This review presents first ever literature survey on historical development of farm animal welfare indicators and assessment in the Danube region. This area, encompassing European Eastern countries and the Balkans, is to a large extent heterogeneous in terms of culture and language. However, international publications were disproportionally small compared to the amount of research institutions and animal welfare activities present in the region. Therefore, the authors aimed at investigating the published literature, focusing on country level and on native languages. Data (...) were collected for the 1980–2015 period referring to scientific papers published in international and national journals, papers and abstracts in proceedings of the international and national conferences, reviews, monographs, short communications, Ph.D., Master and Graduation theses. Welfare assessment of all farm animal species was observed including fish. Over 180 papers were in line with the preselected index. Data collected showed that publishing dynamics grew rapidly towards the last decade. Most of the studies were focused on animal welfare indicators such as stress, injuries and mutilations, behaviour, body condition and management practices. Cattle, chickens, pigs and sheep were the predominant species investigated. The study revealed that experts from the region were greatly involved in the studies of animal welfare indicators and assessment, contributing to development of the currently most widely used animal welfare assessment protocols, thus having an important role in animal welfare research and protection. (shrink)

It is well documented that the language skills of preschool children differ substantially and that these differences are highly predictive of their later academic success and achievements. Especially in the early phases of children’s lives, the importance of different structural and process characteristics of the home learning environment has been emphasized and research results have documented that process characteristics such as the quality of parental interaction behavior and the frequency of joint activities vary according to the socio-economic status of the (...) family. Further, both structural and process characteristics are associated with children’s language development. As most of the studies focus on single indicators or didn’t take the dynamics of parenting behavior across age into account, the present paper aims to investigate the associations of different characteristics of the home learning environment as well as their potentially changing impact on the language skills of 2-year-old children. Using data of 2.272 families of the infant cohort study of the German National Educational Panel Study, longitudinally assessed process characteristics and structural characteristics were considered. Language skills of the children at the age of two were measured by a standardized and validated parent report instrument. Results showed that all three process characteristics of the home learning environment are associated with the family’s SES; across three assessment waves nearly all process characteristics predicted children’s vocabulary and grammar skills with some process-specific changes across waves; despite separate direct effects of nearly all HLE-process characteristics in each wave, the amount of explained variance in a joint model including the HLE facets from each wave is hardly higher than in the separate models; and socioeconomic background predicted both language facets of the children in each model even when controlling for the assessed process characteristics of the home learning environment. (shrink)

National decline is typically blamed on special interests from the demand side of politics corrupting a country's institutions. The usual demand-side suspects include crony capitalists, consumer activists, economic elites, and labor unions. Less attention is given to government insiders on the supply side of politics - rulers, elected officials, bureaucrats, and public employees. In autocracies and democracies, government insiders have the motive, means, and opportunity to co-opt political power for their benefit and at the expense of national well-being. Many storied (...) empires have succumbed to such inside jobs. Today, they imperil countries as different as China and the United States. Democracy - government by the people - does not ensure government for the people. Understanding how government insiders use their power to subvert the public interest - and how these negative consequences can be mitigated - is the topic of this book by Mark A. Zupan. (shrink)

This volume collects thirteen original essays that address the concept of will in Classical German Philosophy from Kant to Schopenhauer. During this short, but prolific period, the concept of will underwent various transformations. While Kant identifies the will with pure practical reason, Fichte introduces, in the wake of Reinhold, an originally biological concept of drive into his ethical theory, thereby expanding on the Kantian notion of the will. Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer take a step further and conceive the will either (...) as a primal being, as a socio-ontological entity, or as a blindly striving, non-rational force. Thus, the history of the will is marked by a complex set of tensions between rational and non-rational aspects of practical volition. The book outlines these transformations from a historical and systematic point of view. It offers an overview of the most important theories of the will by the major figures of Classical German Philosophy, but also includes interpretations of conceptions developed by lesser-studied philosophers such as Maimon, Jacobi, Reinhold, and Bouterwek. (shrink)

Social robots are designed to interact with humans. That is why they need interaction models that take social behaviors into account. These usually influence many of a robot’s abilities simultaneously. Hence, when designing robots that users will want to interact with, all components need to be tested in the system context, with real users and real tasks in real interactions. This requires methods that link the analysis of the robot’s internal computations within and between components with the interplay between robot (...) and user. This article presents Systemic Interaction Analysis as an integrated method to derive prototypical courses of interaction based on system and interaction level, identify deviations from these, infer the causes of deviations by analyzing the system’s operational sequences, and improve the robot iteratively by adjusting models and implementations. Keywords: analysis tools, user studies, autonomous robots. (shrink)

The introduction to the volume situates the concept of drive in the history of classical German philosophy and in the history of biology. It outlines the recent state of research and provides an overview of the contributions.

In the Groundwork Kant refers to the analogy between the moral law and the law of nature when clarifying the concept of the categorical imperative. However, in the Groundwork itself, he does not give any further explanation as to why he introduces the analogy. Therefore, I take the Groundwork as a starting point of my article, but then I explicate on the analogy from a broader perspective, focusing especially on his lecture courses Moral Mrongovius II and Naturrecht Feyerabend as well (...) as on his Typic chapter of the second Critique. (shrink)

The concept of Triebfeder, commonly translated into English as “incentive,” plays a crucial role in Kant’s moral philosophy. In the Critique of Practical Reason, in which a whole chapter is dedicated to the Triebfedern of pure practical reason, Kant argues that the moral law is not only the objective determining ground of the will but also functions as a Triebfeder, that is, as a subjective determining ground of the will. Kant’s concept of Trieb, by contrast, is much less clearly defined, (...) and its meaning remains in many ways ambivalent. In the second part of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, for instance, Kant refers to Blumenbach’s idea of Bildungstrieb in order to describe the unique formative powers of organic nature. This chapter offers a detailed comparison of the two etymologically related but philosophically distinct conceptions of Triebfeder and Trieb and draws special attention to the shift of focus that occurs in the third Critique. (shrink)

This volume gathers a collection of fourteen original articles discussing the concept of drive in classical German philosophy. Its aim is to offer a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of drive at the turn of the 19th century and to discuss it both historically and systematically. From the 18th century onward, the concept of drive started to play an important role in emerging disciplines such as biology, anthropology, and psychology. In these fields, the concept of drive was used to (...) describe the inner forces of organic nature, or, more particularly, human urges and desires. But it was in the period of classical German philosophy that this concept developed into an important philosophical concept crucial to Kant’s and post-Kantian idealistic systems. Reflecting the complexity of this concept, the volume first discusses historical sources of drive theories in Leibniz, Reimarus, and Blumenbach. Afterwards, the volume presents the philosophical accounts of drives in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and also gives a systematic overview of other important drive theories that were formed around 1800 by Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Novalis, Reinhold, Schiller, and Schopenhauer. (shrink)

PurposeThe COVID-19 lockdown interrupted normal daily activities, which may have led to an increase in sedentary behavior. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the level of physical activity among Swiss office workers.MethodsOffice workers from two Swiss organizations, aged 18–65 years, were included. Baseline data from January 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic became effective in Switzerland were compared with follow-up data during the lockdown phase in April 2020. Levels of physical activity were (...) assessed using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Paired sample t-tests or Wilcoxon signed-rank test were performed for statistical analysis.ResultsData from 76 participants were analyzed. Fifty-four participants were female. The mean age was 42.7 years at baseline. About 75% of the participants met the recommendations on minimal physical activity, both before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the lockdown. Weak statistical evidence for a decline in total physical activity in metabolic equivalent of task minutes per week was found, with no evidence for a decrease in the three types of activity: walking, moderate-intensity activity and vigorous-intensity activity. Across the three categories “high,” “moderate,” and “low” physical activity, 17% of the participants became less active during the lockdown while 29% became more active.ConclusionThe COVID-19 pandemic did not result in a reduction in total physical activity levels among a sample of Swiss office workers during the first weeks of lockdown. Improved work-life balance and working times may have contributed to this finding.Clinical Trial Registrationwww.ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04169646. Registered 15 November 2019 – Retrospectively registered, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04169646. (shrink)

Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupancic [haceks over both cs] considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and (...) definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object--of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupancic [haceks over both cs] writes, is not exactly a simple story. It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussed comedy and laughter. But Zupancic [haceks over both cs] draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, from Aristophanes, Molière, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan to George W. Bush and Borat. She distinguishes incisively between comedy and ideologically imposed, "naturalized" cheerfulness. Real, subversive comedy thrives on the short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders. Zupancic [haceks over both cs] examines the mechanisms and processes by which comedy lets the odd one in. Alenka Zupancic [haceks over both cs] is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana. She is the author of The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two. (shrink)

What is it that makes Nietzsche Nietzsche? In The Shortest Shadow, Alenka Zupancic counters the currently fashionable appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who was "ahead of his time" but whose time has finally come -- the rather patronizing reduction of his often extraordinary statements to mere opinions that we can "share." Zupancic argues that the definitive Nietzschean quality is his very unfashionableness, his being out of the mainstream of his or any time.To restore Nietzsche to a context in which (...) the thought "lives on its own credit," Zupancic examines two aspects of his philosophy. First, in "Nietzsche as Metapsychologist," she revisits the principal Nietzschean themes -- his declaration of the death of God, the ascetic ideal, and nihilism -- as ideas that are very much present in our hedonist postmodern condition. Then, in the second part of the book, she considers Nietzsche's figure of the Noon and its consequences for his notion of the truth. Nietzsche describes the Noon not as the moment when all shadows disappear but as the moment of "the shortest shadow" -- not the unity of all things embraced by the sun, but the moment of splitting, when "one turns into two." Zupancic argues that this notion of the Two as the minimal and irreducible difference within the same animates all of Nietzsche's work, generating its permanent and inherent tension. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed many challenges, especially for families. Both the public and the scientific community are currently discussing the extent to which school closings have worsened existing social differences, especially with regard to children’s academic and socio-emotional development. At the same time, parents have had to manage childcare and home schooling alongside their jobs and personal burdens posed by the pandemic. Parents’ possibilities for meeting these cognitive and emotional challenges might also depend on the different conditions in families. (...) For this reason, the present paper investigates the structural and process characteristics of the family as well as children’s and parents’ psychological characteristics that predict how parents assess their ability to support their child’s learning during homeschooling as well as parents’ perceived emotional stress caused by school closure. The study analyses data of the Newborn Cohort Study of the German National Educational Panel Study. The two dependent variables were measured during the COVID-19 pandemic after the first school closure in Germany, at a time when the children of this cohort were attending second grade. Besides a number of control variables, families’ structural characteristics [socioeconomic status, education], process characteristics, parents’ psychological characteristics, and the child’s psychological characteristics from earlier waves were included as predictors. The results of structural equation models show that perceived stress was associated with structural factors and the preceding psychological stress of parents. Parents with higher preceding stress reported higher perceived stress. Interestingly, higher-educated parents also reported more stress than lower educated parents during the pandemic. The effect was the other way around for SES – parents with lower SES reported more stress than parents with higher SES. The self-reported abilities to support the learning of the child seemed to be mainly predicted by the parent’s education as well as preceding psychological stress. To sum up, the results identify important aspects that determine how parents handle the challenges of the school closures. Especially, socially disadvantaged families carry their burden into the pandemic. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, students were facing great challenges. Learning was shifted from the classroom to the home of the students. This implied that students had to complete their tasks in a more autonomous way than during regular lessons. As students’ ability to handle such challenges might depend on certain cognitive and motivational prerequisites as well as individual learning conditions, the present study investigates students’ cognitive competencies as well as affective-motivational factors as possible predictors of coping with this new learning (...) situation at home. The study uses data of Starting Cohort 2 of the German National Educational Panel Study. Data of two measurement points are analyzed: Predictors were assessed at the earlier time point, when students mostly attended seventh grade of a secondary school. They completed competence tests in reading as well as mathematics and rated affective-motivational aspects in terms of willingness to exert effort, learning enjoyment, and intrinsic motivation. One and a half years later − during the COVID-19 pandemic and the first period of school closures − the second measurement point took place. Students’ parents rated the situation of learning at home with respect to students’ coping with the new situation and parents’ difficulties to motivate them. Regression analyses controlling for school track, students’ gender, and parents’ educational level and parental stress revealed that students’ reading competencies and their willingness to exert effort were significant predictors of their coping with the new learning situation at home. Moreover, parents reported that boys were more difficult to motivate to learn during this time as compared to girls. Other predictors turned out to be non-significant when entered simultaneously in the regression analyses. The results point to the importance of children’s prerequisites for autonomous learning situations without structuring elements by teachers within the school context. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals working in intensive care units are often involved in end-of-life decision-making. No research has been done so far about these processes taking place in Croatian ICUs. The aim of this study was to investigate the perceptions, experiences, and challenges healthcare professionals face when dealing with end-of-life decisions in ICUs in Croatia. A qualitative study was performed using professionally homogenous focus groups of ICU nurses and physicians of diverse professional and clinical backgrounds at three research sites. In total, six (...) institutions at the tertiary level of healthcare were included. The constant comparative analysis method was used in the analysis of the data. Differences were found between the perceptions and experiences of nurses and physicians in relation to end-of-life decisions. Nurses’ perceptions were more focused on the context and features of immediate care, while physicians’ perceptions also included the wider sociocultural context. However, the critical issues these specific professional groups face when dealing with end-of-life decisions seem to overlap. A high variability of practices, both between individual practitioners and between different organizational units, was omnipresent. The lack of adequate legal, professional, and clinical guidelines was commonly expressed as one of the most critical source of difficulties. (shrink)

BackgroundDecisions about limitations of life sustaining treatments are made for end-of-life patients in intensive care units. The aim of this research was to explore the professional and ethical attitudes and experiences of medical professionals on treatment of end-of-life patients in ICUs in the Republic of Croatia.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted among physicians and nurses working in surgical, medical, neurological, and multidisciplinary ICUs in the total of 9 hospitals throughout Croatia using a questionnaire with closed and open type questions. Exploratory factor (...) analysis was conducted to reduce data to a smaller set of summary variables. Mann–Whitney U test was used to analyse the differences between two groups and Kruskal–Wallis tests were used to analyse the differences between more than two groups.ResultsLess than third of participants stated they were included in the decision-making process, and physicians are much more included than nurses. Sixty two percent of participants stated that the decision-making process took place between physicians. Eighteen percent of participants stated that ‘do-not-attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitations’ orders were frequently made in their ICUs. A decision to withdraw inotropes and antibiotics was frequently made as stated by 22.4% and 19.9% of participants, respectively. Withholding/withdrawing of LST were ethically acceptable to 64.2% of participants. Thirty seven percent of participants thought there was a significant difference between withholding and withdrawing LST from an ethical standpoint. Seventy-nine percent of participants stated that a verbal or written decision made by a capable patient should be respected. Physicians were more inclined to respect patient’s wishes then nurses with high school education. Nurses were more included in the decision-making process in neurological than in surgical, medical, or multidisciplinary ICUs. Male participants in comparison to female, and physicians in comparison to nurses with high school and college education displayed more liberal attitudes about LST limitation.ConclusionsDNACPR orders are not commonly made in Croatian ICUs, even though limitations of LST were found ethically acceptable by most of the participants. Attitudes of paternalistic and conservative nature were expected considering Croatia’s geographical location in Southern Europe. (shrink)

This study aimed to advance our understanding of 5-year-olds’ behavioral difficulties by modeling and testing both mediational protective and risk pathways simultaneously. Drawing on two national samples from different Western European countries—the United Kingdom and Germany, the proposed model considered observed sensitive parental interactive behaviors and tested child vocabulary as protective pathways connecting parental education with children’s behavioral outcomes; the risk pathways focused on negative parental disciplinary practices linking parental education, parental distress, and children’s difficult temperament to children’s behavioral difficulties. (...) Further, the tested model controlled for families’ income as well as children’s sex and formal child care attendance. Children with comparatively higher educated parents experienced more sensitive interactive behavior, had more advanced vocabulary, and exhibited fewer behavioral difficulties. Children with a comparatively higher level of difficult temperament or with parents who suffered from distress tended to experience more negative disciplinary behavior and exhibited more behavioral difficulties. Additionally, children’s vocabulary skills served as a mechanism mediating the association between parental education and children’s behavioral difficulties. Overall, we found similar patterns of results across the United Kingdom and Germany with both protective and risk pathways contributing simultaneously to children’s behavioral development. The findings suggest that promoting parents’ sensitive interactive behaviors, favorable disciplinary practices, and child’s vocabulary skills have potential for preventing early behavioral difficulties. (shrink)

Issue number 4 of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" is devoted to the Dutch philosopher François Hemsterhuis and 250th anniversary of the birth of the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. This fourth issue of the journal contains nearly 600 pages of new research articles, translations, review-essays, and book reviews. The main section on Hemsterhuis among the German Romantics was guest edited by Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway, University of London).

This third 2021 issue of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" contains a main dossier of new research articles guest edited by Leif Weatherby (New York University) and devoted to the topic of early German romanticism and science. In addition to the papers of this main section issue number 3 of SYMPHILOSOPHIE includes translations of primary sources and book reviews. All contents are freely available online.

The areas of interest of the scholar of religious studies, Karl E. Grozinger, are diverse. His research is concentrated on the religious and cultural history of Judaism throughout the ages: Israel in antiquity, the era of rabbinical traditional literature, philosophy of religion during the Middle Ages, the kabbalistic tradition, as well as Jewish thinkers and devout movements in contemporary times. On the occasion of Professor Grozinger's seventieth birthday, numerous scholars present the first fruits of their current research as a first (...) look into the tendencies of future research in Jewish studies. In accordance with this scholar's broad interests, the volume Jewish Lifeworlds and Jewish Thought, edited by Nathanael Riemer, is comprised of contributions to a wide variety of topics of Jewish cultural history.With contributions by Hermann Lichtenberger, Hanna Liss, Ronit Meroz, Yoav Elstein, Susanne Talabardon, Nathanael Riemer, Giuseppe Veltri, Dirk Westerkamp, Thomas Meyer, Daniel Jutte, Frederek Musall, Robert Jutte, J. Friedrich Battenberg, Admiel Kosman, Rella Kushelevsky, Elvira Grozinger, Simon Bronner, Avidov Lipsker, Jascha Nemtsov, Rebekka Denz, Micha Brumlik, Micha? Galas, Manja Herrmann, Hans-Michael Haussig, Anat Feinberg, Adam Lipszyc, Vivian Liska, Julius H. Schoeps, Edward D'browa, Ewa Geller, Manfred Voigts, Mordechai Lewy and Stanislaw Krajewski. (shrink)

Wie können wir das Böse verstehen? Die Beiträge des Sammelbandes nähern sich dem Phänomen aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive an und zeigen seine fächerübergreifende Bedeutung auf. Theologisch aus jüdischer, christlicher und islamischer Sicht. Philosophisch beginnend mit Augustinus über Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard und Arendt bis hin zur gegenwärtigen analytischen Debatte. Ästhetisch in der Literatur, der Musik und im Film. Schließlich wird das Phänomen auch aus juristischer und psychiatrischer Perspektive betrachtet. Mit Beiträgen von Thomas Buchheim, Heidrun Eichner, Zachary Goldberg, Manja Kisner, Amit Kravitz, (...) Armin Kreiner, Jörn Müller, Jörg Noller, Nahlah Saimeh, Rainer Sontheimer, Sabrina Sontheimer und Petra Wittig. (shrink)

Der Band vereinigt die Vorträge der internationalen Vorlesungsreihe “Tierrechte” an der Universität Heidelberg im Sommersemester 2006. Herausgegeben von der Interdisziplinären Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik (IAT) mit ihren gegenwärtigen und früheren Mitgliedern Katharina Blesch, Alexandra Breunig, Stefan Buss, Guillaume Dondainas, Rainer Ebert, Florian Fruth, Nils Kessler, Matthias Müller, Uta Panten, Anette Reimelt, Bernd Schälling, Jürgen Schneele, Adriana Sixt-Sailer, Manja Unger und Alexander Zehmisch, setzt er die mit der Vorlesungsreihe begonnenen Bemühungen um eine unvoreingenommene Vermittlung der tierethischen Forschung fort. Der Band will es (...) Lesern und Leserinnen ermöglichen, von verschiedenen Seiten Einblick in den modernen Tierrechtsdiskurs zu erhalten. Beiträge lieferten: Silke Bitz, Gieri Bolliger, Carl Cohen, Raymond Corbey, Eugen Drewermann, Mylan Engel Jr., Antoine F. Goetschel, Helmut F. Kaplan, Eisenhart von Loeper, Jörg Luy, Renate Rastätter, Tom Regan, Kurt Remele, Hanna Rheinz, Peter S. Wenz, Markus Wild, Hanno Würbel. (shrink)