This chapter contains sections titled: The Invention of the Picturesque Style Olmsted and Central Park: Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics “The Gates” and the Meaning of the Park Notes.

Wild places are rich with meaning. This runs contrary to accounts of vast undeveloped regions like the Arctic as being devoid of meaning (and thus open for—or even in need of—resource exploitation) and to accounts that dismiss conceptualizations of the Arctic as containing substantial wilderness landscapes as an invalid colonial concept. There is rather an unappreciated commonality between Indigenous conceptions of place and conceptualizations of wilderness: both recognize undeveloped landscapes as substantial founts of meaning that are (...) not the product of their own projections. Their senses of these meanings are not equivalent but overlap in important respects and are shared by many cultures across the globe, thus challenging premises of relativism and of meaning as merely locally produced. Furthermore, meaning is a topic often overlooked or marginalized in the context of climate change adaptation and nature preservation. The Arctic is considered as a specific case study to illustrate these points as it is one of the world's largest undeveloped areas and is particularly affected by climate change. The Arctic is rich with meaning for the Inuit and other residents who depend on it for sustenance. It also contains some of the most extensive and least developed or otherwise impacted and manipulated landscapes on the planet—a relatively small portion of which is protected as parks and wilderness, though substantial in comparison to temperate or tropical regions. Climate change threatens not only the traditional subsistence livelihoods of Arctic residents, but also the emergent meanings that inhere in these landscapes. Simultaneously, the meaning and value of protected Arctic landscapes, particularly those designated as wilderness, is also under duress. Climate change is impacting the Arctic more than many other areas, posing a threat to its meanings as a home and as a wilderness. Acknowledging the centrality of meaning, while rejecting the “received idea” inherited from constructivist thought that meaning is overlaid on a passive landscape open for—or even in need of—human created meanings, can lead to new approaches to nature preservation and to human adaptation in the era of climate change. (shrink)

In modern medicine, health risks are often managed through the collection of health data and subsequent intervention. One of the goals of clinical genetics, for example, is to identify genetic predisposition to disease so that individuals can intervene to prevent potential harms. But recently, some clinicians have suggested that patients should undergo less testing and monitoring in an effort to reduce overdiagnosis and overtreatment. In this paper, I explore how clinicians navigate the tension between identifying real disease risks for (...) their patients with concerns about overdiagnosis and overtreatment. I focus on clinicians ordering genetic testing for inherited cardiovascular diseases. Of the genes determined to be “clinically actionable” by the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG), half are related to cardiovascular diseases. But, due in part to high levels of uncertainty surrounding cardiovascular genetics, there is still disagreement within the field about how to order and interpret these tests. Based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 clinicians who order genetic testing for cardiovascular diseases, I find that there is considerable variability in the ways that clinicians determine which types of genetic tests are appropriate for their patients and how they interpret test results. Most importantly, I find that many providers do not presume that more genetic data will lead to better care. Instead, increased genetic data can lead to confusion and inappropriate treatment. This re-valuation of the utility of medical data is crucial for bioethicists to explore, especially as medical fields are sorting through increasing amounts of data. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Hugh McLachlan argues from a deontological perspective that the most ethical means of distributing scarce supplies of an effective vaccine in the context of an influenza pandemic would be via an equal lottery. I argue that, even if one accepts McLachlan's ethical theory, it does not follow that one should accept the vaccine lottery. McLachlan's argument relies upon two suppressed premises which, I maintain, one need not accept; and it misconstrues vaccination programmes as clinical interventions targeted (...) solely at protecting the health of vaccinated individuals, rather than as public health interventions targeted at protecting the health of the population as a whole. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:To Bear Man's Greatness:On the Moral-Theological Message of a Recent Document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Samaritanus Bonus1Andrzej KucinskiBackground and ObjectiveWhen, in 1582, Camillus de Lellis, the later-canonized founder of the Order of Camillians, the "servants of the sick," had the inspiration to found a society of men who would serve the sick for religious motives,2 the revolutionary nature of such a decision was clear. (...) An unprecedented hope broke into the world of the hopelessly marginalized, who did not have sufficient means to be cared for at home, and therefore had to go to hospitals, where they were often assisted only by untrained caregivers, who did so under obligation because they were either criminals or compelled by economic need to perform such menial service. This hope consisted in the message that the love of God urges the voluntary and sacrificial service of dedication to the sick, and especially to those who will not recover from their illness. However, this service should be holistic, because the welfare of the needy encompasses all the dimensions of the human person: the body and the soul, but also the spirit.The letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) Samaritanus Bonus, dated July 14, 2020—the liturgical day of commemoration of Camillus of Lellis—on the care of persons in the critical and [End Page 753] terminal phases of life, seeks to promote the same concern for comprehensive service to the sick out of respect for the divinely anchored dignity of the human person. The letter suggests that it is this dignity, and therefore the incomparable greatness of each human being, that makes it necessary, contrary to any logic of efficiency and a cost–benefit calculation, to persevere at the side of the (terminally) ill until their natural death.This article aims to highlight some (in the author's opinion) central elements of this letter, and to comment on them specifically against the background of the magisterial positions underlying the document. For this purpose, I will often quote Robert Spaemann, the German philosopher who died in 2018 and whose ethical views appear in parts as well suited to illuminate from the ethical point of view the foundations of thought of the universal Church magisterium with regard to the relevant topics and to prepare these foundations for a scientific discussion. However, it is explicitly not the aim here to engage in such a discussion or to analyze the already existing relevant contributions. Rather, it is to deepen the current Church teaching in certain aspects on the basis of this new document. In this sense, contributions from the press conference on its presentation on September 22, 2020, will also be drawn upon. After the exploration of what one could understand as "core" of the letter according to a certain reading of the document, some concretizations follow under the guiding perspective of the "Catholic" approach to the terminally ill.The Core of the DocumentThe structure of Samaritanus Bonus will be briefly described: An introduction, in which above all the need for magisterial intervention is justified, is followed by chapter 1, on the comprehensive character of the care which is always possible for persons in critical states, according to the principle that "the judgement that an illness is incurable cannot mean that care has come at an end" (8).3 Chapter 2 then further explicates the grounds of Christian hope in the face of approaching death, starting from the mystery of the Crucified, with special reference to those who stay around him at the moment of the Passion. Chapter 3 recalls the positive meaning of human life as an expression of inalienable human dignity and as the source of certain imperatives in dealing with it. A clear reference to the proclamation [End Page 754] of Pope Francis is made in chapter 4, which explains some "cultural obstacles" to the recognition of the "sacred value of every human life." Finally, chapter 5 (the longest) addresses individual bioethical, medical-ethical, legal, pastoral, and educational issues related to care at critical stages of life.In substance, the doctrine set forth in the new document... (shrink)

Introduction: Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and action research of a city in lockdown. As we write this chapter, most cities across the world are subject to a similar set of measures due to the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus, which is now a global pandemic. Independent of city size, location, or history, an observer would note that almost all cities have now ground to a halt, with their citizens being confined to their private dwellings, social and public gatherings being almost entirely (...) forbidden, and commercial areas being nearly devoid of visitors. Striking as these apparent similarities are, closer scrutiny would reveal important differences between cities and within cities – differences that can be highly relevant to consider when scholars are assessing the responses of cities to this pandemic or trying to predict the consequences of those responses. For example, the public health systems in some cities are better prepared than in others for coping with the increasing number of patients in life threatening conditions. Multigenerational households, which are associated with a greater risk for elderly members, are not equally common in all cities. Tourist destinations have taken a more severe economic hit from the lockdown than those cities which are economically less dependent upon this particular source of income. Communal celebrations in one city will result in a higher number of contagions and perhaps even deaths in this situation, whereas that same social fabric generally does contribute to a population’s health. The pandemic has also had unprecedented effects on differences and inequalities within cities. In cities in the United States, neighborhoods primarily inhabited by African Americans have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 due to living and health conditions, yet also due to the fact they disproportionately perform vital jobs. Parks and green spaces are crowded, while city centers like Amsterdam’s Red Light District have suddenly lost the bustle of tourism, providing opportunities for citizens to reoccupy scarce public spaces and reclaim ownership. Clearly, such differences between cities are in many cases only discernible to the eye of an expert, possessing the necessary background knowledge to interpret the perceptible local changes caused by the global pandemic. Typically, drawing upon his or her disciplinary training, the expert also knows how to further probe the impact of the pandemic in an appropriate way. However, compared to the usual application of expertise, this crisis situation might, in an unusual way, test even experts. For the pandemic has created a unique situation, imposing unfamiliar constraints on the health, economic, social, and other conditions of cities, constraints that interact in sometimes unexpected ways with each other. Such interactions in turn force experts to collaborate across the boundaries commonly associated with disciplines, their concepts, theories, methods, and assumptions (Klein, 1996). These brief observations of how a virus pandemic can have differential impacts upon various cities, and what this exceptional situation might mean for the application of city methods, allow us to draw a few consequences for the current context of this chapter on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. First, whenever we are investigating a complex and dynamic phenomenon it is by no means easy to determine which disciplinary perspectives are required to do justice to it. Indeed, the choice of useful disciplines can only be made after an initial overview of the situation and a preliminary selection of what appear to be the most important features of the situation. Relevance is key in guiding this selection process and scholars must remain open to the possibility that they may need to revise their earlier assessments of what is relevant and what is not. Second, if scholars from different disciplines were to study different features of a city in isolation, their ‘multidisciplinary’ account would miss important dynamic and complex interactions, such as those between a city’s demographics and geographical situation, its governance and economy. In other words, it is the integration of the perspectives of different disciplines that is crucial, as only then are such interactions taken into account. Indeed, this integration between disciplinary perspectives is what distinguishes an interdisciplinary from a multidisciplinary account. Thirdly, in addition to checking the relevance of disciplines and aiming for their integration, the outcome of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research has typically limited generalizability. Since a city is sensitive to a multitude of internal and external dynamical factors, in ways that partly rest upon its socio-cultural history, its investigation will often have the nature of a case study rather than be capable of leading to law-like insights (Krohn, 2010; Menken & Keestra, 2016). As can be seen from these three characteristics of ascertaining the relevance of different disciplinary contributions, the challenge of their integration, and the limited generalizability of their results owing to the specificity of interdisciplinary (ID) and transdisciplinary (TD) research, such research into ‘real world problems’ is clearly distinct from most monodisciplinary research. A consequence of this distinction is the absence of a general ID/TD methodology that can guide specific case studies. By contrast, the collaboration implied in such research requires researchers – and stakeholders, if they are involved – to reflect upon their potential contribution and the implicit assumptions associated with that. We will elaborate on this in the next section. Next, we offer several typologies of integration that urban scholars could employ for their research projects, after which we will offer a few brief analyses of initial collaborations of urban research. Finally, we discuss in more detail the process of the interdisciplinary research project. This will include a brief reflection upon the decision-making process that is implied in such projects. In sum, we aim to provide some guidance in conducting an ID/TD project, albeit not in the form of a definite methodology. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that there is a deep connection between home-based care, technology, and the self. Providing the means for persons to receive care at home is not merely a kindness that respects their preference to be at home: it is an important means of extending their selfhood and respecting the unique selves that they are. Home-based technologies like telemedicine and robotic care may certainly be useful tools in providing care for persons at home, but they also (...) have important implications for sustaining selfhood in ways that are of value to individuals and those who care for them. I will argue, by appealing to Hilde Lindemann’s notion of “holding” persons’ identities in place, that technological interventions are not only useful tools for improving and sustaining health and good care at home, but that they may also help to extend our personal identities and relational capacities in ways that are practically and ethically good. Because of these important goods, I will claim that there is a prima facie moral duty to do this “holding” work and that it is best done by family members and loved ones who are well suited to the job because of their history and relationship with the individual that needs to be “held” in place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking by Stephen CritesLawrence S. StepelevichStephen Crites. Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 572. Cloth, $65.00Unlike either Wittgenstein or Heidegger, or his contemporary, Schelling, there is really no “Early” or “Later” Hegel. The fundamentals of his system were, if not always fully articulated, nevertheless present from (...) the very beginning of his career. There is, in Hegel, a remarkable consistency in the development of his thought, in which the elements that comprised his final system can be detected in his earliest efforts—and it is only in this sense that one can speak of an “Early” or a “Later” Hegel. That his final expression was indeed the result of an effort, a struggle to fuse and clarify seemingly disparate elements, is the thesis of Professor Crites. In this case, the specific disparate elements that are considered are those which confronted Hegel from his earliest days as a student of theology, those elements expressed in the “Christian Drama.” Crites sets out the eight revered acts of this drama: the creation, the fall, God’s covenant with Israel, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church, and the last judgment. It is his contention that Hegel “critically engaged the claims of this mythos and the social practices associated with it.” And so, the essence of Crites’s well-written and well-researched study is to set out how this drama served as a “template that affected the way he framed other topics in the ever-widening range of his philosophical inquiry.” It is to his credit that Crites does not consider his own explication of Hegel’s preoccupation with the gospels as some sort of a “secret” key that could unlock the full meaning of Hegel’s philosophy, but nevertheless, as he rightly stresses, this preoccupation cannot be ignored—for it ultimately exercised a crucial role in the formation of that which is now taken as Hegel’s mature thought.Unlike most studies of Hegel’s development—and there are more than a few—Crites avoids taking a retrospective posture, a concluding a priori stance which would allow him to point out where and why this or that particular element was rejected or retained by Hegel, His method is historical, intent upon following Hegel’s own sometimes tortured development, until, finally in this course, we reach a point where we suddenly see that Hegel “shows clear signs of becoming what we can only call a Hegelian—or better still, he shows signs of being Hegel!”The source of this inner development begins, and is traced from, Hegel’s initial appearance as “The Model Pupil of Stuttgart” to that moment in when he stands revealed as embodying that Absolute Knowledge which concludes the Phenomenology. This path from Stuttgart to Jena, which Hegel himself might have had in mind when he spoke of the philosophical “highway of despair” is detailed by Crites with a sure hand. Every stumbling block is noted, and every new resolution ıs marked, from those first essays composed during the bitter days as Hauslehrer, through the steady advances [End Page 540] of “the Jena ‘Philosophy’ ” until the passage completes itself in the Phenomenology and its termination in the “Recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.”More than half of Crites’ extensive study is devoted to explicating how the subject of religion is dealtwith in the course of the Phenomenology. In this survey of Hegel’s most well-known work, its fundamental leitmotif emerges clearly into focus: the identification of the “portentous power of the negative” with the Death of God. This death, which is philosophically reflected in dialectical negativity, is the central moment of the gospel drama. In this act, Absolute Spirit must itself suffer and die, for “Not only the Christian God incarnate, but the absolute spirit suffers, suffers its Golgotha and dies.” It is only from this sacrifice that new life can arise—for out of it comes “the resurrection of a new human-divine totality.” What Hegel has retained of the gospel... (shrink)

There is growing interest in nature-based interventions to improve human health and wellbeing. An important nascent area is exploring the potential of outdoor therapies to treat and prevent common mental health problems like depression. In this conceptual analysis on the nature–depression nexus, we distil some of the main issues for consideration when NBIs for depression are being developed. We argue that understanding the mechanisms, or ‘active ingredients’ in NBIs is crucial to understand what works and for whom. Successfully identifying (...) modifiable mediating intervention targets will pave the way for interventions with increased efficacy. We highlight a non-exhaustive list of five clinically relevant putative, candidate mechanisms which may underly the beneficial effects of NBIs on depression: stress, rumination, mindfulness, sleep and exercise. We also make the case that when developing NBIs it is important to not neglect young people, explore personalised approaches and focus on both treatment and prevention approaches. To achieve these aims methodologically rigorous programmes of clinical research are needed that include well-powered and controlled experimental designs including randomised controlled trials, qualitative research, longitudinal studies and large prospective cohorts. (shrink)

This article seeks to assess the meaning and scope of one of Lacan's most famous and decried notion: scansion. Scansion is a notion of prosody which undoubtedly was not chosen at random by Lacan. Scanning, which proved central to his conception of the analytic cure and handling of the treatment, turns out to be a gesture of a very particular kind: through an action which involves minimal intervention is revealed a double entendre, the content of the unconscious fantasy. (...) The clinical function of scansion is hence to accentuate a ‘part’ of the subject's discourse to make it resonate, to isolate a signifier, to make it audible through its material and phonemic plasticity in its irreducible ambiguity. As the article tries to demonstrate, scansion is for Lacan of Freudian descent: clinically stemming and theoretically deduced from the principle of the determinism of the unconscious, it relies on the ‘weft’ of the dream's written fabric as evinced by The Interpretation of Dreams. (shrink)

In this book Christopher Belshaw draws on earlier work concerning death, identity, animals, immortality, extinction, and builds a large-scale argument on the value and meaning of life. Rejecting suggestions that life is sacred or intrinsically valuable, he argues instead that its value varies, and varies considerably, both within and between different kinds of things. So in some case we might have reason to improve or save a life, while in others that reason will be lacking. The book's central section (...) focuses on just one key question; that of whether we ever have reason to start lives. Not only is it denied that there is any such reason, but some sympathy is afforded to the anti-natalist contention that there is always reason against. The final chapters deal with meaning. Support is given to the sober and familiar view wherein meaning derives from an enthusiasm for, and some success with, the pursuit of worthwhile projects. Now suppose we are immortal. Or suppose, in contrast, that we face imminent extinction. Would either of these threaten meaning? The claim here is that the force of such threats is often exaggerated. The Value and Meaning of Life is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, ethics and religion, and will be of interest to all those concerned with how to live, and to how to think about the lives of others. (shrink)

Declaring that the universe was created in a certain order, Almighty Allah said, "Do not make mischief on earth after it has been brought into order." With this statement she made, she warned humanity not to disturb the established order. Natural disasters such as epidemics, earthquakes, floods and landslides that we face in the 21st century make it necessary to draw attention to the actions of people once again. Human beings, who interfere with nature irresponsibly, disrupt the balances in the (...) universe, and these disturbed balances return to humanity as a calamity over time. Almighty Allah knows in many verses that these calamities are the result of people's own deeds. To this situation; He emphasizes with the expressions “bimâ kesebû, “bimâ kesebet eydinnâs”, “febimâ kesebet eydiküm”, “bimâ kaddemet eydîhim”,“bimâ zalemû”. It is understood from these expressions that a significant part of the calamities are caused by human error, negligence and unjust interventions. While troubles and calamities mean punishment/retribution for some people, the same event can be a test or a lesson for other people. In this context, it is stated in the Qur'an that many troubles and calamities that have been experienced in the past, such as Noah's Flood, have been made a lesson for all humanity as follows: “As for the people of Noah, We drowned them because they denied their prophet, and made them a sign for the people. We have prepared a painful chastisement for the wrongdoers.” As can be seen, while it is stated in the verse that the cause of the torment is people's denial of the prophets, on the other hand, it is emphasized that this event is a lesson for all humanity. However, it is stated in the next verse that those who do not take lessons from these events and warnings and insist on doing what their souls want deserve punishment.However, the words of the Prophet also guide us regarding the epidemic that befell us and our attitude towards troubles. He (sas) prayed to Allah so that his ummah would not be destroyed altogether. He said that "taun" is a kind of punishment that Allah punishes some people, but it is a mercy for believers. In line with the verses we have mentioned, although most of the calamities are the result of human actions, it is out of the question to call every calamity a divine punishment. Because the prophets suffered the greatest of troubles. This topic is too broad to be tackled from a single point of view. The individual, social, human, divine and test dimensions of the subject should be evaluated as a whole. Therefore, such a sensitive issue that needs to be evaluated from multiple perspectives; Bringing only a part of it to the fore as "trouble equals divine punishment" would be to deviate the subject from its target. In this study, within the framework of the scriptures, the individual, social and divine dimensions of troubles and calamities, these calamities may have spiritual causes as well as material reasons; it will be examined that every calamity is not caused by the mistakes of people, but some of them are caused by what people do. In addition, it will be pointed out that troubles and calamities should be evaluated in a multi-dimensional way within the framework of main elements such as faith, test, hope, precaution, trust, patience, prayer and divine providence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Formal Technique and Epithalamial Setting in the Song of the Parcae (Catullus 64.305–22, 328–36, 372–80)Marcos Ruiz SánchezThe present study aims to analyze the technique of verbal reminiscences and the structure of the frame of the song of the Parcae, one of the most important sections in poem 64 and the most controversial in meaning, together with the implications these verbal echoes have for the meaning of the (...) text.Catullus’ poem 64 was undoubtedly conceived by the author himself as his masterpiece and it appears as such in the very centre of the collection. We know from poem 95 that Cinna, Catullus’ poet friend and companion on his journey to the East, took nine years to write a similar poem, the epyllion entitled Zmyrna. Cinna’s work was famous for its obscurity, but also poem 35 mentions the time spent by another poet from Catullus’ circle of friends in writing a poem on the Magna Mater. Both references reveal the meticulousness (the labor limae) with which the neoteric poets composed their most important works.This explains the reason for the compositional virtuosity that can frequently be discovered in poem 64. An example of this is the repeated use of verbal reminiscences throughout the poem. 1 For the author this procedure serves various purposes: to provide a frame for the descriptive sections or direct speech; to link the different events by underlining the causal relations between them; to confer a symbolic nature on the text, and so forth. Before we turn to the introduction of the Parcae and their song, which is the main focus of this paper, it will be useful to illustrate Catullus’ technique of simultaneous ring composition and forward [End Page 75] cross-reference through verbal echoes from verses 112–15. This one case and its allusive network may serve as an example, among many, of this compositional virtuosity of Catullus. When he describes the hero Theseus emerging from the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur, he does so in the following terms:inde pedem sospes multa cum laude reflexit errabunda regens tenui vestigia filo, ne labyrintheis e flexibus egredientem tecti frustraretur inobservabilis error.(64.112–15)These verses are an echo, after the elaborated Homeric simile used by the author to refer to the death of the monster, of those in which Catullus previously described the fears of Ariadne enamoured by Theseus’ fortune:cum saevum cupiens contra contendere monstrum aut mortem appeteret Theseus aut praemia laudis! non ingrata tamen frustra munuscula divis promittens tacito succepit vota labello.2 (64.101–4)In both cases the narration centres on the favours granted Theseus by Ariadne: in the first with the supplications she directs to the gods; in the second with the gift of the ball of thread which enables the hero to escape from the labyrinth.It is not difficult to discover a closer relation between the two passages. In the first, Theseus wishes to fight the monster: cum saevum cupiens contra contendere monstrum /... Theseus. The expectation thus raised with regard to possible narratives is answered in verse 110, which evokes the previous verse: sic domito saevum postravit corpore Theseus.The hero wishes for death or glory: 3 aut mortem appeteret Theseus [End Page 76] aut praemia laudis This verse is taken up later in the following passage: inde pedem sospes multa cum laude reflexit (64.112). If Theseus wished for death or the reward of glory, Ariadne’s help enabled him to avoid one and achieve the other. The reappearance of the term frustra (102) in the verb frustraretur (115) stresses the heroine’s intervention. 4In verses 112–15 we find, moreover, the stylistic recourse of etymologically related words that had been used by the poet in the previous simile (indomitus turbo, 107; exturbata, 108; domito, 110). Reflexit (112) and errabunda vestigia (113) are echoed again in labyrintheis flexibus (114) and inobservabilis error (115), such that the verses are ordered as follows: A (112), B (113), A′ (114), B′ (115).The repetitions stress the difficulty in returning and the importance of Ariadne’s help. Theseus’ life depends on the tenuous thread that governs his steps. Reflexit and flexibus emphasize the tortuousness... (shrink)

In this manuscript, the author demonstrates how a new idea of the future came into being in eighteenth-century France with the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering. With the emergence of these practices, the future transformed from something that was largely believed to be predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be significantly affected through actions in the present. Focusing on the second-half of the century, The author argues that specific mechanisms for constructing (...) the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and create a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but was fundamentally different from it. The new active orientation to the future that emerged from these practices was not something that was explicitly articulated during the Enlightenment. Instead this practical orientation must be seen as an implicit understanding of historical temporality. Historical actors often had a tacit knowledge of time--one that they worked with--without necessarily being fully aware of it or articulating it explicitly in their writing. The full articulation of the new idea of the future did not occur until the French Revolution, but the practical understanding of it that developed during the Enlightenment played an important role in making possible the French revolutionaries' unprecedented attempts to remake the world completely anew. (shrink)

Over the last decades, educational programs involving age simulation suits emerged with the ambition to further the understanding of age-related loss experiences, enhance empathy and reduce negative attitudes toward older adults in healthcare settings and in younger age groups at large. However, the impact of such “instant aging” interventions on individuals’ personal views on aging have not been studied yet. The aim of the current study is to address possible effects of ASS interventions on multiple outcomes related to views on (...) aging, i.e., aging-related cognitions, awareness of age-related change and age stereotypes. Moreover, we explore effects on broader constructs with relevance to aging, i.e., perceived obsolescence, risk perceptions, as well as desired support through technology. In a within-subjects design, N = 40 participants went through a series of established geriatric assessments with and without an ASS. Views on aging constructs were assessed in standardized questionnaires before and after the ASS intervention. Changes in aging-related cognitions were observed, with more negative expectations regarding social integration and continuous development after wearing the ASS. AARC and age stereotypes did not change from pre- to post-assessment, but participants reported an increased susceptibility to age-associated impairments and stronger feelings of obsolescence. Those participants who exhibited higher difficulties in geriatric assessments while wearing the suit reported higher openness to be supported by intelligent assistive devices or robots afterwards. We conclude that ASS interventions should only be combined with education on losses and gains during the aging process to prevent negative effects on individual views on aging. On the other hand, potentials regarding technology acceptance and formation of intentions to engage in prevention and health behaviors among middle-aged to young-old adults are discussed. (shrink)

Wishful thinking (WT) of Israeli voters was measured in the unprecedented event of three failing national elections repeated within one year. WT is considered as Type 1 fast/intuitive thinking leading to bias. A novel method for measuring WT – including relevant campaign information and distinguishing between “WT for self” and “WT for others” – was introduced. WT components of voters in leading and trailing camps were compared across the three elections to examine whether patterns would be consistent or haphazard. (...) Despite the presumed uncontrolled nature of WT, the patterns were not haphazard but rather consistent. We also tried to debias WT by applying a novel variation of incentive intervention to shift respondents from fast thinking to slow, rational Type 2 thinking. Unlike past studies, the method was extremely effective in debiasing WT and leading to realistic predictions. However, this was true only for self-WT and not for WT for others. (shrink)

The music of Christoph Willibald von Gluck was a revolution for Paris operagoers when his work premiered there in 1774. In a setting known for its restive and often rowdy spectators, Alceste, Iphigénie en Aulide, and Orpheé et Eurydice seized audiences with unprecedented force. They shed silent tears or sobbed openly, and some cried out in sympathy with the sufferers onstage. “Oh Mama! This is too painful!” three girls called out as Charon led Alcestis to the underworld, and a (...) boy pleaded with his father to take him home. A woman who watched the same performance described falling on her knees in her opera-box as the march of the priests of Apollo began, staying in this position “suppliant and with my hands clasped until the end of the piece.”Gluck's streamlined musical language was one reason for these emotional responses. He and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi simplified the conventions by eliminating extraneous subplots, abandoning the repetitive da capo form, and replacing trills and runs with simpler melodies meant to convey passion. Another reason was the widespread culture of sentimentalism, which equated virtue with sincerity and judged tears to be the natural sign of an open heart. Painters depicted tender and tumultuous family scenes, and friends pledged trembling vows of fidelity. Listeners were also readers, and many described similar tearful responses when they read the century's bestseller, Rousseau's novel Julie; or, The New Heloise.Everist, a musicologist, takes up the story of Gluck in France in the nineteenth century, when the German composer remained a presence in repertoires. No longer prone to tears, the public was often indifferent and sometimes hostile to his works. Conductors and composers nevertheless persisted in promoting Gluck's music. Between 1828 and 1870, operatic excerpts appeared roughly twice a year in performances of the prestigious Société des Concerts, and the charismatic conductor Jules Pasdeloup regularly programmed his music. Many listeners remained unconvinced. A writer in 1861 described the “sepulchral boredom that reigned the length of all five acts” of Alceste. The periodical Monde dramatique used the same language to characterize Gluck's music: it was “profoundly boring.” After a high point of performances in the middle of Napoleon III's reign, Gluck disappeared from the Paris opera and concert stage for some thirty years.Everist's aim in this slim book is to isolate the “agents” involved in the French reception of Gluck. Traditional reception histories might begin with Gluck and his aims, identifying musical features, particular responses of audiences, critics’ accounts, and perhaps the more elusive temper of the times. Everist focuses instead on less conspicuous networks of impresarios, theater directors, and publishers. In his telling, such agents also include journalists and writers of fiction. The avowed effort is to decenter the artist and his art to emphasize the limited role that composers and librettists play in the performance of an opera. A quoted passage in the book reminds us that without parking attendants, stagehands, and ticket sellers the show could not go on. True enough. Genealogies of Music and Memory therefore provides tables listing Gluck arias in anthologies, particular singers’ performances, works by composers other than Gluck who also drew themes from classical antiquity, and works by other foreign-born composers. A section on “material culture” lists paintings and sculptures of Gluck in Paris theaters and museums.As a “genealogy,” the book is a salutary reminder of the web of amateurs and professionals who discuss, promote, and perform works that others have created. Writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mme de Staël, and Hippolyte Taine held up Gluck as the embodiment of German music. Hector Berlioz wrote frequently and enthusiastically about Gluck, although he was less keen to program his music. The singers François Delsarte and Pauline Viardot aroused temporary interest in Gluck by regularly including his arias in their recitals. Musical anthologies for the bourgeois household included piano arrangements of his best-known arias. Some nineteenth-century adaptations of his works were scored for the military band.Genealogies of Music and Memory is musicology with very little music. Everist's reliance on networks of actors, agents, publishers, pedagogical practices, and archival environments leads him to assert that “multiple agency is endemic in the story told here.” Unfortunately, it is often unclear just what the story is. Carelessness in writing and editing throughout—including a subject-verb clash in the book's final sentence—has rendered key passages obscure. Everist describes Delsarte's voice as feeble, broken, veiled, and ready to be extinguished twice in the same paragraph, first as a paraphrase and again in a quotation (with a misplaced comma).Decentering artists and their work to elevate others responsible for its reception brings attention to the unseen and often unsung. In the absence of particular performance histories, musical analyses and description, or sustained accounts of shared tastes or critical responses, however, conclusions remain piecemeal. Everist claims to have revealed a “Geertzian web of culture” in his study. A more modest account would describe it as an enumeration of references, revivals, editions, excerpts, and arrangements. (shrink)

The purpose of the present study is the understanding of Gentili's position on the law of the sea as expressed in his classic De iure belli . The key constitutive elements turn out to be: 1) the idea of the sea as 'res communis' to all mankind, which amounts to the concept of 'freedom of the sea'; 2) 'jurisdiction' of the coastal state on the adjacent sea, even on the high seas, in order to police crime and prevent/punish piracy. As (...) such these two key elements, if taken in isolation, are rooted in the civil law tradition, but their true meaning can only be captured by placing them in the intellectual framework of which they constitute an integral part. Firstly, the epistemic structure of discourse hinges on the new science of natural jurisprudence, as applied to the subject of 'ius gentium bellicum'; secondly, the constituent theoretical languages emanate from a distinctive combination of civil law, scholastic-theological and humanist traditions. This procedure enables us to highlight the strikingly original and distinctly modern traits of Gentili's perspective on the law of the sea, which emerges as a corollary of his project of international/global order. A project that is based on the crucial notion of 'respublica magna' of mankind, a notion encompassing the two notions of 'freedom' and 'jurisdiction' that constitute and define the legal regime of the sea.The Stoic humanist notion of universal human society as 'corpus unum' implies, first of all, 'freedom of intercourse', or 'ius communicationis', to start from 'free passage' and 'freedom of commerce'. It is in the context of his argument about these basic freedoms that Gentili is finally led to discuss the subject of the 'law of the sea'. But, not only the concept of 'res communis', or 'freedom of use', but also the concept of 'jurisdiction', or 'protection', are strictly related to the same foundational concept of 'respublica magna'. This is a crucial characteristic of Gentili's approach to world order that is proved by reference to two cardinal points of his new 'cosmopolitan justice': 1) the 'international right to punish', as exemplified by the legitimacy of the wars of 'humanitarian intervention' and of the wars in support of the 'common law of mankind'; 2) the 'occupation of vacant land', which again underlines the relevance of the principle of 'jurisdiction' by striking a balance between the principle of 'free use' of nature and the 'jurisdiction' of the local ruler.Such a reconstruction definitely rejects the traditional image of Gentili as a supporter of 'maritime protectionism', on the ground of his Advocatio Hispanica published posthumously in 1613 and containing his pleadings as Spanish advocate before the Court of Admiralty. The guiding assumption here is that the book is strictly of a forensic character and as such devoid of any coherent theoretical substance. To the contrary, in his De iure belli, far from anticipating the English position in favour of 'mare clausum', Gentili tends to anticipate the essentials of Grotius' position, especially at the level of the ethic of the 'modern cosmopolis' and the related theme of colonial empire. On this very plane of discourse, Gentili's thinking transcends the so-called battle of the books and emerges as especially significant in illuminating the wider and deeper intellectual currents that contributed to the development of what were to become basic standard positions of modern international theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:134 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it —­Genesis 3:6 Abstract Aesthetics has emerged as an important battleground in the moral quest for a lower carbon society. Especially in the case of proposed wind farms (an environmentally benign technology in terms of low carbon emissions), (...) opponents frequently refer to the unsightly machines creating negative landscape impacts and ruining the view. This essay seeks to reflect on the particular ways in which visual aesthetics are framed and mobilized in this moral debate. Exploring the dividing lines between pictoral and more-­ than-­ representational approaches I ask if the moral dilemmas in our landscape decisions (e.g. individual rights to beauty or collective duties toward future generations) are obscured by physical or visual realms. The largely invisible nature of wind, electricity and climate change, set within the physical and tangible nature of landscapes and turbines, challenges us to experience the aesthetics of landscapes-­ with-­ machines through more creative and engaging means that are not limited to visibility, nor deaf to morality. SIN, DUTY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF NATURE As the first act of sin in the bible, Eve’s consumption of a visually aesthetic fruit led to humans being banned from the Garden of Eden. Looking at the above sentence more closely, we could even argue that “good for food” is not a positive condition (e.g. tasty, nourishing), but Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? ‘Looking’ Beyond the Visual Aesthetics of Wind Machines in a Post-­Productivist Landscape DAN VAN DER HORST Dan van der Horst / Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? 135 rather the absence of a negative (e.g. inedible), whilst “also desirable” may sound like the hunger for wisdom was only a secondary, additional attraction. The sentence thus draws attention to the key role of aesthetics in the making of a moral decision; would Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit if it was not “pleasing for the eye”? Aesthetic judgments may be informed by a range of factors, but as this bible quote illustrates, morality is key among them. Associations between right and wrong on the one side and beauty or ugliness on the other, are not exactly rare in written history, be they religious, literary or scholastic works. As a marked contribution to the latter, Immanuel Kant has paid particularly close attention to the links between aesthetics and morality, arguing amongst others that any universal agreement in judgments of the sublime must rest on an appeal to moral feelings.1 But universality is not the only logical link between aesthetic judgementandmorality.Peoplecanfeelasenseof‘duty’tofindcertainthings beautiful e.g. because that is the aesthetic judgment of the group they aspire to belong to.2 Whilst this sense of duty can refer to social conditioning and group belonging, it also has resonance for landscape aesthetics at a time of anthropogenic climate change (a universal threat) when we must “learn to love the low carbon landscape.”3 This presents a point of departure from the debate on the moral obligation of preserving aesthetically pleasing landscapes (as we tend to do through legal designations, e.g. national parks), an ethical logic which leads, to use the words of Holmes Rolston, “from beauty to duty.”4 Moreover a posi­ tive aesthetical appreciation of a landscape because it accommodates low carbon technologies, would potentially require an inverse ethical logic, i.e. from duty to beauty.5 Notwithstanding the clear conceptual links between moral and aesthetic judgment, in everyday life it may be far less clear what kind of moral issues may underpin particular expressions of aesthetic sensibility. This can be particularly problematic for the deployment of environmental technologies (i.e. technologies pursued to reduce pollution ) that have significant landscape footprints. That is where we can find universal moral claims demanding environmental action for the common good rubbing up against aesthetic landscape judgments in places where such developments are proposed. This produces an unsatisfactory situation in which the deployment of clean technologies ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 10 / ISSUE 1 / 2018 136 is delayed, tensions within local communities may increase... (shrink)

Background Self-binding directives (SBDs) are psychiatric advance directives that include the possibility for service users to consent in advance to compulsory care in future mental health crises. Legal provisions for SBDs exist in the Netherlands since 2008 and were updated in 2020. While ethicists and legal scholars have identified several benefits and risks of SBDs, few data on stakeholder perspectives on SBDs are available. Aims The aim of the study was to identify opportunities and challenges of SBDs perceived by stakeholders (...) who have personal or professional experience with legally enforceable SBDs. Methods Data collection was carried out in the Netherlands from February 2020 to October 2021 by means of semi-structured interviews. Participants were selected through purposive sampling and snowball methods. Interviews were conducted with mental health service users (n = 7), professionals (n = 13), and an expert on SBD policy (n = 1), resulting in a total number of 21 interviews. The data were analyzed thematically. Results Perceived benefits of SBDs included increased autonomy, improvement of the therapeutic relationship, possibility of early intervention and prevention of harm, prevention of compulsory care, reduction of the duration of compulsory care and recovery, mitigation of negative experiences around compulsory care, and guidance for professionals in providing compulsory care. Perceived risks included infeasibility of SBD instructions, difficulty in decision-making around SBD activation, limited accessibility of SBDs, disappointment of service users due to non-compliance with SBDs, and limited evaluation and updating of SBD content. Barriers to SBD completion included lack of knowledge of SBDs among professionals, lack of motivation or insight among service users, and lack of professional support for SBD completion. Facilitators of SBD completion and activation included support for SBD completion, involvement of relatives and peer experts, specification of SBD content, and evaluation of compulsory care and SBD content. The new legal framework was regarded as having both positive and negative effects on SBD implementation. Conclusions Stakeholders who have personal or professional experience with legally enforceable SBDs perceive SBDs as having important benefits and tend not to articulate the fundamental ethical concerns about SBDs which can be found in the ethics and legal literature. Instead, they perceive ethical and practical challenges that can be addressed through the implementation of suitable safeguards. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 29-31 [Access article in PDF] On the Border:Reflections on the Meaning of Self-Injury in Borderline Personality Disorder Robert L. Woolfolk Keywords borderline personality disorder, values, psychotherapy, diagnosis IT IS A PLEASURE to comment on Nancy Potter's elegantly written, provocative paper. Professor Potter raises important and intriguing issues that have not only clinical implications for practitioners, but also are of theoretical significance for (...) those who ponder the conceptual status of mental illnesses and their manifestations.Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is the mental health professional's bête noire. In the diagnostic context, borderline is an adjective that is evocative, albeit imprecise. Persons with BPD tend to the worst of multiple pathological worlds, to fall through the diagnostic cracks, to occupy the boundaries of decorum and safety. Even such intrepid and astute folk as Marsha Linnehan and Otto Kernberg, who have devoted careers to understanding and treating those with BPD, have acknowledged the limited state of current knowledge. Justice Stewart's theory of natural concepts seems to apply to patients to whom we give the label borderline personality disorder: we cannot define the disorder readily, but we know one when we see one. And when we see such a patient it is costly in time and stress and corrosive of one's sense of professional efficacy. So with these patients, any assistance in conceptualizing the problem or in modification of therapeutics is welcome.Professor Potter's phenomenological formulation of self-injury is cogent and helpful in a number of ways. Self-injurious behavior is, when conventionally interpreted, a prototype for irrationality and affliction. It is also dramatic, graphic, and often repugnant. Professor Potter's analysis brings us face to face with what most of us know but sometimes forget or fail to apply: Psychotherapy is a value-laden endeavor. Early on, both Max Weber and Carl Jung were eloquent on this point and we have been reminded often enough of it in the last four decades (Rieff 1966; Woolfolk 1998; Woolfolk and Murphy, in press). Usually it is the moral values residing in the underlying ideologies of treatment and diagnosis that are brought to our attention. The axiological underpinnings of psychotherapy, however, are aesthetic as well as ethical. Professor Potter successfully argues that, as therapists, we may be in the thrall of a parochial aesthetic that produces [End Page 29] a kind of tunnel vision inimical to therapeutic effectiveness and to the ethical treatment of the human beings who are our patients. She has impeccable advice for therapists on this topic: Although none of us can step outside of culture altogether, we can evaluate our attitudes, beliefs, and values from a second-order level (Taylor 1989; Frankfurt 1971). Complete objectivity is an unlikely ideal. But clinicians can, and should, think critically about ways in which prevailing norms and values may be influencing their understanding of the world and their ways of being in it. (Potter 2003, 11) Professor Potter also quite effectively persuades that a comprehensive understanding of disorders that occur mostly in women (e.g., somatization disorder) must effectively comprehend feminist scholarship and the sociocultural realities of gender. The concept of the commodification of the female body has been informative in both the epidemiology and treatment of yet another woman's disorder, anorexia nervosa. And although the linkages of somatic commodification to self-injurious behavior may not appear to be so straightforward, the paper points the way to deeper and possibly richer explanations of phenomena that seem at first glance to be inexplicable.The introduction of the concept of uptake into clinical contexts is also a valuable contribution. Those of us familiar with the traditions of psychotherapy recognize a concept both familiar and central. Uptake has family resemblance to the empathic attitude so extensively discussed by both Rogers and Kohut. Those with hermeneutic leanings will recognize affinities with Verstehen and the Gadamerian anticipation of completeness (Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit). Any truly humanistic approach to treatment or diagnosis must encompass the lived experience of the patient. This is not to... (shrink)

In Cognition and Work, Max Scheler offers an early critique of American pragmatism and demonstrates the dynamic relation that not only the human being but all living beings have to the environment they inhabit.

The decisive epistemological and methodological moment of feminist analysis and critique is the moment of intervention. An intervention does not require a standpoint; instead, it displaces the locus of critique from the standpoint to the effects or consequences of critique. Intervention requires no new information or hitherto concealed facts about the object being interfered with. The critical effects of an intervention are the results of what is called a ‘sexing-up’ strategy. Different epistemological and methodological aspects (...) of this strategy are discussed and a connection established between feminist interventions in science and politics, and the strategy of sexing-up. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“A Candle in Sunshine”Desire and Apocalypse in Blake and HölderlinMichael Kirwan, SJ (bio)Introduction1René Girard, in the wake of the critical theorists Adorno and Horkheimer, offers “an analysis of the present epoch.” His work can be seen as a further attempt to articulate the “dialectic of Enlightenment”: to explore precisely why, despite the hopes invested in the possibilities of human emancipation, the “enlightened world radiates disaster triumphant.” Like them, Girard (...) seeks to diagnose the present age and its Siamese twinning of emancipatory knowledge and barbarism.He does so by invoking messianic religious themes, notably the biblical theological category of apocalypse.2 In Battling to the End—by Girard’s own admission, a “bizarre book”—the apocalypse has quite specific geographical and historical coordinates. The hypermimetic rivalry between France and Germany that escalates through the nineteenth century reaches a symbolic tipping point in Hegel’s fascinated interpretation of Napoleon Bonaparte’s intervention at Jena in 1806—a fascination shared by Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), Prussian military theorist and author of the unfinished treatise On War. Girard thinks through Clausewitz’s appalled realization of the special nature of this [End Page 179] conflict: namely, that the intense “escalation to extremes” that ensnares these two protagonists will prove capable of overwhelming the “sacrificial” function of warfare. In other words, war will no longer have the capacity for channeling and containing conflict within strictly codified parameters. Click for larger view View full resolutionThe Last Judgement (1808) by William Blake (1757–1827), The Egremont Collection (accepted in lieu of tax by H.M. Treasury in 1957 and subsequently transferred to the National Trust). © NTPL/John Hammond[End Page 180]Following this logic, Girard argues that the total mobilization of populations begun with the French revolutionary army has indeed escalated, into the nightmarish catastrophes engulfing Europe and the world in the last century, which we now experience in the form of a global and globalized “war on terror”—a “global civil war.” Robert Hamerton-Kelly understands the situation as apocalyptic, defined as “an interpretation of politics in the form of a coded narrative.”3 Drawing on the root meaning of apokalypsis as “unveiling” or “disclosure,” he declares that ”something is being revealed about our world order, whether by divine grace or human reason,”4 a revelation that not only documents the threat to order but is itself a cause of the instability.Whether this heightened sense of history and its convulsions constitutes a significant change in mimetic theory, an “apocalyptic turn,” is open to debate. Hamerton-Kelly reminds us that Girard’s writing has been apocalyptic from the outset: witness Girard’s discussion of “The Dostoyevskian Apocalypse” in his first book. In his other main works, Girard has developed “an apocalyptic anthropology” that unveils the sacred structure of “this world.” This is apocalypse, but with a twist:Mimetic theory is ironically apocalyptic, because it is the opposite of what normally passes for that genre. It is nonviolent, while the vulgar apocalypse is violent, it decodes while the vulgar encodes, nevertheless, it is apocalyptic because it deals with universal history and human nature and assumes that historiography is possible and the human story is not “a tale told by an idiot.” It is apocalyptic because it decodes the encryption of violence in the vulgar apocalypse, in symbols such as the divine judgement and the torture of the guilty.5Bringing this context to light is less a matter of archaeology as of astrophysics: here, as it were, is modernity’s “big bang,” the point of origin of the matter and anti-matter of resentful energy that now threatens to overwhelm us.6 Girard’s reading offers much for the historian to grapple with, and yet it calls for more than historical analysis. In addition to Hegel and Clausewitz, Girard summons a further witness, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), a “theological poet” or Dichter, whose life and verse are read as a further commentary on the turbulent opening decade of the nineteenth century. The aim of the present article is to elucidate this poetical-theological dimension of Girard’s argument, partly by highlighting Girard’s invocation of Hölderlin, but also... (shrink)

The present paper examines the concept of the meaning of life in the Soren Kierkegaard’s view. Kierkegaard sees the concept of "meaning" as "end" and believes in "biology" as the supreme biologist. Based on evidence from his works, he believes that the end is not to be discovered in biology, but it is creatable. There are three witnesses to this: first, the end is, in Kierkegaard''''''''s view, paradoxical, and paradox is not real, but mental. Secondly, Christianity, in his (...) opinion, is anxious, not religious, and religion is unreasonable, and in relation to the mind not connected with the outside, and third, that he does not consider God as an active being, but rather the existence of anxiety, The mind and mind of man. Kierkegaard''''''''s predictions in this evidence include ontological non-reality, individualism, and faith. An analysis of these three presumptions suggests that Kierkegaard believed in the supposition of meaning in life. (shrink)

Tschumi believes that the quality of architecture depends on the theoretical factor it contains. Such a view led to the creation of architecture that would achieve visibility and comprehensibility only after its interpretation. On his way to creating such an architecture he took on a purely philosophical reflection on the basic building block of architecture, which is space. In 1975, he wrote an essay entitled Questions of Space, in which he included several dozen questions about the nature of space. The (...) questions he formulated could be regarded as analogous to the situation in the philosophy of the time, in which the interest in questioning the most obvious forms of understanding the world and intellectual categories increased. The research on space is an area common to many fields of natural sciences, humanities and artistic creation, but it also deals with other problems, such as issues of experience. The concept of space-time continuum proposed by Hermann Minkowski drew attention to the identity of time and space with the events taking place. Probably regardless of the postulates of physicists commenting on Einstein’s discoveries, also in philosophy it increased the importance of the concept of the event which became dominant in Heidegger’s latest work Contributions of Philosophy. Of the event. Furthermore, Tschumi’s reflections on space entered into relation with the problem of experience, which aroused the interest of a group of French philosophers trying to assimilate Georges Bataille’s concept of “inner experience”. Both Tschumi and Derrida referred to Bataille because his views could be used not only to modify the concept of the subject, but also to change the understanding of what constitutes the area of architecture. The discussion on experience has led to the recognition that the subject is not sovereign, but actually a form of what is on their outside. Such insights make it possible to treat the area of the Parc de La Villette as existing mainly when it is organised by its users. The decisive features of the Park are its assumptions, according to which it is a variety of active void that leads to agreeing new social relations with it. The park does not force to participate in already existing moral or political communities, but tries to move into an unknown future in which the scope of free functioning of individuals will be increased. Doubts about the principles of functioning of the individual self and its discovery as a whole composed of non-coherent parts, as well as its dependence on its own depth full of disordered forces, influenced the understanding of architecture as a set of contradictions whose source is a fundamental void anticipating the empty phenomenal space. The use of this phenomenal void in architecture, as well as the rejection of the whole and unity, had a specific political purpose and drew its inspiration from political analyses. In the Parc de La Villette, metaphysics and politics were brought closer together because the philosophy of void was used to create new conditions for community action. It can be argued that the source of this philosophy was the perception of errors in existing societies dependent on the shortcomings of traditional metaphysics. Spacing (espacement) was one of the key terms in Derrida’s philosophy, which was also combined with the concepts of différance and chôra. The study of the nature of space, especially its transition from the level of pure possibility to the level of sensual phenomenon, also contributes to understanding how well designed space can have an impact on its audience. This explanation is based on Tschumi’s assumption that the space of the Parc de La Villette contradicts the integrating approaches and instead exposes contradictions, but it does so in a way that combines incompatible properties into a single piece of architecture. The specificity of such integration is similar to the invention of a musical phrase, which is an ideological message: moral and political. Such a thesis may raise doubts, however, if both the clearly adopted assumptions and those deduced from the work allow for their ↪Quart Nr 2(52)/2019 logically ordered presentation then to a limited extent it may be assumed that the work has achieved a connection between a specific philosophy of space and its practical application. Derrida combined the problem of spatiality with the problem of transcendental imagination in Kant’s philosophy, who in the first version of Critique of Pure Reason assumed that pure imagination precedes the appearance of time and space, even in their transcendental forms. The imagination in such a situation can be described as a factor activating time and space, which indicates what function is played by movement in this activity. This leads us to recognize that the ultra originary source of pure forms of sensual intuition is movement, which in early Greek philosophy was identified with void and its lack of resistance to phenomena occurring in it. Derrida’s philosophy in search of a certain super-transcendental source of time and space pointed to différance which, like void or the chôra, does not have material features or even any other form of being. Différance is the primary cause of the disruption of motionlessness and the introduction of activity into motionless time and space, thus its activity can be described as spacing (espacement). Derrida’s discoveries in this respect are not entirely original, because Hegel already pointed out when examining the present that it is primarily a differential relation (differente Beziehung), which, being seemingly neutral, influences the present with supernatural force and makes it unidentifiable with itself. Differente Beziehung must similarly influence the originary space, negating its initial character by multiplying its divisions and expanding its boundaries. Différance acts by revealing contradictions wherever there is apparent undifferentiation. Tschumi, composing the Parc de La Villette as a variety of void and a set of incompatible layers, followed the rules of différance or the chôra: he made void visible together with its saturation with contradictions. If space can be considered to be the result of the activity of difference, such activity has a certain regularity, which influences the behaviour of its observers. Differences or contradictions fall into a certain rhythm, which can be considered a manifestation of transcendent order. The problem is that what can be considered the source of such order, namely the logos or God, is partly disorder and error. According to descriptions contained in Timaeus, the world is a combination of forces that drive to order with forces of erroneous necessity that resounds in every order and forces it to return to disorder. Derrida denied the possibility of understanding différance as a theological value, even if it were a negative or apophatic theology, but no categorical denial could be perfect. The assumption that différance or the chôra are not endowed with any substance properties cannot deny their activity, and thus a certain force. Already since Democritus, philosophy has multiplied the names of such a force and the contradictory variety of its manifestations, never forgetting also the necessity for reason to withdraw from the possibility of giving its correct characteristics. Such a withdrawal may be interpreted as an expression of respect and, in certain situations, as a cult of the force that precedes reasonableness. The Parc de La Villette, which is an artistic divagation about the contradictions and forces behind them, can be considered as a place of their sublimation, and therefore as a variation of the temple of what differs from order and disorder. (shrink)

While evidence-based medicine (EBM) is often accused on relying on a paradigm of 'absolute truth', it is in fact highly consistent with Karl Popper's criterion of demarcation through falsification. Even more relevant, the first three steps of the EBM process are closely patterned on Popper's evolutionary approach of objective knowledge: (1) recognition of a problem; (2) generation of solutions; and (3) selection of the best solution. This places the step 1 of the EBM process (building an answerable question) in a (...) pivotal position for the understanding of the whole process, and underscores a few aspects which are often overlooked in EBM courses. First in this step internal evidence (including personal expertise) must be appraised and integrated in the problem. Second, issues of applicability of the possible solution should be anticipated. Third, and possibly more important, the goal of the intervention should be set at this stage (typically by choosing the outcome in a PICO question). Depending whether or not goals depend on the goals of others, and whether they concern others' voluntary behaviour, goals may be classified as self-serving, moral, altruistic or moralistic. Thus, delicate ethical questions must be addressed at this stage, which means that patient preferences and values must be carefully sought, so that empathy, counselling and narrative medicine must be mastered to be able to formulate correctly an answerable question. The need to modify the current description of the EBM process to increase the recognition of implicit assumptions and increase the consistency of this model is discussed. (shrink)

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need of a Zeitgeist-adjusted (...) conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender. -/- Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means. -/- The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted. (shrink)

Although the potential of boredom has been part of the Christian tradition from its very beginning, the experience of boredom among adult believers has often been stigmatized or silenced. In this paper I explore the ‘politics of boredom’, suggesting that the experience of boredom within faith communities may be a form of minority stress, indicating that sub-groups do not find themselves represented in the shared narrative and practice. I argue that while many disciplines, including psychology and theology, have a tendency (...) to problematise those who are bored, it may be more fruitful to change this scope and investigate the boring. As an example I explore a feeling I call ‘Jesus fatigue’; the sense of being tired with the repetitive narrative investment in Jesus as a figure of inclusion, while actual inclusion is continuously postponed. I then discuss the subversive potential of ‘the yawn’, the open display of boredom, as a possible theological intervention that confronts tradition with its implicit exclusionary tendencies. (shrink)

For decades, the problem of evil has occupied a centre stage in the Western philosophical discourse of the existence of God. The problem centres on the unlikelihood to reconcile the existence of an absolute and morally perfect God with the evidence of evil in the universe. This is the evidential problem of evil that has been a source of dispute among theists, atheists, agnostics, and sceptics. There seems to be no end to this dispute, making the problem of evil a (...) perennial one in Western Philosophy of Religion. In this essay, I will contribute to this discourse from an African perspective. This essay, therefore, explores the evidential problem of evil within the African philosophy of religion. I argue that it is unlikely for the evidential problem of evil to be a problem in African philosophy of religion. I invoke an Ejima-based argument to support this claim. I conceptualize the Igbo word Ejima to metaphysically mean the inevitable coexistence of two opposite variables as complements to argue that God could be both good and evil within the African Traditional Religion, which explains why good and evil exist in the universe. (shrink)

Publication date: 28 April 2021 Source: International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 90 Author: Sarah Kinya Mburugu Listing of a company in the securities exchange has been observed to be followed by underpricing in the first day and long term period of underperformance in terms of pricing in the subsequent days. Consequently, there has been a considerable curiosity from stakeholders, investors and academics to comprehend the assessments of why companies go public and the issues surrounding the short and (...) long-run performance of newly issued equities. Underpricing is necessary to induce uninformed investors to participate in IPO offering when faced with adverse selection from informed investors. This often leads to first day price not reflecting a fair value of the IPO. The objective of the study was to determine the long-run performance IPOs and effects in the Kenyan stock market for the period 2007-2014. A descriptive survey research design was employed in the study. The population of the study encompassed all the 64 listed companies at the NSE as at 2016. The study employed a non-probability purposive sampling technique. Data collected for this study was secondary data obtained from NSE website, NSE price lists and the Central Bank of Kenya website for the period 2007 to 2014. The data obtained was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science. Mean Average Buy and Hold Returns, Abnormal Returns and Cumulative Abnormal Returns were used to calculate the performance of the stocks. T-statistic for CAR was computed to the test for its significance. T-test was conducted at 95% confidence level to find if MABHR and CAR were statistically significant after IPOs announcement. (shrink)

What do modern academic economists do? What currently is mainstream economics? What is neoclassical economics? And how about heterodox economics? How do the central concerns of modern economists, whatever their associations or allegiances, relate to those traditionally taken up in the discipline? And how did economics arrive at its current state? These and various cognate questions and concerns are systematically pursued in this new book by Tony Lawson. The result is a collection of previously published and new papers distinguished in (...) providing the only comprehensive and coherent account of these issues currently available. The financial crisis has not only revealed weaknesses of the capitalist economy but also highlighted just how limited and impoverished is modern academic economics. Despite the failings of the latter being more widely acknowledged now than ever, there is still an enormous amount of confusion about their source and true nature. In this collection, Tony Lawson also identifies the causes of the discipline's failings and outlines a transformative solution to its deficiencies. Amongst other things, Lawson advocates for the adoption of a more historical and philosophical orientation to the study of economics, one that deemphasizes the current focus on mathematical modelling while maintaining a high level of analytical rigour. In so doing Lawson argues for a return to long term systematic and sustained projects, in the manner pursued by the likes of Marx, Veblen, Hayek and Keynes, concerned first and foremost with advancing our understanding of social reality. Overall, this forceful and persuasive collection represents a major intervention in the on-going debates about the nature, state and future direction of economics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art in Social Studies: Exploring the World and Ourselves with RembrandtIftikhar Ahmad (bio)IntroductionRembrandt’s art lends itself as a fertile resource for teaching and learning social studies. His art not only captures the social studies themes relevant to the Dutch Golden Age, but it also offers a description of human relations transcending temporal and spatial frontiers. Rembrandt is an imaginative storyteller with a keen insight for minute details. His narrative (...) of the culture, society, economy, geography, and contemporary events of seventeenth-century Dutch life is as vivid and perceptive as a historian’s eloquent text. How people lived in community, how the city of Amsterdam functioned, how important religion was to people, how diverse and cosmopolitan the culture was, how interdependent the world was in the seventeenth century, and what the social and civic ideals of the Dutch people were during the Golden Age—Rembrandt’s paintings, etchings, and drawings neatly organize these and other social studies themes into visual messages. More importantly, our appreciation and interpretation of Rembrandt’s work helps us learn about not just Dutch society and culture of four hundred years ago but also about ourselves. The passion, emotions, conflicts, and inspirations of his subjects are essentially human and eternal, arousing empathy in every generation and cross-section of society. In this article I look at Rembrandt’s art for the purpose of teaching and learning social studies in our contemporary interdependent world—a world that is chronologically and geographically distant from the Dutch Golden Age but in many respects shares its enduring values, norms, ideals, pursuits, challenges, and possibilities. To do so, I employ a conceptual lens—the curriculum thematic strands of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)—to examine Rembrandt’s art in order to explore life and make meaning of the story that is being told about the human condition, and to seek out its relevance to ourselves and [End Page 19] our world in the early twenty-first century. Although Rembrandt’s oeuvre is extensive, including the diverse genres of self-portraits, group portraits, drawings, etchings, landscapes, and religious themes, for our limited purpose I have selected only those works that, in my judgment, correspond with the following seven of the ten thematic curriculum strands of the NCSS:CultureTime, Continuity, and ChangePeople, Places, and EnvironmentIndividual Development and IdentityProduction, Distribution, and ConsumptionGlobal ConnectionsCivic Ideals and PracticesThese thematic curriculum strands are derived from the foundational disciplines of the social sciences and humanities such as anthropology, history, geography, sociology, political science, psychology, economics, philosophy, and law, but they are conceptually interrelated.1 For example, culture is a core concept in anthropology but it is also relevant to Time, Continuity, and Change, which is the main concept in the history discipline. Similarly, culture is relevant to the theme of People, Places, and Environment, which is the central focus of geography. More importantly, since social studies is about human experiences, there is a general consensus among the social studies educators that classroom teachers should draw content knowledge not just from the social sciences as mentioned here but from wide sources “to construct curricular experiences enabling students to actively relate new knowledge to existing understanding.”2 That is to say all fields of knowledge that are related to human civilization and that help in developing students’ skills in reflective thinking, decision making, and problem solving are relevant to social studies education. Those fields also include art. Rembrandt’s art is especially relevant because his themes are universal and the social, political, and economic contexts in which he created his work—globalization, individualism, and free enterprise—are more or less similar to our age.It needs to be mentioned that by looking at Rembrandt’s art from the social studies perspective it is not my intention to strip his work of its aesthetic scope and value. On the contrary, by looking at Rembrandt in the social studies classroom I seek to humanize social studies education itself. That [End Page 20] is to say I wish to step back from the conventional view of social studies to feel free from the bonds of traditionalism and discover, describe, analyze... (shrink)

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism , I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. (...) ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can. (shrink)

The modern era has witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented growth in our empirical knowledge regarding the human body. This raises the question: what, if anything, can phenomenology teach us about the body that the empirical sciences cannot? Whereas common sense and empirical sciences begin from the body as straightforwardly and obviously given and go on from there to think about what this thing is, what it is made up of, and how it originated, phenomenology steps back from the straightforward (...) fact in order to ask: what is the structure of the body as an appearance? This chapter considers how some of the main figures in phenomenology have tried to answer this question. The body is not explicitly discussed in what might be thought of as the two foundational works of phenomenology: Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Heidegger’s Being and Time. Nevertheless, these works set the stage for the subsequent phenomenology of the body by describing the phenomena of multidimensionality and horizontality. Our first task will be to sketch out how these phenomena were described in the foundational works. This sets up our exposition of the body as a multidimensional phenomenon. We consider Husserl’s treatment of the body in Ideas II. We also examine how the Husserlian insights were taken up and developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In conclusion we raise some critical questions regarding a phenomenological focus on the body and its multidimensionality. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore and discuss the use of the concept of being affected in biomedical decision making processes in Germany. The corresponding German term ‘Betroffenheit’ characterizes on the one hand a relation between a state of affairs and a person and on the other an emotional reaction that involves feelings like concern and empathy with the suffering of others. An example for the increasing relevance of being affected is the postulation of the participation of people with (...) disabilities and chronic or acute diseases in the discourse, as partly realized in the German National Ethics Council or the Federal Joint Committee. Nevertheless, not only on the political level, the resistance against the participation of affected people is still strong; the academic debate seems to be cross-grained, too. Against this background, we explore the meaning and argumentative role of the concept of being affected as it is used by affected and lay people themselves. Our analysis is based on four focus group discussions in which lay people, patients and relatives of patients discuss their attitudes towards biomedical interventions such as organ transplantation and genetic testing. This setting allows for a comparison of how affected and non-affected people are concerned and deliberate about medical opportunities, but also of how they position themselves as being affected or non-affected with respect to (scientific) knowledge and morality. On this basis, we discuss the normative relevance of being affected for the justification of political participation. (shrink)

The seventh chapter is dedicated to Gottfried Leibniz. In a letter to the English philosopher Samuel Clark, Leibniz recalls the episode in the park in connection with his famous principle of the identity of the indistinguishable, or simply "Leibniz's law". The futile search for two exactly identical leaves or blades of grass highlights a metaphysical principle that extends to the smallest elements of nature. If there are not two exactly the same, then they all bear the stamp of uniqueness (...) and individuality, ultimately going back to the wisdom of the Creator. The ethical implications of this ontological axiom are obvious: to destroy a leaf, let alone a whole plant, means to get rid of something that will never appear again in exactly the same form. If there are many species of plants and if each species includes a myriad of subspecies, it is because they all must exist to actualize the infinite possibilities of Divine self-expression. The loss of biological diversity diminishes the richness of manifestations that God finds in the world. From the real park, the philosopher leads us into an allegorical garden depicting his understanding of matter. In paragraph 67 of Monadology, he urges us to imagine every part of matter like a garden full of plants and a pond full of fish. But every branch of a plant, every member of an animal, every drop of its juices is again the same garden or the same pond. Each part of matter, accordingly, is a garden within a garden within a garden — and so on ad infinitum. Thus, it can be said that the plant, as its capabilities become more relevant, expresses (a) the world, (b) God's vegetable view of (a), and (c) essence. As a non-verbal sign, it is oversaturated with meaning, it is entrusted to bear the weight of theological and metaphysical entities partially revealed through it. One can only welcome the philosopher's bold assumption that a plant is not a passive object available for manipulation by humans and animals, but a subject endowed with the ability to act. However, the weak point of this statement lies in the double comparison of animals with humans and plants with animals. The standard that all other living beings must meet is hopelessly anthropocentric, since it implies that animals are less perfect people, and plants are less perfect animals. Thus, an ancient metaphysical prejudice creeps into the philosophical system, which boldly put forward the vegetative idea of infinite matter and the expressive uniqueness of each leaf and each blade of grass. The eighth chapter deals with Immanuel Kant. In his penchant for abstraction, Kant reduces flowers to specimens of pure color, and tulips seem to him the purest of all. Its simple form does not distract us from the beauty of its pure color, and in this it perfectly matches the asceticism of Kant's philosophy and the austere splendor of his aesthetic thought. Kant views tulips as examples of completeness «belonging to no purpose», where by «purpose» he means those practical tasks associated with economic activity in the broad sense of the word. The meaning and essence of the tulip varies according to the field in which we encounter it: as a natural object of study and scientific inquiry, as a useful object of our practical interest, or as an alluring embodiment of the beautiful. In his personal writings of the 1760s, Kant defends the thesis that a plant is possible only in accordance with an idea, defining the latter as the a priori cognition of the understanding by which an object becomes possible. If the material aspects of human existence, according to Kant, do not deserve respect, then even less do non-human animals and plants, which have no share in the rationality of transcendental subjects. There is only one possibility of placing plants and animals under the umbrella of Kantian respect, and it has to do with human self-respect. Kant does not abandon the idea that flowers are vital links in the chain of plant reproduction by which the genus is preserved. In flowers, and in aesthetics in general, Kant sees a utopian prefiguration of human freedom. When he calls flowers «free beauty», he means their liberation from both natural necessity and conceptual understanding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman JacksonBernabé S. Mendoza (bio)Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World New York: By New York University Press, 2020, 320 pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-9004-0the radical work of black feminism is to upend Western dualistic ways of thinking that structure our understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Human: (...) Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson troubles the dominant dualistic distinction of the human and the animal. Jackson argues that antiblackness undergirds Enlightenment discourses on the human-animal divide such that blackness cannot be extricated from the very concept of the animal because both “are not only interdependent representations but also entangled concepts” (28). Central to Jackson’s argument on the animalization of blackness is the notion of “ontologized plasticity,” which posits the being of black(ened) people as infinitely malleable and mutable matter and further points to the fluidification of form and “fleshly existence.” Far from seeing the human as a category that has “ontological integrity,” as scholars in the fields of animal studies, new materialisms, and posthumanism presuppose, Jackson instead seeks to redefine the concept of the human through the theorization of blackness (16). She points out that such theorization has been, for such scholars, a lacuna and the “space of the unthought,” which thus marks her intervention in these fields. [End Page 211]The author offers a sustained engagement with the knowledge claims of science and philosophy, reading them through and against the intellectual contributions of black feminist writers and artists. She draws from such luminaries as Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the artist Wangechi Mutu to show the ways in which they reject an enclosed notion of the human that is defined only by keeping the racialized other at bay and in a degraded animalized and liquified state. As such, she showcases how black feminist visual and literary culture “theorizes and philosophizes” and reveals the faulty, antiblack premises upon which science and philosophy establish their claims of knowledge on the human.Offering a materialist theory of black ontology and temporality, Jackson poses three main arguments on the racialization of the human-animal distinction. The first is the aforementioned notion of ontologized and black(ened) plasticity that speaks to the constant modulation and manipulation of black matter as it relates to gender, sexuality, and sexual reproduction. Reading US slavery as an experimental playground for testing the limits of the human, Jackson argues that “black female f lesh... functions as the limit case of ‘the human’ and is its matrix-figure” (4). She defines plasticity as a “praxis that seeks to define the essence of a black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable in antiblack, often paradoxical sexuating terms as a means of hierarchically delineating sex/gender, reproduction, and states of being more generally” (11). There is, in other words, an inversion that takes place in that it is only through opposition and the imposed instability and illegibility of blackness—of black matter and the black mater(nal) situated as “chaos by design”—that such categories as “woman,” “mother,” and “female body” can themselves take hold and become intelligible forms (11). Jackson engages with the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter in order to argue that “Man,” as the object of analysis within liberal humanism, “produces an untenable dichotomy—‘the human’ versus ‘the animal,’ whereby the black(ened) female is posited as the abyss dividing organic life into ‘human’ or ‘animal’ based on wholly unsound metaphysical premises” (12). This claim on the centrality of the black female in the plasticization of blackness is given support in chapter 2, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative novel Brown Girl in the Ring, where plasticity gives way to opacity.In this chapter, Jackson explores the ways in which the black female body, as that which is opaque and nonrepresentable within the “dominant grammar of representation,” shatters what she argues is Heidegger’s metaphysical and hierarchical ordering of human, animal, and world. In exploring “how our received conceptions of being hinges on our im/perception of black mater... (shrink)

It is the contention of this paper that ethics of work ought to be anthropological, and artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, which is the focus of work today, should be anthropological, that is, human-centered. This paper discusses the philosophical and theological implications of the development of AI research on the intrinsic nature of work and the nature of the human person. AI research and the implications of its development and advancement, being a relatively new phenomenon, have not been (...) comprehensively interrogated in the social and ethical teachings of the Catholic Church. This paper, therefore, proposes a path for this interrogation by expounding a discourse which is believed to be epistemically helpful in the developing discourse of AI in the ethical and social teachings of the Church. The advancement in the research on AI is not only redefining the meaning of work, but, even more so, it is questioning the metaphysical notion of the human person and the theological notion of work as an intrinsic part in the selfhood and dignity of the human person. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by discussing the different ways in which Spinoza’s famous conatus argument has been understood, after which I present my own reconstruction of the derivation: each and every true finite thing is, in itself, an expresser of power (E1p25c, 1p34) that never acts self-destructively (E3p4) but instead strives to drive itself through opponents to produce effects as they follow from the definition of the thing in question (E1p25c, 1p34, and 3p5). This tells us something decisive about (...) the meaning of Spinoza’s doctrine: according to it, things are active causers whose “power to exist and act” has conatus character in temporality, amounting not only to striving to prolong the duration of one’s actualization but also to striving to be as active or autonomous as possible, that is, to attain a state determined by the striving subject’s essence alone. (shrink)

Despite the emphasis placed by most curricula in the development of social and emotional competencies in education, there seems to be a general lack of knowledge of methods that integrate strategies for assessing these competencies into existing educational practices. Previous research has shown that the development of social and emotional competencies in children has multiple benefits, as they seem to contribute to better physical and mental health, an increase in academic motivation, and the well-being and healthy social progress of (...) children. This study aims at assessing the possible changes in children’s self-esteem, socio-emotional competencies, and school-related variables after participating in the Learning to Be project (L2B) project.Methods:This quasi-experimental study included an intervention group (L2B) and a control group. The participants were 221 students in primary education (55.2% girls) between the ages of eight and 11 (M= 9.31; SD = 0.89). The L2B intervention program took place over a period of 5 months. The assessment was carried out twice, before and after the intervention through three main evaluation instruments: the Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem questionnaire, the Socio-Emotional competence questionnaire (SEQ), and self-report scales for measuring school difficulties, school engagement, opinions about school, and school absence. Ten schools from different Spanish provinces participated.Results:The results indicate that those participants in the experimental group show higher self-esteem, better responsible decisions, and higher self-awareness than those in the control group. There were no other statistical differences between groups.Conclusions:The results of this work suggest that the implementation of the L2B program did not improve social and emotional competencies in primary school students. Further research related to how include formative assessment in SEL programs is needed. (shrink)

The Sabbath is part of Jewish tradition. In Christianity it has taken on a new meaning. Both faiths saw it as a gift from God, a tool to affirm one’s spiritual creed and identity, and a way to maintain a distinct faith identity. The secularism of contemporary society has resulted in a misinterpretation of the purpose of Sunday rest and a disregard for the spiritual aspects that the Sunday celebration involves. A false perception of Sunday rest has emerged in (...) modern times: It is not perceived as a divine gift that enables a spiritual ministry, which leads to resistance and opposition to the restless anxiety of the consumerist world and serves as an alternative to advertising’s demanding presence in this world. This rest, as a gift from God, has been one of the most fundamental defining features of man’s connection with God throughout history. Since Christian antiquity, there has been substantial debate over how to observe this tremendous gift of rest. Rest was valued as a gift in the Jewish culture in a specific way that included defining the identity of the chosen people. Later, in the Christian tradition, it was connected to the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection and the spiritual healing He provided to the world. There has been much debate on the continuity and discontinuity between the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday, as well as on how the transition from the Sabbath to the Sunday celebration came about. The two qualities of the Jewish Sabbath – a day of rest and a day of religious celebration – have been transferred to the Christian Sunday but in a radically different context.Contribution: By analysing early Christian literature, this study aims to investigate how the concept of Sabbath rest was taken up and reconstructed in Christianity in the celebration of Sunday, and how spiritual work was a constant in the life of Christian communities up until the 4th century, when Sunday rest was established by law. Contrary to Rordorf’s opinions, this article aims to show that Christians, despite being physically obligated to work on Sundays, tacitly observed this day as a day of resurrection, emphasising the spiritual work of the virtues as their vehicle towards their entrance into the rest in God, even before Sunday became socially established as a day of rest (Heb 4:1–11). This study intends to show that this unique vision of the Sunday rest of the early church can be an element of resistance and an alternative to the demanding stress and restless anxiety of modern society. (shrink)

Bioeconomy solutions potentially reduce the utilization demand of natural resources, and therefore, represent steps towards circular economy, but are not per se equivalent to sustainability. Thus, production may remain to be achieved against losses in natural resources or at other environmental costs, and materials produced by bioeconomy are not necessarily biodegradable. As a consequence, the assumption that emerging bioeconomy by itself provides an environmentally sustainable economy is not justified, as technologies do not necessarily become sustainable merely through their conversion to (...) using renewable resources for their production. A source of the above assumption is that the utility of bioeconomy is mostly assessed in interaction between technology developers and economists, resulting in biased assessment with private commercial technology benefits being included, but environmental costs, especially longer term ones, not being sufficiently considered in the economic models. A possible solution to this conceptual contradiction may come from bioethics, as a strong concept in environmental ethics is that no technological intervention can be imposed on nature beyond its receptive capacity. To achieve a better balanced analysis of bioeconomy, environmental and ecological, as well as non-economic social aspects, need to be included in the overall assessment. (shrink)

Background Some have hypothesized that changing attitudes toward medical aid in dying (MAID) contribute to increased suicide rates, perhaps by increasing interest in dying or the perceived acceptability of suicide. This would represent a strong criticism of MAID policies. We sought to evaluate the association between the legalization and implementation of MAID across the U.S. and changing suicide rates.Methods We evaluated state-level monthly suicide death rates from 1995 to 2021. Because suicide rates vary by state, we constructed geographically-weighted regression models (...) controlling for annualized state-level sociodemographic factors, such as racial distribution (percent Caucasian), average age, income levels, unemployment rates, rates of spiritual engagement, firearm ownership rates, gender ratios, and education levels. We applied a difference-in-difference analysis within our geographically-weighted models.Results 927,929 Suicide deaths were represented in the study. Ten states and the District of Columbia had legalized MAID within the study period. In an univariable analysis, states that legalized MAID differed significantly from non-MAID states with respect to mean monthly suicide rate (non-MAID States: 1.46; MAID states: 1.78; p < 0.0001), as well as several covariates. Monthly suicide death rates were spatially autocorrelated (Moran’s I = 0.607, p < 0.0001). In separate geographically-weighted difference-in-difference analyses, changes in suicide rates were not significantly associated with MAID legalization (β = 0.042, p = 0.33) or with later MAID implementation (β = 0.030, p = 0.63), with differences in suicide rates in MAID and non-MAID states being attributable to baseline between-state differences.Conclusions Our study failed to find evidence that suicide rates were positively associated with MAID legalization or MAID implementation, when controlling for geographic variation and multiple sociodemographic factors associated with suicide risk. This finding contrasts with other studies that have reported a positive association between suicide rates and MAID, and so calls into question one argument against MAID legalization. (shrink)

Plans Not Needed if You Have High and Stable Self-Efficacy: Planning Intervention and Snack Intake in the Context of Self-Efficacy Trajectories Forming action plans is expected to move people from intention to action. We hypothesized that the effects of planning interventions may depend on changes in self-efficacy beliefs. Participants were assigned to the control or the planning intervention groups and reported their self-efficacy, sweet and salty snack intake at the baseline and four months later. The results suggest that (...) an increase of efficacy beliefs over time augmented the effects of the planning intervention and resulted in the lowest snack intake. Planning intervention also prompted lower unhealthy snacking if efficacy beliefs were decreasing. Those who have stable-high self-efficacy were able to achieve low snack intake regardless of the group assignment. (shrink)

Despite the unquestionable importance of technological progress in twenty-first-century society, the decision by many political leaders worldwide to treat natural sciences as an almost exclusive priority betrays a terrible misconception of the complexity of the contemporary world. As the Renaissance cannot be reduced to Copernicus’s or Galileo’s brilliant contributions, or Enlightenment to the works of such giants as Newton and Cavendish, contemporary society will hardly be remembered as just a series of amazing software and gadget updates. There are three categories (...) of questions today that only humanities are prone to answer. The first one, exploring the relations between subject and object mediated by the meaning of “property”, ultimately concerns the discussion between legality and legitimacy. Not long ago, teenagers were still being sued by the giants of the Entertainment Industry for downloading songs, and the practice of mash-ups or remixing even now arouses huge polemics. The second one, focused on the self-representations of the subject, concerns the changing meanings (and representations) of identity and cultural borders in a globalizing world. Finally, the inter-subjective interactions are the centre of the political tensions between democracy and demagogy, two opposed categories that have often been presented as hardly distinguishable from each other. (shrink)

This debate took place over ten years ago. To say that it was a debate is, in fact, not really accurate, because not long after the discussions had begun, it turned into a criticism and massacre of the expression "two combine into one" and of those who used it. Later, it became the platform on which those so-called "authorities on theory," and those like Chen Boda who did the bidding of Lin Biao and the "gang of four" became the "heroes" (...) of this massacre. The expression "two combine into one" by that time was being used as a political indictment against those guilty of the enemy-versus-us contradiction. And in the Great Cultural Revolution it became an even more fearful crime. It was of course very difficult to carry out a scholarly discussion in that kind of atmosphere. The expression "two combine into one" and some of the arguments raised by those comrades who advocated the use of this expression were originally worthy of study, even though some of their positions were really untenable, such as the statement that all objective things are "two combined into one," and that we should use "one divides into two" in the process of understanding them. What really is the inherent meaning of the expression "one divides into two"? In what sense and in what contexts should it be used? This also needs to be examined carefully. But because philosophical research was turned into political criticism, these theoretical evaluations and their mutual discussion never progressed, and thus, aside from remembering that these philosophical propositions "one divides into two" and "two combine into one" were at the time laden with political meaning, there is little understanding of their philosophical content. And few even of those who work in philosophy have had the courage to study them philosophically. Thus this "debate" which confused scholarly differences for political struggle, and for even the enemy-versus-us struggle, may be said to have added nothing positive to our understanding and research on the law of the unity of opposites in Chinese philosophical circles. It provided us with only a profound lesson. (shrink)

This article argues that while the presence and influence of “futility” as a concept in medical decision-making has declined over the past decade, medicine is seeing the rise of a new concept with similar features: suffering. Like futility, suffering may appear to have a consistent meaning, but in actuality, the concept is colloquially invoked to refer to very different experiences. Like “futility,” claims of patient “suffering” have been used (perhaps sometimes consciously, but most often unconsciously) to smuggle value judgments (...) about quality of life into decision-making. And like “futility,” it would behoove us to recognize the need for new, clearer terminology. This article will focus specifically on secondhand claims of patient suffering in pediatrics, but the conclusions could be similarly applied to medical decisions for adults being made by surrogate decision-makers. While I will argue that suffering, like futility, is not sufficient wholesale justification for making unilateral treatment decisions, I will also argue that claims of patient suffering cannot be ignored, and that they almost always deserve some kind of response. In the final section, I offer practical suggestions for how to respond to claims of patient suffering. (shrink)

In in the second half of the 1940s, Jan Patočka emphasized the essentially negative character of human existence. He thus found himself in the neighborhood of Sartre’s existentialism, Heidegger’s philosophy of being, and Hegel’s dialectic, and at the same time in opposition to schools of thought which either completely reject the substantive use of “the nothing,” such as Carnap’s positivism, or relativize it, like Bergson. It is the latter polemic, Patočka’s with Bergson, which is discussed in this article. The (...) concept of negativity in Patočka basically refers to the idea that human existence is defined by a capacity to adopt a distance toward what is pre-given, be it the reality of the physical world or the established habits and rules of a particular society. Negativity qua distance has in Patočka an absolute character. It is this claim that he defends in his critique of Bergson. The article attempts to reconstruct Patočka’s position. I claim that the wager on absolute negativity does not make Patočka a nihilist, but a philosopher of a negative holism, and, in a sense, even a moralist. Above a reconstruction of Patočka’s stance, I spell out some reservations focused especially on the systematic meaning of Patočka’s recourse to negativity. I suggest that negation is an indispensable part of a more complex existential structure Patočka is aiming at. The terms he uses for this structure include “thirst for the absolute,” “thirst for reality,” “restlessness of the heart” and “desire.” To translate these allusions onto a general plan, it is useful to talk about the capacity to establish differences that matter. As general as it seems, this turn of phrase can grasp both Patočka’s emphasis on negativity, and his emphasis on the absolute, the latter – nevertheless – not residing in a distance from being, but in differences established, maintained and abandoned by ourselves within being. (shrink)

Background: The high disease burden of Africa, the emergence of new diseases and efforts to address the 10/90 gap have led to an unprecedented increase in health research activities in Africa. Consequently, there is an increase in the volume and complexity of protocols that ethics review committees in Africa have to review. Methods: With a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET) undertook a survey of 31 ethics review committees (ERCs) across sub-Saharan (...) Africa as an initial step to a comprehensive capacity-strengthening programme. The number of members per committee ranged from 3 to 21, with an average of 11. Members of 10 institutional committees were all from the institution where the committees were based, raising prima facie questions as to whether independence and objectivity could be guaranteed in the review work of such committees. Results: The majority of the committees (92%) cited scientific design of clinical trials as the area needing the most attention in terms of training, followed by determination of risks and benefits and monitoring of research. The survey showed that 38% of the ERC members did not receive any form of training. In the light of the increasing complexity and numbers of health research studies being conducted in Africa, this deficit requires immediate attention. Outcome: The survey identified areas of weakness in the operations of ERCs in Africa. Consequently, AMANET is addressing the identified needs and weaknesses through a 4-year capacity-building project. (shrink)