_The assessment of institutional quality and its influence on economic performance is highly relevant in Nigeria due to the country's constantly changing governmental institutions, dynamic market circumstances, and diversified socioeconomic atmosphere. Thus, the study aims to investigate the impact of institutional quality on the economic performance of Nigeria. This study employed ex post facto research, while time series data was used, which spans from 1996 to 2021, sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). (...) The study employed unit root tests, Johansen cointegration, and the Error Correction Model as estimation techniques. However, post estimation tests such as normality, serial correlation, heteroskedasticity and stability tests were carried to ascertain the level of statistical accuracy outcome of the variables used. The findings suggest that there is a sustained nexus between the quality of institutions and characteristics related to economic growth. Also, it was equally found out that political stability has a significant impact in the short run. This suggests that a unit increase in political instability would definitely amount to a decrease in economic performance in Nigeria during the period under investigation. The study suggests enhancing accountability, transparency, administrative efficiency, and law adherence to improve Nigerian institutions. This can be achieved through reform implementation, capacity building, and good governance mechanisms, while reducing political unrest and fostering stability._. (shrink)

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value (...) is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

Background: Poor mental health affects adolescent development and is associated with health and social outcomes in later life. The current study uses cross-sectional data to explore the understudied aspects of peer relationships as a predictor of depressive symptom severity of adolescents in Germany.Method: Data from the German BELLA study were analyzed. We focused on the most recent measurement point of the BELLA study and analyzed data of 446 adolescents. Peer relationship was measured using four items from the internationally established Patient-Reported (...) Outcome Measurement Information System. Depressive symptoms were assessed via seven items of the German version of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Short Depression Scale. Hierarchical linear regression models were computed to explore the association between depressive symptoms and peer relationships. Hierarchical linear regression models served to determine the added predictive effects of each aspect of peer relationships.Result: The regression model showed that 22% of the variance of the severity of depressive symptoms could be explained by the quality of adolescents’ peer relationships = 125.65, p < 0.001). Peer acceptance has the most substantial unique contribution to peer relationship as a predictor of depressive symptom severity. The gender-specific analysis shows different trends for boys and girls.Conclusion: The quality of peer relationships is a significant predictor of adolescents’ depressive symptoms severity. Improved peer acceptance, dependability, and ease of making new friends are significantly associated with reduced depression symptoms for Germany’s adolescent population. (shrink)

Eye tracking is used to investigate human choice procedures. We infer from eye movement patterns in choice problems where the deliberation process is clear to deliberations in problems of choice between two lotteries. The results indicate that participants tend to compare prizes and probabilities separately. The data provide little support for the hypothesis that decision makers use an expected utility type of calculation exclusively. This is particularly true when the calculations involved in comparing the lotteries are complicated.

Moral distress has been well reviewed in the literature with established deleterious side effects for all healthcare professionals, including nurses, physicians, and others. Yet, little is known about the quality and effectiveness of interventions directed to address moral distress. The aim of this integrative review is to analyze published intervention studies to determine their efficacy and applicability across hospital settings. Of the initial 1373 articles discovered in October 2020, 18 were appraised as relevant, with 1 study added by hand search (...) and 2 after a repeated search was completed in January and then in May of 2021, for a total of 22 reviewed articles. This review revealed data mostly from nurses, with some studies making efforts to include other healthcare professions who have experienced moral distress. Education-based interventions showed the most success, though many reported limited power and few revealed statistically lowered moral distress post intervention. This may point to the difficulty in adequately addressing moral distress in real time without adequate support systems. Ultimately, these studies suggest potential frameworks which, when bolstered by organization-wide support, may aid in moral distress interventions making a measurable impact. (shrink)

This pioneering work in the history of science, which originated in a series of three Gauss Seminars given at Princeton University in 1984, demonstrated how the roots of the scientific revolution lay in medieval scholasticism.

The systematic comparison of Avicenna’s Ilāhiyyāt of the Šifā' with Aristotle’s Metaphysics , accomplished for the first time in the present volume, provides a detailed account of Avicenna’s reworking of the epistemological profile and contents of the Metaphysics and a comprehensive investigation of this latter’s transmission in pre-Avicennian Greek and Arabic philosophy.

This book offers a fresh account of one of the remarkable figures in the Renaissance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), by focusing on a neglected aspect of his work; his reading of scholasticism and its reception in the fifteenth century.

The book shows that discourse and community are central issues for communitarianism, feminism, postmodernism and liberation ethics, and reveals how plurality and multiculturalism have become a matter for critical philosophy.

The broad aim of this paper is to track the evolution of adult literacy policy in the UK across three decades, highlighting convergences between policy phases and the promotion of democratic learning spaces. It is anchored onto the argument that, although it is generally accepted that democratic learning spaces are perceived as beneficial to adult literacy learners, policy has often deterred its promotion and, therefore, implementation. The paper identifies three block phases of adult literacy development: the seventies to mid-eighties, the (...) mid-eighties to mid-nineties and the mid-nineties to the Moser Committees. The features of each of these phases are highlighted to map out convergences and divergences to the ethos of democratic learning spaces. The paper argues that, with the evolution of policy in adult literacy, the ethos of democratic learning space continuously diminished, such that as policy evolved year on year, the principle of democratic learning space found itself at counterpoint to policy. We draw on two theoretical frameworks, the NLS view of literacy and Bourdieu’s capital framework to explain these divergences and conclude that the dominant perception of literacy and the prioritised capital in the context of policy appear to limit the vestiges of democratic learning spaces. Keywords: Adult literacy, policy, democratic learning spaces, cultural dissonance, human capital, social capital. (shrink)

The starting-point and, at the same time, the foundation of recent scholarship on the Arabic translations of Aristotle's Metaphysics are Maurice Bouyges' excellent critical edition of the work in which the extant translations of the Metaphysics are preserved – i.e. Averroes' Tafsīr of the Metaphysics – and his comprehensive account of the Arabic translations and translators of the Metaphysics in the introductory volume. Relying on the texts made available by Bouyges and the impressive amount of philological information conveyed in his (...) edition, subsequent scholars have been able to select and focus on more specific topics, providing, for example, a closer inspection of the Arabic translations of the single books of the Metaphysics, or a detailed comparison of some of these translations with the original text of the Metaphysics. A new trend of research in recent times has been the study of these versions as part of the wider context of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement. (shrink)

The Protestant Work Ethic is a powerful force in Western culture with far reaching effects on our values and judgments. While research on PWE as a cultural value is abundant in diverse disciplines, little research has explored how this cultural value facilitates the use of heuristics when evaluating the morality of others. Using both PWE and illusory correlation as foundations, this paper explores whether people attribute positive moral characteristics to others merely based upon a description as hardworking. Three experiments suggest (...) merely being described as hardworking leads to perceptions of greater honesty, a more careful and detailed approach to one’s work, accompanied by a lesser likelihood of engaging in cheating behavior and a greater likelihood of accountability. These results have implications regarding the detection of deviant/fraudulent behavior. (shrink)

In Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (Also a History of Philosophy), Jürgen Habermas weaves together various themes such as faith and knowledge, history and theology, naturalism and epistemic justification, learning processes and moral development as well as multiculturalism and deliberative democracy in a transnational public sphere. This article argues that to articulate these multiple elements, Habermas adopts a robust framework built upon four conceptual pillars that can be clearly identified: postmetaphysical, postconventional, postnational, and postsecular. This “conceptual plurality” underlies his genealogy (...) of the centuries-long tension and mutual learning between religious faith and scientific knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition. By considering the interplay of these concepts, it is possible to understand the several ways in which religion emerges in contemporary society and the equally multiple strategies Habermas uses to interpret religion throughout his career, which are masterfully reconsidered and articulated in his opus magnum on religion. (shrink)

Stories of young children who make up exaggerated stories provide questions for a discussion about lying.

Plato’s dialogues, the Symposium, and Phaedrus, provide a reasonable explanation of love. G. Vlastos and M. Nussbaum do not share such an opinion. The former contends that Plato’s view of love is about loving only a person’s beauty, but not the entire person; thus, it falls short of an appropriate explanation of love. The latter holds that a theory of love should be complete, and that Plato’s one is incomplete on the grounds that it does not account for personal love. (...) These criticisms will be re-evaluated in light of the duality of love as well as participants’ views in the Symposium; a re-assessment will weaken the mentioned objections. This paper contends that from the Symposium and Phaedrus, one can have a fruitful understanding of being in love, being out of love, falling in love, loving for its own sake and being erotically in love. In order to account for these related issues of love it is important to consider Plato’s works in terms of his “official” and “unofficial” views. The former is construed as the doctrine of the lover or loving for its own sake: this is associates with Diotima’s views which are repeated by Socrates. With reference to the latter, it is possible to explain what personal love or being in love, being out of love, falling in love, and being erotically in love involve. Erotic love will be interpreted as an extension of our philosophical conception of love, related to views of love that are mentioned in the Symposium other than Socrates’ report of Diotima’s conceptions. This paper is divided into two parts: the first one will show views of love in the Symposium. That is, being in love, being out of love, falling in love and loving for its own sake will be discussed. In addition, the forementioned criticisms will be re-evaluated. In the second section, we will show that Aristophanes’ speech expresses erotic love, and then Kant’s objections will be explained and discussed. (shrink)

El presente trabajo pretende ser una reflexión teórica sobre las rupturas y nuevas articulaciones de las formas de movilización política en el periodo postcrisis. Proponemos que en la década de 2010, catalizadas por las tecnologías digitales, cristalizan tres grandes rupturas: socioeconómicas, en las que la precarización de las condiciones laborales y vitales supone la reemergencia de una crítica social material; temporales, en las que la dinámica aceleradora del capitalismo tardío intensifica la primacía del corto plazo; y socioculturales, en las que (...) la fragmentación se traduce en una sensación de inseguridad e incertidumbre. Todo ello deriva en una transformación en las formas de movilización, que tienden hacia una acción colectiva efímera, espasmódica. Esta puede dar pie al surgimiento del gran evento, donde lo primordial es juntar físicamente a personas y recuperar el sentido de comunidad. (shrink)

In spite of the numerous occasions on which Adam Smith expresses his reservations regarding the morality of commercial societies, there seems to be an agreement that he believed such systems to be fundamentally just. To some, this is so because they attribute to Smith a concept of justice which is narrowly confined to the ‘right to have [one's] body free from injury, and [one's] liberty free from infringement’ . In a world where people have an interest in the fortune of (...) others regardless of how selfish their motives for action might be, injuring someone else's body or restricting someone else's liberty is unlikely to be the behavioural norm. To others, natural liberty in the sphere of economic activity is just not only because individuals behind the system naturally comply with justice in its commutative sense, but also because the system itself generates justice in the distributive sense. Such arguments are based on either the working of the invisible hand — which produces the ‘same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants …’ — or on the approval of the ‘impartial spectator’ of the distribution which is associated with the natural price. (shrink)

In the Commentary on the Metaphysics, Albert the Great (d. 1280) envisages the possibility that the human intellect relates to the highest realities not only as the eyes of the bat see the light of day (analogy used by Aristotle at the beginning of the second book of the Metaphysics) but also – thanks to study and gradually, already in this life – as the eyes of the eagle see the circle of the Sun. In the Summa theologiae, discussing the (...) same Aristotelian passage, Albert the Great replaces the eagle with the herodius (“golden eagle”, i.e. the eagle having supreme vision for Albert). The paper analyzes the meaning of this variation in Albertine ornithology, examining other passages of his works in which the herodius is mentioned and evaluating whether this is a sheer case of substitution of a species (the eagle) with one of its subspecies (the herodius) with the same meaning and function, or a subtle distinction between two different cognitive abilities required respectively by metaphysics and theology to know their objects of investigation. (shrink)