The prospect of European elections has begun to alter the conditions under which national poli tical parties exercise their functions. It has brought parties to negociate common platforms and to strengthen transnational organizations. How these organizations wilt be structured, what functions they wilt assume, will be determined largely by the issue of a conflict-solving process between existing national structures, by the ability of national parties to accomplish new functions in a European system, and by the demands of that system.This study (...) presents a tentative framework of analysis for the examination of European groupings of political parties. It may help to interpret current negotiations and future actions of these organizations with reference to the criteria, structures and functions that are classically those of political parties. It suggests how new situations in the European field may be met by existing organizations or give rise to original political answers. (shrink)

Across the world, pain is under-treated in emergency departments. We canvass the literature testifying to this problem, the reasons why this problem is so important, and then some of the main hypotheses that have been advanced in explanation of the problem. We then argue for the plausibility of two new hypotheses: pain's under-treatment in the ED is due partly to an epistemic preference for signs over symptoms on the part of some practitioners, and some ED practices that themselves worsen pain (...) by increasing patients' anxiety and fear. Our argument includes the following logic. Some ED practitioners depart from formal guidance in basing their acute pain assessments on observable features rather than on patient reports of pain. This is potentially due to an epistemic preference for signs over symptoms which aims to circumvent intentional and/or unintentional misrepresentation on the part of patients. However, conducting pain assessments in line with this epistemic preference contributes to the under-treatment of pain in at least three respects, which we detail. Moreover, it may do little to help the practitioner circumvent any intentional misrepresentation on the part of the patient, as we explain. Second, we examine at least four ED practices that may be contributing to the under-treatment of pain by increasing patient anxiety and fear, which can worsen pain. These practices include failing to provide orienting information and partially objectifying patients so as to problem-solve along lines pre-established by modern medical science. We conclude by touching on some potential solutions for ED practice. (shrink)

GoalThis paper presents an immersive Virtual Reality system to analyze and train Executive Functions of soccer players. EFs are important cognitive functions for athletes. They are a relevant quality that distinguishes amateurs from professionals.MethodThe system is based on immersive technology, hence, the user interacts naturally and experiences a training session in a virtual world. The proposed system has a modular design supporting the extension of various so-called game modes. Game modes combine selected game mechanics with specific simulation content to target (...) particular training aspects. The system architecture decouples selection/parameterization and analysis of training sessions via a coaching app from an Unity3D-based VR simulation core. Monitoring of user performance and progress is recorded by a database that sends the necessary feedback to the coaching app for analysis.ResultsThe system is tested for VR-critical performance criteria to reveal the usefulness of a new interaction paradigm in the cognitive training and analysis of EFs. Subjective ratings for overall usability show that the design as VR application enhances the user experience compared to a traditional desktop app; whereas the new, unfamiliar interaction paradigm does not negatively impact the effort for using the application.ConclusionThe system can provide immersive training of EF in a fully virtual environment, eliminating potential distraction. It further provides an easy-to-use analyzes tool to compare user but also an automatic, adaptive training mode. (shrink)

Assyrien und Urarṭu I: Der Achte Feldzug Sargons II. im Jahre 714 v. Chr. By Walter Mayer. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 395/1. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2013. Pp. xv + 189. €64. Assyrien und Urarṭu II: Die assyrisch-urartäischen Bilinguen. By Walter Mayer. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 395/2. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2013. Pp. xv + 156. €58.

Using an analysis of two of Sartre's biographies, and , I will show how freedom can be inverted into captivity in order to constitute an affective destiny. If every choice, act and affect of an individual is, through its “original project,” confined to a specific framework, the schema of freedom positing its choice of existence seems to resemble a circle of captivity: total freedom at the outset, and then a trapped freedom, limited by itself. At the basis of this alienating (...) circle lie original emotions: consciousness reacts affectively to its initial situation, before even constituting itself as a , and adopts these emotions as integral parts of its project, as the structure of its relationship to the world. But the empirical affects which follow are then captured in the vortex of captivity, in accordance with a two-fold criterion: participating in the ultimate end of the individual while at the same time being inscribed in the affective structure which follows from it. Originally the very source of the original project, emotion then becomes its slave. French À travers l'analyse de deux biographies sartriennes, Baudelaire et Mallarmé , nous mettons en évidence la manière dont la liberté s'inverse en captivité pour se constituer un destin affectif. Si tout choix, acte et affect de l'individu est, par son projet originel , circonscrit à un cadre d'action précis, le schéma de la liberté posant son choix d'existence paraît assimilable au cercle de la captivité : une liberté totale à l'origine, une liberté piégée, limitée par elle-même, ensuite. Au fondement même de ce cercle aliénant, des émotions originelles : la conscience réagit affectivement à sa situation initiale, avant même de se constituer en personne , et assume ces émotions comme partie intégrante de son projet, comme structure de son rapport au monde. Mais les affects empiriques qui s'ensuivent sont alors pris dans le tourbillon de la captivité, devant répondre à un double critère : participer à la fin ultime de l'individu tout en s'inscrivant dans la structure affective qui en découle. Source même du projet originel, l'émotion en devient l'esclave. (shrink)

Lucid dreaming refers to a dream state characterized by the dreamers awareness of being in a dream and being able to volitionally control its content. The aim of this study was to find neurophysiological evidence for the 7 criteria of lucid dreaming proposed by Paul Tholey. Each of the criteria was analyzed separately with regard to its underlying neurocircuits. We hypothesized that not one, but many regions are involved in the state of lucid dreaming. Our results have shown a (...) satisfactory overlap of the theoretical components and the brain regions activated during a lucid dream. During lucid dreaming, a brain network seems to emerge, that is more than the sum of its parts. Further research is needed to understand the psychoneurological underpinnings of lucid dreams. (shrink)

Enlightenment - both the phenomenon specific to the eighteenth century and the continuing trend in Western thought - is an attempt to dispel ignorance, achieve mastery of a potentially hostile environment, and contain fear of the unknown by promoting science and rationality. Enlightenment is often accompanied and challenged by countercultures such as German Romanticism, which explored the nature of fear and deployed it as a corrective to the excesses of rationalism. The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism uncovers the formative (...) role this movement played in the development of dark or negative aesthetics. Recovering a missing chapter in the history of the aesthetics of fear, Paola Mayer illustrates that Romanticism was a crucial transitional phase between the eighteenth-century sublime and the early twentieth-century uncanny. Mayer puts literature and philosophy in dialogue, examining how German Romantic literature employed narratives of fear to radicalize and then subvert the status quo in society, culture, and science. She traces the development of this aesthetic from its inception with pre-Romantics such as Jean Paul Richter to its end in Joseph von Eichendorff's critical retrospective, and juxtaposes canonical authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann - the father of the modern fantastic - with writers who have previously been ignored. Today, when the dark side of science looms in the foreground, The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism points to the power of a literary movement to construct competing currents of thought. (shrink)

The books I review are a series of three volumes of the same project, Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy, edited in 2017 by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey, Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay who seek to situate Nietzsche’s work in relation to Kant and Kantianism and to interpret it from this perspective. This review consists of two parts: the first part reviews and discusses each of the works focusing on a selection (...) of prominent chapters; the second part extends their intuitions. (shrink)

Introduction to a collection of essays that celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Quine's paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Contributor: Herbert Schnädelbach, Paul A. Boghossian, Kathrin Glüer, Verena Mayer, Christian Nimtz, Åsa Maria Wikforss, Hans-Johann Glock, Peter Pagin, Tyler Burge, Geert Keil und Donald Davidson.

Usury ceilings seem indefensible. Their opponents insist these caps harm the consumers they are intended to help. Low ceilings are said to prevent the least advantaged agents from accessing legal credit and drive them into the black market, where prices are higher and collection methods are harsher. But in this paper, I challenge these arguments and show that the benefits of interest-rate limitations in the most expensive credit markets clearly outweigh the costs. The test case is payday lending. Deregulated pricing (...) in this market produces negative externalities that justify usury restrictions. Unless prices are capped, the more solvent majority of borrowers is compelled to cross-subsidize the least solvent debtors, who have a high rate of default. Rationing the riskiest debtors out of this market by means of a moderate usury cap puts an end to this unfairness and produces fewer bad consequences than the advocates of deregulated pricing recognize. I argue that only an extreme principle like maximizing the minimum could justify a free market in payday credit. (shrink)

Paul Stevens; On the Nuffield Philosophy of Science, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 99–111, https://doi.org/10.1111/.

This paper uses the example of payday loans to identify two standards of exploitation that better accord with intuitions about taking unfair advantage than neoclassical or neo-Marxian exploitation theory. These two standards are derived from ongoing policy debates about the regulation of payday loans. The sufficiency standard is more restrictive than relative-advantage theory, but the latter indicates when exceptions to the prohibition on exploitation should be made for the sake of the disadvantaged party.

U.S. multinational enterprises must now follow the policies of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in their overseas operations, at least with respect to U.S. expatriate employees. Doing so in a culture which discourages gender equality in the workplace raises difficult issues, both practically and ethically. Vigorously importing U.S. attitudes toward gender-equality into a social culture such as Japan or Saudi Arabia may seem ethnocentric, a version of ethical imperialism. Yet adapting to host country norms risks a (...) kind of moral relativism. This article supports the view that MNEs which promote workplace equality in a host country such as Japan, which is actively involved in the international economic and political community, is not ethical imperialism in any pejorative sense and is preferable to a moral relativism or social contract approach.We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (shrink)

In Out of Eden, Paul W. Kahn offers a philosophical meditation on the problem of evil. He uses the Genesis story of the Fall as the starting point for a profound articulation of the human condition.

Introduction au numéro spécial "L'articulation de la phénoménologie et de l'herméneutique chez Paul Ricœur".

In Acquiring Modernity, Paul B. Paolucci, updating classical theory, examines the nature of modern society. Investigated from a sociological perspective but written in accessible everyday language, this book provides a multifaceted account of what makes modern society what it is, from its historical roots to its current conditions. Neither traditional classroom text nor a work of detailed erudition for the specialist few, Acquiring Modernity draws on material from known historical events, scholarly research, and recent global developments to tell modernity's (...) story through topics such as the modern classes, religious practice, relations of gender and race, politics, environmental issues, and economic crises. Valuable reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary life and society. (shrink)

Conventionally, multilevel analysis of covariance (ML-ANCOVA) has been the recommended approach for analyzing treatment effects in quasi-experimental multilevel designs with treatment application at the cluster-level. In this paper, we introduce the generalized ML-ANCOVA with linear effect functions that identifies average and conditional treatment effects in the presence of treatment-covariate interactions. We show how the generalized ML-ANCOVA model can be estimated with multigroup multilevel structural equation models that offer considerable advantages compared to traditional ML-ANCOVA. The proposed model takes into account measurement (...) error in the covariates, sampling error in contextual covariates, treatment-covariate interactions, and stochastic predictors. We illustrate the implementation of ML-ANCOVA with an example from educational effectiveness research where we estimate average and conditional effects of early transition to secondary schooling on reading comprehension. (shrink)

In the general introduction to the first part of his Philosophie de la Volonté, Le volontaire et l’involontaire Paul Ricoeur writes that the phenomenological or ‘pure description […] of the Voluntary and the Involuntary’ is ‘constituted by bracketing’ two things: first the fault, which is essentially a perversion of the pure nature or the essence of human willing; and second ‘Transcendence which hides within it the ultimate origin of subjectivity’. Evil, the condition of brokenness or the reality of the (...) fault, asks for an empirical description of concrete myths and symbols. He will remove this first bracketing in the second part of his Philosophy of the Will and in the long ‘series of detours’ of his hermeneutical writings. The second bracketing, however, will turn out to be much more difficult to remove. It demands a ‘poetics’, which would threaten Ricoeur’s effort to separate his Christian faith from his ‘autonomous’ philosophizing. In this article I argue that Ricoeur eventually did present his poetics, though only in the epilogue to his penultimate book on ‘Difficult Forgiveness’. The article indicates why this epilogue might fulfil the promise of a poetics, explains why this could only be done in an epilogue and gives at least one possible reason why Ricoeur could write at the end of his oeuvre, what he could not at its beginning. (shrink)

This work is available individually, or can be purchased as part of the 7 volume set Max Weber: Classic Monographs.

L'état de crise générale qui règne aujourd'hui dans la société française, comme l'a révélé, entre autres, l'ampleur sans précédent de la "manif pour tous", menace aujourd'hui l'universalité même de notre modèle sociopolitique national. Depuis que les trois notions qui fondent nos "valeurs républicaines" - liberté, égalité, fraternité - ont été détournées de leur sens véritable. La "liberté", devenue illimitée, consacre un sujet dominé par son seul ego, l'"égalité" est désormais synonyme d'une abolition de toute différence, fût-elle biologique, et la "fraternité" (...) se réduit à des promiscuités imposées. D'une promesse d'élévation citoyenne passant par l'accession de tous à l'autonomie, les principes des Lumières semblent bien conduire aujourd'hui à la négation même de ce qui définit notre humanité. Comment pareille grandeur humaniste a-t-elle pu dégénérer, en moins de trois siècles, en humanitarisme hygiénique de base? Ne faut-il pas chercher dans l'échec métapolitique du libéralisme mondialisé la réponse à cette question, qui dépasse de loin la banale scission gauche/droite? Paul-François Paoli passe au crible les mensonges et les contradictions criantes de la "religion laïque" en convoquant tour à tour dans le débat saint Augustin, Nietzsche, Raymond Boudon ou encore Pierre Manent. (shrink)

ArgumentThe psychoanalytic setting counts today as one of the familiar therapeutic rituals of the Western world. Taking up some of the insights of the anthropology of science will allow us to account for both the social and the material arrangements from which Freud's invention emerged at the end of the nineteenth century out of the clinical laboratories and private consulting rooms of practitioners of hypnosis. The peculiar way of neglecting or forgetting the object world and the institution of the psychoanalyst (...) as a “transference object” will be traced back to multiple reconfigurations in the history of hypnotism in France and in Germany. In this process, different practitioners tried to achieve a synthesis of clinical work and experimental psychology, with the aim of objectifying knowledge about human subjectivity. While Freud retained the claim of psychoanalysis performing an experimental situation, he set apart his own setting from the objectifying practices which were characteristic of this experimental psychology located in the clinic and the private consulting room.It is not easy to over-estimate the importance of the part played by hypnotism in the history of the origin of psychoanalysis. From a theoretical as well as from a therapeutic point of view, psycho-analysis has at its command a legacy which it has inherited from hypnotism.Sigmund Freud, A Short Account of Psycho-Analysis. (shrink)

What did Lenin mean when he claimed to be thinking dialectically about questions of political practice? Renewed interest has been expressed in this subject, but the tendency of most studies is to treat Lenin's dialectic as a metaphysical doctrine consisting of universal laws such as transformation into opposite, and so forth. Emphasizing Lenin's Hegel Notebooks, commentators have argued that his tactical innovations after 1914 were simply applications of these dialectical laws. Examination of Lenin's conception of the dialectic as set forth (...) in his tactical writings after the turn of the century shows, however, that the Leninist practice of dialectical thinking was in fact the very antithesis of metaphysical reason, because it repudiated the universality of abstract rules in the formulation of tactics. Several examples of this practice are examined, including the case of national self-determination and the problem of party dictatorship over the working class. (shrink)

Paul Rateau traces the genesis and development of G.W. Leibniz's treatment of the problem of evil, from his earliest writings through the Essays on Theodicy (1710). By investigating Leibniz's early thinking about what evil is and where it comes from, Rateau reveals the deeply original nature of Leibniz's later work and the challenges it raises. Rateau explores the ways in which the Theodicy's theoretical project, which integrates numerous disciplines and various argumentative strategies, informs and is influenced by two more (...) practical aims-justifying the end of denominational divisions between Catholics and Protestants, and inculcating "true piety" in believers. By paying equal attention to both Leibniz's intellectual and personal development, Rateau offers a holistic view of Leibniz's most profound and sophisticated work of philosophy. Rateau shows how the young Leibniz moves from suggesting that the author of evil is God himself to later defending an original theory of necessitarianism (in The Confession of a Philosopher), which makes God the first link in the chain of beings that constitute the world, but which ultimately denies God's responsibility for sin. By examining Leibniz's theoretical development after 1673, he demonstrates how Leibniz comes to a revised framework that forms the basis for the project of theodicy. After having examined the defensive and the doctrinal aspects of the Theodicy, Rateau shows how human freedom can be reconciled with divine freedom in Leibniz's system. Newly translated from the original French edition, Rateau's book offers a novel and important new interpretation of Leibniz and will appeal to scholars both of Leibniz and of early modern thought generally. (shrink)

This essay reads The Argonauts against a preceding literature of queer and trans parenting, specifically by women of colour, to account for absences and evasions in Maggie Nelson's relation to queer feminist literary history. Resituating her quotation about “kinship systems” from Judith Butler into Butler's discussion of house mothers in ball culture, it calls attention to the erasure of queer racialized embodiment and intellection from Nelson's account, emblematized by Cherríe Moraga's Medea and – as embodied site of “shit and labor” (...) – the perineum, figuring the work of connection. (shrink)