Summary Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–96), the German-born Government Botanist of Victoria from 1853 until his death, and concurrently Director of the Melbourne Botanic Garden from 1857 until 1873, was a prolific systematic botanist, but also heavily involved in public educational activities. He conceived of the Garden as an educative place of recreation, but ultimately lost control over it. His loss did not stop his popular writing and lecturing, especially in areas related to the application of botany in horticulture, agriculture, and (...) forestry. The structure of his introductory school text—very different from the intensely logical grammar-like botany texts of the period—owed much to his political masters, but it is characterized by careful attention to language and locality. Mueller's work represents a consistent and pervasive example of attention to the ‘public understanding of science’ that resonates with the concerns of early twenty-first-century funders of scientific research. (shrink)

La relación entre lenguaje y creación no se reduce para San Agustín en los recursos que presenta un término de la analogía para ilustrar al otro, sino que el lenguaje tiene un poder de agenciamiento en la realidad cuya eficacia está en su capacidad de determinar, contaminar, purificar o enredar las relaciones del ordo amoris. A lo largo de La Ciudad de Dios puede verse como la palabra performa, su potencia es una promesa en sí misma, su posibilidad o imposibilidad (...) comunicativa son asuntos que devienen, para el de Hipona, de la palabra en relación, del cuerpo de una palabra inserta y encarnada en una trama de vínculos visibles e invisibles que se ordenan o no, según su condición, a lo divino. (shrink)

In October 2021, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence publicly released Delphi, an artificial intelligence system trained to make general moral decisions (Allen Institute for Artifi...

Today intersectionality has expanded from being primarily a metaphor within structuralist feminist research to an all-encompassing theory. This article discusses this increasing dedication to intersectionality in European feminist research. How come intersectionality has developed into a signifier for ‘good feminist research’ at this particular point in time? Drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonial theory the authors examine key articles on intersectionality as well as special issues devoted to the concept. They interrogate the conflicts and meaning making processes as well as the (...) genealogies of the concept. Thus, the epistemology and ontology behind the ‘intersectional turn’ in feminist theory is the main concern here. The authors argue that the lack of ontological discussions has lead to its very popularity. Intersectionality promises almost everything: to provide complexity, overcome divisions and to serve as a critical tool. However, the expansion of the scope of intersectionality has created a consensus that conceals fruitful and necessary conflicts within feminism. (shrink)

The axiomatic presentation of modal systems and the standard formulations of natural deduction and sequent calculus for modal logic are reviewed, together with the difficulties that emerge with these approaches. Generalizations of standard proof systems are then presented. These include, among others, display calculi, hypersequents, and labelled systems, with the latter surveyed from a closer perspective.

Mind blanking is a mental state in which attention does not bring any perceptual input into conscious awareness. As this state is still largely unexplored, we suggest that a comprehensive understanding of mind blanking can be achieved through a multifaceted approach combining self-assessment methods, neuroimaging, and neuromodulation. In this article, we explain how EEG and TMS could be combined to help determine whether mind blanking is associated with a lack of mental content or a lack of linguistically or conceptually determinable (...) mental content. We also question whether mind blanking occurs spontaneously or intentionally and whether these two forms are instantiated by the same or different neural correlates. (shrink)

Writers on collective action are in broad agreement that in order for a group of agents to form a collective intention, the members of that group must have beliefs about the beliefs of the other members. But in spite of the fact that this so-called "interactive knowledge" is central to virtually every account of collective intention, writers on this subject have not offered a detailed account of the nature of interactive knowledge. In this paper, we argue that such an account (...) is necessary for any adequate analysis of collective intention. Furthermore, we argue that an application of Robert Aumann's theory of interactive knowledge may be used to address several puzzling features of collective intention. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

What does the term academic ethics mean? How does this term relate to others in the academic integrity literature, such as research misconduct? Does conceptual confusion in the study of academic ethics complicate development of valid analyses of ethical behavior in an academic setting? The intended goal of many empirical projects on academic ethics is to draw causal conclusions about the factors that lead to faculty or students possessing or disregarding academic integrity. Yet, it is not clear that scholars using (...) the concept academic ethics are measuring the same phenomenon when they use associated concepts, such as responsible conduct of research. The purpose of this paper is to develop a taxonomy of concepts for the empirical study of academic ethics. Based in research on comparative analysis of democracy, another normatively preferable but multifaceted concept, I argue for a taxonomy of concepts for the study of academic integrity that reduces problems of “conceptual stretching” and challenges to the validity of empirical research in this field. (shrink)

This chapter develops an alternative to the dominant articulation of human existence on the basis of classical phenomenology, arguing that Edmund Husserl's phenomenological inquiries into the structures of embodiment provide a very different and more fruitful starting point for the investigation of sexual difference than the ideas of social gender and biological sex. The ways of classifying sex and gender characteristics mark them out on several different conceptual bases, and thus their categories may not correspond or coincide. Moreover historical and (...) biological inquiries indicate that the dimorphic notion of sex is prescriptive and constructive. Finally the sex/gender paradigm is dominated by the explanatory framework of causes and effects. The phenomenological analysis shows that the causal-functional framework is inadequate for the investigation of the plurality of the bodily existence and sexual difference as a dimension of this existence. In the light of the explication of the concepts of sex and gender, and the phenomenological analysis of embodiment, the sex/gender paradigm cannot offer a basis for a comprehensive philosophy of sexual existence. (shrink)

van Fraassen's constructivist empiricist account of theories makes an epistemic distinction between entities that can and cannot be observed with the naked eye. A belief about the correctness of a theoretical description of an entity that is observable with the naked eye can be warranted by a theory. In contrast, no theory can warrant a belief about the correctness of a description of an unobservable entity. I argue that we ought to instead adopt a view that takes account of the (...) fact that some entities that cannot be observed with the naked eye can nevertheless be observed on the basis of the same physical principle as those entities that can be. This suggests that there is a distinction different from van Fraassen's that might do the work van Fraassen intends his to do, but a distinction that is principled. Understanding why this is so suggests that his distinction is grounded merely in human chauvinism. (shrink)

The article proposes Logic of Secrets in Collaboration Networks, a formal logical system for reasoning about a set of secrets established over a fixed configuration of communication channels. The system’s key feature, a multi-channel relation called independence, is a generalization of a two-channel relation known in the literature as nondeducibility. The main result is the completeness of the proposed system with respect to a semantics of secrets.

Abstract:AbstractWomen's Liberation was a radical, multiracial feminist movement that grew directly out of the New Left, civil rights, antiwar, and related freedom movements of the 1960s. Its insight that “the personal is political,” its intentionally decentralized structure, and its consciousness raising method allowed it to grow so fast and with such intensity that it swept up liberal feminist organizations in a wildfire of change. Though women's liberation was fundamental to the emergence of a mass feminist movement, the persistent stereotypes of (...) this feminist upsurge as white, middle-class, anti-motherhood, and anti-sex have obscured the creative radicalism of this early period and erased the presence of women of color and working class women. In a period of extreme racial polarization, feminist efforts to articulate the intersections of gender with race, class, and sexuality were often deeply flawed, but they began a conversation on which later generations could build. As scholars unearth the complex history of this dynamic and revolutionary moment they complicate narratives of the so-called “second wave.”. (shrink)

Il passo della Retorica (1358 a 10-21) dove è introdotta la distinzione óo e i' è uno dei più controversi dell'opera aristotelica. Il presente lavoro propone un chiarimento della natura e del ruolo di óo e i' nella costruzione di un'argomentazione dialettico-retorica. Tale chiarimento viene presentato attraverso un confronto tra Topici e Retorica che, se pur espressamente evidenziato da Aristotele stesso, sembra essere stato trascurato da quanti si sono occupati dell'esegesi di tale sezione della Retorica.

This research investigated whether perceived situational appropriateness (defined as the degree of fit between product and intended usage situations) is predictive of consumer choices for foods and beverages, on the theoretical premise that intended usage situation acts as a frame of reference in orienting choices. Extant research on the topic, though suggestive of a link, is very limited in scope and almost completely lacking with regards to choice behaviour (as opposed to other aspects such as food acceptability or intake). To (...) address the hypotheses, data collected in a series of 15 experiments ($N= 2731$ consumers in total) -- covering a wide range of product categories and usage situations -- are presented. In all studies, participants evaluated a set of stimuli varying with respect to perceived appropriateness (low to high), and evaluated each stimulus either monadically using a choice likelihood scale or by performing a discrete choice task. Regression analyses from all studies consistently indicated that perceived appropriateness significantly predicted choice response. The results were robust with respect to variation in product category and experimental protocol and, overall, strongly support the notion that appropriateness can provide a simple yet powerful (in some case accounting for over 50\% of variance) predictor of consumer choice. Effect sizes varied substantially: perceived appropriateness explained from a minimum of 3\% to over 65\% of variance in consumer choice, and this variation was linearly related to the degree of product heterogeneity in the product sets. This research also investigated possible moderators of the link between appropriateness and choice, by relating the results to consumers’ product familiarity and involvement. While both traits significantly (and positively) affected choice, they did not interact with appropriateness. Possible explanations for these results, as well as other possible candidate moderators to explore in future research, are highlighted. (shrink)

Entre los múltiples legados de la filosofía de Agustín de Hipona se detecta un reconocimiento muy atento al lenguaje. Su aproximación trata de una variedad de encuadres que exhiben que la lengua debe entenderse en relación a una cierta noción de praxis. No solo porque sus escritos sintetizan un rico recorrido propio de exploraciones lingüísticas teóricas y empíricas. Sino también porque es a través de una efervescente implicación en el discurso en donde Agustín construye su posición gestualmente. Lo hace escribiendo, (...) predicando, corrigiendo, contestando, discutiendo, enseñando. Incesantemente sumergido en algún acto verbal que incita a que en su obra se pueda respirar una original simbiosis entre lenguaje y acción. Sus advertencias sobre la blasfemia y de la maledicencia resultan fundamentales para comprender la postura lingüística sobre el lenguaje de reniego de toda una tradición posterior. (shrink)

Se analizan las políticas medio ambientales e indígenas durante el período 1990- 2010 de gobiernos de la Concertación, los tratados internacionales sobre el medio ambiente que inciden en el uso de recursos naturales en territorios huilliche. Se concluye que la política pública medioambiental, por su naturaleza reactiva, en el contexto de los mercados globales, se ha visto sobrepasada por la hegemonía del poder de las transnacionales que invierten en los commodities forestal, minero, agropecuario, amparadas por una legislación ambiental débil y (...) un discurso político obsecuente. (shrink)

This article considers the development of nurse-led services as a part of a pilot study and explores the therapeutic nature of the role of the nurse. In particular it suggests a need for reconsideration of the fundamental values of nurse-led care in the context of changing organizational culture. Within the UK there has been pressure from policy makers to extend the role of the specialist nurse and create new nursing roles, shifting the boundaries between professional health groups. The philosophy of (...) nurse-led initiatives has therefore been driven mainly from a service redesign and clinical need standpoint rather than necessarily focusing on enhancing patients’ experience and the changes in organizational culture required to achieve this. While several studies have focused on the safety, comparative cost and comparative patient outcomes in nurse-led care in relation to traditional or doctor-led care, little attention has been given to the changing organizational values underlying the nursing role. Exploring this context is essential if new nursing roles are to provide more than relief for bottlenecks in the system and also meet their potential for providing patient centred and innovative models of care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rhetoric of Romantic ProphecySara GuyerThe Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Ian BalfourStanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. 368. $70.00, cloth; $29.95, paperback.Not insignificantly, Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot are the first two names to appear in Ian Balfour's excellent study The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Benjamin and Blanchot are authors of two of the most influential essays on romanticism, essays that, it just so happens, Ian Balfour is (...) responsible for introducing to an English-reading audience. 1 Thus, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is not only a long awaited, prize-winning book by a major theorist of romanticism, it is also a book written by the first English translator of Benjamin's and Blanchot's essays. Both Blanchot's "The Athenaeum" and Benjamin's "On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" expose the incompletion of the romantic project and unsettle the relation between the past and the present. They also provide a context for understanding the kind of book that Ian Balfour has written. Like its eminent predecessors, this book focuses on local phenomena, yet its force far exceeds the field that it so thoughtfully treats. In it, Balfour shows how a turn to the past (to a set of historical texts) has the effect of unsettling the present, and he argues that an apparent turn to the future (prophecy) has as its issue the present.The book's introduction, entitled "The Call of Prophecy and the Future (After Benjamin)," alerts us to the fact that Benjamin and Blanchot, who have written extensively on language, also have written compellingly on the prophetic. While the prophetic today most often seems to signify religion's naive or violent claims on the future (and by implication on the present), in Benjamin's and Blanchot's work—and in Balfour's work—"the prophetic" (by which Balfour means not a genre, but a "mode") poses problems of referentiality and interpretation. Benjamin's treatment of messianism and allegory in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" offers Balfour a clear framework for undertaking this examination. And, in style and approach, Benjamin is the thinker with whom Balfour has the closest kinship. Like Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Balfour's The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is a historical study that is not historicist, that is, it does not aim to account for a historical phenomenon, but is a philosophical and rhetorical investigation into language.However, it is Blanchot's brief essay "Prophetic Speech"—a review of André Neher's L'essence du prophétisme—that informs Balfour's thinking about the prophetic. Indeed, Balfour's book can be read as a meditation on the rhetorical implications of Blanchot's suggestion that: [End Page 257]Prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset all the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence. 2With this passage, Blanchot not only recasts the conventional account of prophecy (and, implicitly, the symbolic reading upon which prophecy relies), but also shows that if prophecy turns the future into a referent—and hence becomes history—the present is lost. Balfour's transfer of Blanchot's account of the prophetic to romanticism is broadly explained by the debates within romanticism (and contemporary criticism of romanticism) about referentiality and the primacy of symbol over allegory, debates that today are most well-known to non-romanticists through Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality."Balfour offers a lucid account of his project—and its relation to history and historicist criticism—when he explains:If there is a historical force to the analysis here, it lies not in the attempt to show how representative these texts were of some larger, pervasive phenomenon—although they sometimes are—but rather to mark what was possible to be thought and done at a given moment. More than that, the analysis implicitly and sometimes explicitly confronts... (shrink)

Background: Direct–to–consumer genetic testing (DTCGT) offers risk estimates for a variety of complex diseases and conditions, yet little is known about its impact on actual users, including their decisions about sharing the information gleaned from testing. Ethical considerations include the impact of unsolicited genetic information with variable validity and clinical utility on relatives, and the possible burden to the health care system if revealed to physicians. Aims: The qualitative study explored primary care patients’ views, attitudes, and decision making considerations regarding (...) DTCGT. This article focuses on the disclosure decisions participants made regarding participation, testing, and results of DTCGT, a topic which arose as a secondary aim of the study. Methods: Through four longitudinal interviews (pre–test, results, 3 and 12 months post–test) we examined twenty primary care patients’ decisions, expressed intentions, and actions regarding disclosure to immediate and extended family, friends and coworkers, and physicians about participation in and results of DTCGT. Individual interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis and a summative approach to describe the global themes. Results: Most participants disclosed to some immediate family; less than half disclosed to extended family; approximately half talked to friends. Most participants stated they would or might disclose to physicians about DTCGT and a few did. Conceptual themes that emerged from the data analysis include ambivalence about disclosure, consistency between intention and actual disclosure behavior and decisions, and conditional information sharing. Conclusions: Participants’ intentional and actual disclosure patterns offer insight into how they view DTCGT, weigh results, and the potential impact of DTCGT. (shrink)

Current facts about soil erosion, groundwater “mining,” and impact of toxic substances suggest a resource crisis in our farming system. Yet traditional checks on the exploitation of farmland, capsulized in the “stewardship ethic,” proceed from too limited a viewpoint to adequately address the root of the exploitation and proffer an alternative. After briefly examining the stewardship ethic, I consider the developmentof a “partnership ethic” to guide the use of land for farming which builds its essential elements out of the reflections (...) of feminist thinkers on the relationship between humankind and nature. Instead of using “rights” language to express the ethic, I develop a theory of appropriate use analogous to the appropriate use of another person’s capabilities-i.e., that such moral use should respect and not destroy the other and that it should return something of value to the other in exchange for the use. Finally, those principles are examined for their practical implications for farmland use and national farm policy. (shrink)

The formal justice model proposed by Anita Silvers in Disability, Discrimination, and Difference emphasizes the social model of disability and the need for full equality of opportunity, and it suggests that a distributive model of justice that gives special benefits to individuals with disabilities is self-defeating. Yet in that work, Silvers allows an exception for the "profoundly impaired." In this paper, I show how the formal justice theory falls short when it comes to defining and dealing with "profoundly impaired" individuals (...) and explore the ways in which making the exception raises serious theoretical concerns for the grounding of the formal justice model. (shrink)

A fundamental criterion considered essential to deem the procedure of vital organ procurement for transplantation ethical is that the donor must be dead, as per the Dead Donor Rule (DDR). In the case of Donation after Circulatory Death (DCD), is the donor genuinely dead? The main aim of this article is to clarify this uncertainty, which primarily arises from the fact that in DCD, death is determined based on cardiac criteria (Circulatory Death, CD), rather than neurological criteria (Brain Death, BD), (...) and that to allow the procurement procedure, physicians reperfuse the organs in an assisted manner. To ensure that the cessation of circulation leads to the irreversible loss of brain functions, DCD regulations require that physicians wait a certain period after CD before commencing vital organ procurement. However, during this “no-touch period,” the organs are at risk of damage, potentially rendering them unsuitable for transplantation. When DCD is performed on patients whose CD follows a Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Treatment (WLST) (DCD Maastricht III category), how long should the no-touch period last? Does its existence really make sense? Does beginning the procedure of vital organ procurement immediately after WLST constitute a violation of the DDR that can be ethically justified? The discussion aims to provide arguments in support of the non-absoluteness of the DDR. (shrink)

Non-governmental organizations and governments are promoting cooperatives as key to linking smallholder farmers with modern markets to achieve inclusive development, yet the specifics of these supply relationships remain poorly understood. This article uses data from 51 interviews with supply chain stakeholders and a survey of 110 smallholder vegetable farmers in Nicaragua to investigate the impact of cooperative-supermarket supply chain relationships on cooperatives, and the role retailers and NGOs play in facilitating these relationships. The study found that in Nicaragua, cooperatives selling (...) to Walmart became unstable, in contrast with the performance of cooperatives selling to local supermarket chain La Colonia. The results show that cooperative performance is impacted by an interaction between differences in the types of farmers reached by the two supermarket chains, in the performance of the NGOs involved in each supply chain, and in the supermarkets’ business practices. The findings suggest that NGOs should pay more attention to buyer sourcing strategies and farmer needs when designing development interventions to link cooperatives of resource-poor farmers to markets, so as not to increase the vulnerability of smallholder farmers. (shrink)

Wittgenstein conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a subject. Thus, his work is highly relevant to the contemporary philosophical counseling movement. This paper explores the ways in which his views on how to do philosophy shed light on how we can approach philosophical counseling. First, Witgenstein's anti-theoretical approach to conceptual analysis highlights the dangers of interpreting clients? symptoms in light of theory. Second, his notion that "pictures hold us captive" underscores the need to help clients recognize unfounded assumptions (...) underlying their apparent dilemmas. Finally, Wittgenstein's Socratic conception of philosophy as a means to lead an authentic life shows the value of philosophizing beyond the confines of the academy. (shrink)

This paper studies the relation between dialogue, truth and communication in Plato's thought and the similarities between Plato's theory of language and some philosophers of the twentieth century like Heidegger or Gadamer.

This work considers Heidegger's treatment of Aristotle's doctrine of logos apophantikos. Through a singular interpretation of Aristotle's De Interpretatione, Heidegger rejects the traditional notion of truth as "adaequatio" that takes place in judgement to offer an alternative comprehension in terms of unconcealment.