Overweight individuals often struggle to lose weight. While previous studies established goal setting as an effective strategy for weight loss, little is known about the effects of numeric goal precision. The present research investigated whether and how the precision of weight loss goals—the number of trailing zeros—impacts a goal’s effectiveness. In two preregistered, longitudinal experiments, we contrasted competing predictions as to whether precise or round goals are more effective compared to a waiting control condition. In Experiment 1, participants in the (...) two goal conditions lost more weight compared to the control condition—an effect that was mainly driven by precise goals. In Experiment 2, we sought to replicate this effect but found no significant weight loss differences. An individual participant data meta-analysis across both experiments revealed that the goal groups jointly lost more weight than the waiting control group and the precise and round goal groups did not differ in weight loss success. An IPD-based multiple mediation analysis showed that healthier eating, but not physical exercise accounted for goal-setting-induced weight loss. We discuss possible explanations for the null findings in Experiment 2 and highlight directions for future research. (shrink)

Background Nurse leaders increasingly need effective tools that facilitate the prioritisation of ethics and help staff navigate ethical challenges and prevent moral distress. This study examined experiences with a new digital tool for ethical reflection, tailored to improve the capabilities of both leaders and employees in the context of municipal long-term care. Aim The aim was to explore the experiences of nurse leaders and nurses in using Digital Ethical Reflection as a tool for ethics work in home nursing care. Research (...) design The study employed a qualitative design, incorporating individual and focus group interviews for data collection. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data. Participants and research context The participants comprised six nurse leaders and 13 nurses, representing six home care zones across two Norwegian municipalities. Ethical considerations The study involved informed, voluntary participation and was approved by the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. Findings Four themes were developed: a constant walk on the edge between engagement and discouragement and lost in translation describe the process, while tuning in to the ethical dimension and navigating ethical uncertainties illuminate the experienced significance of Digital Ethical Reflection. Conclusion Success with Digital Ethical Reflection in home nursing care depends on clear leadership planning, nurses’ understanding of the tool’s purpose, and active use of digital registrations. Support from ethically interested nurses enhances overall engagement. Further research is needed to explore the potential of Digital Ethical Reflection as an additional tool in long-term care ethics work. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy of science, the consensus view seems to be that scientific explanations describe mechanisms responsible for the phenomena to be explained. Two kinds of explanatory relevance figure in mechanistic accounts of explanation: causal and constitutive. Following prominent accounts, it seems natural to analyze both these relations in terms of systematic interventions into some factor X with respect to another factor Y. However, such interventions are tailored to uncover causal relations only. Construing the constitutive relationship between parts and wholes (...) in terms of interventions thus raises metaphysical, conceptual, and epistemological questions. We here review the barriers that intervention-based inquiry into mechanisms encounters and consider some solutions. (shrink)

Background Healthcare leader support and facilitation for ethics work are of great importance for healthcare professionals’ handling of ethical issues, moral distress, and quality care provision. A digital tool for ethical reflection in long-term care was developed in response to the demand for appropriate tools. Research aim This study aimed to explore healthcare leaders’ expectations of using a digital tool for ethical reflection among their home nursing care staff. Research design A qualitative research design with vignettes and focus group interviews (...) was used. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants and Research Context The sample comprised ten healthcare leaders from municipal long-term care in Norway. Ethical Considerations Participation was voluntary and based on informed consent. The Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research approved this study. Findings The analysis resulted in the development of three themes representing leaders’ expectations of the tool: (i) giving staff a voice, (ii) revealing ethics in practice, and (iii) keeping the pot boiling. Discussion Leaders must be informed about the ethical issues experienced to engage in supportive measures for their staff. Digital channels can increase the democratization, safety, and efficiency of communication between employees and leaders and increase awareness of ethical aspects in daily care work. The leaders had positive expectations of employees’ activities and benefits from using the tool for ethical reflection. However, they admitted that realizing the tool’s potential to ensure continuity in ethics work requires considerable organizational and leader involvement. Conclusions This study shows that healthcare leaders are open to digital solutions for managing ethics work in home nursing care. Both opportunities and important prerequisites for successfully implementing the digital tool were identified. (shrink)

Promoting youth representation in parliaments is a growing global priority. To promote youth leadership and more inclusive politics, youth organizations in Nigeria mobilized successfully for a constitutional reform to lower the eligibility age to run for political office. In this paper, we draw on global data to assess whether lower eligibility ages will in fact lead to higher levels of youth participation. We find that lower age requirements positively affect the representation of the youngest and next youngest cohorts in parliament. (...) We draw on qualitative interviews and gender literature to theorize that lower age limits have immediate and longer-term “mobilizing effects”, shifting the calculations of potential candidates in terms of the age at which they first decide to run for office. (shrink)

Promoting youth representation in parliaments is a growing global priority. To promote youth leadership and more inclusive politics, youth organizations in Nigeria mobilized successfully for a constitutional reform to lower the eligibility age to run for political office. In this paper, we draw on global data to assess whether lower eligibility ages will in fact lead to higher levels of youth participation. We find that lower age requirements positively affect the representation of the youngest and next youngest cohorts in parliament. (...) We draw on qualitative interviews and gender literature to theorize that lower age limits have immediate and longer-term “mobilizing effects”, shifting the calculations of potential candidates in terms of the age at which they first decide to run for office. (shrink)

In this chapter it is argued that Mary Wollstonecraft’s political is best characterized as ‘feminist republicanism’. Wollstonecraft’s feminism challenges republicanism from within. The republican movement used the language of rights and liberty in arguments for popular sovereignty and against despotic and aristocratic privilege. Wollstonecraft articulated her feminism within and against this movement, which argued for the rights of all while taking for granted that ‘all’ is properly represented by white men with property. Her feminism requires the dismantling of all hierarchies, (...) for the sake of freedom and virtue. Many have read Wollstonecraft as a liberal. If by liberal one simply means a philosophy based on natural rights and a principle of individual liberty, then Wollstonecraft was a liberal, but we do not gain any understanding of the particulars of her thinking in that way. The republican conception of personal freedom – independence or freedom from arbitrary rule – is an organising principle in Wollstonecraft’s thought. This conception of freedom feeds her feminist critique of republicanism: the sexism of republicanism is found in the definitional association of liberty and virtue with maleness. Of equal importance is her critical take on the civic humanist discourse of virtue as a way of living freely in society. Virtue is not a set of rules; it is the learnt habit of a resolute and independent personal character. This in turn requires that a person receives rational education and is treated with equal respect. Women are deliberately kept out of this sphere of moral progress. When Wollstonecraft ironically notes that ‘truth, fortitude and humanity’ are seen to be ‘manly morals’ she attacks, from within, the republican language that makes virtue into a male domain. (shrink)

Encyclopedic entry on Mary Wollstonecraft's social and political philosophy.

The scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft is divided concerning her views on women's role in public life, property rights, and distribution of wealth. Her critique of inequality of wealth is undisputed, but is it a complaint only of inequality or does it strike more forcefully at the institution of property? The argument in this article is that Wollstonecraft's feminism is partly defined by a radical critique of property, intertwined with her conception of rights. Dissociating herself from the conceptualization of rights in (...) terms of self-ownership, she casts economic independence—a necessary political criterion for personal freedom—in terms of fair reward for work, not ownership. Her critique of property moves beyond issues of redistribution to a feminist appraisal of a property structure that turns people into either owners or owned, rights-holders or things acquired. The main characters in Wollstonecraft's last novel—Maria, who is rich but has nothing, and Jemima, who steals as a matter of principle—illustrate the commodification of women in a society where even rights are regarded as possessions. (shrink)

Halldenius argues that we should regard Mary Wollstonecraft as a feminist republican, drawing out the implications of reading her in that way for the meaning and role of freedom in Wollstonecraft’s philosophy. Her republicanism directs our attention to the fact that freedom for Wollstonecraft is conceptualized in terms of independence, importantly in two analytically distinct yet heavily interdependent ways. There is a long philosophical tradition of treating moral freedom as an internal phenomenon, as an aspect of freedom of the will. (...) Wollstonecraft makes this inner freedom politically conditioned. Liberty is independence in relation to others and in relation to the law and institutions of society, but also a kind of inner intellectual independence. Attending to the dynamics between the external and internal aspects of independence is crucial for our understanding of Wollstonecraft’s view of society and morality, but also of her philosophical method, which is to reason through lived experience. What liberty is and requires can only be articulated by “poor men, or philosophers”, as she puts it in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1790. Halldenius argues that the “poor man” here represents the philosophical vantage point. The view of the unprivileged, of those with no wealth or titles to lose, constitutes the disinterested, impartial view. Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the lived experience of unfreedom and subordination as a valid source of knowledge implies that a crucial question regarding freedom and unfreedom is not only what freedom is, but what it is like. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy [1798]. The focus is on the republican implications of her views on sympathy, with comparisons to Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft. Critical attention is paid to claims made on de Grouchy’s behalf that her philosophy is republican and that she offers republican arguments for gender and class equality. These claims are made by Sandrine Bergès [2021] in ‘Revolution and Republicanism: Women Political Philosophers of Late Eighteenth-Century France and Why (...) They Matter’ to which this paper is an invited commentary. This paper does not dispute that de Grouchy’s thought is republican but concludes (1) that her Letters are conspicuously silent on women’s citizenship rights and that the gendered conceptual world of republican thought can account for that, and (2) that any commitment to equality of wealth is negated by her definition of property rights. Since gender and class equality would have been a subversion rather than an application of late eighteenth-century republican thought, this makes de Grouchy a more recognisable republican than Wollstonecraft, whose philosophy explicitly included a commitment to equality of wealth and equal citizenship rights for women. (shrink)

Is there a political theory in Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings? The question is relevant since Wollstonecraft’s main preoccupation was moral rather than political: the duty of every thinking person to strive to make themselves as good as they can be. This is a complex duty, involving independent thought, acting on principles of reason, and making oneself useful to others. The challenge involved in this endeavor is a recurrent theme in most of what she wrote. The idiosyncrasies of Wollstonecraft’s political theory are (...) partially a reaction to republican principles but from within republican commitments. I analyse some of the features that make her republicanism distinctive: the moral ends of government, her suspicion of the republican trope of “the people”, and her conflicted views on revolution. I conclude with her critique of hierarchies of privilege and wealth. (shrink)

For Mary Wollstonecraft, the moral purpose of government is to act on the principle of equality and protect the weak against the fact of inequality. The political day-to-day is characterized by classes and groups with competing interests, some more powerful than others. Wollstonecraft was a republican thinker and so it is reasonable to expect in her writings a notion of political society as representative, but how? After placing Wollstonecraft in relation to contemporary republicanism, we can see that Wollstonecraft’s notion of (...) representation operates on different levels of right: constitutional and political. The “what” that is represented on is, respectively, authority of the people and the perspectives of groups or classes. The people as an abstract, idealized union, so crucial for many republicans, makes sense only on the constitutional level. The political field of law making and policy is an agonistic one where representation has to be practical and no unity is to be expected beyond class or group interests. That is why women and the labouring classes need to have their own interests represented by representatives who share their interests and perspectives. (shrink)

In this chapter it is argued that Mary Wollstonecraft’s political is best characterized as ‘feminist republicanism’. Wollstonecraft’s feminism challenges republicanism from within. The republican movement used the language of rights and liberty in arguments for popular sovereignty and against despotic and aristocratic privilege. Wollstonecraft articulated her feminism within and against this movement, which argued for the rights of all while taking for granted that ‘all’ is properly represented by white men with property. Her feminism requires the dismantling of all hierarchies, (...) for the sake of freedom and virtue. Many have read Wollstonecraft as a liberal. If by liberal one simply means a philosophy based on natural rights and a principle of individual liberty, then Wollstonecraft was a liberal, but we do not gain any understanding of the particulars of her thinking in that way. The republican conception of personal freedom – independence or freedom from arbitrary rule – is an organising principle in Wollstonecraft’s thought. This conception of freedom feeds her feminist critique of republicanism: the sexism of republicanism is found in the definitional association of liberty and virtue with maleness. Of equal importance is her critical take on the civic humanist discourse of virtue as a way of living freely in society. Virtue is not a set of rules; it is the learnt habit of a resolute and independent personal character. This in turn requires that a person receives rational education and is treated with equal respect. Women are deliberately kept out of this sphere of moral progress. When Wollstonecraft ironically notes that ‘truth, fortitude and humanity’ are seen to be ‘manly morals’ she attacks, from within, the republican language that makes virtue into a male domain. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy [1798]. The focus is on republican implications of her views on sympathy, with comparisons to Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft. Critical attention is paid to claims made on de Grouchy’s behalf that her philosophy is republican and that she offers republican arguments for gender and class equality. These claims are made by Sandrine Bergès in Revolution and Republicanism: Women Political Philosophers of Late Eighteenth-Century France and Why They Matter, (...) Australian Philosophical Review 2020, to which this paper is an invited commentary. This paper does not dispute that de Grouchy’s thought is republican but concludes that her Letters are conspicuously silent on women’s citizenship rights and that the gendered conceptual world of republican thought can account for that and that any commitment to equality of wealth is negated by her definition of property rights. Since gender and class equality would have been a subversion rather than an application of late eighteenth-century republican thought, this makes de Grouchy a more recognizable republican than Wollstonecraft, whose philosophy explicitly included a commitment to equality of wealth and equal citizenship rights for women. (shrink)

Is there a political theory in Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings? The question is relevant since Wollstonecraft’s main preoccupation was moral rather than political: the duty of every thinking person to strive to make themselves as good as they can be. This is a complex duty, involving independent thought, acting on principles of reason, and making oneself useful to others. The challenge involved in this endeavor is a recurrent theme in most of what she wrote. The idiosyncrasies of Wollstonecraft’s political theory are (...) partially a reaction to republican principles but from within republican commitments. I analyse some of the features that make her republicanism distinctive: the moral ends of government, her suspicion of the republican trope of “the people”, and her conflicted views on revolution. I conclude with her critique of hierarchies of privilege and wealth. (shrink)

English summary: Marie-Odile Goulet-Caze examines the thesis of some Theologians following Q, that Jesus and his disciples where highly influence by cynic preachers in Galilee. Translated into German by Lena Seehausen. German description: Mit seiner Kritik an der Zivilisation, seiner Infragestellung von sozialen Hierarchien, seiner Verachtung von Reichtumern und seiner radikalen Askese bot der Kynismus dem fruhen Christentum der ersten Jahrhunderte diverse Beruhrungspunkte. Unter den Exegeten und Theologen des Neuen Testaments findet man sogar jene, namlich die Anhanger und (...) Befurworter der Cynic hypothesis, die glauben, dass Jesus selbst und seine Wegbegleiter Kyniker in Galilaa hatten kennen konnen, und dass sie folglich ganz entscheidend von der Moral und dem Verhalten dieser Wanderprediger hatten beeinflusst werden konnen. Ein kynischer Charakter der ursprunglichen Lehre Jesu sei besonders in der sogenannten Quelle "Q" der synoptischen Evangelien ersichtlich, sofern man sie im Lichte der griechischen, ja sogar kynischen, Chrien und durch das Raster der Moral des Diogenes liest. Das vorliegende Werk pruft die Gultigkeit der These. In den darauffolgenden Jahrhunderten ubernahmen die Christen, hin- und hergerissen zwischen der Bewunderung fur die Askese der ersten Kyniker und ihrer Abneigung gegenuber der Schamlosigkeit und dem Atheismus der Hunde ihrer Epoche, vielfaltige und manchmal gegensatzliche Haltungen; mal appellierten sie an das Beispiel der Kyniker, mal beschimpften und verleumdeten sie diese von eitlem Ruhm besessenen Menschen, die in ihren Augen die Affirmation eines menschlichen Willen reprasentierten, der im Gegensatz zur religiosen Unterwerfung des christlichen Glaubens stand. Die Herausforderung dieser Studie besteht darin, die Verbindungen zwischen Kynismus und Christentum zu untersuchen, ohne die Texte zu forcieren und ohne sich irgendeiner Ideologie zu unterwerfen. (shrink)

Im Gegensatz zum drei Jahre jüngeren Schelling, dem er sein Leben lang verbunden blieb, wird Steffens nach seinem Tod nahezu vergessen; in der landläufigen Überlieferung hat er als der Überbringer der Romantik nach Dänemark überlebt. Erst mit Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts wird er als Naturforscher, als Philosoph und Universitätsreformer wiederentdeckt, nicht zuletzt auch im Diskurs-Zusammenhang um das Anthropozän. Steffens-Forscherinnen und Forscher aus Norwegen, Dänemark und Deutschland setzen sich mit dem romantischen Denken der Zeit, mit den Aspekten der nationalen Wiedergeburt in (...) Kultur, Politik und Wissenschaft auseinander, mit Naturgeschichte und Kunst: Marit Bergner, Marie-Theres Federhofer, Bernd Henningsen, Lore Hühn, Daniel Fulda, Norman Kasper, Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen, Jessika Piechocki, Anna Lena Sandberg und Elisabeth Décultot. (shrink)

Featuring contributions from the world’s leading experts on the subject and based partly on several detailed case studies, this volume is the first comprehensive analysis of the scientific notion of robustness as well as of the general ...

The volume is a collection of essays devoted to the analysis of scientific change and stability. It explores the balance and tension that exist between commensurability and continuity on the one hand, and incommensurability and discontinuity on the other. Moreover, it discusses some central epistemological consequences regarding the nature of scientific progress, rationality and realism. In relation to these topics, it investigates a number of new avenues, and revisits some familiar issues, with a focus on the history and philosophy of (...) physics, and an emphasis on developments in cognitive sciences as well as on the claims of “new experimentalists”. The book constitutes fully revised versions of papers which were originally presented at the international colloquium held at the University of Nancy, France, in June 2004. (shrink)

This chapter analyses role, usefulness and challenges of invoking “irrelevance” as a deciding factor in an account of what discrimination is, or with what is wrong with it.

Czech translation of Marguerite Léna’s Choisir l’ Europe: Constantin Sigov et la dignité humaine.

In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but (...) what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)

Emotional AI is an emerging technology used to make probabilistic predictions about the emotional states of people using data sources, such as facial (micro)-movements, body language, vocal tone or the choice of words. The performance of such systems is heavily debated and so are the underlying scientific methods that serve as the basis for many such technologies. In this article I will engage with this new technology, and with the debates and literature that surround it. Working at the intersection of (...) criminology, policing, surveillance and the study of emotional AI this paper explores and offers a framework of understanding the various issues that these technologies present particularly to liberal democracies. I argue that these technologies should not be deployed within public spaces because there is only a very weak evidence-base as to their effectiveness in a policing and security context, and even more importantly represent a major intrusion to people’s private lives and also represent a worrying extension of policing power because of the possibility that intentions and attitudes may be inferred. Further to this, the danger in the use of such invasive surveillance for the purpose of policing and crime prevention in urban spaces is that it potentially leads to a highly regulated and control-oriented society. I argue that emotion recognition has severe impacts on the right to the city by not only undertaking surveillance of existing situations but also making inferences and probabilistic predictions about future events as well as emotions and intentions. (shrink)

Der Band widmet sich vor diesem Hintergrund mit Blicken auf verschiedene Bereiche der Kultur Menschenbildern im historischen und heutigen China. Er vereint die Beitrage einer Tagung der Deutschen Vereinigung fur Chinastudien.

This book provides an analysis of the construction, diagnosis (as chaotic) and evaluation of models in chaos theory. It contains a detailed look at the interaction of the different models used in chaos theory and analyses how these models influence the way chaos is defined. Furthermore, the book discusses the conditions for the occurrence of chaos and the detection of chaos in nature.

INTRODUCTION My underlying concern in this work is with the sociological analysis and description of members' practical activities and their practical ...

Lena Grezella widmet sich mit ihrem Buch der Utopie eines Diversity Managements in Organisationen des Jahres 2035 in Deutschland. In ihrem Text entwirft sie ein wünschenswertes Zukunftsbild, das mögliche und wahrscheinliche gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen in ihre umfassenden Betrachtungen einbezieht. Die Autorin greift im Rahmen eines qualitativen Forschungsdesigns auf Sachverständigenwissen zurück, um Erkenntnisse über das organisationale Diversity Management der Zukunft zu gewinnen. In den Ergebnissen beschreibt sie Veränderungen für organisationales Handeln und den Umgang mit Vielfalt bis in das Jahr 2035, aus (...) denen sich neue Handlungsfelder für das Diversity Management in Deutschland ergeben. Dabei zeigt die Autorin Vorstellungen über die zukünftige strukturelle Verankerung von Diversity Management sowie die Verantwortlichkeit für diversitybezogene Maßnahmen auf. Damit entwickelt sie ein zukunftsorientiertes Verständnis von Diversity Management und stellt die Merkmale vor, die organisationalen Umgang mit Vielfalt zukünftig ausmachen sollten. Die Autorin Lena Grezella arbeitet in einer Unternehmensberatung, die sich mit Projekt- und Prozessmanagement beschäftigt. Sie engagiert sich dort für soziale Nachhaltigkeit und interkulturelle Kompetenz. Nach ihrem Bachelorabschluss in Betriebswirtschaft und Wirtschaftspsychologie absolvierte sie einen Masterabschluss in Nachhaltigkeit und Systemischem Management, mit Schwerpunkt Diversity Management. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

The paper introduces precise definitions of the inevitabilist and contingentist positions. On this basis, it reveals the analytical structure and some inherent difficulties of the contingentist/inevitabilist issue. It then discusses some of these difficulties, relying on the thought-experiment of a ‘divided physics’. Along the way, it investigates the kinds of differences that two alternative physics should present, if they are to give rise to non-benign forms of contingentism.Keywords: Contingency; Inevitabilism; Incommensurability; Theory-comparison; Scientific realism; Constructivism.

Are idioms stored in memory in ways that preserve their surface form or language or are they represented amodally? We examined this question using an inci- dental cued recall paradigm in which two word idiomatic expressions were presented to adult bilinguals proficient in Russian and English. Stimuli included phrases with idiomat- ic equivalents in both languages (e.g. “empty words/пycтыe cлoвa”) or in one language only (English—e.g. “empty suit/пycтoй кocтюм” or Russian—e.g. “empty sound/пycтoй звyк”), or in neither language (e.g. “empty rain/пycтoй (...) дoждь”). If idioms are stored in a language-specific format, then phrases with idiomatic equivalents in both languages would have dual representation, and should therefore be more easily recalled than phrases with idiomatic meaning in only one language. This result was obtained. As such, the findings support the dual-coding theory of memory and are also compatible with models of the bilingual lexicon that include language tags or nodes. (shrink)

For centuries, scholars have not doubted that Macrobio Ambrogio Teodosio was pagan. Recently, prof. Alan Cameron in his The Last Pagans of Rome clamied that the late antique writer was actually a Christian. This essay seeks to refute this assumption. --Translated from back cover.

What kinds of norms constrain mechanistic discovery and explanation? In the mechanistic literature, the norms for good explanations are directly derived from answers to the metaphysical question of what explanations are. Prominent mechanistic accounts thus emphasize either ontic or epistemic norms. Still, mechanistic philosophers on both sides agree that there is no sharp distinction between the processes of discovery and explanation. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that ontic and epistemic accounts of explanation will be accompanied by ontic and epistemic (...) accounts of discovery, respectively. As we will show here, however, recent discovery accounts implicitly rely on both ontic and epistemic norms to characterize the discovery process. In this paper, we develop an account that makes explicit that, and how, ontic and epistemic norms work together throughout the discovery process. By describing mechanism discovery as a process of pattern recognition we demonstrate that scientists have to develop epistemic activities to distinguish a pattern from its background. Furthermore, they have to determine which epistemic activities successfully describe how the pattern is implemented by identifying the pattern’s components. Our approach reveals that ontic and epistemic norms are equally important in mechanism discovery. (shrink)

The present study examined the effects of mindfulness training on attention regulation in university students and whether the potential benefits of implementation are influenced by the yoga component of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and/or by MBI homework practice. In a non-randomized trial with pre- and post-assessments, n = 180 university students were allocated to either mindfulness training (experimental groups), awareness activities (active control group), or no training (passive control group). Mindfulness was taught through two MBIs, one including yoga and the other (...) excluding yoga. Attention regulation was operationalized via behavioral indicators, namely sustained attention, cognitive flexibility, cognitive inhibition, and data-driven information processing. With the exception of speed in a cognitive flexibility task, the results indicated no systematic or differential advantage arising from mindfulness training, with or without yoga, regarding the aspects of attention regulation. There was no consistent influence of homework quantity or quality. The implications for mindfulness training in academic contexts are discussed. (shrink)

Hermeneutics and narration: a way to deal with qualitative data This article focuses a hermeneutic approach on the interpretation of narratives. It is based on the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theory of interpretation but modified and used within a caring science paradigm. The article begins with a presentation of the theoretical underpinnings of hermeneutic philosophy and narration, as well as Ricoeur's theory of interpretation, before going on to describe the interpretation process as modified by the authors. The interpretation process, which (...) consists of several stages, is exemplified and discussed using a single case from a larger study on suffering. The results of that study indicate that the struggle of suffering is perceived as a struggle formed between shame and dignity, and that nurses must engage in the process of preserving and restoring the dignity of their suffering patients. The authors suggest that Ricoeur's theory of interpretation is useful when trying to understand narrative data if the researcher realises that the process of distanciation, although central in Ricoeur's thinking, is not the goal of the process but rather a means to deal with the researcher's pre‐understandings. According to Ricoeur, distanciation is accomplished by putting the context aside and dealing with the text ‘as text’ and thereby explaining its meaning. Explanation thus becomes the dialectic counterpart to understanding in the interpretation process. The researchers further argue that distanciation must be followed by reflection, where the interpretations are linked back to the empirical context. (shrink)

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted (...) as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. (shrink)