This is a book about the role that psychological impairment should play in a theory of criminal liability. Criminal guilt in the Anglo-American legal tradition requires both that the defendant committed some proscribed act and did so with intent, knowledge, or recklessness. The second requirement corresponds to the intuitive idea that people should not be punished for something they did not do 'on purpose' or if they 'did not realize what they were doing'. Unlike many works in this area, this (...) book addresses the automatism and insanity defences by examining the types of functional impairment that typical candidates for these defences actually suffer. What emerges is a much wider conceptual framework that allows us to understand the significance of psychological states and processes for the attribution of criminal responsibility in a manner that is logically coherent, morally defensible, and consistent with research in psychopathology. (shrink)

This paper reviews the debate on the notion of biological function and on functional explanation as this takes place in philosophy. It describes the different perspectives, issues, intuitions, theories and arguments that have emerged. The author shows that the debate has been too heavily influenced by the concerns of a naturalistic philosophy of mind and argues that in order to improve our understanding of biology the attention should be shifted from the study of intuitions to the study of the actual (...) practice of biological inquiry. (shrink)

This is a book about the role that psychological impairment should play in a theory of criminal liability. Criminal guilt in the Anglo-American legal tradition requires both that the defendant committed some proscribed act and did so with intent, knowledge, or recklessness. The second requirement corresponds to the intuitive idea that people should not be punished for something they did not do 'on purpose' or if they 'did not realize what they were doing'. Unlike many works in this area, this (...) book addresses the automatism and insanity defences by examining the types of functional impairment that typical candidates for these defences actually suffer. What emerges is a much wider conceptual framework that allows us to understand the significance of psychological states and processes for the attribution of criminal responsibility in a manner that is logically coherent, morally defensible, and consistent with research in psychopathology. (shrink)

Following Mayr (1961) evolutionary biologists often maintain that the hallmark of biology is its evolutionary perspective. In this view, biologists distinguish themselves from other natural scientists by their emphasis on why-questions. Why-questions are legitimate in biology but not in other natural sciences because of the selective character of the process by means of which living objects acquire their characteristics. For that reason, why-questions should be answered in terms of natural selection. Functional biology is seen as a reductionist science that applies (...) physics and chemistry to answer how-questions but lacks a biological point of view of its own. In this paper I dispute this image of functional biology. A close look at the kinds of issues studied in biology and at the way in which these issues are studied shows that functional biology employs a distinctive biological perspective that is not rooted in selection. This functional perspective is characterized by its concern with the requirements of the life-state and the way in which these are met. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on elderly patients’ and nursing staff perceptions of privacy in the care of elderly patients/residents in five European countries. Privacy includes physical, social and informational elements. The results show that perceptions of privacy were strongest in the UK (Scotland) and weakest in Greece. Country comparisons revealed statistically significant differences between the perceptions of elderly patients and also between those of nurses working in the same ward or long-term care facility. Perceptions of privacy by patients (...) and their nursing staff were quite similar in Finland, Germany and the UK. In contrast, in Greece and Spain these perceptions were different: nurses believed that they took account of their patients’ privacy needs more often than the patients themselves felt this was the case. Among Spanish and UK patients, an association was found between lower levels of independence and comparatively less positive perceptions of privacy. No associations were established between nurses’ perceptions and their demographic factors. This is the third of a set of five articles published together in this issue of Nursing Ethics in which the results of this comparative research project are presented. (shrink)

Social anxiety disorders (SAD) are among the most prevalent mental disorders (lifetime prevalence: 7–12%), with high impact on the life of an affected social system and its individual social system members. We developed a manualized disorder-specific integrative systemic and family therapy (ISFT) for SAD, and evaluated its feasibility in a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT). The ISFT is inspired by Helm Stierlin’s concept of related individuation developed during the early 1980s, which has since continued to be refined. It integrates solution-focused (...) language, social network diagnostics, and genogram work, as well as resource- and problem orientation for both case conceptualization and therapy planning. Post-Milan symptom prescription to fluidize the presented symptoms is one of the core interventions in the ISFT. Theoretically, the IFST is grounded in radical constructivism and “Cybern-Ethics,” multi-directional partiality, and a both/and attitude toward a disorder-specific vs. non-disorder-specific therapy approach. SAD is understood from the viewpoint of social systems theory, especially in adaptation to a socio-psycho-biological explanatory model of social anxiety. In a prospective multicenter, assessor-blind pilot RCT, we included 38 clients with SAD (ICD F40.1; Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, LSAS-SR > 30): 18 patients participated in the ISFT, and 20 patients in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT; age:M = 36 years,SD = 14). Within-group, simple-effect intention-to-treat analyses showed significant reduction in social anxiety (LSAS-SR; ISFT:d = 1.67; CBT:d = 1.04), while intention-to-treat mixed-design ANOVA demonstrated the advantage of ISFT (d = 0.81). Per-protocol analyses supported these results. The remission rate based on blind diagnosticians’ ratings was good to satisfactory (Structured Clinical Interview, SCID; 78% in ST, 45% in CBT,p = 0.083); this has yet to be verified in a subsequent confirmatory RCT. The article will present the ISFT rationale and manual, including a special focus on multi-person settings, and the central findings from our pilot RCT. (shrink)

I argue that there are at least four different ways in which the term ‘function’ is used in connection with the study of living organisms, namely: function as activity, function as biological role, function as biological advantage, and function as selected effect. Notion refers to what an item does by itself; refers to the contribution of an item or activity to a complex activity or capacity of an organism; refers to the value for the organism of an item having a (...) certain character rather than another; refers to the way in which a trait acquired and has maintained its current share in the population. The recognition of a separate notion of function as biological advantage solves the problem of the indeterminate reference situation that has been raised against a counterfactual analysis of function, and emphasizes the importance of counterfactual comparison in the explanatory practice of organismal biology. This reveals a neglected problem in the philosophy of biology, namely that of accounting for the insights provided by counterfactual comparison. (shrink)

Although machine learning has been successful in recent years and is increasingly being deployed in the sciences, enterprises or administrations, it has rarely been discussed in philosophy beyond the philosophy of mathematics and machine learning. The present contribution addresses the resulting lack of conceptual tools for an epistemological discussion of machine learning by conceiving of deep learning networks as ‘judging machines’ and using the Kantian analysis of judgments for specifying the type of judgment they are capable of. At the center (...) of the argument is the fact that the functionality of deep learning networks is established by training and cannot be explained and justified by reference to a predefined rule-based procedure. Instead, the computational process of a deep learning network is barely explainable and needs further justification, as is shown in reference to the current research literature. Thus, it requires a new form of justification, that is to be specified with the help of Kant’s epistemology. (shrink)

This article deals with a type of functional explanation, viability explanation, that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of science. Viability explanations relate traits of organisms and their environments in terms of what an individual needs to survive and reproduce. I show that viability explanations are neither causal nor historical and that, therefore, they should be accounted for as a distinct type of explanation.

Continuous reducibilities are a proven tool in Computable Analysis, and have applications in other fields such as Constructive Mathematics or Reverse Mathematics. We study the order-theoretic properties of several variants of the two most important definitions, and especially introduce suprema for them. The suprema are shown to commutate with several characteristic numbers.

The focus of this article is on elderly patients’ and nursing staff perceptions of informed consent in the care of elderly patients/residents in five European countries. The results suggest that patients and nurses differ in their views on how informed consent is implemented. Among elderly patients the highest frequency for securing informed consent was reported in Finland; the lowest was in Germany. In contrast, among nurses, the highest frequency was reported in the UK (Scotland) and the lowest in Finland. In (...) a comparison of patients’ and nurses’ perceptions, nurses had more positive views than patients in all countries except Finland. Patients with less need for nursing interventions in Greece and Spain gave their consent less often. The German and Greek patients were older, and the results also point to an association between this and their lower frequency of giving consent. In Spain, patients who were married or who had a family member or friend to look after their personal affairs were more likely to be included in the group whose consent was sought less often. This is the fourth of a set of five articles published together in this issue of Nursing Ethics in which the results of this comparative research project are presented. (shrink)

This handbook explores the ways biomedicine and pop culture interact while simultaneously introducing the reader with the tools and ideas behind this new field of enquiry. From comic books to health professionals, from the arts to genetics, from sci-fi to medical education, from TV series to ethics, it offers different entry points to an exciting and central aspect of contemporary culture: how and what we learn about scientific knowledge and its representation in pop culture. Divided into three sections the handbook (...) surveys the basics, the micro-, and the macroaspects of this interaction between specialized knowledge and cultural production: After the introduction of basic concepts of and approaches to the topic from a variety of disciplines, the respective theories and methods are applied in specific case studies. The final section is concerned with larger social and historical trends of the use of biomedical knowledge in popular culture. Presenting over twenty-five original articles from international scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, this handbook introduces the topic of pop culture and biomedicine to both new and mature researchers alike. The articles, all complete with a rich source of further references, are aimed at being a sincere entry point to researchers and academic educators interested in this somewhat unexplored field of culture and biomedicine. (shrink)

Nietzsche's model of eternal return triggers a drama of affirmation, the overcoming of a simple miming of our ancestors in favour of an active participation in the counter-actualisation of hidden potentials in recurrent events. Based on a close study of Zarathustra's struggle to free himself from a suffocating nihilism, the paper focuses on the revelatory caesura that ushers in what Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time, a time of ‘doing’ rather than reflection.

"André Tosel (1941-2017) fut par excellence un intellectuel organique au sens donné par Gramsci. Militant pour une part, et pour l'autre, auteur d'une oeuvre singulière et riche, nourrie de ; Spinoza, de Marx et de Gramsci dont il fut l'un des spécialistes français. OEuvre tout entière tournée vers une refondation non-dogmatique de la théorie marxienne de la révolution et vers l'élaboration d'une définition actualisée et rénovée de l'émancipation, maître-mot sans doute de sa pensée. Émancipation juridique (de l'État "pénal" plus que (...) de droit), sociale (de l'impératif systémique capitaliste), politique (de la "démocratie-régime", en réalité un "libéral-totalitarisme") et religieuse (repensant les conditions de la laïcité, autre maître-mot de cette oeuvre, contre le ré-enchantement métaphysico-religieux). Arno Munster rend ici hommage à une oeuvre dont on s'étonne qu'elle n'ait pas davantage été connue, qui doit l'être plus et mieux, et qui la critique aussi bien, en toute amitié, depuis les points de vue qui lui sont propres, poursuivant en somme ce qui a, des années durant, lié essentiellement leurs deux pensées et les a parfois opposés."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with reasonings that purport to explain why certain organisms have certain traits by showing that their actual design is better than contrasting designs. Biologists call such reasonings 'functional explanations'. To avoid confusion with other uses of that phrase, I call them 'design explanations'. This paper discusses the structure of design explanations and how they contribute to scientific understanding. Design explanations are contrastive and often compare real organisms to hypothetical organisms that cannot possibly exist. They are not (...) causal but appeal to functional dependencies between an organism's different traits. These explanations point out that because an organism has certain traits, it cannot be alive if the trait to be explained were replaced by a specified alternative. They can be understood from a mechanistic point of view as revealing the constraints on what mechanisms can be alive. (shrink)

This major study advances an interpretation of criminal justification defences that views them as an integral component of the structure of the criminal law. Criminal law is defined here as the institutional representation of the underlying principles of political morality in a liberal society. The book extends the traditional scope of the legal and philosophical discussion of justification defences. It integrates philosophical analysis with a consideration of contemporary applications, it shows how these defences are key components of criminal law, and (...) it explores the relationship between legal and moral justification. (shrink)

There are currently two different views about the relation between philosophy and the empirical sciences. One of them – the “Quinean” view – holds that there is only a difference in degree: both are trying to gain insights in parts of the world, but philosophy, in opposition to the empirical sciences, which deal with concrete parts of the world, tries to find out insights of a very general type. The other view – which has a century old history, beginning with (...) Socrates/Plato and ending, in a certain sense, with the late Wittgenstein – holds that philosophy and the empirical sciences are separated by a sharp categorical difference: Empirical sciences deal with parts of the world, and philosophy deals with concepts, that is with our habits of distinguishing and classifying things, which enable us to deal empirically with the world. This paper tries to develop some arguments in favour of the second view, and, furthermore, tries to suggest some implications of this view. One of these implications is that there are three special tasks of philosophy as a concept-reflecting enterprise: the descriptive, the explanatory and the critical. It is remarkable to see that within these aims empirical insights come again to play a certain, although limited role. (shrink)

American adults currently enjoy a widely accepted and legally well-settled right to refuse health care, including life sustaining treatment. Joel Feinberg provides a moral foundation for this right in liberal political theory. Feinberg's theory grounds the right to refuse in a broad right to self-determination, and it implements the right through a variable conception of voluntariness. This theory provides a plausible account that comports with the widely accepted right to refuse, commonsense, and ordinary practice. -/- Allen Buchanan and Dan Brock (...) contend, however, that Feinberg's priority for the right to self-determination is inconsistent with his variable scale of voluntariness. Although Feinberg presents his theory as one that grants categorical priority to self-determination over individual well-being, Buchanan and Brock argue that Feinberg's variable scale of voluntariness involves a balancing of self-determination and well-being. This balancing approach, which Buchanan and Brock endorse, seems to undermine the competent patient's right to refuse care because it allows concern for the patient's well-being to override that person's right to self-determination in some circumstances. Taken together, these arguments seem to suggest that we must give up either the competent patient's right to refuse treatment or the intuitively sensible variable scale. -/- In this paper, I argue that one can reconcile a categorical priority for self-determination with legal rules that incorporate a variable scale of competence. This integration requires careful examination of the practical and expressive functions of legal rules as well as of the manner in which these rules embody moral priorities. This analysis pursues specific and general projects. Specifically, it addresses the moral foundations of the legal right to refuse treatment, identifying a substantive difference between the balancing approach and the priority for self-determination that characterizes Feinberg's liberalism. Generally, it examines the types of priorities embodied by legal rules as practical decision guides and as expressions of the conventional morality represented by the law. This general project extends beyond the right to refuse treatment to the analysis of the manner in which legal rules express and apply moral priorities. (shrink)

Quine, em seu livro Philosophy of Logic, identifica lógica com lógica de primeira ordem e defende a concepçáo segundo a qual a completude é uma propriedade necessária dos sistemas lógicos. O objetivo deste trabalho é discutir a argumentaçáo de Quine e mostrar que suas idéias a respeito da natureza da lógica apresentam diversos problemas tanto conceituais, como técnicos.

Das Lehrbuch, das neuartige Zugänge bietet, die sowohl die Politikgestaltung beeinflussen, als auch der Politikwissenschaft ein komplexes kritisch-rationales Handlungs- und Orientierungswissen bereitstellen. Das Werk eignet sich sowohl für das Selbststudium als auch für den akademischen Unterricht.

Dieses Buch schlägt - unter dem Titel "synthetischer Materialismus" - einen neuen Weg zur Klärung des Geist-Materie-Problems vor. Ausgangspunkt ist die These, dass wir als Betrachter der Welt frei sind, dieselben Gegenstände in unterschiedlich komplexe raum-zeitliche Zusammenhänge einzuordnen, und dass sich daraus unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten der Klassifikation von Gegenständen ergeben können: Wenn wir von "Lebewesen", "Handlungssubjekten" und "Personen" sprechen, und ihnen psychische Phänomene zuschreiben, nutzen wir den Umstand, dass die Konstellationen von Kohlehydraten, Eiweißen, Wasser und Nukleinsäuren, die jene Entitäten auch sind, (...) in einer besonderen Weise mit Teilen ihrer Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft in Verbindung gebracht werden können. Der synthetische Materialismus vermag so zu zeigen, dass es zwischen einem ausschließlich "materialistischen" Verständnis der Welt und jenen Sichtweisen, innerhalb derer wir manche Komplexe von materiellen Phänomenen als Individuen mit ihnen selbst bewussten Empfindungen, Absichten und Überzeugungen verstehen, Übergänge gibt, die methodisch-wissenschaftlich nachvollzogen werden können und die nicht zu nutzen töricht wäre. (shrink)

Exploration of the political roles firms play in society is a flourishing stream within corporate social responsibility research. However, few empirical studies have examined multiple levels of political CSR at the same time from a critical perspective. We explore both how the motivations of managers and internal organizational practices affect a company’s choice between competing CSR approaches, and how the different CSR programs of corporate and civil society actors compete with each other. We present a qualitative interpretative case study of (...) how a French children’s clothing retailer develops CSR practices in response to accusations of poor working conditions and child labor in its supply chain. The company’s CSR approach consists of superficial practices, such as supplier audits by a cooperative business-organized nongovernmental organization and philanthropic activities, which enable managers to silence more radical alternative models defended by other NGOs, activists, and trade unions. By this approach, the core business model based on exploitative low-cost country sourcing remains intact through self-regulated CSR. Through the case study, we develop a framework of dynamism in competing CSR programs. We discuss the implications of our study for CSR researchers, company managers, and policy makers. (shrink)

Fringe stakeholders with limited resources, such as grassroots organizations (GROs), are often ignored in business and society literature. We develop a conceptual framework and a set of propositions detailing how GROs strategically gain legitimacy and influence over time. We argue that GROs encounter specific paradoxes over the emergence, development, and resolution of an issue, and they address these paradoxes using cognitive, moral, and pragmatic legitimacy strategies. While cognitive and moral strategies tend to be used consistently, the flexible and paradoxical use (...) of pragmatic strategies has important consequences, both for GROs’ legitimacy and for their potential influence over powerful organizations associated with them. We enrich our framework with the help of two illustrative cases and discuss the implications of the framework for GROs’ legitimacy strategies in business and society literature. (shrink)

Long description: Wie lässt sich die Verbindung zwischen Leiblichkeit und der Konstitution kultureller Bedeutungen denken? Die Beiträge des Bandes reichen von begrifflichen Überlegungen zu den Körpern über die Einbeziehung der Psychosomatik zu jenen Körperpraktiken, welche die akademische Praxis selbst mitbestimmen. Der Vielfalt von Blickwinkeln gemeinsam ist die Aufmerksamkeit für den Körper als Ausgangspunkt und sinnstiftendes Medium wissenschaftlichen Denkens, Vortragens und Schreibens. Künstlerische Formen wie die Lecture-Performance geraten ebenso in den Blick wie die Frage, ob sich die Philosophie in der Perspektive (...) der Korporalen Performanz selbst als eine Form leiblicher Kreativität enthüllt. (shrink)

The work [11] deals with questions of first-order definability in algebraic function fields. In particular, it exhibits new cases in which the field of constant functions is definable, and it investigates the phenomenon of definable transcendental elements. We fix some of its proofs and make additional observations concerning definable closure in these fields.

The spectrum of methods (cf. Osterhoudt 1974) and the modes of thought that are used to analyse the world of sports are enormous. However, in international contexts, the range of philosophical reflections often seems to be reduced to a dichotomous structure, i.e. the analytical and the phenomenological approach. While the analytical position is linked to Anglo-Saxon countries, the phenomenological tradition is ascribed to continental philosophers. In this paper, firstly, I will address this seeming dichotomy of the continental and the Anglo-Saxon (...) positions ? being well aware of the problems of such generalisations. Secondly, I will sketch some key aspects of the phenomenology of movement and, especially, the phenomenological methodology from a German/French/Dutch perspective. Thirdly, I will focus on the existentialist interpretation of sports and how the existential philosophy is rooted in the phenomenological tradition. And finally, I will outline some advantages and limitations of the phenomenological method. (shrink)

The term “translation” has three meanings: the practice of the translator, the textual outcome of this practice, and the relationship it creates between texts and languages. In this article, I would like to draw attention to this third aspect, translation as a relation. To do so, I will first propose a historical overview of the first two meanings, as well as of the normative or descriptive aims associated to them. Secondly, I identify three motives for thinking about translation that are (...) primarily concerned with its relational dimension: the lack of a language to speak about the relationship between languages, i.e. about what’s incomparable and what gets subtracted. I conclude this article with the hypothesis that translation as a relation constitutes a refuge event for the plurality of languages. (shrink)