Background In the ethical and clinical literature, cases of parents who want treatment for their child to be withdrawn against the views of the medical team have not received much attention. Yet resolution of such conflicts demands much effort of both the medical team and parents. Objective To discuss who can best protect a child9s interests, which often becomes a central issue, putting considerable pressure on mutual trust and partnership. Methods We describe the case of a 3-year-old boy with acquired (...) brain damage due to autoimmune-mediated encephalitis whose parents wanted to stop treatment. By comparing this case with relevant literature, we systematically explored the pros and cons of sharing end-of-life decisions with parents in cases where treatment is considered futile by parents and not (yet) by physicians. Conclusions Sharing end-of-life decisions with parents is a more important duty for physicians than protecting parents from guilt or doubt. Moreover, a request from parents on behalf of their child to discontinue treatment is, and should be, hard to over-rule in cases with significant prognostic uncertainty and/or in cases with divergent opinions within the medical team. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Utopias in Africa is an emerging academic field. While we are witnessing an increasing number of fictional and ideological utopias, little attention is paid to lived utopias. The Green Camp Gallery Project is such a lived utopia, which predominantly strives for realizing desired future imaginations in daily practices. Localized in the urban context of Durban, in a derelict house in the industrial area, the Green Camp strives for a “simple post-growth life,” which is closely related to nature and the (...) philosophy of Ubuntu. In so doing, the Green Camp responds to the overlapping crisis of urbanity and offers an alternative future aspiration. The Green Camp is not perfect and it is not able to solve the deep problems of South African society, but it offers an “island” of hope and imagination in a challenging urban environment. At the same time the lived utopia reveals the agency of the urban marginalized and contradicts widespread assumptions concerning environmentalism. Based on a qualitative study, the article takes an unusual perspective by analyzing the imagination of lived utopia in an emerging utopian hotspot—Africa. (shrink)

Flow describes a state of intense experiential involvement in an activity that is defined in terms of nine dimensions. Despite increased interest in understanding the flow experience of musicians in recent years, knowledge of how characteristics of the musician and of the music performance context affect the flow experience at the dimension level is lacking. In this study, we aimed to investigate how musicians’ general music performance anxiety level and the presence of an audience influence the nine flow dimensions. The (...) participants were 121 university music students who performed solo a music piece once by themselves and once in front of an audience. Their general MPA level was measured with an adapted version of the STAI and ranged from 27 to 76. The level of the nine flow dimensions was assessed with the Flow State Scale-2 after each performance. The levels of “concentration on task at hand,” “sense of control,” and “autotelic experience” decreased significantly with increasing general MPA level. The levels of “unambiguous feedback” and “loss of self-consciousness” decreased significantly with increasing general MPA level during the public performance only. The level of “sense of control” was significantly lower during the public performance than the private performance across participants. The level of “unambiguous feedback” was significantly lower during the public performance than the private performance for participants with a general MPA level higher than 47. The level of “loss of self-consciousness” was significantly lower during the public performance than the private performance for participants with a general MPA level higher than 32. In contrast, the general MPA level and the audience did not significantly affect the levels of “challenge-skill balance,” “clear goals,” and “action-awareness merging.” These results show that the effects of general MPA level and audience vary greatly across flow state dimensions. We conclude that musicians’ flow state should be analyzed at the dimension level rather than as a global score. We discuss how our findings could inform the development and implementation of interventions. (shrink)

Anti-Aging and Biomedicine: Critical Studies on the Pursuit of Maintaining, Revitalizing and Enhancing Aging Bodies Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Notes Pages 187-195 DOI 10.1007/s12376-009-0021-9 Authors Antje Kampf, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Mainz Germany Lynn A. Botelho, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Indiana PA USA Journal Medicine Studies Online ISSN 1876-4541 Print ISSN 1876-4533 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 3.

The globalization of production and trade has contributed to the rise in complex global value chains where the reach of state regulation is limited. As an alternative, private regulation, developed and administered by companies, industry associations, and nongovernmental organizations, has emerged to safeguard economic, environmental, and social sustainability in producer countries and along the value chain. The academic literature on private regulation in global value chains has grown over the last decade, but currently few major reviews of the research have (...) been undertaken. This paper examines peer-reviewed research in the relevant disciplines published in academic journals up to December 2011. Our goal is to identify and classify the topics and theories in the global value chain literature. We conclude that the number of articles explicitly examining private regulation, in a global value chain context, is relatively small when considering the importance and growth of these chains in the world’s economy. We also conclude that agriculture, forestry, and apparel manufacturing are the most often studied economic sectors; in contrast, other sectors, such as the information, communication and technology, with their complex global value chains, and often problematic environmental and social conditions, are understudied. (shrink)

Applied philosophy is experiencing its “golden days,” as Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen says in his insightful introduction to A Companion to Applied Philosophy. Applied philosophy seems to be distinguished from its opposite, pure philosophy, usually understood as traditional philosophy, which deals with subjects such as free will, consciousness, or knowledge in philosophical subdisciplines like ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. To embrace applied philosophy could thus mean to advocate for a philosophy that deals with questions “relevant to ‘the important questions of everyday life,’” as (...) Leslie Stevenson puts it, as opposed to questions that arise from within the subdisciplines of pure philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a novel propositional semantics based on the framework of branching time. The basic idea is to replace the moment-history pairs employed as parameters of truth in the standard Ockhamist semantics by pairs consisting of a moment and a consistent, downward closed set of so-called transitions. Whereas histories represent complete possible courses of events, sets of transitions can represent incomplete parts thereof as well. Each transition captures one of the alternative immediate future possibilities open at a (...) branching point. The transition semantics exploits the structural resources a branching time structure has to offer and provides a fine-grained picture of the interrelation of modality and time. In addition to temporal and modal operators, a so-called stability operator becomes interpretable as a universal quantifier over the possible future extensions of a given transition set. The stability operator allows us to specify how and how far time has to unfold for the truth value of a sentence at a moment to become settled and enables a perspicuous treatment of future contingents. We show that the semantics developed along those lines generalizes and extends extant approaches: both Peirceanism and Ockhamism can be viewed as limiting cases of the transition approach that build on restricted resources only, and on both accounts, stability collapses into truth. (shrink)

"As a 'rhetoric of the mean' (mesotes ideal), sensibility provides a positive catalog of emotionalization. This is because ethos as an emotional level is viewed as being able, through gentle emotions, to please, placate and achieve sympathy and virtue (Quintilian). Sensibility in literature creates a bridge between an 'art of the soul' that developed into a major subjective and personal factor in the 18th century and a sense of sociability that aimed to integrate the individual into the community. The goal (...) of this study is to provide, through a structural linking of the ethos of virtue and the 'rhetoric of the mean', a reading of literature of sensibility based on rhetoric and cultural history that can explain both its public success 'with the people' and the reasons for why it failed to meet its own claims."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Quipus, knotted structures of woollen or cotton cords, were used as a bureaucratic tool in the Inca state. In the absense of a writing system, numerals and possibly other pieces of information were encoded on the quipus by tying knots into elaborately structured coloured cords. Though interpretation of the quipu contents is far from complete, some information on Inca mathematics can be deducted from the analysis of ancient specimen, especially when combined with the results of anthropological and linguistic research in (...) contemporary Andean societies. In this paper, the quipus are introduced, their structure is explained, and some results on mathematical concepts of the Incas are presented based on a comparison of mathematical and anthropological literature on the subject. (shrink)

How is it possible to develop an identity that lives from the meaningful relationship to a concrete tradition without falling into fundamentalist self-closure when trying to maintain this relationship? The present study addresses this question by interpreting Alasdair MacIntyre's traditional concept in response to the lack of orientation in contemporary society. The American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre assumes that modern societies can only convey identity through the traditions they contain. He defines "tradition" as a discussion about the correct interpretation of the (...) traditional content. MacIntyre sees coexistence in plural societies as a permanent encounter of different, traditional identities that struggle to convince each other of the truthfulness of their own worldview. The consequence is not blind conflict, but rather the acquisition of cultural language skills: Real encounters occur when a tradition learns to understand its counterpart from its genuine perspective. In this way, MacIntyre makes communicative competence the guiding factor of its model. In conversation with Karl Barth's theology, the study further develops this model from a Protestant perspective. Barth is received as the 20th century theologian who most consistently thought of Christian identity in particular terms. Even more than for Barth, the self-assurance of Christian tradition is being put to the test today. The study develops a model of Christian orientation in pluralism, which is based on the interplay of cultural competence and trust in the sustainability of one's own religious identity. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a thorough discussion and reconstruction of Bernard Bolzano’s theory of grounding and a detailed investigation into the parallels between his concept of grounding and current notions of normal proofs. Grounding (Abfolge) is an objective ground-consequence relation among true propositions that is explanatory in nature. The grounding relation plays a crucial role in Bolzano’s proof-theory, and it is essential for his views on the ideal buildup of scientific theories. Occasionally, similarities have been pointed out between Bolzano’s (...) ideas on grounding and cut-free proofs in Gentzen’s sequent calculus. My thesis is, however, that they bear an even stronger resemblance to the normal natural deduction proofs employed in proof-theoretic semantics in the tradition of Dummett and Prawitz. (shrink)

The internet could be an efficient political instrument if it were seen as part of a democracy where free and open discourse within a vital public sphere plays a decisive role. The model of deliberative democracy, as developed by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, serves this concept of democracy best. The paper explores first the model of deliberative democracy as a ‘two-track model’ in which representative democracy is backed by the public sphere and a developing civil society. Secondly, it outlines (...) the normative concept of the public sphere and its basic ideas, namely the uncoerced communication of equal participants with equal access and equal rights to intervene or propose themes. The third part for discussion shows how the internet could fit into this concept of public sphere and influence the quality of political debates, and emphasizes the important role it can play in the political process. (shrink)

The transition semantics presented in Rumberg :77–108, 2016a) constitutes a fine-grained framework for modeling the interrelation of modality and time in branching time structures. In that framework, sentences of the transition language \ are evaluated on transition structures at pairs consisting of a moment and a set of transitions. In this paper, we provide a class of first-order definable Kripke structures that preserves \-validity w.r.t. transition structures. As a consequence, for a certain fragment of \, validity w.r.t. transition structures turns (...) out to be axiomatizable. The result is then extended to the entire language \ by means of a quite natural ‘Henkin move’, i.e. by relaxing the notion of validity to bundled structures. (shrink)

Participation in further education is a central success factor for economic growth and societal as well as individual development. This is especially true today because in most industrialized countries, labor markets and work processes are changing rapidly. Data on further education, however, show that not everybody participates and that different social groups participate to different degrees. Activities in continuous vocational education and training are mainly differentiated as formal, non-formal and informal CVET, whereby further differences between offers of non-formal and informal (...) CVET are seldom elaborated. Furthermore, reasons for participation or non-participation are often neglected. In this study, we therefore analyze and compare predictors for participation in both forms of CVET, namely, non-formal and informal. To learn more about the reasons for participation, we focus on the individual perspective of employees and additionally integrate institutional characteristics. The results mainly show that non-formal CVET is still strongly influenced by institutional settings. In the case of informal CVET, on the other hand, the learning biography plays a central role. (shrink)

Abstract State Machines (ASMs) provide a formal method for transparent design and specification of complex dynamic systems. They combine advantages of informal and formal methods. Applications of this method motivate a number of computability and decidability problems connected to ASMs. Such problems result for example from the area of verifying properties of ASMs. Their high expressive power leads rather directly to undecidability respectively uncomputability results for most interesting problems in the case of unrestricted ASMs. Consequently, it is rather natural to (...) ask whether there exist expressive classes of ASMs for which we can prove positive decidability and computability results. In this work, we introduce such a class of ASMs. The concept is similar to the one of the guarded fragment of first-order logic. We analyze the expressive power of this class and prove that it is stronger than Datalog LITE and the guarded fragment of first-order fixed point logic. Some decidability and computability results have been proven in earlier works. (shrink)

Suppose there comes a day when Homo sapiens has evolved into or been overtaken by techno sapiens. Will it then still make sense to speak of human beings as created in the image of God? What is the relevance of asking such a question today? I offer a sketch of the present state of development and discussion in artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL) and discuss some implications for the human condition. Taking into account both reality and fiction in (...) AI and AL, I hold that, regardless of the degree of realization, issues related to technological evolution inform the cultural agenda—at least the European–American one. I comment on antireductionist arguments and on arguments from philosophy and (history of) culture. I argue in favor of a consonance between neurotechnology and the Christian gospel in terms of realizing the marks of messianic life. However, issues of justice, reason versus nature, and perfection and finitude versus imperfection and immortality call for further illumination. Even though no principal opposition seems to exist between technological evolution and possible interpretations of the concept of the image of God (imago dei), a number of significant dissimilarities need to be addressed, such as the differences between technical improvement and forgiveness or transformation and between immortality and resurrection. The role of irregularity, disturbance, and error for creative processes in nature and culture is an exciting topic in science and technology as well as in theology. (shrink)

A central challenge of Amartya Sen’s comparative view of justice is to bring cultural diversity to bear on conceptualizing global justice, which includes building bridges across cultures that enable effective action, and rendering compatible the most beneficent of Rawlsian (or transcendental) intentions with irreducible cultural diversity. For social scientists meeting this challenge requires, first, taking account of variation of social practices in the social construction of meaning, and second, uncovering invisible frontiers of global justice that remain hidden due to conceptual (...) or empirical oversight. The latter is especially true for contemporary International Relations (IR) theory, which assumes state actors to be the main interlocutors in the global realm, and thus precludes consideration of micro-level forms of inter-national relations (understood as interaction among all types of actors that takes place across country borders and that bears traits of national identity). Alternatively, Sen’s micro-perspectival approach offers a welcome support for pluralist approaches that both appreciate non-state access to contestation in the international arena, and account for the meaning-in-use of fundamental norms (democracy, rule of law, human rights) in different cultural and inter-national contexts. (shrink)

For Seneca, the firmness of the Wise is shown in his ability to remain calm against attacks, as he explains in his treatise of that name. Attacks can come in the form of injustice, iniuria, and disparagement, contumelia; Seneca proves that neither of them affects the wise man. Contumelia is linked to contemptus in definition and conceptualization so that the remarks on how to deal with disparagement contain clues as to what contemptus means for Seneca. The article argues that Seneca (...) understands the term in a double sense: First, contemptus denotes a reprehensible attitude. Second, it designates a kind of indifference which is to be understood in the context of Stoic apatheia. (shrink)

Digitalization and the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will bring about substantial changes in all aspects of life. This happens in a world marked by the poisonous synergy of five Ps, polarization, populism, protectionism, post‐truth, patriarchy, as well as an ambiguous interplay of secularization and new visibility of religion.If development of AI is to be beneficial for people and planet a number of challenges must be met. In this regard, religion‐and‐science dialogue needs improvement in making things not only intellectually but (...) also spiritually fit. Ethics should be involved from the beginning rather than being called upon first when problems arise. Faith communities have a prophetical, diaconal, ethical, and theological role.Based on the characterization of life as a fourfold web of relationality, personal, social, political, as well as global issues are identified and discussed. These include mental health disorders, addiction, manipulation, and self‐exploitation. Reflections on leadership suggest resilience, coexistence, and hope as theological key components for navigating the uncharted realms of the digital age. (shrink)

I argue that there is no “roaring reality of rampant secularism” with “technological application as its chief agent,” as claimed by John Caiazza (2005). Two phenomena, techno‐religion and a spirituality of technology, suggest a different picture of reality: Technology may be an alternative spirituality rather than an ally of a secularism that makes “nutcrackers of the soul” out of people who should be “dancers” (Nietzsche). An analysis of secularism and its manifold causes indicates that secularism is a fruit of both (...) science and religion. The secular is a companion of religion rather than its enemy. Hence, I recommend a heuristic instead of an ontological use of the concept of secularism. In a technological age, religion is changing rather than being displaced. These changes are illustrated by the increase of private religiosity, megachurches, and cyber‐spirituality. Energized by the tension between finitude and creativity, technology shares in the marks of spirituality (Philip Hefner) and in the potential for good and evil. In this situation, fundamentalism and dogmatism in religion, science, and technology are a greater threat than secularism. (shrink)

The transition semantics presented in Rumberg (J Log Lang Inf 25(1):77–108, 2016a) constitutes a fine-grained framework for modeling the interrelation of modality and time in branching time structures. In that framework, sentences of the transition language L_t are evaluated on transition structures at pairs consisting of a moment and a set of transitions. In this paper, we provide a class of first-order definable Kripke structures that preserves L_t-validity w.r.t. transition structures. As a consequence, for a certain fragment of L_t, validity (...) w.r.t. transition structures turns out to be axiomatizable. The result is then extended to the entire language L_t by means of a quite natural ‘Henkin move’, i.e. by relaxing the notion of validity to bundled structures. (shrink)

Stress-related psychopathology is on the rise, and there is a pressing need for improved prevention strategies. Positive appraisal style, the tendency to appraise potentially threatening situations in a positive way, has been proposed to act as a key resilience mechanism and therefore offers a potential target for preventive approaches. In this article, we review n = 99 studies investigating associations of positive cognitive reappraisal, an important sub-facet of positive appraisal style, with outcome-based resilience and relevant other outcomes, which are considered (...) resilience-related. According to the studies reviewed, positive cognitive reappraisal moderates the relation between stressors and negative outcomes and is positively related to several resilience-related outcomes. It also mediates between other resilience factors and resilience, suggesting it is a proximal resilience factor. (shrink)

This study investigates the role of sensory processing sensitivity as a predictor of employees’ proactive work behavior. SPS is a multidimensional concept that depicts differences in people’s sensory awareness, processing, and reactivity to internal and external influences. Based on research on SPS as grounded in a heightened sensitivity of the behavioral inhibition and activation systems, it was argued that the relationships with task proactivity and personal initiative as indicators of proactive work behavior differ for the three SPS dimensions. Furthermore, based (...) on the person–environment fit perspective, SPS was assumed to moderate the relationship between employees’ job complexity and proactivity. The hypotheses were tested in two two-wave studies. Across both studies, ease of excitation was unrelated to proactivity. Low sensory threshold was negatively related to personal initiative, only in Study 2, but it did not predict task proactivity. Meanwhile, aesthetic sensitivity was positively related to proactivity, but in Study 2, this relationship could only be established for personal initiative. Moreover, job complexity was positively related to proactivity for those employees high but not for those low in AES. EOE and LST did not act as moderators. This study offers evidence of positive behavioral implications among highly sensitive persons when dealing with job complexity. Overall, the study presents an interesting point of departure for the role of SPS in employee proactivity that calls for more research. (shrink)

One of the most robust findings in psychopathology is the fact that specific phobias are more prevalent in women than in men. Although there are several theoretical accounts for biological and social contributions to this gender difference, empirical data are surprisingly limited. Interestingly, there is evidence that individuals with stereotypical feminine characteristics are more fearful than those with stereotypical masculine characteristics; this is beyond biological sex. Because gender role stereotypes are reinforced by parental behavior, we aimed to examine the relationship (...) of maternal gender stereotypes and children’s fear. Dyads of 38 mothers and their daughters were included. We assessed maternal implicit and explicit gender stereotypes as well as their daughters’ self-reported general fearfulness, specific fear of snakes, and approach behavior toward a living snake. First, mothers’ fear of snakes significantly correlated with their daughters’ fear of snakes. Second, mothers’ gender stereotypes significantly correlated with their daughters’ self-reported fear. Specifically, maternal implicit gender stereotypes were associated with daughters’ fear of snakes and fear ratings in response to the snake. Moreover, in children, self-reported fear correlated with avoidance of the fear-relevant animal. Together, these results provide first evidence for a potential role of parental gender stereotypes in the development and maintenance of fear in their offspring. (shrink)

Social network structure has been argued to shape the structure of languages, as well as affect the spread of innovations and the formation of conventions in the community. Specifically, theoretical and computational models of language change predict that sparsely connected communities develop more systematic languages, while tightly knit communities can maintain high levels of linguistic complexity and variability. However, the role of social network structure in the cultural evolution of languages has never been tested experimentally. Here, we present results from (...) a behavioral group communication study, in which we examined the formation of new languages created in the lab by micro‐societies that varied in their network structure. We contrasted three types of social networks: fully connected, small‐world, and scale‐free. We examined the artificial languages created by these different networks with respect to their linguistic structure, communicative success, stability, and convergence. Results did not reveal any effect of network structure for any measure, with all languages becoming similarly more systematic, more accurate, more stable, and more shared over time. At the same time, small‐world networks showed the greatest variation in their convergence, stabilization, and emerging structure patterns, indicating that network structure can influence the community's susceptibility to random linguistic changes (i.e., drift). (shrink)

Communicating the process quality of ethically produced food effectively is of highest interest to policy makers, organizations, retailers and producers in order to enhance ethical food production and increase ethical label use. The objective of this paper is to unveil the effectiveness of different communication treatments in regard to changing purchase behavior of different consumer groups. Different communication material for beef produced according to consumer expectations was compiled and applied in a consumer survey—incorporating a choice experiment and a questionnaire—with 676 (...) respondents in three cities of Germany. A Latent Class Mixed Logit Model was basis to identify different consumer segments and their response to the different communication treatments. The effects of different communication treatments unveil the importance to address information in an objective manner. Target groups could be enlarged through the assessment of clear, objective information. Moreover, most consumers were more likely to refrain from choosing a cheap beef product from conventional, barn-based rearing. Hence, consumers might be interested in reducing their overall consumption of beef and prefer the consumption of high value ethical beef with less frequency. Producers, market actors and policy makers should realize that a high share of consumers, not only smaller target groups, value ethical food and may be ready to change their consumption habits, if they are adequately informed. (shrink)

Although there is increasing public criticism of intensive livestock production, the market share of meat with an animal welfare standard exceeding legal requirements remains small. Food retailers, in their role as gatekeepers, can influence changes in production and consumption patterns. Their strategic role between farmers and consumers allows them to control commodity, information and value flow and therefore places them into a key position when it comes to the distribution of meat with a higher animal welfare standard. The aim of (...) this explorative study is to identify factors which motivate food retailers to take on the marketing of products of increased animal welfare standards, in this case, pasture-based beef. Nine in depth-interviews were conducted with representatives of the food retail industry. The interviews took place in June 2018, followed a structured guideline and were transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were categorized and evaluated using qualitative content analysis. Results showed that food retailers are driven by both extrinsic and intrinsic motives. The main extrinsic motive is the perceived customer demand. Consciousness for animal welfare and the regional production cycles, including close connection between farmers and retailers are inherently intrinsic motives. Interestingly, the interviewed retailers show a high personal interest and moral obligation with regard to sourcing and marketing pasture-based beef. As such, this research finds innovative retailers, who take on a new role in sustainable food systems which exceed classical distribution functions and may have a considerable effect in transforming the food system. (shrink)

A comparison of Merge, a model of comprehension, and WEAVER, a model of production, raises five issues: merging models of comprehension and production necessarily creates feedback; neither model is a comprehensive account of word processing; the models are incomplete in different ways; the models differ in their handling of competition; as opposed to WEAVER, Merge is a model of metalinguistic behavior.

Many authors have recently highlighted the importance of prediction for language comprehension. Pickering & Garrod (P&G) are the first to propose a central role for prediction in language production. This is an intriguing idea, but it is not clear what it means for speakers to predict their own utterances, and how prediction during production can be empirically distinguished from production proper.

In 2015 students in South Africa mobilized to decolonize universities and to struggle for free higher education. This article discusses these developments in the context of contemporary theories of remembrance, repression and denial and current debates around decolonization and “talking race” in post-apartheid South Africa. The current South African student movement challenge apartheid legacies and white colonial culture, contending that campuses are still dominated by racist symbolic and economic orders. They argue, “As we learn we need to unlearn and develop (...) new epistemologies.” This article analyses this process as it unfolds and looks at the unfolding intergenerational tensions and discusses how a lack of affirmative labor of remembrance on the side of the white South African population complicates notions of decolonization in relation to a gendered black nationalism. A point of conceptual reference is the 1968 student protest movement in West Germany, which forcefully broke the silence surrounding fascist continuities within the newly democratized institutions that was “unable to mourn” and remember. (shrink)

Indicative conditionals with present tense antecedents can have ‘shifted’ readings that are unexpected given the semantic behavior of the tenses outside of conditionals. In this paper, we compare two accounts of this phenomenon due to Kaufmann (J Semant 22(3):231–280, 2005) and Schulz (SALT XVIII, pp. 694–710, 2008), by reconstructing them in the framework of branching time. We then propose a novel account of indicative conditionals based on the branching time semantics suggested in Rumberg (J Logic Lang Inf 25(1):77–108, 2016), viz. (...) transition semantics. We show that not only is the account of ‘shifted’ readings with present tense antecedents within this semantics very natural, but it also is empirically superior to its rivals in some respects. (shrink)

This article compares health promotion attitudes towards prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Our aim is to demonstrate that these two apparently distinct conditions of the aging body – one affecting the male reproductive system, the other primarily the brain – are addressed in similar fashion in recent public health activities because of a growing emphasis on a ‘cardiovascular logic’. We suggest that this is a form of reductionism, and argue that it leaves us with a dangerous paradox: while re-transcending, at (...) least partially, the conceptual separation of body and brain, it clouds much-needed discussion and research, such as contingent issues of socio-economic and socio-cultural disease disparities. (shrink)

The article takes up J. P. Arnason's basic theoretical assumption that the western trajectory to modernity marks only one possibility of the modern constellation and that modernity has to be pluralized. Arnason's differentiation between a civilizational paradigm and a civilizational horizon allows us to acknowledge the ambivalent perceptions of modernity prevalent in the colonial and postcolonial encounter and gives space for counter-paradigms of modernity. Through a brief discussion of Indian reflections on modernity (P. Chatterjee, J. Alam) I want to argue (...) that the aspect of agency, marginalized in the philosophical and sociological debate on multiple modernities, has to be integrated into the theory. Examples from the Indian Himalayas should show how in everyday life as well as in the course of a social movement for regional autonomy `preferred futures' are negotiated on the basis of a reflexive balancing of `traditional' and `modern' elements which are articulated and joined in a self-made present. The article ends with a plaidoyer for an anthropology of modernity. (shrink)