History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds. In this essay and in the contributions that follow, verticality appears as a (...) condition of knowledge production—a set of movements and mobilities, technical challenges, political negotiations, and bodily hardships—and an object of scientific inquiry, requiring new techniques of mapping and visualisation and generative of new insights into physical processes and temporal change. By foregrounding the vertical, historians of science can gain new insights and tell new stories about how science is done in the field, the observatory, and the laboratory, and about how those sciences have helped build a modern, three-dimensional world. (shrink)

Dans ce texte paru en 1927 dans l’organe principal de la social-démocratie autrichienne Arbeiter-Zeitung, et traduit pour la première fois en français, Otto Bauer, alors principal leader du Parti socialdémocrate autrichien dont il s’efforce de préserver l’unité en dépit des divisions aggravées par le conflit mondial et ses conséquences, dissipe les malentendus et les imprécisions entourant la dénomination d’« austromarxisme », et présente de manière vivante et singulière les différents déclinaisons de ce courant à l’heure où l’Autriche entre dans (...) une période de profonde turbulence politique. (shrink)

The problem of names of illnesses is both a problem of words and values that should address not only the classification of disorders, but also a fundamental question both for medical sciences and humanities: can psychiatric nosology and classifications fit with the ontological constitution of human beings? This paper aims to discuss the so-called “psychiatric object” and its language and it intends to provide a hermeneutical-phenomenological account to mental health. In doing so, the paper will firstly examine the “psychiatric object” (...) and its language; secondly, it will show the difference between taxonomy and ontology, both of interest for the psychiatric object; third, it will insist on the critique of the epistemological status of psychiatry conceived from a natural point of view following three main paths: a metaphysical one (Heidegger, Jaspers), a social one (Szasz, Foucault, Basaglia), and an ethical one (Laing). Finally, it will clarify why phenomenology and in particular hermeneutical-phenomenology can illuminate the understanding of the psychiatric object and its implications in a cultural context, in order to achieve a more humanistic psychiatry. (shrink)

This article contributes to ongoing discussions in the social sciences about how to interpret the incorporation of gender equality into integration policies – is it a form of state feminism or femonationalism? Drawing upon intersectionality, we analyse how gender equality is presented, discussed and negotiated in relation to ethnicity and nationality in Sweden. Methodologically, we employ a bifocal lens that combines (1) a quantitative investigation of representations of civic orientation programmes in Swedish policy documents and mainstream media, and (2) a (...) qualitative analysis of ethnographic data collected in six civic orientation courses – three in English and three in Arabic – in three large municipalities. Such a two-pronged approach, which connects policy and media discourses with interactions in civic orientation classes, offers a granular picture of the complex and often ambivalent intersections of ethnicity and gender in relation to migration in Sweden. Ultimately, the co-optation of feminist values brings with it the risk of warping feminism into a trait of national/ethnic distinctiveness. Crucially, femonationalism is not the prerogative of far-right parties but is already becoming institutionalised, informing both mainstream media and educational practices in a feminist state like Sweden. (shrink)

The formal part of this chapter is concerned with measures of need-based justice. According to the measures we propose, a distribution is unjust (i) the more it deviates from absolute need satisfaction and equal degrees of need satisfaction, (ii) the more the given undersupply could have been mitigated by transfers, or (iii) the more resources are used for oversupply instead of need satisfaction. These measures are compared, i.e., as to the satisfaction of need-oriented relatives of axioms prominent in poverty measurement; (...) and we have a critical eye on the proposals of Jasso and Miller. The empirical part reports on three vignette studies conducted to find out how people evaluate the justice of given distributions and how they distribute goods when aiming at justice. The main goal was to measure the significance ascribed to need. This significance was compared with the significance ascribed to effort or equality; and it was shown that a need’s influence decreases when the corresponding person is accountable for having a higher amount of it. In the third study, we found out that needs that are not directed at bare survival, such as the need for participation in social life, are attributed lower degrees of importance. The chapter concludes with some implications of our research for a theory of need-based justice. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary work is intractable because the search for knowledge in different fields entails different interests, and thereby different values too; and the different possibilities of knowledge about different subjects also lead to different epistemologies. Thus differ ences among practitioners of the various disciplines are pervasive and aptly described as cultural ones, and interdisciplinary work requires transcending unconscious habits of thought. The more those unconscious habits are explicated and the more we under stand how the disparate characteristics of the various intellectual (...) cultures are related to the necessarily different interests, values, and epistemologies, the more feasible becomes the goal of transcending thought habits. Two sorts of interdisciplinary effort seem to have been successful: specific, delimited problems have been solved by teams in what is actually multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary work, and new disciplines have sprung up at the intersections of existing ones. STS fits neither of those patterns. Can it nevertheless be viable? (shrink)

Statistics constitute the social universe of which they are gathered. The foundation necessary to develop quantified knowledge about society is the population. If quantified knowledge changes society, the question arises on how individuals become to be represented as population. The population has to be extracted from individuals in a process that we call “populationisation.” This encompasses the development of the individual into a segment of a population through the compilation of individual data into population data and its analysis. To describe (...) the process of populationisation, we follow a statistical risk assessment tool, the German Diabetes Risk Score, from its inception in a cohort study to its entry into the public sphere of German society. The population is extracted from individuals that function as research subjects through an identification number. Preprocessed information is entered into a dynamic database that enables its rearrangement according to main aggregates. Through populationisation, a signified is enacted that can be sliced up and that is equal in all its parts. Now predictions can be computed and fed back to society as tools of moral judgment. The acting individual and “society” are—numerically and literally!—entangled in the production and enactment of risk knowledge. (shrink)

The pushmi-pullyu representation is a non-conjunctive representation with both descriptive and directive contents. Introduced by Millikan, the PPR is supposed to aid in explaining how organisms adapt behavior to environmental variance in the absence of intermediate inference. Until recently, it has led an uncontroversial theoretical life. However, Artiga has suggested that the PPR postulate conflicts with Millikan-style teleosemantics and, as a consequence, the PPR postulate should probably be set aside. I suggest here that the theoretical motivations for the PPR are (...) independent of any specific theory of naturalized content. If Artiga is right about the PPR’s incompatibility with Millikan-style teleosemantics, then that only reveals the inadequacy of Millikan-style teleosemantics. The PPR has a clear role to play in explaining the primitive systems that dominate the biosphere. However, Millikan did not want to limit the explanatory utility of the PPR to primitive systems but suggested that it has explanatory work to play in the animal signaling of complex organisms, Gibsonian affordances, as well as with distinctively human mental life and language. Contra Millikan, I suggest that the PPR has no or at best a very limited explanatory role to play in such cases. Further, the non-inferential feature of the PPR suggests that it should be understood at best as a marginal or borderline representation. (shrink)

Feminist scholars reacted to news of Beauvoir's death in 1986 by initiating a reevaluation of her life's work, a task encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter, who edited for posthumous publication many of Beauvoir's personal notebooks and letters to Sartre. Some of the most exciting new interpretations of Beauvoir's philosophy that have resulted are brought together here for the first time; many of them, indeed, were written expressly for this first volume of essays on Beauvoir's philosophy (...) written since her death. (shrink)

In the past decade, digital technology, fiber optics, cellular phones, satellite television, home computers, and the Internet have substantially transformed business, education, and leisure practices. These technologies are becoming so integrated into our daily routines that their ubiquity often goes unnoticed. We are, nonetheless, in the midst of a telecommunications revolution, and the healthcare industry is becoming a major player. The burgeoning field of home-based telemedicine is evidence of this.

Transcending all ideological differences, the Book of Metamorphoses (Yijing, I-Ging) has been viewed in traditional Chinese culture as a basic work not only of the art of sooth-saying, but of an understanding of the world as a whole. Among the 64 situations described therein, the 56th deals with the constellation of ‘the wanderer’ (Lü). It is symbolized by the ‘fire’ above the ‘mountain’, i.e., a fleeting phenomenon whose ephemeral character is highlighted by the fact that it appears above something as (...) solid and immovable as a mountain. (shrink)

Third World debt, seen as distant from the realm of international affairs and ethics, is often subject to abstract economic analysis. Bauer argues that the way in which debt is addressed by debtors and lenders is heavily politicized and should be subjected to ethical scrutiny.

Recently some bioethicists and neuroscientists have argued for an imperative of chemical cognitive enhancement. This imperative is usually based on consequentialist grounds. In this paper, the topic of cognitive self-enhancement is discussed from a Kantian point of view in order to shed new light on the controversial debate. With Kant, it is an imperfect duty to oneself to strive for perfecting one’s own natural and moral capacities beyond one’s natural condition, but there is no duty to enhance others. A Kantian (...) approach does not directly lead to a duty of chemical cognitive self-enhancement, but it also does not clearly rule out that this type of enhancement can be an appropriate means to the end of self-improvement. The paper shows the benefits of a Kantian view, which offers a consistent ideal of self-perfection and teaches us a lesson about the crucial relevance of the attitude that underlies one’s striving for cognitive self-improvement: the lesson of treating oneself as an end in itself and not as mere means to the end of better output. (shrink)

In attempts to compare different distributions with regards to need, so-called “measures of need-based distributive justice” have emerged in recent years. Each of the proposed measures relies on a single dimension of need that is taken into account. This is shown to be problematic since humans experience different kinds of need that appear to be incommensurable. A strategy to deal with this problem is introduced by using multidimensional measures.

In the interwar years the Gran Paradiso ibex population followed two subsequent, contrasting trends: a steady rise once the national park was established in 1922, followed by a precipitous fall after the Fascist regime took direct control of conservation in 1934, which almost led to the colony’s extinction. This paper addresses the issue of how models taken from population ecology may inform historical narratives. The data for the interwar years were analyzed using a statistical model based on climate and population (...) density, which has proved reliable for most of the post-World War II period. The article highlights the pivotal role of anthropic variables in determining the inter-war trends and how these are best analyzed using historical scholarship. (shrink)

This article explores human genetic diversity research east of what was the iron curtain. It follows the technique of “genogeographic mapping” back to its early Soviet origins and up to the post-Soviet era. Bringing together the history of genogeographic mapping and genealogies of “nationality” and “race” in the USSR, I discuss how populations and belonging were enacted in late Soviet biological anthropology and human genetics. While genogeography had originally been developed within the early Soviet livestock economy, anthropologists, public health scientists, (...) and medical geneticists reanimated the technique in the late 1960s after the end of the Lysenko era and its ban on classical genetics. In the 1970s, population geneticists pursued a project to compile all genetic data on the USSR population, resulting in a “genogeographic atlas,” consisting of series of tables as well as maps projecting genetic markers onto geographic grids. Following the post-Soviet trajectories of these maps, I examine the ways in which human genetic diversity studies realign with renegotiations of difference in today’s Russian Federation. The exploration of the Soviet case of human genetic diversity research contributes to our understanding of the varied ways in which racializing discourses were entangled in the project of modernization. (shrink)

Die Leitfragen dieser wahrheitstheoretischen Interpretation lauten: Welche Rolle spielt die Wahrheitsfrage in der ‚Kritik der reinen Vernunft‘ generell und in den einzelnen Abteilungen der Untersuchung? Welche Wahrheitskonzeption vertritt Kant, mit welchen Argumenten und welche Kritik konkurrierender philosophischer Positionen ist damit verbunden? Alle Hauptabteilungen der Kritik der reinen Vernunft werden in diesem Lichte erklärt, geprüft und kommentiert. Entgegen der verbreitenden Tendenz, den Wahrheitsbegriff bei der Interpretation der Kritik der reinen Vernunft in den Hintergrund treten zu lassen, wird demonstriert, dass sich deren (...) zentrale Philosopheme in wahrheitstheoretischer Perspektive erschließen. Indem sie die Wahrheitsfrage als Schlüssel zum adäquaten Verständnis der Kritik der reinen Vernunft erweist, eröffnet die Arbeit ein neues Verständnis der Kritik der reinen Vernunft und der kantischen Transzendentalphilosophie. Das zentrale Ergebnis der Arbeit integriert exegetischen und die systematischen Fragestellungen: Es besteht in dem Nachweis, dass Kant in der ‚Kritik der reinen Vernunft‘ durch die immanente Kritik des Erkenntnisvermögens das Widerspruchsprinzip, das transzendentale Prinzip analytischer Urteile, um ein transzendentales Prinzip synthetischer Urteile ergänzt. Dadurch wird die Wahrheitsskepsis sowohl in der rationalistischen als auch in der empiristischen Variante ausgeräumt und die Erkenntnisansprüche reiner Vernunft in ihre Grenzen gesetzt. (shrink)

After decades of specialization within the sciences, the development and application of implantable microchips and biosensors are now being made possible by a growing convergence among seemingly disparate scientific disciplines including, among others, biology, informatics, chemistry, and engineering. This convergence of diverse scientific disciplines is the basis for the creation of new technologies that will have significant medical potential. As of today, implantable microchips and biosensors are being used as mental prostheses to compensate for a loss of normal function, to (...) remotely monitor patients' vital signs, to control the delivery of medications, and to communicate with geographically distant healthcare professionals and the outside environment. (shrink)

In today’s highly dynamic societies, moral norms and values are subject to change. Moral change is partly driven by technological developments. For instance, the introduction of robots in elderly care practices requires caregivers to share moral responsibility with a robot (see van Wynsberghe 2013 ). Since we do not know what elements of morality will change and how they will change (see van der Burg 2003 ), moral education should aim at fostering what has been called “moral resilience” (Swierstra 2013 (...) ). We seek to fill two gaps in the existing literature: (i) research on moral education has not paid enough attention to the development of moral resilience; (ii) the very limited literature on moral resilience does not conceptualise moral resilience in relation to new technological developments. We argue that philosophical accounts of moral education need to do justice to the importance of moral resilience, and that a specific form of moral resilience should be conceptualised as “technomoral resilience” to underline the added value of cultivating moral resilience in relation to technomoral change. We illustrate the role of technomoral resilience in practice by looking at the context of elderly care. To make the first step towards an account of how technomoral resilience can be fostered in moral education, we propose that moral education shall focus on a triangle of capacities: (1) moral imagination, (2) a capacity for critical reflection, and (3) a capacity for maintaining one’s moral agency in the face of disturbances. (shrink)

Los procesos educativos deben asumir de modo expreso, reflexiva y críticamente nuestros ethos originarios (histórica, filosófica y antropológicamente hablando), las condiciones de marginalidad y exclusión de la mayoría de la población mundial, y la de nuestro país dentro de la planificación del desarrollo global. Y deben, desde esta reflexión, asumir el progreso científico y tecnológico que se transfiere y realiza, en los diferentes países como en las universidades, teniendo como fin la satisfacción de nuestras necesidades integrales, y no la inserción (...) de la dominación cultural y la explotación económica. En este libro, el método analéctico está tomado, no como receta mágica, sino como instrumento de análisis, intervención y transformación de la subjetividad y de la realidad. No está abordado como una esencia que pueda totalizarse, de allí la mayor inquietud de desplegarlo en las demás dimensiones teórico-prácticas, ya que en ese mismo despliegue se hace posible la articulación transformadora con la realidad socio-histórica en sus distintas facetas. Carlos Francisco Bauer es Profesor de Filosofía, Profesor de Historia, Licenciado en Filosofía y Doctor en Filosofía por la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. También es Profesor en la Universidad Federal de Integración Latinoamericana, en Brasil. Allí, aborda las materias Ética y Ciencia e Introducción al Pensamiento Científico desde la perspectiva descolonizadora. En 2011, obtuvo el Primer Premio en el VIII Concurso Internacional de Ensayo "Pensar a Contracorriente", La Habana 2011. En 2012, en el marco de la Jornada de trabajo por la Paz y el medio ambiente de La Habana, convocada por Fidel Castro, el Profesor Bauer participó del conversatorio que dio origen al libro Fidel Castro con los intelectuales, que fue publicado ese mismo año por la Editorial José Martí y presentado desde Casa de las Américas en simultáneo para varias capitales del mundo. PROMETEO LIBROS ARGENTINA Este libro contiene el desarrollo de los siguientes temas, entre otros: - Punto de partida: desmitificación, afirmación del nosotros y vosotros - Crítica a la modernidad como totalidad subjetiva desde la meta-física de la alteridad - Levinas o el "otro" para una exterioridad - Hacia una analogía arquitectónica - Deconstrucción del sistema hegemónico - Hacia un proyecto de liberación cultural - Camino hacia una política latinoamericana - El giro o viraje marxista. ¡Marx a la vista! - Retomando el planteo inicial camino hacia la política - Eurocentrismo: ¿un artificio sin límite? - Primer Manifiesto de la Filosofía de la Liberación Con este libro usted tendrá un interesante análisis. ¡Adquiera ya este libro y aproveche esta interesante lectura! TAGS: filosofía, colonización, Latinoamérica, política, Sudamerica, eurocentrismo, soberanía. (shrink)

In der Theologie wird Habermas oftmals mit einer gewissen Skepsis begegnet, da seine Einstellungen gegenuber der Religion durchaus kontrovers sind. Sie haben sich bis in die Gegenwart hinein stetig weiterentwickelt, so dass sein Werk insgesamt bedeutende Potentiale hinsichtlich der gesellschaftlichen Rolle von Religion birgt - und daruber hinaus auch hinsichtlich derjenigen von Bildung. Daniel Tobias Bauer rekonstruiert beide Entwicklungslinien bis in die Gegenwart hinein und uberfuhrt sie in den praktisch-theologischen Diskurs. Dies geschieht methodisch anhand Habermas' These, dass bedeutende geistesgeschichtliche (...) Begriffe ursprunglich in der Religion verankert waren und nur aus dieser Verwurzelung heraus gegenwartig angemessen zu verstehen sind. So wird das semantische Potential des Bildungsbegriffs aus seiner Verwurzelung in der Religion erschlossen, hermeneutisch reflektiert und der Bezug sowohl auf Habermas' Bestimmungen als auch auf die gegenwartige praktisch-theologische Diskurslage aufgezeigt. (shrink)

Two questions often shape our view of the world. On the one hand, we ask what there is, on the other hand, we ask what there ought to be. Empirical research and normative theory, the methodological traditions concerned with these questions, entered a difficult relationship, from at least as early as around the time of the advent of modern sciences. To this day, there remains a strong separation between the two domains, with both tending to neglect discourses and results from (...) the other. Contrary to a verdict of strict segregation between »is« and »ought«, there are, nowadays, various attempts to integrate both theoretical approaches. This calls for a newly intensified discourse on the relation between empirical research and normative theory. In this volume, scholars from different disciplines – including psychology, sociology, economics, and philosophy – discuss possible desired or undesired influences on, and limits of, the integration of these two approaches. (shrink)

We report the results of a vignette study with an online sample of the German adult population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distribution decisions. We asked participants to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The study systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that (...) participants distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is partially compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is given a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of participants being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need. (shrink)

In the advent of the 21st century there can be no doubt that we have entered uncharted territory as we continue to employ diverse information and communication technologies within healthcare. This is simply a matter of fact, at least for the Western world. But, as a question of value, what are the ethical and social ramifications of this healthcare trek? What assessments can we render on this murky, barely explored topography? A utopian answer is that ICT would deliver us to (...) a technologic garden of healthcare delights. Here, health-related information and services abound and healthcare professionals and patients, under the protection of an electronic, global umbrella, operate in perfect harmony for the good of patients. (shrink)

Needs play a key role in many fields of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, different conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a normatively relevant need) have been proposed. Many of them include (in one way or the other) needs for survival, decency, belonging, and autonomy. Little work has been done on how these kinds of needs are evaluated in terms of (...) their significance for distributive justice. To begin closing this gap, we investigate the role of the four aforementioned kinds of needs for impartial observers. We do so in two empirical studies. The first study asks participants to evaluate the importance of each of the four kinds of needs separately. We find that different levels of importance are attributed to the kinds of needs, which places them in a hierarchy. The second study asks participants to make distributive decisions. Results further support the hierarchy found in the first study and, additionally, reveal that participants tend to make coherent allocation decisions. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the currently sparse literature on transnational families and gender. It focuses on the retrospective accounts of Caribbean-born adults who as children were serial migrants, joining their parents in the UK following a period of separation. It considers aspects of their relationships with their siblings and with their mothers and fathers. The article illuminates what the serial migrants viewed as contradictory everyday practices that produced ‘non-shared environments’. It discusses three ways in which transnationalism appeared to (...) be a central part of the serial migrants’ family lives. First, it was embodied. Second, it was lived as cultural difference between Caribbean-born and UK-born siblings. Third, it was reported to be evident in parental practices. The article illustrates the importance of viewing gendered narratives in a psychosocial intersectional perspective. (shrink)

Narrative has proven itself a continuous as well as adaptable means for environmentally oriented expression. Its role goes beyond the mediation of pre-existing knowledge imported into the realm of storytelling from other domains; rather, influential models of the natural world tend to circulate as storyworlds. This special issue of SubStance proceeds from the premise that narratives are not only a sequence of signs encoding a story but also “invisible, elusive representations that exist only in the mind”. Narrative forms generate and (...) transfer environmental knowledge; moreover, any specifically narrative concerns are important contributing factors to the models of agency, change... (shrink)

Article enumerates memoirs and diaries written between the late 16th and the middle of the 17th century in which Russian threads occur. As the review of source texts, it acts as an introduction to research on rich and detailed image of Russia and Russians, emerged from many relics of Old Polish memoirism. Paper debriefs also a current studies related to this issue.

Macphail’s comparative approach to intelligence focused on associative processes, an orientation inconsistent with more multifaceted lay and scientific understandings of the term. His ultimate emphasis on associative processes indicated few differences in intelligence among vertebrates. We explore options more attuned to common definitions by considering intelligence in terms of richness of representations of the world, the interconnectivity of those representations, the ability to flexibly change those connections, knowledge, and individual differences. We focus on marine mammals, represented by the amphibious pinnipeds (...) and the aquatic cetaceans and sirenians, as animals that transitioned from a terrestrial existence to an aquatic one, experiencing major changes in ecological pressures. They adapted with morphological transformations related to streamlining the body, physiological changes in respiration and thermoregulation, and sensory/perceptual changes, including echolocation capabilities and diminished olfaction in many cetaceans, both in-air and underwater visual focus, and enhanced senses of touch in pinnipeds and sirenians. Having a terrestrial foundation on which aquatic capacities were overlaid likely affected their cognitive abilities. Vocal and behavioral observational learning capabilities in the wild and in laboratory experiments suggest versatility in group coordination. Empirical reports on aspects of intelligent behavior like problem-solving, spatial learning, and concept learning by various species of cetaceans and pinnipeds, suggest rich cognitive abilities. The high energy demands of the brain suggest brain-intelligence relationships might be fruitful areas for the study when specific hypotheses are considered, e.g., brain mapping indicates hypertrophy of specific sensory areas in marine mammals. Modern neuroimaging techniques provide ways to study neural connectivity, and the patterns of connections between sensory, motor, and other cortical regions provide a biological framework for exploring how animals represent and flexibly use information in navigating and learning about their environment. At this stage of marine mammal research, it would still be prudent to follow Macphail’s caution that it is premature to make strong comparative statements without more empirical evidence, but an approach that includes learning more about how animals flexibly link information across multiple representations could be a productive way of comparing species by allowing them to use their specific strengths within comparative tasks. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response To June Boyce-Tillman, “Towards an Ecology of Music Education”Elizabeth BauerJune Boyce-Tillman explores the values implicit in the Western musical traditions that also dominate music education. She examines the five interlocking areas of materials, expression, construction, values, and spirituality and how these areas create a more holistic way of conceptualizing the musical experience within music education. By describing the divide between the values of system A and system B, (...) Boyce-Tillman reminds us that these issues are persistent and demand our constant attention as music educators. She supports the conviction that music [End Page 186] curricula should not be dictated by a national curriculum. Instead, education should be a powerful way of supporting the dominant value system of a culture. As an educator focusing on the population of students with special needs, I find myself agreeing with her advocacy of holistic education and suggest that she look at the model of special education to implement this ecology of music education. Boyce-Tillman's proposal evokes a number of responses, of which I will mention two.My first response is to her belief in the individual within the community. This is often problematic in current educational circles. States and countries are being held to standardized curricula. While in and of themselves standards are not bad because they set educational expectations, dictated curricula do not allow for individuality and creativity. Special education addresses this problem by the use of an individualized education plan (IEP). This plan is devised to meet the abilities and capabilities of each individual student. An IEP states the educational goals for the student with special needs for one academic year. Although the IEP contains year-long educational goals, it also contains the methods for how a student will meet those goals. No two students with special needs will have the same educational curriculum. This idea is supported by humanistic ideas in that the individual child is more important than a fixed curriculum. Furthermore, the IEP is developed by all teachers working with the child. For example, a child with Down syndrome normally works with a speech therapist, physical therapist, occupational therapist, general education teacher, and several other subject specific teachers (music, art, physical education, and so on). During the creation of the IEP, all therapists and teachers work together to devise the best educational plan for the student. This helps to ensure continuity between therapies and teaching methods.Currently, many music teachers are excluded from the process of devising the IEP. This also supports Boyce-Tillman's ideas on how national curricula often support the dominant value systems and reinforce the notion of subjugating other value systems. However, I propose that the inclusion of the music teacher in the IEP process because music class is one of the easiest ways to make the student with special needs feel part of a community. The music classroom supports the idea of working together to accomplish a common goal.My second response relates to the valuing of process. While Western culture has typically placed value on product, the converse is true in special education. Throughout the devising of the IEP, the process of learning is valued. Although special education teachers have an ultimate goal for what the student is to accomplish, it is more important to examine the process of how the student achieves that goal. Furthermore, students with special needs are not given rigid time-lines in which they have to accomplish a goal. Instead, a student is allowed to move at his or her own pace. [End Page 187]Moreover, while the students with special needs are moving at their own pace, they are also nurtured by the teacher. In the United States it is common for students with special needs to be educated in the classroom with their nondisabled peers. This is referred to as inclusion. For certain parts of the day, the students with special needs may leave the regular classroom and receive tutoring in certain subject areas by the special education teacher. Many teachers who do not have experience in teaching students with special needs have noticed how the students with special needs achieve more when they are with their special education... (shrink)

Domestic violence is an important social problem that strongly impacts the healthcare system. It is estimated that two to four million women are physically abused each year by their husbands, ex-husbands, or boyfriends. Many of these abused women enter the medical system as patients with physical injuries, somatic symptoms, or psychiatric problems. These patients represent a large proportion of women patients in a variety of clinical settings: 22–35% of women presenting to emergency departments, up to 37% of obstetric patients, and (...) over 25% of women seeking primary care. Despite the significant health implications of marital abuse, healthcare providers often fail to identify and treat this problem when signs are present. (shrink)

A review of the paradigms of social influence – suggestion, imitation, normalization, conformity, compliance, conversion – leads me to diagnose a triple malaise: the shrinkage of paradigms to cognitive dual-processing theories of information; the dominant methodology of laboratory experiments falls short of the reality of (mass) communication; and the focus of social influence on inter-subjectivity is only half of the story. I will suggest two extensions of social influence theory to include mass media communication and the inter-objectivity of artefacts. We (...) need to be able to conceptualize the modalities of why, how and to what effect somebody might put up a wall to influence neighbours instead of contenting themselves with putting up a public note ‘Do not trespass!’. Social influence by fait accompli needs to be within the remit of social psychology, otherwise it loses its relevance in a technological society where artefacts mediate most inter-personal relations. (shrink)

We present a vignette study conducted with a quota sample of the German population (n = 400). Subjects had to redistribute a good between two hypothetical persons who contributed equally to the available amount but differed in quantity needed and the reason for their neediness. On a within-subjects level, we tested for the effects of need, accountability, and resource availability on their third-party distribution decisions. Between subjects, we further varied the kinds of needs: The persons either needed the good as (...) a means to survive, to live a decent life, to participate in society, or to be autonomous. Despite equal productivity, the mean share allocated to the needier person was significantly higher than an equal share. However, this share turned out significantly smaller when the needier person was accountable for needing more than the other. Nonetheless, even if accountable, the needier person still got a share larger than their contribution would suggest. When there was a surplus of resources, the needier person got an even higher share than when resources were scarce. (shrink)