The dramatic events of the crisis have reignited debates on the independence of central banks and the scope of their mandates. In this article, I contribute to the normative understanding of these developments by discussing John Rawls’s position in debates of the 1950s and 1960s on the independence of the US Federal Reserve. Rawls’s account of the central bank in his property-owning democracy, Democratic Central Banking, assigns authority over monetary policy directly to the government and prioritizes low unemployment over price (...) stability. I contrast DCB with Central Bank Independence, which requires that the central bank is independent of the government and pursues low inflation. I evaluate DCB by asking whether justice as fairness requires democratic control of the central bank and argue that it does not. Instead, so I argue, the choice between DCB and CBI should be justified in terms of the difference principle. By reflecting on central banking in a property-owning democracy, I cast new light on the Rawlsian realistic utopia of a just capitalist society, while also investigating democratic objections to today’s independent central banks. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to shed light on the dynamics of regional identity construction and deconstruction. We will argue that four forms of identity can be identified that are linked through various processes of change. To that end, we will theoretically conceptualise 'identity' by discussing historical and current scholarly debates on identity in a variety of scientific disciplines. Then, we will argue that the mutual contradiction of the current theories is a paradox if seen from the angle of regional (...) identity construction and deconstruction. Building upon elements from the various theoretical approaches, we propose a heuristic model describing the dynamics of identity construction and deconstruction, which will be explored by means of the example of the Green Heart region, a spatial planning concept in western Holland. (shrink)

A lot of research has been done on the detection of mental workload using various bio-signals. Recently, deep learning has allowed for novel methods and results. A plethora of measurement modalities have proven to be valuable in this task, yet studies currently often only use a single modality to classify MWL. The goal of this research was to classify perceived mental workload using a deep neural network that flexibly makes use of multiple modalities, in order to allow for feature sharing (...) between modalities. To achieve this goal, an experiment was conducted in which MWL was simulated with the help of verbal logic puzzles. The puzzles came in five levels of difficulty and were presented in a random order. Participants had 1 h to solve as many puzzles as they could. Between puzzles, they gave a difficulty rating between 1 and 7, seven being the highest difficulty. Galvanic skin response, photoplethysmograms, functional near-infrared spectrograms and eye movements were collected simultaneously using LabStreamingLayer. Marker information from the puzzles was also streamed on LSL. We designed and evaluated a novel intermediate fusion multimodal DNN for the classification of PMWL using the aforementioned four modalities. Two main criteria that guided the design and implementation of our DNN are modularity and generalisability. We were able to classify PMWL within-level accurate on a seven-level workload scale using the aforementioned modalities. The model architecture allows for easy addition and removal of modalities without major structural implications because of the modular nature of the design. Furthermore, we showed that our neural network performed better when using multiple modalities, as opposed to a single modality. The dataset and code used in this paper are openly available. (shrink)

The 2022 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond, and Philip Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises”. Jens van 't Klooster reflects on Bernanke, Diamond, and Dybvig's work.

In this paper we aim to shed light on the dynamics of regional identity construction and deconstruction. We will argue that four forms of identity can be identified that are linked through various processes of change. To that end, we will theoretically conceptualise 'identity' by discussing historical and current scholarly debates on identity in a variety of scientific disciplines. Then, we will argue that the mutual contradiction of the current theories is a paradox if seen from the angle of regional (...) identity construction and deconstruction. Building upon elements from the various theoretical approaches, we propose a heuristic model describing the dynamics of identity construction and deconstruction, which will be explored by means of the example of the Green Heart region, a spatial planning concept in western Holland. (shrink)

Democratic societies are rife with talk of trust in institutions such as governments, banks, news agencies, medical practitioners, nuclear power plants, weather forecasters and social network sites. These institutions are anonymous in the sense that citizens tend to know very little about them. Philosophers have argued that trust in the absence of sufficient evidence may fit a child who trusts its parents but is inappropriate for the vigilant citizens of a democratic society. In this article, I defend the appropriateness of (...) trusting anonymous institutions against its critics. To this end, I develop two principles of appropriateness that apply to a wide range of trusting attitudes. First, the principle of epistemic duties according to which the truster should not be culpably ignorant about the trustee, where, what constitutes culpable ignorance will depend on the relationship of trust. Second, the principle of appropriate normative expectations according to which a truster should have normative expectations that fit the relationship with the trustee and the valued outcome at stake in the trust relation. I then show that it is often appropriate to trust anonymous institutions. In fact, the evidential requirements on trust are sometimes so low as to allow citizens to trust institutions which they know literally nothing about. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to shed light on the dynamics of regional identity construction and deconstruction. We will argue that four forms of identity can be identified that are linked through various processes of change. To that end, we will theoretically conceptualise 'identity' by discussing historical and current scholarly debates on identity in a variety of scientific disciplines. Then, we will argue that the mutual contradiction of the current theories is a paradox if seen from the angle of regional (...) identity construction and deconstruction. Building upon elements from the various theoretical approaches, we propose a heuristic model describing the dynamics of identity construction and deconstruction, which will be explored by means of the example of the Green Heart region, a spatial planning concept in western Holland. (shrink)

Moral transformation is the process by which a person grows in holiness. The grace of the Holy Spirit enables this growth. This article explores how the notion of ‘prudence of the Spirit’ in Aquinas’s commentary on Romans can help to further elaborate the concept of moral transformation. It does so by first presenting this transformation as a human process. Second, the article presents an in-depth interpretation of Aquinas’s commentary on Romans 8:14: ‘those who are led by the Spirit of God (...) are children of God’. Here, special attention will be given to the proper character of the prudence the Holy Spirit forms in believers. The concluding discussion draws lessons from our reading of the commentary and related texts. This reinforces the conviction that grace enables freedom and will help us to find proper metaphors for speaking of the transformative work of the Holy Spirit. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show a structural relationship in Dutch between sentences with the main verb "duren" (last) and specifying complements such as een week (a week) or "drie kwartier" (three quarters of an hour) on the one hand, and sentences with Duration Measuring Adverbials such as "gedurende een week" (for a week), "gedurende die week" (lit: for that week) on the other.

Carmen4.2 is one of the most commented upon of the odes of Horace. It is indeed a complex poem. To summarize roughly: addressing the young poet Iullus Antonius, Horace presents the dangers of emulating Pindar, offering what seems like a lengthy description as well as an approximation of Pindar's own poetic style. Not as a doomed Icarus imitating the grand Pindaric swan, but in his own preferred mode, like a bee on the banks of Tibur, Horace will continue to produce (...) his own highly refined poems on a small scale. Iullus Antonius, on the other hand, will sing of Augustus’ triumphmaiore plectro. Modestly, Horace himself will be content to join in with the popular chants for Augustus’ triumphal return as one happy civilian among the crowd. Iullus Antonius will moreover offer a grand sacrifice of ten bulls and as many cows on that occasion, whereas Horace promises a single bull-calf that he is saving especially for the purpose. I will try to offer a new interpretation of these last two strophes by pointing out an unnoticed allusion to a Hellenistic subtext. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to a reaction to our joint paper Measuring Duration in Dutch (1971).

Carmen4.2 is one of the most commented upon of the odes of Horace. It is indeed a complex poem. To summarize roughly: addressing the young poet Iullus Antonius, Horace presents the dangers of emulating Pindar, offering what seems like a lengthy description as well as an approximation of Pindar's own poetic style. Not as a doomed Icarus imitating the grand Pindaric swan, but in his own preferred mode, like a bee on the banks of Tibur, Horace will continue to produce (...) his own highly refined poems on a small scale. Iullus Antonius, on the other hand, will sing of Augustus’ triumphmaiore plectro. Modestly, Horace himself will be content to join in with the popular chants for Augustus’ triumphal return as one happy civilian among the crowd. Iullus Antonius will moreover offer a grand sacrifice of ten bulls and as many cows on that occasion, whereas Horace promises a single bull-calf that he is saving especially for the purpose. I will try to offer a new interpretation of these last two strophes by pointing out an unnoticed allusion to a Hellenistic subtext. (shrink)

I should like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor H. Schultink, whose criticisms and careful reading helped me to improve considerably upon the clarity of exposition while I wrote this study, and whose seemingly innocent requests to elaborate confronted me time and again with the need of revising or abandoning ideas I thought stood on firm ground. His support, and Dr. M. C. van den Toom's gratefully acknowl edged willingness to read and evaluate the manuscript enabled me to (...) present this work as a thesis in the University of Utrecht. In more than one way, lowe a debt to Albert Kraak, Professor of Linguistics in the University of Nijmegen. His inspiring enthusiasm awakened my interest in linguistics when I was a student of his. He in troduced me to transformational grammar at a time when it seemed almost improper to talk about it, and the stimulating experience of writing a book on Dutch syntax together with him taught me invaluable lessons. I should also like to thank my friend and colleague Henk Verkuyl, to gether with whom I prepared an article on the subject of measuring duration in Dutch. Without our stimulating discussions on the subject, the fourth chapter of this study could never have been written in the present form. I am also indebted to him for criticisms and helpful suggestions. At an early stage I profited greatly from discussions with Pieter A. M. (shrink)

Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested (...) in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper. (shrink)

T. A. Cavanaugh's Hippocrates' Oath and Asclepius' Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession articulates the Oath as establishing the medical profession's unique internal medical ethic - in its most basic and least controvertible form, this ethic mandates that physicians help and not harm the sick. Relying on Greek myth, drama, and medical experience (e.g., homeopathy), the book shows how this medical ethic arose from reflection on the most vexing medical-ethical problem -- injury caused by a physician -- and argues (...) that deliberate iatrogenic harm, especially the harm of a doctor choosing to kill (physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, and involvement in capital punishment), amounts to an abandonment of medicine as an exclusively therapeutic profession. The book argues that medicine as a profession necessarily involves stating before others what one stands for: the good one seeks and the bad one seeks to avoid on behalf of the sick, and rejects the view that medicine is purely a technique lacking its own unique internal ethic. It concludes noting that medical promising (as found in the White Coat Ceremony through which U. S. medical students matriculate) implicates medical autonomy which in turn merits respect, including honoring professional conscientious objections. (shrink)

How do we think about animals? How do we decide what they deserve and how we ought to treat them? Subhuman takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, drawing from research in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, law, history, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Subhuman argues that our attitudes to nonhuman animals, both positive and negative, largely arise from our need to compare ourselves to them.

Exegesis, with text, on the Nyāyasūtra of Gautama, basic aphoristic text of Nyāya.

Kit Fine (2000) breaks with tradition, arguing that, pace Russell (e.g., 1903: 228), relations have neither directions nor converses. He considers two ways to conceive of these new "neutral" relations, positionalism and anti-positionalism, and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. Cody Gilmore (2013) argues for a generalization of positionalism, slot theory, the view that a property or relation is n-adic if and only if there are exactly n slots in it, and (very roughly) that each slot (...) may be occupied by at most one entity. Slot theory (and with it, positionalism) bears the full brunt of Fine's (2000) symmetric completions and conflicting adicities problems. I fully develop an alternative, plural slot theory (or pocket theory), which avoids these problems, key elements of which are first considered by Yi (1999: 168 ff.). Like the slot theorist, the pocket theorist posits entities (pockets) in properties and relations that can be occupied. But unlike the slot theorist, the pocket theorist denies that at most one entity can occupy any one of them. As a result, she must also deny that the adicity of a property or relation is equal to the number of occupiable entities in it. By abandoning these theses, however, the pocket theorist is able to avoid Fine's problems, resulting in a stronger theory about the internal structure of properties and relations. Pocket theory also avoids a serious drawback of anti-positionalism. (shrink)

_Purpose._ This paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of a human being within the Confucian tradition as well as its interpretations from intercultural perspective. _Theoretical basis._ One of the ways to understand the deepest level of the intercultural dialogue is to reveal the interpretations of a human being in philosophical traditions, since they refer to the formation of personality and identity within a given culture including interpersonal, intergroup, and intercultural relations. Humanism based on the unity of Human and Heaven runs (...) like a red thread through the philosophical teachings of Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming defining the ideas of human nature, his/her duties, his/her place and roles in society that shaped the Chinese mentality. _Originality._ Quite often, Chinese concepts (for example, human dignity beyond the ideas of democracy and mass political participation, guanxi, mianzi) are incomprehensible to the representatives of the Western civilization, which leads to the challenges in intercultural communication. The interpretation of these ideas in the context of Confucianism allows to understand them from the perspective of Others and expand the set of patterns of cultural perception. This ultimately leads to the awareness that there are many social, political, cultural realities, which we perceive through the lens of our own concepts and attitudes. The participants of an intercultural dialogue realize that each of them has a unique experience, own way of posing a problem and resolving it, and no one is better or worse. _Conclusions._ Confucian philosophy shaped the worldview of Chinese people, defined values, goals, meanings, attitudes, communication models, which affected all spheres of Chinese life and culture. The study of the philosophical heritage of the great Chinese civilization enhances the cultural competence of the intercultural communicators and expands the field of dialogue to the level of global communication. (shrink)

There is a gap of knowledge about the extent to which gratitude is indeed the working mechanism of change in gratitude interventions aiming to promote mental well-being. This study explores the mediational role of gratitude as mood in the context of a recently conducted randomized controlled trial on the effects of a 6-week gratitude intervention on mental well-being in comparison with a waitlist control group. Gratitude as mood was measured at 2, 4, and 6 weeks. Both simple and multiple mediation (...) models were conducted as well as various sensitivity analyses. Results showed a gradual increase of gratitude as mood during the intervention. The effects of the 6-week gratitude intervention on mental well-being were mediated by increases of gratitude as mood at 4 weeks but not at 2 weeks. These findings suggest a dose-response relationship for gratitude interventions, but more research is warranted. (shrink)

Interactions with global markets offer development opportunities for Indigenous communities. They also place pressure on the natural resources that communities depend upon for their livelihood and, in many cases, their political and cultural autonomy. These markets often interact with family-based enterprises embedded within commons, with important implications for the social relationships and shared territorial resources that characterise such regimes. In this paper, we analyse the relationships that exist between commons, global markets, and small-scale family enterprises, using the case of mezcal (...) production—an alcoholic beverage made from agave—in an Indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico. Most mezcal production is organized at the family level; yet the raw materials and inputs necessary for making mezcal are held communally and regulated by locally-crafted institutions. Empirical data show that as family enterprises engage with an emergent global market for mezcal, the commons become essential for not only protecting territorial resources but also maintaining a degree of autonomy from powerful global markets and value chains. However, this requires substantial investment in monitoring and enforcement, and for community members to value sustainable commons management over short-term economic self-interest. To seek autonomy while participating in global markets, producer families also join together to develop cooperative strategies to access markets on better terms. (shrink)