First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

In this final response, the author reflects on the recent European elections that favored Euro-skeptic right-wing parties all over Europe. Their Far-Right views blame ‘immigrants’ for the current problems in Europe and challenge institutionalized solidarity. The response, firstly, attacks the dominating discourses in the media which obscure that 75 % of the voters embrace the status quo of free movement and regional citizenship within the EU. Secondly, this final reply connects the move to Far-Right views to general feelings of insecurity (...) that increased in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Current scape-goat policies regarding immigrants can be traced to strategies of neighborliness, which in turn reflect deeper social and economic anxieties caused by the withdrawal of state services and the logic of neo-liberal capitalism. (shrink)

Interviews met zeven Vlaamse filosofen over hun favoriete speelfilms en de filosofische thema's die daarin aan bod komen.

In the behavioral literature on human movement, a distinction is made between the learning of parameters and the learning of new movement forms or topologies. Whereas the target articles by Thach, Smith, and Houk et al. provide evidence for cerebellar involvement in parametrization learning and adaptation, the evidence in favor of its involvement in the generation of new movement patterns is less straightforward. A case is made for focusing more attention on the latter issue in the future. This would directly (...) help to bridge the gap between current neurophysiological approaches to the role of the cerebellum and the behavioral expressions of human motor learning, [HOUK et al.; SMITH; THACH]. (shrink)

In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but (...) what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)

Featuring contributions from the world’s leading experts on the subject and based partly on several detailed case studies, this volume is the first comprehensive analysis of the scientific notion of robustness as well as of the general ...

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

Hermeneutics and narration: a way to deal with qualitative data This article focuses a hermeneutic approach on the interpretation of narratives. It is based on the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theory of interpretation but modified and used within a caring science paradigm. The article begins with a presentation of the theoretical underpinnings of hermeneutic philosophy and narration, as well as Ricoeur's theory of interpretation, before going on to describe the interpretation process as modified by the authors. The interpretation process, which (...) consists of several stages, is exemplified and discussed using a single case from a larger study on suffering. The results of that study indicate that the struggle of suffering is perceived as a struggle formed between shame and dignity, and that nurses must engage in the process of preserving and restoring the dignity of their suffering patients. The authors suggest that Ricoeur's theory of interpretation is useful when trying to understand narrative data if the researcher realises that the process of distanciation, although central in Ricoeur's thinking, is not the goal of the process but rather a means to deal with the researcher's pre‐understandings. According to Ricoeur, distanciation is accomplished by putting the context aside and dealing with the text ‘as text’ and thereby explaining its meaning. Explanation thus becomes the dialectic counterpart to understanding in the interpretation process. The researchers further argue that distanciation must be followed by reflection, where the interpretations are linked back to the empirical context. (shrink)

Cities and local governments loom large on the sustainability agenda. Networks such as Fair Trade Towns International (FTT) and the Organic Cities Network aim to bring about global policy change from below. Given the new enthusiasm for local approaches, it seems relevant to ask to what extent local groups exercise power and in what form. City networks present their members as “ethical places” exercising _power with_, rather than _power over_ others. The article provides an empirical analysis of the power of (...) FTT and Organic Cities in Germany. In both cases, we found cities that are eager to emphasize their inclusive potential. Their willingness to compromise is demonstrated most illustratively by the fact that several cities are members of both networks: While the FTT campaign aims to address problems of international trade but does not abandon it, Organic Cities advocate for a new localism based on food supply from farmers in the same region. In both cases, city networks use their purchasing power to increase the share of certified products. By doing so, the city networks reproduce privileged positions of consumers benefitting from the global capitalist order (_power over_). However, our analysis revealed that networks also make citizens reflect upon agri-food challenges and allow developing alternatives for more sustainable systems (_power with_). (shrink)

The biofuel boom is placing enormous demands on existing cropping systems, with the most crucial consequences in the agri-food sector. The biofuel industry is responding by initiating private governance and certification. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Cramer Commission, among others, have formulated criteria on “sustainable” biofuel production and processing. This article explores the legitimacy of private governance and certification by the biofuel industry, highlighting opportunities and challenges. It argues that the concept of output based legitimacy is (...) problematic in the case of biofuel as long as no consensus or commonly agreed “best” solution has been established on what sustainable biofuel production is. Furthermore, it shows that the private governance initiatives analyzed fail to adequately include actors from developing countries. Finally, the article argues that we need mechanisms for control and accountability in order to guarantee that the political output of biofuel certification serves the common welfare. (shrink)

Explanations in psychiatry often integrate various factors relevant to psychopathology. Identifying genuine causes among them is theoretically and clinically important, but epistemically challenging. Woodward’s interventionism appears to provide a promising tool to achieve this. However, Woodward’s interventionism is too demanding to be applied to psychiatry. I thus introduce difference-making interventionism, which detects relevance in general rather than causation, to make interventionist reasoning viable in clinical practice. DMI mirrors the empirical reality of psychiatry even more closely than interventionism, but it needs (...) to be supplied with additional heuristics to disambiguate between causes and other difference-makers. To achieve this, I suggest employing heuristics based on multiple experiments, temporal order and scientific domain. (shrink)

This paper presents methodological reflections on power sharing and shifts of power in various interview situations. Narratives are said to be shaped by our attempts to position ourselves within social and cultural circumstances. In an interview situation, power can be seen as something that is created and that shifts between the interviewer and the interviewed. Reflexivity is involved when we as interviewers attempt to look at a situation or a concept from various perspectives. A modified form of discourse analysis inspired (...) by subject positioning was used to reflect on power relations in four different interview situations. The analyses indicate that reflection on the power relations can lead to other forms of understanding of the interviewee. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that power relations are created within an interview situation and therefore it is important to be aware of dominant perspectives. Researchers and nurses face the challenge of constantly raising their level of consciousness about power relationships, and discursive reflexivity is one way of doing this. Thus, reflexivity is an important part of the qualitative research process. (shrink)

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted (...) as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. (shrink)

A large number of legal rules create an obligation to prevent, repair or otherwise mitigate damage to human health or the environment. Many of these rules require that a legally relevant causal relation between human behaviour and the damage at issue is established, and in the establishment of causal relations of this kind scientific information is often pressed into service. This thesis examines this specifically legal use of scientific information. It shows that many legally relevant causal relations cannot be established (...) in this way. It also shows that the legal strategy for dealing with epistemic difficulties by relaxing the standard of proof is of limited value in tackling this problem. Consequently, the legal rules focused upon are less efficient tools for combating damage to human health and the environment than their appearances suggest. Other legal means to achieve this aim should therefore be considered. The thesis begins by presenting a framework which can be used to solve some important problems with communication and the division of labour that arise when scientific information is used to answer legal questions. This framework recognizes both epistemological and ontological differences between law and science. The latter are differences between the kinds of entity which are relevant in distinct theoretical contexts; the former, by contrast, are differences between applicable standards of proof. In subsequent parts of the thesis this framework shapes the discussion of the question: To what extent can legally relevant causal relations, involving legally significant entities, be established through the application of scientific information about other, scientifically relevant entities and legal standards of proof. The thesis concludes with a discussion of some of the ways in which the legal regulation could, potentially, be adapted, so as to counteract damage to human health and the environment more efficiently. (shrink)

We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, (...) we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth ( 2005 ) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. (shrink)

Background Healthcare leader support and facilitation for ethics work are of great importance for healthcare professionals’ handling of ethical issues, moral distress, and quality care provision. A digital tool for ethical reflection in long-term care was developed in response to the demand for appropriate tools. Research aim This study aimed to explore healthcare leaders’ expectations of using a digital tool for ethical reflection among their home nursing care staff. Research design A qualitative research design with vignettes and focus group interviews (...) was used. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants and Research Context The sample comprised ten healthcare leaders from municipal long-term care in Norway. Ethical Considerations Participation was voluntary and based on informed consent. The Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research approved this study. Findings The analysis resulted in the development of three themes representing leaders’ expectations of the tool: (i) giving staff a voice, (ii) revealing ethics in practice, and (iii) keeping the pot boiling. Discussion Leaders must be informed about the ethical issues experienced to engage in supportive measures for their staff. Digital channels can increase the democratization, safety, and efficiency of communication between employees and leaders and increase awareness of ethical aspects in daily care work. The leaders had positive expectations of employees’ activities and benefits from using the tool for ethical reflection. However, they admitted that realizing the tool’s potential to ensure continuity in ethics work requires considerable organizational and leader involvement. Conclusions This study shows that healthcare leaders are open to digital solutions for managing ethics work in home nursing care. Both opportunities and important prerequisites for successfully implementing the digital tool were identified. (shrink)

Emotional AI is an emerging technology used to make probabilistic predictions about the emotional states of people using data sources, such as facial (micro)-movements, body language, vocal tone or the choice of words. The performance of such systems is heavily debated and so are the underlying scientific methods that serve as the basis for many such technologies. In this article I will engage with this new technology, and with the debates and literature that surround it. Working at the intersection of (...) criminology, policing, surveillance and the study of emotional AI this paper explores and offers a framework of understanding the various issues that these technologies present particularly to liberal democracies. I argue that these technologies should not be deployed within public spaces because there is only a very weak evidence-base as to their effectiveness in a policing and security context, and even more importantly represent a major intrusion to people’s private lives and also represent a worrying extension of policing power because of the possibility that intentions and attitudes may be inferred. Further to this, the danger in the use of such invasive surveillance for the purpose of policing and crime prevention in urban spaces is that it potentially leads to a highly regulated and control-oriented society. I argue that emotion recognition has severe impacts on the right to the city by not only undertaking surveillance of existing situations but also making inferences and probabilistic predictions about future events as well as emotions and intentions. (shrink)

It is my contention here that Quentin Skinner’s conception of neo-roman liberty as it is articulated in Liberty Before Liberalism serves to establish two normative premises for human rights philosophy. Those premises are, first, that human rights should offer the strongest protection for those persons who are most vulnerable and liable to social and political discrimination and marginalisation. Second, the objects of human rights should be conceptualised in terms of open-ended goals of justice, predicated on a commitment to structural equality. (...) I will have reason to refer to a reflection that Skinner makes on utopianism and how the “classic liberal case” of liberty can be associated with a critique of utopianism in political theory. By utopianism Skinner means – with reference to William Paley – a political theory that incorporates into its concepts demands that cannot be met without a fundamental change of practice and which moves beyond what it is at present reasonable for most people to expect of life. On this understanding, Skinner points out, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is a utopian treatise: it does not adapt to whatever is politically feasible but sets a challenging standard of justice for political institutions. I would qualify this by saying that the challenging nature of Rawls’s theory of justice is connected to the fact that it is systemic rather than utopian. A fear of the charge of utopianism is one of the recurrent features of human rights philosophy as we know it today. This is manifest in an incongruous tendency to join a moral philosophy of the good life with a political theory of basic provisions and life at the subsistence level. I hope to show that there is a consistent neo-roman case to be made for a more politically challenging human rights philosophy. (shrink)

The thesis offers a theoretical account of how and why, in contemporary western societies characterized by formal-legal equality and women’s relative economic independence, women continue to be subordinated to men through sexuality and love. By means of an innovative application of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, dialectical critical realism and philosophy of metaReality, it investigates and elaborates Anna G. Jónasdóttir’s claim that men tend to exploit women of their ‘love power’. Also, the thesis advances a critique of the state of affairs (...) of contemporary feminist theory, demonstrating that the meta-theoretical framework of critical realism offers tools that can counter the poststructuralist hegemony in feminist theory. Part I engages in a comprehensive evaluation of Catharine MacKinnon’s, Judith Butler’s and Jónasdóttir’s theorizations of sexuality and gendered power. Insofar as the works of these theorists represent different philosophical paradigms, this critique opens up a discussion of more general meta-theoretical issues, which are elaborated in Part II, where poststructuralist feminist positions are challenged. Following Jónasdóttir’s broadening of the concept of sexuality so as to essentially include practices of love, in Part III the focus of the thesis is shifted from sexuality to love. Here a dialectical deepening and partial recasting of Jónasdóttir’s work is offered, by means of an application of dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality. The thesis outlines a feminist dialectical-realist depth ontology of love, sexuality and power, which constitutes an alternative to dominant discursive approaches to sexuality and attributes to love its proper place in our existence as sexual human creatures. Although the thesis makes a case for the tenacity of female subordination in and through sexuality and love, it ends on a more optimistic note, by offering a model of how women can break the shackles of love. (shrink)

"The introduction of Historical Dictionary of Feminist Philosophy provides a useful overview of the subject, while the chronology runs the gamut from ancient Greek to contemporary feminist philosophers. Dictionary entries cover both the central figures and ideas from the historical tradition of philosophy, as well as ideas and theories from contemporary feminist philosophy, such as epistemology and topics like abortion and sexuality. In addition to including entries on Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Beauvoir, and Daly, relevant aspects of other fields (...) of philosophy, the major concepts, and prevailing interpretations and conjectures are also covered. A comprehensive bibliography allows for further reading."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Background In Swedish intensive care units, nine percent of patients do not survive despite receiving advanced life-sustaining treatments. As these patients transition to end-of-life care, ethical considerations may become paramount. Aim To explore the ethical challenges that critical care nurses encounter when caring for patients at the end of life in an intensive care context. Research design The study used a qualitative approach with an interpretive descriptive design. Research context and participants Twenty critical care nurses from eight intensive care units (...) in an urban region in Sweden were interviewed, predominately women with a median age of fifty-one years. Ethical considerations This study was approved by The Swedish Ethics Review Authority. Findings Critical care nurses described encountering ethical challenges when life-sustaining treatments persisted to patients with minimal survival prospects and when administering pain-relieving medications that could inadvertently hasten patients’ deaths. Challenges also arose when patients expressed a desire to withdraw life-sustaining treatments despite the possibility of recovery, or when family members wanted to shield patients from information about a poor prognosis; these wishes occasionally conflicted with healthcare guidelines. The critical care nurses also encountered ethical challenges when caring for potential organ donors, highlighting the balance between organ preservation and maintaining patient dignity. Conclusion Critical care nurses encountered ethical challenges when caring for patients at the end of life. They described issues ranging from life-sustaining treatments and administration of pain-relief, to patient preferences and organ donation considerations. Addressing these ethical challenges is essential for delivering compassionate person-centered care, and supporting family members during end-of-life care in an intensive care context. (shrink)

Recension av jag må bo mitt ibland dem. Stockholms stora synagoga 150 år.

For centuries, scholars have not doubted that Macrobio Ambrogio Teodosio was pagan. Recently, prof. Alan Cameron in his The Last Pagans of Rome clamied that the late antique writer was actually a Christian. This essay seeks to refute this assumption. --Translated from back cover.

Despite their opposite emotional effects, humor and horror are highly similar phenomena. They both can be traced back to (the detection, resolution, and emotional elaboration of) incongruities, understood as semantic violations through unexpected combinations of oppositional information. However, theoretical and experimental comparisons between humor and resolvable incongruities that elicit other emotions than exhilaration have been lacking so far. To gain more insights into the linguistic differences between humor and horror and the cognitive real-time processing of both, a main concern of (...) this book is to discuss the transferability of linguistic humor theories to a systematic horror investigation and directly compare self-paced reading times (SPR), facial actions (FACS), and event-related brain potentials (ERP) of normed minimal quadruplets with frightening and humorous incongruities as well as (in)coherent stimuli. The results suggest that humor and horror share cognitive resources to detect and resolve incongruities. To better distinguish humor from neighboring phenomena, this book refines current humor theories by incorporating humor and horror in a cognitive incongruity processing model. (shrink)

This study focuses on the meaningful encounters of patients and next of kin, as seen from their perspective. Identifying the attributes within meaningful encounters is important for increased understanding of caring and to expand and develop earlier formulated knowledge about caring relationships. Caring theory about the caring relationship provided a point of departure to illuminate the meaningful encounter in healthcare contexts. A qualitative explorative design with a hermeneutic narrative approach was used to analyze and interpret written narratives. The phases of (...) the analysis were naïve interpretation, structure analysis on two different levels (narrative structure, and deep structure through metaphors) and finally a dialectic interpretation. The narratives revealed the meaning of the meaningful encounter as sharing, a nourishing fellowship, common responsibility and coming together, experienced as safety and warmth, that gives, by extension, life‐changing moments, a healing force and dissipated insight. The meaningful encounter can be seen as a complex phenomenon with various attributes. Understanding the meaningful encounter will enable nurses to plan and provide professional care, based on caring science, focusing on patient and next‐of‐kin experiences. (shrink)