Dans ce volume considérable, on été réunies les contributions d'un Congrès international tenu à Louvain en 1998 pour marquer l'achèvement de la première édition de la Théologie Platonicienne de Proclus. Ces contributions, toutes rigoureusement centrées sur la Théol. Plat. concernent (1) les principes et les sources de la Théol. plat. (2) Les méthodes théologiques de Proclus (3) La postérité de la Théol. plat. dans le monde grec, païen comme chrétien, et dans le monde islamique. Des indices très détaillés permettent de (...) retrouver tous les passages cités et commentés dans ce volume. (shrink)

Enactive approaches to emotion are rare and to anxiety and anxiety disorder even more. This article aims to show how an enactive paradigm might be helpful in solving some problems in the clinical and scientific understanding of anxiety and anxiety disorder. I begin by pointing at a number of relevant clinical features of anxiety and anxiety disorder and by sketching how and why anxiety theories have difficulties with doing justice to these features. I specifically focus on two themes: a) how (...) to conceptualize anxiety as the expression of a dynamical interaction with the environment instead of as just a reaction to the environment (or to... (shrink)

The speed-accuracy trade-off effect refers to the behavioral trade-off between fast yet error-prone respones and accurate but slow responses. Multiple theories on the cognitive mechanisms behind SAT exist. One theory assumes that SAT is a consequence of strategically adjusting the amount of evidence required for overt behaviors, such as perceptual choices. Another theory hypothesizes that SAT is the consequence of the mixture of multiple categorically different cognitive processes. In this paper, these theories are disambiguated by assessing whether the fixed-point property (...) of mixture distributions holds, in both simulations and data. I conclude that, at least for perceptual decision making, there is no evidence for a mixture of different cognitive processes to trade off accuracy of responding for speed. (shrink)

Moral sensitivity and moral reasoning are essential competencies biomedical researchers have to develop to make ethical decisions in their daily practices. Previous research has shown that these competencies can be developed through ethics education. However, it is unclear which underlying mechanisms best support the development of these competencies. In this article we argue that the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning can be fostered through teaching strategies that tap into students’ moral imagination. We describe how moral imagination can stimulate (...) the development of these competencies through three different merits of moral imagination. Moral imagination can help students to 1) transfer and apply abstract moral concepts to concrete situations and contexts, 2) explore the perspective of others, 3) explore and foresee the moral consequences of different decisions and actions. We explain these three merits of moral imagination in the context of biomedical research and present a theoretical model for how these merits can be used to stimulate the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning. Furthermore, we describe multiple teaching strategies for biomedical curricula that tap into the three merits of moral imagination. These teaching strategies can inspire teachers to design ethics education that activates students’ moral imagination for the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning. (shrink)

The strategy of updating credences by minimizing the relative entropy has been questioned by many authors, most strongly by means of the Judy Benjamin puzzle. I present a new analysis of Judy Benjamin–like forms of new information and defend the thesis that in general the rational posterior is indeterminate, meaning that a family of posterior credence functions rather than a single one is the rational response when that type of information becomes available. The proposed thesis extends naturally to all cases (...) in which new information is traditionally handled by minimizing the relative entropy. (shrink)

An infinite lottery experiment seems to indicate that Bayesian conditionalization may be inconsistent when the prior credence function is finitely additive because, in that experiment, it conflicts with the principle of reflection. I will show that any other form of updating credences would produce the same conflict, and, furthermore, that the conflict is not between conditionalization and reflection but, instead, between finite additivity and reflection. A correct treatment of the infinite lottery experiment requires a careful treatment of finite additivity. I (...) will show that the results of the experiment, paradoxical though they may be, are not inconsistent, but that they conflict with one particular version of reflection . I will reject that version and I will propose a slight modification of a different version of reflection such that the modified version does maintain the mutual consistency of finite additivity, reflection and conditionalization. As a result, I will strengthen the case for finite additivity by showing that Bayesian conditionalization is fully consistent with it. (shrink)

This article analyzes the changes in The Handmaid’s Tale’s moral and political outlook as it tracks different forms of complexity in the novel, the film, and the TV series. While the sense of female empowerment increases with each adaptation of this tale of forced sexual servitude in fictional theocratic state of Gilead, the essay argues that Hulu’s TV series develops an intriguing interaction between the interiority of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel and the exteriority emphasized in Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 film. In (...) so doing, the TV series Escher-twists across related binaries between activity/passivity and personal/political actions as well. By expanding, displacing, and creatively intersecting storylines which the novel cut short, the series weaves an intricate perspectival web that invites the viewer to participate in its mind games. (shrink)

This volume contains the proceedings of the conference "Casimir Force, Casimir Operators and the Riemann Hypothesis – Mathematics for Innovation in Industry and Science" held in November 2009 in Fukuoka. The conference focused on the following topics: Casimir operators in harmonic analysis and representation theory Number theory, in particular zeta functions and cryptography Casimir force in physics and its relation with nano-science Mathematical biology Importance of mathematics for innovation in industry.

Diagnosis theory reasons about incomplete knowledge and only considers the past. It distinguishes between violations and non-violations. Qualitative decision theory reasons about decision variables and considers the future. It distinguishes between fulfilled goals and unfulfilled goals. In this paper we formalize normative diagnoses and decisions in the special purpose formalism DIO2 as well as in extensions of the preference-based deontic logic PDL. The DIagnostic and DEcision-theoretic framework for DEontic reasoning DIO2 formalizes reasoning about violations and fulfillments, and is used to (...) characterize the distinction between normative diagnosis theory and decision theory. The extension of the preference-based deontic logic PDL shows how normative diagnostic and decision-theoretic reasoning — i.e. reasoning about violations and fulfillments — can be formalized as an extension of deontic reasoning. (shrink)

The development and management of the Covid-19 outbreak in the Netherlands is described. The “intelligent lockdown” was aimed at minimizing new infections and limiting the number of deaths, while keeping the economy running as much as possible. Changes in consumer behavior, exit strategy, and lessons learned are considered.

On April 10, 2001, after extensive committee deliberations, the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament passed a bill that was introduced in August 1999 legalizing physician-assisted death. The bill is officially called It was passed by a majority vote in the Second Chamber of Parliament and was supported by the majority parties constituting the present coalition government (i.e., liberals and socialists). Opposition to the law came mainly from a minority of Christian parties. In this report we explore the meaning of (...) this bill and describe some of its problematic and paradoxical items. (shrink)

This book offers an Arabic edition, English translation, study and glossaries of ʿUbaidallāh Ibn Buḫtīšūʿ’s important work on apparent death; an appendix moreover provides the Arabic and Hebrew recensions of ʿUbaidallāh’s lost Greek _Vorlage_.

Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader’s text comprehension: (...) i. the (low-level) rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and ii. the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. `too') in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, concomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment. (shrink)

Over the last years, self-management has become a central value in the practice of mental health care. Patients are positioned as expertclients who are actively involved in the management of their disease. Some of the ideas that are implied in the concept of self-management may raise important and intriguing questions. For instance, in the context of psychiatry impaired agency and altered self-experience are often part of the psychopathological process itself. The capacity to manage oneself may be impeded by the very (...) problem that needs to be managed. Therefore, how should self-management be conceived in... (shrink)

An agent who receives information in the form of an indicative conditional statement and who trusts her source will modify her credences to bring them in line with the conditional. I will argue that the agent, upon the acquisition of such information, should, in general, expand her prior credence function to an indeterminate posterior one; that is, to a set of credence functions. Two different ways the agent might interpret the conditional will be presented, and the properties of the resulting (...) indeterminate posteriors compared. The cause of the expansion from a single prior credence function to a set of credence functions forming the indeterminate posterior one will be explained. The expansion undermines the Bayesian dogma that the result of assimilating new information into a determinate prior credence functions is always a determinate posterior one. (shrink)

This book focuses on two important, interlinked themes in psychiatry, i.e., the relation between self (or: person), context and psychopathology; and the intrinsic value-ladenness of psychiatry as a practice. -/- Written against the background of scientistic tendencies in today’s psychiatry, it is argued in Part I that psychiatry needs a clinical conception of psychopathology alongside more traditional scientific conceptions; that this clinical conception of psychopathology must be based on a fundamental rethinking of the interaction between illness manifestations, contextual influences and (...) the patient as person, such that psychopathology is conceived as the product of this interaction rather than as the outward manifestation of a broken mechanism within the patient. -/- In Part II, it is shown that self- and context-related factors have a large impact on who one is as a professional. I argue that an analysis is needed of the normative aspects of the relations that sustain and frame professional role-fulfilment. This analysis culminates into a so-called normative practice model (NPM) which distinguishes between qualifying, conditioning and foundational principles (or: rules, norms). The normative practice model helps to locate and resist scientistic defenses of the legitimacy of psychiatry and to replace them by a positive account that provides clinicians (and scientists) the conceptual tools they need to justify what they do in broader contexts. The main thrust of the argument is to show that psychiatry needs a value-sensitive account of its legitimacy, in which other normative dimensions are recognized than those that sustain the expert role. Psychiatrists should in other words not defend the legitimacy of their profession by referring to the expert role solely but provide a broader account in which justice is done to the broader social, legal, and economic contexts of professional activity. The analysis of this inherent normativity begins within clinical practice, it extends to the concept of disease as well as to wider domains of psychiatric care and the sociology of professions, and, finally, amounts into an analysis of the value-ladenness of interactions between healthcare institutions, the government, professional organizations and patient groups. (shrink)

This article reviews ECJ case law on the conceptualization and legal circumscription of the doctrine of consistent interpretation, reflecting its fundamental importance as a mode of giving effect to Community law before national authorities. Legal uncertainty, an inherent characteristic of the technique, should be reduced, it is argued, by improving the reasoning of the ECJ's judgments. In particular, a highly critical discussion of the Arcaro judgment concludes that its precedent value is very limited. A parallelism in approach to both consistent (...) interpretation and direct effect is suggested. Partly, this has already been achieved insofar as the issue of expiry of the transposition period of directives is concerned. In addition, the article suggests a reform of the case law on consistent interpretation in actions by the State versus individuals and offers explanations for the seemingly inconsistent nature of the cases producing a horizontal impact of directives despite the lack of horizontal direct effect properly so‐called (incidental effects). In considering whether the doctrine gives rise to unacceptable legal uncertainty, a comparison with the interpretive obligation under the UK Human Rights Act 1998 is made, which produces similar results. (shrink)

Important bioethcs changes are underway in the Netherlands that carry, for better or worse, far-reaching social consequences. The two major areas of change involve economics and containing soaring health costs and end-of-life care as reflected in several high-profile cases: in a decision handed down by the Dutch Supreme Court on reviewing the procedures for the termination of life, in the discussion surrounding The Groningen Protocol and the active ending of lives in neonatology, and in a report of a Royal Dutch (...) Medical Society's Committee on the role of physicians in ending life in cases of requests to die outside the area of terminal diseases. (shrink)

Does preaching bring God on stage? Protestants assume an intimate relationship between the ‘Word of God’ and preaching. However, the principle that ‘preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God’ caused intense debates about the status of God language. The author highlights the classic disputes of the 19th and 20th centuries and argues that the old dilemma must be overcome. Sermons address the subjective-contextual conditions of the listeners, and this in no way precludes the attention for divine (...) disclosure. On the contrary, there is a true reciprocity between personal spirituality and the sense of God as really other. The author defends the thesis that the renewed attention for the human condition in the theological debates of the last decades should also include a positive stand towards the believer’s spiritual awareness of God’s real existence and presence. (shrink)

The debate on the ethical permissibility of euthanasia in medicine has a corollary in the ethical application of drugs. The overall moral limits of medical treatment apply evenly to the moral acceptability of the pharmacological aspect of the act of euthanasia. The pharmacological aspect of the act is of ethical importance not only for the person requesting an active ending of his or her life, but also for the grieving family. Keywords: effectivity, ideal euthanaticum, patient's/family's interest, pharmacology of euthanasia, routes (...) of application CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this article we try to show how revolutionary the idea of sovereignty was and is in the Islamic world, preceding all nationalism. Sovereignty marks the very transition from empire to the central state that the nation state presupposes.Sovereignty made its entrance in the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. It functioned in the centralization policy of the sultan, who needed this central position to realize a top down process of modernization. This policy took apart the Empire’s traditional system of (...) checks and balances. Thus, the nation state does not conserve traditional culture, but is the result and producer of cultural change, in fact, of a process of modernization that involves language and religion .This does not imply that all nation states are homogenized by a globalizing process of modernization. A civil society based on individual freedom and the application of human rights and democracy makes a real difference in the world of nation states. Those ideas prevent the return of empire in the disguise of globalization. In Europe, these liberal ideas mark the limits of sovereignty and preceed the emergence of nationalism; in the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world, sovereignty and nationalism are used for a top-down process of modernization sometimes at odds with those liberal ideas. The implementation of these ideas in an specific cultural context is necessary and is at the same time a guarantee against cultural isomorphism. (shrink)