The Scandinavian welfare states are known for their universal access to healthcare; however, health inequalities affecting ethnic minority patients are prevalent. Ethnic minority patients' encounters with healthcare systems are often portrayed as part of a system that represents objectivity and neutrality. However, the Danish healthcare sector is a political apparatus that is affected by policies and conceptualisations. Health policies towards ethnic minorities are analysed using Bacchi's policy analysis, to show how implicit problem representations are translated from political and societal discourses (...) into the Danish healthcare system. Our analysis shows that health policies are based on different ideas of who ethnic minority patients are and what kinds of challenges they entail. Two main issues are raised: First, ethnic minorities are positioned as bearers of ‘culture’ and ‘ethnicity’. These concepts of ‘othering’ become both explanations for and the cause of inappropriate healthcare behaviour. Second, the Scandinavian welfare states are known for their solidarity, collectivism, equality and tolerance, also grounded in a postracial, colour‐blind and noncolonial past ideology that forms the societal self‐image. Combined with the ethical and legal responsibility of healthcare professionals to treat all patients equally, our findings indicate little leeway for addressing the discrimination experienced by ethnic minority patients. (shrink)

Disgust, the emotion of rotting carcasses and slimy animalitos, finds itself at the center of several critical questions about human culture and cognition. This article summarizes recent developments, identify active points of debate, and provide an account of where the field is heading next.

Recently, McGinn (2011) has proposed a new theory of disgust. This theory makes empirical claims as to the history and function of disgust, yet does not take into account contemporary scientific research on the subject. This essay evaluates his theory for its merits as an account of disgust, and as a piece of scholarship more generally, and finds it lacking.

I present an argument for the view that laws ground their instances. I then outline two important consequences that follow if we accept the conclusion of this argument. First, the claim that laws ground their instances threatens to undermine a prominent recent attempt to make sense of the explanatory power of Humean laws by distinguishing between metaphysical and scientific explanation. And second, the claim that laws ground their instances gives rise to a novel argument against the view that grounding relations (...) are metaphysically necessary. (shrink)

Much neuroethics literature concludes with a set of normative recommendations. While these recommendations can be a helpful way of summarizing a proposal for a future direction, some have recently argued that ethics scholarship has devoted insufficient attention to considerations of audience and real-world applications. To date, however, while scholars have conducted topic analyses of neuroethics literature, to our knowledge no study has evaluated who neuroethics scholarship addresses and what it recommends. The objective of the present study therefore was to provide (...) a preliminary characterization of recommendations offered in neuroethics scholarship and an assessment of their target audiences. Rather than attempting to demarcate what constitutes “neuroethics scholarship,” we analyzed text that authors’ had self-identified as being neuroethics-related: abstracts presented at the International Neuroethics Society (INS) annual meetings and published as top abstracts in AJOB Neuroscience in the last decade (2011–2020). We found that a majority of abstracts utilized conceptual methods (62.2%) and provided conceptual recommendations (68%). Roughly 77% of all abstracts did not explicitly address a target audience, yet nearly all of these were implicitly directed at other scholars. The remainder specified a target audience of scholars (12.2%), regulators (6.7%), healthcare providers (6.7%) and industry (2.6%). Only a subset of abstracts provided practical or policy recommendations (19.7%). Of those, the majority (61.5%) did not specify a target audience. Among the subset with actionable recommendations, a clarification of target audience may help increase the impact. (shrink)

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy_the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

In a recent article published in Body & Society, Nikolas Rose considers what he takes to be possible historical–ontological implications of recent developments in brain-decoding technologies. He argues that such technologies embody the premise that the brain is the real locus of mental states and processes, hence that a new materialist ontology of thought may be in the process of emerging through technological demonstration rather than through philosophical resolution. In this reply, I offer some reasons for being sceptical about such (...) claims. I argue that the ontology in question hardly amounts to anything particularly new, that technologies cannot demonstrate anything in these matters independently of philosophical inclinations of some kind and that it is at least an open issue whether the ontology in question can secure its claim to be a materialist ontology of thought. (shrink)

In medieval epics such as the Byzantine Digenis Akritis and the Persian Šāhnāme, dragons are usually considered to be mere opponents of the hero. But the symbolism attached to them is far from being exclusively that of a monstruous creature fighting a good hero. The motif of the three-headed dragon combines an allegorical meaning with a mythological framework. The confrontation between a dragon and an apparently weaker protagonist like a maiden or a younger son highlights the latters’ inner strength and (...) intelligence, while dangerously revealing the dragon’s possession of these human qualities. On an axiological level, the dragon’s symbolism displays the same variety: the dragon is a malevolent creature, and the archetype of the enemy, but also serves as an auxiliary to sound out men’s hearts, as in Fereydūn’s trial of his three sons. The dragon furthermore symbolizes power when painted on banners. When united to its celestial foe, the dragon’s lineage leads to the birth of the greatest hero of the Persian epic, Rostam. Thus the dragon ultimately guarantees the world’s balance between good and evil. (shrink)

This paper draws on data undertaken with very young children within the context of Norwegian kindergartens. Specifically, the paper focuses on non-human and human movements. Mine included, that are undertaken in time and space. Following I argue that as the researcher I am always already entangled in inquiry and that there is no beginning. As a consequence, I cannot offer an account concerning movements that are predicated on humanist notions of linearity. Moreover, by immersing myself in process ontology, my efforts (...) are not directed at using a presumed mastery where I both recognize and use a priori categories in order to render data intelligible and/or to reduce data to common sense. Rather, by paying careful attention to human and non-human bodies, and by being sensitive to and immersing myself within affect and movement, I draw attention to elements within the kindergarten which while, present are very often ignored by researchers and in so doing I disrupt traditional approaches to qualitative research. By effectively positioning myself in a post-human logic both the researcher and the research are open to different potentialities, potentialities where through thinking-feeling the peculiarities and differences of the empirical can be taken into account. (shrink)

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

For more than a decade Nina Baym has pioneered in the reexamination of American literature. She has led the way in questioning assumptions about American literary history, in critiquing the standard canon of works we read and teach, and in rediscovering lost texts by American women writers. Feminism and American Literary History collects fourteen of her most important essays published since 1980, which, combining feminist perspectives with original archival research, significantly revise standard American literary history. In Part I, "Rewriting (...) Old American Literary History," the focus is on male writers. Essays range from close readings of individual works to ambitious critiques of the main paradigms by which scholars have conventionally linked disparate texts and authors in a narrative of nationalist literary history: the self-in-the-wilderness myth, the romance-novel distinction, the myth of New England origins. Part II, "Writing New American Literary History," studies examples of women's writing from the Revolution through the Civil War. Stressing much overtly public and political writing that has been overlooked even by feminist scholars, noting public and political themes in supposedly domestic works, the essays substantially modify and historicize the paradigm by which premodern American women's writing is currently understood. The contentious and influential essays in Part III, "Two Feminist Polemics," address feminist literary theory and pedagogy, advocating a pluralist practice as the basis for scholarship, criticism, and humane feminism. No one interested in American literature or in women's writing can afford to ignore Baym's revisionist work. Humorous and gracefully written, this book is enjoyable and indispensable. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists both ask questions about what the world is like. How do these fields interact with one another? How should they? Naturalism Beyond the Limits of Science investigates an approach to these questions called methodological naturalism. According to methodological naturalism, when coming up with theories about what the world is like, philosophers should, whenever possible, make use of the same methodology that is deployed by scientists. Although many contemporary philosophers have implicit commitments that lead straightforwardly to methodological naturalism, (...) few have a clear understanding of how widespread and disruptive methodological naturalism promises to be for the field. By way of a series of case studies involving laws of nature, composition, time and modality, and drawing on historical and contemporary scientific developments including the discovery of the neutrino, the introduction of dark energy, and the advent of relativity theory, this book demonstrates the ways in which scientists rely on extra-empirical reasoning and how that very same extra-empirical reasoning can yield surprising results when applied to philosophical debates. Along the way, Nina Emery's investigation illuminates the complex relationship between philosophy and the sciences, and makes the case that philosophers and scientists alike would benefit from a greater understanding of the connections between the two fields. (shrink)

Otto Weininger’s work entitled Sex and Character is an important text in the intellectual history of Viennese modernism of the f‌in de siècle period. The author makes a pessimistic diagnosis of modern culture, which, according to him, is infected by anti-cultural feminine values. With desperate passion, he looks for a way to heal this state of affairs and finds it in the project of male reorientation in culture. To make this plan a reality, he thoroughly redef‌ines sex and gender. The (...) aim of the article is to investigate various paradoxes and contradictions contained in this famous work. (shrink)

Separate focus on crop fertilization or feeding practices inadequately describes nitrogen (N) loss from mixed dairy farms because of (1) interaction between animal and crop production and between the production system and the manager, and (2) uncertainties of herd N production and crop N utilization. Therefore a systems approach was used to study N turnover and N efficiency on 16 conventional and 14 organic private Danish farms with mixed animal (dairy) and crop production. There were significant differences in N surplus (...) at the farm level (242 kg. N/ha. vs. 124 kg. N/ha. on conventional and organic dairy farms respectively) with a correlation between stocking rate and N surplus. N efficiency was calculated as the output of N in animal products divided by the net N import in fodder, manure and fertilizer. N turnover in herd and individual crops calculated on selected farms showed differences in organic and conventional crop N utilization. This is explained via a discussion of the rationality behind the current way of planning the optimum fertilizer application in conventional agriculture. The concept of marginal N efficiency is insufficient for correcting problems of N loss from dairy farms. Substantial reductions in N loss from conventional mixed dairy farms is probably unlikely without lower production intensity. The concept of mean farm unit N efficiency might be a way to describe the relation between production and N loss to facilitate regulation. This concept is linked to differing goals of agricultural development—i.e. intensification and separation vs. extensification and integration. It is discussed how studies in private farms—using organic farms as selected critical cases—can demonstrate possibilities for balancing production and environmental concern. (shrink)

Self-surveillance and self-experimentation are of concern to everyone interested in finding out the factors that increase one's risk of stroke from.

In this article I explore if and how very young children can be the educators of their early childhood educators. I describe and discuss a story constructed form a fieldwork done in one early childhood setting in Norway. The story is read with Levinas and his concepts Said and Saying. Further I discuss if and how this might be understood as education arguing that the children`s expressions are offering new beginning and change in the pedagogical thinking and praxis within the (...) early childhood setting. (shrink)

This paper questions whether Critchley's ethical project can adequately talk about anarchism without acknowledging the critiques that political position has of philosophy. It argues that Critchley is too quick to dismiss "philosophical anthropology" as a way of understanding the link between politics and a certain notion of infinity. By a comparison of Noam Chomsky and Emmanuel Levinas, it attempts to show that there is a way of conceiving politics that does not give philosophy the final say.

This article examines the treatment of women in flight from domestic violence at the U.S. – Mexico border. It compares the robust state protections available to domestic violence victims in the interior of the country with the hostile landscape women encounter at the border. The article draws on three sources for information about the treatment at the border of domestic violence victims: an in-depth case study of one woman’s experience of domestic violence and flight, a small data set of domestic (...) violence victims detained in the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona during 2010 and 2011, and a detailed analysis of the policies and practices at play when a woman in flight from domestic violence comes to the U.S. border. From these sources, a grim picture emerges that may surprise many. Women fleeing violence whose lives entangle with the border confront a bureaucracy and justice system that harkens back to the time, 50 years ago, when domestic violence was seen as a private matter about which there was little the government could or should do to respond.Building on this descriptive account, the article draws on political theories of citizenship and membership to highlight the moral and legal inconsistencies between the immigration policies of the United States and its national values and commitments regarding violence against women. It suggests that language about the “private” nature of the violence at issue for women in flight from domestic violence should not be used to cloak underlying concerns about immigration admissions policies. Transparent discussion of the considerations at issue lays bare the irrationality of applying fundamentally different conceptions of domestic violence depending on which side of the geographic border it occurs. (shrink)

Theoretical work on media, which brings together certain lines of development from both the modern exact sciences and the human sciences, has elevated the pressing global question of the place of t...

ABSTRACT Temporal eliminativism is the view that the present is privileged because past and future entities do not exist. Temporal ersatzism is the view that the present is privileged because, although past and future entities exist, they are not concrete. I argue that shifting from temporal eliminativism to temporal ersatzism can help to address objections to the former theory that are due to relativity theory—but only if temporal ersatzism is understood in a fairly specific way and only in so far (...) as the temporal ersatzist is willing to take on some prima facie surprising commitments. I close by showing how the claims that I make with respect to temporal ersatzism generalise to other theories of time on which the present is privileged, including McDaniel’s [2018] presentist existential pluralism. (shrink)

There is a widespread notion, both within the sciences and among the general public, that mental deterioration can rob individuals of their identity. Yet there have been no systematic investigations of what types of cognitive damage lead people to appear to no longer be themselves. We measured perceived identity change in patients with three kinds of neurodegenerative disease: frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Structural equation models revealed that injury to the moral faculty plays the primary role in (...) identity discontinuity. Other cognitive deficits, including amnesia, have no measurable impact on identity persistence. Accordingly, frontotemporal dementia has the greatest effect on perceived identity, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has the least. We further demonstrated that perceived identity change fully mediates the impact of neurodegenerative disease on relationship deterioration between patient and caregiver. Our results mark a departure from theories that ground personal identity in memory, distinctiveness, dispositional emotion, or global mental function. (shrink)

Introduction:The effects of specific suggestions are usually studied by measuring parameters that are directly addressed by these suggestions. We recently proposed the use of a uniform, unrelated, and objective measure like maximal muscle strength that allows comparison of suggestions to avoid nocebo effects and thus to improve communication. Since reduced breathing strength might impair respiration and increase the risk of post-operative pulmonary complications, the aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of the suggestions on respiratory muscle power. (...) Both the identification and neutralization of negative suggestions in the clinical context and stimulating suggestions could improve breathing force, a predictor of physical fitness and convalescence.MethodsIn 50 healthy, adult volunteers, respiratory muscle strength was measured by maximal inspiratory and expiratory pressures, as well as by maximal inspiratory and expiratory flows. Baseline was compared to values after application of eleven suggestions, five out of clinical context, including memory of negative or positive past, risk information for informed consent, and a non-verbal suggestion. Six stimulating suggestions included self-affirmation, empowering words, a heroic mirror image, and an imagination.ResultsAll suggestions showed an impact on respiratory muscle strength, indicating placebo and nocebo effects. No single parameter could represent the breathing force in its complexity, however, trends and different specific aspects of it were measured. The strongest reaction was observed with the recall of a previous negative situation resulting in a reduction in expiratory flow to 96.1% of baseline. After risk information, a decrease was observed in three of the parameters, with the highest extend in expiratory pressure by 4.4%. This nocebo effect was neutralized by adding positive aspects to the risk information. Every intended strengthening suggestion resulted in statistically significant increases of at least one parameter, with changes of up to 10%, indicating placebo effects. Here, expiration was more affected than inspiration. Sex was the only influencing factor reaching statistical significance, with stronger reactions in women.ConclusionRespiratory muscle strength proved to be sensitive to suggestions with clinical context, as well as suggestions intended for stimulation. With this objective measurement, evaluation, and comparison of different suggestions is possible to help avoid nocebo effects. The demonstrated effect of supporting suggestions can be followed up and used in clinical practice. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking study, Nina Gurianova identifies the early Russian avant-garde as a distinctive movement in its own right and not a preliminary stage to the Constructivism of the 1920s. Gurianova identifies what she terms an “aesthetics of anarchy”—art-making without rules—that greatly influenced early twentieth-century modernists. Setting the early Russian avant-garde movement firmly within a broader European context, Gurianova draws on a wealth of primary and archival sources by individual writers and artists, Russian theorists, theorizing artists, and German philosophers. (...) Unlike the post-revolutionary avant-garde, which sought to describe the position of the artist in the new social hierarchy, the early Russian avant-garde struggled to overcome the boundaries defining art and to bridge the traditional gap between artist and audience. As it explores the aesthetics embraced by the movement, the book shows how artists transformed literary, theatrical, and performance practices, eroding the traditional boundaries of the visual arts and challenging the conventions of their day. (shrink)

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book's ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the (...) lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine "I", who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death's material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning "I"'s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the psychological relevance of a logical model for deductive reasoning. We propose a new way to analyze logical reasoning in a deductive version of the Mastermind game implemented within a popular Dutch online educational learning system (Math Garden). Our main goal is to derive predictions about the difficulty of Deductive Mastermind tasks. By means of a logical analysis we derive the number of steps needed for solving these tasks (a proxy for working memory load). Our (...) model is based on the analytic tableaux method, known from proof theory. We associate the difficulty of Deductive Mastermind game-items with the size of the corresponding logical trees obtained by the tableaux method. We derive empirical hypotheses from this model. A large group of students (over 37 thousand children, 5–12 years of age) played the Deductive Mastermind game, which gave empirical difficulty ratings of all 321 game-items. The results show that our logical approach predicts these item ratings well, which supports the psychological relevance of our model. (shrink)

Actualism is the view that only actually existing things exist. Presentism is the view that only presently existing things exist. In this paper, I argue that being an actualist without also being a presentist is not as easy as many philosophers seem to think. A common objection to presentism is that there is an unavoidable conflict between presentism and relativity theory. But actualists who do not wish to be presentists cannot point to this relativity objection alone to support their position. (...) Unless they have some antecedent reason for thinking that actualism is more plausible than presentism, anyone who is moved by the relativity objection to give up presentism should be moved by a related objection to give up actualism as well. If there is a reason to be an actualist without also being a presentist, it must go beyond the relativity objection to presentism. (shrink)

Reflection is an ambiguous buzzword in contemporary educational and professional settings. Work has been done to clarify the concept theoretically, but a gap remains between such clarifications and actual reflective activities in educational and work-related practices. Reflective activities embody epistemological presuppositions about the nature of competence, knowledge, and learning, and about the relation between thinking, communicating, and acting. In this article, Nina Bonderup Dohn identifies the epistemological presuppositions of two paradigm cases of reflection (“solitaire reflection” and “communicative reflection”) and (...) assesses these against a view of knowledge, competence, learning, and action inspired by the Scandinavian interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy as well as by insights from phenomenology and situated learning. The outcome of Dohn's assessment is that the presuppositions of the paradigm cases are misguided and, therefore, so are the reflective activities. The problems and pitfalls that result from this situation are identified and illustrated with empirical examples. Dohn concludes by suggesting an alternative paradigm: “situated reflection.”. (shrink)

Many of the theories that have been discussed in recent years are distrustful of the anthropological inroads or are openly hostile to them. The problems of the environment, global politics, and the discoveries of biology and medicine create a rich foundation for such attitudes. They are also manifested in the genres of comments that emanate from the domains of rigorous theory and science into the zones of unprovable projections, forecasts, and programs. Perhaps only media philosophy still dares to talk about (...) the need for media anthropology. Yet how is it possible to try to determine what is human in such conditions—among conglomerations of particles (Whitehead-Latour) and entanglements (Barad), in the indiscernibility of the organic and the inorganic? What language can one still use to discuss it—the language of psychoanalytic loss, of scientific impartiality, of literary fiction? Through what concepts can one lay out the path—of function, of environment, of system? This article provides a brief summary of the selection of articles included in the present special issue. The authors of these articles attempt to talk about the human by unleashing this concept in their own way from a cosmic and universal perspective. (shrink)

The ancient philosophies, both Eastern and Western, expound a way of liberation from the fleeting and sensual world of ever-changing experience and toward the reality of true being, free from death and untruth. For this soteriological purpose, the perfect conception of self-control is offered as the perfect means of liberation. The connection between the two realms of the empirical world and the reality of true being is fixed in a human being, which is viewed as a complex corporeal, mental, and (...) extra-mental structure, free from any connection with the body and its intellectual activity. What is more, self-control does not mean a simple rational command endowed with ethical value. Philosophical instructions praise... (shrink)

Concerning challenges with the social inclusion of children with special educational needs, it is imperative to evaluate teacher interventions that promote social inclusion. This study aimed to investigate the effects of cooperative learning intervention on social inclusion. In addition, it was investigated to what degree CL implementation affected the outcomes. Fifty-six teachers of 958 fifth-grade children were randomly selected to intervention and control groups upon recruitment to the study. The intervention teachers received training and coaching in CL and implemented this (...) approach three to four times a week for 15 weeks. The results showed a significant but small effect of CL on children’s social acceptance, but no significant effect on children’s friendships and perceptions of classroom relationships. The degree of CL implementation had effect on children’s social acceptance, but the effect was not consistent across social acceptance measures as a friend or a groupmate. Thus, it can be concluded that CL, conducted with the length and intensity of this study, may not lead to substantial changes in the social inclusion of children with SEN. In future studies, more focus needs to be devoted to teacher implementation of the CL approach. (shrink)

The relevance of the study is that the II Vatican Council has not only historical but also cultural significance for the believers. The ideology of the Ajornamento, introduced by this Council, is directed not only to dialogue and tolerance, the rapprochement and unity of the believers in the modern world, but also to the revival of the names of those figures who, through their apostolic activity, have been ahead of their time for millenia and have become a model for modern (...) religious tradition. This implies the phenomenon of Cyril and Methodius - Slavic educators and apostles who, during missionary activities in Moravia and Pannonia, initiated the Slavic rite of Christianity and thus demonstrated the example of the first Christian inculturation. (shrink)

Editorial of Approaching Religion, Vol. 11 Issue 1, based on a two-day seminar arranged in Helsinki in August 2020 by the Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation under the title ‘Clear-sighted Art – Open Mind? Encounters between Art and Esotericism’.

Obituary of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who died in January 2009.