The freedom theme has always been in the centre of life and philosophical and political discourse. Freedom is one of the magic words causing many positive emotions in everyday life. Certain social and philosophical studies highlight the ways of replacing traditional and, sometimes, spontaneous absolutization of human freedom at an empirical level of social consciousness. It lies in achieving desired results and being entitled to choose what to achieve. The difference between these “formulas” is obvious. In the second case, one (...) can observe one's acceptance of certain restrictions of freedom due to social reality and understanding that it can only be fully realized through self-restraint. However, one needs to come to such conclusions on one’s own. Practice shows that the categorical power of authorities in terms of citizens’ duties mostly leads to opposite results. Therefore, more than ever, it is essential to develop a permanent, well-developed, multi-level humanitarian programme for working with the population based on social and philosophical studies. The state needs to build the “net” of permanent special state-owned institutions since it will improve the quality of public administration, pave the way for tolerance and successful compromises. The ultimate goal of this article is to form a conscious civic position and self-determination as a result of one’s full awareness of responsibility for one’s decisions. (shrink)

Much neuroethics literature concludes with a set of normative recommendations. While these recommendations can be a helpful way of summarizing a proposal for a future direction, some have recently argued that ethics scholarship has devoted insufficient attention to considerations of audience and real-world applications. To date, however, while scholars have conducted topic analyses of neuroethics literature, to our knowledge no study has evaluated who neuroethics scholarship addresses and what it recommends. The objective of the present study therefore was to provide (...) a preliminary characterization of recommendations offered in neuroethics scholarship and an assessment of their target audiences. Rather than attempting to demarcate what constitutes “neuroethics scholarship,” we analyzed text that authors’ had self-identified as being neuroethics-related: abstracts presented at the International Neuroethics Society (INS) annual meetings and published as top abstracts in AJOB Neuroscience in the last decade (2011–2020). We found that a majority of abstracts utilized conceptual methods (62.2%) and provided conceptual recommendations (68%). Roughly 77% of all abstracts did not explicitly address a target audience, yet nearly all of these were implicitly directed at other scholars. The remainder specified a target audience of scholars (12.2%), regulators (6.7%), healthcare providers (6.7%) and industry (2.6%). Only a subset of abstracts provided practical or policy recommendations (19.7%). Of those, the majority (61.5%) did not specify a target audience. Among the subset with actionable recommendations, a clarification of target audience may help increase the impact. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists both ask questions about what the world is like. How do these fields interact with one another? How should they? Naturalism Beyond the Limits of Science investigates an approach to these questions called methodological naturalism. According to methodological naturalism, when coming up with theories about what the world is like, philosophers should, whenever possible, make use of the same methodology that is deployed by scientists. Although many contemporary philosophers have implicit commitments that lead straightforwardly to methodological naturalism, (...) few have a clear understanding of how widespread and disruptive methodological naturalism promises to be for the field. By way of a series of case studies involving laws of nature, composition, time and modality, and drawing on historical and contemporary scientific developments including the discovery of the neutrino, the introduction of dark energy, and the advent of relativity theory, this book demonstrates the ways in which scientists rely on extra-empirical reasoning and how that very same extra-empirical reasoning can yield surprising results when applied to philosophical debates. Along the way, Nina Emery's investigation illuminates the complex relationship between philosophy and the sciences, and makes the case that philosophers and scientists alike would benefit from a greater understanding of the connections between the two fields. (shrink)

The relevance of the study is that the II Vatican Council has not only historical but also cultural significance for the believers. The ideology of the Ajornamento, introduced by this Council, is directed not only to dialogue and tolerance, the rapprochement and unity of the believers in the modern world, but also to the revival of the names of those figures who, through their apostolic activity, have been ahead of their time for millenia and have become a model for modern (...) religious tradition. This implies the phenomenon of Cyril and Methodius - Slavic educators and apostles who, during missionary activities in Moravia and Pannonia, initiated the Slavic rite of Christianity and thus demonstrated the example of the first Christian inculturation. (shrink)

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates a resistance (...) image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man. (shrink)

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book's ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the (...) lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine "I", who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death's material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning "I"'s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject. (shrink)

Collective moods are ubiquitous in social life. People may experience the sharing of a mood at a large sporting event, a concert or a religious ceremony, but also at a small family celebration or as part of a tour group. However, in philosophical discussions, collective moods are often framed as experiences of ecstasy, intoxication or even disinhibition at mass events without examining other aspects. Yet we practice and cultivate the sharing of moods in quite varied forms. In this paper I (...) intend to offer a differentiating suggestion as to the levels and forms of the sharing of moods, drawing on discussions of shared feelings, work on the phenomenology of social understanding, and social theory. (shrink)

This article takes Viviana Zelizer’s (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child to the new millennium. Zelizer documented the transformation between the 19th and 20th century from an “economically useful” to an “emotionally priceless” child. She observed that by the 1930s, American children were practically economically worthless but invested with significant emotional value. What has happened to this emotionally priceless child at the dawn of the new millennium? Has there been a new transformation in the social value of children, and, if so, (...) what might have such a transformation entailed? To address these questions, we examine overtime trends that point to increasing devotion of resources and time to children’s education, a key input in the exceedingly influential human capital theory, which connects investment into children’s human capital with their future market value. Therefore, we argue that the priceless child 2.0 is a useful-to-be human capital investment child. We use four empirical examples of overtime growth in children’s human capital investment: (a) enrollments in early childhood education, (b) federal spending on early education, (c) federal spending on K-12 programs, and (d) parental spending on child care, education and extracurricular activities. In the conclusion, we discuss some potential consequences and concerns about raising children as human capital investment. (shrink)

For more than a decade Nina Baym has pioneered in the reexamination of American literature. She has led the way in questioning assumptions about American literary history, in critiquing the standard canon of works we read and teach, and in rediscovering lost texts by American women writers. Feminism and American Literary History collects fourteen of her most important essays published since 1980, which, combining feminist perspectives with original archival research, significantly revise standard American literary history. In Part I, "Rewriting (...) Old American Literary History," the focus is on male writers. Essays range from close readings of individual works to ambitious critiques of the main paradigms by which scholars have conventionally linked disparate texts and authors in a narrative of nationalist literary history: the self-in-the-wilderness myth, the romance-novel distinction, the myth of New England origins. Part II, "Writing New American Literary History," studies examples of women's writing from the Revolution through the Civil War. Stressing much overtly public and political writing that has been overlooked even by feminist scholars, noting public and political themes in supposedly domestic works, the essays substantially modify and historicize the paradigm by which premodern American women's writing is currently understood. The contentious and influential essays in Part III, "Two Feminist Polemics," address feminist literary theory and pedagogy, advocating a pluralist practice as the basis for scholarship, criticism, and humane feminism. No one interested in American literature or in women's writing can afford to ignore Baym's revisionist work. Humorous and gracefully written, this book is enjoyable and indispensable. (shrink)

A series of recent arguments purport to show that most counterfactuals of the form if A had happened then C would have happened are not true. These arguments pose a challenge to those of us who think that counterfactual discourse is a useful part of ordinary conversation, of philosophical reasoning, and of scientific inquiry. Either we find a way to revise the semantics for counterfactuals in order to avoid these arguments, or we find a way to ensure that the relevant (...) counterfactuals, while not true, are still assertible. I argue that regardless of which of these two strategies we choose, the natural ways of implementing these strategies all share a surprising consequence: they commit us to a particular metaphysical view about chance. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify the concept of relational work for understanding economic life as proposed by Viviana Zelizer. To do so, it first compares the concept to similar notions used in other disciplinary fields. Second, it reinterprets some exemplary economic sociology studies by using the relational work lens to clarify the concept’s utility for empirical analysis. Third, it speculates about the place of relational work in the theoretical toolkit of economic sociologists, in particular its relation to embeddedness. The paper (...) concludes by arguing for the utility of the concept to integrate structural, cultural, and power-focused analyses of economic life, to highlight the often-overlooked role of emotions in economic exchange, and to ground an alternative to rational action theory in economic sociology. (shrink)

This article analyzes the origins and essence of the social ideal of the early-twentieth-century Russian liberal-centrists. We note the leading role played by a number of their most prominent repre...

This paper responds to a recent challenge for the validity of extrapolation of neurobiological knowledge from laboratory animals to humans. According to this challenge, experimental neurobiology, and thus neuroscience, is in a state of crisis because the knowledge produced in different laboratories hardly generalizes from one laboratory to another. Presumably, this is so because neurobiological laboratories use simplified animal models of human conditions that differ across laboratories. By contrast, I argue that maintaining a multiplicity of experimental protocols and simple models (...) is well justified. It fosters rather than precludes the validity of extrapolation of neurobiological knowledge. The discipline is thriving. (shrink)

It is divided into four sections covering science as a whole, the new technologies of the postmodern era, bio-medical discourses, and nature. A distinguished cast of contributors explores the central feminist concerns in each arena, through the central metaphors of monster, mother goddess and cyborg. They look at the consequences of gynogenesis, postmodern eco-buddhism in heathcare, sexual violence in cyberspace, the postmodernization of menopause, the dolphin as androgyne and feminist environmentalism.

Das Sterben wird längst nicht mehr verdrängt und verschwiegen, es gehört vielmehr zu den ausgiebig erörterten Themen unserer Zeit. Viele Debatten ranken sich um Sterbehilfe und um die Frage, was einen guten Tod ausmacht. Dabei scheinen wir uns bemerkenswert einig zu sein, dass gut stirbt, wer bis zuletzt er oder sie selbst bleibt. Wir wünschen uns, so die These dieses Buches, unseren 'eigenen Tod': ein Lebensende, wie es uns entspricht, ein authentisches Sterben. Dieses Ideal leitet in unterschiedlicher Weise die Palliativversorgung (...) und die Sterbehilfebewegung an. Doch Nina Streeck zeigt, dass sich das, was so erstrebenswert klingt, als anspruchsvoll entpuppt. Die Idee des 'eigenen Todes' droht sich in ihr Gegenteil zu verkehren: in einen Zwang zum authentischen Sterben."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

I present an argument for the view that laws ground their instances. I then outline two important consequences that follow if we accept the conclusion of this argument. First, the claim that laws ground their instances threatens to undermine a prominent recent attempt to make sense of the explanatory power of Humean laws by distinguishing between metaphysical and scientific explanation. And second, the claim that laws ground their instances gives rise to a novel argument against the view that grounding relations (...) are metaphysically necessary. (shrink)

All the early advocates of women’s education, male and female, had proposed history as a central subject in women’s education—perhaps as the central subject. They envisaged it as a substitute for novel reading, which they viewed as strengthening women’s mental weakness and encouraging them in unrepublican habits of idleness, extravagance, and daydreaming.6 Many prominent women educators wrote history, among them Pierce, Rowson, and Willard. But besides such history writing and history advocacy by materialist educational reformers, American women wrote history in (...) other modes and contexts, and it is on these that I want to focus now.Speculating on history as a woman’s writing practice from the earliest years of the republic, my approach is purely literary in taking for granted, but considering it unimportant, that by present-day standards none of these women could have been “good” historians. More generally, I supposed that insofar as our present-day definition of literature or, more generally, of writing, invokes such forms as poem, play, story, and novel—and insofar as the feminist enterprise of recovering women’s writing further emphasizes such private, putatively unpublished forms as journal, diary, and letters—we have been instructed to perceive women writers as largely sealed off from public discourse, writing from somewhere outside the public sphere. This currently dominant view of women’s writing may be an inadvertent artifact of an unself-conscious, individualistic, curiously romantic definition of writing even among postmodernist critics; or, it may be a strategic view designed to focus attention on and valorize previously silenced or presently new forms of utterance. In contrast, to encompass diverse, already published, programmatically public instances of women’s writing in our definition is to begin to see how often and how openly American women have written in such forms. We then begin to recover a different sort of writing woman from the madwoman in the attic and acquire materials with which to begin constructing a different narrative of American women’s literary history. Nina Baym is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana. She is the author of many books and articles on American and feminist literary topics. (shrink)

I argue against the common and influential view that non-trivial chances arise only when the fundamental laws are indeterministic. The problem with this view, I claim, is not that it conflicts with some antecedently plausible metaphysics of chance or that it fails to capture our everyday use of ‘chance’ and related terms, but rather that it is unstable. Any reason for adopting the position that non-trivial chances arise only when the fundamental laws are indeterministic is also a reason for adopting (...) a much stronger, and far less attractive, position. I suggest an alternative account, according to which chances are probabilities that play a certain explanatory role: they are probabilities that explain associated frequencies. 1 Introduction2 A Paradigm Case3 The Incompatibilist’s Criterion4 Against the Incompatibilist’s Criterion5 The Explanatory Criterion6 Conclusion. (shrink)

A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and (...) identify features that distinguish people’s understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral, and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology. (shrink)

I argue against the common and influential view that non-trivial chances arise only when the fundamental laws are indeterministic. The problem with this view, I claim, is not that it conflicts with some antecedently plausible metaphysics of chance or that it fails to capture our everyday use of ‘chance’ and related terms, but rather that it is unstable. Any reason for adopting the position that non-trivial chances arise only when the fundamental laws are indeterministic is also a reason for adopting (...) a much stronger, and far less attractive, position. I suggest an alternative account, according to which chances are probabilities that play a certain explanatory role: they are probabilities that explain associated frequencies. (shrink)

Reshaping ethnography: contemporary postpositivist possibilitiesFollowing Leinginger's introduction of ethnography into the field of nursing research, numerous descriptive and interpretive studies of health care beliefs and practices have been conducted. The resultant data have been translated into recommendations relative to the areas of nursing education, administration and clinical practice in an effort to ensure that the identified cultural needs are recognized and met. In this paper die discourses that inform such work are explored. Its practices and emergent dilemmas are reassessed in (...) die light of an emerging body of work that challenges its foundational assumptions. Linked under die umbrella of ‘postpositivist ethnography’, such work recognizes the research area as a social and political field of which the researcher is an integral part. Hence, as an informed subject, die researcher, like the informants, is seen to be implicated in the generation of data. She, or he, is not charged with occupying die opposing roles of objective researcher and subjective participant, nor with reporting ‘the truth’ as told by informants. This emergent tradition is not without its dilemmas and of particular concern is the issue of authority; that is, whose voice constructs the text? As nursing academics grapple with questions regarding die nature of die knowledge that informs their discipline, it is imperative that they critique potentially fruitful research practices before they appropriate them. Failure to do so may lead diem to unwittingly generate knowledge that is inimical to their particular quest. The lsquo;new edinographyrsquo; discussed in this paper, offers academics and odiers interested in the generation of knowledge, not only a mediodology that invites the possibility of opening up previously hidden areas of practice, but one that actively involves die researcher in challenging her taken‐for‐granted assumptions. (shrink)

Some theories of quantum mechanical phenomena endorse wave function realism, according to which the physical space we inhabit is very different from the physical space we appear to inhabit. In this paper I explore an argument against wave function realism that appeals to a type of simplicity that, although often overlooked, plays a crucial role in scientific theory choice. The type of simplicity in question is simplicity of fit between the way a theory says the world is and the way (...) the world appears to be. This argument can be understood as one way of spelling out the so-called “incredulous stare objection” that is sometimes leveled against surprising metaphysical theories. (shrink)

Relational reasoning is a hallmark of human higher cognition and creativity, yet it is notoriously difficult to encourage in abstract tasks, even in adults. Generally, young children initially focus more on objects, but with age become more focused on relations. While prerequisite knowledge and cognitive resource maturation partially explains this pattern, here we propose a new facet important for children's relational reasoning development: a general orientation to relational information, or a relational mindset. We demonstrate that a relational mindset can be (...) elicited, even in 4‐year‐old children, yielding greater than expected spontaneous attention to relations. Children either generated or listened to an experimenter state the relationships between objects in a set of formal analogy problems, and then in a second task, selected object or relational matches according to their preference. Children tended to make object mappings, but those who generated relations on the first task selected relational matches more often on the second task, signaling that relational attention is malleable even in young children. (shrink)

The paper presents two case studies of multi-agent information exchange involving generalized quantifiers. We focus on scenarios in which agents successfully converge to knowledge on the basis of the information about the knowledge of others, so-called Muddy Children puzzle and Top Hat puzzle. We investigate the relationship between certain invariance properties of quantifiers and the successful convergence to knowledge in such situations. We generalize the scenarios to account for public announcements with arbitrary quantifiers. We show that the Muddy Children puzzle (...) is solvable for any number of agents if and only if the quantifier in the announcement is positively active (satisfies a version of the variety condition). In order to get the characterization result, we propose a new concise logical modeling of the puzzle based on the number triangle representation of generalized quantifiers. In a similar vein, we also study the Top Hat puzzle. We observe that in this case an announcement needs to satisfy stronger conditions in order to guarantee solvability. Hence, we introduce a new property, called bounded thickness, and show that the solvability of the Top Hat puzzle for arbitrary number of agents is equivalent to the announcement being 1-thick. (shrink)

Palliative care names as one of its central aims to prevent and relieve suffering. Following the concept of “total pain”, which was first introduced by Cicely Saunders, PC not only focuses on the physical dimension of pain but also addresses the patient’s psychological, social, and spiritual suffering. However, the goal to relieve suffering can paradoxically lead to a taboo of suffering and imply adverse consequences. Two scenarios are presented: First, PC providers sometimes might fail their own ambitions. If all other (...) means prove ineffective terminal sedation can still be applied as a last resort, though. However, it may be asked whether sedating a dying patient comes close to eliminating suffering by eliminating the sufferer and hereby resembles physician-assisted suicide, or euthanasia. As an alternative, PC providers could continue treatment, even if it so far prove unsuccessful. In that case, either futility results or the patient might even suffer from the perpetuated, albeit fruitless interventions. Second, some patients possibly prefer to endure suffering instead of being relieved from it. Hence, they want to forgo the various bio-psycho-socio-spiritual interventions. PC providers’ efforts then lead to paradoxical consequences: Feeling harassed by PC, patients could suffer even more and not less. In both scenarios, suffering is placed under a taboo and is thereby conceptualised as not being tolerable in general. However, to consider suffering essentially unbearable might promote assisted dying not only on an individual but also on a societal level insofar as unbearable suffering is considered a criterion for euthanasia or PAS. (shrink)

The theory of causal Bayes nets [15, 19] is, from an empirical point of view, currently one of the most promising approaches to causation on the market. There are, however, counterexamples to its core axiom, the causal Markov condition. Probably the most serious of these counterexamples are EPR/B experiments in quantum mechanics (cf. [13, 23]). However, these are also the only counterexamples yet known from the quantum realm. One might therefore wonder whether they are the only phenomena in the quantum (...) realm that create problems for causal Bayes nets. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that not only the phenomenon of quantum correlations in EPR/B experiments create problems for causal Bayes nets, but also the temporal evolution of quantum systems, which is described as dualistic by quantum mechanics. For this purpose, it is shown that single photon experiments in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) violate the causal Markov condition as well. It is then argued, however, that the Markov violation does not occur under the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of Bohmian mechanics. (shrink)

Processing the motivational relevance of a visual scene and reacting accordingly is crucial for survival. Previous work suggests the emotional content of naturalistic scenes affects response speed, such that unpleasant content slows responses whereas pleasant content accelerates responses. It is unclear whether these effects reflect motor-cognitive processes, such as attentional orienting, or vary with the function/outcome of the motor response itself. Four experiments manipulated participants’ ability to terminate the picture and, thereby, the response’s function and motivational value. Attentive orienting was (...) manipulated via picture repetition, which diminishes orienting. A total of N = 81 participants completed versions of a go/no-go task, discriminating between distorted versus intact pictures drawn from six content categories varying in positive, negative, or neutral valence. While all participants responded faster with repetition, only participants without offset control exhibited slower responses to unpleasant and accelerated responses to pleasant content. Emotional engagement, measured by the late positive potential, was not modulated by attentional orienting, suggesting that the interaction between repetition and offset control is not due to altered emotional engagement. Together, results suggest that response time changes as a function of emotional content and sensitivity to attention orienting depends on the motivational function of the motor response. (shrink)

While a circular economy (CE) paradigm shift has gained significant momentum among academics, practitioners, and policymakers, theory regarding its social aspects remains scant, especially theory based on an ethical, micro-level perspective. Circular consumption, referring to those consumption practices that aim to extend the lifetimes of objects and materials, involves ethical considerations. However, everyday circular consumption and its ethics have not gained a foothold in the CE literature. This article builds on the existing circular consumption literature by drawing insights from the (...) posthuman feminist theorising of care, shifting the focus of care from humans to the complex relations between humans and nonhumans and conceptualising circular consumption practices as matters of care. This conceptualisation, which follows a thinking-with-theory approach, is based on empirical material constructed in two research projects focusing on frontrunner consumers in terms of circular consumption in Finland: food waste reduction and circular clothing consumption. We identify circular consumption as care by introducing three distinct perspectives: care as tinkering, care as affective practices, and care as ethico-political action. We show that approaching circular consumption practices as matters of care, while not always easy or straightforward, is an attempt to make consumption better: more attentive, inclusive, durable, and enjoyable. Our findings emphasise the interconnected nature of circular practices, the constant performativity of circular consumption, and nonhumans as crucial stakeholders in care relations. Consequently, we offer an alternative to technocentric CE perspectives and a way to promote a sustainable world through care. (shrink)

Recently, McGinn (2011) has proposed a new theory of disgust. This theory makes empirical claims as to the history and function of disgust, yet does not take into account contemporary scientific research on the subject. This essay evaluates his theory for its merits as an account of disgust, and as a piece of scholarship more generally, and finds it lacking.

Although it seems scientifically implausible, holistically oriented forms of alternative and complementary medicine have become popular over the past few years. Homeopathy is considered to be one of the most widespread, heterogeneous, and controversial of these therapies. Science works as a generator of professional identity in such groups of medical outsiders. This article is based on extensive research on homeopathic communities conducted over several years. It will outline social conditions of homeopathic knowledge and treatment as opposed to scientific standards and (...) will shed some light on homeopathyas affected by science onthree levels: homeopathicresearch, education, and everyday work. Since the area of medical science and research affects homeopathic practice but not vice versa, this article will also highlight the challenge of “doing science” in a still marginalized field. (shrink)

Beginning in 1989, the breakup of the Soviet Bloc disrupted trade and cut off Cuba's source of subsidized fuel oil, making many modern agricultural practices impossible, including the wide use of pesticides. Among Cuba's responses was an emphasis on biological control of plant diseases. Research into biological control began in the 1930s, and after the revolution many scientists maintained an unofficial interest. When the 1989 economic crisis occurred, the government placed a high priority on biocontrol, and researchers were in a (...) position to begin immediate implementation. For example, the construction of factories for the mass production of biological agents had been approved in 1988, and are currently in operation. Disease monitoring was undertaken before the current crisis, with more than 90% of Cuban agriculture using it to some extent. Such monitoring has allowed a reduction in pesticide use. Since the 1989 onset of economic crisis the monitor system has not been greatly modified for use with biological control techniques, but an example of a successful transition from chemical treatment to biocontrol in Cuba is in banana plantations.At the various research centers, research is being conducted in the biocontrol of vegetable diseases, tobacco root diseases, nematodes, and pasture weeds. Technical research is being done on mass production of inoculum, the production of application formulations, and storage of biocontrol products. Because wide use of biocontrol agents was urgently desired, the government cooperated at every step of research, including in regulatory matters. Obstacles to successful biocontrol mentioned by Cuban scientists were the lack of taxonomic knowledge and the need for strict quality control.There are few economic studies of biocontrol agents despite the importance of such studies. Cuban scientists are in an excellent position to do such research. Forced by the economic crisis to act, Cuba has made a major change in national agronomic policy that may represent a significant and new direction for “modern” agricultural practices. (shrink)

Reflection is an ambiguous buzzword in contemporary educational and professional settings. Work has been done to clarify the concept theoretically, but a gap remains between such clarifications and actual reflective activities in educational and work-related practices. Reflective activities embody epistemological presuppositions about the nature of competence, knowledge, and learning, and about the relation between thinking, communicating, and acting. In this article, Nina Bonderup Dohn identifies the epistemological presuppositions of two paradigm cases of reflection (“solitaire reflection” and “communicative reflection”) and (...) assesses these against a view of knowledge, competence, learning, and action inspired by the Scandinavian interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy as well as by insights from phenomenology and situated learning. The outcome of Dohn's assessment is that the presuppositions of the paradigm cases are misguided and, therefore, so are the reflective activities. The problems and pitfalls that result from this situation are identified and illustrated with empirical examples. Dohn concludes by suggesting an alternative paradigm: “situated reflection.”. (shrink)

We discuss Hintikka’s Thesis [Hintikka 1973] that there exist natural language sentences which require non–linear quantification to express their logical form.

Experience has shown that the application of ethical guidelines developed for research in developed countries to research in developing countries can be, and often is, impractical and raises a number of contentious issues. Various attempts have been made to provide guidelines more appropriate to the developing world context; however, to date these efforts have been dominated by the fields of bioscience, medical research and nutrition. There is very little advice available for those seeking to undertake collaborative social science or natural (...) science research in developing countries and what is there tends to be held within disparate sources. Charting the development of a set of ethics documentation for future use by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme research community, this paper outlines past and present attitudes towards ethics procedures amongst this community and suggests ways in which ethics procedures might be made more relevant and user-friendly to researchers working in this area. (shrink)