In this paper the author compares the concept of a Noh play, Matsukaze, with a Slovak altar painting from Košice Cathedral. The article uses Japanese Noh, where stage continuity has been preserved up until the present day, to reconstruct European medieval stage practices reflected in 15th century painting. Referring to the platonic tradition, the second speech represents a corrective to the first, thus legitimizing a sense of passion in the process leading to catharsis, or enlightenment.

In this paper the author compares the concept of a Noh play, Matsukaze, with a Slovak altar painting from Košice Cathedral. The article uses Japanese Noh, where stage continuity has been preserved up until the present day, to reconstruct European medieval stage practices reflected in 15th century painting. Referring to the platonic tradition, the second speech represents a corrective to the first, thus legitimizing a sense of passion in the process leading to catharsis, or enlightenment.

In this paper the author compares the concept of a Noh play, Matsukaze, with a Slovak altar painting from Košice Cathedral. The article uses Japanese Noh, where stage continuity has been preserved up until the present day, to reconstruct European medieval stage practices reflected in 15th century painting. Referring to the platonic tradition, the second speech represents a corrective to the first, thus legitimizing a sense of passion in the process leading to catharsis, or enlightenment.

The study addresses some aspects of Suprematist theory of perception, allowing to investigate the structure of Suprematist phenomenon in the context of ontology, socio-political and religious-mystical works of K. Malevich. The aim of the paper is to present Malevich’s theory of perception in the framework of enactivism. Namely, the article focuses on the theory of social affordances, which today is widely used in design, game development and other everyday practices. The author refers to Malevich’s theoretical and sociopolitical essays, as well (...) as to the commentary literature. Although Suprematism represents a well-researched tradition in art theory, the author stress the need for a follow-up study of Malevich’s theoretical essays in the contemporary context of philosophy of consciousness. The author also emphasizes the relevance of Suprematist philosophy for today’s way of thinking. For the most authentic presentation of Malevich’s ideas I use the phenomenological and hermeneutical method on a par with elements of the ecological approach in psychology and enactivism in the philosophy of consciousness. Consequently, the theory of affordances an effective and natural unification of all the aspects discussed above. The study shows the affinity of Malevich’s ideas to this theory. The author focused on the thesis of feeling as the goal of the expressive act of art. As one could see, Kazemir Malevich always emphasized the bodily-affective dimension of art, and in this sense he participated in a global cultural-historical shift in our conception of the essence of art. Since then, art has ceased to be elitist, but has instead inherited everyday practices. Thus, Malevich speaks of a new art that suits the man of the new world, the Soviet citizen. In this context, I relate the idea of affordance, which means the creation of a feeling-opportunity for subjective action (agency), to the artistic act whose goal, according to Malevich, is the creation of an emotional body-affective feeling. I defend the theory of social affordances, explaining the mechanism of social interaction, as the most adequate model for explaining Suprematism. As a result, based on the already developed concept of bodily-affective dynamics, I show how visionary and creative Malevich was, and how his ideas contribute to the development of a theory of social, emotional affordances. (shrink)

This study examines the presence of ethical climates in skilled nursing facilities and identifies their antecedents (work group, job position, tenure). A cross-sectional survey design was implemented. A total of 359 facilities were selected in the Midwestern United States. Responses were received from nurses representing 100 of those facilities (28%). A total of 656 usable questionnaires were returned of the 3060 distributed (21.4% response rate). Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, and multivariate and univariate analyses of variance were used. The results (...) confirmed the presence of five ethical climates. Significant differences between registered and licensed practical nurses with regard to egoistic and independence ethical climates were found. Furthermore, nurses in management and non-management positions differed significantly in their perceptions of caring and egoistic climates. The results suggest incongruence in value perceptions and imply that researchers and practitioners have to direct efforts towards preventing and identifying reasons behind this. (shrink)

The paper compares two intellectual traditions, that is, psychoanalysis and Russian philosophy. As a result, it demonstrates the kinship of the main methodological principles of both of these two trends of thinking in twentieth century. First, a psychoanalytic image of the Russian type of cognition is set - this is an existentially loaded experience of asking the truth, carried out by a person from the people. In culture, this image is presented as an agent of truth, usually in need. The (...) following demonstrates the attitude to this image in the work and personal way of knowing N.A. Berdyaev. In this part of the article, a psychoanalytic study of the work of the Russian philosopher is done. In particular, the neurotic nature of N. Berdyaevs letter, which is expressed in the excessive emotionality of the text and the prophetic emphasis, which sets the tone throughout his work, is noted. The main part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the intuitive-symbolic method of working with consciousness in the psychoanalysis of Freud and the philosophy of Berdyaev. Here the author emphasizes the practical side of the psychoanalysis and to how an emotionally and bodily tinted meaning arises in that context. This phenomenological reconstruction allows us to draw a parallel with what constitutes a symbol in the tradition of Russian religious thought, which also notes the experienced nature of the work of obtaining the meaning of a symbolic utterance. In this perspective, the author conducts a hermeneutic reconstruction of the continuity of the method of these two traditions from mystical Christian theology, in which the knowledge of God is understood as a passionately lived experience of communication with the Other, which occupies the status of a lover. This article represents the initial stage of a more detailed study of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Russian philosophy. (shrink)

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally (...) different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in the metaphysics of dispositions regarding which type of modality governs their manifestation. This paper assumes as its default position the view that dispositions manifest by conditional necessity; that is, when in appropriate circumstances dispositions manifest necessarily. From this standpoint, the paper engages critically with an existing alternative in the literature, put forward most prominently by Mumford and Anjum, and known as dispositional modality. According to this latter view, even when in appropriate manifestation conditions, dispositions (...) only merely tend towards their manifestation. By raising difficulties for this alternative, the paper offers indirect support for the conditional necessity view. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in the metaphysics of dispositions regarding which type of modality governs their manifestation. This paper assumes as its default position the view that dispositions manifest by conditional necessity; that is, when in appropriate circumstances dispositions manifest necessarily. From this standpoint, the paper engages critically with an existing alternative in the literature, put forward most prominently by Mumford and Anjum, and known as dispositional modality. According to this latter view, even when in appropriate manifestation conditions, dispositions (...) only merely tend towards their manifestation. By raising difficulties for this alternative, the paper offers indirect support for the conditional necessity view. (shrink)

Do the new sciences of well-being provide knowledge that respects the nature of well-being? This book written from the perspective of philosophy of science articulates how this field can speak to well-being proper and can do so in a way that respects the demands of objectivity and measurement.

During the mid-twentieth century, Soviet scientists developed the “natural focus” theory–practice framework to explain outbreaks of diseases endemic to wild animals and transmitted to humans. Focusing on parasitologist-physician Evgeny N. Pavlovsky and other field scientists’ work in the Soviet borderlands, this article explores how the natural focus framework’s concepts and practices were entangled in political as well as material ecologies of knowledge and practice. We argue that the very definition of endemic plague incorporated both hands-on materialist experience and ideological concepts (...) that supported Soviet colonization. Theorizing and fighting plague assisted with the goals of controlling and improving landscapes and peoples in southern Russia and Central Asia. The history of the natural focus framework illustrates how Soviet disease ecology co-developed with the needs of local and central political powers in the Soviet borderlands. (shrink)

Given how central causality is in ancient as well as in modern philosophical thought, it is surprising that the number of existing studies on the way the topic was theorized on in antiquity are still too few. This is one of the reasons why the present volume is a very welcome addition to the literature on ancient theories of causation. This volume also has the special merit of covering a period in ancient Western thought that, as a whole, has been (...) so far less investigated than others: the Hel... (shrink)

In the paper, Jan Łukasiewicz’s program of the logicization of philosophy is presented and discussed. Łukasiewicz, known mostly for his invention of trivalent logic as well as his achievements in propositional calculus and metalogic, had always been concerned with the methodological condition of philosophy. He finally found “the measure of exactness” in mathematical logic. According to him, only the use of logical tools may provide philosophical investigations with an appropriate level of exactness. He expressed his views most firmly and directly (...) in the paper, “A call for the method of Philosophy”. Łukasiewicz proposed giving philosophical theories the form of axiomatic systems by indicating the primitive terms of their language, selecting suitable axioms, and explicitly determining the applied rules of inference. All the theses of these systems should be consequences of the accepted axioms and confronted with the data of experience and the results of science. Łukasiewicz’s program is presented together with its inspirations and prospects. (shrink)

Martha Albertson Fineman's earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependencies as a way of problematizing the core assumptions underlying the 'autonomous' subject of liberal law and politics in the context of US equality discourse. Her 'vulnerability thesis' represents the evolution of that earlier work and situates human vulnerability as a critical heuristic for exploring alternative legal and political foundations. This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and (...) Fineman's 'vulnerability thesis'. The contributors include scholars who have thought about vulnerability in different ways and contexts prior to encountering Fineman's work, as well as those for whom Fineman's work provided an introduction to thinking through a vulnerability lens. This collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges. Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, the book will be of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics. (shrink)

Every kind of exploration is touched in some way by a philosophy of persons; touched and often vitally enhanced. This collection sets out to mine this rich seam of influence, bringing together authors keen to strike new developments and applications. Together, they have put their philosophy of persons to work in fields as wide-ranging as the moral and the metaphysical, the practical and the political, the cultural and the cosmological. In doing so, they have drawn on and illustrated the depth (...) and breadth of modern Personalist thought, demonstrating its crucial relevance to debates across the entire philosophical spectrum. (shrink)

It has long been accepted that participating in music, either as a performer, listener, and/or composer can contribute to human flourishing. This volume explores a fourth musical activity, the act of music scholarship, and reveals how engagement with the cultural, social, and political practices surrounding music contributes to human flourishing in a way that listening, performing, and even composing alone cannot. Music and Human Flourishing contains chapters by eleven prominent scholars representing the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. The (...) chapters are divided into three general categories—Contemplation, Critique, and Communication—and cover a broad range of topics and music traditions. In Part I, Contemplation, contributors explore a specific facet of music’s connection to human flourishing and contemplate new approaches for future action. Part II, Critique, contains chapters that challenge past assumptions of the various roles of music in society and highlight the effects that unconscious bias and stereotyping have had on music’s effectiveness to facilitate human flourishing. Part III interacts broadly with the concept of Communication and features chapters that explore how ethnicity, gender, religion, and technology influence one’s ability to connect with others through music. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate how the process of thinking and writing about music and human flourishing can lead to revelations about cultural identity, social rituals, political ideologies, and even spiritual transcendence. (shrink)

Background As more people are living longer, they become frail and are affected by multi-morbidity, resulting in increased demands from the ambulance service. Being vulnerable, older patients may have reduced decision-making capacity, despite still wanting to be involved in decision-making about their care. Their needs may be complex and difficult to assess, and do not always correspond with ambulance assessment protocols. When needing an ambulance, older patients encounter ambulance clinicians who are under high workloads and primarily consider themselves as emergency (...) medical care providers. This situates them in the struggle between differing expectations, and ethical conflicts may arise. To resolve these, providing ethical care, focussing on interpersonal relationships and using ethical competence is needed. However, it is not known whether ambulance clinicians possess the ethical competence required to provide ethical care. Thus, the aim of this study was to deductively explore their ethical competence when caring for older patients with reduced decision-making ability. Methods A qualitative deductive and exploratory design was used to analyse dyadic interviews with ambulance clinicians. A literature review, defining ethical competence as comprising ethical sensitivity, ethical knowledge, ethical reflection, ethical decision-making, ethical action and ethical behaviour, was used as a structured categorization matrix for the analysis. Results Ambulance clinicians possess ethical competence in terms of their ethical knowledge, highlighting the need for establishing an interpersonal relationship with the older patients. To establish this, they use ethical sensitivity to interpret the patients’ needs. Doing this, they are aware of their ethical behaviour, signifying how they must act respectfully and provide the necessary time for listening and interacting. Conclusions Ambulance clinicians fail to see their gut feeling as a professional ethical competence, which might hinder them from reacting to unethical ways of working. Further, they lack ethical reflection regarding the benefits and disadvantages of paternalism, which reduces their ability to perform ethical decision-making. Moreover, their ethical knowledge is hampered by an ageist approach to older patients, which also has consequences for their ethical action. Finally, ambulance clinicians show deficiencies regarding their ethical reflections, as they reflect merely on their own actions, rather than on their values. (shrink)

Both Novalis and Günderrode provide grounds for a number of different kinds of hope. The first part of this chapter briefly sketches the most obvious of these: the hope for union with loved ones after death. This section also explains Günderrode’s metaphysics, which entails significant differences from Novalis in the other areas of hope that she identifies. Part two explores “epistemological hope”: the hope for knowledge or experience of that which lies outside the limitations of reason. Part three considers Günderrode’s (...) “moral hope,” which emerges from her critique of Kantian morality. Finally, parts four and five consider “political hope” and “ontological hope,” i.e., hope for improvement in the world as a whole and human society in particular. For Novalis, this famously takes the form of “raising,” “Romanticizing” or “cultivating,” effected by human beings. In Günderrode, this kind of improvement is largely beyond human control (although human beings can contribute to it), leaving us in a state of hopeful ambiguity regarding the possibility of the eventual realization of an “immortal ideal” for the earth and the establishment of ideal human communities. (shrink)

In her Nobel speech in 2019, Olga Tokarczuk presented the category of tenderness as a new way of narrating the contemporary world. This article is a proposal for the analysis and interpretation of tenderness in ethical and aesthetic terms. (1) From an ethical perspective, tenderness is interpreted as an extension and complement of feminist relational ethics, i.e., the ethics of care. In the proposed approach, tenderness is a broader and more universal quality than care in the feminist understanding. This article (...) opens with a brief discussion of feminist interventions in ethics, with particular emphasis on the ethics of care. Next, the differences between care and tenderness are enumerated and described, in order to show how tenderness can serve as an extension and complement of the feminist ethic of care. These considerations are guided by the question of why tenderness is a better—more appropriate and more responsive to contemporary challenges—moral guidepost than care. (2) From the aesthetic perspective, tenderness is the negation of a contemplative, distanced, impersonal, and rational view of reality. As an aesthetic imperative, tenderness implies engaged experience of the beauty of reality in all of its manifestations. Therefore, in the last part of the article, existential tender attunement is described in aesthetic terms, as a position serving to sensitize others to the beauty and complexity of the post-anthropocentric world. (shrink)

Calvino’s apology of multiplicity starts with the exposure, revealed by his take on typically modern novels, of some fundamental contradictions underlaying the modern quest for knowledge, which are definitely not alien to our day education. Then, when Calvino goes on to explore how twentieth century literature transcended those difficulties, he provides us with a valuable inspiration for how education could cope with its ambiguous relation to knowledge, still deeply rooted in the modern approach. Guided by Calvino’s readings, we are shown (...) that literature can succeed in its epistemological (r)evolution. Meanwhile, education, as it seems, is still struggling to overcome its entanglement with the unreachable goal of teaching everything about everything, to cope with the infinity and complexity of that everything, making reflecting upon education’s epistemological stance in the twenty-first century very much a necessity, one that I will try to pursue in the following pages After a methodological introduction, the paper starts by placing Calvino’s examination of beautiful, yet unsuccessful literary attempts at an exhaustive account of the world in the context of education, to show how their unattainable ambitions are mirrored in pedagogical practice, pointing out to the “modern spirit” underlying both the aforementioned novels’ and contemporary education’s relation to knowledge. Then, with the help of J. Rancière’s take on education, I will try and make educational sense of Calvino’s account of Bouvard and Pécuchet failed quest to know everything there is to be known, and relate it to the particular model of knowledge at work in education, one that needs to be questioned. Finally, I will draw on Calvino’s praise of “the contemporary novel as (…) a method of knowledge” (SM, p. 105), and particularly on his analysis of Perec’s masterpiece La Vie mode d’emploi, and his rehabilitation of the idea of arbitrariness, to outline some reflections about how an educational multiplicity, where “everything is in everything” could come to life (Rancière, 1991, p. 26). (shrink)

If only implicitly, social anthropology has long incorporated joint attention as a research technique employed in what anthropologists call “the field”. This paper outlines the crucial role joint attention plays in anthropolgical fieldwork—specifically in Participant Observation—and advances the position that joint attention is a goal rather than a starting point of fieldwork practice. Exploring how anthropologists tentatively use attention as a methodological tool to understand other people’s lifeworlds, this paper draws parallels between Participant Observation and ordinary everyday interactions, thus teasing (...) out a view of _joint_ attention as a goal to be reached only by means of knowing what matters to others in the context of the lifeworld they inhabit. (shrink)

The present article discusses the main issues and threads of the ontological and aesthetic considerations of Roman Ingarden. The point of departure of this Polish thinker’s philosophy is the controversy over the existence of the world. It is around this problem that he focuses the systemicity of his thoughts in combination with complex structuring and precise analysis of detailed philosophical issues. Yet it is ontology that is Ingarden’s first study, free of any assumptions or premises derived from other disciplines. The (...) first part of the present article, devoted to ontological issues, constitutes an introduction to the individual chapters of this book on the topic of ontology. The second part of the article deals with aesthetic issues, which Ingarden also understood systemically, meaning that his aesthetics remained closely related to his ontology and epistemology. Aesthetic research was particularly important for this Polish philosopher, as it was aimed at the creation of an original systemic proposal concerning phenomenological aesthetics. A discussion of the most important aesthetic issues raised by Ingarden serves as an introduction to the second part of this book, which concerns new interpretations of Ingarden’s aesthetics and philosophy of art. (shrink)

Research ethics committees (RECs) have a crucial role in protecting children in research. However, studies on REC members’ perspectives on paediatric research are scarce. We conducted a qualitative study to explore Swedish scientific REC members’ perspectives on ethical aspects in applications involving children with severe health conditions. The REC members considered promoting participation, protecting children and regulatory adherence to be central aspects. The results underscored the importance of not neglecting ill children’s rights to adapted information and participation. REC members supported (...) a contextual and holistic approach to vulnerability and risk, which considers the child’s and parents’ psychological wellbeing and the child’s integrity, both short and long term. The ethical complexity of paediatric research requires continuous ethical competence development within RECs. (shrink)

Values have always tended to play a central role in discourse on the environment, a tendency which is currently particularly evident in the biodiversity context. Traditionally, arguments about the environment have invoked instrumental value to highlight the necessity or utility of a healthy environment for people and intrinsic value to emphasize the importance of protecting nature for its own sake. More recently, this value dichotomy has been challenged, and the notion of a third value category – relational value – has (...) been introduced into the political and social conservation discussion. In the field of environmental philosophy, the idea of a third category of environmental value already has a longer tradition. This article describes and compares several philosophical accounts of third-category environmental value to contribute to a better characterization of relational value and thus to a better understanding of the role this type of value can play in environmental discourse and policy. (shrink)

This article describes a survey among Finnish business students to find answers to the following questions: How do business students define a well-run company? What are their attitudes on the responsibilities of business in society? Do the attitudes of women students differ from those of men? What is the influence of business education on these attitudes? Our sample comprised 217 students pursuing a master's degree in business studies at two Finnish universities. The results show that, as a whole, students valued (...) the stakeholder model of the company more than the shareholder model. However, attitudes differed according to gender: women students were more in favor of the stakeholder model and placed more weight on corporate ethical, environmental, and societal responsibilities than their men counterparts - both at the beginning and at the end of their studies. Thus, no gender socialization effect of business school education could be observed in this sense. Business school education was found to shape women and men students' attitudes in two ways. Firstly, valuation of the shareholder model increased and, secondly, the importance of equal-opportunity employment decreased in the course of education. This raises the question whether the educational context is creating an undesirable tendency among future business professionals. The results further suggest that the sociocultural context can make a difference in how corporate social responsibility is perceived. The article also discusses possible ways to influence the attitudes of business students. (shrink)

Psychological experiments have shown that humans do not reason according to classical logic. Therefore, we might argue that logic-based approaches in general are not suitable for modeling human reasoning. Yet, we take a different view and are convinced that logic can help us as an underlying formalization of a cognitive theory, but claim rather that classical logic is not adequate for this purpose. In this chapter we investigate abduction and its link to human reasoning. In particular we discuss three different (...) variations we have explored and show how they can be adequately modeled within a novel computational and integrated, cognitive theory, the Weak Completion Semantics. (shrink)

Fetal surgery has been practised for some decades now. However, it remains a highly complex area, both medically and ethically. This paper shows how the routine use of ultrasound has been a catalyst for fetal surgery, in creating new needs and new incentives for intervention. Some of the needs met by fetal surgery are those of parents and clinicians who experience stress while waiting for the birth of a fetus with known anomalies. The paper suggests that the role of technology (...) and visualisation techniques in creating and meeting such new needs is ethically problematic. It then addresses the idea that fetal surgery should be restricted to interventions that are life-saving for the fetus, arguing that this restriction is unduly paternalistic. Fetal surgery poses challenges for an autonomy-based system of ethics. However, it is risky to circumvent these challenges by restricting the choices open to pregnant women, even when these choices appear excessively altruistic. (shrink)