Aristoteles' (384-322 f.Kr.) mange filosofisk-videnskabelige værker er blevet studeret og kommenteret i over 2.000 år, men aldrig så intensivt som i tiden mellem 1100 og 1600, hvor de var rygraden i den såkaldt "skolastiske" lærdomskultur, der skabte det europæiske universitetssystem. Der forskes stadig i Aristoteles verden over, men moderne fortolkere drager kun sjældent nytte af den rige ældre tradition. Denne bog beskriver og sammenligner fortolkningsmetoder og publikationsstrategier hos skolastikerne og nutidens aristotelikere. Der argumenteres for, at dele af den gamle metodik (...) med fordel kunne genoptages, og det vises, at der i konkrete tilfælde kan findes værdifulde fortolkningsforslag, som ikke ses i den nyere litteratur. (shrink)

This article is a philosophical analysis of escapism as a pedagogical possibility, with a particular focus on TV series. Taking my own, as well as students, experience of escapism into TV series as a starting point, that is, their ability take us somewhere far away, something which has become more acute during the pandemic time since we remain more or less self-isolated because of the corona virus Covid-19, the article discusses escapism in relation to distraction and attention in life as (...) well as within teaching, but also in relation to colportage, hope and social justice. According to Ernst Bloch, social justice cannot materialize without regarding things differently. Something that is often dismissed as mere escapism might be a seed for a new and more humane social order, as it can be seen as an “immature, but honest substitute for revolution”. Drawing on Bloch’s understanding of colportage and hope, as well as Walter Benjamin’s understanding of mass culture and cinema, the article treats escapism and TV series not as something simple, but rather as possible seeds for a new social order and thus as having pedagogical possibilities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article the Irish harp tradition is re-configured as a space consisting of visual and sonic dimensions. The visual dimension of the Irish harp space incorporates the employment of the instrument in contemporary iconography; the sonic dimension includes the employment of the instrument as a metaphor in contemporary literature and songs. By employing Bloch’s concept of surplus and tracing the path of the Irish harp from its earliest employment in Christian iconography, its prominence as an icon of (...) colonial and Ascendancy rule, and finally its utilisation as an utopian tool to inspire members of the Volunteer and United Irish movements in the late eighteenth century, I identify how the accumulation of centuries of utopian surplus resulted in the creation of an utopian icon that had the capacity to inspire a generation of Irish men and women to critique the prevailing social and political order in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Écrire une biographie, en l’occurrence celle de Raïssa Bloch (1898-1943), retracer l’itinéraire d’une personne, ainsi côtoyée des années, est toujours « une expérience humaine », comme l’écrit Agnès Graceffa en prélude des remerciements aux descendants de proches qu’elle a rencontrés et aux archivistes qui l’ont guidée dans sa « quête ». Son beau livre est « né de la découverte fortuite de plusieurs lots de lettres de Raïssa Bloch et de Michel Gorlin [son mari] à leurs amis », (...) notamment à la... (shrink)

Ethical issues are pivotal to the practice of psychiatry. Anyone involved in psychiatric practice and mental healthcare has to be aware of the range of ethical issues relevant to their profession. An increased professional commitment to accountability, in parallel with a growing "consumer" movement has paved the way for a creative engagement with the ethical movement. The bestselling 'Psychiatric Ethics' has carved out a niche for itself as the major comprehensive text and core reference in the field, covering a range (...) of complex ethical dilemmas which face clinicians and researchers in their everyday practice. This new edition takes a fresh look at recent trends and developments at the interface between ethics and psychiatric practice. Coming ten years after the third edition, the editors have observed several emerging aspects of psychiatric practice requiring coverage, as a result, 5 new chapters have been added, including cutting edge topics - such as neuroethics. All other chapters have been fully revised and updated. The book will continue to be essential reading for psychiatrists, psychologists, other mental health professionals, and bioethicists, as well as of interest to policy makers, managers and lawyers. (shrink)

"Charming, interesting, thought-provoking and a great read." Rosalind Hursthouse The daughter of a pacifist rector who answered "No!" when his congregation asked him "Is everything in the bible true?", perhaps Mary Midgley was destined to become a philosopher. Yet few would have thought this inquisitive, untidy, nature-loving child would become "one of the sharpest critical pens in the west." This is her remarkable story. Probably the only philosopher to have been in Vienna on the eve of its invasion by Nazi (...) Germany in 1938 and dance in Trafalgar Square on VE day seven year later, she studied philosophy at Oxford in the same year as Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, all of whom became close friends. Midgley tells us in vivid and humorous fashion how they cut a swathe through the arid landscape of 1950s British philosophy, writing and arguing - often with each other - about the grand themes of character, beauty and the meaning of rudeness while the spectral figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein hovered in the background. She also charts the highs and lows of philosophy and academia in Britain. On joining the Reading philosophy department on £400 a year in 1949, she doubled its staff complement. But her many years at Newcastle University - where Mike Brearley, who later captained England at cricket, also used to teach - were rewarded with the closure of the philosophy department in the 1980s. The mother of three children, her journey is also one of a woman who in the 1950s and 1960s was fighting to combine a professional career with raising a family. In startling contrast to many of the academic stars of her generation, we learn that Midgley nearly became a novelist and started writing philosophy only when in her fifties, suggesting that Minerva's owl really does fly at dusk. Plainly told like her philosophy, this is an elegiac and moving account of friendships found and lost, bitter philosophical battles and of a profound love of teaching all too rarely acknowledged today. (shrink)

Sample quotes from emails sent by visitors to Mary Klages's successful literary theory web pages on which this book is based: 'Finding your course was a godsend ...

In the Philippines, all transplant centers are mandated by the Department of Health (DOH) to have a Hospital Transplant Ethics Committee (HTEC) to ensure that donations are altruistic, voluntary and free of coercion/commercial transactions. This study was undertaken primarily to describe the organizational and functional profile of existing HTECs and identify areas for improvement. This is a descriptive cross‐sectional study. There was variation in their logistical arrangements (support from hospital, filing systems, office spaces), operations (length and frequency of meetings, number (...) of referrals) and membership (composition, qualifications, occupation, training). The approval rate for donor‐recipient pairs is high with the majority of cases made by living non‐related donors. Appropriate reasons were cited for rejection. The perception of HTECs is that they are competent and confident in their decision‐making. However, there is a need to standardize HTEC composition, provide operating procedures and additional training which can be done by the DOH. (shrink)

En quoi consiste, ou devrait consister, l'éthique professionnelle en enseignement? Comment se manifeste-t- elle dans les gestes pédagogiques? Selon quels critères peut-on la juger? Comment développer l'éthique professionnelle dans le cadre des formations initiale et continue en enseignement? En tenant compte du contexte social et culturel du Québec, des principes éthiques déjà énoncés par le ministère de l'Education ainsi que des lois, codes et conventions ayant des incidences sur la pratique enseignante, les auteures présentent des éléments à considérer pour la (...) réflexion éthique sur l'agir professionnel. Elles proposent des clarifications conceptuelles et un certain nombre de repères et de balises afin de guider les enseignants et de stimuler la discussion sur l'éthique professionnelle, non seulement dans la classe, mais aussi dans l'école et dans la société. (shrink)

Taking notice of race is both risky and inevitable, in medicine no less than in other endeavors. On the one hand, race can be a useful stand-in for unstudied genetic and environmental factors that yield differences in disease expression and therapeutic response. Attention to race can make a therapeutic difference, to the point of saving lives. On the other hand, racial distinctions have social meanings that are often pejorative or worse, especially when these distinctions are cast as culturally or biologically (...) fixed. I argue in this essay that we should start with a presumption against racial categories in medicine, but permit their use when it might prolong lives or meaningfully improve health. Use of racial categories should be understood as an interim step; follow-up inquiry into the factors that underlie race-correlated clinical differences is important both to improve the efficacy of clinical care and to prevent race in itself from being misunderstood as a biological determinant. If we pursue such inquiry with vigor, the pernicious effects of racial categories on public understanding can be managed. But perverse market and regulatory incentives create the danger that use of race will be “locked-in,” once drugs or other therapies are approved. These incentives should be revisited. (shrink)

Anthropology combines two quite different enterprises: the ethnographic study of particular people in particular places and the theorizing about the human species. As such, anthropology is part of cognitive science in that it contributes to the unitary theoretical aim of understanding and explaining the behavior of the animal species Homo sapiens. This article draws on our own research experience to illustrate that cooperation between anthropology and the other sub-disciplines of cognitive science is possible and fruitful, but it must proceed from (...) the recognition of anthropology’s unique epistemology and methodology. (shrink)

A chilling subplot in the twentieth-century saga of state-sponsored mass murder, torture, and other atrocities was the widespread incidence of medical complicity. Nazi doctors' human and assistance in genocidal killing are the most oft-cited exemplar, but wartime Japanese physicians' human vivisection and other grotesque practices rivaled the Nazi medical horrors. Measured by these standards, Soviet psychiatrists' role in repressing dissent, Latin American and Turkish military doctors' complicity in torture, and even the South African medical profession's systematic involvement in apartheid may (...) seem, to some, almost prosaic. Yet these and other reported cases of medical complicity in human rights abuse compel an inquiry into medicine's vulnerability to becoming an adjunct to illicit state purposes. (shrink)

Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, here presented for the first time in English translation, is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the twentieth-century. A peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, drawing on both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music, but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, The Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a (...) process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The first part concerns a mode of 'self-encounter' which presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. The second part is entitled 'Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse'. (shrink)

Olivier Bloch travaille sur l'histoire de la philosophie, et plus particulièrement sur l'histoire des doctrines, courants et traditions matérialistes, dans le domaine de la philosophie antique et dans celui de la philosophie de l'âge classique (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles), en particulier en France (Descartes, Gassendi et ses disciples, les philosophes matérialistes du XVIIIe siècle), et en Grande-Bretagne (Hobbes). Depuis le début des années 80, ses recherches portent principalement sur les traditions libertines et clandestines de l'âge classique et leur prolongement (...) dans le matérialisme des Lumières, et, dans cette perspective, sur les rapports entre matérialisme et littérature, avec un intérêt tout particulier pour Cyrano de Bergerac, puis Molière. Ses collègues ont voulu lui rendre hommage par ce recueil d'études sur ses domaines de prédilection. (shrink)

This commentary criticises Bering on two counts. First, because we do not know what he attributes to natural selection and what he sees as derived representations. Second, Bering's ethnography of religion is inadequate. People who practise ancestor worship are not concerned with their own survival but with that of others. Many supernatural beings are not thought of as morally motivated.

Ernst Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers' encounter with Aristotle. He argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today.

A growing consensus in the philosophy and psychology of concepts is that while theories such as the prototype, exemplar, and theory theories successfully account for some instances of concept formation and application, none of them successfully accounts for all such instances. I argue against this ‘new consensus’ and show that the problem is, in fact, more severe: the explanatory force of each of these theories is limited even with respect to the phenomena often cited to support it, as each fails (...) to satisfy an important explanatory desideratum with respect to these phenomena. I argue that these explanatory shortcomings arise from a shared assumption on the part of these theories, namely, they take similarity judgements and application of causal knowledge to be discrete elements in a theory of concepts. I further propose that the same assumption carries over into alternative theories offered by proponents of the new consensus: pluralism, eliminativism, and hybrid theories. I put forth a sketch of an integrated model of concept formation and application, which rejects this shared assumption and satisfies the explanatory desiderata I discuss. I suggest that this model undermines the motivation for hybrid, pluralist, and eliminativist accounts of concepts. _1_ Introduction _2_ The Similarity-Based Approach and the Importance of Theory _2.1_ The similarity-based approach _2.2_ The selection desideratum _2.3_ Causal knowledge as satisfying the selection desideratum _3_ The Theory-Based Approach and the Importance of Similarity _3.1_ The theory-based approach _3.2_ The range desideratum _3.3_ Similarity as satisfying the range desideratum _4_ An Integrated Approach to Concepts _4.1_ An integrated model _4.2_ The integrated theory versus hybrid theories of concepts _5_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Several logical operators are defined as dual pairs, in different types of logics. Such dual pairs of operators also occur in other algebraic theories, such as mathematical morphology. Based on this observation, this paper proposes to define, at the abstract level of institutions, a pair of abstract dual and logical operators as morphological erosion and dilation. Standard quantifiers and modalities are then derived from these two abstract logical operators. These operators are studied both on sets of states and sets of (...) models. To cope with the lack of explicit set of states in institutions, the proposed abstract logical dual operators are defined in an extension of institutions, the stratified institutions, which take into account the notion of open sentences, whose satisfaction is parametrised by sets of states. A hint on the potential interest of the proposed framework for spatial reasoning is also provided. (shrink)

In a previous paper we have shown that in quantum chromodynamics the gluon propagator vanishes in the infrared limit, while the ghost propagator is more singular than a simple pole. These results were obtained after angular averaging, but in the current paper we go beyond this approximation and perform an exact calculation of the angular integrals. The powers of the infrared behaviour of the propagators are changed substantially. We find the very intriguing result that the gluon propagator vanishes in the (...) infrared exactly like p2, whilst the ghost propagator is exactly as singular as 1/p4. We also find that the value of the infrared fixed point of the QCD coupling is much decreased from the y-max estimate: it is now equal to 4π/3. Following a recent study by von Smekal et al.[1], we analyzed in Ref.[2] the coupled Dyson- Schwinger equations for the gluon and ghost form factors F and G. The approximations were two-fold: firstly the vertices were taken bare, and secondly angular averaging was introduced (the so-called y-max approximation). Deferring to later work an improvement of the vertices. (shrink)

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject to (...) ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation. (shrink)

Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is one of the most important and neglected works advocating the establishment of women's academies. Its reception was so controversial that Astell responded with a lengthy sequel, also in this volume. The cause of great notoriety, Astell's Proposal was imitated by Defoe in his "An Academy for Women," parodied in the Tatler, satirized on the stage, plagiarized by Bishop Berkeley, and later mocked by Gilbert and Sullivan in Princess Ida.

Die mit 126 Briefen und Gegenbriefen fast luckenlos erhaltene Geschaftskorrespondenz des Philosophen Ernst Bloch (1885 -1977) mit dem Aufbau-Verlag Berlin ist ein buch- und verlagsgeschichtliches Zeitdokument erster Ordnung: Es belegt alle ...

Some views of holism fail to fully encapsulate the structure and independence of consciousness while others are reductionist in their insistence on a strict structure. After examining holism and mental state consciousness, I move to my own proposal for the structure of consciousness: experiential swaths. By highlighting the phenomenal interdependence of some aspects of consciousness without conceding that all aspects are so strongly intertwined, experiential swaths allow for further conceptual structurization within consciousness.

The partisan and ideological polarization of American politics since the 1970s appears to have affected pubic opinion in striking ways. The American public has become increasingly partisan and ideological along liberal-conservative lines on a wide range of issues, including even foreign policy. This has raised questions about how rational the public is, in the broad sense of the public's responsiveness to objective conditions. Widespread partisan disagreements over what those conditions arei.e., disagreements about the factssuggest that large proportions of the public (...) may be perceiving the facts incorrectly. The facts in question are important enough that these partisan disagreements may translate into sub-optimal policy preferences and electoral decisions. (shrink)

This paper examines the interplay between conceptual structure and the evolution of scientific concepts, arguing that concepts are fundamentally ‘forward-looking’ constructs. Drawing on empirical studies of similarity and categorization, I explicate the way in which the conceptual taxonomy highlights the ‘relevant respects’ for similarity judgments involved in categorization. I then propose that this taxonomy provides some of the cognitive underpinnings of the ongoing development of scientific concepts. I use the concept synapse to illustrate my proposal, showing how conceptual taxonomy both (...) facilitates and constrains the accommodation of newly discovered phenomena. I end by briefly considering the implications of the proposed approach for a normative evaluation of scientific concepts. (shrink)

The Supreme Court seems poised to overrule Roe v. Wade and hold that there is no constitutional right to choose abortion. The reversal of Roe seems to run counter to public opinion in the United St...

Mary Kalantzis was from 2006 to 2016 Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Bill Cope is a Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They are co-authors of multiple books including Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge, forthcoming), New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education (Cambridge, 2008, 2012), Literacies (Cambridge 2012, 2016) and e-Learning Ecologies (2017).

Similarity‐based theories of concepts have a broad intuitive appeal and have been successful in accounting for various phenomena related to the formation and application of concepts. Their adequacy as theories of concepts has been questioned, however, as similarity is often taken as too flexible, too unconstrained, to be explanatory of categorization. In this article, I propose an account of similarity that takes the “foil” against which the target items are measured as integral to the process of comparison, making the similarity (...) relation a fundamentally triadic one. I argue that this account delivers more internal constraints on the process of comparison than the traditional, dyadic account of similarity does. Finally, I propose that this account is advantageous for a similarity‐based theory of concepts, as it easily integrates with the notion of conceptual taxonomy and uses it to deliver additional constraints on categorization. On such a theory of concepts, the foil, whose variability is in large part responsible for the flexible nature of similarity judgements, is turned within the framework of conceptual taxonomy to the very element that constrains similarity judgements in categorization. Therefore, this notion of similarity mitigates the worry that similarity is too flexible to be explanatory of categorization. (shrink)

This title includes the following features: Presents a comprehensivediscussion of the central issues of psychiatric ethics, defining and exploringeach of these issues; Contains essential readings for each of these central issues, providing in onevolume readings that would otherwise be difficult to obtain; Includes introductory essays that provide a comprehensive overview of eachissue, efficiently and effectively organizing the reader's approach to theselected readings; Draws on the success of the well-known and respected 'PsychiatricEthics'.

In Codes of Ethics and the Professions 12 contributors, including philosophers, historians, lawyers, nurses, psychiatrists, and a journalist seek answers to a range of tough questions. Do we need codes of ethics? How do we go about creating them? Can codes of ethics be misused and abused? How should they be enforced, regulated and revised?

Children and adults from a remote Zafimaniry village in eastern Madagascar were probed for their intuitive understanding of the biological inheritance of bodily features. They were told a story about a baby adopted at birth, and were asked whether, when grown, he would be more likely to resemble his birth parents or his adoptive parents in bodily traits, beliefs, preferences, temperaments, and skills. In spite of the fact that the Zafimaniry, like other Southeast Asian and Malagasy peoples, profess explicit beliefs (...) concerning the fixation of individuals' properties that are at variance with Western folkbiology, Zafimaniry adults responded as do American adults on the task. Zafimaniry children, however, did not repond as did the adults, nor did they respond as did the majority of American children. Rather, they responded in the manner most consistent with what would be predicted, for children as well as for adults, from the ethnographic literature. That is, they tended to judge that an adopted boy would resemble his adoptive rather than his birth parents on virtually all traits, including bodily traits. The implications of these findings for current debates within cognitive science and anthropology are discussed. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in emotions, organizational scholars have largely ignored the moral emotion of schadenfreude, which refers to pleasure felt in response to another’s misfortune. As a socially undesirable emotion, it might be assumed that individuals would be hesitant to share their schadenfreude. In two experimental studies involving emotional responses to unethical behaviors, we find evidence to the contrary. Study 1 revealed that subjects experiencing schadenfreude were willing to share their feelings, especially if the misfortune was perceived to be deserved. (...) Study 2 extends this work by incorporating schadenfreude targets of different status. Consistent with the “tall poppy syndrome,” subjects were more willing to share schadenfreude concerning high status targets than low status targets when the perceived severity of the target’s misconduct was low. This status effect disappeared at higher levels of perceived deservingness, however. Reported willingness to share schadenfreude was strongest at these levels but did not differ significantly between high and low status targets. These findings build on the social functional account of emotions, suggesting that sharing schadenfreude may signal normative cues to others regarding workplace behaviors that are deemed to be unethical. (shrink)

This paper identifies, develops, and argues for an interpretation of Mary Astell’s understanding of self-government. On this interpretation, what is essential to self-government, according to Astell, is an agent’s responsiveness to her own reasoning. The paper identifies two aspects of her theory of self-government: an “authenticity” criterion of what makes our motives our own and an account of the capacities required for responsiveness to our own reasoning. The authenticity criterion states that when our motives arise from some external source without (...) validation by our own understanding of the reasons supporting them, then they are not our own. The capacities requisite for responsiveness to our own reasoning are those of examining and evaluating our own motives and of resisting the social pressure to conform to others’ opinions. An upshot of this interpretation of Astell’s theory of self-government is that it reveals her insights into the ways “custom” can undermine an individual’s ability to govern oneself. (shrink)