Most people who are regular consumers of psychoactive drugs are not drug addicts, nor will they ever become addicts. In neurobiological theories, non-addictive drug consumption is acknowledged only as a “necessary” prerequisite for addiction, but not as a stable and widespread behavior in its own right. This target article proposes a new neurobiological framework theory for non-addictive psychoactive drug consumption, introducing the concept of “drug instrumentalization.” Psychoactive drugs are consumed for their effects on mental states. Humans are able to learn (...) that mental states can be changed on purpose by drugs, in order to facilitate other, non-drug-related behaviors. We discuss specific “instrumentalization goals” and outline neurobiological mechanisms of how major classes of psychoactive drugs change mental states and serve non-drug-related behaviors. We argue that drug instrumentalization behavior may provide a functional adaptation to modern environments based on a historical selection for learning mechanisms that allow the dynamic modification of consummatory behavior. It is assumed that in order to effectively instrumentalize psychoactive drugs, the establishment of and retrieval from a drug memory is required. Here, we propose a new classification of different drug memory subtypes and discuss how they interact during drug instrumentalization learning and retrieval. Understanding the everyday utility and the learning mechanisms of non-addictive psychotropic drug use may help to prevent abuse and the transition to drug addiction in the future. (shrink)

This essay traces the complex constellation of ideas that informs Anders's turn to the generalizing expression ‘the human’ in his postwar work. It mobilizes the properties of radioactive material and digital data, which are both curiously imperceptible to our senses, to discuss Anders’s insistence on the universalizing pronoun `we' and assess its significance in the contemporary world. To do so, it aligns Anders's work with current debates about the Anthropocene and critiques of the use of the term ‘the human’ in (...) postcolonial settings. (shrink)

Following decades of neglect, the work of the German Jewish philosopher, literary author, cultural critic, and poet Günther Anders (1902–1992) is gaining increasing recognition in the English-speaking world. This translation of “Résistance heute” (Resistance Today) makes one of Anders’s most programmatic and polemical short texts available. Published at the height of his anti-nuclear activism, “Resistance Today” is the written version of a speech Anders delivered in November 1962 upon acceptance of the northwest Italian city of Omegna’s Resistance Prize (other notable (...) recipients included Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon). It first appeared in print in the West German left-wing journal Das Argument in November 1963. Clearly written for the occasion, the text condenses (and often further radicalizes) key premises about the end of history, the amoral character of work, and the continuity between Nazi totalitarianism, the nuclear age and the world of consumerism that are developed in great nuance across a range of books that Anders had recently published. Key co-ordinates include: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1 (The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1, 1956), his groundbreaking critique of technology; Der Mann auf der Brücke (The Man on the Bridge, 1959), a philosophical travel diary occasioned by Anders’s 1958 visit to Japan and his participation at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Tokyo; Burning Conscience (1961), a correspondence with the American reconnaissance pilot Claude Eatherly, who scouted the target area before the Enola Gay went on to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. It seems likely that Burning Conscience, which turned into an international bestseller, occasioned the award of the prize. (shrink)

Proposing a change to the view on psychoactive drug use in non-addicts touches a sensitive issue because of its potential implications to addiction prevention, therapeutic practice, and drug policy. Commentators raised nine questions that ranged from clarifications, suggested extensions of the model to supporting data previously not regarded, to assumptions on the implications of the model. Here, we take up the suggestions of the commentators to expand the model to behavioral addictions, discuss additional instrumentalization goals, and review the evidence from (...) laboratory animal studies on drug instrumentalization. We consider further the role of sociocultural factors and individual development in the establishment in drug instrumentalization and addiction. Finally, we clarify which implications we think this model may have. We conclude that drug instrumentalization theory can be further applied to other behaviors but will require a sensitive debate when used for drug and addiction policy that directly affects prevention and treatment. (shrink)

In the Anglo-American cultural sphere, the growing awareness of global warming and ecocide has coincided with the proliferation of a much discussed, post-apocalyptic imaginary that transports us to uninhabitable planetary futures. These “fictions,” as E. Ann Kaplan notes in a discussion of their mobilising potential, act as “memories for the future” which make us “identify with future selves struggling to survive.” This article turns to Günther Anders’s notion of “apocalypse-blindness” (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to set out an alternative (...) way of understanding the powerfully sentimental force such images of doom convey. While seemingly turning our gaze to the future and onto the devastating impact of consumerist lifestyles, I argue that this doom-ridden imaginary also entails a sentimentalisation of our own “inability to feel” and be sufficiently affected by the reality we know ourselves to be contributing to. As such, it bears witness to the trauma of “not being able to adequately feel” what one already knows. By revisiting The Road, a text that occupies a central role in discussions of the potentials and cathartic pitfalls of post-apocalyptic fiction, I suggest that its political potential lies in this confrontation with the limits of feeling. And the politics it opens onto does not hinge on images on ruin, but on a yearning for a socially sanctioned right to feel and express the fear representations only seem able to convey in an inadequate, anaesthetic manner. (shrink)

The inscription published here, found in 1985 at Haliartus in Boeotia, is a three-sided stele, broken from top to bottom, bearing lists of proper names. It can be dated to about the middle of the 3rd c. BC from the engraving, and particularly from the majority presence of patronymic adjectives. In spite of the lack of a title, due to the break in the stone, it may be said with probability that it concerns one or more lists of conscripts. If (...) a prosopographical study does not permit a sure conclusion, an onomastic analysis is rather more rewarding. Thus it is possible to distinguish three layers of names: the first comprises names current throughout the Greek world, the second names that were properly Boeotian, in particular theophoric ones like Πτωιόδωρος, and the third rare names, like Πέρμιχος and Πέρμων. (shrink)

Behavioural phenotypes have been explained by genetic and environmental factors (E) and their interaction. Here we suggest a rethinking of the E factor. Passively incurred environmental influences (E pass) and actively copied information and behaviour (E act) may be distinguished at shared and non-shared level. We argue that E act underlies mutation and selection and is the base of gene-independent heritability.

Science has needed a dispassionate valuation of psychoactive drugs, but a motivational analysis should be conducted with respect to long-term reward rather than reproductive fitness. Because of hyperbolic overvaluation of short-term rewards, an individual's valuation depends on the time she forms it and the times she will revisit it, sometimes making her best long-term interest lie in total abstinence.

We argue that the economic evaluation of health care (cost–benefit analysis) should respect individual preferences and should incorporate distributional considerations. Relying on individual preferences does not imply subjective welfarism. We propose a particular non-welfarist approach, based on the concept of equivalent income, and show how it helps to define distributional weights. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with empirical results from a pilot survey.

Hyperplasia and hypertrophy are elements of phenotypic plasticity adjusting organ size and function. Because they are costly, we assume that they are beneficial. In this review, the authors discuss examples of tissue and organ systems that respond with plastic changes to osmotic stress to raise awareness that we do not always have sufficient experimental evidence to conclude that such processes provide fitness advantages. Changes in hydranth architecture in the hydroid Cordylophora caspia or variations in size in the anal papillae of (...) insect larvae upon changes in medium salinity may be adaptive or not. The restructuring of salt glands in ducklings upon salt‐loading is an example of phenotypic plasticity which indeed seems beneficial. As the genomes of model species are recently sequenced and the animals are easy to rear, these species are suitable study objects to investigate the biological significance of phenotypic plasticity and to study potential epigenetic and other mechanisms underlying phenotypic changes. (shrink)

Mark Coeckelbergh’s mobilisation of Wittgensteinian language games makes an important contribution to exposing the social dimension of machine use. This commentary asks to what extent this social dimension of meaning and the wider imaginary that forms around technological objects on account of the transparency of language is also part of a technological “confidence trick”. It suggests that philosophical anthropology, especially the perspectives developed by Günther Anders and Helmut Plessner, can offer additional resources to trace and critique the wider ownership structures (...) and social relations of power that Mark Coecklebergh’s work productively exposes. It argues that language games alone cannot fully account for the hidden social relations that are habitually presented to us as abilities of “smart”, “intelligent” machines. Here a language that defamiliarizes machines, tries to make them visible by using exaggerated, pessimistic and object-oriented perspectives can perhaps help to make these power-relationships more comprehensible, “obvious” and thereby resistible and open to debate. (shrink)

Este artículo examina el desarrollo histórico y la jurisdicción del "inspector de la policía y del mercado" (sahib al-surta wa-l-suq) en Córdoba a través de los casos judiciales tomados de la colección de dictámenes jurídicos de Ibn Sahl al-Ahkam al-Kubrà y de fuentes biográficas e históricas. Durante el período de Taifas, esta expresión omeya dio paso al "inspector de sentencias jurídicas" (sahib al-ahkam). A través de más de veinte casos, datables entre los años 456 / 1064 y 464 / 1072, (...) se demuestra cómo este juez, que no era qadi, seguía en sus sentencias el fiqh malikí, tanto en las leyes procesales como en la ley sustantiva. (shrink)

Este artículo examina el desarrollo histórico y la jurisdicción del «inspector de la policía y del mercado» {ṣāḥib al-šurṭa wa-l-sūq) en Córdoba a través de los casos judiciales tomados de la colección de dictámenes jurídicos de Ibn Sahl al-Aḥkām al-Kubrà y de fuentes biográficas e históricas. Durante el período de Taifas, esta expresión omeya dio paso al «inspector de sentencias jurídicas» {sāḥib al-aḥkām). A través de más de veinte casos, datables entre los años 456/1064 y 464/1072, se demuestra cómo este (...) juez, que no era qāḍī, seguía en sus sentencias el fiqh mālikī, tanto en las leyes procesales como en la ley sustantiva. (shrink)

The formation of citizenship as a concept to define the rights of participation in the formation processes of modern territorial states is well known. But the transnational dimensions of defining citizenship and how to combine national legislations with enlightened universal and natural law rules in the mid-19th century is not very well known. The article aims to explore the transnational discourses on the political, economic and moral rights and duties of the citizen in the pan—European liberal Association Internationale pour le (...) Progrès des Sciences Sociales. During the 1860s, its congresses should serve as a vast commission of enquiry and should eventually lead to a general definition of citizenship in Europe which could be implemented in national legislations. The article shows how the Association Internationale tried to deduce universal moral rules from national legislations and peculiarities by the means of moral or positive social science. In combining moral unity with national and regional diversities, the Association Internationale tried to give an elastic framework for a European civil society in which national subjects should become active citizens. (shrink)

Hat die Scharia eine Geschichte? Und welche gesellschaftliche Rolle spielt das Rechtsdenken im Islam? Hierauf bietet dieses Buch fundierte Antworten aufgrund neuer Fakten und Fragestellungen. Die chronologisch ausgerichtete Grundlagenforschung des Autors in Bereichen der Rechtsregeln, juristischer Hermeneutik und Rechtsurkunden ermöglicht eine Revision bisheriger Überzeugungen vom islamischen Recht. Die umfassende Synthese stellt das Juristenrecht aus dogmatischer sowie anwendungsbezogener Sicht zudem in den Rahmen historischer Rechtsordnungen seit der Frühzeit bis zu den Umbrüchen im 19. Jahrhundert. Nachgezeichnet wird die Entwicklung von Institutionen, Regelverständnis (...) und Legitimation durch Rechtsgelehrte. Die Wandlung „islamischen Rechts“ vom Kalifatsrecht zum Juristenrecht und dessen schariatischer Phase ab dem 13. Jahrhundert sind Ausdruck der gewandelten Bedeutung des Rechtsdenkens für die Praxis. Die juristische Ausgestaltung des Offenbarungsrechts, die auch in Theologie und Philosophie hineingriff, widerspricht der Vorstellung des prophetischen Vorbilds als alleinige Richtschnur im Frühislam – und damit Teilen des heutigen Verständnisses von „Scharia“. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza el corpus de 900 documentos del Haram al-�ari-f desde la perspectiva de la conservación de archivos. En su mayoría, estos documentos están relacionados con el juez de Jerusalén �araf al-Di-n ?I-sa- b. Ga-nim y con el periodo en el que se mantuvo en el cargo, entre 793/1391 y 797/1395. La muestra de documentos estudiada, sobre todo inventarios de bienes, pero también documentos relacionados con otras áreas del derecho que pertenecen a la competencia del qa-di-, contradicen la hipótesis (...) de que los documentos del corpus del Haram al-�ari-f son registros del tribunal compilados sistemáticamente en un archivo. Los certificados judiciales sobre ventas de bienes inmuebles y otras transacciones que se han conservado de otros periodos en el corpus no aparecen precisamente para el periodo que va entre los años 793/1391 y 797/1395. De esta época abundan también documentos relativos a las transacciones financieras realizadas dentro de instituciones para las que el juez tenía jurisdicción. La necrología realizada por el cronista contemporáneo Ibn Hiy^y^i- (d. 816/1413) abre una perspectiva interesante para explicar la selección de documentos relacionados con �araf al-Di-n, que estuvo involucrado en un enorme asunto de corrupción. (shrink)

Hegels Kritik an Kants praktischer Philosophie wurde in der Rezeptionsgeschichte zumeist anhand des Begriffspaares "Moralit t und Sittlichkeit" er rtert. Die Frage, welche Auswirkungen diese Kritik auf die einzelnen Kategorien der Rechtsmetaphysik hat, wurde demgegen ber kaum gestellt. Bestehen Unterschiede zwischen den Ausf hrungen beider Philosophen hinsichtlich der einzelnen Rechtsbegriffe? Lassen sich etwaige Differenzen auf die Verschiedenartigkeit der Freiheitskonzeptionen zur ckf hren? Und l sst sich Hegels allgemein gehaltene Kritik an Kant auf dessen Einzelausf hrungen in den "Metaphysischen Anfangsgr nden (...) der Rechtslehre" bertragen? Das Buch untersucht diese Fragen mit Blick auf die f r Kant wie Hegel zentrale Rechtskategorie des Eigentums. (shrink)

Arguably, the religious use of hallucinogenic drugs stems from a human search of metaphysical insight rather than from a direct need for cognitive, emotional, social, physical, or sexual improvement. Therefore, the sacramental and spiritual intake of hallucinogenic drugs goes so far beyond other biopsychosocial functions that it deserves its own category in the drug instrumentalization list.

Este artículo examina el desarrollo histórico y la jurisdicción del «inspector de la policía y del mercado» {ṣāḥib al-šurṭa wa-l-sūq) en Córdoba a través de los casos judiciales tomados de la colección de dictámenes jurídicos de Ibn Sahl al-Aḥkām al-Kubrà y de fuentes biográficas e históricas. Durante el período de Taifas, esta expresión omeya dio paso al «inspector de sentencias jurídicas» {sāḥib al-aḥkām). A través de más de veinte casos, datables entre los años 456/1064 y 464/1072, se demuestra cómo este (...) juez, que no era qāḍī, seguía en sus sentencias el fiqh mālikī, tanto en las leyes procesales como en la ley sustantiva. (shrink)

Children and adolescents with an intellectual disability and autistic traits often attend special needs schools where they are surrounded by peers with diverse characteristics. Given the role that peers can play in social development, we examined whether autistic traits development in students with ID and high levels of such characteristics are influenced by the level of autistic traits among the schoolmates they like most. Furthermore, we investigated the degree to which this peer influence susceptibility depends on students’ gender. A longitudinal (...) design, with data collection points at the beginning and the end of a school year, was used. Staff reported on 330 students with high levels of autistic traits who attended 142 classrooms in 16 Swiss special needs schools. Results showed that students’ future individual level of autistic traits was not predicted by the autistic traits level of preferred peers, controlling for individual autistic traits at T1, level of general functioning, gender, and age. However, the peer effect was significantly moderated by students’ gender, indicating that girls but not boys were susceptible to peer influence. These findings are discussed in terms of implications for understanding autistic traits development and directions of support for children and adolescents in their peer context. (shrink)

The drug-reinforcement theory explains why humans get engaged in drug taking behavior. This theory posits that drugs of abuse serve as biological rewards by activating the reinforcement system. Although from a psychological and neurobiological perspective this theory is extremely helpful, it does not tell us about the drug-taking motives and motivation of an individual. The definition of drug instrumentalization goals will improve our understanding of individual drug-taking profiles.

Bringing together both established and emerging scholars from critical and cultural theory, literature, philosophy, and theology, this book examines the intersection of economics and religion.