In this journal, Vishnu Sridharan presents a novel objection to attributionism, the view according to which agents are responsible for their conduct when it reflects who they are or what they value. The key to Sridharan's objection is that agents can fulfil all attributionist conditions for responsibility while being under the control of a manipulator. In this paper, we show that Sridharan's objection falls prey to a dilemma—either his manipulator is counterfactually robust, or she is not—and that neither of its (...) horns undermines attributionism. (shrink)

Gutes und Guter, Leben, Leib, Tugend - in diesem Band werden die Vortrage der ersten vier Symposien der Mainz Moral Meetings aus den Jahren 2009-2011 zu diesen Themen zusammengefasst. Ein interdisziplinarer Zugang durch Bibelwissenschaft, Judaistik, Altphilologie, Philosophie, Patristik, Systematische Theologie und weiteren Disziplinen eroffnet einen Blick auf die ethischen Normen des fruhen Christentums. Die Autoren der Beitrage fragen nach den Moglichkeiten von Norm und Normbegrundung einer fruhchristlichen Ethik in ausgewahlten Bereichen sowohl im Kontext antiker Philosophie als auch in gegenwartiger Verantwortung. (...) Mit Beitragen von: Jochen Althoff, Frederick D. Aquino, Wilhelm Blumer, Maximilian Forschner, Christian Hengstermann, Christoph Horn, Friedrich W. Horn, David Horrell, Manfred Lang, Sebastian Moll, Maren Niehoff, Jorg Roder, Eckart David Schmidt, Nikolaus Schneider, Lorenzo Scornaienchi, Notger Slenczka, Mira Stare, Gerd Theissen, Ulrich Volp, Jan G. van der Watt, Werner Zager, Ruben Zimmermann. (shrink)

This provocative study forges new and creative connections between Deleuzian philosophy and contemporary film studies.

This contribution aims at deconstructing a Christian master narrative that interprets Josephus as crucial support for the New Testament message that the Temple had to become a ruin, in line with the will of God. It argues for an alternative interpretation, namely that both Jesus of Nazareth and Josephus considered the Temple to be still relevant, albeit in different ways. For Jesus the Temple was the self-evident cultic centre of Judaism and a special place to experience his relationship with God. (...) None of Jesus’ statements about the Temple in their original context necessarily implies that Jesus assumed that the institution of the Temple would stop functioning in the near future or at the end of time. Josephus’s perspective on the Temple changes in his works. The elaborate description of Jerusalem and the Temple in War 5 reads as a written monument of the past, but several passages in Josephus’s Antiquities and Against Apion imply that the Temple was still important after 70 CE. Josephus may have reckoned with the possibility that the Temple was going to be rebuilt if the Romans allowed for it.This contribution is dedicated to Pieter G.R. de Villiers, a modest but sophisticated scholar and a good friend. (shrink)

In this analysis we discuss the change in criteria for triage of patients during three different phases of a pandemic like COVID-19, seen from the critical care point of view. Availability of critical care beds has become a hot topic, and in many countries, we have seen a huge increase in the provision of temporary intensive care bed capacity. However, there is a limit where the hospitals may run out of resources to provide critical care, which is heavily dependent on (...) trained staff, just-in-time supply chains for clinical consumables and drugs and advanced equipment. In the first phase, we can still do clinical prioritisation and decision-making as usual, based on the need for intensive care and prognostication: what are the odds for a good result with regard to survival and quality of life. In the next, the resources are mostly available, but the system is stressed by many patients arriving over a short time period and auxiliary beds in different places in the hospital being used. We may have to abandon admittance of patients with doubtful prognosis. In the last phase, usual medical triage and priority setting may not be sufficient to decrease inflow and there may not be enough intensive care unit beds available. In this phase different criteria must be applied using a utilitarian approach for triage. We argue that this is an important transition where society, and not physicians, must provide guidance to support triage that is no longer based on medical priorities alone. (shrink)

The effects of public announcements, private communications, deceptive messages to groups, and so on, can all be captured by a general mechanism of updating multi-agent models with update action models, now in widespread use. There is a natural extension of the definition of a bisimulation to action models. Surely enough, updating with bisimilar action models gives the same result. But the converse turns out to be false: update models may have the same update effects without being bisimilar. We propose action (...) emulation as a notion of equivalence more appropriate for action models, and generalizing standard bisimulation. It is proved that action emulation provides a full characterization of update effect. We first concentrate on the general case, and next focus on the important case of action models with propositional preconditions. Our notion of action emulation yields a simplification procedure for action models, and it gives designers of multi-agent systems a useful tool for comparing different ways of representing a particular communicative action. (shrink)

Today’s students are accustomed to a world where information is available on-demand, anywhere and anytime. They bring this expectation to their academic world where they want to work cooperatively and flexibly, using the modern information processing tools and access with which they are familiar. New hardware platforms such as e-Readers and tablet computers have made substantial inroads in the consumer market. E-Readers are becoming more prevalent in universities – replacing the need for physical textbooks, lecturing notes and other academic documents. (...) Many universities are now running pilot programs, while some are already using e-Readers. Tablet computers, apart from their ability to read, edit or create various types of information documents, also offer additional features such as collaborative and social networking services. This empirical research project investigated student perspectives on the educational use of e-Readers and tablets within the University of Cape Town. A questionnaire was distributed to a significant portion of the student population and stratified according to seniority and faculty. Quantitative data was gathered and analysed on themes ranging from awareness to preferences to facilitating conditions around e-Readers within the academic environment. The students sent a clear signal: that they are keen to embrace these new technologies and the advantages they offer. E-Books can be updated automatically and downloaded to e-Readers instantly from almost anywhere in the world. Students feel they would benefit greatly through the use of e-Readers and many believe they are set to replace books completely. Having access to a portable library of information in their backpacks would benefit both students and the environment. However, there are a number of barriers to the comprehensive introduction of these technologies, including the cost of the devices; cost, rights and file format of e-books; the need for a critical mass of textbooks available in digital format and device characteristics such as battery life, and ubiquitous Wi-Fi access. (shrink)

After more than a century of research on glycolysis, we have detailed descriptions of its molecular organization, but despite this wealth of knowledge, linking the enzyme properties to metabolic pathway behavior remains challenging. These challenges arise from multi‐layered regulation and the context and time dependence of component functions. However, when viewed as a system that functions according to the principles of supply and demand, a simplifying theoretical framework can be applied to study its regulation logic and to assess the coherence (...) of experimental interpretations. These principles are universally applicable, as they emphasize the common metabolic tasks of glycolysis: the provision of free‐energy carriers, and precursors for biosynthesis and stress‐related compounds. Here we will review the regulation of multi‐tasking by glycolysis and consider how an understanding of this central metabolic pathway can be pursued using general principles, rather than focusing on the biochemical details of constituent components. (shrink)

Analysis of the Freudian interpretation of the Oedipus myth which functions as a paradigm case for the Oedipus complex reveals the neglect of certain essential details. Moreover, it appears that clinical material as presented by psychoanalysts in support of the Oedipus complex is strongly biased towards the acceptance of the hypothesis that the Oedipus complex is a universal phenomenon. In this article arguments are given that cast serious doubt on the validity of psychoanalytic theory. The author proposes a new interpretation (...) which explains the putative Oedipal conflict in the child as the projection of parental aggression on the child. (shrink)

This article chronicles the process used to transform a content-driven chemistry lab course into a course focused on developing critical-thinking skills. In general, the process described includes the following: 1) determining the needs of the students, 2) understanding the history of the course, 3) identifying some specific critical thinking skills that could be developed in the course, 4) considering how the skills can be taught developmentally, 5) defining criteria for the skills at different levels; 6) revising the lab manual to (...) include explicit critical-thinking definitions, directions and criteria for students, and 7) designing assessments of the students’ critical thinking abilities as defined and practiced in the lab. Six critical thinking skills (testing hypotheses, distinguishing between observationsand inferences, identifying assumptions, drawing conclusions supported by data, evaluating conclusions, and considering alternative explanations of data) were incorporated into the course. The lab manual displaying the results of this transformation is available by request from either the author or the journal editor. (shrink)

In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze remarks that masochism may be reflected on from three perspectives: as a pleasure–pain alliance, as an enactment of humiliation and slavery, and as a consideration of the enslavement of contractual relations. Later Deleuze and Guattari consider masochism in terms of an ontology of desire – in terms of virtuality rather than extensity. I argue that while the actualisation of pain might be considered secondary, and is oftentimes portrayed as incidental in popular depictions, it also constitutes (...) the exhaustive/exhausted and refrain functions of masochism so that the masochist might be thought of as the figure of exhaustion. (shrink)

In this paper1, we develop an epistemic logic to specify and reason about the information flow on the underlying communication channels. By combining ideas from Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) and Interpreted Systems (IS), our semantics offers a natural and neat way of modelling multi-agent communication scenarios with different assumptions about the observational power of agents. We relate our logic to the standard DEL and IS..

Computer software is written in languages like C, Java or Haskell. In many cases social software is expressed in natural language. The paper explores connections between the areas of natural language analysis and analysis of social protocols, and proposes an extended program for natural language semantics, where the goals of natural language communication are derived from the demands of specific social protocols.

1. Introduction. It is an amazing thing that, unlike pebbles, clouds and stars, the smallest building stones of Nature—the electrons, the protons and the neutrons—are all completely uniform. There seems to be a necessity in Nature for systems of a very special form, and one can wonder now what kind of necessity this is. I believe that this can only be a mathematical necessity, that consequently the principle of Nature is a mathematical one. How else could Nature obey the mathematical (...) laws of physics if it were not because of her own principle? It can be argued that these mathematical laws, like Newtonian mechanics, the classical theory of electromagnetism and the quantum theory of the electron are all some form of beginner's luck, and that continued investigation will reveal Nature as more and more mysterious and irrational. If that were true, one might as well give up the pursuit of physics completely! But on one hand modern physics has discovered what we believe to be the elementary particles of the material world, and on the other hand it comes out that at least a part of these elementary forms obey mathematic laws to a very high degree of accuracy. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate Kripke models, used to model knowledge or belief in a static situation, and action models, used to model communicative actions that change this knowledge or belief. The appropriate notion for structural equivalence between modal structures such as Kripke models is bisimulation: Kripke models that are bisimilar are modally equivalent. We would like to find a structural relation that can play the same role for the action models that play a prominent role in information updating. Two (...) action models are equivalent if they yield the same results when updating Kripke models. More precisely, two action models are equivalent if it holds for all Kripke models that the result of updating with one action model is bisimilar to the result of updating with the other action model. We propose a new notion of action emulation that characterizes the structural equivalence of the important class of canonical action models. Since every action model has an equivalent canonical action model, this gives a method to decide the equivalence of any pair of action models. We also give a partial result that holds for the class of all action models. Our results extend the work in van Eijck et al. (Synthese 185(1):131–151, 2012). (shrink)

Ernest Mandel theorised the capitalist world economy as an articulated system of capitalist, semi-capitalist and precapitalist relations of production, linked to each other by capitalist relations of exchange and domination by the capitalist world market. This seems to be an interesting starting point for an historically well-founded theory, building on and going beyond Marx's work, of the worldwide expansion of the capitalist mode of production from its origins to the present. In his attempt to formulate his theory, Mandel did not (...) succeed in resolving all difficulties, however. His main works – Marxist Economic Theory and Late Capitalism – show a number of dangling loose ends. The central question is whether these loose ends are merely technical difficulties or whether they reveal fatal flaws in the theory as a whole. In order to come a step closer to answering this question, a conference was organised in Amsterdam, November 2003. This introduction formulates the five, closely interrelated issues that were highlighted at this conference. (shrink)

Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative (...) outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme. (shrink)

Kripke has argued that definitions of units of measurements provide examples of statements that are both contingent and a priori. In this paper I argue that definitions of units of measurement are intended to be stipulations of what Kripke calls "theoretical identities": a stipulation that two terms will have the same rigid designation. Hence such a definition is both a priori and necessary. The necessity arises because such definitions appeal to natural kind properties only, which on Kripke's account are necessary.

The purpose of this paper is to show the pervasive, though often implicit, role of arguments in negotiation dialogue. This holds even for negotiations that start from a difference of interest such as mere bargaining through offers and counteroffers. But it certainly holds for negotiations that try to settle a difference of opinion on policy issues. It will be demonstrated how a series of offers and counteroffers in a negotiation dialogue contains a reconstructible series of implicit persuasion dialogues. The paper (...) is a sequel to van Laar and Krabbe, in which we showed that for some differences of opinion it may be reasonable to shift from persuasion dialogue, aimed at a resolution of the difference on the merits, to negotiation dialogue, aimed at compromise, whereas in the present paper we show that such a shift need not amount to the abandonment of argumentation. Our main aim in this paper as well as in the previous one is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation. (shrink)

Some critical reactions hardly give clues to the arguer as to how to respond to them convincingly. Other critical reactions convey some or even all of the considerations that make the critic critical of the arguer’s position and direct the arguer to defuse or to at least contend with them. First, an explication of the notion of a critical reaction will be provided, zooming in on the degree of “directiveness” that a critical reaction displays. Second, it will be examined whether (...) there are normative requirements that enhance the directiveness of criticism. Does the opponent have in circumstances a dialectical obligation to provide clarifications, explanations, or even arguments? In this paper, it is hypothesized that the competitiveness inherent in critical discussion must be mitigated by making the opponent responsible for providing her counterconsiderations, if available, thus assisting the proponent in developing an argumentative strategy that defuses them. (shrink)

Extending a strategy previously used by Clancy, Schacter, McNally, and Pitman , we administered a neutral and a trauma-related version of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm to a sample of women reporting recovered or repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse , women reporting having always remembered their abuse , and women reporting no history of abuse . We found that individuals reporting recovered memories of CSA are more prone than other participants to falsely recalling and recognizing neutral words that were never presented. (...) Moreover, our study is the first to show that this finding even held when trauma-related material was involved. Correlational analyses revealed that fantasy proneness, but not self-reported traumatic experiences and dissociative symptoms were related to false recall and false recognition. (shrink)

Some critical reactions hardly give clues to the arguer as to how to respond to them convinc-ingly. Other critical reactions convey some or even all of the considerations that make the critic critical of the arguer’s position and direct the arguer to defuse or to at least contend with them. First, an explication of the notion of a critical reaction will be provided, zooming in on the degree of ‘directiveness’ that a critical reaction displays. Second, it will be examined whether (...) and to what extent there is a normative requirement to strive after criticism that is more than minimally directive. In this paper, it is hypothesized that the com-petitiveness inherent in critical discussion must be mitigated by making the opponent responsible for providing her counterconsiderations, if available, thus assisting the proponent in developing an argumenta-tive strategy that defuses them. (shrink)