In recent years there has been an increasing interest in museum studies in exhibitions on what is termed Difficult Matters —such as rape and mass murder—and how such exhibitions may evoke ethical change. This raises the question about the conditions on which such exhibitions can lead to an ethical change. By developing a conceptual framework this article contributes to museum studies on Difficult Matters demonstrating how vulnerability can work as a key concept in a relational pedagogical understanding of the conditions (...) for ethical change. Inspired by feminist ethics the article suggests that there is an “ambivalent potentiality” of the concept of vulnerability and forwards a double perspective on vulnerability as condition: vulnerability is inherent to the human condition and always situational. From this point of departure vulnerability is fleshed out as a key concept in museum pedagogy via pedagogical thinkers inspired by the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’ ethics. Concepts like heteronomy, incarnation, Face and Saying/Said are introduced to define vulnerability and the relation between exhibition and visitor is defined as a teaching–learning relation conditioned by vulnerability. Vulnerability is defined as openness to an encounter with the Other as being different, which is conditional of an ethical transformation of existing perceptions of self, others and the world. Finally, inspired by feminist philosophy a norm critical is introduced. It is argued that displaying Difficult Matters in order to evoke an ethical transformation museum professionals need consider critically the norms of vulnerability at play in particular situations. On this basis, the concept of vulnerability can serve as a lever for discussions on the pedagogy of exhibitions on Difficult Matters and the ethical responsibility of museum professionals in public museums in this regard. (shrink)

Research on sustainability assurance is still in its beginnings. One of the key questions in this field that also is of the highest practical relevance is concerned with the quality of the assurance process. However, a common understanding of assurance quality and how it should be measured is still missing. We try to close this gap by building on the financial audit literature. We introduce a definition of assurance quality that comprises two key aspects: the depth of the assurance process (...) and the breadth of the assurance statement. Based on prior research, we hypothesize that a firm’s sustainability performance is related to the depth of the assurance process, while the type of the assurance provider, more precisely the affiliation to the accounting profession, is related to the breadth of the assurance statement. Results for a sample of 122 European firms reveal a negative relationship between sustainability performance and assurance process depth as well as between the affiliation to the accounting profession and assurance statement breadth. Thus, we find evidence that poor sustainability performers ask for in-depth assurance services, most likely as a means to enhance their internal sustainability-related processes and systems. Assurance providers that do not belong to the accounting profession in turn are associated with broader assurance statements. (shrink)

In this paper, we rigorously prove the existence of type-level ordered pairs in Quine’s New Foundations with atoms, augmented by the axiom of infinity and the axiom of choice (NFU + Inf + AC). The proof uses the cardinal squaring principle; more precisely, its instance for the (infinite) universe (VCSP), which is a theorem of NFU + Inf + AC. Therefore, we have a justification for proposing a new axiomatic extension of NFU, in order to obtain type-level ordered pairs almost (...) from the beginning. This axiomatic extension is NFU + Inf + AC + VCSP, which is equivalent to NFU + Inf + AC, but easier to reason about. (shrink)

This article focusses on the social and legal implications that blockchain technology brings about, not only due to its ideological framework, but also, and especially, due to the concept of law it inaugurates. Thus, this article claims, that, by interlocking technological and legal structures, blockchain technology initiates a profound displacement of legal symbolics and imaginaries. It shows how blockchain law, by emancipating itself from three essential dimensions of law—language, territory, and the body—implies a profound disruption of how we perceive law (...) and its legitimacy. Starting with an overview of the technological details of blockchain, the paper then addresses its ideological context and traces the underlying ideas, values and functions and their relation with—and impact on—the general perception of law and legal issues. By critically assessing the claim that blockchain will liberate the subject from any heteronymic constraints, this paper analyses to what extent this technology has social and legal implications that reach far beyond its virtual, purely blockchain-related scope of applications—and why this technology should matter to us all. (shrink)

In view of the numerous accounting and corporate scandals associated with various forms of moral misconduct and the recent financial crisis, economics and business programs are often accused of actively contributing to the amoral decision making of their graduates. It is argued that theories and ideas taught at universities engender moral misbehavior among some managers, as these theories mainly focus on the primacy of profit-maximization and typically neglect the ethical and moral dimensions of decision making. To investigate this criticism, two (...) overlapping effects must be disentangled: the self-selection effect and the treatment effect. Drawing on the concept of moral judgment competence, we empirically examine this question with a sample of 1773 bachelor’s and 501 master’s students. Our results reveal that there is neither a self-selection nor a treatment effect for economics and business studies. Moreover, our results indicate that—regardless of the course of studies—university education in general does not seem to foster students’ moral development. (shrink)

The main feature of NF/NFU is the notion of stratification, which sets it apart from other set theories. We define stratification and prove constructively that every stratified formula has the (unique) least assignment of types. The basic notion of stratification is concerned only with variables, but we extend it to abstraction terms in order to simplify further development. We reflect on nested abstraction terms, proving that they get the expected types. These extensions enable us to check whether some complex formula (...) is stratified without rewriting it in the basic language. We also introduce natural numbers and a variant of the axiom of infinity, in order to precisely introduce type level ordered pairs, which are crucial in simplifying the definitions in the last part of the article. Using these notions we can easily define the sets of ordinal and cardinal numbers, which we show at the end of the article. The same approach can be readily applied to NF. (shrink)

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here, we argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. (...) In a subliminal priming paradigm we show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects. (shrink)

While interdisciplinarity is not a new concept, the political and discursive mobilisation of interdisciplinarity is. Since the 1990s, this movement has intensified, and this has affected central funding bodies so that interdisciplinarity is now a de facto requirement in successful grant application. As a result, the literature is ripe with definitions, taxonomies, discussions and other attempts to grasp and define the concept of interdisciplinarity. In this paper, we explore how strategic demands for interdisciplinarity meet, interact with and change local research (...) practices and results of higher education and research. Our aim is to question and trace the consequences of applying the slippery and difficult term interdisciplinarity in research. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish interdisciplinary research programme, where we observed and analysed practices of writing, publishing, collaboration and educational development in five different research projects. We show how the call for interdisciplinarity was mobilised in a way that rendered the incentives and motives behind the programme unclear. Furthermore, we argue that the absence of clear definitions and assessment criteria produced a dominant, all-inclusive, but vague, configuration of interdisciplinarity that affected the research outcome, and ultimately, promoted and reproduced the existing monodisciplinary research and power structures. (shrink)

While situation theory and situation semantics provide an appropriate framework for a realistic model-theoretic treatment of natural language, serious thinking on their 'computational' aspects has only recently started. Existing proposals mainly offer a Prolog- or Lisp-like programming environment with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of situation theory. In this paper, we introduce a computational medium (called BABY-SIT) based on situations. The primary motivation underlying BABY-SIT is to facilitate the development and testing of programs in domains ranging from linguistics (...) to artificial intelligence in a unified framework built upon situation-theoretic constructs. (shrink)

This book closely examines texts from Chinese and Western traditions that hold up ethics as the inviolable ground of human existence, as well as those that regard ethics with suspicion. The negative notion of morality contends that because ethics cannot be divorced from questions of belonging and identity, there is a danger that it can be nudged into the domain of the unethical since ethical virtues can become properties to be possessed with which the recognition of others is solicited. Ethics (...) thus fosters the very egoism it hopes to transcend, and risks excluding the unfamiliar and the stranger. The author argues inspirationally that the unethical underbelly of ethics must be recognized in order to ensure that it remains vibrant. (shrink)

Texts and textures: approaching an age of human-made nature through the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. We have entered the Anthropocene era—a geological age of our own making, in which what we have understood to be nature is made by man. We need a new way to understand the dynamics of a new epoch. These volumes offer writings that approach the Anthropocene through the perspectives of grain, vapor, and ray—the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. The first three volumes—each (...) devoted to one of the three textures—offer a series of paired texts, with contemporary writers responding to historic writings. A fourth volume offers a guide to the project as a whole. Grain: Granular materials add up to concrete forms; insignificant specks accumulate into complex entities. The texts in this volume narrate some of the fundamental qualities of the granular. In one pairing of texts, Robert Smithson compares the accumulation of thoughts to the aggregation of sediment, and an environmental historian writes about the stakes for earthly knowledge today. Other authors include Alfred Russel Wallace, Denis Diderot, and Georges Bataille. Vapor: The vaporous represents matter's transformations. In this volume, a political scientist compares Kafka's haunting “Odradek” to “vibrant matter”; a media theorist responds to poems and diagrams by Buckminster Fuller; and more, including texts by Hippocrates, Italo Calvino, and James Clerk Maxwell. Ray: A ray is an act of propagation and diffusion, encompassing a chain of interdependencies between energy and matter. This volume includes texts by Spinoza (with a reconceptualization by a contemporary philosopher), Jacques Lacan (followed by an anthropologist's reflections on temporality), Thomas Pynchon (accompanied by an interpretation of Pynchon's “electro-mysticism”), and others. These volumes constitute a unique experiment in design and composition as well as content. The mingling of texts and the juxtaposition of different areas of knowledge represented in a variety of forms express the dynamics of a world in change. (shrink)

This study explores the attitude of German psychiatrists in leading positions towards joint crisis plans and psychiatric advance directives. This topic was examined by contacting 473 medical directors of German psychiatric hospitals and departments. They were asked to complete a questionnaire developed by us. That form contained questions about the incidence and acceptance of joint crisis plans and psychiatric advance directives and previous experiences with them. 108 medical directors of psychiatric hospitals and departments responded . Their answers demonstrate that in (...) their hospitals these documents are rarely used. Among the respondents, joint crisis plans are more accepted than psychiatric advance directives. There is a certain uncertainty when dealing with these instruments. Our main conclusion is that German psychiatry needs an intensified discussion on the use of instruments for patients to constitute procedures for future critical psychiatric events. For this purpose it will be helpful to collect more empirical data. Furthermore, the proposal of joint crisis plans in psychiatric hospitals and departments should be discussed as well as the possibility of consulting an expert during the preparation of a psychiatric advance directive. (shrink)

This paper examines whether adults can adapt to novel accents of their native language that contain unfamiliar context-dependent phonological alternations. In two experiments, French participants listen to short stories read in accented speech. Their knowledge of the accents is then tested in a forced-choice identification task. In Experiment 1, two groups of listeners are exposed to newly created French accents in which certain vowels harmonize or disharmonize, respectively, to the rounding of the preceding vowel. Despite the cross-linguistic predominance of vowel (...) harmony over disharmony, the two groups adapt equally well to both accents, suggesting that this typological difference is not reflected in perceptual learning. Experiment 2 further explores the mechanism underlying this type of phonological learning. Participants are exposed to an accent in which some vowels harmonize and others disharmonize, yielding an increased featural complexity. They adapt less well to this regularity, showing that adaptation to novel accents involves feature-based inferences. (shrink)

The subjective experience of time in depression has been described to be altered in complex ways, with sensations of particular slowness, delay or stillness being the most often named articulations. However, the attempts to provide empirical evidence to the phenomenon of “time slowing down in depression” have resulted in inconsistent findings. In consequence, the overall claim that depressive time somehow differs from ordinary time has often been discarded as unfounded. The article argues against such conclusion, contending that the described ambiguity (...) might be caused by the methods employed to assess the phenomenon under observation. In the first part of the article, a reconceptualization of the experience of time in depression is proposed on the grounds of classic and contemporary phenomenological psychiatry. This leads to identify the essential features of depressive time as described both in clinical and philosophical contexts. In the second part, a critique of the existing methods of time perception assessment is conducted, with a specific focus on duration estimation and time passage perception tasks. The above-mentioned core features serve as guidelines in discussing to what degree such methods fit the phenomenon at stake. Finally, an alternative and innovative method is put forward, that might not only help to explore the scope of existing methods but might itself present an alternative to such: the micro-phenomenological interview. (shrink)

Katrin Flikschuh offers an accessible introduction to divergent conceptions of freedom in contemporary liberal political philosophy.

When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring applications are still morally acceptable, and develop approaches to avoid the promotion of health inequalities (...) through self-monitoring applications. (shrink)

We provide a detailed description of an interleaved and heavily annotated copy of Florae Berolinensis Prodromus, a flora of Berlin published by the German apothecary and botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow in 1787, which today is preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. We demonstrate that this is the copy that the author himself used and carried with him during his botanical excursions in and around Berlin to prepare a second edition of the work. By analyzing this document as (...) paper technology, we reveal that even seemingly trifling aspects of its material organization enabled far-reaching biological research agendas that were not originally intended. The hybrid form of manuscript and printed book, used in field excursions, enabled a kind of natural-historical observation that was at once detailed and bound by strict convention, a combination that inadvertently opened new research questions and suggested new objects of research. We thereby contribute to an understanding of the history of natural history that goes beyond the history of ideas and the intended uses of techniques, giving an example of how routine work on paper within a scientific tradition could generate innovation. (shrink)

When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring applications are still morally acceptable, and develop approaches to avoid the promotion of health inequalities (...) through self-monitoring applications. (shrink)

Ziel des Aufsatzes ist es, das Projekt angewandter interkultureller Philosophie „Briefe über Philosophie weltweit“ vorzustellen. Der Beitrag ist in vier Teile gegliedert. Im ersten Abschnitt werden Anlass und Profil des Projektes vorgestellt. Der „akademische Nomadismus“ der Gegenwart verstärkt die immer schon interkulturelle Verfasstheit der akademischen Praxis und stellt den lebensweltlichen Anlass des Projektes dar, dies in Form von Briefen über die verschiedenen Bedingungen des Philosophierens auch zu reflektieren. Im zweiten Abschnitt wird genauer nach Erfahrungen gefragt, die in den Briefen zum (...) Ausdruck kommen und die wir als „interkulturelle Erfahrungen“ bezeichnen und näher bestimmen wollen. Thema des dritten Abschnitts ist die gewählte Darstellungsform für derartige interkulturelle Erfahrungen, nämlich die Briefform als Medium für Perspektivität. Im vierten Abschnitt machen wir abschließend den Versuch, das Projekt als Form angewandter interkultureller Philosophie zu profilieren. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

We investigated the impact of attention during encoding on later retrieval. During study, participants read some words aloud and named the print color of other words aloud . Then one of two memory tests was administered. The explicit test—recognition—required conscious recollection of whether a word was studied. Previously read words were recognized more accurately than were previously color named words. This contrasted sharply with performance on the implicit test—repetition priming in lexical decision. Here, words that were color named during study (...) showed priming equivalent to words that were read during study; both were responded to faster than unstudied words. Thus, an attentional manipulation during study had a strong effect on an explicit test of memory, but almost no effect on an implicit test. Focal attention during study is crucial for remembering consciously but not necessarily for remembering without awareness. (shrink)

Serious thinking about the computational aspects of situation theory is just starting. There have been some recent proposals in this direction (viz. PROSIT and ASTL), with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of the theory. We believe that a programming environment incorporating bona fide situation-theoretic constructs is needed and describe our very recent BABY-SIT implementation. A detailed critical account of PROSIT and ASTL is also offered in order to compare our system with these pioneering and influential frameworks.

While situation theory and situation semantics provide an appropriate framework for a realistic model-theoretic treatment of natural language, serious thinking on their 'computational' aspects has just started. Existing proposals mainly offer a Prolog- or Lisp-like programming environment with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of situation theory. In this paper, we introduce a computational medium (called BABY-SIT) based on situations. The primary motivation underlying BABY-SIT is to facilitate the development and testing of programs in domains ranging from linguistics to (...) artificial intelligence in a unified framework built upon situation-theoretic constructs. (shrink)

We describe a novel approach to the analysis of pronominal anaphora in Turkish. A computational medium which is based on situation theory is used as our implementation tool. The task of resolving pronominal anaphora is demonstrated in this environment which employs situation-theoretic constructs for processing.

Overweight and obesity among children and adolescents are global problems of our time. Due to their authority and role modeling, parents play an essential part in the efficacy of prevention and intervention programs. This study assessed the barriers that parents of overweight/obese children face in preventive and interventional health care utilization. Sixteen parents were qualitatively interviewed. A content analysis was performed, and barriers to change were allocated to their stage of change according to the transtheoretical model. Among the main barriers (...) is the underestimation of health risks caused by overweight/obesity in association with diminished problem awareness. Parents seem not necessarily in need of theoretical knowledge for prevention and interventions. They do however need support in evaluating the weight status of their child and the knowledge of whom to turn to for help as well as specific and hands-on possibilities for change. The results extend past studies by adding specific barriers to change that parents commonly experience. Possibilities to address these barriers, e.g., through trainings at the pediatric practice or adoption of conversation techniques, are discussed. Future studies might identify subgroups experiencing specific barriers and thus be able to address these in an individualized way. (shrink)

Micro-phenomenology is an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience. As a research tool, it provides detailed descriptions of brief moments of any type of subjective experience and offers techniques for systematically comparing them. In this article, we use an auto-ethnographic approach to present and explore the method. The reader is invited to observe a dialogue between two authors that illustrates and comments on the planning, conducting and analysis of a pilot series of five micro-phenomenological interviews. All these interviews (...) asked experienced researchers of micro-phenomenology to browse their memories to identify one successful and one challenging instance of working with micro-phenomenology. The interview then focused on this reflective task to investigate whether applying the method to itself might reveal quality criteria. The article starts by presenting a shortened and edited version of the first of these interviews. Keeping the dialogue format, we then outline the micro-phenomenological analysis procedure by demonstrating its application to part of this data and corresponding passages of other interviews. We focus on one unexpected finding: interviewed researchers judge the quality of an interview in part based on a connection or contact between interviewer and interviewee. We discuss these results in the context of the means and intentions of the method and suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)

This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl (2000) to formalize a causal (...) notion of consequence. This notion inserted in premise semantics for counterfactuals in the style of Veltman (1976) and Kratzer (1979) will provide a new interpretation rule for conditionals. I will illustrate how this approach overcomes problems of previous proposals and end with some remarks on remaining questions. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy’s (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof’s (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass die deutsche Gesellschaft als eine geschichtete Gesellschaft beschrieben werden kann, verfolgt der vorliegende Beitrag das Ziel, den aktuellen Forschungsstand zu schichtspezifischen Einfärbungen der Sportengagements von Kindern und Jugendlichen in Deutschland zu beschreiben und zu reflektieren. Dabei zeigt sich, dass in einem Teil der vorliegenden Publikationen auf die Darlegung theoretischer Annahmen verzichtet wird und dass die gewählten Methoden zur Datenerfassung und -auswertung wie auch die Komplexität der Interpretationsansätze als heterogen einzuschätzen sind. Die vorliegenden empirischen Befunde (...) deuten darauf hin, dass Schichtmerkmale zentrale, auch indirekt wirkende Parameter für die Sportengagements von Heranwachsenden sind, dass die Stärke dieser Zusammenhänge jedoch mit der Form des Sportengagements variiert. (shrink)

Children develop language and communication skills through interaction with adults and other children. This study therefore focuses on two interdependent issues: the effect of philosophizing with children on children’s language development and the speech acts of teachers and children in philosophical enquiries. As part of a before-after test with the “Hamburger Verfahren zur Analyse des Sprachstandes Fünfjähriger”, weekly philosophical discussions were undertaken with a test class over a period of six months. The central findings are that the philosophising children developed (...) significantly higher language ability compared with a non-philosophising control class in two areas, namely general performance in discussion and the use of more sophisticated connectors. A further part of the study compared the speech acts of the children and their pre-school teacher in the context of philosophical discussion with their speech acts in a different dialogic situation. This showed that philosophical questions from the pre-school teacher led to the production of particularly complex language by the children. Complex speech acts involve the use of higher-level verb structures and connectors. These are necessary in order to reason and act as a citizen agent and are supported by philosophising with children, as this study shows. (shrink)

El presente artículo demuestra que el anhelo por el más allá que había expresado Juan Larrea en su poesía llega a su culminación en Diario del Nuevo Mundo. La experiencia vivida en el exilio mexicano le impulsa a abandonar el yo subjetivo y dejarse absorber por una conciencia objetiva que viene a constituir el epicentro de su proyecto filosófico. De esta manera, Larrea funda en Diario del Nuevo Mundo los principios constitutivos de una filosofía transcendental a la vez que describe (...) la situación personal en la que se encuentra. Además, el artículo mantiene que Larrea es de los más radicales entre los pensadores exiliados en su crítica de la racionalidad tecno-científica y que el proyecto de Larrea solo es posible porque se apoya en disciplinas tradicionalmente marginalizadas dentro de la filosofía como son la psicología, la religión y la poesía. (shrink)