The development of sustainable agri-food systems requires not only new academic knowledge, but also concrete social and organizational change in practice. This article reflects on the action research process that supported and explored the learning process in an emerging agri-food value chain in the Berlin-Brandenburg region in eastern Germany. The action research study involved value chain actors, academic researchers, and process facilitators in a learning network. By framing the network’s learning and problem solving processes in concepts of organizational learning, lessons (...) were drawn for researchers and value chain developers. The results underline the importance of process facilitation in a learning value chain to create a social space, in which the actors in the value chain can interact and find a common basis for collaboration. In the learning process, facilitators used an iterative design to consistently align learning activities with the needs of practitioners to ensure practical relevance. To establish new practices and partnerships, value chain actors challenged existing routines and developed new ideas and visions, while at the same time improving established practices within their organizations and along the entire value chain. (shrink)

ON ITS surface the Theaetetus ends inconclusively. It has even been said to end in failure. Yet this dialogue is exceptionally full of promise. The speakers are singularly well disposed. Two of them are gifted and resemble one another in looks and interests. Inquiry progresses splendidly through most of a long conversation. Although Theaetetus's first two definitions have to be given up, he is in the process led through a meticulous survey of cognition. These and other circumstances are too auspicious (...) for the termination of the dialogue to be taken at face value. The present essay is meant to disclose a partly hidden successful ending. The latter has to be discovered by readers. However the dialogue itself licenses and encourages active interpretation. The last ten pages of discourse contain so many specific clues that the text can be read as a single development ending in an affirmative conclusion. There is indeed a way to construe "true opinion with logos" so it applies to a cognition worthy of the name "epistémé.". (shrink)

In 2020, Amy-Jill Levine challenged the Society of Christian Ethics to take Christian privilege seriously. But Christian ethicists generally neglect Christian privilege as a distinct type. One site for Christian privilege is the ideal of authenticity, which grew from the idea that Christianity represents love, interiority, and spirituality (spirit), while Judaism represents legalism, exteriority, and materiality (letter). By prioritizing “spirit” over “letter,” an isolated ethic of authenticity can detach moral identity from history, race, community, land, and other seemingly extrinsic factors. (...) I draw on Willie James Jennings and Daniel Boyarin to illustrate authenticity’s exclusionary potential and Moses Mendelssohn to construct a more inclusive ideal. (shrink)

Background Informed consent procedures for large population-based cohort studies should be comprehensive and easy-to-use. This is particularly challenging when participants from different socio-economic groups and multicultural ethnic backgrounds are involved. Recently, more and more studies have tried to use multimedia in informed consent procedures. We describe the development and testing of a digital informed consent app and elaborate on whether this may contribute to a comprehensive and practical procedure to obtain informed consent for public health research. Methods In a sample (...) of parents with young children, we used a mixed method approach to study the user experience of an informed consent app and evaluate whether it can be used to adequately inform people and register their consent. Through semi-structured interviews we investigated participants’ experiences with and opinions about the app, with a special focus on comprehensibility of the content and the usability of the app. Information retention questions were asked to evaluate to what extent participants could recall key aspects of the provided study information. Results The 30 participants in this study used the app between 4 and 15 min to give their consent. Overall, they found the app well-designed, informative and easy to use. To learn more about the study for which informed consent is asked, most of the participants chose to watch the animated film, which was generally found to convey information in a clear manner. The identification process was met with mixed reactions, with some feeling it as a secure way to give consent, while for others it contradicted their view of using data anonymously. Information retention questions showed that while all participants remembered various aspects of the study, fewer than half answered all four questions satisfactorily. Conclusion Our study shows that a well-designed informed consent app can be an effective tool to inform eligible participants and to record consents. Still, some issues remain, including trust barriers towards the identification procedure and lack of information retention in some participants. When implementing consent procedures that incorporate digital formats, it may be beneficial to also invest in a complementary face-to-face recruitment approach. (shrink)

An increasing number of small and medium-sized enterprises in the German organic agri-food sector involves citizens through different community financing models. While such models provide alternative funding sources as well as marketing opportunities to SMEs, they allow private investors to combine their financial and ethical concerns by directly supporting the development of a more sustainable food system. Due to the low level of financial intermediation, community financing is characterized by close relations between investors and investees. Against this background, we apply (...) the proximity concept from economic geography to explore spatial and relational aspects of community financing in the German organic agri-food sector. Based on a qualitative multiple case study approach, we find that the relevance of proximity is twofold. While different forms of proximity between SMEs and their potential investors are key success factors, proximity is also considered as one desired outcome of community financing. Furthermore, our results reveal that the extent to which SMEs rely on particular proximity dimensions distinguishes two different approaches to community financing. (shrink)

Of course private-public terminology has a certain first-hand obviousness for us. No one does my experiencing for me; there are features of myself evident to me simply by virtue of the fact that I live through them. These features are not available in quite the same way to others. And your situation is the same. Meanwhile we all have the same sort of access to what we can see and touch and explore scientifically, i.e., the public common world. These remarks (...) must not be taken to imply that a human's privacy is identical with awareness or with immediate feelings; privacy is not exhausted in consciousness. Nevertheless the importance of the private-public distinction à propos actualities is its promise for clearing up or at least clarifying many puzzles involving consciousness: problems about perception, mind-brain connections, and even perhaps immortality. At least the distinction is promising if you begin by taking us to be indeed individual centers of an awareness which discloses some private content but also discloses real other bodily beings. That is, something like Weiss's conception of private and public or inside and outside seems to be essential if one holds that mentality has a firm non-dubious place in the natural world. (shrink)

Professor Solmsen's interpretation is orthodox; his comprehensive account builds on recent more specialized studies, including his own, and those of Jaeger, Ross, and Cherniss. If in some ways the book contains no large surprises, it nevertheless makes a major contribution by its treatment of Plato. The author has skillfully disengaged Plato's observations about nature from the customary ethical, epistemic, or, as the case may be, metaphysical contexts. He demonstrates that Plato was toward the end of his career a more serious (...) investigator of physical phenomena than is commonly supposed. Moreover, at almost every turn he finds Platonic precedents for Aristotle's thinking in this field. He does not detract from Aristotle's originality, but illumines it, and Plato's as well. (shrink)

The debate over international trade has long pitted “free trade” advocates against those who argue that particular reasons support trade restraints. The newest argument is that open trade leads to a “race to the bottom” in the regulation of health, safety, welfare, and especially labor and environmental concerns, harming the nation’s citizens and undermining national sovereignty. One predicate for this argument – that trade increases competitive pressure on domestic industry – is accurate. That, in turn, will raise the cost of (...) some national policies that otherwise would win political approval. But the remainder of the race to the bottom argument rests on assumptions about regulation, the political process, and trade that do not stand up to examination. While responses to increased international competition will vary, the effects of such competition will generally be consistent with any meaningful notion of sovereignty and also will improve national welfare judged by common economic norms.Le débat sur le commerce international a longtemps opposé les défenseurs du libre échange à ceux qui soutiennent qu’il existe des raisons particulières en faveur de barrières à l’échange. L’argument le plus récent est que le libre échange conduit à une course au “nivellement par le bas” au niveau de la réglementation de la santé, de la sécurité, du bienêtre, et plus particulièrement dans les domaines du travail et de l’environnement. Selon ses tenants, elle aurait pour conséquence de léser les citoyens de la nation et d’affaiblir la souveraineté nationale.Un présupposé de cet argument – selon lequel le commerce accroît la pression concurrentielle subie par l’industrie nationale – est fondé. A son tour cela entraînera une augmentation du coût de certaines politiques nationales qui auraient par ailleurs obtenu un assentiment politique.Mais le reste de l’argumentation du nivellement par le bas repose sur des hypothèses à propos de la réglementation, du processus politique, et du commerce qui ne résistent pas à un examen critique.Bien que les réactions à une concurrence internationale accrue varient, les effets d’une telle concurrence seront généralement cohérents avec toute notion pertinente de souveraineté et amélioreront le bien-être national tel que jugé par les normes économiques standard. (shrink)

For Kant’s moral universalism, contingent religious law is legitimate only when it serves as a means of fulfilling the moral law. Though Kant uses traditional theological resources to account for the possibility of “statutory ecclesiastical law” in historical religions, he denies this possibility to Jewish law. Something like Kant’s logic appears in the work of some of his intellectual successors who continue to define Christianity in terms of its moral superiority to Judaism while attempting to excise remaining “Jewish” elements from (...) it. A more adequate account of the Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and the origins of Christianity exposes deficiencies in Kant’s universalizing logic which seems to deny any intrinsic value to historical religions. A possible alternative may lie in a modified account of the relationship between the moral law and religious law, perhaps nourished by Jewish thought, including the rabbinic tradition of the Noachide commandments. (shrink)

‘Wisten jullie dat je middeleeuwse privé-kapelletjes in grote kerken eigenlijk zou kunnen zien als de allereerste skyboxen? Niet alleen werden ze door rijke families gekocht om zo op de eerste rang te zitten tijdens missen, maar ze waren ook ideaal om na de dood nog lange tijd herinnerd te worden omdat je op zo'n voorname plaats lag,’ vertelt Wim Weijland. ‘Fascinerend. Maar dat zag je natuurlijk ook al in de opkomst van de portretkunst, dat mensen zichzelf wilden vastleggen voor het (...) nageslacht,’ stelt Hans Alma, ‘of in het beschrijven van heldendaden en de overlevering daarvan. Dat is eigenlijk het centrale punt in het belang dat we hechten aan overleven: dat we energie stoppen in overlevering om zo te kunnen overleven.’. (shrink)

The anticipated social capabilities of robots may allow them to serve in authority roles as part of human-machine teams. To date, it is unclear if, and to what extent, human team members will comply with requests from their robotic teammates, and how such compliance compares to requests from human teammates. This research examined how the human-likeness and physical embodiment of a robot affect compliance to a robot's request to perseverate utilizing a novel task paradigm. Across a set of two studies, (...) participants performed a visual search task while receiving ambiguous performance feedback. Compliance was evaluated when the participant requested to stop the task and the coach urged the participant to keep practicing multiple times. In the first study, the coach was either physically co-located with the participant or located remotely via a live-video. Coach type varied in human-likeness and included either a real human, a Nao robot, or a modified Roomba robot. The second study expanded on the first by including a Baxter robot as a coach and replicated the findings in a different sample population with a strict chain of command culture. Results from both studies showed that participants comply with the requests of a robot for up to 11 min. Compliance is less than to a human and embodiment and human-likeness on had weak effects on compliance. (shrink)

THE PASSAGE CITED IN THE TITLE IS commonly said to deal with puzzles or paradoxes about size and other measurable attributes of bodies. Nearly all recent commentators seek to interpret this portion of the dialogue as supporting or otherwise cohering with the Protagorean position Socrates expounds in the Theaetetus. On the present analysis, however, the support or harmony is mere appearance. The puzzles Socrates brings up are indeed associated with entities rejected by Protagoras. Socrates certainly uses the puzzles to foster (...) Theaetetus's trust in Protagorean doctrine. All the same, Socrates' procedure should not be taken at face value. The passage, which is an important digression, is fundamentally quite critical of the Protagorean position. (shrink)

"Wherein can consist the unity of that, the formula of which we call a definition, as for instance in the case of man, 'two-footed animal'; for let this be the formula of man. Why, then, is this one, and not many, viz. 'animal' and 'two-footed'? This is how the problem is stated. 'Animal' and 'two-footed' do make a unity, and they should, since: "The definition is a single formula and a formula of substance, so that it must be a formula (...) of some one thing; for substance means a 'one' and a 'this', as we maintain." All the same, there is a need to trace the unity of genus and difference back to its origin, and to see just how this unity differs from others. (shrink)

Aristotle's reasoning in Z, 10-11 has three stages. In the first, Aristotle proposes two different definitions for our consideration. The definitions contrast, at least superficially, for one appears to elucidate a whole by reference to its material parts, while the other does not appear to do so. Aristotle then in effect shows that the form of a whole can be taken in three somewhat different ways: We may be concerned with form by itself, or with the essential determinacy which is (...) form-having- its-formal-effect-in-a-milieu; in the latter alternative, the essential determinacy may be so taken as to be particular or as to be typical. In each of the three cases, form as the primary intelligible is the governing factor. On this basis, it is possible to clarify the character of the two definitions originally proposed as suggestive of a difficulty. (shrink)

Substantial form is a pivotal topic in the Metaphysics. While being is the subject of the entire work, ousiai are the primary cases of being. Among ousiai, individual material things are the ones directly available for examination. Substantial form is the chief determinant of such things. Aristotle assures us, moreover, that an understanding of this type of form will carry us forward, eventually, to an understanding of the formal being which exists totally apart from matter and change--the necessary reality somewhat (...) inadequately discerned by Plato. (shrink)