Like all deaths, Raymond Williams’ must touch most profoundly those who were closest to him; it belongs first to his private circle. But it also belongs to his fame: to those who have read his books, heard him speak in public, were taught by him, and, then, to those who have been taught by those he taught, and so on. Because Williams was so committed and important politically—writing not just as an academic but as a leftist—his death also enters public (...) history. One can ask: does it mark the end of an era? Or, on the contrary, is it the sign of a beginning set in motion by the programs, the shifts of emphasis, he urged? Such questions are all the most insistent because the left, as a political force and as an idea, is so fragile today. Indeed, no other theme seems as urgent in thinking about Williams’ life and work now; for, to put it rather glibly, it is no longer easy to tell left from right. If we regard “being on the left” as requiring the belief that state control of the economy and the ideological apparatus and the empowerment of the proletariat are steps demanded by the journey towards real, rather than illusory or formal, freedom, then who is still on the left? And if “being on the left” does not require such beliefs, if there is a left that is not statist, how does it differ from liberalism, from a Deleuzian or Foucauldian micro-politics or a mere insistence on “social justice”?2 2. This is not to approach the question of what it means to be a “Marxist” in cultural/literary studies. Historically, one of the clearest demarcations of Marxism within and from the left in general was its willingness to theorize and imagine revolution. The difficulties faced by Williams’ work and career are very much those posed by a nonrevolutionary Marxism. Simon During is a lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne. His Foucault and Literature will appear in 1990, and he is currently working on a book entitled Literature without Culture. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe COVID-19 pandemic and government measures implemented to counter the spread of the infection may be a major stressor affecting the psychological health of university students. This study aimed to explore how anxiety symptoms changed during the pandemic.Methods676 students at Zurich University of Applied Sciences participated in the first and second survey waves. Anxiety symptoms were assessed using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-Scale-7. Risk and protective factors were examined.ResultsGAD-7 scores decreased significantly from T0 to T1. Participants with moderate-to-severe anxiety score (...) were 20.2 and 15.6% at T0 and T1, respectively. The following positively predicted anxiety: older age, female gender, non-Swiss nationality, loneliness, participants’ concern about their own health, and interaction between time and participants’ concern about their own health. Resilience and social support negatively predicted anxiety.ConclusionsOur findings provide information for public health measures and psychological interventions supporting the mental health of university students during the COVID-19 emergency. (shrink)

Research highlights several risk and resilience factors at multiple ecological levels that influence individuals’ mental health and wellbeing in their everyday lives and, more specifically, in disaster or outbreak situations. However, there is limited research on the role of these factors in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. The present study examined if and how potential risk factors and resilience factors are associated with mental health and well-being outcomes, and whether these resilience factors buffer the associations between risk factors (...) and said outcomes. One to two weeks after the government recommended preventative measures, 1,122 Canadian workers completed an online questionnaire, including multiple wellbeing outcome scales in addition to measures of potential risk and resilience factors. Structural equation models were tested, highlighting that overall, the considered risk factors were associated with poorer wellbeing outcomes, except social distancing which was associated with lower levels of stress. Each of the potential resilience factors was found to have a main effect on one or more of the wellbeing outcomes. Moderation analysis indicated that in general these resilience factors did not, however, buffer the risk factors. The findings confirm that the COVID-19 crisis encompasses several stressors related to the virus as well as to its impact on one’s social, occupational, and financial situation, which put people at risk for lower wellbeing as early as one to two weeks after the crisis began. While several resilience factors emerged as positively related to wellbeing, such factors may not be enough, or sufficiently activated at that time, to buffer the effects of the numerous life changes required by COVID-19. From an ecological perspective, while mental health professionals and public health decision-makers should offer/design services directly focused on mental health and wellbeing, it is important they go beyond celebrating individuals’ inner potential for resilience, and also support individuals in activating their environmental resources during a pandemic. (shrink)

This article presents an investigation of the organization and structures of talk-in-interaction over mobile phone. The analysis is based upon naturally occurring data consisting of a corpus of calls recorded during everyday activities of a young adult. Using these data we reveal a range of sequential phenomena associated with mobile phone usage. Established conversation analytic work on landline telephone conversation is used in order to build a comparative analysis of how actions such as openings, caller–called identity management, and topic (...) introduction are accomplished in mobile vs landline telephone conversation. We first show that, far from revolutionizing the organization of telephone conversation, mobile phone talk retains many of the norms associated with landline phone talk. Subsequently, focusing on those modifications that are identifiable in our data, we show how these are related to aspects of the communicative affordances of mobile phones, orientations to which are observable in the talk of participants in mobile phone conversation. (shrink)

In the reported, experiment participants hit a ball to aim at the vertex of a Müller–Lyer configuration. This configuration either remained stable, changed its shaft length or the orientation of the tails during movement execution. A significant illusion bias was observed in all perturbation conditions, but not in the stationary condition. The illusion bias emerged for perturbations shortly after movement onset and for perturbations during execution, the latter of which allowed only a minimum of time for making adjustments (...) . These findings indicate that allocentric information is exploited for online control when people make rapid adjustments in response to a sudden change in the environment and not when people guide their limb movements to interact with a stable environment. (shrink)

Courses on ethics and technology have become compulsory for many students at the three Dutch technical universities during the past few years. During this time, teachers have faced a number of didactic problems, which are partly due to a growing number of students. In order to deal with these challenges, teachers in ethics at the three technical universities in the Netherlands — in Delft, Eindhoven and Twente — have developed a web-based computer program called Agora (see www.ethicsandtechnology.com). This (...) program enables students to exercise their ethical understanding and skills extensively. The program makes it possible for students to participate actively in moral reflection and reasoning, and to develop the moral competencies that are needed in their later professional practice. The developers of the program have tried to avoid two traps. Firstly, they rejected, from the outset, a cookbook style of dealing with ethical problems that applied ethics is often taken to be and, secondly, they wanted to design a flexible program that respects the student’s as well as the teacher’s creativity, and that tries to engage students in moral reflection. Agora meets these requirements. The program offers possibilities that extend beyond the requirements that are usually accepted for case-exercises in applied ethics, and that have been realised in several other computer models for teaching ethics. In this article, we describe the main considerations in the development of Agora and the features of the resulting program. (shrink)

In this paper, we use the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe to address the question of what kind of knowledge we should incorporate into public health policy. We show that policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic has been biomedicine-centric in that its evidential basis marginalised input from non-biomedical disciplines. We then argue that in particular the social sciences could contribute essential expertise and evidence to public health policy in times of biomedical emergencies and that we should thus strive (...) for a tighter integration of the social sciences in future evidence-based policy-making. This demand faces challenges on different levels, which we identify and discuss as potential inhibitors for a more pluralistic evidential basis. (shrink)

This article explores the way in which the practice of neuroscience, in the form of contemporary brain-imaging, has to actively define and isolate aspects of mindfulness as solely contained within the individual. Although hidden from final scientific accounts, at the centre of this process is the need for the researchers to forge brief but intimate and personal relationships with the volunteers in their studies. With their increasing interest in studying more and more complex mental processes, and in particular as researchers (...) focus on what they term `the social brain', a potential paradox arises from the commitment to the straightforward location of brain function and recognition of the more distributed and intersubjective nature of the objects of their study. Consequently, in order to elicit specific mental activities, such as empathy, the scientists inevitably employ a range of socially based resources, which includes establishing a personal relationship with the volunteers. The scientists themselves see this as ensuring that they can trust that the volunteers will participate in the ways intended. But in contrast, the article argues that the central feature is actually the creation of a sense of intimacy, which serves to align the expectations and experiences of volunteer and researcher. Yet, while this relationship is necessary in order to ensure the required mental state is generated, during the experiment itself a great deal of work is then done to ensure it can be excluded from the final conceptualization of mental activity. (shrink)

Dialog is a joint action at different levels. At the highest level, the goal of interlocutors is to align their mental representations. This emerges from joint activity at lower levels, both concerned with linguistic decisions (e.g., choice of words) and nonlinguistic processes (e.g., alignment of posture or speech rate). Because of the high‐level goal, the interlocutors are particularly concerned with close coupling at these lower levels. As we illustrate with examples, this means that imitation and entrainment are particularly pronounced (...) class='Hi'>during interactive communication. We then argue that the mechanisms underlying such processes involve covert imitation of interlocutors’ communicative behavior, leading to emulation of their expected behavior. In other words, communication provides a very good example of predictive emulation, in a way that leads to successful joint activity. (shrink)

Adolescence is a period of life during which peers play a pivotal role in decision-making. The narrative of social influence during adolescence often revolves around risky and maladaptive decisions, like driving under the influence, and using illegal substances. However, research has also shown that social influence can lead to increased prosocial behaviors and a reduction in risk-taking. While many studies support the notion that adolescents are more sensitive to peer influence than children or adults, the developmental processes that (...) underlie this sensitivity remain poorly understood. We argue that one important reason for this lack of understanding is the absence of precisely formulated models. To make a first step toward formal models of social influence during adolescence, we first identify three prominent verbal models of social influence in the literature: social motivation, reward sensitivity, and distraction. We then illustrate how these can be translated into formal models, and how such formal models can inform experimental design and help identify developmental processes. Finally, by applying our formal models to existing datasets, we demonstrate the usefulness of formalization by synthesizing different studies with seemingly disparate results. We conclude with a discussion on how formal modeling can be utilized to better investigate the development of peer influence in adolescence. (shrink)

Political Writings offers an abundance of newly translated essays by Simone de Beauvoir that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy. The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, (...) from exposés of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the "two-state solution" in Israel. Together these texts prefigure Beauvoir's later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization. (shrink)

Instrumentalism about moral compromise in politics appears inconsistent with accepting both the existence of non-instrumental or principled reasons for moral compromise in close personal friendships and a rich ideal of civic friendship. Using a robust conception of political reconciliation during democratic transitions as an example of civic friendship, I argue that all three claims are compatible. Spouses have principled reasons for compromise because they commit to sharing responsibility for their joint success as partners in life, and not because their (...) relationship involves strong affective attitudes of goodwill, solidarity, trust, and the like. Since shared responsibility for ends is an inappropriate element in the political relationship between citizens, the members of a divided society may manifest the constitutive attitudes of political reconciliation without any commitment to principled reasons for moral compromise. (shrink)

New translations tracing decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement during the turbulent era of decolonization, from articles exposing conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard hitting attacks on right-wing intellectuals in the 1950s, to a 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article calling for the 'two state solution' in Israel. The texts range from a surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic 18th c. pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to the transcription (...) of a co-written 1974 documentary film on the aged in France. (shrink)

Contemporary socio-political issues often seen as socially controversial and highly politicised topics, such as anthropogenic climate change, public scepticism over preventive public health measures during pandemics such as COVID-19, and Indigenous sovereignty, lands rights, and ways of knowing, being and doing, highlight the need for education to address such issues more effectively. Controversial issues do not exist in isolation. They are connected to questions of order, interpretation, meaning-making, ethics, and why and how we live, i.e., to philosophical questions. We (...) argue that philosophical inquiry is essential for dealing with controversial topics in the classroom. However, we point to the need for teachers to understand the role of the community of inquiry in addressing such topics. This has implications for teacher preparation. We, therefore, examine John Dewey’s use of experiential education to argue for rethinking teacher preparation, especially when dealing with controversial topics which point to the need for greater emphasis on how best to engage with them philosophically. To this end, we will argue in favour of a reconstruction of educational philosophy, specifically the community of inquiry, by integrating a Deweyan inspired place-based education that emphasises environment, experience, and social reconstruction learning. (shrink)

This article researches how a corporate code of ethics (CCE) implemented in local government X has influenced the behavior of its employees, middle managers, and managers. Metaphors from the existing and desired CCE elicited by these three groups provided information on how to improve the effectiveness of the CCE. This method proved to be very fruitful. It appeared that continuous systematic attention needed to be paid to the CCE after the CCE had been implemented, particularly by management. Initiatives from management (...) to start discussions about relevant questions of integrity appeared to be also necessary to make the topic a “normal” topic which employees were no longer afraid to discuss. In this way, the possibility could be created to develop collectively a “practical” frame of reference concerning relevant questions of integrity that would help employees to make decisions in difficult situations during their work in the future. (shrink)

There has been very little discussion of the appropriate principles to govern a modal logic of plurals. What debate there has been has accepted a principle I call (Necinc); informally if this is one of those then, necessarily: this is one of those. On this basis Williamson has criticised the Boolosian plural interpretation of monadic second-order logic. I argue against (Necinc), noting that it isn't a theorem of any logic resulting from adding modal axioms to the plural logic PFO+, and (...) showing that the most obvious formal argument in its favour is question begging. I go on to discuss the behaviour of natural language plurals, motivating a case against (Necinc) by developing a case that natural language plural terms are not de jure rigid designators. The paper concludes by developing a model theory for modal PFO-f which does not validate (Necinc). An Appendix discusses (Necinc) in relation to counterpart theory. Of course, it would be a mistake to think that the rules for "multiple pointing" follow automatically from the rules for pointing proper. Max Black—The Elusiveness of Sets In some influential articles during the 1980s George Boolos proposed an interpretation of monadic second-order logic in terms of plural quantification [4, 5]. One objection to this proposal, pressed by Williamson [22, 456-7], focuses on the modal behaviour of plural variables, arguing that the proposed interpretation yields the wrong results in respect of the modal status of atomic predications. In the present paper I will present this objection and argue against it. In the course of developing the argument, I will have cause to consider the under-investigated question of how a logic for plurals should be extended to incorporate modal operators. (shrink)

This paper examines the process through which micro-businesses ‘go green’. It builds upon previous studies that have identified the different drivers of this greening process. However, rather than a static focus on specific drivers, the study articulates the evolution of environmental practices over time. The paper uses comparative case studies of six micro-businesses to build a composite sequence analysis that plots the greening process from its roots through to large-scale and ambitious ecological projects. The study identifies three distinct stages that (...) businesses pass through during this greening process. This has important implications for policy-makers and advisors as it was found that the support needed by the businesses changed as they passed through these different stages. In particular, it was found that appropriate support is currently lacking at certain key points of the businesses' greening development. The paper therefore adds to current understanding of small business ecological responsibility by showing how activities and drivers change with the level of engagement. Pointers are provided as to how support can be improved. (shrink)

This paper examines the process through which micro-businesses ‘go green’. It builds upon previous studies that have identified the different drivers of this greening process. However, rather than a static focus on specific drivers, the study articulates the evolution of environmental practices over time. The paper uses comparative case studies of six micro-businesses to build a composite sequence analysis that plots the greening process from its roots through to large-scale and ambitious ecological projects. The study identifies three distinct stages that (...) businesses pass through during this greening process. This has important implications for policy-makers and advisors as it was found that the support needed by the businesses changed as they passed through these different stages. In particular, it was found that appropriate support is currently lacking at certain key points of the businesses' greening development. The paper therefore adds to current understanding of small business ecological responsibility by showing how activities and drivers change with the level of engagement. Pointers are provided as to how support can be improved. (shrink)

Non-profit (NP) organizations present complex challenges in managing stakeholder relationships, particularly during times of environmental change. This places a premium on knowing which stakeholders really matter if an effective relationship marketing strategy is to be developed. This article presents the successful application of a model, which combines Mitchell’s theory of stakeholder saliency and Coviello’s framework of contemporary marketing practices in a leading NP organization in the U.K. A cooperative enquiry approach is used to explore stakeholder relationships, dominant marketing practices, (...) and to surface differing perceptions about the organization’s marketing strategy. Resolving these differences sets the scene for developing choices in marketing strategy for the future. (shrink)

The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the ‘mechanization of the world-picture.’ That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of one key group of natural philosophers working in England during the 1670s shows that their program necessarily incorporated souls (...) and spirits, attractions and congruities, within both their ontology and their epistemology. Any natural philosophical strategy which excluded spirits and sympathies from its world was condemned as tending to subversion and irreligion. This examination shows that the term ‘mechanical philosophy’ was a category given its meanings within local contexts and carries no universal sense separate from that accomplished by these natural philosophers. It also shows how the experimental praxis was compelled to treat souls and spirits, to produce them through experimental labor, and then to extend these experimentally developed entities throughout the cosmos, both social and natural. The development of mechanical philosophy cannot be used to explain the cognitive and social structure of this program, nor its success: instead, the historical setting of experimental work shows how a philosophy of matter and spirit was deliberately constructed by the end of the seventeenth century. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There is growing concern about the reuse and exportation of biological materials (human tissues) for use in research worldwide. Most discussions about samples have taken place in developed countries, where genetic manipulation techniques have greatly advanced in recent years. There is very little discussion in developing countries, although collaborative research with institutions from developed countries is on the increase. The study sought to identify and describe ethical issues arising in the storage, reuse and exportation of samples in a developing (...) country. Research protocols presented to two Ethics Review Committees in Kenya during a period of two years were reviewed. A record was made of the protocol title, sample collected, request for storage, reuse or exportation and whether or not subject consent was sought. The findings indicated that about 25% out of the 388 protocols sought permission for reuse and only half of those actually informed subjects of the contemplated re‐use. Less than 20% requested storage and again, about half of them sought consent from subjects. There is an indication that investigators do not see the need to seek consent for storage, reuse and exportation of samples. It is proposed that these issues should be addressed through policy interventions at both the national and global levels. (shrink)

There seems to be an important historical connexion between changes in the concept of evidence and that of the person capable of giving evidence. Michel Foucault urged that during the classical age the relationship between evidence and the person was reversed: scholasticism derived statements’ authority from that of their authors, while scientists now hold that matters of fact are the most impersonal of statements.1 In a similar vein, Ian Hacking defines a kind of evidence which ‘consists in one thing (...) pointing beyond itself’, and claims that until the early modern period ‘testimony and authority were primary, and things could count as evidence only insofar as they resembled the witness of observers and the authority of books’.2 This captures a rather familiar theme of the ideology of early modern natural philosophy. Nullius in verba was the Royal Society of London’s motto. Robert Boyle, doyen of the Society’s experimental philosophers, tried to build up the credit of laboratory objects at the expense of untrustworthy humans. He reckoned that ‘inanimate bodies … are not capable of prepossessions, or giving us partial informations’, while vulgar men may be influenced by predispositions, and so many other circumstances, that they may easily give occasion to mistakes’. So an inanimate body’s deeds could function as signs of some other state of affairs in a way that the stories of vulgar humans could not.3 1. See Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale au Collêge de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 .2. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference , pp. 34, 33.3. Quoted in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump , p. 218. See also Peter Dear, ‘Totius in verba:’ Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society’, Isis 76 : 145-61. Simon Schaffer lectures in history and philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is the coauthor of Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life and coauthors of The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. (shrink)

Bedside handover is the delivery of the nurse-to-nurse handover at the patient’s bedside. Although increasingly used in nursing, nurses report many barriers for delivering the bedside handover. Among these barriers is the possibility of breaching the patient’s privacy. By referring to this concept, nurses add a legal and ethical dimension to the delivery of the bedside handover, making implementation of the method difficult or even impossible. In this discussion article, the concept of privacy during handovers is being discussed by (...) use of observations, interviews with nurses, and interviews with patients. These findings are combined with international literature from a narrative review on the topic. We provide a practice-oriented answer in which two mutually exclusive possibilities are discussed. If bedside handover does pose problems concerning privacy, this situation is not unique in healthcare and measures can be taken during the bedside handover to safeguard the patient. If bedside handover does not pose problems concerning privacy, privacy is misused by nurses to hide professional uncertainties and/or a reluctance toward patient participation. Therefore, a possible breach of privacy—whether a justified argument or not—is not a reason for not delivering the bedside handover. (shrink)

The Bells of Sevastopol: On Nietzsche's First Musical Composition. This article offers an interpretation and new dating of Nietzsche’s early musical compositions. These documents – harmony exercises and small compositions – are crucial for understanding the beginning of Nietzsche’s study of music. Of these musical scores, the most interesting is the so-called “melody fragment.” This short “melody” is not simply an adolescent’s attempt to write music; it is instead an interesting document on the intellectual activity of the young Nietzsche (...) class='Hi'>during the years of the Crimean War. A comparison of some notebooks of the period reveals similarities that allow us a precise dating. Moreover, this “melody” suggestively recalls the death knell after “the fall of Sevastopol.”. (shrink)

Resumo Este artigo examina um período muito breve da juventude de Nietsche, de seu nascimento a 1862. Durante estes anos Nietzsche descobre progressivamente que o mundo encantado ao interno do qual ele nascera, protegido e seguro, não é imune ao mal e às doenças. Neste estudo examina-se todas as doenças que Nietzsche viu entrar em casa, através do pai, dos parentes e dos amigos. Antes mesmo que sua biografia registrasse patologias que ele carregará consigo até o fim, Nietzsche encontrará as (...) feições do mal nas formas históricas que a sua época registrou deixando marcas indeléveis no seu imaginário.This article examines a very short period of Nietzsche's youth, from his birth to 1862. During these years, Nietzsche gradually discovered that the enchanted world in which he was born, protected and safe, was not immune to evil and disease. This study examines all the diseases that Nietzsche has experienced inside the house, through his father, relatives and friends. Even before his biography recorded pathologies that he would remember ever after, Nietzsche met the face of evil in the historical knowledge that his time recorded leaving indelible traces in his imagination. (shrink)

Love—unconditional, selfless, unchanging, sincere, and totally accepting—is worshipped today as the West's only universal religion. To challenge it is one of our few remaining taboos. In this pathbreaking and superbly written book, philosopher Simon May does just that, dissecting our resilient ruling ideas of love and showing how they are the product of a long and powerful cultural heritage. Tracing over 2,500 years of human thought and history, May shows how our ideal of love developed from its Hebraic and (...) Greek origins alongside Christianity until, during the last two centuries, "God is love" became "love is God"—so hubristic, so escapist, so untruthful to the real nature of love, that it has booby-trapped relationships everywhere with deluded expectations. Brilliantly, May explores the very different philosophers and writers, both skeptics and believers, who dared to think differently: from Aristotle's perfect friendship and Ovid's celebration of sex and "the chase," to Rousseau's personal authenticity, Nietzsche's affirmation, Freud's concepts of loss and mourning, and boredom in Proust. Against our belief that love is an all-powerful solution to finding meaning, security, and happiness in life, May reveals with great clarity what love actually is: the intense desire for someone whom we believe can ground and affirm our very existence. The feeling that "makes the world go round" turns out to be a harbinger of home--and in that sense, of the sacred. (shrink)

Practical reasoning as an important form of argumentation in politics has received limited research attention in critical discourse studies despite the proposal of an analytical model. Focusing on argument development surrounding events related to the extradition bill crisis of Hong Kong, this paper analyzes 48 editorials published in the South China Morning Post during the crisis period adopting Fairclough’s model. A number of recurrent themes have been identified in the corpus in association with the four argument components within the (...) model – Claims, Goals, Values and Circumstances – which may increase understanding of the social contexts of the extradition bill crisis. It is further argued that, although Fairclough’s model may not capture the arguments in individual editorials comprehensively, the model can be usefully applied to analyze a collection of interrelated editorials to reveal more insights about an ongoing political crisis. (shrink)

The Newcomb problem is analysed here as a type of common cause problem. In relation to such problems, if you take the dominated option your expected outcome will be good and if you take the dominant option your expected outcome will be not so good. As is explained, however, these arenot conventional conditional expected outcomes but `conditional evidence expected outcomes' and while in the deliberation process, the evidence on which they are based is only hypothetical evidence.Conventional conditional expected outcomes are (...) more sensitive to your current epistemic state in that they are based purely on actual evidence which is available to you during the deliberation process. So although they are conditional on a certain act being performed, they are not based on evidence that you would have only if that act is performed. Moreover, for any given epistemic state during the deliberation process, your conventional conditional expected outcome for the dominant option will be better than that for the dominated option. The principle of dominance is thus in perfect harmony with the conventional conditional expected outcomes. In relation to the Newcomb problem then, the evidence unequivocally supports two-boxing as the rational option. Yet what is advanced here is not simply a two-boxing strategy. To see why, two stages to the problem need to be recognised. The first stage is that which occurs before the information used by the predictor in making his predictions has been gained. The second stage is after this point. Provided that you are still in the first stage, you have an opportunity to influence whether or not the predictor places the $1m in the opaque box. To maximise the probability that it is, you need to commit yourself to one-boxing. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence, as well as its increased presence in everyday life, have brought the emergence of many new phenomena, including an intriguing appearance of what seems to be a variant of body dysmorphic disorder, coined “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Body dysmorphic disorder is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder defined as a preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others. Snapchat dysmorphia is fueled by automated selfie filters that reflect (...) unrealistic sociocultural standard. In this paper, we discuss how body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions could arise, using the conceptual resources provided by the active inference framework. We suggest that these disorders involve dysfunctional self-modelling which entails maladaptive internalization of sociocultural preferences during adolescent identity formation. Identity formation is hereby described as cycles of interpersonal active inference that arbitrate between identity exploration and commitment. We propose that impaired self-modelling is unable to reduce interpersonal uncertainty during identity exploration, which, over time, degenerates into uncontrollable epistemic habits that isolate the body image from corrective sensory evidence. In light of these insights, we subsequently explore some of the consequences of image-centered social media platforms on the identity formation process. We conclude that heightened interpersonal uncertainty in this novel context could precipitate the onset of body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions, particularly when selfie filters are involved. (shrink)

The information technological progress that has been achieved over the last decades has also given the humanities the opportunity to expand their methodological toolbox. This paper explores how recent advancements in natural language processing may be used for research in the history of ideas so as to overcome traditional scholarship's inevitably selective approach to historical sources. By employing two machine learning techniques whose potential for the analysis of conceptual continuities and innovations has never been considered before, we aim to determine (...) the extent to which they can enhance conventional research methods. It will amount to a critical evaluation of how the advantages of computational in-breadth analysis could be combined with the merits of traditional in-depth analysis in a philosophically fruitful way. After a brief technical description, the approach will be applied to an example: the conceptual (dis)continuity between medieval and early modern philosophy. All the challenges encountered during development and application will be carefully evaluated. We will then be able to assess whether these tools and techniques present promising extensions to the methodological toolbox of traditional scholarship, or whether they do not yet have the potential for a task as complex as the analysis of philosophical literature. The present investigation can thus be seen as an experiment on how far one can go with current machine-learning techniques in this area of research. In doing so, it provides important insights and guidance for future advances in the field. (shrink)

Under conditions of physiological stress, officers are sometimes required to make split-second life-or-death decisions, where deficits in performance can have tragic outcomes, including serious injury or death and strained police–community relations. The current study assessed the performance of 122 active-duty police officers during a realistic lethal force scenario to examine whether performance was affected by the officer’s level of operational skills training, years of police service, and stress reactivity. Results demonstrated that the scenario produced elevated heart rates, as well (...) as perceptual and cognitive distortions, such as tunnel vision, commensurate with those observed in naturalistic use of force encounters. The average performance rating from the scenario was 59%, with 27% of participants making at least one lethal force error. Elevated stress reactivity was a predictor of poorer performance and increased lethal force errors. Level of training and years of police service had differential and complex effects on both performance and lethal force errors. Our results illustrate the need to critically reflect on police training practices and continue to make evidence-based improvements to training. The findings also highlight that while training may significantly improve outcomes, flawless performance is likely not probable, given the limits of human performance under stress. Implications for the objective reasonableness standard, which is used to assess the appropriateness of force in courts of law, are discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the elements which characterize a research attitude and approach introduced by Michel Foucault and further developed as ‘studies of governmentality’ into a sub‐discipline of the humanities during the past decade, including also applications in the field of education. The paper recalls Foucault's introduction of the notion of ‘governmentality’ and its relation to the ‘mapping of the present’ and sketches briefly the way in which the studies of governmentality have been elaborated in general and (...) in the context of research in education more particularly. It indicates how the studies of governmentality can be related to a cartography of the learning society, a cartography which helps us to get lost and to liberate our view. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist and was a leading member and eventually director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Adorno studied an extraordinary range of subjects during his lifetime – from dialectical logic and the syntax of poetry to newspaper astrology columns and the Hollywood studio system – and he left a significant mark on each of the many disciplines in which he worked. His philosophically sophisticated rethinking of Marxian materialism has been central to (...) much European and American social theory in the latter half of the twentieth century and his studies of mass culture, radio and television were foundational documents for the discipline of cultural studies. This collection charts the most important moments in the international reception of Adorno's thinking, covering the wide range of disciplines his studies touched upon, including literary criticism, musicology, aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics. There is also a great deal of important scholarship and commentary on Adorno in German that remains untranslated into English. This set will therefore provide Anglophone scholars with the first English translations of these important works. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence, as well as its increased presence in everyday life, have brought the emergence of many new phenomena, including an intriguing appearance of what seems to be a variant of body dysmorphic disorder, coined “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Body dysmorphic disorder is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder defined as a preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others. Snapchat dysmorphia is fueled by automated selfie filters that reflect (...) unrealistic sociocultural standard. In this paper, we discuss how body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions could arise, using the conceptual resources provided by the active inference framework. We suggest that these disorders involve dysfunctional self-modelling which entails maladaptive internalization of sociocultural preferences during adolescent identity formation. Identity formation is hereby described as cycles of interpersonal active inference that arbitrate between identity exploration and commitment. We propose that impaired self-modelling is unable to reduce interpersonal uncertainty during identity exploration, which, over time, degenerates into uncontrollable epistemic habits that isolate the body image from corrective sensory evidence. In light of these insights, we subsequently explore some of the consequences of image-centered social media platforms on the identity formation process. We conclude that heightened interpersonal uncertainty in this novel context could precipitate the onset of body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions, particularly when selfie filters are involved. (shrink)

This chapter addresses a question of onlooker morality. It asks whether it is wrong to be publicly happy, or to engage in certain sorts of leisure, when (as was the case during the pandemic) we are aware that many members of our community are sick and dying.

Augustine's dialogue De libero arbitrio is, with his Confessions and City of God, one of his most important and widely read works. It contains one of the earliest accounts of the concept of 'free will' in the history of philosophy. Composed during a key period in Augustine's early career, between his conversion to Christianity and his ordination as a bishop, it has often been viewed as a an incoherent mixture of his 'early' and 'late' thinking. Simon Harrison offers (...) an original account of Augustine's theory of will, taking seriously both the philosophical arguments and literary form of the text. Relating De libero arbitrio to other key texts of Augustine's, in particular the City of God and the Confessions, Harrison shows that Augustine approaches the problem of free will as a problem of knowledge: how do I know that I am free?, and that Augustine uses the dialogue form to instantiate his 'way into the will'. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate Hegel's reception of Jakob Böhme during the Jena period. In section 1, the Author analyses Fragment 46 and Fragment 49 of The Jena Wastebook, in which Hegel outlines a God's life-course inspired by Böhmian motives. For Hegel, the Böhmian theory of the wrath of God and fall of Lucifer expresses the opposition and reconciliation between nature and spirit. The relational model here developed is that of an external negativity, which annihilates nature's (...) being-for-itself. In section 2, the Author shows Hegel's use of the same relational model in The Jena Logic and Metaphysics, assuming a Kantian and Böhmian terminology. The part on the Highest Essence explains the opposition between the good and evil principles and their necessary unity. The introjection of the evil principle into the good principle is exactly what leads Hegel to investigate philosophically the myth of the fall. In sections 3 and 4, the emphasis is on the connection of this myth with the ideas of the wrath of God and fall of Lucifer: The Jena Logic and Metaphysics and The Phenomenology of Spirit consider Böhme's thought as a prefiguration of that self-relational negativity which discloses the development of the thing itself. (shrink)

This book provides a definitive account of Jacques Derrida's involvement in debates about the university. Derrida was a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy (GREPH), an activist group that mobilized opposition to the Giscard government's proposals to "rationalize" the French educational system in 1975. He also helped to convene the Estates General of Philosophy, a vast gathering in 1979 of educators from across France. Furthermore, he was closely associated with the founding of the International College (...) of Philosophy in Paris, and his connection with the International Parliament of Writers during the 1990s also illustrates his continuing interest in the possibility of launching an array of literary and philosophical projects while experimenting with new kinds of institutions in which they might take their specific shape and direction. Derrida argues that the place of philosophy in the university should be explored as both a historical question and a philosophical problem in its own right. He argues that philosophy simultaneously belongs and does not belong to the university. In its founding role, it must come from "outside" the institution in which, nevertheless, it comes to define itself. The author asks whether this irresolvable tension between "belonging" and "not belonging" might not also form the basis of Derrida's political thinking and activism where wider issues of contemporary significance are concerned. Key questions today concerning citizenship, rights, the nation-state and Europe, asylum, immigration, terror, and the "return" of religion all involve assumptions and ideas about "belonging"; and they entail constitutional, legal, institutional and material constraints that take shape precisely on the basis of such ideas. This project will therefore open up a key question: Can deconstruction's insight into the paradoxical institutional standing of philosophy form the basis of a meaningful political response by "theory" to a number of contemporary international issues? (shrink)

Sleep enhances integration across multiple stimuli, abstraction of general rules, insight into hidden solutions and false memory formation. Newly learned information is better assimilated if compatible with an existing cognitive framework or schema. This article proposes a mechanism by which the reactivation of newly learned memories during sleep could actively underpin both schema formation and the addition of new knowledge to existing schemata. Under this model, the overlapping replay of related memories selectively strengthens shared elements. Repeated reactivation of memories (...) in different combinations progressively builds schematic representations of the relationships between stimuli. We argue that this selective strengthening forms the basis of cognitive abstraction, and explain how it facilitates insight and false memory formation. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that consciousness of encoding is not necessary for the rapid formation of new semantic associations. We investigated whether unconsciously formed associations are as semantically precise as would be expected for associations formed with consciousness of encoding during episodic memory formation. Pairs of faces and written occupations were presented subliminally for unconscious associative encoding. Five minutes later, the same faces were presented suprathreshold for the cued unconscious retrieval of face-occupation associations. Retrieval instructions required participants to classify the (...) presented individuals according to their putative regularity of income, length of education, and creativity value of occupational activity. The three instructions yielded more classifications consistent with a person’s occupation if the person had been subliminally presented with his written occupation versus a meaningless word . This suggests that consciousness is not necessary to encode, long-term store, and retrieve semantically precise associations between primarily unrelated items. (shrink)

During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of (...) Russell and Moore, were conceived as the bearers of the properties of truth and falsehood. Some thinkers however, such as Russell, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Husserl in the Logische Untersuchungen, argued that instead of, or in addition to, truth-bearers, one must assume the existence of certain entities in virtue of which sentences and/or propositions are true. Various names were used for these entities, notably 'fact', 'Sachverhalt', and 'state of affairs'. (1) In order not to prejudge the suitability of these words we shall initially employ a more neutral terminology, calling any entities which are candidates for this role truth-makers. (shrink)

Scholars are divided over whether a victim's rights persist when an agent permissibly responds to an emergency. According to the prevailing view the moral force of rights is not extinguished by moral permissibility and the agent, therefore, has a duty to compensate the victim. According to another influential view permissibility does erase the moral force of rights and the agent, therefore, can only have a duty to compensate for reasons other than the fact that they committed a rights transgression. I (...) argue that liability does not follow even if we grant that the victim's rights persevere. A non-pecuniary remedy such as a formal apology provides an adequate way of vindicating the victim's rights and of recognizing the agent's causal role. Thus, the answer to the question of what remedy the permissible transgressor owes the victim does not provide us with an answer to the question of who should bear the burden. (shrink)

Suárez’s primary attempt to rethink angelology can be found in the De Angelis. This work is a mighty commentary on the prima pars of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (qq. 50-64) which Suárez left to his colleagues after his years in Coimbra (1597-1607), and which was published posthumously in Lyon in 1620. The composition of the text is somewhat stratified and it includes many references to the Disputationes Metaphysicae, but Suárez most likely already started writing it during his years of teaching (...) in Spain and Italy (1575-1597), before 1597. Because of its Thomistic inspiration, the De angelis is a fundamentally theological and doctrinal work, the metaphysical core of which is independently treated in the DM 35, entitled De immateriali substantia creata. In this passage, which is eminently theoretical, Suárez grapples with the most important quaestiones concerning angels under a metaphysical point of view, therein offering one of the most interesting overviews of early modern angelology. In this paper, I will refer especially to the DM 35, a more synthetic and peculiar work, with some reference to De Angelis as well. I will focus especially on sections 1-3 of DM 35, and try to reconstruct Suárez’s views on the following points: a) the cosmological necessity of angels, their rational demonstrability and the possibility of man’s knowing them (sections 1-2); b) the immaterial essence of angels (section 3). (shrink)

This article adopts an ecological view of cognition to analyze the role of the environment in scaffolding metaphorical experience. Using ethnographic material collected from two real estate showrooms in China, we describe how each showroom setting is equipped with to-be-phenomenologically-experienced objects designed to stimulate desirable sensorimotor experiences and altered bodily states during the guided showroom tours. By analyzing the qualities of such settings and identifying the processes through which visitors become environmentally coupled—including active and passive touch in highly organized (...) auditory, olfactory, and gustatory environs—we demonstrate how the showrooms constitute an affordance space for enacting metaphoricity through doubleness in experience. Implications for conceptual metaphor theory relating to the nature of environments and bodies are discussed. (shrink)