Mães exercem papel importante no processo de hospitalização das crianças. As intervenções em psicologia positiva podem contribuir com o fortalecimento dos recursos positivos delas, o que por sua vez auxilia na recuperação da saúde das crianças. Este estudo teve por objetivo apresentar o relato da aplicação e avaliação de uma intervenção em psicologia positiva para mães de crianças hospitalizadas, visando demonstrar evidências de utilidade clínica da intervenção. A intervenção buscou diminuir sintomas de estresse, ansiedade e depressão, aumentar os níveis de (...) bem-estar subjetivo e promover o uso de estratégias de enfrentamento adaptadas ao contexto da hospitalização infantil entre as mães. Os resultados mostraram que o procedimento pode ter auxiliado as mães usarem estratégias favorecedoras durante a hospitalização, bem como alternarem o seu uso conforme a demanda. Além disso, elas puderam vislumbrar elementos positivos presentes e sentirem-se apoiadas. (shrink)

This book takes the reader on a philosophical quest to understand the dark side of emotions. The chapters are devoted to the analysis of negative emotions and are organized in a historical manner, spanning the period from ancient Greece to the present time. Each chapter addresses analytical questions about specific emotions generally considered to be unfavorable and classified as negative. The general aim of the volume is to describe the polymorphous and context-sensitive nature of negative emotions as well as changes (...) in the ways people have interpreted these emotions across different epochs. The editors speak of ‘the dark side of the emotions’ because their goal is to capture the ambivalent – unstable and shadowy – aspects of emotions. A number of studies have taken the categorial distinction between positive and negative emotions for granted, suggesting that negative emotions are especially significant for our psychological experience because they signal difficult situations. For this reason, the editors stress the importance of raising analytical questions about the valence of particular emotions and focussing on the features that make these emotions ambivalent: how – despite their negativity – such emotions may turn out to be positive. This opens up a perspective in which each emotion can be understood as a complex interlacing of negative and positive properties. The collection presents a thoughtful dialogue between philosophy and contemporary scientific research. It offers the reader insight by illuminating the dark side of the emotions. (shrink)

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end I (...) take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

Besides its use in basic research, the DNA:RNA hybridization technique has helped the development of genetic engineering: it is instrumental in the isolation of specific genes that can be inserted into foreign cells, thus modifying their genetic information. Plants, animals, and microorganisms can now be altered to yield improved crops, pest-resistant plants, and a cheaper source of important proteins or drugs. The social relevance of genetic engineering received official sanction in 1980 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that genetically modified (...) organisms can be patented. In this article I have tried to describe the discovery of the DNA:RNA hybridization technique as the successful outcome of years of intelligent and patient research in many laboratories, of inductive and deductive processes in the minds of many biologists. The synthesis that led to the final result and to the early development of the technique was made possible by the coming together of two brilliant scientists, Sol Spiegelman and Benjamin Hall. (shrink)

In the present interview, Jürgen Habermas answers questions about his wide-ranging work in philosophy and social theory, as well as concerning current social and political developments to whose understanding he has made important theoretical contributions. Among the aspects of his work addressed are his conception of communicative rationality as a countervailing force to the colonization of the lifeworld by capitalism and his understanding of philosophy after Hegel as postmetaphysical thinking, for which he has recently provided a comprehensive historical grounding. The (...) scope and relevance of his ideas can be seen from his reflections on current issues, ranging from the prospects of translational democracy at a time of resurgent nationalism and populism, to political developments in Germany since reunification, to the role of religion in the public sphere and the impact of the new social media on democratic discourse. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Studie erschließt erstmals umfassendden Zurechnungsbegriff in Kants praktischer Philosophie. Ein Zurechnungsurteil bringt zum Ausdruck, dass eine Handlung auf den freien Willen einer bestimmten Person zurückgeführt wird. Zurechnung ist ein zentraler Begriff des Rechts und von grundlegender Bedeutung für unsere alltägliche Praxis, wenn wir andere Personen loben, tadeln oder dankbar sind. Eine fundamentale Relevanz des Zurechnungsbegriffs zeigt die Autorin auch für Kants praktische Philosophie auf. Ausgehend von Kants Definition des Zurechnungsbegriffs in der Metaphysik der Sitten wird deutlich, wie Zurechnung (...) mit anderen zentralen Begriffen von Kants Handlungs- und Moraltheorie verknüpft ist: sowohl für die Auflösung der Freiheitsantinomie als auch für den Begriff der Person als freiem, moralischem Subjekt und Träger eines Gewissens ist Zurechnung ein Schlüsselbegriff. Am Leitfaden des Zurechnungsbegriffs entsteht ein differenziertes Bild der praktischen Philosophie Kants, das diese auch aus heutiger Sicht attraktiv und tragfähig erscheinen lässt. In systematischer Hinsicht schlägt die Arbeit einen Bogen zu aktuellen Debatten und zeigt, dass Kants Theorie in zentralen Punkten anschlussfähig ist. (shrink)

Narratives are ever-present in medicine and care: patients, relatives, doctors, nurses and pastoral workers tell quite different stories. The present volume examines the question of the significance of narratives for the ethical judgement in medicine and care and illustrates what theological reflection can contribute to the current discussion about the ethics of medicine and care. The focus of the volume is on the theological discussion on the ethical issues of medicine and care which is enriched by contributions from literary studies, (...) philosophy, nursing science and the ethics of medicine and care. (shrink)

This article provides a contribution to the concept of a peace ethics which understands human peacemaking as a churchly practice accepting and joining in God's reconciling works. From a pacifist stance, the author argues that ecclesial ethics allows a forceful reframing of the just war tradition as it is developed in the largely unknown Reformed confessions of the l61 h century. A theological exploration of the peace church's pathos drives the author towards a rediscovery of the church's central worshiping practices, (...) such as eucharist, as distinctively peacemaking practices. Following John Calvin's and Karl Barth's ethical account, the mode of peacemaking is defined as a hastening that waits. (shrink)

Following the traces of a statement by Margaret Mead, emphasizing that the first photographic images of the Earth from space presented notions of fragility, the article contextualizes the recent critique of the dominant representation of the Earth as a globe that emerged in conjunction with the discourse on the Anthropocene. It analyses the globe as an image and the sentiments that accompanied it since the first photographs of our planet from space were published in 1968. The article outlines how the (...) cultural meaning of the whole Earth representation changed in parallel with the appropriation of the image by the large technological enterprises that emerged from US America’s counterculture. It returns to the possibility of a coexistence of ‘views from within’ and ‘views from without’ following a detour with Gregory Bateson via Bali and proposes a Cybernetics of Grace as a practice of resistance against pure exteriority. The article concludes by linking the Cybernetics of Grace with the second-order conversations of Gordon Pask. (shrink)

Uterus transplantation is a relatively new intervention. A woman with absolute uterine factor infertility receives, by a surgical procedure, a transplanted uterus, most often by living donation. The uterus recipient may thus become pregnant and conceive her own child. As with any other medical treatment, UTx requires legitimation. The anticipated benefits must outweigh the risks of the medical intervention. The risks and benefits of UTx are by no means unequivocal and cannot be easily determined. The benefits depend on the final (...) evaluation of the suffering to be alleviated by the intervention. In the following, we will analyze the suffering addressed by UTx and discuss its normative value. First, we point out that (a) suffering is generally considered an important normative criterion in medicine as well as in the context of UTx; (b) we then describe the risks and anticipated benefits of UTx for the three persons directly concerned: the child, the donor, and the recipient; (c) we further analyze the suffering addressed by UTx. The intervention addresses a form of existential suffering. We discuss the common notion that existential suffering should be evaluated from the subjective perspective of the sufferer; (d) afterwards, we argue that in a social practice like medicine, a one‐sided evaluation stemming from the sufferer alone is not sufficient; and (e) finally, arguments from a societal perspective lead us to the conclusion that the existential suffering addressed by UTx does not possess a sufficiently strong normative value to legitimize a high‐risk, expensive procedure. (shrink)

It has been argued that Kants actions. However, it would be uncompromising to allow for only two possibilities: either full responsibility or none. Moreover, in the Metaphysics of Morals Kant himself claims that there can be degrees of responsibility, depending on the magnitude of the obstacles that have to be overcome when acting. I will show that this claim is consistent with Kant’s theory as a whole and thereby make transparent how degrees of responsibility are possible for Kant. The solution (...) is based on the distinction between two senses of responsibility: taking oneself to be an accountable person is an all-or-nothing affair, whereas praise- or blameworthiness for a particular action can still be a matter of degree. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This essay pursues the question of vegetal respiration in Presocratics’ doctrines in contrast to Aristotle’s categorical circumscription of this vital process to the blooded animals. It finds that epithelial respiration in DK31 B100 is central to Empedocles’ conception of plants’ breathing, linked to their fructification, deciduousness, and overall life preservation. It also discusses plants’ respiration in relation to their body temperature in Menestor, then, concludes by analyzing Democritus’ psychological doctrine, arguing that the intake of fiery atoms pertained to all living (...) beings, plants included. (shrink)

The paper emphasizes the inadequacy of formal semantics, the classical paradigm in semantics, in treating contextual dependence. Some phenomena of contextual dependence threaten one central assumption of the classical paradigm, namely the idea that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and utterances have truth conditions well defined. It is possible to individuate three forms of contextual dependence: the one affecting pure indexicals, the one affecting demonstratives and "contextual expressions", and the one affecting all linguistic expressions. The third type of dependence (...) is top-down: context, and not only linguistic material, shows which variables must be instantiated, relying on context itself. The generalization of underdetermination to all linguistic expressions is in fact a kind of metadependence: the mode of dependence itself depends on context. (shrink)

Over the last decades, various predictors have proven relevant for job performance [e.g., general mental ability, broad personality traits, such as the Big Five]. However, prediction of job performance is far from perfect, and further potentially relevant predictors need to be investigated. Narrower personality traits, such as individuals' character strengths, have emerged as meaningfully related to different aspects of job performance. However, it is still unclear whether character strengths can explain additional variance in job performance over and above already known (...) powerful predictors. Consequently, the present study aimed at examining the incremental validity of character strengths as predictors of job performance beyond GMA and/or the Big Five traits and identifying the most important predictors of job performance out of the 24 character strengths, GMA, and the Big Five. Job performance was operationalized with multidimensional measures of both productive and counterproductive work behavior. A sample of 169 employees from different occupations completed web-based self-assessments on character strengths, GMA, and the Big Five. Additionally, the employees' supervisors provided web-based ratings of their job performance. Results showed that character strengths incrementally predicted job performance beyond GMA, the Big Five, or GMA plus the Big Five; explained variance increased up to 54.8, 43.1, and 38.4%, respectively, depending on the dimension of job performance. Exploratory relative weight analyses revealed that for each of the dimensions of job performance, at least one character strength explained a numerically higher amount of variance than GMA and the Big Five, except for individual task proactivity, where GMA exhibited the numerically highest amount of explained variance. The present study shows that character strengths are relevant predictors of job performance in addition to GMA and other conceptualizations of personality. This also highlights the role of socio-emotional skills, such as character strengths, for the understanding of performance outcomes above and beyond cognitive ability. (shrink)

"What do grown children owe their parents?" Over two decades ago philosopher Jane English asked this question and came up with the startling answer: nothing (English 1979). English joins many contemporary philosophers in rejecting the once-traditional view that grown children owe their parents some kind of fitting repayment for past services rendered. The problem with the traditional view, as argued by many, is, first, that parents have duties to provide fairly significant services to their growing children, and persons do not (...) owe repayment for others' mere performance of duty; second, even where parents go above and beyond duty in their loving and generous rearing of their children, the benefits are bestowed, at least on young children, without their voluntary acceptance and consent, and so, again, fail to generate any obligation of subsequent repayment on their part (see Blustein 1982: 182-3). Moreover, the entire idiom of obligation and repayment, in English's 1 words, "tends to obscure, or even to undermine, the love that is the correct ground of filial obligation" (352). English's alternative, however -- that children strictly "owe" their parents nothing except what flows naturally from whatever love and affection exist between them -- also strikes many as problematic. Christina Hoff Sommers offers examples of what seem to be clearly delinquent adult children, who simply don't "feel" like sharing their lives with their aging parents, or providing any emotional or financial support to them, and so don't (Sommers 1986: 440-41). Sommers points out that we need some talk of obligations in order to fill in the cracks in human relationships where love and affection fail: "The ideal relationship cannot be 'duty-free,' if only because sentimental ties may come unraveled, often leaving one of the parties at a material disadvantage'" (450-51). Sommers proposes as her alternative to English that legitimate duties arise out of special relationships defined by social roles: being a father or mother, a son or a daughter, "is socially as well as biologically prescriptive; it not only defines what one is; it also defines who one is and what one owes" (447).. (shrink)

Subject of my paper is the connection between Hegel’s philosophy of nature and the new conception of subjectivity developed in his works. At the centre of my reflection is the origin of desire from biological needs of the animal world, as affirmed by Hegel in the Encyclopaedia of philosophical sciences and inPhenomenology of Spirit. The animal nutrition is periodical: hunger and thirst are forms of lack, from which, in Hegel’s eyes, arises the first form of self‐consciousness: they produce a first, (...) obscure and indefinite sense of self. The correspondent concept in Phenomenology of Spirit is desire, as awareness of limits, and also as necessity to overcome them: as impulse to action. The fight and recognition which follow imply this natural source. The formation (Bildung) of subjectivity itself presupposes in Hegel this fundamental role of desire: What I want to analyse is the measure in which philosophy of nature influenced Hegel’s theory of subjectivity. Researches of the last decades give a new evaluation of the importance of this part of his philosophy and show the evident links to romantic philosophy of nature. My paper intends to demonstrate that desire in Hegel’s philosophy shows an evident cognitive value and can be considered a key-instrument for a new conception of reason, not opposed to passions. This approach can be interesting within the present international debate about the strategic role of passions in our post-modern world. (shrink)

: Emotions are currently at the center of a lively international and interdisciplinary debate. The first sections of this essay present a synthetic overview of its key features. The main sections provide a re-examination of one of the most historically significant developments in the field of affective studies. René Descartes’ approach to the study of emotions implies a positive assessment of the role of the body and a remarkable attenuation of his classical dualism that allows an innovative perspective on the (...) subject. He inaugurated a new scientific style of research, which is one of the original sources of some key concepts of the current research. Keywords: Emotions; René Descartes; Embodied Cognition; Classification of Emotions; Philosophy of Emotions Le emozioni di Descartes: dal corpo al corpo Riassunto: Le emozioni sono attualmente al centro di un dibattito internazionale e interdisciplinare molto vivace, di cui la prima sezione del saggio presenta una panoramica sintetica. La sezione principale propone un’analisi critica di uno dei passaggi storicamente più significativi nel campo dello studio dei fenomeni emotivi. L’approccio di Descartes al tema delle emozioni presuppone una considerazione positiva del ruolo del corpo e una notevole attenuazione del dualismo per cui è noto, consentendo così una prospettiva innovativa al tema. Descartes inaugura un nuovo stile di ricerca che è alle origini di alcuni concetti chiave della ricerca contemporanea. Parole chiave: Emozioni; René Descartes; Conoscenza incarnata; Classificazione delle emozioni; Filosofia delle emozioni. (shrink)

Emotions are complex phenomena. We all have an intuitive understanding of what they are because we experience them in everyday life. They occur in response to triggering situations in the external environment and play a major role in our perception, cognition, and motivation. Despite their paramount importance in our lives, attempts to provide a general definition or complete taxonomy of emotions have failed. To date, both the definition and classification of emotions remain controversial and depend on the theory of emotions (...) one favours. (shrink)

J’ai souvent songé que le propre du clerc dans l’âge moderne est de prêcher dans le désert. Je crois que j’y suis passé maître.Julien Benda Faute de savoir dans quelle catégorie vous classer, on ne vous inscrit dans aucune.Louis Rougier.

In my paper, I present two competing perspectives on the foundational problem (as opposed to the descriptive problem) of quantifier domain restriction: the objective perspective on context (OPC) and the intentional perspective on context (IPC). According to OPC, the relevant domain for a quantified sentence is determined by objective facts of the context of utterance. In contrast, according to IPC, we must consider certain features of the speaker’s intention in order to determine the proposition expressed. My goal is to offer (...) a plausible and fair reconstruction of IPC. Drawing a parallel between quantifier domain restriction and standard cases of context dependence as indexicality, I argue that the speaker’s intentions can play a semantic role only if they satisfy an Availability Constraint: an intention must be made available or communicated to the addressee, and for that purpose the speaker can exploit any feature of the objective context (words, gestures, relevance or uniqueness of either the quantificational domain or of the referent in the context of utterance). An intention satisfying the Availability Constraint must be something that a hearer in normal circumstances is able to work out by relying on the physical surroundings of the utterance situation, on utterances exchanged during the previous conversation, and on background knowledge shared by speaker and addressee. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the relations existing between four deductive systems that have been called categorial grammars and have relevant connections with linguistic investigations: the syntactic calculus, bilinear logic, compact bilinear logic and Curry''s semantic calculus.

Kant's critical philosophy is often regarded as standing in a problematic relation to his works in “anthropology”, or the study of human nature. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes his critical project as a “Copernican” turn toward the cognitive subject, which might seem to signal a reorientation of philosophy around anthropology.1 However, both in the first Critique and in his subsequent works he relegates “empirical anthropology” and “practical” or “moral anthropology” to (...) the sidelines of his critical projects in cognitive and practical philosophy. Yet Kant's formulation of his critical philosophy coincided almost exactly with the development of his interest in anthropology. During the 1770s, the “silent decade” in which he formulated his critical philosophy, Kant initiated a course on anthropology at the University of Königsberg. This course was among the most popular in his regular schedule, and he offered it annually for twenty-five years until his retirement. He then published a revised version of his lectures as the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, a text that is one of his most accessible publications, and might even seem uncharacteristically loose and anecdotal to readers of his other works. Kant also published a number of shorter works on anthropological topics during this period, and even suggested, in several scattered remarks, that anthropology in some way encompasses all of the philosophical disciplines. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to point out that some mathematical doctrines attributed by Aristotle to Plato find their origin in a threefold order of problems: first, in some allusions contained in the dialogues, which might create ambiguities within the so-called standard model of ideas; second, in the Aristotelian interpretation of ideal entities as universals or predicates, an interpretation in turn partly authorized by Plato himself; third, in the tendency not to emphasize the possibility of understanding participation and the (...) whole-part relationship from a non-quantitative point of view. In this paper I will disregard the complex debate about whether or not to attribute the unwritten doctrines of the Aristotelian account to Plato, but I will appraise in what sense some Aristotelian objections to participation may arise from the fact of conceiving of numbers and magnitudes as ideas. (shrink)

Based on the findings about the importance of social support network in the success of treatment and long term recovery, this article will provide an insight of the successful elements in addiction individual and group counseling interaction through which addicts manage to overcome the denial of addiction, to accept the recovery program, to go through the stages of recovery, and to identify appropriate research methods for understanding the phenomenon of interaction in recovery from addictions. This exploratory study will attempt to (...) identify an innovative perspective of the aspects pertaining to the recovery from addiction which are susceptible to be disclosed primarily by using methods inspired by the analysis of interactions. The method used in research is qualitative focus group with addictions counsellors and people in recovery, working in a counseling center. Using the application of ELAN software to annotate and transcribe interactions from the video and audio recordings, it will situate the research on addiction and recovery from addiction in the larger field of investigations on communication processes in human interactions in various cultural, social and professional contexts. (shrink)

According to postmodern scholars, subjects are defined only through their relationship to power. However, if we are only political subjects insofar as we are subjected to existing power relations, there is little hope of political transformation. To instigate change, we need to draw on collective power, but appealing to a particular type of subject, whether "working class," "black," or "women," will always be exclusionary. Recent work in political and feminist thought has suggested that we can get around these paradoxes by (...) eliminating the idea of political subjects entirely or else thinking of political identities as constantly shifting. In this book, I argue that these are both failed ideas. Instead, I suggest a novel idea of a subject in outline as the agent of socio-political change. This subject moves within the tension of coherence necessary for an agency (the subject) and permanent openness necessary to counter the exclusionary character of a political collectivity based on identity (the outline). I also develop the idea of the moment of the limit, which refers to those moments when power structures fail to subject us, and transformative agency becomes a possibility. While I reject the idea of political autonomy, I show that there is always a moment in which subjects can contest the power relations that define them. Throughout the book, I ground these concepts in work by Adorno, Lacan, and Marx - the very theorists who are often seen as denying the subject's agency. (shrink)

In this article, I bring Marx and Adorno into conversation with affect theory to establish three points: First, an affective reading of the concepts of alienation and exploitation via Marx’s metaphor of the “vampire capital” explains how capitalism depletes raced, gendered, and sexed working class of their bodily and mental powers. Second, discussing these thinkers’ ideas in the context of the larger mind and body opposition revives attention to the body in contemporary political theory and exposes how the mind and (...) body opposition covers the suffering caused by capitalism. Third, it shows that we must theorize the mind and body, feeling and thinking, as a mediated relation to grasping how particularly negative feelings can generate critical thinking, necessary to rebel against the vampire capital. (shrink)

Most cognitive scientists nowadays tend to think that at least some of the mind’s capacities are the product of biological evolution, yet important conceptual problems remain for all scientists in order to be able to speak coherently of mental or cognitive systems as having evolved naturally. Two of these important problems concern the articulation of adequate, interesting, and empirically useful concepts of homology and variation as applied to cognitive systems. However, systems in cognitive science are usually understood as functional systems (...) of some sort. Thus, to be able to talk about functional systems being homologous requires having a solid, adequate, and empirically articulated concept of functional homology—and the same is true about functional variation. Here I construct an original concept of functional homology that, in my view, adequately systematizes a number of actual uses of the word “functional homology” in a variety of biological disciplines and in ethology. I also propose a number of criteria for the empirical application of the concept that are analogous to the criteria that are currently used in comparative biology, ethology, and molecular developmental genetics. Then I construct a concept of functional variation on the basis of this concept of homology. (shrink)