What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated - from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of (...) the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space - an astro-culture - in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come. (shrink)

The 2023 theme for the Society of Christian Ethics invites us to consider what fuels our collective imagination in the United States today, its impact, and implications for the future of the field of ethics. American exceptionalism, racial anxieties and fear help feed influential myths that prevent the nation from “making real the promises of democracy,” much less approaching the Beloved Community (King). Whereas ethics often focuses upon critique, its scholars and practitioners are also invited to undertake the work of (...) repair, which entails attention to affect, art, and activism—particularly given the malformation of moral imagination. Such shifts have implications for pedagogy and the framing and terrain of the field of Christian ethics, as well. (shrink)

This is a collection of sixteen essays by a diverse group of international scholars that offers a wide-ranging and contemporary perspective on the major aspects of Christian Wolff’s ethics. The volume focuses on Wolff’s German Ethics, arguably his most important and influential text on moral philosophy, but many of the chapters also consider the development of the basic tenets of Wolff’s moral theory in his later Latin writings. The contributions cover a range of topics, including the systematic structure of the (...) text itself and the relation between Wolff’s ethics and the preceding natural law tradition. Many chapters pay special attention to the core concepts of Wolff’s moral philosophy, such as obligation, perfection, the highest good, and happiness. Other notable topics include Wolff’s conception of moral judgment and moral education, as well as the role of psychology and anthropology in his ethical thought. The volume also contains discussion of the influence of Wolff’s ethics on subsequent figures such as C.A. Crusius, G.F. Meier, and Kant. As a whole, the volume seeks to establish the importance of Wolff’s German Ethics within the history of ethics as well as inspire others to engage with his thought. (shrink)

Die Anforderungen an das ethisch-professionelle Handeln Pflegender und somit auch die Forderungen an die professionelle Ethikkompetenz Pflegender im praktischen Berufsfeld wandeln sich sowohl qualitativ als auch quantitativ. Dies wird auch in den veränderten normativen Rahmungen der Pflegebildung deutlich. Der Lernort Praxis als ein zentraler Ort pflegebezogener (Aus‑)Bildungsprozesse rückt somit nochmals stärker in den Fokus der Ethikkompetenzentwicklung professionell Pflegender. Der Beitrag konturiert zentrale Anforderungen und veränderte Bezüglichkeiten für die Ethikbildung im beruflichen Handlungsfeld professioneller Pflege und formuliert davon ausgehend zentrale Prämissen an (...) organisationsethische Rahmenbedingungen mit dem Ziel, eine ethisch fundierte professionelle pflegerische Handlungspraxis zu unterstützen. (shrink)

Background: After their attempts to have patient safety concerns addressed internally were ignored by wilfully blind managers, nurses from Bundaberg Base Hospital and Macarthur Health Service felt compelled to ‘blow the whistle’. Wilful blindness is the human desire to prefer ignorance to knowledge; the responsibility to be informed is shirked. Objective: To provide an account of instances of wilful blindness identified in two high-profile cases of nurse whistleblowing in Australia. Research design: Critical case study methodology using Fay’s Critical Social Theory (...) to examine, analyse and interpret existing data generated by the Commissions of Inquiry held into Bundaberg Base Hospital and Macarthur Health Service patient safety breaches. All data was publicly available and assessed according to the requirements of unobtrusive research methods and secondary data analysis. Ethical considerations: Data collection for the case studies relied entirely on publicly available documentary sources recounting and detailing past events. Findings: Data from both cases reveal managers demonstrating wilful blindness towards patient safety concerns. Concerns were unaddressed; nurses, instead, experienced retaliatory responses leading to a ‘social crisis’ in the organisation and to whistleblowing. Conclusion: Managers tasked with clinical governance must be aware of mechanisms with the potential to blind them. The human tendency to favour positive news and avoid conflict is powerful. Understanding wilful blindness can assist managers’ awareness of the competing emotions occurring in response to ethical challenges, such as whistleblowing. (shrink)

Perception is a subject of great current interest and one that is is likely to escalate over coming years. The focus of this book is on conceptual and philosophical issues of perception, including the classic notion of unconscious inferences in perception. The book consists of contributions from a group of international researchers who spent a year together as distinguished fellows at the German Centre for Advanced Study.

This volume aimed to highlight narrative identities of European cities or city neighbourhoods that have been overlooked, such as mid-sized cities. These cities are neither small towns nor metropolises, cities that are now unveiling their appeal or specificity. The present special issue thus covers a range of representations of cities. The articles investigate more systematically how different texts deal with various cities from different experiential and fictional perspectives. The issue covers the geographical scope across Europe, from east to west or (...) vice versa, as well as a range of different works of national literature(s), but with a clear emphasis on mid-sized European cities that have until now been deemed as lesser-known, secondary, peripheral, ‘other’ cities that are in the focus of the research of the COST project Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City, within which this journal issue is being published. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the biosocial origins of ritual by pointing to its significant social and evolutionary functions. Furthermore, it offers a detailed analysis of ethological studies on rituals in non-human species that are considered groundwork for an integrated analysis of rituals in people. Due to the fact that sociological and anthropological studies of rituals were aimed at studying social functions of rituals and rituals as a form of social interaction and neglected the existence of biogenetic models as the basis of (...) ritual behavior, the aim of this paper was to indicate that ritual is not only a product of cultural development but that it has played an adaptive role in the processes of biological and cultural evolution. (shrink)

Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 experts and stakeholders using the World Café method to identify key governance challenges and explore how public involvement can (...) meet these challenges. This brief report discusses four cross-cutting themes from the study: the need to move beyond individual consent; issues in benefit and data sharing; the challenge of delineating and understanding publics; and the goal of clarifying justifications for public involvement. The report aims to provide a starting point for making sense of the relationship between public involvement and the governance of population-level biomedical research, showing connections, potential solutions and issues arising at their intersection. We suggest that, in population-level biomedical research, there is a pressing need for a shift away from conventional governance frameworks focused on the individual and towards a focus on collectives, as well as to foreground ethical issues around social justice and develop ways to address cultural diversity, value pluralism and competing stakeholder interests. There are many unresolved questions around how this shift could be realised, but these unresolved questions should form the basis for developing justificatory accounts and frameworks for suitable collective models of public involvement in population-level biomedical research governance. (shrink)

This book considers different forms of voluntarism developed from the 13th to 18th centuries. By crossing the conventional dividing line between the medieval and early modern periods, the volume draws important new insights on the historical development of voluntarism. Voluntarism places a special emphasis on the will when it comes to the analysis and explanation of fundamental philosophical questions and problems. Since the Middle Ages, voluntarist considerations and views played an important role in the development of different theories of action, (...) ethics, metaethics, and metaphysics. The chapters in this volume are grouped according to three distinct kinds of voluntarism: psychological, ethical, and theological voluntarism. They address topics such as the threat of irrationality as the standard objection to voluntarism, incontinent actions and their explanation, the nature of the will as rational appetite, the relationship between intellect and will, the implications of conceptions of the will for political freedom, and the relations between divine freedom and the modal status of eternal truths. The chapters not only consider towering figures of the Middle Ages--Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Gent, William of Ockham, Francisco de Vitoria--and early modern period--René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Samuel Pufendorf--but also engage with less well-known figures such as Peter John Olivi, John of Pouilly, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Christian August Crusius. Varieties of Voluntarism in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in medieval philosophy, early modern philosophy, the history of ethics, and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Zulässigkeit der terminalen Sedierung als ultima-ratio-Maßnahme der Palliativmedizin bei sterbenden Patienten, die unter anders nicht kontrollierbaren schwersten Schmerzen und seelischen Qualen leiden, wird neuerdings auch in Europa kontrovers diskutiert. Während ihre Befürworter betonen, dass die terminale Sedierung nur dann zum Einsatz kommt, wenn die Standardmethoden der Palliativmedizin versagt haben, äußern ihre Gegner Angst vor einer neuen, unkontrollierten Form der aktiven Sterbehilfe. Insbesondere dann, wenn zeitgleich mit der terminalen Sedierung auf künstliche Ernährung und Flüssigkeitszufuhr verzichtet wird, wirft man ihr die (...) Umgehung der verbotenen aktiven Sterbehilfe vor, und es wird die Forderung nach einem strafrechtlichen Verbot erhoben. In diesem Artikel wird die rechtliche Bedeutung der terminalen Sedierung untersucht. Im Laufe der Analyse wird gezeigt, dass sie weder mit aktiver Sterbehilfe noch mit verbotener ärztlicher Beihilfe zum Suizid gleichgesetzt werden kann und dass sie — unter bestimmten Bedingungen — nicht unter ein strafrechtliches Verbot fällt. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Diskussion rechtlicher und ethischer Aspekte für die Entwicklung von Leitlinien. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 253 Sonja Thomas The Women’s Wall in Kerala, India, and Brahmanical Patriarchy On January 1, 2019, a human chain of women, between three and five million strong and 385 miles long, gathered to protest the barring of menstruating women from entering Sabarimala Temple in Kerala, India. The so-called Women’s Wall received widespread news coverage; in the United (...) States, NPR, the BBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all had stories on it. Debra Messing, Kerry Washington, and Rose McGowan tweeted about it. As a scholar of caste, gender, and religion in Kerala, India, I watched the news and international attention with a good deal of interest and a bit of unease about how the intersections of casteism and patriarchy (brahmanical patriarchy) were glossed over in the reporting. The issues surrounding the Women’s Wall reveal the ways in which certain groups invest in the protection of brahmanical patriarchal power; a power that is reflected in political tensions between the Kerala state and the Indian central government that may come to a head in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Casteism and religious divides in Kerala are rarely discussed in depth because Kerala is largely seen as a progressive state, with a 94 percent literacy rate. Other development indicators also point to the assumption that Kerala is exceptional: low infant mortality rates, low maternal mortality rates, low fertility rates, and a population where there are more women than men. Kerala is seen as secular because there is a large number of both Christian and Muslim religious minorities. In 1957, 254 News and Views Kerala made history by democratically electing a communist government and initiating a set of far-reaching (although not all-encompassing) land distribution policies. The state is seen as transgender friendly with a transgender beauty pageant and support for trans surgery. The “feminist ” Women’s Wall protest fits in quite neatly within the dominant narrative that Kerala is exceptional, progressive, and thus a model for other Indian states and for countries in the Global South to follow. However, even as “progressive” Kerala is celebrated today, it is not clear that women in the state are necessarily as empowered as commonly believed. The state has some of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation and violence against women is widespread.1 Kerala’s suicide rates are two times the national average, and Kerala leads all other states in India in the number of family murder/suicides.2 Women are vastly underrepresented in politics.3 Although women are educated, the female workforce participation rate is one of the lowest in India.4 There is evidence to suggest that educated, nonworking women are using their education toward securing a better marriage match rather than for employment or empowerment.5 Kerala has a history of extremely repressive caste practices. This area of India once not only practiced untouchability, but what is known as “distance pollution.” A Dalit (the most oppressed caste in the caste hierarchy) was not allowed within sixty feet of a Brahmin (the most privileged caste), and the mere shadow of a Dalit falling upon a dominant-caste person could result in a Dalit’s death.6 Dalit Bahujans were prohibited 1. See Swapna Mukhopadhyay, ed., The Enigma of the Kerala Woman: A Failed Promise of Literacy (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2007). 2. Jocelyn Lim Chua, In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 3. J. Devika and Binitha V. Thampi, New Lamps for Old? Gender Paradoxes of Political Decentralisation in Kerala (New Delhi: Zubaan: 2012). 4. Praveena Kodoth and Mridul Eapen, “Looking Beyond Gender Parity: Gender Inequities of Some Dimensions of Well-Being in Kerala,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 30 (2005): 3278. 5. Sonja Thomas, “Education as Empowerment? Gender and the Human Right to Education in Postcolonial India,” in Human Rights in Postcolonial India, ed. Om Prakash Dwivedi and V. G. Julie Rajan (New York: Routledge, 2016), 82; Ritty A. Lukose, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 104. 6... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that, unlike proponents of Humean accounts of intentional action, Ockham can also answer the fundamental question of why we desire anything at all. For Ockham, desire cannot be the starting point of the explanation, since desire presupposes yet another kind of appetitive act that is objectual, or non-propositional, in its nature. Ockham calls this love (amor). It should become clear that Ockham's approach, even in his day, is not common. It is, however, (...) worthy of detailed examination because it furthers a deeper and more complete understanding of intentional action by shedding light on this more fundamental question. In his terminology, love is the most basic kind of unconditional willing, not least because it is purely objectual: we appreciate persons as ends, not as means. The explanation of intentional action has to start somewhere. And, for Ockham, it starts with love for persons. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Christian Wolff’s conception of motivating and normative reasons. My aim is to show that in the discussion of error cases, Wolff pursues a strategy that is strikingly similar to the strategy of contemporary defenders of nicht-psychologist accounts of motivating reasons. According to many nicht-psychologist views, motivating reasons are facts. My aim is to show that Wolff’s motivation in pursuing this strategy is very different. The point is that due to his commitment to the Principle of (...) Sufficient Reason, Wolff has to show that error cases are compatible with the PSR. The issue is worth discussing because it is not yet sufficiently explored what motivating reasons are, according to Wolff, and how they relate, in substance, to normative reasons. Methodologically, my approach can be characterized as one of “mutual illumination”: I think it is possible to highlight some crucial ambiguities of Wolff’s conception against the backdrop of the contemporary conception of motivating reasons, but also to question the importance and role of the ontological question of what motivating reasons are in contemporary discussions against the backdrop of Wolff’s position. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes References.

_Thinking Education Through Alain Badiou_ represents the first collection to explore the educational implications of French philosopher Alain Badiou's challenge to contemporary philosophical orthodoxy put forth in his 1993 work, _Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil._ Represents the first collection of work in education to grapple with what Alain Badiou might mean for the enterprise of schooling Takes up Badiou's challenge to contemporary and conventional Anglo-American doxa Includes original essays by experts in several different educational fields.

L'article compare le motif de la contemplation de sa propre image dans une surface réfléchissante chez Plotin avec des motifs semblables que l'on trouvenon seulement dans les récits mythologiques, mais aussi dans les doctrines cosmologiques des systèmes philosophiques, gnostiques surtout, qui sont à la fois proches de Plotin et concurrent, à l'égard de la philosophie plotinienne. En même temps, en analysant deux métaphores mythologiques, dont une se sert du motif de la réflexion dans le miroir (le mythe orphique du démembrement (...) de Dionysos) et l'autre de la réflexion dans l'eau (le mythe de Narcisse), l'article souligne les différences qui séparent la doctrine plotinienne de la descente de l'âme et celle de la chute de l'âme. (shrink)

Sonja Arndt, Michael Peters, Marek Tesar Introspection is a key concept in epistemology, since introspective knowledge is often thought to be particularly secure, maybe even immune to skeptical dou...

In the literature the work of C. Piron on OQL, “the operational quantum logic of the Geneva School”, has a few times been criticised. Those criticisms were often due to misunderstandings, as has already been pointed out in [19]. In this paper we follow the line of defense in favour of OQL by replying to the criticisms formulated some time ago in [4] and [17]. In order for the reader to follow our argumentation, we briefly analyze the basic conceptual machinery (...) of OQL. (shrink)

We analyze G.M. Hardegree's interpretation of the Sasaki hook as a Stalnaker conditional and explain how he makes use of the basic conceptual machinery of OQL, i.e. the operational quantum logic which originated with the Geneva Approach to the foundations of physics. In particular we focus on measurements which are ideal and of the first kind, since these encode the content of the so-called Sasaki projections within the Geneva Approach. The Sasaki projections play a fundamental role when analyzing the condition (...) under which the properties expressed by Sasaki hooks can be considered as actual. We finish with a note on how the Sasaki hook can be conceived as ``assigning causes for properties to be actual", which links the interpretation of G.M. Hardegree to what has been called ``dynamic OQL". (shrink)

In Ockham's Assumption of Mental Speech: Thinking in a World of Particulars, Sonja Schierbaum offers a detailed philosophical reconstruction of William Ockham's (1287-1349) conception of mental speech. Ockham's conception provides a rich account of cognition and semantics that binds together various philosophical issues and forms a point of departure for many later and even contemporary debates. The book analyses the role of mental speech for the semantics and the use of linguistic expressions as well as its function within Ockham's (...) cognitive theory and epistemology. Carefully balancing Ockham's position against contemporary appropriations in the light of Fodor's LOTH, it allows us to understand better Ockham's view on human thought and its relation to language. (shrink)

Despite a paucity of psychological research exploring the interface between lesbian and gay issues and human rights, a human rights framework has been widely adopted in debates to gain equality for lesbians and gay men. Given this prominence within political discourse of human rights as a framework for the promotion of positive social change for lesbians and gay men, the aim of this study was to explore the extent to which rights‐based arguments are employed when talking about lesbian and gay (...) issues in a social context. An analysis of six focus group discussions with students showed that when lesbian and gay issues are discussed, rights‐based reasoning is employed intermittently, and in relation to certain issues more so than others. The implications of these findings for moral education aimed at promoting positive social change for lesbians and gay men are discussed. (shrink)

On n’imagine pas de justice sans possibilité de faire miséricorde ; inversement, une miséricorde qui ne tiendrait pas compte de la justice ne serait plus la miséricorde. Les deux notions sont liées, mais sur un socle inégal : car la justice inspirée par la loi naturelle déborde la justice positive, de même que la misère des miséreux ne se laisse pas ramener au mal commis par le misérable. En découlent des variations où l’on peut voir se profiler trois moments : (...) 1. La loi coutumière est bousculée par le Dieu de justice qui en questionne la légitimité ; 2. La répartition des tâches en chrétienté délègue l’exercice de la justice au pouvoir civil, l’Église se réservant la charité ; 3. L’époque contemporaine fait prévaloir l’idée de seconde chance à la base de toute justice, la responsabilité collective contrebalançant alors la culpabilité individuelle. (shrink)

Depuis trente ans, le terme d’éthique a supplanté celui de morale dans l’espace francophone. Le Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie de Lalande connaît encore la distinction entre la morale, dimension normative qui transparaît dans les mœurs et qui se formalise dans des règles tenues pour inconditionnellement valables, et l’éthique, comprise quant à elle comme « théorie raisonnée du bien et du mal », c’est-à-dire comme réflexion sur la morale ; mais cette distinction paraît ne ..

Research within the operational approach to the logical foundations of physics has recently pointed out a new perspective in which quantum logic can be viewed as an intuitionistic logic with an additional operator to capture its essential, i.e., non-distributive, properties. In this paper we will offer an introduction to this approach. We will focus further on why quantum logic has an inherent dynamic nature which is captured in the meaning of "orthomodularity" and on how it motivates physically the introduction of (...) dynamic implication operators, each for which a deduction theorem holds with respect to a dynamic conjunction. As such we can offer a positive answer to the many who pondered about whether quantum logic should really be called a logic. Doubts to answer the question positively were in first instance due to the former lack of an implication connective which satisfies the deduction theorem within quantum logic. (shrink)

This paper is part of an on-going programme on the study of the logical aspects of social network formation. It recalls the so-called social network model, discussing the properties of a notion of closeness between agents ; then introduces an extended social network model in which different agents might assign different values to different traits, discussing the properties of the notion of weighted closeness that arises. These notions are used to define social network creation operations by means of a threshold (...) strategy. The paper studies the properties of the social networks the updates create, providing sound and complete axiom systems for formal languages describing these updates’ effects. (shrink)

Literature on the subject of the menopause, primarily from the past three decades, is selectively reviewed in the form of an annotated bibliography. In order to highlight particular methodological problems, the review is presented in three sections, each preceded by a brief discussion, as follows: the general report of clinical observation or experience, the survey, and the clinical trial. Several recommendations are also made for further research in this field.

We propose a new topological semantics for evidence, evidence-based justifications, belief, and knowledge. Resting on the assumption that an agent’s rational belief is based on the available evidence, we try to unveil the concrete relationship between an agent’s evidence, belief, and knowledge via a rich formal framework afforded by topologically interpreted modal logics. We prove soundness, completeness, decidability, and the finite model property for the associated logics, and apply this setting to analyze key epistemological issues such as “no false lemma” (...) Gettier examples, misleading defeaters, undefeated justification versus undefeated belief, as well as the defeasibility theories of knowledge. (shrink)