In May 2009 the World Health Assembly passed a resolution on reducing health inequities through action on the social determinants of health, based on the work of the global Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2005–2008. The Commission's genesis and findings raise some important questions for global health governance. We draw out some of the essential elements, themes, and mechanisms that shaped the Commission. We start by examining the evolving nature of global health and the Commission's foundational inspiration – the (...) universal pattern of health inequity and the imperative, driven by a sense of social justice, to make better and more equal health a global goal. We look at how the Commission was established, how it was structured internally, and how it developed external relationships – with the World Health Organization, with global networks of academics and practitioners, with country governments eager to spearhead action on health equity, and with civil society. We outline the Commission's recommendations as they relate to the architecture of global health governance. Finally, we look at how the Commission is catalyzing a movement to bring social determinants of health to the forefront of international and national policy discourse. (shrink)

On August 28, 2008, Michael Marmot, Chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, formally handed over the Commission’s Final Report to Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It was a significant moment. Dr. Chan addressed a hall packed with representatives of the world’s communications media in a speech that was remarkably direct. Dr. Chan reiterated the Commission’s position that to improve health and health equity action needs to be (...) taken not just across the health sector but across all social and economic policy areas, and stated, “Social deprivation is not a matter of fate. It is a marker of policy failure.” This was a bold statement from one of the world’s leading diplomats. Policy failure! The phrase echoes the Commission’s assertion that “a toxic combination of poor social policies, unfair economic arrangements and bad politics is killing people on a grand scale.” The Commission’s messages are far reaching. (shrink)

Charles Taylor's attempt to map the complexity and fullness of the modern identity has led him to recuperate its moral sources. This paper explores the zone of ontological contestation Taylor has engaged by defending a notion of the self that does not succumb to a narrowing or partiality of vision. Taylor's criticisms of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas are examined to draw out the features of his project and its own limitations.

SEBASTIÁN RUDAS | : Moralized secularism is the view that “secularism” is defined in relation to certain moral values. Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor’s “liberal pluralism” is an influential version of moralized secularism, for it states that freedom of conscience and equal respect are the fundamental moral values of secularism. I present the objection that secularism is a redundant category because it carries no distinctive normative content that cannot be found in the more general, and less divisive, terminology of (...) liberalism and democracy. In order to avoid this objection, I argue for conceiving secularism in a nonmoralized way. According to my view, secularism refers solely to the institutional arrangements that a state can put in place in order to address conflicts with organized religion that might emerge at the moment of advancing its ideological political project. Through this interpretation, it is possible to conceptualize expressions of secularism that are either not liberal or not motivated by the acknowledgment of new forms of pluralism as being the prime challenge a state faces for advancing its political project. As the redundancy objection shows, this is a possibility that moralized accounts of secularism preclude. | : Les versions moralisées de la laïcité définissent la « laïcité » par rapport à des valeurs morales. Le « pluralisme libéral » de Jocelyn Maclure et Charles Taylor est un exemple influent de la laïcité moralisée, car il affirme que la liberté de conscience et l’égal respect sont les valeurs morales fondamentales de la laïcité. Je propose l’objection selon laquelle la laïcité est une catégorie redondante, car elle ne comporte aucun contenu normatif distinctif qui ne peut être trouvé dans la terminologie plus générale et moins controversée du libéralisme et de la démocratie. Pour répondre à cette objection, je soutiens qu’il faut concevoir la laïcité de manière non moralisée. Selon moi, la laïcité se réfère seulement aux arrangements institutionnels qu’un État peut mettre en place pour répondre aux conflits avec les religions organisées qui pourraient surgir au moment de faire avancer son projet politique idéologique. Dans cette interprétation, il est possible de conceptualiser des expressions de laïcité qui sont non libérales, ou qui ne sont pas motivées par la reconnaissance de nouvelles formes de pluralisme à titre de principal défi auquel un État est confronté pour faire avancer son projet politique. Comme le montre l’objection de redondance, c’est une possibilité que la laïcité moralisée exclut. (shrink)

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Charles Taylor has been one of the most original and influential figures in contemporary philosophy: his 'philosophical anthropology' spans an unusually wide range of theoretical interests and draws creatively on both Anglo-American and Continental traditions in philosophy. A selection of his published papers is presented here in two volumes, structured to indicate the direction and essential unity of the work. He starts from a polemical concern with behaviourism and other reductionist theories (particularly in psychology and the philosophy of language) (...) which aim to model the study of man on the natural sciences. This leads to a general critique of naturalism, its historical development and its importance for modern culture and consciousness; and that in turn points, forward to a positive account of human agency and the self, the constitutive role of language and value, and the scope of practical reason. The volumes jointly present some two decades of work on these fundamental themes, and convey strongly the tenacity, verve and versatility of the author in grappling with them. They will interest a very wide range of philosophers and students of the human sciences. (shrink)

This paper argues for the normative significance of attention. Attention plays an important role when describing an individual’s mind and agency, and in explaining many central facts about that individual. In addition, many in the public want answers and guidance with regard to normative questions about attention. Given that attention is both descriptively central and the public cares about normative guidance with regard to it, attention should be central also in normative philosophy. We need an ethics of attention: a field (...) of study of which normative pressures, if any, govern attention. Like the ethics of belief, the ethics of attention will connect those normative questions to issues regarding the nature of attention, i.e. to what is subject to such normative pressures. Philosophers should develop an ethics of attention that helps to provide normative guidance and that is commensurate in its richness to the descriptive significance of attention. The second half of the paper sketches a framework that may help us to get started at developing the ethics of attention. (shrink)

Eva Schmidt argues that facts about incoherent beliefs can be non-evidential epistemic reasons to suspend judgment. In this commentary, I argue that incoherence-based reasons to suspend are epistemically superfluous: if the subjects in Schmidt’s cases ought to suspend judgment, then they should do so merely on the basis of their evidential reasons. This suggests a more general strategy to reduce the apparent normativity of coherence to the normativity of evidence. I conclude with some remarks on the independent interest that reasons-first (...) epistemology might have within an evidentialist framework. (shrink)

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first (...) aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

This book compares and contrasts publicly espoused security concepts in the Nordic region, and explores the notion of societal security. Outside observers often assume that Nordic countries take similar approaches to the security and safety of their citizens. This book challenges that assumption and traces the evolution of 'societal security', and its broadly equivalent concepts, in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. The notion of societal security is deconstructed and analysed in terms of its different meanings and implications for each country, (...) through both country- and issue-focused studies. Each chapter traces the evolution of key security concepts and related practices, allowing for a comparison of similarities and differences between these four countries. Using discourses and practices as evidence, this is the first book to explore how different Nordic nations have conceptualised domestic security over time. The findings will be valuable to scholars from across the geographical and theoretical spectrum, while highlighting how Nordic security discourses and practices may deviate from traditional assumptions about Nordic values. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, Nordic politics and International Relations. (shrink)

A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection between animal and disability liberation--the debut of an important new social critic How much of what we understand of ourselves as "human" depends on our physical and mental abilities--how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much does our definition of "human" depend on its difference from "animal"? Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura (...) Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled--and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls "cripping animal ethics." Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice--which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition--are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, and science--including factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals--Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that will open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability. Beasts of Burden is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant debut author. (shrink)

How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and in ethics. Yet its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. Responsibility for Rationality is the first book that connects recent debates on responsibility and on rationality in a unifying dialectic. It achieves four main goals: first, it reinterprets the problem of responsibility (...) for attitudes as a problem about the normativity of rationality; second, it breaks the stalemate between rationalist and voluntarist accounts of mental responsibility by defending a hybrid view; third, it provides novel support to recent accounts of the normativity of rationality by arguing that epistemic reasons and other ‘right-kind’ reasons are genuine normative reasons; fourth, it sets the foundations and the research agenda for an ‘ethics of mind’, including an illustration of how to approach applied issues in epistemology within the presented framework. After spelling out connections between responsibility and rationality (part I), the book engages in debates in normative epistemology (part II) and brings them to bear on the broader field of an ethics of mind (part III). -/- Full draft of current version available on request, comments welcome! (shrink)

Kantian disinterest is the view that aesthetic judgement is constituted (at least in part) by a form of perceptual contemplation that is divorced from concerns of practical action. That view, which continues to be defended to this day, is challenged here on the basis that it is unduly spectator-focussed, ignoring important facets of art-making and its motivations. Beauty moves us, not necessarily to tears or rapt contemplation, but to practical action; crucially, it may do so as part and parcel of (...) its appreciation. This claim is defended via reflection on (i) the art of photography, (ii) the concepts of ‘attentional salience’ and ‘experienced mandates’, and (iii) a virtue-based account of aesthetic value. (shrink)

In the traditional understanding, human dignity is often portrayed as a «final», «inherent», and «absolute» value. If human dignity as the core of the status of a human being did indeed have thos characteristics, this would yield a severe limitation for obligations that stem from the moral status of non-human animals, plants, eco systems and other entities discussed in environmental ethics; for obligations that arise from human dignity standardly take priority over the duties toward entities with non-human moral status. Yet, (...) many theorists of human dignity nowadays have given up the traditional picture in favour of a more «contingent» understanding of human dignity that abandons one or more of its traditional characteristics.In this paper, I argue that to the contrary, we have good reasons to think that the three characteristics of human dignity just mentioned can indeed be attributed to a value that deserves the name «human dignity». In a first part, I argue for a specific understanding of the three value characteristics under consideration. After these preliminaries, I show in a second part that given such an understanding, we have ample evidence that we can indeed say that human dignity is an inherent, absolute and final value; and also that these three characteristics are properties of a single value. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

In developing a theory of consciousness, one of the main problems has to do with determining what distinguishes conscious states from non-conscious ones—the delimitation problem. This paper explores the possibility of solving this problem in terms of self-awareness. That self-awareness is essential to understanding the nature of our conscious experience is perhaps the most widely discussed hypothesis in the study of consciousness throughout the history of philosophy. Its plausibility hinges on how the notion of self-awareness is unpacked. The idea that (...) consciousness involves self-awareness has been understood in two different ways: either as awareness of oneself—the subject of experience—or as awareness of the conscious episode itself. In this paper I argue (i) that every experience concerns the subject in a very specific way, involving what I will call ‘perspectival de se representation’, and (ii) that there is no need to appeal to the experience itself in order to characterize the awareness within that experience. The view I articulate explains the subjective nature of experience without over-intellectualizing it, accommodates the phenomenology of experience, and dispels any doubt about the need to find the self in introspection. (shrink)

It is often claimed that a minimal form of self-awareness is constitutive of our conscious experience. Some have considered that such a claim is plausible for our ordinary experiences but false when considered unrestrictedly on the basis of the empirical evidence from altered states. In this paper I want to reject such a reasoning. This requires, first, a proper understanding of a minimal form of self-awareness – one that makes it plausible that minimal self-awareness is part of our ordinary experiences. (...) I will argue that it should be understood as Perspectival First-Person Awareness : a non-conceptual identification-free self-attribution that defines the first-person perspective for our conscious experience. I will offer a detailed characterization of PFP-Awareness in semantic and epistemological terms. With this tool in hand, I will review the empirical literature on altered states. I will focus on psychedelics, meditation and dreams, as they have been claimed to present the clearest cases in favor of a radical disruption of self-awareness. I will show that the rejection of the idea that minimal self-awareness is constitutive of our experience on the basis of this evidence is unfounded, for two main reasons. First, although there are good grounds to think that some forms of self-awareness that typically accompany our ordinary experiences are compromised, they do not support the claim that PFP-Awareness is absent. Secondly, the reports that could make us think of a radical disruption of self-awareness are most probably due to a confirmation bias – and hence we should mistrust them – derived from the expectations and metaphysical views of their subjects. (shrink)

Introduction to Hegel's thought for the student and general reader, emphasizing in particular his social and political thought and his continuing relevance to contemporary problems.

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another (...) element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective. (shrink)

Sowohl in der analytischen Philosophie als auch im verwandten Projekt einer erneuerten Praxisphilosophie gewinnt sinnkritisches Philosophieren derzeit eine neue Dringlichkeit. Beide begreifen die menschliche, vernünftige Praxis als primäre Quelle von Sinn und als privilegierten Gegenstand philosophischer Analyse. Der Band vereint Beiträge zu zentralen Aspekten sinnkritischer, praxisformanalytischer Philosophie: von der Frage nach dem Sinn religiöser Rede und Praxis über das Problem der Struktur und die Form menschlichen Handelns bis hin zu Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Wahrnehmung. Beiträge u. a. von (...) Robert Brandom, James Conant, Christoph Demmerling, Thomas Rentsch, Sebastian Rödl, Hans Julius Schneider, Henning Tegtmeyer und Holm Tetens. (shrink)

Feminists today are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. Mattering, edited by noted feminist scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor, presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or ‘naturalizing’ turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements (...) of matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power, taking materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues. The contributors, an international group of feminist theorists, scientists and scholars, apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neuralplasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs.A unique and interdisciplinary collection, Mattering presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing and transformations in the sciences. (shrink)

Situational crime prevention (SCP) measures attempt to prevent crime by reducing the opportunities for crime to occur. One of the ways in which some SCP measures reduce such opportunities is by providing victims with advice about how to avoid being victimised, for instance through public awareness campaigns or safety apps. Some scholars claim that this approach to preventing crime often or always promotes victim-blaming and that it is therefore morally wrong to pursue such strategies. Others have made sweeping rejections of (...) this claim. However, in this paper, I suggest that neither view is correct. Specifically, I demonstrate that there are at least three distinct ways of interpreting what I term the victim-blaming argument against advice-giving SCP measures – i.e. as an argument based on a concern for direct victim-blaming, indirect victim-blaming, or self-blame – and that both SCP opponents and supporters have legitimate grounds for their position, depending on how the argument is spelled out. (shrink)

The concept of "life" has always been part of the basic philosophical topoi. In Greek antiquity, the question of what constitutes a "good" or "successful" life was regarded as a fundamental question of philosophy. As a result, early philosophers engaged in practice-oriented philosophizing which regarded philosophy as a form of life. In Modern philosophy, the term "life" became a technical term in different philosophical traditions such as the philosophy of life, philosophy of existence, and phenomenology. This volume brings together contributions (...) in German and French that explore the concept of "life" historically and systematically, focusing on metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical issues. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Don't Laugh at “Slow” Sailing: Average Versus Instantaneous Motion Motion Relative to What? – Galilean Relativity But There are No Fixed Reference Frames – Special Relativity General Relativity – Can it Really Matter?

Lässt sich der Einsatz militärischer Gewalt zum Schutz der Menschenrechte innerhalb fremder Staaten rechtfertigen? Die Arbeit beleuchtet die Frage nach der Rechtfertigung humanitärer Interventionen. Dazu werden Interventionsargumente in der Geschichte des politischen Denkens ausgehend von Wurzeln in Antike und Mittelalter über die Kriegsethik der spanischen Spätscholastik, das politische Denken der Neuzeit bis zur Kritik jeglicher Form von Interventionen vor dem Hintergrund der Dominanz des Souveränitätsprinzips im politischen Denken des 18. Jahrhunderts rekonstruiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund argumentiert der Autor dafür, dass die (...) Souveränität der Staaten nicht unabhängig vom Schutz der grundlegenden Menschenrechte ihrer Bürger gedacht werden kann. Staaten haben eine primäre Verantwortung für den Schutz ihrer Bürger, die, wenn der einzelne Staat sie nicht erfüllt, als sekundäre Verantwortung auch der Staatengemeinschaft als Schutzverantwortung (responsibility to protect) zukommt und militärische Interventionen im Falle massiver Menschenrechtsverletzungen als letztes Mittel erlaubt. (shrink)

Für Aristoteles ist das Kontinuum ein potentiell Unendliches. Dieser Unendlichkeitsbegriff, den er neben dem prozessualen und aktualen einführte, wurde im Laufe der Philosophiegeschichte nicht mehr berücksichtigt. So verwenden ihn u.a. weder Kant noch Weyl in ihren Kontinuumsbetrachtungen, obwohl ihr Kontinuumsverständnis ihn geradezu nahelegt. - In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen die ontologischen Kontinuumslehren des Aristoteles und späterer Philosophen und Mathematiker behandelt, zum anderen erfährt die von Aristoteles im 6. Buch der «Physik» vorgelegte strukturelle Kontinuumsuntersuchung eine eingehende Würdigung.

This article argues for a ban on the performance of medically unnecessary genital normalizing surgeries as part of assigning a binary sex/gender to infants with intersex conditions on the basis of autonomy, regardless of etiology. It does this via a dis/analogy with the classic case in bioethics of Jehovah Witness (JW) parents' inability to refuse life-saving blood transfusions for their minor children. Both cases address ethical medical practice in situations where parents are making irreversible medical decisions on the basis of (...) values strongly held, identity, and relationship-shaping values—such as religious beliefs or beliefs regarding the inherent value of binary sex/gender—amidst ethical pluralism. Furthermore, it takes seriously—as we must in the intersex case—that the restriction of parents' right to choose will likely result in serious harms to potentially large percentage of patients, their families, and their larger communities. I address the objection that parents' capacity to choose is restricted in the JW case on the basis of the harm principle or a duty to nonmaleficence, given that the result of parent choice would be death. I provide evidence that this is mistaken from how we treat epistemic uncertainty in the JW case and from cases in which clinicians are ethically obligated to restrict the autonomy of nonminor patients. I conclude that we restrict the parents' right to choose in the JW case—and should in the case of pediatric intersex surgery—to secure patient's future autonomy. (shrink)

Schools in Germany are frequently named after people. Thus, these persons are remembered in the public sphere. This article answers the question to what extent the school names in the federal state of Thuringia correspond with the history of scientific pedagogy. For this purpose, in a first step, the controversial discussion about key figures in pedagogy and history of education is presented. In a second step the entirety of all school names in Thuringia is considered and individual results are discussed. (...) As a rule, it is not pedagogues who lend their names to schools but writers, artists and political figures. Only one fifth of all schools named after a person are named after educators. It is found that the key figures in pedagogy are rarely available as namesakes, whereas in practice successful school founders are preferred as name-givers. Accordingly, the history of pedagogy is represented in a filtered way in school names. Based on these results, further research perspectives for research on school names are formulated. (shrink)

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine raises fundamental ethical issues. As one example, AI systems in the field of mental health successfully detect signs of mental disorders, such as depression, by using data from social media. These AI depression detectors (AIDDs) identify users who are at risk of depression prior to any contact with the healthcare system. The article focuses on the ethical implications of AIDDs regarding affected users’ health-related autonomy. Firstly, it presents the (ethical) discussion of AI (...) in medicine and, specifically, in mental health. Secondly, two models of AIDDs using social media data and different usage scenarios are introduced. Thirdly, the concept of patient autonomy, according to Beauchamp and Childress, is critically discussed. Since this concept does not encompass the specific challenges linked with the digital context of AIDDs in social media sufficiently, the current analysis suggests, finally, an extended concept of health-related digital autonomy. (shrink)

Eine der Größen des ›Internationalismus‹ war zweifelsohne die II. Internationale. Sebastian D. Schickl analysiert die Diskurse um Raum und Zeit innerhalb der II. Internationale zwischen 1889 und 1917. Er geht den Aussagen nach, die innerhalb der II. Internationale zur temporalen und räumlichen Struktur der Welt gemacht wurden. Welche Weltentwürfe und -analysen, Weltstrukturen und Weltordnungsvorstellungen prägten die II. Internationale, veränderten sich diese durch den Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs? Der Beitrag der II. Internationale in diesem Prozess und die Veränderungen und Verschiebungen (...) durch den Weltkrieg auf die temporale Welterklärung und die territoriale Weltordnung stehen im Mittelpunkt der Arbeit. Als Beispiele dienen zum Einen territoriale Streitfragen wie die Kolonien, der ›Balkan‹, Armenien, Palästina, Elsass-Lothringen, Polen und Belgien, zum Anderen temporale Kategorien wie der Erfahrungsraum und der Erwartungshorizont (Koselleck). Dabei stellt sich heraus, dass das Spannungsfeld von Universalismus und Partikularismus immer deutlicher zutage trat. Wer zum Beispiel partikularnationalistische Interessen formulieren wollte, musste sie in ein universales Ensemble einbetten. (shrink)

Reflecting teams play a significant role in family therapy; they broaden perspectives on how family dynamics or problems can be understood. However, what happens when a reflector does not feel compassionate towards a particular family member? There is a risk of biased reflections: families can pick up negative signals, putting the therapeutic relationship at risk. In this paper, I explore how I was supported to explore my lack of compassion for Dad ‘John’. It was only after reaching out to an (...) experienced supervisor who undertook an ‘internalised other’ interview with me – where I played the role of Dad – did my compassion increase. From an ethics of care perspective, I suggest that social professionals need to explore ways to increase empathy and compassion for clients they dislike. If they do not, they are open to valid criticism that they are behaving unethically as professionals. Therefore, there is a need to address deficits in empathy and compassion to sustain ethical social work practices. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy -- Understanding the other: a Gadamerian view on conceptual schemes -- Language not mysterious? -- Celan and the recovery of language -- Nationalism and modernity -- Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights -- Democratic exclusion (and its remedies?) -- Religious mobilizations -- Themes from a secular age -- The immanent counter-enlightenment -- Notes on the sources of violence: perennial and modern -- The future of the religious past -- Disenchantment-re-enchantment -- What does secularism (...) mean? -- Die blosse Vernunft ("reason alone") -- Perils of moralism -- What was the Axial revolution? (shrink)

Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a semantic (...) explanation for this derogation. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on a theory of the ideological public sphere in the age of digital media. It describes the public sphere as an initially ascending and then descending communication process that includes both polarising and integrating publics, which are organised by antagonistic media and compromise-building mass media. This framework allows us to distinguish between hegemonic, populist, and popular-oriented flows of communication, as well as register changes in the interplay of different publics driven by digital media platforms. Digital transformations of (...) the public sphere give rise to antagonistic and networked-individualistic flows of populist communication that put public hegemony under constant pressure. The challenge is to find ways to strengthen popular communications that enable democratic learning processes and the flourishing of communicative competences of all citizens. (shrink)