This article addresses the sacredness of Ayahuasca from the perspective of the global shamanic vocation. If encounters with Ayahuasca are said to revitalize forms of sacredness in contemporary societies, this is perhaps clearest in cases where individuals understand themselves to be called to lead ceremonies. Recognizing the global scale of Ayahuasca shamanism, we compare facilitators of ceremonies in two societies to discern differences and similarities in how Ayahuasca vocations exist in differently modernized societies: Peru, a predominantly Catholic society with a (...) substantial Indigenous Amazonian population and an active Ayahuasca shamanism tourism sector, and Denmark, a secular society in Northern Europe, where Ayahuasca is illegal. Building on recent reappraisals of Weber’s reflection on vocation and Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, we argue that being called by Ayahuasca to follow shamanic vocations in contemporary societies leads to tensions around the need to both justify and resist the rationalization of Ayahuasca. (shrink)

We define a complete theory SHF e of separably closed fields of finite invariant e (= degree of imperfection) which carry an infinite stack of Hasse-derivations. We show that SHF e has quantifier elimination and eliminates imaginaries.

In this chapter, I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and aesthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright (...) laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afromodernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put. (shrink)

Abstract:It is a common belief that obesity is wholly or partially a question of personal choice and personal responsibility. It is also widely assumed that when individuals are responsible for some unfortunate state of affairs, society bears no burden to compensate them. This article focuses on two conceptualizations of responsibility: backward-looking and forward-looking conceptualizations. When ascertaining responsibility in a backward-looking sense, one has to determine how that state of affairs came into being or where the agent stood in relation to (...) it. In contrast, a forward-looking conceptualization of responsibility puts aside questions of the past and holds a person responsible by reference to some desirable future state of affairs and will typically mean that he or she is subjected to criticism, censure, or other negative appraisals or that he or she is heldcost-responsible in some form, for example, in terms of demanded compensation, loss of privileges, or similar. One example of this view is the debate as to whether the obese should be denied, wholly or partially, free and equal access to healthcare,notbecause they are somehow personally responsible in the backward-looking sense but simply because holding the obese responsible will have positive consequences. Taking these two conceptions of responsibility into account, the authors turn their analysis toward examining the relevant moral considerations to be taken into account when public policies regarding obesity rely on such a conception of responsibility. (shrink)

Alm, Margit Review of: Countdown: Our last, best hope for a future on earth?, by Alan Weisman, First Published in the US by Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group ISBN 978-1-4087-0267-3.

Alm, Margit Review of: Growing for broke: How the government has sold out to private interests, by Peter North, Published in 2016 by Tomorrow Press, PO Box 238, Berwick, Vic. 3806 ISBN 978-168418977-9.

Muscle synergies reflect the presence of a common neural input to multiple muscles. Steering small sets of synergies is commonly believed to simplify the control of complex motor tasks like walking and running. When these locomotor patterns emerge, it is likely that synergies emerge as well. We hence hypothesized that in children learning to run the number of accompanying synergies increases and that some of the synergies’ activities display a temporal shift related to a reduced stance phase as observed in (...) adults. We investigated the development of locomotion in 23 children aged 2–9 years of age and compared them with seven young adults. Muscle activity of 15 bilateral leg, trunk, and arm muscles, ground reaction forces, and kinematics were recorded during comfortable treadmill walking and running, followed by a muscle synergy analysis. We found that toddlers and preschoolers utilize a “walk-run strategy” when learning to run: they managed the fastest speeds on the treadmill by combining double support and flight phases. In particular the activity duration of the medial gastrocnemius muscle was weakly correlated with age. The number of synergies across groups and conditions needed to cover sufficient data variation ranged between four and eight. The number of synergies tended to be smaller in toddlers than it did in preschoolers and school-age children but the adults had the lowest number for both conditions. Against our expectations, the age groups did not differ significantly in the timing or duration of synergies. We believe that the increase in the number of muscle synergies in older children relates to motor learning and exploration. The ability to run with a FP is clearly associated with an increase in the number of muscle synergies. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with analyzing transformations in the development, marketing, prescription, and access issues of pharmaceuticals, paying special attention to a variety of ethical and social aspects. A major focus of the article is on pharmacogenetics – a rapidly developing discipline which in the near future might well have a major effect on both drug development and clinical medicine.

Cheyne and Girard characterize felt presence during sleep paralysis attacks as a pre-hallucinatory expression of a threat-activated vigilance system. While their results may be consistent with this interpretation, they are nonetheless correlational and do not address a parsimonious alternative explanation. This alternative stipulates that FP is a purely spatial, hallucinatory form of a common cognitive phenomenon—social imagery—that is often, but not necessarily, linked with threat and fear and that may induce distress among susceptible individuals. The occurrence of both fearful and (...) non-fearful FPs in a multiplicity of situations other than sleep paralysis attacks supports the notion that FPs are hallucinatory variants of social imagery and that they are not necessarily bound to threat-activated vigilance. Evidence linking FPs with anxiety disorders supports the notion that the distress they evoke may be mediated by a more general affective distress personality factor. To illustrate the predominantly spatial character of FP hallucinations, similarities between FP and phantom limbs are summarized and the possibility that these two phenomena are parallel expressions of a mirror neuron system is considered. (shrink)

A comprehensive understanding of the ethics of the COVID-19 pandemic priorities must be sensitive to the influence of social inequality. We distinguish between ex-ante and ex-post relevance of social inequality for COVID-19 disadvantage. Ex-ante relevance refers to the distribution of risks of exposure. Ex-post relevance refers to the effect of inequality on how patients respond to infection. In the case of COVID-19, both ex-ante and ex-post effects suggest a distribution which is sensitive to the prevalence social inequality. On this basis, (...) we provide a generic fairness argument for the claim that welfare states ought to favour a healthcare priority scheme that gives particular weight to protecting the socially disadvantaged. (shrink)

This article examines non-statutory executive powers, which are commonly employed in the modern state but rarely studied as a distinct concept. The article assesses three treatments of these powers available in current English public law—prerogative, common law powers which rely on analogies between the state and legal persons, and judicial review—and argues that they fail to provide a proper balance between legality and need. Royal prerogative connotes a shrinking reservoir of ancient powers, while non-statutory powers respond to unexpected futures and (...) statute’s intrinsic eventual failings. Analogies to legal persons fail to address the particularities of executive powers. Judicial review provides only a partial solution, since absence of parliamentary approval is not, in itself, ground for special treatment of executive action. The author joins calls for theoretization of public law and advances a model of executive powers that draws on a composite theory of the executive branch and its functions.This article examines non-statutory executive powers, which are commonly employed in the modern state but rarely studied as a distinct concept. The article assesses three treatments of these powers available in current English public law—prerogative, common law powers which rely on analogies between the state and legal persons, and judicial review—and argues that they fail to provide a proper balance between legality and need. Royal prerogative connotes a shrinking reservoir of ancient powers, while non-statutory powers respond to unexpected futures and statute’s intrinsic eventual failings. Analogies to legal persons fail to address the particularities of executive powers. Judicial review provides only a partial solution, since absence of parliamentary approval is not, in itself, ground for special treatment of executive action. The author joins calls for theoretization of public law and advances a model of executive powers that draws on a composite theory of the executive branch and its functions. (shrink)

This article focuses on healthcare ethics discussions in Estonia. We begin with an overview of the reform policies that the healthcare institutions have undergone since the region regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The principles of distributing healthcare services and questions regarding just what ethical healthcare should look like have received abundant coverage in the national media. An example of this is the exceptionally public case of V—a woman with leukemia whose expensive drugs the national health insurance fund (...) refused to compensate. In our subsequent discussion, we focus on a grand-scale local healthcare and research project—the Estonian Genome Project—that attempts to include 1 million DNA samples into one database. (shrink)

The past decade has seen an explosion of work on the history of the human sciences during the Cold War. This work, however, does not engage with one of the leading human sciences of the period: linguistics. This article begins to rectify this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of linguistics and its concept of study, language, on American public, political and intellectual life during the postwar and early Cold War years. I show that language emerged in three frameworks in (...) this period: language as tool, language as weapon, and language as knowledge. As America stepped onto the international stage, language and linguistics were at the forefront: the military poured millions of dollars into machine translation, American diplomats were required to master scores of foreign languages, and schoolchildren were exposed to language-learning on a scale never before seen in the United States. Together, I argue, language and linguistics formed a critical part of the rise of American leadership in the new world order — one that provided communities as dispersed as the military, the diplomatic corps, scientists and language teachers with a powerful way of tackling the problems they faced. To date, linguistics has not been integrated into the broader framework of Cold War human sciences. In this article, I aim to bring both language, as concept, and linguistics, as discipline, into this framework. In doing so, I pave the way for future work on the history of linguistics as a human science. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence systems are becoming increasingly autonomous and will soon be able to make decisions on their own about what to do, AI researchers have started to talk about the need to align AI with human values. The AI ‘value alignment problem’ faces two kinds of challenges—a technical and a normative one—which are interrelated. The technical challenge deals with the question of how to encode human values in artificial intelligence. The normative challenge is associated with two questions: “Which values (...) or whose values should artificial intelligence align with?” My concern is that AI developers underestimate the difficulty of answering the normative question. They hope that we can easily identify the purposes we really desire and that they can focus on the design of those objectives. But how are we to decide which objectives or values to induce in AI, given that there is a plurality of values and moral principles and that our everyday life is full of moral disagreements? In my paper I will show that although it is not realistic to reach an agreement on what we, humans, really want as people value different things and seek different ends, it may be possible to agree on what we do not want to happen, considering the possibility that intelligence, equal to our own, or even exceeding it, can be created. I will argue for pluralism which is compatible with objectivism. In spite of the fact that there is no uniquely best solution to every moral problem, it is still possible to identify which answers are wrong. And this is where we should begin the value alignment of AI. (shrink)

This reply focusses on three aspects: advantages and disadvantages of our proposed ‘cooperative entry certificates’ for the countries of origin, for the migrants, and for the host countries. It analyzes in what respects our proposal can be improved based on the valuable points made by the commentators. In addition, the question of how to deal with winners and losers within the three groups is discussed.

Large-scale migration is one of the most topical issues of our time. There are two main problems. First, millions of persons will enter Europe in the short and middle run in spite of the firewalls we have built. When the income levels in the development countries raises, the migration pressure will even become stronger for a long time. Second, the present integration policy in most European countries is deficient. In contrast to common knowledge, strong social benefits for migrants, multicultural policies (...) and fast naturalization do not further integration. To address these two problems we propose a procedure that takes into account that most migrants react to incentives in a rational way. Migrants in our countries are joining a cooperative and take advantage of many collective goods and social institutions the citizen of the immigration countries have provided. Migrants therefore should pay an entry fee to join the cooperative. This proposal has positive consequences for both the countries of immigration and of origin, as well as for actual and would-be immigrants. It has many advantages compared to other schemes. (shrink)

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE WORKERS - POLITICAL CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF 'THE WORKER', 1750-2015Although ‘the worker’ has been one of the key concepts in political language since the second half of the 19th century only few studies have been made of the historical shifts in its definition and semantic demarcation. Inspired by present day semantic shifts in the meaning and use of ‘the worker’ in Danish political debate, this article examines the long history of the politicization of the concept. With inspiration from (...) Reinhart Kosellecks Begrieffsgeschichte, the article analyzes how ‘the worker’ functions as both an indicator of and a factor in the creation of ‘the modern’. From being a concept used purely as a descriptive category for the wageworker in manual production in the pre-1790-era it changes into a category defining the workers as a social group with a revolutionary potential. The article argues that the concept plays a key role in political parties’ different strategies of mobilization and legitimization, and that since the 1970s a definitive change can be identified. A change that embodies what Francois Hartog has described as a transition from the future-oriented to the presentist regime. (shrink)

The vital status of patients who are a part of controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) is widely debated in bioethical literature. Opponents to currently applied cDCD protocols argue that they violate the dead donor rule, while proponents of the protocols advocate compatibility. In this article, we argue that both parties often misinterpret the moral implications of the dead donor rule. The rule as such does not require an assessment of a donor’s vital status, we contend, but rather an assessment (...) of whether procurement of organs in cDCD cause the death of the donor or not. We then argue that commonly practiced cDCD protocols do not violate the dead donor rule, since the donation does not trigger or cause the death of the donors. (shrink)

Crisis management can be simultaneously a content specific problem solving process and an opportunity for stimulating and enabling an organization's ethical tradition. Crisis can be an opportunity for ethical organizational development. Kierkegaardian "upbuilding" dialog method builds from within the internal ethical tradition of an organization to respond to crises while simultaneously adapting and protecting the organization's tradition. The crisis itself may not be a directly ethical crisis, but the method of responding to the crisis is built upon the ethical foundations (...) of an organization's tradition. A limitation of this method is that it may be less applicable to organizations with questionably ethical traditions. The concept of "upbuilding" dialog is derived from Kierkegaard, but here is applied to organizational crisis management. The method is illustrated and discussed in the context of a wrongful death crisis of the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute, a non-profit organization, and an economic survival crisis at Ben and Jerry's, a business organization. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to discuss a theoretical explanation for the positive relationship between patients’ knowledge and their trust in healthcare personnel. Our approach is based on John Dewey’s notion of continuity. This notion entails that the individual’s experiences are interpreted as interrelated to each other, and that knowledge is related to future experience, not merely a record of the past. Furthermore, we apply Niklas Luhmann’s theory on trust as a way of reducing complexity and enabling action. Anthony Giddens’ (...) description and analysis of the high modern society provides a frame for discussing the preconditions for patient-healthcare personnel interaction. High modernity is dominated by expert systems and demands trust in these. We conclude that patient knowledge and trust in healthcare personnel is related because both knowledge and trust are future- and action-oriented concepts. The traits of high modernity provides opportunities and challenges as the personnel can and must perform discretion. This discretion must be made in a context where knowledge is considered uncertain and preliminary. (shrink)

This paper seeks to analyse small‐ and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) managers' representations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and CSR communication in a corporate communication perspective. The basic question is: how strategic is CSR communication in SMEs? Corporate communication and CSR theories are used to establish an ideal typology of CSR concepts informing an analysis of qualitative data in the form of interviews with three middle managers in two Danish SMEs. A CSR communication model published earlier by the authors is challenged (...) from a SME perspective. Results from an Internet‐based questionnaire survey of 1071 SMEs pave the way for the analysis. Our analysis shows that SME managers clearly have an inside‐out approach to CSR, with a strong emphasis on the internal (corporate culture) dimension. However, SMEs and/or SME managers tend not to communicate externally about the CSR activities of the company. Based on these findings, the paper argues that CSR communication in SMEs is challenged by the global economy and is under revision. The contribution of the paper is to provide an insight into SMEs' present stage in relation to a possible future approach to strategic CSR communication. The paper also reminds us that SMEs have no interest in turning their local and authentic practice into a forced marketing and branding exercise, leaving them with an artificial picture of who they are and strive to be in the future. They should keep on acting locally but force themselves to think globally. (shrink)

Whereas in the 1970s early bioethicists believed that bioethics is an arena for the application of philosophical theories of utilitarianism, deontology, and natural law thinking, contemporary policy-oriented bioethicists seem rather to be keen on framing ethical issues through political ideologies. Bioethicists today are often labeled “liberal” or “communitarian,” referring to their different understandings of the relationship between the individual and society. Liberal individualism, with its conceptual base of autonomy, dignity, and privacy, enjoyed a long period of dominance in bioethics, but (...) it has increasingly come under attack from ideologies promoting a more salient role for concepts of solidarity, community, and public interest. (shrink)

This article provides a short survey of Joachim Kopper’s understanding of Kant’s theory of cognition in CPR. Kant’s critical thought is developed via a dogmatic method but marks a transition to transcendental thought delivered from dogmatic assertions. The assertion that cognition emerges from the relation between mind and objects is made at the beginning of CPR. Kopper holds that transcendental reflection starts not on the basis of this distinction but on the impossibility of logical assertion about existence as it is (...) reached in antinomic. The fact of experience must thus be explained otherwise than by dogmatic assertions of relations between objects or between objects and thought. Reflection on necessity, affirmed by the law of causality, enables transcendental inspection to understand experience and human life in one unrelational meaning. (shrink)

Summary The recovery of the Camp Century deep ice core in 1966 – the first ice core to reach all the way through a polar ice sheet to bedrock – marked a shift from an era of United States military dominated glaciological research in Greenland to an era of climate oriented research on the island. This paper aims to provide an understanding of this shift. I show that the Camp Century ice core was at the heart of a complex blend (...) of environmental, military and scientific interests. By deconstructing these interests, I ultimately show that the island of Greenland underwent two reimaginings during the early Cold War. First, the island was reimagined as part of the US Cold War military sphere: driven by the need to secure the North American continent, the US established a hegemonic military colonization of Greenland. In the second reimagining of the island, environmental geography led the way: the scientific results of the Camp Century ice core and political concern about climatic change converged in the early 1970s to build Greenland into a unique location for pursuing research on climate questions. This paper adds to the literature by contextualizing the Camp Century ice core at the interface between the history of science, environmental history and Cold War history, and thereby illuminating Greenland as a dual geopolitical entity and environmental space. By highlighting the interaction of climatic change, geophysical sciences and national security narratives, it responds to recent historiographic calls to unite a set of narratives which, too often, talk past one another. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I argue that people have a right to self‐determination when they are plainly predominant in a certain territory and do not violate the civil liberties of minorities. But there is no self‐determination without the preservation of self‐identity and the cultural preservation that goes with its secure existence. So to preserve autonomy and self‐determination people must preserve their cultural identity and this cannot be securely sustained in modern conditions without a nation‐state concerned to nourish that identity. Such considerations support a (...) right to secession when certain conditions are met. The conditions are that the people in question have a cultural identity, live in a distinct territory which they have inhabited for a long time, form an extensive majority, and respect the civil liberties of the minorities living in that territory (as well as elsewhere). Where they are such a group they have a right to secede from a larger state to which they are historically attached. These conditions, I argue, are met in Quebec. (shrink)