A body of research documents teacher–child reading behaviors in educational settings. Few will disagree that the potential for word and narrative comprehension increases when children’s prior knowledge is activated and when children’s focus is fully on the reading session. Despite this, little is known about the potential for establishment of joint attention and activation of prior knowledge in an early childhood education and care setting and how early childhood educators prepare young children to participate in shared book reading sessions before (...) formal reading starts. Based on video data of teachers (N = 12) and small groups of children (N = 72) reading picture books and picture book apps in kindergarten, we sought to shed light on what behaviors occur before reading starts. The analyses were conducted in two phases. The first phase was based on 48 videotaped readings and followed a descriptive quantitative approach to investigate early childhood teachers’ time use before the reading session, with readings of both print books and picture book apps. The second phase was based on two app readings in which the pre-reading phases stood out for their long duration. A qualitative analytical approach was applied to describe the teacher–child behavior, establishment of joint attention, and activation of prior knowledge during the two specific pre-reading events. Even though the sample is small, we find clear examples of pre-reading strategies specific to app readings. In this s... (shrink)

Background The interaction of health personnel with relatives is linked to the quality of care results in nursing homes. However, there is limited knowledge of how relatives perceive being an integral part of the nursing home context. This secondary analysis has its starting point in an ethical concern about relatives’ experiences in a previous study. Aim To critically discuss relatives’ experiences of suffering when their next of kin live in a nursing home in a rural arctic context. Research Design, Participants (...) and Context The critical hermeneutic stance is informed by Habermas. The secondary analysis is conducted on original data from five semi-structured focus groups with 18 relatives of residents of two nursing homes in a rural part of Norway. The theoretical framework concerning dignity, well-being, and suffering, as developed by Galvin and Todres, contrasts the analysis. Ethical Considerations The study followed the principles of the Helsinki Declaration. It was approved by the Norwegian Center for Research Data (NSD) (reg. no. 993360). Findings The main theme of this study is: suffering while resigning to an unacceptable violation of dignity. This theme is deepened by two subthemes: (a) suffering while adapting to a relationship of dependence and (b) suffering while accepting the unacceptable. Conclusions Relatives experience suffering as a cross-pressure in their struggle to interact responsibly with health personnel in nursing homes. This may have a negative outcome, where relatives end up adapting to being silent witnesses to missed care and a violation of dignity. (shrink)

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) theory could be modified to describe how listeners rapidly incorporate context to generate predictions about speech despite inter-talker variability. However, in order to do so, the content of predicted percepts must be expanded to include phonetic information. Further, the way listeners identify and represent inter-talker differences and subsequently determine which prediction method to use would require further specification.

SUMMARYThe idea that the public needs enlightenment is generally formulated by people who consider themselves in possession of the enlightenment the public supposedly needs. Herein lies the paternalism problem of popular enlightenment. Some seventy years after Immanuel Kant formulated his famous answer to the question What is enlightenment?, a Norwegian philosopher reaches for his pen on a similar errand. The Norwegian context, however, is different, and the reflection takes a different turn. The questions become: What is popular enlightenment? Who is (...) in a position to decide what kind of enlightenment ‘the people’ need and to define what is enlightenment as opposed to darkness? The text takes a closer look at the Norwegian reflections, published as three articles in two newspapers in 1852 and 1855. The newspaper articles are written by the philosopher Marcus Jacob Monrad. He finds support in Kantian insights when reflecting upon how a concrete initiative for the enlightenment of the public, in which he himself participates, should be understood. Monrad addresses the problem of paternalism in popular enlightenment, and he does this by using his reason publicly, which is what is required, according to Kant, in order for man to escape from tutelage. (shrink)

Trude Dijkstra discusses how Chinese religion and philosophy were represented in printed works produced in the Dutch Republic between 1595 and 1700. By focusing on books, newspapers, learned journals, and pamphlets, this study sheds new light on the cultural encounter between China and western Europe in the early modern period. Form, content, and material-technical aspects of different media in Dutch and French are analysed, providing new insights into the ways in which readers could take note of Chinese religion and (...) philosophy. This study thereby demonstrates that there was no singular image of Chinese religion and philosophy, but rather a varied array of notions on the subject. (shrink)

In recent years a growing number of scholars in science studies and related fields are developing new ontologies to displace entrenched dualisms. These efforts often go together with a renewed interest in the roles played by symbolisms and tools in knowledge and being. This article brings Maurice Merleau-Ponty into these conversations, positioning him as a precursor of today’s innovative recastings of technoscience. While Merleau-Ponty is often invoked in relation to his early work on the body and embodiment, this article focuses (...) on his later work, where the investigation of perception is integrated with an ontological exploration. The resulting approach revolves around the highly original idea of the body as a standard of measurement. We further develop this idea by coining the term ‘the measuring body’, which to a greater extent than did Merleau-Ponty accentuates the relative autonomy of symbolisms and tools and their capacity to decentre the perceiving body. (shrink)

BackgroundAll hospital trusts in Norway have clinical ethics committees. Some of them invite next of kin/patients to be present during the discussion of their case. This study looks closer at how parents of seriously ill children have experienced being involved in CEC discussions.MethodsTen next of kin of six seriously ill children were interviewed. Their cases were discussed in two CECs between April of 2011 and March of 2014. The main ethical dilemma was limitation of life-prolonging treatment. Health care personnel who (...) could elucidate the case were also present in the discussion. The interviewer observed each discussion and then interviewed the next of kin shortly after the meeting, following a structured interview guide.ResultsAll next of kin emphasized that it had been important for them to be present. They stressed the important role of the CEC chair and appreciated that their case was discussed in a systematic way. Some next of kin appreciated that the child’s impending death was discussed openly, and believed that this would facilitate their future grieving. Having had an opportunity to hear all the arguments behind the decision to be made would probably help them to accept the road ahead.All of them felt that they were taken seriously and listened to. They felt that they had added vital information to the discussion. All but one couple did not want any decision-making responsibility, some of them even worried that they might have influenced the discussion too much.ConclusionsNone of the next of kin felt that being present during the CEC discussion had been too heavy a burden. On the contrary, they claimed that their presence in a CEC discussion may add vital information to the discussion and may improve the quality of the decision. It is important that the CEC’s role is explained to them so they are well prepared for what to expect. They need to be followed up after the discussion. (shrink)

This article contributes to contemporary philosophy of technology by carrying out a diffractive reading of Ernst Cassirer’s “Form und Technik” (1930) and Gilbert Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958). Both thinkers, who are here brought together for the first time, stood on the brink of the defining bifurcations of twentieth-century philosophy. However, in their endeavor to come to grips with the “being” of technology, Cassirer and Simondon, each in their own way, were prompted to develop an ontology of (...) emergence that gives ontological priority to “technicity,” that is, to technology considered in its efficacy or operative functioning. By reading Cassirer’s and Simondon’s insights through one another, we aim to further develop this ontology of emergence, and, simultaneously, to demonstrate the relevance of these thinkers for present-day theorizing. As we hope to show, the insistence on the ontological force of technological apparatuses transverses received philosophical and ontological divides and revitalizes the notions of “nature” and “the human,” which are now understood as coevolving with technology. (shrink)

Cassirer's approach to symbolic mediation differs in some important ways from currently prevailing approaches to meaning and signification such as semiology and its more recent poststructuralist varieties. Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms offers a theory of symbols that does not amount to a sign theory or semiology. It sketches out, rather, a dynamic and nonrepresentational framework in which an alternative notion of difference takes centre stage. In order to make the original features of Cassirer's approach stand out, I will compare (...) it with the approach of the perhaps most influential differential thinker of our day, Jacques Derrida. The philosophy of symbolic forms explicitly prefigures a great many of the insights and concerns of poststructuralism. Yet, there are some critical differences. Rather than rejecting the concepts of objectivity, identity, and truth on the premises established by traditional metaphysics, Cassirer chooses to redefine these concepts through a radical conceptual reframing. The result is a doctrine that—in Derridean parlance—neither jumps beyond the oppositions of metaphysics, nor tries to resolve them in a Hegelian synthesis—a doctrine, that is, that even though it appeals to origins, cannot so easily be dismissed as yet another instantiation of the metaphysics of presence. (shrink)

Cassirer's thought-provoking essay Form and Technology (1930) considers the theoretical work performed by material instruments and, in so doing, it ascribes to technology a new dignity as a genuine tool of the mind in equal company with language and art. Germinating in this essay, we find an ambitious program for a new kind of philosophy of technology that resonates with contemporary approaches focusing on material apparatuses, relational and performative processes, and the embodied, embedded, and enacted nature of perception and cognition. (...) Cassirer's approach, however, is unique in the way that it integrates logical concerns, championed by scientifically oriented philosophers, with the concerns of the historical and cultural sciences. The current revival of interest in Cassirer's thinking has precisely to do with its potential for bridging unproductive intellectual gaps. Form and Technology, especially, provides a rich resource for current attempts, across disciplines, to develop new conceptual and ontological frameworks. Cassirer's classic essay, translated here into English for the first time, is accompanied by ten critical essays that explore its current relevance. (shrink)

From Dr. Erik Hoel, The World Behind the World delves into the quest for a theory of consciousness that will trigger a paradigm shift in neuroscience and beyond.

Cassirer’s approach to symbolic mediation differs in some important ways from currently prevailing approaches to meaning and signification such as semiology and its more recent poststructuralist varieties. Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms offers a theory of symbols that does not amount to a sign theory or semiology. It sketches out, rather, a dynamic and nonrepresentational framework in which an alternative notion of difference takes centre stage. In order to make the original features of Cassirer’s approach stand out, I will compare (...) it with the approach of the perhaps most influential differential thinker of our day, Jacques Derrida. The philosophy of symbolic forms explicitly prefigures a great many of the insights and concerns of poststructuralism. Yet, there are some critical differences. Rather than rejecting the concepts of objectivity, identity, and truth on the premises established by traditional metaphysics, Cassirer chooses to redefine these concepts through a radical conceptual reframing. The result is a doctrine that—in Derridean parlance—neither jumps beyond the oppositions of metaphysics, nor tries to resolve them in a Hegelian synthesis—a doctrine, that is, that even though it appeals to origins, cannot so easily be dismissed as yet another instantiation of the metaphysics of presence. (shrink)

This particular roundtable falls at the end of a four-year networking project (COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’) and reflects upon the genealogies of new materialism and how these flow into the individual working practices of participants. The texts below were contributed remotely via email by members of the group, following face-to-face meetings in Barcelona, Maribor, Warsaw, Liverpool, Paris and Utrecht. Authors were unaware of each other’s responses and in this way the (...) dialogue has unfolded a little like a game of Exquisite Corpse or Consequences, with questions acting like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Accordingly, the text is the product of a partially bounded experimental system ‘designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able to clearly ask’ (Rheinberger 1997: 28). Thus, it both ruminates upon work to date and is intended to generate novel responses from authors and readers alike. (shrink)

This article contributes to contemporary philosophy of technology by carrying out a diffractive reading of Ernst Cassirer’s “Form und Technik” (1930) and Gilbert Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958). Both thinkers, who are here brought together for the first time, stood on the brink of the defining bifurcations of twentieth-century philosophy. However, in their endeavor to come to grips with the “being” of technology, Cassirer and Simondon, each in their own way, were prompted to develop an ontology of (...) emergence that gives ontological priority to “technicity,” that is, to technology considered in its efficacy or operative functioning. By reading Cassirer’s and Simondon’s insights through one another, we aim to further develop this ontology of emergence, and, simultaneously, to demonstrate the relevance of these thinkers for present-day theorizing. As we hope to show, the insistence on the ontological force of technological apparatuses transverses received philosophical and ontological divides and revitalizes the notions of “nature” and “the human,” which are now understood as coevolving with technology. (shrink)

This book provides an introduction to postphenomenology, an emerging school of thought in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies, which addresses the relationships users develop with the devices they use.

This systematic review aimed to provide an overview of earlier research on the relationships between age conceptualizations and indicators of employability. We have conducted a systematic literature search using PsycINFO, Academic Search Premier, Business Source Complete, CINAHL, ERIC, MEDLINE, and Science Direct. Two raters evaluated the articles and subsequently distinguished k = 41 studies that met the inclusion criteria for this systematic review. Our review revealed that many researchers adopted different operationalizations to measure employability. Moreover, most studies included calendar age (...) as indicator of aging at work, and were based on a cross-sectional design. Based on the Standardized Index of Convergence method, different types of evidence were found for the relationships between age and the employability measures. For relationships between psychosocial age and lifespan age, on the one hand, and employability measures, on the other hand, too few studies were found to draw conclusions. Yet, for relationships between calendar age and labor market-based measures strong consistent negative relationships were found across the studies, and moderately strong positive relationships were found for functional age and labor market- based measures. For organizational age and both competence-based as well as labor market-based measures moderately strong negative relationships were found. We discuss the implications of these results and propose a research agenda for future studies. (shrink)

Considerable research has demonstrated that teachers’ self-efficacy plays a major role in implementing instructional practices in classroom lessons. Only few studies, however, have examined the interplay between how teachers’ self-efficacy and the challenges that lie outside their influence are related to their implementation of cognitive-activation strategies (CAS), especially in science classrooms. Using the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015 data from Grades 4, 5, 8, and 9, we explored the extent to which teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching science and (...) the perceived time constraints explained variation in the enactment of general and inquiry-based CAS. Overall, the findings revealed that highly self-efficacious teachers reported more frequent implementation of both general and inquiry-based CAS, whereas those who perceived strong time constraints reported a less frequent use of inquiry-based CAS. We further found that these relations differed significantly between primary- and secondary-school teachers and discuss these findings in light of teachers’ professional competences and the resources for science activities in primary and secondary education. We point to the theoretical implications of this study for enhancing the conceptual understanding of generic and specific aspects of CAS and the practical implications for teacher education, professional development, and educational policy. (shrink)

We provide a critical assessment of the account of causal emergence presented in Erik Hoel’s 2017 article “When the map is better than the territory”. The account integrates causal and information theoretic concepts to explain under what circumstances there can be causal descriptions of a system at multiple scales of analysis. We show that the causal macro variables implied by this account result in interventions with significant ambiguity, and that the operations of marginalization and abstraction do not commute. Both (...) of these are desiderata that, we argue, any account of multi-scale causal analysis should be sensitive to. The problems we highlight in Hoel’s definition of causal emergence derive from the use of various averaging steps and the introduction of a maximum entropy distribution that is extraneous to the system under investigation. (shrink)

Conscious macrostates are usually assumed to be emergent from the underlying physical microstates comprising the brain and nervous system of biological organisms. However, a major problem with this assumption is that consciousness is essentially nonmeasurable unlike all other proven emergent properties of physical systems. In an earlier paper, using a no-go theorem, it was shown that conscious states cannot be comprised of processes that are physical in nature (Reason, 2019). Combining this result with another unrelated work on causal emergence in (...) physical systems (Hoel, Albantakis and Tononi, 2013), we show in this paper that conscious macrostates are not emergent from physical systems and they also do not supervene on physical microstates. An important implication of our work is that there must be some form of violation of energy conservation in biological systems that are conscious. (shrink)

Heute früh besuchte uns hier Fräulein Trude Czepka aus Brünn. Sie kam im Auftrage von Herrn Professor Dr. Adolf Plachý und wollte Ihnen eine Bestellung ausrichten.