Background: In modern society, death has become ‘forbidden’ fed by the medical technology to conquer death. The technological paradigm is challenged by a social-liberal political ideology in postmodern Western societies. The question raised in this study was as follows: Which arguments, attitudes, values and paradoxes between modern and postmodern tendencies concerning treatment and care of older persons with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator appear in the literature? Aims: The aim of this study was to describe and interpret how the field of (...) tension concerning older persons with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator – especially end-of-life issues – has been expressed in the literature throughout the last decade. Methods: Paul Ricoeur’s reflexive interpretive approach was used to extract the meaningful content of the literature involving qualitative, quantitative and normative literature. Analysis and interpretation involved naive reading, structural analysis and critical interpretation. Ethical considerations: The investigation complied with the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. Findings and discussions: The unifying theme was ‘Normativity under change’. The sub-themes were ‘Death has become legitimate’, ‘The technological imperative is challenged’ and ‘Patients and healthcare professionals need to talk about end-of-life issues’. There seems to be a considerable distance between the normative approach of how practice ought to be and findings in empirical studies. Conclusion: Modern as well as postmodern attitudes and perceptions illustrate contradictory tendencies regarding deactivation of the implantable cardioverter defibrillator and replacement of the implantable cardioverter defibrillator in older persons nearing the end of life. The tendencies challenge each other in a struggle to gain position. On the other hand, they can also complement each other because professionalism and health professional expertise cannot stand alone when the patient’s life is at stake but must be unfolded in an alliance with the patient who needs to be understood and accepted in his vulnerability. (shrink)

In the following study we shall investigate the ancient Greek ‘(all-)day runners’ (ήμεροδρόμοι) 2 from a historical as well as from a modern physiological perspective. Hemerodromoi were of some importance in Greek interstate communication, in particular in military long-distance communication, and are, accordingly, a subject of some interest for the study of interaction in the ancient Greek city-state culture. The investigation begins by considering the ancient evidence on these ‘(all-)day runners’ and moves on to a physiological consideration of this evidence, (...) with particular reference to the feat of the Athenian hemerodromos Pheidippides 3 who ran from Athens to Sparta in 490 BC, shortly before the famous battle of Marathon. (shrink)

The manufacturing industry faces a trend in which employees’ work processes are being redesigned into simple, repetitive tasks that maximize performance and efficiency. This neo-Tayloristic business model reduces social interactions and stifles relationship building, leading to disgruntled employees and raising questions about leaders’ moral obligation as to the mechanisms they use to enhance employees’ performance at work. As an alternative to redesigning work processes, we contend that servant leaders can enhance employees’ overall performance by cultivating positive interpersonal dynamics at work (...) where social connectedness flourishes. Integrating insights from self-determination theory with servant leadership’s moral foundations, we investigate the degree to which servant leadership fosters two elements of a relationally supportive social context, interactional justice climate and coworker support, that facilitate its influence on followers’ intrinsic motivation and, subsequently, their voice and in-role performance. Temporally-separated data collected from a sample of 296 employees and their supervisors situated in 44 teams yielded results that support our hypotheses. Results underscore the importance of servant leadership cultivating a positive relational context to increase employees’ intrinsic motivation and improve their behaviors at work. (shrink)

This paper examines the way in which Ordinary Language Philosophy came to exert an important influence on the work done at Aarhus University’s department of philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century. The first section depicts the rise of Ordinary Language Philosophy as an international movement centered around Oxford in the wake of World War ii. The second section goes on to describe how it was brought to Aarhus by Professor Justus Hartnack, who had been deeply influenced by (...) the movement during stays abroad in the UK and the US. The following three sections move on to describe some of the important ways in which Ordinary Language Philosophy has influenced the work of three of Hartnack’s most prominent students, who have influenced the life of the department in crucial ways from the 1970s until recently. Finally, the paper ends by briefly assessing the legacy and contemporary influence of Ordinary Language Philosophy in Aarhus. (shrink)

The shapes of neurons and glial cells dictate many important aspects of their functions. In olfactory systems, certain architectural features are characteristics of these two cell types across a wide variety of species. The accumulated evidence suggests that these common features may play fundamental roles in olfactoryinformation processing. For instance, the primary olfactory neuropil in most vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems is organized into discrete modules called glomeruli. Inside each glomerulus, sensory axons and CNS neurons branch and synapse in patterns (...) that are repeated across species. In many species, moreover, the glomeruli are enveloped by a thin and ordered layer of glial processes. Theglomerular arrangement reflects the processing of odor information in modules that encode the discrete molecular attributes of odorant stimuli being processed. Recent studies of the mechanisms that guide the development of olfactory neurons and glial cells have revealed complex reciprocal interactions between these two cell types, which may be necessary for the establishment of modular compartments. Collectively, the findings reviewed here suggest that specialized cellular architecture plays key functional roles in the detection, analysis, and discrimination of odors at early steps in olfactory processing. (shrink)

A number of philosophers, from Thomas Reid1 through C. A. J. Coady2, have argued that one is justified in relying on the testimony of others, and furthermore, that this should be taken as a basic epistemic presumption. If such a general presumption were not ultimately dependent on evidence for the reliability of other people, the ground for this presumption would be a priori. Such a presumption would then have a status like that which Roderick Chisholm claims for the epistemic (...) principle that we are justified in believing what our senses tell us. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Curative Work:Dana's Two Years Before The MastAllan Christensen (bio)In narrating his voyage out from Boston on the Pilgrim and his voyage home on the Alert, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., encourages an ambivalent interpretation of the experience. As one possibility, contagious sickness and forms of bondage characterize the culture of home, whereas the sailor's condition and less civilized sites offer health, romance, and freedom. But an opposite possibility is (...) that the ship resembles an unhealthy prison and the foreign settings are spoiled, and so hope resides in the curative power still emanating from the civilization of home. The two possibilities may relate to the Goethean-Carlylean pattern of Bildung, whereby the protagonist initially rebels and escapes from home but later repents and returns, recognizing that his America must be "here or nowhere" (Carlyle 1899, 156),1 in Massachusetts rather than in California. Dana indeed desires first to become entirely the sailor but then in terror before that eventuality desires to return to his identity as a Harvard scholar. With respect to the motif of literacy, the initial effort to live fully amid the bracing energies of winds and sea gives way to an appreciation of the curative force of reading and writing books. Yet the two phases are not after all so neatly opposed and divided between two halves of the story. They coexist in a tension that is sometimes also resolved.In 1842, two years after publishing Two Years before the Mast, Dana began to compose "An Autobiographical Sketch, 1815–1841." This "Sketch" (1968) creates a context for the previously published work that justifies the first of the two interpretations. His early life has already featured, in the "Sketch," many incidents of wandering away from home and of rebellion against the restrictions and injustices of society. The turbulent young protagonist especially resents the tyranny of the schoolmasters who administer floggings and later the tyranny of the authorities at Harvard College who unfairly punish a classmate. In response to this latter incident, Dana's own rebellion leads to his suspension from the college for a term, an event that he welcomes as a liberation from an oppressive educational system. The inevitability of his future career as [End Page 219] a lawyer also weighs heavily upon him and probably worsens an incapacitating crisis of 1834. Specifically, the crisis begins with a contagious disease: he catches measles, an illness that triggers a hereditary tendency toward degenerating eyesight, and reading becomes insupportably painful for him. The revulsion against books derives, as Thomas Philbrick suspects, from both physical and psychological causes (1981, 10).2 Dana seeks an occupation that will remove him not only from the necessity of reading but from the debilitating, literate civilization of New England. At this juncture the lure of a sea voyage becomes irresistible:I had many offers of free passage, but I knew a passenger's life would be insupportable without books. Partly from these considerations, but aided very much by the attractiveness of the romance & adventure of the thing, I determined to go before the mast, where I knew that the constant occupation would make reading unnecessary.(Dana 1968, 1:26–27)As opposed to the culture associated with books, the sailor's life offers health as well as romance and freedom. Omitting, then, as unnecessary any account of the intervening events narrated in Two Years before the Mast, the "Autobiographical Sketch" resumes the narrative by restating the opposition:I will take this journal up, again, from the place where my published narration ends. Upon our arrival at Boston on 22 of Sept 1836,... I was very much struck with the pallid & emaciated appearance of the gentlemen I met with, when compared with the rough, sun burnt, hardy faces which I had solely seen for the last five months. If I had been [told] that there had been a famine or fever in the city & that these persons were recovering its effects, I should have said that their appearances indicated it plainly enough. The women looked like mere shades.(Dana 1968, 1:28)In the penultimate chapter of Two Years, one of the pallid, apparently fever-stricken Bostonians had observed, on meeting the... (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that when epistemic peers disagree, each has an obligation to accord the other's assessment the same weight as her own. I first make the antecedent of this Equal-Weight View more precise, and then I motivate the View by describing cases in which it gives the intuitively correct verdict. Next I introduce some apparent counterexamples – cases of apparent peer disagreement in which, intuitively, one should not give equal weight to the other party's assessment. To defuse these apparent (...) counterexamples, an advocate of the View might try to explain how they are not genuine cases of peer disagreement. I examine David Christensen's and Adam Elga's explanations and find them wanting. I then offer a novel explanation, which turns on a distinction between knowledge from reports and knowledge from direct acquaintance. Finally, I extend my explanation to provide a handy and satisfying response to the charge of self-defeat. (shrink)

In philosophy, as in many other disciplines and domains, stable disagreement among peers is a widespread and well-known phenomenon. Our intuitions about paradigm cases, e.g. Christensen's Restaurant Case, suggest that in such controversies suspension of judgment is rationally required. This would prima facie suggest a robust suspension of judgment in philosophy. But we are still lacking a deeper theoretical explanation of why and under what conditions suspension is rationally mandatory. In the first part of this paper I will focus (...) on this question. After a critical survey of some recent alternative approaches (diversity as a thread to the reliability, decision problem, acquisition of undercutting defeaters), I will argue that in fact discovering disagreement with an opponent provides me with a rebutting defeater, but only if some further non-trivial conditions are satisfied - among them my acknowledging her as my reliability peer. In the second part of the paper I will explore in more detail the skeptical implications this account has for philosophy. Here, I will defend two claims. First, skepticism about philosophy is mandatory only if the relevant peerness assumption can be justified. Second, in philosophy there is no basis available that would support the relevant peerness assumption. If this is correct, we are not forced into skepticism about philosophy and may rationally retain our philosophical beliefs even in the face of controversy. (shrink)

This essay explores the nature and neurological basis of creativity in technical production. After presenting a model of expert technical cognition based in cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology, the authors propose that craft production has three inherent sources of novelty — procedural drift, serendipitous error and fiddling. However, these are quite limited in their creative potential, which may help explain the virtual absence of innovation over the long millennia of the Palaeolithic. Innovation can be far more rapid and effective via (...) invention, which requires folk theories of causation and adequate working memory capacity, all fairly recent evolutionary developments. The neurological basis of expert technical cognition lies in well-known cortical and sub-cortical structures, but recent research has established a provocative role for the cerebellum in the formulation of novel arrangements. (shrink)

Recently, Tomas Bogardus (2016), Andreas Mogensen (2017) and – at least on one plausible reconstruction – Sharon Street (2005) have argued that evolutionary theory debunks our moral beliefs by providing higher-order evidence of error. In response, moral realists such as Katia Vavova (2014) have objected that such evolutionary debunking arguments are self-defeating. The literature lacks any discussion of whether this self-defeat objection can be handled. My overall aim is to argue that it cannot, thus filling that lacuna – and vindicating (...) Vavova’s worry. To achieve my aim, I proceed in two steps. First, I propose a novel, prima facie promising strategy for avoiding self-defeat: evolutionary debunkers should reject Conciliationism, as defended by David Christensen (2007, 2009, 2011) and others, and instead explore Thomas Kelly’s (2010) Total Evidence View as their background view on the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence of error. Then, I show that evolutionary debunkers face insuperable difficulties trying to successfully implement that strategy. Depending on the kind of higher-order evidence of error that evolutionary considerations putatively provide, they either struggle with evidential weight or are committed to inconsistent assumptions about evolutionary counterparts. Either way, the evolutionary debunking argument from higher-order evidence of error fails. (shrink)

The paper is about the interpretation of opaque verbs like “seek”, “owe”, and “resemble” which allow for unspecific readings of their (indefinite) objects. It is shown that the following two observations create a problem for semantic analysis: (a) The opaque position is upward monotone: “John seeks a unicorn” implies “John seeks an animal”, given that “unicorn” is more specific than “animal”. (b) Indefinite objects of opaque verbs allow for higher-order, or “underspecific”, readings: “Jones is looking for something Smith is looking (...) for” can express that there is something unspecific that both Jones and Smith are looking for. Given (a) and (b), it would seem that the following inference is hard to escape, if the premisses are construed unspecifically and the conclusion is taken on its under- specific reading: Jones is looking for a sweater. Smith is looking for a pen. Smith is looking for something Jones is looking for. (shrink)

This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is critical (...) for formal ontology. We provide examples to support this thesis from the domain of biomedicine. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Findings in dynamic unit formation suggest that completion processes reflect the optics of our world. Dynamic unit formation may depend on patterns of motion signals that are consistent with the causes of optical changes. In addition, dynamic completion conforms to a local curvature minimization constraint. Such relational aspects of vision are important to consider in linking perceptual experience and neural activity.

[1] From Thales to Plato.--[2] From Aristotle to Plotinus.

THEISTIC IDEALISM ; OR, BEEKELET.* Visa quaedam mitti a Deo velut ea quae in somnis videantur. Cic. ACAD. ii.. IRELAND may claim the distinction of having..

Semantic theories account for the literal, conventional meanings of linguistic expressions, and they tend to do so by assigning them one or more semantic values: extensions, intensions, and characters. Lest semantics should be a cul-de-sac, at least some of these values must be interpretable from the outside. The semantic values, are supposed to figure in accounts of preconditions of utterances and their communicative effects, contributing aspects of their literal meaning. The semantic values are assigned to expressions, not to surface strings. (...) The disambiguation of surface strings usually shows in the part-whole structure of the underlying expressions. The semantically relevant parts of an expression need not be determined according to its surface structure. Rather, there is a specific level of syntactic analysis—sometimes called Logical Form —that defines the syntactic input to semantic analysis. The compositional treatment of an expression may call for otherwise unmotivated structuring. (shrink)

In the European Enlightenments it was often argued that moral conduct rather than adherence to certain theological doctrines was the true measure of religious belief. Thomas Ahnert argues that this characteristically “enlightened” emphasis on conduct in religion was less reliant on arguments from reason alone than is commonly believed. In fact, the champions of the Scottish Enlightenment were deeply skeptical of the power of unassisted natural reason in achieving “enlightened” virtue and piety. They advocated a practical program of “moral (...) culture,” in which revealed religion was of central importance. Ahnert traces this to theological controversies going back as far as the Reformation concerning the key question of early modern theology, the conditions of salvation. His findings present a new point of departure for all scholars interested in the intersection of religion and Enlightenment. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Karl Marx’s claim in his Economic and Phil-osophic Manuscripts of 1844, that the subject in its “individual existence is at the same time a social being.” I redefine what has been translated as “social being” as “common being” in order to extrapolate an understanding of subjectivity that is a socio-ontological and collectively structured collectivity. In doing so, I demonstrate (1) that this common being is a collection of different socio-ontological traits; (2) that in order for (...) this common being to be approximated we must take into account all modes of subjectivity production that intersect in what will appear as the subject; and (3) that the Other is the constitutive parameter of the common being on which the subject depends. Finally, I revisit three exemplary modes of practice - namely critique, solidarity, and utopia - and show that conceiving of the subject as a common being renders critique constellational, solidarity overdetermined, and utopia a koinotopia. (shrink)