If school attendance is important for social integration, then a particular out of school practice like home education could possibly represent a threat to social integration. The findings of a Norwegian research project that surveyed socialization among Norwegian home educated students from different regions are presented and discussed using socialization theory and a theory of cultural order. Among the conclusions are the following: Pragmatically motivated home educated students are often socially well integrated. Religiously motivated home educated students that hold values (...) distant from the values of society are not necessarily socially isolated. With more openness and more communication between society and home educators home educated students could meet criteria for social integration even more so than is presently the case. (shrink)

Recent developments in quantum physics postulate the existence of some form of multiverse, often considered inimical to theism. We argue that a cosmology of many worlds is not novel either to philosophy or to theism. The multiverse is not a monolithic concept and we refer to and use the four levels of categorization proposed by Max Tegmark. We trace the idea of a multiverse back to the Milesians and Epicureans in order to initially demonstrate its use of a plenitude argument. (...) We then examine the argument for possible compatibility based on a theistic principle of plenitude in three specifically Christian theists: Origen, Thomas Aquinas, and G. W. Leibniz. We conclude that this argument is sustainable so that if any level of the multiverse actually exists then it is harmonious with theism, and we argue that its fit is most successful if a multiverse is considered as a single possible world. We call this view Thomistic modal realism. (shrink)

As the label “Leibnizian-Wolffian School Philosophy” suggests, Christian Wolff has traditionally been regarded as Leibniz’s disciple. Thanks to L. W. Beck, C. A. Corr, J. École, and others, we now know that Wolff was inspired by.

Aktuelle Debatten um Food Ethics, Körperlichkeit und gutes Leben sind von Wechselspielen zwischen gastraler und gedanklicher Verdauung geprägt. Doch auch die Geschichte der abendländischen Philosophie ist von Fragen der Verdauung durchzogen. Die thematische Vielfalt ist hier enorm und erbitterter Meinungsstreit keine Seltenheit. Christian W. Denker greift charakteristische Motive dieser Ideengeschichte auf, etwa bei Pythagoras, Platon, Epikur, Philon, Montaigne, Diderot, Kant, Lichtenberg, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Searle und Derrida, und zeigt zum einen, wie sich die Bedeutung der Verdauung für (...) philosophische Erklärungen zum Wissen, zum Handeln und zur Beurteilung des sinnlichen Erlebens aus der ursprünglichen Kopplung zwischen Sprache und Bauch entwickelt hat. Zum anderen macht er deutlich, wie wissenschaftliche, religiöse und künstlerische Motive den alltäglichen Umgang mit Bäuchen konkret und symbolisch bereichern. (shrink)

Die assyrischen Königstitel und -epitheta vom Anfang bis Tukulti-Ninurta I. und seinen Nachfolgern. By Vladimir Sazonov. State Archives of Assyria Studies, vol. 25. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus ProJect, 2016. Pp. xiii + 139. $59. [Distributed by Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, IN].

We study the relationship between common knowledge and the sequence of iterated mutual knowledge from a topological point of view. It is shown that common knowledge is not equivalent to the limit of the sequence of iterated mutual knowledge. On that account the new epistemic operator limit knowledge is introduced and analyzed in the context of games. Indeed, an example is constructed where the behavioral implications of limit knowledge of rationality strictly refine those of common knowledge of rationality. More generally, (...) it is then shown that limit knowledge of rationality is capable of characterizing any solution concept for some appropriate epistemic-topological conditions. Finally, some perspectives of a topologically enriched epistemic framework for games are discussed. (shrink)

We analyze the sequential structure of dynamic games with perfect information. A three-stage account is proposed, that species setup, reasoning and play stages. Accordingly, we define a player as a set of agents corresponding to these three stages. The notion of agent connectedness is introduced into a type-based epistemic model. Agent connectedness measures the extent to which agents' choices are sequentially stable. Thus describing dynamic games allows to more fully understand strategic interaction over time. In particular, we provide suffcient conditions (...) for backward induction in terms of agent connectedness. Also, our framework makes explicit that the epistemic independence assumption involved in backward induction reasoning is stronger than usually presumed, and makes accessible multiple-self interpretations for dynamic games. (shrink)

Medical-legal partnerships connect legal advocates to healthcare providers and settings. Maintaining effectiveness of medical-legal partnerships and consistently identifying opportunities for innovation and adaptation takes intentionality and effort. In this paper, we discuss ways in which our use of data and quality improvement methods have facilitated advocacy at both patient (client) and population levels as we collectively pursue better, more equitable outcomes.

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness‐ratings studies. This is particularly relevant to metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete. To investigate whether perceived concreteness ratings differ for metaphorical versus non‐metaphorical (...) word meanings, we obtained concreteness ratings for 96 English nouns from 230 participants. Results show that nouns are perceived as less concrete when a metaphorical (versus non‐metaphorical) meaning is triggered. We thus recommend taking metaphoricity into account in future concreteness‐ratings studies to further improve the quality and reliability of such studies, as well as the consistency of the empirical studies that rely on these ratings. (shrink)

This article describes the Metaphorical Source Domain Identification Procedure (MSDIP), which can be used to code source domains in metaphor identification. In the first part of the article, we describe the complexity of source-domain coding in corpus analysis. We argue that, in many cases, discourse is underspecified and multiple source-domain candidates may be relevant for a specific metaphorical expression. For instance, if a word like “fight” or “target” is used metaphorically, it could refer to either the source domain of war (...) or sports. To make these issues explicit for analysts, we developed MSDIP, which builds on and extends the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU). In the second part of the article, we explain the coding steps of MSDIP and subsequently report on a reliability analysis, demonstrating the reproducibility of the procedure. We end with a number of detailed sample analyses, demonstrating the role of co-text and context in selecting the likeliest source-domain candidate through MSDIP. These analyses show that MSDIP is both reliable and flexible in dealing with the complexities of real-life discourse during source-domain coding. (shrink)