ObjectiveTo determine the impact of the affiliate stigma on mental well-being of relatives caring for a person with dementia.DesignThe study was conducted in a cross sectional design.SettingThe study was conducted in a public setting, addressing relatives caring for a person with dementia.ParticipantsParticipants were relatives of patients with a formal diagnosis of dementia. Relatives were defined as caring or living closely to a patient. Participants were recruited with the help of care and welfare organizations.Outcome MeasuresThe main outcome measure was the impact (...) of the affiliate stigma on mental well-being of caring relatives.Results228 participants fully completed the survey. Women, relatives with a higher education and partners experienced more impact of the affiliate stigma on mental well-being than man, relatives with a lower education and relatives with another relationship to the person with dementia. The duration of dementia and the age of the caregiver had a clear significant effect on affiliate stigma.ConclusionThis study revealed that caregiver related features are predicting the presence of an affiliate stigma. Interventions to prevent or reduce the impact of this stigma might focus on these groups. Education about dementia and the impact on patients, relatives and the broader social context might alter the affiliate stigma surrounding dementia. (shrink)

Pleidooi voor de beleving als kennis-instrument.

The paper is meant to be a contribution to the study of Indian and comparative ethics. It treats the Vajjālaggam, an anthology of Prākrit stanzas (subhāsita literature) dealing with a variety of topics. Focusing on the ‘ethical’ sections of the VL, it tries to describe and analyse its underlying ethical system. In Part I the different ethical themes of the VL (Valour and Destiny, Virtues and Vices, Masters and Servants, Friendship and Affection, Poverty and Charity) are described in detail. In (...) Part II it is shown that the VL. offers a clear example of a virtue ethic with a strong emphasis on self‐regarding virtues (gunas), based on a pluralistic and instrumental theory of the good. The paper also treats the crucial ethical problem of the relationship between personal well‐being and virtuousness as described in the VL. (shrink)

This paper examines the consequences of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness for theology. Today, it seems, the human cannot encounter a real Otherness in immanence, let alone in history. This is theology’s main problem in today’s western culture marked by the experience of the absence of God. The consequence is that each and everything becomes subjectified, included God’s presence. God seems no longer to be present himself. The author finds in Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, the possibility to think again the (...) encounter with real otherness, and this according to God’s threefold manifestation: God’s invisible mystery as the otherness of history, God’s advent in history in Jesus Christ, and finally, the Eucharistic Christ – indeed these are three manifestations for which Cardinal Ratzinger uses the term of God’s praesentia realis. In the first instance this applies at the level of God’s possible appearing as the Transcendent in immanence. Givenness retrieves a real otherness in our gazing gaze, in the self-giving of phenomenality, and thus makes the phenomenon of the other belong to phenomenality as invisible. The philosophical and theological consequences of this otherness belonging to phenomenality appear to be multiple. Second, Marion succeeds in thinking a phenomenon of revelation-as-possibility, of which Jesus Christ appears to be the historical paradigm. And third, the miraculous event of Eucharistic presence can be understood phenomenologically as a phenomenon of revelation. Looked at from a theological perspective, it appears thus that Marion’s phenomenology of givenness offers to theology a new first philosophy as ancilla theologiae: it provides theology again with a presence, as a present or a gift. (shrink)

Ce livre a pour objet principal de décrire le sport en tant qu’art de vivre. L’art de vivre pose la question de la vie bonne, du sens, de la qualité de vie. Jadis, les Hellènes en avaient déjà soulevé l’importance d’un point de vue philosophique et pratique. Ainsi, la quête de cette vie bonne n’est possible que si elle prends en compte la dimension du soin du corps. Notre tradition occidentale a trop souvent éliminé la corporéité, le besoin de prendre (...) soin de son corps. Les maladies actuelles de la civilisation (stress, dépressions,...) en sont la preuve. Or, le corps est notre manière primaire d’être-dans-le-monde. L’art de vivre est également synonyme d’harmonie, de juste mesure, de dialogue avec l’environnement. Le sport en tant qu’art de vivre n’a pour dire pas de but; il est le but. Ce qui compte, ce n’est pas de penser en termes de quantité ou d’efficacité, mais en termes de qualité, de bien-être. La manière dont Marc Van den Bossche aborde le sport en tant qu’art de vivre est novatrice. En effet, rares sont les auteurs qui ont présenté l’art de vivre avec cette dimension du soin du corps, ou bien le sport nécessite de performances. (shrink)

This paper explores the functioning of political propaganda during the Brabant Revolution, that is, during Belgium's contribution to the ‘Age of the Democratic Revolution’. More in particular, it examines the differences between royalist and patriot propaganda. Detailed reference to the political dialogue pamphlets of the time allows for the reconstruction of the first instance of nation-building in Belgian history. In more general terms, the paper hopes to contribute to the argument for an historic and developmental approach to the study of (...) nation, with particular attention for its multi-faceted and emancipatory functionality. (shrink)

In his recent study on ‘The Excessiveness of Christianity’ the K.U. Leuven professor of phi- losophical anthropology Paul Moyaert describes how Christianity is marked with excessiveness in its ethical, religious-metaphysical and mystical self-understanding. Here we deal only with the middle part of the study, on “the incarnation of meaning.” In the first part of our contribution we explore Moyaerts theory of symbol. Moyaert rightly resists both an instrumental reduction of the symbol and an intellectual reduction. But in his search for (...) the own rationality of the symbol, he inclines towards absolutising its meaning, installing an intrinsic relation between the signifier and the signified. Moyaert recognises the role of human intentionality installing a signification in the symbol, but argues that the symbol exceeds that subjective signification with an objective meaning which it brings about itself. He sees an “intimate entanglement of ‘significatio’ and ‘esse’ ” which is at the heart of what he calls a “realism of meaning.” Our argument against this reasoning is that if the symbol bridges the distance between signifier and signified in an objective relationship between both, apart from every signifying human intentionality, then this symbol escapes historicity, and brings about an absolute presence, or the divine, thus becoming what we call the locus onto-theologicus susceptible to unmasking as an idol. Moyaert partly seems to recognize this, but nonetheless defends it as the “surrealistic perspective” from which we must think the symbol. In the second part of our contribution we follow Moyaert in his application of his theory of symbol to sacramental presence, especially the praesentia realis. He replaces the terms “signifier – signified” with their religious equivalents “incarnans – incarnatum,” seeming to assume that they have the same meaning. But this is not an innocent procedure. Whereas in the symbolic the distance between both poles should be held apart in order to avoid idolatry, in the movement of sacramental incarnation God bridges this distance in His becoming present through the historical. The praesentia realisis in the tradition of the Church not the highest possible symbolic presence of God, hence a kind of “praesentia surrealis”, but God’s sacramental presence, pushed to the limit of its historicity, in a manner analogous with Jesus’ being completely one of us and yet also “without sin.” Hence does faith not occur in a perspective of surrealism, but of realism. In our evaluation, we make a plea for a theological nuance of Moyaerts theory of symbol, recognising that a symbol as signifier needs to maintain distance from its signified in order to avoid becoming an idol, and so must also be recognized the historicity of the indeed irreducible otherness of the symbol for the individual. What is distinctive about the sacrament, as opposed to the symbol, is its accomplishment of God’s Mysterious movement bridging the distance between creation and Creator. Without this nuance, Moyaerts position appears to us to fall back into to the ultimate functionalisation of faith which consists in mastering contingency through the symbolic. Indeed, Moyaert is not alone among contemporary philosophers who turn from recognizing the irreducible groundlessness of life to a rediscovery of Christianity as an inspiration for philosophical anthropology which, however, threatens to reduce faith to a kind of post-religious wisdom tradition. In those cases, one suspects that this new sympathy for Christian faith may turn out to be a Trojan horse in the mother of all religious wars, still ongoing between Greek-modern autonomy and Jewish-biblical heteronomy. (shrink)

‘Vandaag ga je toch niet hardlopen, met zo'n rotweer?’ Vraag van een collega aan een andere collega. ‘Natuurlijk wel,’ klonk het antwoord. ‘Net met dit regenweer vind ik het heerlijk om er eens tegenaan te gaan.’ Dat antwoord beviel me wel. Vorige winter heb ik het nog zo vaak mogen meemaken tijdens het fietsen. Een geselende wind, ijskoude regendruppels, opspattende modder: bij het begin van een trainingsrit roept dat vraagtekens op naar de zin van dit gedoe. Dat duurt hooguit een (...) uur. Dan worden je twijfels overstemd door wat je lichaam je zeer nadrukkelijk influistert: dit is genieten. Van binnen in je lijf lijken allerlei explosieve stofjes naar buiten te willen. Lijden als springstof. Een klein beetje doodgaan om je springlevend te voelen. Duursporters kennen die wijsheid van het lichaam. (shrink)

In this contribution the author tries to formulate an approach to the art of living with technology based on Heidegger’s The Principle of Reason, a work often overlooked by contemporary commentators in the philosophy of technology. This approach couples the concept of releasement to insights hailing from Wolfgang Schirmacher concerning Heidegger’s nihilism.

In my reply to the commentaries by Babette Babich and Robert C. Scharff I make a distinction between critical remarks and additions that are relevant for my view on philosophy for substantive reasons and others that relate to a style or way of philosophizing. My reply to Scharff concerns the latter. I continue to defend an updated version of Heidegger’s thinking about technology, which I bring together with elements from the work of Don Ihde and Andrew Feenberg. I read all (...) this from the perspective of a neo-pragmatist way of philosophizing, explicitly inspired by Richard Rorty. (shrink)

Following an article by John von Neumann on infinite tensor products, we develop the idea that the usual formalism of quantum mechanics, associated with unitary equivalence of representations, stops working when countable infinities of particles (or degrees of freedom) are encountered. This is because the dimension of the corresponding Hilbert space becomes uncountably infinite, leading to the loss of unitary equivalence, and to sectorisation. By interpreting physically this mathematical fact, we show that it provides a natural way to describe the (...) “Heisenberg cut”, as well as a unified mathematical model including both quantum and classical physics, appearing as required incommensurable facets in the description of nature. (shrink)

InPart I of my article I have tried to show how the problem of negation has led the Jains to accept Non-existence and Existence as constituents ordharmas of every real object and to formulate their first dialectical principle:sad-asad-rŪpa $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{m} $$ vastu or ‘Every real object possesses a mode as an existent and as a non-existent’. Their interpretation of negation seems to be based on the ‘primitive’ realistic standpoint that every word in a true proposition, including the word ‘not(-)’, must have (...) some sort of objective reference. InPart II I have tried to show, using Mereology as a logical tool, howHaribhadra SŪri in the first chapter of theAnekānta-jaya-patākā defends the Jain viewpoint. (shrink)

This volume consists of several contributions to a refined understanding of religious experience in view of contemporary theological epistemology.

In this volume we present the proceedings from the fourth international Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology (LEST IV, November 5-8, 2003), which focussed ...

In this article we seek to lay bare a couple of potential conceptual and methodological issues that, we believe, are implicitly present in contemporary philosophy of technology. At stake are the sustained pertinence of and need for coping strategies as to ‘how to live with technology ’ notwithstanding PhilTech’s advancement in its non-essentialist analysis of ‘technology’ as such; the issue of whether ‘living with technology’ is a technological affair or not ; and the tightly related question concerning the status of (...) the methodological bedrock of contemporary PhilTech, the ‘empirical turn.’ These matters are approached from the perspective of the philosophical notion of the ‘art of living,’ and our argumentation is developed both as a context for and on the basis of the contributions to the special issue ‘The Art of Living with Technology.’. (shrink)

Romans 7: 14 if. has traditionally been one of the most frequently discussed passages in the whole of the Pauline Corpus. Nevertheless, this pericope has attracted attention more because it is consistently regarded as a crucial part of Paul's theology, than because of its intrinsic exegetical problems. The main issue is whether the ‘split personality’ and the weakness of will should be regarded as essential to the life of the believing Christian; or, rather, as characteristic for those who are (...) not ‘in Christ’ and therefore beyond the power of his Spirit. For the systematic theologian, the question of whether the first person singular in these verses should be understood in an autobiographical sense is a subordinate one. However this particular question is answered, we are still confronted by the main issue. (shrink)

Het ethos waarin de mens leeft en handelt is in verandering zolang de mens leeft en handelt. In De maakbare moraal reflecteren verschillende filosofen over de antwoorden die het moderne en hedendaagse denken kunnen bieden op vragen die net door dat veranderend ethos tot stand worden gebracht. De idee dat moraal 'maakbaar' zou zijn houdt meteen ook een kritisch standpunt in: wat precies is er in onze morele omgang met elkaar dat beheersbaar, expliciteerbaar, voorstelbaar... zou kunnen zijn? De maakbare moraal (...) bundelt bijdragen van Daniel Acke, Hans Alma, Sonja Lavaert, Julia Maria Mönig, Johan Stuy en Adelheid Rigo, Marc Van den Bossche, Yoni Van Den Eede, Karl Verstrynge en Else Walravens. De reeks Humanismen wil het denken over de hedendaagse condition humaine op een prikkelende en eigenzinnige manier stimuleren. Het begrip humanisme krijgt hier een zeer ruime omschrijving: respect voor de mens in zijn diversiteit en pluraliteit en voor de manier waarop individuen zoeken naar identiteit en zingeving. De reeks komt tot stand onder begeleiding van prof. dr. Marc Van den Bossche van de vakgroep Wijsbegeerte en Moraalwetenschappen van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel. (shrink)

The cloister of the Poor Clares St.-Elisabethsdal in Boxtel, in the present-day province of Brabant, the Netherlands, is one of the monasteries created during the new wave of Observant Clarissan monastic foundations in the Northern Low Countries between ca. 1460 and 1513. It was established after Wamel, Haarlem, Veere, Delft, Brielle, Gouda and Alkmaar.1 But it was not the first Clarissan settlement in what is currently the Netherlands. More than a century before, Willem van den Bossche, lord of Erp, (...) enabled through his last will d.d. 28 augustus 1335 the foundation of a convent of Poor Clares in the town of 's-Hertogenbosch,2... (shrink)

In Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity scholars reflect on politico-cultural, philosophical, and religious forms of critical conversation in the ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and early-Islamic world. They enquire into the boundaries between debate, polemics, and intolerance, and address their manifestations in both philosophy and religion. This cross-cultural and inclusive approach shows that debate and polemics are not so different as often assumed, since polemics may also indicate that ultimate values are at stake. Polemics can also have a positive (...) effect, stimulating further cultural development. Intolerance is more straightforwardly negative. Religious intolerance is often a justification for politics, but also elite rationalism can become totalitarian. The volume also highlights the importance of the fluency of minorities in the dominant discourses and of their ability to develop contrapuntal lines of thought within a common cultural discourse. Contributors are: Robbert van den Berg, Stefan Beyerle, George Boys-Stones, Reuven Firestone, Pieter B. Hartog, Paul Heck, Paulin Ismard, George van Kooten, Marjo C. Korpel, Dominik Markl, Steve Mason, Peter Franz Mittag, James C. Oleson, James Carleton Paget, Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, Jacques van Ruiten, Diego R. Sarrió Cucarella, Clare Wilde. (shrink)

Within current debates about the future impact of Artificial Intelligence on human society, roughly three different perspectives can be recognised: the technology-centric perspective, claiming that AI will soon outperform humankind in all areas, and that the primary threat for humankind is superintelligence; the human-centric perspective, claiming that humans will always remain superior to AI when it comes to social and societal aspects, and that the main threat of AI is that humankind’s social nature is overlooked in technological designs; and the (...) collective intelligence-centric perspective, claiming that true intelligence lies in the collective of intelligent agents, both human and artificial, and that the main threat for humankind is that technological designs create problems at the collective, systemic level that are hard to oversee and control. The current paper offers the following contributions: a clear description for each of the three perspectives, along with their history and background; an analysis and interpretation of current applications of AI in human society according to each of the three perspectives, thereby disentangling miscommunication in the debate concerning threats of AI; and a new integrated and comprehensive research design framework that addresses all aspects of the above three perspectives, and includes principles that support developers to reflect and anticipate upon potential effects of AI in society. (shrink)

Chervenak and McCullough, authors of the most acknowledged ethical framework for maternal–fetal surgery, rely on the ‘ethical–obstetrical’ concept of the fetus as a patient in order to determine what is morally owed to fetuses by both physicians and the women who gestate them in the context of prenatal surgery. In this article, we reconstruct the argumentative structure of their framework and present an internal criticism. First, we analyse the justificatory arguments put forward by the authors regarding the moral status of (...) the fetus qua patient. Second, we discuss the internal coherence and consistency of the moral obligations those authors derive from that concept. We claim that some of the dilemmas their approach is purported to avoid, such as the debate about the independent moral status of the fetus, and the foundation of the moral obligations of pregnant women (towards the fetuses they gestate) are not, all things considered, avoided. Chervenak and McCullough construct the obligations of physicians as obligations towards entities with equal moral status. But, at the same time, they assume that the woman has an independent moral status while the moral status of the fetus is dependent on the decision of the woman to present it to a physician for care. According to the logic of their own argumentation, Chervenak and McCullough implicitly admit a different moral status of the woman and the fetus, which will lead to different ascription of duties of the physician than those they ascribed. (shrink)

This intervention study examined the effects of a career crafting training on physicians' perceptions of their job crafting behaviors, career self-management, and employability. A total of 154 physicians working in two hospitals in a large Dutch city were randomly assigned to a waitlist control group or an intervention group. Physicians in the intervention group received an accredited training on career crafting, including a mix of theory, self-reflection, and exercises. Participants developed four career crafting goals during the training, to work on (...) in the subsequent weeks, after which a coaching conversation took place over the phone. Physicians in the control group received no intervention. A pre- and post-test 8 weeks later measured changes in job crafting and career self-management and employability of 103 physicians that completed the pre- and post-test. RM ANOVAs showed that the intervention enhanced perceptions of career self-management and job crafting behavior to decrease hindering job demands. No support was found for the effect of the intervention on other types of job crafting and employability. This study offers novel insights into how career crafting can be enhanced through training, as this is the first empirical study to examine a career crafting intervention. HR managers can use the outcomes to develop tailored career policies and career development practices. (shrink)

This article is a longitudinal analysis of the relation between gendered labour divisions and new data processing technologies at the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics. Following social-constructivist and evolutionary economic approaches, the authors hold that the relation between technology and work organization is a two-way process. This means that technology does not only affect the relations between men and women at work, but that these relations also influence technological choices. The proportional numbers of men and women on the labour market (...) and changing conceptions of which work is deemed appropriate for women have been important factors in the strongly varying extent to which women participated in office work. They have also been important factors in determining the course of technological development. Shortages of women on the labour market have even determined search heuristics for new technological solutions in specific directions. (shrink)

In the age of Big Data, companies and governments are increasingly using algorithms to inform hiring decisions, employee management, policing, credit scoring, insurance pricing, and many more aspects of our lives. Artificial intelligence systems can help us make evidence-driven, efficient decisions, but can also confront us with unjustified, discriminatory decisions wrongly assumed to be accurate because they are made automatically and quantitatively. It is becoming evident that these technological developments are consequential to people’s fundamental human rights. Despite increasing attention to (...) these urgent challenges in recent years, technical solutions to these complex socio-ethical problems are often developed without empirical study of societal context and the critical input of societal stakeholders who are impacted by the technology. On the other hand, calls for more ethically and socially aware AI often fail to provide answers for how to proceed beyond stressing the importance of transparency, explainability, and fairness. Bridging these socio-technical gaps and the deep divide between abstract value language and design requirements is essential to facilitate nuanced, context-dependent design choices that will support moral and social values. In this paper, we bridge this divide through the framework of Design for Values, drawing on methodologies of Value Sensitive Design and Participatory Design to present a roadmap for proactively engaging societal stakeholders to translate fundamental human rights into context-dependent design requirements through a structured, inclusive, and transparent process. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an ecological-enactive perspective on the role rules play in linguistic behaviour. I formulate and motivate the hypothesis that metalinguistic reflexivity – our ability to talk about talking – is constitutive of linguistic normativity. On first sight, this hypothesis might seem to fall prey to a regress objection. By discussing the work of Searle, I show that this regress objection originates in the idea that learning language involves learning to follow rules from the very start. I (...) propose an ecological-enactive response to the regress objection. The key move is to deny that language learning consists initially in learning rules. A child first engages in regular communicative behaviour, by learning first-order linguistic skills, and then retroactively interprets her own behaviour in normative metalinguistic terms, i.e., as being guided by rules by relying on reflexive or second-order linguistic skills. On this view, metalinguistic reflexivity enables regulation of already regular communicative behaviour, and thereby constitutes linguistic normativity. Finally, I argue that linguistic rules are resources: they are available to participants in order to (re)negotiate properties of situated language behaviour and thereby reorganize linguistic practices. The account developed in this paper thus allows us to understand the constitutive role of metalinguistic reflexivity for linguistic normativity without falling prey to the regress objection. (shrink)

This essay takes Arthur Danto’s end-of-art thesis as a case in point of a substantive philosophy of history. Such philosophy explains the direction that art has taken and why that direction could not have been different. Danto never scrutinized the philosophy of history that his end-of-art thesis presumes. I aim to do that by drawing a distinction between what I refer to as the common view of history and the philosophical view of history, and by arguing that we need the (...) latter if we want to properly assess the plausibility of the end-of-art thesis. (shrink)

In this interview with Jan Hendrik van den Berg, the Dutch phenomenologist and psychiatrist addresses the origins of his work, his most significant influences, and the purpose of metabletic phenomenology in the modern age. In the course of the interview. Dr. Van den Berg provides a basic overview of his work, and highlights the central finding of his metabletic analyses: a loss of wonder before nature, which results from the more fundamental loss of genuine spirituality in the modern world.