BackgroundTo prevent sexual boundary violations (SBV) in mental health care institutions overall governments require these institutions to report SBV incidents to a central registry and to develop institutional guidelines how to react. In Europe SBV policies are only recently developed or implemented, as is also the case in Flanders (Belgium). The implementation of a new institutional policy is always a challenge and can encounter resistance, especially when it concerns SBV, because they remain delicate and complex.MethodThis study evaluated the extent to (...) which mandatory policies on SBV have been implemented in mental health care institutions in Flanders, and possible factors for (non-)implementation of these policies. An online survey was sent to the executives of all mental health care institutions in Flanders (N = 162).ResultsIn total 56 executives of mental health care institutions filled out the survey (response rate 35%). Results showed that the implementation of an SBV policy in mental health care institutions is unfortunately inadequate and not all SBV incidents were reported to the central registry. Type of institution and opinions on the SBV policy were related to the (non-)implementation of the requirements.ConclusionsIt is recommended that governments regularly communicate with mental health care institutions to better understand the concerns and difficulties concerning implementation of the required SBV policy and to support/stimulate an organisational culture of more openness and safety on this topic. (shrink)

The Philosopher's Banquet is the first sustained study of Plutarch's Table Talk, a Greek prose text which is a combination of philosophical dialogue (in the ...

There is an increasing amount of empirical work investigating the sense of agency, i.e. the registration that we are the initiators of our own actions. Many studies try to relate the sense of agency to an internal feed-forward mechanism, called the ‘‘comparator model’’. In this paper, we draw a sharp distinction between a non-conceptual level of feeling of agency and a conceptual level of judgement of agency. By analyzing recent empirical studies, we show that the comparator model is not able (...) to explain either. Rather, we argue for a two-step account: a multifactorial weighting process of different agency indicators accounts for the feeling of agency, which is, in a second step, further processed by conceptual modules to form an attribution judgement. This new framework is then applied to disruptions of agency in schizophrenia, for which the comparator model also fails. Two further extensions are discussed: We show that the comparator model can neither be extended to account for the sense of ownership (which also has to be differentiated into a feeling and a judgement of ownership) nor for the sense of agency for thoughts. Our framework, however, is able to provide a unified account for the sense of agency for both actions and thoughts. (shrink)

The neurocognitive structure of the acting self has recently been widely studied, yet is still perplexing and remains an often confounded issue in cognitive neuroscience, psychopathology and philosophy. We provide a new systematic account of two of its main features, the sense of agency and the sense of ownership, demonstrating that although both features appear as phenomenally uniform, they each in fact are complex crossmodal phenomena of largely heterogeneous functional and representational levels. These levels can be arranged within a gradually (...) evolving, onto- and phylogenetically plausible framework which proceeds from basic non-conceptual sensorimotor processes to more complex conceptual and meta-representational processes of agency and ownership, respectively. In particular, three fundamental levels of agency and ownership processing have to be distinguished: The level of feeling, thinking and social interaction. This naturalistic account will not only allow to “ground the self in action”, but also provide an empirically testable taxonomy for cognitive neuroscience and a new tool for disentangling agency and ownership disturbances in psychopathology. (shrink)

This book gives a comprehensive account of methods in philosophy of education, it also examines their application in the 'real world' of education. It will therefore be of interest to philosophers and educators alike.

Fr. Vandenabeele, Amaihonle : Le Chantier sous la porte de l'Acropole. p. 519-530 Publication de la fouille faite en 1977, 1979 et 1980 devant la porte du rempart : on a trouvé des pièces d'un habitat archaïque, des galeries souterraines et divers ensembles dont ni la date ni la fonction n'ont pu être précisées, du fait de la limitation de la fouille. Publication du matériel (céramique et quelques figurines) allant de l'époque archaïque à l'époque impériale.

In this article, the authors examine the circumstances under which scholars can become effective figures of identification in medicine, after whom prizes or institutions are named – and under which circumstances scholars cannot or can no longer fulfill such a role. Trends and changes in professional cultural memory are examined, illustrated by the biographies and receptions of the human geneticist Hans Nachtsheim, the circulatory researcher Rudolf Thauer, the urologist Dora Teleky as well as the dentists Karl Häupl and Elsbeth von (...) Schnizer. This study shows that the evaluation criteria themselves are historically changeable and that gender is an important influencing factor. While formal criteria (e. g., membership in parties and organizations) have traditionally been important evaluation criteria, the authors advocate that actions in research and clinical practice be given even greater attention in the future. (shrink)

The role of critique in the Anglophone analytical tradition of philosophy of education is outlined and some of its shortcomings are noted, particularly its apparent claim to methodological objectivity in arriving at what are clearly contestable positions about the normative basis of education. Many of these issues can be seen to have a long history within European, and especially German, philosophy of education. In the light of this the discussion moves on to a consideration of similarities and contrasts between the (...) Anglophone and German-inspired deployment of the concept of critical rationality in philosophy of education. The claims to objectivity of the Anglophone tradition are contrasted with a more self-conscious concern for social justice and improvement in other European traditions, which has been followed more recently by a greater scepticism concerning the potential of critique for delivering social justice and improvement in education. This has parallels with the growing Anglophone disillusion with ‘classical’ analytic philosophy of education. This in turn has resulted in a greater awareness of the limitations of critique: its ideological character, its rootedness in specific contexts, its own potential dogmatism and its ambiguities. The various contributions to this volume are briefly described and related to each other. (shrink)

Recent work has demonstrated that the sense of agency is not only determined by efference-copy-based internal predictions and internal comparator mechanisms, but by a large variety of different internal and external cues. The study by Moore and colleagues [Moore, J. W., Wegner, D. M., & Haggard, P. . Modulating the sense of agency with external cues. Conscious and Cognition] aimed to provide further evidence for this view by demonstrating that external agency cues might outweigh or even substitute efferent signals to (...) install a basic registration of self-agency. Although the study contains some critical points that, so we argue, are central to a proper interpretation of the data, it hints at a new perspective on agency: optimal cue integration seems to be the key to a robust sense of agency. We here argue that this framework could allow integrating the findings of Moore and colleagues and other recent agency studies into a comprehensive picture of the sense of agency and its pathological disruptions. (shrink)

Au total 1367 documents avec une inscription en linéaire A sur les 1427 connus peuvent être datés selon le système d'Evans. Ils permettent d'établir avec certitude que cette écriture a été en usage en Crète du MM II au MR I B, avec peut-être un prolongement au MR II. En dehors de Crète, elle est attestée dans les Cyclades, à Kéa au MM III et au MR I B, à Milos au MR I et à Théra au MR I A (...) ; elle est connue à Cythère au MM IIΙ Β-MR I Aet elle a même gagné la Laconie sans qu'on puisse dire à quelle époque. (shrink)

The question of whether protective labor legislation is beneficial to female workers has triggered much debate among feminist scholars. Like proponents of laissez-faire, some feminist scholars and activists have argued that such legislation harms the economic interests of women by lowering their wages and diminishing their employment prospects on the free labor market. This article reexamines the arguments made by opponents of protective labor legislation in the light of the historical development of the welfare state in Britain and France. It (...) is shown that the case against gender-specific protective labor legislation does not hold on empirical grounds. A strong body of evidence shows that protective labor legislation historically brought increasing economic returns and expanded opportunities to women in both countries. This has important implications for contemporary debates about the relationship between protective labor legislation and gender discrimination in the European Community, the International Labor Organization, and developing countries. (shrink)

In reaction to Doret De Ruyter's recent defence of the importance of ideals in education, I advocate cautiousness in three respects. First, I explain the importance of distinguishing ideals more sharply from goals by demonstrating the problems of considering ideals even approximately realisable. Second, I substantiate my doubts about their indispensability in human motivation, and question the desirability of encouraging the motivational use of ideals. Third, I question whether ideals could or should be ‘passed on’ in education, drawing attention to (...) their non-objective, personally created nature. (shrink)

Objective To determine whether presenting delivery room management options as defaults influences decisions to resuscitate extremely premature infants. Materials and methods Adult volunteers recruited from the world wide web were randomised to receive either resuscitation or comfort care as the delivery room management default option for a hypothetical delivery of a 23-week gestation infant. Participants were required to check a box to opt out of the default. The primary outcome measure was the proportion of respondents electing resuscitation. Data were analysed (...) using χ2 tests and multivariate logistic regression. Results Participants who were told the delivery room management default option was resuscitation were more likely to opt for resuscitation (OR 6.54 95% CI 3.85 to 11.11, p<0.001). This effect persisted on multivariate regression analysis (OR 7.00, 95% CI 3.97 to 12.36, p<0.001). Female gender, being married or in a committed relationship, being highly religious, experiences with prematurity, and favouring sanctity of life were significantly associated with decisions to resuscitate. Discussion Presenting delivery room options for extremely premature infants as defaults exert a significant effect on decision makers. The information structure of the choice task may act as a subtle form of manipulation. Further, this effect may operate in ways that a decision maker is not aware of and this raises questions of patient autonomy. Conclusion Presenting delivery room options for extremely premature infants as defaults may compromise autonomous decision-making. (shrink)

The nature and function of thoughts have been a central topic of philosophy from its ancient beginnings, yet its critical assessment was put forward in particular by the development of the philosophy of mind in the last decades: thoughts were no longer taken to be the secure basis of which we immediately know the content and its nature , but to be mental entities that require critical investigation concerning the determination of their content and nature. Thoughts are traditionally discussed in (...) connection with reasoning, planning, and justification, but the intrinsic connection between thoughts and rationality was later challenged by psychological conceptions that dismissed rationality as a central notion for a theory of thinking. (shrink)

Advances in psychopharmacology raise the prospects of enhancing neurocognitive functions of humans by improving attention, memory, or mood. While general ethical reflections on psychopharmacological enhancement have been increasingly published in the last years, ethical criteria characterizing physicians’ role in neurocognitive enhancement and guiding their decision-making still remain highly unclear. Here it will be argued that also in the medical domain the use of cognition-enhancing drugs is not intrinsically unethical and that, in fact, physicians should assume an important role in gating (...) their usage. For finding normative orientation, concepts of disease, normality or medicine will not be helpful since—due to their cryptonormative nature—they rather hamper than allow targeted discussion and decision-making. As an alternative, the common and widely accepted bioethical criteria of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and distributive justice allow a clinically applicable, highly differentiated context- and case-sensitive approach. By embedding decision-making in a participative physician–patient relationship extrinsic objections against neurocognitive enhancement (e.g. invalid perceptions about efficacy, benefit or risk; questionable voluntariness; restrained decision-making capacity) can be curtailed. (shrink)

Since the 1980s scholars have been increasingly confronted with expectations to orient themselves toward societal and economic priorities. This normative demand for societal responsiveness is inscribed in discourses aimed at increasing the usefulness, competitiveness, and control of academia. New performance criteria, funding conditions, and organizational forms are central drivers of this debate – thereby, they change the conditions in which scholars conduct research and advance their careers. However, little is known so far about the impact these institutional changes have on (...) the habitus of academics. This article analyzes how stable and consistent habitus formations among academics turn out to be in the course of institutional changes. We compare the habitus formations of two generations of German scholars before and after institutional changes gained pace in Germany. Three distinct habitus formations can be identified, which we refer to as “self-fulfilling,” “self-surpassing,” and “self-asserting.” These habitus formations hold across the two generations, but the lines between them become blurry in the new generation. (shrink)

How can philosophy exert its critical function in society and in education if any appeal to independent and even relatively ‘certain’ criteria seems problematic? The epistemological doubts that foundationalist models of justification encounter unavoidably seem to raise this question. In particular, the relativist implications that seem to result from rejecting such models seem to paralyse the critical potential of philosophy of education. In order to explore the possibilities of a conception of educational critique that avoids the pitfalls of foundationalism, I (...) analyse the epistemological dimensions of this much-feared relativism, illustrating this with some characteristic examples. Solving the problems raised will require an interpretation of critique that leaves our daily sense of critique intact, without literally adopting its—foundationalist—basic assumptions. After systematically developing such an alternative interpretation of critical usage, a non-relativist but still non-foundationalist and powerful conception of philosophical critique seems possible. I illustrate results with some examples from philosophy of education. (shrink)

In his recent political writings, Habermas has opposed his cosmopolitan project to that of the Bushite neoconservatives. However, this article argues that in some respects Habermas's works come closer to the neoconservative agenda than he realizes and that this poses a potential danger of its being appropriated by precisely the camp he opposes. These problems particularly come to the fore in his analysis of Islamic fundamentalism, democracy and the Middle East, but also in his recommendations concerning UN-based internationalism and his (...) appeals to Woodrow Wilson. By tracking these problematic areas in Habermas's work, this article argues that Habermas needs to engage in a more carefully articulated, concrete and empirical analysis if he is to avoid these problems. (shrink)

This paper makes the point that Kierkegaard’s ideas concerning individuality cannot be understood clearly without placing them in the context of what I am calling ontological isolation. This means the radical deprivation by selfhood of every aspect of reality, to the point where not even the possibility or illusion of reality is available to the self. In this context the self is required to become itself, forming itself in and out of its own absolute nothingness, ontological destitution, or wrongness. With (...) this form of isolation as our investigative key, we unlock what Kierkegaard means by his command to become a self, where becoming itself, in absence of prior possibility, constitutes the reality of self, and why Kierkegaard places crucial emphasis, contrary to the tradition, on the priority of negativity. By having the self originate itself in “absolute difficulty,” or that wherein the act itself, or pure doing without result, is primary, Kierkegaard now replaces metaphysics with ethics in order of priority, and places the self inseparably in a world that responds directly to that act. I show here a parallel between Kierkegaard’s approach to ethical action with that of artistic creation of a kind of world, the work of art. In doing so I reveal the inadequacy of interpretations that would impose traditional forms of isolation, social and cosmic, on Kierkegaard, as some of his critics do, or that would place Kierkegaard’s ethics within traditional developmental models, as many of his sympathizers do. (shrink)

We argue that multiple levels of trauma were present in Egypt before, during and after the 2011 revolution. Individual, social and political trauma constitute a triangle of traumatisation which was strategically employed by the Egyptian counter-revolutionary forces – primarily the army and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood – to maintain their political and economic power over and above the social, economic and political interests of others. Through the destruction of physical bodies, the fragmentation and polarisation of social relations and (...) the violent closure of the newly emerged political public sphere, these actors actively repressed the potential for creative and revolutionary transformation. To better understand this multi-layered notion of trauma, we turn to Habermas’ ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ thesis which offers a critical lens through which to examine the wider political and economic structures and context in which trauma occurred as well as its effects on the personal, social and po... (shrink)

With the advent of new AIDS treatment initiatives such as the World Health Organization's “3 by 5” program and the United States' “President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” the ethical questions about AIDS care in the developing world have changed. No longer are they fundamentally about the conduct of research; now, we must turn our attention to developing treatment programs. In particular, we must think about how to spread limited treatment resources among the vast reservoir of people who need them.

Die Fortschritte in der Psychopharmakologie führen zu einem immer breiteren Angebot an Substanzen zur Verbesserung der Stimmung, des Gedächtnisses oder der exekutiven Funktionen. Dieses Angebot trifft auf die Wünsche und Bedürfnisse vieler Menschen, ihre mentalen Leistungen und Zustände zu verbessern. Wie sollte die Medizin mit diesen Wünschen umgehen? An welchen Kriterien sollte sich insbesondere der ärztliche Entscheidungsprozess orientieren? Im Folgenden soll gezeigt werden, dass sich aus einer „Treatment-enhancement-Unterscheidung“, einem Krankheits- oder Normalitätsbegriff oder einem bestimmten Medizinkonzept keine zielführenden normativen Kriterien für (...) diesen Entscheidungsprozess ableiten lassen. Demgegenüber wird ein Entscheidungsmodell entwickelt, das auf traditionellen Kriterien ärztlichen Handelns beruht: dem Kriterium des Wohlergehens, des Nichtschadens und der Autonomie. Mit diesem Modell soll zugleich ein neues Konzept einer „wunscherfüllenden Medizin“ vorgeschlagen werden: eine subjektive Medizin mit ärztlichem Empfehlungs- und Vetovorbehalt. (shrink)

In this paper we elaborate Lacan's theory on courtly love to establish a link between literature, psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytic theory. Lacan himself had already established the link between courtly love and psychoanalytic practice as a way of working through the mourning for the structural lack in the Symbolic order. As such, both can be seen as an anticipation of anticipation: not the object itself is anticipated, but rather the anticipation of this object. Through the use of Stiegler's reinterpretation of (...) the concept of the pharmakon we understand psychoanalytic theory and literature in general as attempts to work through this mourning by creating an anamnesis, a “long circuit” of knowledge in which the creators are implied with their own subjectivity. An analysis of Graham Swift's novel Ever After and of Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler demonstrate how this principle applies to the processes of writing and reading. (shrink)

Differential academic language proficiency is an issue of major educational concern, bearing on problems varying from pupil performance, to social prospects, and citizenship. In this paper we develop a conception of the language‐acquiring subject, and we discuss the consequences for understanding differential language proficiency in schools. Starting from Wittgenstein's meaning‐as‐use theory we show that learning a language requires an activity that relates the subject both to the community of language users, and to the things language is about. In opposition to (...) Luntley, we contend that this does not mean that linguistic development involves linguistic adjustment to the world ‘as it is’. It is argued that, in as far as linguistic development involves a process of adjustment, this concerns conceptions about the world as it is presupposed to be—a ‘world’ that is subjected to doubt and revision time and again. With respect to dealing with differential academic language proficiency, this approach to linguistic development suggests bringing pupils into situations which require active participation in processes of ‘negotiating meaning’, including negotiating the prevailing presuppositions about what the world is like. This also puts novices in a different position—less assimilatory—recognising their co‐constructive potencies at a more fundamental level. (shrink)