Innere Bilder sind fur das Auge nicht sichtbar, sie sind kein Objekt visueller Wahrnehmung. SIe treten vor das 'geistige Auge'. ZIel des vorliegenden Buches ist die Konzeptualisierung einer Disposition fur innere Bildlichkeit als Erkenntnisorgan neben der Sprache und im Zusammenwirken mit ihr. HErausgestellt wird ein bislang weniger beachtetes menschliches Vermogen, das zunachst als allgemein anthropologische Fahigkeit untersucht wird und in einem zweiten Schritt als spezifisch dichterisches Vermogen. ES stellen sich einige grundsatzliche Fragen: Was sind innere Bilder? Inwiefern sind sie relevant (...) fur unsere Orientierung und fur unseren Zugang zur Welt? Welche Rolle spielen innere Bilder im Hinblick auf Wahrnehmung, Vorstellung und Erkenntnis? Innere Bilder sind erkenntnistheoretisch gesehen eine Herausforderung - sprachliche oder kunstlerische Darstellungsweisen ermoglichen einen Zugang zu ihnen. DIe theoriebildende Arbeit dient im abschlieSSenden Teil des Buches als Instrumentarium fur Studien uber erzahlende Literatur folgender Autoren: E.T.A. HOffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, Theodor Fontane, Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Thomas Bernhard. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDieser Beitrag ist Teil des Forums COVID-19: Perspektiven in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Mit Blick auf die sozialwissenschaftliche Katastrophenforschung des Kalten Krieges als Herkunftsort und als historisches Vergleichsmoment beschäftigt sich der Artikel mit der bisherigen sozialwissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung mit der COVID-19-Krise. Er behandelt erstens, wie die Rolle von sozialer Ungleichheit erörtert wird, zweitens die Idee der Katastrophe als „große Enthüllerin“ und drittens das Verhältnis von Katastrophenwissenschaft, Öffentlichkeit und Politik.This paper is part of Forum COVID-19: Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences.The (...) article connects and juxtaposes current day discussions on the social effects of the COVID-crisis with the history of social science disaster research during the Cold War. It elaborates on statements regarding the role of social inequalities in disaster, the idea of the “revealing” nature of disaster and crisis, and the relationship between disaster science, public and politics. (shrink)

Throughout the history of genetics, the concept of the gene has been a hot topic. Theories of the gene as a coherent structured particle, a large molecule, or part of such molecule, were prominent from the 1920s until well after the discovery of DNA structure and its function in the production of proteins in the 1950s and 1960s. As knowledge of the material basis of heredity advanced, new and more sophisticated definitions were proposed (see, for example, Gerstein et al. 2007; (...) Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2012). But rapid growth of knowledge about the molecular basis of biological heredity and individual development during the last half-century has made the idea of a particulate “gene” more and more elusive. Or .. (shrink)

The theory of consequences was one of the most important developments in logic during the Middle Ages. The distinction between formal consequences and material consequences was probably introduced by Ockham and soon became the main division of consequences, to be found in nearly all 14th-century treatises on the theory of consequences. This paper discusses the concept of a formal and material consequence according to the English tradition. It is based mainly on Richard Bil­lingham’s De consequentiis, but also takes into account (...) other 14th-century authors. Billingham defines the formal consequence as one where the consequent is understood in the antecedent and differentiates this kind of consequence from the material one. The definition is followed by a list of rules for valid consequences. However, with respect to some of these valid consequences the question arises whether they are formal or not and, if they are formal, how it is possible to explain the criterion of the intelligitur in. After explaining the material and the formal consequence and discussing these difficulties, the question is raised whether the intelligitur in is an appropriate structural criterion to distinguish between formal and material consequences. Finally, two interpretations for the intelligitur in compatible with the text situation are proposed. (shrink)

There is currently little empirical information about attitudes towards cognitive enhancement - the use of pharmaceutical drugs to enhance normal brain functioning. It is claimed this behaviour most commonly occurs in students to aid studying. We undertook a qualitative assessment of attitudes towards cognitive enhancement by conducting 19 semi-structured interviews with Australian university students. Most students considered cognitive enhancement to be unacceptable, in part because they believed it to be unethical but there was a lack of consensus on whether it (...) was similar or different to steroid use in sport. There was support for awareness campaigns and monitoring of cognitive enhancement use of pharmaceutical drugs. An understanding of student attitudes towards cognitive enhancement is important in formulating future policy. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how regulators, prosecutors, and courts might support and encourage the efforts of organizations to not only reintegrate after misconduct but also to improve their conduct in a way that reduces their likelihood of re-offense. We explore a novel experiment in creative sentencing in Alberta Canada that aimed to try to change the behaviour of an industry by publicly airing the root causes of a failure of one the industry’s leaders. Drawing on this case and prior (...) work, we articulate a model for a responsive and restorative approach to organizational misconduct that balances the punitive role of regulators and courts with new roles in supporting and overseeing rehabilitation. (shrink)

Although the terms mentor and thesis advisor (or research supervisor) are often used interchangeably, the responsibilities associated with these roles are distinct, even when they overlap. Neither are role models necessarily mentors, though mentors are role models: good examples are necessary but not sufficient. Mentorship is both a personal and a professional relationship. It has the potential for raising a number of ethical concerns, including issues of accuracy and reliability of the information conveyed, access, stereotyping and tracking of advisees, and (...) the abuse of power. Nevertheless, mentors can be critically important for professional success and are one of a number of elements that affect the responsible conduct of research. In addition, the community as a whole has a responsibility to mentor junior members. (shrink)

Addiction is increasingly described as a “chronic and relapsing brain disease”. The potential impact of the brain disease model on the treatment of addiction or addicted individuals’ treatment behaviour remains uncertain. We conducted a qualitative study to examine: (i) the extent to which leading Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians accept the brain disease view of addiction; and (ii) their views on the likely impacts of this view on addicted individuals’ beliefs and behaviour. Thirty-one Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians (10 females (...) and 21 males; 16 with clinical experience and 15 with no clinical experience) took part in 1 h semi-structured interviews. Most addiction neuroscientists and clinicians did not uncritically support the use of brain disease model of addiction. Most were cautious about the potential for adverse impacts on individuals’ recovery and motivation to enter treatment. While some recognised the possibility that the brain disease model of addiction may provide a rationale for addicted persons to seek treatment and motivate behaviour change, Australian addiction neuroscientist and clinicians do not assume that messages about “diseased brains” will always lead to increased treatment-seeking and reduced drug use. Research is needed on how neuroscience research could be used in ways that optimise positive outcomes for addicted persons. (shrink)

Developments in neuroscience have raised the possibility that pharmaceuticals may be used to enhance memory, mood, and attention in people who do not have an illness or disorder, a practice known as “cognitive enhancement.” We describe historical experiences with two medicinal drugs for which similar enhancement claims were made, cocaine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and amphetamines in the mid 20th century. These drugs were initially introduced as medicinal agents in Europe and North America before becoming more (...) widely used for a variety of purposes, including what would nowadays be considered cognitive enhancement. Their trajectory of use conformed to the typical use cycle of psychotropic drugs. There was an initial steep rise in prescribing for medical use, followed by expanded nonmedical use that was fueled by enthusiasm for the drugs’ effects. As the number of regular users increased, problems related to use (such as addiction) became apparent, societal concern increased, and laws were passed banning nonmedical use and eventually, medical use. This historical experience draws attention to the adverse side effects of enhancement use that only become apparent with regular, wide-scale use of a drug. We highlight the similarities between the enthusiasms for cocaine and amphetamines and the current enthusiasms for using prescription stimulants for cognitive enhancement. We argue bioethicists should not encourage the cognitive enhancement use of drugs such as methylphenidate in the absence of evidence on the efficacy and safety of their use for cognitive enhancement purposes. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays exploring adaptive systems from many perspectives, ranging from computational applications to models of adaptation in living and social systems. The essays on computation discuss history, theory, applications, and possible threats of adaptive and evolving computations systems. The modeling chapters cover topics such as evolution in microbial populations, the evolution of cooperation, and how ideas about evolution relate to economics. The title Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems honors John Holland, whose 1975 (...) Book, Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems has become a classic text for many disciplines in which adaptation play a central role. The essays brought together here were originally written to honor John Holland, and span most of the different areas touched by his wide-ranging and influential research career. The authors include some of the most prominent scientists in the fields of artificial intelligence evolutionary computation, and complex adaptive systems. Taken together, these essays present a broad modern picture of current research on adaptation as it relates to computers, living systems, society, and their complex interactions. (shrink)

David Lewis famously argued that the time traveller ‘can’ murder her grandfather, even though she never will: it is compossible with a particular set of facts including her motive, opportunity and skill . I argue that while ordinary agents ‘can’ under Lewis’s conception, philosophers cannot – the latter will not only fail to fulfill their homicidal intentions but also fail to form them in the first place.

The rationality of means-end reasoning is the bedrock of the Humean account of practical reasons. But the normativity of such reasoning can not be taken for granted. I consider and reject the idea that the normativity of instrumental reasoning can be explained – either in terms of its being constitutive of the very notion of having an end, or solely in terms of instrumental considerations. I argue that the instrumental principle is itself a brute norm, and that this is consistent (...) with a Humean account of practical reasons. (shrink)

Trust is a critical component of research: trust in the work of co-workers and colleagues within the scientific community; trust in the work of research scientists by the non-research community. A wide range of factors, including internally and externally generated pressures and practical and personal limitations, affect the research process. The extent to which these factors are understood and appreciated influence the development of trust in scientific research findings.

“Antibiotic resistance is usually associated with a fitness cost” is frequently accepted as common knowledge in the field of infectious diseases. However, with the advances in high‐throughput DNA sequencing that allows for a comprehensive analysis of bacterial pathogenesis at the genome scale, including antibiotic resistance genes, it appears that this paradigm might not be as solid as previously thought. Recent studies indicate that antibiotic resistance is able to enhance bacterial fitness in vivo with a concomitant increase in virulence during infections. (...) As a consequence, strategies to minimize antibiotic resistance turn out to be not as simple as initially believed. Indeed, decreased antibiotic use may not be sufficient to let susceptible strains outcompete the resistant ones. Here, we put in perspective these findings and review alternative approaches, such as preventive and therapeutic anti‐bacterial immunotherapies that have the potential to by‐pass the classic antibiotics. (shrink)

Open Humanities Press, Living Books About Life Series.

Trust is a critical component of research: trust in the work of co-workers and colleagues within the scientific community; trust in the work of research scientists by the non-research community. A wide range of factors, including internally and externally generated pressures and practical and personal limitations, affect the research process. The extent to which these factors are understood and appreciated influence the development of trust in scientific research findings.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) reportedly struggle with the comprehension of aspect. However, since aspect and tense are closely entangled in the languages spoken by the children with DLD in previous studies, it is unclear whether the difficulty stems from aspect, tense, or both. Mandarin Chinese, a language without morphological manifestations of tense, is ideal to investigate whether the comprehension of aspect is specifically affected in children with DLD, yet to date work on this is scarce and presents methodological (...) limitations. In this study, we examined whether preschool Mandarin-speaking children with DLD have difficulty in comprehending perfective aspect (represented with the aspect marker -le) compared to imperfective aspect (represented with the aspect markerszai-and -zhe), whether performance can be explained in terms of the pre- vs. post-verbal realization of the aspect markers, and the potential role played by lexical aspect in the comprehension of grammatical aspect. Fourteen preschool children with DLD (mean age: 61.11 months old) and 14 TD children (mean age: 63.4 months old) matched for age and nonverbal intelligence participated in a sentence-picture matching task. Global results showed that, similar to their TD peers, children with DLD performed better on imperfective aspect than perfective aspect. Concerning specific aspect markers, while children with DLD indeed performed similarly to TD children on imperfective-zhe, they obtained significantly lower accuracy than TD children on perfective-leand imperfectivezai-. However, considering verb types combined with these aspect markers, results revealed that children with DLD scored significantly higher on the prototypical combination(s) (e.g.,zai- + Activity verbs) than on the non-prototypical combination(s) (e.g.,zai- + Accomplishment verbs). The performance pattern suggests that the comprehension of aspect markers by children with DLD is particularly affected by lexical aspect. As this also affects younger TD children, children with DLD are arguably at an earlier stage of aspectual development than their age and nonverbal intelligence matched TD peers. Therefore, the aspectual development of children with DLD appears to be delayed rather than deviant. Given this, language programs addressing difficulties in DLD may need to incorporate training on the use of aspect markers, especially targeting their combination with non-prototypical verbs. (shrink)

Grandparental altruism may be partially understood in the same way as other instances of altruism. Acts of altruism often occur in a context in which the actor has a broader sense of cause and effect than is evident in more typical behavioral interactions where cause and effect appear relatively transparent. Many believe that good deeds will ultimately produce good results.

"Why is it that so many Catholics continue to find Continental Philosophy attractive? This volume by leading philosophers and theologians explores the reception of continental philosophy, and its history within Catholic Institutions in the twentieth century. From its earliest days in North America, Catholic philosophers and theologians have been the strongest supporters of continental philosophy; in turn, this has contributed to the intellectual enrichment of Catholic universities, making an important mark on Catholic thought. By taking a stance towards the evolving (...) relationship between Catholics and Continental Philosophy, many of the contributors to this volume serve as living demonstrations that this engagement is far from over. Exploring the mutual interests that made this alliance possible as well as their underlying tensions, contributors provide, for the first time, a sustained account of the historical, institutional, and intellectual relationship between Catholicism and Continental Philosophy."--. (shrink)

It is remarkable how many journalists embrace the principles of public journalism but fail to recognize the importance of applying those principles to journalism itself. While the press stands ready to expand the opportunities for public debate by inviting everyone to participate, journalists typically exempt themselves by declining invitations others are expected to accept. I f indeed the press plays a vitally important role in creating and maintaining the conditions for selfgovernance, as journalists claim whenever they raise the banner of (...) public journalism, the press needs to assume responsibility for-and invite commenta y on-the quality of its performance and the integrity of its practices. In short, the press needs to recognize itself as a distinctively public institution bound by the same standards of accountability expected of other public institutions. (shrink)

This study explored the challenges of informed consent and understanding of the research process among Black and Latino men under community supervision. Between February and October 2012, we conducted cognitive face-to-face interviews using open-ended questions on the significant areas of research participation among 259 men aged 35 to 67 under community supervision in Bronx, New York. Content analysis of the open-ended questions revealed limited knowledge concerning the understanding of research participation. The study participants appeared to generally understand concepts such as (...) compensation after research participation and confidentiality. Participants demonstrated a lack of understanding of certain aspects of the research process—informed consent, human subject, Institutional Review Board, and clinical trials. These findings are informative to researchers conducting studies with criminal justice populations and Institutional Review Boards reviewing research studies. (shrink)

Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have made an interesting discovery about people's preferences. In several experiments, subjects underwent two separate ordeals of pain, identical except that one ended with an added amount of diminishing pain. When asked to evaluate these episodes after experiencing both, subjects generally preferred the longer episode--even though it had a greater objective quantity of pain. These data raise an ethical question about whether to respect such preferences when acting on another's behalf. John Broome thinks that it (...) is wrong to add extra pain in order to satisfy a person's preference for a better ending. His explanation for this intuition is that pain is intrinsically bad. I argue against this explanation, and raise several doubts about the moral intuition Broome endorses. In doing so, I offer alternate interpretations of Kahneman's data, and show that these each yield different values which are relevant to the ethical question. (shrink)

This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency (...) while downplaying European historical trajectories, and therefore they provide historians of science with materials and methodologies that promise nuanced portrayals of knowledge production in cross-cultural settings. Rather than unifying the oceans into a cohesive narrative, we seek to uncover the many horizons of Indo-Pacific worlds and pluralize the spaces within which knowledge travelled at specific times, but not at others. Offering a middle plane between the globe and the region, islands are particularly productive sites for such analyses, as they bring to attention both localized kinds of agency and the impacts of colonialism and globalization. This special issue investigates what happens to knowledge within island spaces and demonstrates that even as small strips of land, islands can significantly enhance our understanding of the practices of knowledge making within the broader contours of world history. In bringing to the fore the contributions of actors from across the wider social spectrum and, especially, the interacting roles of indigenous agents and their traditions, Indo-Pacific worlds thus offer exciting new directions for a field which has often been dominated by a focus on European institutions. (shrink)

This book tackles the concerns of stressed teachers. Whether from nurturance suffering or from the piles of paperwork yet to be tackled, the author helps the reader sort through the causes of stress, the emotional, physical and social reactions to stress and how one can begin to plan a stress management plan.

Neuroscience research, like all science, is vulnerable to the influence of extraneous values in the practice of research, whether in research design or the selection, analysis and interpretation of data. This is particularly problematic for research into the biological mechanisms that underlie behavior, and especially the neurobiological underpinnings of moral development and ethical reasoning, decision-making and behavior, and the other elements of what is often called the neuroscience of ethics. The problem arises because neuroscientists, like most everyone, bring to their (...) work assumptions, preconceptions and values and other sources of potentially inappropriate bias of which they may be unaware. It is important that the training of neuroscientists, and research practice itself, include open and in-depth discussion and examination of the assumptions that underlie research. Further, policy makers, journalists, and the general public, that is, the consumers of neuroscience research findings (and by extension, neurotechnologies) should be made aware of the limitations as well as the strengths of the science, the evolving nature of scientific understanding, and the often invisible values inherent in science. (shrink)

When making decisions on behalf of someone, is asking what they would have wanted a good way to respect their autonomy? Against prevalent assumptions, I argue that in decisions about the care and treatment of those with advanced dementia, the notion of ‘what one would have wanted’ is conceptually, epistemically, and practically problematic. The problem stems from the disparity between the first-person subjectivity of the past person and that of the present person. The transformative nature of dementia renders the very (...) meaning of ‘what the patient would have wanted’ problematic. When applied to those with advanced dementia, the subjunctive notion is either (i) incoherent, (ii) fundamentally indeterminate, or (iii) normatively irrelevant. (shrink)

The article elaborates on the emergence of a new social category: the “worker incapable of working,” which has not yet been recognized in the scientific literature. In Germany, people excluded from the labour market are increasingly employed in workshops for people with disabilities due to what is defined as a total incapacity to work. In addition to the objective of labour market participation of people with disabilities, these workshops assume the aim of (re)establishing their performance and monitoring their reintegration into (...) the general labour market. Changes in the profiles of people working in the workshops and their recent expansion are described, as well as the transformation of working processes and conditions, especially through digitalisation. The consequences of these transformations are studied within the framework of “activating” policies. (shrink)