The medical profession is observing a rising number of calls to action considering the threat that climate change poses to global human health. Theory-led bioethical analyses of the scope and weight of physicians’ normative duty towards climate protection and its conflict with individual patient care are currently scarce. This article offers an analysis of the normative issues at stake by using Korsgaard’s neo-Kantian moral account of practical identities. We begin by showing the case of physicians’ duty to climate protection, before (...) we succinctly introduce Korsgaard’s account. We subsequently show how the duty to climate protection can follow from physicians’ identity of being a healthcare professional. We structure conflicts between individual patient care and climate protection, and show how a transformation in physicians’ professional ethos is possible and what mechanisms could be used for doing so. An important limit of our analysis is that we mainly address the level of individual physicians and their practical identities, leaving out important measures to respond to climate change at the mesolevels and macrolevels of healthcare institutions and systems, respectively. (shrink)

In 1907, Charles Peirce attempted to write an article that would introduce his distinct variety of pragmatism to a general audience. He eventually produced more than five hundred handwritten sheets, culminating in five major variants. Peirce left the second unfinished, while extensive portions of the third through fifth have appeared in collections of his writings, including the beginning that is common to all five. This is the completed and signed first version, which has never been published before and offers fresh (...) insights into the evolution of its author’s thinking about semeiotic and pragmatism. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss visualizations in mathematics from a historical and didactical perspective. We consider historical debates from the 17th and 19th centuries regarding the role of intuition and visualizations in mathematics. We also consider the problem of what a visualization in mathematical learning can achieve. In an empirical study we investigate what mathematical conclusions university students made on the basis of a visualization. We emphasize that a visualization in mathematics should always be considered in its proper context.

Theater rehearsals are (usually) confronted with the problem of having to transform a written text into an audio-visual, situated and temporal performance. Our contribution focuses on the emergence and stabilization of a gestural form as a solution for embodying a certain aesthetic concept which is derived from the script. This process involves instructions and negotiations, making the process of stabilization publicly and thus intersubjectively accessible. As scenes are repeatedly rehearsed, rehearsals are perspicuous settings for tracking interactional histories. Based on videotaped (...) professional theatre interactions in Germany, we focus on consecutive instances of rehearsing the same scene and trace the interactional history of a particular gesture. This gesture is used by the director to instruct the actors to play a particular aspect of a scene adopting a certain aesthetic concept. Stabilization requires the emergence of shared knowledge. We will show the practices by which shared knowledge is established over time during the rehearsal process and, in turn, how the accumulation of knowledge contributes to a change in the interactional practices themselves. Specifically, we show how a gesture emerges in the process of developing and embodying an aesthetic concept, and how this gesture eventually becomes a sign that refers to and evokes accumulated knowledge. At the same time, we show how this accumulated knowledge changes the instructional activities in the rehearsal process. Our study contributes to the overall understanding of knowledge accumulation in interaction in general and in theater rehearsals in particular. At the same time, it is devoted to the central importance of gestures in theater, which are both a means and a product of theatrical staging. (shrink)

We are extremely grateful for the insightful and thought-provoking commentaries on our feature article.1 We have distilled four themes emerging from the commentaries, and we would also like to address one misunderstanding of our argument that has appeared. In our article, we explicitly acknowledge that major decisions relevant for climate protection take place at the mesolevels and macrolevels of healthcare, a point raised again in some of the commentaries.2–4 Climate protection is a societal issue, and we thank these authors for (...) the concrete proposals of potential models to guide action. Yet, to us, it still makes sense to reflect simultaneously on the responsibilities that physicians have themselves. Without wanting to put the main responsibility on them, we argue it is important to start thinking about the scope of action that physicians actually have (or not have). As we have argued the need for climate action comes ever more into focus of society, we wanted to explore whether the professional ethics of the medical professionals needs to be amended. Our argument is that this is the case, based on the reasons that climate change has a big health impact while simultaneously the health system has a strong climate impact. Based on the World Medical Association (WMA) Declaration of Geneva the focus on the individual patient is clear, but this and other important codices do also include a public health perspective. The (model) Professional Code for Physicians in Germany, for example, states in its first article that ‘Physicians serve the health of …. (shrink)

Den Philosophen und Theologen Friedrich Schleiermacher und den dänischen Philosophen, Mineralogen und Theologen Henrik Steffens verband nicht nur eine enge Freundschaft, sondern sie verstanden sich – kurz nacheinander 1804 an die Universität Halle berufen – auch als wissenschaftliches Pendant. Grundlegend für den gefühlten Gleichklang beider Köpfe ist der romantische Gedanke progressiver Universalität, der auf der Suche nach einer angemessenen wissenschaftlichen Methodik gleichermaßen die Forderung nach System und Antisystem, System und seine Subversion generiert. Trotz dieser häufig konstatierten wissenschaftlichen Entsprechung beider Denker (...) ist ihr systematisches Verhältnis bis dato in der Forschung kaum bedacht und ebenso Desiderat wie die philosophische Literatur zu Steffens Werk überhaupt. Die Beiträge des Bandes gehen biographischen Spuren nach, thematisieren die Einheit des Wissens im Spannungsverhältnis von System und Subversion, untersuchen das Wechselverhältnis von Ethik und Physik, Naturphilosophie und Naturwissenschaft und fragen auch nach den im Verlauf ihrer Freundschaft zunehmenden Differenzen im Denken beider Philosophen, die sich nicht zuletzt in ihren theologischen und kirchenpolitischen Schriften manifestieren. (shrink)

In depicting five “spheres of morality” occupied by physicians Doernberg and Troug provide an impressive analysis on physicians’ various commitments and role conflicts which are excellently illustr...

Can associative learning take place without awareness? We explore this issue in a sequence learning paradigm with amnesic and control participants, who were simply asked to react to one of four possible stimuli on each trial. Unknown to them, successive stimuli occurred in a sequence. We manipulated the extent to which stimuli followed the sequence in a deterministic manner (noiseless condition) or only probabilistically so (noisy condition). Through this paradigm, we aimed at addressing two central issues: first, we asked whether (...) sequence learning takes place in either condition with amnesic patients. Second, we asked whether this learning takes place without awareness. To answer this second question, participants were asked to perform a subsequent sequence generation task under inclusion and exclusion conditions, as well as a recognition task. Reaction times results show that amnesic patients learned the sequence only in the deterministic condition. However, they failed to be able to reproduce the sequence in the generation task. In contrast, we found learning for both sequence structures in control participants, but only control participants exposed to a deterministic sequence were successful in performing the generation task, thus suggesting that the acquired knowledge can be used consciously in this condition. Neither amnesic nor control participants showed correct old/new judgments in the recognition task. The results strengthen the claim that implicit learning is at least partly spared in amnesia, and the role of contextual information available for learning is discussed. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The busy beaver problem of Rado [6] is reexamined for the case of Turing machines given by quadruples rather than quintuples. Moreover several printing symbols are allowed. Some values of the corresponding beaver function are given and it is shown that this function for a fixed number of states and varying number of symbols is nonrecursive for three or more states and recursive for two states. As a byproduct we get that the minimal number of states in a universal Turing (...) machine (quadruples) is three. (shrink)

English summary: In this anthology distinguished and internally renowned scholars from different fields present their different and often controversial concepts of consciousness.

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

Stakeholder literature tends to presume that effective stakeholder dialogue, occurring directly or indirectly, among a focal firm, local communities, governments, and nongovernmental organizations is desirable for successful firm–stakeholder relationships. Even if theoretically desirable, effective dialogue does not always occur. There are two key theory-informing lessons in Botnia’s Fray Bentos successful green field pulp mill investment and start-up in Western Uruguay. First, critics could not halt the project politically supported by Uruguay in an expanding multi-party international dispute. Second, the Botnia corporate (...) communications process did not succeed in building consensus relationships, and attention was not paid to discourse creating shared meanings among all stakeholders. Participatory relationships were few, and successful dialogue was at best limited to supporters. This article uses discursive analysis to examine how newspaper and press release texts and language used therein both shaped and reflected the dynamically changing nature of firm–stakeholder relations in the Fray Bentos dispute. Despite the focal firm’s professed good intentions to create participatory relationships with its stakeholders during the building project, various stakeholders opposed the project and Botnia was caught in the crossfire of heated debate between Uruguay and Argentina. Three different frames changing over time are identified: the investment frame, the conflict frame, and the political frame. The analysis shows that the relationships between the focal firm and stakeholders involved many meanings only partly shared, due in part to a lack of corporate appreciation for the role of language in managing firm–stakeholder relationships. (shrink)

Ethics is a foundational competency in healthcare inherent in everyday nursing practice. Therefore, the promotion of qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence is essential to ensure ethically high-quality and sustainable healthcare. The aim of this integrative literature review is to identify the factors contributing to the promotion of qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence. The review has been registered in PROSPERO (CRD42023386947) and reported according to the PRISMA guideline. Focusing on qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence, a (...) literature search was undertaken in January 2023 in six scientific databases: CINAHL, Cochrane Library, PsycINFO, PubMed Medline, Scopus and Web of Science. Empirical studies written in English without time limitation were eligible for inclusion. A total of 29 full texts were retrieved and included out of 5233 citations. Quality appraisal was employed using Joanna Briggs Institute checklists and the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool. Data were analysed using inductive content analysis. Research about the factors contributing to the promotion of qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence is limited and mainly explored using descriptive research designs. The contributing factors were identified as comprising two main categories: (1) human factors, consisting of four categories: individual, social, managerial and professional factors, and ten sub-categories; and (2) structural factors, consisting of four categories: educational, environmental, organisational and societal factors, and eight sub-categories. This review provides knowledge about the factors contributing to the promotion of qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence for the use of researchers, nurse educators, managers, organisations and policymakers. More research about the contributing factors is needed using complex intervention, implementation and multiple methods designs to ensure ethically sustainable healthcare. (shrink)

Ontic structural realists hold that structure is all there is, or at least all there is fundamentally. This thesis has proved to be puzzling: What exactly does it say about the relationship between objects and structures? In this article, I look at different ways of articulating ontic structural realism in terms of the relation between structures and objects. I show that objects cannot be reduced to structure, and argue that ontological dependence cannot be used to establish strong forms of structural (...) realism. At the end, I show how a weaker, but controversial, form of structural realism can be articulated on the basis of ontological dependence. (shrink)