The article describes the development of adolescents for a sense of self in a lesbian home, in order to compile guidelines for lesbian parents as well as pastoral counsellors to help and guide adolescents to develop a healthy sense of self. From the research results, it appears that there are certain positive and negative aspects of a lesbian home that influence adolescents’ sense of self. Where both parents are involved with the adolescents, share household duties equally and have a quality (...) relationship with each other and the adolescents, the adolescents are generally well-adapted, happy and able to handle challenges in order to develop a healthy sense of self. The positive influence that Christian religious certainty has on the overall development of the adolescents was also confirmed by this study. On the other hand, adolescents experience particular aspects as challenging and impeding in their development of a healthy sense of self: Conflict and criticism from the companion parents are humiliating and destructive. Stigmatising, teasing and rejection from the hetero-normative society, as a result of their parents’ sexual orientation, appear to be the largest obstacles in their psychosocial development. They react in a shy, negative and evasive way to the stigmatisation and withdraw themselves from situations that could be painful and humiliating. It also appears that the absence of a father figure and financial tension in lesbian families are impeding the adolescents’ healthy development of a sense of self. (shrink)

Vrijheid van kunst betekent dat de maker vrij is om de kunst te maken die hij wil. Hij is degene die bepaalt wat hij maakt en hoe hij het gemaakte naar buiten brengt. Het publiek kan verschillend op de naar buiten gebrachte kunst reageren en kan eventueel de kunstenaar vragen verantwoording af te leggen. Een kunstenaar kan op dit verzoek ingaan, al hoeft dat in verreweg de meeste gevallen niet. Het afleggen van verantwoording beperkt de vrijheid van kunst echter niet. (...) Zij staat voor de dialoog die door kunstenaars zelf in bepaalde gevallen wordt gezocht, met name als het gaat om geëngageerde kunst. (shrink)

While having a breast reconstruction, women have certain expectations about their future breasted bodies. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze these expectations in the process of reconstruction. By applying a qualitative, phenomenological study within a longitudinal research design, this paper acknowledges the temporarily complex, contextualized, embodied, and subjective nature of the phenomenon of expectations. The analysis identified expectations regarding three different aspects of women’s embodiment: their gazed body, their capable/practical body, and their felt body. After reconstruction, (...) these women try to reconfigure—adjust, level or retrospectively rewrite—their expectations. Further, some women face what apparently arrives totally unexpected, namely a strange feeling breast or a failed reconstruction. The development of these women’s expectations can be understood as an active, continuously evolving, difficult and sometimes impossible dynamic of expecting the surprise that is a breast reconstruction. Within this dynamic, women formulate and reconfigure—by definition—unrealistic expectations and validate and try to achieve unexpected futures. We suggest that medical professionals can facilitate this dynamic in various ways. (shrink)

State legitimacy is often said to have two aspects: an internal and an external one. Internally, a legitimate state has the right to rule over its subjects. Externally, it has a right that outsiders not interfere with its domestic governance. But what is the relation between these two aspects? In this paper, I defend a conception of legitimacy according to which these two aspects are related in an importantly asymmetrical manner. In particular, a legitimate state’s external right to rule affords (...) it protections that include and go beyond what its internal right to rule enables it to do. This asymmetrical view, I argue, is preferable to its two main rivals: the view that a state’s internal and external legitimacy are separate issues, and the view that internal and external legitimacy are mirroring. (shrink)

A single global authority is not sufficient to regulate heterogenous agents in multiagent systems based on distributed architectures, due to idiosyncratic local situations and to the need to regulate new issues as soon as they arise. On the one hand institutions should be structured as normative systems with a hierarchy of authorities able to cope with the dynamics of local situations, but on the other hand higher authorities should be able to delimit the autonomy of lower authorities to issue valid (...) norms. In this paper, we study the interplay of obligations and strong permissions in the context of hierarchies of authorities using input/output logic, because its explicit norm base facilitates reasoning about norm base maintenance, and it covers a variety of conditional obligations and permissions. We combine the logic with constraints, priorities and hierarchies of authorities. In this setting, we observe that Makinson and van der Torre’s notion of prohibition immunity for permissions is no longer sufficient, and we introduce a new notion of permission as exception and a new distinction between static and dynamic norms. We show how strong permissions can dynamically change an institution by adding exceptions to obligations, provide an explicit representation of what is permitted to the subjects of the normative system and allow higher level authorities to limit the power of lower level authorities to change the normative system. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on "diffraction." This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or "new materialist.". (shrink)

This paper argues, first, that biological evolution can be both random and divinely guided at the same time. Next it discusses the idea that the claim that evolution is unguided is not part of the science of evolution, and defends it against a number of objections.

In the interview in this article, Randall Collins discusses various aspects of his oeuvre. First, he considers why interaction rituals (IRs) in religion are special emotional transformers. This is followed by a discussion of IRs in the digital age and the symbolic and economic power that is required to orchestrate IRs in politics and revolutions. Then comes a discussion of social scientific research into violence, in the past and more recently. The interview continues with a reflection on the notion of (...) attention space, a concept which Collins has applied in analyses of violent interactions and the intellectual struggles between philosophers. Finally, the article considers the state of the art of sociology and its future prospects, evaluating its potential for rapid discovery and its position on the abstraction-reflexivity continuum. As the interview demonstrates Collins’s insightful sociological craftsmanship, it provides social scientists with a strong and optimistic lead in how to do social theory. (shrink)

:In this essay, I defend a theory of liability to defensive force. The theory contains two elements. The first is a dual Lockean-inspired condition. The second aims to make this first condition consistent with problems arising from uncertainty. Drawing on recent work by Michael Zimmerman, I argue that the rights-based condition should be made sensitive to the evidence available to defenders.

‘Homophobia’ is shorthand for stigmatising attitudes and practices towards people who demonstrate sexual diversity. In this article, we reflect on how African Christian faith may become redemptive rather than violent in the context of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex forms of sexuality.

As we owe the division of ecology into autecology and synecology to botanists, the arguments for this subdivision and also the definitions and contents of both subsciences as given bySchröter, Flahault &Schröter, Gams andDu Rietz are communicated in full. The same is the case with the division of ecology given by the zoologistsAdams andChapman. Moreover the opinions of these authors in this respect are critisized in detail as well as in their general aspects. This critique is connected with the author's (...) own positive opinion, which is given at the end of the paper, where also the remarks covered by the first two papers of this series are summarised.In ecology as a biological science either the individual or the complex of individuals has to occupy a central position. Therefore science about the environment, especially the abiotic one, as well as science about a definite region or spot of the earth ought not to be incorporated in biology.In autecology the individual occupies a central position, it is one of the subsciences of idiobiology, it is a science about the relations to environment, taken in the broadest sense. Dependent upon the contents of this we have many definitions of ecology, the most important ones being: 1) ecology is a biogeographical subscience; 2) ecology is taken in the sense of ethology; 3) ecology is taken as a science of the teleological relations of the individual to its environment and the objects in it, thus of the non-causal relations, the causal ones being assigned to physiology. These non-causal relations appear under four aspects, all called teleological, i.e. the true purpose-notion, relation in the sense of requirement, that in the sense of wholeness, and of adaptation and the degree of adaptation. Adaptation is taken in a broad sense, covering as well the degree of adaptation , as the latitude of the possibility of adaptation and the degree of variability of the individual to adapt itself. The proposal is made to confine the term autecology to this teleological aspect of the relations of the individual, i.e. of all its characters, not of the epharmonic ones only, to environment.In synecology the complex of individuals, showing direct real connections during individual life, occupies a central position, with equal scientific interest for all members of the complex. Synecology contains all biological scientific contents about this matter. The application ofTschulok's system of subsciences to synecology is critisized and the development of the system of these subsciences is left to its developmental fate in time. Considering the importance of the knowledge of the tendencies of thought for the development of synecology an attempt is made to state those already applied in synecology; author distinguishes the systematical, the mathematical, the causal, the historical, the teleological and the essential tendency of thought. Also the difference in the tendencies of thought shows that autecology and synecology are to be separated in a logical system of biological subsciences.Puisque c'est aux botanistes que nous devons la division de l'écologie en autécologie et synécologie, l'auteur passe en revue tous les arguments qui ont amené les biologistes à faire cette subdivision, ainsi que les définitions de ces deux subsciences et les matières qu'elles comprennent, comme elles sont données parSchröter, Flahault &Schröter, Gams etdu Rietz. Il en fait de même pour la division de l'écologie faite par les zoologistesAdams etChapman. En outre il discute les opinions de ces auteurs sous ce rapport, dans leurs détails aussi bien que dans leurs aspects généraux. Cette discussion est en rapport avec l'opinion positive de l'auteur, qu'il expose à la fin de l'article, où se trouvent résumées également les remarques qui se trouvaient déjà dans les deux premiers articles de cette série.Dans l'écologie, en tant que science biologique, l'individu — ou bien l'ensemble des individus — doit occuper une position centrale. C'est pourquoi ni la science qui concerne le milieu, en particulier le milieu abiotique, ni la science qui se rapporte à une région ou un endroit défini de la terre, ne devrait être incorporée dans la biologie.Dans l'autécologie l'individu occupe une position centrale. Cette science est une des subsciences de l'idiobiologie; elle se rapporte aux relations entre le sujet et son milieu — „milieu” pris dans le sens le plus large du mot. Selon les significations diverses qu'on peut attacher aux termes „relations” et „milieu”, nous avons plusieurs définitions de l'écologie, parmi lesquelles les plus importantes suivent ci-dessous:1)L'écologie est une subscience biogéographique; 2) le terme „écologie” est pris dans le sens d'éthologie; 3) l'écologie est considérée comme la science des relations téléologiques entre l'individu et son milieu et les objets se trouvant dans ce milieu; elle est donc considérée comme la science des relations non-causales, les relations causales étant conférées à la physiologie. Ces relations non-causales se présentent sous quatre aspects, tous appelés téléologiques, c. à. d. la vraie notion de but, les relations dans le sens de besoins, les relations dans le sens de „tout” et les relations dans le sens d'adaptation et de degré d'adaptation.Le mot „adaptation” est pris dans un sens étendu, comprenant aussi bien le degré d'adaptation que l'amplitude de la possibilité d'adaptation et le degré de variabilité dans l'adaptation de l'individu à son milieu. L'auteur propose de restreindre le terme „autécologie” à cet aspect téléologique des relations entre l'individu et son milieu; il s'agit ici, bien entendu, de toutes les qualités de l'individu et non seulement des qualités epharmoniques.Dans la synécologie l'ensemble des individus montrant des rapports directs et réels durant la vie individuelle occupe une position centrale et offre un intérêt scientifique pareil pour tous les membres de l'ensemble. La synécologie comprend tout ce qu'il y a à dire sur cette matière par rapport à la science biologique. L'application du système des subsciences deTschulok à la synécologie est critiquée par l'auteur, qui juge prématuré de s'occuper déjà d'un tel système de subsciences: l'avenir seul nous apprendra quel système se développera ici. Vu l'importance d'une connaissance exacte des différentes tendances de penser pour le développement de la synécologie, l'auteur s'efforce de rassembler celles qui ont déjà été appliquées dans la synécologie; il distingue les tendances de penser systématique, mathématique, causale, historique, téléologique et essentielle . En outre les différences entre ces tendances de penser démontrent, que l'autécologie et la synécologie doivent être séparées dans un système logique de subsciences biologiques. (shrink)

The body plays an important role in the book of Job - as do animals. According to psychoanalytical specifically object-relations theory, a subjective body image was partly constructed through the internalisation of external stimuli from significant others who mirrored the subject through their feedback or through their own bodies, which served as an ideal or critique to the subject. Amongst the external stimuli, animals constitute such significant others. Animals could therefore have impacted Job's subjective body image, particularly as their bodies (...) were described in detail by God as a response to Job's complaints and searching. CONTRIBUTION: Two theoretical and interrelated problems were acknowledged although they cannot be satisfactorily solved: the cultural aspect of the body image and the relationship to animals. (shrink)

Moral exemplars are often held up as objects to be admired. Such admiration is thought beneficial to the admirer, inducing him or her to emulate virtuous conduct, and deemed flattering to the admired. This paper offers a critical examination of admiration from a broadly Kantian perspective, arguing that admiration – even of genuine moral exemplars – violates the duty of self-respect. It also provides an explanation for the fact that moral exemplars themselves typically shun admiration. Lastly, it questions the assumption (...) that admiration leads to emulation on the basis of scientific findings that indicate that admiration induces passivity in the admirer rather than an incentive to self-improvement. (shrink)

Due to huge advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, chatbots are gaining significance in the field of customer service. For users, it may be hard to distinguish whether they are communicating with a human or a chatbot. This brings ethical issues, as users have the right to know who or what they are interacting with (European Commission in Regulatory framework proposal on artificial intelligence. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai, 2022). One of the solutions is to include a disclosure at the start (...) of the interaction (e.g., “this is a chatbot”). However, companies are reluctant to use disclosures, as consumers may perceive artificial agents as less knowledgeable and empathetic than their human counterparts (Luo et al. in Market Sci 38(6):937–947, 2019). The current mixed methods study, combining qualitative interviews (n = 8) and a quantitative experiment (n = 194), delves into users’ responses to a disclosed vs. undisclosed customer service chatbot, focusing on source orientation, anthropomorphism, and social presence. The qualitative interviews reveal that it is the willingness to help the customer and the friendly tone of voice that matters to the users, regardless of the artificial status of the customer care representative. The experiment did not show significant effects of the disclosure (vs. non-disclosure). Implications for research, legislators and businesses are discussed. (shrink)

In many countries health insurers, employers and especially governments are increasingly using pressure and coercion to enhance healthier lifestyles. For example by ever higher taxes on cigarettes and alcoholi..

Being part of the RoboCup initiative, the RoboCup@Home league targets the development and deployment of autonomous service and assistive robot technology being essential for future personal domestic applications. The domain of domestic service and assistive robotics implicates a wide range of possible problems. The primary reasons for this include the large amount of uncertainty in the dynamic and non-standardized environments of the real world, and the related human interaction. Furthermore, the application orientation requires a large effort towards high level integration (...) combined with a demand for general robustness of the systems. This article details the need for interdisciplinary community effort to iteratively identify related problems, to define benchmarks, to test and, finally, to solve the problems. The concepts and the implementation of the RoboCup@Home initiative as a combination of scientific exchange and competition is presented as an effi cient method to accelerate and focus technological and scientific progress in the domain of domestic service robots. Finally, the progress in terms of performance increase in the benchmarks and technological advancements is evaluated and discussed. Keywords: Domestic Service Robotics, Application, Uncertainty, Benchmark, Competition, Human–Robot Interaction, RoboCup@Home. (shrink)

Aggleton & Brown propose that familiarity-based recognition depends on a perirhinal-medial dorsal thalamic system. However, connections between these structures are sparse or absent. In contrast, the perirhinal cortex is connected to midline/intralaminar nuclei. In a human, a lesion in this thalamic domain, sparing the medial dorsal nucleus, impaired familiarity-based recognition while sparing recollective-based recognition. It is thus more likely that the intralaminar/midline nuclei are involved in recognition.

The aim of this study was to empirically investigate differences in role expectations, among the stakeholders involved, about the devolved personnel management role of front-line managers. In particular, we researched the role expectation differences between FLMs, their middle managers, and Human Resource practitioners. In total, nineteen semi-structured interviews have been conducted involving eleven FLMs, eight middle managers, and two HR practitioners working at the same Dutch hospital. Most discovered role expectation differences were related to how FLMs should execute their HR (...) tasks. FLMs were often uncertain if their role enactment met those of their middle managers and/or HR practitioners, herewith indicating role stress. Our findings underline the importance of paying attention to role expectations’ differences in aligning components of the HRM-performance relationship. Future research could include the role expectations of other important stakeholders, such as: subordinates and top management. The outcomes of this empirical work are translated into four interventions to diminish FLMs’ role stress. (shrink)

The neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen famously wrote that Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism.” This paper seeks to explicate Cohen’s socialist reconstruction of Kant’s ethics and show that this reconstruction overcomes some weaknesses of Kant’s ethics. In conclusion, the paper discusses the contemporary relevance of Cohen’s cooperative socialism.

This paper starts from the presupposition that moral codes often do not suffice to make agents understand their moral responsibility. We will illustrate this statement with a concrete example of engineers who design a truck’s trailer and who do not think traffic safety is part of their responsibility. This opinion clashes with a common supposition that designers in fact should do all that is in their power to ensure safety in traffic. In our opinion this shows the need for a (...) moral philosophy that helps engineers to interpret their responsibility and think more critically about it. For this purpose we will explore the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, which is particularly interesting because he locates the beginning of moral thinking in the daily practice of a profession. This is consistent with the history of moral codes, for codes are also the product of moral reflection by professionals. We will use MacIntyre’s philosophy to (1) explain what is wrong with the designers’ understanding of their responsibility and (2) show a possible way to bring their reflection to a more self-critical level. We will also inspect MacIntyre’s proposal critically. (shrink)

This paper sketches the ambitious outlines of an assessment of the place of Russian philosophy in philosophical history ‘at large’, i.e. on a global and world-historical scale. At the same time, it indicates, rather modestly, a number of elements and aspects of such a project. A retrospective reflection and reconstruction is not only a recurrent phenomenon in philosophical culture (which, the author assumes, has become global), it also is, by virtue of its being a philosophical reflection, one among many possible (...) perspectives. The central claim of the paper is that the key to an assessment of the world-historical place of Russian philosophy is to be found in the Soviet period, not only because it was, through its isolation policy and its subordination of philosophy to political and ideological goals, a determining factor for a large part of the 20th century, but also, and more importantly, because it has systematically distorted the perception of Russia’s philosophical history, including of the Soviet episode itself. The very undoing of these distortions, however, risks becoming a distortion because of, on the one hand, a demonization of the Soviet factor and, on the other hand, a disregard for its philosophical and meta-philosophical relevance. (shrink)

Africa in the View of the Academic World of the GDR: An Overview of the History of African Ethnography. Ethnography – also referred to as ethnology by the GDR – was a “minor subject” in which typical big science problems such as mass-study and large-scale research played no role. It was therefore not the focus of science policy interventions by the state and/or its ruling party. Nevertheless, ethnographic research, exemplified by the sub-discipline related to Africa, remained within the limits set (...) by the state and ruling party. Despite of these relative restrictions, the two East German universities in Berlin and Leipzig, as well as the ethnological museums in Leipzig and Dresden, have succeeded in presenting research results that are relevant and remain valid to the present day. (shrink)

Looking back at the twentieth century the question is what we have 'learned' in the field of philosophy in that century. In the case of philosophy 'learning' is understood as getting a more adequate insight into the frameworks in terms of which we spell our experience, in particular as getting an eye for aspects of it that were overlooked or insufficiently noticed in the philosophy of earlier periods. In that connection four themes are discussed: 1. subjectivity and inwardness, i.e. the (...) issue of the special mode of being of the subject ; 2. intersubjectivity and connectedness, i.e. the 'discovery' that by the relation between subjects a very special dimension of reality is indicated that cannot be adequately characterized in terms of the subject-object relationship ; 3. mediation, the issue that meanings are always context and tradition bound, that subjectivity, mind, etc., manifest themselves only as 'incarnated', mediated by nature ; and 4. the evolution from a uniform to a manifold concept of rationality and experience. (shrink)

Belgium's annual «horizontal» State budgets for scientific activities show a transition from the «golden» sixties and early seventies, with a privileged higher increase than the State budget as a whole, to recent years, during which the science budget has had some difficulty to maintain its level in absolute figures, constant prices.This evolution reflects mainly three phenomena : the completion, in 1971, of the legal and financial measures for university expansion gradually developed since the early sixties and creating a large reserve (...) of student places; beginning in the same year, the surprising reducingrate of increase and even stagnation of student numbers, as against the previous explosion of these numbers; the fact that the expansion of scientific activities in higher education was not followed to the same extent by a process of «scientification» outside education.Out of the decade came probably less enthusiasm in society for science and many aften organizational problems. The main task for the next few years is, especially considering Belgian conditions and the context of economic crisis, to reinforce, through various policies, scientific activities and impact on productive and service industries as well as in the publicservice. (shrink)

Toen onze grootouders als huilende baby’s ter wereld kwamen telde de vroedvrouw hun vingers en tenen om hun gezondheid te bepalen. Tegenwoordig wordt daarvoor een breed scala aan technieken ingezet, bijvoorbeeld om het bloed te screenen dat een paar dagen na de geboorte wordt afgenomen uit de hiel van een kind. Dit is de zogenaamde hielprik, ofwel de neonatale screening. De technieken die worden gebruikt om babybloed te analyseren hebben de afgelopen veertig jaar gezorgd voor verschuivingen in de visie op (...) wat ‘ziekte’ is en wat ‘gezondheid’. En naar alle waarschijnlijkheid gaan die betekenissen de komende tien jaar opnieuw veranderen, wanneer het goedkoper en effectiever wordt om het hele genoom van een kind bij de geboorte te analyseren dan om de huidige screeningsmethoden te blijven gebruiken. Hoe beïnvloeden deze ontwikkelingen onze visie op wat het betekent om een gezond kind te krijgen? En kunnen ouders in de toekomst ooit nog vol vertrouwen zeggen: ‘Ons kind blaakt van gezondheid’? (shrink)