This paper was presented at the conference ‘The Marrano Phenomenon: Jewish Hidden Tradition and Modernity’, Warsaw, 16–19 September 2019. It considers the case of Marcus Ehrenpreis, chief rabbi of Stockholm. Ehrenpreis followed in the tradition from Antiquity of Philo of Alexandria, who expressed his Jewish philosophy in Greek, and Moses Mendelssohn, who attempted to bring the principles of the Englightenment to German Jews and to promote an understanding of Judaism among non­Jews. Ehrenpreis sought to follow a similar path among the (...) Swedes, not least in making Swedish his preferred language of writing. Although the Marrano phenomenon relates primarily to the concept of ‘borderline’ Jewishness, of which Ehrenpreis was not an exponent, it nonetheless proves fruitful to consider him from a Marrano perspective in order to extend our understanding of him as an innovative figure who sought to achieve greater understanding across the religious and cultural boundaries between Judaism and non­-Judaism. (shrink)

In this study, we explore the impact of Machiavellian rhetoric on fundraising within the increasingly important context of online crowdfunding. The “all-or-nothing” funding model used by the world’s largest crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, may be an attractive context in which entrepreneurs can utilize Machiavellian rhetoric to reach their funding goal, lest they get no funding at all. This study uses data from 76,847 crowdfunding projects posted on kickstarter.com and develops a dictionary for computer-aided text analysis (CATA) of Machiavellian rhetoric to measure (...) the relationship between the frequency of Machiavellian rhetoric use and crowdfunding performance, operationalized as either reaching a funding goal or the number of backers who funded the project. Machiavellian rhetoric is segregated into eight facets, which are categorized into hard and soft influence tactics. Hard tactics include revenge, intimidation, betrayal, and manipulation. Soft tactics include ingratiation, supplication, self-disclosure, and persuasion. Results reveal that signals of revenge, self-disclosure, and intimidation have negative effects, whereas signals of ingratiation and persuasion have mixed positive effects on crowdfunding performance. Ingratiation is found to increase the number of backers, but not funding success. Conversely, persuasion is found to increase funding success, but not the number of backers. Surprisingly, betrayal rhetoric is positively related to both measures of crowdfunding performance. Thus, this article complements the literature on backer decision-making, entrepreneurial methods, reward-based crowdfunding, and ethics in entrepreneurship by demonstrating how the displays of potentially negative phenomena, such as Machiavellianism, have complex consequences for entrepreneurial outcomes. (shrink)

The present trend of resource depletion and environmental destruction is related to a lack of morals in society. Available tools like exergy, ecology and democracy are ignored. This not only makes us unaware of reality but also of the possibilities of avoiding a catastrophe. Instead, economics and politics are often based on myths. The most dangerous threat to humankind is new, unknown diseases, fostered by environmental pollution. This knowledge is suppressed. The author concludes that too much attention has been given (...) to the body of society, that is, its metabolism. Therefore, the focus should now be directed to the soul of society, especially morals and love. (shrink)

Ethics has an established place within the medical curriculum. However notable differences exist in the programme characteristics of different schools of medicine. This paper addresses the main differences in the curricula of medical schools in South East Europe regarding education in medical ethics and bioethics, with a special emphasis on research ethics, and proposes a model curriculum which incorporates significant topics in all three fields. Teaching curricula of Medical Schools in Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro were (...) acquired and a total of 14 were analyzed. Teaching hours for medical ethics and/or bioethics and year of study in which the course is taught were also analyzed. The average number of teaching hours in medical ethics and bioethics is 27.1 h per year. The highest national average number of teaching hours was in Croatia, and the lowest was in Serbia. In the countries of the European Union the mean number of hours given to ethics teaching throughout the complete curriculum was 44. In South East Europe, the maximum number of teaching hours is 60, while the minimum number is 10 teaching hours. Research ethics topics also show a considerable variance within the regional medical schools. Approaches to teaching research ethics vary, even within the same country. The proposed model for education in this area is based on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Bioethics Core Curriculum. The model curriculum consists of topics in medical ethics, bioethics and research ethics, as a single course, over 30 teaching hours. (shrink)

Martin E. Rosenberg -/- The Gift of Silence: Towards an Anthropology of Jazz Improvisation as Neuro-Resistance. -/- ABSTRACT: -/- This essay addresses how the complex processes that occur during jazz improvisation enact behaviors that resemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss. It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz. Yet, I would like to shift from focusing this (...) analysis of jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all of these approaches require), to grounding improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. By silence, I refer to the embodied, yet shared pure duration as felt synchrony within an individual performer, that extends to the members of an ensemble. Thus, I refer to both aesthetic and micro-political implications of embodied, yet also distributed musical cognition in real time. -/- For jazz musicians, embodied silence becomes the initial condition for processes of cognitive bifurcation. For it is bifurcation that attracts us to jazz in the first place. Here I expand my previous work establishing similarities in the behavior of bifurcating systems in physical and cognitive sciences to the unfolding of ambiguity in real time during improvisation with respect to polyphony, polytonality and polyrhythms in the history of jazz from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman. We can therefore re-conceptualize jazz improvisation as a subversive antidote for processes of determination identified in a sub-discipline of cultural studies called “cognitive capitalism.” By examining silence from this anthropological perspective, we can conceive of jazz performance as a ritualized resistance to top-down cognitive control immanent with social and digital networks. The ritual enactment that is jazz improvisation points towards an aesthetics of bifurcation that is simultaneously a micro-politics of neuro-resistance. In other words, I argue that freedom of thought requires freedom from thought as an initial condition. -/- Yet, I emphasize the empirical rather than mystical grounds to this gift of silence. The valorization of silence by jazz musicians is not simply etiquette, an ethics of reciprocity for performers exchanging “riffs,” but an initial condition that jazz performers (and, I would argue, listeners) experience in their bodies, thus linking embodied cognition to a collective field of cultural production that emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems. The recent and remarkable research on music and the brain has demonstrated that it is now possible to describe jazz improvisation as possessing both embodied and distributed cognitive properties. The emergent neuronal ensemble behavior within the individual that is visible in jazz improvisors, discovered by the neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins led by Charles Limb, bears striking resemblance to the interactive behaviors of the jazz ensemble itself. Thus, it is by recourse to recent research by myself and others into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation specifically, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible. (shrink)

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the European Commission’s in-house science and knowledge service, employing a substantial staff of scientists devoted to conducting research to provide independent scientific advice for EU policy. Focussed on various research areas aligned with EU priorities, the JRC excels in delivering scientific evidence for policymaking and has published numerous science-for-policy reports and scientific articles. Drawing on a scientific integrity statement, surveys among JRC’s research staff, and thematic discussions with JRC’s research leaders, the JRC has developed (...) a comprehensive Scientific Integrity and Research Ethics (SIRE) framework, including instruments, procedures, and guidelines to ensure high standards and independence in its research. Key components of the SIRE framework include a Scientific Integrity Officer, an Editorial Review Board, a Research Ethics Board, and guidelines for responsible conduct of research. This article provides an overview of the JRC’s SIRE framework and how it was developed, emphasising the importance of maintaining independence, integrity, and ethics in scientific research that supports EU policy. The article also discusses potential gaps in the framework and where additional efforts may be needed, comparing with the recent U.S. National Science and Technology Council report on Protecting the Integrity of Government Science. (shrink)

Modernity is better defined as a time orientation, instead of as a set of institutions, which usually smuggles in some provincial or other aprioristic assumptions. A time conception of modernity also gives a precise meaning to postmodernity. Modernity in this non-Eurocentric sense, entails several different, competing master narratives, different social forces of, and conflicts between, modernity and anti-modernity, and different cultural contextualizations of the past-future contrast. But these different varieties do not simply coexist and challenge each other, they are entangled (...) with each other in various ways. Starting from observing how different time warps were interwoven in vanguard modernist art, an analytical framework for grasping, understanding, and explaining the entanglement of modernities is spelled out. (shrink)

The consequences of chasm between the rich and the poor vary, depending on whether or not it is suffered by an individual or a larger group of people. Although in the case of various social groups it encompasses a larger area of effect, especially if it amasses as a protest, the consequences can be worse for an individual because the individual feels it stronger. In this paper, considered is the notion of existence in two aspects, socio­economic and philosophical, following examples (...) from the films Parasite and Joker. The focus is placed on the problem of poverty. (shrink)

Nowadays, people, states and international organizations feel more threatened and insecure, more than in the past, and this has contributed to an increase in need for security and the establishment of a new order and rules through which the world’s problems will be successfully solved. One of the leading countries is the People’s Republic of China, which is taking an increasing share on the global stage and is striving to reduce the dominance and role of the United States and European (...) countries. The rise of China as an economic, security-military and information-technological power has contributed to the shift of the centre of gravity and power from the West to the East, and a lot of opportunities have been created for other Asian countries to find their place and role and be an important subject in the new international structure. With the inclusion of new actors on the international stage, the balance of power changes and new rules of the game are imposed, contrary to the Western countries. The “new managers” are expected to have greater responsibility and influence in reforming the existing international institutions, as well as reducing the factors that cause instability and lead to an anarchic world order. However, due to the different values, interests and goals promoted by the PRC, a number of security implications of an international nature, intensification of geopolitical and geo-economics rivalries, polarization, emergence of new risks and dangers, and increased tension between great powers are expected. (shrink)

Recent events have proved that colonialism has left indelible prints in history. In 2013, the British Foreign Secretary apologized and promised compensation for the atrocities in Kenyan detention camps in the 1950s and the same year the heads of governments of the Caribbean Community issued a declaration demanding reparation for the genocide of indigenous populations and for slavery and the slave trade during colonialism. The discussion and literature on global justice has mainly focused on distributive justice. What are the implications (...) of colonialism for a theory of global justice today? What does rectificatory justice mean in the light of colonialism? What does global rectificatory justice require in practice? This book seeks the answers to these questions. (shrink)

Weber’s very important theory on the influence of religion on economic behaviour was tested in the societies which belong to different cultural and religious circles. However, due to various socio-political circumstances, the testing of Weber’s theoretical-methodological framework has been largely neglected in the countries where Orthodox Christianity is dominant. However, the difficulties that arose in Orthodox societies during the post-socialist transformation, as well as the shift from the economic research paradigm to the cultural one on the global level, along with (...) the revival of religion in Eastern Europe as one of the most important institutions of ideological and social life, contributed to the focus of our scientific interest be directed in this direction. The central questions that we tried to answer on this occasion were primarily related to the specifics of the concept of work in Orthodox Christianity and the relationship to the accumulation of capital. (shrink)

Both interpersonal and mass media communication is demanding for competence of communicators. The aim of this study was to determine the dimensions of interpersonal communicative competence. First, a total of 23 skills and traits were identified that are by various authors related to interpersonal communicative competence. Then, a research instrument named Interpersonal Communication Competence Inventory (ICCI) was developed for the measurement of those skills and traits. After evaluation of the ICCI scales, their total scores were factor analyzed in an attempt (...) to identify the possible dimensions of interpersonal communication competence. The results of the factor analyses are presented in a schematic model and theoretically elaborated. Finally, more insight is given into various aspects of competent interpersonal communication, and the potential uses of the model presented in this study are outlined. (shrink)

The founding fathers of neoliberalism are usually imagined as very rational neoclassical economists uninterested in cultural and religious issues. The aim of this paper is to paint a different picture by discussing the ideas of (neo)liberal economists regarding spiritual heritage, with an emphasis on eastern religions. Starting from the existing historiographical debate on the role of Daoist notions in the birth of political economy in 18th-century Europe, as an example of cultural transfer par excellence, argumentation develops into a comparative analysis (...) of philosophical underpinnings of modern laissez-faire liberalism and neoliberalism. The main thesis of the paper is that important epistemological differences between analysed doctrines imply the differences in the attitude of modern economic liberalism towards religion, which is demonstrated via examples of appropriations and translations of eastern heritage. This is a preliminary analysis but with the potential to shed new light on the political theology of contemporary culture and neoliberalism itself. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of information overload have important precedents during the years 1550-1750. An examination of the early modern period in Europe, including work of humanism, science, theology, and popular encyclopedias demonstrates that perceptions of information overload have as much to do with the ways in which knowledge is represented as with any quantitative measurers in the production of new texts, ideas, or facts. Key figures in this account include Francis Bacon, Conrard Gesner, Francesco Sacchini, Johann Heinrich Alsted, Casoar Bauhin, Rempert (...) Dodeones, Samuel Bochrt, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, John Wilkins, Jonathan Swift, Ephraim Chambers, Smauel Johnson, Denis Diderot, and Louis-Sébastian Mercier. (shrink)

A new diagnostic system for organic psychiatry is presented. We first define "organic psychiatry", and then give the theoretical basis for conceiving organic psychiatric disorders in terms of hypothetical psychopathogenetic processes, HPP:s. Such hypothetical disorders are not strictly identical to the clusters of symptoms in which they typically manifest themselves, since the symptoms may be concealed or modified by intervening factors in non typical circumstances and/or in the simultaneous presence of several disorders. The six basic disorders in our system are (...) Astheno Emotional Disorder (AED), Somnolence Sopor Coma Disorder (SSCD), Hallucination Coenestopathy Depersonalisation Disorder (HCDD), Confusional Disorder (CD), Emotional Motivational Blunting Disorder (EMD) and Korsakoff's Amnestic Disorder (KAD). We describe their usual etiologies, their typical symptoms and course, and some forms of interaction between them. (shrink)

Semiotics is generally conceived as being opposed to phenomenology, but such an opposition can only result from taking too much for granted, about both phenomenology and semiotics. While recognising that semiotics and phenomenology are historically different traditions, the present essay suggests that these traditions have a lot in common and that their very differences may give rise to fruitful phenomenological explorations. In the first part, we look at the similarities between Husserlean and Peircean phenomenology, and then proceed to consider the (...) different approaches of these two scholars to the nature of propositions, where the discoveries of one can be used to rectify the neglect of the other. In the second part, we ponder Derrida’s critique of phenomenology, considered as an out-growth of structuralist semiotics, showing that, while Derrida’s remarks are pertinent, they miss the real issue. In so doing, we first scrutinize the Husserlean notion of sign, as understood by Derrida, as opposed to how it emerges from Husserl’s total work, and then we embark on the grander issue of presence, which, to Husserl, is never really divorced from absence. (shrink)

Is it possible to communicate ethics across cultural borders? Not according to representatives of “the incommensurability thesis”, who claim that values and norms are culturally bounded. This article argues against this thesis. A first problem is that cultures and traditions are seen as comprehensive, delimited, and exclusive. Normally, however, a culture develops from and is in dialogue with other cultures. Further, the inner diversity of cultures and traditions opens the possibility of communication and shared understandings across cultural borders. Finally, the (...) teaching and discussion of cross-cultural ethics provide practical evidence of the possibility of dialogue and mutual understanding. *. (shrink)

This paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that French Romantic writers first developed to describe their own relationship to historical time: the notion of the “transitional period.” At first, the term related strictly to the evolving periodic conception of history, one that required breaks, spaces, or zones of indeterminacy to bracket off periods imagined as organic wholes. These transitions, necessary devices in the new grammar of history, also began to attract interest on their own, conceived either as (...) chaotic but creative times of transformation, or, more often, as slack periods of decadence that possessed no proper style but exhibited hybrid traits. Their real interest, however, lies in their reflexive application to the nineteenth century itself, by writers and historians such as Alfred de Musset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Renan, who in their effort to define their own period envisioned the “transitional period” as a passage between more coherent and stable historical formations. This prospective self-definition of the “age of history” from a future standpoint is very revealing; it shows not just the tension between its organic way of apprehending the past and its own self-perception, but it also opens a window on a new and paradoxical experience of time, one in which change is ceaseless and an end in itself. The paper also presents a critique of the way the term “modernity” has functioned, from Baudelaire’s initial use to the present, to occlude the experience of transition that the Romantics highlighted. By imposing on the nineteenth-century sense of the transitory a heroic period designation, the term “modernity” denies precisely the reality it describes, and sublimates a widespread temporal malaise into its contrary. The paper concludes that the peculiarly “modern” mania for naming one’s period is a function of transitional time, and that the concept coined by the Romantics still governs our contemporary experience. (shrink)

The F-twist is giving way to the methodology of scientific research programs. Milton Friedman's “Methodology for Economics” is being supplanted as the orthodox rationale for neoclassical economics by Imre Lakatos' account of scientific respectability. Friedman's instrumentalist thesis that theories are to be judged by the confirmation of their consequences and not the realism of their assumptions has long been widely endorsed by economists, under Paul Samuelson's catchy rubric “the F-twist.” It retains its popularity among economists who want no truck with (...) methodology, but among the increasing number of able economists who are writing on methodology the F-twist has been surrendered, not so much because these writers have decided it is false, as because something better has finally come along. (shrink)

To understand fully the contemporary imposition of capitalist class power, we need to consider not only social relations and neoliberal economic doctrines, but also academic and vernacular cultural contexts, including social critique, within which neoliberalism has been ideologically tailored and practically applied. Among the vernacular cultural contexts, religion – related to deepest human identifications, feelings and ideas about the nature of reality – certainly represents such an unavoidable political resource, inseparable from secular ideologies of a given social world. Taking this (...) into account, we will try to show how neoliberalism was built in a specific context, developing governmental approaches relative to elements of progressive critique, and has eventually succeeded to legitimize new mechanisms of capitalist accumulation, linking them, among other things, to specific religious “externalities”. We will suggest that the satisfactory explanation of profound changes in the contemporary religious life, referred to as the emergence of “New Age spirituality”, is only possible if we understand them as an integral part of the processes of neoliberalization. This does not mean that we are trying to reduce a complex multitude of contemporary spiritual practices to a simple one-dimensional reflex of neoliberalization, but rather to suggest that only such an approach can complement the omissions and correct the misconceptions of various inquiries that analyze New Age spirituality using the frameworks of postmodern culture and/or consumer society. By doing this, we wil discuss not only countercultural spirituality, but also neoliberal social epistemology and different critical aproaches to understanding it. (shrink)

For liberalism, values such as respect, reciprocity, and tolerance should frame cultural encounters in multicultural societies. However, it is easy to disregard that power differences and political domination also influence the cultural sphere and the relations between cultural groups. In this essay, I focus on some challenges for cultural pluralism. In relation to Indian political theorist Rajeev Bhargava, I discuss the meaning of cultural domination and epistemic injustice and their historical and moral implications. Bhargava argued that as a consequence of (...) colonialism, “indigenous cultures” were inferiorized, marginalized, and anonymized. Although cultures are often changing due to external influences, I argue that epistemic injustice implies that a culture is forced to subjection, disrespected, and considered as inferior and that it threatens the dominated people’s epistemic framework, collective identity, and existential security. Finally, I refer to John Rawls’s theory of political liberalism as a constructive approach to avoid parochialism and Western cultural domination -/- . (shrink)

Paradoxes are an unavoidable part of work life. The unusualness of attempting to simultaneously satisfy contradictory imperatives can result in creative outcomes that simultaneously satisfy both imperatives by inducing search for, and selection of, novel and useful solutions. Likewise, extant research suggests that paradoxes can also result in anxiety, defensiveness, and persistence of old ways of doing things. However, there is little work attempting to describe how paradoxes affect cognition and when it results in higher or lower creativity. To tackle (...) this issue, a theory of paradoxical creativity is developed. Paradoxical creativity is the attempt by an individual to creatively resolve a contradiction by simultaneously achieving competing demands. The theory is implemented into a computational model and a simulation is used to describe how paradoxes affect creative cognitive process and how these processes in turn result in higher or lower degrees of creativity. The results show that creative output is enhanced when paradoxes have a balanced effect on the cognitive processes responsible for an individual’s capacity to search for new information and willingness to tolerate new ideas. Hence, individuals with high baseline levels of creative cognition are more likely to suffer negative creative performance consequences resulting from contradictory demands. For those individuals, contradictory demands may produce more alternatives, which increases uncertainty and time to insight (if insight is ever reached). This suggests that incentives or rewards to resolve contradictions may have the unintentional effect of reducing creative output in some circumstance. (shrink)

In this paper I will take the right to privacy as an example when discussing the question of the prospects of global value consensus or value conflicts. The question whether privacy is a contextual value will be discussed in the remaining part of my paper and I will take the views of the Japanese ICT-ethicists Yohko Orito and Kiyosho Murata as my point of departure. In “Privacy protection in Japan: cultural influence on the universal value” (2005), they argue against the (...) view that the right to privacy is a universal value. Their argument is straightforward and clear, hence their article is a valuable contribution to the discussion. However, I will object to their argument. I will defend the view that privacy is a universal value, although there are contextual differences concerning what kind of information is considered as privacy sensitive. (shrink)

This article seeks to reveal, conceptualize, and analyze a trend in the development of the retributive theory of punishment since the beginning of the 21st century. We term this trend “retributarianism.” It is reflected in the emergence of retributive approaches that through expanding the concepts of censure and culpability extend the relevant time-frame for assessing the deserved punishment beyond the sentencing moment. These retributarian approaches are characterized by the individualization of retributivism. On one hand, retributarianism shares with classic retributivism the (...) rhetoric of justice, a focus on the moral evaluation of the severity of the offense, and the primary importance ascribed to maintaining proportionality. On the other hand, it shares with utilitarianism the possibility of taking into account, in addition to the severity of the offense, the offender’s personal circumstances, with a future-oriented perspective that also considers developments subsequent to the commission of the offense. This article analyzes the emergence of retributarianism, suggests possible explanations for its development, and assesses its possible implications for penal theory and policy. (shrink)

Artikeln tar sin utgångspunkt i två aktuella exempel på krav på historisk rättvisa efter kolonialismen: forna Mau-Mau-kämpars krav på gottgörelse för britternas övergrepp på 1950-talet och hererofolkets krav till Tyskland på gottgörelse för det folkmord som ägde rum 1904–1907. Dessa exempel aktualiserar frågan om historisk rättvisa. Vad innebär historisk rättvisa? Vilka krav på historisk rättvisa är berättigade att ställa? Hur lång tid efter övergrepp och våld finns det skäl att kräva gottgörelse? Kan kraven ärvas till efterkommande generationer? Vem bör gottgöra (...) dem som drabbats? Dessa frågor måste besvaras för att man skall kunna ta ställning till krav på gottgörelse och rättvisa. Syftet med denna artikel är att identifiera och söka besvara en rad frågor som krav på gottgörande rättvisa efter kolonialismen ställer. Avslutningsvis diskuteras kraven från Mau-Mau-kämparna som var internerade i brittiska läger och hererofolkets krav på kompensation från Tyskland.Nyckelord: Gottgörande rättvisa, kompensation, kolonialism, herero, Mau-Mau, global rättvisa, historisk rättvisaEnglish summary: The Meaning of Historical Justice after ColonialismRecently, four Kikuyus and former Kenyan Mau-Mau fighters claimed compensation for castration, torture and rape committed in the British detention camps in the 1950s. Also recently, representatives of the Herero people went to Berlin to bring home skulls that Germans brought to Berlin after the genocide at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The detentions and abuses of Kikuyu and the genocide of the Herero people are just two examples of offenses carried out by European nations during colonialism. Do these offenses have any reverberations today? Should we simply forget about the deeds that happened such a long time ago or do they raise any legal or moral questions?The concept of justice has two dimensions, distributional and rectificatory. This article focuses on the meaning and implication of rectificatory justice for historical wrongs. The simple idea that if A is harming B, A has to correct her act, i.e. the basic idea of rectificatory justice, presupposes a line of complicated assumptions when it is applied to specific historical incidences, for example colonialism.A model provides a basis for an explication of rectificatory justice. It is then applied to a discussion of rectification after colonialism. The questions of who can rightly claim rectification and who owes rectification, if there are temporal limitations to rectification and what rectification after colonialism would imply are discussed. The article ends with an explication of the meaning of rectificatory justice, an argumentation for why rectificatory justice is commendable and an assessment of the demands of the Mau-Mau-fighters and the Herero. (shrink)