What kind of challenge does sexual and racial difference pose for postmodern ethics? What is the relation between ethical obligation and feminist interpretations of embodiment, passion, and eros? How can we negotiate between ethical responsibility for the Other and democratic struggles against domination, injustice, and equality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other? We cannot address such questions, Ziarek argues, without putting into dialogue discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, (...) and the idea of radical democracy. Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers - including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray - the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to propose an outline of a new respiratory animal philosophy. Based on an analysis of the forgetting of breath in Western philosophy, it aims to gesture towards a future, breathful and compassionate world of co-sharing and co-breathing. In the first part, the basic features of forgetting of breath are explained based on David Abram’s work in respiratory ecophilosophy. This part also introduces an important contribution to modern philosophy by Ludwig Klages. The second part is dedicated (...) to reflections on what I understand as an unfortunate transition from soul and pneuma to spirit and Geist. Based on these analyses, I proceed towards an idiosyncratic thought on the nocturnal mystery of pneuma, with references to ancient Upanishadic and 20th-century phenomenological Levinasian thought. Based on these teachings, I argue that, at the bottom of her existence, the subject is a lung partaking in an immense external lung (Merleau-Ponty). In the fourth part of the essay, I extend my reflections toward comparative animal respiratory phenomenology and argue for the immense compassion for all our fellow breathing beings. Finally, in the concluding, fifth part of this essay, I am arguing for a future biocentric and breathful environment, signifying and bringing a new compassionate-respiratory alliance into the world. (shrink)

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological responses. Based (...) on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

How Tocqueville’s ideas can help us build resilient liberal democracies in a divided world How can today’s liberal democracies withstand the illiberal wave sweeping the globe? What can revive our waning faith in constitutional democracy? Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours argues that Alexis de Tocqueville, one of democracy’s greatest champions and most incisive critics, can guide us forward. Drawing on Tocqueville’s major works and lesser-known policy writings, Ewa Atanassow shines a bright light on the foundations of liberal democracy. She argues that (...) its prospects depend on how we tackle three dilemmas that were as urgent in Tocqueville’s day as they are in ours: how to institutionalize popular sovereignty, how to define nationhood, and how to grasp the possibility and limits of global governance. These are pivotal but often neglected dimensions of Tocqueville’s work, and this fresh look at his writings provides a powerful framework for addressing the tensions between liberalism and democracy in the twenty-first century. Recovering a richer liberalism capable of weathering today’s political storms, Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours explains how we can reclaim nationalism as a liberal force and reimagine sovereignty in a global age—and do so with one of democracy’s most discerning thinkers as our guide. (shrink)

Dominant views of personal identity in philosophy take some kind of psychological continuity or connectedness over time to be criterial for the identity of a person over time. Such views assign psychological states, particularly those necessary for narrative memory of some kind, special importance in thinking about the nature of persons. The extended mind thesis, which has generated much recent discussion in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, holds that a person’s psychological states can physically extend beyond that person’s (...) body. Since “person” is a term of both metaphysical and moral significance, and discussions of both extended minds and personal identity have often focused on memory, this article explores the relevance of extended cognition for the identity of persons with special attention to neuroethics and memory. (shrink)

The study aims to analyse the clinical proceedings in pregnant women diagnosed with brain death. Apart from the diagnostic premises and the patient’s rights, the ontological status of the foetus proves to be a severe problem. In reference to the principles of zeroth-order logic, the assumption of potential used by personalists is not a tautology.

According to grounding necessitarianism if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter. Proponents of grounding contingentism argue against this claim, stating that it is possible for the former facts to obtain without necessitating the latter. In this article I discuss a recent argument from restricted accidental generalisations provided by contingentists that advances such possibility. I argue that grounding necessitarianism can be defended against it. To achieve this aim, I postulate a relationship between grounding (...) and essence by introducing a notion of individual essences understood as a set of essential properties that individuate its bearer. According to a proposed view grounding holds in virtue of identities of its relata, which are in turn determined by their respective individual essences. From there I claim that if grounding holds in virtue of the individual essences of its relata, then it is possible to resist the objection from restricted accidental generalisations and maintain a view that grounds necessitates what is grounded. (shrink)

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also faced problems, (...) which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 479-491.

Changes in Metaphor Comprehension in Children The aim of the study was to follow the implicit patterns in children's responses to metaphor describing human by means of a name of animal. The main problem in present study was: which traits of topic would be spontaneously used by children from three age groups? The study followed a quasi-experimental design. The subjects were 77 children from three age groups: 5;6-6;0, 8;0-8;6, 9;6-10;0. The dependent variable: the level of comprehension of 18 metaphors with (...) vehicles from the animal domain and one topic - human. The variable was measured through individual Piagetian interviews. The study confirmed the hypothesis that the ability to activate metaphorical thinking in order to describe human attributes increases with age, with a turning point around 8 year of life. The traits mentioned by subjects could be classified into five categories: unambiguous evaluations, physical features, behavior, behavioral traits, dispositions and agency. Older children assigned more human dispositional traits, thoughts and preferences to the objects of metaphors. Younger ones often focused on the physical features of animals. With age, the tendency to give positive evaluations to the objects of metaphors increases. (shrink)

This paper examines early syntactic development from a usage-based perspective, using transcripts of the spontaneous speech of two Englishspeaking children recorded at relatively dense intervals at ages 2;0 and 3;0. We focus primarily on the children’s question constructions, in an effort to determine (i) what kinds of units they initially extract from the input (their size and degree of specificity / abstractness); (ii) what operations they must perform in order to construct novel utterances using these units; and (iii) how the (...) units and the operations change between the ages of two and three. In contrast to nativist theories of language development which suggest that children are working with abstract syntactic categories from an early point in development, we suggest that the data are better accounted for by the proposal that children begin with lexically specific phrases and gradually build up a repertoire of increasingly abstract constructions. (shrink)

While many linguists view language as either a cognitive or a social phenomenon, it is clearly both: a language can live only in individual minds, but it is learned from examples of utterances produced by speakers engaged in communicative interaction. In other words, language is what (Keller 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Taylor & Francis) calls a “phenomenon of the third kind”, emerging from the interaction of a micro-level and a macro-level. Such a dual perspective (...) helps us understand some otherwise puzzling phenomena, including “non-psychological” generalizations, or situations where a pattern which is arguably present in a language is not explicitly represented in most speakers’ minds. This paper discusses two very different examples of such generalizations, genitive marking on masculine nouns in Polish and some restrictions on questions with long-distance dependencies in English. It is argued that such situations are possible because speakers may represent “the same” knowledge at different levels of abstraction: while a few may have extracted an abstract generalization, others approximate their behaviour by relying on memorised exemplars or lexically specific patterns. Thus, a cognitively realistic usage-based construction grammar needs to distinguish between patterns in the usage of a particular speech community (a social phenomenon) and patterns in speakers’ minds (a cognitive phenomenon). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 4 Seiten: 617-653.

The terms “eustress” and “distress” are widely used throughout the scientific literature. As of February 2020, 203 items in the Web of Science show up in a search for “eustress,” however, there are almost 16 400 items found in a search for the term “distress.” Based on the reasoning in this article, however, it is believed there is no such thing as eustress or distress. The adaptation reaction of an organism under stress is not intrinsically good or bad, and its (...) effect on health or performance depends on a plethora of other interactions of the body with the environment as well as on the history of such interactions. The vagueness of the terms “eustress/distress” has historically led to vast differences in the perception and application of the terms across disciplines. While psychology or sociology perceive eustress as something inextricably linked to positive perception and enhanced cognition, biomedicine perceives eustress as generally associated with better survival, health, or increased longevity, no matter how the event is perceived. In this paper, the authors review the current understanding of the term “eustress” in different fields, discuss possible implications of its misleading use, and suggest that the term may be replaced by “stress” only. (shrink)

Kluczowy kontekst artykułu stanowi najnowsza wiedza dotycząca powagi planetarnego kryzysu środowiskowego i jego reperkusji społeczno-gospodarczych (kompromitacja kapitalizmu paliw kopalnych i nierówności). Na tym tle teoretycznym zostaną ze sobą krytycznie porównane trzy ujęcia. Chodzi o filozofię Herberta Marcusego, krytykę tzw. „tanich natur” i kapitałocenu Jasona W. Moore’a oraz o ekonomię ekologiczną wystudzania wzrostu. Wszystkie z nich to postkapitalistyczne eko-utopie budowane w obliczu troski o samo przetrwanie cywilizacji. Tekst poszukuje antycypacji myśli Moore’a i idei ekonomistów ekologicznych w refleksji Marcusego na temat ekologii. (...) Wskazane zostaną ważne podobieństwa, jak i wybrane różnice między wymienionymi wyżej koncepcjami. Artykuł rozpatruje przy tym dwa poziomy: diagnozy dotyczącej problemów rozwiniętego społeczeństwa przemysłowego oraz możliwej, systemowej oraz konstruktywnej korekty. Tekst przekonuje, że istnienie konkretnych ujęć ekonomii ekologicznej dewzrostu, dobrobytu i redystrybucji przeczy tezie Marcusego o tym, że kapitalizm całkowicie kolonizuje ludzką wyobraźnię. (shrink)

The increase in suicidal behaviour among elderly people makes it necessary to take action in the field of broadly understood prevention. This includes helplines, which play an essential role in anti-suicidal measures. The aim of this study was to obtain information about the experience of Polish helpline workers in communicating with older people in suicidal crisis. The study was conducted among 106 helpline workers from various helpline centres across Poland. It proved that helpline workers in Poland have considerable experience in (...) communicating with elderly people in suicidal crisis, albeit the majority of respondents feel they need additional training in the area of broadly understood suicidology. (shrink)

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the global economy, including the provision of health services, with medical facilities and patients cancelling or postponing medical appointments. An alternative to in-person appointments was through the available forms of telemedicine. Scientific reports around the world have suggested that the accessibility and quality of health services declined. The aim of this study was to investigate the accessibility and quality of health services in Poland and to verify whether there were differences (...) between men and women in this respect. The study was based on the authors’ own survey questionnaire filled in by 265 respondents, including 181 women, 82 men, and 2 persons without a defined gender. The study revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the accessibility and quality of health services declined. Additionally, women were more likely to use general and specialist health services than men, but a comparison of changes in the assessment of accessibility and quality of services by gender revealed no differences in the assessment of accessibility and quality. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to analyse the relationship between the following three assessments: the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, the Alberta Infant Motor Scale, and the General Movement Assessment. 29 patients from the neonatal unit of the Gynecology and Obstetrics Clinical Hospital were examined. The study was conducted between feedings by a person properly trained in the use of the NBAS, the AIMS, and the GMA. The average postmenstrual age of the examined newborns was 35.6 weeks. The average week (...) of gestation was the 29th, the average birth weight was 1469 g, and the Median Apgar score in the fifth minute of life was 7. A relationship was found between the AIMS and the NBAS. It was concluded that the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale and the Alberta Infant Motor Scale may be used to determine the motor development of preterm infants. Moreover, it is advisable to use more than one assessment method in order to adjust the intervention. (shrink)

Le but de cet article consiste à présenter des influences de l’évolutionnisme Darwinien et des idées de Frederick Matthias Alexander sur l’esthétique naturaliste de John Dewey. Ces influences menaient Dewey à sa propre version de l’esthétique naturaliste, c’est-à-dire une conception large, non cartésienne, dynamique d’un sujet, qui peut aussi inclure des animaux. Par conséquent John Dewey construisait une sorte d’anti-anthropocentrisme, ce qui décidait que son esthétique était en avance sur son temps.

Communication problems are often the first noticeable symptom of developmental abnormalities. About 15% of children at the age of 2 years demonstrate a lower level of speech expression than their peers. Speech development disorders may constitute either symptoms of global developmental delay or only isolated difficulties. One of the main challenges for professionals dealing with early development support is recognizing whether a child whose linguistic competence differs significantly from that of their peers suffers from a specific language impairment, or whether (...) they belong to the group of ‘late bloomers’ who at some point, without the intervention of a specialist, will achieve an appropriate level of communication skills. Although a differential diagnosis can be extremely difficult, the analysis of the literature leads to the conclusion that there are some markers that can aid a specialist in establishing an accurate diagnosis. (shrink)

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

How do wealth managers understand and comply with the social norms embedded in banks’ codes of conduct (CoC), and how do they cope with ethical dilemmas? Do they have a tendency after the global financial crisis to prioritize banks’ financial security over clients’ interests? To answer these and related questions, we conduct a nonincentivized online survey with wealth management employees of the Swiss legal entity of a large multinational bank. We propose a method to estimate the comprehension and the level (...) of expected adherence to the CoC principles that we test with our sample. We further show that framing questions under the label of “Financial Security” increased response accuracy and that employees’ honesty helped guide their decision-making toward integrity in ethical dilemmas. Thus, in addition to validating a method for testing the level of CoC comprehension and the expected adherence to its principles, our study is among the first to show that in the wealth management business, honesty and social injunctive norms defined in the bank’s CoC reinforce one another. (shrink)

L'intention de ce texte est de présenter l'opinion de Leszek Kołakowski sur la relations entre le discours de la rationalité et celui de la foi. Chacun de ces domaines a son propre discours qui lui est specifique et intraduisible. En general, la réflexion de Kołakowski tand à prouver que la présence d'un Absolu est necessaire. Ici, cet Absolu a le visage de Dieu. C'est Lui qui permet de reconnaître comme valables les principes moraux qui en dehors de la foi sont (...) dépourvus de fondement. Ces principes ont évolué à partir du discours de la foi et ont été adaptés à l'ordre de la vie quotidienne. (shrink)

Most contemporary models of disease development consider the interaction between genotype and environment as static. The authors argue that because time is a key factor in genotype–environment interaction, this approach oversimplifies the pathology analysis and may lead to wrong conclusions. In reviewing the field, the authors suggest that the history of genotype–environment interactions plays an important role in the development of diseases and that this history may be analyzed using the phenotype as a proxy. Furthermore, a theoretical and experimental framework (...) is proposed based on the assumption that phenotypes do not change from one to another randomly but are interconnected and follow certain phenotype trajectories. It then follows that analysis of such phenotype trajectories might be useful to predict the future phenotypes including the onset of disease. In addition, an analysis of phenotype trajectories can be subsequently used to choose better control subjects in comparative studies reducing noise and bias in studies investigating disease mechanisms. (shrink)

Tekst podejmuje temat kondycji i tożsamości etyki środowiskowej XXI wieku w oparciu o analizę wybranych narracji występujących w debacie na temat antropocenu. Czy zwrot w stronę antropocenu odmienia nasze dotychczasowe myślenie dotyczące troski o przyrodę? Artykuł pokazuje, że nauka o systemie Ziemi i ograniczeniach planetarnych umożliwia nam identyfikację zupełnie nowych problemów etycznych. Są to m.in. problem nieodwracalnych strat, utraty kontroli i sterowalności a także kluczowa kwestia irracjonalnej krótkowzroczności wpisanej w ludzkie horyzonty moralne. Tekst szuka odpowiedzi na dwa dodatkowe pytania: 1) (...) Czy troska o postprzyrodę okaże się wyłącznie zarządzaniem stratą? 2) Czy etyka postprzyrody jest antropocentryczna? (shrink)