Physical activity counteracts some of the negative consequences associated with chronic neurological diseases. Here, we describe the levels of physical activity and sports activity in patients with multiple sclerosis and chronic stroke and test compliance with the recommendation for health-promoting physical activity of the World-Health Organization. Secondly, we tested for differences between the groups of patients, and thirdly, we examined relationships between PA and Sport with psychological indicators of perceived energy and self-beliefs. Psychological constructs were assessed with validated measures from (...) different disciplines in Psychology. A statistical aim was to describe interpretations gained by parametric Bayesian and Null-Hypothesis-Significance Testing statistics on the example of the conducted tests for differences and relationships. Descriptive analyses revealed that pMS and pStroke complied with recommendations of the WHO, but with large variance indicating that patient groups are not homogenous. Tests for differences showed that the PA difference between pMS and pStroke can be attributed to the higher proportion of women in the pMS sample as they engage more in household chores. Tests for relationships showed that for pStroke, vitality, self-control, and self-efficacy were positively related to the level of sports activity. Furthermore, pStroke who were sport active had lower fatigue and higher self-control and self-efficacy scores than sport inactive people. Although they address slightly different questions, the Bayesian and the NHST approach led to similar general conclusions. (shrink)

Adaptive behavior critically depends on performance monitoring, the ability to monitor action outcomes and the need to adapt behavior. PM-related brain activity has been linked to guiding decisions about whether action adaptation is warranted. The present study examined whether PM-related brain activity in a flanker task, as measured by electroencephalography, was associated with adaptive behavior in daily life. Specifically, we were interested in the employment of self-control, operationalized as self-control failures, and measured using ecological momentary assessment. Analyses were conducted using (...) an adaptive elastic net regression to predict SCFs from EEG in a sample of 131 participants. The model was fit using within-subject averaged response-locked EEG activity at each electrode and time point within an epoch surrounding the response. We found that higher amplitudes of the error-related negativity were related to fewer SCFs. This suggests that lower error-related activity may relate to lower recruitment of interventive self-control in daily life. Altered cognitive control processes, like PM, have been proposed as underlying mechanisms for various mental disorders. Understanding how alterations in PM relate to regulatory control might therefore aid in delineating how these alterations contribute to different psychopathologies. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die Überwindung des mathematischen Erkenntnisideals" verfügbar.

The fall of the Berlin Wall had enormous symbolic resonance, marking the collapse of Marxist politics and economics. Indeed, Marxist regimes have failed miserably, and with them, it seems, all reason to take the writings of Karl Marx seriously. Jonathan Wolff argues that if we detach Marx the critic of current society from Marx the prophet of some never-to-be-realized worker's paradise, he remains the most impressive critic we have of liberal, capitalist, bourgeois society. The author shows how Marx's main (...) ideas still shed light on wider concerns about culture and society and he guides the reader through Marx's notoriously difficult writings. Wolff also argues that the value of a great thinker does not depend on his or her views being true, but on other features such as originality, insight, and systematic vision. From this perspective, Marx still richly deserves to be read. Why Read Marx Today? reinstates Marx as an important critic of current society, and not just a figure of historical interest. (shrink)

The revised edition of this highly successful text provides a clear and accessible introduction to some of the most important questions of political philosophy. Organized around major issues, Wolff provides the structure that beginners need, while also introducing some distinctive ideas of his own.

Explores sociocultural influences on the construction of traditional aesthetic theories and judgments.

My paper ‘Hobbes and the Motivations of Social Contract Theory’ was published in this journal in 1994. In this contribution I explain the background that led me to write that paper at an early stage of my career, relating the explanation to my education as a student at UCL, and, briefly, at Harvard and contrasting the methodological approaches I experienced in the two departments. The Hobbes paper itself offers a type of ‘rational reconstruction’ of Hobbes, drawing on the logic of (...) different social contract arguments, and while there is much in the paper I still agree with, it assumes an approach to Philosophy that I would not adopt now. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to reflect on the complex practice of responsibility within the context of a globalised world and contemporary means of action. Levinas' exploration of the ethical serves as point of entry and is shown to be seeking inter-cultural political relevance through engagement with the issues of postcoloniality and humanism. Yet, Levinas fails to realise the ethical implications of the inevitable instrumental mediation between ethical meaning and political practice. With recourse to Weber, Apel and Ricoeur, Ernst (...) Wolff proposes a theory of strategic co-responsibility for the uncertain global context of practice. (shrink)

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

This new book integrates material drawn from a variety of sources – feminist theory, cultural and literary analysis, sociology and art history – in an original discussion of women′s relationship to modern and post–modern culture. The essays in the book challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (and feminist) theory and enquiry. They address critically the question of women′s writing, exploring the idea that women may begin to define their own lives and construct their identities in (...) a patriarchal culture through the very process of writing. They also present a cogent defence of a feminist cultural politics, including a politics of the body. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Résumé éditeur : "Nous avons perdu les deux repères qui permettaient autrefois de nous définir entre les dieux et les bêtes. Nous ne savons plus qui nous sommes, nous autres humains. De nouvelles utopies en naissent. D'un côté, le post-humanisme prétend nier notre animalité et faire de nous des dieux promis à l'immortalité par les vertus de la technique. D'un autre côté, l'animalisme veut faire de nous des animaux comme les autres et inviter les autres animaux à faire partie de (...) notre communauté morale. Alors forgeons une nouvelle utopie à notre mesure. Ne cherchons plus à nier les frontières naturelles - celles qui nous séparent des dieux ou des animaux - et défendons un humanisme conséquent, c'est-à-dire un cosmopolitisme sans frontières.". (shrink)

Hume famously argues that Social Contract theory collapses into a form of utilitarianism. Bentham endorses Hume's argument. I show that, if Hume's argument refutes Social Contract theory, it equally undermines Bentham's own utilitarian account of political obligation. This discussion is used to illustrate a more general thesis that there is no single problem of political obligation, but different problems for different theorists.

A jellyfish surrounds a plastic fragment, merging the synthetic material with its body; a water agency poster warns of dangerous plastic bottle ‘fish’ in the Mediterranean; marine organisms take shelter on and under synthetic materials. These are the denizens of a growing realm marine ecologists call the ‘plastisphere’, where sea life and plastics meet. Building upon multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies interrogations of nature/culture divides and the practical work of classification, this article explores the indeterminacy – the very plasticity (...) – of the category of ‘species’ as it is engaged in seriousness and irony, with living and nonliving bodies. First, I draw on participant observation at a nonprofit marine institute laboratory in California to trace the travels of plastic-creatures through attempts to disentangle them in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Here volunteers sort tiny plastic bits from animal ones under the microscope, enacting material boundaries as they decide what gets counted as life (not plastic) and what does not (plastic). Second, I follow movements of plastic-creatures through public education campaigns, paying particular attention to assumptions about belonging and agency enacted with assumptions about whether and when plastic-species should or should not meet. I argue that the ‘danger’ of plastic relationships lurks not in associations but in the very categories used to know and live with forms of plastic and forms of life, in the kinds of belonging that emerge with kinds of materials, and in the failure to recognize the impossibility of their separation. (shrink)

Here is an account of the enlightenment experience and its consequences written by a trained philosopher and mathematician who is also a master of English prose.

abstract This paper considers the question of whether unemployed individuals have a duty of fairness to accept retraining as a condition of receiving unemployment benefit. It is argued, in response to Stuart White, that, although there are some circumstances where individuals do have such a moral duty, for an egalitarian it is never the case that there is sufficient reason for enforcing such a duty by means of the law.

This book presents a philosophy that includes the enlightenment experience--a philosophy grounded on the authority of direct realization resulting from transformation in consciousness.

Feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, among other critical approaches, have undermined traditional notions of aesthetics in recent decades. But questions of aesthetic judgment and pleasure persist, and many critics now seek a "return to aesthetics" or a "return to beauty." Janet Wolff advances a "postcritical" aesthetics grounded in shared values that are negotiated in the context of community. She relates this approach to contemporary debates about a committed politics similarly founded on the abandonment of certainty. Neither universalist nor relativist, (...) the "aesthetics of uncertainty" provides a discourse on beauty that contemporary critics can engage with and offers a basis for judgment that is committed to assigning value to works of art. Wolff explores her position through a range of topics: the question of beauty in relation to feminist critique; the problematic status of twentieth-century English art, visual representations of the Holocaust, Jewish identity as portrayed by the artist R. B. Kitaj, refugee artists and modernism in 1940s Britain, and the nature and appeal of imagistic thinking in sociology. She addresses the desire for certainty and the timeliness of doubt and concludes with a meditation on the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, arguing that ethical issues are very much implicated in aesthetic discourse. (shrink)