Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss. The chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine approaches to ecological and social extinction and resurgence from a variety of fields, including environmental studies, literary studies, political science, and philosophy. Grounding their scholarship in decolonial, Indigenous, and counter-hegemonic frameworks, the contributors advocate for shifting the discursive focus from ruin to regeneration. -/- .

ABSTRACTWhat is the relation between ethical reflection and moral behavior? Does professional reflection on ethical issues positively impact moral behaviors? To address these questions, Schwitzgebel and Rust empirically investigated if philosophy professors engaged with ethics on a professional basis behave any morally better or, at least, more consistently with their expressed values than do non-ethicist professors. Findings from their original US-based sample indicated that neither is the case, suggesting that there is no positive influence of ethical reflection on moral action. (...) In the study at hand, we attempted to cross-validate this pattern of results in the German-speaking countries and surveyed 417 professors using a replication-extension research design. Our results indicate a successful replication of the original effect that ethicists do not behave any morally better compared to other academics across the vast majority of normative issues. Yet, unlike the original study, we found mixed results o... (shrink)

Contributors to this volume present methodological foundations for deductive modeling in policy analysis, applications to particular areas of public policy, and applications to the institutional framework within which particular policies are chosen.

This article investigates the role of prosody in conversational humor in the HBO series Sex and the City in an exploratory study. Specifically, we examine how pitch and pauses are part of the prosodic bundle that can be used to mark an utterance as humoristic. We find that the use of prosodic resources participates not only in the marking but also the creation of humor. In this regard, we view pitch variation and pauses as having communicative strategies and cognitive benefits. (...) They are part of the performance of humor and participate in the characterization of the personage. The authors suggest the existence of a repertoire of prosodic devices associated to humor and to a particular discourse. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most university students have engaged in some form of academic dishonesty. These actions can have detrimental consequences for the student, the university, and society at large. It is important to understand factors that contribute to academic dishonesty as well as to identify potential predictors of this behavior. This study employed an experimental design with 361 undergraduate students in a laboratory setting. Deception was used during the experiment to determine the impact of peer influence, personality, and an honor code on (...) cheating behavior. Results revealed that peer influence had the largest impact on cheating behavior. In addition, personality, specifically, individuals who scored high on the openness trait were significantly more likely to cheat than those who scored lower on this trait. Implications of these findings for addressing academic dishonesty in higher education are provided. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that an operational organism concept can help to overcome the structural deficiency of mathematical models in biology. In our opinion, the structural deficiency of mathematical models lies mainly in our inability to identify functionally relevant biological characters in biological systems, and not so much in a lack of adequate mathematical representations of biological processes. We argue that the problem of character identification in biological systems is linked to the question of a properly formulated organism concept. (...) Lastly, we demonstrate how a decomposition of an organism into independent characters in the context of a specific biological process--such as adaptation by means of natural selection--depends on the dynamical properties and invariance conditions of the equations that describe this process. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the act of resistance by nurses and midwives at the nexus of abortion care and gender-based violence. We commence with a brief overview of a multiphased extended grounded theory doctoral project that analysed the individual, situational and socio-political experiences of Australian nurses and midwives who provide abortion care to people victimised by gender-based violence. We then turn to Essex's conceptualisation of resistance in health and healthcare and draw upon these concepts to tell a unifying and (...) cohesive story about how nurses and midwives exercise their politics. Vignettes taken from the three study phases are provided for demonstrative purposes. Finally, we discuss the potential of resistance in health and healthcare as a postmodern feminist research tool to analyse acts by nurses and midwives that could be categorised as political. (shrink)

A pesquisa procura não só conceituar e expor a estética de Hegel, mas também elucidar seu pensamento referente à questão. Em suas palavras, estética seria o belo artístico, criado pelo homem. Nesse sentido, a ascendência da arte está na precisão que o homem tem de objetivar seu espírito, morfosiando o mundo e também se transformando. Assim, nas páginas que se seguem há uma exposição do conceito vulgar de estética em contraponto a visão hegeliana, para tanto, o filósofo cita a ascensão (...) e declínio do conceito de arte e estética buscando contextualizá-la enquanto função na história do homem. (shrink)

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the (...) many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

It is a common socio-moral practice to appeal to reasons as a guiding force for one’s actions. However, it is an intriguing possibility that this practice is based on fiction: reasons cannot or do not motivate the majority of actions—especially moral ones. Rather, pre-reflective evaluative processes are likely responsible for moral actions. Such a view faces two major challenges: i.) pre-reflective judgements are commonly thought of as inflexible in nature, and thus they cannot be the cause of the varied judgements (...) people rely on in everyday life, and ii.) if reflective reason-based judgements do not play a strong causative role in judgement, why do people rely on the articulation of reasons in their moral practices? We argue that the pre-reflective judgements motivating moral actions are embodied in nature. The experience of the rightness of an action that drives a person to act depends on the sensorimotor interactions that have cultivated an agent’s perspective on the world. These interactions are embedded in relational contexts, relative to which judgements are individuated. Because of this relational embeddedness they are more flexible than they are commonly thought to be, enabling us to explain the variety of human behavior by appealing to them. The Anglo-European practice of appealing to reason as if they were propositional belief-statements motivating actions can be accounted for as nothing more than an idiosyncratic way of constructing narratives to clarify and express the relational context of intentional actions. (shrink)

An ω-categorical supersimple group is finite-by-abelian-by-finite, and has finite SU-rank. Every definable subgroup is commensurable with an acl( $\emptyset$ )-definable subgroup. Every finitely based regular type in a CM-trivial ω-categorical simple theory is non-orthogonal to a type of SU-rank 1. In particular, a supersimple ω-categorical CM-trivial theory has finite SU-rank.

Given the pervasiveness of gene sharing in evolution and the extent of homology across the tree of life, why is everything not homologous with everything else? The continuity and overlapping genetic contributions to diverse traits across lineages seem to imply that no discrete determination of homology is possible. Although some argue that the widespread overlap in parts and processes should be acknowledged as “partial” homology, this threatens a broad base of presumed comparative morphological knowledge accepted by most biologists. Following a (...) long scientific tradition, we advocate a strategy of “theoretical articulation” that introduces further distinctions to existing concepts to produce increased contrastive resolution among the labels used to represent biological phenomena. We pursue this strategy by drawing on successful patterns of reasoning from serial homology at the level of gene sequences to generate an enriched characterization of serial homology as a hierarchical, phylogenetic concept. Specifically, we propose that the concept of serial homology should be applied primarily to repeated but developmentally individualized body parts, such as cell types, differentiated body segments, or epidermal appendages. For these characters, a phylogenetic history can be reconstructed, similar to families of paralogous genes, endowing the notion of serial homology with a hierarchical, phylogenetic interpretation. On this basis, we propose a five-fold theoretical classification that permits a more fine-grained mapping of diverse trait-types. This facilitates answering the question of why everything is not homologous with everything else, as well as how novelty is possible given that any new character possesses evolutionary precursors. We illustrate the fecundity of our account by reference to debates over insect wing serial homologs and vertebrate paired appendages. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is a disturbance of the self, of which the attribution of agency is a major component. In this article, we review current theories of the Sense of Agency, their relevance to schizophrenia, and propose a novel framework for future research. We explore some of the models of agency, in which both bottom-up and top-down processes are implicated in the genesis of agency. We further this line of inquiry by suggesting that ongoing neurological activity (the brain’s resting state) in self-referential (...) regions of the brain can provide a deeper level of influence beyond what the current models capture. Based on neuroimaging studies, we suggest that aberrant activity in regions such as the default mode network of individuals with schizophrenia can lead to a misattribution of internally/externally generated stimuli. This can result in symptoms such as thought insertion and delusions of control. Consequently, neuroimaging can contribute to a more comprehensive conceptualization and measurement of agency and potential treatment implications. (shrink)

Positive thinking is often assumed to foster effort and success. Research has shown, however, that positive thinking in the form of fantasies about achieving an idealised future predicts less (not...

Musical genius, polemicist, explosive personality-that was the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, who paid as much attention to his reputation as to his genius. Often maddening, and sometimes called mad, Wagner wrote with the same intensity that characterized his music. The letters and essays collected in Judaism in Music and Other Essays were published during the 1850s and 1860s, the period when he was chiefly occupied with the creation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Highlighting this collection is (...) the notorious 1850 article "Judaism in Music, " which caused such a firestorm that nearly twenty years later Wagner published an unapologetic appendix. Other prose pieces include "On the Performing of Tannhauser, " written while he was in political exile; "On Musical Criticism, " an appeal for a more vital approach to art undivorced from life; and "Music of the Future." This volume concludes with letters to friends about the intent and performance of his great operas; estimations of Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and others; and suggestions for the reform of opera houses in Vienna, Paris, and Zurich. The Bison Book edition includes the full text of volume 3 of William Ashton Ellis's 1894 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society. (shrink)

A central topic in research at the intersection of development and evolution is the origin of novel traits. Despite progress on understanding how developmental mechanisms underlie patterns of diversity in the history of life, the problem of novelty continues to challenge researchers. Here we argue that research on evolutionary novelty and the closely associated phenomenon of co-option can be reframed fruitfully by: (1) specifying a conceptual model of mechanisms that underwrite character identity, (2) providing a richer and more empirically precise (...) notion of co-option that goes beyond common appeals to “deep homology”, and (3) attending to the nature of experimental interventions that can determine whether and how the co-option of identity mechanisms can help to explain novel character origins. This reframing has the potential to channel future investigation to make substantive progress on the problem of evolutionary novelty. To illustrate this potential, we apply our reframing to two case studies: treehopper helmets and beetle horns. (shrink)

The article focuses on the study on moral conflicts and ethical relativism. There are few theories in the history ethics that stated that a moral dilemma can not be adhered by to moral requirements. According to philosophy professor David Wong, occurrence of irresolvable moral disagreement is one of the normative problems. On the other hand, the author asserted that single-agent moral conflicts do not necessarily fall under the relativism theory.

I begin with a discussion of the value of privacy and what we lose without it. I then turn to the difficulties of preserving privacy for genetic information and other medical records in the face of advanced information technology. I suggest three alternative public policy approaches to the problem of protecting individual privacy and also preserving databases for genetic research:(1) governmental guidelines and centralized databases, (2) corporate self-regulation, and (3) my hybrid approach. None of these are unproblematic; I discuss strengths (...) and drawbacks of each, emphasizing the importance of protecting the privacy of sensitive medical and genetic information as well as letting information technology flourish to aid patient care, public health and scientific research. (shrink)

Meike Wagner and Wolf-Dieter Ernst Performing the Matrix. Mediating Cultural Performances Neo: The matrix? Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is? ...

We study local strengthenings of the simplicity condition. In particular, we define and study a local Lascar rank, as well as short, low, supershort and superlow theories. An example of a low, non supershort theory is given.

This paper begins with a discussion of the value of privacy,especially for medical records in an age of advancing technology.I then examine three alternative approaches to protection ofmedical records: reliance on governmental guidelines, the useof corporate self-regulation, and my own third hybrid view onhow to maintain a presumption in favor of privacy with respectto medical information, safeguarding privacy as vigorously andcomprehensively as possible, without sacrificing the benefitsof new information technology in medicine. None of the threemodels I examine are unproblematic, yet (...) it is crucial to weighthe strengths and weaknesses of these alternative approaches. (shrink)

Although testing for substance abuse can be intrusive, inaccurate, and ineffective at ferreting out those who are a threat to others, it can be morally justified in certain carefully circumscribed cases.

Most of us have certain intuitions about moral rights, at least partially captured by the ideas that: (A) rights carry special weight in moral argument; (B) persons retain their rights even when they are legitimately infringed; although (C) rights undoubtedly do conflict with one another, and are sometimes overridden as well by nonrights considerations. I show that Dworkin's remarks about rights allow us to affirm (A), (B), and (C), yet those remarks are extremely vague. I then argue that Feinberg's more (...) comprehensive and precise theory, designed to do justice to all three theses, cannot assure us of (A), that rights are not merely one consideration to be weighed in the balance with heterogeneous others. I show how Feinberg accepts (C) despite being drawn toward an alternative absolutist theory of rights and commits himself to (B) through his rejection of prima facie rights. But his promising distinction between recognition and enforcement of a right, which helps give some sense to (B) despite its tension with (C), undermines the force of rights in moral argument apparently intended by (A). We thus learn that Feinberg's and Dworkin's accounts of rights are incompatible, though each is correct in important ways. Contrasting their views allows us to clarify the implications and consistency of alternative theses about rights, one step toward meeting the challenge of developing a theory which shows more adequately how respect for rights is to be combined with other intuitions about rights and their relation to other values. (shrink)

The VIA Classification on character strengths and virtues suggests 24 character strengths clustered into six core virtues. Three recent studies employed different methods for testing the assignment of character strengths to virtues, and generally supported the VIA classification. However, the co-occurrence of character strengths and virtues within individuals has not been examined yet. Another untested assumption is that an individual’s composition of character strengths is related to being considered of “good character.” Thus, the present study addresses three research questions: How (...) do character strengths and measured virtues co-occur within individuals? How does the number of character strengths an individual possesses within a virtue cluster relate to their level of the respective virtue? How does the composition of an individual’s character strengths relate to being considered of “good character”? We combined data from different studies to obtain a sample of N = 1,241 participants aged 18 to 92 years. All participants completed assessments of character strengths and virtues. Regarding, we found a high convergence of the correlations between strengths and virtues and the VIA Classification: 22 out of 24 character strengths correlated with the assigned virtue. Also, 15 character strengths showed the numerically highest correlation with their assigned virtue. Regarding, overall, we found a linear trend between the number of strengths within one cluster and the virtue level. Regarding, we found higher levels of reported “good character” in those who possessed either at least one character strength in each virtue cluster or all character strengths in at least one virtue compared to those who did not. The present results contribute to the discussion regarding the structure of character: individuals’ character strengths relate to differences in virtues, across different measures and data sources. Relationships were mostly as expected, and deviations were consistent with results obtained using other approaches. (shrink)

A totally ordered group G is called coset-minimal if every definable subset of G is a finite union of cosets of definable subgroups intersected with intervals with endpoints in G{±∞}. Continuing work in Belegradek et al. 1115) and Point and Wagner 261), we study coset-minimality, as well as two weak versions of the notion: eventual and ultimate coset-minimality. These groups are abelian; an eventually coset-minimal group, as a pure ordered group, is an ordered abelian group of finite regular rank. (...) Any pure ordered abelian group of finite regular rank is ultimately coset-minimal and has the exchange property; moreover, every definable function in such a group is piecewise linear. Pure coset-minimal and eventually coset-minimal groups are classified. In a discrete coset-minimal group every definable unary function is piece-wise linear 261), where coset-minimality of the theory of the group was required). A dense coset-minimal group has the exchange property ); moreover, any definable unary function is piecewise linear, except possibly for finitely many cosets of the smallest definable convex nonzero subgroup. Finally, we give some examples and open questions. (shrink)

"In the same period Wagner was deeply inspired by the works of Shakespeare, an influence that runs throughout this volume. The title essay, "Actors and Singers," is one of Wagner's most deliberate and philosophical writings. He wrote, "Art ceases, strictly speaking, to be Art from the moment it presents itself as Art to our reflecting consciousness. " He described how the unconsciousness of art, and thus art's power, connected natural genius to cultivate traditions.

The paper delves into the evolution of language in French and English, focusing on the feminization and neutralization of job titles in legal and professional settings. It explores how these linguistic changes are intertwined with the broader implications of language in shaping moral and ethical standards, advocating for gender equality, and challenging gender biases. The study highlights the slow but impactful progress in linguistic reform within legal contexts, suggesting strategies to align legal language with contemporary principles of gender equality.

Faculty in a large, urban school of engineering designed a longitudinal study to assess the critical thinking skills of undergraduate students as they progressed through the engineering program. The Paul-Elder critical thinking framework was used to design course assignments and develop a holistic assessment rubric. This paper presents the analysis of the freshman course artifacts (baseline and course critical thinking assignments) and associated faculty scoring sessions for all three cohorts. A total of 649 first semester freshman students at least 18 (...) years old agreed to participate in the study. The majority were white males with a mean high school grade point average of 3.73, ACT composite score of 28.33, and final freshman engineering course grade of 3.57. There was a statistically significant positive relationship between the freshman course artifacts and the faculty scores. Data from the study are being used to enhance the critical thinking experiences for undergraduate engineering students. (shrink)

Among the many sorts of problems encountered in decision theory, allocation problems occupy a central position. Such problems call for the assignment of a nonnegative real number to each member of a finite set of entities, in such a way that the values so assigned sum to some fixed positive real number s. Familiar cases include the problem of specifying a probability mass function on a countable set of possible states of the world, and the distribution of a certain sum (...) of money, or other resource, among various enterprises. In determining an s-allocation it is common to solicit the opinions of more than one individual, which leads immediately to the question of how to aggregate their typically differing allocations into a single “consensual” allocation. Guided by the traditions of social choice theory decision theorists have taken an axiomatic approach to determining acceptable methods of allocation aggregation. In such approaches so-called “independence” conditions have been ubiquitous. Such conditions dictate that the consensual allocation assigned to each entity should depend only on the allocations assigned by individuals to that entity, taking no account of the allocations that they assign to any other entities. While there are reasons beyond mere simplicity for subjecting allocation aggregation to independence, this radically anti-holistic stricture has frequently proved to severely limit the set of acceptable aggregation methods. As we show in what follows, the limitations are particularly acute in the case of three or more entities which must be assigned nonnegative values summing to some fixed positive number s. For if the set V⊆[0,s] of values that may be assigned to these entities satisfies some simple closure conditions and Vis finite, then independence allows only for dictatorial or imposed aggregation. This theorem builds on and extends a theorem of Bradley and Wagner and, when V={0,1}, yields as a corollary an impossibility theorem of Dietrich on judgment aggregation. (shrink)

Was bedeutet es, über die Dauer des Lebens als individuelle Person fortzubestehen? Wagner entwickelt eine Theorie, die Personen als psycho-physische Akteure auffasst, deren Identität durch die kontingenten faktischen Normen und Strukturen der Handlungswelt bestimmt wird. Personenidentität wird als graduierbare Relation verstanden, die unsere Existenz auf einem Kontinuum zwischen Menschsein und Personsein lokalisiert.