When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring applications are still morally acceptable, and develop approaches to avoid the promotion of health inequalities (...) through self-monitoring applications. (shrink)

Cornelius Castoriadis is one of the very few social and political philosophers – modern and ancient – for whom a concept of imagination is truly central. In his work, however, the role of imagination is so overarching that it becomes difficult to grasp its workings and consequences in detail, in particular in its relation to democracy as the political form in which autonomy is the core imaginary signification. This article will proceed by first suggesting some clarifications about Castoriadis’s employment of (...) the concept. This preparatory exploration will allow us in a second step to discuss why the idea of democracy is closely linked to tragedy, and why this linkage in turn is dependent on the centrality of imagination for human action. In a third conceptual step, finally, we suggest that any concept of imagination will need to take into account the plurality and diversity of the outcomes of the power of imagination. Thus, the question of the nature of the novelty that imagination creates needs to be addressed as well as the one of the agon in the face of different imagined innovations in a given democratic political setting. As a consequence of this shift in emphasis, to be elaborated further, one will be able to say more about one question of which Castoriadis was well aware, which he never addressed himself in detail, though: the decline and end of polities and political forms, the question of political mortality. (shrink)

Through to the early part of the twentieth century the concept of indoctrination was straight-forward and generally free of controversy. Ideological agitations likely fermented by several factors such as a misunderstanding of the progressive education movementProgressive Education Movement, reaction to the growth of FascismEnlightenment, theand Fascism and Communism in Europe especially and student revolts of the sixties and seventies brought with them a host of disturbing connotation surrounding the idea of indoctrination. This is unfortunate as shown in the essay that (...) follows since a simple and clear reading of standard dictionary definitions of indoctrination allow it to serve as an apt benchmark and cautionary guide to practicing science educators. (shrink)

Summary: "Ein Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte?" Worin gründet diese besondere "Sagkraft" der Bilder, wie sind epistemische Gehalte von Bildern denkbar, die sich einer sprachlichen Vermittlung entziehen, ja: ein genuin bildliches, nicht-sprachliches Erkenntnispotential für sich einfordern?

A few years ago, a manuscript by Jost Bürgi (1552–1632) was brought to scholarly attention, which included an ingenious sine calculation method. The purpose of this paper is to discuss two aspects of this manuscript. First, we wish to improve the current understanding of Bürgi’s method of sine calculation, especially with respect to the calculation of sines at a resolution of 1 min. Second, we wish to suggest a possible transfer of knowledge between India’s Kerala School of mathematical astronomy and (...) Bürgi. The evidence for the latter seems to be stronger than the evidence for other available case studies, but still revolves mainly around analogies, and can therefore not be considered as conclusive proof of transmission. We also append a translation of the relevant chapter of Bürgi’s treatise. (shrink)

In framing the concept of rational consensus, decision theorists have tended to defer to an older, established literature on social welfare theory for guidance on how to proceed. But the uncritical adoption of standards meant to regulate the reconciliation of differing interests has unduly burdened the development of rational methods for the synthesis of differing judgments. In particular, the universality conditions typically postulated in social welfare theory, which derive from fundamentally ethical considerations, preclude a sensitive treatment of special cases when (...) carried over to the realm of judgment aggregation, especially in the case of probabilistic judgment. (shrink)

This essay asks: Is “culture” the subject of a communication among anthropologists, or are anthropologists subjects to a communication among cultures? Put more simply, is there only one culture, comprised of multiplex variations recovered from various parts of an ever-changing world, or are there a great many, all of them variations on a single theoretical insight, which anthropologists have made up in secret and carefully keep as a secret from themselves? (Why not? the author asks, adding that such is exactly (...) how the modern state operates.) Is it possible, he further asks, for a memory to have an independent existence, untroubled by the people who constantly keep occurring to it? It is of course absurd to ascribe agency to what amount to mere figures of speech, metaphors, or enigmatic perceptual cues, “but if a metaphor could not think, as an agency in and of itself, then neither could we.” (Memories would have to be metaphors; otherwise how could we forget them?) Finally, the essays asks: What is more natural than the agency of the one you see in the mirror, that steals your act of looking, but only to view itself? (shrink)

Kostas Axelos and Cornelius Castoriadis are among the most inspiring thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. They each combine comprehensive philosophy with social and political theory, and a broad view on human history with a critical diagnosis of the present, with nuanced observations on our current condition—characteristics, rare during this period, that this article describes as polyscopic thought. Castoriadis is widely known as the philosopher of ‘autonomy’, of the human capacity to give oneself one’s own law; his (...) diagnosis of the present focused on the weakening of this capacity in contemporary capitalism and democracy. Axelos, in turn, is a thinker of the ‘planetary age’ in which the human pretence to master the world and one’s own fate withers away in the face of the predominance of ‘technique’. This essay connects and contrasts the work of the two thinkers trying to understand the differences and to uncover underlying commonalities. Significantly, it suggests that both scholars saw a need to rethink key concerns in philosophy and the social sciences with a view to better grasp what awaits human beings in the current world and what can be done about it. (shrink)

According to Vera Moser, the first professorship of healing pedagogy, Heilpädagogik at the University of Zürich in 1931, established pedagogy of the disabled as an academic discipline. Through the definition of the smallest common denominator for all disabilities, which Heinrich Hanselmann called “weakness of the soul,” a connecting element of “imbecility, deaf-mutism, blindness, neglect and idiocy” was established. Under Nazi rule, school pedagogy advanced to völkisch, nationalist special pedagogy, shifting from the category of “innate imbecility” to a broader concept of (...) disability. As an outcome of these programs and policies, 300,000 people with disabilities were killed as a part of the “T4 Aktion.” Within just a few decades after World War II, special pedagogy expanded its sphere of influence through professionalization and institutionalization in West and East Germany and across Europe. This paper explores how special pedagogy aligned itself with the Nazi regime’s discourse and policy on eugenics and race hygiene, leading to the murder and mass sterilization of “disabled” children and adults. It probes questions regarding the extent to which the professionalization of special pedagogy has drawn from the Nazi-era terminology of the deficient and foreign to legitimate the contemporary migrant bias in German and Austrian special pedagogical care. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions on causal inference in medicine are stuck in dyadic camps, each defending one kind of evidence or method rather than another as best support for causal hypotheses. Whereas Evidence Based Medicine advocates the use of Randomised Controlled Trials and systematic reviews of RCTs as gold standard, philosophers of science emphasise the importance of mechanisms and their distinctive informational contribution to causal inference and assessment. Some have suggested the adoption of a pluralistic approach to causal inference, and an inductive (...) rather than hypothetico-deductive inferential paradigm. However, these proposals deliver no clear guidelines about how such plurality of evidence sources should jointly justify hypotheses of causal associations. We here develop such guidelines by first giving a philosophical analysis of the underpinnings of Hill’s viewpoints on causality. We then put forward an evidence-amalgamation framework adopting a Bayesian net approach to model causal inference in pharmacology for the assessment of harms. Our framework accommodates a number of intuitions already expressed in the literature concerning the EBM vs. pluralist debate on causal inference, evidence hierarchies, causal holism, relevance, and reliability. (shrink)

According to the objective Bayesian approach to inductive logic, premisses inductively entail a conclusion just when every probability function with maximal entropy, from all those that satisfy the premisses, satisfies the conclusion. When premisses and conclusion are constraints on probabilities of sentences of a first-order predicate language, however, it is by no means obvious how to determine these maximal entropy functions. This paper makes progress on the problem in the following ways. Firstly, we introduce the concept of a limit in (...) entropy and show that, if the set of probability functions satisfying the premisses contains a limit in entropy, then this limit point is unique and is the maximal entropy probability function. Next, we turn to the special case in which the premisses are categorical sentences of the logical language. We show that if the uniform probability function gives the premisses positive probability, then the maximal entropy function can be found by simply conditionalising this uniform prior on the premisses. We generalise our results to demonstrate agreement between the maximal entropy approach and Jeffrey conditionalisation in the case in which there is a single premiss that specifies the probability of a sentence of the language. We show that, after learning such a premiss, certain inferences are preserved, namely inferences to inductive tautologies. Finally, we consider potential pathologies of the approach: we explore the extent to which the maximal entropy approach is invariant under permutations of the constants of the language, and we discuss some cases in which there is no maximal entropy probability function. (shrink)

This article sketches an idealized strategy for the identification of neural correlates of consciousness. The proposed strategy is based on a state space approach originating from the analysis of dynamical systems. The article then focuses on one constituent of consciousness, phenomenal awareness. Several rudimentary requirements for the identification of neural correlates of phenomenal awareness are suggested. These requirements are related to empirical data on selective attention, on completely intrinsic selection and on globally unconscious states. As an example, neuroscientific findings on (...) synchronized γ activity are categorized according to these requirements. (shrink)

We study questionnaire responses to situations in which sacrificing one life may save many other lives. We demonstrate gender differences in moral judgments: males are more supportive of the sacrifice than females. We investigate a source of the endorsement of the sacrifice: antisocial preferences. First, we measure individual proneness to spiteful behavior, using an experimental game with monetary stakes. We demonstrate that spitefulness can be sizable—a fifth of our participants behave spitefully—but it is not associated with gender. Second, we find (...) that gender is consistently associated with responses even when we account for individual differences in the propensity to spitefulness. (shrink)

As digital media becomes more central to the lives of adolescents, it also becomes increasingly relevant for their sexual communication. Sexting as an important image-based digital medium provides opportunities for self-determined digital communication, but also carries specific risks for boundary violations. Accordingly, sexting is understood either as an everyday, or as risky and deviant behavior among adolescents. In the affectedness of boundary violations gender plays an important role. However, it is still unclear to what extent digital sexual communication restores stereotypical (...) gender roles and restrictive sexuality norms or, alternatively, enables new spaces of possibility. In this sense, current research points to a desideratum regarding adolescents’ orientations toward sexting as a practice between spaces of possibility and boundary violations. This paper discusses the possibilities, but also the risks, of intimate digital communication among adolescents. The main question is, how adolescents themselves perceive sexting practices and how they position themselves between both spaces for possibility and for the exchange of unwanted sexual content. For this purpose, orientations toward normalities and gender of students are reconstructed. To answer these questions, twelve single-sex, group discussions were carried out with students aged 16 and 17 at five different secondary schools in northern Germany. A total of 20 boys and 22 girls took part. The group discussions were structured by a narrative generating guideline. The analysis draws its methodology from the Documentary Method, regarding implicit and explicit forms of knowledge and discourse. It results in a typology of three types with different orientations. The study shows, that most of the students consider sexting to be a risky practice; only one type shows normality in the use of sexting. At the same time, some of the young people are interested in experimenting with image-based intimate digital communication. Further, gender differences in use and affectedness are also documented. In this way, orientations toward gender stereotypes “favor” both the attribution of responsibility to girls, and overlook the responsibility of students who perpetrated the boundary violation. The orientations of adolescents should be taken more into account in research as well as in educational programs for the prevention of sexual violence. (shrink)

Palabras pronunciadas por Jürgen Habermas en el Memorial a Richard Rorty con motivo de su fallecimiento, ceremonia que tuvo lugar en la Universidad de Stanford el día 2 de noviembre de 2007.

The so-called "non-commutativity" of probability kinematics has caused much unjustified concern. When identical learning is properly represented, namely, by identical Bayes factors rather than identical posterior probabilities, then sequential probability-kinematical revisions behave just as they should. Our analysis is based on a variant of Field's reformulation of probability kinematics, divested of its (inessential) physicalist gloss.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Barion, J. Was es heisst, ein Philosoph zu sein.--Flach, W. Die Objektivität der Erkenntnis.--Schmidt, G. Die Transzendentalität des Seingedankens.--Winterhager, E. Das Sich-Haben des Subjekts.--Hartmann, K. Analytische und kategoriale Transzendentalphilosophie.--Marx, W. Systemidee und die Problematik ihrer Begründung.--Röd, W. Transzendentalphilosophie und deskriptive Philosophie als wissenschaftliche Theorien.--Vuillemin, J. Caractères et fonctions des signes.--Ritzel, W. Zur Theorie praktischer Wissenschaft.--Hufnagel, E. Relationen--zum Streit um die pädagogische Anthropologie.--Derbolav, J. Politik und Moral.--Wolandt, G. Standpunkte der Kunstphilosophie.

An allocation problem is a type of aggregation problem in which the values of individuals' opinions on some set of variables (canonically a set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive possibilities) sum to a constant. This paper shows that for realistic allocation problems, namely ones in which the set of possible opinion values is finite, the only universal aggregation methods that satisfy two commonly invoked conditions are the dictatorial ones. The two conditions are, first, that the aggregate opinion on any variable (...) depends only on the individuals' opinions on that variable and not on their opinions on any other variable and, secondly, that the aggregate opinion minimally preserves unanimous individual opinion. Connections between this result and similar ones in the literature on judgment aggregation are explored and their significance assessed. (shrink)