BackgroundLiterature shows that middle-aged and older adults sometimes experience a wish to die. Reasons for these wishes may be complex and involve multiple factors. One important question is to what extent people with a wish to die have medically classifiable conditions. Aim(1) Estimate the prevalence of a current wish to die among middle-aged and older adults in The Netherlands; (2) explore which factors within domains of vulnerability (physical, cognitive, social and psychological) are associated with a current wish to die; (3) (...) assess how many middle-aged and older adults with a current wish to die do not have a medically classifiable condition and/or an accumulation of age-related health problems.MethodsData of 2015/16 from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam were used for this cross-sectional study (1563 Dutch middle-aged and older adults aged between 57 and 99 years), obtained through structured medical interviews and self-reported questionnaires. Three experienced physicians assessed whether the participants with a current wish to die could be classified as having a medically classifiable condition and/or an accumulation of age-related health problems.ResultsN = 62 participants (4.0%) had a current wish to die. Having a current wish to die was associated with multiple characteristics across four domains of vulnerability, among which: self-perceived health, problems with memory, self-perceived quality of life and meaningfulness of life. Fifty-four participants with a current wish to die were assessed with having a medically classifiable condition, of which one was also assessed with having an accumulation of age-related health problems. Six people were assessed to have neither, and for two people it was unclear.ConclusionA small minority of middle-aged and older adults in the Netherlands have a current wish to die. Most of them can be classified with a medical condition and one person with an accumulation of age-related health problems. Furthermore, the findings show that having a current wish to die is multi-faceted. There is still a need for more knowledge, such as insight in to what extent suffering stemming from the medical classifiable disease contributes to the development of the wish to die. (shrink)

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

Parcours prodigieux que nous racontent ces mémoires sans en cacher les obstacles, les drames ou les échecs, et où l'on rencontre plusieurs figures exceptionnelles croisées au cours de cette carrière menée tambour battant hors des sentiers battus.

The aim of this study is to better understand why public officials and business employees engage in corruption. Insight into individual-level explanations for corruption was obtained with the aid of a self-report survey. The results suggest that the most indicative factors of whether or not individuals are corruption-prone are as follows: the moral conviction they have to refrain from corruption; perceptions of whether their colleagues approve of and engage in corruption; and difficulties experienced in complying with the rules on corruption. (...) This result pattern was identical for public officials and business employees alike, and as a consequence, for both sides of corrupt acts. The latter indicates that the same motives may not only underlie corruption in both private and public sectors, but also the act of corruption in its active and passive forms. The results of the current study do not provide strong support for the assumption that economic considerations—expected costs and benefits—are crucial in predicting corruption. Based on the findings that norms and the perceived opportunity to comply are dominant factors in explaining corruption, this article focuses on the practical implications for the development of anti-corruption strategies within both public and private sectors. (shrink)

Although a large number of studies have explored the main causes of gender inequality in academia, less attention has been given to the processes underlying the failure of gender equality initiatives to enhance gender representation, especially at the professorial level. We offer a critical discourse analysis of recently promulgated gender policy documents of the five Flemish universities, and demonstrate that defensive institutional work is a fundamental process underlying resistance to gender equality in the academic profession. That is, powerful organizational actors (...) resist gender change by intentionally deploying a combination of discursive strategies that legitimate what we describe as non–time-bound gender equality initiatives: The expected outcomes are undetermined in time, and they delegitimate concrete, time-bound measures that define specific outcomes against well-defined deadlines. By explicitly bringing a temporal dimension into our analysis, we argue that defensive institutional work deflects questions regarding what ought to be achieved when, and contributes to the slow pace of gender change in academia. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in research on mediated communication via social touch. Previous studies indicated that mediated social touch can induce similar positive outcomes to interpersonal touch. However, studies investigating the user experience of MST technology predominantly involve brief experiments that are performed in well-controlled laboratory conditions. Hence, it is still unknown how MST affects the relationship and communication between physically separated partners in a romantic relationship, in a naturalistic setting and over a longer period (...) of time. In a longitudinal explorative field study, the effects of MST on social connectedness and longing for touch among geographically separated romantic couples were investigated in a naturalistic setting. For 2 weeks, 17 couples used haptic bracelets, that were connected via the internet, to exchange mediated squeeze-like touch signals. Before and after this period, they reported their feelings of social connectedness and longing for touch through questionnaires. The results show that the use of haptic bracelets enhanced social connectedness among geographically separated couples but did not affect their longing for touch. Interviews conducted at the end of the study were analyzed following the thematic analysis method to generate prominent themes and patterns in using MST technology among participant couples. Two main themes were generated that captured the way the bracelets fostered a positive one-to-one connection between partners and the way in which participants worked around their frustrations with the bracelets. Detailed findings and limitations of this longitudinal field study are further discussed, and suggestions are made for future research. (shrink)

Dress serves as a discursive daily practice of gender, and this article explains the dress practices of Bosnian Muslim refugee women living in Vermont. These dress practices tend toward elaborate, carefully cultivated styles for hair, makeup, and dress. Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and secondary historical sources, the authors seek to explain the meanings and practice of these dress practices. They argue that gendered dress practices reflect agentic processes that are situated within the flow of time and are rooted (...) in relational processes that occur at the macrostructural level of history and nation and at the micro world of social interaction and lived experience. (shrink)

Selected Logic Papers, long out of print and now reissued with eight additional essays, includes much of the author's important work on mathematical logic and ...

Explores the nature and types of mystical experience and discusses the value of mysticism for humanity.

An agent who receives information in the form of an indicative conditional statement and who trusts her source will modify her credences to bring them in line with the conditional. I will argue that the agent, upon the acquisition of such information, should, in general, expand her prior credence function to an indeterminate posterior one; that is, to a set of credence functions. Two different ways the agent might interpret the conditional will be presented, and the properties of the resulting (...) indeterminate posteriors compared. The cause of the expansion from a single prior credence function to a set of credence functions forming the indeterminate posterior one will be explained. The expansion undermines the Bayesian dogma that the result of assimilating new information into a determinate prior credence functions is always a determinate posterior one. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 209 Seiten: 77-97.

A complete translation of Aristotle's classic that is both faithful and readable, along with an introduction that provides the modern reader with a means of understanding this seminal work and its impact on our culture. In this volume, Joe Sachs (translator of Aristotle's _Physics, Metaphysics,_ and the _Nicomachean Ethics _)also supplements his excellent translation with well-chosen notes and glossary of important terms. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a (...) glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Aristotle’s immediate audience. (shrink)

The strategy of updating credences by minimizing the relative entropy has been questioned by many authors, most strongly by means of the Judy Benjamin puzzle. I present a new analysis of Judy Benjamin–like forms of new information and defend the thesis that in general the rational posterior is indeterminate, meaning that a family of posterior credence functions rather than a single one is the rational response when that type of information becomes available. The proposed thesis extends naturally to all cases (...) in which new information is traditionally handled by minimizing the relative entropy. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

This paper argues that the impact of individual higher education institutions’ strategies on system diversity should be explored. By looking at how universities respond strategically to governmental policies as well as to the actions of other (competing) institutions, our understanding of determinants of diversity can be enriched. A conceptual framework focusing on institutional positioning is explained using the dimensions deliberateness of organizational actions versus environmental influence, on the one hand, and differentiation versus compliance, on the other. We posit institutional positioning (...) as the mechanism through which organizational and environmental levels are linked. Our model features multiple dimensions and relations reflecting how higher education institutions locate themselves in specific niches, i.e. positions where they are able to gather the necessary resources for their core activities. The implications for research on diversity and for policymaking are discussed. (shrink)

Noch während des Zweiten Weltkriegs in den Vereinigten Staaten entstanden, 1947 als Buch erschienen, mit der Neuausgabe von 1969 endgültig zum einflussreichsten Werk der ”Frankfurter Schule“ geworden: eine Sonderausgabe zum hundertsten Geburtstag Theodor W. Adornos am 11. September 2003.

Some cognitive processes appear to have “phenomenal” properties that are directly revealed to the subject and not determined by physical properties. I suggest that the source of this appearance is the method by which our brain processes sensory information. The appearance is an illusion. Nonetheless, we are not mistaken when we judge that people sometimes fee lpain.

"First published by Oxford University Press, 1916."--Title page verso.

In this essay I suggest that we view design principles in systems biology as minimal models, for a design principle usually exhibits universal behaviors that are common to a whole range of heterogeneous (living and nonliving) systems with different underlying mechanisms. A well-known design principle in systems biology, integral feedback control, is discussed, showing that it satisfies all the conditions for a model to be a minimal model. This approach has significant philosophical implications: it not only accounts for how design (...) principles explain, but also helps clarify one dispute over design principles, e.g., whether design principles provide mechanistic explanations or a distinct kind of explanations called design explanations. (shrink)

These nineteen original studies deal with Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489), the Modern Devotion and its influence, subjects and personalities of early humanism and ...

Un panorama complet de l'histoire des philosophes depuis l'Antiquité : les auteurs fondateurs ; les systèmes et grands courants de pensée ; des références bibliographiques pertinentes. Un concept inédit : les concepts explicités par les textes ; un classement chronologique (des Présocratiques à nos jours) ; le parcours intellectuel de chaque philosophe.

An infinite lottery experiment seems to indicate that Bayesian conditionalization may be inconsistent when the prior credence function is finitely additive because, in that experiment, it conflicts with the principle of reflection. I will show that any other form of updating credences would produce the same conflict, and, furthermore, that the conflict is not between conditionalization and reflection but, instead, between finite additivity and reflection. A correct treatment of the infinite lottery experiment requires a careful treatment of finite additivity. I (...) will show that the results of the experiment, paradoxical though they may be, are not inconsistent, but that they conflict with one particular version of reflection . I will reject that version and I will propose a slight modification of a different version of reflection such that the modified version does maintain the mutual consistency of finite additivity, reflection and conditionalization. As a result, I will strengthen the case for finite additivity by showing that Bayesian conditionalization is fully consistent with it. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of 'new paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century. Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work in a careful and accessible way, emphasizing Kuhn's detailed studies of (...) the history of science, which often assist the understanding of his more abstract philosophical work. These historical studies provide vital insight into what Kuhn was actually trying to achieve in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: an endeavour far less extreme than either his 'foes' or his 'fans' claim. In the book's second half, Sharrock and Read provide excellent explications, defences and, where appropriate, criticisms of Kuhn's central concept of 'incommensurability', and tackle head on the crucial issue of whether Kuhn's insights concerning the natural sciences can be extrapolated to other disciplines, such as the social sciences. This is the first comprehensive introduction to the work of Kuhn and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars in philosophy, theory of science, management science and anthropology. (shrink)