Overweight and obesity among children and adolescents are global problems of our time. Due to their authority and role modeling, parents play an essential part in the efficacy of prevention and intervention programs. This study assessed the barriers that parents of overweight/obese children face in preventive and interventional health care utilization. Sixteen parents were qualitatively interviewed. A content analysis was performed, and barriers to change were allocated to their stage of change according to the transtheoretical model. Among the main barriers (...) is the underestimation of health risks caused by overweight/obesity in association with diminished problem awareness. Parents seem not necessarily in need of theoretical knowledge for prevention and interventions. They do however need support in evaluating the weight status of their child and the knowledge of whom to turn to for help as well as specific and hands-on possibilities for change. The results extend past studies by adding specific barriers to change that parents commonly experience. Possibilities to address these barriers, e.g., through trainings at the pediatric practice or adoption of conversation techniques, are discussed. Future studies might identify subgroups experiencing specific barriers and thus be able to address these in an individualized way. (shrink)

Als geronnene Wiederholungen prägen Rituale unseren Alltag und unser Zusammenleben maßgeblich. Nicht von ungefähr galten sie lange Zeit als Inbegriff des Konservativen, Starren und Förmlichen. Eine gänzlich durchritualisierte Welt wäre zweifellos eine unfreie Welt. Im Zeitalter der Deregulierung, der Hyperaktivität und des Aufmerksamkeitsdefizits wird nun ihre Halt gebende und strukturierende Seite wiederentdeckt.Die AutorInnen reflektieren gesellschaftskritisch Theorien und psychoanalytische Erfahrungen rund um das Thema Rituale und widmen sich den folgenden Fragen: Werden Rituale zu Widerstandsnestern gegen die allgemeine Flüchtigkeit? Können sie als (...) Angelpunkte des Innehaltens und als Wegbahner unbeirrten Denkens eine neue kritische Potenz erhalten?Mit Beiträgen von Thomas Dietzel, Gesa Foken, Dirk Hofmeister, Katharina Lacina, Konrad Paul Liessmann, Nina Reis Saroldi, Elisabeth Rohr, Jochen Schade, Hans-Ernst Schiller, Edgar Weiß, Laura Wolf und Carsten Wonneberger. (shrink)

This book focuses on some of the most pressing methodological, ethical, and technique-philosophical questions that are connected with the concept of artificial autonomous systems. (Series: Hermeneutics and Anthropology / Hermeneutik und ...

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

We sley Salmon, in his influential and detailed book, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, argues that the pragmatic approach to scientific explanation, “construed as the claim that scientific explanation can be explicated entirely in pragmatic terms” (1989, 185) is inadequate. The specific inadequacy ascribed to a pragmatic account is that objective relevance relations cannot be incorporated into such an account. Salmon relies on the arguments given in Kitcher and Salmon (1987) to ground this objection. He also suggests that Peter Railton’s (...) concepts of the ideal explanatory text and explanatory information (Railton 1981) can provide what the pragmatic approach lacks. This suggestion is not a conclusion of course; we read it as the promotion of part of a research program aimed at forging a greater consensus on scientific explanation-an admirable goal. However, we do not see the pragmatic approach as inadequate. We will show that a synthetic account inspired by Salmon’s adaptation of Railton would be equivalent to van Fraassen’s pragmatic account in three respects: accepting or rejecting requests for explanation; the practice of giving scientific explanations; and the evaluation of the goodness of explanations. We include all three under the general rubric of explanatory “practice.” Admittedly these are not the only three features by which an account of explanation might be evaluated. Roughly, we mean to show that a synthetic account cannot do a better job of accounting for the scientific practices which are of importance to the constructive empiricist, and therefore no argument can be presented to the constructive empiricist to convince her that by her own standards the synthetic account is superior. (shrink)

Dan Brock has asserted that those who claim that the early embryo has full moral status are not consistent, and that the rationality of such a position is dubious when it is adopted from a religious perspective. I argue that both claims are flawed. Starting with the second claim, which is grounded in Brock’s moral abstolutist position, I argue that Brock has provided no argument on why the religious position should be less rational than the secular position. With regard to (...) the first claim, I argue that those who hold the view that the early embryo has full moral status can be consistent even if they do not oppose sexual reproduction, even if they do not grieve as much over the loss of embryos as over the loss of other humans, even if they prefer to save one child instead of 100 embryos in the event of fire, and even if they do not accept racism and sexism. (shrink)

The scope of embryo research in the UK has been expanded by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Regulations 2001. Two advisory bodies—the Chief Medical Officer’s Expert Group and the House of Lords’ Select Committee—presented various arguments in favour of embryo research. One of these is the view that, just as lottery tickets have relatively little value before the draw because of the low probability of their being the winning ticket, early embryos have relatively little value because of the presumed low (...) probability that they will mature into more developed embryos. This argument from probability is questioned in this paper, as well as the contention that allowing embryo destruction is incompatible with the view that embryos have full moral status. Although I challenge Savulescu’s view that early embryos should be entered into a lottery in which they are subjected to the probability of being destroyed , a revised version of Thomson’s analogy of the famous violinist defies the view that the position that the embryo has full moral status is incompatible with qualified support for embryo destruction. (shrink)

Service robotics has increasingly become the focus of reflective research on new technologies over the last decade. The current state of technology is characterized by prototypical robot systems developed for specific application scenarios outside factories. This has enabled context-based Science and Technology Studies and technology assessments of service robotic systems. This contribution describes the status quo of this reflective research as the starting point for interdisciplinary technology assessment (TA), taking account of TA studies and, in particular, of publications from the (...) ethical and empirical social science perspective. Finally, based on this status quo, evaluation criteria for service robots are developed, which are relevant for further reflective research. (shrink)

In recent years, the integration of philosophical with scientific theorizing has started to yield new insights. This chapter surveys some recent philosophical and empirical work on the nature and structure of action, on conscious agency, and on our knowledge of actions.

The moral enhancement of human beings is a constant theme in the history of humanity. Today, faced with the threats of a new, globalised world, concern over this matter is more pressing. For this reason, the use of biotechnology to make human beings more moral has been considered. However, this approach is dangerous and very controversial. The purpose of this article is to argue that the use of another new technology, AI, would be preferable to achieve this goal. Whilst several (...) proposals have been made on how to use AI for moral enhancement, we present an alternative that we argue to be superior to other proposals that have been developed. (shrink)

Examines traditional sites of binary thinking in ancient Greek texts and culture to demonstrate surprising ambiguity, especially with regard to sexual difference.

Borders are essentially imaginary structures, but their effects are very real. This volume explores both geopolitical and conceptual borders through an interdisciplinary lens, bridging the disciplines of philosophy and literature. With contributions from scholars around the world, this collection closely examines the concepts of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality in order to reveal the paradoxical ambiguities inherent in these seemingly solid binary oppositions, while critiquing structures of power that produce and police these borders. As a political paradigm, liminality may be (...) embraced by marginal subjects and communities, further blurring the boundaries between oppressive distinctions and categories. (shrink)

Readings in Health Care Ethics provides a wide-ranging selection of important and engaging contributions to the field of health care ethics. The second edition adds a chapter on health care in Canada, and the introduction has been expanded to include discussion of a new direction in feminist naturalized ethics. The book presupposes no prior knowledge, only an interest in the bioethical issues that are shaping our world.

In 2010, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research started a series of citizens’ dialogues on future technologies. In the context of the German history of public participation in technology-oriented policy making, these dialogues are unique for at least two reasons: The Federal Ministry retains the responsibility for the entire process and is heavily involved in its planning, organization and communication, and the number of participants and process elements is significantly higher than in most other participative events. The paper (...) presents insights into the political background of the citizens’ dialogues, its general concept as well as first observations from the dialogue rounds on energy and high-tech medicine. In addition, it discusses reactions of other political actors and expectations regarding legitimacy and representativeness of the dialogue results. (shrink)

A timely book that uses science fiction to provoke reflection and discussion on philosophical issues From the nature of mind to the ethics of AI and neural enhancement, science fiction thought experiments fire the philosophical imagination, encouraging us to think outside of the box about classic philosophical problems and even to envision new ones. Science Fiction and Philosophy explores puzzles about virtual reality, transhumanism, whether time travel is possible, the nature of artificial intelligence, and topics in neuroethics, among other timely (...) issues. This thought-provoking volume is suitable for students and general readers but also examines new and more advanced topics of interest to seasoned philosophers and scientists. Susan Schneider is Assistant Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and an Affiliated Faculty Member at the Institutes for Research in Cognitive Science and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (shrink)

Han Solo‐orphan, laconically cool Corellian smuggler, Rebel general, and martyr for the Resistance, is one of the most‐loved characters in the Star Wars universe. His emotional and moral development throughout the original trilogy into a trusted friend, Leia's lover, and a warrior for Rebel values is inspiring. In the sequel trilogy, he's returned to smuggling and reluctantly re‐assumes the mantle of father to Ben Solo, an alienated and ultimately patricidal son, but even death fails to stop him from offering fatherly (...) advice to bring Kylo Ren back to the light side. In a universe of tyrants, freedom‐fighters, Force‐sensitives, Jedi, and Sith, everybody seems to be peddling a philosophy. But Han Solo is a scoundrel, a skeptic, and a Corellian who seems to want to evade a philosophical life. Skepticism, anti‐authoritarianism, and a desire to demystify–to strip away pretensions to reveal the true, but often ugly face of reality. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Der Tagungsband zielt auf Grundsatzliches in der Verwendung von Begriffen ab und versteht sich als Beitrag zu einer interdisziplinar gefuhrten Diskussion um Genese und Geltung von Kategorien in der gegenwartigen geistes-, kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Ausgehend von einer vorlaufigen Differenzierung in metaphysische, analytische oder kulturhistorische Kategorien zeigen die versammelten Beitrage gerade die Verschranktheit und wechselseitige Abhangigkeit dieser Dimensionen auf. Kategorien als methodische Werkzeuge zur wissenschaftlichen Einordnung und Unterscheidung von beobachteten Phanomenen stehen neben Kategorien als Untersuchungsgegenstand der Begriffs- und Ideengeschichte und (...) werfen daruber hinaus die Frage nach der Kategorialitat in den Bedingungen menschlichen Denkens und den allgemeinen Aufbauprinzipien von Welt auf. Unterschiedliche theoretische und methodologische Ansatze sowie konkrete Anwendungsbeispiele aus Anglistik, Amerikanistik, Filmwissenschaft, Germanistik, Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Sprachwissenschaft zeugen von der Brisanz des Themas. (shrink)

From antiquity, Galenic physicians extensively discussed the active powers of simple and compound drugs. In their views, simple drugs, that is, single ingredients, acted according to their material qualities and the properties of their substance. As for compound drugs, their efficacy resulted from the mutual interaction of their ingredients and their modes of preparation. In the late Renaissance, Galenic physicians and naturalists, such as Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, attempted to explain these pharmacological properties or “faculties” at the intersection (...) of medicine, botany, and natural philosophy. This chapter examines the case of the Italian physician and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. His pharmacological treatise De medicamentorum facultatibus [On the Faculties of Drugs, 1593] was particularly significant for its reception of ancient and medieval texts on drug properties, materia medica, and the role of the senses in the knowledge of bodies. (shrink)

Elisabeth Porter's guide to the development of feminist thought on ethics & moral agency surveys feminist debates on the nature of feminist ethics, intimate relationships, professional ethics, politics, sexual politics, abortion and reproductive choices.

A vital and timely contribution to the growing scholarship on the political thought of Alain Badiou.