In the last decade, Family Group Conferences have increasingly been used to help people and their networks deal with their problems. The FGC fits well with the call for equal rights and self-management coming from clients and client movements, as well as the economy-driven pressure towards more informal and less professional care coming from governments. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the underlying theory to explain how the FGC works. In this article, we aim to provide such a (...) theoretical basis by examining how the concept of empowerment can be linked with the basic assumptions underlying the FGC. Can making a plan of their own indeed help to empower people and if so, how does the process of empowerment proceed? Empowerment is often mentioned as a goal of the FGC, but authors are not unanimous when it comes to the operationalisation of empowerment, especially on the relational level of the person in his or her social context. In the article, we use the concepts of relational autonomy and resilience to conceptualize empowerment on the relational and individual level. (shrink)

With technological possibilities in healthcare steadily increasing, more tools for digital cognitive rehabilitation become available. Acceptance of such technological advances is crucial for successful implementation. Therefore, we examined technology acceptance specifically for this form of rehabilitation in a sample of healthcare providers involved in cognitive rehabilitation. An adjusted version of the Technology Acceptance Model questionnaire was used, including the subscales for perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, subjective norm, and intention to use, which all contribute to actual use of a (...) specific technology. Results indicate a generally favorable attitude toward the use of digital cognitive rehabilitation and positive responses toward the TAM constructs. Only for subjective norm, a neutral mean response was found, indicating that this could pose a potential obstacle toward implementation. Potential differences between subgroups of different age, gender, and professional background were assessed. Age and gender did not affect the attitude toward digital cognitive rehabilitation. Occupational therapists showed lower scores than healthcare psychologists and physiatrists with regard to perceived usefulness, possibly linked to a difference in operational and managerial tasks. The findings of his study stimulate further implementation of digital cognitive rehabilitation, where the role of subjective norms should be specifically considered. (shrink)

A collection of several articles on African ethics by Thaddeus Metz translated into Igbo by M. B. Mbah, and edited by Prof Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi of the University of Abuja, Nigeria.

The default position in Western ethics is that survivor’s guilt is either irrational or not rational, i.e., that while survivor’s guilt might be understandable, it is not justified in the sense of there being good reason for a person to exhibit it. From a widely held perspective, for example, one ought to feel guilty only for having done wrong, and in a culpable way, which, by hypothesis, a mere survivor has not done. Typical is the following: ‘Strictly speaking, survivor guilt (...) is not rational guilt, for surviving the Holocaust, or surviving battle….is not typically because a person has deliberately let another take his place in harm’ (N Sherman, ‘Guilt in War’). However, I find in the African tradition resources that promise to entail and plausibly explain why it would be reasonable, and specifically morally desirable, for a person to feel survivor’s guilt. The core idea that I take from this tradition is that a person is virtuous insofar as she is communal in her actions and attitudes. In my contribution I develop the hypothesis that feeling guilty upon the dumb luck of survival can be apt as a virtuous form of one’s attitudes being positively bound up with others. (shrink)

AI systems have often been found to contain gender biases. As a result of these gender biases, AI routinely fails to adequately recognize the needs, rights, and accomplishments of women. In this article, we use Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition to argue that AI’s gender biases are not only an ethical problem because they can lead to discrimination, but also because they resemble forms of misrecognition that can hurt women’s self-development and self-worth. Furthermore, we argue that Honneth’s theory of recognition (...) offers a fruitful framework for improving our understanding of the psychological and normative implications of gender bias in modern technologies. Moreover, our Honnethian analysis of gender bias in AI shows that the goal of responsible AI requires us to address these issues not only through technical interventions, but also through a change in how we grant and deny recognition to each other. (shrink)

This article offers a structural analysis of Cicero's Orator, sections 140–8. Situating Cicero's defence of a form of educational activity in relation to his earlier denials that he is teaching anything, the article proposes an explanation for Cicero's apparent reversal of position rooted in status theory, the conceptual framework developed by Greek and Roman rhetorical theorists for schematizing the points at issue in a case and the corresponding lines of approach that a defender should take. Understanding the status-inspired organization of (...) Cicero's self-defence affords readers smoother passage through a text that is often difficult and obscure. Furthermore, this analysis shows how Cicero deploys rhetorical techniques in defence of his educational endeavours both to support his claim to continued relevance and to exemplify the versatility of the ideal orator whom he portrays in the Orator. (shrink)

The introduction of contraceptive technologies hasresulted in the separation of sex and procreation. Theintroduction of new reproductive technologies (mainlyIVF and embryo transfer) has led not only to theseparation of procreation and sex, but also to there-definition of the terms mother and family.For the purpose of this essay, I will distinguishbetween:1. the genetic mother – the donor of the egg;2. the gestational mother – she who bears and gives birth to the baby;3. the social mother – the woman who raises the (...) child.This essay will deal only with the form of gestationalsurrogacy in which the genetic parents intend to bethe social parents, and the surrogate mother has nogenetic relationship to the child she bears anddelivers. I will raise questions regarding medicalethical aspects of surrogacy and the obligation(s) ofthe physician(s) to the parties involved. I will arguethat the gestational surrogate is a womb to rent,that there is great similarity between gestationalcommercial surrogacy and organ transplant marketing.Furthermore, despite claims to freedom of choice andfree marketing, I will claim that gestationalsurrogacy is a form of prostitution and slavery,exploitation of the poor and needy by those who arebetter off. The right to be a parent, although notconstitutional, is intuitive and deeply rooted.However, the issue remains whether this rightoverrules all other rights, and at what price to theparties involved. I will finally raise the followingprovocative question to society: In the interim periodbetween today''s limited technology and tomorrow''sextra-corporeal gestation technology (ectogenesis),should utilizing females in PVS (persistent vehetativestate) for gestational surrogacy be sociallyacceptable/permissible – provided they have leftpermission in writing? (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

The ethics of artificial intelligence is an upcoming field of research that deals with the ethical assessment of emerging AI applications and addresses the new kinds of moral questions that the advent of AI raises. The argument presented in this article is that, even though there exist different approaches and subfields within the ethics of AI, the field resembles a critical theory. Just like a critical theory, the ethics of AI aims to diagnose as well as change society and is (...) fundamentally concerned with human emancipation and empowerment. This is shown through a power analysis that defines the most commonly addressed ethical principles and topics within the field of AI ethics as either to do with relational power or with dispositional power. Moreover, it is concluded that recognizing AI ethics as a critical theory and borrowing insights from the tradition of critical theory can help the field forward. (shrink)

Definitions of terms that are central to a theoretical understanding of the Royal Government of Bhutan's policy of Gross National Happiness.

I graduated from law school in 1970 and I’ve been proud every day since of being a lawyer. My father was a lawyer, as are our two sons, and I’ve always seen lawyers as democracy’s warriors: the people who protect rights and by protecting rights protect justice. You law students are the future democracy warriors—actually, the future of democracy full stop—so this lecture is dedicated to you and to the hope that you will make justice your transcendent preoccupation, no matter (...) what you decide to do with your law degree. You are, after all, in law school where you have a window on what the law says—guided by your professors—and a window on what the law looks like outside the walls of your classrooms—guided by watching the news. (shrink)

Visser's rules form a basis for the admissible rules of . Here we show that this result can be generalized to arbitrary intermediate logics: Visser's rules form a basis for the admissible rules of any intermediate logic for which they are admissible. This implies that if Visser's rules are derivable for then has no nonderivable admissible rules. We also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the admissibility of Visser's rules. We apply these results to some specific intermediate logics and (...) obtain that Visser's rules form a basis for the admissible rules of, for example, De Morgan logic, and that Dummett's logic and the propositional Gödel logics do not have nonderivable admissible rules. (shrink)

This article introduces a special issue of Philosophical Papers devoted to the topic of meaning in life. In the paper, I engage with articles by Robert Audi, David Velleman, John Martin Fischer, Laurence Thomas, Berit Brogaard, Barry Smith and Larry James, laying out their central views, criticizing them, and suggesting ways they could be developed.

I seek to advance enquiry into the point of a public higher education institution by drawing on ideals salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. There are relational, and specifically communal, values prominently held by African thinkers that I use to ground a promising rival to the dominant contemporary Western, and especially Anglo-American, accounts of what a university ultimately ought to strive to achieve, which focus mainly on autonomy, truth, and citizenship. My aims are not merely comparative, contrasting an Afro-communal (...) approach with other ones that have been more globally influential, but also substantive. Although the theory of a university’s point that I articulate and defend has an African pedigree, I work to show that it should be taken seriously by a global audience, for plausibly capturing a variety of intuitions and claims that are widely shared. (shrink)

Rosalie Osmond examines both literal and metaphorical aspects of the relationship between body and soul in seventeenth-century literature and their significance within a primarily dualistic philosophy.

Is there a ghost in the machine? Are we born trailing clouds of glory? Is there a part of us that will survive death? Is the soul reborn in different bodily forms? These and similar questions have occupied humankind since the dawn of consciousness. Rosalie Osmond's book explores the way the soul has been represented in different cultures and at different times, from ancient Egypt and Greece, through medieval Europe and into the 21st century. Basing her approach on historical (...) sources, she reveals the many different ways in which the soul has been imagined and the range of human needs and aspirations these imaginings have addressed. (shrink)

Karl Marx's normative views have routinely been contrasted with moral-political theories such as utilitarianism and Rawlsian justice. They have not been systematically contrasted with characteristically African, and specifically communal, values, with post-independence African leaders such as Nyerere and Nkrumah instead having emphasized the similarities. In this article, a work of analytic philosophy, I sketch the essentials of Marx’s approach to the human good, especially his early writings on alienation from 1843-1845, and weigh them up against a theoretical interpretation of the (...) under-explored African moral-political tradition. According to the latter perspective, a person displays human excellence insofar as she prizes communal relationships, ones of sharing a way of life and caring for others’ quality of life. My aims are to identify key differences between this Afro-communalism and the young Marx’s views, and, where they diverge, to provide some reasons for favouring one approach over the other. I conclude that insofar as the two ethics differ, the African ideal is the better candidate for capturing a moral point view, one that includes human rights, whereas Marx’s is preferable, and even compelling to a wide contemporary audience, as a broader account of how to live well. (shrink)

Philosophers have already recognized the importance of causal preemption involving “positive” events. First, preemption with positive events raises problems for counterfactual theories of causation. Second, theories of moral and legal responsibility rely heavily on the concept of causation, so accurately assessing responsibility in preemption cases requires correctly assessing their causal structure. However, philosophers have not discussed preemption involving “negative” events or omissions. This paper argues that cases of preemptive omissions exist and have important implications for theories of causation and for (...) moral and legal responsibility. Of theoretical importance, the alterations made to counterfactual theories of causation to address preemption with positive events do not seem to work for accommodating preemptive omissions. Of practical importance, there have been actual legal cases involving preemptive omissions, and at least one such case was, this paper contends, decided incorrectly on erroneous causal grounds. This paper identifies what must happen for preemptive omissions to obtain. It then argues for the existence of preemptive omissions by constructing a series of cases and drawing structural parallels between preemption cases with positive events and cases with omissions. It ultimately presents a formula for generating preemptive omissions and examines both why “traditional” methods of generating preemption fail for omissions and why the proposed method avoids such concerns. (shrink)

Ancient medical and healing systems are currently attracting considerable interest. This issue includes interdisciplinary studies which focus on new perceptions of some ancient and medieval medical systems, exploring how they related to each other, and assessing their contribution to modern society. It is shown that pre-Greek medicine included some rational elements, and that Egyptian and Babylonian medical systems contributed to a tradition which led from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and beyond. The reliability of sources of evidence is considered, (...) as well as the legacy of the ancient healing environments and disease treatments. Finally, where documentation survives, the legacy of social attitudes to health and disease is considered. Overarching principles directed policies of social medicine and healthcare in antiquity and the Middle Ages: for example, the causes and transmission routes of infectious diseases, as well as the basic principles of sterilization, were unknown, but nevertheless attempts were made to improve sanitation, provide clean water, and ensure access to trained physicians. In some cases, the need to limit the size of the population prompted the use of contraceptive measures, and surviving information also illuminates attitudes to deformity, disability and the treatment of the terminally ill. (shrink)

Online reprint of part of an encyclopedia entry (from the Encyclopaedia of Quality of Life and Well-being Research 2014).

Este trabalho analisa a repercussão social do cartaz do “Salão do Livro da Região Sul e Sudeste do Pará”, evento da Feira Pan-Amazônica do Livro de 2018, para compreender como o processo de resposta social (BRAGA, 2006) impôs uma mudança institucional por parte da Secretaria de Cultura do Estado. O país homenageado foi a Colômbia e a peça de divulgação destacava uma mulher negra carregando livros na cabeça, representação das palenqueras. O fato gerou repercussão nas redes sociais e na mídia (...) local e nacional. Os protestos voltaram-se contra a reiteração de uma imagem que inferioriza as mulheres negras, reproduzindo colonialidades de gênero, poder e saber. O corpuscompõe-se de postagens no Facebooke de matérias jornalísticas veiculadas em abril de 2018. Duas técnicas metodológicas foram usadas: a netnografia (RECUERO, 2012; KOZINETS, 2014) e a aplicação de um questionário online, por meio do Facebook e Whatsapp. (shrink)

Preserved human remains from ancient Egypt provide an unparalleled opportunity for studies in the history of disease and medical practices. Egyptian medical papyri describe physiological concepts, disease diagnoses and prescribed treatments which include both ‘irrational’, and ‘rational’ procedures. Many previous studies of Egyptian medicine have concluded that ‘irrational’ methods predominated, but this perception is increasingly challenged by results from scientific studies of ancient human remains, and plant materials. This paper demonstrates the significant contribution being made by multidisciplinary studies to our (...) understanding of disease occurrence and medical treatments in ancient Egypt, and considers the feasibility of developing epidemiological comparisons of ancient and modern data sets that will provide acceptable historical contexts for contemporary disease studies. (shrink)

We present a basis for the admissible rules of intuitionistic propositional logic. Thereby a conjecture by de Jongh and Visser is proved. We also present a proof system for the admissible rules, and give semantic criteria for admissibility.

This paper contains a detailed account of the notion of admissibility in the setting of consequence relations. It is proved that the two notions of admissibility used in the literature coincide, and it provides an extension to multi–conclusion consequence relations that is more general than the one usually encountered in the literature on admissibility. The notion of a rule scheme is introduced to capture rules with side conditions, and it is shown that what is generally understood under the extension of (...) a consequence relation by a rule can be extended naturally to rule schemes, and that such extensions capture the intuitive idea of extending a logic by a rule. (shrink)

Dans le cadre du groupe de Recherches en littérature et spiritualité, fondé à l’Université de Metz, le volume publié par N. Brucker fait place à un large éventail de genres et d’œuvres littéraires, de saint Paul à nos jours. Plus de vingt communications au total, regroupées en six sections, dont les titres (« Spiritualité, éthique et société », « Homme nouveau, nouvelle écriture ? », par exemple) marquent, il faut le reconnaître, ce que risque d’avoir d’artificiel une telle tentative de (...) class.. (shrink)

Admissible rules of a logic are those rules under which the set of theorems of the logic is closed. In this paper, a Gentzen-style framework is introduced for analytic proof systems that derive admissible rules of non-classical logics. While Gentzen systems for derivability treat sequents as basic objects, for admissibility, the basic objects are sequent rules. Proof systems are defined here for admissible rules of classes of modal logics, including K4, S4, and GL, and also Intuitionistic Logic IPC. With minor (...) restrictions, proof search in these systems terminates, giving decision procedures for admissibility in the logics. (shrink)

Frankfurt‐style action cases have been immensely influential in the free will and moral responsibility literatures because they arguably show that an agent can be morally responsible for a behavior despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. However, even among the philosophers who accept Frankfurt‐style action cases, there remains significant disagreement about whether also to accept Frankfurt‐style omission cases – cases in which an agent omits to do something, is unable to do otherwise, and is allegedly morally responsible for that omission. (...) Settling this debate about Frankfurt‐style omission cases is significant because the resolution entails an important fact about moral responsibility: whether there is there a moral asymmetry between actions and omissions with respect to the ability to do otherwise. My proposal is that both Frankfurt‐style action cases and omission cases involve the same type of causal structure: causal preemption. However, the preemptor and the preemptee differ. In action cases, the Frankfurted agent preempts the neuroscientist and is causally and morally responsibility for the effect. In omission cases, Frankfurted agent is neither causally nor morally responsible for the effect. Instead, the neuroscientist preempts the Frankfurted agent. Thus, there are no Frankfurt‐style omission cases. (shrink)

Rapidly advancing studies on rhodopsin have focused on new strategies for crystallization of this integral membrane protein for x-ray analysis and on alternative methods for structural determination from nuclear magnetic resonance data. Functional studies of the interactions between the apoprotein and its chromophore have clarified the role of the chromophore in deactivation of opsin and in photoactivation of the pigment.

Emotion recognition technology uses artificial intelligence to make inferences about a person’s emotions, on the basis of their facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, or other types of input. Underlying such technology are a variety of assumptions about the manifestation, nature, and value of emotions. To assure the quality and desirability of emotion recognition technology, it is important to critically assess the assumptions embedded in the technology. Within philosophy, there is a long tradition of epistemological, ontological, phenomenological, and ethical (...) reflection on the manifestation, nature, and value of emotions. This article draws from this tradition of philosophy of emotions, in order to challenge the assumptions underlying current emotion recognition technology and to promote a more critical engagement with the concept of emotions in the tech-industry. (shrink)

We investigate the logical structure of intuitionistic Kripke-Platek set theory , and show that the first-order logic of is intuitionistic first-order logic IQC.

This paper contains a brief overview of the area of admissible rules with an emphasis on results about intermediate and modal propositional logics. No proofs are given but many references to the literature are provided.

This paper contains a proof-theoretic account of unification in transitive reflexive modal logics, which means that the reasoning is syntactic and uses as little semantics as possible. New proofs of theorems on unification types are presented and these results are extended to negationless fragments. In particular, a syntactic proof of Ghilardi’s result that $\mathsf {S4}$ has finitary unification is provided. In this approach the relation between classical valuations, projective unifiers, and admissible rules is clarified.

In this article I aim to make progress towards the philosophical goal of ascertaining what, if anything, all mental illnesses have in common, attempting to unify a large sub-set of them that have a relational or interpersonal dimension. One major claim is that, if we want a promising theory of mental illness, we must go beyond the dominant western accounts of mental illness/health, which focus on traits intrinsic to a person such as pain/pleasure, lethargy/liveliness, fragmentation/integration, and falsehood/authenticity. A second major (...) claim is that the relational facets of mental illness are plausibly understood theoretically in terms of a person’s inability to identify with others or to exhibit solidarity with them, relational values that are salient in the African philosophical tradition. I show that these two extrinsic properties well explain several intuitive instances of mental illness, including, amongst several others, being abusive, psychopathic, narcissistic, histrionic, paranoid, and phobic. (shrink)

Omissions are puzzling, and theyraise myriad questions for many areas of philosophy. In contrast, omissions ofomissions are not usually taken to be very puzzling since they are oftenthought to just be a fancy way of describing ordinary “positive” events, statesof affairs, or actions. This paper contends that – as far as agency isconcerned – at least some omissions of omissions are omissions, not actions. First,this paper highlights how our actions are accompanied by many first-orderomissions - i.e., omissions to act – (...) and that there already are many strongreasons to think that at least some of these first-order omissions are agentiallydistinct from simultaneous actions and from other first-order omissions. Itthen argues that our actions and first-order omissions are also accompanied byhigher-order omissions – i.e., omissions to omit to act – and that higher-orderomissions are distinct from actions and first-order omissions for similarreasons. Higher-order omissions also illuminate a more holistic picture of agency,which involves recognizing that our exercises of agency at a moment in timeinclude all of our overlapping behaviors – our actions, first-order omissions,and higher-order omissions. This paper concludes by exploring the impacts ofhigher-order omissions. (shrink)