The article presents a particular case of undergraduate students working on subprojects within the framework of their supervisors' (the authors') research project during Autumn Semester 2012 and Spring Semester 2013. The article's purpose is to show that an institutionalized focus on students as "research learners" rather than merely curriculum learners proves productive for both research and teaching. We describe the specific university learning context and the particular organization of undergraduate students' supervision and assistantships. The case builds on and further enhances (...) a well-established and proven university model of participant-directed, problem-oriented project work. We explore students' and researchers' experiences of being part of the collaboration, focusing on learning potentials and dilemmas associated with the multiple roles of researcher and student that characterized this particular intertwined research and education arrangement. We show that the connection to the research project assisted students to orientate, learn, and contribute in relation to empirical and theoretical aspects of research and supported the development of broad perspectives and deep analysis. (shrink)

This collection of new essays addresses emotion in relation to the arts. The essays consider such topics as the paradox of fiction, emotion in the pure and abstract arts, and the rationality and ethics of emotional responses to art.

This paper tries to combine Peirce’s cosmology and metaphysics with current understanding in physics of the evolution of the universe, regarded as an ongoing semiotic process in a living cosmos. While the basic property of Life is viewed as an unexplainable Firstness inherent in the initial iconic state of the vacuous continuum we shall consider and exemplify two sign developing processes: (a) the transition from icon to index is considered as a symmetry breaking emergence of order actualising one among the (...) possibilities of the iconic vacuum; (b) the transition from index to symbol, regarded as a habit formation — an adaptation of the surroundings to the order that has emerged. While the iconic state is characterized by fractal self-similarity the transitions to index and symbol are modelled by the mean field theory of second order phase transitions. (shrink)

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

This article addresses two great global challenges of the 2020s. On one hand, the accelerating climate crisis and, on the other, the deepening crisis of representation within liberal democracies. As temperatures and water levels rise, rates of popular confidence in existing democratic institutions decline. So, what is to be done? This article discusses whether sortition – the ancient Greek practice of selecting individuals for political office through lottery – could serve to mitigate both crises simultaneously. Since the 2000s, sortition has (...) attracted growing interest among activists and academics. Recently it has been identified in countries like the UK and France as a mechanism for producing legitimate political answers to the climate challenge. However, few theoretical reflections on the potentials and perils of sortition-based climate governance have yet emerged. This article contributes to filling the gap. Based on a critique of the first successful case of sortition used to enhance national environmental policy – in Ireland in 2017–18 – we argue that sortition-based deliberation could indeed speed up meaningful climate action whilst improving the health of democratic systems. However, this positive outcome is not preordained. Success depends not only on green social movements getting behind climate sortition but also on developing flexible, context-specific designs that identify adequate solutions to a number of problems, including those of power ; expertise ; and participation. (shrink)

(2004). A vindication of the rights of brutes. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 259-264.

Commercial cooperation between transBaltic neighbours Denmark and Poland is thriving, yet relationships between business people in the two countries are not always easy as a consequence of differing cultural histories and misunderstandings. The author is Associate Professor in the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management in Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, DK‐2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark.

Commercial cooperation between transBaltic neighbours Denmark and Poland is thriving, yet relationships between business people in the two countries are not always easy as a consequence of differing cultural histories and misunderstandings. The author is Associate Professor in the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management in Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, DK‐2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark.

This volume contains a collection of 17 essays on Philo written by Peder Borgen between 1987 and 2018. The first six studies deal with important issues in Philo's religious thought and social world, such as his views on Flaccus, prayers, and his eschatology. The next five essays illustrate how an understanding of Philo can contribute to the interpretation of Paul, especially his Letter to the Galatians. The final six studies deal with the importance of Philo's writings for the interpretation (...) of the Revelation of John, a subject too rarely touched upon in recent scholarship. (shrink)

The attitudes of women patients with cancer were explored when they were invited to participate in one of three randomised trials that included chemotherapy at two university centres and a satellite centre. Fourteen patients participating in and 15 patients declining trials were interviewed. Analysis was based on the constant comparative method. Most patients voiced positive attitudes towards clinical research, believing that trials are necessary for further medical development, and most spontaneously argued that participation is a moral obligation. Most trial decliners, (...) however, described a radical change in focus as they faced the actual personal choice. Almost no one got an impression of clinical equipoise between treatments in the trials, and most patients expressed discomfort with randomisation. A patient’s choice to participate was mainly determined by whether the primary focus was on treatment effect or on adverse effects. Both knowledge about and feelings towards trials originated mostly from the media, although paradoxically the media were largely seen as untrustworthy. Mistrust was shown towards the pharmaceutical industry, and although most patients originally trusted that doctors primarily pursued the interest of patients, they did not trust the adequacy of doctors or industry in maintaining self-regulation. Thus, public control measures were judged to be essential. (shrink)

The Danish marine biologist Anton Frederik Bruun (1901–1961) is chiefly remembered as an explorer of the deep-sea fauna and a key figure in international scientific organizations during the 1950s. As the Cold War increasingly permeated the marine sciences and it became too expensive for small states to operate deep-sea research vessels, he became an asset to the USA's oceanographic establishment as it sought to first assess Soviet strength (in terms of research, technology and logistical capacity) and then to build up (...) American oceanography in response. Bruun's contacts with the USSR – including a visit in 1957 – strengthened his contacts to the American military as well as American oceanographers. His enthusiasm for raising interest in the marine sciences in developing countries could also be matched to American geopolitical goals. Bruun's participation in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Naga expedition to the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand captured the mutually beneficial nature of his American connections. Bruun was able to use the USA to reach distant oceans, while the USA in turn gained from Bruun's prestige as it forged connections with friendly states through science, an increasingly important arena for Cold War competition. (shrink)

Les théories post-colonialistes nous ont montré à quel point l'absence d'une reconnaissance de la valeur de certaines formes culturelles produit des effets nuisibles. Ces théories ignorent pourtant la nature asymétrique des relations régissant l'interaction entre des cultures mineures et des cultures majeures, c'est-à-dire entre les grandes et les petites nations. Par conséquent, la nécessité d'une politique de la reconnaissance spécifique aux petites nations privilégiées n'est pas reconnue. Afin d'établir ce point, j'examine quelques aspects de la production cinématographique danoise. J'essaie aussi (...) de montrer que les cinéastes appartenant à des petites nations privilégiées doivent adopter une stratégie précise de la reconnaissance.Influential postcolonial theories have successfully shown that the failure to recognize the value of certain cultural forms inflicts a form of harm. What these theories fail to note is that small, prosperous nations also require a politics of recognition as a result of the asymmetrical nature of relations governing major and minor cultures. To prove this point I consider aspects of contemporary Danish cinematic production. I attempt to identify the strategy for recognition that is best suited to filmmakers belonging to small, but prosperous nations. (shrink)

Introduction O DY ss E us , one of the earliest and best-known strategists in the history of literature, chances upon the cave of the dim-witted giant ...

Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portrait paintings have eyes staring outward at the beholder. A minority of these eyes have slightly elevated pupils in comparison to the iris. These off-centre pupils are not the norm, but they occur regularly in works by skilful European portrait painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article takes a closer look at selected portrait paintings by Danish artists Jens Juel and Constantin Hansen and argues that the discrepancy between the pupils and the rest of (...) the paintings creates an illusion of movement or presence when looking the paintings in the eye. The discrepancy creates an aesthetic effect corresponding with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of internal discordance. According to Merleau-Ponty, visual art can create the illusion of movement by portraying its parts in different moments. These internal discordances make the painting “move” because the beholder unconsciously creates a fictive link between the parts thereby expanding time in space. The article combines presence theory (Jean-Luc Nancy and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht), phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and art theory and perception theory (James Elkins, Dominic McIver Lopes and Michael Fried) in order to study the effects and possible reasons for creating pupils out of sync with the rest of the painting. (shrink)

The European Convention of Human Rights system was originally created to sound the alarm if democracy was threatened in the member states. Yet, it eventually developed into a very different system with a focus on providing individual justice in an ever growing number of member states. This transformation has raised fundamental questions as to the level of difference and diversity allowed within the common European human rights space. Was the system to rest on minimum standards with room for domestic differences, (...) or was it to create uniform standards? These questions have come up as increasingly contentious issues over the past years and have triggered a number of reforms seeking to introduce more subsidiarity in the system, striking a different balance between the European and national oversight of human rights. The article analyses this turn to subsidiarity by exploring whether the reform process has introduced new forms of difference and diversity within the common space of European human rights. Covering the period from 2000 to the end of 2019 and using a dataset of all judgments of the period, the article provides a structural analysis of developments in reference to the margin of appreciation which is the European Court of Human Rights’ long-standing tool for balancing the common standards, yet leaving space for individual member states to find local solutions to implementing those standards. It concludes that recent developments have contributed to a more federal-style construction of European human rights with more space for differences within the common general standards. (shrink)

“One who elects to serve mankind by taking the law into his own hands thereby demonstrates his conviction that his own ability to determine policy is superior to democratic decision making. [Defendants’] professed unselfish motivation, rather than a justification, actually identifies a form of arrogance which organized society cannot tolerate.” Those were the words of Justice Harris L. Hartz at the sentencing hearing of three nuns convicted of trespassing and vandalizing government property to demonstrate against U.S. foreign policy. Citizens engaging (...) in civil disobedience are indeed at times accused of being arrogant because they apparently think their own political judgment is superior to that of the democratic majority. This paper examines and evaluates the claim that dissenters are epistemically arrogant. Contrary to the dominant viewpoint in the literature, I argue that epistemic arrogance involves inflating the epistemic worth of one’s view. Indeed, the most plausible charge against civil dissenters consists of two claims: (A) civil dissenters have a higher degree of rational certainty in P than is warranted, and (B) civil dissenters use a method of expression that requires a higher level of rational certainty than is warranted in the propositions that their political view is right and the injustice they fight is substantial. I argue that civil disobedience does not necessarily involve epistemic arrogance. Whether an act of civil disobedience evinces epistemic arrogance has to be determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the extent to which each dissenter lives up to (A) and (B). (shrink)

In public debate GMPs are oftenreferred to as being unnatural or a violationof nature. Some people have serious moralconcerns about departures from what is natural.Others are concerned about potential risks tothe environment arising from the combination ofhereditary material moving across naturalboundaries and the limits of scientificforesight of long-term consequences. To addresssome of these concerns we propose that anadditional element in risk assessment based onthe concept of familiarity should beintroduced. The objective is to facilitatetransparency about uncertainties inherent inthe risk assessment of (...) the GMP. Familiarityconventionally involves data and experiencerelating to the plant species and the ecosystemin question. We would like to extend thisconcept to the molecular level of plantbreeding and suggest that GMP characteristicsshould be compared to a reference baselinedetermined by conventional breeding techniques.Three GMPs are ranked according to familiarityat the plant and ecosystem level and themolecular level. The approach may help tointegrate discussion of the scientificarguments and moral questions raised in thedebate about GMOs by providing an operationalscheme within which moral concerns are broughtwithin the framework of science-based riskassessment. (shrink)

Understanding stakeholders’ perceptions and motivations is of significant importance in relation to conservation and protected area projects. The importance of stakeholder analysis is widely recognized as a necessary means for gaining insight into the complex systemic interactions between natural processes, management policies, and local people depending on the resource. Today, community and group-based participatory inquiry approaches are widely used for this purpose. Recently, participatory approaches have been critiqued for not considering power relations and conflict internal to the community. In this (...) article, we suggest that the five-step Rapid Stakeholder and Conflict Assessment (RSCA) methodology addresses this critique. The objective of the methodology is to provide a facilitator with a comprehensive foundation on which to plan and conduct subsequent participatory project development. The RSCA integrates elements of soft systems and critical systems thinking. Qualitative research interviews and cognitive mapping of stakeholders’ mental models are used for collection of empirical material and analysis. The RSCA methodology is demonstrated in a case study concerning buffer zone management in the coastal wetlands of southern Vietnam. The case study shows that the RSCA methodology can provide an efficient way of obtaining a holistic and critical understanding of a complex resource management situation, thus potentially enhancing project performance in an instrumental as well as an ethical sense. (shrink)

I outline a new approach to the question of when civil disobedience is legitimate by drawing on insights from the epistocracy literature. I argue that civil disobedience and epistocracy are similar in the sense that they both involve the idea that superior political judgment defeats majority authority, because this can lead to correct, i.e. just, prudent or morally right, political decisions. By reflecting on the question of when superior political judgment defeats majority authority in the epistocracy case, I identify considerations (...) that also apply to the disobedience context. I conclude that disobedience in protest of law X performed by agents who know that X is wrong is legitimate when: 1) it is not reasonably disputable that the civil dissenter knows that X is wrong 2) the adoption of X is a high-stakes political decision and 3) no destabilizing effects ensue. (shrink)

Buckminster Fuller’s experiences in the Navy became a model for his ecological design projects and suggestions for the global management of ‘Spaceship Earth’. Inspired by technocratic ideas of the 1930s, Fuller envisaged, in the 1970s, an elitist world without politics, in which designers were at the helm, steering the planet out of its environmental crises.

Kierkegaard's ambiguous aesthetics -- Becoming Christian -- Christ and the art of subjective becoming -- Mimesis, aesthetics, and Christian becoming -- Becoming amidst the existence stages -- Becoming and art.

_Examining inequality through the lenses of moral traditions_ Rising inequality has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years from scholars and politicians, but the moral dimensions of inequality tend to be ignored. Is inequality morally acceptable? Is it morally permissible to allow practices and systems that contribute to inequality? Is there an ethical obligation to try to alleviate inequality, and if so, who is obligated to take that action? This book addresses these and similar questions not through a (...) single lens of morality but through a comparative study of ethical traditions, both secular and religious, Western and non-Western. The moral and political traditions considered are: liberalism, Marxism, natural law, feminism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Confucianism. The types of inequality examined include property, natural resources, products, wealth, income, jobs, and taxation. The editors open the book with an introduction providing information on contemporary dimensions of the problem of economic inequality, and the book concludes with a summary of the perspectives represented. _Economic Inequality and Morality_ is unusual in that it addresses similarities and differences on the questions of inequality within and across moral traditions. Authors of the individual studies answer a common set of topic-related questions, giving the reader a broad perspective on how a broad range of traditions view and respond to inequality. (shrink)

This work brings together three themes whose relationship has gone unexplored in the recent literature of philosophy: the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, the phenomenological ontology of Martin Heidegger and the discipline of logic, especially formal logic. Part One and Two of the work present a detailed explication of Husserl's and Heidegger's philosophy of logic which are respectively characterized as an archeology of logic based upon transcendental phenomenological criticism and a radical phenomenology of logic based upon phenomenological criticism which issues (...) from a concern with the question of the meaning of Being. Part Three, then, offers a comparative analysis combined with a critical appraisal of these two philosophies of logic in order to achieve a more penetrating understanding of the relationship between Husserl and Heidegger. Thus, in one sense, this work takes the domain of logic and the varying approaches to it by Husserl and Heidegger as a clue to the similarities and dissimilarities within the thinking of these two phenomenologists, especially with regard to the understanding each has of the goal and method of phenomenology, and the results proper to phenomenological reflection. (shrink)

Deepening and developing the seminal vision of _Habits of the Heart_, this volume presents original essays by leading thinkers in the social sciences, philosophy, and religion.

The Protestant Christianity that came to China in the 19th century was mostly a “modernizing” Christianity that promoted the transition to what Charles Taylor calls an “immanent frame”—a disenchanted world based on natural laws, knowable through scientific reason, which can be used by humans for their mutual benefit. Within this immanent frame, religion is a matter of private belief that cultivates good personal moral character. And there is no place for “signs and wonders”—miracles that suspend the laws of nature. But (...) Chinese modernity has turned out to be a hybrid kind. Especially (but by no means exclusively) in the countryside, the immanent modernity brought from the West has mingled with the enchanted world carried down from Chinese traditions. One sign of this is the prevalence of “signs and wonders” popular Christianity, which has been the most rapidly growing form of Christianity in China. The history of Catholicism in China has similarities to these developments. (shrink)