In this paper, I develop a novel interval-based approach to some well-known semantic puzzles related to aspect shift, in particular, to the interaction of for-adverbials with accomplishment and achievement verbs that take indefinite, bare plural, and mass noun complements. My approach is based on the insight that implicit frequentative aspect plays a central role in this interaction, a fact that was largely ignored in previous analyses. Specifically, I interpret frequentative aspect as an abstract verb-level pluractional operator that brings about aspect (...) shift and that is responsible for the distribution of subevent times and subevent participants over the event time of an atelic sentence. What Zucchi and White (2001) call "the aspectual effect of frequency adverbs" thus becomes the general rule for all frequentatively understood for-adverbial sentences. Linguistic support for silent verb-level frequentativity in English is drawn from overt frequentative aspect marking in West Greenlandic verbs. (shrink)

This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs like seek and owe that give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs like resemble that resist any lexical decomposition of the seek ap try to find kind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de (...) dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on properties. This is a strongly modified version of a paper entitled lsquoDo We Bear Attitudes towards Quantifiers?rsquo that I have presented at conferences in Gosen (Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), Ithaca (SALT I), and Konstanz (Lexikon). I owe a special debt to Hans Kamp and Arnim von Stechow for shaping my views on the subject of this paper during the past ten years or so. Comments from and discussions with the following friends and colleagues have also led to considerable improvements: Heinrich Beck, Steve Berman, David Dowty, Veerle van Geenhoven, Fritz Hamm, Irene Heim, Wolfgang Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Morreau, Barbara Partee, Mats Rooth, Roger Schwarzschild, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Emil Weydert, Henk Zeevat, and three referees. (shrink)

To eliminate the leap of faith required to explain how visual consciousness arises from visual representation, O'Regan & Noë focus on the sensorimotor interaction with the outside world and ban internal representations from their account of vision. We argue that evidence for transsaccadic representations necessitates a central position for an internal, on-line stimulus rendition in any adequate theory of vision.

Objectives: Childhood cancer is a life-threatening disease that poses significant challenges to the life of the diagnosed child and his/her family members. Based on the ABCX-model, the aim of the current study was to explore the association between family functioning, cancer appraisal and the individual adjustment of patients, parents and siblings. Method: Participants were 60 children with leukemia or non-Hodgkin lymphoma, 172 parents and 78 siblings (115 families). Time since diagnosis varied from zero to 33 months. Patients, parents and siblings (...) completed the Family Environment Scale, Perceived Stress Scale, Situation-Specific Emotional Reactions Questionnaire and Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory/Maudsley Marital Questionnaire. Results: Family functioning and the appraisal of the cancer diagnosis proved to be related to patients’, parents’ and siblings’ cancer-related emotions and quality of life post-diagnosis. In addition, family members differed in their perception of some family functioning domains, the appraisal of the cancer diagnosis, positive feelings and quality of life. Discussion: Our findings led to the conclusion that family functioning and the appraisal of the cancer diagnosis are important for the individual adjustment of patients, parents and siblings when facing a diagnosis of cancer in the child. Differences across members within one family speak to the need of screening all family members and intervening at the level of the family unit. (shrink)

Deficiencies or unclear statements in consent forms used for research with human participants may lead to publicly-funded research data being unsuitable for sharing with other researchers. Long-term data use is encouraged or required by many of the UK research councils and other funding bodies. Researchers may fail to address long-term use and sharing of data when obtaining informed consent and when arranging to keep data obtained from participants confidential. Sharing data should not compromise confidentiality if care is taken to anonymize (...) information where this is needed or has been explicitly requested. Whilst researchers should consider all potential uses of their research data in confidentiality and consent agreements, research ethics committees can provide better guidance by pointing out to researchers that long-term use, preservation and sharing of research data should be taken into account when informing participants and obtaining their consent. (shrink)

University students are at elevated risk for psychological distress, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this study was to warmly contact our students and investigate the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the subjective wellbeing and levels of psychological symptoms of university students in Belgium. All bachelor and master students of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels were invited for a brief structured telephone interview in March, 2021. In total, 7,154 students were assessed by a structured interview, based on (...) the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale and the Anamnestic Comparative Self-Assessment. Compared to a representative sample, students considered their life during the pandemic as less satisfying compared to their life before the pandemic. Overall, all students have suffered from COVID-19 and the measures taken to contain the pandemic. Twenty percent of our sample of 7,154 VUB students scored above the K6 cutoff, indicating a heightened risk for having a diagnosable mental illness severe enough to cause functional limitations and to require treatment. This study highlights the need for psychological support for all students, during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

In this essay I present what is, I contend, the free-will problem properly thought through, or at least presented in a form in which it is possible to think about it without being constantly led astray by bad terminology and confused ideas. Bad terminology and confused ideas are not uncommon in current discussions of the problem. The worst such pieces of terminology are "libertarian free will" and "compatibilist free will." The essay consists partly of a defense of the thesis that (...) the use of these phrases by writers on the problem of free will can only generate conceptual confusion and partly of a formulation of the problem that does not make use of them. I contend that this formulation is neutral with respect to the historically important positions on free will (e. g., compatibilism and incompatibilism). (shrink)

Virtue ethics has now well and truly established itself as one of the main normative theories. It is now quite common, and indeed, expected, for virtue ethics to be included, alongside deontology and consequentialism, in any Moral Philosophy syllabus worth its salt. Students are typically introduced to virtue ethics only after studying the other two normative theories, and this often sets the scene for various sorts of misunderstandings, with students expecting virtue ethics to be based on the same set of (...) rules and assumptions as its rivals. Or at least, that is my experience. In this paper I want to focus on one such misunderstanding, which arises when trying to apply virtue ethics to our judgments of other people’s actions and behaviour. Although there are countless ways in which a theory can be misunderstood, it is worth guarding against this one in particular, given that it can lead someone who takes virtue ethics seriously to act in ways that are not virtuous, or even vicious. I begin by making a few remarks about the role of normative theory, and then go on to give four examples of how applying virtue ethics can lead to poor behaviour. In the final section I identify the mistake in question and conclude by noting how it can be avoided. (shrink)

BackgroundVarious forms of Clinical Ethics Support (CES) have been developed in health care organizations. Over the past years, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how to foster the quality of ethics support. In the Netherlands, a CES quality assessment project based on a responsive evaluation design has been implemented. CES practitioners themselves reflected upon the quality of ethics support within each other’s health care organizations. This study presents a qualitative evaluation of this Responsive Quality Assessment (RQA) project.MethodsCES (...) practitioners’ experiences with and perspectives on the RQA project were collected by means of ten semi-structured interviews. Both the data collection and the qualitative data analysis followed a stepwise approach, including continuous peer review and careful documentation of the decisions.ResultsThe main findings illustrate the relevance of the RQA with regard to fostering the quality of CES by connecting to context specific issues, such as gaining support from upper management and to solidify CES services within health care organizations. Based on their participation in the RQA, CES practitioners perceived a number of changes regarding CES in Dutch health care organizations after the RQA: acknowledgement of the relevance of CES for the quality of care; CES practices being more formalized; inspiration for developing new CES-related activities and more self-reflection on existing CES practices.ConclusionsThe evaluation of the RQA shows that this method facilitates an open learning process by actively involving CES practitioners and their concrete practices. Lessons learned include that “servant leadership” and more intensive guidance of RQA participants may help to further enhance both the critical dimension and the learning process within RQA. (shrink)

Precision livestock farming (PLF) is the management of livestock using the principles and technology of process engineering. Key to PLF is the dense monitoring of variegated parameters, including animal growth, output of produce (e.g. milk, eggs), diseases, animal behaviour, and the physical environment (e.g. thermal micro-environment, ammonia emissions). While its proponents consider PLF a win-win strategy that combines production efficiency with sustainability goals and animal welfare, critics emphasise, inter alia, the potential interruption of human-animal relationships. This paper discusses the notion (...) that the objectification of animals by PLF influences the developmental pathways of conventional industrial farming. We conduct a conceptual analysis of objectification by comparing discussions in feminist ethics and animal ethics. We find that in animal ethics, objectification includes deontological arguments regarding instrumentalisation, de-animalisation, alienation, commodification and quantification of animals. The focus on socio-political context and relationality connects these debates to central ideas in care ethics. We adopt a care ethics perspective to assess the implications of the objectification of animals in livestock farming. The basic claim is that sensory knowledge symbolised by the farmers’ unity of hand, head and heart would make it harder to objectify animals than abstract and instrumental reasoning where the pursuit of knowledge is intertwined with the pursuit of control, as in mainstream PLF. Despite of what can be considered as a good caring relationship between farmers and animals that is mediated by PLF, people involved in conventional industrial farming still seem to become further detached from farmers and animals, because the PLF system itself is objectifying. PLF redefines the notion of care, in terms of data transparency, standardisation of methods for analysis, real-time collection and processing of data, remote control, and the use of digital platforms. This creates new expectations and requires a redistribution of responsibilities within a wider scope of relations in the value chain. (shrink)

To tackle zoonotic disease threats, a One Health approach is currently commonplace and generally understood as an integrated effort of multiple disciplines to promote the health of humans, animals and the environment. To implement One Health strategies in zoonotic disease control, many countries set up early warning systems, in which human and veterinary health professionals cooperate. These systems, like the Dutch Zoonoses Structure, can be successful to detect emerging disease threats. However, these systems are not well equipped to handle moral (...) dilemmas that can arise in zoonotic disease control, like the culling of healthy animals. This research studies the role of normative presuppositions of professionals involved in zoonotic disease control policies in the Netherlands. We found that these professionals in general adhered to a holistic view of the One Health concept, however, in practice an anthropocentric approach was dominant. Public health was identified as the trumping moral value, which reveals an inherent field of tension with the core of One Health thinking. The lack of ethical expertise in control systems for zoonotic diseases can lead to misconception of ethical principles, like the precautionary principle which is frequently evoked to justify disease control measures. (shrink)

Dieses Lehrbuch vermittelt eines der wichtigsten Werkzeuge der Philosophie durch die Einführung in die Grundideen einer formalen Sprache. Schrittweise werden so die relevanten Sprachstrukturen aufgedeckt, die dann in der Aussagen- und Prädikatenlogik formalisiert werden. Sowohl die Semantik als auch ein Kalkül des natürlichen Schließens werden jeweils detailliert diskutiert. In Kombination mit einer Lernplattform wird der zentrale Stoff anwendungsorientiert und plastisch vermittelt, was die auch zum Selbststudium geeignete Einführung zum idealen Begleiter für das Philosophiestudium macht.

While the design of sex robots is still in the early stages, the social implications of the potential proliferation of sex robots into our lives has been heavily debated by activists and scholars from various disciplines. What is missing in the current debate on sex robots and their potential impact on human social relations is a targeted look at the boundedness and bodily expressivity typically characteristic of humans, the role that these dimensions of human embodiment play in enabling reciprocal human (...) interactions, and the manner in which this contrasts with sex robot-human interactions. Through a fine-grained discussion of these themes, rooted in fruitful but largely untapped resources from the field of enactive embodied cognition, we explore the unique embodiment of sex robots. We argue that the embodiment of the sex robot is constituted by what we term restricted expressivity and a lack of bodily boundedness and that this is the locus of negative but also potentially positive implications. We discuss the possible benefits that these two dimensions of embodiment may have for people within a specific demographic, namely some persons on the autism spectrum. Our preliminary conclusion—that the benefits and the downsides of sex robots reside in the same capability of the robot, its restricted expressivity and lack of bodily boundedness as we call it—demands we take stock of future developments in the design of sex robot embodiment. Given the importance of evidence-based research pertaining to sex robots in particular, as reinforced by Nature for drawing correlations and making claims, the analysis is intended to set the stage for future research. -/- . (shrink)

Background Notwithstanding the need to produce evidence-based knowledge on medications for pregnant women, they remain underrepresented in clinical research. Sometimes they are excluded because of their supposed vulnerability, but there are no universally accepted criteria for considering pregnant women as vulnerable. Our aim was to explore whether and if so to what extent pregnant women are vulnerable as research subjects. Method We performed a conceptual and empirical analysis of vulnerability applied to pregnant women. Analysis A conceptual analysis supports Hurst's definition (...) of vulnerability. Consequently, we argue that pregnant women are vulnerable if they encounter an identifiably increased likelihood of incurring additional or greater wrong. According to the literature, this increased likelihood could exist of four alleged features for pregnant women's vulnerability: informed consent, susceptibility to coercion, higher exposure to risk due to lack of knowledge, vulnerability of the fetus. Discussion Testing the features against Hurst's definition demonstrates that they all concern the same issue: pregnant women are only vulnerable because a higher exposure to risk due to lack of scientific knowledge comprises an increased wrong. Research Ethics Committees have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable, but a higher exposure to risk due to lack of scientific knowledge is a much broader issue and also needs to be addressed by other stakeholders. Conclusions The only reason why pregnant women are potentially vulnerable is to the extent that they are increasingly exposed to higher risks due to a lack of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, the discussion can advance to the development of practical strategies to promote fair inclusion of pregnant women in clinical research. (shrink)

This paper presents the outline of an ontology of the social realm that aims to provide a new perspective to the study of social phenomena. It will be argued that in order to raise the impact of the social sciences, research should start from a new ontological discursive perspective. This implies that rather than dividing the social and psychological realm into different “disciplines”, the social and the psychological realm need to be imagined as two sides of the same coin. And (...) also, that space and time should not be regarded as the primary referential grid for the social sciences but conversations and people. Within this perspective the “substance” of the social realm can be imagined as a species-wide and history-long web of conversations between people in which speech-acts are the basic forces that create agents and structures. The power of speech-acts is in essence non-local: it does not matter much where and when they occur, but rather by whom and in which conversational contexts they are uttered. This can be captured by the metaphor of social entanglement where social events have particular bonds that transcend space and time. All of this resonates more with the probabilistic realm of quantum physics than with the Newtonian world were causality reigns. (shrink)

Onderzoek naar idealisme en betrokkenheid onder de Nederlandse bevolking.

Bijdragen over de actuele betekenis van de filosofie, met name de Reformatorische Wijsbegeerte.

The discipline, Christian Spirituality, evokes a new interest in Early Christian spirituality. What conceived spiritualities were fostered when the early Christians read the documents that were written to them and how did it influence them? According to Wolfgang Iser, a ‘reader often feels involved in events which, at the time of reading, seems real to him’. This article looks into how John describes and explains the divinity of Jesus. It also attempts to determine conceived spiritualities (lived experiences) fostered when the (...) early Christians read John. The article starts with a brief orientation of what it means when a reader becomes entangled in the reading of a text. Then some mechanisms, as proposed by Waaijman and Iser, that can foster spiritualities are employed to examine the text, including the interaction between the text and the reader; the creation of images; the dialectic between retention and pretension and the filling of gaps. (shrink)

This paper derives, from Richard Moran’s work, three different accounts of doxastic Transparency—roughly, the view that when a rational person wants to know whether she believes that p, she directs her attention to the truth-value of p, not to the mental attitude she has vis-à-vis p. We investigate which of these is the most plausible of the three by discussing a number of examples. We conclude that the most plausible account of Transparency is in tension with the motivation behind Transparency (...) accounts: it is disconnected from the deliberative stance. (shrink)