This essay presents an integrated account of Michael Wyschogrod's Zionism as a function of his broader theological anthropology, eschatology, and carnal interpretation of Israel's election. Against Leora Batnitzky, I show that Wyschogrod's Zionism, while definitively messianic, is decidedly not fanatical or fundamentalist. Against Meir Soloveichik, I show that Wyschogrod has maintained this non-fanatical messianism consistently throughout his career, and so his pacific political prescriptions are organically at one with his vigorous calls for Jewish sovereignty over the land.

The volume investigates the question of meaning of mystical phenomena and, conversely, queries the concept of "meaning" itself, via insights afforded by mystical experiences. The collection brings together researchers from such disparate fields as philosophy, psychology, history of religion, cognitive poetics, and semiotics, in an effort to ascertain the question of mysticism's meaning through pertinent, up-to-date multidisciplinarity. The discussion commences with Editor's Introduction that probes persistent questions of complexity as well as perplexity of mysticism and the reasons why problematizing mysticism (...) leads to even greater enigmas. One thread within the volume provides the contextual framework for continuing fascination of mysticism that includes a consideration of several historical traditions as well as personal accounts of mystical experiences: Two contributions showcase ancient Egyptian and ancient Israelite involvements with mystical alterations of consciousness and Christianity's origins being steeped in mystical praxis; and four essays highlight mysticism's formative presence in Chinese traditions and Tibetan Buddhism as well as medieval Judaism and Kabbalah mysticism. A second, more overarching strand within the volume is concerned with multidisciplinary investigations of the phenomenon of mysticism, including philosophical, psychological, cognitive, and semiotic analyses. To this effect, the volume explores the question of philosophy's relation to mysticism and vice versa, together with a Wittgensteinian nexus between mysticism, facticity, and truth; language mysticism and "supernormal meaning" engendered by certain mystical states; cognitive-poetic analysis of mystical poetry; and a semiotic scrutiny of some mystical experiences and their ineffability. Finally, the volume includes an assessment of the so-called New Age authors' contention of the convergence of scientific and mystical claims about reality. The above two tracks are appended with personal, contemporary accounts of mystical experiences, in the Prologue; and a futuristic envisioning, as a fictitious chronicle from the time-to-come, of life without things mystical, in the Postscript. The volume contains fourteen chapters; its international contributors are based in Canada, Israel, United Kingdom, and the United States. (shrink)

This paper expands the definition of gray-marketing to include some ethically problematic marketing activities and techniques used in personal selling in China. Based on this, a conceptual model of gray-marketing for a particular type of selling in which both the sellers and the buyers exhibit problematic ethics in an exchange and the associated hypotheses are developed and tested. The findings show that, first, the respondents have different ethical evaluations of different marketing practices used in personal selling such as giving and (...) accepting gifts, buying and accepting meals, and offering and accepting kickbacks. Some of these practices may not be considered unethical. Second, in terms of ethical assessment, gray-marketing practiced by buying agents is more unacceptable than when practiced by sales agents. Third, a person's ethical evaluation of gray-marketing behavior, empathy for gray-marketing, and belief that gray-marketing has serious consequences, significantly affects his inclination to use gray-marketing. This paper concludes with a discussion of some possible applications of our research findings. (shrink)

Whilst previous observational studies have linked negative thought processes such as an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles with depression, the directionality of these associations and the potential role that these factors play in the transition to adulthood and parenthood has not yet been investigated. This study examined the association between locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression in young adulthood and whether parenthood moderated these associations. Using a UK prospective population-based birth (...) cohort study: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, we examined the association between external locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence with odds of depression in 4,301 young adults using logistic regression models unadjusted and adjusted for potential confounding factors. Interaction terms were employed to examine whether parenthood moderated these associations. Over 20% of young adults in our sample were at or above the clinical threshold indicating probable depression. For each standard deviation increase in external locus of control in adolescence, there was a 19% higher odds of having probable depression in young adulthood, after adjusting for various confounding factors including baseline mood and different demographic and life events variables. Similarly, for each SD increase in negative cognitive styles in adolescence, there was a 29% higher odds of having probable depression in the adjusted model. We found little evidence that parenthood status moderated the relationship between external locus of control or negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression following adjustment for confounding factors. Effect estimates were comparable when performed in the complete case dataset. These findings suggest that having an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles in mid- to late adolescence is associated with an increased likelihood of probable depression in young adulthood. (shrink)

What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary person, the person on the street? And, what could they come to mean? In this paper, we present an overview of a year-long project to examine just such questions and complicate, in some ways, what it is to ask them. The project is a collective exercise in which we – a mixture of social scientists, designers and makers – and those living and working on one (...) street in Cambridge, Tenison Road, are working to think through how data might be materialised and come to matter. The project aims to better understand the specificities and contingencies that arise when data is produced and used in place. Mid-way through the project, we use this commentary to give some background to the work and detail one or two of the troubles we have encountered in putting locally relevant data to work. We also touch on a methodological standpoint we are working our way into and through, one that we hope complicates the separations between subject and object in data-making and opens up possibilities for a generative refiguring of the manifold relations. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of philosophers have conducted empirical studies that survey people's intuitions about various subject matters in philosophy. Some have found that intuitions vary accordingly to seemingly irrelevant facts: facts about who is considering the hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, or the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered. Our research applies this experimental philosophical methodology to Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous Loop Case, which she used to call into question (...) the validity of the intuitively plausible Doctrine of Double Effect. We found that intuitions about the Loop Case vary according to the context in which the case is considered. We contend that this undermines the supposed evidential status of intuitions about the Loop Case. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for philosophers who rely on the Loop Case to make philosophical arguments and for philosophers who use intuitions in general. (shrink)

The “fair benefits” approach to international research is designed to produce results that all can agree are fair without taking a stand on divisive questions of justice. But its appealing veneer of collaboration masks ambiguities at both a conceptual and an operational level. An attempt to put it into practice would look a lot like an auction, leaving little reason to think the outcomes will satisfy even minimal conditions of fairness.

Contingencies of the early nuclear arms race Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-23 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9495-z Authors S. S. Schweber, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Alex Wellerstein, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Ethan Pollock, Department of History, Box N, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA Barton J. Bernstein, History Department, Building 200, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2024, USA Michael D. Gordin, (...) History Department, 305 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

The rising cost of the opioid antagonist and overdose reversal agent naloxone is an urgent public health problem. The recent and dramatic price increase of Evzio, a naloxone auto-injector produced by Kaléo, shows how pharmaceutical manufacturers entering the naloxone marketplace rely on market exclusivity guaranteed by the patent system to charge prices at what the market can bear, which can restrict access to life-saving medication. We argue that 28 U.S.C. § 1498, a section of the federal code that allows the (...) government to use patent-protected products for its own purposes in exchange for reasonable compensation, could be used to procure generic naloxone auto-injectors, or at least bring Kaléo to the negotiating table. Precedent exists for the use of § 1498 to procure pharmaceuticals, and it could give meaning to the federal government's recent declaration of a public health emergency around the opioid epidemic, discourage new market entrants from charging exorbitant prices, and yield important public health benefits. (shrink)

Bringing together original essays by French, British and American scholars, this collection explores the key role of gender and sexual politics in 20th-century French cinema.

We agree with Vaesen that there is evidence for cognitive differences between humans and other primates. However, it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the uniqueness of the cognitive mechanisms underlying human tool use. Tests of causal understanding are in their infancy, as is the study of animals more distantly related to humans.

This paper explores relational syllogistic logics, a family of logical systems related to reasoning about relations in extensions of the classical syllogistic. These are all decidable logical systems. We prove completeness theorems and complexity results for a natural subfamily of relational syllogistic logics, parametrized by constructors for terms and for sentences.

Purpose There is a contradictive debate on factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness among scholars. This study aims to examine factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness for accessing agricultural marketing information. Design/methodology/approach A descriptive cross-sectional research design was used with 400 smallholder grape farmers. The use of structured questionnaires, focus group discussions and key informant interviews helped to collect primary data. Data analysis was subjected to descriptive, ordinal logistic regression and thematic approaches. Findings This study found that farmers were mostly (...) aware of voice calls helping to access buyers and price information. Education, age and sex were the critical factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness among grape smallholder farmers. Originality/value This study contributes to scientific knowledge by providing an understanding of the perceived factors on mobile phone usage awareness within the grape subsector to inform policymakers. (shrink)

The idea that there is a fundamental difference in value between persons and things, and that respecting this difference is an important moral requirement, has strong intuitive appeal. Kantian ethics is unique in placing this requirement at the center of a moral system and in explicating the conditions for complying with it. Unlike challenges to Kantian ethics that focus on tragic cases that pit respect for one person against respect for another, this paper focuses on the question of how we (...) can respect the value distinction between persons and things under conditions of uncertainty. After exploring why decision making under uncertainty is a neglected topic among Kantians and demonstrating how uncertainty challenges our ability to comply with this norm, we propose a notion of morally insignificant risk within a framework that allows agents to navigate real-world decisions involving material benefit and some risk to dignity without violating the Kantian’s core commitments. We conclude by exploring some of the challenges facing this approach. (shrink)

In some views, philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over. While philosophers were especially important in the early days of the field, so the argument goes, the majority of the work in bioethics today involves the “simple” application of existing philosophical principles or concepts, as well as empirical work in bioethics. Here, we address this view head on and ask: What is the role of philosophy in bioethics today? This paper has three specific aims: (1) to respond to skeptics and (...) make the case that philosophy and philosophers still have a very important and meaningful role to play in contemporary bioethics, (2) to discuss some of the current challenges to the meaningful integration of philosophy and bioethics, and (3) to make suggestions for what needs to happen in order for the two fields to stay richly connected. We outline how bioethics center directors, funders, and philosopher bioethicists can help. (shrink)

Foucault’s contribution to the critical theorization of race and racism has been much debated. Most commentators, however, have focused on his most direct remarks on the topic, which are found in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and in the lecture course “Society Must Be Defended.” This paper argues that those remarks should be reread in light of certain moves Foucault makes in earlier lecture courses, especially The Punitive Society and Psychiatric Power. Although the earlier courses do not (...) always explicitly address the theme of race, the concepts of the “accumulation of men” and the differential “management of illegalisms” developed in them immensely enrich Foucault’s outline of a genealogy of racism. They also permit a clarification of the problem to which the concept of “state racism” is an answer, and they provide the key for understanding the wider social conditions of state racism. The guiding thread linking these earlier courses to the later material is the problem of a genealogy of logics of enmity. At the same time, the earlier courses make explicit the link between these logics and the development of capitalist society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Keaton’s Yoke ALEX PRIOU Love, looking at me meltingly under dark-lidded eyes, by all manner of charms throws me into the limitless fishing-net of the Cupridian [Aphrodite]. And I tremble as he approaches, just as an aged, yoke-carrying horse that has carried off victory unwillingly walks into contest with swift chariots. (Ibycus, frag. 287)1 The resurgence of love in his old age prompts a fearful reflection in the (...) aged Ibycus. Love sets a trap he must escape, but cannot for all its infinitude, just as an athlete’s prior victories never sate his love of competition. Ibycus discovers the paradox of his situation, that the satisfaction sought is immeasurably greater than what a finite victory could ever provide. The competition of rival lovers for the beautiful beloved appears to Ibycus to be an immediate contrivance for an ineluctably distant object. Ibycus thus learns that love is human finitude’s attempt to answer the question that it itself raises. And yet, despite his fear, Ibycus’ reflection seems more comic than tragic, for his bestial image of love’s effects subverts all pretense to participation in the divinity of Aphrodite. The thought that the ultimate object of love’s longing is spurious may engender fear, but fear, in giving us an acute sense of our mortal limits, has the potential to take us outside ourselves and so prepare us for laughter. For reasons this tattered remnant of Ibycus’ poem doesn’t give us, the apparent tragedy of love—of the simultaneous necessity of pursuing the beloved and impossibility of complete satisfaction—appears resolved by our very awareness of it.2 Thankfully, Ibycus’ vision of love as both tragic and comic has a striking corollary in the films of Buster Keaton, who arion 26.3 winter 2019 mirrors the tension between yoked racehorse and reflective poet in the determined striving of his protagonists and the reflective depth of his directing. As both actor and director, Keaton is both striving body and disembodied thought, both trapped in finitude and reflecting thereupon. Ibycus and Keaton may bear love’s yoke, but they know the yoke’s on them. Keaton’s films thus promise some glimpse into the possibility of a comic redemption to the tragedy of lover and beloved, so much so that it seems one can connect these tatters of papyrus using celluloid film. Can the finite, particular beloved ever satisfy the lover, who strives to escape the limits of finitude? Or must we resign ourselves to our own transience? Keaton explores these questions by crafting comedies around characters who so strive. These characters—strikingly similar in their circumstances and ambitions, yet with slight but essential differences in disposition—offer Keaton a way to look for who bears easiest the weight of love’s yoke. I’ve chosen four films—Cops, College, The Playhouse, and The General—that, when ordered thus, bring us gradually from unavoidable tragedy to the unwitting self-redemption that comes when we laugh at ourselves. Discussing each in turn, I hope to offer some glimpse into what Ibycus may have had in mind when he playfully cast man’s most distinctive and serious striving as a yoked horse. CO P S (1922) the burden of love’s yoke is nowhere clearer in Keaton’s films than in Cops, as the film’s ominous epigraph warns: “Love laughs at locksmiths.” Keaton the director elegantly and humorously frames Keaton’s character as among love’s prisoners. The first shot features him behind bars, gripping them from within what appears to be a jail cell, as he and his love interest carry on a discussion with forlorn looks on their faces. Because the camera is on her side of the bars, we are invited to imagine ourselves free from Keaton’s predicament. She bids him farewell, and as she walks away Keaton the 116 keaton’s yoke director cuts to the other side of the bars and at a greater distance from the action. We discover that he isn’t in jail, but standing outside the gates to a great mansion. Keaton’s love interest turns around and speaks again, now stern rather than solemn. An intertitle finally... (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Foucault's concept of illegalism and explores its significance for his genealogies of modern punishment and racial formation. The concept of illegalism, as distinct from illegality, plays a double role. It allows Foucault to describe a ruling class tactic for managing inequalities and also to characterize an important vein of resistant subjugated knowledges. The political project of the prison is linked to a new crime policy that does not so much aim to repress illegalisms as to manage them (...) differentially. This practice of differential management, which arises in the 18th century, produces a primary split along class lines between two types of illegalism—an insight that has a certain resonance with Edwin's Sutherland's concept of “white collar crime.” Foucault's investigation of a third category of “infralegal illegalism” sheds light not only on the genealogy of the category of delinquency but also on his genealogy of racial categorization. Finally, Foucault argues that a genuinely radical critique of modern society must address the “need” organized political power has for the illegalisms from which it purportedly seeks to protect society. Against this practice of differentially managing illegalisms, Foucault seeks to reactivate a subjugated problematic that might open up questions about the transformative possibilities of illegalism today. (shrink)

Philosophy of Science is a mid-level text for students with some grounding in philosophy. It introduces the questions that drive enquiry in the philosophy of science, and aims to educate readers in the main positions, problems and arguments in the field today. Alex Rosenberg is certainly well qualified to write such an introduction. His works cover a large area of the philosophy of natural and social sciences. In addition, the author of the argument that the ‘queen of the social (...) sciences’, economics, is not a science at all, can be counted on to show how the philosophy of science can be relevant to the understanding of the status of scientific knowledge and can provide a critical assessment of practitioners’ view of their field. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the unique value of a Husserlian phenomenological account of the affective (or “feeling”) dimension of emotional experience for realizing Aristotle’s vision of the cultivation of virtue. Through an analysis of envy, the author defends the claim that the affective dimension of self-assessment is central to the process of conceptualization by which we learn to apprehend our own emotional responses. Analytic conceptual analyses that dismiss the subjective, affective correlate of emotional experiences, therefore, fail to take seriously what is (...) involved in learning from one's mistakes. (shrink)

The Unity of Perception offers a grand synoptic vision of how perception, consciousness and knowledge fit together. It is a remarkable achievement. A short comment can only address fragments of Schellenberg’s picture; naturally I will look for weak spots.

Saul Kripke’s much discussed Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language has, I believe, been widely misinterpreted. The purpose of this note is to offer a correction. As it happens, on my reading of Kripke’s text Kripke’s Wittgenstein begins to look recognisably like Wittgenstein himself. But I shall not be concerned here with the question of whether Kripke’s Wittgenstein is Wittgenstein. My only aim is to correct the misinterpretation.

This book proposes a cosmopolitan ethics that calls for analyzing how economic and political structures limit opportunities for different groups, distinguished by gender, race, and class. The author explores the implications of criticisms from the social sciences of Eurocentrism and of methodological nationalism for normative theories of mobility. These criticisms lend support to a cosmopolitan social science that rejects a principled distinction between international mobility and mobility within states and cities. This work has interdisciplinary appeal, integrating the social sciences, political (...) philosophy, and political theory. (shrink)

In 'Rethinking the Good', Larry Temkin makes two core claims. First, the goodness of a distribution is sometimes ‘essentially comparative’ – it sometimes depends on which alternative distribution(s) it is compared to. Second, such cases threaten the transitivity of ‘all things considered better than’. I argue that the goodness of a distribution may indeed depend on what other distributions are feasible. But contrary to Temkin, I also argue that transitivity holds even when the goodness of a distribution depends on the (...) feasible set of which it is a member. (shrink)

This article uses Foucault’s lecture courses to illuminate his reading of Marx’s Capital in Discipline and Punish. Foucault finds in Marx’s account of cooperation a precedent for his own approach to power. In turn, Foucault helps us rethink the concepts of productive force and labour power in Marx. Foucault is shown to be particularly interested in one of Marx’s major themes in Capital, parts III–IV: the subsumption of labour under capital. In Discipline and Punish and The Punitive Society, Foucault offers (...) a genealogy of the forms of labour power and productive force. One of his central problems is to understand how labour power is converted in productive force and how, prior to that, productive subjects who can properly bear and dispose of their labour power are formed. Foucault’s reading of Capital resonates with those currents of Marx interpretation today that seek to repoliticize the concept of productive force and to offer a materialist account of subject formation. (shrink)

Alex Oliver; Discussions: Classes and Goodman's Nominalism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 179–192, https://doi.

Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's (...) reasons. -/- In *Fitting Things Together*, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics. -/- Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon. (shrink)

Foucault famously divided the history of twentieth-century French philosophy between a “philosophy of experience” and a “philosophy of the concept,” placing Bergson in the former camp and his teacher Canguilhem in the latter. This division has shaped the Anglophone reception of Canguilhem as primarily a historian and philosopher of biology. Canguilhem, however, was also a philosopher of life and a careful reader of Bergson. The recently-begun publication of Canguilhem’s Œuvres complètes has revealed the depth of this engagement, and a re-reading (...) of Canguilhem’s final major statement on Bergson, the 1966 essay “The Concept and Life,” has thus become necessary. The basic problem of that essay is the relationship between knowledge and life in the history of biology and philosophy, with a special place for Bergson. Canguilhem’s strong criticism of him turns, however, on a misquotation. In claiming that Bergson fails to account for the struggle of the living being to maintain a species form, Canguilhem misconstrues the crucial Bergsonian distinction between vital order and geometrical identity; he thus misses the importance that Bergson accords to general biological tendencies, rather than to the generality of the species. Despite the differences on display in the 1966 essay, it will be argued that Canguilhem’s earlier remarks on Bergson show a surprising convergence in the underlying aim of each thinker’s biological philosophy: the call for a new ontology that grasps the ordered and intelligible character of life without relying on a principle of identity. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Are there ‘degrees of causation’? Yes and no: causation is not a scalar relation, but different causes can contribute to a causing of an effect to different extents. In this paper, I motivate a probabilistic analysis of an event’s degree of contribution to a causing of an effect and explore some of its consequences.

In this paper, we present two variants of Peirce’s Triadic Logic within a language containing only conjunction, disjunction, and negation. The peculiarity of our systems is that conjunction and disjunction are interpreted by means of Peirce’s mysterious binary operations Ψ and Φ from his ‘Logical Notebook’. We show that semantic conditions that can be extracted from the definitions of Ψ and Φ agree (in some sense) with the traditional view on the semantic conditions of conjunction and disjunction. Thus, we support (...) the conjecture that Peirce’s special interest in these operations is due to the fact that he interpreted them as conjunction and disjunction, respectively. We also show that one of our systems may serve as a suitable base for an interesting implicative expansion, namely the connexive three-valued logic by Cooper. Sound and complete natural deduction calculi are presented for all systems examined in this paper. (shrink)

Books reviewed in this essay:Fred d'Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the Essential Tension (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)Edwin H.-C. Hung, Beyond Kuhn: Scientific Explanation, Theory Structure, Incommensurability and Physical Necessity (Hants: Ashgate, 2006)Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen, The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Forty-eight years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, fourteen since the death of its author, Thomas S. Kuhn, and ten since the publication of the posthumous Road Since Structure (...) (2000), the Kuhn cottage industry continues to produce. In preparing this essay review I .. (shrink)

Agitation is one of the most common behavioural and psychological symptoms in people living with dementia. This behaviour can cause tremendous stress and anxiety on family caregivers and healthcare providers. Direct observation of PLwD is the traditional way to measure episodes of agitation. However, this method is subjective, bias-prone and timeconsuming. Importantly, it does not predict the onset of the agitation. Therefore, there is a need to develop a continuous monitoring system that can detect and/or predict the onset of agitation. (...) In this study, a multi-modal sensor platform with video cameras, motion and door sensors, wristbands and pressure mats were set up in a hospital-based dementia behavioural care unit to develop a predictive system to identify the onset of agitation. The research team faced several barriers in the development and initiation of the study, namely addressing concerns about the study ethics, logistics and costs of study activities, device design for PLwD and limitations of its use in the hospital. In this paper, the strategies and methodologies that were implemented to address these challenges are discussed for consideration by future researchers who will conduct similar studies in a hospital setting. (shrink)

Robotic warfare has now become a real prospect. One issue that has generated heated debate concerns the development of ‘Killer Robots’. These are weapons that, once programmed, are capable of finding and engaging a target without supervision by a human operator. From a conceptual perspective, the debate on Killer Robots has been rather confused, not least because it is unclear how central elements of these weapons can be defined. Offering a precise take on the relevant conceptual issues, the article contends (...) that Killer Robots are best seen as executors of targeting decisions made by their human programmers. However, from a normative perspective, the execution of targeting decisions by Killer Robots should worry us. The article argues that what is morally bad about Killer Robots is that they replace human agency in warfare with artificial agency, a development which should be resisted. Finally, the article contends that the issue of agency points to a wider problem in just war theory, namely the role of moral rights in our normative reasoning on armed conflict. (shrink)