While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, French, and (...) US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims. (shrink)

This article presents three brief case studies of the way Romans talked about and expressed contempt. It examines aspects of discourses about contempt that are characteristic both of Roman literature and of modern concepts. The focus is on the relationship of hierarchy, recognition, and (active and passive) contempt in the Latin vocabulary and in two literary motifs taken from invective and historiography, two genres in which expressions of contempt are particularly frequent and prominent.

In this paper, I spell out a descriptive account of agnosticism that captures the intuitive view that a subject enters the mental state of agnosticism via an act or event called suspension. I will argue that agnosticism is a complex mental state, and that the formation of an attitude is the relevant act or event by which a subject commits to indecision regarding some matter. I will suggest a ‘two-component analysis’ that addresses two aspects that jointly account for the settled (...) state of agnosticism: the subject’s de facto indecision and the subject’s commitment to her indecision. Unlike meta-cognitivist or sui generis accounts, I do not take the agnostic’s commitment to indecision as constitutive for her indecision but rather as an evaluation or qualification of the indecision that she already exhibits. Agnosticism, thus, is a settled form of indecision that marks the end of inquiry. (shrink)

Vaccine hesitancy persists despite vaccination’s important role in global health. As many vaccines provide social benefits through herd immunity, vaccination decisions can raise moral concerns. Two studies explored the role of moral convictions in vaccination decisions. Study 1 (N = 485) revealed higher vaccination intentions when individuals thought about vaccination in moral terms. Emotions and moral piggybacking positively predicted moral convictions. In Study 2 (N = 1,111), we evaluated the effects of emotional, moral, and scientific pro-vaccination arguments on moral convictions, (...) support for mandatory vaccination, and tolerance of dissenting views. While no group differences were observed, moral convictions were correlated with increased support for mandatory vaccination but also with a reduced tolerance of dissenting opinions. Overall, moral convictions play a small but significant role in vaccination-related decisions. While moral convictions have beneficial effects on compliance, it is crucial not to overlook the adverse consequences, which may lead to a growing societal divide. (shrink)

Smart Cities consist of a multitude of interconnected devices and services to, among others, enhance efficiency, comfort, and safety. To achieve these aims, smart cities rely on an interplay of measures including the deployment of interventions targeted to foster certain human behaviors, such as saving energy, or collecting and exchanging sensor and user data. Both aspects have ethical implications, e.g., when it comes to intervention design or the handling of privacy-related data such as personal information, user preferences or geolocations. Resulting (...) concerns must be taken seriously, as they reduce user acceptance and can even lead to the abolition of otherwise promising Smart City projects. Established guidelines for ethical research and practice from the psychological sciences provide a useful framework for the kinds of ethical issues raised when designing human-centered interventions or dealing with user-generated data. This article thus reviews relevant psychological guidelines and discusses their applicability to the Smart City context. A special focus is on the guidelines’ implications and resulting challenges for certain Smart City applications. Additionally, potential gaps in current guidelines and the limits of applicability are reflected upon. (shrink)

In accordance with societal norms and values, consumers readily indicate their positive attitudes toward sustainability. However, they hardly take sustainability into account when engaging in exchange relationships with companies. To shed light on this paradox, this paper investigates whether defense mechanisms and the more specific concept of neutralization techniques can explain the discrepancy between societal norms and actual behavior. A multi-method qualitative research design provides rich insights into consumers’ underlying cognitive processes and how they make sense of their attitude–behavior divergences. (...) Drawing on the Ways Model of account-taking, which is advanced to a Cycle Model, the findings illustrate how neutralization strategies are used to legitimize inconsistencies between norm-conforming attitudes and actual behavior. Furthermore, the paper discusses how the repetitive reinforcement of neutralizing patterns and feedback loops between individuals and society are linked to the rise of anomic consumer behavior. (shrink)

This article addresses intraorganizational pressures for organizational transformation toward more responsible business practices by exploring the role of internal activists. Building on the interactive framing perspective, I ask how internal activists develop a framing of their company’s responsibilities as they attempt to transform its business practices from the inside out. I explore this question in the context of a Danish pharmaceutical company’s responsibilities regarding the rising diabetes problem. Grounded in an inductive, interpretive analysis, I show how internal activists developed a (...) framing of the company’s responsibility over time and eventually instigated new ways of thinking about and doing business in their organization. I theorize the constitutive processes that strengthened frame alignment and allowed the internal activists to shape business practices. My study contributes to the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication by explaining how intraorganizational processes of meaning making may constitute more responsible business practices and by explicating the distinct role of internal activists as agents of organizational transformation. (shrink)

Ecopolitics is a study of environmental awareness--or non-awareness--in contemporary French theory. Arguing that it is now impossible not to think in an ecological way, Verena Andermatt Conley traces the roots of today's concern for the environment back to the intellectual climate of the late '50s and '60s. Major thinkers of 1968, the author argues, changed the way we think the world; this owes much to an ecological awareness that remains at the heart of issues concerning cultural theory in general. (...) The book points to critiques of ecology in the work of Luc Ferry and Jean Baudrillard before turning to more complicated ecological awareness primarily in French thought. The author considers key texts by influential figures such as Michael Serres, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel de Certeau, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. (shrink)

The question of diversity, both with regard to the demographic profile of philosophers as well as the content of philosophical inquiry, has received much attention in recent years. One figure that has gone relatively unnoticed is that of the foreigner. To the extent that philosophers have taken the foreigner as their object of inquiry, they have focused largely on challenges nonnative speakers of English face in a profession conducted predominantly in English. Yet an understanding of the foreigner in terms of (...) the nonnative speaker does not exhaust the conceptual space of the foreigner. This article provides a more nuanced conceptual apparatus that allows for a more precise identification and discussion of other ways in which one can be a foreigner in philosophy. I develop a taxonomy of different conceptions of the foreigner, namely the linguistic, material, cultural, and epistemic foreigner; I discuss the different and specific challenges they face; and I show how foreigners enrich philosophical practice. (shrink)

Verzeihen bedeutet Verzicht. Als ein zeitlicher Verzicht auf Tilgung von Schuld entzieht sich das Verzeihen dem Macht- und Möglichkeitsbereich normativ regulierbarer Handlungen und bildet die Grundlage für eine Ethik der Urteilsenthaltung. Verena Rauen weist in ihrer Studie das Verzeihen als Quellpunkt der ethischen Zeit aus. Das Verzeihen interveniert in den Schuldzusammenhang der kontinuierlichen Zeit der Geschichte und ermöglicht ethische, d.h. neue und nicht durch vorherige Schuld bestimmte Handlungen. Eine solche zeitliche Unterbrechung der Kausalverkettung der Schuld kann sich nur durch (...) einen Verzicht auf das moralische Urteil ereignen, der einen Wiederanfang in der Beziehung mit dem Anderen stets von neuem ermöglicht. So eröffnet das Verzeihen den ethischen Zeitraum des Zusammenlebens angesichts der nicht wiedergutzumachenden Schuld der Vergangenheit und der Ungewissheit der Zukunft - es bildet den konstitutiven Ursprung der Ethik. (shrink)

Tracing the History of a Super‐Category: The ‘Empirical’ in German Agricultural Improvement and Science around 1800. In accordance with some historians of philosophy, this paper claims that Kant′s critical philosophy can be seen as a watershed between the largely negative and ascriptive term ‘empiric’ applied during the early modern period and the more self‐referential term ‘empiricist’ of the modern period. I will examine the usage and polemical function of the ‘empirical’ label in German agricultural improvement, and will point out its (...) largely negative connotation with respect to agricultural knowledge before 1810. I will then go on to demonstrate how the most prominent founding figure of modern agricultural science in Germany, Albrecht Daniel Thaer (1752–1828), used the conceptual watershed moment as a means to his own academic and polemical ends. Whereas Thaer's opponents, cameralist authors such as Johann Beckmann (1739–1811) and Friedrich Benedict Weber (1774–1848), remained on one side of the watershed, Thaer's reasoning embraced both connotations of the ‘empirical’, and did so in significant ways. My conclusion is that the conceptual transition of the term reflects societal conflicts and social change on a broader level. Thus, the general historiographical claim of this paper is that conceptual histories are a useful and prolific tool of historical research. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 2 Seiten: 769-784.

The paper addresses the nature of seemings in light of their role in inquiry. Seemings are mental states or events with propositional content that have a specific phenomenology often referred to as “felt truth”. In epistemology, seemings are mainly discussed as possible (non-inferential) justifications for belief. Yet, epistemology has recently taken a zetetic turn, that is, a turn toward the study of inquiry. I will argue that the role of seemings in epistemology should be re-assessed from the perspective of inquiry (...) and deliberation. Seemings may fall short of justifying beliefs, but there is an important role for seemings in the zetetic realm, which may also explain why seemings lack direct justificatory force for beliefs. Seemings, so I will suggest, can provide normative reasons for performing certain zetetic tasks, but they cannot provide normative reasons for making up one’s mind about the inquired question. In this sense, the zetetic role of seemings can be described as guiding rational inquiry. I will suggest that a modified version of the so-called Taking Evidence View about the nature of seemings is best fitted to accommodate their zetetic role. Yet, contra existing versions of the Taking Evidence View, my modified account acknowledges that seemings are genuine experiences (of one’s evidential standing during inquiry) that are accompanied by the characteristic phenomenology of what is called a “feeling of truth”. By doing so, my modified version of the Taking Evidence View incorporates the (as I take it) most important feature of the rival Experience View of seemings. (shrink)

Diese Publikation untersucht eine altspanische Handschrift von Aristoteles' De animalibus unter Anwendung philologischer, traduktologischer und sprachhistorischer Methoden. Zudem wird eine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Würdigung vorgenommen. Auszüge aus der Handschrift werden erstmals ediert, mit dem arabischen und lateinischen Text verglichen und kommentiert. Als Ergebnis weist die Untersuchung nach, dass zwei Übersetzer, wahrscheinlich in der zweiten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts, gleichzeitig aus dem Arabischen und dem Lateinischen ins Kastilische übersetzten- eine bislang noch unbelegte Arbeitstechnik.

Pylyshyn raises hot topics like the number and kinds of pictorialist theories there are and their explanatory power. Pylyshyn states that pictorialists have only two possibilities – they can posit either “only functional” images or “really spatial” images – and that neither of these possibilities is convincing or sufficient in explanatory power for empirical and theoretical reasons. Is pictorialism, in principle, untenable?

Age attitudes and age stereotypes in the workplace can lead to discrimination and impaired productivity. Previous studies have predominantly assessed age stereotypes with explicit measures. However, sole explicit measurement is insufficient because of social desirability and potential inaccessibility of stereotypical age evaluations to introspection. We aimed to advance the implicit and explicit assessment of work-related evaluations of age groups and age stereotypes and report data collected in three samples: students (n = 50), older adults (n = 53), and workers (n (...) = 93). Evaluative age attitudes were measured implicitly with an Implicit Association Test. Regardless of group, age, and condition (neutral or semantically biased stimuli), the results confirm a stable, moderate implicitly measurable preference for younger over older workers. Whereas explicit measures of general age preferences showed no clear age preference, differentiated explicit measures of work-related age stereotypes also revealed stable preferences in all three samples: Younger workers were rated higher on performance and adaptability and older workers were rated higher on competence, reliability, and warmth. The explicit-implicit correlations were relatively low. Although explicit work-related age stereotypes are differentiated, the stable implicitly measured age bias raises concern. We suggest to apply implicit and explicit measures in the field of ageism in the workplace. (shrink)

Despite major advances in research on musical ability in infants, relatively little attention has been paid to individual differences in general musicality in infants. A fundamental problem has been the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes “general musicality” or “musical ability” in infants and toddlers, resulting in a wide range of test procedures that rely on different models of musicality. However, musicality can be seen as a social construct that can take on different meanings across cultures, sub-groups, and (...) individuals, and may be subject to change over time. Therefore, one way to get a clearer picture of infant musicality is to assess conceptions of musicality in the general population. Using this approach, we surveyed 174 German adults, asking about their view and conceptions regarding behaviors that characterize a musical child under 3 years. Based on previous studies on adult and child musicality, we designed a survey containing 41 statements describing musical behaviors in children. Participants were asked to rate how indicative these behaviors were of musicality in infants and toddlers. PCA analysis revealed 4 components of musical abilities and behaviors in under-3-year-olds: Musical Communication, Enthusiasm and Motivation, Adaptive Expressiveness, and Musical Abilities as traditionally defined. Professional background and musical expertise of the respondents did not significantly influence participants’ conceptions. Our results suggest that, in order to capture musicality in young children, a wider range of skills and observable behaviors should be taken into account than those assessed by traditional musical ability tests for young children. (shrink)

This book takes a wider approach to ethics, looking at several different dimensions and discussing these themes in a manner suitable for either reflective ...

This paper is about the efforts the norwegian psychologist Jan Smedslund made in analyzing and checking philosophically his theory called ‘Psycho-logic’. I am going to reconstruct and discuss the debates between Smedslund and several critics, which have been going on since about 1978, mainly in the “Scandinavian Journal of Psychology”. A result will be that the kind of modal logics Smedslund uses — a type with realistic semantics and epistemology — is not the proper one for the analysis of ‘Psycho-logic’.

Die hier versammelten Beiträge analysieren Typen und Funktionen der Ambiguität an Beispielen aus der mittelalterlichen bis zur zeitgenössischen Kunst.

This well-known core text on nursing ethics provides an in-depth exploration of nursing ethics content from the western philosophical tradition along with some ...