This collection of essays delineates the history of the rather disparate intellectual tradition usually labeled as "Platonic" or "Neoplatonic". In chronological order, the book covers the most eminent philosophic schools of thought within that tradition. The most important terms of the Platonic tradition are studied together with a discussion of their semantic implications, the philosophical and theological claims associated with the terms, the sources that furnish the terms, and the intellectual traditions aligned with or opposed to them. The contributors thereby (...) provide a vivid intellectual map of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Contributions are written in English or German. (shrink)

We study a propositional bimodal logic consisting of two S4 modalities £ and [a], together with the interaction axiom scheme a £ϕ → £ aϕ. In the intended semantics, the plain £ is given the McKinsey-Tarski interpretation as the interior operator of a topology, while the labelled [a] is given the standard Kripke semantics using a reflexive and transitive binary relation a. The interaction axiom expresses the property that the Ra relation is lower semi-continuous with respect to the topology. The (...) class of topological Kripke frames characterised by the logic includes all frames over Euclidean space where Ra is the positive flow relation of a differential equation. We establish the completeness of the axiomatisation with respect to the intended class of topological Kripke frames, and investigate tableau calculi for the logic, although tableau completeness and decidability are still open questions. (shrink)

In prevention and health promotion interventions, screening methods and risk profile assessments are often used as tools for establishing the interventions’ effectiveness, for the selection and determination of the health status of participants. The role these instruments fulfil in the creation of effectiveness and the effects these instruments have themselves remain unexplored. In this paper, we have analysed the role screening methods and risk profile assessments fulfil as part of prevention and health promotion programmes in the selection, enrolment and participation (...) of participants. Our analysis showed, that screening methods and health risk assessments create effects as they objectify health risks and/or the health status of individuals, i.e., they select the individuals ‘at risk’ and indicate the lifestyle modifications these people are required to make in order to improve their health. Yet, these instruments also reduce the group of participants thereby decreasing the possible effect of interventions, as they provide the legitimisation for people to make choices to whether they enrol or not and what lifestyle changes they incorporate into their lives. In other words, they present a space of interaction, in which agency is distributed across the practice nurses, the participants and the instruments. Decisions were not just made upon the projection of the outcomes of these instruments; decisions that were made by both the patients and practice nurses were the resultant of their opinions on these outcomes that were formed in interaction with the instruments. (shrink)