The aim of the article is to present the application of the lean management method as appropriate for the management of the organizational system of psychiatric care in the Zealand region of Denmark. The organizational solutions of the Danish psychiatric care system presented in this paper are individualized and adapted to the regional needs of the residents. In Denmark, there are five administrative regions, in which each independently organizes its own system of medical (psychiatric) care. This means that the regions (...) have considerable independence in choosing the acceptable and necessary methods of management, including – as is clear from the conducted research – the use of methods put-upon other areas of economy. Although the national laws in Denmark define certain conditions and guidelines for the functioning of psychiatric care (e.g. regarding the use of direct coercion/restrains for patients treated in the centres), there is a distinct separation of structures and methods of functioning throughout the whole country, which constitutes unique observation material – from the cognitive point of view. The authors of this paper conduct extensive research and analyse the systems of psychiatric care organizations in various countries (including Spain, Italy and Japan) and, as a result, the obtained results may lead to the selection of the best models from other systems (good organizational practices and management, the management methods in use), which can be applied in the currently reorganised system of the Polish psychiatric care. The choice of Denmark for the observational study is not accidental and is related not only to the fact that there is a large degree of systemic identity within the country and between the regions, but also because the country applies solutions addressed to patients with very different cultural conditions and needs, resulting from their descent, religion, and (world)-views. Denmark is one of those European countries that express a significant acceptance of diversity and tolerance, which is why communities with very different imponderables, denominations, and worldviews co-exist. In the area related to the organization of the psychiatric system, these conditions are of key importance. In the period from January 2015 to December 2017 the authors participated in study visits in Denmark, conducting research aimed at identifying the key success factors of the psychiatric care organization system in the country. The conducted analysis is also based on the analysis of literature and own and participant observations. The conclusions concerning this subject are also the result of interviews conducted with employees of the visited hospitals and system users, both professionals and patients. As the search for an optimal organizational model of psychiatric care is currently an ongoing concern in Poland, it seems justified to review the existing solutions in Europe and perform their critical analysis. A comparison of the adopted solutions was performed, in the context of, above all, the improvement of the quality of these services, their availability, and the satisfaction of patients and their families from the proposed organizational changes. The economic benefits of these solutions are also significant. (shrink)

This paper describes Confucian ceremonies and the objectives that were assigned to them in socio-political life and religious practices, as well as the artistic and spiritual journey aimed at self-realization.

Public universities in Poland receive fairly limited financial support for creating e-textbooks (interactive online textbooks) and lack the appropriate ICT competences among teaching staff, especially in the case of non-technical universities. The authors propose a pedagogical and technological paradigm for e-textbooks in medical education using open source software with minimal IT skills required. Technologies used to develop e-textbooks are connected with: publication and distribution of e-textbooks, e-book readers, and editing tools. The paper also discusses a survey that targeted students of (...) medical sciences, which focused on their understanding of their educational needs that can be met through new online resources as well as their expectations of how such e-textbooks should be like. (shrink)

Resilience is the process and outcome of healthy adaptation despite significant adversity. Proliferation of research on the resilience construct has led to scientific concerns about the operationalization and measurement of resilience for assessment science and practice. Various studies that have investigated the psychometric properties and construct validity of the Resilience Scale for Adolescents have yielded inconsistent findings, which could partly be due to variations in the methodological approaches. This study investigated the factor structure and construct validity of the READ in (...) four European regions participating in the Universal Preventive Resilience Intervention Globally Implemented in Schools to Improve and Promote Mental Health for Teenagers project. Participants included adolescents aged 10–15 years from Spain, Iceland, Italy, and Poland. The five-factor model of the READ was similar across gender and participating regions. Construct validity of the READ was supported. After establishing construct separability, incremental validity was supported. The READ is a valid and reliable measure of protective factors involved in resilience and demonstrates promise for cross-cultural applicability. Recommendations for measuring resilience and validating the READ in future investigations are provided. (shrink)

What is "race"? What role, if any, should race play in our moral obligations to others and to ourselves? Ethics along the Color Line addresses the question of whether black Americans should think of each other as members of an extended racial family and base their treatment of each other on this consideration, or eschew racial identity and envision the day when people do not think in terms of race. Anna Stubblefield suggests furthermore that white Americans should consider the (...) same issues. She argues, finally, that for both black and white Americans, thinking of races as families is crucial in helping to combat anti-black oppression. Stubblefield is concerned that the philosophical debate—argued notably between Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lucius Outlaw—over whether or not we should strongly identify in terms of race, and whether or not we should take race into account when we decide how to treat each other, has stalled. Drawing on black feminist scholarship about the moral importance of thinking and acting in terms of community and extended family, the author finds that strong racial identification, if based on appropriate ideals, is morally sound and even necessary to end white supremacy. (shrink)

What sort of claims do scientific models make and how do these claims then underwrite empirical successes such as explanations and reliable policy interventions? In this paper I propose answers to these questions for the class of models used throughout the social and biological sciences, namely idealized deductive ones with a causal interpretation. I argue that the two main existing accounts misrepresent how these models are actually used, and propose a new account. *Received July 2006; revised August 2008. †To contact (...) the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri, St. Louis, 599 Lucas Hall (MC 73), One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63121-4400; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Different arguments in favor of the moral relevance of the concept of biodiversity (e.g., in terms of its intrinsic or instrumental value) face a range of serious difficulties, despite that biodiversity constitutes a central tenet of many environmentalist practices and beliefs. That discrepancy is considerable for the debate on potential moral reasons for protecting biodiversity. This paper adds a new angle by focusing on the potential of the concept of natural otherness—specifically individual and process otherness in nature—for providing additional moral (...) reasons in favor of the protection of biodiversity as variety. Four arguments are presented. Two arguments draw on the individual natural otherness of nonhuman living beings and two additional arguments draw on the process otherness of active nature. The upshot is that each of these arguments—if successful—provides a moral reason in favor of the protection of biodiversity. (shrink)

Can social phenomena be understood by analyzing their parts? Contemporary economic theory often assumes that they can. The methodology of constructing models which trace the behavior of perfectly rational agents in idealized environments rests on the premise that such models, while restricted, help us isolate tendencies, that is, the stable separate effects of economic causes that can be used to explain and predict economic phenomena. In this paper, I question both the claim that models in economics supply claims about tendencies (...) and also the view that economics, when successful, necessarily follows this method. When economics licenses successful policy interventions, as it did in the case of the Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions, its method is not to study tendencies but rather to study the phenomenon as a whole. Key Words: economic models • tendencies • economic experiments • policy making • John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

Pain is a global problem whose social, economic, and psychological costs are immeasurable. It is now seen as the most common reason why people seek medical (including psychiatric) care. But what is pain? This article shows that the discourse of pain tends to suffer from the same problems of ethnocentrism and obscurity as the discourse of emotions in general. Noting that in the case of pain, the costs of miscommunication are particularly high, this article offers a new paradigm for communicating (...) about pain. It shows how the use of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) techniques developed in linguistic semantics can help in this area, as in other areas concerned with human subjectivity, and can lead to a greater understanding between psychologists, psychiatrists, medical practitioners, social workers, and ordinary suffering mortals. (shrink)

Abstract‘Little by Little’. Data Collection and Scales in Nineteenth‐Century Legal Anthropology. With the growing possibilities to measure and accumulate data, two strategies for a small discipline like the history of science are suggested: (1) It should facilitate and maintain the cooperation of specialists who pursue different subject matters and methods. (2) It should invite the recent history of quantification as an essential perspective. A large data collection on the anthropology of law by the German colonial office serves as example.

In Valuing Health, Dan Hausman argues that well-being is not measurable, at least not in the way that science and policy would require. His argument depends on a demanding conception of well-being and on a pessimistic verdict upon the existing measures of subjective well-being. Neither of these reasons, I argue, warrant as much skepticism as Hausman professes.

This article demonstrates that emotion concepts—including the so‐called basic ones, such as anger or sadness—can be defined in terms of universal semantic primitives such as “good”, “bad”, “do”, “happen”, “know”, and “want”, in terms of which all areas of meaning, in all languages, can be rigorously and revealingly portrayed.The definitions proposed here take the form of certain prototypical scripts or scenarios, formulated in terms of thoughts, wants, and feelings. These scripts, however, can be seen as formulas providing rigorous specifications of (...) necessary and sufficient conditions (not for emotions as such, but for emotion concepts), and they do not support the idea that boundaries between emotion concepts are “fuzzy.” On the contrary, the small set of universal semantic primitives employed here (which has emerged from two decades of empirical investigations by the author and colleagues) demonstrates that even apparent synonyms such as sad and unhappy embody different—and fully specifiable—conceptual structures. (shrink)

Julian Reiss correctly identified a trilemma about economic models: we cannot maintain that they are false, but nevertheless explain and that only true accounts explain. In this reply we give reasons to reject the second premise ? that economic models explain. Intuitions to the contrary should be distrusted.

The article deals with philosophy of mathematics called quasi-empiricism, with special attention paid to concepts of changes in mathematics as a result of social activity during its development. Three outlooks on historical changes in the development of mathematics are presented: Wilder's description of mathematical practise in a cultural framework, Garbiner's analysis of „scientific revolution” in mathematics in the end of 18th century and Kitcher's criticism of invariability and cummulativity of mathematical knowledge and his application of Kuhn's philosophy of science to (...) mathematics. (shrink)

Semantics of natural language; includes some Australian language examples.

Both scientists and representatives of industry claim that important advantages can be secured through advances in biotechnology. However, the European public views new developments with caution, in particular when the applications concern animals and food. These differences in attitude cannot be explained merely in terms of differences in knowledge but also seem to be the upshot of contrasting values. One way to understand moral opinions and values is to view them against the background of so-called ethical theories. In this paper (...) we seek to describe the theoretical foundations of different public concerns over animal biotechnology. We also discuss the extent to which the values adhered to by the public are compatible with the visions of scientists regarding applications of biotechnology and other practices involving animals. We conclude that, in general, public worries about animal biotechnology can be located in the different ethical theories with bearings on animals. However, in most cases where biotechnology is found problematic, corresponding problems can be found in other widespread uses of animals that do not involve modem biotechnology. In recognition of this, we argue that the critical analysis not only of new biotechnology but also of existing technologies, gives rise to a-serious discussion of the limits to what it is ethically acceptable to do to animals. (shrink)

THE WEST AFRICAN NOTION OF THE "PALAVER," AS DESCRIBED BY CONgolese theologian Bénézet Bujo, is an excellent resource for postconflict reconciliation. The palaver creates physical, social, and psychological space for open communication so that persons can be integrated into the life and expectations of their communities. Through the palaver African communities heal sickness, educate their members about moral standards, and reconcile enemies. Three palaver-based commitments intersect with goals of postconflict reconciliation: a commitment to open communication, especially truth-telling; a commitment to (...) memory or developing a shared sense of the past; and a commitment to reconciliation at the communal level. Given the violent conflict still roiling parts of Africa today, it is critical to make explicit those African traditions that can encourage postconflict reconciliation and promote a just peace. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar y revisar las normas que filosóficamente asociamos al proceso de testimonio, inquiriendo hasta qué puntoson0 consistentes con los conocimientos empíricos de las ciencias cognitivas.Tradicionalmente, el problema del testimonio surgía cuando, desde una epistemología de corte individualista, se suponía, siguiendo el dictum ya marcado en la Modernidad tanto por racionalistas como por empiristas, de que el conocimiento debía ser testado personalmente. Sin embargo, disciplinas y enfoques recientes, como la Cognición Socialmente Distribuida y la Epistemología (...) Social ofrecen otra vía al considerar al grupo la unidad cognitiva realmente significativa e intentar solucionar el problema del testimonio desde esa perspectiva. Nuestro objetivo es analizar los motivos por los que la CSD es un buen modelo para explicar algunas de las paradojas y problemas epistemológicos cuando tenemos en cuenta el papel del testimonio en el desarrollo de la ciencia. The goal of this paper is to review and analyze norms philosophically associated with the process of testimony and to investigate to what extent they are consistent with empirical knowledge supplied by cognitive science. Traditionally, the problem of testimony used to arise when it was supposed, from the viewpoint of an individualistic epistemology, that followed the dictum stated by rationalists and empiricists in Modernity, that knowledge had to be tested personally. However, recent disciplines and approaches, like Socially Distributed Cognition and Social Epistemology, provide alternative ways of thinking. This is the case when we consider the group as the truly significant cognitive unit and from such perspective we try to solve the problem of testimony. Therefore, our aim is to examine the reasons why SDC offers a good model for explaining some of the paradoxes and epistemological problems that arise when we consider the issue of testimony in the development of science. (shrink)

The U.S. military is developing augmented reality (AR) capabilities for use on the battlefield as a means of achieving greater situational awareness. The superimposition of digital data—designed to expand surveillance, enhance geospatial understanding, and facilitate target identification—onto a live view of the battlefield has important implications for virtuous conduct in war: Can the soldier exercise practical wisdom while integrated into a system of militarized legibility? Adopting a virtue ethics perspective, I argue that AR disrupts the soldier’s immersion in the scene (...) such that he is blinded to features beyond those identified in advance by the military’s system of cybernetic judgment. I turn to Michael Walzer’s classic account of the “naked soldier” dilemma to illustrate how AR capabilities radically shrink the bounds within which the soldier can cultivate the capacity for right conduct. By transforming the ambiguous ethical matter of killing an enemy combatant into the straightforward application of a rule, AR hollows out the soldier’s potential for virtuous action. The “smart battlefield” leaves no space for deliberative judgments that transcend the technical and legal determinations already written into the soldier’s view of the scene. (shrink)

This essay deals with the problem of the status of colours, traditionally considered as the paradigmatic case of secondary qualities: do colours exist only as aspects of experience or are they real properties of objects, existing independently of human and animal perception? Recently, John Campbell has argued in favour of the simple view of colours, according to which colours are real properties of objects. I discuss the place of Campbell's position in a debated which was started by John Mackie and (...) continued by John McDowell, and defend it from a criticism due to Michael Smith. I conclude that the simple view is a philosophically credible position. Subsequently, I consider an alleged contradiction between the simple view and semantic externalism pointed out by Jim Edwards. I suggest that a supporter of the simple view may consistently maintain semantic externalism, if she also accepts epistemological externalism about the canonical warrant of perceptual judgements. (shrink)

Habilitation thesis, book proposal in preparation.

Scholars have long recognised the interest of the Stoics' thought on geometrical limits, both as a specific topic in their physics and within the context of the school's ontological taxonomy. Unfortunately, insufficient textual evidence remains for us to reconstruct their discussion fully. The sources we do have on Stoic geometrical themes are highly polemical, tending to reveal a disagreement as to whether limit is to be understood as a mere concept, as a body or as an incorporeal. In my view, (...) this disagreement held among the historical Stoics, rather than simply reflecting a doxographical divergence in transmission. This apparently Stoic disagreement has generated extensive debate, in which there is still no consensus as to a standard Stoic doctrine of limit. The evidence is thin, and little of it refers in detail to specific texts, especially from the school's founders. But in its overall features the evidence suggests that Posidonius and Cleomedes differed from their Stoic precursors on this topic. There are also grounds for believing that some degree of disagreement obtained between the early Stoics over the metaphysical status of shape. Assuming the Stoics did so disagree, the principal question in the scholarship on Stoic ontology is whether there were actually positions that might be called "standard" within Stoicism on the topic of limit. In attempting to answer this question, my discussion initially sets out to illuminate certain features of early Stoic thinking about limit, and then takes stock of the views offered by late Stoics, notably Posidonius and Cleomedes. Attention to Stoic arguments suggests that the school's founders developed two accounts of shape: on the one hand, as a thought-construct, and, on the other, as a body. In an attempt to resolve the crux bequeathed to them, the school's successors suggested that limits are incorporeal. While the authorship of this last notion cannot be securely identified on account of the absence of direct evidence, it may be traced back to Posidonius, and it went on to have subsequent influence on Stoic thinking, namely in Cleomedes' astronomy. (shrink)

This article is both an elaborated critique on the one-sided analysis of the misogynist nature of ballet as a cultural practice, and a contribution to a more embodied feminist theory. Based on empirical material, that was brought together by observing the body practices in ballet and listening to the life stories of dancers, the author explores the contradictions that the body in ballet provokes. In describing the embodied experiences ofprofessional ballet dancers she shows that ballet offers women the possibility to (...) transcend the discontinuity of body, mind and emotions. (shrink)

Nabataean history is significantly overlooked in the works of ancient historians. Josephus is an exception to this, as he includes several important events from Nabataean history in De Bello Judaico and Antiquitates Judaicae. However, his retelling of these events differs between the two works. In this paper, I argue that Josephus became more “pro-Roman” over time and eventually overshadowed an accurate portrayal of Nabataean history in his later narrative. He undermined moments of tension between Rome and Nabataea in order to (...) showcase Roman power in the Near East, even beyond reality. In support of this argument, I analyze the Nabataean sections of Josephus’ works, as each passage has overlapping details, but significantly different emphasis, characterization, and perspective through variations in terminology, imagery, and tone. Though problematic, Josephus has preserved a unique look into Roman-Nabataean relations in the two centuries prior to the incorporation of Nabataea into the Empire. (shrink)

The notions of failure and denial are co-constitutive of both “global” theory and social order. Though these concepts have been used to evoke an array of metaphors and images to under­stand the condition of international relations as a knowledge production site and in rela­tion to other social sciences, they have not been deemed pivotal for much theorizing of world politics’ events, including the “success” of a sovereign state, or the subjects and knowledge production of decolonial realities. The article critically assesses (...) how the term failure is used by IR’s scholarly community as signifier and analogy and what it signifies and analogizes. It grapples with Bruno Latour’s “The Immense Cry Channeled” by Pope Francis and ‘“Love your Monsters.’” It concludes with a discussion of the ethics of critical theory and its empha­sis on critique. I problematize its critical moves to lodge racializations in the enslaved and colonized body and body politic of ‘failed’ states, and the normative projects it bolsters. I also point to its broader social and political implications, including its acknowledging of certain publics at the expense of others and its death limits in times of terror and the Anthropocene. I finally argue for a ‘global’ decolonizing social analysis that in an Fanonian sense, is a “real leap” as it introduces “invention into existence” by rupturing evolutionary trajectories and linear temporalities (i.e., pure immanence, or transcendentalism). (shrink)