It is widely claimed that the second Critique’s argument for the postulate of immortality is relevantly different from the first Critique’s argument for the postulate. It is also widely claimed that after the second Critique, Kant distances himself from its particular version of the argument, and even the postulate altogether. It is the purpose of this article to challenge these claims, arguing instead that (a) there is overwhelming textual evidence showing that Kant did not abandon the postulate; (b) the second Critique does not contain a substantially different argument for the postulate than how it is argued for in the first Critique; and (c) the philosophical objections levied against the second Critique’s argument, including its putative substitution of holiness for virtue, become moot once its argument is better understood.

This paper explores the movement of the New York City Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT) for “equal pay for equal work” in teaching salaries, which it won in 1911. The IAWT’s success sheds light on the possibilities and limits of women teachers advocating for change within a feminized profession. Leading the movement were of a group of women teachers, organizing before woman’s suffrage and in an era of sex-differentiated work and pay, who convinced the city’s public and state’s legislators that they deserved pay equal to what men teachers received. They did so by strategic maneuvering in city and state politics and making equal pay look reasonable. And they did so by narrowly defining their goals and leaning on their identities as women to push a theoretically sex-neutral claim of justice. Their success, though limited, was nonetheless a victory in shifting ideas about women’s societal and professional status in New York City and the state.

Bayesian agents, argues Belot, are orgulous: they believe in inductive success even when guaranteed to fail on a topologically typical collection of data streams. Here we shed light on how pervasive this phenomenon is. We identify several classes of inductive problems for which Bayesian convergence to the truth is topologically typical. However, we also show that, for all sufficiently complex classes, there are inductive problems for which convergence is topologically atypical. Last, we identify specific topologically typical collections of data streams, observing which guarantees convergence to the truth across all problems from certain natural classes of effective inductive problems.

Although the theology of Tradition of the Dominican Yves Congar was highly influential in drafting the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum at the Second Vatican Council, postconciliar debates neglected some of the most original aspects of this theology. This article proposes a retrieval of the notion of Tradition as ‘milieu éducatif’, advanced by the theologian in Tradition and Traditions, as a valuable resource for contemporary discussions on Christian formation. It intends to highlight how Congar connected the theological realities of revelation and its transmission by the Church with the concrete practice of Christian life. This notion is, then, put in conversation with contemporary Christian thinkers who have reflected on the practical aspects of Christian formation, chiefly James K.A. Smith. This dialogue aims to show the relevance of Congar’s notion to current discussions. While the theology of Tradition exposed by the French Dominican can be completed and specified by current proposals, it can also offer a new theological depth to those proposals.

The nature and value of the religious priesthood have often been questioned, including after Vatican II. John Paul II, however, claims that the religious priest ‘reproduces in his life the fullness of the mystery of Christ’. Examining Aquinas’s understanding of Christ’s total self-sacrifice provides a model that explains how. In this article, I present a Christological and Thomistic approach to the question by identifying Christ as a religious priest, highlighting one of Aquinas’s patristic sources (St Gregory the Great) and one of his greatest spiritual interpreters of modern times (Bl Columba Marmion). Because of his grace of headship, Christ contains all the perfections found in his members. The perfection of Christ’s priestly and religious life consists in his total sacrifice of himself to the Father out of love. Christ firmly fixed his will to offer himself from the moment of the Incarnation. By vowing to follow the counsels, religious priests imitate the fixity of Christ’s will to offer himself as a total self-holocaust. This conclusion allows me to propose that Christ is the religious priest, which has several theological and pastoral implications.

Exposure to stress related to the COVID-19 pandemic contributes to psychopathology risk, yet not all children are negatively impacted. The current study examined a parasympathetic biomarker of stress sensitivity, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), as a moderator of the effects of exposure to pandemic stress on child internalizing and externalizing behaviors in a sample of children experiencing economic marginalization. Three to five years pre-pandemic, when children were preschool-aged, RSA during baseline and a challenging parent-child interaction were collected. Mid-pandemic, between November 2020 and March 2021, children’s exposure to pandemic stress and internalizing and externalizing behaviors were collected. Results demonstrated that children who, pre-pandemic, demonstrated blunted parasympathetic reactivity (i.e., no change in RSA relative to baseline) during the dyadic challenge exhibited elevated risk for externalizing behaviors mid-pandemic. Further, this risk was greatest for children exposed to high and moderate levels of pandemic stress. Consistent with diathesis stress and polyvagal frameworks, these conditional effects suggest that blunted parasympathetic reactivity in response to stress in early childhood may escalate the development of externalizing behaviors following stress exposure at school age.

This paper uses the writings of European teachers and Chinese students at St. Stephen’s Girls’ College in Hong Kong—published in English periodicals of its school magazine and local English newspapers—to examine how the school tactically positioned itself as an educational site for the “useful women of China” during a period in Republican China that was simultaneously defined as a time of “cosmopolitan modernity” and “national rebuilding.” St. Stephen’s brand of usefulness responded to the “New Woman” phenomenon in Republican China, and it was defined through the narrative of science learning and a sense of service. Through its progressive science curriculum and social service branch, the school helped prepare a class of “career women” for China. It was in educating this class that St. Stephen’s, in resonance with the colonial state, envisioned its role in the shaping of modern China.

It is unclear how much adolescents’ lives were disrupted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic or what risk factors predicted such disruption. To answer these questions, 1,080 adolescents in 9 nations were surveyed 5 times from March 2020 to July 2022. Rates of adolescent COVID-19 life disruption were stable and high. Adolescents who, compared to their peers, lived in nations with higher national COVID-19 death rates, lived in nations with less stringent COVID-19 mitigation strategies, had less confidence in their government’s response to COVID-19, complied at higher rates with COVID-19 control measures, experienced the death of someone they knew due to COVID-19, or experienced more internalizing, externalizing, and smoking problems reported more life disruption due to COVID-19 during part or all of the pandemic. Additionally, when, compared to their typical levels of functioning, adolescents experienced spikes in national death rates, experienced less stringent COVID-19 mitigation measures, experienced less confidence in government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, complied at higher rates with COVID-19 control measures, experienced more internalizing problems, or smoked more at various periods during the pandemic, they also experienced more COVID-19 life disruption. Collectively, these findings provide new insights that policymakers can use to prevent the disruption of adolescents’ lives in future pandemics.

Let $\mathbb {F}_q^d$ denote the d-dimensional vector space over the finite field $\mathbb {F}_q$ with q elements. Define for $\alpha = (\alpha _1, \dots , \alpha _d) \in \mathbb {F}_q^d$. Let $k\in \mathbb {N}$, A be a nonempty subset of $\{(i, j): 1 \leq i < j \leq k + 1\}$ and $r\in (\mathbb {F}_q)^2\setminus {0}$, where $(\mathbb {F}_q)^2=\{a^2:a\in \mathbb {F}_q\}$. If $E\subset \mathbb {F}_q^d$, our main result demonstrates that when the size of the set E satisfies $|E| \geq C_k q^{d/2}$, where $C_k$ is a constant depending solely on k, it is possible to find two $(k+1)$-tuples in E such that one of them is dilated by r with respect to the other, but only along $|A|$ edges. To be more precise, we establish the existence of $(x_1, \dots , x_{k+1}) \in E^{k+1}$ and $(y_1, \dots , y_{k+1}) \in E^{k+1}$ such that, for $(i, j) \in A$, we have $\lVert y_i - y_j \rVert = r \lVert x_i - x_j \rVert $, with the conditions that $x_i \neq x_j$ and $y_i \neq y_j$ for $1 \leq i < j \leq k + 1$, provided that $|E| \geq C_k q^{d/2}$ and $r\in (\mathbb {F}_q)^2\setminus \{0\}$. We provide two distinct proofs of this result. The first uses the technique of group actions, a powerful method for addressing such problems, while the second is based on elementary combinatorial reasoning. Additionally, we establish that in dimension 2, the threshold $d/2$ is sharp when $q \equiv 3 \pmod 4$. As a corollary of the main result, by varying the underlying set A, we determine thresholds for the existence of dilated k-cycles, k-paths and k-stars (where $k \geq 3$) with a dilation ratio of $r\in (\mathbb {F}_q)^2\setminus \{0\}$. These results improve and generalise the findings of Xie and Ge [‘Some results on similar configurations in subsets of $\mathbb {F}_q^d$’, Finite Fields Appl. 91 (2023), Article no. 102252, 20 pages].

We prove Abelian and Tauberian theorems for regularized Cauchy transforms of positive Borel measures on the real line whose distribution functions grow at most polynomially at infinity. In particular, we relate the asymptotics of the distribution functions to the asymptotics of the regularized Cauchy transform.

The loading and unloading operations of smart logistic application robots depend largely on their perception system. However, there is a paucity of study on the evaluation of Lidar maps and their SLAM algorithms in complex environment navigation system. In the proposed work, the Lidar information is finetuned using binary occupancy grid approach and implemented Improved Self-Adaptive Learning Particle Swarm Optimization (ISALPSO) algorithm for path prediction. The approach makes use of 2D Lidar mapping to determine the most efficient route for a mobile robot in logistical applications. The Hector SLAM method is used in the Robot Operating System (ROS) platform to implement mobile robot real-time location and map building, which is subsequently transformed into a binary occupancy grid. To show the path navigation findings of the proposed methodologies, a navigational model has been created in the MATLAB 2D virtual environment using 2D Lidar mapping point data. The ISALPSO algorithm adapts its parameters inertia weight, acceleration coefficients, learning coefficients, mutation factor, and swarm size, based on the performance of the generated path. In comparison to the other five PSO variants, the ISALPSO algorithm has a considerably shorter path, a quick convergence rate, and requires less time to compute the distance between the locations of transporting and unloading environments, based on the simulation results that was generated and its validation using a 2D Lidar environment. The efficiency and effectiveness of path planning for mobile robots in logistic applications are validated using Quanser hardware interfaced with 2D Lidar and operated in environment 3 using proposed algorithm for production of optimal path.