Politiek gaat over het verenigen van gemeenschappelijke en conflicterende belangen in bindende collectieve besluitvorming op een wijze die door winnaars en verliezers kan worden aanvaard. In dit artikel baseer ik mij op het politiek gezaghebbende duurzaamheidsconcept van de Brundtlandcommissie in Our Common Future: ‘Duurzame ontwikkeling is ontwikkeling die tegemoetkomt aan de behoeften in het heden zonder de mogelijkheid van toekomstige generaties om te voorzien in hun eigen behoeften in de weg te staan’ . Dan blijkt direct dat het vinden (...) van principes voor een duurzame politiek lastig is, want het gaat hier om een morele eis rekening te houden met de belangen van mensen in komende generaties die nu nog geen deel uitmaken van een politieke gemeenschap. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adolf Meyer: Psychiatric AnarchistS. Nassir Ghaemi (bio)KeywordsMeyer, biopsychosocial model, Jaspers, pluralism, philosophy, psychiatryThey had weekly lunches in 1920s New York City: In one door stepped a stooped philosopher, with a mustache and a twinkle, perhaps ruminating on some recent Marxist theory; in the other door came the elegant Swiss physician, goateed and erudite. Every week, for a time, John Dewey (leader of American pragmatism) and Adolf Meyer (...) (dean of mid-twentieth century American psychiatry and long-time chair of the Johns Hopkins psychiatry department) lunched together and, somewhere in those conversations—one might imagine—the field of philosophy and psychiatry was born (Meyer 1948, 152).Yet pragmatism—as a proper school of philosophy—does not capture Meyer’s psychiatry. Rather, the core of his thinking, in my view, is to be found in a vague term that deserves analysis: eclecticism.EclecticismIt has been said that eclecticism is a vice in theory but a virtue in practice (Stone 1981), which highlights why so many are attracted to it. Deep down, practitioners just want to be free: They believe that their freedom of choice will tailor treatments best to patients and thus result in best outcomes. As a conceptual theory for psychiatry, eclecticism is a model that views any theory or method as potentially correct, but no theory or method as definitively incorrect. There is no way to avoid an “anything goes” practice with eclecticism: It is—to use a political analogy—an anarchism of mind.William James once remarked that the basis for all philosophies lies in the personalities of philosophers. So it was with Meyer’s eclecticism: congenial personally, he seemed congenitally incapable of disagreeing with any person. Any idea, even the most unusual, would receive a respectful hearing from Meyer. (Double brings out new, excellent documentary evidence of this extreme indecision in the drafts of Meyer’s unsent letters to the behaviorist John Watson.) Although quaint and commendable pedagogically, this excessive open mindedness left American psychiatry—so dependent on Meyer—prey to hard-headed biological radicals and psychoanalytic dogmatists. This is where his eclecticism failed us.Enabling Biological ExtremismMeyer played a key role in legitimizing extreme biological approaches. In addition to his interest in insulin coma (which Double mentions), Meyer enabled the popularization of colectomy and frontal [End Page 341] lobotomy. Psychiatric colectomy, developed by Henry Cotton, was based on the focal toxin theory of mental illness—the idea that mental illness was caused by toxins released by bacteria in the body, the specific locations of which where were the colon and rotted teeth. In one hundred case reports, with mostly short-term follow-up, published in his prominent text, The Defective Delinquent and Insane (Cotton 1921), Cotton laid out his case, which Meyer legitimized by writing a generous foreword. Meyer’s authority was powerful enough to render Cotton’s limited evidence base much more credible than it might otherwise have been. In the 1920s and 1930s, tens of thousands colectomies and full mouth teeth extractions were conducted in patients with mental illness. (Meyer himself sometimes recommended it).1The other biological extremist story is more famous. In a 1936 conference, with Meyer in attendance, the neurologist Walter Freeman presented, for the first time, cases of refractory schizophrenia treated with a new method: frontal lobotomy. Psychoanalyst attendees protested that Freeman was proposing nothing more than mutilation of the brain; yet Meyer intervened in favor of Free-man (“I am not antagonistic to this work, but find it very interesting” [El-Hai 2005]). Unfortunately, Freeman, like Cotton, was a dogmatist: Over time, he performed frontal lobotomy more and more extensively, not just as a treatment of last resort in the most ill schizophrenics (as in the first cases presented to Meyer), but later as a treatment of first resort for the mildest mood disorders. (By 1950 Freeman had personally conducted 2400 transorbital lobotomies, an “office procedure” that allowed him to lobotomize a patient in 15 minutes [El-Hai 2005]).2Lest my critique of Meyer in that era be seen as a Whiggish interpretation of history (the claim that we are so much smarter than those shrinks of the past; in fact I think... (shrink)

This work offers a selection of the philosophical writings of Karl Jaspers.

Begegnung des Verlegers mit Karl Jaspers, von K. Piper.-Philosophische Autobiographie, von K. Jaspers.- Jaspers und der Staat, von D. Sternberger.- Jaspers als geschichtlicher Denker, von G. Mann.- Jaspers in Frankreich, von J. Hersch.- Karl Jaspers und die italienische Philosophie, von L. Quattrocchi.- Die Philosophie von Karl Jaspers in Japan, von F. Hashimoto.-Karl Jaspers und der Rundfunk, von P. Meyer-Gutzwiller.- Karl Jasper's Lebensdaten.- Bibliographie der Werke und Schriften, von H. Saner [p.[173] -[216]].

Experts provide an alternative source of information to classical data collection methods such as surveys. They can provide additional insight into problems, supplement existing data, or provide insights when classical data collection is troublesome. In this paper, we explore the (dis)similarities between expert judgments and data collected by traditional data collection methods regarding the development of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSSs) in children with burn injuries. By means of an elicitation procedure, the experts’ domain expertise is formalized and represented in the (...) form of probability distributions. The method is used to obtain beliefs from 14 experts, including nurses and psychologists. Those beliefs are contrasted with questionnaire data collected on the same issue. The individual and aggregated expert judgments are contrasted with the questionnaire data by means of Kullback–Leibler divergences. The aggregated judgments of the group that mainly includes psychologists resemble the questionnaire data more than almost all of the individual expert judgments. (shrink)

What Sigmund Freud is to psychoanalysis, Max Weber is to sociology: the founding father, the primary source of idea, invention, and organization upon which the modern practice of the science is based. Karl Jaspers occupies an equally high place in the existentialist movement in philosophy. For many years, these two intellectual giants were close associates. These brilliant and eminently readable essays were written between 1920 and 1962, originally in German. Here they are available in English. Jaspers divides Weber's work into (...) three broad categories--philosophical, scientific, and political. He examines Weber's passionate devotion to the goal of purifying science of all passion, and specifically of making the social sciences an objective, value-free inquiry. He explores Weber's notion of the role of political leadership, and of the crisis of contemporary civilization as experienced in Germany. When one towering intellect writes about another, we enjoy insights into the minds of both. On Max Weber speaks to the philosopher, the sociologist, the political scientist, and the scholar, while it broadens the intellectual horizons of everyone concerned with deeper questions of mind, society, and the human condition.--From publisher description. (shrink)

In 1910, Karl Jaspers wrote a seminal essay on morbid jealousy in which he laid the foundation for the psychopathological phenomenology that through his work and the work of Hans Gruhle and Kurt Schneider, among others, would become the ...

Both during and after his long career, many political philosophies have been attributed to John Dewey. Perhaps most familiarly, Dewey is seen as a kind of communitarian or participatory democrat who provides a rich account of human nature requiring a moral state.2 Rob Talisse, for example, defines “Deweyan Democracy” as “a style of substantive democratic theory which emphasizes citizen participation in the shared cooperative undertaking of self-government at all levels of social association” (2003, 1). On this reading, Dewey’s account of (...) “thick” terms like “community” or “growth” and his inter-subjective view of human nature provide philosophical grounds for the normative superiority of participatory democracy. If .. (shrink)

Die These von einer Achsenzeit in der Weltgeschichte Die zentrale Annahme dieses Buches ist die universalgeschichtliche These von einer Achsenzeit (880-200 v. Chr.) in der Weltgeschichte, in der voneinander unabhangig in China, Indien und dem Abendland strukturell ahnliche kulturelle Revolutionen und Aufbruche erfolgt sind. Inwieweit diese Aufbruche fur das kulturelle Leben in der Gegenwart weiterhin bedeutsam sind, wird heute in kulturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen wie der Religions- und Kultursoziologie, der vergleichenden Kulturtheorie, der Theorie der Moderne u.a. neu diskutiert. Neben der These von (...) der Achsenzeit wird in Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte u.a. der Stellenwert von Wissenschaft und Technik in der Moderne erortert; es werden Uberlegungen uber eine mogliche Welteinheit (im Sinne eines Weltfriedenszustandes) angestellt sowie zeitgeschichtliche Tendenzen in der Politik (z.B. Totalitats- und Planungsideologien) kritisiert, die im Gegensatz zu Jaspers' liberalem Ethos der Freiheit und der Humanitat stehen. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the 'mess' of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

The book surveys the key metaphysical contributions of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More (1614–1687).

The intent of Jaspers' philosophizing then is simply to recall us to our authentic situation. This recall is not itself a doctrine; it is only the stimulus to an inward action each must perform for himself in communication with others. Jaspers' Existenz-philosophy is thus an attempt to consider and enact human honesty; it is philosophy, not as wisdom, but as the love of wisdom.

This paper explores the ontology of Malebranche's notion of "intelligible extension", the archetypal divine idea of matter which he believed to be the immediate object of our own minds in all of our thoughts about corporeal things. Building on this account of its ontology, and through an examination of a form of isomorphism between intelligible extension and the created spatial world, the paper also attempts to explain the manner in which it could fulfill its epistemological role of representing all possible (...) bodies and supplying us with our abstract knowledge of geometry. (shrink)

The relation and collaboration of human and animal medicine had its ups and downs throughout history. The interaction between these two disciplines has been especially fruitful in the broad areas of patho-physiology and of epidemiology. An exploration of the interaction between the two disciplines, using historical and contemporary examples in comparative medicine, zoonoses, zooprophylaxis, and human-animal bond, reveals that a better understanding of animal and human disease, as well as societal changes such as interest in non-conventional medicine, are leading to (...) a broader concept of one medicine that includes animal and human medicine as well as social and other sciences. (shrink)

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)--"founder of German existentialism" (Martin Heidegger) and "a lucid and flexible intelligence in the service of a genuine and ...

BACKGROUND: Delusions in schizophrenia are commonly approached as empirical false beliefs about everyday reality. Phenomenological accounts, by contrast, have suggested that delusions are more adequately understood as pertaining to a different kind of reality experience. How this alteration of reality experience should be characterised, which dimensions of experiential life are involved, and whether delusional reality might differ from standard reality in various ways is unclear and little is known about how patients with delusions value and relate to these experiential alterations. (...) This study aimed to investigate the nature of delusional reality experience, and its subjective apprehension, in individuals with lived experience of delusions and a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis. METHODS: In this qualitative phenomenological study, we recruited individuals with lived experience of delusions and a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis from two psychiatric-hospital services in Belgium using homogenous sampling. Criteria for participation were having undergone at least one psychotic episode with occurring delusional symptoms, present at least 1 year before participation, on the basis of clinical notes assessed by the attending psychiatrist; a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis, ascertained through clinical interview by the attending psychiatrist upon admission; being aged between 18 years and 65 years; and having the capacity to give informed consent. Exclusion criteria included worries concerning capacity to consent and risk of distress caused by participation. We did phenomenologically driven semi-structured interviews with the participants to explore the nature of delusional reality experience and their subjective valuation of these experiences. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative method tailored to the in-depth exploration of participants’ first-person perspective, to analyse their accounts. FINDINGS: Between March 2, 2020, and Sept 30, 2020, 18 adults participated in the interview study. The findings suggest that delusions are often embedded in wide-ranging alterations of basic reality experience, involving quasi-ineffable atmospheric and ontological qualities that undermine participants’ sense of the world as unambiguously real, fully present, and shared with others. We also found that delusional reality experience can differ from standard reality in various ways, across multiple dimensions, and that participants are often implicitly or explicitly aware of the distinction between delusional and standard reality. Delusional experience can have an enduring value and meaning that is not fully captured by a strictly medical perspective. INTERPRETATION: Increased awareness and recognition of the distinctive nature of delusional reality experience, in both clinical and research settings, can improve diagnostic accuracy, explanatory models, and therapeutic support for individuals with delusions whose lived realities are not always evident from an everyday perspective. FUNDING: FWO Flanders. TRANSLATION: For the Dutch translation of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section. (shrink)

: This paper charts the gradual development of a theory of real space, underlying the created world and constituted by the extension of God Himself, in the writings of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More. It identifies two impediments to More's embracing such a theory in the earlier part of his career, namely his initial commitment to the principles that (a) space was not real and (b) God was not extended, and it shows how he finally came to renounce these principles (...) in order to devise the theory so closely associated with him. (shrink)

It is often alleged that Cantor’s views about how the set theoretic universe as a whole should be considered are fundamentally unclear. In this article we argue that Cantor’s views on this subject, at least up until around 1896, are relatively clear, coherent, and interesting. We then go on to argue that Cantor’s views about the set theoretic universe as a whole have implications for theology that have hitherto not been sufficiently recognised. However, the theological implications in question, at least (...) as articulated here, would not have satisfied Cantor himself. (shrink)

With the publication of Reason and Existenz, originally delivered as a series of five lectures at the University of Groningen in 1935, one of the most important of Jaspers's philosophic works is made available to the English-speaking world. It concerns itself with a general statement of the principal philosophic categories which have given uniqueness to Jaspers's thinking: existence, freedom, and history, and the limit-situations of death, suffering, and sin. Written shortly after Jaspers's major systematic work and before his analysis of (...) the problem of truth, Reason and Existenz occupies a primary position in the development of his thought. (shrink)

Many ethical concerns have been voiced about Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs). Special attention has been paid to the effect of CDSSs on autonomy, responsibility, fairness and transparency. This journal has featured a discussion between Rosalind McDougall and Ezio Di Nucci that focused on the impact of IBM’s Watson for Oncology (Watson) on autonomy. The present article elaborates on this discussion in three ways. First, using Jonathan Pugh’s account of rational autonomy we show that how Watson presents its results might (...) impact decisional autonomy, while how Watson produces knowledge might affect practical autonomy. Second, by drawing an analogy with patient decision aids we identify an empirical way of estimating Watson’s impact on autonomy (ie, value-congruence). Lastly, McDougall introduced the notion of value-flexible design as a way to account for the diverging preferences patients hold. We will clarify its relation with the established domain of value-sensitive design. In terms of the tripartite methodology of value-sensitive design, we offer aconceptualclarification using Pugh’s account of rational autonomy, anempiricaltool to evaluate Watson’s impact on autonomy and situate a group oftechnicaloptions to incorporate autonomy in Watson’s design. (shrink)

Although there is much discussion exploring the potential causes of plagiarism, there is limited research available which provides evidence as to the academic interventions which may help reduce this. This paper discusses a bespoke English for Academic Purposes programme introduced at the university level, aimed at improving the academic writing standards of students, reducing plagiarism, and detecting cases of contract cheating. Results from 12 semesters of academic misconduct data demonstrate a 37.01% reduction in instances of detected plagiarism following the intervention, (...) but due to limited data, cannot demonstrate a direct impact on reducing detected rates of contract cheating. The results also show a lower than expected proportion of plagiarised assignments among submissions. (shrink)

By permission of The Gale Group, this article is reprinted (here on-line) from “Nicholas of Cusa,” pp. 122-125, Volume 9 of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, edited by Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987 ). The short bibliography at the end of the original article has been omitted; and the page numbers of the article are here changed.

This article explores the theory of natural kind essentialism, as developed by Putnam and Kripke. It defends the theory against certain criticisms, but also suggests that it should not be treated as universally true. Rather, it comes down to how different people use language, offering reasons why some people's idiolects might behave in an essentialist way while others behave in the contrary way, but explaining how we can all still communicate perfectly well despite this.

Translator's summary and notes: Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) argues that modern advances in the natural sciences and in technology have exerted transforming influence on the art of clinical medicine and on its ancient Hippocratic ideal, even though Plato's classical argument about slave physicians and free physicians retains essential relevance for the physician of today.Medicine should be rooted not only in science and technology, but in the humanity of the physician as well. Jaspers thus shows how, within the mind of every medical (...) person, the researcher contests with the physician and the technician with the humanist. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the ‘mess’ of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)