Filosoof en arts Marli Huijer, de opvolger van René Gude als Denker des Vaderlands, is geen studeerkamergeleerde, al schreef ze meerdere boeken, zoals het recente Ritme en Discipline. Ze is geen tegen-, geen mee-, maar een tussendenker, ze wil de stemmen van allerlei verschillende mensen laten klinken. In de interviews in Het leven is niet leuk als je je mond houdt praat Peter Henk Steenhuis met haar over haar inspiratiebron Hannah Arendt, haar overstap van haar werk bij de methadonpost in (...) Beverwijk naar de filosofie, haar bijdrage aan het Filosofisch Elftal van Trouw, hoe wij met elkaar omgaan, hoe je jezelf kunt disciplineren, Simone de Beauvoir en Martha Nussbaum, de participatiesamenleving, omgaan met teleurstellingen, bevolkingsonderzoeken. In deze veelheid van onderwerpen benadrukt Huijer keer op keer dat het belangrijk is je vrijmoedig uit te spreken.00. (shrink)

In this article the public-theological motives in the film As it is in heaven is analised to demonstrate the film producer Kay Pollack's ideal to communicate through the film that people should live their lives here and now authentically without seeking excuses for being happy. In this article the principles of narratology is applied in the analysis of the film's plot, characterisation, plotted time and narrated spaces. It is also argued that the protagonist in the film can be regarded as (...) a 'Christ-figure' and that the film conveys a 'Christ narrative' in a secularised context. Societal issues such as emotional abuse and violence against children, women, people with disability and animals constitute building blocks of the narrative. Ecclesiastical hypocrisy and outdated sexual values endorsed by the institutional church are replaced by a choir consisting of common people which leads a whole world to sing in harmony. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 17-21 [Access article in PDF] Self-Injury:Symbolic Sacrifice/Self-Assertion Renders Clinicians Helpless Christa Krüger Keywords feminism, iconic communication, moral conflict, oppression, psychiatrist/psychologist roles, societal norms. POTTER'S PAPER CONSIDERS self-injury in women diagnosed with borderline person ality disorder (BPD) to be a form of body modification where the body is used to communicate meaning. She touches on symbolism as a possible explanatory theory for this sort (...) of self-injury. She also refers to the culture of body commodification as underlying self-injury. She then argues that clinicians have a duty to give uptake to the patient's own interpretations about the meaning of the self-injury. Giving uptake is a virtuous approach for ethical interactions with people diagnosed with BPD who self-injure, and it aims to preserve the communicator's integrity, along with other benefits. Potter offers five maxims for giving uptake properly. However, I shall argue that giving uptake can be very difficult for clinicians, and that an appreciation of this difficulty depends on an expansion and linkage of some of the theories that she touched on. Self-injury is revisited experimentally as a double-edged sword of symbolic sacrifice and iconic-symbolic self-assertion. This revisiting aims to illustrate how clinicians might be caught in a double bind, where giving uptake properly might be very difficult if not more or less doomed to fail.Potter's paper starts by situating self-injury in a broader discourse of body modifications. In this discourse the body is being used as a text, a tool to communicate meaning. The meaning that is communicated might be difficult or impossible to articulate otherwise (by using words, for example). The meaning of the communication is embedded in a context of social, cultural, religious, political, and other norms. Potter explores possible interpretations of the meaning of self-injury in women with BPD, including an interpretation of self-injury as symbolic sacrifice. She suggests that a cultural understanding/nonunderstanding of the meaning of a particular instance of self-injury is an important determinant of whether such self-injury is considered pathological/nonpathological. She then shifts the focus to the present-day culture in which women's bodies are commodified and objectified, and where women become alienated from their bodies. Self-injury might then be interpreted as an attempt to re-own one's body as a part of oneself. This re-owning is a socially transgressive act that violates repressive norms for the bodies of women. [End Page 17]Notwithstanding these possible significations of self-injury, Potter then argues that clinicians have a duty to give uptake to the patient's own interpretations, instead of jumping to conclusions (my oversimplification) about the meaning of the self-injury. Giving uptake, then, constitutes a framework for ethical interactions with people diagnosed with BPD who self-injure, and it aims to preserve the communicator's integrity. Potter offers five maxims for giving uptake properly.At the risk of losing their essence, I translate the five maxims for practicing psychiatrists as involving the following: critical self-reflection about one's own conceptual framework and cultural context; being receptive to the patient's conceptual framework and cultural context; giving the patient the benefit of the doubt; being open to the emergence of new meanings of self-injury; and keeping a range of possible interpretative options open, rather than insisting on having the final word. We should try to understand what the world looks like from the patient's position. All of this requires some moral effort.Potter describes a number of benefits that result from giving uptake. Giving uptake is a crucial corrective to the human tendencies of becoming overly committed to prevailing societal norms and conceptual schemes (stuck in our ways), of imposing our views on others, and of silencing or distorting the communications of our patients. Giving uptake allows clinicians to be dialogically responsive and to treat patients with respect and dignity. Giving uptake fosters trust in a therapeutic relationship where clinicians do not exploit their patients' vulnerabilities. Giving... (shrink)

For Bernard Stiegler ‘the question of philosophy is first of all that of action’ (p.7). By extending this statement to philosophy of education, I consider the possibilities of action in education in responding to the conditions of the contemporary. These conditions, which have come to be discussed and dissected with reference to such terms as Anthropocene (Stoermer, Crutzen), Capitalocene (Moore), Plantationocene (Haraway), hold unprecedented and mostly devastating consequences for all life. To consider possibilities for action within the field of education (...) to the conditions of the contemporary, I read Walter Mignolo’s concept of the colonial wound together with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the wound. Based on this reading, I argue for the conditions of the contemporary to be understood as a wound in both Mignolo’s and Deleuze’s sense. Conceptualising it as such in turn allows me to ask how we might counter-actualise the wounds of the contemporary. In other words, how might we be worthy of the wound-event and respond in an affirmative yet critical manner to it within the field of education, and in so doing generate new possibilities of (educational) life. To consider what one such possibility of counter-actualisation might entail, I propose that education be informed by the notion of incompleteness, as expressed in the concept of conviviality. I conclude by reflecting on implications of counter-actualising the wound of the contemporary in relation to education if we were to activate the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality and pursue a different aesthetics of (educational) life. (shrink)

We discuss a recent approach to investigating cognitive control, which has the potential to deal with some of the challenges inherent in this endeavour. In a model-based approach, the researcher defines a formal, computational model that performs the task at hand and whose performance matches that of a research participant. The internal variables in such a model might then be taken as proxies for latent variables computed in the brain. We discuss the potential advantages of such an approach for the (...) study of the neural underpinnings of cognitive control and its pitfalls, and we make explicit the assumptions underlying the interpretation of data obtained using this approach. (shrink)

Abstract John McDowell argues for minimal empiricism via using the notion of second nature of human beings. I should like to invite him to discuss Helmuth Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology in order to elaborate a more substantial conception of second nature. McDowell seems to think that it is adequate for his more epistemological aim to remind us of second nature as though it were to be taken for granted. But I think, following Plessner, that this right reminder needs a therapeutic elaboration (...) in Kant's sense of propaedeutics. What had been called our second nature found itself being questioned in order to limit the range of ways of treating the self we can authorize. (shrink)

The goal of the present volume is to discuss the notion of a 'conceptual framework' or 'conceptual scheme', which has been dominating much work in the analysis and justification of knowledge in recent years. More specifi cally, this volume is designed to clarify the contrast between two competing approaches in the area of problems indicated by this notion: On the one hand, we have the conviction, underlying much present-day work in the philosophy of science, that the best we can hope (...) for in the justifi cation of empirical knowledge is to reconstruct the conceptual means actually employed by science, and to develop suitable models for analyzing conceptual change involved in the progress of science. This view involves the assumption that we should stop taking foundational questions of epistemology seriously and discard once and for all the quest for uncontrovertible truth. The result ing program of justifying epistemic claims by subsequently describing patterns of inferentially connected concepts as they are at work in actual science is closely connected with the idea of naturalizing epistemology, with concep tual relativism, and with a pragmatic interpretation of knowledge. On the other hand, recent epistemology tends to claim that no subsequent reconstruction of actually employed conceptual frameworks is sufficient for providing epistemic justification for our beliefs about the world. This second claim tries to resist the naturalistic and pragmatic approach to epistemology and insists on taking the epistemological sceptic seriously. (shrink)

This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning – in that order. Evidence is provided that this progression arises from the developmental ordering of the underlying social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. (...) Imitative learning relies on a concept of intentional agent and involves simple perspective-taking. Instructed learning relies on a concept of mental agent and involves alternating/coordinated perspective-taking (intersubjectivity). Collaborative learning relies on a concept of reflective agent and involves integrated perspective-taking (reflective intersubjectivity). A comparison of normal children, autistic children and wild and enculturated chimpanzees provides further evidence for these correlations between social cognition and cultural learning. Cultural learning is a uniquely human form of social learning that allows for a fidelity of transmission of behaviors and information among conspecifics not possible in other forms of social learning, thereby providing the psychological basis for cultural evolution. (shrink)

This essay argues that the practical reason approach to the study of social conventions (and social normativity more generally) fails to adequately account for the fluency of social action in environments that we experience as familiar. The practical reason approach, articulated most recently in Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions: From Language to Law (2009) does help us, though not wholly adequately, to understand how we tend to react to, and experience, unfamiliar situations or unfamiliar behaviors, that is, those situations in which (...) a certain practice becomes problematic or is problematized, or where we are obliged to, or moved to, justify or deliberate. The reason why the practical reason approach is not wholly adequate when it comes to understanding unfamiliar situations or unfamiliar behaviors is that it tends to subsume the unfamiliar under the familiar, that is, it tends to negatively evaluate anything that is deemed to be not in accordance with the rules and reasons already familiar to the observer. This excludes the possibility of the observer having to transform himself or herself, and thus change what is familiar to him or her. (shrink)

A teaching method may not work for all students. Therefore, attention should be paid to the type of students entering the learning environment in order to explain how they perceive the learning environment and achieve. This study investigates students? perceptions and achievement in four learning environments that differed in the degree to which case-based and lecture-based learning were implemented (either separately or combined), hereby making use of students? motivational and learning profiles. Participants were 1098 first-year student teachers who took a (...) course on child development. Results showed that autonomously motivated deep-strategic learners were significantly more positive about each type of learning environment than little motivated and less pronounced deep-strategic learners. However, with regard to achievement, student profiles did not differ. Instead, the learning environment proved to be of significant influence: students in a gradually implemented case-based setting and a completely lecture-based setting scored significantly higher than students in a completely case-based setting. (shrink)

Afghānī, Jamāl al-Dīn, 1838-1897; views on; philosophy; rationalism; Islam and reason.

Health is certainly a valuable asset in the life of every human being and of particular relevance for a flourishing childhood. As empirical research concerning the social determinants of health shows, its distribution can, at least to a certain extent, be influenced by the way a society is arranged. Many philosophers now acknowledge that a fair distribution of health has to be a central part of a just society and they discuss to what extent a right to health can be (...) justified. However, they do not typically distinguish between physical and mental health and neglect the special problems arising from these distinct, though related, perspectives. In this paper, we argue in favour of such a distinction and ask whether a minimally just society ought to include mental health among the goods that are to be distributed in a fair way among its children. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between mental health and happiness and ask whether making mental health a subject of justice implies that children are entitled not only to a healthy but also to a happy childhood. Despite the positive impact of happiness on the lives of children, we conclude that happiness cannot be incorporated into a functional theory of justice, since it does not fully meet the criteria of objectivity, measurability and influenceability. (shrink)

We cooperate with other people despite the risk of being exploited or hurt. If future artificial intelligence (AI) systems are benevolent and cooperative toward us, what will we do in return? Here we show that our cooperative dispositions are weaker when we interact with AI. In nine experiments, humans interacted with either another human or an AI agent in four classic social dilemma economic games and a newly designed game of Reciprocity that we introduce here. Contrary to the hypothesis that (...) people mistrust algorithms, participants trusted their AI partners to be as cooperative as humans. However, they did not return AI's benevolence as much and exploited the AI more than humans. These findings warn that future self-driving cars or co-working robots, whose success depends on humans' returning their cooperativeness, run the risk of being exploited. This vulnerability calls not just for smarter machines but also better human-centered policies. (shrink)

In a questionnaire study on organ allocation 348 students of medicine (102) and economics (246) at the universities of Halle (114 students) and Hannover (234 students) responded to questions concerning their basic attitudes toward alternative criteria of organ allocation. Medical criteria were widely accepted by the respondents. Considerations concerning the patient's value to society were seen as being of minor importance. With respect to reciprocity, we could detect a high share of respondents who would favor former living donors and discriminate (...) against murderers. Among considerations of fairness, the criterion of waiting time gained the highest support. Furthermore, majorities favored the view that health-compromising behavior and differences in age should play a role. Economic considerations were strongly rejected as criteria of organ allocation. (shrink)

Mitchell: Could we begin by discussing the problem of public art? When we spoke a few weeks ago, you expressed some uneasiness with the notion of public art, and I wonder if you could expand on that a bit.Kruger: Well, you yourself lodged it as the “problem” of public art and I don’t really find it problematic inasmuch as I really don’t give it very much thought. I think on a broader level I could say that my “problem” is with (...) categorization and naming: how does one constitute art and how does one constitute a public? Sometimes I think that if architecture is a slab of meat, then so-called public art is a piece of garnish laying next to it. It has a kind of decorative function. Now I’m not saying that it always has to be that way—at all—and I think perhaps that many of my colleagues are working to change that now. But all too often, it seems the case.Mitchell: Do you think of your own art, insofar as it’s engaged with the commercial public sphere—that is, with advertising, publicity, mass media, and other technologies for influencing a consumer public—that it is automatically a form of public art? Or does it stand in opposition to public art?Kruger: I have a question for you: what is a public sphere which is an uncommercial public sphere? Barbara Kruger is an artist who works with words and pictures. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a literary history of writing the colonial interregnum through the comparison of a canonical Dublin text and its filmic adaptation with a canonical Johannesburg text and its filmic adaptation. Njabulo Ndebele’s short story ‘Fools’ (1983) repurposes formal elements from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), transposing strategies for representing late colonial Dublin to a Johannesburg township during the height of apartheid in a context of extreme racial domination; beginning with close comparative readings of both stories, my chapter argues that (...) the context in which ‘Fools’ emerges determines the significance of its reappropriation of Joycean formal devices and simultaneously forces a re-reading of Joyce’s flirtation with bourgeois naturalism in ‘The Dead.’ Further, the respective publishing contexts of ‘Fools’ and ‘The Dead’ go on to determine their reception and recirculation, as demonstrated by the diverse histories of the American John Huston’s adaptation of ‘The Dead’ (1984), and Ramadan Suleman’s South African adaptation of ‘Fools’ (1997). In following this circumatlantic history of influence and adaptation from Joyce to Ndebele to Huston to Suleman, across hemispheres and media, I mean to articulate a relationship between modernist form and forms of modernity, particularly as those forms that appear and reappear in the global south over the course of the long twentieth century. Particular attention is paid here to the history of underdevelopment in the global south and how it impinges upon the production and circulation of literary adaptations. (shrink)

Experts in the field of organ transplantation had to rank order a set of 32 patients according to their priority in receiving a donated kidney. The patients were described by the five characteristics that are incorporated in the kidney allocation algorithm applied by Eurotransplant. The priority rankings as defined by the experts were analyzed and patterns of dedsion making identified in the rankings investigated in this study. All patterns could be explained by some type of lexicographical ranking. The larger group (...) of experts preordered tissue compatibility or, more technically speaking, the criterion of HLA match, while the complementary group applied the criterion of the length of waiting time first. Analyzing the finer decision structures of expert rankings and com paring the method of pattern exploration with a conjoint measurement analysis led to two follow-up questions: First, how can the value judgments of the experts be described adequately? Second, which type of aggregated ordering derived from the individual rankings represents them ‘best’? (shrink)

This article explores the maternal experiences of a heterogeneous group of 26 mothers from Granada. The aim is to analyse the needs and demands that these women express with regard to childrearing, using a qualitative methodology. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and analysed the discourses of the mothers following the hermeneutical method. The variables used for sample selection and the themes that emerged during the interviews revealed that the discourses of the mothers revolve around three dimensions: indifference, demands and resignation (...) regarding support for childrearing. The lack of paternal involvement in childrearing appears as a transversal dimension. This article shows that the material conditions of existence marked the differences in the responses of the women regarding support for childrearing, while the sexual division of labour and gender inequalities unified their discourses. (shrink)

This collection of original essays brings together leading legal historians and theorists to explore the oft-neglected but important relationship between these two disciplines. Legal historians have often been sceptical of theory. The methodology which informs their own work is often said to be an empirical one, of gathering information from the archives and presenting it in a narrative form. The narrative produced by history is often said to be provisional, insofar as further research in the archives might falsify present understandings (...) and demand revisions. On the other side, legal theorists are often dismissive of historical works. History itself seems to many theorists not to offer any jurisprudential insights of use for their projects: at best, history is a repository of data and examples, which may be drawn on by the theorist for her own purposes. The aim of this collection is to invite participants from both sides to ask what lessons legal history can bring to legal theory, and what legal theory can bring to history. What is the theorist to do with the empirical data generated by archival research? What theories should drive the historical enterprise, and what wider lessons can be learned from it? This collection brings together a number of major theorists and legal historians to debate these ideas. (shrink)

Review Essay of Stephen P. Turner, Explaining the Normative, 2010.

This paper offers an example of what may be called ‘an aesthetic history of legal and political thought’. Such a task engages in theorising historically the features of aesthetic traditions that enable and further normative inquiry, i.e. an exploration of the norms and values that might contribute to the good life and the common good. The three features offered in this paper as useful to identifying such aesthetic traditions are communality and interactivity, experimentalism, and exemplarity. The paper shows how each (...) of these features is present, in particular ways, in one specific aesthetic tradition, namely the declamatory tradition. Tracing the declamatory tradition back to Ancient Rome, and examining its influence in the English Renaissance, especially in Sir Thomas More’s response to Lucian’s declamatory thema, Tyrannicide, the paper argues that the particular ways in which declamatory practice combines the above three features enables those engaged in it to pursue normative inquiry. The paper argues that the integration of these three features is especially visible in one aspect of declamatory practice, namely the introduction and exchange of colores, i.e. changes in the narrative, introduced by declaimers and their audiences, which shed light on the possible motivation of a character, and thereby also invited shifts in affective allegiance and evaluative perspective. The paper argues that it is in large part through such introduction and exchange of colores that the declamatory tradition enables and furthers normative inquiry, and thus also offers a good reason for including the declamatory tradition in ‘an aesthetic history of legal and political thought’. (shrink)

Stripping the Virgin Mary of the myths, stories, and dogmas surrounding her is a task that has particularly appealed to a branch of feminist theology which seeks to reclaim her as a figure of female empowerment. This article aims to explore the transformation of Mary’s body into an element of resistance in the work of some contemporary artists. By depicting her nude or semi-nude, artists disrupt the gender values commonly associated with the Virgin and open up alternative possibilities of affirmative (...) selfhood through her body. I contend that, in these works, the Virgin’s body functions as a ‘relational’ body that enters into dialogue with hitherto marginalized categories, such as the carnal, the sensual, the notion of fleshly materiality, or even the excluded sexualities of transgender people. (shrink)

This paper argues that not only does history matter to legal epistemology, but also that understanding legal epistemology can yield a certain understanding of the past. The paper focuses on the common law practice of precedent and argues that there is no set of rules, principles, reasons or material facts that constitute the fixed or foundational content of past decisions, but rather that what is taken by a judge resolving a particular dispute to be the content of past decisions depends (...) on the active and creative construal of relevance engaged in by that judge. Precedents are better thought of as `thick resources with dynamic content'. Such content is constrained by a variety of stabilising practices, but never so constrained as to determine how it can be construed to be relevant. This image of law's past may offer a general view of the past as something with which we can actively and creatively relate in the course of coping with the present. (shrink)

The hypothesis for this research is that the youth is an inherent part of the church. The church, which includes the children, received spiritual gifts from God. The edification of the church is the main purpose in the utilisation of all the gifts. The church received a significant responsibility in equipping and convoying children to be obedient in their calling to be followers of Jesus Christ. Parents and children must use their gifts for their own diakonia. The word diakonia gives (...) expression to the fact that diakonia must take place in accordance to the calling by God. In recent research the expression diakonia also received a more comprehensive meaning. The research field will be explored in four phases and, in doing so, try to come to grips with the current practical-theological situation. In phase one the authors tried to offer a descriptive reflection on research in the practical theology. In phase two the authors undertook exploratory research from the field of the social psychology in order to indicate the prominent role of wrong attitudes and insufficient convoying of children in the praxis. Therefore the authors undertook an intra-disciplinary conversation with the development psychology. In phase three the authors offered basic-theoretical perspectives from Scripture in order to show how the praxis must be. In the last phase of this research practical-theoretical perspectives are explored in order to underline the responsibility of churches in this regard of equipping children in fulfilling their own diakonia. The authors drew a conclusion from their research that children who serve in diakonia and also in obedience to Christ, are also people that are enabled to show the attitude of Jesus Christ towards the world. Parents and other believers must serve in mentoring children. By mentoring children in their diakonia, they enable children and also contribute towards spiritual maturity in their lives. (shrink)

Reflections or Dialogicals: Ways for Making up an Ethics. This purpose of this article is to analyze the relationship between reason and ethics in the thoughts ofLéon Brunschvicg and Gaston Bachelard. It will demonstrate that although the positions of these two authors have points in common as far as the development of their philosophical trajectories, there are also profound divergences in regards to their ethical conceptions. In affirming the passage from intellectual reason to moral consciousness, the ethical humanism of Brunschvicg (...) takes as foundation a monological conception of reason. In showing that the constitution of ethical principles is modeled after the dialogical nature of the scientific city, Bachelard opts for a conception of reason and ethics that passes thorough a reflection on the path taken by man, a path filled with contradictions, but that it is nonetheless as true as the one established by Brunschvicg. (shrink)