BackgroundThe literature shows the negative psychological impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak on frontline healthcare workers. However, few are known about the mental health of physicians and nurses working in general hospitals during the outbreak, caring for patients with COVID-19 or not.ObjectivesThis survey assessed differences in mental health in physicians and nurses working in COVID-19 or non-COVID-19 medical care units.DesignA cross-sectional mixed-mode survey was used to assess burnout, insomnia, depression, anxiety, and stress.SettingA total of 1,244 physicians and nurses from (...) five general hospitals in Belgium, working in COVID-19 care units, non-COVID-19 care units, or both were informed of the study.ParticipantsSix hundred forty-seven healthcare workers participated in the survey.MeasurementsValidated instruments were used to assess the outcomes: the PFI, the ISI, and the DASS-21.ResultsResults showed high prevalence of burnout, insomnia, depression, and anxiety among participants. After adjusting for confounders, multivariate analysis of variance showed no differences between CCU, NCCU, and CCU + NCCU workers. Univariate general linear models showed higher level of burnout, insomnia, and anxiety among nurses in comparison to physicians. Being a nurse, young, isolated, with an increased workload were risk factors for worse mental health outcomes.LimitationsThe mental health of the tested sample, before the outbreak, is unknown. Moreover, this cross-sectional design provides no information on the evolution of the mental health outcomes over time.ConclusionDirectly caring for patients with COVID-19 is not associated with worse mental health outcomes among healthcare workers in general hospitals. High prevalence of burnout, insomnia, depression, and anxiety among physicians and nurses requires special attention, and specific interventions need to be implemented.Protocol RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NCT04344145. (shrink)

A classic source for understanding the connections between information theory and physics, this text was written by one of the giants of 20th-century physics and is appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Topics include the principles of coding, coding problems and solutions, the analysis of signals, a summary of thermodynamics, thermal agitation and Brownian motion, and thermal noise in an electric circuit. A discussion of the negentropy principle of information introduces the author's renowned examination of Maxwell's demon. Concluding chapters (...) explore the associations between information theory, the uncertainty principle, and physical limits of observation, in addition to problems related to computing, organizing information, and inevitable errors. 1962 ed. 81 figures. 14 tables. (shrink)

Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 1 kapitel eller op til 5% af teksten.

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most original philosophers in the twentieth century. In this book, continuing his thought on obligation, he investigates the possibility that the word God can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. The thirteen essays collected in this volume offer an introduction to the wide range of Levinas's thought, addresses philosophical questions concerning politics, language and religion and the philosophies of, amongst others, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Marx and Derrida. The (...) essays also touch on the Marxist concept of ideology, death, hermeneutics, the concept of evil, the philosophy of dialogue, the relation of language to the Other, and the acts of communication and mutual understanding. Nine of the essays appear in English for the first time. (shrink)

Analyse dans la perspective phénoménologique de l'essence comme expression de "l'être" différent de l'"étant". Substitution, dans la subjectivité, de soi à autrui.

Contemporary philosophers are increasingly turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas to bring a consideration of ethics into their own thinking. As an exponent of the phenomenological tradition, Levinas ranks with Heidegger and Sartre; as a disciple of Husserl, he was one of the most independent and original interpreters, testifying to the fruitfulness of Husserl's phenomenology. In collecting almost all of Levinas's articles on Husserlian phenomenology, this volume gathers together a wealth of thoughtful exposition and interpretation by one of the (...) most important European philosophers of the twentieth century. Levinas's thought is relevant to a broad variety of disciplines and concerns. This volume serves as a reliable introduction for the beginning student, as well as satisfying the expert's more demanding and critical desire for insight into the complexities of Levinas's thought. (shrink)

According to a historical claim oft-repeated by contemporary epistemologists, the ‘traditional’ conception of knowledge prevailed in Western philosophy prior to the publication in 1963 of Edmund’s Gettier’s famous three-page article ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’. On this conception, knowledge consists of justified true belief. In this article, I critically consider evidence for and against this historical claim, and conclude with a puzzle concerning its widespread acceptance.

The 'nations' of the title are the 'seventy nations': in the Talmudic idiom, the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes five Talmudic readings from between 1981 and 1986, essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion with Francoise Armengaud which raises questions of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This (...) work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.". (shrink)

Can we rely on the altruism of professionals or the public service ethos to deliver good quality health and education services? How should patients, parents and pupils behave - as grateful recipients or active consumers? The book provides new answers to these questions, and evaluates recent government policies in health services, education, social security and taxation, and puts forward proposals for policy reform: universal capital or 'demogrants', discriminating vouchers, matching grants for pensions and for long-term care and hypothecated taxes.

Physics not only describes past, present, and future events but also accounts for unrealized possibilities. These possibilities are represented through the solution spaces given by theories. These spaces are typically classified into two categories: kinematical and dynamical. The distinction raises important questions about the nature of physical possibility. How should we interpret the difference between kinematical and dynamical models? Do dynamical solutions represent genuine possibilities in the physical world? Should kinematical possibilities be viewed as mere logical or linguistic constructs, devoid (...) of a deeper connection to the structure of physical reality? This chapter addresses these questions by analyzing some of the most significant theories in physics: classical mechanics, general relativity and quantum mechanics, with a final mention to quantum gravity. We argue that only dynamical models correspond to genuine physical possibilities. (shrink)

Over the last decade, businesses, policymakers, and researchers alike have advocated the need for value creation through inter-organizational collaboration. Researchers have widely argued that organizations that are engaged in collaborative processes create value. Because researchers have tended to focus on the identification of organizational motivations and on key success factors for collaboration, however, both the nature and processes of value creation in inter-organizational collaboration have yet to be examined. A recent theory by Austin and Seitanidi :726–758, 2012a; Nonprofit Volunt Sect (...) Q 41:929–968, 2012b) has proposed an analytical framework for analyzing value creation in inter-organizational collaboration, based on four types of value. The purpose of this current study is to empirically test this framework, and to provide key pointers for analyzing the nature of value, particularly in relation to learning. Our detailed empirical research is based on a 6-year retrospective case study of an inter-organizational partnership within an international development project for local economic development in Guatemala. The study’s contributions are twofold. First, it provides evidence of the critical path of the creation of diverse types of values in a collaborative process; second, it links the different types of value creation with the types of learning that occur in an inter-organizational process. (shrink)

Suppose that knowledge and ignorance are complements in the sense of being mutually exclusive: for person S and fact p, either S knows that p or is ignorant that p. Understood in this way, ignorance amounts to a lack or absence of knowledge: S is ignorant that p if and only if it is not the case that S knows that p. Let us call the thesis that knowledge and ignorance are opposites the “Complement Thesis”. In this article, I discuss (...) its deployment in an ingenious new argument advanced by Alvin Goldman and Erik Olsson (2009) which, if sound, establishes that there is a kind of knowledge that amounts to nothing more than true belief. I rebut their argument and in doing so delineate some important epistemological lessons brought to light by the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. (shrink)

Since the demise of the Sense-Datum independent objects or events to be objects Theory and Phenomenalism in the last cenof perception; however, unlike Direct Retury, Direct Realism in the philosophy of alists, Indirect Realists take this percepperception has enjoyed a resurgence of tion to be indirect by involving a prior popularity.1 Curiously, however, although awareness of some tertium quid between there have been attempts in the literature the mind and external objects or events.3 to refute some of the arguments against (...) Idealists and Phenomenalists agree with Direct Realism, there has been, as of yet, the Indirect Realists. (shrink)

First published in 1935, On Escape represents Emmanuel Levinas’s first attempt to break with the ontological obsession of the Western tradition. In it, Levinas not only affirms the necessity of an escape from being, but also gives a meaning and a direction to it. Beginning with an analysis of need not as lack or some external limit to a self-sufficient being, but as a positive relation to our being, Levinas moves through a series of brilliant phenomenological analyses of such phenomena (...) as pleasure, shame, and nausea in order to show a fundamental insufficiency in the human condition. In his critical introduction and annotation, Jacques Rolland places On Escape in its historical and intellectual context, and also within the context of Levinas’s entire oeuvre, explaining Levinas’s complicated relation to Heidegger, and underscoring the way Levinas’s analysis of “being riveted,” of the need for escape, is a meditation on the body. (shrink)

Crispin Sartwell ingeniously defends the provocative thesis that mere true belief suffices for knowledge. In doing so, he challenges one of the most deeply entrenched epistemological tenets, namely that knowledge must be more than mere true belief. Particularly interesting is the way he defends his thesis by appealing to considerations adduced by such prominent epistemologists as William Alston, Laurence BonJour, Alvin Goldman and Paul Moser, each of whom denies that knowledge is merely true belief. In this paper, I argue that (...) the case Sartwell presents for his thesis fails. However, by examining why it fails, we may derive at least four important epistemological lessons: being justified does not entail being able to give a justification; we should distinguish between epistemic justification conceived of as intrinsically conducive to truth and conceived of as extrinsically conducive to truth; we should distinguish between epistemic justification conceived of as an essential criterion of knowledge and conceived of as an accidental criterion of knowledge ; and epistemologists need to specify how the telos of inquiry involves more than the acquisition of true beliefs.Socrates: Then tell me: what definition can we give with the least risk of contradicting ourselves? (shrink)

I articulate and defend a conception of skepticism inspired by Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. On it, skepticism is vicious when deficient and when excessive. Virtuous skepticism lies as a mean between these two extremes.

After reviewing the literature on current knowledge about consciousness in humans, we present a state-of-the art discussion on consciousness and related key concepts in animals. Obviously much fewer publications are available on non-human species than on humans, most of them relating to laboratory or wild animal species, and only few to livestock species. Human consciousness is by definition subjective and private. Animal consciousness is usually assessed through behavioural performance. Behaviour involves a wide array of cognitive processes that have to be (...) assessed separately using specific experimental protocols. Accordingly, several processes indicative of the presence of consciousness are discussed: perception and cognition, awareness of the bodily-self, self-related knowledge of the environment (including social environment). When available, specific examples are given in livestock species. Next, we review the existing evidence regarding neuronal correlates of consciousness, and emphasize the difficulty of linking aspects of consciousness to specific neural structures across the phyla because high-level cognitive abilities may have evolved independently along evolution. Several mammalian brain structures (cortex and midbrain) are involved in the manifestations of consciousness, while the equivalent functional structures for birds and fishes would likely be the pallium/tectum and midbrain. Caution is required before excluding consciousness in species not having the same brain structures as the mammalian ones as different neural architectures may mediate comparable processes. Finally, specific neurophysiological mechanisms appear to be strongly linked to the emergence of consciousness, namely neural synchrony and neural feedback. Considering the limited amount of data available and the few animal species studied so far, we conclude that different manifestations of consciousness can be observed in animals but that further refinement is still needed to characterize their level and content in each species. Further research is required to clarify these issues, especially in livestock species. (shrink)

Genre has been a critical issue in discourse analysis as well as in other disciplines. Based on a literature review of the concept of genre and taking judgments as one type of genre in legal settings, the present study provides a corpus-based insight into the nature of genre. The literature review per se reveals that genre has one typical feature of a sign, that is, being subject to multiple and alternative interpretations; in other words, genre as a sign may have (...) various interpretants. The present study unravels the actual generic structures, distinguishes different types of generic structures within the given genre, and then defines the dominant generic structure of judgments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. This study also examines and contrasts the generic structure potential of judgments in each jurisdiction. In addition, the variation of Mainland China's judgments over time is briefly discussed. Comparing the generic structures of judgments among the three jurisdictions, as well as the structures of judgments in Mainland China over time, the paper argues that genre also has the essential features of a sign, that is, the characteristics of temporality and spatiality. (shrink)

According to the Ignorance Factivity Thesis, for every proposition p, one is ignorant of p only if p is a truth. By contrast, according to the Ignorance Non-Factivity Thesis, it is false that, for every proposition p, one is ignorant of p only if p is a truth. I argue that, on balance, the case for the latter thesis is stronger than the case for the former.

Fatalistic arguments have a long history. Fatalism invites people to look at their metaphysical ideas about time itself, and asks whether there is anything in those ideas that represents a threat to human freedom. The chapter begins by taking a look at the traditional fatalistic argument, and seeing where it fails. It then analyzes recent answers to two questions: Is the future real? Does time really pass? It explores how, together, they constitute a dilemma. The chapter then discusses fallacies of (...) fatalism, and passage and permanence in detail. Finally, it ends by canvassing some possible defenses of metaphysical freedom. If the direction of time is defined by the direction of causation, we can continue to say that when a cause occurs its effect is still indeterminate, and the cause is what it is that subsequently makes the effect determinate. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 209 Seiten: 1-3.

The phenomenon of knowledge withholding is a vital issue that undermines knowledge sharing and innovation, hinders the development of offline and online organizations. Clarifying the relationship between influencing factors and knowledge withholding is significant to improve the phenomenon of knowledge withholding in offline and online organizations. Few types of research focus on the online virtual academic community and integrate the three factors of knowledge, individual, and environment to research knowledge withholding. To solve the limitation, this research is based on sociology (...) and psychology-related theories. The two dimensions of enabling and inhibition are divided into factors affecting knowledge withholding. An attempt is made to explore the path between the three types of factors influencing knowledge, individual and environment, and knowledge withholding. This study collected data from 616 users in China’s virtual academic community. It used a structural equation model combined with a cross-layer connected neural network to conduct an empirical analysis on the proposed hypothesis. The results found that: in the virtual academic community, knowledge power in the enabling dimension is the main reason for users to form knowledge psychological ownership, which affects users’ knowledge withholding. However, the effect of professional commitment on users’ knowledge psychological ownership is not significant. After SEM-ANN model fitting, the combined inhibitory effect of community privacy protection and community reciprocity on user knowledge withholding in the inhibition dimension is significantly improved. This research has a specific guiding significance for enhancing the knowledge withholding phenomenon of the virtual academic community and creating an excellent academic exchange atmosphere. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to critically build on Justin Biddle and Anna Leuschner’s characterization of epistemologically detrimental dissent in the context of science. We argue that the presence of nonepistemic agendas and severe nonepistemic consequences offers neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for EDD to obtain. We clarify their role by arguing that they are contingent enabling factors, not stable difference-makers, in the production of EDD. We maintain that two stable difference-makers are core to the production of EDD: production (...) of skewed science and effective public dissemination. (shrink)

The social environment influences what information individuals sample: people are often exposed to alternatives that are popular. This can systematically change an individual's evaluation of an alternative if she had previously been avoiding it due to a negative evaluation. The authors show that social exposure can have positive or negative effects on evaluation, depending on how popularity and prior evaluations interact. This theory was supported by a large‐scale analysis of data from a hotel chain.

‘A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.’ This was how Jean-Paul Sartre characterized himself at the end of his autobiographical study, Words. And Bernard-Henri Lévy shows how Sartre cannot be understood without taking into account his relations with the intellectual forebears and contemporaries, the lovers and friends, with whom he conducted a lifelong debate. His thinking was essentially a tumultuous dialogue with his whole age and himself. He learned from (...) Gide the art of freedom, and how to experiment with inherited fictional forms. He was a fellow-traveller of communism, and yet his relations with the Party were deeply ambiguous. He was fascinated by Freud but trenchantly critical of psychoanalysis. Beneath Sartre’s complex and ever-mutating political commitments, Lévy detects a polarity between anarchic individualism on the one hand, and a longing for absolute community that brought him close to totalitarianism on the other. Lévy depicts Sartre as a man who could succumb to the twentieth century’s catastrophic attraction to violence and the false messianism of its total political solutions, while also being one of the fiercest critics of its illusions and shortcomings. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of automatically extracting legal indices which express the important contents of legal documents. Legal indices are not limited to single-word keywords and compound-word keywords, they are also clause keywords. We approach index extraction using structural information of Japanese sentences, i.e. chunks and clauses. Based on the assumption that legal indices are composed of important tokens from the documents, extracting legal indices is treated as a problem of collecting chunks and clauses that contain as many important (...) tokens as possible. Each token is assigned a weight which is a statistical score, e.g. TF–IDF and Okapi BM25, to indicate its importance. The importance of a chunk or clause is determined based on the average weight of tokens included in that chunk or clause. Then, highly weighted chunks and clauses are recognized as the indices for legal documents. The experimental results on Japanese National Pension Act data show that our proposed method achieves better performance than TextRank, the most popular unsupervised method in extracting single-word and compound-word keywords. In addition, this approach is also applicable to extract clause keywords with high performance. (shrink)

The empty set of course contains no computable point. On the other hand, surprising results due to Zaslavskiĭ, Tseĭtin, Kreisel, and Lacombe have asserted the existence of non-empty co-r. e. closed sets devoid of computable points: sets which are even “large” in the sense of positive Lebesgue measure.This leads us to investigate for various classes of computable real subsets whether they always contain a computable point.

This paper argues that economic rationality and ethical behavior cannot be reduced one to the other, thus casting doubt on the validity of assertions such as ‘profit is ethical’ or ‘ethics pays’. In order to express ethical dilemmas in a way which opposes economic interest with ethical concerns, we propose a model of rational behavior that combines these two irreducible dimensions in an open but not arbitrary manner. Behaviors that are neither ethical nor profitable are considered irrational . However, behaviors (...) that are profitable but unethical, and behaviors that are ethical but not profitable, are all treated as rational . Combining ethical concerns with economic interest, ethical business is in turn seen as an optimal form of rationality between venality and sacrifice. Because everyone prefers to communicate that they act ethically, ethical business remains ambiguous until some economic interest is actually sacrificed. We argue, however, that ethical business has an interest in demonstrating its consistency between communication and behavior by a transparent attitude. On the other hand, venal behaviors must remain confidential to hide the corresponding lack of consistency. This discursive approach based on transparency and confidentiality helps to further distinguish between ethical and unethical business behaviors. (shrink)

Defamation law is a long-standing research focus. Previous studies on defamation law have pointed out the importance of balancing two fundamental issues in law, namely, protection of reputation and freedom of speech. The present corpus-based legal study, using ConcGram 1.0 as the analytical tool, examined the phraseological profile of reported cases on defamation in Hong Kong in order to find out the types of defense and the approach to meaning in the defamation case law in Hong Kong. Regarding defenses to (...) a defamation claim, the results show that fair comment, qualified privilege, and justification are the most prevalent types, that unintentional defamation is not used at all, and that there has been a noticeable shift from fair comment to honest comment. As for the approach to meaning, the ordinary and natural approach is found to be a pivotal means of solving the threshold problem in defamation cases, that is, whether the words involved are defamatory or not. (shrink)

The demise of the value-free ideal constitutes a threat to public trust in science. One proposal is that whenever making value judgments, scientists rely only on democratic values. Since the influence of democratic values on scientific claims and recommendations is legitimate, public trust in science is warranted. I challenge this proposal. Appealing to democratic values will not suffice to secure trust because of at least two obstacles: polarization and marginalization.

From the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that the practices of naming the disease, its nature and its handling by the health authorities, the news media and the politicians had social and ideological implications. This article presents a sociosemiotic study of such practices as reflected in a corpus of headlines of eight newspapers of four countries in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis. After an analysis of the institutional naming choices of the World Health Organization (...) and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, the study focuses on the changes in newspapers’ naming patterns following the WHO’s announcement of the disease name on 11 February 2020. A subsequent political controversy related to naming in the United States is then examined in reports of The New York Times and The Washington Post as a further illustration of how public discourses and perceptions can rapidly evolve in the context of health crises. (shrink)

A hitherto unexamined problem for the ‘‘Kantian ideal’’ that one should always treat patients as ends in themselves, and never only as a means to other ends, is explored in this paper. The problem consists of a prima facie conflict between this Kantian ideal and the reality of medical practice. This conflict arises because, at least presently, medical practitioners can only acquire certain skills and abilities by practising on live, human patients, and given the inevitability and ubiquity of learning curves, (...) this learning requires some patients to be treated only as a means to this end. A number of ways of attempting to establish the compatibility of the Kantian Ideal with the reality of medical practice are considered. Each attempt is found to be unsuccessful. Accordingly, until a way is found to reconcile them, we conclude that the Kantian ideal is inconsistent with the reality of medical practice. (shrink)