Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that research in these related fields has focused on the mechanics of how speech can be recognized. In Marr's (1982) terms, emphasis has been on the algorithmic and implementational levels rather than on (...) the computational level. In this article, we provide a computational-level analysis of the task of speech recognition, which reveals the close parallels between research concerned with HSR and ASR. We illustrate this relation by presenting a new computational model of human spoken-word recognition, built using techniques from the field of ASR that, in contrast to current existing models of HSR, recognizes words from real speech input. (shrink)

Associative Democracy has been developed as a specific response to statist socialism and neoliberal capitalism, drawing on older traditions such as associationalism, democratic socialism, and cooperative socialism. As the ‘real third way’, it is distinct from neoliberal privatization and deregulation in the Blair–Schröder varieties of social democracy and in the conservative Reagan–Thatcher–Cameron varieties. This article summarizes what seemed to make AD an attractive realist utopia: its combination of economic, societal and political democracy; its focus on (...) democratic institutional pluralism in all these regards; its considered moral/political minimalism; and its practical experimentalism. It recapitalizes some of the important economic, societal and political changes during the last decennia that seem to make AD plainly utopian again. It focuses on an outline of basic principles and institutions of socio-economic alternatives to capitalism because, if neoliberalism rules supreme, no viable alternatives can emerge and grow. Even if there is not one institutional design that fits all countries and contexts, we can show what the basic tenets of such alternatives are and how such a colourful democratic socialism relates to and can integrate other approaches such as ‘circular economy’, ‘foundational economy’ and ‘radical social innovation’. The hope is that AD’s broad institutional pluralism and its emphasis on practical experimentalism show new ways of thinking which are urgently needed for sustainable and socially fair economic development and for renewing representative democracy. (shrink)

To understand Lacan’s thinking process on vision, the entirety of his teaching must be taken into consideration. Until the 60s, the visual field is the imaginary, the constitutive principle of reality in its phenomenal giving to the experience of a subject. This register is the opposite of the field of the word with the L schema and, subsequently, as subordinated to the symbolic system according to the model of the optical schema of the inverted flower vase of Bouasse. It is (...) only with the 1964 seminar that Lacan makes a daring turnaround through which the visual becomes a sign of the emergence of a real that is irreducible to both reality and the mediation of the subject of knowledge. The split that separates reality and the real is reproduced in Lacan within the visual field, which is, on the one hand, the cardinal principle of the consistency of the experience of reality, and on the other, it is an element of irreducibility to reality. This produces a cascade of consequences: first of all, the modification of the presentation of the mirror stage. Unlike the voice, which through prosody, tone, and volume, finds some strips with which anchor itself imaginatively to reality, the gaze, invisible and elusive, escapes the imaginary grasp. Captured in myths, it reveals its power and ability to annihilate—as in the myth of Medusa’s gaze—or to make people fall in love but only with a narcissistic love that leads inexorably to death as in the myth of Narcissus. The gaze is elusive because the subject is dependent on it in the field of desire. Like the voice, it is about the desire on which the subject is supported; it is one of the objects on which the phantom depends. In our opinion, thanks to this characteristic, the gaze object can make remote psychoanalytic treatment possible through easily accessible videoconferencing tools and, at the same time, create new conditions within it that should be carefully evaluated to understand its implications in the session itself. (shrink)

The paper conceptualizes five basic developmental paths the post-Soviet republics followed. The conceptual framework of this paper is expanded theory of real socialism in non-Marxian historical materialism, namely proposed the model of secession from socialist empire. The first developmental path was followed by societies in which an independent civil revolution took place. This path of development bifurcates into two furhter sub-variants. Namely civil revolutions in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) resulted in the independence and stable democracies. Civil (...) revolution in Caucasus republics (Armenia, Gergia) were partially succesfull because civil movement in these societies were unable to build stable democracies. Countries such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine followed next developmental path. Its characteristic feauture is active participation of republican communist nomenclatures in seceding from the Soviet Union and gaining state independence. In this variant of development, democratization - characteristic for the first period of independence was counterbalanced by the growing autocratization of political system. This path of development was divided into two developmental variants: in one group of countries (Ukraine) the growth of autocratization caused civil resistance (Ukraine), in the rest societies of this group (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova) - not. Finally the countries of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) followed the fith developmental path. In these societies, independence permitted to preserve dictatorship of local communist nomenclatures. (shrink)

This article defends four claims. The first is that in the last few decades, two waves of democratic innovation based on random selection must be differentiated by their partly different concrete devices, embodying different social dynamics and pointing toward different kinds of democracy. The second claim is that the rationale of the first wave, based on randomly selected minipublics, largely differs from the dynamic of political sortition in Athens, as it points toward deliberative democracy rather than radical (...) democracy. Conversely, empowered sortition processes that have emerged during the second wave capture better the spirit of radical Athenian democratic traditions. The third claim is normative: these empowered sortition processes are more promising for a real democratization of democracy. The last claim is that any proposal of a legislature by lot must rely on this lesson when trying to defend a normatively convincing and politically realistic perspective. (shrink)

In this volume philosophers from throughout the Asia-Pacific region discuss a wide range of topics related to the development of democratic values and ways of life. The papers explore ideas, values and practices related to democracy from the different perspectives of the great religious and philosophical traditions of Asia, as well as considering both philosophical issues and the place of philosophy in a democratic society. While the contributors represent different philosophical traditions, they are connected through a common (...) concern with humanity, a belief in the value of philosophical inquiry and scholarship and by a commitment to the value of philosophy education in building and sustaining democracy. (shrink)

3 Mart 1924 tarihinde ilan edilen Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu’nun uygulama boyutu Cumhuriyet Tarihi boyunca devam eden tartışmaların çıkış noktası olmuştur. Kanuna dayandırılarak medreselerin kaldırılması ardından açılan yeni din eğitimi kurumlarının da bir müddet sonra kapatılması ve din derslerinin de aşamalı olarak eğitim programlarının dışında bırakılması din derslerini uzun yıllar eğitimin bir parçası olmaktan çıkarmıştır. Çoğulcu demokrasi fikrinin ortaya çıkardığı ifade hürriyeti ve bunun sosyal ve siyasi hayattaki yansımalarının bir sonucu olarak din dersleri yeniden gündem konusu haline gelmiştir. Bu makalede Türkiye’de (...) çok partili hayata geçişin sağlanmasıyla birlikte din dersleri konusunda yaşanan gelişmeler ve din eğitimi veren kurumların geçirdiği yeniden yapılanma süreci kronolojik bir yöntemle sunulmuştur. Makale çerçevesinde 1924’ten 1946 yılına kadar olan süreçte din dersleri konusunda yaşanan gelişmeler kısaca anlatılmış, ardından 1960 yılına kadar olan süreç incelenmiştir.As we analyze the history of Republic of Turkey, the year 1946 and the following years have become the milestone for the transition process to pluralist democracy. This period of time could be regarded of a crucial influence on political and social transformation. Within the article, developments taken place in religion classes and re-construction period of the institutions taught religion after the transition process to pluralist democracy from single party regime have been chronologically presented. The article looks through the developments in religion classes from 1924 until 1946 and then analyzes the period up until 1960. (shrink)

In this study, we investigate whether firms recognised as superior sustainability performers respond differently to climate change regulatory, physical and other risks/opportunities and examine whether such differences predict sustainability performance in subsequent years. Further, we seek to gain insights from climate change programs and strategies of both superior and inferior sustainability performers. Adopting mixed methods, we use a merged sample from the Top500 world’s largest firms and the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations. Our quantitative analyses show that greater (...) awareness of physical and other climate change opportunities is what sets superior performers apart, and that superior future sustainability performance is related to a firm’s stated awareness of these two types of opportunities. Qualitative content analysis of narrative disclosures confirm that superior performers provide more detailed description of climate change strategies that go beyond managing climate change risks. Our study contributes to the limited amount of research highlighting the value of proactively seeking opportunities rather than merely focussing on risk management. (shrink)

Lachlan Umbers defends democracy against Jason’s Brennan’s competence objection, by showing that voting even incompetently does not violate the rights of others, as the risk imposed is negligible, and furthermore lower than other permissible actions, e.g. driving. I show there are costs in taking this line of argument. Accepting it would make arguing for the duty to vote more difficult in two ways: since voting incompetently is permissible, and not voting imposes less risk than not voting, then not voting (...) is permissible; in terms of fairness, voting incompetently is worse than not voting, if voting incompetently is permissible, then there cannot be a fairness-based duty to vote. (shrink)

Western society has been diverted from the goal of spiritual freedom and autonomy as expressed in the ancient Pythagorean 'theory of the cosmos'. Indeed, following Heidegger's analysis, it can be seen that modern Western society has arrived at the opposite pole of anthropocentric 'absolute subjectivism' in which the entire non-human world is seen as a material resource to be consumed in the satisfaction of our egoistic passive desires. It is further argued that Spinozism is actually a modern version of (...) the 'theory of the cosmos' which, when supplemented by a vision of man's identity with the ecological world, would provide us with the only adequate portrayal of the God/Nature/Man relationship. (shrink)

Telling the truth is one of the most respected virtues in medical history and one of the most emphasized in the code of medical ethics. Health care providers are frequently confronted with the dilemma as to whether or not to tell the truth. This dilemma deepens when both choices are critically vicious: The choice is no longer between “right and right” or “right and wrong,” it is between “wrong and wrong.” In the case presented and discussed in this paper, a (...) research team in Saudi Arabia unintentionally uncovered information regarding misattributed paternity. In such a situation and in the context of a tribal cultural system, what should the team do with this information? This case analysis demonstrates the joint application of ethical resources originating from within and outside the Saudi Arabian context. The article analyses the case based on the moral problems involved, relevant medical application, and the impact of such information in the Saudi tribal and Islamic domains. The most pertinent relevant values and secular debates on similar matters are discussed. Finally, the article aims to provide an Islamic dimension of family, fatherhood, and adultery. (shrink)

In this book, developed by a group of collaborating scholars in bioethics from different European countries, an overview is given of the most salient themes in present-day bioethics. The themes are discussed in order to enable the reader to have an in-depth overview of the state of the art in bioethics. Introductory chapters will guide the reader through the relevant dimensions of a particular area, while subsequent case discussions will help the reader to apply the ethical theories to specific (...) clinical problems and health policy queries. The book focuses on perspectives typical for the European context. This highlights not only particular bioethical themes such as social justice, choices in health care, and health policy (e.g., in post-communist countries), it also emphasizes specific approaches in ethical theory, in relation to Continental philosophies such as phenomenology and hermeneutics. Because of its articulation of what is typical for the European health care setting as well as for bioethical debate, this book is unique in comparison to existing textbooks in bioethics. The book is an introductory textbook acquainting the reader with the major issues in present-day health care as well as the various theoretical and practical approaches to clarify these issues. (shrink)

Deep ecology and ecofeminism are contemporary environmental philosophies that share the desire to supplant the predominant Western anthropocentric environmental frameworks. Recently thinkers from these movements have focused their critiques on each other, and substantial differences have emerged. This essay explores central aspects of this debate to ascertain whether either philosophy has been undermined in the process and whether there are any indications that they are compatible despite their differences.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Dialogic Interpretation of Hume's Dialogues William Lad Sessions For all ofits prominence in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion, Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion continues to provoke divergent readings, especially as regards its author's intentions and beliefs. Most writers today, following Norman Kemp Smith's masterful analysis, accept some version ofwhat I will call "the standard interpretation": Hume aimed to discredit religion—natural and revealed religion alike, but especially the (...) "experimental theism" represented by Cleanthes' so-called "design argument." Hence, the sceptic "Philo represents Hume's views onreligiousbelief,"even though Cleanthes (occasionally) and Demea(rarely) also speakfor Hume.1 But a significant minority have given divergentinterpretations: some have held that Pamphilus, the narrator of the Dialogues, is Hume;2 some have given credence to Hume's remark in a letter that "I make Cleanthes the Hero of the Dialogue";3 others think that none of the characters represent Hume, at least not consistently, either because the characters represent types, not individuals,4 or because none are "wholly consistent, completely clear-headed, and unmuddled throughout,"5 or because "it is the whole of the dialogue which represents Hume."6 One interpreter has even gone so far as to declare that "I shall take it that Hume in the Dialogues is any speaker who appears tobe makingagood philosophical point,"7 whichis tantamount to identifying Hume with any self-assured philosophical reader of the Dialogues] My chief purpose in this essay is not to take issue with these interpretations, nor to propose a novel interpretation of the text—though I will do both—but rather to promote a different kind of interpretation altogether: what I will call a "dialogic" interpretation, since it views the literary form as contributory and indeed essential to the philosophical message.8 Still, the particular dialogic interpretation I propose may be of interest. On it, the Dialogues are not chiefly a diatribe against theism, much less a polemic against all (theistic or Christian) religion. Rather, the book at its most searching level is a careful rational examination of"true" vs. "false" religion, with the virtues ofthe former commended even as the vices ofthe latter are condemned. In short, Hume gives us an eighteenth century discussion ofreligiousfaith in relation to human Volume XVII Number 1 15 WILLIAM LAD SESSIONS reason, a discussion wherein reason is not automatically the enemy of faith (in all its guises). More specifically, Philo's and Cleanthes' apparent disagreements on the results and utility ofnatural theology mask a more fundamental and considerably more important harmony in their views concerning "the proper office ofreligion."9 Contrary to the standardinterpretation, they fundamentally agree on the nature and value of natural piety, which is the other component of natural religion besides natural theology.10 In the end, then, Pamphilus is not wrong to judge that Cleanthes' principles "approach still nearer to the truth" than Philo's, and not merely for reasons of filial piety (he is, after all, Cleanthes' house-guest, his loyal student, and his "adopted son"). No doubt Philo does tend to "win" his skirmishes in natural theology with Cleanthes (not to mention those with Demea!), but though Philo triumphs tactically, Cleanthes is the victor in the wider war for Pamphilus' heart and mind: critical scepticism may be a useful safeguard for careful thinkers against the "superstition" endemic to "false" and harmful piety, butitsutilityislimited; Philo's prophylaxisis muchless effective than Cleanthes' empirical theism at the vitally important task of inculcating and nurturing "true" natural piety in a young person such as Pamphilus. However, before supporting this controversial view of the Dialogues, I need to make clearer the nature, limits and value of a dialogic interpretation, by way of contrast with the more common approaches. I. Standard Hermenéutica Most philosophical interpretations of the Dialogues share several assumptions—or perhaps one should say "presumptions." First, they all focus on the propositions, beliefs, and arguments expressed by characters in the Dialogues—their claims, assertions, speculations, suggestions, rejections, replies, reasons, rebuttals, and the like—and they seek to extract from the discussion those expressed or implied beliefs and arguments which current interpreters believe most worthy of continuing philosophical adherence, development, demolition, or at least discussion. Literary... (shrink)

Teachers´ attitudes toward their students have been associated with differential teachers´ expectations and, in turn, with students´ educational pathways. Theories of social cognition can explain the link between attitudes and behavior. In this regard, the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes is worth to be considered, whereby implicit attitudes are automatically activated when the attitude object is present and guide automatic behavior. In contrast, explicit attitudes infer deliberation and reflection, hence affecting controlled behavior. As teachers often are required to act (...) immediately in situations that do not allow for thoughtful reflection due to time restraints, teachers´ implicit attitudes concerning different student groups with shared characteristics, such as gender or ethnicity, may be especially important when considering teachers´ behavior in relation to students´ educational pathways. This notion is reflected by an increased interest in adopting implicit methodology in the educational domain. Over the last 10 years, several studies have been conducted in different countries, involving in- and preservice teachers and investigating their attitudes toward different student groups. Estimates of effects have varied and may be affected by sampling bias. To systematically review and integrate data from different studies, this meta-analysis focuses on teachers´ implicit attitudes. Following the systematic search of the database and initial screening, 43 articles were identified from which 22, describing 34 studies, were retained for the meta-analysis after further inspection. First analyses revealed an estimated average effect size of 0.56 for implicit attitudes in favor of non-marginalized groups. As there was a large extent of heterogeneity between studies, several moderator variables, were investigated. Results showed that the employed implicit measure and stimulus materials as well as the student target group affected the effect sizes. Low or non-significant relationships were reported between implicit and explicit attitudes. Findings are discussed in terms of theory and future research. (shrink)

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion may be read in the way Cleanthes reads Nature, as analogous to human artifice and contrivance. The Dialogues and Nature then are both texts, with an intelligent author or Author, and analogies may be started from these five facts of Hume's text: the independence of Hume's characters; the non-straightforwardness of the characters' discourse; the way the characters interact and live; the entanglements of Pamphilus as an internal author; and the ways in which a reader (...) is also involved in making a dialogue. These and other analogies should reflect upon the Author of Nature as they do upon Hume's authorship: They do not prove the existence of their respective authors, but may well shed some light on the nature of these disparate beings. (shrink)

In the last few decades, the study of terminology has undergone a cognitive shift that has led to the development of several approaches that study the social, linguistic, and cognitive dimension of terms, such as Communicative Theory of Terminology (CTT) and Frame-Based Terminology (FBT). CTT was developed in the early 1990s and argues that the study of terminology should be based on a communicative perspective, taking into account aspects such as the communicators and the context of communication. FBT has been (...) developed from 2007 and uses certain aspects of Frame Semantics to conceptualise specialised domains and create non-language-specific representations through the analysis of the domain event and on the study of the behaviour of the terminological units in texts. The two theories share many of the same premises and propose the representation of the concepts of a domain in an ontology. FBT also proposes a representation in frames. We explore how these two methods of domain representation can be used to represent the terminology of the domain of seafood in Germany and Spain. (shrink)

From the above lines one can see that St. Cyril of Alexandria is presented, along with a great theologian, as it is clear from the writings against the heretics of his time, like a true apologist for Christianity with paganism dispute that resurfaced after Emperor Julian, the Apostate. On the other hand, the writing of the Orthodox Patriarch proves to be of great importance in understanding the difficulties experienced by the Christian faith in a territory where paganism flourished (...) from time to time. Moreover, the work of St. Cyril can be put together with Christian apologists ‗works from previous centuries, being of a real interest for our times into a field so necessary but forgot in the theological schools and pastoral work: Apologetics. (shrink)

Although hierarchical approaches are evidently important to reinforcement learning, most existing hierarchical RL models either do not involve automatically developing hierarchies (i.e., using pre-determined hierarchies; e.g., Dayan and Hinton 1993, Sutton 1995, Pre-cup et al 1998, Parr and Russell 1997, Dietterich 1997), or involve only domain-speci c processes. Models in the latter category rely on domain-speci c knowledge or procedures and are thus not generic or autonomous; for example, Lin (1993), Moore and Atkeson (1994), and Singh (1994). The problems of (...) such hierarchies include in exibility (because the characteristics of the domain can change over time) and lack of generality (because domain-speci c hierarchies most likely vary from domain to domain). This is true even when limited learning is used to ne tune mostly pre-determined hierarchies (e.g., Parr and Russell 1997, Dietterich 1997). (shrink)

Business ethics has largely been written from the perspective of analytical philosophy with very little attention paid to the work of continental philosophers. Yet although very few of these philosophers directly discuss business ethics, it is clear that their ideas have interesting applications in this field. This innovative textbook shows how the work of continental philosophers - Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Levinas, Bauman, Derrida, Levinas, Nietzsche, Zizek, Jonas, Sartre, Heidegger, Latour, Nancy and Sloterdijk - can provide fresh insights into (...) a number of different issues in business ethics. Topics covered include agency, stakeholder theory, organizational culture, organizational justice, moral decision-making, leadership, whistle-blowing, corporate social responsibility, globalization and sustainability. The book includes a number of features designed to aid comprehension, including a detailed glossary of key terms, text boxes explaining key concepts, and a wide range of examples from the world of business. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with autonomous learning of plans in probabilistic domains without a priori domain-specific knowledge. In contrast to existing reinforcement learning algorithms that generate only reactive plans and existing probabilistic planning algorithms that require a substantial amount of a priori knowledge in order to plan, a two-stage bottom-up process is devised, in which first reinforcement learning/dynamic programming is applied, without the use of a priori domain-specific knowledge, to acquire a reactive plan and then explicit plans are extracted (...) class='Hi'>from the reactive plan. Several options for plan extraction are examined, each of which is based on a beam search that performs temporal projection in a restricted fashion, guided by the value functions resulting from reinforcement learning/dynamic programming. Some completeness and soundness results are given. Examples in several domains are discussed that together demonstrate the working of the proposed model. (shrink)

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This (...) is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God. (shrink)

The transmission of a product or idea from one culture or point of origin to another and the maintenance of control outside the new locality has been referred to as the distribution and maintenance of “nothing.” This perspective has been used to describe the global marketplace and the influence of large multinational corporations on the politics and cultures of host countries. This paper uses this concept, but within a much smaller context. Using the sensitizing concept of a “disjoint constitution,” (...) we interviewed health inspectors and apple cider producers in Michigan to determine if the implementation of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) program designed to ensure food safety was characterized by a power differential that would favor the inspectors. In addition, a larger survey of processors and an internet survey of apple cider consumers was conducted to supplement this data. It was found that HACCP had characteristics of both “nothing” and “something” and that better communication is needed between these groups to move it further along toward the something end of the continuum. (shrink)

One dark and rainy night, Yuso sexually assaults and tortures Zelan. In escaping from the scene of his crime, he falls heavily and becomes an impotent paraplegic. Instead of treating his fate as divine retribution for his wicked acts, Yuso sees it as sheer bad luck. He shows no remorse for what he has done, and vainly hopes that he will recover his powers, which he now treats as involuntarily hoarded resources to be used on less rainy days. In (...) the presence of others, he pretends that he has turned over a new leaf. He asks for religious and educational books, hoping to make up for his poor education and deprived social background. But he immediately discards them when he is alone in favor of the pornographic magazines which he has bribed a nurse to smuggle in for him. His deception and various obscene acts committed in the hospital are exposed; by the time he comes up for trial, everyone knows that he is still a lustful, sadistic, and unrepentant man. Most retributivists have a sufficient justification for punishing Yuso independently of the social consequences of his punishment. Two features of the case might cause some difficulties. First, Yuso has already experienced considerable suffering and deprivation both before and after his crime, and retributivists might disagree about the relevance of the suffering to his punishment. Secondly, Yuso is unrepentant, and it is unlikely that punishment will change him. This might, as we shall see, create a problem for those who think that the justifying aim of punishment is the moral reform of the offender. (shrink)

The main object of criticism of present-day medical ethics is the standard view of the relationship between theory and practice. Medical ethics is more than the application of moral theories and principles, and health care is more than the domain of application of moral theories. Moral theories and principles are necessarily abstract, and therefore fail to take account of the sometimes idiosyncratic reality of clinical work and the actual experiences of practitioners. Suggestions to remedy the illnesses of contemporary medical ethics (...) focus on re-establishing the connection between the internal and external morality of medicine. This article discusses the question how to develop a theoretical perspective on medical ethical issues that connects philosophical reflection with the everyday realities of medical practice. Four steps in a comprehensive approach of medical ethics research are distinguished: (1) examine health care contexts in order to obtain a better understanding of the internal morality of these practices; this requires empirical research; (2) analyze and interpret the external morality governing health care practices; sociological study of prevalent values, norms, and attitudes concerning medical-ethical issues is required; (3) creation of new theoretical perspectives on health care practices; Jensen's theory of healthcare practices will be useful here; (4) develop a new conception of bioethics that illuminates and clarifies the complex interaction between the internal and external morality of health care practices. Hermeneutical ethics can be helpful for integrating the experiences disclosed in the empirical ethical studies, as well as utilizing the insights gained from describing the value-contexts of health care practices. For a critical and normative perspective, hermeneutical ethics has to examine and explain the moral experiences uncovered, in order to understand what they tell us. (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)

In this paper we argue that hybrid logic is the deductive setting most natural for Kripke semantics. We do so by investigating hybrid axiomatics for a variety of systems, ranging from the basic hybrid language (a decidable system with the same complexity as orthodox propositional modal logic) to the strong Priorean language (which offers full first-order expressivity).We show that hybrid logic offers a genuinely first-order perspective on Kripke semantics: it is possible to define base logics which extend automatically to (...) a wide variety of frame classes and to prove completeness using the Henkin method. In the weaker languages, this requires the use of non-orthodox rules. We discuss these rules in detail and prove non-eliminability and eliminability results. We also show how another type of rule, which reflects the structure of the strong Priorean language, can be employed to give an even wider coverage of frame classes. We show that this deductive apparatus gets progressively simpler as we work our way up the expressivity hierarchy, and conclude the paper by showing that the approach transfers to first-order hybrid logic. (shrink)

BackgroundThe triangle completion test has been used to assess egocentric wayfinding for decades, yet there is little information on its reliability. We developed a virtual reality based test and investigated whether either test of spatial navigation was reliable.ObjectiveTo examine test-retest reliability of the real-world and VR triangle completion tests. A secondary objective was to examine the usability of the VR based test.Materials and methodsThirty healthy adults aged 18–45 years were recruited to this block randomized study. Participants completed two (...) class='Hi'>sessions of triangle completion tests in the real-world and VR on the same day with a break between sessions.ResultsIn both test versions distance from the endpoint and angle of deviation showed poor test-retest reliability. Distance traveled had moderate reliability in both the real-world and VR tests. The VR triangle test showed poor correlation with the real-world test.ConclusionThe triangle completion test has poor test-retest reliability and demonstrates poor concurrent validity between the real-world and VR. Nevertheless, it was feasible to translate a real-world test of spatial navigation into VR. VR provides opportunities for development of clinically relevant spatial navigation tests in the future. (shrink)

The growth of knowledge and its effects on the practice of medicine have been issues of philosophical and ethical interest for several decades and will remain so for many years to come. The outline of the present volume was conceived nearly three years ago. In 1987, a conference on this theme was held in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on the occasion of the founding of the European Society for Philosophy of Medicine and Health Care (ESPMH). Most of the chapters of this (...) book are derived from papers presented at that meeting, and for the purpose of editing the book Stuart Spicker, Ph. D., joined two founding members of ESPMH, Henk ten Have and Gerrit Kimsma. The three of them successfully brought together a number of interesting contribu tions to the theme, and ESPMH is grateful and proud to have initiated the production of this volume. The Society intends that annual meetings be held in different European countries on a rotating basis and to publish volumes related to these meetings whenever feasible. In 1988, the second conference was held in Aarhus, Denmark on "Values in Medical Decision Making and Resource Allocation in Health Care". In 1989, a meeting was held in Czestochowa, Poland, on "European Traditions in Philosophy of Medicine. From Brentano to Bieganski". It is hoped that these conferences and the books to be derived from them, will initiate a new European tradition, lasting well into the 21 st century! P. J. (shrink)

I want now to argue that just as no intentional representations of retinal images intervene between physical objects and the seeing of those objects, no representations of speaker intentions in speaking need intervene between world affairs spoken of by speakers and hearers' understandings of those words.1 When conventional signs are true or satisfied and when this has come about in the normal way, conventional signs are locally recurrent natural signs. True, tokens of the same conventional sign may have diverse etiologies, (...) through different people's perceptual systems and cognitive systems. They differ from more ordinary recurrent natural signs in that there will usually be numerous different kinds of causal paths to their production, depending on the ways that different speakers have managed to translate diverse prior natural signs into a uniform medium of thought and expression. But there are reasons why the same linguistic form continues to coincide with the same kind of represented affair over a certain domain --it is no accident-- and we have decided to take that as the primary criterion for a locally recurrent sign. Assuming that this step in the production of a conventional sign has been accomplished through normal mechanisms --the speaker is not confused, does not lie, and so forth-- then reading a conventional sign is mainly a matter of tracking its natural domain, that is, determining what reproducing family it has been copied from. Compare tracking the. (shrink)

Why did nineteenth‐century German historians and physicists habitually warn against vices that they believed philosophers in particular embodied: speculation, absence of common sense, and excessive systematizing? Drawing on a rich array of sources, this article interprets this vice‐charging as a rhetorical practice aimed at delineating empirical research from Naturphilosophie and Geschichtsphilosophie as practiced in the heyday of German Idealism. The strawman of “the philosopher” as invoked by historians and physicists served as a negative model for strongly empiricist scholars committed (...) to virtues like precision, thoroughness, and conscientiousness. In their historical narratives, historians and physicists consistently depicted philosophy either as a relic from the past or as a phase that they had virtuously left behind. This boundary work was central to the self‐positioning of both history and physics, which makes clear that the persona of the philosopher mattered not only to philosophers but also to scholars in adjacent disciplines. (shrink)

The papers in this volume focus on two central issues in the philosophy of law, the relationship between law and morality, and crime and punishment. In the essay that gives the title to this volume, it is argued that, although in many legal systems there are in fact significant connections between law and morality, these connections are not conceptually or logically necessary. They depend on various social practices. Ronald Dworkin's famous attempt to undermine the legal positivist's separation of law (...) class='Hi'>from morality is rejected, and it is argued that Dworkin's own positive theory of law may indeed be quite compatible with certain versions of legal positivism. Other essays explore the notion of a wicked legal system, the rule of law, and various perspectives on the nature of law. The essays on crime and punishment discuss the theory and practice of punishment. They extend the work done in the author's earlier book, "Crime, Guilt and Punishment". They reject a purely retributive justification of punishment, in spite of the increasing sophistication in its recent formulations. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: Cognitive and sensory difficulties frequently jeopardize informed consent of frail elderly patients This study is the first to test whether preliminary research experience could enhance geriatric patients' capacity to consent. DESIGN/SETTING: A step-wise consent procedure was introduced in a study on fluid balance in geriatric patients. Eligible patients providing verbal consent participated in a try-out of a week, during which bioelectrical impedance and weight measurements were performed daily. Afterwards, written informed consent was requested. Comprehension, risk and inconvenience scores (ranges: (...) 0-10) were obtained before and after the try-out by asking ten questions about the study's essentials and by asking for a risk and inconvenience assessment on a ten-points rating scale. SUBJECTS AND RESULTS: Seventy of the 78 eligible subjects started the try-out and 53 (68%) provided written consent. The comprehension score increased from 5.0 (+/- 2.3) to 7.0 (+/- 1.9) following the try-out (P < 0.001). The number of subjects capable of weighing risks and inconveniences increased from 32 to 48 (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Research experience improved the capacity to consent, still enabling an acceptable participation rate. Therefore, experienced consent seems a promising tool to optimize informed consent in frail elderly subjects. (shrink)

In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data‐hungry artificial neural networks. In this paper, we argue that datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and language use. We present a method that leverages the recent development of powerful computational models to obtain the fine‐grained annotation required to apply metrics and techniques (...) class='Hi'>from Cognitive Science to large datasets. Previous work in Cognitive Science has investigated the question‐asking strategies of human participants by employing different variants of the so‐called 20‐question‐game setting and proposing several evaluation methods. In our work, we focus on GuessWhat, a task proposed within the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities that is similar in structure to the 20‐question‐game setting. Crucially, the GuessWhat dataset contains tens of thousands of dialogues based on real‐world images, making it a suitable setting to investigate the question‐asking strategies of human players on a large scale and in a natural setting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of computational tools to automatically code how the hypothesis space changes throughout the dialogue in complex visual scenes. On the one hand, we confirm findings from previous work on smaller and more controlled settings. On the other hand, our analyses allow us to highlight the presence of “uninformative” questions (in terms of Expected Information Gain) at specific rounds of the dialogue. We hypothesize that these questions fulfill pragmatic constraints that are exploited by human players to solve visual tasks in complex scenes successfully. Our work illustrates a method that brings together efforts and findings from different disciplines to gain a better understanding of human question‐asking strategies on large‐scale datasets, while at the same time posing new questions about the development of conversational systems. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty, published in 1859, has had a powerful impact on philosophical and political debates ever since its first appearance. This volume of essays covers the whole range of problems raised in and by the essay, including the concept of liberty, the toleration of diversity, freedom of expression, the value of allowing 'experiments in living', the basis of individual liberty, multiculturalism and the claims of minority cultural groups. Mill's views have been fiercely contested, and they are (...) at the centre of many contemporary debates. The essays are by leading scholars, who systematically and eloquently explore Mill's views from various perspectives. The volume will appeal to a wide range of readers including those interested in political philosophy and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Recently a child’s right to a father was invoked to justify the prevention of single women from obtaining access to IVF. This article explores the conceptual and normative issues about the nature of the right and its conflict with a woman’s right to procreative autonomy. The discussion relates the conceptual issues to those raised in the context of ‘wrongful life’ tort cases. It concludes that the right to be born with a father, although conceptually sound, does not justify the (...) restriction on the procreative right of single women. (shrink)

Since the founding of the University of Limburg (1974), in The Netherlands, an innovative medical curriculum has been guided by educational principles of problem-orientation, continuous assessment, student initiative and attitude development. The teaching of medical ethics was built into the preclinical curriculum from the start. However, the clinical years remained largely unaffected, and only recently has an effort been made to extend the educational philosophy to this more or less traditional part of medical education. Within this context, an experiment (...) of clinical ethics teaching was introduced in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology (Ob/Gyn) clerkships. The objectives, methods and results of this experimental programme are described in this paper. The success of the teaching is based on three features of the programme: 1) its student-centred approach; 2) the programme is designed in a way similar to regular patient conferences; 3) the programme is taught by a team consisting of both clinician and ethicist. Before starting a longitudinal programme of ethics teaching during the clinical years, it proved very helpful to experiment with a well designed and evaluated pilot programme. (shrink)

This is a book that we would enthusiastically recommend to those who unconditionally believe in the epistemologically or politically unproblematic character of organisational research. Carl Rhodes, once an employee of the Boston Consulting Group, now researcher at the University of Technology, Sydney, has written a small yet important book about academic writing on organisation. It has appeared in a small but interesting collection called Advances in Organization Studies that is edited by Stewart Clegg and Alfred Kieser and published by John (...) Benjamins. Rhodes’ book resonates well with developed traditions in narrative and storytelling approaches to management and organisation studies. Such traditions have approached organisational knowledge from a narrative perspective1 and used narrative and literary methods to understand organisations.2 More specifically, Rhodes both draws on and contributes to an understanding of the relationship between narrative and power3 and to using multiple interpretations and representations in research.4 However, although we would argue that it is possible to identify Rhodes’ position in the field, ‘summing up’ in his own terms what he has to say is not easy. His central point seems to be that conclusively singular representations, perhaps including the one that we give here, are problematical from both an ethical and political perspective. One may be tempted to discard this as yet another postmodernist frivolity, but we would suggest that what writers and researchers in organisation studies, and the social sciences more generally, might get from this work is an increased sensitivity to the ethics of their writing practices. We intend in this review essay not so much to provide the reader with a neat survey of Rhodes’ book as to build further on some of its ideas. And in doing so, we will highlight its philosophical underpinnings not only because we think that these are especially interesting for the readers of this journal but also because we think that some of them are problematical. We have tried to provide a fairly neutral reconstruction of Rhodes’ argument in the first three sections below, and from the fourth section onwards — ‘authorless writing’ — we question some of Rhodes’ assumptions and ideas. While we are enthused by the questions raised in this book and indeed by the way the overall argument is presented, we will also claim that in places he seems to succumb to an anti-realist and anti-authoritarian position that we regard as unnecessarily radical. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to a defense of the now quite familiar argument from the perceptual model of religious experience (hereafter PMR) to the rationality of beliefs formed on the basis of religious experience. The contribution will not, however, come in the form of a positive argument for PMR. Neither will this contribution take the form of a response to key objections to the plausibility of that model. Instead, I wish to argue that there is a widespread assumption (...) about the role of concepts in perceptual experience generally which, when assimilated by PMR, complicates the attempt to respond to the most serious objection to the argument from PMR to the rationality of religious belief—viz. the objection from conflicting religious claims. Again, this paper will not respond to the objection from conflicting religious claims. Rather, it will explain how a common assumption makes that problem worse (or even intractable) and it will offer a positive suggestion about how to avoid that common assumption. Of course, to have shown how not to make a problem worse is not yet to have solved the problem. But, if the argument of this paper succeeds, it is a crucial first step. In what follows, I will (i) very briefly summarize the role of PMR in an argument for the rationality of religious belief, (ii) state the problem of conflicting religious claims, (iii) explain how a widespread assumption about the role of concepts in perceptual experience exacerbates the problem and (iv) offer the beginnings of an alternative account of the role of concepts in perceptual experience and comment on the evidential force of religious experience construed along the lines of this alternative account. Of course, an adequate treatment of the points in (iv) would require far more attention than can be devoted to them here. The primary burden of this paper is to establish the critical point in (iii), i.e., to generate some dissatisfaction with the “widespread assumption,” and to use this dissatisfaction as a motivation for exploring an alternative account of conceptual contribution. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to a defense of the now quite familiar argument from the perceptual model of religious experience (hereafter PMR) to the rationality of beliefs formed on the basis of religious experience. The contribution will not, however, come in the form of a positive argument for PMR. Neither will this contribution take the form of a response to key objections to the plausibility of that model. Instead, I wish to argue that there is a widespread assumption (...) about the role of concepts in perceptual experience generally which, when assimilated by PMR, complicates the attempt to respond to the most serious objection to the argument from PMR to the rationality of religious belief—viz. the objection from conflicting religious claims. Again, this paper will not respond to the objection from conflicting religious claims. Rather, it will explain how a common assumption makes that problem worse (or even intractable) and it will offer a positive suggestion about how to avoid that common assumption. Of course, to have shown how not to make a problem worse is not yet to have solved the problem. But, if the argument of this paper succeeds, it is a crucial first step.In what follows, I will (i) very briefly summarize the role of PMR in an argument for the rationality of religious belief, (ii) state the problem of conflicting religious claims, (iii) explain how a widespread assumption about the role of concepts in perceptual experience exacerbates the problem and (iv) offer the beginningsof an alternative account of the role of concepts in perceptual experience and comment on the evidential force of religious experience construed along the lines of this alternative account. Of course, an adequate treatment of the points in (iv) would require far more attention than can be devoted to them here. The primary burden of this paper is to establish the critical point in (iii), i.e., to generate some dissatisfaction with the “widespread assumption,” and to use this dissatisfaction as a motivation for exploring an alternative account of conceptual contribution. (shrink)

Human language is a salient example of a neurocognitive system that is specialized to process complex dependencies between sensory events distributed in time, yet how this system evolved and specialized remains unclear. Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) studies have generated a wealth of insights into how human adults and infants process different types of sequencing dependencies of varying complexity. The AGL paradigm has also been adopted to examine the sequence processing abilities of nonhuman animals. We critically evaluate this growing literature in (...) species ranging from mammals (primates and rats) to birds (pigeons, songbirds, and parrots) considering also cross‐species comparisons. The findings are contrasted with seminal studies in human infants that motivated the work in nonhuman animals. This synopsis identifies advances in knowledge and where uncertainty remains regarding the various strategies that nonhuman animals can adopt for processing sequencing dependencies. The paucity of evidence in the few species studied to date and the need for follow‐up experiments indicate that we do not yet understand the limits of animal sequence processing capacities and thereby the evolutionary pattern. This vibrant, yet still budding, field of research carries substantial promise for advancing knowledge on animal abilities, cognitive substrates, and language evolution. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated an imbalance between the clinical needs of the population and the effective availability of advanced life support (ALS) resources. Triage protocols have thus become necessary. Triage decisions in situations of scarce resources were not extraordinary in the pre-COVID-19 era; these protocols abounded in the context of organ transplantation. However, this prior experience was not considered during the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain. Lacking national guidance or public coordination, each hospital has been forced to put forth independent (...) and autonomous triage protocols, most of which were, nonetheless, based on common ethical principles and clinical criteria. However, controversial, non-clinical criteria have also been defended by Spanish scientific societies and public institutions, including setting an age cut-off value for unilaterally withholding ALS, using ‘social utility’ criteria, prioritising healthcare professionals or using ‘first come, first served’ policies. This paper describes the most common triage criteria used in the Spanish context during the COVID-19 epidemic. We will highlight our missed opportunities by comparing these criteria to those used in organ transplantation protocols. The problems posed by subjective, non-clinical criteria will also be discussed. We hope that this critical review might be of use to countries at earlier stages of the epidemic while we learn from our mistakes. (shrink)

This article is a systematic repudiation of Joseph Hamburger's thesis in his book John Stuart Mill on Liberty And Control . Hamburger maintains that Mill wanted to promote the `moral regeneration of mankind' by eroding Christian belief and replacing it with a religion of humanity. He argues that Mill's defense of liberty must be seen in this context, although Mill himself tried to conceal some of his views. Mill in fact permitted interference even in the area of self-regarding conduct. He (...) was against interference by public opinion, but not against interference by superior persons. Mill valued freedom because it enabled superior persons to promote the desired progress toward the religion of humanity. But this article argues that Hamburger fails to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of interference, a distinction that is central to Mill's case for liberty. Superior persons are not allowed to coerce others from engaging in non-harmful but `miserable' conduct. The progress that Mill envisaged was to be achieved within the framework of freedom for all. Key Words: liberty • social control • self-regarding conduct • Christianity • religion of humanity • public opinion. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard offers a much-needed corrective to a prevailing understanding of the Beatitudes according to which they are virtues or conditions for blessing in God's kingdom. Unfortunately, Willard weds this corrective to an implausible read of the more positive sounding beatitudes according to which they are vices or unattractive conditions in spite of which one can be blessed. In what follows, I hope to rescue the main thrust of Willard's gloss on the beatitudes from his (...) interpretation of these particular traits. (shrink)

While COVID-19 has generated a massive burden of illness worldwide, healthcare workers (HCWs) have been disproportionately exposed to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection. During the so-called ‘first wave’, infection rates among this population group have ranged between 10% and 20%, raising as high as one in every four COVID-19 patients in Spain at the peak of the crisis. Now that many countries are already dealing with new waves of COVID-19 cases, a potential competition between HCW and non-HCW patients for scarce resources can (...) still be a likely clinical scenario. In this paper, we address the question of whether HCW who become ill with COVID-19 should be prioritised in diagnostic, treatment or resource allocation protocols. We will evaluate some of the proposed arguments both in favour and against the prioritisation of HCW and also consider which clinical circumstances might warrant prioritising HCW and why could it be ethically appropriate to do so. We conclude that prioritising HCW’s access to protective equipment, diagnostic tests or even prophylactic or therapeutic drug regimes and vaccines might be ethically defensible. However, prioritising HCWs to receive intensive care unit (ICU) beds or ventilators is a much more nuanced decision, in which arguments such as instrumental value or reciprocity might not be enough, and economic and systemic values will need to be considered. (shrink)