In today’s pluralistic society, clinical ethics consultation cannot count on a pre-given set of rules and principles to be applied to a specific situation, because such an approach would deny the existence of different and divergent backgrounds by imposing a dogmatic and transcultural morality. Clinical ethics support (CES) needs to overcome this lack of foundations and conjugate the respect for the difference at stake with the necessity to find shared and workable solutions for ethical issues encountered in clinical practice. We (...) argue that a pragmatist approach to CES, based on the philosophical theories of William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce, can help to achieve the goal of reaching practical solutions for moral problems in the context of today’s clinical environment, characterized by ethical pluralism. In this article, we outline a pragmatist theoretical framework for CES. Furthermore, we will show that moral case deliberation, making use of the dilemma method, can be regarded an example of a pragmatist approach to CES. (shrink)

Orienting biases for speech may provide a foundation for language development. Although human infants show a bias for listening to speech from birth, the relation of a speech bias to later language development has not been established. Here, we examine whether infants' attention to speech directly predicts expressive vocabulary. Infants listened to speech or non-speech in a preferential listening procedure. Results show that infants' attention to speech at 12 months significantly predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months, while indices of general (...) development did not. No predictive relationships were found for infants' attention to non-speech, or overall attention to sounds, suggesting that the relationship between speech and expressive vocabulary was not a function of infants' general attentiveness. Potentially ancient evolutionary perceptual capacities such as biases for conspecific vocalizations may provide a foundation for proficiency in formal systems such language, much like the approximate number sense may provide a foundation for formal mathematics. (shrink)

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from examples of specific usages, and that exhibit patterns of behavior over the course of learning similar to those in children. Early learning of (...) verb argument structure is an area of language acquisition that provides an interesting testbed for such approaches due to the complexity of verb usages. A range of linguistic factors interact in determining the felicitous use of a verb in various constructions—associations between syntactic forms and properties of meaning that form the basis for a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language. This article presents a computational model for the representation, acquisition, and use of verbs and constructions. The Bayesian framework is founded on a novel view of constructions as a probabilistic association between syntactic and semantic features. The computational experiments reported here demonstrate the feasibility of learning general constructions, and their exceptions, from individual usages of verbs. The behavior of the model over the timecourse of acquisition mimics, in relevant aspects, the stages of learning exhibited by children. Therefore, this proposal sheds light on the possible mechanisms at work in forming linguistic generalizations and maintaining knowledge of exceptions. (shrink)

To advance current knowledge on ethical decision-making in organizations, we integrate two perspectives that have thus far developed independently: the organizational identification perspective and the ethical climate perspective. We illustrate the interaction between these perspectives in two studies, in which we presented participants with moral business dilemmas. Specifically, we found that organizational identification increased moral decision-making only when the organization’s climate was perceived to be ethical. In addition, we disentangle this effect in Study 2 from participants’ moral identity. We argue (...) that the interactive influence of organizational identification and ethical climate, rather than the independent influence of either of these perspectives, is crucial for understanding moral decision-making in organizations. (shrink)

To tackle zoonotic disease threats, a One Health approach is currently commonplace and generally understood as an integrated effort of multiple disciplines to promote the health of humans, animals and the environment. To implement One Health strategies in zoonotic disease control, many countries set up early warning systems, in which human and veterinary health professionals cooperate. These systems, like the Dutch Zoonoses Structure, can be successful to detect emerging disease threats. However, these systems are not well equipped to handle moral (...) dilemmas that can arise in zoonotic disease control, like the culling of healthy animals. This research studies the role of normative presuppositions of professionals involved in zoonotic disease control policies in the Netherlands. We found that these professionals in general adhered to a holistic view of the One Health concept, however, in practice an anthropocentric approach was dominant. Public health was identified as the trumping moral value, which reveals an inherent field of tension with the core of One Health thinking. The lack of ethical expertise in control systems for zoonotic diseases can lead to misconception of ethical principles, like the precautionary principle which is frequently evoked to justify disease control measures. (shrink)

" Nous avons tenté dans cet ouvrage de tracer le chemin qui va de la logique traditionnelle à la logique transcendantale [...] à la logique transcendantale qui n'est pas une seconde logique mais qui est seulement la logique elle-même, radicale et concrète, qui doit son développement à la méthode phénoménologique. En vérité, pour s'exprimer plus précisément, nous n'avons justement eu en vue, comme logique transcendantale, que la logique telle qu'elle est délimitée traditionnellement, la logique analytique qui sans contredit grâce à (...) sa généralité vide et formelle embrasse toutes les sphères d'êtres et d'objets, corrélativement toutes les sphères de connaissances. Toutefois, étant astreints à reconsidérer la caractérisation du sens et de l'ampleur de la recherche transcendantale, nous avons par avance acquis aussi du même coup le moyen de comprendre les " logiques " (qu'il reste à fonder) ayant un autre sens, conçues comme doctrines de la science, mais comme doctrines matérielles ; doctrines de la science parmi lesquelles la plus élevée et la plus étendue serait la logique de la science absolue, la logique de la philosophie phénoménologico-transcendantale elle-même ". E. Husserl. (shrink)

We do not know how much clinical physicians carrying out clinical trials in oncology and haematology struggle with ethical concerns. To our knowledge, no empirical research exists on these questions in a Nordic context. Therefore, this study aims to learn what kinds of ethical challenges physicians in Sweden, Denmark and Finland face when caring for patients in clinical trials; and what strategies, if any, they have developed to deal with them. The main findings were that clinical cancer trials pose ethical (...) challenges related to autonomy issues, unreasonable hope for benefits and the therapeutic misconception. Nevertheless, some physicians expressed that struggling with such challenges was not of great concern. This conveys a culture of hope where health care professionals and patients uphold hope and mutually support belief in clinical trials. This culture being implicit, physicians need opportunities to deliberately reflect over the characteristics that should constitute this culture. (shrink)

Relationships between self-ratings and expectations of an ideal U.S. president, were studied in 43 men drawn from a university setting in the eastern coast of the U.S.A. The men first rated themselves on personality variables, life choices (agentic and communal), peacefulness, spirituality, and morality. Then they were presented with a vignette requesting that they describe an ideal U.S. president on inventories measuring personality variables, life choices, peacefulness, spirituality, and morality. For the rating of the ideal U.S. president, they also were (...) asked to respond to a 20 item questionnaire that was a composite of several factors on organization and leadership, morality, spirituality, and peacefulness. The respondents belonged to one of seven different political persuasions, similar in some ways to different cultures. Self-ratings of the men and expectations of the president were highly correlated for extraversion, openness, trait morality, agentic and communal life choices. However, no significant correlations were found between the self-ratings and expectations of the president for neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, peacefulness, nor state morality. The men were also presented with vignettes for the ideal physician and ideal automechanic and asked to rate each of them on the inventory items. Overall, the U.S. President was rated as more neurotic and immoral in terms of ingrained ideas of right and wrong, but also as more caring for others, transcendent, seeking goodness and truth, forgiving, cooperative, and most concerned with matters of justice and mercy, and more concerned with both agentic (power-seeking) and communal (community-minded) life choices than were either the ideal physician or ideal automechanic. The ideal physician was rated as highest in extra-version, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and overall peacefulness, and lowest in neuroticism. The ideal automechanic was rated as highest in state or situational immorality, and lowest in both agentic (power-seeking, business-mindedness) and communal (community-mindedness) life choices, and also lowest in caring for others well-being, transcendence, seeking goodness and truth, forgiveness and cooperation, being concerned with justice and mercy, overall expectations, overall spirituality, and overall organization and leadership. In general, the self-ratings were significantly related to ratings/expectations, of the U.S. President, ideal physician, and ideal automechanic. The men seemed to identify more with the automechanic than with the present or physician. (shrink)

Is aesthetics a product of evolution? Are human aesthetic behaviors in fact evolutionary adaptations? The creation of artistic objects and experiences is an important aesthetic behavior. But so is the perception of aesthetic phenomena qua aesthetic. The question of evolutionary aesthetics is whether humans have evolved the capacity not only to make beautiful things but also to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in things. Are our near-universal love of music and cute baby animals essential to our species’ evolutionary development, which took (...) place over thousands of years? In other words, do aesthetic practice and appreciation help people to survive or reproduce? Do aesthetic behaviors help to propel natural selection? If so, what does that tell us about ourselves as human beings? What does it tell us about art, our other aesthetic practices, and aesthetic experience? (shrink)

The federal Common Rule, which governs the conduct of research with human subjects, specifies the criteria and procedures by which Institutional Review Boards should review such research. Although there is wide agreement that IRBs, or Research Ethics Committees as they are called in most of the world, are essential to assuring that human subjects research meets common standards of ethics, IRBs have always come under considerable criticism. Some have critiqued IRBs for using important resources inefficiently, including the large amount of (...) time researchers put into submitting applications, modifications, and reports and delaying the start of data collection within the limited time that grants and contracts provide. Others have critiqued the inconsistency of review of multi-site projects. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Two experiments involving an international collaboration of experimenters sought to replicate and extend a previously published psi experiment on precognition by Daryl Bem that has been the focus of extensive research. The experiment reverses the usual cause–effect sequence of a standard psychology experiment using priming and reaction times. The preregistered confirmatory hypothesis is that response times to incongruent stimuli will be longer than response times to congruent stimuli even though the prime has not yet appeared when the participant records their (...) judgments. The confirmatory hypothesis for Experiment 1 was not supported. Exploratory analyses indicated that those participants who completed the English-language version rather than a translation showed a significant effect, as was the case in the original study; no significant departure from chance was found in data involving non-English translations. Experiment 2 sought to enhance the predicted effect by having each participant read either a pro-psi or an anti-psi statement at the beginning of the experiment to test the pre-recorded hypothesis that a pro-psi statement would produce a larger effect than an anti-psi statement. The results did not support the primary psi hypothesis and there was no effect in the English-language sample. However, there was mixed support for the effect of the psi statement on performance; those participants who received the pro-psi statement had a greater psi score than those who received the anti-psi statement. As in the original experiment, neither the experimenters’ nor participants’ beliefs were significantly associated with the dependent measure. In sum, the pre-registered confirmatory hypotheses were not supported. The importance of the personality variable Sensation Seeking, a component of extraversion, as a correlate of psi performance is discussed as are the challenges and implications for international collaborations and replication in controversial science. Keywords: priming; expectancy effect; retrocausation; consciousness; sociology; precognition; psi; replication Two experiments involving an international collaboration of experimenters sought to replicate and extend a previously published psi experiment on precognition by Daryl Bem that has been the focus of extensive research. The experiment reverses the usual cause-effect sequence of a standard psychology experiment using priming and reaction times. The preregistered confirmatory hypothesis is that response times to incongruent stimuli will be longer than response times to congruent stimuli even though the prime has not yet appeared when the participant records his or her judgments. The confirmatory hypothesis for Study 1 was not supported. Exploratory analyses indicated that those participants who completed the English-language version rather than a translation showed a significant effect, as was the case in the original study; no significant departure from chance was found in data involving non-English translations. Study 2 sought to enhance the predicted effect by having each participant read either a pro-psi or an anti-psi statement at the beginning of the experiment to test the pre-recorded hypothesis that a pro-psi statement would produce a larger effect than an anti-psi statement. The results did not support the primary psi hypothesis and there was no observed association between belief and experience of ESP and psi outcome. However, there was mixed support for the effect of the psi statement on performance; those participants who received the pro-psi statement had a greater psi score than those who received anti-psi statement. As in the original experiment, neither the experimenters’ nor participants’ beliefs or expectations were significantly correlated with the dependent measure. In sum, the pre-registered confirmatory hypotheses were not supported. The importance of the personality variable Sensation Seeking, a component of extraversion, as a correlate of psi performance is discussed as are the challenges and implications for international collaborations and replication in controversial science. (shrink)

Plato's Hesiod is a neglected topic, scholars having long regarded Plato's Homer as a more promising field of inquiry. My aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that this particular bias of scholarly attention, although understandable, is unjustified. Of no other dialogue is this truer than of the Ion.

Aesthetic responsivity and the phenomenology of arts processes reflect integrative self-world engagements, and are informative about the nature of the world and our biology in ways that are often not be made evident through scientific research. Akins’ and Hahn’s research regarding human trichromatic visual perception brings together the art of photography, neuroscience, and psychophysics, along with analyses of perspectives on vision in science and philosophy, to invoke anti-reductive, holistic understandings of how we see colour. We bring aesthetics and the phenomenology (...) of arts processes to bear in exploring creaturely re-sponsivity to the complex inter-relational dynamics of light perception, and o˙er reflective metaphors for human engagements that challenge Darwinian utilitarian conceptions. We argue that attending to aesthetic and phenomenological aspects of experiences is essential to understanding how the shared circuits of cognition and sensory-motor engagement shape our perceptive responsive interactions. (shrink)

The personality and the writings of Marsilio Ficino mark the turning point from the middleages to the Renaissance. In John Marenbon’s apt description, medieval philosophy is ‘the story of a complex tradition founded in Neoplatonism, but not simply as a continuation or development of Neoplatonism itself’. ‘Not simply’ because the Enneads, the first and finest flowering of that tradition, testify to Plotinus’ deep engagement, not only with the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Middle Platonists, but also with (...) a variety of theologico-mystical writings of diverse middleeastern provenances, from Egypt to Persia. This complex tradition, Ficino transmitted to the West in the form of translations from Greek into Latin of the dialogues of Plato and the Enneads of Plotinus as well as of several commentaries on those texts by later thinkers. In addition to such exegetical works, Ficino wrote several philosophical treatises of his own. Finally, as an ordained priest, he was also well acquainted with the writings of the Church Fathers, all of which had contributed to his belief that religion should not be separated from philosophy. To the completion of this ambitious scholarly programme and the fulfilment of his commitment to the Church, he brought the resources of his powerfully syncretistic mind. Rather than merely combining various texts and traditions, he made them speak to each other and, in the process, evolved a system that was both sui generis and attuned to the new ways of thinking that were then emerging in quattrocento Florence. His in-depth understanding of all these texts, together with his ability to spot similarities, analogies and correspondences between them, enabled him to fuse into a coherent system various elements which a modern historian of philosophy would regard as dissimilar if not incompatible. His philosophical acumen enabled him, when he thought it appropriate, to improve on the views of those he regarded as his masters and to fill whatever gaps he found in their arguments. The present essay is an attempt to unravel the nature of Ficino’s syncretism, in which three levels of widening scope will be distinguished: authorial, trans-authorial and trans-doctrinal. To achieve a desirable level of both precision and concision, a short text will then be analysed, namely Speech Five of his most widely read treatise, a Latin commentary on Plato’s Symposium, entitled Commentarium in Convivium Platonis De Amore. It will be shown how, through the fictional speech that he put in the mouth of Marsuppini, his chosen spokesperson of the Platonic Agathon, Ficino succeeded, not only in blending Platonic, Plotinian and Christian elements in the reconstruction of an argument that Plato had meant us to regard as flawed to the core, but he also composed an elegant and original speech that continues to intrigue and enchant its readers after a gap of over six centuries. (shrink)

Is scientific reasoning the standard of rationality? Can historical explanation be reduced to the scientific mode of reasoning? R.G. Collingwood answered both questions negatively. He further attempted to show that the types of justification used to account for moral actions are closely similar to historical explanations. His ethics has thus a strong historicist and relativistio flavour. Hie aim of my paper is to state Collingwood's ethical views and to show that the "ethical judgment", which inevitably relies on rules, cannot be (...) equated with the "historical judgment". (shrink)

BackgroundSome children appear to not hear well in class despite normal hearing sensitivity. These children may be referred for auditory processing disorder (APD) assessment but can also have attention, language, and/or reading disorders. Despite presenting with similar concerns regarding hearing difficulties in difficult listening conditions, the overall profile of deficits can vary in children with suspected or confirmed APD. The current study used cluster analysis to determine whether subprofiles of difficulties could be identified within a cohort of children presenting for (...) auditory processing assessment.MethodsNinety school-aged children (7–13 years old) with suspected APDs were included in a cluster analysis. All children had their reading, language, cognition and auditory processing assessed. Parents also completed the Children’s Auditory Performance Scale (CHAPS). Cluster analysis was based on tasks where age-norms were available, including word reading (Castles and Coltheart irregular and non-words test), phonological awareness (Queensland University Inventory of Literacy), language [Comprehensive Language of Assessment-4, Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL)], sustained attention (Continuous Performance Test), working memory (digits forward and backward), and auditory processing [Frequency Pattern Test (FPT), Dichotic Digits Test (DDT)]. Hierarchical cluster analysis was undertaken to determine the optimal number of clusters for the data, followed by... (shrink)

Our contributors invite new ways of thinking Hegels ideas through contemporary art and theories that arise from current perspectives; and of thinking through such art and perspectives via Hegelianism.

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

Our contributors explore a rich variety of aesthetic problems that bring about the self-reflexive re-evaluation of ideas.

A hijacking is a violent takeover, a misappropriation of something for a purpose other than its intended one, by parties other than those for whom the thing was meant. This issue explores the aesthetic practices and consequences of unauthorized repurposing.

Donors, scientists and farmers all benefit when research and development projects have high impact. However, potential benefits are sometimes not realized. Our objective in this study is to determine why resource-poor farmers in Togo (declined to) adopt recommended practices that were promoted through a multi-organizational project on soil fertility management. We examine the processes and outcomes related to the adoption process. The project was undertaken in three villages in the Central Region of Togo in West Africa. The development and research (...) processes that took place during the implementation of the project were critically analyzed using a conceptual framework that may be useful for improving the impact of future participatory projects. At the macro level, opportunities for innovation were not deliberately explored with participating farmers and other village members; consequently “pre-analytical choices” made during the planning phase resulted in practices that resource-poor farmers were, for a variety of reasons, unable or unwilling to adopt. From the outset, donors and scientists focused on soil fertility management, but failed to take into account the wider economic context within which soil fertility management took place. This was a major obstacle to the subsequent adoption of recommended management strategies. Scientists and donor partners measured the success of the Project in terms of crop productivity, but farmers’ choices were influenced by a complex mix of socio-economic, political and technical factors. We also illustrate the importance of selecting appropriate categories of farmers for a particular experiment. We conclude that for participatory research and development projects to be successful, it is not enough to develop technologies that “work” in a technical sense. In order to be scaled up and widely implemented, such technologies must also meet a variety of needs of resource-poor farmers and be acceptable from a socio-cultural point of view. (shrink)