In an important and widely discussed series of studies, Jonathan Phillips and colleagues have suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness has a substantial moral component. For in- stance, two persons who enjoy the same extent of positive emotions and are equally satisfied with their lives are judged as happy to different degrees if one is less moral than the other. Considering that the relation between morality and happiness or self-interest has been one of the central questions of moral philosophy (...) since at least Plato, such a result would be of considerable philosophical interest. On closer examination of the original research and new studies, we suggest that the data point to a different conclusion: in the dominant folk understanding of happiness, morality has no fundamental role. Findings seeming to indicate a moralized concept are better explained, we suggest, by folk theories on which extreme moral turpitude indicates that an individual suffers from psychological dysfunction. (shrink)

As a multi-layered theory of the foundations of “‘mathematicizing’ logic”, Husserlian pure logic is stratified on three levels (sub-theoretical, theoretical, meta-theoretical), which are then themselves transversally split in two sides (apophantic and ontological). This paper investigates how symbolic knowledge works in this framework—viz. in terms of ‘How can the subjective operating with symbols be justified in the process of obtaining objective contents of knowledge?’ To do so, it innovates in showing how Husserl’s theory of semiotic intentionality provides the epistemological-transcendental foundation (...) for the syntactic-semantic correspondence of the meaning relationship that is operative at the kernel of pure logic—i.e. on the theoretical level, between systems of axioms and formal manifolds. And thereby, it bridges the gap between the two volumes of the first edition of the Logical Investigations (namely, the Prolegomena and the six Investigations). (shrink)

In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of insincere questions to be lies, namely questions carrying a believed-false presupposition the speaker intends to convey. These judgements are robust and remain so when the participants are given the possibility of classifying the utterances as misleading or as deceiving. (...) The judgements contrast with judgements participants give about cases of misleading or deceptive behaviour, and they pattern with judgements participants make about declarative lies. Finally, the possibility of lying with non-declaratives is not confined to questions: ordinary speakers also judge utterances of imperative, exclamative and optative sentences carrying believed-false presuppositions to be lies. (shrink)

As cell engineering is used to develop new types of implanted health-monitoring devices, this may raise ethical issues for individuals and society.

Freedom of research and democratization of science are often conflicting concepts in democratic societies. It is thus necessary to define when either applies.

The lack of engagement of philosophy with decisions made under conditions of risk and uncertainty has lately received increasing attention. But philosophers have devoted little thought to the development of a conceptual framework for distinguishing different types of risks. This article begins by illustrating the need for a more nuanced conceptual framework. As the normative considerations risks give rise to are highly varied, ethicists need to distinguish between different types of risks. It then offers two ideas. First, it proposes that (...) we understand ‘risk’ as a multi-dimensional concept, i.e. a concept that can always be evaluated in different dimensions, e.g. a qualitative, a quantitative and an epistemic dimension. While this understanding of risk underlies the current practice of risk analysis, making it explicit is of value, in particular for the philosophical debate. It draws attention to the diversity of risks, helps to group them sensibly and sharpens existing arguments. Second, the article introduces a novel account of the notion ‘systemic risk’. Criticising existing accounts, it proposes we understand ‘systemic risk’ as referring to a risk that endangers the functioning of a system and originates in the system or its background noise, where a system is conceived of as a set of interdependent, interacting components that form a complex, functionally defined whole. The article identifies a number of structural features shared by systemic risks and evaluates the distinctive normative considerations they give rise to. It then argues that the notion ‘systemic risk’ is particularly suited to characterise some of the most pressing risks faced in an increasingly interconnected world. While the notion ‘systemic risk’ rests on the understanding of ‘risk’ as a multi-dimensional concept, it also complements it. Its necessity shows that in addressing risks, it is sometimes helpful to move beyond a characterisation based solely on their dimensions. (shrink)

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Indian and Pakistani Punjab, this paper focuses on how, despite membership in or conversion to majority religious communities, former untouchables in both countries continue to experience caste-based discrimination. In India, a rights-based idiom for caste politics is limited by fragmentation within the Dalit community and the compromises required by electoral politics, while the imposition of a totalising Islamic identity by the state has resulted in the erasure of caste from the political discourse in Pakistan. This (...) paper suggests that class-based mobilisation may be a better route to Dalit empowerment on both sides of the border. (shrink)

Ethnographic studies from the decades after Indian independence showed how subordinate castes once delivered their votes to upper caste patrons in exchange for patronage, credit and employment, and out of a sense of hierarchical deference. Literature on rural India suggests that such relations of dominance, and the vote banks associated with them, are a thing of the past, not least because the secret vote has enabled the lower castes to vote against their dominant caste patrons without fear of retaliation. While (...) acknowledging broader shifts in power, this paper on local elections illustrates the persistent but shifting contours of vote-bank politics. (shrink)

Despite official reports and widespread popular accounts of electoral fraud, manipulation, and violence in India and Pakistan, this topic has not been systematically addressed by the scholarly literature. This special issue explores how electoral malpractices are performed across a variety of settings (villages, small towns and cities) in criminalised political contexts. Our in-depth ethnographic studies of the electoral seasons show how fraud and manipulation of electoral processes are a diffuse and pervasive assemblage of practices, discourses and representations which shape and (...) are shaped by local modes of governance and by the idea of free and fair elections. (shrink)

The paper discusses Zhai Yongming’s 翟永明 (b. 1955) most recent long poem, “Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang” (随黄公望游富春山, 2015). In this text, Zhai revisits a Yuan handscroll, the classic artistic medium of literati aesthetics, and turns it into the departure point for her own exploration of modern Chinese poetry. As in many of her other poems, in this work Zhai creatively navigates her way through poetic legacies from the remote past in order to comment upon the present socio-cultural (...) situation. For example, she questions the hegemony of the male voice in the Chinese poetic tradition and references the topic of the possibility of gendered, genuinely female, poetics. She also introduces a contemporary ecocritical perspective into the discussion of the genre of landscape poetry when she turns to the ongoing transformation of the natural environment by the forces of modernization. The paper offers a preliminary inquiry into the dense text with a focus on its gendered ecocritical edge. From this vantage point, it seeks to shed light on the creative tensions between past and present in Zhai’s poetry. (shrink)

In a commercialised and globalised China, museum institutions are pivotal elements in public strategies to present and create national self‐consciousness, insofar as their vast collections provide symbols of cultural identification on a national as well as an international level. This article will explore Chinese public museum policy and impact, firstly by describing the current status of the system as background information; secondly, by presenting the most recent trends in museum strategies and finally, by replacing the challenges and complexities of the (...) museum system in a broader context. The analysis will draw from first hand material from interviews and informal conversations with museum professionals, small‐scale visitor surveys as well as the most recent facts and figures, and it will be illustrated by examples and supported by secondary sources. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss access and benefit-sharing (ABS) for plant genetic resources from an ethical perspective. This leads to the question of what types of justice actually play a role when more equity and fairness is demanded for plant genetic resources. Five dimensions of justice will be distinguished: classical distributive justice, which deals with a fair distribution of goods; commutative justice, which concerns a fair exchange of “give-and-receive”; justice as recognition, which relates to treating all involved parties with the (...) same respect; reparative justice, which pertains to fair amendments for wrongful actions in the past; and procedural justice, which is concerned with just decision processes. Drawing on the discussion of ethical problems with biopiracy, the distribution of environmental burdens, and plant genetic resources in agriculture, I will illustrate that the use of genetic resources poses challenges across all five dimensions of justice. Because the combination of justice challenges is specific for each case of resource use, I will argue that it is important that users of genetic resources are aware of the complexity of justice problems to ensure fair and equitable ABS negotiations. “Justice” is a paramount ideal underlying the debates on how to regulate and use plant genetic resources. We discuss questions such as Who has rights to access and use these resources? How should benefits be shared? How should the use of genetic resources be regulated?Who should be involved in discussing these questions? All of these are questions concerning justice. They are asked and discussed with the aim of finding answers that take into account what is due to all those who have a stake in genetic resources. I have written this overview article from an understanding of justice in analytic philosophy.1 Although there is wide agreement that justice is important, there may be different views on what it means to safeguard justice in the development of policy as well as in specific access and benefit sharing negotiations. One reason for such disagreement is that justice is a concept with different dimensions. I will distinguish between five such dimensions, which all play a role in dealing with genetic resources. The aim of this analysis is to contribute to the understanding of first, why the use of genetic resources generates so much attention and controversy, and second, what needs to be considered in regulating and handling them justly. By discussing these issues, I am addressing not only philosophers but also an interdisciplinary readership, hoping that the article provides an occasion for them to take a step back from the everyday occupation with genetic resources and to reflect on the ethical implications associated with their use. Ideally, this will contribute toward bringing more justice reflections into the drafting or implementing of regulatory schemes. Moreover, these reflections may facilitate specific access and benefit-sharing (ABS) negotiations, which may be complicated by the fact that the different parties are prioritizing different dimensions of justice possibly without awareness of this source of disagreement. After a brief introduction of the conception of justice underlying this article, each of the five dimensions of justice will be presented separately. For this purpose, I will start with a general introduction of the particularities of the respective justice dimension followed by a discussion of the role that it plays in the context of genetic resources. In doing so, I will draw on my own previous research and connect it to the philosophical work of other authors, for instance, Bram de Jonge and Doris Schroeder. Moreover, I will connect the literature on justice for genetic resources with parallel discourses on environmental justice or restorative justice. The presentation of the five dimensions of justice will be followed by the discussion of three practical justice challenges to illustrate how the justice dimensions meet: first, biopiracy; second, the distribution of environmental burdens; and third, plant genetic resources in agriculture. The article will close with two practical conclusions for a fair and equitable use of plant genetic resources. (shrink)

Recent advances in imaging technology now provide us with 3D images of developing organs. These can be used to extract 3D geometries for simulations of organ development. To solve models on growing domains, the displacement fields between consecutive image frames need to be determined. Here we develop and evaluate different landmark-free algorithms for the determination of such displacement fields from image data. In particular, we examine minimal distance, normal distance, diffusion-based, and uniform mapping algorithms and test these algorithms with both (...) synthetic and real data in 2D and 3D. We conclude that in most cases, the normal distance algorithm is the method of choice and wherever it fails, diffusion-based mapping provides a good alternative. (shrink)

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein famously criticizes Frege's conception of assertion. "Frege's opinion that every assertion contains an assumption", says Wittgenstein, rests on the possibility of parsing every assertoric sentence into two components: one expressing the assumption that is put forward for assertion, the other expressing that it is asserted. But this possibility does not entail that the "assertion consists of two acts, entertaining and asserting" – any more than the possibility of rendering assertions as pairs of questions and affirmative (...) answers entails that they consist of questions. Frege scholars protest that such criticism is inappropriate, not only because Frege doesn't speak about assumptions, but also – and crucially – because Wittgenstein fails to address the logical nature of assertion as reflected in Frege's use of the judgment stroke. They seem to read Wittgenstein's argument in the light of a remark in the Tractatus saying that the judgment stroke is "logically meaningless" because it simply indicates that the author holds the propositions marked with this sign to be true. In this paper, I argue that Wittgenstein's criticism of Frege is not that the latter's conception of judgment and assertion contains a corrupting psychological element. Rather, the criticism is that for Frege judgment and assertion are composed of two separate acts, i.e. an act of referring to a truth value and an act of determining which of the two it is. Through a detailed examination of the 'black-spot analogy' in the Tractatus, I want to show that Wittgenstein presents a serious objection to Frege's conception of judgment and assertion. (shrink)

Moral dilemmas have long been debated in moral philosophy without reaching a definitive consensus. The majority of value pluralists attribute their origin to the incommensurability of moral values, i.e. the statement that, since moral values are many and different in nature, they may conflict and cannot be compared. Neuroscientific studies on the neural common currency show that the comparison between allegedly incompatible alternatives is a practical possibility, namely it is the basis of the way in which the agent evaluates choice (...) options. Indeed, both in economic and moral decision-making, the value of options is represented and directly compared in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Therefore, we contend that moral dilemmas do not originate from value incommensurability and, on the basis of the neuroscientific discoveries on the neural currency, we derive the implications for the philosophical debate on moral dilemmas. We also provide a possible connection between the experience of moral dilemmas and their neural representation: one of the causes of the individual’s indecision is the neural tie, i.e. the condition in which two options have the same value at neural level, and her regret could be due to the motivational force of the rejected option that is still signalled by affective processes in the brain. We apply this interpretation and the common currency hypothesis to vocational decisions and propose that, although from the agent’s perspective the options are qualitatively different, they may be nevertheless equivalent at neural level. This can be seen as a reason for downgrading the importance commonly attributed to the risk of making the “wrong choice”. (shrink)

This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like ‘syringe’, ‘wound’, ‘knife’, and ‘cactus’ are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pain-sensitive. These findings dovetail with recent studies suggesting that certain (...) bodily characteristics influence the way people form mental representations (Casasanto, 2009). We discuss three mechanisms which could potentially account for our findings: attention and memory bias, prototype analysis, and embodied cognition. We argue that, whereas none of these three accounts can be ruled out, the embodied cognition hypothesis provides a particularly promising view to accommodate our data. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of material ecology and explains the pedagogical approach that is embedded in the notion of environmental awareness by applying these methods to examples from contemporary art production and Yu Jian‘s thing poetry. Material ecology is a method of cultural analysis that opens up new perspectives on the relationship between human and nonhuman agents, ecosystems in particular, and on a planetary level. This new outlook is meant to engender a consensual set of environmental values that can (...) transcend national borders. As a concept, environmental awareness applies to efforts by official or unofficial agents to change behavioral patterns that can harm the environment. This is done by demonstrating the consequences of said actions. The two approaches are at the core of the quest for a global polity that can support and integrate different communities in their various endeavors to implement rules and incentives for sustainable ways of living based on environmental justice. These must be widely agreed upon in order to commit all social levels, be it individuals, local communities, or transnational stakeholders. Since cultural representations fulfill a seminal role in changing world-views, I will discuss a selection of Chinese literary and art-works which serve as examples of this new perspective on things in material ecology. Highlighting the transformation of landscapes through globalized, unsustainable patterns of urbanization, agri-industrial production, electric power generation, resource extraction and waste disposal, the paper will first explore how nonhuman agency needs to be reimagined, perceived, researched and taught as well as aesthetically represented and narrated in the wake of this transition. In a second step, it will introduce Kunming poet Yu Jian’s thing poetry. I will argue that the poet aims at the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility that can overcome the modern world’s obsession with façades, masks, and surfaces in general—be they composed of words or images. Subverting the regimes of data and information acquisition by means of a kind of haptic epistemology, Yu Jian’s creative bricolage of Anglo-American nature writing, European modernist realism, Chinese Taoist animism, and traditional shanshui, or landscape art does not only promote environmental awareness, but moreover transcends linguistic and visual modes of communication. Hence, his poetry brings to the fore humanity’s material embeddedness and protests against the materialist annihilation of nonhuman worlds and things. (shrink)

Authenticity has been recognized as a central concept in the ethics of human enhancement. In the last decade, a plethora of novel distinctions, specifications, and definitions of authenticity have been added to the debate. This chapter takes a step back and maps the different accounts of authenticity to provide a nuanced taxonomy of authenticity and reveal the emerging underlying structures of this concept. This chapter identifies three kinds of conditions for authentic creation and change of the true self (coherence, endorsement, (...) and relations) as well as ways how the true self should be expressed (in one's self-conception, self-presentation, and one's body, emotions, and actions). Based on this analysis, this chapter discusses the hopes and concerns human enhancement raises for authenticity. Enhancement technologies do not threaten or foster authenticity across the board but affect different dimensions of authenticity individually. Finally, this chapter turns to the value of authenticity and argues that the debate on authenticity in the ethics of human enhancement would profit from a more extended discussion on the comparative value of the individual dimensions of authenticity. (shrink)

Building on the account of a pattern-theory of self introduced by Shaun Gallagher, this article investigates the unique role of the narrative dimension of the self within the self-pattern. According to a pattern-theory, the self is constituted by a cluster of dimensions that interact with each other. A particular variation of this pattern constitutes a self. This article advances the argument that for selves who narrate, the narrative dimension of the self takes a special role that cuts across the other (...) dimensions. First, the pattern-theory of self is introduced and a conceptual and ethical argument for employing a pattern-theory is developed. Second, the distinct role of the narrative dimension of the self is analysed.Through the narrative dimension of the self, we engage in self-definition, integrate and connect the other dimensions of the self, make them intelligible, and ascribe personal meaning to them. And third, the narrator type of self is characterized. Organizing one’s experiences through a self-narrative changes the self. Narrators constitute a unified self, they can actively plan and lead a life and engage in forensic practices, and they integrate the subjective and objective nature of the self. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs some of the core elements of Dworkin’s epistemology of ethics. To understand why, for Dworkin, questions of legal philosophy lead to moral epistemology, the main points of Dworkin’s last restatement of his theoretical account of law are outlined. Against this background, the paper critically assesses the merits of Dworkin’s criticism of current prominent forms of skepticism and what it teaches us about the epistemology of legal thought.

This Element provides a comprehensive introduction to contemporary theories of mental content. After clarifying central concepts and identifying the questions that dominate the current debate, it presents and discusses the principal accounts of the nature of mental content (or mental representation), which include causal, informational, teleological and structuralist approaches, alongside the phenomenal intentionality approach and the intentional stance theory. Additionally, it examines anti-representationalist accounts which question either the existence or the explanatory relevance of mental content. Finally, the Element concludes by (...) considering some recent developments in the debate about mental content, specifically the “explanatory turn” and its implications for questions about representations in basic cognitive systems and the representational character of current empirical theories of cognition. (shrink)

The paper proposes (1.) a non-standard interpretation of the proverbial expression “deuteros plous” by giving a fresh look to Phaedo, 99c9-d1. Then (2.) it proceeds to the philosophical problem raised in this passage according to this interpretation, that is, the problem of the “hypothesis” or the “unproved principle”. It indicates finally (3.) the kernel of truth contained in the standard Interpretation and it concludes with some remarks on the “weakness of the logoi”.

Social stratification among Muslims in South Asia, specifically the phenomenon of Muslim caste, has recently gained scholarly and media attention, particularly in India. However, the public discussion – often empirically shallow and politically polarized – fails to adequately explain the mechanisms through which Muslims perpetuate social inequality while invoking egalitarian principles. This special section, based on a panel held at the 2022 BASAS annual conference, aims to contribute to the scholarly and public discourse by advocating for the study of Muslim (...) caste associations. Taking the associational life of caste into account provides a tangible object of study. Moreover, it shifts the focus away from macro-level discussions towards an empirically grounded analysis at the meso- and micro-levels. This introduction explores two central aspects. First, we suggest that caste associations offer a fresh perspective on the study of Muslim social mobility, beyond the oft-assumed imitation of dominant caste groups or Ashrafization. Second, documenting caste associations helps us understand the diversity of Muslim representation, specifically, the tension between Muslim minority politics and Muslim caste politics. Overall, this special section provides multiple examples of Muslims’ associational engagements with caste, which encompass endeavours as diverse as political assertion, declassing, social exclusion, or universal charitable aspirations. (shrink)

In the early decades of the twentieth century in colonial India, the development of education, the expansion of electoral politics, and the decennial censuses led many caste communities, or ‘caste groups’, to organize collectively in search of internal solidarity and public assertion. Informed by the notions of service and reform, Muslims participated in this new associationism. Among them, the Sayyids – a privileged status group that claims descent from Prophet Muhammad – also formed their organizations. This article compares three Sayyid (...) organizations in India and Pakistan, with two principal aims. First, it brings out the implicit notions of inclusion and exclusion that inform the functioning of the organizations as they seek community preservation. Second, it draws broader conclusions about associational forms available to South Asian Muslims when they act collectively on the basis of a shared social status or caste. The article concludes by delineating three ‘organizational models’ that Muslim caste groups can draw upon – the anjuman, the jami‘at, and the association. Overall, this article illustrates how Muslims frame practices of social distinction in an Islamic language of equality, piety, or service. (shrink)

Understanding the origins of human social cognition is a central challenge in contemporary science. In recent decades, the idea of a ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) has emerged as the most popular way of explaining unique features of human social cognition. This default view has been progressively undermined by research on ‘implicit’ ToM, which suggests that relevant precursor abilities may already be present in preverbal human infants and great apes. However, this area of research suffers from conceptual difficulties and empirical limitations, (...) including explanatory circularity, over-intellectualisation, and inconsistent empirical replication. Our article breaks new ground by adapting ‘script theory’ for application to both linguistic and non-linguistic agents. It thereby provides a new theoretical framework able to resolve the aforementioned issues, generate novel predictions, and provide a plausible account of how individuals make sense of the behaviour of others. Script theory is based on the premise that pre-verbal infants and great apes are capable of basic forms of agency-detection and non-mentalistic goal understanding, allowing individuals to form event-schemata that are then used to make sense of the behaviour of others. We show how script theory circumvents fundamental problems created by ToM-based frameworks, explains patterns of inconsistent replication, and offers important novel predictions regarding how humans and other animals understand and predict the behaviour of others. (shrink)

Generally speaking, the present literature on agency has been heavily focused on human agency. This approach proves to be very useful for the immediate applications of the philosophy of agency, e.g. to develop a definition ready for use in ethics or political philosophy. However, there are some limitations to this line of thought, as, for instance, it poses too restrictive requirements on agency, like purposefulness, consciousness, or willingness. In this paper, I would like to tackle the question of agency with (...) the need to include non-human agency in mind. I will set the foundations for a conceptual framework to define agency in the most general terms possible. This framework should be able to capture the conditions at which something possesses agency and the features of different kinds of agents in a way that includes animals and plants, mobs, institutions, ecosystems, AI machines, artifacts, and so on. In general, I claim that agency is based on a weak notion of intentionality, ‘directedness’, which does not require mentality or purposefulness. (shrink)

Hans-Johann Glock develops a capacity-based alternative to the currently widespread view that concepts and experiences are mental representations. He claims that experiences must be explained by way of perceptual and sensory capacities and that concepts must be explained by way of intellectual ones, in particular, by way of capacities for classification and reasoning. Glock does not, however, identify concepts with intellectual capacities. He rather conceives of them as rules that guide the application of capacities. He defines the relationship between perceptions (...) and concepts by coupling rationalistic, Aristotelian, and Kantian motifs: perceptions are to be strictly distinguished from concepts; perceptual capacities genetically, causally, and conceptually precede conceptual ones; and conceptual capacities must, in principle, be applicable to objects of experience. Glock's “capacity approach” can accordingly be understood as a variant of non-conceptualism. (shrink)

All of our lives come to an end. For most people in Western societies, this is not until they reach a relatively advanced age, often 80 years and above. For others, death comes earlier, whether unexpectedly as when someone dies in car crash, or after a short or long period of physical decline as when a middle-aged person develops terminal cancer. To the extent that people experience such a stage of decline, usually with the prior knowledge that it will result (...) in their death, we tend to speak of their ‘end-of-life-stage’. In this chapter, my aim is to analyze one of the main ways in which our personal autonomy might be, and often is, undermined during this stage, namely that we come to suffer from severe cognitive impairments. To be more precise, I seek to show how two different philosophical views on personal autonomy can lead to very different verdicts on how severely cognitively impaired individuals may or ought to be treated in various contexts, whereby I will be mostly critical on one of the views discussed. On the first view, we cease to have autonomy-interests once we become severely cognitively impaired as we will no longer be capable of reflecting upon what makes our life worth living. On the second view, we continue to have such interests provided that we independently endorsed a conception of the good life before we became severely cognitively impaired. (shrink)

Predictability is a prerequisite for effective human control of artificial intelligence (AI). The inability to predict malfunctioning of AI, for example, impedes timely human intervention. In this paper, we empirically investigate how AI’s predictability compares to the predictability of humans in a real-effort task. We show that humans are worse at predicting AI performance than at predicting human performance. Importantly, participants are not aware of the differences in relative predictability of AI and overestimate their prediction skills. These results raise doubts (...) about the human ability to effectively exercise control of AI — at least in certain contexts. (shrink)

Sebastiano Franci (1715–1772), who belonged to the circle around Pietro Verri and to the authors of the Milanese journal ‘Il Caffè’, is one of the forgotten Enlightenment thinkers. He was influenced by the Physiocrats and put forward proposals for agricultural reform. As an alternative to the bloody war of expansion fought with weapons, he pleaded for a ‘war of industry’ to defeat humanity’s worst enemy, poverty, and to promote general prosperity, ‘public happiness’, which for him was the central purpose of (...) the state. Neither luxury nor trade were morally reprehensible, he said, because they precisely served this purpose. Trade, he argued, connected people, had a peacemaking function, and made people citizens of the world. On all these points, he was not a pioneer, but he was undoubtedly a typical enlightener whose ideas were inspired by the European Enlightenment. But as the author of the ‘Difesa delle donne’ he is – and this is his lasting merit – one of the early feminist thinkers. (shrink)

The purpose of the present article is to show how scientific activities appear in documentary evidence and in what way this agrees with evidence from scientific handbooks. This cannot be presented in a systematic way, since the research in the field of Arabic documents related to the sciences is only at its beginning and greatly varies across disciplines. Historians of the scientific disciplines in the Islamic world have based their accounts almost exclusively on literary works, and documents have played no (...) significant role. This contrasts with the situation in research on the sciences in classical antiquity, in which both literary and documentary sources inform scholarly consensus/opinion. The aim of this article is to give documentary examples of scientific activities and to explain how they are a significant contribution to our understanding of scientific practice. In most cases, scientific textbooks give little information about their social context and their Sitz im Leben. Often it remains an open question if their relevance goes beyond the restricted areas of school and education. As in many other domains of civilization, documents shed more light on practices in everyday life. This is also true for the domain of the sciences. The following examples for medicine, pharmacy, alchemy, magic, geomancy, cryptography, astronomy, and astrology will provide positive evidence for their practice outside the great cities. Naturally, the materials presented here are all from Middle or Upper Egypt. On the one hand, this limits the results based on them. On the other hand, they shed new light on a region for which no other source for scientific activities is available. At the end, the question of the continuity of astronomy from late antiquity to Islamic times will be discussed. It turns out that it returned to Egypt, after a break of 300 years, which is where it had been created more than a thousand years ago. (shrink)

This article contributes to normative debates about residential segregation and its relationship to inequality. It defends a position often disregarded in literature: that there is merit to advancing residential integration through some scenarios where advantaged individuals move to disadvantaged areas. It develops this case in dialogue with three other views. In relation to advocates of addressing the inequalities of residential segregation through redistribution, it defends integration as a means of tackling social and political factors that sustain injustice. It challenges those (...) who defend relocating disadvantaged individuals to advantaged areas by highlighting the burdens and demand for cultural assimilation this imposes on the disadvantaged. It considers the worry that advantaged individuals relocating to disadvantaged areas harbours the problematic features of gentrification. It responds that these concerns, while important in some cases, do not arise in all scenarios of this kind. (shrink)

The dissertation is mainly concerned with the following question: How can we be responsible for our attitudes? Traditional formulations of the philosophical problem underlying this question see it as a conflict between responsibility and the absence of voluntary control. I interpret it, by contrast, as a problem about the responsibility that we have for being (ir)rational. To illuminate this responsibility, I engage in discussions about the normative status of object-given reasons for attitudes, present a novel case against pragmatism about reasons (...) for attitudes, and propose that we can understand our responsibility for being (ir)rational by grounding the normative force of reasons for attitudes in our practice of holding each other answerable for our (ir)rationality. Properly distinguishing the direct answerability we have for our attitudes from the indirect accountability that we have for managing our attitudes allows us to see that not all kinds of responsibility presuppose control. Rather, attitudes for which we are directly answerable are within the space of reasons without always being within our control. (shrink)

In the 1987 Hollywood film Fatal Attraction, the protagonist Dan Gallagher, played by Michael Douglas, is a successful, wealthy Manhattan lawyer with an attractive wife and a daughter he dotes on. At the beginning of the film, he could not be more satisfied with his happy, conventional life. This all changes after an encounter with Alex Forrest, a seductive female played by Glenn Close. They meet at a business party and have a brief but memorable conversation. Not knowing if they (...) will ever meet again, they are surprised — and delighted — to encounter one another at a business meeting the following day, but Dan restrains his urge to flirt with her. After the meeting, he rushes outside on the way to his next appointment. Rain is bucketing down, but his umbrella refuses to unfurl. Emerging from the building at that moment, Alex comes up to him and jokingly asks,... (shrink)

In Scepticism and Naturalism Strawson characterized his position as a form of naturalism. Not even in that work, however, did he subscribe to any standardly recognized types of naturalism (ontological, epistemological, meta-philosophical). Strawson’s naturalism, as far as it goes, is anthropological instead of scientific, and descriptive rather than revisionary. It insists that central features of our common-sense conceptual scheme are part of our human nature and therefore immune to naturalization by either reduction or elimination. My contribution explores both strengths and (...) weaknesses of this position. It discusses the ‘relativizing move’ that insists on the legitimacy of both the ‘participant’ or ‘involved’ perspective of everyday life vs. the ‘objective’ or ‘detached’ of science as well as Strawson’s ‘relaxed realism’. It ends with a defence of the general idea of anthropological naturalism. In spite of problems concerning details of execution, this approach is more sober, realistic and illuminating than mainstream naturalisms. (shrink)

The idea of moral certainties is venerable, highly contentious, and nevertheless alive. What I call “hinge ethics” (in analogy to hinge epistemology) combines three currents – meta-ethical concerns about the scope and limits of moral knowledge and objectivity, the idea of limits of doubt as articulated in On Certainty, and sympathies for Wittgensteinian ideas about ethics. This essay critically assesses hinge ethics, focusing on Nigel Pleasants’ work. My main objection is not that Wittgensteinian ideas about certainty cannot be transferred from (...) the domain of physical phenomena to the moral domain. Nor shall I nail my colours to the mast of moral relativism. Instead my main tack will be as follows: Several of the views hinge ethicists detect in or derive from On Certainty are intriguing and ingenious, yet either unwarranted and/or not echt Wittgensteinian. Purported moral certainties like the wrongness of killing are neither ineffable, nor non-propositional, nor quasi-transcendental preconditions of moral thought and action. In so far as morality has scaffolding foundations, it is not certainties but capacities. At least some of these capacities are cognitive, a matter of social cognition. (shrink)

Commentaries on literary texts, be they Kāvyas or Nāṭyas, are a prolific though still much understudied genre in South Asia. The stress on the literary text as the achieved and circumscribed “work of art” has undermined studies on the reception history, transmission, and composing and staging of literary texts, where the poem or drama in its entirety is not always the main unit to be considered. Along these lines, literary commentaries are crucial for understanding the relation between theoretical prescriptions and (...) compositional/performative practices, as they often put these two dimensions of literature (the theoretical and the practical) into dialogue. Moreover, a host of knowledge systems (nāṭyaśāstra, alaṃkāraśāstra, vyākaraṇa, mīmāṃsā, etc.), along with their philosophical insights, technical vocabulary, and hermeneutical techniques, are employed, combined, and creatively refunctionalized in literary commentaries, which therefore represent a liminal genre of śāstra that crosses the seemingly well-established boundaries among disciplines and offers to the modern scholar a unique window into the intellectual life of premodern South Asia. (shrink)

Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign-function mapping optionality, one of acquisition-dependent sign-function coupling, and one of lack of motivatedness. We characterize these notions, illustrate the benefits of keeping them apart, and describe two reactions to our proposal: (...) abandoning arbitrariness-talk in favor of the newly introduced conceptual vocabulary, or feeding the distinctions back into the parent concept. (shrink)

An important part of friendships are the so-called special obligations generated by them. Friends owe things to each other that they do not owe to strangers. While such special obligations are an important part of our everyday practice, they raise several philosophical questions. These questions include the status of special obligations (are such obligations sui generis or is it possible to reduce them to general moral principles?), the source of such special obligations (what grounds special obligations of friendship?), and the (...) content of special obligations (what is the content of special obligations of friendship?). This chapter gives an overview of some of the most important positions in the literature with regard to these questions. (shrink)

Denkard VII which considered as the “Legend of Zoroaster” has been the subject of several investigations. The first translation was by E.W. West (1897: The Sacred Books of the East. Vol. 47. Clarendon: Oxford University Press: 26); Many years later Marijan Molé (1967) published a French version of Book VII; in Persian, Ahmad Tafazzolī and Žāleh Āmūzgār (1993: 55–110) translated some parts of the book VII; the last version which is in Persian belongs to Rashed Muhassel (2012: Denkard VII. Tehran: (...) Pažuheshgāh-e olūm-e ensāni). Chapter two, sentence 34 of Denkard VII contains a word transcribed as tōšn / tušn of which this essay aims to have a critical view. (shrink)

In recent years, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly invoked the notion of ‘New India’ to describe its policies. In a Times of India column on 30 May 2022, Home Minister Amit Shah defined New India as ‘resilient, strong, capable and atmanirbhar’ (self-reliant), adding that its ‘foundations have been laid by the PM’. The idea denotes a political project that the government seeks to bring about, but also rings of self-congratulatory triumphalism – New India is not only (...) a goal towards which the government strives, but it is in the making in the here and now. What does the project of New India entail? The themes of the Home Minister’s article remarkably illustrate what historian Ravinder Kaur has termed as the ‘capitalization of the nation-state’. It insists on the economy, arguing that India recovered tremendously well from the Covid crisis and lauding India’s rise in the ease of doing business ranking. Amit Shah depicts the government’s economic policy as an inclusive project, repeating the official slogan ‘Sab ka sath, sab ka vikas’ and listing schemes and packages supposed to have benefitted ‘all sections of society’. The article also mentions India’s standing in the world of nations, praising the prime minister for making ‘the world realize the importance and significance of India’ – a search for global recognition in line with what Kaur describes as an aspiration to ‘cleanse the shame of colonial subjugation’. This assertion rests on a ‘deep focus on national security’: the minister invokes the defence budget, the acquisition of new armament like the Rafale fighter jet, and a tough stance on terrorism as signs that the nation now has a decisive and unwavering leader in the prime minister. In short, in Amit Shah’s words, the advent of New India is something Indians should celebrate as the country commemorates its 75 years of independence. New India is the moment when what the independence was supposed to bring finally becomes a reality. New India, the reader seems to be implicitly told, is the moment when you finally get a chance. The rhetoric of New India thus addresses a dual audience: it tells the world of India’s readiness for investment, while telling Indians that a new dawn has come. Ravinder Kaur thus describes New India as ‘the popular name for the postreform, techno-friendly, high-consumption entrepreneurial nation’ which is meant to be ‘an income-generating asset’. The current government, however, is not the first to talk of New India. At the time of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of India’s new awakening, wishing the decolonial moment to see the triumph of democracy, with India as a moral leader among postcolonial states. Moreover, New India was to achieve prosperity through central planning and industrial development, led by rational engineers and technocrats. Yet despite the modernist character of Nehru’s post-independence project, it is interesting to note that a major book on the subject, Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India, does not mention the expression at all. The idea of New India took on a different meaning with the liberalization initiated in 1991, one that sought, precisely, to consign to the past what were now seen as the problems of the Nehruvian era – a slow and bureaucratic state that impeded economic growth. The exercise of branding India to the world as a new capitalist Eldorado thus began not with the Bharat Janata Party’s ascent to power in 2014 but in the 1990s, later reinforced by the BJP’s India Shining campaign in 2004 and the Congress’ focus on the benefits to the common man, the aam aadmi. What is so new, then, about New India? (shrink)

The introduction charts Hans-Johann Glock’s academic career, introduces some of his core philosophical views, and provides an overview of the chapters included in the festschrift.

Who speaks for Muslims in India? Who are the leaders of the so-called “Muslim organizations”? What family and educational background do they come from? What is their relation to state authorities? This article addresses these questions by presenting a unique biographical database and the results of statistical treatments (multiple correspondence analysis and hierarchical clustering on principal components) of this data. This database includes the office-bearers of a selected set of organizations that make representative claims in the name of Muslims in (...) India. Our analysis thus delineates the contours of the social space of Muslim spokespersons in India and describes how it is structured. We will highlight the important distinctions that exist among these Muslim spokespersons, such as the opposition between secular figures and religious scholars, the political sphere and the educational sphere, and between central power and regional dynamics. This analysis allows us, more broadly, to examine the role of state authorities in the definition of the Muslim spokespersons, thus highlighting some of the characteristic features of state secularism in India. (shrink)

This chapter is devoted to an examination of state-family relations by looking at the political and regulatory making of the family in the modern and contemporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The co-constitutiveness of family as social system as well as an ideological trope and the modern nation state has triggered a situation of entanglement, if not amalgamation, between the political and the familial. The different national trajectories of state-building projects as well as the changing politics of reform (...) and modernization have directly affected the ways in which family and kin are absorbed, marginalized and/or reshuffled. Starting from the much-observed ubiquitous family crisis discourse in the region, the chapter explores the different ways in which the hegemonic model of the conjugal, male bread-winner family continues to be invested by different societal as well as political forces. At the same time, it stresses the diversity of social settings and the complexity of forms of selfing subsumed under the generalizing label of family. (shrink)

This article examines prisoner photography in Qajar Iran encompassing images not only of criminals but also of religious apostates and political opponents, taken in an institutional framework between the 1860s and the 1910s. The article sheds light on the use of photography as a technology of violence by the Qajar autocracy in the late nineteenth century and its use as a technology of evidence following the police reforms in the early twentieth century. Frequently used prior to imminent execution, photographs of (...) prisoners became a ritual within the violent regime: a performative act associated with death and dying. Thus, prisoner photography correlated with the earlier body-centred forms of chastisement and torture in Qajar society that were abounded from the public spaces after several penal reforms. It was only in the wake of the broad-reaching police reforms in the 1910s that a universal system of judicial photography as instructed by Alphonse Bertillon was established, epitomising the ostensive aspects of the global mobility and circulation of technologies, methods and expertise. Thus, the practice of photographing prisoners lays bare unique insights into the judicial and penal systems of Qajar Iran and their ensuing transformation as part of modernisation and the formation of nation-building. (shrink)

This essay argues that an alternative conception of time to that underlying the ideology of productivism and growth is not only possible, but desirable. The creation of this time requires what I refer to as the practice of refusal via taking time: the self-determined arrangement of the nexus of time, action and utility that begins with the a-synchronous insertion of unproductive time into the synchronous horizontal time of productivism. The essay is divided into three sections. The first offers the reader (...) a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s notion of time as a social and political medium that partitions and distributes actions and utility. The subsequent section of the essay elaborates in aesthetic terms an account of unproductive time that is indifferent to the time of productivism. In the final section, I discuss examples that show how taking time to do ‘nothing’ can elicit an emancipatory politics that seeks to liberate us from the hegemony of productivism. I conclude that political theory should attend to time as a political medium and to the possibilities of its occupation, and that picturing the taking of time in terms of stopping the force of productivism’s normalized horizontal time by entering the unproductive time of reverie and aesthetic experience, provides a promising perspective from which to apprehend a time for thriftless refusals, deliberate dis-identifications, and the forging of cooperation among people(s) and with nature. (shrink)

This is a revised short overview of Plato’s “greatest thing to be learned” or the “greatest lesson” (megiston mathêma) – the Idea of the Good.

This chapter explores the case of Switzerland as a “small power” in the currently emerging new world order. Particularly, we address the Swiss position amid the growing strategic competition between the United States (US) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and given its long-standing but evolving practice of neutrality. In our chapter, we set off by discussing Switzerland’s foreign policy positioning against the backdrop of three theoretical perspectives: Switzerland as a state like all others; Switzerland as a small state; (...) and, finally Switzerland as a small neutral state. With the help of these three categories, we further locate Switzerland’s foreign policy firmly in the “hedging zone,” especially concerning the country’s China policy. The chapter then discusses four key documents, all of which have been released in recent years, drawing out the country’s foreign policy framework, before reaching some conclusions. (shrink)

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number (...) of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts. (shrink)

When two actors have the same mental state but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits a milder moral judgement. To understand how this outcome effect would affect post-harm interactions between victims and perpetrators, we examined how the social role from which transgressions are perceived moderates the outcome effect, and how outcome effects on moral judgements transfer to agentic and communal interpersonal goals. Three vignette experiments (N = 950) (...) revealed similar outcome effects on moral judgement across social roles. In contrast, outcome effects on agentic and communal goals varied by social role: victims exhibited the strongest outcome effects and perpetrators the weakest, with bystanders falling in between. Moral judgement did not mediate the effects of outcome severity on interpersonal goals. We discuss the possibility that outcome severity raises normative expectations regarding post-harm interactions that are unrelated to moral considerations. (shrink)

Relational values have recently been proposed as a concept to expand our understanding of environmental values from the categories previously dominating the discourse: instrumental (nature for people's sake) and intrinsic values (nature for its own sake). Empirical and conceptual research on relational values has so far focused on the content of relational values or their relationship to other kinds of values. In this paper, we fill a key gap in understanding exactly what relational values are and how they work; we (...) call this the ‘syntax’ of relational values. We do so by applying the Syntax of Environmental Values Framework, which describes relational values as bidirectional, expressed by genuine respect and care on the one hand and an eudaimonic contribution to wellbeing on the other. We developed a novel interview protocol which we applied in semistructured interviews with Swiss alpine farmers. We examine how both of these directions are manifested in farmers' relational values. Our results showed how the bidirectionality manifests in relational values of alpine farmers. Specifically, we identified three components of each directionality. The intrinsic element of relational values was constituted by: an attitude of respect, attention to the relationship and practices of care. The instrumental element of relational values was constituted by: emotional and experiential contributions for the valuer, satisfaction and joy in the relationship, and practical contributions to the activities associated with the relationship (e.g. farm management). We further elaborate on the conditions required to sustain relational values, including physical, emotional and sociopolitical conditions. These results informed an elaborated conceptual framework of relational values, and environmental valuing more generally. While specifically derived from our dataset, we believe our conclusions could directly or in a modified form, apply to diverse cases of relational valuing. In sum, this paper offers a concrete step towards better characterizing, distinguishing and applying the relational values concept. (shrink)

Traditional evolutionary theory invoked natural and sexual selection to explain species- and sex-typical traits. However, some heritable inter-individual variability in behaviour and psychology – personality – is probably adaptive. Here we extend this insight to common psychopathological traits. Reviewing key findings from three background areas of importance – theoretical models, non-human personality and evolved human social dynamics – we propose that a combination of social niche specialisation, negative frequency-dependency, balancing selection and adaptive developmental plasticity should explain adaptation for individual differences (...) in psychology – ‘specialised minds’ – explaining some variance in personality and psychopathology trait dimensions, which share various characteristics. We suggest that anthropological research of behavioural differences should be extended past broad demographic factors (age and sex) to include individual specialisations. As a first step towards grounding psychopathology in ancestral social structure, we propose a minimum plausible prevalence, given likely ancestral group sizes, for negatively frequency-dependent phenotypes to be maintained as specialised tails of adaptive distributions – below the calculated prevalence, specialisation is highly unlikely. For instance, chronic highly debilitating forms of autism or schizophrenia are too rare for such explanations, whereas attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and broad autism phenotypes are common enough to have existed in most hunter-gatherer bands, making adaptive explanations more plausible. (shrink)

The biopsychosocial model remains the de facto framework of current healthcare, but lacks causational depth, scientific rigour, or any recognition of the importance of evolutionary theory for understanding health and disease. In this article it is updated to integrate Tinbergen’s four questions with the three biopsychosocial levels. This ‘evobiopsychosocial’ schema provides a more complete framework for understanding causation of medical conditions. Its application is exemplified by tabulating depression, rheumatoid arthritis and COVID-19 within its format, which highlights the direct research and (...) practical applications uniquely offered by evolutionary medicine. An evobiopsychosocial framework can serve as a useful tool to introduce evolutionary concepts into mainstream medicine by highlighting the broad and specific contributions of evolutionary analysis to researching, treating and preventing health conditions, providing a suitable next step for the mainstream model of medicine. (shrink)

This chapter replies to and reflects on the comments and discussions provided by the contributors to the festschrift.

Affect-based theorists and life satisfaction theorists disagree about the nature of happiness, but agree about this methodological principle: a philosophical theory of happiness should be in line with the folk concept HAPPINESS. In this article, we present two empirical studies indicating that it is affect-based theories that get the folk concept HAPPINESS right: competent speakers judge a person to be happy if and only if that person is described as feeling pleasure/good most of the time. Our studies also show that (...) the judgement that a person is feeling pleasure/good most of the time reliably brings about the judgement that they are satisfied with their life, even if that person is described as not satisfied. We suggest that this direct causal relation between the concepts POSITIVE AFFECT and LIFE SATISFACTION might explain why many philosophers have been attracted to life satisfaction theories. (shrink)

In the standard volunteer’s dilemma (VoD), a single prosocial act (i.e., volunteering) yields the optimal overall outcome. Whereas the volunteer’s outcome is certain, the defector’s outcome depends on what others do. This research addressed the confounding of prosocial responses with uncertainty avoidance in the standard VoD. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 102) considered 18 hypothetical one-shot two-person VoD scenarios with certain, risky, and uncertain outcomes when volunteering. In Experiment 2, participants (N = 496) considered three hypothetical one-shot two-person VoD (...) scenarios; a certain VoD and two uncertain VoDs of which one had a lower expected collective outcome of volunteering than the certain VoD and the other a higher one. Results suggest that volunteering does not reflect a desire to avoid uncertainty but to maximize expected collective outcomes, reinforcing the assumption that the high volunteering rates we see in a standard VoD are due to social/moral preferences and social projection. (shrink)

Governments in developing countries struggle to reach intended beneficiaries when targeting social transfers towards vulnerable populations. Rates of eligible individuals not receiving social transfers and ineligible individuals receiving them tend to be high, constraining the effectiveness of such anti-poverty programs. While interventions to incentivize or monitor local agents in charge of selecting beneficiaries are typically expensive, an important complementary and cost-effective approach could be to reform eligibility criteria to facilitate the selection of beneficiaries. Whether reforms should focus on reducing the (...) number of rules, or selecting criteria which are easy to verify, or do both remains an unanswered question. We address this knowledge gap based on India’s social pension scheme for elderly poor. We find that making eligibility criteria easier to verify has the potential to achieve a substantial improvement in the targeting performance through a reduction in the exclusion error. Those who meet the relevant criteria have a much higher chance of actually becoming beneficiaries. Since eligibility criteria can be changed at low cost, this suggests a viable route for reform in many developing countries. However, a major caveat remains that criteria must sufficiently well reflect actual poverty if the more accurate selection of beneficiaries according to formal criteria shall also translate into actual poverty reduction. (shrink)

Background: Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is a rare, but lethal pediatric brain tumor with a median survival of less than 1 year. Existing treatment may prolong life and control symptoms, but may cause toxicity and side effects. In order to improve child- and family-centered care, we aimed to better understand the treatment decision-making experiences of parents, as studies on this topic are currently lacking. Procedure: The data for this study came from 24 semistructured interviews with parents whose children were (...) diagnosed with DIPG in two children's hospitals in Switzerland and died between 2000 and 2016. Analysis of the dataset was done using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: For most parents, the decision for or against treatment was relatively straightforward given the fatality of the tumor and the absence of treatment protocols. Most of them had no regrets about their decision for or against treatment. The most distressing factor for them was observing their child's gradual loss of independence and informing them about the inescapability of death. To counter this powerlessness, many parents opted for complementary or alternative medicine in order to "do something." Many parents reported psychological problems in the aftermath of their child's death and coping strategies between mothers and fathers often differed. Conclusion: The challenges of DIPG are unique and explain why parental and shared decision-making is different in DIPG compared to other cancer diagnoses. Considering that treatment decisions shape parents' grief trajectory, clinicians should reassure parents by framing treatment decisions in terms of family's deeply held values and goals. (shrink)

This political biography is the first ever written about Ponická, despite her being a household name in Slovakia. Josette Baer’s analysis is based on Ponická’s memoirs of that cruel year of 1977, newspaper articles she published prior to 1971, when the regime effectively banned any critical voice from publication, and newspaper articles she published after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 to promote the establishing of a rule-of-law state and democracy. The documents of the StB, the Slovak and Czech Security Services, (...) are analyzed for the first time; they are evidence of how the StB tried to pressure the resilient and disciplined grandmother of three into obedience. Oral history interviews with Dirk Matthias Dalberg, Vlasta Jaksicsová, and Mary Šamal inform the reader about the situation of the Slovak dissidents of Charter 77, how normal citizens lived in the regime, and how the Czech and Slovak exile communities in the USA saw the dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia. (shrink)

Language is a potential source of predictors for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs), as changes in speech characteristics, communication habits, and word choice may be indicative of increased suicide risk. We reviewed the current literature on STBs that investigated linguistic features of spoken and written language. Specifically, we performed a search in linguistic, medical, engineering, and general databases for studies that investigated linguistic features as potential predictors of STBs published in peer-reviewed journals until the end of November 2021.We included 75 (...) studies that investigated 279,032 individuals with STBs (age = 29.53 ± 10.29, 35% females). Of those, 34 (45%) focused on lexicon, 20 (27%) on prosody, 15 (20%) on lexicon and first-person singular, four (5%) on (morpho)syntax, and two (3%) were unspecified. Suicidal thoughts were predicted by more intensifiers and superlatives, while suicidal behaviors were predicted by greater usage of pronouns, changes in the amount of verb usage, more prepend and multifunctional words, more nouns and prepositions, and fewer modifiers and numerals. A diverse field of research currently investigates linguistic predictors of STBs, and more focus is needed on their specificity for either suicidal thoughts or behaviors. (shrink)