We should not admit categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well formed strings. Syntactically well formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these and ought to be able to. Gareth Evans’ generality constraint, though Evans himself restricted it, should be viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and propositional thought. For (a) even well formed but (...) semantically cross-categorial strings often do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically; (c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings with inferential roles. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

What is conceptual art? Is it really a kind of art in its own right? Is it clever – or too clever? Of all the different art forms it is perhaps conceptual art which at once fascinates and infuriates the most. In this much-needed book Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens demystify conceptual art using the sharp tools of philosophy. They explain how conceptual art is driven by ideas rather than the manipulation of paint and physical materials; how it challenges the (...) very basis of what we can know about art, as well as our received ideas of beauty; and why conceptual art requires us to rethink concepts fundamental to art and aesthetics, such as artistic interpretation and appreciation. Including helpful illustrations of the work of celebrated conceptual artists from Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth and Piero Manzoni to Dan Perjovschi and Martin Creed, Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? is a superb starting point for anyone intrigued but perplexed by conceptual art - and by art in general. It will be particularly helpful to students of philosophy, art and visual studies seeking an introduction not only to conceptual art but fundamental topics in art and aesthetics. (shrink)

One in three university students experiences mental health problems during their study. A similar percentage leaves higher education without obtaining the degree for which they enrolled. Research suggests that both mental health problems and academic underperformance could be caused by students lacking control and purpose while they are adjusting to tertiary education. Currently, universities are not designed to cater to all the personal needs and mental health problems of large numbers of students at the start of their studies. Within the (...) literature aimed at preventing mental health problems among students (e.g., anxiety or depression), digital forms of therapy recently have been suggested as potentially scalable solutions to address these problems. Integrative psychological artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of a chatbot, for example, shows great potential as an evidence-based solution. At the same time, within the literature aimed at improving academic success, the online life-crafting intervention in which students write about values and passions, goals, and goal-attainment plans has shown to improve the academic performance and retention rates of students. Because the life-crafting intervention is delivered through the curriculum and doesn’t bear the stigma that is associated with therapy, it can reach larger populations of students. But life-crafting lacks the means for follow-up or the interactiveness that online AI-guided therapy can offer. In this paper, we propose to integrate the current literature on chatbot interventions aimed at the mental health of students with research about a life-crafting intervention that uses an inclusive curriculum-wide approach. When a chatbot asks students to prioritize both academic as well as social and health-related goals and provides personalized follow-up coaching, this can prevent -often interrelated- academic and mental health problems. Right on-time delivery, and personalized follow-up questions enhance the effects of both -originally separated- intervention types. Research on this new combination of interventions should use design principles that increase user-friendliness and monitor the technology acceptance of its participants. (shrink)

Background:Through the Norwegian ethics project, ethics activities have been implemented in the health and care sector in more than 200 municipalities.Objectives:To study outcomes of the ethics activities and examine which factors promote and inhibit significance and sustainability of the activities.Research design:Two online questionnaires about the municipal ethics activities.Participants and research context:A total of 137 municipal contact persons for the ethics project answered the first survey, whereas 217 ethics facilitators responded to the second survey.Ethical considerations:Based on informed consent, the study was (...) approved by the Data Protection Official of the Norwegian Social Science Data Services.Findings:Around half of the respondents found the ethics project to have been highly significant for daily professional practice. Outcomes include better handling of ethical challenges, better employee cooperation, better service quality, and better relations to patients and next of kin. Factors associated with sustainability and/or significance of the activities were sufficient support from stakeholders, sufficient available time, and ethics facilitators having sufficient knowledge and skills in ethics and access to supervision.Discussion:This study shows that ethics initiatives can be both sustainable and significant for practice. There is a need to create regional or national structures for follow-up and develop more comprehensive ethics training for ethics facilitators.Conclusion:It is both possible and potentially important to implement clinical ethics support activities in community health and care services systematically on a large scale. Future ethics initiatives in the community sector should be designed in light of documented promoting and inhibiting factors. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

" De quoi demain sera-t-il fait? " interroge Victor Hugo. Un philosophe, une historienne répondent au long d'un dialogue serré, exigeant. Pourquoi ont-ils choisi de faire ce livre ensemble? En raison d'une longue amitié, au nom d'une histoire commune, en vertu de la qualité d'un débat qui n'a jamais cessé entre eux depuis qu'à la fin des années soixante la jeune étudiante découvrit l'importance de ce penseur de quinze ans son aîné qui, avec d'autres, réveillait l'esprit critique de toute une (...) génération. Si les points de vue sont différents, l'héritage intellectuel est commun. Et c'est cet héritage qu'ils s'attachent à inventorier avant de circonscrire des enjeux majeurs de notre temps : comment penser la différence dans l'universel? La famille a-t-elle encore un avenir? La liberté se réduira-t-elle demain pour l'homme à l'intelligibilité des contraintes qui pèsent sur lui, ou le désir et l'imprévisible auront-ils encore leur place? Que nous dit la souffrance des animaux que nous massacrons? La page de la révolution est-elle définitivement tournée après l'échec du communisme? Est-il envisageable d'en finir une fois pour toutes avec la peine de mort? Quelles seront demain les formes nouvelles de l'antisémitisme et comment les combattre? L'échange s'achève sur un éloge de la psychanalyse, référence commune tout au long du dialogue. (shrink)

La 4e de couv. indique : "Prenant ici toute l’initiative, Elisabeth Weber a choisi, en les présentant, vingt entretiens parmi tous ceux auxquels Jacques Derrida a participé depuis près de vingt ans. Elle s’est donné pour cela un certain nombre de critères, et d’abord celui de la diversité : celle des sujets (la question des femmes, la poésie, la drogue, le sida, l’enseignement, en particulier celui de la philosophie, et, croisant tous ces thèmes, la politique et les médias), celle des (...) tons (analytique ou joueur, militant ou « autobiographique »), celle des destinataires (en France, en Europe, Outre-Altantique).". (shrink)

The tension between economic policy and health policy is a longstanding dilemma, but one that was brought to the fore with the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement in 1994. The pharmaceutical industry has long argued that intellectual property protection is vital for innovation. At the same time, there are those who counter that strong IPP negatively impacts the affordability and availability of essential medicines in developing countries. However, actors on both sides of the debate were (...) in agreement that something needed to be done to address the HIV/AIDS crisis, especially in developing countries. In response to sustained and significant pressure from civil society groups, members of the World Trade Organization agreed to the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health in 2001. The Declaration clarified that countries unable to manufacture the needed pharmaceuticals could obtain more affordable generics elsewhere if necessary. (shrink)

The expression ‘Like’ has a wide variety of uses among English and American speakers. It may describe preference, as in (1) She likes mint chip ice cream. It may be used as a vehicle of comparison, as in (2) Trieste is like Minsk on steroids.

I argue that stories are ‘equipment for living’ in two senses: retrospectively, they provide ‘configurational comprehension’ of a temporal sequence of events; prospectively, they offer templates for action. Narrative conceptions of the self appear well poised to leverage these functional roles for stories into an intuitively compelling view of self-construction as self-construal. However, the narrative conception defines selves in terms of the lives they live: a self is the protagonist in a lifelong story. And narrative structure is itself defined by (...) ‘retrospective necessity’: the meaning of events within a story is given by their contribution to that story's ending. Together, this entails that life stories hold selves metaphysically, epistemically, and practically hostage to their ends. Fortunately, narratives are just one species of interpretive frame. I suggest some alternative types of frames, including identity labels and metaphors, that support configurational comprehension, action guidance, and self construction without shackling selves to their lives’ ends. (shrink)

The Swedish welfare debate increasingly focuses on market liberal notions and its healthcare perspective aims for more patient‐centered care. This article examines the new Swedish Patient Act describing and analyzing how the patient is constructed in government documents. This study takes a Foucauldian discourse analysis approach following Willig's analysis guide. The act contains an entitlement discourse for patients and a requirement discourse for healthcare personnel. These two discourses are governed by a values‐based healthcare discourse. Neo‐liberal ideology, in the form of (...) New Public Management discourse, focusing on the value of efficiency and competition, is given a hegemonic position as laws and regulations are used to strengthen it. The new Swedish Patient Act seems to further strengthen this development. The Act underlines the increased entitlement for patients, but it is not legally binding as it offers patients only indirect entitlement to influence and control their care. To safeguard the patient's entitlement under the Patient Act, healthcare personnel should be made aware of the contents of the Act, so that they can contribute to the creation of systems and working methods that facilitate respect of the Act's provisions in daily healthcare work. (shrink)

This paper examines two recent examples of compulsory licensing legislation: one globally embraced regime and one internationally controversial regime operating under the same WTO rules. In particular, we consider Canadian legislation and the use of compulsory licensing for HIV/AIDS drugs destined for a developing country. This is then contrasted with the conditions under which Thai authorities are pursuing compulsory licenses, the outcomes of their compulsory licenses, as well as the likely impact of the Thai policy. Finally, we construct a rubric (...) to evaluate characteristics of a successful regime. This is used to analyze the Canadian and Thai regimes and frame the expected implications of each national policy. It is hoped that the assessment will guide changes to compulsory licensing design to ensure that legitimate regimes are embraced while illegitimate ones are disallowed. (shrink)

Given the high prevalence and dramatic impact of being bullied at school, it is crucial to get more insight into how teachers can reduce bullying. So far, few instruments have measured elementary teachers’ responses to bullying. This study investigated the validity of the student-reported Teachers’ Responses to Bullying Questionnaire. The factor structure and measurement invariance were tested across two educational contexts among fourth and fifth grade students from Italy and Belgium. Furthermore, associations between student-perceived teachers’ responses and students’ bullying behavior (...) were examined. Confirmatory Factor Analysis supported the predicted five-factor structure, distinguishing Non-Intervention, Disciplinary Methods, Group Discussion, Mediation, and Victim Support. A partial factor means invariance model was found, allowing for valid comparisons between the Italian and Belgian educational contexts. Significant associations were found between self-reported, but not peer-nominated, bullying behavior and most student-perceived teachers’ responses. (shrink)

It is widely assumed, both in philosophy and in the cognitive sciences, that perception essentially involves a relative or egocentric frame of reference. Levinson has explicitly challenged this assumption, arguing instead in favour of the 'neo-Whorfian' hypothesis that the frame of reference dominant in a given language infiltrates spatial representations in non-linguistic, and in particular perceptual, modalities. Our aim in this paper is to assess Levinson's neo-Whorfian hypothesis at the philosophical level and to explore the further possibility that perception may (...) not just use frames of reference other than the relative one but may also, in some cases at least, be perspective-free. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungKnochen waren im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert ein unverzichtbarer, größtenteils importabhängiger Rohstoff der chemischen Industrie, die daraus Düngemittel, Tierfutter, Leim, Gelatine, Seife und andere Produkte herstellte. Das Thema Knochenverwertung wurde im Schulunterricht der NS-Zeit genutzt, um Jugendlichen die Relevanz des Vierjahresplans und der deutschen Autarkiepolitik zu verdeutlichen und sie zu motivieren, sich im Rahmen der Altstoffsammlungen an der heimischen Erfassung dieses Rohmaterials zu beteiligen. Diverse NS-Instanzen hatten ein differenziertes Spektrum von Lehrmitteln erarbeitet, um die Behandlung dieses Themas in der (...) Schule zu unterstützen. Der Artikel untersucht, welche Botschaften diese damals hochmodernen Unterrichtsmedien vermittelten und zeigt, wie auch weniger ideologieanfällig scheinende Fächer, etwa der Chemieunterricht, politisch instrumentalisiert wurden. (shrink)

Mind and the Body Politic is a collection of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's essays and lectures on political theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, and the theory of biography.

In “Games and the Art of Agency,” Thi Nguyen argues that games both highlight and foster a profound complexity in human motivation, in the form of “purposeful and managed agential disunity.” I agree that human agency is “fluid and fleeting” rather than stable and unified; but I argue that Nguyen’s analysis itself relies on a traditional conception of selves as enduring goal-driven agents which his discussion calls into question. Without this conception, games look more like life, and both look riskier, (...) than we might otherwise hope. (shrink)

Psychoanalytica Elisabeth Young-Bruehl gaat nader in op de bewering van Jonathan Sacks in diens openingslezing dat het Verbond van Noach gold voor alle mensen, niet slechts een groep uitverkorenen, en dat het daarmee ruim baan gaf tolerantie en vrijheid van godsdienst. Young-Bruehl is eerder van het tegendeel overtuigd: het Verbond legt wetten op die al wie ze niet gehoorzaamt, uitsluiten. De monotheïstische godsdiensten blijven daarmee bij uitstek intrinsiek autoritair en sadomasochistisch van aard.

RESUMENLas clases naturales tienen un importante valor heurístico que no ha sido explorado a nivel epistémico. Una revisión crítica del concepto de “clase natural” sugerido por la teoría del Cúmulo de Propiedades Homeostáticas (HPC), desde la complejidad y la causalidad, muestra que es incompatible con las prácticas científicas, en especial las de la biología. Debido a los múltiples problemas que presenta en ese ámbito científico el concepto de ‘clase natural’ debería ser reconfigurado con el fin de estar acorde con las (...) inferencias explicativas y predictivas de la biología. Esto tendría como consecuencia un mejor entendimiento filosófico de los procesos y entidades naturales a la vez que ayudaría a resolver algunos problemas filosóficos y científicos.PALABRAS CLAVECLASE NATURAL, CAUSALIDAD, COMPLEJIDAD, PRACTICAS CIENTÍFICAS, ESPACIOS DE POSIBILIDAD EPISTÉMICOSABSTRACTNatural kinds have an important epistemic value that has not been studied due to the fact that the philosophical research has been focused on both semantics and logical aspects. I propose a critical review from causality and complexity to the concept of «natural kind» advanced by Homeostatic Properties Cluster Theory (HPC) in order to demonstrate that the kinds in the HPC style s are not supported by scientific practices such as biology. I think that a different concept of “natural kind” should be based on scientific practices in order to obtain a better philosophical understanding compared to HPC of both, natural processes and obtaining successful inferences. I hold that this epistemic approach provides us a new characterization of “natural kind” that will be useful as a unifying concept of natural phenomena, as well as for generating new spaces of epistemic possibilityKEY WORDSNATURAL KINDS, CAUSALITY, COMPLEXITY, SCIENTIFIC PRACTICES, EPISTEMIC POSSIBILITY SPACES. (shrink)

To explore literary silence is to explore the relationships between literary texts and the silence of the ineffable. It is to enquire what dynamics texts develop as they strive to 'say the unsayable', and it is to think literature as a silence that speaks itself. This study describes these literary and silent dynamics through readings of Pascal's Pensées, Rousseau's Rêveries, and Beckett's trilogy Molloy, Malone meurt, and L'Innommable. It contributes to our understanding of three major writers and challenges our idea (...) of what silence is. The subject of silence and of the ineffable has a long philosophical and critical tradition. A careful study of this tradition reveals the dominance of a limiting dualistic understanding of silence and its relationship to noise or language: silence becomes the negative other, the beyond, about which there remains nothing to say. The study of literary silence seeks rather to trace a language that becomes its own silence. It compromises the attempt to think a silence that moves within and through texts, that is inherent to the literary expression. Central to this theoretical endeavour are thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Gadamer, and Vattimo. The theoretical understanding of silence permits an effective methodology for reading literary silence. Notions of repetition, the aporia and the implosion, which are developed in reference to Kierkegaard and Bataille, describe textual strategies of literary silence and structure the readings. Finally, the reading of literary silence has its point of reference in writers like Mallarmé, Blanchot, and Beckett. It is their texts that have taught us to become topological readers, to move in and out of texts' movements; they have shown us how the literary expression is irreducible to linear, meaning oriented language. As readers of such texts we have been prepared to read the dynamics of the unsayable, and finally to start discerning the silences of the literary. (shrink)

In 1885, the Austrian music critic and scholar Friedrich von Hausegger published his book “Die Musik als Ausdruck” (“Music as Expression”) which may be understood as an answer to Eduard Hanslick’s “Vom Musikalisch-Schönen” (“On the Musically Beautiful”, 1854). Unlike Hanslick, Hausegger takes the body as central to any adequate account of music. Hence Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, in particular his book “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872), becomes a central reference for Hausegger. His treatise is a (...) detailed and systematic reconstruction of the probable development of musical expression. The new edition is the first to present the complete text of the second edition of 1887 (amended by Hausegger) in modern Latin typeface. (shrink)

By means of exploring the idiosyncratic form of political intimacy generated by anti-cosmopolitanism, and assuming an analytical and critical stance towards the ...

There is a spectrum of identities: from the mathematical, through cases where specific criteria matter, to the complex or intuitive cases where we can recognize identity but don't know what the criteria should be. In a series of essays by senior figures in the sciences and humanities, this book examines what identity means across a number of academic disciplines. Topics range from mathematics, through the rules of recognition in biology and the law, to comprehending the individual in the visual, performing (...) and literary arts, and ultimately to notions of the philosophy of existence. Using the theme of identity to make new interdisciplinary connections, the contributors offer interested readers a glimpse into their specialist subjects and suggest new ways for students and scholars to think about identity in relation to their own work. (shrink)

Health technologies such as apps for digital contract tracing [DCT] played a crucial role in containing and combating infections during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their primary function was to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by consistently generating and disseminating information related to various events such as encounters, vaccinations or infections. While the functionality of DCT has been well researched, the necessity of transparency in the use of DCT and the consent to share sensitive information such as users’ health, vaccination and location (...) status remains unclear. On one hand, DCT enabled the continuous monitoring of various risk factors, including data-based calculations of infection probabilities. On the other hand, digital monitoring of health risks was closely associated with various uncertainties, such as the ambiguous storage of personal data and its potential future misuse, e.g., by tech companies or health authorities. Our contribution aims to retrospectively analyze the COVID-19 pandemic from a post-pandemic perspective and utilize it as a case study for the implementation of new technological measures. We argue that under the condition of voluntary use of DCT, transparency plays a key role in convincing individuals to install health technologies on their mobile devices, keep them activated and consent to the sharing of sensitive data. We support our argument with qualitative data from an expert survey conducted between 2020 and 2021 and analyzed according to the principles of Grounded Theory. (shrink)