Relativism, an ancient philosophical doctrine, is once again a topic of heated debate. In this book, Maria Baghramian and Annalisa Coliva present the recent arguments for and against various forms of relativism. -/- The first two chapters introduce the conceptual and historical contours of relativism. These are followed by critical investigations of relativism about truth, conceptual relativism, epistemic relativism, and moral relativism. The concluding chapter asks whether it is possible to make sense of relativism as a philosophical thesis. -/- (...) The book introduces readers to the main types of relativism and the arguments in their favor. It also goes beyond the expository material to engage in more detailed critical responses to the key positions and authors under discussion. -/- Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary, Relativism is essential reading for students of philosophy as well as those in related disciplines where relativism is studied, such as anthropology, sociology, and politics. (shrink)

A Philosophy to Live By highlights Murdoch's distinctive conception of philosophy as a spiritual or existential practice and enlists the resources of her thought to explore a wide range of thinkers and debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics.

El presente artículo analiza las primeras consideraciones de Ludwig Wittgenstein respecto de la percepción de figuras ambiguas, lo que posteriormente fue englobado por la más amplia noción de “percepción de aspectos”. El objetivo consiste en poner de manifiesto algunas las consideraciones del Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus respecto al carácter intrínsecamente representacional de la percepción en el caso del Cubo de Necker, para establecer de qué manera y en qué medida sus primeras observaciones críticas de la percepción de propiedades que admiten grados en (...) Some Remarks on Logical Form, en 1929, puede impactar análogamente sobre su propia descripción de esta clase particular de experiencias bajo consideración. (shrink)

Nursing, or caring science, is mainly concerned with developing knowledge of what constitutes ideal, good health care for patients as whole persons, and how to achieve this. The aim of this study was to find clinical empirical indications of good ethical care and to investigate the substance of ideal nursing care in praxis. A hermeneutic method was employed in this clinical study, assuming the theoretical perspective of caritative caring and ethics of the understanding of life. The data consisted of two (...) Socratic dialogues: one with nurses and one with nursing students, and interviews with two former patients. The empirical data are first described from a phenomenological approach. Observations of caregivers offering `the little extra' were taken to confirm that patients were `being seen', not from the perspective of an ideal nursing model, but from that of interaction as a fellow human being. The study provides clinical evidence that, as an ontological response to suffering, 'symbolic acts' such as giving the `little extra' may work to bridge gaps in human interaction. The fact that `little things' have the power to preserve dignity and make patients feel they are valued offers hope. Witnessing benevolent acts also paves the way for both patients and caregivers to increase their understanding of life. (shrink)

Over the last three quarters of a century, international guidelines and regulations have undergone significant changes in how children are problematised as participants in biomedical research. While early guidelines enacted children as vulnerable subjects with diminished autonomy and in need of special protection, beginning in the early 2000s, international regulatory frameworks defined the paediatric population as vulnerable due to unaddressed public health needs. More recently, ethical recommendations have promoted the active engagement of minors as research partners. In this paper, I (...) adopt a post-structuralist approach to policy analysis to examine deep-seated assumptions and presuppositions underlying the changes in the problematisation of children as biomedical research participants over time. While biomedical research ethics focuses on the autonomy and vulnerability of minors, ethical guidelines are situated in specific sociocultural contexts, shaped, among other things, by contingent public health needs and changing conceptions of the value of research and science for society. In the process, I demonstrate the challenge of moving away from an approach that in taking adults as the model overshadows the complexity of children’s lived experiences as well as their personal, cultural, and social lives. The lack of acknowledgement of this complexity makes children vulnerable to epistemic injustice, which is particularly crucial to address in public involvement initiatives. (shrink)

This contribution explores how Forrester’s work on cases has opened up an arena that might be called ‘the medical case as a travelling genre’. Although usually focused on the course of disease in an individual patient and authored mostly by one medical author, medical case histories have a social dimension: Once published, they often circulate in networks of scholars. Moreover, scholars of the history of literature have shown that numerous medical cases seem to travel easily beyond the context of medical (...) science into the realm of popular literature and journalism. After tracing the idea of cases travelling in Forrester’s Thinking in Cases, I discuss several contributions by authors who, in the wake of interdisciplinary research on cases in the past two decades, have dealt in different ways with this idea. In the third section, I present my own research on a case of self-crucifixion that was widely discussed in 19th-century Europe. I suggest that understanding the case as a ‘traveling genre’ – an expression borrowed from literary genre theory – highlights the role of readers and publication formats as constitutive for cases, and enables us to see more clearly what cases do for scientists and writers who work with them. (shrink)

Asking students to generate a prediction before presenting the correct answer is a popular instructional strategy. This study tested whether a person’s degree of confidence in a prediction is related to their curiosity and surprise regarding the answer. For a series of questions about numerical facts, participants (N = 29) generated predictions and rated their confidence in the prediction before seeing the correct answer. The increase in pupil size before viewing the correct answer was used as a physiological marker of (...) curiosity, and the increase in pupil size after viewing the correct answer was used as a physiological marker of surprise. The results revealed that the pupillometric marker of curiosity was most pronounced if students were slightly more confident in their prediction than usual, and it was lower for predictions made with either very high or very low confidence. Furthermore, the results showed that high-confidence prediction errors and low-confidence correct responses yielded a pupillary surprise response, suggesting that highly unexpected results evoke surprise, independent of the correctness of the prediction. Together, results suggest that confidence in a prediction plays an important role in the occurrence of epistemic emotions such as curiosity and surprise. (shrink)

The present study examines the processing of subject-verb (SV) number agreement with coordinate subjects in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions in Greek. Greek is a language with morphological number marked on nominal and verbal elements. Coordinate SV agreement, however, is special in Greek as it is sensitive to the coordinate subject's position: when pre-verbal, the verb is marked for plural while when post-verbal the verb can be in the singular. We conducted two experiments, an acceptability judgment task with adult monolinguals as (...) a pre-study (Experiment 1) and a self-paced reading task as the main study (Experiment 2) in order to obtain acceptance as well as processing data. Forty adult monolingual speakers of Greek participated in Experiment 1 and a hundred and forty one in Experiment 2. Seventy one children participated in Experiment 2: 30 Albanian-Greek sequential bilingual children and 41 Greek monolingual children aged 10–12 years. The adult data in Experiment 1 establish the difference in acceptability between singular VPs in SV and VS constructions reaffirming our hypothesis. Meanwhile, the adult data in Experiment 2 show that plural verbs accelerate processing regardless of subject position. The child online data show that sequential bilingual children have longer reading times (RTs) compared to the age-matched monolingual control group. However, both child groups follow a similar processing pattern in both pre-verbal and post-verbal constructions showing longer RTs immediately after a singular verb when the subject was pre-verbal indicating a grammaticality effect. In the post-verbal coordinate subject sentences, both child groups showed longer RTs on the first subject following the plural verb due to the temporary number mismatch between the verb and the first subject. This effect was resolved in monolingual children but was still present at the end of the sentence for bilingual children indicating difficulties to reanalyze and integrate information. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that (a) 10–12 year-old sequential bilingual children are sensitive to number agreement in SV coordinate constructions parsing sentences in the same way as monolingual children even though their vocabulary abilities are lower than that of age-matched monolingual peers and (b) bilinguals are slower in processing overall. (shrink)

Pragmatism, taken not just as a philosophical movement but as a way of addressing problems, strongly influenced the debate on the foundations of probability during the first half of the twentieth century. Upholders of different interpretations of probability such as Hans Reichenbach, Ernest Nagel, Rudolf Carnap, Frank Ramsey, and Bruno de Finetti, acknowledged their debt towards pragmatist philosophers, including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Clarence Irving Lewis, William Dewey and Giovanni Vailati. In addition, scientist-philosophers like Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, Henri (...) Poincaré, Pierre Duhem, and Karl Pearson, who heralded a conception of science and knowledge at large that was close to pragmatism, were very influential in that debate. Among the main interpretations of probability – frequentism, propensionism, logicism and subjectivism -, the latter is no doubt the closest to the pragmatist outlook. This paper concentrates on three representatives of the subjective theory, namely Frank Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti and Émile Borel. (shrink)

ABSTRACTÉmilie Du Châtelet is the only French woman author of a work included in the corpus of clandestine philosophical literature: a set of treatises, dissertations, or letters that circulated in Europe, and especially in France, mainly in manuscript form, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the main purpose of which was to subject religion to rigorous rational criticism (philosophical, historical, scientific). These Examens de la religion, one of the most controversial works in this corpus, circulated during the eighteenth century and (...) gave rise to a form of legend: sometimes said to be the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, sometimes the result of a form of collaboration between Du Châtelet and the one whose life she shared for a long time: Voltaire. If the feminine point of view on the Bible played a role in the recent attribution of this text to Émilie Du Châtelet, the existence of a properly feminine writing in the wider context of clandestine philosophical literature can now be discussed. This article aims to put this debate into perspective, at both the methodological and philosophical level. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effect of enacted ethical and instrumental values on corporate governance effectiveness. It further considers whether and how compliance with formal corporate governance codes influences the effect of these organizational values on governance effectiveness. Empirical evidence based on a sample of firms listed in the Athens Stock Exchange shows that strong ethical values are the key element for effective corporate governance, while instrumental values play a significant role only in the presence of compliance. Compliance, although not sufficient (...) by itself, serves as a complementary mechanism strengthening the effects of ethical values and creating the conditions by which instrumental values can act in favor of corporate governance. The results highlight that governance benefits can emanate from maintaining high ethical standards as well as from synergies between compliance and a focus on organizational values. Overall, our findings provide important implications for managers regarding how to utilize behavioral along with structural governance mechanisms to enhance corporate governance. The findings add to the behavioral perspective of corporate governance bringing aspects of the social fabric into the corporate governance puzzle. (shrink)

The German-Jewish writer and poetess, Rose Ausländer, who came from Chernivtsi, capital of Bukovina, one of the former provinces of the Hapsburg Empire, is one of the most highly acclaimed lyric poets to have written in German in the 20th century. Throughout her whole life she was an adherent of the philosophy of Spinoza, first becoming acquainted with it in the so-called “ethics seminar” of the secondary-school teacher Friedrich Kettner. In the wake of the First World War the youth of (...) Chernivtsi were in need of new sources of intellectual stimulation, so he set out to introduce them to the philosophy of Spinoza, as well as to that of Constantin Brunner, a contemporary German philosopher influenced by him. Rose Ausländer remained a follower of Spinoza right up to the end of her life. This is confirmed by her two very different poems of the same name, “Spinoza”—the first composed before 1939, the second in 1979—as well as by her many explorations of topics drawn from his ethics, ranging from her very first printed poem, “Amor Dei,” up to her lyrics written in old age, in the 1970s and 1980s. In this short paper I will attempt to chart the course of, and analyze, her interest in Spinoza's philosophical system and life. (shrink)

Topic modelling is a popular unsupervised method for text processing that provides interpretable document representation. One of the most high-level approaches is additively regularized topic models (ARTM). This method features better quality than other methods due to its flexibility and advanced regularization abilities. However, it is challenging to find an optimal learning strategy to create high-quality topics because a user needs to select the regularizers with their values and determine the order of application. Moreover, it may require many real runs (...) or model training which makes this task time consuming. At the current moment, there is a lack of research on parameter optimization for ARTM-based models. Our work proposes an approach that formalizes the learning strategy into a vector of parameters which can be solved with evolutionary approach. We also propose a surrogate-based modification which utilizes machine learning methods that makes the approach for parameters search time efficient. We investigate different optimization algorithms (evolutionary and Bayesian) and their modifications with surrogates in application to topic modelling optimization using the proposed learning strategy approach. An experimental study conducted on English and Russian datasets indicates that the proposed approaches are able to find high-quality parameter solutions for ARTM and substantially reduce the execution time of the search. (shrink)

The relevance of the research topic is that the interaction of managerial education and managerial culture in the information society is an integral part of the formation of a management paradigm of the ХХ1 century. The interaction of managerial education and managerial culture in information societies is an interdisciplinary matrix of many socio-humanities and behavioral sciences. The problem is conceptualization of the interaction of managerial education and managerial culture in the information society, which allows to develop modern directions of improvement (...) of managerial culture in the conditions of transition to a new technological way. It is at the post-industrial stage that the formation and development of a management culture based on knowledge, intelligence, professionalism, and formed by managerial sciences is taking place. Analysis of recent researches and publications - for analysis, we distinguish publications by Regina Andryukaytene, V. Bekh, Yu.Bekh, V.Voronkova, O.Kivlyuk, V.Nikitenko, M.Maksmenyuk, R.Oleksenko, O.Punchchenko, O.Sosnin, which allow us to justify the interaction of managerial education and managerial culture in the information society. Isolation of unexplored parts of the general problem - management culture as the basis of management, based on the culture of management. The task statement is an analysis of the methodological principles of the interaction of managerial education and management culture in the information society. Methods - general sciences and methods of constructive methodology applied to cultural management. In the economic, sociological, socio-philosophical literature of recent years the concept of "cultural management" has become widespread. At the core of the study - the conceptualization of methodological foundations, allowing penetrating the interaction of managerial education and management culture in the information society, the development of directions for improving the culture of management activities. The scientific novelty of the research is the application of constructive methodology aimed at increasing the effectiveness of the culture of management activity. It is proved that the most important attributes of managerial culture, aimed at analysis of a complex self-regulated system, are the culture of management, self-organization and reflexivity, which promote the interaction of culture and management. This qualitatively accelerates the process of transformation of society through the inclusion of culture in management activities. Conclusions - the thematic domain of the interaction of managerial education and managerial culture in the information society should be considered as a dynamic process, the result and a complex social phenomenon. The use of this interaction contributes to the formation of the concept of a culture of management, which is necessary to solve the problems of modern society and increase the dynamic development of the state and society. (shrink)

The progressive multistage stabilization of memory (consolidation) relies on post-acquisition neural reorganization. We hypothesize that two processes subserve procedural memory consolidation and are reflected in delayed post-acquisition performance gains: (1) synaptic consolidation, which is classical Hebbian, and (2) in some tasks, concurrently or consequently, “system consolidation,” which might in some skills be sleep-dependent. Behavioral interference may affect either type of consolidation.

En este trabajo critico la interpretación moralizada de la obligación política en Hobbes que defiende Luciano Venezia. Exploro una lectura diferente que evita una dicotomía tajante entre las razones prudenciales y las razones morales y subraya en cambio la discontinuidad entre la normatividad subjetiva de la ley natural y la normatividad objetiva de la ley positiva. Sostengo que el contrato de sujeción política establece obligaciones objetivas recién cuando el soberano exige el cumplimiento de los contratos. La obligación política es entonces (...) una forma de obligación jurídica. Además, enfatizo que la comunidad moral de Hobbes solo es posible dentro del Estado. In this paper, I criticize Luciano Venezia's moralized interpretation of the Hobbesian concept of political obligation. I explore a different reading that avoids a clear-cut dichotomy between prudential and moral reasons and underscores instead the discontinuity between natural law's subjective normativity and civil law's objective normativity. I contend that the pact of political subjection establishes objective obligations only when the sovereign requires the fulfillment of contracts. Political obligation is then a form of legal obligation. In addition, I emphasize that Hobbes's moral community is only possible within the State. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo, discutiremos algunas lecturas posibles de Física IV 2, donde Aristóteles identifica la χώρα platónica del Timeo con ὕλη, μεταληπτικόν y μεθεκτικόν. Estudiaremos rasgos comunes que acercan el receptáculo del Timeo con la materia y el espacio aristotélicos, y que hacen que Aristóteles encuentre natural identificar la χώρα con la materia. Sin embargo, intentaremos mostrar que, a pesar de las semejanzas entre el receptáculo y lo que Aristóteles entiende por lugar y materia, la mecánica de apropiación del (...) texto platónico que opera el Estagirita, forzando una equivalencia con sus propios términos técnicos, posiblemente implique una distorsión que no termina de hacer justicia a las formulaciones del maestro. (shrink)

In this article I deal with Kant's concept of reflective judgment, and recover it through its links to the aesthetic dimension as its fundamental scenario. Then I go on to explain why Hannah Arendt understood this important Kantian connection, and why she thought it would allow her to develop it through a political dimension. Last, having reviewed both Kant and Arendt's contributions to the concept of reflective judgment, I recover my own input to the concept by showing its linguistic dimension (...) based on the Heideggerian notion of world-disclosure. With this in mind, I show how the concept of reflective judgment is the most suitable to analyze evil actions. (shrink)

How do we perceive the agency of others? Do the same rules apply when interacting with others who are radically different from ourselves, like other species or robots? We typically perceive other people and animals through their embodied behavior, as they dynamically engage various aspects of their affordance field. In second personal perception we also perceive social or interactional affordances of others. I discuss various aspects of perceptible agency, which might begin to give us some tools to understand interactions also (...) with agents truly other than ourselves or “perhaps agents” like present and future social robots. Robots have various kinds of physical and behavioral presence and thus make their agency—if we want to call it that—perceptible in ways that computers and other forms of AI do not. The largely dualist assumptions pertaining to the hidden bodies of traditional Turing tests are discussed, as well as the social affordance effects of such indirect interactions as opposed to interactions in physically shared space. The question is what role various abilities to reveal, hide and dynamically control the body and broader behavior plays in heterogeneous tech or machine mediated interactions. I argue that the specifics and richness of perceptible agency matters to the kind of reciprocity we can obtain. (shrink)

Author: Werner Maria Title: VICTOR BASCH’S INTERPRETATION OF KANTIAN THEORY OF THE SUBLIME (Victora Bascha interpretacja Kantowskiej teorii wzniosłości) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2005, vol:.5, number: 2005/1, pages: 189-201 Keywords: BASCH, KANT, THEORY OF THE SUBLIME Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The article shows the critical analysis of the analytics of the sublime from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, presented by V. Basch. In his work Essai critique sur l’esthetique de Kant (...) Basch tries to prove Kantian division between the mathematical and dynamically sublime superfluous. In his interpretation of the problem also other aspects of Kant’s theory of the sublime (such as referring to the idea of the infinity and his description of the process of ‘grasping and uniting’ in the experience of mathematical sublime) are needless. On the grounds of his criticism Basch gives his own theory of the sublime. According to it the very nature is sublime, and the glorification of human nature is given not in calling to the ideas of reason, but in the uniting with nature. (shrink)

Este trabajo se propone analizar la relación entre teología y política en el pensamiento de Ernst Bloch y Walter Benjamin, particularmente en los inicios de la década del veinte, período en el que ambos encuentran en el mesianismo una respuesta política frente a la crisis que enfrentaba Alemania. El marco de discusión se plantea a partir de Thomas Münzer, teólogo de la revolución [1921] de Bloch, en vistas de cotejarlo con los escritos de Benjamin de la época. Se pondrá a (...) prueba la hipótesis de que sus reapropiaciones del mesianismo convergen en sus consideraciones sobre la historia, aunque no obturan sus diferencias en relación al sujeto histórico; éstas se traducen en distancias políticas que dan cuenta del escenario heterogéneo al interior de la izquierda alemana en el período 1920-1921. (shrink)

The Common Cause Principle, stating that correlations are either consequences of a direct causal link between the correlated events or are due to a common cause, is assessed from the perspective of its viability and it is argued that at present we do not have strictly empirical evidence that could be interpreted as disconfirming the principle. In particular it is not known whether spacelike correlations predicted by quantum field theory can be explained by properly localized common causes, and EPR correlations (...) are known to be unexplainable only by common causes that are required to satisfy conditions that are empirically not tested. (shrink)

While dreaming amputees often experience a normal body image and the phantom limb may not be present. However, dreaming experiences in amputees have mainly been collected by questionnaires. We analysed the dream reports of amputated patients with phantom limb collected after awakening from REM sleep during overnight videopolysomnography . Six amputated patients underwent overnight VPSG study. Patients were awakened during REM sleep and asked to report their dreams. Three patients were able to deliver an account of a dream. In all (...) dreaming recalls, patients reported that the amputated limbs were intact and completely functional and they no longer experienced phantom limb sensations. Phantom limb experiences, that during wake result from a conflict between a pre-existing body scheme and the sensory information on the missing limb, were suppressed during sleep in our patients in favour of the image of an intact body accessed during dream. (shrink)