A study of the rhetorical and political strategy adopted by the Roman orator and statesman Cicero as a newcomer in Roman republican politics. Henriette van der Blom argues that Cicero advertised himself as a follower of chosen models of behaviour from the past - his role models - and in turn presented himself as a role model to others.

(2013). A Written Republic: Cicero's Philosophical Politics. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 404-406. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2013.771250.

This document presents the Bonn PRINTEGER Consensus Statement: Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for research performing organisations. The aim of the statement is to complement existing instruments by focusing specifically on institutional responsibilities for strengthening integrity. It takes into account the daily challenges and organisational contexts of most researchers. The statement intends to make research integrity challenges recognisable from the work-floor perspective, providing concrete advice on organisational measures to strengthen integrity. The statement, which was concluded February 7th 2018, provides guidance on (...) the following key issues: § 1.Providing information about research integrity § 2.Providing education, training and mentoring § 3.Strengthening a research integrity culture § 4.Facilitating open dialogue § 5.Wise incentive management § 6.Implementing quality assurance procedures § 7.Improving the work environment and work satisfaction § 8.Increasing transparency of misconduct cases § 9.Opening up research § 10.Implementing safe and effective whistle-blowing channels § 11.Protecting the alleged perpetrators § 12.Establishing a research integrity committee and appointing an ombudsperson § 13.Making explicit the applicable standards for research integrity. (shrink)

Geschiedwetenschap was lange tijd vooral geschiedschrijving. Historische verhalen werden gebruikt om heersende gebruiken en opvattingen in het heden te ondersteunen. In de 19de eeuw werd de geschiedbeoefening een echt academische wetenschap. Deze professionalisering heeft voor veel goeds gezorgd, maar kan soms ook een last blijken. Met name het ontstaan van elkaar al dan niet verketterende 'scholen' en 'richtingen' heeft ertoe geleid dat historici soms meer bezig waren met het bestrijden van elkaars opvattingen dan met het onderbouwen van hun eigen standpunten.0Een (...) keur aan auteurs brengt in dit boek deze 'last der geschiedenis' en hoe daarmee om te gaan in kaart. Op welke manieren gingen historici sinds de professionalisering van hun vak in de 19de eeuw gebukt onder dominante representaties en benaderingswijzen van het verleden? Hoe hebben zij soms getracht, tegen de stroom in, daarmee te breken, en wat heeft dat aan nieuwe inzichten opgeleverd? (shrink)

Almost 22 years ago the Franciscan Authors Website: A Catalogue in Progress was published on-line for the first time. This internet site, which is a co-production of Maarten van der Heijden and myself, and which can still be found at its original internet address, is meant to develop into a digital successor to the Franciscan authors catalogues of Lucas Wadding and Sbaraglia. The site is by no means complete, but it does contain biographical information, bibliographical references, and information on the (...) works produced by a large and growing number of Franciscan authors... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

While having a breast reconstruction, women have certain expectations about their future breasted bodies. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze these expectations in the process of reconstruction. By applying a qualitative, phenomenological study within a longitudinal research design, this paper acknowledges the temporarily complex, contextualized, embodied, and subjective nature of the phenomenon of expectations. The analysis identified expectations regarding three different aspects of women’s embodiment: their gazed body, their capable/practical body, and their felt body. After reconstruction, (...) these women try to reconfigure—adjust, level or retrospectively rewrite—their expectations. Further, some women face what apparently arrives totally unexpected, namely a strange feeling breast or a failed reconstruction. The development of these women’s expectations can be understood as an active, continuously evolving, difficult and sometimes impossible dynamic of expecting the surprise that is a breast reconstruction. Within this dynamic, women formulate and reconfigure—by definition—unrealistic expectations and validate and try to achieve unexpected futures. We suggest that medical professionals can facilitate this dynamic in various ways. (shrink)

State legitimacy is often said to have two aspects: an internal and an external one. Internally, a legitimate state has the right to rule over its subjects. Externally, it has a right that outsiders not interfere with its domestic governance. But what is the relation between these two aspects? In this paper, I defend a conception of legitimacy according to which these two aspects are related in an importantly asymmetrical manner. In particular, a legitimate state’s external right to rule affords (...) it protections that include and go beyond what its internal right to rule enables it to do. This asymmetrical view, I argue, is preferable to its two main rivals: the view that a state’s internal and external legitimacy are separate issues, and the view that internal and external legitimacy are mirroring. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The traditional view holds that political philosophy should aim at the truth. By contrast, Avner de Shalit argues that political philosophers should do something different. According to him, they should work in direct consultation with “the people” in order to think through their theories about political institutions. This article defends the traditional aim of truth-seeking and shows the mistakes in De Shalit’s alternative approach.

A single global authority is not sufficient to regulate heterogenous agents in multiagent systems based on distributed architectures, due to idiosyncratic local situations and to the need to regulate new issues as soon as they arise. On the one hand institutions should be structured as normative systems with a hierarchy of authorities able to cope with the dynamics of local situations, but on the other hand higher authorities should be able to delimit the autonomy of lower authorities to issue valid (...) norms. In this paper, we study the interplay of obligations and strong permissions in the context of hierarchies of authorities using input/output logic, because its explicit norm base facilitates reasoning about norm base maintenance, and it covers a variety of conditional obligations and permissions. We combine the logic with constraints, priorities and hierarchies of authorities. In this setting, we observe that Makinson and van der Torre’s notion of prohibition immunity for permissions is no longer sufficient, and we introduce a new notion of permission as exception and a new distinction between static and dynamic norms. We show how strong permissions can dynamically change an institution by adding exceptions to obligations, provide an explicit representation of what is permitted to the subjects of the normative system and allow higher level authorities to limit the power of lower level authorities to change the normative system. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on "diffraction." This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or "new materialist.". (shrink)

This paper argues, first, that biological evolution can be both random and divinely guided at the same time. Next it discusses the idea that the claim that evolution is unguided is not part of the science of evolution, and defends it against a number of objections.

Objectives: To investigate why physicians label end-of-life acts as either ‘euthanasia/ending of life’ or ‘alleviation of symptoms/palliative or terminal sedation’, and to study the association of such labelling with intended reporting of these acts. Methods: Questionnaires were sent to a random, stratified sample of 2100 Dutch physicians. They were asked to label six hypothetical end-of-life cases: three ‘standard’ cases and three cases randomly selected, that varied according to type of medication, physician’s intention, type of patient request, patient’s life expectancy and (...) time until death. We identified the extent to which characteristics of cases are associated with physician’s labelling, with multilevel multivariable logistic regression. Results: The characteristics that contributed most to labelling cases as ‘euthanasia/ending of life’ were the administration of muscle relaxants or disproportional morphine. Other important factors were an intention to hasten death and a life expectancy of several months. Physicians were much more willing to report cases labelled as ‘euthanasia’ or ‘ending of life’ than other cases. Conclusions: Similar cases are not uniformly labelled. However, a physicians’ label is strongly associated with their willingness to report their acts. Differences in how physicians label similar acts impede complete societal control. Further education and debate could enhance the level of agreement about what is physician-assisted dying, and thus should be reported, and what not. (shrink)

In the interview in this article, Randall Collins discusses various aspects of his oeuvre. First, he considers why interaction rituals (IRs) in religion are special emotional transformers. This is followed by a discussion of IRs in the digital age and the symbolic and economic power that is required to orchestrate IRs in politics and revolutions. Then comes a discussion of social scientific research into violence, in the past and more recently. The interview continues with a reflection on the notion of (...) attention space, a concept which Collins has applied in analyses of violent interactions and the intellectual struggles between philosophers. Finally, the article considers the state of the art of sociology and its future prospects, evaluating its potential for rapid discovery and its position on the abstraction-reflexivity continuum. As the interview demonstrates Collins’s insightful sociological craftsmanship, it provides social scientists with a strong and optimistic lead in how to do social theory. (shrink)

:In this essay, I defend a theory of liability to defensive force. The theory contains two elements. The first is a dual Lockean-inspired condition. The second aims to make this first condition consistent with problems arising from uncertainty. Drawing on recent work by Michael Zimmerman, I argue that the rights-based condition should be made sensitive to the evidence available to defenders.

‘Homophobia’ is shorthand for stigmatising attitudes and practices towards people who demonstrate sexual diversity. In this article, we reflect on how African Christian faith may become redemptive rather than violent in the context of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex forms of sexuality.

This paper examines the increasingly popular view that new insights from the science of subjective well-being (SSWB) should play a prominent role in the determination of public policy. Though there are instrumental reasons for caring about societal happiness too, these political aspirations of the SSWB appear to be mostly intrinsically motivated. As the intrinsic value of happiness is endorsed across the political happiness as a fitting response to the state of the world, authenticity, and merit – it is shown that (...) different views of the conditionality of the intrinsic value of happiness have widely diverging policy implications, which greatly undermines the political aspirations of the SSWB. (shrink)

As we owe the division of ecology into autecology and synecology to botanists, the arguments for this subdivision and also the definitions and contents of both subsciences as given bySchröter, Flahault &Schröter, Gams andDu Rietz are communicated in full. The same is the case with the division of ecology given by the zoologistsAdams andChapman. Moreover the opinions of these authors in this respect are critisized in detail as well as in their general aspects. This critique is connected with the author's (...) own positive opinion, which is given at the end of the paper, where also the remarks covered by the first two papers of this series are summarised.In ecology as a biological science either the individual or the complex of individuals has to occupy a central position. Therefore science about the environment, especially the abiotic one, as well as science about a definite region or spot of the earth ought not to be incorporated in biology.In autecology the individual occupies a central position, it is one of the subsciences of idiobiology, it is a science about the relations to environment, taken in the broadest sense. Dependent upon the contents of this we have many definitions of ecology, the most important ones being: 1) ecology is a biogeographical subscience; 2) ecology is taken in the sense of ethology; 3) ecology is taken as a science of the teleological relations of the individual to its environment and the objects in it, thus of the non-causal relations, the causal ones being assigned to physiology. These non-causal relations appear under four aspects, all called teleological, i.e. the true purpose-notion, relation in the sense of requirement, that in the sense of wholeness, and of adaptation and the degree of adaptation. Adaptation is taken in a broad sense, covering as well the degree of adaptation , as the latitude of the possibility of adaptation and the degree of variability of the individual to adapt itself. The proposal is made to confine the term autecology to this teleological aspect of the relations of the individual, i.e. of all its characters, not of the epharmonic ones only, to environment.In synecology the complex of individuals, showing direct real connections during individual life, occupies a central position, with equal scientific interest for all members of the complex. Synecology contains all biological scientific contents about this matter. The application ofTschulok's system of subsciences to synecology is critisized and the development of the system of these subsciences is left to its developmental fate in time. Considering the importance of the knowledge of the tendencies of thought for the development of synecology an attempt is made to state those already applied in synecology; author distinguishes the systematical, the mathematical, the causal, the historical, the teleological and the essential tendency of thought. Also the difference in the tendencies of thought shows that autecology and synecology are to be separated in a logical system of biological subsciences.Puisque c'est aux botanistes que nous devons la division de l'écologie en autécologie et synécologie, l'auteur passe en revue tous les arguments qui ont amené les biologistes à faire cette subdivision, ainsi que les définitions de ces deux subsciences et les matières qu'elles comprennent, comme elles sont données parSchröter, Flahault &Schröter, Gams etdu Rietz. Il en fait de même pour la division de l'écologie faite par les zoologistesAdams etChapman. En outre il discute les opinions de ces auteurs sous ce rapport, dans leurs détails aussi bien que dans leurs aspects généraux. Cette discussion est en rapport avec l'opinion positive de l'auteur, qu'il expose à la fin de l'article, où se trouvent résumées également les remarques qui se trouvaient déjà dans les deux premiers articles de cette série.Dans l'écologie, en tant que science biologique, l'individu — ou bien l'ensemble des individus — doit occuper une position centrale. C'est pourquoi ni la science qui concerne le milieu, en particulier le milieu abiotique, ni la science qui se rapporte à une région ou un endroit défini de la terre, ne devrait être incorporée dans la biologie.Dans l'autécologie l'individu occupe une position centrale. Cette science est une des subsciences de l'idiobiologie; elle se rapporte aux relations entre le sujet et son milieu — „milieu” pris dans le sens le plus large du mot. Selon les significations diverses qu'on peut attacher aux termes „relations” et „milieu”, nous avons plusieurs définitions de l'écologie, parmi lesquelles les plus importantes suivent ci-dessous:1)L'écologie est une subscience biogéographique; 2) le terme „écologie” est pris dans le sens d'éthologie; 3) l'écologie est considérée comme la science des relations téléologiques entre l'individu et son milieu et les objets se trouvant dans ce milieu; elle est donc considérée comme la science des relations non-causales, les relations causales étant conférées à la physiologie. Ces relations non-causales se présentent sous quatre aspects, tous appelés téléologiques, c. à. d. la vraie notion de but, les relations dans le sens de besoins, les relations dans le sens de „tout” et les relations dans le sens d'adaptation et de degré d'adaptation.Le mot „adaptation” est pris dans un sens étendu, comprenant aussi bien le degré d'adaptation que l'amplitude de la possibilité d'adaptation et le degré de variabilité dans l'adaptation de l'individu à son milieu. L'auteur propose de restreindre le terme „autécologie” à cet aspect téléologique des relations entre l'individu et son milieu; il s'agit ici, bien entendu, de toutes les qualités de l'individu et non seulement des qualités epharmoniques.Dans la synécologie l'ensemble des individus montrant des rapports directs et réels durant la vie individuelle occupe une position centrale et offre un intérêt scientifique pareil pour tous les membres de l'ensemble. La synécologie comprend tout ce qu'il y a à dire sur cette matière par rapport à la science biologique. L'application du système des subsciences deTschulok à la synécologie est critiquée par l'auteur, qui juge prématuré de s'occuper déjà d'un tel système de subsciences: l'avenir seul nous apprendra quel système se développera ici. Vu l'importance d'une connaissance exacte des différentes tendances de penser pour le développement de la synécologie, l'auteur s'efforce de rassembler celles qui ont déjà été appliquées dans la synécologie; il distingue les tendances de penser systématique, mathématique, causale, historique, téléologique et essentielle . En outre les différences entre ces tendances de penser démontrent, que l'autécologie et la synécologie doivent être séparées dans un système logique de subsciences biologiques. (shrink)

The body plays an important role in the book of Job - as do animals. According to psychoanalytical specifically object-relations theory, a subjective body image was partly constructed through the internalisation of external stimuli from significant others who mirrored the subject through their feedback or through their own bodies, which served as an ideal or critique to the subject. Amongst the external stimuli, animals constitute such significant others. Animals could therefore have impacted Job's subjective body image, particularly as their bodies (...) were described in detail by God as a response to Job's complaints and searching. CONTRIBUTION: Two theoretical and interrelated problems were acknowledged although they cannot be satisfactorily solved: the cultural aspect of the body image and the relationship to animals. (shrink)

Due to huge advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, chatbots are gaining significance in the field of customer service. For users, it may be hard to distinguish whether they are communicating with a human or a chatbot. This brings ethical issues, as users have the right to know who or what they are interacting with (European Commission in Regulatory framework proposal on artificial intelligence. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai, 2022). One of the solutions is to include a disclosure at the start (...) of the interaction (e.g., “this is a chatbot”). However, companies are reluctant to use disclosures, as consumers may perceive artificial agents as less knowledgeable and empathetic than their human counterparts (Luo et al. in Market Sci 38(6):937–947, 2019). The current mixed methods study, combining qualitative interviews (n = 8) and a quantitative experiment (n = 194), delves into users’ responses to a disclosed vs. undisclosed customer service chatbot, focusing on source orientation, anthropomorphism, and social presence. The qualitative interviews reveal that it is the willingness to help the customer and the friendly tone of voice that matters to the users, regardless of the artificial status of the customer care representative. The experiment did not show significant effects of the disclosure (vs. non-disclosure). Implications for research, legislators and businesses are discussed. (shrink)

In many countries health insurers, employers and especially governments are increasingly using pressure and coercion to enhance healthier lifestyles. For example by ever higher taxes on cigarettes and alcoholi..

Being part of the RoboCup initiative, the RoboCup@Home league targets the development and deployment of autonomous service and assistive robot technology being essential for future personal domestic applications. The domain of domestic service and assistive robotics implicates a wide range of possible problems. The primary reasons for this include the large amount of uncertainty in the dynamic and non-standardized environments of the real world, and the related human interaction. Furthermore, the application orientation requires a large effort towards high level integration (...) combined with a demand for general robustness of the systems. This article details the need for interdisciplinary community effort to iteratively identify related problems, to define benchmarks, to test and, finally, to solve the problems. The concepts and the implementation of the RoboCup@Home initiative as a combination of scientific exchange and competition is presented as an effi cient method to accelerate and focus technological and scientific progress in the domain of domestic service robots. Finally, the progress in terms of performance increase in the benchmarks and technological advancements is evaluated and discussed. Keywords: Domestic Service Robotics, Application, Uncertainty, Benchmark, Competition, Human–Robot Interaction, RoboCup@Home. (shrink)