The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the interdependency of healthcare systems and research organizations on manufacturers and suppliers of personnel protective equipment and the need for well-trained personnel who can react quickly to changing working conditions. Reports on challenges faced by research laboratory workers are rare in contrast to the lived experience of hospital health care workers. We report on experiences gained by RLWs who significantly contributed to combating the pandemic under particularly challenging conditions due to increased workload, sickness and interrupted (...) PPE supply chains. RLWs perform a broad spectrum of work with SARS-CoV-2 such as autopsies, establishment of virus cultures and infection models, development and verification of diagnostics, performance of virus inactivation assays to investigate various antiviral agents including vaccines and evaluation of decontamination technologies in high containment biological laboratories. Performance of autopsies and laboratory work increased substantially during the pandemic and thus led to highly demanding working conditions with working shifts of more than eight hours working in PPE that stressed individual limits and also the ergonomic and safety limits of PPE. We provide detailed insights into the challenges of the stressful daily laboratory routine since the pandemic began, lessons learned, and suggest solutions for better safety based on a case study of a newly established HCBL designed for autopsies and research laboratory work. Reduced personal risk, increased resilience, and stress resistance can be achieved by improved PPE components, better training, redundant safety measures, inculcating a culture of safety, and excellent teamwork. (shrink)

Expressed emotion is a measure of the family environment that has been demonstrated to be a reliable, cross-culturally valid psychosocial predictor of relapse in patients with schizophrenia, mood disorders, and other — also somatic — illnesses. Assessed during the Camberwell Family Interview CFI, relatives are classified as being high in EE if they make more than a specified threshold number of critical comments or show any signs of hostility or marked emotional overinvolvement. In schizophrenia, the median relapse rate for patients (...) returning after hospital discharge to a high EE environment is 48%, compared with 21% in a low EE-environment. In this article, the history of EE research will be outlined, and the evidence for the association between family EE and the course of schizophrenia and mood disorders will be presented. Conclusions about the treatment of major mental disorders are discussed as well as the directions of future studies. (shrink)

It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if this is (...) so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behavior that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research. (shrink)

Recent writers claim that responsibilist virtue epistemology courts skepticism, owing to the fact that most of us lack the virtues it deems necessary for justified belief and knowledge. A powerful version of this objection is the challenge from situationist social psychology pressed by Alfano (2012, 2013) and Olin and Doris (2014). This paper develops a new version of responsibilism that is immune from this objection, and shows that this view has many advantages over other forms of virtue epistemology. My responsibilism (...) dispenses with the ubiquitous but (I argue) mistaken idea that responsibilist virtue properties must be understood in terms of character traits. My view parallels an often overlooked form of virtue ethics suggested by Thomson (1997) that some situationists (e.g., Harman (2001)) have praised. That form shares with other forms the thought that virtue properties are normatively fundamental, but it adds that act-attaching ones are prior to person-attaching ones, and require no backing by character traits. Far from being an ad hoc retreat position, I argue that this view is independently attractive. (shrink)

Sound definitions of its basic concepts are fundamental to every scientific discipline. In some instances, like in the case of the ecosystem concept, the question arises if we can define such concepts at all. And if we can define them, how should we choose from the multiple definitions available? And what are the preconditions for a scientifically sound and useful definition? On the basis of the ecosystem concept, this paper illustrates a major, often neglected distinction in the definition of ecological (...) concepts, namely that between defining criteria and additional descriptive statements connected to those definitions. As is demonstrated by examples from the literature, mixing up these categories leads to false inferences about the properties of physical objects (e.g. a particular forest) subsumed by the concept (e.g. the ecosystem). As a further consequence, this inference becomes problematic in terms of theory development and/or the application of ecological concepts for management decisions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of critical thinking for improving the writing skill of undergraduate Arab students who study English Literature at Saudi universities under lockdown circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, it explores the impact of implementing Facebook as an online Constructivist tool to improve this skill. A general overview of the status of English language education in Saudi Arabia is briefly presented to shed light on the ongoing English language (...) challenges in learning writing for undergraduate students in the English language and literature departments, which got more manifested due to the current status of education mode with the emergence of the pandemic. Two-group posttest-only randomized experiment was employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, using the infusion and constructivism approaches. A total of 40 students enrolled in a literature course at a private university in Saudi Arabia participated in the experiment. The treatment was conducted through utilizing Facebook. The results demonstrated that students’ improvement in English writing was due to the combination of the infusion of a set of critical skills and the constructivist teaching and learning mode. (shrink)

1. It seems that the description and explanation of what is going on in inanimate nature differ in important respects from the description and explanation of what is going on when that involves human beings or certain animals. The difference is sometimes expressed by saying that whereas in the former case what we describe and explain is always events, in the latter it is sometimes events and sometimes actions. Material objects, one might say, do not do anything, do not perform (...) actions, are not agents. The question arises whether the differences between material objects and agents, and consequently between events and actions, are such as to render inapplicable to actions the categories of explanation employed in the natural sciences. This question is sometimes answered in the affirmative. In particular, it is argued that actions do not admit of causal explanations, or of explanations in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, or in terms which imply that the occurrence of an action is wholly determined. Or it is argued more cautiously, that, even if some kinds of action are so explicable, the most important kinds, those which are voluntary, intentional, deliberate, cannot be. In this essay, I argue for a third theory. It shares with the first two the view that in the narration and description of events and actions we do not employ exactly the same categories and that, therefore, in the explanation of one, reference may have to be made to types of fact not mentioned in the explanation of the other. Thus, in the explanation of why I raised my arm, I may have to refer to my purpose, intention or aim, whereas in the explanation of my arm’s going up, this may be irrelevant. Nevertheless, the theory here defended maintains that all kinds of action, including intentional ones, admit of causal or deterministic explanations. (shrink)

Stoicism has had a diverse reception in German philosophy. This is the first interpretive study of shared themes and dialogues between late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century experts on classical antiquity and philosophers. Assessing how modern philosophers have incorporated ancient resources with the context of German philosophy, chapters in this volume are devoted to philosophical giants such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and Peter Sloterdijk. Among the ancient Stoics, the focus is on (...) Seneca, Epictetus, and doxography, but reference will also be made to texts that have so far been neglected by non-specialists. Often references to Stoic texts are playful, making it hard for non-specialists to reconstruct their understanding of the sources; by illuminating and enhancing the philosophical significance of these receptions, this book argues that they can change our understanding of Greek and Roman Stoic doctrines and authors, twentieth-century continental philosophy, and the themes which coordinate their ongoing dialogues. Some of these themes are surprising for Stoicism, such as the poetics of tragic drama and the anthropological foundations of hermeneutics. Others are already central to Stoic reception, such as the constitution of the subject in relation to various ethical, ecological, and metaphysical powers and processes; among these are contemplation and knowledge; identity and plurality; temporality, facticity, and fate; and personal, social, and planetary forms of self-cultivation and self-appropriation. Addressing the need for a synoptic vision of related continental readings of Stoicism, this book brings ancient texts into new dialogues with up-to-date scholarship, facilitating increased understanding, critical evaluation, and creative innovation within the continental response to Stoicism. (shrink)

This volume contains Constant's remarkable speeches to the Tribunal, published after all available sources, including the minutes of the sessions, with records of all his interventions and of a lost speech, fragments of an uncompleted work »De la possibilité d'une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays«, edited on the basis of all the manuscripts, a number of other texts from the same period, and a partial copy of »Des circonstances actuelles« by Mme de Staël, which left its mark on the (...) uncompleted work and is essential to an informed understanding of the initial foundations of Constant's political thinking. This rich collection of texts presented from an unwonted perspective is rounded off, as always, by a chronology, bibliographic resources, and an index of proper names. (shrink)

This volume contains the political works and the personal texts written by Benjamin Constant between June 1814 and July 1815. The collection is arranged into five thematic sections and placed in the order best suited to reflect their actual chronology. It comprises Constant's articles on the freedom of the press, his texts on the Kingdom of Naples affair, the two versions of the "Mémoires de Juliette", political texts written during the last few months of the Première Restauration, and writings published (...) during the Cent Jours. The most important texts in the volume are the treatise "De la Responsabilité des Ministres", the "Acte additionnel aux constitutions de l'Empire", in which Constant was closely associated, and above all the 1815 version of the "Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements représentatifs", one of his major political works. The volume rounds out with a chronology, annexes, a bibliography and an index of proper names. (shrink)