it is a bi-criteria problem. The main contribution in this part is the application of Pareto points for the search space partition. The proposed methodology is applied to three endpoints in chemoinformatics and predictive toxicology. After having identified a model for the new data, we would like to know how the model obtained its prediction and how trustworthy it is. An interpretation of model predictions is straightforward for linear models thanks to the availability of model parameters and their statistical significance. For non linear models this information can be hidden inside the model structure. This thesis proposes an approach for interpretation of a random forest classification model. This approach allows for the determination of the influence (called feature contribution) of each variable on the model prediction for an individual data. In this part, there are three methods proposed that allow analysis of feature contributions. Such analysis might lead to the discovery of new patterns that represent a standard behaviour of the model and allow additional assessment of the model reliability for new data. The application of these methods to two standard benchmark datasets from the UCI machine learning repository shows a great potential of this methodology. The algorithm for calculating feature contributions has been implemented and is available as an R package called rfFC.

This dissertation represents a prolegomena to a new approach to the study of the Greek New Testament, with ½ó¼o[varsigma] in Romans as a test case. Chapter 1 introduces the seemingly intractable interpretive debates concerning the Mosaic Law. Chapter 2 outlines an integrative model of understanding language--systemic-functional linguistics (SFL)--that forms the foundation of this study and the central pillar for the application of that theory--corpus linguistics using the annotation database of Opentext.org project. Chapter 3 develops a number of tools on the basis of SFL and corpus linguistics as supporting pillars for text analysis. Specifically, it provides a map on what to study in a text and how to do it. Chapter 4 illustrates the methods developed in chapter 3 and introduces the reader to the discourse of Romans through the Opening (Rom 1:1-7) and Thanksgiving (Rom 1:8-17) sections. Ultimately, a more comprehensive study building upon this initial attempt at a bottom-up analysis will be needed for a full discourse commentary on Romans. Chapter 5 explores the portrait of ½ó¼o[varsigma] from the angle of patterns of lexical repetition. Different passages on ½ó¼o[varsigma] are shown to be mutually interpretive. Chapters 6 and 7 examines the functional patterns of ½ó¼o[varsigma] as the head term of a word group (without a genitive qualifier) and as a modifier respectively. The common meaning component and reference patterns for ½ó¼o[varsigma] are uncovered in the process. Chapter 8 investigates the patterns of ½ó¼o[varsigma] as modified by a genitive. It was discovered that ½ó¼o[varsigma] has different reference patterns when modified. Chapter 9 is the overall summary. This work contends that while ½ó¼o[varsigma] most often refers to the Mosaic Law, the more general reference usage of the word as an entity that prescribes standards and as a controlling principle (in Romans 7-8) shed light on the meaning and function of the Mosaic Law and on the theme of control in Romans. / This item is only available to students and faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If you are not associated with SBTS, this dissertation may be purchased from <a href="http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb">http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb</a> or downloaded through ProQuest's Dissertation and Theses database if your institution subscribes to that service.