Concentrating on Propertius 3.21 in particular, this article identifies a previously unnoticed network of allusions by three Roman poets (Catullus, Propertius and Ovid) to one another and to Book 1 of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. It shows that these intertextual links are pivoted on the three poets’ common use of the verse-ending lintea malo in scenes of departure by sea, and on their common interest in framing other aspects of the nautical context (especially the naval equipment involved and the presence of (...) a favourable wind) in specific ways. Highlighting the presence in all three cases of departing male lovers with traditionally compromised or otherwise dubious claims to heroism, the article argues that each of the three instances shows the poet in question interacting competitively and self-consciously with the usages of his predecessor(s) (and with those usages’ immediate contexts) and exploiting the choices made by them to serve his new context and to advertise his personal skill in the creative deployment of revered poetic models. (shrink)

How do people judge the degree of causal responsibility that an agent has for the outcomes of her actions? We show that a relatively unexplored factor -- the robustness of the causal chain linking the agent’s action and the outcome -- influences judgments of causal responsibility of the agent. In three experiments, we vary robustness by manipulating the number of background circumstances under which the action causes the effect, and find that causal responsibility judgments increase with robustness. In the first (...) experiment, the robustness manipulation also raises the probability of the effect given the action. Experiments 2 and 3 control for probability-raising, and show that robustness still affects judgments of causal responsibility. In particular, Experiment 3 introduces an Ellsberg type of scenario to manipulate robustness, while keeping the conditional probability and the skill deployed in the action fixed. Experiment 4, replicates the results of Experiment 3, while contrasting between judgments of causal strength and of causal responsibility. The results show that in all cases, the perceived degree of responsibility increases with the robustness of the action-outcome causal chain. (shrink)

BackgroundMoral case deliberation as a form of clinical ethics support is usually implemented in health care institutions and educational programs. While there is no previous research on the use of clinical ethics support on the level of health care regulation, employees of regulatory bodies are regularly confronted with moral challenges. This pilot study describes and evaluates the use of MCD at the Dutch Health Care Inspectorate.The objective of this pilot study is to investigate: 1) the current way of dealing with (...) moral issues at the IGZ; 2) experience with and evaluation of MCD as clinical ethics support, and 3) future preferences and needs regarding clinical ethics support for dealing with moral questions at the IGZ.MethodsWe performed an explorative pilot study. The research questions were assessed by means of: 1) interviews with MCD participants during four focus groups; and 2) interviews with six key stakeholders at the IGZ. De qualitative data is illustrated by data from questionnaires on MCD outcomes, perspective taking and MCD evaluation.ResultsProfessionals do not always recognize moral issues. Employees report a need for regular and structured moral support in health care regulation. The MCD meetings are evaluated positively. The most important outcomes of MCD are feeling secure and learning from others. Additional support is needed to successfully implement MCD at the Inspectorate.ConclusionWe conclude that the respondents perceive moral case deliberation as a useful form of clinical ethics support for dealing with moral questions and issues in health care regulation. (shrink)

The method of positron emission tomography illustrates the circular logic popular in subtractive neuroimaging and linear reductive cognitive psychology. Both require that strictly feed-forward, modular, cognitive components exist, before the fact, to justify the inference of particular components from images after the fact. Also, both require a "true" componential theory of cognition and laboratory tasks, before the fact, to guarantee reliable choices for subtractive contrasts. None of these possibilities are likely. Consequently, linear reductive analysis has failed to yield general, reliable, (...) componential accounts. (shrink)

Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of a Research Program explores the nature of consciousness and its place in the world, offering a revisionist account of what it means to say that consciousness is nothing over and above the physical. By synthesizing work in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science from the last twenty years and forging a dialogue with contemporary research in the empirical sciences of the mind, Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove advance and defend a novel (...) formulation of physicalism. Although physicalism has been traditionally understood to be a metaphysical thesis, Elpidorou and Dove argue that there is an alternative and indeed preferable understanding of physicalism that both renders physicalism a scientifically informed explanatory project and allows us to make important progress in addressing the ontological problem of consciousness. Physicalism, Elpidorou and Dove hold, is best viewed not as a thesis (metaphysical or otherwise) but as an interdisciplinary research program that aims to compositionally explain all natural phenomena that are central to our understanding of our place in nature. Consciousness and Physicalism is replete with philosophical arguments and informed, through and through, by findings in many areas of scientific research. It advances the debate regarding the ontological status of consciousness. It will interest students and scholars in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of science. And it will challenge both foes and friends of physicalism. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE PLACE OF RENE GIRARD IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY Guy Vanheeswijck University ofAntwerp and ofLeuven Iwould like to start by quoting a text which is likely to be recognized by everyone, who is even on a superficial level familiar with the work of René Girard: Desire that bears on a natural object is only human to the extent that it is mediated by the desire of another bearing on the (...) same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus an object that is perfectly useless from a biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a human desire, and human reality as it differs from animal reality, is only created by the action that satisfies such desires. Human history is the history of desires that are desired [Désirs désirés]. Undoubtedly, these could be words written by Girard. However, they are not. These words are quoted from the famous lectures given by Alexandre Kojève on Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes at the Ecole pratique des hautes études between 1933 and 1939. They were followed by what would become the crème ofpost-war French philosophy: Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Koyré, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre.' Kojève's interpretation ofHegel has, as generally known, become the point ofreference to the post-war twentieth ' Although Sartre himselfcould not attend the lectures (at that time he taught philosophy in Le Havre en Laon), he must have heard from it by way of Aron or Merleau-Ponty. 96Guy Vanheeswijck century philosophy in France. Before 1930 the word "dialectic" was burdened with an odium of sin, after 1930 it became a word—thanks to Kojève —radiant with prestige. Before 1930 there had been no talk of an Hegelian school whatsoever in France, after 1930 the situation changed so drastically that Merleau-Ponty was able to write these often quoted lines in 1946: Hegel is at the origin of everything that has been great in philosophy for over a century; for example Marxism, Nietzsche, phenomenology and German existentialism, psychoanalysis. He inaugurates the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it within a wider rationality that remains the philosophical task of our century. (Sens et non-sens 109-110) Half a century later, these words have lost their self-evident character. While the generation of French thinkers between 1930 and 1960 stresses its dependence on Hegel, the generation after 1960 heavily reacts against him. In 1970 Michel Foucault gave his inaugural speech at the Collège de France. On behalf of his generation he testified to a generalized antiHegelianism at that moment: "Our entire epoch, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, seeks to evade Hegel's Imperium [échapper à Hegel] (L'Ordre du discours 74). Obviously, René Girard belongs to the second generation, which, on the one hand, embroiders on the theme ofdesire, borrowed from Kojève's interpretation ofHegel, but, on the other, in its search for answers precisely wishes to get rid of Hegel. But, is it correct to call René Girard a philosopher? His schooling was that of an historian. In 1947 he graduated in Paris as an archivistepal éographe at the Ecole de Chartres: his thesis was "La vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle." Three years later—in the meantime he had emigrated to the United States—he received his Ph.D. at the faculty of history of the University of Indiana. The topic of his dissertation was "American opinion ofFrance, 1940-1943." However, he has never worked as a professional historian. He owes his reputation first and foremost to his literary analyses, subsequently to his research in anthropology, finally to his exegesis ofthe Bible. Time and again, Girard has expressed his preference for literature to both humanities and philosophy. Human behavior is, in his view, much less elucidated by the conceptual structures of discursive philosophy than by the evocative force of a Greek tragedy, the Biblical passion story or a modern novel. One might retort that René Girard... (shrink)

Many believe that severe intellectual impairment, blindness or dying young amount to serious harm and disadvantage. It is also increasingly denied that it matters, from a moral point of view, whether something is biologically normal to humans. We show that these two claims are in serious tension. It is hard explain how, if we do not ascribe some deep moral significance to human nature or biological normality, we could distinguish severe intellectual impairment or blindness from the vast list of seemingly (...) innocent ways in which we fail to have as much wellbeing as we could, such not having super‐intelligence, or not living to 130. We consider a range of attempts to draw this intuitive normative distinction without appealing to normality. These, we argue, all fail. But this doesn't mean that we cannot draw this distinction or that we must, implausibly, conclude that biological normality does possess an inherent moral importance. We argue that, despite appearances, it is not biological normality but rather statistical normality that, although lacking any intrinsic moral significance, nevertheless makes an important moral difference in ways that explain and largely justify the intuitive distinction. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that personalization technologies used by Google for the purpose of tailoring search results for individual users create filter bubbles, which reinforce users’ political views. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for a personalization-induced filter bubble has not been forthcoming. Here, we investigate whether filter bubbles may result instead from a searcher’s choice of search queries. In the first experiment, participants rated the left-right leaning of 48 queries (search strings), 6 for each of 8 topics (abortion, benefits, climate change, sex (...) equality, immigration, nuclear family, Islam, and taxation). An independent sample of participants were then asked to select one of these queries for each of the 8 topics. With the exception of the topic of Islam, participants were significantly more likely to select a query corresponding to their own political leaning, compared to other queries, explaining between 12% and 39% of the variance. A second experiment investigated the effect of the political leaning of the same queries on the overall political leaning of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in Google Search. The top six results of each SERP were rated collectively by a third group of participants, explaining 36.3% of the variance across all 48 search terms (p < .00001). That is, (1) participants in our experiments tended to select own-side search queries, and (2) using those queries tended to yield own-side search results when using the Google search engine. Our results are consistent with the notion of a self-imposed filter bubble in which query selection plays a salient role. (shrink)

The invisibility of nursing work has been discussed in the international literature but not in relation to learning clinical skills. Evans and Guile's (Practice‐based education: Perspectives and strategies, Rotterdam: Sense, 2012) theory of recontextualisation is used to explore the ways in which invisible or unplanned and unrecognised learning takes place as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate to and supervise the work of the healthcare assistant. In the British context, delegation and supervision are thought of as skills which are learnt (...) “on the job.” We suggest that learning “on‐the‐job” is the invisible construction of knowledge in clinical practice and that delegation is a particularly telling area of nursing practice which illustrates invisible learning. Using an ethnographic case study approach in three hospital sites in England from 2011 to 2014, we undertook participant observation, interviews with newly qualified nurses, ward managers and healthcare assistants. We discuss the invisible ways newly qualified nurses learn in the practice environment and present the invisible steps to learning which encompass the embodied, affective and social, as much as the cognitive components to learning. We argue that there is a need for greater understanding of the “invisible learning” which occurs as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate and supervise. (shrink)

This book offers a solution for the problem of structure and agency in sociological theory by developing a new pair of fundamental concepts: metric and nonmetric. Nonmetric forms, arising in a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, correspond to social groups that divide the many individuals in the crowd into insiders and outsiders. Metric forms correspond to congested zones like traffic jams on a highway: individuals are constantly entering and leaving these zones so that they continue to exist, even though (...) the individuals passing through them change. Building from these concepts, we can understand “agency” as a requirement for group identity and group membership, thus associating it with nonmetric forms, and “structure” as a building-up effect following the accumulation of metric forms. This reveals the contradiction between structure and agency to be a case of forced perspective, leaving us victim to an optical illusion. (shrink)

We examine conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of the scientific study of possible influences of religious belief on the experience of physical pain. We start by attempting to identify a notion of religious belief that might enter into interesting psychological generalizations involving both religious belief and pain. We argue that it may be useful to think of religious belief as a complex dispositional property that relates believers to a sufficiently thick belief system that encompasses both cognitive (...) and non-cognitive elements. Such a conception of religious belief is more likely to correlate with psychological properties of believers that are both sufficiently shared and sufficiently unique to distinguish their psychology from believers in another religion or from non-believers. If the dispositional psychological property that constitutes religious belief does influence pain, then our analysis suggests that it doesn’t do so directly but rather through one of its occurrent manifestations. We offer a taxonomy of the different ways in which occurrent states of belief or experience may interact with physical pain, and we try to identify those that are more interesting or promising. We then proceed to employ the conceptual framework we developed to some of the existing evidence about the neural and psychological correlates of religious belief and experience, and about the cognitive modulation of physical pain. Finally we turn to analyse two experiments that directly investigated the relation between religious belief and pain. We draw attention to the limitations of existing evidence and end by suggesting directions for future conceptual and empirical inquiry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Review Essay:Aquinas, Modern Theology, and the TrinityGuy Mansini O.S.B.As one would expect from his Incarnate Lord, Thomas Joseph White's Trinity is no exercise in historical theology, although of course it calls on history, but aims to give us St. Thomas's theology as an enduring and so contemporary theology that both respects the creedal commitments of the Catholic Church and offers a more satisfying understanding of the Trinity than anything (...) proposed by the great theologians, Catholic and Protestant, of the past hundred years.1 The Trinity, however, gives a more complete and satisfying view of its subject than does The Incarnate Lord.Can St. Thomas really be fruitfully located within the dialectic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Trinitarian speculation? Yes, and it is one of White's principal contributions to show how St. Thomas's medieval contemporaries, the early Franciscans on the one hand and William of Ockham on the other, remotely but really adumbrate nineteenth- and twentieth-century theological positions, once due attention is paid to the key issues of the analogical naming of God and his knowability. The reader is thus assured that Aquinas's original project was composed with some awareness of temptations and alternatives repeated (though not exactly, of course) in modern thought. It should be added that St. Thomas is by no means treated as the only systematic theological authority for Trinitarian theology, but White recognizes his paradigmatic place in the Catholic theological tradition. [End Page 1415]The most important issue for assessing the enduring value of Thomas's Trinitarian theology, then, whether in the thirteenth century or twentieth century, turns out to be the applicability and centrality of the psychological analogy for an understanding of the immanent intelligibility of the Trinity, an analogy suggested by Scripture, and developed by the Cappadocians, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and other medieval writers, not to mention John Henry Newman and Matthias J. Scheeben.What is the status of this analogy? Olivier-Thomas Venard laconically describes it as "revealed"—too hot. Michael Maria Waldstein has recently argued vigorously and at length that it is not revealed at all—too cold. White does not discuss this in detail but is satisfied with saying that it is "derived" from Scripture—just right. However one thinks this question is to be resolved, White robustly defends the psychological analogy as a proper analogy and as the only systematic theological instrument ever offered by the theological tradition that succeeds in providing real understanding of the immanent life of the Trinity, one that preserves the transcendence of God and honors the dogmatic tradition of the Church bearing on the nature of God and the Trinity of persons—Nicaea, Lateran IV, and Vatican I, especially. This is how he does it in chapter 22.1. We know the mystery of interior Trinitarian life based on God's manifestation of it to us in the economy of salvation via the missions of Word and Spirit, which disclose to us distinct personal processions.2. Such processions are either immanent or transitive.3. But transitive processions terminate in some substance distinct from whence they emanate.4. God, however, is one in nature (essence, substance) both specifically and numerically.5. Therefore, the processions are immanent to the godhead.6. However, there are only two immanent immaterial activities known to us, that of knowing and that of loving.7. Therefore, we cannot have some understanding of the mystery of interior Trinitarian life except by analogy with these two [End Page 1416] activities. That is to say, we know the mystery of the Trinitarian life according to the "psychological model" or not at all.This argument can be re-phrased with more pointed reference to modern theologies of the Trinity.1. If we wish to understand the mystery of the immanent Trinitarian life of distinct persons, but not by way of immanent activities and processions, then we must appeal to transitive activity to account for the distinction of persons.2. Transitive divine activity can be conceived of (1) as creative, (2) as within creation relative to its history (the continental way), or (3) as taking place between three already constituted divine individuals, relating transitively to one... (shrink)

Nous remercions Dan Frost et Rebecca Guy de nous avoir autorisés à reproduire ce texte qui a déjà paru dans Recherches et pratiques pédagogiques en langues de spécialité, Vol. 35, N° spécial 1 | 2016 : Du secteur Lansad et des langues de spécialité. Résumé : La production orale pose de nombreuses difficultés pour les apprenants francophones en anglais et peut-être plus encore dans le secteur Lansad où ils sont souvent adultes et où le temps et les ressources sont particulièrement (...) limités. Le langage et - Linguistique et théorie du langage – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Quand tu es seul, debout au milieu de la haute plaine d'Asie,sous la coupole insondable où parfois un piloteou un ange sème dans l'azur une coulée d'amidon;quand tu tressailles sentant ta petitesse,apprends-le: l'espace auquel semble-t-il il ne fautrien, a grandement besoin en réalitéd'un regard extérieur, de distance, de vide.Tu es seid à pouvoir lui rendre ce service.Joseph BrodskyIn the course of this century, a number of authors have asserted that geographic knowledge is useful for the development of programs to parcel (...) out land. Hoping to foster this link between insight and action, applied geography saw the light of day. In order to be genuinely effective, the practice of this kind of planning, so it was thought, needed to rely on the expertise of the geographer who studied forms of human settlement. More fundamentally, the utilitarian claim of applied geography rested on the conviction according to which the spatial organization of human societies brought into play the question of justice and commonweal. As Jean Gottmann wrote, our epoch is particularly sensitive to the fact that everyone, whoever or from wherever they may be, consider themselves “to be entitled to live just as well as all others.” In this way a “popular will” was affirmed “that the necessary measures be taken to envisage, prepare, and provide for an improvement of life's comforts …, for a better life.” Inspired by the “modern idea of planning,” applied geography set itself the goal of “establishing justice […] by a more even distribution of people, of their means of subsistence, [and] of their living standard.”. (shrink)

La philosophie de Camus a déjà été bien étudiée ; son rapport au christianisme est connu et les chrétiens se sont immédiatement intéressés à son oeuvre. Mais cette affinité restait à analyser. C'est ce que propose cet ouvrage, selon diverses perspectives : à partir de la formation que reçut Camus, de son art d'écrivain et de metteur en scène, de ses relations avec les philosophes chrétiens et, enfin, de la manière dont sa propre réflexion aborde le christianisme. Camus ne se (...) voulait pas en effet un philosophe "professionnel". Il récusait les dogmes et les systèmes en philosophie, et les combattait également sans relâche dans les religions. Sa pensée de l'absurde et de la révolte a ainsi rencontré dans le christianisme un écho à son sens de la condition humaine, irréductible à l'idéologie. Cet ouvrage est le fruit d'un colloque international, qui fut organisé à l'Institut catholique de Paris, les 15 et 16 mars 2010, avec la collaboration de la Société des études camusiennes. Ce fut la première fois que des chercheurs se réunissaient autour de cette question. (shrink)

Concerns about climate change have led to the development of legal frameworks, including national regulations and international protocols to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases. Current mitigation measures, however, may not be sufficient to limit global warming to an average of 2°C since the pre-industrial period. Other approaches may therefore be required, including adaptation measures and climate engineering initiatives. Only a few legal frameworks are available to regulate adaptation initiatives and to constrain climate engineering approaches whose potential side-effects are not (...) always sufficiently well known. This Article provides a brief overview of scientific progress made to better assess climate change and addresses possible societal responses, including the mitigation, adaptation and climate engineering strategies. It provides a brief summary of current knowledge about expected climate change as a basis for the definition of future international climate policies and associated legal frameworks. (shrink)

Henri Bate de Malines a développé dans son Speculum divinorum une théorie de l’intellect profondément influencée par Averroès et Thomas d’Aquin, mais qui ne peut être considérée ni comme averroïste ni comme thomiste. Dans sa perspective néoplatonicienne, l’intellect agent est la forme immanente et transcendante du corps humain, tandis que l’intellect possible est un étant relatif et privatif.

In Nicolas of Cusa’s De li non aliud, chapter 19, one should read “in prima seu metaphysicali philosophia” instead of “in prima seu mentali philosophia.” This conjectural emendation is required because the identification of ‘first philosophy’ with ‘mental philosophy’ is attested nowhere else. The paper shows that the huge literature on Cusanus’ alleged re-interpretation of metaphysics as Geistphilosophie rests on a copyist’s mistake.

This volume examines how the notion of law was transformed and reformulated during the Middle Ages. It focuses on encounters between ancient and local legal traditions and the three great revelation religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each of which understood the written word of God as law and formulated new cultures. The work thus furnishes interdisciplinary and intercultural insight into medieval legal discourse.".