Medicine is facing wide-ranging challenges concerning the so-called medically unexplained disorders. The epidemiology is confusing, different medical specialties claim ownership of their unexplained territory and the unexplained conditions are themselves promoted through a highly complicated and sophisticated use of language. Confronting the outcome, i.e. numerous medical acronyms, we reflect upon principles of systematizing, contextual and social considerations and ways of thinking about these phenomena. Finally we address what we consider to be crucial dimensions concerning the landscape of unexplained “matters”; fatigued (...) being, pain-full being and dys-ordered being, all expressive momentums of an aesthetic of resistance. (shrink)

This study focuses on CEO hubris and its detrimental effect on corporate financial performance along with an examination of critical corporate governance contingencies that may moderate the negative effect. From 654 observations of 164 Korean firms over the years 2001–2008, we found that CEO power exacerbated the negative effect of CEO hubris on corporate financial performance, whereas board vigilance mitigated it. This study provides empirical evidence that entrenchment problems arising from CEO hubris would be exacerbated as CEOs become more powerful, (...) but weakened as board of directors become more vigilant. Theoretical contributions and practical implications will be discussed. (shrink)

This article presents results from a multidisciplinary research project on the integration and transfer of language knowledge into robots as an empirical paradigm for the study of language development in both humans and humanoid robots. Within the framework of human linguistic and cognitive development, we focus on how three central types of learning interact and co-develop: individual learning about one's own embodiment and the environment, social learning (learning from others), and learning of linguistic capability. Our primary concern is how these (...) capabilities can scaffold each other's development in a continuous feedback cycle as their interactions yield increasingly sophisticated competencies in the agent's capacity to interact with others and manipulate its world. Experimental results are summarized in relation to milestones in human linguistic and cognitive development and show that the mutual scaffolding of social learning, individual learning, and linguistic capabilities creates the context, conditions, and requisites for learning in each domain. Challenges and insights identified as a result of this research program are discussed with regard to possible and actual contributions to cognitive science and language ontogeny. In conclusion, directions for future work are suggested that continue to develop this approach toward an integrated framework for understanding these mutually scaffolding processes as a basis for language development in humans and robots. (shrink)

Hegel's influence on post-Hegelian philosophy is as profound as it is ambiguous. Modern philosophy is philosophy after Hegel. Taking leave of Hegel's system appears to be a common feature of modern and post-modern thought. One could even argue that giving up Hegel's claim of totality defines philosophy after Hegel. Modern and post-modern philosophies are philosophies of finitude: Hegel's philosophy cannot be repeated. However, its status as a negative backdrop for modern and post-modern thought already shows its pervasive influence. Precisely in (...) its criticism of Hegel, modern thought is bound up with his thinking. (shrink)

Theories of emotion propose that responses to emotional pictures can occur independently of whether or not people are aware of the picture content. Because evidence from dissociation paradigms is inconclusive, we manipulated picture awareness gradually and studied whether emotional responses varied with degree of awareness. Spider fearful and non-fearful participants viewed pictures of spiders and flowers at four levels of backward masking while electrodermal activity and heart rate were measured continuously. Recognition ratings confirmed that participants’ picture awareness decreased with masking. (...) Critically, effects of spider fear on emotion ratings and heart rate also decreased with masking. These findings suggest that effects of spider fear on emotion ratings and heart rate are closely related to picture awareness. (shrink)

This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness.

Associative theories of cognitive representation begin with an ontology of two kinds of entities: concepts and associations. According to most social cognitive theories of attitudes, attitudes are object-evaluation associations of varying strength, where strength is defined in terms of accessibility. This paper proposes a cognitive account of belief such that beliefs are object-attribute associations of varying strength: thus, insofar as evaluative concepts are examples of attribute concepts, attitudes are a species of belief. This cognitive account of belief also denies that (...) additional processes of endorsement—explicit or otherwise—are strictly required for an object-attribute association to count as a belief. (shrink)

The Movement of Showing investigates the idea, shared by Derrida, Hegel and Heidegger, that the value of their thought is not found in its results or conclusions, but in its "movement." All three describe the heart of their work in terms of a pathway, development, or movement rather than in terms of its propositions or conclusions. This seems to deprive their thought of a solid ground, and indeed deconstruction in particular is often criticized in this way. Johan de Jong argues (...) that this is a structural vulnerability that is both its weakness and the source of its value, tracing Derrida's indirect method from his early to later works, and considering his engagements with Hegel and Heidegger. His analysis locates an affinity among Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida in a shared distrust of externality and, against the grain of some Levinasian commentaries, argues that Derrida's indirectness results in an ethics of complicity. The Movement of Showing answers a central question that many polemics about continental philosophy and postmodernism revolve around concerning how, methodologically, one can philosophize responsibly. It shows the difference between critique and polemics, and why simply taking up a position for or against is insufficient in order to think responsibly. (shrink)

Several studies have focused on the effects of corporate social responsibility fit on external stakeholders’ evaluations of CSR activities, attitudes towards companies or brands, and behaviors. The results so far have been contradictory. A possible reason may be that the concept of CSR fit is more complicated than previously assumed. Researchers suggest that there may be different types of CSR fit, but so far no empirical research has focused on a typology of CSR fit. This study fills this gap, describing (...) a qualitative content analysis of the congruence between six organizations and their various CSR activities. Ten annual reports and CSR reports were analyzed, and 102 specific CSR activities were identified. The results show that two levels of fit must be distinguished: based on the means for and the intended ends of the CSR activity. Furthermore, six different types of fit were found, focusing on products and services, production processes, environmental impact, employees, suppliers, and geographical location. Considering the above variety of fit possibilities, the findings emphasize the role of CSR communication as a means of creating fit perceptions. (shrink)

Ecologically responsible policies are concerned only in part with pollution and resource depletion. There are deeper concerns which touch upon principles of diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness.

The growing emphasis on the importance of publishing scientific findings in the academic world has led to increasing prevalence of potentially significant publications in which scientific and ethical rigour may be questioned. This has not only hindered research progress, but also eroded public trust in all scientific advances. In view of the increasing concern and the complexity of research misconduct, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was established in 1997 to manage cases with ethical implications. In order to review the (...) outcomes of cases investigated by COPE, a total of 408 cases that had been managed by COPE were successfully extracted and analysed with respect to 7 distinct criteria. The results obtained indicate that the number of ethical implications per case has not changed significantly (p > 0.01) since the year COPE was instigated. Interestingly, the number of ethical cases, and to some extent, research misconduct, is not diminishing. Therefore, journal editors and publishers need to work closely together with COPE to inculcate adoption of appropriate research ethics and values in younger researchers while discouraging others from lowering standards. It is hoped that with a more concerted effort from the academic community and better public awareness, there will be fewer incidences of ethically and scientifically challenged publications. The ultimate aim being to enhance the quality of published works with concomittant public trust in the results. (shrink)

Automated technologies and robots make decisions that cannot always be fully controlled or predicted. In addition to that, they cannot respond to punishment and blame in the ways humans do. Therefore, when automated cars harm or kill people, for example, this gives rise to concerns about responsibility-gaps and retribution-gaps. According to Sven Nyholm, however, automated cars do not pose a challenge on human responsibility, as long as humans can control them and update them. He argues that the agency exercised in (...) automated cars should be understood in terms of human–robot collaborations. This brief note focuses on the problem that arises when there are multiple people involved, but there is no obvious shared collaboration among them. Building on John Danaher’s discussion of command responsibility, it is argued that, although Nyholm might be right that autonomous cars cannot be regarded as acting on their own, independently of any human beings, worries about responsibility-gaps and retribution-gaps are still justified, because it often remains unclear how to allocate or distribute responsibility satisfactorily among the key humans involved after they have been successfully identified. (shrink)

“Living involves being exposed to pain every second—not necessarily as an insistent reality, but always as a possibility,” writes Arne Vetlesen in A Philosophy of Pain, a thought-provoking look at an inevitable and essential aspect of the human condition. Here, Vetlesen addresses pain in many forms, including the pain inflicted during torture; the pain suffered in disease; the pain accompanying anxiety, grief, and depression; and the pain brought by violence. He examines the dual nature of pain: how we attempt (...) to avoid it as much as possible in our daily lives, and yet conversely, we obtain a thrill from seeking it. Vetlesen’s analysis of pain is revealing, plumbing the very center of many of our most intense and complicated emotions. He looks at pain within different arenas of modern life such as family and work, and he specifically probes at a very common modern phenomenon, the idea of pushing oneself to the limit. Engaging throughout with the ideas of thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Alice Miller, Susan Sontag, and Melanie Klein, A Philosophy of Pain asks which came first, thinking or feeling, and explores the concept and possibility of empathy. Vetlesen offers an original and insightful perspective on something that all of us suffer and endure—from a sprained ankle to a broken heart. Although pain is in itself unpleasant, our ability to feel it reminds us that we are alive. (shrink)

When the social relevance of robotic applications is addressed today, the use of assistive technology in care settings is almost always the first example. So-called care robots are presented as a solution to the nursing crisis, despite doubts about their technological readiness and the lack of concrete usage scenarios in everyday nursing practice. We inquire into this interconnection of social robotics and care. We show how both are made available for each other in three arenas: innovation policy, care organization, and (...) robotic engineering. First, we analyze the discursive “logics” of care robotics within European innovation policy, second, we disclose how care robotics is encountering a historically grown conflict within health care organization, and third we show how care scenarios are being used in robotic engineering. From this diagnosis, we derive a threefold critique of robotics in healthcare, which calls attention to the politics, historicity, and social situatedness of care robotics in elderly care. (shrink)

The paper assumes as a general abstract norm that the specific potentialities of living beings be fulfilled. No being has a priority in principle in the realizing of its possibilities, but norms of increasing diversity or richness of potentialities put limits on the development of destructive life-styles. Application is made to the mixed Norwegian communities of certain mammals and humans. A kind of modus vivendi is established which is firmly based on cultural tradition. It is fairly unimportant whether the term (...) 'rights (of animals)' is or is not used in the fight for human peaceful coexistence with a rich fauna. (shrink)

Besedila je prevedel Arne Kušej. Strokovno redakcijo prevoda je opravil Matjaž Vesel, ki je napisal tudi večino opomb.

_In Perception, Empathy, and Judgment_ Arne Johan Vetlesen focuses on the indispensable role of emotion, especially the faculty of empathy, in morality. He contends that moral conduct is severely threatened once empathy is prevented from taking part in an interplay with cognitive faculties in acts of moral perception and judgment. Drawing on developmental psychology, especially British "object relations" theory, to illuminate the nature and functioning of empathy, Vetlesen shows how moral performance is constituted by a sequence involving perception, judgment, (...) and action, with an interplay between the agent's emotional and cognitive faculties occurring at each stage. In the powerful tradition from Kant to present-day theorists such as Kohlberg, Rawls, and Habermas, reason is privileged over feeling and judgment over perception, in such a way that basic philosophical questions remain unasked. Vetlesen focuses our attention on these questions and challenges the long-standing assertion that emotions are damaging to moral response. In the final chapter he relates his argument to recent feminist critiques that have also castigated moral theorists in the Kantian tradition for their refusal to recognize a role for emotion in morality. While the book's argument is philosophical, its method and scope are interdisciplinary. In addition to critiques of such philosophers as Arendt, MacIntyre, and Habermas, it contains discussions of specific historical, ideological, and sociological factors that may cause "numbing"—selective or broad-ranging, pathological insensitivity—in humans. The Nazis' mass killing of Jews is studied to illuminate these and other relevant empirical aspects of large-scale immoral action. (shrink)

Prenatal screening for foetal abnormalities such as Down's syndrome differs from other forms of population screening in that the usual aim of achieving health gains through treatment or prevention does not seem to apply. This type of screening leads to no other options but the choice between continuing or terminating the pregnancy and can only be morally justified if its aim is to provide meaningful options for reproductive choice to pregnant women and their partners. However, this aim should not be (...) understood as maximizing reproductive choice per se. Only if understood as allowing prospective parents to avoid suffering related to living with serious disorders and handicaps can prenatal screening be a publicly or collectively funded programme. The alternative of moving prenatal testing outside the healthcare system into the private sector is problematic, as it makes these tests accessible only to those who can afford to pay for it. New developments in prenatal screening will have to be assessed in terms of whether and to what extent they either contribute to or undermine the stated aim of providing meaningful options for reproductive choice. In the light of this criterion, this article discusses the introduction of the new non-invasive prenatal test , the tendency to widen the scope of follow-up testing, as well as the possible future scenarios of genome-wide screening and ‘prenatal personalised medicine’. The article ends with recommendations for further debate, research and analysis. (shrink)

Many consumers implicitly associate sustainability with lower product strength. This so-called ethical = less strong intuition (ELSI) poses a major threat for the success of sustainable products. This article explores this pervasive lay theory and examines whether it is a key barrier for sustainable consumption patterns. Even more importantly, little is known about the underlying mechanisms that might operate differently at the implicit and explicit levels of the consumer’s decision-making. To fill this gap, three studies examine how the implicit judgments (...) that consumers activate automatically shape their consumption behaviors, in concert with their more controlled explicit beliefs about sustainable products. The Main Study investigates the ELSI’s imprint on actual shopping patterns and disentangles the implicit and explicit mechanisms of the lay theory. This paper also asks how this negative influence can be attenuated by examining whether the consumer’s interest in sustainable consumption reduces reliance on the ELSI. Two follow-up studies confirm the robustness from different methodological and practical perspectives. Implications for companies and policy makers are derived. (shrink)

“Fair and equitable benefit-sharing” is one of the objectives of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. In essence, benefit-sharing holds that countries, farmers, and indigenous communities that grant access to their plant genetic resources and/or traditional knowledge should share in the benefits that users derive from these resources. But what exactly is understood by “fair” and “equitable” in this context? Neither term is defined in the international treaties. (...) A complicating factor, furthermore, is that different motivations and perspectives exist with respect to the notion of benefit-sharing itself. This paper looks at six different approaches to benefit-sharing that can be extracted from the current debates on “Access and Benefit-Sharing.” These approaches form the basis of a philosophical reflection in which the different connotations of “fair and equitable” are considered, by analyzing the main principles of justice involved. Finally, the various principles are brought together in order to draw some conclusions as to how a fair and equitable benefit-sharing mechanism might best be realized. This results in several recommendations for policymakers. (shrink)

Contrary to assumptions that changes in brain networks are possible only during crucial periods of development, research in the past decade has supported the idea of a permanently plastic brain. Novel experience, altered afferent input due to environmental changes and learning new skills are now recognized as modulators of brain function and underlying neuroanatomic circuitry. Given findings in experiments with animals and the recent discovery of increases in gray and white matter in the adult human brain as a result of (...) learning, the old concept of cognitive reserve, that is the ability to reinforce brain volume in crucial areas and thus provide a greater threshold for age-dependent deficits, has been reinforced. The challenge we face is to unravel the exact nature of the dynamic structural alterations and, ultimately, to be able to use this knowledge for disease management. Understanding normative changes in brain structure that occur as a result of environmental changes and demands is pivotal to understanding the characteristic ability of the brain to adapt. (shrink)

Throughout more than two millennia philosophers adhered massively to ideal standards of scientific rationality going back ultimately to Aristotle’s Analytica posteriora. These standards got progressively shaped by and adapted to new scientific needs and tendencies. Nevertheless, a core of conditions capturing the fundamentals of what a proper science should look like remained remarkably constant all along. Call this cluster of conditions the Classical Model of Science. In this paper we will do two things. First of all, we will propose a (...) general and systematized account of the Classical Model of Science. Secondly, we will offer an analysis of the philosophical significance of this model at different historical junctures by giving an overview of the connections it has had with a number of important topics. The latter include the analytic-synthetic distinction, the axiomatic method, the hierarchical order of sciences and the status of logic as a science. Our claim is that particularly fruitful insights are gained by seeing themes such as these against the background of the Classical Model of Science. In an appendix we deal with the historiographical background of this model by considering the systematizations of Aristotle’s theory of science offered by Heinrich Scholz, and in his footsteps by Evert W. Beth. (shrink)

Where the possibility of metaphysics as a science is concerned, Kant assigns the exact sciences the function of an exemplar; for these disciplines have long been well established on "the secure path of a science." Accordingly, in the Prolegomena Kant explicitly addresses the question "How is metaphysics possible as a science?" by way of the questions "How is pure mathematics possible?" and "How is pure natural science possible?" Moreover, all these questions arise directly out of the main transcendental question: "How (...) are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" The deplorable situation of the metaphysics of the day would have been entirely attributable to misappraisal of this central transcendental question. (shrink)

In what follows I shall speak about many phenomena, but what I wish to convey more than anything else is a combination of positive aspects of the rightly famous seminar headed by Moritz Schlick the years before he was shot on the stairs of the University of Vienna in 1936. These aspects make the seminar unique. I have taken part in a wealth of good seminars before and after 1936, but my experience as a participant of that seminar makes it, (...) for me, stand out as unsurpassed. (shrink)

In psychological contract research, the side of the supervisor is strongly underexposed. However, supervisors are responsible for maintaining relationships with both their subordinates and senior management and are likely to be influenced by events unfolding in these relationships. In this study, we state that supervisor well-being may be affected by subordinates who fail to meet their obligations. This study adds to psychological contract research by developing an understanding of how and when subordinate psychological contract breach (PCB) is associated with supervisor (...) emotional exhaustion. Through a weekly diary survey among 56 Dutch supervisors, we test hypotheses about the relationships between subordinate PCB and the emotional exhaustion of the supervisor, the mediating role of perceptions of performance pressure by the supervisor in this relationship, and the moderating role of i-deals between the supervisor and senior management. Multilevel analyses support the first two hypotheses, but contradictory to our expectations show that the positive association between subordinate PCB and the emotional exhaustion of the supervisor is strengthened when the supervisor has high levels of i-deals with senior management. We discuss the findings in relation to their contribution to psychological contract theory. (shrink)

The Solar City Daegu 2050 Project represents a comprehensive model for shaping the future of this city of 2.5 million residents with a mixed industrial and services economic base. Its specific aims are as follows: realization of a carbon footprint consistent with standards of global sustainability and equity; the development of a renewable-energy - based urban community and economy; and the pursuit of economic development that meets the needs of Daegu’s citizens in a manner that is culturally and ecologically sound. (...) A long-term master plan like SCD 2050 is necessary to reach these transformative goals. At the same time, 50-year planning enables the citizens of Daegu to envision their city’s intergenerational future. SCD 2050 cannot simply lead to an urban energy transition. Conscious efforts to change social structure will also be essential to realizing the plan’s goals. (shrink)