This book/CD package guides readers and listeners on a journey through Franz Schubert's Winterreise song cycle, in which the composer set the poetry of Wilhelm Muller to music. The complete text of the 24 poems is presented in both German and English, with 116 b&w photographs of winter scenes on the facing pages. An introductory essay by Susan Youens offers a critical examination of the song cycle. The music CD features a new recording of Winterreise, performed by baritone Paul Rowe (...) and pianist Martha Fischer. Oversize: 10.25x10.25". Annotation 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Talbot Brewer offers a new approach to ethical theory, founded on a far-reaching reconsideration of the nature and sources of human agency.

Research on sustainability assurance is still in its beginnings. One of the key questions in this field that also is of the highest practical relevance is concerned with the quality of the assurance process. However, a common understanding of assurance quality and how it should be measured is still missing. We try to close this gap by building on the financial audit literature. We introduce a definition of assurance quality that comprises two key aspects: the depth of the assurance process (...) and the breadth of the assurance statement. Based on prior research, we hypothesize that a firm’s sustainability performance is related to the depth of the assurance process, while the type of the assurance provider, more precisely the affiliation to the accounting profession, is related to the breadth of the assurance statement. Results for a sample of 122 European firms reveal a negative relationship between sustainability performance and assurance process depth as well as between the affiliation to the accounting profession and assurance statement breadth. Thus, we find evidence that poor sustainability performers ask for in-depth assurance services, most likely as a means to enhance their internal sustainability-related processes and systems. Assurance providers that do not belong to the accounting profession in turn are associated with broader assurance statements. (shrink)

An understanding of the ethical implications of their work is now essential for all scientists. This accessible textbook clearly explains bioethical theories and their philosophical foundations to science students, enabling them to confidently take part in the key ethical debates of biotechnology. Over 200 activities introduce topics for personal reflection and discussion points encourage students to think for themselves and build their own arguments. Highlighting the potential pitfalls for those new to bioethics, each chapter features boxes providing factual information and (...) outlining the philosophical background. Accompanying online podcasts by the author (two of whose podcasts on iTunesU have attracted over 3 million downloads) explain points that might be difficult for beginners. Detailed case studies provide an insight into real-life examples of bioethical problems. Within-chapter essay questions and quizzes, along with end-of-chapter review questions, allow students to check their understanding and encourage broader thinking about the topics discussed. (shrink)

This article focusses on the social and legal implications that blockchain technology brings about, not only due to its ideological framework, but also, and especially, due to the concept of law it inaugurates. Thus, this article claims, that, by interlocking technological and legal structures, blockchain technology initiates a profound displacement of legal symbolics and imaginaries. It shows how blockchain law, by emancipating itself from three essential dimensions of law—language, territory, and the body—implies a profound disruption of how we perceive law (...) and its legitimacy. Starting with an overview of the technological details of blockchain, the paper then addresses its ideological context and traces the underlying ideas, values and functions and their relation with—and impact on—the general perception of law and legal issues. By critically assessing the claim that blockchain will liberate the subject from any heteronymic constraints, this paper analyses to what extent this technology has social and legal implications that reach far beyond its virtual, purely blockchain-related scope of applications—and why this technology should matter to us all. (shrink)

In view of the numerous accounting and corporate scandals associated with various forms of moral misconduct and the recent financial crisis, economics and business programs are often accused of actively contributing to the amoral decision making of their graduates. It is argued that theories and ideas taught at universities engender moral misbehavior among some managers, as these theories mainly focus on the primacy of profit-maximization and typically neglect the ethical and moral dimensions of decision making. To investigate this criticism, two (...) overlapping effects must be disentangled: the self-selection effect and the treatment effect. Drawing on the concept of moral judgment competence, we empirically examine this question with a sample of 1773 bachelor’s and 501 master’s students. Our results reveal that there is neither a self-selection nor a treatment effect for economics and business studies. Moreover, our results indicate that—regardless of the course of studies—university education in general does not seem to foster students’ moral development. (shrink)

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here, we argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. (...) In a subliminal priming paradigm we show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects. (shrink)

While interdisciplinarity is not a new concept, the political and discursive mobilisation of interdisciplinarity is. Since the 1990s, this movement has intensified, and this has affected central funding bodies so that interdisciplinarity is now a de facto requirement in successful grant application. As a result, the literature is ripe with definitions, taxonomies, discussions and other attempts to grasp and define the concept of interdisciplinarity. In this paper, we explore how strategic demands for interdisciplinarity meet, interact with and change local research (...) practices and results of higher education and research. Our aim is to question and trace the consequences of applying the slippery and difficult term interdisciplinarity in research. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish interdisciplinary research programme, where we observed and analysed practices of writing, publishing, collaboration and educational development in five different research projects. We show how the call for interdisciplinarity was mobilised in a way that rendered the incentives and motives behind the programme unclear. Furthermore, we argue that the absence of clear definitions and assessment criteria produced a dominant, all-inclusive, but vague, configuration of interdisciplinarity that affected the research outcome, and ultimately, promoted and reproduced the existing monodisciplinary research and power structures. (shrink)

This study explores the attitude of German psychiatrists in leading positions towards joint crisis plans and psychiatric advance directives. This topic was examined by contacting 473 medical directors of German psychiatric hospitals and departments. They were asked to complete a questionnaire developed by us. That form contained questions about the incidence and acceptance of joint crisis plans and psychiatric advance directives and previous experiences with them. 108 medical directors of psychiatric hospitals and departments responded . Their answers demonstrate that in (...) their hospitals these documents are rarely used. Among the respondents, joint crisis plans are more accepted than psychiatric advance directives. There is a certain uncertainty when dealing with these instruments. Our main conclusion is that German psychiatry needs an intensified discussion on the use of instruments for patients to constitute procedures for future critical psychiatric events. For this purpose it will be helpful to collect more empirical data. Furthermore, the proposal of joint crisis plans in psychiatric hospitals and departments should be discussed as well as the possibility of consulting an expert during the preparation of a psychiatric advance directive. (shrink)

Boyer & Petersen lay out a compelling theory for folk-economic beliefs, focusing on beliefs about markets. However, societies also allocate resources through mechanisms involving power and group decision-making, through the political economy. We encourage future work to keep folkpoliticaleconomic beliefs in mind, and sketch an example involving pollution and climate change mitigation policy.

De Dreu and Gross's distinction between attack and defense is complicated in real-world conflicts because competing leaders construe their position as one of defense, and power imbalances place status quo challengers in a defensive position. Their account of defense as vigilant avoidance is incomplete because it avoids a reference to anger which transforms anxious avoidance into collective and unified action.

Texts and textures: approaching an age of human-made nature through the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. We have entered the Anthropocene era—a geological age of our own making, in which what we have understood to be nature is made by man. We need a new way to understand the dynamics of a new epoch. These volumes offer writings that approach the Anthropocene through the perspectives of grain, vapor, and ray—the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. The first three volumes—each (...) devoted to one of the three textures—offer a series of paired texts, with contemporary writers responding to historic writings. A fourth volume offers a guide to the project as a whole. Grain: Granular materials add up to concrete forms; insignificant specks accumulate into complex entities. The texts in this volume narrate some of the fundamental qualities of the granular. In one pairing of texts, Robert Smithson compares the accumulation of thoughts to the aggregation of sediment, and an environmental historian writes about the stakes for earthly knowledge today. Other authors include Alfred Russel Wallace, Denis Diderot, and Georges Bataille. Vapor: The vaporous represents matter's transformations. In this volume, a political scientist compares Kafka's haunting “Odradek” to “vibrant matter”; a media theorist responds to poems and diagrams by Buckminster Fuller; and more, including texts by Hippocrates, Italo Calvino, and James Clerk Maxwell. Ray: A ray is an act of propagation and diffusion, encompassing a chain of interdependencies between energy and matter. This volume includes texts by Spinoza (with a reconceptualization by a contemporary philosopher), Jacques Lacan (followed by an anthropologist's reflections on temporality), Thomas Pynchon (accompanied by an interpretation of Pynchon's “electro-mysticism”), and others. These volumes constitute a unique experiment in design and composition as well as content. The mingling of texts and the juxtaposition of different areas of knowledge represented in a variety of forms express the dynamics of a world in change. (shrink)

This paper examines whether adults can adapt to novel accents of their native language that contain unfamiliar context-dependent phonological alternations. In two experiments, French participants listen to short stories read in accented speech. Their knowledge of the accents is then tested in a forced-choice identification task. In Experiment 1, two groups of listeners are exposed to newly created French accents in which certain vowels harmonize or disharmonize, respectively, to the rounding of the preceding vowel. Despite the cross-linguistic predominance of vowel (...) harmony over disharmony, the two groups adapt equally well to both accents, suggesting that this typological difference is not reflected in perceptual learning. Experiment 2 further explores the mechanism underlying this type of phonological learning. Participants are exposed to an accent in which some vowels harmonize and others disharmonize, yielding an increased featural complexity. They adapt less well to this regularity, showing that adaptation to novel accents involves feature-based inferences. (shrink)

Perhaps the most fundamental and distinctive idea of Kantian moral psychology is that no behavior can count as action unless it is performed on a subjective practical principle, or a maxim of action. The maxim is supposed to provide the target of moral assessment of all actions, whether this assessment is prospective or retrospective. The presence of a maxim is also supposed to illuminate how it is that agents are active in, hence responsible for, the peculiar species of events we (...) call actions. To put the point roughly, agents are the sources of their actions in that they have in some sense affirmed or endorsed the maxims of these actions. (shrink)

It is not clear whether to assess Robert Audi’s Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character as a collection of essays or a unified piece of theorizing. Seven of the book’s twelve essays have been published before, and at first blush they appear connected by little more than a common focus on ethics. These essays are framed, however, by an introduction and conclusion characterizing the book as the elaboration of a single, large-scale ethical theory. Perhaps a comprehensive theory can be disentangled from (...) these essays, but its contours and merits would be far clearer if Audi had presented it systematically, drawing selectively from previous essays rather than reproducing them wholesale. (shrink)

The subjective experience of time in depression has been described to be altered in complex ways, with sensations of particular slowness, delay or stillness being the most often named articulations. However, the attempts to provide empirical evidence to the phenomenon of “time slowing down in depression” have resulted in inconsistent findings. In consequence, the overall claim that depressive time somehow differs from ordinary time has often been discarded as unfounded. The article argues against such conclusion, contending that the described ambiguity (...) might be caused by the methods employed to assess the phenomenon under observation. In the first part of the article, a reconceptualization of the experience of time in depression is proposed on the grounds of classic and contemporary phenomenological psychiatry. This leads to identify the essential features of depressive time as described both in clinical and philosophical contexts. In the second part, a critique of the existing methods of time perception assessment is conducted, with a specific focus on duration estimation and time passage perception tasks. The above-mentioned core features serve as guidelines in discussing to what degree such methods fit the phenomenon at stake. Finally, an alternative and innovative method is put forward, that might not only help to explore the scope of existing methods but might itself present an alternative to such: the micro-phenomenological interview. (shrink)

Katrin Flikschuh offers an accessible introduction to divergent conceptions of freedom in contemporary liberal political philosophy.

Perhaps the most fundamental and distinctive idea of Kantian moral psychology is that no behavior can count as action unless it is performed on a subjective practical principle, or a maxim of action. The maxim is supposed to provide the target of moral assessment of all actions, whether this assessment is prospective or retrospective. The presence of a maxim is also supposed to illuminate how it is that agents are active in, hence responsible for, the peculiar species of events we (...) call actions. To put the point roughly, agents are the sources of their actions in that they have in some sense affirmed or endorsed the maxims of these actions. (shrink)

It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them to treat them accordingly. Many theorists have been drawn to Kantianism because they think that it alone can capture this intuition. One aim of this paper is to show that this is a mistake, and that Kantianism cannot provide an independent rational vindication, nor even a fully illuminating articulation, of irreplaceability. A further aim is to outline a broadly Aristotelian view that provides a (...) more fitting theoretical framework for this appealing conception of human value. This critique of Kantianism extends to contemporary theorists with a broadly Kantian orientation, including Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Darwall and John Rawls. The problem with these views, at heart, is that they attempt to ground morality in respect alone. Yet it is love, not respect, that brings irreplaceability into view. The paper closes with a sketch of a virtue-theoretic theory that follows Aquinas in taking love to be a master virtue that refines the other virtues so as to ensure a continuous and practically efficacious sensitivity to the irreplaceable value of fellow human beings. (shrink)

When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring applications are still morally acceptable, and develop approaches to avoid the promotion of health inequalities (...) through self-monitoring applications. (shrink)

We provide a detailed description of an interleaved and heavily annotated copy of Florae Berolinensis Prodromus, a flora of Berlin published by the German apothecary and botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow in 1787, which today is preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. We demonstrate that this is the copy that the author himself used and carried with him during his botanical excursions in and around Berlin to prepare a second edition of the work. By analyzing this document as (...) paper technology, we reveal that even seemingly trifling aspects of its material organization enabled far-reaching biological research agendas that were not originally intended. The hybrid form of manuscript and printed book, used in field excursions, enabled a kind of natural-historical observation that was at once detailed and bound by strict convention, a combination that inadvertently opened new research questions and suggested new objects of research. We thereby contribute to an understanding of the history of natural history that goes beyond the history of ideas and the intended uses of techniques, giving an example of how routine work on paper within a scientific tradition could generate innovation. (shrink)

When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring applications are still morally acceptable, and develop approaches to avoid the promotion of health inequalities (...) through self-monitoring applications. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

We investigated the impact of attention during encoding on later retrieval. During study, participants read some words aloud and named the print color of other words aloud . Then one of two memory tests was administered. The explicit test—recognition—required conscious recollection of whether a word was studied. Previously read words were recognized more accurately than were previously color named words. This contrasted sharply with performance on the implicit test—repetition priming in lexical decision. Here, words that were color named during study (...) showed priming equivalent to words that were read during study; both were responded to faster than unstudied words. Thus, an attentional manipulation during study had a strong effect on an explicit test of memory, but almost no effect on an implicit test. Focal attention during study is crucial for remembering consciously but not necessarily for remembering without awareness. (shrink)

Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in the face of powerful inclinations to act immorally, and indeed that opposing inclinations only highlight the worth of the action. I argue that this conclusion rests on an implausibly mechanistic account of desires, and that many desires are constituted by tendencies to see certain features of one’s circumstances as reasons to perform one or another action. I try to show that inclinations to violate (...) moral requirements sometimes manifest a morally objectionable half-heartedness in one’s commitment to those very requirements, and – by extension – to the values that undergird these requirements. (shrink)

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)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of "commissive" utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me (...) in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer (...) from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it. (shrink)