Authentic feelings like respect and similar moral emotions already start to develop in preverbal infants. However, our schooling systems offer only very few opportunities to train respectful behavior. Marsal, Dobashi, and Nowak introduce four interactive exercices in order to implement them in the moral and democratic education. All exercices are based on Martens’ Five Finger Method and on the didactic experiences made by authors in Germany, Japan, and Poland too.

A primary goal of this book is to enhance intercultural academic exchange and to encourage further research and practical work in this field.

What precisely do we mean by respect? How should we adjudicate between conflicting demands of respect? What obstacles stand in the way of respect? The papers contained in this international anthology were presented at the North American Association of the Community of Inquiry conference in Vancouver, Canada, in June 2012, and were the outcome of in-depth and interdisciplinary discussions around the various aspects of respect. The book is an exacting and exciting analysis of the notion of respect - an analysis (...) that has the potential to have lasting and extensive practical consequences. (shrink)

One of Kant’s famous questions about being human asks, “What may I hope?” This question places individual life within an encompassing horizon of human history and speculates on the possibility of perspectives beyond death. In our time mortality is generally repressed, though the development of personal consciousness is closely linked to realization of one’s finitude. This raises especially urgent questions for children, and they are left to deal with them alone. From the time awareness begins, knowledge that death can occur (...) at any moment is one of the a priori determinants of being alive; that is, life is structured in advance by its future pastness. . According to Max Scheler, death reveals itself as a necessary and manifest constituent of all possible inner experiences in the life process. The cultural and individual interpretations of death’s meaning and consequences derived from this insight opened up an ample space for imagined possibilities of “continued existence,” which affected approaches to life. In our research project “Inochi – The Concept of Life after Death in Children’s Construction of the World. A German-Japanese Comparison,” carried out with German and Japanese research support, we examine concepts developed within the community of inquiry concerning “the individual’s afterlife” as soul, angel, animal, star, etc. In this we want to examine whether a globalized media environment leads to a cultural convergence in children’s ideas, and whether there are differences between views of girls and boys. Relevance of ideas about death is seen in the example of Japanese children who, believing in reincarnation chose “killing oneself” with relative frequency as a problem-solving strategy. Our contribution will present children’s imaginings using the drawings they created within this framework, since these can be interpreted as expressions of “narrative philosophizing,” especially for the Japanese children. Here we follow Mark Johnson who says” Human beings are imaginative synthesizing animals” . These imaginations make up a large part of our understanding, not just our beliefs, but rather our socially constructed way of being in and inhabiting a world. (shrink)

The paper confronts the reader with Nietzchean critical approach to history, truth, life, and education. Far away from progressive-euphoric ideologies of 19th, the authors consider the following questions: How children live historical occurences when being tought in classrooms, how can we strengthen their ability for reflected relations to history as well as for interconnecting between past, present, and future life? Psychological, pedagogical, and philosophical considerations meet intercultural contexts.

Philosophizing, according to E. Martens, can be seen as an elemental cultural technology, like arithmetic or writing, which both can and should be acquired in childhood. Martens is proposing here an understanding of philosophy that attributes value not only to the content canon, but also to the process itself, as Wittgenstein, for one, also did when he stated in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Philosophy is not a doctrine, but an activity.” For Socrates, this activity consisted in “giving an account of ourselves, (...) our knowledge, our way of life.” In Nietzsche’s view, the precondition for this kind of accounting is the personal capacity for self-distancing, which allows us to grasp our quite individual primal experiences of emotion, perception, sudden illuminations of insight, and so on, as general concepts and logical structures. (shrink)

This paper compares the concepts of Japanese and German primary school children as they relate to the “ethics of care.” To do this we have used the research methodology of expanding and replicating an experiment to test whether the results can be interculturally confirmed. In our design we replicated the experiment in children’s philosophy on the question “What are Family Ties?” carried out by Toshiaki Ôse in September 2002 with the 5th grade of the municipal .primary school Hamanogô in Chigasaki.

In diesem Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, dass Nietzsche und Dewey sich aus heutiger Sicht in ihren pädagogischen Konzepten ergänzen und wertvolle theoretische philosophische Hintergründe auf dem Weg der gesellschaftlich eingebetteten Selbstbestimmung bieten. Obwohl sich bei Dewey kein direkter Bezug zu Nietzsche findet, scheint dieses „In-Beziehung-Setzen“ insofern berechtigt zu sein, als gerade Dewey einen engen Zusammenhang zwischen Philosophie und Kultur bzw. Zivilisation sieht. Außerdem steht zu vermuten, dass Dewey durch die Reformpädagogik Nietzsches pädagogische Werteskala der Individualisierung kennenlernte. Auf jeden Fall aber (...) gibt es zwischen Nietzsche und Dewey denkerische Überschneidungen in Bezug auf ihre zentralen Werte wie z.B. Freiheit, Selbstbestimmung oder Individuum. Beide verstanden sich als Erzieher und sahen ihre Aufgabe darin, Hilfestellungen für die Steigerung des Selbst und die Individuation zu bieten sowie die Jugendlichen zum Selbstdenken zu ermutigen. Zentral ist für beide der Wert der eigenen Erfahrung, die im Rahmen des Konzepts vom freien Spiel, das die Vernunft des Leibes integriert, zur Individuation führt. In der „Erfahrung“ wird der Spannungsbogen zwischen „Schöpferischem“ und „Regel“ ausbalanciert. Das hängt damit zusammen, dass „Erfahrung“ sowohl durch eine aktive, kreative Perspektive gekennzeichnet ist, als auch durch eine passive, erleidende, in der das eigene Handeln in Beziehung zu der hervorgebrachten Veränderung gesetzt wird. Dadurch wird die dahinterliegende Regel erkannt. Deshalb führt die Reflexion des Erlebten, d.h. die Erfahrung, zu einem Zuwachs an Freiheit, wie Dewey festhält, der einen engen Zusammenhang zwischen Freiheit und Lernen deklariert. Eine wichtige Rolle als Informationsträger spielt dabei für Nietzsche und Dewey, im Gegensatz zu ihren zeitgenössischen Denkern, der Körper. Beide sind der Meinung, dass wir unseren Intellekt nur dann wirklich produktiv erschließen, wenn wir zu unserer Leiblichkeit zurückfinden. Da die Reflexion der Erfahrung eine Besinnung auf sich selbst voraussetzt, hat der „Rückzug auf sich selbst“ bei der Selbstbildung und bei der Entwicklung der inneren Freiheit einen hohen Stellenwert. Diese Phase muss aber für Dewey mit intensiven sozialen Phasen korrespondieren. Eine freie Haltung entwickelt sich aber nur dann, wenn das Individuum einen angemessenen Spielraum für Erkundungen und Experimente bekommt. Dieser Freiraum wird im Spiel gefunden. Das spielende Kind gilt als Metapher für das Leben in seiner höchsten Erfüllung, die die Zuwendung zum anderen ermöglicht. Nietzsches „Zauber des Dionysischen“, der die Menschen miteinander versöhnt, wird dabei mit Deweys demokratischen 'way of life' der Bürger und Bürgerinnen, den freien und gleichen Individuen, verglichen. Dieser Weg setzt nach Nietzsche bei jungen Menschen an, Dewey konkretisiert ihn für die Schule.This paper intends to show that, from today’s point of view, Nietzsche and Dewey are complementary in their pedagogical concepts and provide valuable theoretical and philosophical background for the path to self-determination in a social context. Although there is no direct reference to Nietzsche in Dewey’s work, this “making the connection” seems justifiable insofar as Dewey sees a close relationship between philosophy and culture or civilization. Also, one can assume it was through progressive reform pedagogy that Dewey became acquainted with Nietzsche’s pedagogical value scale of individuation. But in any case there are areas of overlap in the thought of Nietzsche and Dewey with regard to their central values, such as freedom, self-determination, or the individual. Both saw themselves as educators and understood their mission as offering support for self-enhancement and individuation and also encouraging the young to think for themselves. Central to both is the value of each person’s experience, which, within the conceptual framework of free play integrating the reason of the body, leads to individuation. In “experience” the tension between “what is creative” and “the rule” is balanced out. This relates to the fact that “experience” is characterized both by an active, creative perspective and a passive, receptive one, in which one’s own action is set in relation to the change resulting from it. This leads to recognition of the underlying rule. Thus experience, the reflection of what has been experienced, leads to an increase in freedom, as noted by Dewey, who asserts a close connection between freedom and learning. For Nietzsche and Dewey, as opposed their contemporaries, the body plays an important role in this as information carrier. Both of them believe that we only open up our intellect in a truly productive way when we find our way back to our physical being. Since the reflection of experience presupposes self-reflection, a high value is placed on the “retreat to the self” in self-cultivation and the development of inner freedom. But for Dewey this phase must correspond with intensive social phases. A free attitude can only develop when the individual is given appropriate latitude for investigation and experimentation. This free space is found in play. The playing child serves as metaphor for life in its highest fulfillment, which makes possible concern for the other. Nietzsche’s “enchantment of the Dionysian,” which reconciles humans among themselves, is compared here with the democratic “way of life” of Dewey’s citizens, the free and equal individuals. This path, according to Nietzsche, begins with the young. Dewey puts it into practice for the schools. (shrink)

Socratic Philosophizing is an open process of thinking that follows a net of methods. Martens develops his Five Finger Model in accordance with Socrates and the history of philosophy. Philosophizing within the community of inquiry is characterized by attitudes of curiosity, openness, and the willingness to make oneself understandable as well as to understand the other person in return. There are five core philosophical methods that assist in making such philosophizing successful: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Analysis, Dialectics and Speculation. These five methods (...) are understood as reflective operations which are learned in an elementary way and practiced step-by-step: to be able to describe something exactly, to understand oneself and others, to clarify in a conceptual and argumentative way how something is understood), to ask and to disagree,, to fantasize how something could be understood. Marten’s Five Finger Model builds on these methods in order to help children build broader and distinct questions through philosophizing. To illustrate this we will present an interactive game that can be used to introduce the teaching themes of Who am I?, Partnership, Tolerance, and Foreign Cultures. The game is called “Distance and Closeness.” The game was evaluated afterward using the framework of the five finger method. (shrink)

Our contribute compares the concepts of Japanese and German primary school children relating to the topic of death, healing in the context of values education and the ethics of care. This is a project of the German-Japanese Research Initiative on Philosophizing with Children (DJFPK), cialis 40mg which aims to facilitate individual autonomy by enhancing philosophical-ethical judgment. It encourages the application and appropriate transfer of values based on philosophical-ethical knowledge and acquired through independent reflection to the situations of daily life.

This presentation of our research compares concepts of Japanese and German primary school children relating to the topic of death in the context of values education and the ethics of care. This is a project of the German-Japanese Research Initiative on Philosophizing with Children, which aims to facilitate individual autonomy by enhancing philosophical-ethical judgment. It encourages the application and appropriate transfer of values based on philosophical ethical knowledge acquired through independent reflection on the situations of daily life.

This essay compares the philosophical thoughts on happiness put forth in poems by Friedrich Nietzsche at the age of 12-13 with the happiness concept of Frederik, a modern secondary school student, at about the same age, who was inspired by three of Nietzsche’s poems to consider his own ideas on happiness. The intent is to demonstrate that the child Nietzsche’s poems, written to confront his life problems through philosophizing, can also be useful to 21st-century children, encouraging them to think about (...) problematic and serious fundamental life questions. That this is beneficial has been demonstrated not only by Daniela Camhy in the American and Austrian language areas, but also by Hermann Josef Schmidt in his Quadrology written about Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s childhood and youth.In diesem Aufsatz werden die philosophischen Gedanken zum Glück, die der zwölf - dreizehnjährige Friedrich Nietzsche in Gedichtsform präsentierte, mit der Glückskonzeption des etwa gleichaltrigen heutigen Werkrealschülers Frederik verglichen, der drei Gedichte Nietzsches zum Anlass nahm, um über seine eigenen Vorstellungen zum Glück nachzudenken. Es geht darum zu zeigen, dass die Gedichte, die das Kind Nietzsche geschrieben hatte, um sich philosophierend mit seinen Lebensproblemen auseinander zu setzen, auch Kindern des 21. Jahrhunderts als Impuls dienen können, sich mit problematischen und schwerwiegenden Grundfragen des Lebens zu beschäftigen. Wie heilsam dieses Nachdenken ist, konnte nicht nur Daniela Cahmy für den amerikanischen und österreichischen Sprachraum zeigen, sondern auch Hermann Josef Schmidt in seiner Quadrologie zur Kindheit und Jugend von Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. (shrink)

In unserem Beitrag möchten wir zunächst auf die kategoriale Einordnung des philosophischen Begriffs “Respekt” eingehen und danach zeigen, wie Kinder in der philosophischen Community of Inquiry mit Problemen umgehen, die mit dem Begriffsfeld „Respekt“ verbunden sind. Aus dem breiten Angebot der dabei entwickelten Kategorie möchten wir auf der einen Seite die Kategorie „eine epistemische und moralische Tugend“ herausgreifen und auf der anderen Seite die Kategorie „ein Gefühl“ und zeigen, dass der philosophische Begriff “Respekt” als „Respekt vor jemand oder etwas“, sich (...) in seinem Anforderungsprofil mit der Nähe zum Gegenstand wandelt. Dadurch ergeben sich folgende Fragen: Müssen Personen immer respektiert werden? Kannst du jeden respektieren? Wer verdient Respekt? Kann man sich Respekt verdienen? Welche Handlungen sollten nicht respektiert werden? Kann man Respekt verlieren? Kann man Respekt kaufen? Gibt es falschen Respekt? Hierzu analysieren wir die Kinderdialoge eines philosophischen Gesprächs mit 6 -14 jährigen Kindern sowie ihre Kinderzeichnungen. In unserem Beitrag deuten wir Kinderzeichnungen und Kinderdialoge aus dem von der DAAD geförderten Forschungsprojekt „Kinder philosophieren über das Konstrukt ‚Respekt’“. Die 8 -15 Jahre alten Probanden sind Studierende der Kinderuniversität Bretten. (shrink)

As concerns of the Earth heading towards environmental change is gaining more prominence, this article will introduce a pilot study intended to investigate the common ideas children have about nature and how such ideas emerge within a philosophical community of inquiry about nature. We are particularly interested in a cultural comparison between German and Canadian children in order to see if the different historical and cultural developments influence how children understand and feel about nature. This pilot study contributes towards a (...) greater understanding of the cultural differences underlying how children’s perceptions of nature are tied to their identity formation. Furthermore, the process of philosophical inquiry may lend sensitivity to how children reflect and feel as they grow in today’s culture focused on environmental sustainability and economic development. (shrink)

Promoting philosophical and ethical education in schools requires academic education of teacher candidates who are able to apply professional methods. In schools, information pills in contrast to the academy, advice philosophy and ethics need to be taught in a practical and interactive way.?Learning-by-doing?, more about as distinguished from philosophy according to the?scholastic concept?. Philosophy according to the?universal concept? deals with questions generally asked not only by philosophers, but by all thinking people.

This paper works out which conceptual and theoretical preconditions have to be met, among others, in order for a living creature to be able to have a feeling of being alive beyond the mere capacity for sensation. For the emergence of such a feeling, which can be equated with a rudimentary phenomenal consciousness (1.), it is not enough for the organism to be alive (2. a.). Rather it has to be able to conceive its body as a unit and to (...) relate its sensations to this unit (2. b.). Moreover mobility (2. c.), a basic sense of possibility (2. d.) and a rudimentary sense of time (2. e.) are also necessary. The analysis of these preconditions relies primarily on Aristotelian theoretical approaches, encompassing both historical interpretation (3. a.), and systematic work, which includes a look at the current debates in the analytic philosophical tradition (3. b.). (shrink)

Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb argue that there is more to heredity than genes. They trace four "dimensions" in evolution -- four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. These systems, they argue, can all (...) provide variations on which natural selection can act. Evolution in Four Dimensions offers a richer, more complex view of evolution than the gene-based, one-dimensional view held by many today. The new synthesis advanced by Jablonka and Lamb makes clear that induced and acquired changes also play a role in evolution.After discussing each of the four inheritance systems in detail, Jablonka and Lamb "put Humpty Dumpty together again" by showing how all of these systems interact. They consider how each may have originated and guided evolutionary history and they discuss the social and philosophical implications of the four-dimensional view of evolution. Each chapter ends with a dialogue in which the authors engage the contrarieties of the fictional "I.M.," or Ifcha Mistabra -- Aramaic for "the opposite conjecture" -- refining their arguments against I.M.'s vigorous counterarguments. The lucid and accessible text is accompanied by artist-physician Anna Zeligowski's lively drawings, which humorously and effectively illustrate the authors' points. (shrink)

This article historicizes a single stage in how the contemporary obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) category was built. Starting from the position that the two central components which make up OCD are ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, it illustrates how these concepts were taken apart by a small group of clinical psychologists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in south London in the early 1970s, and why compulsions were investigated whilst obsessions were ignored. The decision to distinguish the previously (...) undifferentiated symptoms is attributed to the commitment amongst psychologists at the Maudsley, most notably Stanley Rachman, to an empirical conception of science which emphasized observability. Two aspects of this are discussed. First, compulsions were deemed ‘visible’ through their correspondence with animal behaviour. Second, the symptom was seen as open to an experimental modification procedure which privileged visible outcomes. Ultimately, the article concludes that the historical division between ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, and the extensive investigation of the latter, has had substantial implications for the development of OCD as a category centred on visible behaviours and treated through behavioural means. (shrink)

Socially responsible business and ethical behaviour of companies have been of interest to academia and practice for decades. But the focus has almost exclusively been on large corporations while small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have not received as much attention. Thus, this paper focuses on socially responsible business practices of SME entrepreneurs or owner–managers in Germany. Based on the assumption that decision-makers in SMEs are the central point where all business activities start, members of a German entrepreneurs association were approached (...) in the course of a qualitative and quantitative survey. They were asked to assess in what way their social responsibility is expressed in specific management practices towards selected stakeholder groups. These practices in turn were assumed to result in perceived positive reactions of the respective stakeholders and subsequently to positively influence the firm's financial performance, i.e. cost reductions and increase in profits. In the paper, a research model is presented that elaborates the relationship between an SME executive's social responsibility and the value creation of a firm, i.e. whether (personal) values create (economic) value. It was found that socially responsible management practices towards employees, customers and to a lesser extent society have a positive impact on the firm and its performance. As such, values can create additional value. (shrink)

Telepsychiatry has long been discussed as a supplement to or substitute for face-to-face therapeutic consultations. The current pandemic crisis has fueled the development in an unprecedented way. More and more psychiatric consultations are now carried out online as video-based consultations. Treatment results appear to be comparable with those of face-to-face care in terms of clinical outcome, acceptance, adherence and patient satisfaction. However, evidence on videoconferencing in a variety of different fields indicates that there are extensive changes in the communication behaviour (...) in online conversations. We hypothesise that this might impact ethically relevant aspects of the therapeutic relationship, which plays a prominent role in psychiatry. In this paper, we review effects of video-based consultations on communication between therapists and patients in psychiatry. Based on a common understanding of video-based consultations as changing the lived experience of communication, we categorise these effects according to sensory, spatial and technical aspects. Departing from a power-based model of therapeutic relationships, we then discuss the ethical significance of this changed communication situation, based on dimensions of respect for autonomy, lucidity, fidelity, justice and humanity. We conclude that there is evidence for ethically relevant changes of the therapeutic relationship in video-based telepsychiatric consultations. These changes need to be more carefully considered in psychiatric practice and future studies. (shrink)

'...a challenging and useful book, both because it provokes a careful scrutiny of one's own basic ideas regarding evolutionary theory, and because it cuts across so many biological disciplines.' -The Quarterly Review of Biology 'In my view, this work exemplifies Theoretical Biology at its best...here is rampant speculation that is consistently based on cautious reasoning from the available data. Even more refreshing is the absence of sloganeering, grandstanding, and 'isms'.' -Biology and Philosophy 'Epigenetics is fundamental to understanding both development and (...) gene expression, and not surprisingly, evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated with its proper place in evolutionary theory...Enter Jablonka and Lamb, who provide a thoughtful review of the recent molecular literature and suggest a number of potential consequences.' -EvolutionSince first publication of this controversial book, much of the initial opposition to the ideas it contained has been replaced by a general, although often grudging, acceptance of them. Advances in knowledge, especially at the molecular level, have enhanced general awareness and interest in epigenetics and the evolution of systems that store and transmit information and put any of the authors' speculations on a more solid basis. This paperback edition contains a new Preface that sets out the major changes in the scientific world and in the authors' own thinking that have occurred since the book was published. A new Appendix provides a selected bibliography of the many books and articles about epigenetic inheritance and its role in evolution that have appeared since first publication. (shrink)

Socially responsible business and ethical behaviour of companies have been of interest to academia and practice for decades. But the focus has almost exclusively been on large corporations while small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have not received as much attention. Thus, this paper focuses on socially responsible business practices of SME entrepreneurs or owner–managers in Germany. Based on the assumption that decision-makers in SMEs are the central point where all business activities start, members of a German entrepreneurs association were approached (...) in the course of a qualitative and quantitative survey. They were asked to assess in what way their social responsibility is expressed in specific management practices towards selected stakeholder groups. These practices in turn were assumed to result in perceived positive reactions of the respective stakeholders and subsequently to positively influence the firm's financial performance, i.e. cost reductions and increase in profits. In the paper, a research model is presented that elaborates the relationship between an SME executive's social responsibility and the value creation of a firm, i.e. whether (personal) values create (economic) value. It was found that socially responsible management practices towards employees, customers and to a lesser extent society have a positive impact on the firm and its performance. As such, values can create additional value. (shrink)

The scientific study of consciousness or subjective experiencing is a rapidly expanding research program engaging philosophers of mind, psychologists, cognitive scientists, neurobiologists, evolutionary biologists and biosemioticians. Here we outline an evolutionary approach that we have developed over the last two decades, focusing on the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to minimally conscious, subjectively experiencing organisms. We propose that the evolution of subjective experiencing was driven by the evolution of learning and we identify an open-ended, representational, generative and recursive form of associative (...) learning, which we call Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), as an evolutionary transition marker of minimal consciousness. This evolutionary marker provides evidence that the evolutionary transition to consciousness has gone to completion and allows reverse-engineering from this learning capacity to the system that enables it – making possible the construction of a toy model of UAL. The model allows us to identify some of the key processes and structures that constitute minimal consciousness, points its taxonomic distribution and the ecological context in which it first emerged, highlights its function and suggests a framework for exploring developmental and evolutionary modifications of consciousness. We point to ways of experimentally testing the relationship between UAL and consciousness in human and in non-human animals and discuss the theoretical and ethical implications of our approach. The framework we offer allows the exploration of the evolutionary changes in agency, value systems, selective processes and goals that were involved in the transition to subjective experiencing from a perspective that resonates with the approaches of bio-semioticians. (shrink)

According to the Bayesian paradigm in the psychology of reasoning, the norms by which everyday human cognition is best evaluated are probabilistic rather than logical in character. Recently, the Bayesian paradigm has been applied to the domain of argumentation, where the fundamental norms are traditionally assumed to be logical. Here, we present a major generalisation of extant Bayesian approaches to argumentation that utilizes a new class of Bayesian learning methods that are better suited to modelling dynamic and conditional inferences than (...) standard Bayesian conditionalization, is able to characterise the special value of logically valid argument schemes in uncertain reasoning contexts, greatly extends the range of inferences and argumentative phenomena that can be adequately described in a Bayesian framework, and undermines some influential theoretical motivations for dual function models of human cognition. We conclude that the probabilistic norms given by the Bayesian approach to rationality are not necessarily at odds with the norms given by classical logic. Rather, the Bayesian theory of argumentation can be seen as justifying and enriching the argumentative norms of classical logic. (shrink)

Robots are increasingly envisaged as our future cohabitants. However, while considerable progress has been made in recent years in terms of their technological realization, the ability of robots to inter-act with humans in an intuitive and social way is still quite limited. An important challenge for social robotics is to determine how to design robots that can perceive the user’s needs, feelings, and intentions, and adapt to users over a broad range of cognitive abilities. It is conceivable that if robots (...) were able to adequately demonstrate this, humans would eventually accept them as social companions. We argue that the best way to achieve this is using a systematic experimental approach based on behavioral and physiological neuroscience methods such as motion/eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), or functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) embedded in interactive human-robot paradigms. This approach requires understanding how humans interact with each other, how they perform tasks together and how they develop feelings of social connection over time, and using these insights to formulate design principles that make social robots attuned to the workings of the human brain. In this review, we put forward the argument that the likelihood of artificial agents being perceived as social companions can be increased by designing them in a way that they are perceived as intentional agents that activate areas in the human brain involved in social-cognitive processing. We first review literature related to social-cognitive mechanisms involved in human-human interactions, and high-light the importance of perceiving others as intentional agents to activate these brain areas. We then discuss how attribution of intentionality can positively affect human-robot interaction by (a) fostering feelings of social connection, empathy and prosociality, and by (b) enhancing performance on joint human-robot tasks. Lastly, we describe circumstances under which attribution of intentionality to robot agents might be disadvantageous, and discuss challenges associated with designing social robots that are inspired by neuroscientific principles. (shrink)

The doctor-patient relationship is a crucial aspect of primary-care practice Research on associations between quality of care provision and burnout and empathy in a primary care setting could improve this relationship. Cross-sectional study of family physicians and nurses of twenty-two primary care centers in the health district of Lleida, Spain. Empathy and burnout were measured using the Jefferson Physician Empathy Scale and the Maslach Burnout Inventory, while quality of care delivery was evaluated using Quality Standard Indicator scores. JPSE and MBI (...) results were grouped into low, medium, and high scores to analyze associations with QSI scores and sociodemographic variables. The mean QSI score recorded for the family physicians and nurses was 665. Higher, albeit insignificant, QSI scores were observed for practitioners with high burnout. No differences were observed according to level of empathy. The differences with respect to sex, age, and area of practice were not significant. Practitioners with low empathy had higher QSI scores than those with high empathy while those with high burnout had higher scores than those with low burnout. Burnout and empathy did not significantly influence quality of care delivery scores in 22 primary care centers. More studies, however, are needed to investigate the unexpected trend observed that suggests that physicians and nurses with higher levels of burnout provide higher quality care. (shrink)

In 1809--the year of Charles Darwin's birth--Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published Philosophie zoologique, the first comprehensive and systematic theory of biological evolution. The Lamarckian approach emphasizes the generation of developmental variations; Darwinism stresses selection. Lamarck's ideas were eventually eclipsed by Darwinian concepts, especially after the emergence of the Modern Synthesis in the twentieth century. The different approaches--which can be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive--have important implications for the kinds of questions biologists ask and for the type of research they conduct. (...) Lamarckism has been evolving--or, in Lamarckian terminology, transforming--since Philosophie zoologique's description of biological processes mediated by "subtle fluids." Essays in this book focus on new developments in biology that make Lamarck's ideas relevant not only to modern empirical and theoretical research but also to problems in the philosophy of biology. Contributors discuss the historical transformations of Lamarckism from the 1820s to the 1940s, and the different understandings of Lamarck and Lamarckism; the Modern Synthesis and its emphasis on Mendelian genetics; theoretical and experimental research on such "Lamarckian" topics as plasticity, soft (epigenetic) inheritance, and individuality; and the importance of a developmental approach to evolution in the philosophy of biology. The book shows the advantages of a "Lamarckian" perspective on evolution. Indeed, the development-oriented approach it presents is becoming central to current evolutionary studies--as can be seen in the burgeoning field of Evo-Devo. Transformations of Lamarckism makes a unique contribution to this research. (shrink)

A key feature of facial behavior is its dynamic quality. However, most previous research has been limited to the use of static images of prototypical expressive patterns. This article explores the role of facial dynamics in the perception of emotions, reviewing relevant empirical evidence demonstrating that dynamic information improves coherence in the identification of affect (particularly for degraded and subtle stimuli), leads to higher emotion judgments (i.e., intensity and arousal), and helps to differentiate between genuine and fake expressions. The findings (...) underline that using static expressions not only poses problems of ecological validity, but also limits our understanding of what facial activity does. Implications for future research on facial activity, particularly for social neuroscience and affective computing, are discussed. (shrink)

Philosophy & Public Affairs, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 239-266, Spring 2022.

The guarded fragment (GF) was introduced by Andréka, van Benthem and Németi as a fragment of first order logic which combines a great expressive power with nice, modal behavior. It consists of relational first order formulas whose quantifiers are relativized by atoms in a certain way. Slightly generalizing the admissible relativizations yields the packed fragment (PF). In this paper we investigate interpolation and definability in these fragments. We first show that the interpolation property of first order logic fails in restriction (...) to GF and PF. However, each of these fragments turns out to have an alternative interpolation property that closely resembles the interpolation property usually studied in modal logic. These results are strong enough to entail the Beth definability property for GF and PF. Even better, every guarded or packed finite variable fragment has the Beth property. For interpolation, we characterize exactly which finite variable fragments of GF and PF enjoy this property. (shrink)