The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

Freiwilligkeit, personale Identität (im Sinne eines harmonisch verfassten und stabilen Selbst) und epistemische Gewissheit sind bei den meisten antiken Philosophieschulen untrennbar miteinander verbunden und garantieren im Rahmen einer als Lebenskunst verstandenen Philosophie das Glück. Im Anlehnung an Überlegungen bei Aristoteles und dem zeitgenössischen Philosophen Peter Bieri analysieren wir, wie Entscheidungen, die zum Zeitpunkt ihres Treffens als bedingt frei und selbstbestimmt wahrgenommen wurden, im Nachhinein vom Han-delnden aufgrund des damals fehlenden Wissens über die Handlungsumstände als unfrei wahrgenommen werden und zu Erfahrungen (...) der Selbstentfremdung führen können. Anknüpfend an Pamela Hieronymis Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Formen der Ausübung mentaler Freiheit zeigen wir anhand von fiktiven Fallbeispielen, wie die Protagonisten trotz epistemischer Ungewissheit zur Autorität über ihren Geist sowie zu einer funktionalen Selbstbeziehung zurückfinden können, und stellen dies in den Kontext einer zeitgenössischen Philosophie als Lebenskunst. (shrink)

Dissident circles during the Czechoslovak communist regime were organized in semi-private islands of resistance. They saw themselves as a parallel polis in line with Arendt’s notion of political action by pursuing “life in truth,” authentic experience, and ultimately freedom. The heroes of these circles were that society’s pariahs. In their quest for authenticity, they turned to the past to find meaning, to understand the nature of their communities and the needs for political action towards the future. As such, they sought (...) what Heidegger would label authentic public interpretations. After 1989, these heroes shaped and adapted to the constitutional design of the new polis and often experienced a transformation from pariah to inauthentic hero to at least the potential to become strong man, maintaining varying degrees of authenticity. (shrink)

The prospect of consumable meat produced in a laboratory setting without the need to raise and slaughter animals is both realistic and exciting. Not only could such in vitro meat become popular due to potential cost savings, but it also avoids many of the ethical and environmental problems with traditional meat productions. However, as with any new technology, in vitro meat is likely to face some detractors. We examine in detail three potential objections: 1) in vitro meat is disrespectful, either (...) to nature or to animals; 2) it will reduce the number of happy animals in the world; and 3) it will open the door to cannibalism. While each objection has some attraction, we ultimately find that all can be overcome. The upshot is that in vitro meat production is generally permissible and, especially for ethical vegetarians, worth promoting. (shrink)

The introductory chapter places creativity in a historical context. It shows how objectivist and subjectivist research philosophies have emerged and how they relate to technical, practical and emancipatory knowledge interests which inform the study of organizational creativity. Based on a sensitizing concept of organizational creativity the chapter then suggests context, process and practice as the conceptual framing for the subsequent arguments of the book.

Udo Schaefers Studien zum Baha'ıtum - Ethische Aspekte der Schrift ist ein Versuch, die Baha'ıtum - Ethik systematisch darzustellen, ihre zugrundeliegenden Strukturen zu analysieren und ihre innere Architektur aufzuspüren. Der erste der beiden Bände, Grundlagen, enthält eine kurze Darstellung des Baha'ıtums, einen systematischen Überblick über seine Lehren, über den Ursprung und die Herkunft moralischer Werte. Die metaphysische Natur des Menschen und seine Verantwortlichkeit wird ebenso untersucht wie der Verstand und das Gewissen sowie die Freiheit und ihre Grenzen.

Gemass der Intention der Reihe "Orient und Okzident" steht die Darstellung und Analyse der mannigfaltigen Vernetzung beider Kulturraume von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart im Fokus. Das philosophiegeschichtliche und systematische Band, welches das Gros der Beitrage eint, ist der gemeinsame Bezug der diskutierten Denker (darunter al-Farabi, Avicenna und Thomas von Aquin) auf den Seelenbegriff des Aristoteles. Dabei stellt die aristotelische Seelenlehre in "De anima" die Basis fur die nachfolgende islamisch-arabische und christliche Debatte zum Seelenbegriff dar. Die religios-dogmatisch bedingten Differenzen im (...) Seelenkonzept mittelalterlicher islamischer und christlicher Autoren werden dabei ebenso berucksichtigt wie die historische Perspektive, welche die wechselseitige Befruchtung mittelalterlicher, neuzeitlicher und zeitgenossischer Diskussionen deutlich macht. (shrink)

This article explores Franz Brentano's opposition to papal infallibility, and sets this in the context of his development as a Catholic scholar. An active participant in the Catholic revival of the nineteenth century, Brentano contributed to the emergence of neoscholasticism through his philosophical rehabilitation of Aristotle. Brentano ultimately left the Church however as the result of intensive scrutiny of his faith occasioned by his analysis of infallibility. This article explores this crisis of faith by analyzing, for the first time, Brentano's (...) position on papal infallibility, and suggesting ways that it informed his philosophical development. (shrink)

Although big-data research has met with multiple controversies in diverse fields, political and security implications of big data in life sciences have received less attention. This paper explores how threats and risks are anticipated and acted on in biobanking, which builds research repositories for biomedical samples and data. Focusing on the biggest harmonisation cluster of biomedical research in Europe, BBMRI-ERIC, the paper analyses different logics of risk in the anticipatory discourse on biobanking. Based on document analysis, interviews with ELSI experts, (...) and field research, three types of framing of risk are reconstructed: data security, privacy, and data misuse. The paper finds that these logics downplay the broader social and political context and reflects on the limits of the practices of anticipatory governance in biobanking. It argues that this regime of governance can make it difficult for biobanks to address possible future challenges, such as access to biomedical data by authorities, pressures for integrating biobank data with other type of personal data, or their use for profiling beyond medical purposes. To address potential controversies and societal implications related to the use of big data in health research and medicine, the paper suggests to expand the vocabulary and practices of anticipatory governance, in the biobanking community and beyond. (shrink)

This chapter highlights the impact of the work of French phenomenologist Michel Henry and Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank on psychoanalysis. I contend that Henry and Rank clarify the nature and role of mindfulness and creativity in psychoanalysis. To begin, I draw out the implications of Henry’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. In my view, Henry’s work reveals and untangles basic inconsistencies in Freud’s views on the unconscious, affective layer of the subject’s life, and establishes that the creativity of life’s immanent movement (...) is essential to the development of the subject’s personality and to the acquisition and alleviation of neuroses. At the same time, I maintain that, while Henry’s work acknowledges a potential role for mindfulness in the development of life’s creativity, his account is problematic. At the end of the day, Henry’s conception of life as an immanent, self-enclosed reality fails to adequately account for the relation between life (creativity) and intentionality (mindfulness). As a result, it fails to sufficiently account for the intersubjective character of creativity and mindfulness. To address these issues, I bring Henry’s insights into these matters into dialogue with Rank’s psychology of difference, which similarly regards affectivity and creativity as central to human life and to psychoanalysis. By doing so, what comes forward is that mindfulness and creativity are relationships that can strengthen and weaken one another, and which always involve self-enclosure and openness towards others and the cosmos. Bearing this in mind, I maintain that mindfulness and creativity can play an important role in allowing psychoanalysis to realize its aim of improving the well-being of human beings. (shrink)

This Handbook assembles state-of-the-art insights into the co-evolutionary and precarious relations between science and public policy. Beyond this, it also offers a fresh outlook on emerging challenges for science (including technology and innovation) in changing societies, and related policy requirements, as well as the challenges for public policy in view of science-driven economic, societal, and cultural changes. In short, this book deals with science as a policy-triggered project as well as public policy as a science-driven venture.

This paper engages in a critical examination of Michel Henry’s (1922-2002) phenomenological study of the erotic relation. I argue that while Henry’s analysis sheds light on the nature of eros and how it might be renewed from the obscene objectivism to which it has largely been reduced in Western society today, his analysis of eros undermines his account of the phenomenological life of the subject as a radically immanent mode of appearing and calls for revision. I contend that it is (...) by acknowledging life as a movement of transcendence toward the world that we can resolve this issue and further refine Henry’s insights into the nature of eros and how it might once again be renewed in contemporary Western civilization. I begin by laying out Henry’s account of how the forgetting of life results in a reduction of the erotic (i.e., inter-subjective) relation to a merely sexual (i.e., inter-objective) one, and how this lays the groundwork for what he regards as the destructive sadomasochistic practices of voyeurism and pornography. Following this, I outline Henry’s account of the nature and limits of the erotic relation, and I demonstrate how Henry’s work harbours the latent suggestion that the failure of eros can serve as a step toward a higher union with others in a love of God. In the closing section, I show how Henry’s analysis of the erotic relation calls for a re-conception of life as a movement of transcendence. I outline how this re-conception better accounts for the complex exchanges between the non-objectifying drives of life and the objectifying acts of consciousness, and I show how this allows us to retain some of Henry’s insights into eros and its renewal while forcing us to modify others. (shrink)

This paper is the result of encounters with cinema in a course entitled Cultural Activities, a required class in the undergraduate education program of the School of Education at Brazil’s Fluminense Federal University. The goal was to produce aesthetic experiences with the moving images of cinematic language that would go beyond the usual didactic and utilitarian ways of exemplifying course content. We counted on the power of moving images to produce affective images, an aesthetic device that drives the relation between (...) thought and language, thereby contributing to a pause in time, thereby allowing us the opportunity to examine more carefully the existential human condition as historically constituted in the world today. This paper was thus the result of using cinema as a tool of social analysis and a methodological resource for the training of undergraduate education students. The cinematic artifact presented here is an animated feature whose story unfolds through the eyes of a child confronting a world tainted by the misfortunes of capitalism. For theoretical support, we focus on authors who analyze the capitalist political and socioeconomic model and its effects on the human condition. Through O menino e o mundo, a student and teacher share their different, but nonetheless powerful, ideas about the field of education, work, and the consumerism and alienation that result from current modes of production. It is particularly important to emphasize that the paper itself is a byproduct of the methodological approach of the course. (shrink)

In a clinic-wide approach to establish liberal policies, a closed psychiatric ward was planned to be opened. The leaders of the multi-professional team of this ward requested continuous ethics support during the first few months after the transition from their previously closed ward into an open one. During the process of accompanying the team through this ethically sensitive period of institutional change, several variations of ethics consultation were developed: the ‘context-adjusted’ clinical ethics support. Some ethics consultations focused on a retrospective (...) evaluation of a patient case, in other ethics consultations consolidation of a previous case discussion was worked out, and/or reflections on fundamental ethical issues were included. Based on our experiences and the feedback of the team, we consider this context-adjusted clinical ethics support as feasible and effective. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 1 Seiten: 1-33.

This book offers a critical assessment of Axel Honneth’s complex and growing opus in social and political philosophy. It examines this in the context of the history and future of the Frankfurt School and in its relation to contemporary analytic approaches to social and political philosophy as well as postmodernist critics.

With the world grappling with continued spread of monkeypox internationally, vaccines play a crucial role in mitigating the harms from infection and preventing spread. However, countries with the greatest need - particularly historically endemic countries with the highest monkeypox case-fatality rates - are not able to acquire scarce vaccines. This is unjust, and requires rectification through equitable allocation of vaccines globally. We propose applying the Fair Priority Model for such allocation, which emphasizes three key principles: 1) preventing harm; 2) prioritizing (...) the disadvantaged; and 3) treating people with equal moral concern. Post-exposure prophylaxis (PEPV) has the most potential to mitigate harm, and so ensuring countries have sufficient supply for PEPV should be the first priority. And historically endemic countries, which face disadvantages that compound potential harms from monkeypox, should be the first recipients of such vaccines. Once sufficient supply is allocated for countries to apply PEPV, global allocation could move on to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), again prioritizing historically endemic countries first before distribution to the rest of the global community, based on projected number of cases and vulnerability to harm. (shrink)

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and (...) were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches. (shrink)

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy monolingual adults' performance on a serial reaction time task and a self‐paced reading task, we show how individual differences in statistical pattern learning are reflected in readers' knowledge of (...) linguistic co‐occurrence patterns and in their exploration and exploitation of content‐specific and task‐general information. First, we investigated the extent to which an individual's pattern learning correlates with his or her sensitivity to systematic morphological and syntactic co‐occurrences, as evidenced while reading authentic sentences. We found that the stream of morphological and syntactic information has a more pronounced effect on the reading speed of, as we will label them, content‐sensitive learners in that the more probable the co‐occurrence pattern, the faster their reading of that pattern will be. Next, we investigated how differences in pattern learning are reflected in the ways in which individuals approach the reading task itself and adapt to it. Casting this relation in terms of exploration/exploitation strategies, known from Reinforcement Learning, we conclude that content‐sensitive learners are also more likely to initially probe (explore) a wider range of directly relevant patterns, which they can later use (exploit) to optimize their reading performance further. By affecting exploratory behavior, pattern learning influences the information that is gathered and becomes available for exploitation, thereby increasing the effect pattern learning has on language cognition. (shrink)

Článek ukazuje pohled na utváření novověké koncepce pokroku v dílech Bernarda Le Boviera de Fontenelle. Idea pokroku byla poprvé přesně zformulována právě ve Fontenellových pracích. Podnětem pro Fontenellovy úvahy byla intelektuální debata querelle des anciens et des modernes. Tato diskuze měla rozhodnout o nadřazenosti novověku nad antikou nebo naopak. Fontenelle se debaty účastnil a závěry, k nimž došel, dovršily jeho teorii pokroku, jíž se věnoval nejen téměř ve všech pracích, ale též ve chvalořečích.

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these (...) result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é um estudo da virtude em Aristóteles. O termo areté é frequentemente traduzido como “virtude”, mas sua real significação remete-nos à ideia de “excelência”. Cada atividade humana, prática, possui uma areté particular. No domínio político, além da deliberação, Aristóteles expõe a noção de phronesis. Esta última é a excelência do líder político.

Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual-route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory handling idiosyncratic lexical knowledge and procedural memory handling rule-governed knowledge of grammar.We experimentally contrast the processing of morphology (case and aspect), syntax (subordination), and lexical semantics (collocations) in a healthy L1 (...) population of Polish, a language rich in form distinctions. We study the processing of these four types under two conditions: a single task condition in which the grammaticality of stimuli was judged and a concurrent task condition in which grammaticality judgments were combined with a digit span task. Dividing attention impedes access to declarative memory while leaving procedural memory unaffected and hence constitutes a test that dissociates which types of linguistic information each long-term memory construct subserves.Our findings confirm the existence of a distinction between lexicon and grammar as a generative, dual-route model would predict, but the distinction is graded, as usage-based models assume: the hypothesized grammar–lexicon opposition appears as a continuum on which grammatical phenomena can be placed as being more or less “ruly” or “idiosyncratic.” However, usage-based models, too, need adjusting as not all types of linguistic knowledge are proceduralized to the same extent. This move away from a simple dichotomy fundamentally changes how we think about memory for language, and hence how we design and interpret behavioral and neuroimaging studies that probe into the nature of language cognition. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 447-463.

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus- and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that-complements in Polish. Polish verbs (...) exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that-complement occurs with low frequency. These low-frequency that-clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated. (shrink)

We examined how language supports the expression of temporality within sentence boundaries in English, which has a rich inventory of grammatical means to express temporality. Using a computational model that mimics how humans learn from exposure we explored what the use of different tense and aspect combinations reveals about the interaction between our experience of time and the cognitive demands that talking about time puts on the language user. Our model was trained on n-grams extracted from the BNC to select (...) the TA combination that fits the context best. It revealed the existence of two different sub-systems within the set of TA combinations, a “simplex” one that is supported lexically and is easy to learn, and a “complex” one that is supported contextually and is hard to learn. The finding that some TA combinations are essentially lexical in nature necessitates a rethink of tense and aspect as grammatical categories that form the axes of the temporal system. We argue that the system of temporal reference may be more fruitfully thought of as the result of learning a system that is steeped in experience and organised along a number of functional principles. (shrink)

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus‐ and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that‐complements in Polish. Polish verbs (...) exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that‐complement occurs with low frequency (<0.66 ipm). These low‐frequency that‐clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated. (shrink)

This essay examines the status of events of 1989 in Czechoslovakia from an Arendtian perspective, focusing on whether they qualify as a revolution or even, precisely speaking, a modern event. For Arendt, revolutions are decidedly modern in that they expand freedom to all equally, an expansion conceivable because history can be thought of as rectilinear and because new ideas can be introduced into the secular world. Leaving aside the importance of violence as a criterion, we find that 1989 in Czechoslovakia (...) does not live up to her other criteria, nor does it make sense to call it either modern or postmodern. We thus claim that it is an ‘immodern’, non-revolutionary event. In concluding, we nd that its immodernity is why it failed to be a revolution. (shrink)