In this paper, I argue that current attempts at classifying life–mind continuity (LMC) feature several important ambiguities. We can resolve these ambiguities by distinguishing between the extensional, categorical, and systematic relationships that LMC might encompass. In Sect. 1, I begin by introducing the notion of LMC and the theory behind it. In Sect. 2, I show how different ideas of mind shape different approaches to continuity and how to achieve its aim. In Sect. 3, I canvas various canonical formulations and (...) classifications of LMC; I then demonstrate that they retain important ambiguities. Section 4 builds on this by arguing that we must conceive of the extensional and categorical aspects of continuity independently. In Sect. 5, I show further that current literature has underexplored multiple systematic aspects of continuity. I then take a constructive approach in Sect. 6 by providing a classification model for LMC based on extensional and categorical commitments. Here, I comment on aspects of the thesis omitted from the model but essential for a full classification and thorough comparison between various approaches to LMC. All of these arguments lay the foundation for more exhaustively classifying accounts of LMC. (shrink)

Generative AI programs can produce high-quality written and visual content that may be used for good or ill. We argue that a credit–blame asymmetry arises for assigning responsibility for these outputs and discuss urgent ethical and policy implications focused on large-scale language models.

In a reconstruction of the theories of Freud and Klein, Sebastian Gardner asks: what causes irrationality, what must the mind be like for it to be irrational, to what extent does irrationality involve self-awareness, and what is the point of irrationality? Arguing that psychoanalytic theory provides the most penetrating answers to these questions, he rejects the widespread view of the unconscious as a 'second mind', in favour of a view of it as a source of inherently irrational desires seeking (...) expression through wish-fulfilment and phantasy. He meets scepticism about psychoanalytic explanation by exhibiting its continuity with everyday psychology. (shrink)

It is often said in physics that if two models of a theory are related by a symmetry, then the two models provide (or could provide) two different representations of the very same situation, alike the case of two maps of different color for the very same city. It is also said that the situations represented by two models of a theory are indiscernible in some ways when the models in question are related by a symmetry of the theory, just (...) like the situation in the interior of the cabin of a train when the train is at rest in the station is empirically indiscernible from the situation in the interior when the train is moving uniformly (in classical mechanics, these two situations are represented by two models related by a boost). In recent years, philosophers of physics have focused a lot of attention in developing various principles that aim to elucidate these and similar remarks on symmetries, models, physical equivalence, and representation that are widespread in physics practice. The goal of the current article is to provide a critical review of these principles, and suggest a new framework for thinking about these kinds of questions. One important upshot of the paper is that questions of indiscernibility, and questions of the representational capacity of models, must be distinguished from one another. (shrink)

Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements and continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today. The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject, and essential reading for any student or scholar of phenomenology. Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five clear parts: main figures in the phenomenological movement, from Brentano to (...) Derrida main topics in phenomenology phenomenological contributions to philosophy phenomenological intersections historical postscript. Close attention is paid to the core topics in phenomenology such as intentionality, perception, subjectivity, the self, the body, being and phenomenological method. An important feature of the Companion is its examination of how phenomenology has contributed to central disciplines in philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of religion as well as disciplines beyond philosophy such as race, cognitive science, psychiatry, literary criticism and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The latter half of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in Kant’s philosophy in Continental Europe, the effects of which are still being felt today. _The Neo-Kantian Reader_ is the first anthology to collect the most important primary sources in Neo-Kantian philosophy, with many being published here in English for the first time. It includes extracts on a rich and diverse number of subjects, including logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, (...) and transcendental idealism. Sebastian Luft, together with other scholars, provides clear introductions to each of the following sections, placing them in historical and philosophical context: the beginnings of Neo-Kantianism: including the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, Otto Liebman, Friedrich Lange, and Hermann Lotze the Marburg School: including Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer the Southwest School: including Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, and Hans Vaihinger responses and critiques: including Moritz Schlick, Edmund Husserl; Rudolf Carnap, and the 'Davos dispute' between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. The Neo-Kantian Reader is essential reading for all students of Kant, nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and phenomenology, as well as to those studying important philosophical movements such as logical positivism and analytic philosophy and its history. (shrink)

Imagine that we are on a train playing with some mechanical systems. Why can’t we detect any differences in their behavior when the train is parked versus when it is moving uniformly? The standard answer is that boosts are symmetries of Newtonian systems. In this paper, I use the case of a spring to argue that this answer is problematic because symmetries are neither sufficient nor necessary for preserving its behavior. I also develop a new answer according to which boosts (...) preserve the relational properties on which the behavior of a system depends, even when they are not symmetries. (shrink)

The online version of the original article can be found under doi:10.1007/s11948-007-9045-2.

Due to the frequent occurrence of ethical transgressions and unethical employee behaviors, there has lately been an increasing interest in the ethical foundations of contemporary organizations. However, large-scale comprehensive analyses of organizational ethics are still comparatively limited. Our study contributes to both management control and business ethics literature by empirically examining potential antecedents as well as resulting effects of ethical work climates on organizational-level outcomes. Based on a cross-sectional survey among 295 large- and medium-sized companies, we find that more informal (...) means of control constitute important elements of a broader organizational control context that are strongly related to the emergence of coherent ethical work climates with an increased awareness of ethical issues. Moreover, our results show that the relationship between ethical work climates and organizational performance can be considered as rather indirect as it is fully mediated by increased mutual trust among employees. Overall, our study thus supports the particular importance of ethical work climates and identifies appropriate means to encourage ethical conduct. (shrink)

The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. (...) From a representationalist frameworkregarding our conscious experience, in this article, I will offer a novel argument in favor of EC and show that cognitionconstitutively—and no merely causally—depends upon body activity beyond that in the brain. In particular, I will arguethat in order to solve the problem derived from the empirical evidence in favor of the possibility of shifted spectrum,representationalist should endorse the view that experiences concern its subject: the content of experience isde se.Ishow that this claim perfectly matches the phenomenological observation and helps explaining the subjective characterof the experience. Furthermore, I argue that entertaining this kind of representation constitutively depends on bodilyactivity. Consequently, insofar as cognition depends on consciousness, it is embodied. (shrink)

Consensus in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that conserved quantity theories of causation such as that of Dowe [2000]—according to which causation is to be analysed in terms of the exchange of conserved quantities (e.g., energy)—face damning problems when confronted with contemporary physics, where the notion of conservation becomes delicate. In particular, in general relativity it is often claimed that there simply are no conservation laws for (say) total-stress energy. If this claim is correct, it is difficult to see (...) how conserved quantity theories of causation could survive. In this article, we resist the above consensus and defend conserved quantity theories from this conclusion, at least when focusing on the apparent problems posed by general relativity. We argue that this approach to causation can continue to be defended in general relativity, once one appreciates (a) the availability of approximate symmetries in generic general relativistic spacetimes, and (b) the role of modelling and idealisation in that theory. Given these points, conserved quantity theories of causation must stand or fall on other grounds. (shrink)

Sebastian Sunday Grève calls on us to decide what kind of life with machines we want.

Garry Young has made three objections against Sebastian Ostritsch’s endorsement view on the immorality of computer games. In this paper, we want to defend the endorsement view against all three of them.

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 73-112.

Whistleblowing is an effective tool against fraud and corruption in organizations. However, as researchers have struggled to acquire data on actual whistleblowers, research relies on hypothetical intention data and student samples, which is seen as a major limitation. Using a field study of 1,416 employees from China, Germany, and Russia, the purpose of this article is to identify differences and similarities between intention and actual whistleblowing decisions, thus aiding research and interpretation of prior and future studies. I also contribute by (...) analyzing whether findings can be generalized across different cultures and whether status and power influence the whistleblowing process. My results reveal that the key difference between hypothetical and real decisions is not in variables that affect the process, but in effect sizes: Employees underestimate the effect of situational (retaliation) and organizational (compliance measures) variables in hypothetical compared to actual whistleblowing. Thus, reliance on intention research is not inherently problematic, when effect sizes are interpreted with caution. I also find that results are similar across countries and that status and power may not be decisive factors in whistleblowing. My findings should also be of interest to practitioners and policymakers, as they assist in designing effective whistleblowing systems and environments in organizations. (shrink)

Die Naturphilosophie und die Politische Philosophie werden gemeinhin als Disziplinen aufgefasst, die grundlegend verschiedene Problembereiche zum Gegenstand haben. Die Aporien zu überwinden, welche daraus resultieren, ist die Pointe von Plessners Philosophischer Anthropologie. In dieser Studie wird gezeigt, wie Plessner in der Aneignung elementarer Topoi der klassischen Ontologie eine strukturell neuartige "Ontologie des Organischen" entwickelt. Dieser von Plessner beiläufig verwendete Ausdruck wird in dieser Studie systematisch entwickelt. Was dabei elaboriert wird, ist eine komplexe naturphilosophische "Ontologie des Ausgleichs". In dieser Ontologie des (...) Ausgleichs werden elementare naturphilosophische Ausgleichsleistungen expliziert, die als solche einen Doppelsinn haben: was auf der organismischen Ebene strukturell als Ausgleich des organischen Körpers mit sich selbst und der Umwelt expliziert wird, nimmt im menschlichen Bereich die Gestalt einer Ontologie der Personen an, wo die strukturell identische Ausgleichsleistung als das Spiel der Personalisierung zu vollziehen ist. Plessners Ansatz wird hier als ein auf diese Fragen neuartig antwortender, gleichberechtigt als ontologischer und sozialphilosophischer Ansatz expliziert. (shrink)

It is often said in physics that if two models of a theory are related by a symmetry, then the two models provide (or could provide) two different representations of the very same situation, alike the case of two maps of different color for the very same city. It is also said that the situations represented by two models of a theory are indiscernible in some ways when the models in question are related by a symmetry of the theory, just (...) like the situation in the interior of the cabin of a train when the train is at rest in the station is empirically indiscernible from the situation in the interior when the train is moving uniformly (in classical mechanics, these two situations are represented by two models related by a boost). In recent years, philosophers of physics have focused a lot of attention in developing various principles that aim to elucidate these and similar remarks on symmetries, models, physical equivalence, and representation that are widespread in physics practice. The goal of the current article is to provide a critical review of these principles, and suggest a new framework for thinking about these kinds of questions. One important upshot of the paper is that questions of indiscernibility, and questions of the representational capacity of models, must be distinguished from one another. (shrink)

We present a new notion of game equivalence that captures basic powers of interacting players. We provide a representation theorem, a complete logic, and a new game algebra for basic powers. In doing so, we establish connections with imperfect information games and epistemic logic. We also identify some new open problems concerning logic and games.

We propose a new perspective on logics of computation by combining instantial neighborhood logic INL\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathsf {INL}$$\end{document} with bisimulation safe operations adapted from PDL\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathsf {PDL}$$\end{document}. INL\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathsf {INL}$$\end{document} is a recent modal logic, based on an extended neighborhood semantics which permits quantification over individual neighborhoods plus their contents. This system has a natural interpretation as a (...) logic of computation in open systems. Motivated by this interpretation, we show that a number of familiar program constructors can be adapted to instantial neighborhood semantics to preserve invariance for instantial neighborhood bisimulations, the appropriate bisimulation concept for INL\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathsf {INL}$$\end{document}. We also prove that our extended logic IPDL\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathsf {IPDL}$$\end{document} is a conservative extension of dual-free game logic, and its semantics generalizes the monotone neighborhood semantics of game logic. Finally, we provide a sound and complete system of axioms for IPDL\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathsf {IPDL}$$\end{document}, and establish its finite model property and decidability. (shrink)

Ragpickers are people who salvage usable items from other person’s rubbish, and they are spread over different localities all around the world. This raises numerous issues related to the dignity of human life, and the right to education. In addition to discussion of these issues, this paper includes an interview study on bioethics of 150 ragpickers engaged in collection of papers, bottles, waste plastic materials, scrap iron materials and so on in Tiruppur city, Tamil Nadu, India. Ragpickers are mostly children (...) below 14 years of age. The objectives of the study were to find out the socioeconomic conditions of ragpickers, to examine the effect of environment on their health conditions and to identify their problems at work. Society as a whole regards rag picking children as anti-social elements, an embarrassment to the community and unfit to live. However their useful contribution to society and ecology is little understood and generally ignored. The waste collected by these children is recycled and produces 25% of writing paper, the packing materials, egg trays, economic plastic and metal house hold items, and so on, used in our homes. Society and ecology benefit from the production of cheaper household goods, and the slowing down of the destruction of the already threatened rain forests. It also helps to prevent the mountains of putrifying waste materials from building up in city centres. The ragpickers valuable contribution to society should not be ignored and taken for granted. There are a number of ethical and human rights issues raised by this practice, which should not be condoned as ethically acceptable social attitudes to a child’s life. (shrink)

Martin Seel wonders how it is possible to liberate oneself from wanting to be right. In the following, we will ask whether the idea of a wanting to be right is so much as intelligible. For if one thinks about thinking and asks what it means to think something, then the idea of wanting to be right seems to have no place. Both the possibility and the necessity of a liberation from wanting to be right seem to dissolve. And yet, (...) we will show, there is wanting-to-be-right. But we do not understand the idea of wanting-to-be-right merely by thinking about thinking. Rather, we understand the idea of wanting-to-be-right only because thinking is something that takes place between two whose thoughts can contradict each other. If my thought meets your thought, and your thought negates my thought, then it is possible that we both want tobe right. This is the existential core of the idea of a liberation from wanting to be right: It is about the liberation from conflict and the hope for reconciliation. (shrink)

The well known AGM framework for belief revision has recently been extended to include a model of the research agenda of the agent, i.e. a set of questions to which the agent wishes to find answers (Olsson & Westlund in Erkenntnis , 65 , 165–183, 2006 ). The resulting model has later come to be called interrogative belief revision . While belief revision has been studied extensively from the point of view of modal logic, so far interrogative belief revision has (...) only been dealt with in the metalanguage approach in which AGM was originally presented. In this paper, I show how to model interrogative belief revision in a modal object language using a class of operators for questions. In particular, the solution I propose will be shown to capture the notion of K-truncation , a method for agenda update in the case of expansion constructed by Olsson & Westlund. Two case studies are conducted: first, an interrogative extension of Krister Segerberg’s system DDL, and then a similar extension of Giacomo Bonanno’s modal logic for belief revision. Sound and complete axioms will be provided for both of the resulting logics. (shrink)

In vertebrate development, the HOX genes act to specify cell identity along much of the anterior‐posterior axis of the embryonic central nervous system. In all vertebrates examined to date, the vitamin A metabolite retinoic acid is implicated in the patterning of the anterior posterior axis and the induction of HOX gene expression. Two recent papers have extended the study of retinoic acid induction of HOX genes to the closest relatives of the vertebrates, amphioxus and tunicates(1,2). In both these species, exogenous (...) retinoic acid is able to induce ectopic expression of HOX 1 genes in the anterior central nervous system. This suggests that retinoic acid control of anterior‐posterior axis formation and HOX induction is not specific to vertebrates. However, in the more distantly related echinoderms and arthropods, retinoic acid does not seem to act in the same way. Thus the role of retinoic acid in anterior‐posterior axis specification may be a chordate innovation, perhaps linked to the evolution of another chordate character, the dorsal neural tube. (shrink)

This essay takes a first step in comparative ethics by looking to Aristotle and the Aztec's conceptions of the good life. It argues that the Aztec conception of a rooted life, neltiliztli, functions for ethical purposes in a way that is like Aristotle's eudaimonia. To develop this claim, it not only shows just in what their conceptions of the good consist, but also in what way the Aztecs conceived of the virtues (in qualli, in yectli).

Like many ethics debates surrounding emerging technologies, neuroethics is increasingly concerned with the private sector. Here, entrepreneurial visions and claims of how neurotechnology innovation will revolutionize society—from brain-computer-interfaces to neural enhancement and cognitive phenotyping—are confronted with public and policy concerns about the risks and ethical challenges related to such innovations. But while neuroethics frameworks have a longer track record in public sector research such as the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, much less is known about how businesses—and especially start-ups—address ethics in tech (...) development. In this paper, we investigate how actors in the field frame and enact ethics as part of their innovative R&D processes and business models. Drawing on an empirical case study on direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups, we find that actors engage in careful boundary-work to anticipate and address public critique of their technologies, which allows them to delineate a manageable scope of their ethics integration. In particular, boundaries are drawn around four areas: the technology’s actual capability, purpose, safety and evidence-base. By drawing such lines of demarcation, we suggest that start-ups make their visions of ethical neurotechnology in society more acceptable, plausible and desirable, favoring their innovations while at the same time assigning discrete responsibilities for ethics. These visions establish a link from the present into the future, mobilizing the latter as promissory place where a technology’s benefits will materialize and to which certain ethical issues can be deferred. In turn, the present is constructed as a moment in which ethical engagement could be delegated to permissive regulatory standards and scientific authority. Our empirical tracing of the construction of ‘ethical realities’ in and by start-ups offers new inroads for ethics research and governance in tech industries beyond neurotechnology. (shrink)

In the epistemological trajectory of Philosophy of Religion, contemporary religious epistemologists seem to have undertaken the task of attestation of religious beliefs, their defence, ascertainment and justification, resorting to sanctioned methods of epistemic justification. The models of epistemic justification of religious beliefs they have adopted were intended to bring in a kind of objectivity into religious realm and make meaningful assertions on shared experiences. The acclamation of such esteemed epistemic attempts should be viewed as feverish attempts made by religious epistemologists (...) to subject religious beliefs to standard epistemic treatment. In this paper, three contemporary models of justification of religious beliefs by three outstanding religious epistemologists, namely, Alvin Plantinga whose theory of proper basicality and the warrant, the epistemological holism with the application of Lakatosian principle in Philosophy of Science by Nancey Murphy and the cumulative case evidentialism by Richard Swinburne are critically analyzed using the parameters of logical consistency, methodological acumen, norms of belief formation, the role of subjectivity, features of religious language and the hermeneutic dynamics. (shrink)

In my article I present the conception of soul of Cornelius Agrippa based on his greatest work "De occulta philosophia" which is a kid of summa of natural and occult philosophy, hermeticism, cabbala, astrology, humanistic theology, medicine, and alchemy. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) was a famous renaissance philosopher, cabalist, astrologer and theologian whose contribution in renaissance philosophical deliberations is significant but still unknown in Poland. Agrippa's notion of soul is very important for his own project of new pure (...) magic which is described in his opus magnum. Therefore agrippian magic contains and perfects three kinds of knowledge: phisics, mathematics and theology. In the similary way Agrippa divided whole Cosmos in to three worlds. First and the most inferior world of the threefold Cosmos is the world of four elements of substance in Aristotle's meaning. The second one is the world of celestial bodies which comprises planets, stars and laws that rule them, and which is above the first world. The third one is the divine world of angels, soul of the world with platonic ideas and other intelligibilities. The three kinds of knowledge which Agrippa also called "regulative philosophy" are very useful for human in studying of each of three agrippian worlds. From this point of view also notion of humanity is very important for Agrippa. By the similarity between the macro- and microcosmos which appear in Agrippa's thought also human soul is threefold. Thus human soul contains in hierarchical order three parts viz.: idolum (which is the most inferior), ratio (being the middle part) and mens (which is on highest position in human soul). Each part has its own function which can be fully activated by God's light received by mens. In describing of functions of threefold soul Agrippa receives inspirations from prior philosophers like Aristotle, Awicenna or Awerroes. Another cause which emphases a great role of the agrippian conception of the soul is its connection with oryginal concepts of phantasy and threefold melancholy which is similar to the treepartite soul. Those two concepts are the examples of the influences of celestial powers which source is in stars and planets. (shrink)

Over the last decade, several extensions of Dung’s Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) have been introduced in the literature. Some of these extensions concern the nature of the attack relation, such as the consideration of recursive attacks, whereas others incorporate additional interactions, such as a support relation. Recently, the Attack–Support Argumentation Framework (ASAF) was proposed, which accounts for recursive attacks and supports, attacks to supports and supports to attacks, at any level, where the support relation is interpreted as necessity. Currently, to (...) determine the accepted elements of an ASAF (which may be arguments, attacks, and supports) it is required to translate such an ASAF into a Dung’s AF. In this work, we provide a formal characterization of acceptability semantics directly on the ASAF, without requiring such a translation. We prove that our characterization is sound since it satisfies different results from Dung’s argumentation theory; moreover, we formally show that the approach proposed here for addressing acceptability is equivalent to the preexisting one, in which the ASAF was translated into an AF. Also, we formalize the relationship between the ASAF and other frameworks on which it is inspired: the Argumentation Framework with Recursive Attacks (AFRA) and the Argumentation Framework with Necessities (AFN). (shrink)

Can we take the purpose of nurse education for granted, and, more importantly, should we? That is the issue at stake in this paper. The question of purpose is conspicuously absent in the nursing literature; our aim here is to urge that it not be overlooked by demonstrating its importance to the future of nursing. We approach the question of nurse education's purpose in concrete and speculative terms through two distinct yet interrelated questions: what is the purpose of nurse education? (...) and what should it be? Amidst the complexity and uncertainty of our time, we cast doubt on the adequacy of manualised and regulated approaches—ubiquitous in nurse education—to prepare nurses who can meet the challenges of contemporary practice. We also assert that transgressive approaches to education, as the antithesis of manualisation, reach the same impasse by (over)predetermining what the educational ‘output’ will be. To move beyond this impasse, we draw on the theory of Gert Biesta and Ron Barnett to contrast cultivation and existential‐type education. In so doing, we do not seek to provide ‘answers’ to nurse education's purpose but, rather, raise the profile of what we believe is a right and proper question for the discipline to grapple with. (shrink)

Refugee migration leads to increased diversity in host societies and refugees have to face many stereotyped attitudes in the host society. However, there has been little research on minority group stereotypes toward host society members and how these stereotypes relate to the acculturation-relevant attitudes of refugees in their first phase of acculturation. This study surveyed 783 refugees in Germany who had migrated mostly in the so-called “refugee crisis” between 2015 and 2016. At the time of the survey in 2018, they (...) had been in Germany for an average of 27 months. These refugees reported their positive and negative sociability stereotypes toward German host society members, acculturation-related orientations, shared reality values, and perceived discrimination. Results showed that positive sociability stereotypes toward host society members were associated with increased cultural adoption and shared reality. In contrast, negative sociability stereotypes negatively affected cultural adoption and shared reality. However, stereotypes showed no association at all with cultural maintenance. Interactions between sociability stereotypes and discrimination experiences highlighted a disillusion effect, in the sense that discrimination reduced the motivation to adopt the host culture more strongly among refugees who held strongly positive sociability stereotypes. The study extends knowledge on the significance of minority group stereotypes in the context of refugee migration and reveals the maladaptive consequences of discriminatory behavior against refugees by host society members. (shrink)

: We offer a response to four themes that result from the commentators’ inquiries and critiques: the psychodynamic perspective in contemplative research; the limitations of self-….

Context: Research in the contemplative field has focused on trainable capacities that foster self-regulation and integration. From a psychological perspective, mindfulness and personality research ….

A curious feature of Aztec philosophy is that the basic metaphysical question of the “Western” tradition cannot be formulated in their language, in Nahuatl. This did not, however, prevent the Aztecs from developing an account of 'reality', or whatever it is that might exist. The article is the first of its kind to compare the work of Aristotle on ousia (being) and the Aztecs on teotl and ometeotl. Through this analysis, it suggests that both of the Nahuatl terms are fundamental (...) for expressing the basic character of reality as process for the Aztecs. It also defends their notion as prima facia reasonable, despite its wide divergence from Aristotle's view. (shrink)

This article examines a series of events that are generally known in historiography as the “Tatarbunar Uprising” – an armed rebellion that took place over ten days in September 1924 in south-eastern Bessarabia. I am also interested in the aftermath of those events as well as in their legal and memorial afterlife. My attempt is to reason through and to clarify the legal and historio­graphical construction of narratives of sovereign power as they emerge from the archives of the trial as (...) well as that of the preceding and subsequent military and police operations. The reflection I will conduct here is indeed grounded in the historical context of 1923-1925, but the jurisprudential and comparative legal and political analysis I will deploy here has more general reach insofar as it aims to grasp some more general points about the status of legality under the conditions of emergency. (shrink)

Das Kernanliegen der philosophischen Arbeiten Ludwig Sieps ist die Formulierung einer praktischen Philosophie für die Gegenwart. In seinen jüngeren Arbeiten sind insbesondere der Begriff der Natur und der Begriff der Erfahrung in den Fokus gerückt. Eine plausible Ethik muss nach Siep einerseits eine evaluative Naturbetrachtung und insbesondere eine Reflexion der Natur des Menschen umfassen. Andererseits muss sie aber auch, weil sie sich nicht auf apriorische Prinzipien stützen kann, ein Konzept der historischen Erfahrung heranziehen, wenn sie Antworten auf die heute relevanten (...) Fragen geben möchte. Der Band behandelt anlässlich des 75. Geburtstages Ludwig Sieps zentrale Aspekte seiner jüngeren Arbeiten, teils kritisch und teils mit Vorschlägen für mögliche Weiterentwicklungen. Ziel dieser Auseinandersetzung mit dem philosophischen Denken Ludwig Sieps ist es, entlang der systematischen Linien »Natur« und »Erfahrung« Bausteine zu einer praktischen Philosophie der Gegenwart zu diskutieren. (shrink)

In the traditional understanding, human dignity is often portrayed as a «final», «inherent», and «absolute» value. If human dignity as the core of the status of a human being did indeed have thos characteristics, this would yield a severe limitation for obligations that stem from the moral status of non-human animals, plants, eco systems and other entities discussed in environmental ethics; for obligations that arise from human dignity standardly take priority over the duties toward entities with non-human moral status. Yet, (...) many theorists of human dignity nowadays have given up the traditional picture in favour of a more «contingent» understanding of human dignity that abandons one or more of its traditional characteristics.In this paper, I argue that to the contrary, we have good reasons to think that the three characteristics of human dignity just mentioned can indeed be attributed to a value that deserves the name «human dignity». In a first part, I argue for a specific understanding of the three value characteristics under consideration. After these preliminaries, I show in a second part that given such an understanding, we have ample evidence that we can indeed say that human dignity is an inherent, absolute and final value; and also that these three characteristics are properties of a single value. (shrink)