ObjectiveInformed consent is a prerequisite for caesarean section, the commonest surgical procedure in low- and middle-income settings, but not always acquired to an appropriate extent. Exploring perceptions of health care workers may aid in improving clinical practice around informed consent. We aim to explore health workers’ beliefs and experiences related to principles and practice of informed consent.MethodsQualitative study conducted between January and June 2018 in a rural 150-bed mission hospital in Southern Malawi. Clinical observations, semi-structured interviews and a focus group (...) discussion were used to collect data. Participants were 22 clinical officers, nurse-midwives and midwifery students involved in maternity care. Data were analysed to identify themes and construct an analytical framework.ResultsDefinition and purpose of informed consent revolved around providing information, respecting women’s autonomy and achieving legal protection. Due to fear of blame and litigation, health workers preferred written consent. Written consent requires active participation by the consenting individual and was perceived to transfer liability to that person. A woman’s refusal to provide written informed consent may pose a dilemma for the health worker between doing good and respecting autonomy. To prevent such refusal, health workers said to only partially disclose surgical risks in order to minimize women's anxiety. Commonly perceived barriers to obtain a fully informed consent were labour pains, language barriers, women’s lack of education and their dependency on others to make decisions.ConclusionsHealth workers are familiar with the principles around informed consent and aware of its advantages, but fear of blame and litigation, partial disclosure of risks and barriers to communication hamper the process of obtaining informed consent. Findings can be used to develop interventions to improve the informed consent process. (shrink)

In typical statistical learning studies, researchers define sequences in terms of the probability of the next item in the sequence given the current item (or items), and they show that high probability sequences are treated as more familiar than low probability sequences. Existing accounts of these phenomena all assume that participants represent statistical regularities more or less as they are defined by the experimenters—as sequential probabilities of symbols in a string. Here we offer an alternative, or possibly supplementary, hypothesis. Specifically, (...) rather than identifying or labeling individual stimuli discretely in order to predict the next item in a sequence, we need only assume that the participant is able to represent the stimuli as evincing particular similarity relations to one another, with sequences represented as trajectories through this similarity space. We present experiments in which this hypothesis makes sharply different predictions from hypotheses based on the assumption that sequences are learned over discrete, labeled stimuli. We also present a series of simulation models that encode stimuli as positions in a continuous two‐dimensional space, and predict the next location from the current location. Although no model captures all of the data presented here, the results of three critical experiments are more consistent with the view that participants represent trajectories through similarity space rather than sequences of discrete labels under particular conditions. (shrink)

This book proposes a holistic transdisciplinary approach to sustainability as a subject of social sciences. At the same time, this approach shows new ways, as perspectives of philosophy, political science, law, economics, sociology, cultural studies and others are here no longer regarded separately. Instead, integrated perspectives on the key issues are carved out: Perspectives on conditions of transformation to sustainability, on key instruments and the normative questions. This allows for a concise answer to urgent and controversial questions such as the (...) following: Is the EU an environmental pioneer? Is it possible to achieve sustainability by purely technical means? If not: will that mean to end of the growth society? How to deal with the follow-up problems? How will societal change be successful? Are political power and capitalism the main barriers to sustainability? What is the role of emotions and conceptions of normality in the transformation process? To which degree are rebound and shifting effects the reason why sustainability politics fail? How much climate protection can be claimed ethically and legally e.g. on grounds of human rights? And what is freedom? Despite all rhetoric, the weak transition in energy, climate, agriculture and conservation serves as key example in this book. It is shown how the Paris Agreement is weak with regard to details and at the same time overrules the growth society by means of a radical 1,5-1,8 degrees temperature limit. It is shown how emissions trading must – and can – be reformed radically. It is shown why CSR, education, cooperation and happiness research are overrated. And we will see what an integrated politics on climate, biodiversity, nitrogen and soil might look like. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of the war in the Ukraine, realism has made a comeback in public discourses but it is not clear what realism actually means as it seems to stand for everything: from supporting the Ukraine against Russian aggression to the war is the West’s fault. This is the result of decades of not distinguishing between neorealism and classical realism and implicitly acknowledging neorealist storytelling of having systematized classical realist thought. The present paper is a further intervention to carefully (...) distinguish between both theoretical perspectives to uncover what they can add to current world political problems. It finishes by asking if neorealist scholars like John Mearsheimer have a point that it is the West’s fault and a diplomatic solution needs to be found. They often refer to Hans Morgenthau not least because he was one of the most outspoken critics of the Vietnam War. (shrink)

Formulating a metaphysical definition of human play faces three main difficulties. First, for many years the very possibility, or need, for such a definition has been questioned. Second, very often...

Wilhelm Dilthey und Hans-Georg Gadamer waren wohl die beiden letzten großen Gelehrten, die Philipp Melanchthon als Philosophen ernst genommen hatten. Im 20. Jahrhundert war dieser weitgehend nur ein Thema der Reformationsgeschichte. In den vergangenen wenigen Jahrzehnten hat sich die Forschungssituation jedoch wesentlich verändert. Melanchthon ist in das Blickfeld der allgemeinen Wissenschafts- und Bildungsgeschichte, aber auchvon Einzeldisziplinen wie der Dialektik- und Rhetorikforschung gerückt. Tatsächlich vertrat dieser, 1518 als Gräzist nach Wittenberg berufen, nicht nur mit den "artes liberales", ergänzt durch Geschichte und (...) Literatur, die damaligen Fächer der philosophischen Fakultät. Seine vielfältigen Kommentare, Scholien und Paraphrasen selbst zu den höheren Disziplinen, der Anthropologie und Naturphilosophie, der Ethik und Politik, der Staats- und Rechtsphilosophie weisen ihn als einen universalen Gelehrten des 16. Jahrhunderts aus, der vielfältige Spuren im damaligen Europa hinterließ. (shrink)

This paper investigates the history of a discursive figure that one could call the intelligent whaler. I argue that this figure's success was made possible by the construal and public distribution of whaling intelligence in an important currency of science – facts – in the preparatory phase for the United States Exploring Expedition (1838–1842). The strongest case for the necessity of the enterprise was New England whalers who were said to cruise uncharted parts of the oceans and whose discoveries of (...) uncharted islands were reported in the local press. The document that stood at the core of the lobbying for an expedition was a table that newspaperman and public lecturer Jeremiah Reynolds had compiled after interviewing whaling captains in the country's principal whaling ports. Presenting whalers’ experience in tabular and synoptic form, Reynolds's table helped forge the figure of the ‘intelligent whaler’, a mariner who had better geographical knowledge than other seafarers. By investigating the paper technologies that produced the ‘intelligent whaler’, this paper shows how Reynolds's translation of ‘whaling intelligence’ from news into facts marks the beginning of the intelligent whaler's long career in US-American debates about expansionism, exploration and science. (shrink)

The search for knowledge is a fact of any human society in the quest for development, as it is in the nature of human species to do so. This is geared towards humanisation of the society in the attainment of positive social change, which cannot be realised without adequate and informed knowledge from the culture of the people. This form of knowledge is seen from the identity of the people, focusing on the social change of their society. The creation of (...) a national consciousness is a crucial component of the society as it presupposes identity, seen as the heart of any culture that motivates the collective common goal of the people. This paper, using the analytic methodology in the philosophical discipline, therefore argues that the acceptance of cultural knowledge from the platform of its identity in the quest for development in Africa is a conditio sine qua non. (shrink)

This paper conducts a philosophical inquiry into past empirical research that reveals emotional coupling and category confusion between the human and the social robot. It examines whether emotional coupling and category confusion would increase or diminish the reification of human emotion and the human milieu by examining whether they fulfill the ideal of openness in technology. The important theories of openness, from the respective proposals of open industrial machines by Gérard-Joseph Christian and Karl Marx, to Umberto Eco’s critique of open (...) art and Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of open technology, are in agreement that openness is the condition for realizing the potentiality for transcending the existing aesthetic, technical, or social structure, and that the realization of potentiality would diminish the reification of the human milieu. The therapeutic effect of emotional coupling with social robots seems to fulfill this ideal of open technology, whereas category confusion seems to increase rather than diminish reification. If people confuse the robot with the human, they risk losing sight of the unpredictability of other human beings that is essential to human development. This paper concludes that it is possible to avoid category confusion by building social robots without giving them a human-like appearance. (shrink)

Hermeneutics originates in the mediation of meaningful utterances understood as arising from a suprahuman, divine domain. The religious origin of hermeneutics is centrally connected with the history of Christianity both in the Patristic period, ending with St. Augustine, and in the modern era of Reformation and Counter‐Reformation. Schleiermacher outlines a general theory of interpretation, while resisting any claims to special status of biblical hermeneutics. This chapter charts both facets of hermeneutics before ending with the relation of hermeneutics to the phenomenology (...) of the sacred. The masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, understood religion as a cultural phenomenon, and one which masks a deeper reality. The hermeneutics of religion continues to be a fundamental philosophical and theological concern. Hermeneutics and religious phenomena inform each other in the development of a hermeneutics of religion and an exploration of the religious origins of hermeneutics. (shrink)

In this paper, I spell out a new challenge for epistemic internalism that emerges out of the current debate on testimonial justification. Based on recent developments within this debate, one might argue as follows: Epistemic internalism can’t account for the justification of our testimony-based beliefs, because (1) we should conceive of testimonial justification along anti-reductionist lines and (2) anti-reductionism is incompatible with epistemic internalism. In response to this challenge, I show that, despite initial appearances, epistemic internalism and anti-reductionism are compatible (...) after all. Therefore, being an anti-reductionist with regard to testimonial justification doesn’t force one to reject epistemic internalism. In order to argue for this result, I will make use of resources provided by speech act theory. (shrink)

The Spirit and the Screen explores pertinent pneumatological issues that arise in film and asks how Christian convictions and experiences of the Spirit might shape the way one thinks about films and film-making.

How does one arrive at a life in politics and policy? What happens to one's ideals when confronted with the reality that the only way to get things done in Washington is compromise? Who are the men and women who help shape our national agenda, and what drives their work? Dispatches From the Eastern Front provides fascinating, intensely personal, yet universal answers to these central questions. Recounting four decades inside Washington politics, Gerald Felix Warburg brings remarkable candor to a (...) most unusual memoir. An idealistic California baby boomer transported to the intimidating world of Capitol Hill policymaking at a young age, Warburg finds himself working to reform nuclear energy, strategic arms control, and foreign policy. As his access and power grow, greater challenges loom: how to maintain principles while cutting deals, and how to balance public purpose with private interests. An eclectic career reveals the slow and often painful development of emotional intelligence for work at the highest reaches of the public arena. (shrink)

Following Professor Obiora Ike’s view and in particular Obiora 2012, 2013, 2017 (see reference below), the more students are exposed to ethics practice, the greater their propensity and capability to seek for ethical living. This important assumption is worth close statistical scrutiny as the author shows. Through empirical researches and the stratified sampling approach, 435 university students are randomly selected to illustrate this claim. The method used is the “Perceived Role of Ethics and Democracy Outcome Scale” (PREDOS) and a survey (...) questionnaire used to measure exposure to common good ethics among the respondents. Descriptive analysis – tables and analysis and covariance (ANCOVA), are aimed at facilitating the analysis of the data collected in the study. In tandem with the conclusions drawn from extant literature and works of Professor Obiora Ike, the findings, as the author see, show that exposure to common good ethics has a significant positive effect on students’ ethics practice and democracy outcomes. (shrink)

Why are human rights abuses of refugees at the EU’s geographical periphery tolerated by other EU states? This chapter uses the case of Hungary and Germany to explore how the former abolished the institution of asylum, shedding light on the human rights abuses of refugees, and why states such as the latter seem to condone such actions. It argues that core EU member states condone human rights abuses at the geographical periphery of the EU as long as they contribute to (...) keeping refugees from accessing their territory. If the ‘dirty work’ is being done by others, the moral self-portrait of a generous refugee-receiving state remains, on the surface, untarnished. The chapter aims at disenchanting this image. (shrink)

This book extends a theory of art that addresses the present era’s shift towards global pluralism. By focusing on extrinsic rather than intrinsic qualities of art, this book helps viewers evaluate art across cultural boundaries. Art can be universally classified by an evaluation of its guiding narrative, and can be understood and judged through hermeneutical methods. Since artists engage culture through various local, transnational, and emerging global narratives, it is difficult to decipher what standards are used for evaluation, and which (...) authoritative body evaluates the work. This book implements a narrative-hermeneutical approach to properly classify an artwork and establish its meaning and value. (shrink)

_Buchbesprechung von: Horn, Christoph/dos Santos, Robinson (Hg.), _Kant’s Theory of Value _(Kantstudien-Ergänzungshefte 219)_, _Berlin/Boston, Walter de Gruyter, 2022, 292 pp. ISBN 978-3-11-079598-1._.

The importance of education can never be under-played in any society as it is the most potent weapon left to man in order to transform, change and liberate himself and the society from the slavery of ignorance and backwardness. This is done in order to attain rapid development in all ramifications. The epistemic foundation for the establishment of higher institutions has been devoted to the production of knowledge and cultural reproduction through the ages. It should be known from the outset (...) that universities are moulded on the foundation and systemic structure of the Western ideologies. But there are salient barriers towards the pursuit of higher education in Africa, which are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. The thrust of this paper, then, will be to examine the challenges higher education has in Africa, which hinders its process of producing a body of knowledge that will elevate the human conditions and posit it for all-round development. Therefore, the methodology shall be purely analytic in nature. (shrink)

In the era of consumer distrust of corporations, transparency is becoming a must rather than an option. While prior research has explored why businesses should disclose their costs and how consumers may react to such cost transparency, it is still unclear how marketers can best communicate cost transparency. The present research offers a practical examination of how and when cost transparency is effective, specifically, by examining the moderating role of authentic and hubristic pride on the effectiveness of cost transparency. Across (...) two experimental studies, the effectiveness of cost transparency is leveraged using authentic pride, whereas hubristic pride decreases it. Further, we empirically demonstrate the mediating role of moral elevation. Overall, the results demonstrate that marketing messages that elicit authentic pride can increase the effectiveness of cost transparency. Hence, the current research highlights how marketers and brands can effectively combine specific emotional appeals with cost transparency to obtain favorable consumer evaluations. (shrink)

Neither the hype exemplified in some exaggerated claims about deep neural networks (DNNs), nor the gloom expressed by Bowers et al. do DNNs as models in vision science justice: DNNs rapidly evolve, and today's limitations are often tomorrow's successes. In addition, providing explanations as well as prediction and image-computability are model desiderata; one should not be favoured at the expense of the other.

Editions and translations were a major part of the work of French philosophers in the 19th century. They were not considered trivial tasks but philosophical works unto themselves. In this article, I show that to be considered as such, it is necessary to identify the reasons that would spark an author’s interest in the text he was publishing and the effects he expected from its publication in the philosophical field. I focus on the case of Blaise Pascal in the second (...) half of the 19th century. My goal is to underline that the matter of Pascal’s inclusion or exclusion from the philosophical “canon” led two philosophers, who were hostile to his thought, to publish Pascal’s Pensées: Ernest Havet and Léon Brunschvicg. Their aim was not to declare themselves “against” Pascal but rather to integrate their edition of his texts into their own philosophical projects. (shrink)

There is widespread intuition that historical injustices require reparations. This paper considers one philosophical problem for reparations: the Nonidentity Objection. The Objection states that present agents are not owed reparations for historical injustices because without the historical injustice they would not exist. I show the Objection only challenges the possibility of reparations for historical injustice if we adopt a particular model of reparative justice that takes someone experiencing harms to be a necessary condition for reparative justice. Instead, if we adopt (...) a different model of reparative justice based on relational wrongdoing, we can avoid the Objection. I defend my solution by considering the Nonidentity Objection in detail. I show that it challenges harm-based models of reparative justice regardless of the account of harm that the Objection uses. And I demonstrate that common objections to wrong-based solutions to the general nonidentity problem do not apply in the case of historical injustice. I conclude by sketching challenges my wrong-based model faces and argue that despite these challenges we ultimately have reason to prefer it over harm-based ones. (shrink)

Intelligent Love provides a beautifully written and carefully reconstructed history of autism in the United States, focusing on the period between the 1950s and 1980s. The virtue and strength of Vi...

Multiple studies revealed detrimental effects of face masks on communication, including reduced empathic accuracy and enhanced listening effort. Yet, extant research relied on artificial, decontextualised stimuli, which prevented assessing empathy under more ecologically valid conditions. In this preregistered online experiment (N = 272), we used film clips featuring targets reporting autobiographical events to address motivational mechanisms underlying face mask effects on cognitive (empathic accuracy) and emotional facets (emotional congruence, sympathy) of empathy. Surprisingly, targets whose faces were covered by a mask (...) (or a black bar) elicited the same level of empathy motives (affiliation, cognitive effort), and accordingly, the same level of cognitive and emotional empathy compared to targets with uncovered faces. We only found a negative direct effect of face coverings on sympathy. Additional analyses revealed that older (compared to young) adults showed higher empathy, but age did not moderate face mask effects. Our findings speak against strong negative face mask effects on empathy when using dynamic, context-rich stimuli, yet support motivational mechanisms of empathy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FÉLIX MaRTÍNEZ-?????? TOWARDS A FORMAL ONTOLOGY OF FICTIONAL WORLDS In this discussion ' I propose a few concepts for the description and classification of fictional "worlds." The variety of fictional systems of"reality" can be understood, I diink, as an aspect ofthe phenomenon of style in literary imagination.2 But styles of imagination or of vision, and die style of literary works, are more than simply kinds of fictional worlds. To (...) put in some perspective my attempt at classification of literary works according to their systems of reality, I will make first a few remarks on the notion of style. It is a well-known preliminary problem when speaking of style diat this word seems to have more than one meaning in ordinary usage. I think that some ofits current meanings are rich and important, and that literary knowledge would profit if we could reconstruct them in abstract and defined concepts, so that the notions involved were somewhat clarified. I doubt diat diis is possible with current conceptual tools. We can see what is meant, say, when we hear diat a certain person we know "has style"; and we certainly distinguish diis attribute from others such as elegance, good manners, character, taste, originality, mannerisms, or idiosyncracies. Thus, we occasionally perceive in personal behavior a phenomenon called style. A conceptual description or a satisfactory definition of such a given, however, seems very difficult. Speaking of matters of art and literature, "style" has been used, among other things, to designate both the conventional forms of traditional expression (as in "manuals of style") and the anomalous, convention-breaking forms of highly individuated creation (as in die classic conception of Vosslerian-Spitzerian Stylistics, or in Buffon's "Le style c'est l'homme même," as usually understood). Style, dien, as conformity and style as singularity and deviance; style as impersonal decorum and as presence of a unique personal essence in the work. This perplexing ambiguity may be reducible though. Whether conventional and common or personal and innovative, style appears to be a form that characterizes and holds together a creation or a phenomenal entity. Indeed, the fact that 182 Félix Martínez-Bonati183 singular innovations of style often become the common trait of a school or current and sometimes a part of general tradition seems to indicate that neither singularity nor general acceptance are the most basic elements of die notion of style. On first reflection, we may conceive of style as a formal principle that consistently determines the constitution of die pertinent objects. Nonetíieless, constitutive form is too weak a definition for style, since it would also apply to what is called "technique" and even to genre. We must look for a more specific determination. There is anodier ambiguity in everyday uses of die word "style" diat deserves attention. We speak often of "good style" and "bad style." But sometimes we speak as if no style is bad and the thing that matters is to have style at all and as much of it as possible. Thus, we condemn a work because of its having no style or only a weak one. This contradiction probably derives from the confusion of a particular normative, a general normative, and a merely descriptive notion of style. We should keep, if possible, to a merely descriptive notion. Still another uncertainty of usage, in literary matters, relates to the (not universally accepted) restriction of the notion of style to a linguistic one; style, in this restricted usage, is seen as primarily an attribute of diction. The most numerous of literary studies of die style of singular works have been, so far as I can see, descriptions of idiolects. In many cases, the linguistic peculiarity is taken as an index of the world-view or die style of imagination diat is supposed to have produced the work. Alternative to this approach, indeed complementary, is the study of literary style as an attribute of die fictional entities to which literary discourse refers. We find the latter kind of approach mostly in characterizations of genres or of periods ("the naturalist novel," "romance," "classicism," etc.). One may suppose that an exhaustive analysis of the idiolect of a work... (shrink)