J.M. R. Lenz hat sich keineswegs als ein „vorübergehendes Meteor“ erwiesen, wie Goethe urteilte, sondern gilt inzwischen als einer der wichtigsten Autoren des 18. Jahrhunderts. Sein unglückliches Schicksal ist, vor allem über Büchner vermittelt, ein bis heute aktuelles Thema der produktiven Rezeption. Seine Werke entziehen sich aufgrund ihrer formalen und thematischen Vielschichtigkeit schnellen Deutungen. Das Lenz-Handbuch, an dem namhafte Vertreter der einschlägigen Forschung wie auch junge Autoren mitgearbeitet haben, vermittelt ein umfassendes und differenziertes Bild von Leben und Werk. Die Artikel (...) erschließen das Werk nach Gattungen sowie nach übergreifenden innovativen Gesichtspunkten. Die Rezeption von Autor und Werk in Wissenschaft, Literatur, Kunst, Musik und Film wird einbezogen. Dem ‚Lenz-Kenner‘ vermittelt das Handbuch den aktuellen Stand der Wissenschaft, aber auch neue Einsichten und damit die Grundlage für weitere eigene Forschungsarbeiten, dem Interessenten am Autor, an der Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts und ihrer Aneignung heute bietet das Handbuch eine Fülle von Informationen und Anregungen, die zugleich der besonderen Rolle von Lenz im literarischen Feld seiner Zeit gerecht zu werden versuchen. (shrink)

BackgroundHospitalized older adults frequently have impaired cognition and must rely on surrogates to make major medical decisions. Ethical standards for surrogate decision making are well delineated, but little is known about what factors surrogates actually consider when making decisions.ObjectivesTo determine factors surrogate decision makers consider when making major medical decisions for hospitalized older adults, and whether or not they adhere to established ethical standards.DesignSemi-structured interview study of the experience and process of decision making.SettingA public safety-net hospital and a tertiary referral (...) hospital in a large city in the Midwest United States.ParticipantsThe study included 35 surrogates with a recent decision-making experience for an inpatient aged 65 or older.MeasurementsThe key factors that surrogates considered when making decisions. Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed using the grounded theory method of qualitative analysis.ResultsSurrogates considered patient-centered factors and surrogate-centered factors. Patient-centered factors included: respecting the patient’s input, using past knowledge of the patient to infer the patient’s wishes, and consider ing what is in the patient’s best interests. Some surrogates expressed a desire for more information about the patient’s prior wishes. Surrogate-centered factors included: surrogate’s wishes as a guide, surrogate’s religious beliefs and/or spirituality, surrogate’s interests, and family consensus.ConclusionOur study indicates that surrogate decision making is more complex than the standard ethical models, which are limited to considerations of the patient’s autonomy and beneficence. Because surrogates also imagine what they would want under the circumstances and consider their own needs and preferences, models of surrogate decision making must account for these additional considerations. Surrogates’ desire for more information about patients’ preferences suggests a need for greater advance care planning. (shrink)

I had my accident on the rugby field on July 29, 2000 about 2.00 p.m. during a simple line - out, even before the ball was thrown in. I t just felt like another simple case of concussion , I staggered to the sideline, the coach asked me “what ’s wrong”? He said I told him I just felt sick and to put me back on the field in 10 minutes. Then I collapsed, eventually blacked out and then was rushed (...) to hospital unconscious in an ambulance with them struggling drastically to keep me alive. Af ter three days of being in there, they thought I was alright and were going to send me home. Then it star ted happening. First I nearly collapsed again tak ing a shower . For days the spe - cialists didn’t k now what was wrong with me. M y girlfriend at the time, who had rushed down from Wanak a when she had heard it had happened went mad at the specialists to do something. Af ter six days of going in and out of seizures, finally af ter what seemed like all the tests k nown to man, they said I had suffered several brain stem strokes then one massive major one, which altogether had lef t me diagnosed with the ex tremely rare and unk nown condition only k nown to a few as “ locked in syndrome”. (shrink)

Objectives: Recent legislative changes within the United Kingdom have stimulated professional debate about access to patient data within research. However, there is currently little awareness of public views about such research. The authors sought to explore attitudes of the public, and their lay representatives, towards the use of primary care medical record data for research when patient consent was not being sought.Methods: 49 members of the public and four non-medical members of local community health councils in South Wales, UK gave (...) their views on the value and acceptability of three current research scenarios, each describing access to data without patient consent.Results: Among focus group participants, awareness of research in primary care was low, and the appropriateness of general practitioners as researchers was questioned. There was general support for research but also concerns expressed about data collection without consent. These included lack of respect and patient control over the process. Unauthorised access to data by external agencies was a common fear. Current data collection practices, including population based disease registers elicited much anxiety. The key informants were equally critical of the scenarios and generally less accepting.Conclusions: This exploratory study has highlighted a number of areas of public concern when medical records are accessed for research without patient consent. Public acceptability regarding the use of medical records in research cannot simply be assumed. Further work is required to determine how widespread such views are and to inform those advising on confidentiality issues. (shrink)

Recent solutions to the curve-fitting problem, described in Forster and Sober ([1995]), trade off the simplicity and fit of hypotheses by defining simplicity as the paucity of adjustable parameters. Scott De Vito ([1997]) charges that these solutions are 'conventional' because he thinks that the number of adjustable parameters may change when the hypotheses are described differently. This he believes is exactly what is illustrated in Goodman's new riddle of induction, otherwise known as the grue problem. However, the 'number of adjustable (...) parameters' is actually a loose way of referring to a quantity that is not language dependent. The quantity arises out of Akaike's theorem in a way that ensures its language invariance. (shrink)

Forming implementation intentions has been consistently shown to be a powerful self-regulatory strategy. As the self-regulation of thoughts is important for the experience of involuntariness in the hypnotic context, investigating the effectiveness of implementation intentions on the suppression of thoughts was the focus of the present study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions . Results showed that participants who received information included in the “Carleton Skill Training Program” and in addition formed implementation intentions improved their hypnotic responsiveness (...) as compared to all of the other three groups on measures of objective responding and involuntary responding. Thus, in line with the nonstate or cognitive social–psychological view of hypnosis stating that an individual’s hypnotic suggestibility is not dispositional but modifiable, our results suggest that hypnotic responsiveness can be heightened by furnishing hypnotic instructions with ad hoc implementation intentions. (shrink)

Clinical biobanks processing data of participants in the European Union fall under the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation, which among others includes requirements for consent. These requirements are further specified by the Article 29 Working Party —an EU advisory body currently known as the European Data Protection Board. Unfortunately, their guidance is cause for some confusion. While the GDPR allows participants to give broad consent for research when specific research purposes are still unknown, the WP29 guidelines suggest that (...) additional consent for specific uses should be obtained in addition to broad consent when this becomes applicable. This discrepancy elicits the question whether clinical biobanks can fail the requirement of consent if they obtain broad consent, but not a specific consent for each biomedical study. We analysed this discrepancy within the framework of contextual integrity, in order to describe the context-relative informational norms that govern information flows in clinical biobanks. However, our analysis demonstrates that there is no uniform set of norms that can be applied to all clinical biobanks. As such, neither the GDPR nor the WP29 guidance can act as a “one size fits all” approach to all clinical biobanks. Rather, differences between clinical biobanks—especially regarding the scientific aims and patient populations—make the case for context-relative norms that determine the appropriate type of consent. (shrink)

First Edition 1995, Second Edition 2012.

The premise behind this paper is that "we" have a very serious Fear Problem. As a stream of inquiry in the larger In Search of Fearlessness Movement, the author pursues a long lingering question and concern about how the West has near neglected the call to examine "fearlessness" in contradistinction to the East. With the purpose to build a better understanding of fearlessness, theories about it, and how it fits into the author's most recent turn to co-developing a philosophy of (...) fearism.... (shrink)

Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists have been accused of a great many sins, but are the conspiracy theories conspiracy theorists believe epistemically problematic? Well, according to some recent work, yes, they are. Yet a number of other philosophers like Brian L. Keeley, Charles Pigden, Kurtis Hagen, Lee Basham, and the like have argued ‘No!’ I will argue that there are features of certain conspiracy theories which license suspicion of such theories. I will also argue that these features only license a (...) limited suspicion of these conspiracy theories, and thus we need to be careful about generalising from such suspicions to a view of the warrant of conspiracy theories more generally. To understand why, we need to get to the bottom of what exactly makes us suspicious of certain conspiracy theories, and how being suspicious of a conspiracy theory does not always tell us anything about how likely the theory in question is to be false. (shrink)

Plato's Timaeus contains a powerful and influential myth, of the construction of the universe by a divine craftsman. A god imposes reason on necessity, to bring order from a primeval 'receptacle' of disordered matter. There results the 'child' that is the cosmos - a copy of an eternally-existing perfect model. Here eight new essays from a distinguished international cast, explore aspects of this challenging work: the principles of the mythical narrative, how the world soul and human body are formed, implications (...) for illness - mental and physical, the importance of music and harmonious proportion. Later developments are also treated: Aristotle's theory of generation, the commentary of Proclus and elements of modern evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Looking at set of 76 representative articles published by social psychologists between 2017 and 2023 (reviewed between December 2022 and February 2023), I examine the role of motivating examples---a kind of illustrative example, typically used by researchers at the beginning of their work to motivate the issue or problem they want to resolve or address in that work---in the social psychological work on conspiracy theory. Through an examination of the language around how motivating examples are introduced and used in the (...) social psychological literature, I argue that the abstract and vague way that social psychologists employ such examples ends up relying on what Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders deem as an unviable and easily abused `I-know-it-when-I-see-it' standard. As will be demonstrated, much of the recent work in the social psychology of conspiracy theory assumes and thus fails to establish what is supposedly problematic about belief in the conspiracy theories used as motivating examples. As a consequence the surveyed work typically fails to adequately capture belief in actual conspiracy theories, let alone establish a case for a general suspicion of such beliefs. This work, then, adds to and extends upon existing critiques of the social psychology of conspiracy theory by members of the wider community of scholars studying conspiracy theories. The upshot of this research is that if social psychologists want their work to be of use to the broader scholarly community studying these things called `conspiracy theories', then they need to connect their work on the problems of conspiracy beliefs or mindsets to concrete examples of belief in unwarranted conspiracy theories. (shrink)

This reply to an ongoing debate between conspiracy theory researchers from different disciplines exposes the conceptual confusions that underlie some of the disagreements in conspiracy theory research. Reconciling these conceptual confusions is important because conspiracy theories are a multidisciplinary topic and a profound understanding of them requires integrative insights from different fields. Specifically, we distinguish research focussing on conspiracy *theories* (and theorizing) from research of conspiracy *belief* (and mindset, theorists) and explain how particularism with regards to conspiracy theories does not (...) mean we cannot define a problematic subclass of conspiracy beliefs, while avoiding the problems of generalism. We hope this reply helps conspiracy theory researchers recognize the differences between studying conspiracy theories and conspiracy beliefs and appreciate the possibilities for fruitful, integrative, and interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

This volume offers the first-ever complete English translation of Leibniz’s Dissertatio De Arte Combinatoria together with a critical edition of the original Latin text on fa...