In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 151-171 [Access article in PDF] Eric Voegelin on Nazi Political Extremism Clifford F. Porter Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is not as well known among historians as he is among political theorists, yet he has had a continuing influence on both German Social Democrat and Christian Democrat political leaders. His early life is very much a reflection of both the intellectual developments (...) and the chaos of Germany and Austria between the wars. Voegelin's analysis of Nazism is worth revisiting by historians because it delineated the Nazi rationale for the Holocaust in the early 1930s, even if the Nazis themselves had yet to move towards mass murder early in the regime. Voegelin was not prescient enough to predict the extent of the Holocaust, but he understood that the ideological rationale of Nazi violence was unlimited. Furthermore, his description of political extremism as Gnosticism in 1952 is valid for explaining why an individual might support the Nazis and then voluntarily commit extraordinarily vicious acts to try to realize the dream-world of the Third Reich.The political, economic, and social chaos in Austria after World War I was the catalyst for the young Eric Voegelin's studies of the essence of ideologies and the ideologists who promoted them from both the left and right wing. As National Socialism grew, so did his experiences with and understanding of extremist political ideologies. Contemporary intellectual debates between neo-Kantian and existentialist methodology, however, did not help penetrate to the essential causes of political extremism. His experiences in America in the mid-1920s were essential for his development away from what he characterized as narrow methodological provincialism to an empiricism open to philosophic questions, including spiritual questions. By 1938 he had theorized that ideologies were political secular religions that substituted the state for divine reality.Because of this interpretation, Voegelin's approach to totalitarianism has been characterized as an outdated ersatz religion model, better suited for the Cold War. 1 The ersatz religion model worked reasonably well to describe similarities [End Page 151] the National Socialist movement had with religions, but Voegelin recognized that it did not penetrate to the essence of ideologies. His understanding of ideologies matured after World War II into his theory that ideologies were Gnostic quests for absolute certainty that caused alienation from reality.Voegelin thought that the search for certainty ultimately required excluding any evidence to the contrary of the ideology; therefore, ideologies limited the individual's view of human reality to the immediate world. Furthermore, although ideologies are founded on a kernel of truth—e.g., proletarians are sometimes oppressed—ideologists become quickly alienated from reality as a consequence of their own quest for certainty about meaning in existence. The consequences of alienation are that ideologists pursue the perceived immanent good and try to eliminate the perceived immanent evil, thereby rationalizing criminality and even murder. Violence is inherent to extremist political ideologies. Background and Influences: Weber, Kraus, University, and America Eric Voegelin was born in 1901 and grew up in Vienna. After the war Austria was convulsed by political and social crises ranging from attempted reactionary and Communist coups to constant food shortages. In the first post-war election Voegelin's political and social inclinations led him to vote for the Social Democratic Party (SDP), but he was aggravated by the uncompromising Marxist rhetoric of the SDP leadership. In this atmosphere Voegelin began his long journey toward understanding ideologies, but first he had to work through many different political and philosophic problems before he arrived at an adequate understanding. The intellectuals that influenced him during this long process were diverse, but they shared a hostility to ideologies.The first important academic influence on Voegelin was Max Weber. 2 Weber encouraged intellektuelle Rechtschaffenheit (intellectual honesty) with others and especially with oneself. Weber insisted on following an ethic of responsibility for one's actions (Verantwortungsethik), rather than making apologies for following an ethic of good intentions (Gesinnungsethik). The latter, Weber feared, was often used to justify bad consequences of well-intended actions. 3 These simple... (shrink)

A social responsibility (SR) theory of the press has emerged in various democratic societies worldwide since World War II. The Hutchins Commission in the United States is the source of this paradigm in some cases, but a similar emphasis on serving society rather than commerce or government has also arisen in parallel fashion without any connection to Hutchins. Professionalism and codes of professional ethics are too narrow to serve as the framework for a global SR paradigm of the 21st century. (...) Instead, universal ethical principles are the most appropriate framework, and the cross-cultural axis around which these principles revolve is the sacredness of human life. Embedded in the protonorm of human sacredness are such ethical principles as human dignity, truthtelling, and nonmaleficence. These principles are citizen ethics rather than professional ethics; they are set in the social domain where SR gets its rationale. They provide a frame of reference internationally for assessing local news media practices and formulating codes of ethics. (shrink)

The longstanding debates aver how to enforce codes of ethics reflect a serious flaw in understanding the nature of ?accountability.?; Fuzziness aver that basic notion has allowed the quantity of codes to expand, without any improvement in their quality or in media behavior. The essay maintains that we repeat the same arguments today that moralistic journalists did in the 1920s, because we lack intellectual precision aver such issues as internal vis a vis external controls, ethics vis a vis First Amendment (...) freedoms, and different forms and degrees of accountability to government, to fellow professionals, and to the general public. Self?imposed media codes?with enforcement provisions?and thorough analysis of social ethics are recommended. (shrink)

Using a base of philosophical athropology, this article suggests that an ethical analysis of persuasion must include not just the logic human response, but culture and experience as well. The authors propose potential maxims for ethical behavior in advertising and public relations and applies them to two case studies, political advertising and the Bridgestone/Firestone controversy.

Philippa Foot selected and edited this collection of twelve essays by a gifted young philosopher who died in 1991. She also provided a helpful introduction but not an index. All the essays have been published in professional journals or anthologies from 1978 to 1993 and are arranged here in chronological order ; most had been presented at philosophical conferences and revised to meet criticisms.

In this landmark volume of contemporary communication theory, Ronald C. Arnett applies the metaphor of dialogic confession—which enables historical moments to be addressed from a confessed standpoint and through a communicative lens—to the works of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who pointed to an era of postmodern difference with his notion of "a world come of age." Arnett’s interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s life and scholarship in contention with Nazi dominance offer implications for a dialogic confession that engages the complexity of postmodern narrative (...) contention. Rooted in classical theory, the field of communication ethics is abstract and arguably outmoded. In _Dialogic Confession: Bonhoeffer’s Rhetoric of Responsibility, _Arnett locates cross-cultural and comparative anchors that not only bring legitimacy and relevance to the field but also develop a conceptual framework that will advance and inspire future scholarship. (shrink)

Stephens and Grahamset themselves an apparently modest task, to understand why people who experience alien voices and inserted thoughts do not believe that they themselves are the source of these experiences. However, it soon becomes clear that there are many connected issues here. In eight short chapters, they address the phenomenology and ontology of consciousness, the phenomenology of alien voices, inserted thoughts, obsessive-compulsive thoughts and feelings, and other cases of unusual experience often associated with psychopathology, including brief discussion of multiple (...) personality disorder. They survey some of the main empirical explanations of the phenomenology, set out the shortcomings of these theories, and end by proposing their own schematic account. (shrink)

Multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis is one of the most frequently employed methods to examine the validity of psychological measures. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is a commonly used analytic tool for examining MTMM data through the specification of trait and method latent variables. Most contemporary CFA-MTMM models either do not allow estimating correlations between the trait and method factors or they are restricted to linear trait-method relationships. There is no theoretical reason why trait and method relationships should always be linear, and quadratic (...) relationships are frequently proposed in the social sciences. In this article, we present two approaches for examining quadratic relations between traits and methods through extended latent difference and latent means CFA-MTMM models (Pohl et al., 2008; Pohl and Steyer, 2010). An application of the new approaches to a multi-rater study of the nine inattention symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children (N = 752) and the results of a Monte Carlo study to test the applicability of the models under a variety of data conditions are described. (shrink)

American society has a history of turning to physicians during times of extreme need, from plagues in the past to recent outbreaks of communicable diseases. This public instinct comes from a deep seated trust in physician duty that has been earned over the centuries through dedicated and selfless care, often in the face of personal risks. As dangers facing our communities include terroristic events physicians must be adequately prepared to respond, both medically and ethically. While the ethical principles that govern (...) physician behavior—beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, and social justice—are unchanging, fundamental doctrines must change with the new risks inherent to terroristic events. Responding to mass casualty disasters caused by terrorists, natural calamities, and combat continue to be challenging frontiers in medicine. Preparing physicians to deal with the consequences of a terroristic disease must include understanding the ethical challenges that can occur. (shrink)

This book examines the long term economic growth that has raised the West's material living standards to levels undreamed of by counterparts in any previous time or place. The authors argue this growth has been driven by periodic technological revolutions that have transformed the West's economic, social and political landscape over time and allowed the West to become, until recently, the world's only dominant technological force. A must read for anyone interested in economic growth.

This book examines the long term economic growth that has raised the West's material living standards to levels undreamed of by counterparts in any previous time or place. The authors argue that this growth has been driven by technological revolutions that have periodically transformed the West's economic, social and political landscape over the last 10,000 years and allowed the West to become, until recently, the world's only dominant technological force. Unique in the diversity of the analytical techniques used, the book (...) begins with a discussion of the causes and consequences of economic growth and technological change. The authors argue that long term economic growth is largely driven by pervasive technologies now known as General Purpose. They establish an alternative to the standard growth models that use an aggregate production function and then introduce the concept of GPTs, complete with a study of how these technologies have transformed the West since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Early modern science is given more importance than in most other treatments and the 19th century demographic revolution is studied with a combination of formal models of population dynamics and historical analysis. The authors argue that once sustained growth was established in the West, formal models can shed much light on its subsequent behaviour. They build non-conventional, dynamic, non-stationary equilibrium models of GPT-driven growth that incorporate a range of phenomena that their historical studies show to be important but which are excluded from other GPT models in the interests of analytical tractability. The book concludes with a study of the policy implications that follow from their unique approach. (shrink)

Fitting the Mind to the World explores the brain's remarkable capacity to adapt to its current visual environment. Leading vision researchers explore how visual experience alters the adult brain, fitting the mind to the world, and ensuring the efficient coding of sensory signals. They demonstrate how this plasticity affects every aspect of our visual experience, from the perception of movement and colour, to the perception of subtle, social and emotional information in human faces.

We consider the implications for the ethical evaluation of research programs of two fundamental changes in the revised research ethical guideline of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences. The first is the extension of scope that follows from exchanging “biomedical” for “health‐related” research, and the second is the new evaluative basis of “social value,” which implies new ethical requirements of research. We use the example of antibiotic resistance interventions to explore the need to consider the instances of what (...) we term the pragmatic risks of such interventions to evaluate the social value of certain kinds of health‐related research. These (pragmatic) risks severely threaten the social value of interventions in every area where human and social responses significantly impact on their effectiveness. Thus, the social value of health‐related research needed to demonstrate its effectiveness depends on the extent and successful management of such risks. Research designed to take into account the management of pragmatic risks also gives rise to similar types of risks, and the potential for social value in light of those risks needs to be considered in ethical reviews based on the new guidelines. We argue that, to handle this new expanded task, the international system of research ethical review addressed by the guidelines needs institutional development. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo explore how clients in clinical settings experience the process of opening up and sharing their inner experiences in the initial phase of therapy.MethodsTwo psychotherapy sessions of clients were videotaped and followed by interviews. Interpersonal process recall was used to obtain in-depth descriptions of clients’ immediate experiences in session. A follow-up interview was conducted 3 months later. The interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis.ResultsThe data revealed how and why clients distanced themselves from inner experiences in the initial phase of therapy. (...) The overarching theme was “Holding back and struggling to open up,” which included four subthemes: fearing the intensity and consequences of negative emotions; experiences of being incapable and bodily stuck; being insecure about one’s worthiness and right to share inner experiences with the therapist; and struggling with feeling disloyal to loved ones.ConclusionThe participants held back because they feared different consequences of opening up. A range of concerns led participants to distance themselves from their inner experiences and/or to refrain from openly talking about them to the therapist. Concerns related to appropriate interpersonal conduct as client were especially important. This knowledge is highly relevant to clinicians when building safety for psychotherapeutic work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This manuscript develops the concept of organizational virtue orientation (OVO) and examines differences between family and non-family firms on the six organizational virtue dimensions of Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, Courage, Conscientiousness, and Zeal. Using content analysis of shareholder letters fromS&P 500companies, our analyses find that there are significant differences between family and non-family firms in their espoused OVO, with family firms generally being higher. Specifically, family firms were significantly higher on the dimensions of Empathy, Warmth, and Zeal, but lower on Courage. (...) Based on these findings we further develop the OVO concept through the discussion of implications and areas for future research. (shrink)

We present an interdisciplinary approach to argumentation combining logical, probabilistic, and psychological perspectives. We investigate logical attack principles which relate attacks among claims with logical form. For example, we consider the principle that an argument that attacks another argument claiming A triggers the existence of an attack on an argument featuring the stronger claim A ∧ B. We formulate a number of such principles pertaining to conjunctive, disjunctive, negated, and implicational claims. Some of these attack principles seem to be prima (...) facie more plausible than others. To support this intuition, we suggest an interpretation of these principles in terms of coherent conditional probabilities. This interpretation is naturally generalized from qualitative to quantitative principles. Specifically, we use our probabilistic semantics to evaluate the rationality of principles which govern the strength of argumentative attacks. In order to complement our theoretical analysis with an empirical perspective, we present an experiment with students of the TU Vienna ( n = 139) which explores the psychological plausibility of selected attack principles. We also discuss how our qualitative attack principles relate to well-known types of logical argumentation frameworks. Finally, we briefly discuss how our approach relates to the computational argumentation literature. (shrink)

Current EEG research emphasizes gamma band coherence as a signature of functional integration, that is, the solution to the binding problem. We note that spatial patterns of coherent neural activity are also observed at other EEG frequencies. If these oscillations reflect Nunez's resonant modes, they offer a solution to the binding problem that emerges naturally from the architecture of cortical connections.

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 35-37.

In the 1970s, Robin Giles introduced a game combining Lorenzen-style dialogue rules with a simple scheme for betting on the truth of atomic statements, and showed that the existence of winning strategies for the game corresponds to the validity of formulas in Łukasiewicz logic. In this paper, it is shown that ‘disjunctive strategies’ for Giles’s game, combining ordinary strategies for all instances of the game played on the same formula, may be interpreted as derivations in a corresponding proof system. In (...) particular, such strategies mirror derivations in a hypersequent calculus developed in recent work on the proof theory of Łukasiewicz logic. (shrink)

Other than the ligation of the aortic arch vessels, extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR) and thoraco-abdominal normothermic regional ­perfusion (TA-NRP) in donation after circulatory...