Are there strong positive obligations? We obviously consider it a strong obligation to save a drowning child. The first part of this work investigates the factors that define the strength of such an obligation to help and how this is to be differentiated from actions that transcend obligation and from charitable obligations. The second part examines the question whether this case can be transposed to our relationship with those suffering from poverty and cites morally relevant factors that differentiate the cases.

In two experiments on analogical hypothesis generation, we factorially manipulated the presence of domain and object similarities between a base situation and a target phenomenon, and assessed their effects on the transfer of the source’s explanatory structure before and after an indication to use the base analog as a source for analogical explanations. The absence of any kind of surface similarity led to very low rates of spontaneous transfer. In both experiments, however, either kind of surface similarity sufficed to enhance (...) the spontaneous transfer of the base explanation during the formulation of plausible hypotheses for the target. The transfer advantage of object and domain similarity cannot be attributed to the effect of these variables on post-access processes, since experimental conditions did not differ with regard to the ability to transfer the base explanation upon explicit request. The effect of domain similarity on spontaneous analogical explanation constitutes a relevant finding, especially given the lack of attention received by this dimension of similarity in behavioural studies and computer simulations of analogical retrieval. (shrink)

El principal objetivo de este estudio consiste en dar cuenta de cómo se enmarca la forma de tratamiento nominal marico en el habla de jóvenes universitarios de Caracas, Venezuela, dentro de la Teoría de la cortesía, según la perspectiva ofrecida por los hablantes. Igualmente, se busca documentar qué cambios está presentando en los contextos de uso así como en sus funciones pragmáticas. Los participantes fueron 60 estudiantes universitarios, 30 mujeres y 30 hombres, de 17 a 21 años. Tradicionalmente, la palabra (...) marico se ha usado como agresión verbal vulgar y ha sido, generalmente, considerada un insulto. Luego del análisis cualitativo de los datos, se plantea que esta FTN se halla en una fase de transición de insulto a marcador pragmático anticortés que indica solidaridad dentro de un grupo etario específico y está perdiendo su carácter agraviador. En la actualidad, la juventud caraqueña emplea esta FTN no solo para implicar lazos de amistad, sino para expresar emociones como sorpresa y enojo, crear efectos de intriga, hacer bromas, abrir y cerrar oraciones e, incluso, sustituir otras FTN que nunca han sido consideradas insultos en el español de Venezuela. La metodología empleada fue el cuestionario y el análisis cualitativo de reportes en primera persona. Las variables de edad y sexo son factores determinantes, puesto que parece haber tendencia entre los jóvenes entrevistados a no emplear esta forma nominal con hablantes que están fuera de su grupo etario y las mujeres siguen siendo conservadoras al restringir, más que los hombres, el uso de este vocablo. (shrink)

From June 26 to 27, the workshop Ironists, Reformers, or Rebels? The Role of the Social Sciences in Participatory Policy Making took place at the Collegium Helveticum of the UZH/ETH in Zurich. The organisers’ motivation was the apparently missing involvement of social scientists in public engagement processes. This impression persists because, while social scientists often observe public debates or develop participatory methods for public policy-making, they rarely take part in those processes themselves. A closer look at ethics commissions, expert committees (...) or public hearings concerned with science and technology issues shows natural scientists, physicians, lawyers and the occasional philosopher. Sociologists, anthropologists and other social scientists, on the other hand, are often not involved. Because of this imbalance, the organisers’ aim was to bring together scholars and researchers from different areas of the social sciences to consider the role of their disciplines in public policy making. This article will focus on some of the ideas about specific roles of social scientists in participatory policy-making, discussed at the workshop, and their implications and give a commentary on some future prospects of the social sciences. (shrink)

Moral, die erstens von inhaltlich überzogenen Moralvorstellungen, zweitens von der Missachtung des Eigenrechts von Handlungssphären und drittens von überzogenen Arten des Geltendmachens moralisch legitimer Forderungen herrühren kann. Wir charakterisieren diese Quellen des Moralismus näher, unterscheiden verschiedene Spielarten oder Subtypen und besprechen schließlich Phänomene aus dem Umkreis des Moralismus.

The creation of biobanks depends upon people’s willingness to donate their samples for research purposes and to agree to sample storage. Moreover, biobanks are a public good that requires active participation by all interested stakeholders at every stage of development. Therefore, knowing public’s attitudes towards participation in a biobank and biobank management is important and deserves investigation.

Flow is a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with it. The flow concept was introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and interest in flow research is growing. However, to our best knowledge, no scoping review exists that takes a systematic look at studies on flow which were published between the years 2000 and 2016. Overall, 252 studies have been included in this review. Our review (...) provides a framework to cluster flow research, gives a systematic overview about existing studies and their findings, and provides an overview about implications for future research. The provided framework consists of three levels of flow research. In the first “Individual” level are the categories for personality, motivation, physiology, emotion, cognition, and behavior. The second “Contextual” level contains the categories for contextual and interindividual factors and the third “Cultural” level contains cultural factors that relate to flow. Using our framework, we systematically present the findings for each category. While flow research has made progress in understanding flow, in the future, more experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to gain deeper insights into the causal structure of flow and its antecedents and consequences. (shrink)

This essay discusses the aesthetic potential within Bernard Stiegler’s concept of technics, particularly its nascent or preactual form of realism. This realism fosters a sense of spontaneity, crucial to a modal engagement with time, being, and history in the face of contemporary planetary enframing. By critically appraising Stiegler’s framework, the essay proposes an aesthetics of care that aligns with restoring art’s primordial inhumanism. This stands in stark contrast to the inhumanism inherent in technological modernity. Reviving this aesthetics, a global challenge (...) that traverses East and West, might appear anachronistic. It proposes a return to the primordial integration of the human and inhuman, initially enshrined in art as technics (evident as far back as the Upper Paleolithic). Modern technology, however, severs the organological function of art from its foundational relation with humanity. In this dismemberment, a singular, immanent humanism emerges as the defining characteristic of modernity. This human becomes wholly accessible and subservient to technology, thus negating the reciprocal tension that defines their elemental and productive relationship, their original organology or how life at the time was intensively organized by this so-called tension. In conclusion, the essay advocates restoring this lost inhuman essence through a revitalized aesthetic sensibility that embraces an integral ecology as a countermeasure to stagnation and despair engendered by excessive human-centric enframing. (shrink)

In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 schools around the world have been closed to protect against the spread of coronavirus. In several countries, homeschooling has been introduced to replace classroom schooling. With a focus on individual differences, the present study examined 138 schoolers regarding their self-control and boredom proneness. The results showed that both traits were important in predicting adherence to homeschooling. Schoolers with higher levels of self-control perceived homeschooling as less difficult, which in turn increased homeschooling adherence. In (...) contrast, schoolers with higher levels of boredom proneness perceived homeschooling as more difficult, which in turn reduced homeschooling adherence. These results partially hold when it comes to studying in the classroom. However, boredom threatened adherence only in the homeschooling context. Our results indicate that boredom proneness is a critical construct to consider when educational systems switch to homeschooling during a pandemic. (shrink)

An educational provision for young children with autism that offers intensive behavioural intervention based on the principles of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), within an early years mainstream school setting in the UK, is described. The ABA Class at Westwood School is a collaborative project between the School of Psychology, Bangor University, two Local Education Authorities in North East Wales (Flintshire and Wrexham) and the local NHS Trust. Using two case examples, two important features of mainstream education for children with autism (...) are considered: access to the National Curriculum, and inclusion with peers in mainstream settings. Standardised test data on outcomes for these children over the initial 12 months of their educational placements are also provided. (shrink)

ArgumentDuring the eighteenth century, chemists in the Kingdom of Naples (the South of Italy) were very busy analyzing the chemical composition of ash from Mount Vesuvius. Undoubtedly, after a huge eruption this dusty phenomenon was the most important scientific object of debate. In fact, it was crucial to determine if there were dangerous elements in the ash so that the population could be warned about the potential hazards, such as polluted drinking water. This was not at all a simple issue, (...) as on the other hand there were scholars who realized that ash could be beneficial as a fertilizer, even as clouds of ash had obscured the sun. As chemical inquiries became more precise and the toxic concentration of many elements became known, this double life of Vesuvian ash as a scientific object gradually died. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Immanuel Kant - two important pillars of contemporary philosophy-were proficient critics of traditional metaphysics in their time. They were known to be critical of a sort of metaphysical striving predisposed to grounding or representing an elusive concept of the universal.. Kant had earlier deconstructed a pre-eminent feature of Western metaphysics, namely, the socalled essence of thing, had it consigned to the noumenon evocative of the paradoxical nature of human knowing: it regulates the boundaries according to which any (...) notion of the infinite, the universal or the absolute can be reflexively thematized, or, thus strategically said, problematized. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that poverty should be seen as a violation of dignity, drawing on two of Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative – the formula of humanity and the formula of the kingdom of ends. In our view, poverty should not be seen primarily in terms of exploitation, nor of failures to help people in need. A Kantian perspective should give proper weight to the actual and potential agency of those who suffer poverty. This is a question (...) about power, not just the distribution of material resources. Theoretically, we will place particular emphasis on the rarely remarked reference to “ends and means” in the formula of the kingdom of ends. People are sometimes treated merely as means, which is one sort of disrespect for their equal moral status. Another form of disrespect, deeper and more general in form, is the denial of decent opportunities to act as means for others. The resulting powerlessness, we suggest, should be central to an adequate understanding of poverty and its violations of dignity. (shrink)

Sara Ahmed's work allows us to think of happiness as an emotional regime of government that is distinctive of the «affective turn». The author addresses the way in which affects operate as disciplinary mechanisms in an intensified manner in what she precisely calls the contemporary «happiness turn». However, drawing from Ahmed's figure of the feminist killjoy, this relationship between power and happiness can also be thought of as an experience of transformation of the personal into the political. Feminist politicisation through (...) unhappiness makes it possible to imagine other worlds and other ways of living that deviate from the normativity of the happiness discourses that dominate the present. (shrink)

Als kulturgeschichtlich bedeutsame Phänomene entstammen Masken der Ritual- und Theaterpraxis und traten schon in der Antike als Metapher in den Sprachgebrauch über. Kaum ein Philosoph hat den Masken so viel Raum gegeben wie Friedrich Nietzsche: Sie sind ihm Hilfsmittel der Erkenntnis und conditio humana, sie ermöglichen Höflichkeit und Selbstschutz, fungieren aber auch als Darstellungsform. Corinna Schubert führt zentrale Themen seines Denkens unter einem neuen Gesichtspunkt zusammen und erschließt sie als Philosophie der Masken. Dabei geht es nicht nur darum, was (...) Nietzsche über Masken denkt, sondern auch, wie er mit und in Masken denkt. (shrink)

Tras la pandemia de la covid-19, han aparecido en el contexto hispanohablante tres ensayos que abordan la eclosión de problemas de salud mental en el presente: _Frágiles _(2021), de Remedios Zafra, _Malestamos _(2022), de Javier Padilla y Marta Carmona, y _El murmullo _(2023), de Belén Gopegui. A pesar de la disparidad disciplinar y metodológica de sus autores, sus similitudes son significativas; ante todo, contemplan estos «malestares» atendiendo a sus desencadenantes estructurales. Por un lado, plantean este sufrimiento distintivo de nuestra época (...) como vinculado a las narrativas neoliberales de vida y como una «disfuncionalidad funcional» de las lógicas productivas del capitalismo contemporáneo. Por otro, ofrecen razones para la esperanza, que pasan todas ellas por la búsqueda en colectivo de las condiciones y posibilidades de transformación del presente. (shrink)

La relación entre lengua y sexualidad recién ha comenzado a cobrar importancia dentro de los estudios socioculturales. Este trabajo explora las distintas pistas lingüísticas encriptadas en el cuento La búsqueda de Elizabeth, de Marta Pessarrodona, para desenmascarar la velada identidad sexual del personaje central. Un análisis referente al proceso de reconocimiento, búsqueda y aceptación de una identidad sexual no canónica de la protagonista validará los cuatro principios propuestos por Bucholtz y Hall : afloramiento, indexicalidad, relacionalidad y parcialidad.

I was optimistic of a new beginning in an open society when I came to America in 1999. Since then, I have indeed benefited from many aspects of American life. I have learned a lot – especially through my experience with small farms and farmers. But now, it's time to move on. And it was reading Debt and Dispossession, a book about American agriculture and human values, that crystallized in me why I wanted to leave. By telling the story of (...) the 1980s farm crisis through the words of the residents of a Minnesota town, the book prizes open many of the contradictions of American society. The 1970s were boom times for mid-western farms; farmers took advantage of “easy” farm credit to finance expansion. By the 1980s, the boom burst and slump loomed. Lenders wanted their money back and thousands of farmers were dispossessed. Debt and Dispossession probes beneath the surface of a community apparently united in protest against the dispossessions. Underneath, it finds a tangled picture of a society at war with itself, pitting farmer against farmer in a fratricidal struggle. The book let me glimpse the paradox of American individualism, all-American contradictions centering on government and consumerism, frugality and morality. Just like my experience of American agriculture and farmers as a whole, Debt and Dispossession helped me see the best side of America, but also revealed the fragility of life in a one-on-one society. (shrink)

The question of immigration and its corollary community and minority formation has always been analysed in relation to states. However, the increasing importance of solidarity beyond national borders on the grounds of one or several identities – national, religious, ethnic, regional – removes the claim of recognition of a collective identity from a national level to an international level and, in the European Union, to a supranational level. Such an evolution places territory at the core of the analysis of citizenship (...) and nationhood, for communities as well as states. This article will attempt to show that in this new configuration, negotiations between states and immigrants are brought beyond borders in order for states to maintain the ‘power’ of incorporation and citizenship while expanding their influence beyond their territories and to compete with transnational communities in their engagement in the process of globalization. (shrink)

We all know vampires. Count Dracula and Nosferatu, maybe Blade and Angel, or Stephenie Meyer’s sparkling beau, Edward Cullen. In fact, the Euro-American vampire myth has long become one of the most reliable and bestselling fun-rides the entertainment industries around the world have to offer. Quite recently, however, a new type of fanged villain has entered the mainstream stage: the American Indian vampire. Fully equipped with war bonnets, buckskin clothes, and sharp teeth, the vampires of recent U.S. film productions, such (...) as Blade, the Series or the Twilight Saga, employ both the Euro-American vampire trope and denigrating discourses of race and savagery. It is also against this backdrop that American Indian authors and filmmakers have set out to renegotiate not only U.S. America’s myth of the racially overdrawn “savage Indian,” but also the vampire trope per se. Drawing on American Indian myths and folklore that previous scholarship has placed into direct relationship to the Anglo-European vampire narrative, and on recent U.S. mainstream commodifications of these myths, my paper traces and contextualizes the two oppositional yet intimately linked narratives of American Indian vampirism ensuing today: the commodified image of the “Indian” vampire and the renegotiated vampire tropes created by American Indian authors and filmmakers. (shrink)

Alejandro de Hales, maestro franciscano de la Universidad de París en la primera mitad del siglo XIII, no es un autor que haya sido estudiado con demasiada frecuencia en las últimas décadas. Sin embargo, sus obras, entre las que se destaca su voluminosa Summa Theologica, revelan no solamente profundidad especulativa, sino también una inteligente recepción de las fuentes clásicas, patrísticas y medievales. En la Summa, dedica la Inquisitio tertia a tratar las especies de pecados actuales, y es en la cuestión (...) 1 de la segunda sección del tratado cuarto donde incluye un titulus dedicado a la acedia, en el que luego de precisar la definición de este vicio, discute acerca de su condición de pecado. El propósito de esta comunicación es exponer y comentar el concepto de acedia que propone Alejandro, haciendo hincapié en la recepción de algunos conceptos aristotélicos que allí se manifiesta, a través de una aproximación etimológica, una aproximación conceptual y su ubicación en un género determinado. La conclusión permitirá determinar que, para Alejandro como para los Padres del Desierto, la acedia es el desorden de la espiritualidad que impide que el monje o el religioso alcancen la contemplación. En el caso de Evagrio Póntico, el impedimento estará personalizado en un logismos o pensamiento malvado detrás del cual se esconde un demonio; y en el caso de Alejandro, en cambio, será un pecado consistente en una profunda tristeza que lentifica y entumece las fuerzas espirituales. (shrink)

This review essay engages critically with Heikki Patomäki's The Political Economy of Global Security: War, Future Crises, and Changes in Global Governance. The book is built around the hypothesis that the current ‘era of Neoliberalism’ shares many similarities to the era of the ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century, ending, catastrophically, in World War I and the Great Depression. Patomäki undertakes this comparison by focusing on the principal long-term historical processes, structures, tendencies and contradictions that may be responsible for (...) the similarities between these two eras. To do so Patomäki constructs an explanatory model of the underlying causal processes and mechanisms involved. The implications are ominous and urgent. The essay uses a close examination of this exemplary case of critical realism in social science to discuss critically its historical explanations, the comparative analysis it makes, and especially the question of agency as theorised in the author's ‘future scenarios’. (shrink)

This article offers a Kantian account of dignity violations in the context of contemporary migration to western states. It considers three major issues: “modern slavery,” statutory detention, and lack of rights to engage in economic activity. While most Kantian accounts emphasize the dignity violations of treating people as “mere means,” we point out that this does not capture the central issue: the “hostile environment” that so many migrants face. The first part of the article briefly sets out a Kantian account (...) of dignity violations. The second part highlights two key differences between modern slavery and its historical forebears. It emphasizes the interpersonal rather than institutional character of modern slavery, and distinguishes trafficking from smuggling. The third part argues that migrants who lack formal rights to remain and work face institutional exclusions that violate human dignity. Policies that aim to discourage and restrict immigration demean people’s status as ends in themselves. Moreover, they do so by actively denying opportunities to act as means for others. As such, the article draws a link between Kant’s well-known cosmopolitan right not to be treated with hostility and his less well-known ethical duty, “to be a useful member of the world.” Dignity can be found in acting as a means for others; hostility and exclusion can violate dignity just as much as instrumentalization. (shrink)

Background On December 2017 the Italian Parliament approved law n. 219/2017 “Provisions for informed consent and advance directives” regarding challenging legal and bioethical issues related to healthcare decisions and end-of life choices. The law promotes the person’s autonomy as a right and provides for the centrality of the individual in every scenario of health care by mean of three tools: informed consent, shared care planning and advance directives. Few years after the approval of the law, we conducted a survey among (...) physicians working in four health care facilities specific for the care of people suffering from psychiatric disorders, cognitive disorders and dementia located in the North of Italy aiming to investigate their perceived knowledge and training need, attitudes regarding law n. 219/2017 provisions, and practices of implementation of the law. Methods A semi-structured questionnaire was developed on an online platform. The invitation to participate in the survey was sent by email to the potential participants. Information was collected by means of the online platform (Google Forms) which allows to export data in a spreadsheet (Windows Excel) to perform basic statistical analysis (frequency distributions, bar chart representation). Results Twenty-five out of sixty physicians participated in the survey. None of the respondents value their knowledge of the law as very good, 10 good, 13 neither poor nor good, 1 poor and 1 very poor. All the respondents want to learn more about the law (21 yes and 4 absolutely yes). The majority of respondents agrees with the content of the law as a whole (3 absolutely agree, 13 agree), and on each provision. The question on the clarity of the concept of capacity in the law received mixed answers and this impacted on the physicians’ opinion regarding the legitimacy in principle for our groups of patients to realize shared care planning and write advance directives. Thirteen physicians neither introduced the theme of shared care planning nor arranged for shared care planning and the main reason for this was that no patient was in a clinical situation to require it. When shared care planning is realized, a variability in terms of type and number of meetings, mode of tracking and communication is registered. Conclusions Our survey results indicate a need for more clarity regarding the interpretation and implementation of the law in the patient groups under study. There are in particular two related areas that deserve further discussion: (1) the question of whether these patient groups are in principle legitimized by the law to realize shared care planning or write advance directives; (2) the notion of capacity required by the law and how this notion can be declined in real-life situations. (shrink)