Telepsychiatry has long been discussed as a supplement to or substitute for face-to-face therapeutic consultations. The current pandemic crisis has fueled the development in an unprecedented way. More and more psychiatric consultations are now carried out online as video-based consultations. Treatment results appear to be comparable with those of face-to-face care in terms of clinical outcome, acceptance, adherence and patient satisfaction. However, evidence on videoconferencing in a variety of different fields indicates that there are extensive changes in the communication behaviour (...) in online conversations. We hypothesise that this might impact ethically relevant aspects of the therapeutic relationship, which plays a prominent role in psychiatry. In this paper, we review effects of video-based consultations on communication between therapists and patients in psychiatry. Based on a common understanding of video-based consultations as changing the lived experience of communication, we categorise these effects according to sensory, spatial and technical aspects. Departing from a power-based model of therapeutic relationships, we then discuss the ethical significance of this changed communication situation, based on dimensions of respect for autonomy, lucidity, fidelity, justice and humanity. We conclude that there is evidence for ethically relevant changes of the therapeutic relationship in video-based telepsychiatric consultations. These changes need to be more carefully considered in psychiatric practice and future studies. (shrink)

In this article, we address a major outstanding question of probabilistic Bayesian epistemology: how should a rational Bayesian agent update their beliefs upon learning an indicative conditional? A number of authors have recently contended that this question is fundamentally underdetermined by Bayesian norms, and hence that there is no single update procedure that rational agents are obliged to follow upon learning an indicative conditional. Here we resist this trend and argue that a core set of widely accepted Bayesian norms is (...) sufficient to identify a normatively privileged updating procedure for this kind of learning. Along the way, we justify a privileged formalization of the notion of ‘epistemic conservativity’, offer a new analysis of the Judy Benjamin problem, and emphasize the distinction between interpreting the content of new evidence and updating one’s beliefs on the basis of that content. (shrink)

Veit suggests that the challenge of coordinating movement in multicellular organisms led to the evolution of a prioritizing value system, which rendered organisms complex enough to be sentient and drove the Cambrian explosion, while the absence of this evaluation system led to the demise of Ediacaran animals. In this commentary we criticize Veit’s terminology and evolutionary proposals, arguing that his terminology and evolutionary scenarios are problematic, and put forward alternative proposals. We suggest that sentience is a system property, and that (...) the evolution of sentience was the outcome of the evolution of open-ended associative learning, which included the coevolution of sensory, motor, memory, and value subsystems. We suggest that these coevolutionary system dynamics were a factor in the Cambrian explosion and contributed to the extinction of the Ediacaran biota. (shrink)

This is an expanded version of an interview with Nigel Laurie, based on his contribution to the 11th Annual Australasian Business Ethics Network (ABEN) Conference, held on 8 December 2021. The conference theme Calculative silences and the agency of business ethics scholars is the focus of this interview. After studying philosophy at Glasgow and Guelph in Canada and a career in IBM, Nigel Laurie established his own management consultancy and went on to found the Philosophy of Management journal in 2001. (...) He edited it for its first 8 years and led the early international Philosophy of Management conferences at St Anne’s College, Oxford. In this interview Nigel reflects on his experiences as a consultant in government, the public, private and third sectors across the world and as a visiting academic and offers insights on leadership, agency, analogies, silences and voices for ethics education and practice. (shrink)

According to a mainstream position in contemporary cognitive science and philosophy, the use of abstract compositional concepts is amongst the most characteristic indicators of meaningful deliberative thought in an organism or agent. In this article, we show how the ability to develop and utilise abstract conceptual structures can be achieved by a particular kind of learning agent. More specifically, we provide and motivate a concrete operational definition of what it means for these agents to be in possession of abstract concepts, (...) before presenting an explicit example of a minimal architecture that supports this capability. We then proceed to demonstrate how the existence of abstract conceptual structures can be operationally useful in the process of employing previously acquired knowledge in the face of new experiences, thereby vindicating the natural conjecture that the cognitive functions of abstraction and generalisation are closely related. (shrink)

The problem of old evidence, first described by Glymour [1980], is still widely regarded as one of the most pressing foundational challenges to the Bayesian account of scientific reasoning. Many solutions have been proposed, but all of them have drawbacks and none is considered to be definitive. Here, we introduce and defend a new kind of solution, according to which hypotheses are confirmed when we become more confident that they provide the only way of accounting for the known evidence.

This excellent article (Nelson et al. 2023) clarifies the difficulties of incorporating diverse voices and those who speak of their own experience, into bioethics, a field that aspires to be object...

The easiest and most tempting solution of these problems is to dissolve them by pointing out the artificiality of the issues leading to these "third things." Though tempted, I am not convinced that Kant's philosophy can be treated thus as an exercise in a complicated solution of pseudo-problems. Also, I would thereby deprive myself of the uncomfortable and nagging sense of obscure importance which assails me—and many Kant students share this feeling—whenever I consider these points. I am prepared to admit (...) that the problems may be represented as artificial. But I want to maintain, with special emphasis on the Kantian schema, that a serious reconsideration repays the effort, even if it should force us to reconsider critically also some of Kant's systematic assumptions. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of the structure and purpose of the book. It introduces the philosophical context and motivations of the debate between conceptualism and nonconceptualism. The book is a defense of the nonconceptualist claim that experience is nonconceptual and has nonconceptual content. In particular, it defends what I call ‘Modest Nonconceptualism,’ which is briefly introduced in this chapter. On this view, all perceptual experiences are at least partly nonconceptual, i.e., involve the exercise of at least some concepts. It (...) involves an argument that enables the Modest Nonconceptualist to bridge the gap between the state view and the content view of nonconceptualism. ‘Concept’ talk is taken to be anchored in conceptual abilities that the subject possesses and exercises. Nonconceptual perceptual content is taken to consist in scenario content (see Peacocke, A study of concepts. MIT, Cambridge, 1992), which is both nonconceptual and non-propositional; externally conceived, the content of an experience consists in the worldly states of affairs it represents. The latter content is needed for the Modest Nonconceptualist’s account of perceptual justification. The view claims that the Autonomy Thesis is correct: A perceiver’s experiences may have nonconceptual content even if she possesses no concepts whatsoever. The Modest Nonconceptualist account of the representational content of perceptual experience is based on the subpersonal-level organization of the underlying representational states. (shrink)

This study aimed to find out whether differences in the reported colour of dreams can be attributed to the influence of black and white media or to methodological issues. Two age groups, with different media experience, were compared on questionnaire and diary measures of dream colour. Analysis revealed that people who had access to black and white media before colour media experienced more greyscale dreams than people with no such exposure, and there were no differences between diary and questionnaire measures (...) of dream colour. Moreover, there were inter-group differences in the recall quality of colour and black and white dreams that point to the possibility that true greyscale dreams occur only in people with black and white media experience. (shrink)

Two populations are subdivided into two categories of individuals (hawks and doves). Individuals fight to have access to a resource which is necessary for their survival. Conflicts occur between individuals belonging to the same population and to different populations. We investigate the long term effects of the conflicts on the stability of the community. The modelis a set of ODE's with four variables corresponding to hawk and dove individuals of the two populations. Two time scales are considered. A fast time (...) scale is used to describe frequent encounters and fightings between individuals trying to monopolize the resource. A slow time scale is used for the demography and the long term effects of encounters. We use aggregation methods in order to reduce this model into a system of two ODE's only for the total densities of the two populations which is found to be a classical Lotka-Volterra competition model. We study different cases of proportions of hawks and doves in both populations on the global coexistence and the mutal exclusion of the two populations. Pure dove tactics in both populations are unstable. In cases of mixed hawk and dove in both populations, there is coexistence. Pure dove or mixed hawk-dove tactics in one population can coexist with pure hawks in the other one when the costs of fightings between hawks are large enough. (shrink)

The common theme linking these two books is the ideology of gender, specifically the positioning of the "female" in ancient Greece. Because each author locates herself in a particular scholarly paradigm, they make a fascinating illustration of contrasts and continuities in the field of gender studies in classics.

Topos quantum theory represents a whole new approach to the formalization of non-relativistic quantum theory. It is well known that TQT replaces the orthomodular quantum logic of the traditional Hilbert space formalism with a new intuitionistic logic that arises naturally from the topos theoretic structure of the theory. However, it is less well known that TQT also has a dual logical structure that is paraconsistent. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between these two logical structures and study the implications (...) of this relationship for the definition of modal operators in TQT. (shrink)

This study describes the theoretical assumptions and the application for health‐promoting conversations, as a communication tool for nurses when talking to patients and their families. The conversations can be used on a promotional, preventive and healing level when working with family‐focused nursing. They are based on a multiverse, salutogenetic, relational and reflecting approach, and acknowledge each person's experience as equally valid, and focus on families’ resources, and the relationship between the family and its environment. By posing reflective questions, reflection is (...) made possible for both the family and the nurses. Family members are invited to tell their story, and they can listen to and learn from each other. Nurses are challenged to build a co‐creating partnership with families in order to acknowledge them as experts on how to lead their lives and to use their own expert knowledge in order to facilitate new meanings to surface. In this way, family health can be enhanced. (shrink)

Verträgt sich Religion mit Aufklärung? Was für eine Rolle spielt die Theologie dabei? Kants Der Streit der Fakultäten kommt zu dem Schluss, dass der unendliche Streit um die Religion nicht zwangsläufig zum Problem für die Aufklärung werden muss, sondern seine Institutionalisierung die beste Hoffnung für Freiheit ist: Ohne Kritik kein Fortschritt, ohne Streit bloß Irrglaube. F.W.J. Schellings, Jacques Derridas und Judith Butlers Auseinandersetzung mit Kants Werk zeigen jedoch auch, dass dabei auch die Regeln des Streites strittig werden müssen: Wer legt (...) die Regeln fest? So wird die Kritik an Religion selbst zwangsläufig mit Kritik konfrontiert: Wer hat die Macht über den vernünftigen Diskurs? Eine antagonismustheoretische Perspektive auf dieses Problem zeigt: Aus Feinden können Gegner werden und aus Krieg Streit. Doch ob sich Fortschritt und Freiheit aus braven Debatten und Reformen oder als harter Kampf einstellt - oder eben überhaupt nicht - ist eine offene Frage. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band bietet die erste Gesamtbibliographie aller deutschsprachigen Veröffentlichungen zu Sren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855); darüber hinaus werden sämtliche deutschsprachigen Übersetzungen von Kierkegaards veröffentlichten und unveröffentlichten Schriften sowie von seinen Journalen und Aufzeichnungen erfasst. Der Band ist damit ein unverzichtbares Hilfsmittel zur Erforschung der Übersetzungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte Kierkegaards im deutschen Sprachraum.

The Right to Justification : Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice.

In this paper I argue for a theory of punishment I call Multilateral Retributivism. Typically retributive notions of justice are unilateral: focused on one person’s desert. I argue that our notions of desert are multilateral: multiple people are owed when a moral crime is committed. I argue that the purpose of punishment is communication with the end-goal of reconciling the offender to society. This leads me to conclude that the death penalty and life without parole are unjustified because they necessarily (...) cut communication short. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss arguments for the claim that a subject can both have an experience with a certain content and not be in possession of all the concepts needed to specify this content. If she does not possess all the relevant concepts, then she cannot exercise them. So, she can undergo such an experience without being required to exercise all the concepts needed to specify its content. The argument from memory experience goes back to Martin (Philos Rev 101:745763, (...) 1992). Since we can extract new information from memories of previous experiences when we acquire new concepts, the content of these previous experiences cannot have been fully conceptual. The argument from animal and infant perception presupposes that some subjects who lack concepts of any kind nonetheless have perceptual experiences with the same kind of content as human perception. So, the content of human perception must be nonconceptual just like the perceptual contents of these subjects. The third argument, the argument from concept acquisition (Roskies, Philos Phenomenol Res 76:633659, 2008; Noûs 44:112134, 2010), shows that we cannot explain how subjects acquire some of their first concepts, particularly perceptual-demonstrative concepts, unless we assume that experience content is nonconceptual. The question of whether a subject can have a conscious perceptual experience only if she is able to cognitively appreciate its content is a recurrent theme in the chapter; it is answered in the negative by Modest Nonconceptualism. (shrink)

I defend both conceptualists and nonconceptualists against an attack which has been leveled at them by critics such as Byrne (Perception and conceptual content In: Steup M, Sosa E (eds) Contemporary debates in epistemology. Blackwell, Malden, pp 231-250, 2005), Speaks (Philos Rev 114:359–398, 2005), and Crowther (Erkenntnis 65:5–276, 2006). They distinguish a ‘state’ reading and a ‘content’ reading of ‘(non)conceptual’ and argue that many arguments on either side support only the respective state views, not the respective content views. To prepare (...) the ground for my defense, I argue for an understanding of the state view in terms of concept exercise rather than concept possession and provide an overview of versions of conceptualism and nonconceptualism of different strengths. I then argue that conceptualists and nonconceptualists tacitly accept a so-called ‘state-to-content’ principle, show that existing defenses of this principle fail, and provide a new defense of it. It draws on the sources of the nonconceptualism debate, viz. the need to do justice both to the phenomenology of experience and to its epistemological role and to account for the existence of perceptual content and thought content. I argue that epistemological considerations together with considerations from the subject’s perspective support the claim that conceptual thought has conceptual and propositional content, whereas nonconceptual experience has nonconceptual and non-propositional content. (shrink)

The argument from contradictory contents presented here is based directly on observations about the content of experience. It claims that experience content, if conceptual, allows for contradictions within one and the same content. There are at least two examples of this, the waterfall illusion and the visual experiences of some grapheme-color synesthetes. However, due to a Fregean principle of content individuation, no conceptual contents are contradictory. So experience content is nonconceptual. I motivate a particular version of the argument and defend (...) it against two central objections: First, the objection that there is more than one content involved in apparently self-contradictory experiences and second, the claim that conceptual contents are sometimes contradictory, as is true of some desires. In reaction to the second objection, I argue that we need an explanation of why subjects are not irrational if they do not revise their self-contradictory perceptual experiences, and that the conceptualist has no good account of this. For on his view, just as in thought, conceptual abilities are involved in experience and we are dealing with the same Fregean propositional contents. By contrast, nonconceptualism provides such an explanation, for no conceptual abilities are involved in experience itself, and scenario content is not the kind of content that can be revised under rational pressure. (shrink)

These contributions, although undoubtedly philosophically relevant, are not in themselves philosophical. This is as it should be. I do not wish to imply that their unphilosophical character is a deficiency. They are legitimate and necessary enquiries, undertaken within a special field, although often ranging beyond a narrowly specialist interest. They display, in their best examples, the concrete working out and application of some or other theory, often programmatically stated, sometimes implied, or simply taken for granted. But there is little or (...) no enquiry into the principles of the critical and interpretative activity as such, so as to bring some order and consistency into the profusion of frequently incompatible theoretical assumptions. The rich but confused situation in Germany has not even produced an I. A. Richards to shock people, and there has been no growth of schools or theories of criticism. The need for clarification of the criteria employed in the critical endeavour is not often recognized. We find even in the more constructive proposals a striking vagueness of terminology, a noticeable and often embarrassing tendency to completely wild speculation. It is evident from the professional journals that "meta-critical" discussions and controversies are comparatively rare. (shrink)