Research documents that many chronic non-malignant pain patients experience existential, spiritual and religious needs; however, research knowledge is missing on if and how physicians approach these needs. We conducted a systematic review to explore the extent to which physicians address these needs in their communication with chronic non-malignant pain patients and to explore the facilitators and challenges of this communication. We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, searching Embase, Medline, Scopus and PsycINFO. The quality (...) of the included articles was assessed based on design-specific screening tools. We included four of 2337 screened articles and found the quality to be good. Physicians’ communication about existential, spiritual and religious needs was given low priority and depended on the patients’ own initiative, except when clinicians were interested in holistic care. Patient dissatisfaction with the physician’s attention to these needs was related to higher pain and depression. Physicians’ challenges for addressing these needs were their tendency to prioritize physiological aspects and close further elaboration of existential needs when addressed by the patients. The main facilitator was the individual physician’s willingness to listen with openness and empathy to the patients’ existential concerns. A tentative conclusion is that physicians rarely meet the existential, spiritual and religious needs of their chronic non-malignant pain patients. This might be due to higher priority of physical aspects, lack of time and a lack of knowledge about the importance of and training in the ability to address these needs. Further research is needed on physicians’ communication about existential, spiritual and religious needs and on their training in here. (shrink)

Bodily movement has a deeper meaning than modern sport science might recognize. It can have religious undertones, and in modern societies, it is sometimes related to the building of national identity. In the study, two cases of bodily practice are compared. Norwegian ski has a relation to friluftsliv (outdoor activities) and is highly significant for modern Norwegian identity. Indian yoga is related to the traditional ayurveda medicine and to Hindu spirituality, and obtained an important place in the process of anti-colonial (...) nationalism. The aim is to demonstrate how Norwegian skiing and Indian yoga as national body and movement cultures in different ways, show a complex connection between ‘ancient roots’ and modern transformations of cultural identity. Gliding on skis, sitting, and breathing in yoga make up the basis on which people have built identities of their collective ‘we’. (shrink)

Affect misattribution occurs when affective cues color subsequent unrelated evaluations. Research suggests that affect misattribution decreases when one is aware that affective cues are unrelated to the evaluation at hand. We propose that affect misattribution may even occur when one is aware that affective cues are irrelevant, as long as the source of these cues seems ambiguous. When source ambiguity exists, affective cues may freely influence upcoming unrelated evaluations. We examined this using an adapted affect misattribution procedure where pleasant and (...) unpleasant responses served as affective cues that could influence later evaluations of unrelated targets. These affective cues were either perceived as reflecting a single source , or as reflecting two sources suggesting source ambiguity. Results show that misattribution of affect decreased when participants perceived affective cues as representing one source rather than two. (shrink)

We are grateful to Friesen and colleagues for drawing attention to the tension between the protection of populations that may experience vulnerability with their inclusion in research (Friesen et a...

This study examines urban agriculture (UA) in Sacramento, California (USA), the nation's self-branded “Farm-to-Fork Capital,” in order to highlight UA’s distinct yet entangled roots. The study is based on 24 interviews with a diverse array of UA leaders, conducted as part of a five-year transdisciplinary study of UA in Sacramento. In it, we unearth three primary “taproots” of UA projects, each with its own historical legacies, normative visions, and racial dynamics. In particular, we examine UA projects with “justice taproots,” “health (...) taproots,” and “market taproots.” We use this analysis to understand how different kinds of UA projects are embedded in racial capitalism in ways that transform relationships between people, the city, and food systems. Unearthing these entangled roots helps illuminate UA’s underlying politics, showing how these roots grow in both competitive and symbiotic ways within the soil matrix of racial capitalism. We argue that these roots interact differently with racial capitalism, creating disparities in their growth trajectories. In particular, UA projects associated with the justice taproot are historically underrepresented and undervalued. However, we argue that there are some prospects for building alliances between the UA movement’s three roots, and that these are both promising and problematic. (shrink)

Several studies describe intersectoral collaboration in Western healthcare as hampered by lack of coordination of care and treatment and incoherent patient pathways. We performed an ethnographic study following elderly patients from admission to an emergency unit (EMU) to discharge and further treatment and care at other facilities in the healthcare system. The aim was to explore how health professionals work together across sectors in the Danish healthcare system and how they create patient pathways for elderly patients (+65) with multiple chronic (...) illnesses. Intersectoral collaboration was identified as distant relations between large numbers of health professionals, where communication was conveyed by electronic health record (EHR) formats which promoted information delivery that focused on patients’ immediate symptoms. Other significant ‘mediators’ of communication were the telephone that seemed to resemble face‐to‐face communication and the patient who delivered information from one professional to another. We suggest that the communication among professionals at various facilities interacts with the format and functionalities of the EHRs, which typically fall short in delivery of information across sectors, because the often complex needs of patients with multimorbidity do not fit in with the available functionalities of the EHR. (shrink)

Understanding spoken words involves a rapid mapping from speech to conceptual representations. One distributed feature-based conceptual account assumes that the statistical characteristics of concepts’ features—the number of concepts they occur in and likelihood of co-occurrence —determine conceptual activation. To test these claims, we investigated the role of distinctiveness/sharedness and correlational strength in speech-to-meaning mapping, using a lexical decision task and computational simulations. Responses were faster for concepts with higher sharedness, suggesting that shared features are facilitatory in tasks like lexical decision (...) that require access to them. Correlational strength facilitated responses for slower participants, suggesting a time-sensitive co-occurrence-driven settling mechanism. The computational simulation showed similar effects, with early effects of shared features and later effects of correlational strength. These results support a general-to-specific account of conceptual processing, whereby early activation of shared features is followed by the gradual emergence of a specific target representation. (shrink)

One of Israel Kirzner’s less wellknown contributions is to the theory of capital. In this paper, we link the Austrian theory of capital and the theory of economic organization. Our starting point is the key Austrian notion of capital heterogeneity which we interpret in terms of attributes. Most capital assets are multi-attribute in nature, and many attributes may not be known to entrepreneurs. This fosters a need for experimenting with capital combinations. Because there are costs of measuring attributes, this process (...) has implications for economic organization. Thus, we argue that novel implications for the understanding of ownership and the existence and boundaries of firms may be teased out of such a perspective.La théorie du capital représente une des contributions les moins connues d’Israel Kirzner. Dans cet article, nous établissons le lien entre la théorie autrichienne du capital et la théorie de l’organisation économique. Notre point de départ est la notion autrichienne fondamentale d’hétérogénéité du capital que nous interprétons en termes d’attributs. De par leur nature, la plupart des biens capitaux possèdent plusieurs attributs qui peuvent demeurer inconnus aux entrepreneurs. Ceci accroît la nécessité d’expérimenter des combinaisons capitalistiques. Etant donné les coûts qu’entraîne la mesure des attributs, ce processus a des implications quant à l’organisation économique. Ainsi, cette perspective permet de tirer de nouvelles implications pour notre compréhension de la propriété, de l’existence et de la taille des firmes. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that an array of religious beliefs can be used to enforce socially normative behaviour, but the application of these theories to other supernatural beliefs, including witchcraft, is still nascent. Across two pre-registered studies in Mauritius, we examine how witchcraft is believed to be caused by envy and how this belief can create and enforce social norms around not causing envy. Data was collected in-person in Mauritius. In study 1 (N = 445), we found that both practicing (...) witchcraft and being motivated by envy or self-interest increase perceptions of harm. These motivations also increase the rate with which people suggest a person was doing witchcraft, with envy having the stronger effect. Belief that someone was doing witchcraft increases the negativity with which one views that person and damages their reputation. In study 2 (N = 292), we found that when a person breaks a norm around causing envy, participants believe that a subsequent misfortune is cause by witchcraft, but not by God. When someone acts selfishly towards others a subsequent misfortune is believed to be caused by God but not witchcraft. This suggests that witchcraft beliefs, but not religious ones, are enforcing norms around preventing envy. Together, these studies suggest that witchcraft beliefs can support locally specific social norms, and that these norms might be different than those supported by religion. (shrink)

Fünfzehn Jahre nach ihrer Entstehung ist die Neuroethik ein internationales wissenschaftliches Feld mit enormer Dynamik. Innerhalb weniger Jahre wurden eigene Kongresse, Zeitschriften, Forschungsförderprogramme, Fachgesellschaften und Institute gegründet. Gleichwohl besteht erheblicher Dissens über die Definition und den Gegenstandsbereich dieses neuen Gebiets. Wir argumentieren hier für eine differenzierte Konzeption, wonach neben der Reflexion ethischer Probleme der Neurowissenschaft und ihrer überwiegend neurotechnologischen Anwendungen auch die ethische Reflexion neurowissenschaftlicher Forschung zur Moralität zur Neuroethik gehört. Dies umfasst zwar nicht neurowissenschaftliche oder neuropsychologische Studien zur Moralität, (...) wohl aber die Reflexion der Bedeutung dieser Forschung für die Ethik und das Recht. Wir geben einen Überblick über die wichtigsten Themen der Neuroethik, woraus deutlich wird, wie sehr in verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen, auch jenseits von Medizin und Gesundheitswesen, neuroethische Fragen relevant sind. Das Potenzial der Neuroethik als eines neuen Wissenschaftsfeldes liegt darin, durch eine Verknüpfung neurophilosophischer und medizinethischer Themen sowie eine breite interdisziplinäre Vernetzung neue Antworten auf gesellschaftlich drängende Fragen zu finden. (shrink)

Nowadays, it is common that newly built hospitals are designed with single‐room accommodation, unlike in the past, where shared accommodation was the favoured standard. Despite this change in hospital design, very little is known about how single‐room accommodation affects nurses' work environment and nursing care. This study evaluates how the single‐room design affects nurses and nursing care in the single‐room hospital design. Nurses working in the single‐room design predominantly work alone with little opportunity for peer training, interaction and reflection. In (...) addition, the single‐room design affects the nurses' work environment due to changes in sensory stimulation and increased walking distances. Furthermore, a change in the discourse, namely, regarding the single room as the patient's home, makes the nurses react to queries, demands and tasks in a new way. Overall, the new hospital design forces the nurses into a more reactive role and affect their way of providing nursing care. Despite this, the nurses find single‐room accommodation beneficial for the patients and their nursing care. (shrink)

How many words is a bilingual 2-year-old supposed to know or say in each of her languages? Speech and language therapists or researchers lack the tools to answer this question, because several factors have an impact on bilingual language skills: gender, amount of exposure, mode of acquisition, socio-economic status and the distance between L1 and L2. Unfortunately, these factors are usually studied separately, making it difficult to evaluate their weight on a unique measure of vocabulary. The present study measures the (...) contribution of the following factors to the vocabulary scores of bilingual toddlers: i) gender; ii) sibling ranking; iii) relative amount of exposure to each language; iv) mode of exposure; v) SES; vi) linguistic distance; vii) language spoken between parents. Close to the child’s second birthday, parents of 278 UK-based bilinguals completed successively: a 100-word version of the Oxford-CDI, the CDI in the child’s Additional Language, a family questionnaire, and the Language Exposure Questionnaire. Thirty-six British-English-AL pairs were considered, with languages contrasted on a second-language-learning scale : for example, Dutch and French are close to British-English, while Polish or Cantonese are more distant. Data from the corpus were included in two mixed-effect models, one with the English scores in comprehension as the dependent variable, and the other with production scores. The seven factors listed above were included as predictors. The amount of English exposure was the strongest predictor of comprehension scores = 9.35, p <.005, β = 0.02, t = 3.08, p <.005), followed by the language that parents speak between themselves = 14.94, p <.001, β = 1.37, t = 3.76, p <.0005), linguistic distance = 6.92, p <.01, β = -0.74, t = -2.66, p <.01) and age = 4.86, p <.05, β = 0.55, t = 2.17, p <.05). In production, gender = 13.57, p <.0005, β = -0.91, t = -03.72, p <.0005), amount of exposure to English = 13.57, p <.0005, β = -0.91, t = -03.72, p <.0005), the language that parents speak between themselves = 11.85, p <.005, β = 1.09, t = 3.41, p <.001), and the mother’s occupation = 4.51, p <.05, β = 0.63, t = 2.13, p <.05) were the significant predictors. The more English parents use to address one another, the more English words the child says and understands. This surprising result could be simply explained by the fact that parents who speak English together are also more likely to speak English to their child. The main results of this study is that linguistic distance is a powerful predictor of toddlers’ vocabulary in English, with children learning two close languages growing their vocabulary faster than those learning distant languages. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Technology, Megatrends and Work. Of all the profound changes in business, technology is perhaps the most ubiquitous. There is not a facet of our lives unaffected by internet technologies and artificial intelligence. The Journal (...) of Business Ethics established a dedicated section that focuses on Technology and Business Ethics, yet issues related to this phenomenon run right through all the sections. Kirsten Martin, editor of the Technology and Business Ethics section, joins our interim social media editor, Hannah Trittin-UIbrich, to advance a human-centric approach to the development and application of digital technologies that places Business Ethics at centre of the analysis. For Shuili Du, technology is the defining condition for a new era of Corporate Social Responsibility—CSR 3.0—which she defines as “a company’s socially responsible strategies and practices that deal with key ethical and socio-technical issues associated with AI and related technologies on the one hand and leverage the power of AI and related technologies to tackle social and environmental problems on the other hand.” It is not just technologies that are a determining feature of our lives but technology companies, an argument made by Glen Whelan as he examines Big Business and the need for a Big Business Ethics as we try to understand the impact of Big Tech on our post-work world. Indeed, as noted by Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, megatrends in addition to advancement in technologies, namely globalization, the greening of economies, and changes in demographics and migration, are shaping the future for workers in ways previously unimaginable. Contributing to this important debate, Praveen Parboteeah considers the influence of another longstanding but oft overlooked megatrend, the role of religion in the workplace. Given the enormity of the influence of technology and other megatrends in our world, it is not surprising that this essay introduces ground-breaking ideas that speak to the future of business ethics research. (shrink)

Written by a select international group of leading privacy scholars, Social Dimensions of Privacy endorses and develops an innovative approach to privacy. By debating topical privacy cases in their specific research areas, the contributors explore the new privacy-sensitive areas: legal scholars and political theorists discuss the European and American approaches to privacy regulation; sociologists explore new forms of surveillance and privacy on social network sites; and philosophers revisit feminist critiques of privacy, discuss markets in personal data, issues of privacy in (...) health care and democratic politics. The broad interdisciplinary character of the volume will be of interest to readers from a variety of scientific disciplines who are concerned with privacy and data protection issues. (shrink)

In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness.

This new book by Beate Rossler is a work of real quality and originality on an extremely topical issue: the issue of privacy and the relations between the private and the public. Rossler investigates the reasons why we value privacy and why we ought to value it. In the context of modern, liberal societies, Rossler develops a theory of the private which links privacy and autonomy in a constitutive way: privacy is a necessary condition to lead an autonomous life. The (...) book develops a theory of freedom and autonomy which sees the ability to pose the "practical question" of how one wants to live, of what a person strives to be, at the centre of the modern idea of autonomy. The question of privacy is emerging as an increasingly important topic in social and political theory and is central to many current debates in law, the media and politics. The Value of Privacy will be widely recognised to be a classic contribution to the subject. (shrink)

This article joins in and extends the contemporary debate on the right to privacy. We bring together two strands of the contemporary discourse on privacy. While we endorse the prevailing claim that norms of informational privacy protect the autonomy of individual subjects, we supplement it with an argument demonstrating that privacy is an integral element of the dynamics of all social relationships. This latter claim is developed in terms of the social role theory and substantiated by an analysis of the (...) role of privacy in intimate relationships, in professional relationships and in social interactions between strangers in public. We conclude by arguing that it is not always reasonable to assume a conflict between individual privacy on the one hand and society on the other. Legislators and participants in public debate also have to take into account the consequences of limiting privacy on social interaction and the integration of the society. (shrink)

Gareth Evans famously affirmed an explanatory connection between answering the question whether p and knowing whether one believes that p. This is commonly interpreted in terms of the idea that judging that p constitutes an adequate basis for the belief that one believes that p. This paper formulates and defends an alternative, more modest interpretation, which develops from the suggestion that one can know that one believes that p in judging that p.

This paper has two themes. One is the question of how to understand the relation between inner speech and knowledge of one’s own thoughts. My aim here is to probe and challenge the popular neo-Rylean suggestion that we know our own thoughts by ‘overhearing our own silent monologues’, and to sketch an alternative suggestion, inspired by Ryle’s lesser-known discussion of thinking as a ‘serial operation’. The second theme is the question whether, as Ryle apparently thought, we need two different accounts (...) of the epistemology of thinking, corresponding to the distinction between thoughts with respect to which we are active vs passive. I suggest we should be skeptical about the assumption that there is a single distinction here. There are a number of interesting ways in which thinking can involve passivity, but they provide no support for a ‘bifurcationist’ approach to the epistemology of thinking. (shrink)

On what I will call the No Subject view, there is a sense in which one may be aware of a thought, conceived as an event in one's stream of consciousness, without being aware of oneself thinking something. Philosophical work on the delusion of thought insertion is one of the areas in which the No Subject view has been highly influential: the view has framed what, in the philosophy of mind, has become the standard interpretation of the delusion. Here I (...) want to present a challenge to the No Subject view, developing from reflection on the ontology of thinking. I will also consider how, if the standard interpretation fails, we are to understand thought insertion. In particular, I will suggest that we should question the widespread assumption that understanding the delusion has to be a matter of making sense of it. (shrink)

This chapter argues that recent attempts to make sense of the delusion of thought insertion in terms of a distinction between two notions of thought ownership have been unsuccessful. It also proposes an alternative account, in which the delusion is to be interpreted in the light of its prehistory.

he paper examines the thesis that participants in shared intentional activities have first-person plural ‘practical knowledge’ of what they are jointly doing, in the sense of ‘practical knowledge’ articulated by G.E.M Anscombe. Who is supposed to be the subject of such knowledge? The group, or members of the group, or both? It is argued that progress with this issue requires conceiving of collective activities as instances, not of supra-personal agency, but of interpersonal agency; specifically: as involving communication. There is a (...) sense, it is suggested, in which the basic form of plural practical knowledge is relational: ‘I am doing x with you.’. (shrink)

Matthew Boyle’s Transparency and Reflection articulates and defends what might be called a ‘transformative’ view of self-awareness. The human capacity for self-awareness is part of the very nature of our minds, not added to a form of mentality we share with subjects lacking that capacity. Yet, in his recent work Boyle introduces a striking ‘additive’ element into the overall transformative picture. While ‘non-positional’ self-awareness is an essential aspect of ‘human mindedness’, the capacity for reflection is a further, additional accomplishment. I (...) raise some questions about this additive element — in particular, about its compatibility with a reflectivist account of self-knowledge, and about its motivation. (shrink)

Commonsense epistemology regards perceptual experience as a distinctive source of knowledge of the world around us, unavailable in ‘blindsight’. This is often interpreted in terms of the idea that perceptual experience, through its representational content, provides us with justifying reasons for beliefs about the world around us. I argue that this analysis distorts the explanatory link between perceptual experience and knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it. I propose an alternative analysis, on which representational content plays no explanatory role: we make (...) perceptual knowledge intelligible by appeal to experienced objects and features. I also present an account of how the commonsense scheme, thus interpreted, is to be defended: not by tracing the role of experience to its contribution in meeting some general condition on propositional knowledge (such as justification), but by subverting the assumption that it has to be possible to make the role of experience intelligible in terms of some such contribution. (shrink)

On a widely held view, the canonical way to make sense of intentional actions is to invoke the agent's ‘motivating reasons’, where the claim that X did A for some ‘motivating reason’ is taken to be neutral on whether X had a normative reason to do A. In this paper, I explore a challenge to this view, drawing on Anscombe's ‘second-personal’ approach to the nature of action explanation.

The question of what it means to be aware of others as subjects of mental states is often construed as the question of how we are epistemically justified in attributing mental states to others. The dominant answer to this latter question is that we are so justified in virtue of grasping the role of mental states in explaining observed behaviour. This chapter challenges this picture and formulates an alternative by reflecting on the interpretation of early joint attention interactions. It argues (...) that the standard picture is committed to an implausible account of children's awareness of the co-attender's focus of attention. On a more natural interpretation, children engaged in joint attention perceptually recognize the co-attender's attitude to some object, as something like the (correct) answer to the question of what the object is like. The developmentally basic case is not that of attributing mental states as the causes of observed behaviour but of understanding perceived attitudes and actions as appropriate responses to the shared world. The chapter concludes by exploring how this developmental claim bears on mature adult knowledge of other minds. (shrink)

First-person present-tense self-ascriptions of belief are often used to tell others what one believes. But they are also naturally taken to express the belief they ostensibly report. I argue that this second aspect of self-ascriptions of belief holds the key to making the speaker's knowledge of her belief, and so the authority of her act of telling, intelligible. For a basic way to know one's beliefs is to be aware of what one is doing in expressing them. This account suggests (...) that we need to reconsider the terms of the standard alternative between “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” explanations of first-person authority. In particular, the natural view that the authority we accord to self-ascriptions reflects a distinctive way we have of knowing our own beliefs should not be conflated with the traditional epistemological thesis that such knowledge reflects a private “mode of access”. (shrink)

There is converging evidence that over the course of the second year children become good at various fairly sophisticated forms of pro-social activities, such as helping, informing and comforting. Not only are toddlers able to do these things, they appear to do them routinely and almost reliably. A striking feature of these interventions, emphasized in the recent literature, is that they show precocious abilities in two different domains: they reflect complex ‘ theory of mind’ abilities as well as ‘altruistic motivation’. (...) Our aim in this paper is to present a theoretical hypothesis that bears on both kinds of developments. The suggestion is that children’s ‘instrumental helping’ reflects their budding understanding of practical reasons. We can put the basic idea in the familiar terminology of common coding : toddlers conceive of the goals of others’ actions in the same format as the goals of their own actions: in terms of features of their situation that provide us with reasons to act. (shrink)

According to Jaspers, claims to the effect that one's thoughts, impulses, or actions are controlled by others belong to those schizophrenic symptoms that are not susceptible to any psychological explanation. In opposition to Jaspers, it has recently been suggested that such claims can be made intelligible by distinguishing two ingredients in our common sense notion of ownership of a thought: It is one thing for a thought to occur in my stream of consciousness; it is another for it to be (...) interpretable in terms of my propositional attitudes. I argue that this distinction cannot be sustained and pursue an alternative suggestion, drawing on Louis Sass's "solipsist interpretation" of schizophrenia. (shrink)

According to David Velleman, it is part of the ‘commonsense psychology’ of intentional agency that an agent can know what she will do without relying on evidence, in virtue of intending to do it. My question is how this claim is to be interpreted and defended. I argue that the answer turns on the commonsense conception of calculative practical reasoning, and the link between such reasoning and warranted claims to knowledge. I also consider the implications of this argument for Velleman's (...) project of vindicating the commonsense view by showing it to be consistent with an ‘evidentialist’ epistemology. (shrink)

Perceptual experience, that paradigm of subjectivity, constitutes our most immediate and fundamental access to the objective world. At least, this would seem to be so if commonsense realism is correct — if perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Commonsense realism raises many questions. First, can we be more precise about its commitments? Does it entail any particular conception of the nature of perceptual experience (...) and its relation to perceived objects, or any particular view of the way perception yields knowledge? Second, what explains the apparent intuitive appeal of commonsense realism? Should we think of it as a kind of folk theory held by most human adults or is there a sense in which we are pre-theoretically committed to it — in virtue of the experience we enjoy or in virtue of the concepts we use or in virtue of the explanations we give? Third, is commonsense realism defensible, in the face of formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics and cognitive science? The project of the present volume is to advance our understanding of these issues and thus to shed light on the commitments and credentials of commonsense realism. As you may have guessed from the title, the volume also aims to highlight the key role the concept of causation plays in these debates. Central issues to be addressed include the status and nature of causal requirements on perception, the causal role of perceptual experience, and the relation between objective perception and causal thinking — issues that, as many chapters in the volume bring out, are inseparable from concerns with the very nature of causation. (shrink)

Leading philosophers & psychologists offer an assessment of the commonsense view that perceptual experience is an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects. They examine the nature of perception, its role in the acquisition of knowledge, the role of causation in perception, & how perceptual understanding develops in humans.

Adorno’s subtle utopianism is often overshadowed by the sombreness of his work. In this article, I explore Adorno’s concept of utopia by reading him alongside Ernst Bloch, whose The Spirit of Utopia (1918) had a lasting influence on Adorno. Not least due to the unsteady nature of their friendship, the intellectual relationship between Bloch and Adorno has often been overlooked. I propose that Bloch’s utopianism can help us make sense of Adorno’s rare but distinct remarks on utopia and argue that (...) instead of being a pure negativist, Adorno entertains a “minimal utopianism” that is constitutive to his notion of critique. I conclude that reading Adorno with Bloch reveals utopia as an ineliminable focal point in Adorno’s work and urges us to rethink the importance of utopianism for any critical project. (shrink)

This article examines the new conceptualizing and thinking about privacy. It discusses older theories of privacy and explains why they became obsolete. It suggests that the reconceptualization of privacy was influenced by the developments in information technologies, radical changes in the relation between the sexes, and the intrusion of intimacy into the public realm. It describes the normative problems associated with privacy and differentiates the three dimensions of privacy: decisional privacy, informational privacy, and local privacy.

Privacy and surveillance scholars increasingly worry that data collectors can use the information they gather about our behaviors, preferences, interests, incomes, and so on to manipulate us. Yet what it means, exactly, to manipulate someone, and how we might systematically distinguish cases of manipulation from other forms of influence—such as persuasion and coercion—has not been thoroughly enough explored in light of the unprecedented capacities that information technologies and digital media enable. In this paper, we develop a definition of manipulation that (...) addresses these enhanced capacities, investigate how information technologies facilitate manipulative practices, and describe the harms—to individuals and to social institutions—that flow from such practices. -/- We use the term “online manipulation” to highlight the particular class of manipulative practices enabled by a broad range of information technologies. We argue that at its core, manipulation is hidden influence—the covert subversion of another person’s decision-making power. We argue that information technology, for a number of reasons, makes engaging in manipulative practices significantly easier, and it makes the effects of such practices potentially more deeply debilitating. And we argue that by subverting another person’s decision-making power, manipulation undermines his or her autonomy. Given that respect for individual autonomy is a bedrock principle of liberal democracy, the threat of online manipulation is a cause for grave concern. (shrink)