This paper discusses how, starting from Blaise Pascal’s Wager about God, in his later teaching Lacan rearticulates his Name-of-the-Father concept. Building on a discussion of Lacan’s (1963) single seminar session on the Names-of-the-Father and his 1968–1969 discussion of Pascal’s Wager in Seminar XVI, the author examines what this changing conception implies for the Lacanian approach of psychosis. It is argued that – contrary to what Lacan suggests in the nineteen fifties – within these works from the sixties the Name-of-the-Father no (...) longer refers to a privileged signifier, but to an act of faith concerning the virtuousness of the Other. This act of faith functions as a guarantee for the articulation of the subject, separates the subject from what Lacan calls “object a”, and establishes a positive expectant relation with the Other. The strength of Lacan’s revised conception is that it opens new perspectives on the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis. (shrink)

Self-reflection plays a key role in healthy human adaptation. Self-reflection might involve different capacities which may be impaired to different degrees relatively independently of one another. Variation in abilities for different forms of self-reflection are commonly seen as key aspects of many adult mental disorders. Yet little has been written about whether there are different kinds of deficits in self-reflection found in mental illness, how those deficits should be distinguished from one another and how to characterize the extent to which (...) they are interrelated. We review clinical and experimental literature and suggest four different forms of deficits in self-reflection: sense of ownership of one’s own thoughts and actions, emotional awareness, distinction between fantasy and reality and the integration of a range of different views of oneself and others. We propose how these different impairments in self-reflection are linked with one another. (shrink)

Victims of disaster suffer, not only at the very moment of the disaster, but also years after the disaster has taken place, they are still in an emotional journey. While many moral perspectives focus on the moment of the disaster itself, a lot of work is to be done years after the disaster. How do people go through their suffering and how can we take care of them? Research on human suffering after a major catastrophe, using an ethics of care (...) perspective, is scarce. People suffering from disasters are often called to be in distress and their emotional difficulties ‘medicalised’. This brings them often into a situation of long term use of medication, and one can wonder if medication is of help to them in the long run. In our paper, we will explore another moral perspective, focusing on the importance of the victims’ narrative and their lived experiences. We will use Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological reflections from ‘Suffering is not the same as pain’ for conceptualizing human suffering and how to apply it to victims of disaster. Ricoeur suggests that suffering is not a quantity that can be measured, but a characteristic that should be studied qualitatively in interpersonal and narrative contexts. Above all, the perspective of care and listening could offer an opportunity to reconcile people from their loss and suffering. (shrink)

1. In this contribution we will discuss phenomena of language in mania within a Lacanian framework. In psychiatric descriptions manic language phenomena are mainly captured under the term flight of...

Silence has gained a prominent role in the field of psychotherapy because of its potential to facilitate a plethora of therapeutically beneficial processes within patients’ inner dynamics. This study examined the phenomenon from a conversation analytical perspective in order to investigate how silence emerges as an interactional accomplishment and how it attains interactional meaning by the speakers’ adjacent turns. We restricted our attention to one particular sequential context in which a patient’s turn comes to a point of possible completion and (...) receives a continuer by the therapist upon which a substantial silence follows. The data collection consisted of 74 instances of such post-continuer silences. The analysis revealed that silence can retroactively become part of a topic closure sequence, can become shaped as an intra-topic silence, and can be explicitly characterized as an activity in itself that is relevant for the therapy in process. Only in this last case, the absence of talk is actually treated as disruptive to the ongoing talk. Although silence is often seen as a therapeutic instrument that can be implemented intentionally and purposefully, our analysis demonstrated how it is co-constructed by speakers and indexically obtains meaning by adjacent turns of talk. In the ensuing turns, silence indeed shows to facilitate access to the patient’s subjective experience at unconscious levels. (shrink)

While many with schizophrenia experience deficits in metacognition it is unclear whether those deficits are related to other features of illness. To explore this issue, the current study classified participants with schizophrenia as possessing a deficit in both awareness of their own emotions and those of others , aware of their own emotions but unaware of the emotions of others and aware of their own emotions and of other’s emotions . Groups were compared on assessments of neurocognitive function, symptoms, and (...) history of sexual trauma. ANCOVA controlling for education found that the group unaware of their own emotions and those of others demonstrated poorer verbal memory, processing speed, executive function, less emotional discomfort and higher levels of disorganization symptoms relative to the other groups. The group aware of their own emotions but not those of others had a significantly higher report of childhood sexual abuse. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Delusions in schizophrenia are commonly approached as empirical false beliefs about everyday reality. Phenomenological accounts, by contrast, have suggested that delusions are more adequately understood as pertaining to a different kind of reality experience. How this alteration of reality experience should be characterised, which dimensions of experiential life are involved, and whether delusional reality might differ from standard reality in various ways is unclear and little is known about how patients with delusions value and relate to these experiential alterations. (...) This study aimed to investigate the nature of delusional reality experience, and its subjective apprehension, in individuals with lived experience of delusions and a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis. METHODS: In this qualitative phenomenological study, we recruited individuals with lived experience of delusions and a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis from two psychiatric-hospital services in Belgium using homogenous sampling. Criteria for participation were having undergone at least one psychotic episode with occurring delusional symptoms, present at least 1 year before participation, on the basis of clinical notes assessed by the attending psychiatrist; a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis, ascertained through clinical interview by the attending psychiatrist upon admission; being aged between 18 years and 65 years; and having the capacity to give informed consent. Exclusion criteria included worries concerning capacity to consent and risk of distress caused by participation. We did phenomenologically driven semi-structured interviews with the participants to explore the nature of delusional reality experience and their subjective valuation of these experiences. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative method tailored to the in-depth exploration of participants’ first-person perspective, to analyse their accounts. FINDINGS: Between March 2, 2020, and Sept 30, 2020, 18 adults participated in the interview study. The findings suggest that delusions are often embedded in wide-ranging alterations of basic reality experience, involving quasi-ineffable atmospheric and ontological qualities that undermine participants’ sense of the world as unambiguously real, fully present, and shared with others. We also found that delusional reality experience can differ from standard reality in various ways, across multiple dimensions, and that participants are often implicitly or explicitly aware of the distinction between delusional and standard reality. Delusional experience can have an enduring value and meaning that is not fully captured by a strictly medical perspective. INTERPRETATION: Increased awareness and recognition of the distinctive nature of delusional reality experience, in both clinical and research settings, can improve diagnostic accuracy, explanatory models, and therapeutic support for individuals with delusions whose lived realities are not always evident from an everyday perspective. FUNDING: FWO Flanders. TRANSLATION: For the Dutch translation of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 2 Seiten: 385-422.

The Prophetic hadith “pray with your leader,” which G. H. A. Juynboll argued originated with Shuʿba b. al-Ḥajjāj, urges Muslims to observe the prayer both at its appointed time and with an imam who delays its performance. An isnād analysis that factors in the different readings of the tradition could not reproduce Juynboll’s result and yielded significantly earlier dates of origin for the oldest two variants: the early 60s/680s and the early 80s/700s. It is argued that the tradition was invented (...) and distributed in reaction to activists who disapproved of Umayyad religious practice, especially the postponement of the ṣalāt. Two of the regime’s representatives in Iraq, the governors Ibn Ziyād and al-Ḥajjāj, were publicly accused of delaying the ṣalāt at the time the tradition was circulated. The tradition constituted thus an early articulation of the quietism that would later become a characteristic of Sunnism. (shrink)

In this article I want to construct in a simple and systematic way an ethical theory of animal equality. The goal is a consistent theory, containing a set of clear and coherent universalized ethical principles that best fits our strongest moral intuitions in all possible morally relevant situations that we can think of, without too many arbitrary elements. I demonstrate that impartiality with a level of risk aversion and empathy with a need for efficiency are two different approaches that both (...) result in the same consequentialist principle of prioritarianism. Next, I discuss that this principle can be trumped by an ethic of care principle of tolerated partiality, and a deontological principle of basic right. These three principles represent different kinds of equality that can be applied to animal ethics. Finally, the predation problem leads to the introduction of a triple-N-principle that is related to the value of biodiversity. (shrink)

Moderate pluralism is a popular position in contemporary philosophy of biology. Despite its popularity, various authors have argued that it tends to slide off off into a radical form of pluralism that is both normatively and descriptively ueptable. This paper looks at at the case of biological species classification, and evaluates a popular way of avoiding radical pluralism by relying on the shared aims and norms of a discipline. The main contention is that while these aims and norms may play (...) an important role in the legitimacy of species classifications, they fail to fend off radical pluralism. It follows from this that the legitimacy of species classifications is also determined by local decisions about the aims of research and how to operationalize and balance these. This is important, I argue, because it means that any acceptable view on the legitimacy of classification should be able to account for these local decisions. (shrink)

This article presents an argument for veganism, using a formal-axiomatic approach: a list of twenty axioms are explicitly stated. These axioms are all necessary conditions to derive the conclusion that veganism is a moral duty. The presented argument is a minimalist or core argument for veganism, because it is as parsimonious as possible, using the weakest conditions, the narrowest definitions, the most reliable empirical facts and the minimal assumptions necessary to reach the conclusion. If someone does not accept the conclusion, (...) logical consistency requires that s/he should be able to point at axiom on which s/he disagrees. The argument exposes hidden assumptions and provides a framework for an overview of the philosophical literature on animal rights and vegetarianism / veganism. (shrink)

Some recent policy-oriented publications have put forward a third category of environmental values, namely relational or eudaimonic values, in addition to intrinsic and instrumental values. In this debate, there is, however, much confusion about the content of such values. This paper looks at a fundamental debate in ethics about a third category of reasons besides reasons from morality and self-interest, labelled as reasons of love, care or meaningfulness. This category allows us, first, to see the relation between relational and eudaimonic (...) values, and, second, to make clear and applicable distinctions between the relational valuing of nature and moral or instrumental valuing. (shrink)

The main claim of this thesis is that value-judgments should play a profound role in the construction and evaluation of species classifications. The arguments for this claim will be presented over the course of five chapters. These are divided into two main parts; part one, which consists of the two first chapters, presents an argument for a radical form of species pluralism; part two, which comprises the remaining chapters, discusses the implications of radical species pluralism for the role of values (...) in species classification. The content of the five chapters is as follows. Chapter 1 starts with a discussion of the theoretical assumptions concerning species and natural kinds that form the broad framework within which the arguments of the thesis are placed. The aim of this chapter is to introduce a set of relatively uncontroversial assumptions that frame the rest of the thesis. On the basis of these assumptions, chapter 2 presents an argument for radical species pluralism. The chapter substantiates this argument with a broad range of examples, and compares this position to other forms of species pluralism. Chapter 3 returns to the main interest of the thesis, namely, the role of values in species classification. It introduces the notion of values and presents an argument for the value-ladenness of taxonomy on the basis of the considerations in the first two chapters. It then sketches three important views on values in science in the literature. Chapter 4 argues that the case presented in chapter 3 provides strong support for one of these views, called the ‘Aims View’, and against two other prominent views, called the ‘Epistemic Priority View’ and the ‘Value-Free Ideal’. The resulting view, in line with the Aims View, is that value-judgments should play a particularly substantial role in species classification. Chapter 5 then considers the popular assumption that these value-judgments in taxonomy commonly take the shape of generally accepted classificatory norms, and argues that this assumption is not tenable. Finally, a brief concluding chapter points at some implications of the claims and arguments in this thesis. (shrink)

In the last decade, the study of moral heuristics has gained in importance. I argue that we can consider speciesism as a moral heuristic: an intuitive rule of thumb that substitutes a target attribute (that is difficult to detect, e.g. “having rationality”) for a heuristic attribute (that is easier to detect, e.g. “looking like a human being”). This speciesism heuristic misfires when applied to some atypical humans such as the mentally disabled, giving them rights although they lack rationality. But I (...) argue that it is not necessarily irrational or inconsistent to hold on to this heuristic rule, because we have to take time and knowledge constraints, uncertainty aversion and emotional costs into account. However, this “heuristic defense” of speciesism uses a target attribute (rationality) that has implications of disrespect towards some atypical humans. Therefore, based on notions of impartiality and compassion, I argue for a morally better target attribute: sentience (“having a sense of well-being”). “Being a vertebrate” is suitable as a corresponding heuristic attribute because it is easy to detect and has a strong correlation with the target attribute of sentience. (shrink)

Abusive supervision has been shown to have significant negative consequences for employees’ well-being, attitudes, and behavior. However, despite the devastating impact, it might well be that employees do not always react negatively toward a leader’s abusive behavior. In the present study, we show that employees’ organizational identification and abusive supervision interact for employees’ perceived cohesion with their work group and their tendency to gossip about their leader. Employees confronted with a highly abusive supervisor had a stronger perceived cohesion and engaged (...) in less gossiping behavior when they identified more strongly with their organization. Our findings illustrate that organizational identification functions as a buffer for those confronted with an abusive supervisor. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that the concept of natural kinds should be eliminated because it does not play a productive theoretical role and even harms philosophical research on scientific classification. We argue that this justification for eliminativism fails because the notion of ‘natural kinds’ plays another epistemic role in philosophical research, namely, it enables fruitful investigation into non-arbitrary classification. It does this in two ways: first, by providing a fruitful investigative entry into scientific classification; and second—as is supported by (...) bibliometric evidence—by tying together a research community devoted to non-arbitrary classification. The question of eliminativism then requires weighing off the benefits of retaining the concept against its harms. We argue that the progressive state of philosophical work on natural kinds tips this balance in favour of retaining the concept. (shrink)

It is well known that taxonomists rely on many different methods and criteria for species delimitation, leading to different kinds of groups being recognised as species. While this state of relative disorder is widely acknowledged, there is no similar agreement about how it should be resolved. This paper considers the view that the disorder in species classification should be resolved by a system of taxonomic governance. I argue that such a system of governance is best seen as a combination of (...) standardisation, unification and regulation, each of which can be implemented in different forms. I investigate the forms that these three components should take for taxonomic governance by looking into two successfully governed classification systems, namely, virus classification and enzyme classification. The last part of the paper then defends the governance view against five objections. (shrink)

Despite its uniform appearance, the cerebellar cortex is highly heterogeneous in terms of structure, genetics and physiology. Purkinje cells (PCs), the principal and sole output neurons of the cerebellar cortex, can be categorized into multiple populations that differentially express molecular markers and display distinctive physiological features. Such features include action potential rate, but also their propensity for synaptic and intrinsic plasticity. However, the precise molecular and genetic factors that correlate with the differential physiological properties of PCs remain elusive. In this (...) article, we provide a detailed overview of the cellular mechanisms that regulate PC activity and plasticity. We further perform a pathway analysis to highlight how molecular characteristics of specific PC populations may influence their physiology and plasticity mechanisms. (shrink)

There is growing agreement among taxonomists that species are independently evolving lineages. The central notion of this conception, evolutionary independence, is commonly operationalized by taxonomists in multiple, diverging ways. This leads to a problem of operationalization-dependency in species classification, as species delimitation is not only dependent on the properties of the investigated groups, but also on how taxonomists choose to operationalize evolutionary independence. The question then is how the operationalization-dependency of species delimitation is compatible with its objectivity and reliability. In (...) response to this problem, various taxonomists have proposed to integrate multiple operationalizations of evolutionary independence for delimiting species. This paper first distinguishes between a standard and a sophisticated integrative approach to taxonomy, and argues that it is unclear how either of these can support the reliability and objectivity of species delimitation. It then draws a parallel between the measurement of physical quantities and species delimitation to argue that species delimitation can be considered objective and reliable if we understand the sophisticated integrative approach as assessing the coherence between the idealized models of multiple operationalizations of evolutionary independence. (shrink)

The trolley problem, first described by Foot (1967) and Thomson (The Monist, 59, 204–217, 1976), is one of the most famous and influential thought experiments in deontological ethics. The general story is that a runaway trolley is threatening the lives of five people. Doing nothing will result in the death of those persons, but acting in order to save those persons would unavoidably result in the death of another, sixth person. It appears that, depending on the situation, we have different (...) moral judgments about the permissibility of action. We will review and systematize all the proposals in the literature of the past 35 years that have attempted to grasp our moral intuitions in a simple deontological principle. In particular, seventeen proposals will be classified: six algorithmic, seven psychological, and four other invalid accounts. This review and classification sheds light on some subtle differences and clarify a few issues. (shrink)

Leaders have been shown to sometimes act self-servingly. Yet, leaders do not act in isolation and the perceptions of the ethical climate in which leaders operate is expected to contribute to employees taking counteractive measures against their leader. We contend that in an ethical climate employees feel better equipped to stand up and take retaliation measures. Moreover, we argue that this is explained by employees’ feelings of trust. In two studies using different methods, we predict and find evidence that the (...) relationship between self-serving leader behavior and employees’ desire for retaliation and supervisor-directed deviance is stronger when the ethical climate is high rather than low. Moreover, we show that trust in the leader mediates these relationships. (shrink)

In his article ‘In Defense of Eating Meat’, Timothy Hsiao argued that sentience is not sufficient for moral status, that the pain experienced by an animal is bad but not morally bad, that the nutritional interests of humans trump the interests of animals and that eating meat is permissible. In this article I explore the strengths and weaknesses of Hsiao’s argument, clarify some issues and argue that eating meat is likely in conflict with some of our strongest moral intuitions.

Garnett and Christidis (2017) [hereafter GC] recently proposed that the International Union of the Biological Sciences should centrally regulate the taxonomy of complex organisms. Their proposal was met with much criticism (e.g. Hołyński 2017; Thomson et al., 2018), and perhaps most extensively from Raposo et al. (2017) in this journal. The main target of this criticism was GC’s call to, first, “restrict the freedom of taxonomic action”, and, second, to let social, political and conservation values weigh in on species classification. (...) Some commentators even went as far as to draw a comparison with the infamous Lysenko-case of state-controlled and heavily restricted science (Raposo et al. 2017, 181; Hołyński 2017, 12). This comment will argue, without thereby endorsing GC’s position, that these two aspects of their views need not be as threatening as this comparison suggests, and indeed are very reasonable. (shrink)

In this paper, we will address anonymity, privacy and trust issues that arise during the research on a communication platform for multi-modal transport. Though most logistic information is currently available in electronic form, it is not widely accessible yet to all the parties concerned with transport. The major goal of a communication platform is to improve the conditions for exchanging information, which should lead to better organisation/collaboration within the transport sector. We need to merit credibility by faithfully modelling all the (...) relevant real world interactions. Therefore, we opted for a connectivity solution in which software agents act as representatives of the parties involved. All agents can be equipped with human-like skills and qualities such as intelligence, autonomy, and the ability to cooperate, coordinate and negotiate. We will demonstrate how cooperation between different transport parties can be achieved without necessarily putting all the sensitive information on the web. (shrink)

One potentially extremely fruitful use of the tools of corpus analysis in the philosophy of science is to help us understand disputed terrains within the sciences that we study. For philosophers of biology, for instance, few controversies are as heated as those over the concepts we use in taxonomy to classify the living world, with the definition of ‘species’ perhaps most fundamental among them. As many understandings of biodiversity, in turn, involve counting the number of species present in a given (...) area, these taxonomic concepts thus become crucially implicated in our efforts in conservation biology and our response to climate change. In this chapter, we present a corpus of taxonomic journal papers, and illustrate how it might be used to make progress in the history and philosophy of taxonomy. What parts of the biological world do taxonomists most often study? Are these areas of focus related to other methodological commitments, or perhaps to their underlying conceptual disagreement? Are species that are more important to conservation, or economic concerns, or more important to local cultures, more or less likely to be the target of biological study? Corpus-based methods, we argue, are uniquely powerful for approaching questions such as these, and we hope that the case we present can serve as a fruitful example for others considering their implementation. (shrink)

This article start from two opposing intuitions in the environmental duties debate. On the one hand, if our lifestyle causes environmental harm, then we have a duty to reduce that impact through lifestyle changes. On the other hand, many people share the intuition that environmental duties cannot demand to alter our lifestyle radically for environmental reasons. These two intuitions underlie the current dualism in the environmental duties debate: those arguing for lifestyle changes and those arguing that our duties are limited (...) to promoting just environmental institutions. The paper has two goals: first, to grasp the underlying reasons for the two intuitions, and, second, to provide a proposal that integrates both intuitions. The paper consists of two main parts. The first part examines the ‘our-duties-should-be-limited’ intuition. Two interpretations are discussed, one under the title ‘what I do make no difference’, dealing with causality and collective action, and one under the title ‘my duty cannot be to change my lifestyle completely’, which discusses demandingness, fairness and value conflict. The second part shows how the ‘lifestyle-matters’ intuition can still play an important role. This part consists of two sections, one on ‘how to make a difference’, which deals with the idea of a cooperative ethos, and the other with ‘why lifestyle matters’, discussing expressive rationality and integrity. These ideas allow giving an important place to lifestyle duties, while avoiding the possible counterproductive effect of a private duties account. (shrink)

Is animal farming permissible when animals would have a positive welfare? The happy animal farming problem represent the paradigmatic problem in population ethics, because its simple structure introduces the most important complications of population ethics. Three new population ethical theories that avoid the counter-intuitive repugnant and sadistic conclusions are discussed and applied to the animal farming problem. Breeding farm animals would not be permissible according to these theories, except under some rather unrealistic conditions, such as those farm animals being so (...) happy that they themselves would prefer a continuation of animal farming. Given the fact that many people believe that most farm animals are not so happy and the fact that one can formulate reasonable population ethical theories that condemn happy animal farming, it can be concluded that it is better to avoid animal farming and the consumption of animal products in general. (shrink)

This paper investigates the case of enzyme classification to evaluate different ideals for regulating values in science. I show that epistemic and non-epistemic considerations are inevitably and untraceably entangled in enzyme classification, and argue that this has significant implications for the two main kinds of views on values in science, namely, Epistemic Priority Views and Joint Satisfaction Views. More precisely, I argue that the case of enzyme classification poses a problem for the usability and descriptive accuracy of these two views. (...) The paper ends by suggesting that these two views provide different but complementary perspectives, and that both are useful for evaluating values in science. (shrink)

Just as one line appears to be longer than another in an optical illusion, we can have a spontaneous moral judgment that one individual is more important than another. Sometimes such judgments can lead to moral illusions like speciesism and other kinds of discrimination. Moral illusions are persistent spontaneous judgments that violate our deepest moral values and distract us away from a rational, authentic ethic. They generate pseudo-ethics, similar to pseudoscience. The antidote against moral illusions is the ethical principle to (...) avoid unwanted arbitrariness. Speciesism involves unwanted arbitrariness, and psychological research as well as the problem of wild animal suffering demonstrate that moral illusions such as speciesism can be very persistent. (shrink)

Various authors have recently expressed doubts about the public relevance of philosophy. These doubts target both academic philosophy in general and particular subfields of philosophy. This paper investigates whether these doubts are justified through two tests in which the lack of public relevance of a philosophical paper is operationalized as the degree to which that paper is isolated. Both tests suggest that academic philosophy in general is more isolated from the broader public than it should be, and confirm the hypothesis (...) that some subfields of philosophy are more isolated than others. We argue that this lack of public relevance is caused by the incentive structure of academic philosophy and discuss a range of individual-level and incentive-level solutions. (shrink)