Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) texts should be interpreted against the background of the magico-mythical cosmology of their time, and the Bible is no exception. Earlier scholars were, however, hesitant to recognise this reality as a result of disagreement over how to define myths and because of the problematic idealistic framework that they followed. This framework viewed biblical religion as superior to other ANE religions and thus devoid of myths and the belief in magic. It is, however, argued that the Bible (...) contains both myths and a belief in magic and shares the overarching ANE cosmology. The incompatibility of the scientific cosmology and the magico-mythical cosmology of the ANE causes special problems for modern readers. To prevent modern readers from habitually falling back on their scientific cosmology, and thereby misinterpreting the Bible, it is suggested that a cosmological approach should form the basic framework for all biblical hermeneutics. (shrink)

There was a time in the history of philosophy that the phrase “public philosophy” would have been redundant. In this chapter, the authors survey the debate about the professionalization and institutionalization of philosophy between Scott Soames and Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle. They present an exploration of an example of how professional and non‐professional philosophers may benefit each other. The authors argue that nonprofessional philosophers (whom we might also call “outsider philosophers”) can offer new ways of looking at the canon (...) and broaden the subject matter of philosophy. They present a look forward to the future of interactions between professionalized and outsider philosophers. In an effort to make possible a future where such collaboration is normalized within the broader activity of philosophizing, the authors elucidate both the opportunities and challenges for collaboration. (shrink)

The rise of authoritarian and nationalist forces is currently accompanied by a change in the way public opinion is formed and in the culture of debate, a phenomenon that has been described as a crisis of facticity. There is an urgent need to clarify the (factual) foundations and benchmarks for democratic negotiation, even if lies are nothing new in politics. The article analyses this shift and discusses to what extent the liberal problematization of post-factual politics is becoming a way of (...) coping with the neoliberal crisis of hegemony. Finally, it seeks to illuminate what these developments mean for those strands of critical social science dedicated to exploring the connection between truth and power and deconstructing truth claims. (shrink)

A variety of herbicides act by inhibiting the branched chain amino‐acid biosynthetic enzyme, acetolactate synthase (EC 4.1.3.18). The initial consequences of this event are 2‐ketoacid accumulation and amino‐acid starvation. Recent studies demonstrate that 2‐ketoacid imbalances play a significant role in the action of these herbicides; such imbalances may also be important in certain inborn errors of human metabolism.

This article was derived from my doctoral thesis, ‘Post-apartheid racism among Afrikaans speaking urban adolescents: A narrative-pastoral reflection’. The impetus for this study was the seemingly increasing occurrences of racism amongst post-apartheid Afrikaans-speaking urban adolescents in South Africa by taking a narrative practical theological perspective on the matter to help build meaningful cross-cultural dialogue. This study explored the level of dialogue of the participants using a postfoundational paradigm. Two questions guided the investigation: How deeply embedded are objectifying of cross-cultural relationships? (...) How can we instigate honest dialogue aiding us in being more aware of our biases to embrace diversity and going forward as a unity in diversity? This study was conducted in 2016 amongst white Afrikaans-speaking urban adolescents living in Pretoria-East, South Africa. I had four group conversations with my co-researchers, with six to eight adolescents per group. I made use of certain empirical research methods, such as narrative interviewing and group discussions. From an epistemological perspective, a postfoundational, social constructionist perspective, including an auto-ethnographical approach, was followed. The research indicated that Afrikaner adolescents could live life unquestioned from a position of power and objectivity that was culturally inherited. It was found that by objectifying relationships, diverse engagement becomes almost impossible. Consequently, this article advocates for a dialogical approach towards building relationships in a context where people feel vulnerable and shameful, have fears, but also gain trust to contribute to meaningful dialogue with ‘others’. (shrink)

How do you effectively teach moral philosophy to classes of twenty to thirty-five students who come from diverse national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and educational backgrounds, and most of whom have little or no interest in philosophy? In seeking ways to create a course that is relevant, practical, and engaging, I hit upon the idea of adapting literature circles to the study of moral philosophies. In this paper, I contextualize the need for an approach that promotes individual student responsibility within a (...) teamwork context, introduce the appropriateness and adaptability of the literature circles concept in a philosophy classroom, and uncover the theoretical structure underneath the strategy in order to make it more adaptable to other classrooms and courses. (shrink)

How do you effectively teach moral philosophy to classes of twenty to thirty-five students who come from diverse national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and educational backgrounds, and most of whom have little or no interest in philosophy? In seeking ways to create a course that is relevant, practical, and engaging, I hit upon the idea of adapting literature circles to the study of moral philosophies. In this paper, I contextualize the need for an approach that promotes individual student responsibility within a (...) teamwork context, introduce the appropriateness and adaptability of the literature circles concept in a philosophy classroom, and uncover the theoretical structure underneath the strategy in order to make it more adaptable to other classrooms and courses. (shrink)

In mainstream or strong university education, the teacher selects and transmits knowledge and skills that students are to acquire and reproduce. Many researchers of radical embodied cognitive science still adhere to this way of teaching, even though this prescriptive pedagogy deeply contrasts with the theoretical underpinnings of their science. In this paper, we search for alternative ways of teaching that are more aligned with the central non-prescriptive and non-representational tenets of radical embodied cognitive science. To this end, we discuss recent (...) views on education by Tim Ingold and Gert Biesta, which are based upon Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism and Gibsons’ ecological approach. The paper starts by introducing radical embodied cognitive science, particularly as it relates to motor skill learning, one of our prime interests in research and teaching. Next, we provide a synopsis and critique of the still dominant prescriptive and explicating pedagogy of strong education. Following Ingold and Biesta, we search for a weak alternative through a careful consideration of the education of attention and the participating teacher. To illustrate our arguments, we use examples of the first author’s teaching about/of motor skill learning. The paper is concluded by briefly considering the implications of weak education for a radical embodied science of motor skill learning. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: To determine the relationship between ethical reasoning and gender and occupation among a group of male and female nurses and doctors. DESIGN: Partialist and impartialist forms of ethical reasoning were defined and singled out as being central to the difference between what is known as the "care" moral orientation (Gilligan) and the "justice" orientation (Kohlberg). A structured questionnaire based on four hypothetical moral dilemmas involving combinations of (health care) professional, non-professional, life-threatening and non-life-threatening situations, was piloted and then mailed (...) to a randomly selected sample of doctors and nurses. SETTING: 400 doctors from Victoria, and 200 doctors and 400 nurses from New South Wales. RESULTS: 178 doctors and 122 nurses returned completed questionnaires. 115 doctors were male, 61 female; 50 nurses were male and 72 were female. It was hypothesised that there would be an association between feminine subjects and partialist reasoning and masculine subjects and impartialist reasoning. It was also hypothesised that nurses would adopt a partialist approach to reasoning and doctors an impartialist approach. No relationship between any of these variables was observed. (shrink)

As conventionally understood, corruption relies on a set of universally agreed rules that determine what constitutes the appropriate allocation of organizational resources. This article explores whether rule-based approaches to corruption are applicable where business organizations, such as public private partnerships, and the public fundamentally disagree about what constitutes an appropriate allocation of resources. Drawing on empirical research about PPPs in Vietnam, this article compares how government, business organizations, and the public conceptualize the transfer of public assets into private ownership. It (...) argues that a public interest approach to corruption is needed where PPPs privatize public assets within the law, but against the express wishes of the public. (shrink)

This article argues that Rousseau's endorsement of male domination and his illiberal views of rape, punishment and the education of women have been seriously underestimated by twentieth century commentators who tend to produce expoisitions of his work that evade, ignore or marginalise this 'darker side' of his educational philosophy.

While there is an increasing focus on the use of online networks among autistic users, how autistic adults communicate in social networking sites remains underexplored. The article puts forward an argument for combining systematic observation of digital practices with analysis of evaluative language in order to provide a situated account of ‘autistic sociality’ in social media. Drawing on practice-based theories of social media affordances and discourse analysis research on online self-presentation and affiliation we show how autistic Twitter users rely on (...) association, content persistence and editability in order to signal social engagement through different forms of interaction and alignment. We discuss how the proposed framework can provide a new perspective on communicative practices of autistic social media users and advance development of inclusive digital networking platforms. (shrink)

Bundel bijdragen over wijsgerige ontwikkelingen in Nederland in de twintigste eeuw.

This book originates from an international research program that is reassessing when and why modern careers emerged. With fifteen essays this volume brings together some of the most important results of this new field of research. Based upon the innovative use of micro-level historical sources, the contributions by economic and social historians reveal the emergence of identifiable career paths in a wide range of occupational settings in Europe and the Americas over the period 1800 to the end of World War (...) II. They highlight the economic and social forces that shaped the creation of both formal and informal career paths and led to their diffusion throughout the workforces of most developed economies by the early 1950s. (shrink)

Dissociative identity disorder (DID; called multiple personality disorder in DSMIII-R) is a psychiatric condition in which two or more identity states recurrently take control of the person's behavior. A characteristic feature of DID is the occurrence of apparently severe amnestic symptoms. This paper is concerned with experimental research of memory function in DID and focuses on between-identity transfer of newly learned neutral material. Previous studies on this subject are reviewed and a pilot study with four subjects is described. This study (...) is specifically concerned with the question whether self-reported asymmetries in between-identity transfer can be replicated on experimental memory tests. A secondary aim was to examine whether, in the absence of explicit transfer, implicit transfer of information would occur. The results showed that the apparent amnestic asymmetry for explicit information was substantiated in the laboratory, although at least some leakage was present between the apparently amnestic identities. No evidence was found for better performance on implicit than on explicit memory tests in the apparently amnestic identities. In the discussion, parallels between apparent amnesia in DID and state-dependent memory are drawn, and the question of simulated amnesia is addressed. (shrink)

Weiss, Propen, and Reid gather a diverse group of scholars to analyze the growing obsolescence of the human-object dichotomy in today's world. In doing so, Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman brings together diverse disciplines to foster a dialog on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

The behavior of people in the presence of scarce resources has long been a source of ethical concern and debate. Many of the responses, ranging from outright brutality and cheating on the one hand to altruism, nobility, and sacrifice on the other, were most recently demonstrated in the movie Titanic. It should come as no surprise, then, that rational efforts to allocate the very scarce life-saving resource of organs are sometimes circumvented by these natural human impulses and sheer human creativity. (...) This is especially true when the organs in question are required for continued life and cannot be temporarily or permanently replaced by technology. Thus the focus of this paper will be on the competition for livers. (shrink)

_A comprehensive anthology of Heidegger's early essays._.

This book examines the intricate web linking water science and society using diverse philosophical lenses. Highlighting the tensions within the threads of this web, we spotlight major conceptual tightropes that water researchers tread daily. To effectively navigate these delicate threads, a 'healthy' tension in the encompassing web is necessary. Drawing inspiration from Freud's examination of tensions in "Society and Its Discontents," we illuminate the tension-filled paradoxes inherent to water science, emphasizing the challenges in keeping these paradoxical threads taut enough to (...) ensure a navigable and sustainable bond with society. Central to our narrative is the escalating societal urge to quantify and 'manage' water—something interwoven throughout every environmental layer, including the fabric of our being. An excessive focus on management may alienate users from their water realities, jeopardizing the vital threads that sustainability tether water science and society. Consequently, this book explores compelling and inescapable tensions that resist tidy universal resolution, such as: the language of water science, including its mathematical reductions (i.e., models); the effect of water's commodification on its science; hydrology’s intersection with colonialism; and other concerns that reveal distortions in our hydrology. We aim to aid water professionals in recognizing and fine-tuning the paradoxes intrinsic to their work. To underscore the interwoven complexity of contemporary hydrology, "Hydrology and Its Discontents" guides readers into the tempestuous depths of water research, all the while urging a recalibration of perspectives and motivations. (shrink)

Epistemic logic has grown from its philosophical beginnings to find diverse applications in computer science, and as a means of reasoning about the knowledge and belief of agents. This book provides a broad introduction to the subject, along with many exercises and their solutions. The authors begin by presenting the necessary apparatus from mathematics and logic, including Kripke semantics and the well-known modal logics K, T, S4 and S5. Then they turn to applications in the context of distributed systems and (...) artificial intelligence. These include the notions of common knowledge, distributed knowledge, explicit and implicit belief, the interplays between knowledge and time, and knowledge and action, as well as a graded (or numerical) variant of the epistemic operators. The authors also discuss extensively the problem of logical omniscience. They cover Halpern & Moses' theory of honest formulas, and they make a digression into the realm of nonmonotonic reasoning and preferential entailment. They discuss Moore's autoepistemic logic, together with Levesque's related logic of "all I know". Furthermore, they show how one can base default and counterfactual reasoning on epistemic logic. Graduate students in philosophy or in computer science, especially those with an interest in AI, will find this book useful. (shrink)

We assessed how synchronous speech listening and lipreading affects speech recognition in acoustic noise. In simple audiovisual perceptual tasks, inverse effectiveness is often observed, which holds that the weaker the unimodal stimuli, or the poorer their signal-to-noise ratio, the stronger the audiovisual benefit. So far, however, inverse effectiveness has not been demonstrated for complex audiovisual speech stimuli. Here we assess whether this multisensory integration effect can also be observed for the recognizability of spoken words. To that end, we presented audiovisual (...) sentences to 18 native-Dutch normal-hearing participants, who had to identify the spoken words from a finite list. Speech-recognition performance was determined for auditory-only, visual-only (lipreading) and auditory-visual conditions. To modulate acoustic task difficulty, we systematically varied the auditory signal-to-noise ratio. In line with a commonly-observed multisensory enhancement on speech recognition, audiovisual words were more easily recognized than auditory-only words (recognition thresholds of -15 dB and -12 dB, respectively). We here show that the difficulty of recognizing a particular word, either acoustically or visually, determines the occurrence of inverse effectiveness in audiovisual word integration. Thus, words that are better heard or recognized through lipreading, benefit less from bimodal presentation. Audiovisual performance at the lowest acoustic signal-to-noise ratios (45%) fell below the visual recognition rates (60%), reflecting an actual deterioration of lipreading in the presence of excessive acoustic noise. This suggests that the brain may adopt a strategy in which attention has to be divided between listening and lipreading. (shrink)