The Holocaust demands a theological response. This essay considers that which has been presented by feminist theologians, of both Christian and Jewish faiths. In some cases, the response has been to further promote anti-Judaism in the fight against patriarchy, sustaining and perpetuating the portrayal of the Jew as Other, and even as Nazi. Conversely, other reactions have given rise to a fruitful Jewish-Christian dialogue which contests such a response, and replaces it with a constructive and healing interpretation of teaching and (...) events. A juxtaposition is presented between the anti-Judaic works of Christian feminist theologians such as Christa Mulack and Gerda Weiler, and the reaction and dialogue that have arisen between Jewish theologians, such as Susannah Heschel and Melissa Raphael, and their Christian counterparts, among whom are Rosemary Radford Ruether and Katherina von Kellenbach. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is the acknowledgement that individual reasoning, understood as inner dialogue, and social argumentation, albeit they are two different phenomena, share some similarities. On this basis, this paper sets out to apply instruments from argumentation theory to inner dialogue in order to better explain it. Within this framework, some limitations to the study of inner dialogue are also discussed; and methodological suggestions are provided in order to grasp what could be considered data on “inner dialogue” (...) starting from social research interviews. The ultimate aim is to go beyond a mere recognition of a similarity between inner dialogue and argumentation and start analysing inner dialogue empirically using tools from argumentation theory. The findings show that the analytic overview help shed light on how inner dialogue within processes of individual decision-making develops and what it means to have an internal difference of opinion, in which one and the same person adopts opposing standpoints and argues for them. On the opposite, it is shown that the notion of strategic manoeuvring per se cannot be applied to inner dialogue. (shrink)

Labour, for capitalist critique, is not just slavery analogised; it is slavery materialised and expanded. Across the Marxist terrain, class struggle is presupposed by the struggle not to be a slave: the struggle of ‘the worker’ combats a slavery simultaneously more complex, because it is more mediated, and implicitly more emancipatory, because it materialises what has been called ‘objective possibility’. In this article, I track symptoms of the sublation of slavery by labour in the telling of ‘new labour history’ and (...) counter with ‘objective impossibility’ as a more open and efficacious diagnostic for the slave’s political position. Though the sentences of United States labour history are alive with promises of solidarity, the field also remains an unstable landmine of antagonism, death, failure, limit. I argue that this labour history, despite its gestures towards the problem ‘race’, is grammatically caught in a web of desires that Sylvia Wynter names ‘the hegemony of the labour conceptual frame (i.e., the frame of the struggle against capitalism)’. The labour conceptual frame is hegemonic because the relation between race and class already presupposes a latent Marxist orientation to subjects, objects, consciousness, and history that renders perfect the slave’s objective impossibility and culminates, at the nexus of race and class, in an uncritical conversion of labour’s objective possibility into pure, unmediated possibility. This article tracks how the black worker remains stubbornly impossible throughout this theoretical convergence, bending the apparatus of labour history, the purchase of Marxist theory, and the salience of class-first politics through the excess of blackness to labour. (shrink)

Präzision ist ein Schlüsselbegriff in Technik, Kunst und Wissenschaft, der in enger Verbindung mit Verfahren der Messung und Feinmechanik steht, aber auch die Schärfe sprachlicher Begriffsbildung oder die Synchronisation tänzerischer Bewegungen beschreiben kann. Die Wissenschaftsgeschichte zeigt, dass der Bedarf nach grösstmöglicher Präzision auch die Widersprüche von Messung und Modell, Versuch und Vorhersage in sich aufgenommen hat - abweichende Messergebnisse wurden so zum eigentlichen Beleg für die Genauigkeit einer Methode und den Bedarf ihrer weiteren Raffinierung. Der interdisziplinäre Blick auf verschiedene Felder (...) zeigt, wie der damit verbundene Anspruch in ihnen produktiv gemacht und reflektiert worden ist. Fallstudien zu Beispielen aus mehreren Jahrhunderten gehen dieser Frage nach, ergänzt um Auszüge aus grundlegenden historisch-theoretischen Beiträgen. (shrink)

Clark and Fischer's three levels of depiction of social robots can be conceptualized as cognitive schemas. When interacting with social robots, humans shift between schemas similarly to how they shift between identity category schemas when interacting with other humans. Perception of mind, context cues, and individual differences underlie perceptions of which level of depiction is most situationally relevant.

Mathematical modelling has played an increasingly prominent role in public health responses, for example by offering estimates of how infectious disease incidence over time may be affected by the adoption of certain policies and interventions. In this paper, we call for greater research and reflection into the ethics of mathematical modeling in public health. First, we present some promising ways of framing the ethics of mathematical modeling that have been offered in the very few publications specifically devoted to this subject. (...) Second, to draw out some issues that have not yet been sufficiently considered, we bring in the case of mathematical modeling in voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) initiatives for HIV prevention in Africa. We argue that greater attention should be paid to ethical considerations in mathematical modeling, particularly as its use is becoming more widespread and its potential impacts are becoming greater in the ‘big data’ era, as witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The concept of solidarity is of central importance to the political sense of collective action. But it is a curious fact that solidarity is virtually unmentioned across the large and growing literature in philosophical collective action theory. Instead, we see discussions of collective action overwhelmingly focus on epistemic conditions and group-level correlates of individual action explanations such as collective intentions, collective beliefs, and so on. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the relationship between solidarity and collective action theory. (...) I will try to answer two questions: (1) What is it about the structure of accounts of collective action that seems to preclude discussions of solidarity and related concepts; and (2) How can solidarity be made to play a useful role in those accounts? (shrink)

In recent years, and in the current climate crisis, the interest in veganism and sustainable diet/lifestyle has increased. This growing interest can also be seen within academia. Therefore, we set out to systematically document and organize the social psychological literature on veganism and vegan identity to identify where the field currently is, and what we need to do next. Following PRISMA guidelines we identified a data set of 26 academic papers published between 2010 and 2021. Through a thematic analysis of (...) the data, we created four categories of study focus and content: vegans as a disadvantaged/stigmatized group, the role of ideology in negative attitudes toward vegans, the role of moral and ethical beliefs in changing or sustaining dietary preferences, and veganism as a social movement and vegan activism. Our analysis emphasizes issues with merging all non-meat eaters, reduction of veganism into dietary or lifestyle choices neglecting the politicized content and movement, lack of processes underlying emergence and endurance of veganism, and decontextualization of vegan identity. What is needed is a more fine-grained exploration that addresses the identified issues to account for the content of vegan identity. This would expand, for example, the motives literature to include and emphasize intersectionality in a vegan identity context. Specifically, to facilitate a more sustainable lifestyle, the content of social dimensions needs to be qualitatively explored. (shrink)

Advances in genetic research have created the need to inform consumers. Yet, the communication of hereditary risk and of the options for how to deal with it is a difficult task. Due to the abstract nature of genetics, people tend to overestimate or underestimate their risk. This paper addresses the issue of how to communicate risk information on hereditary breast and ovarian cancer through an online application. The core of the paper illustrates the design of OPERA, a risk assessment instrument (...) that applies the UK National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence's guidelines on the basis of (i) the number of relatives on the same side of the family with the same cancer or cancers that are known to run together; (ii) the ages of these relatives at diagnosis and (iii) the closeness of the family relationship with the person who is doing the assessment. By relying on the argumentation theory, we explain how the communication strategy that OPERA implements is essentially based on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's deductive argumentation by association. By using as premises “facts” (propositions about reality that can be assumed without further justification) and “truths” (propositions that make connections about facts), OPERA delivers its claims with an ex auctoritate causal link aimed at transferring the audience's acceptance of the cause to the effect. Overall, the design of OPERA rests on its capacity to induce users' active processing of risk information through an appeal to their reasoning faculty. In the conclusion, we present some results from a pilot evaluation of users' acceptance of OPERA. (shrink)

TheCulexis now widely recognized as a piece of post-Ovidian, possibly Tiberian, pseudo-juvenilia written by an author impersonating the young Virgil, although it was attached to Virgil's name already in the first centuryc.e., being identified as Virgilian by Statius, Suetonius and Martial. Dedicated to the young Octavian (Octauiin line 1), the poem seems to fill a biographical gap in Virgil's career before his composition of theEclogues. It is introduced as aludus, which Irene Peirano suggests may openly refer to ‘the act of (...) impersonating Virgil’, and, like many of the poems in theAppendix Vergiliana, it seems to have a parodic intent. TheCulexhas been interpreted as a parody of neoteric style and the epyllion, as mock-epic, as Virgil parody (John Henderson called it a ‘spoofAeneidin bucolic drag’), as pointed Augustan satire, as mock Ovidian ‘Weltgedicht’ and as just very bad poetry (Housman's ‘stutterer’). Glenn Most has observed that the poem's three ‘acts’ structurally recapitulate Virgil's three major works in chronological succession. Little attention, however, has been paid to theCulex's final lines, which contain a catalogue of flowers thepastorplaces on the gnat's tomb. Recent scholarship has reintroduced an older interpretation of the gnat's tomb as a political allegory of Augustus’ Mausoleum; in this paper I suggest instead that the tomb and its flowers serve a closural and metapoetic function at the end of the poem. (shrink)

The present paper illustrates an autobiographical writing experience carried out in a therapeutic day care center involving nine preadolescents and adolescents with moderate to severe mental distress. According to the literature, autobiographical writing is an useful tool to improve educational work with teenagers, because it can accommodate the need to express themselves that characterizes the adolescence and can prevent or reduce feelings of distress. Autobiographical practice is particularly suitable to work with teenagers because it is focused on the question “Who (...) am I?”, which is typical of adolescence. This question was the central theme of the autobiographical writing workshop. During the workshop, was proposed an introspective journey in search of one’s identity between past (who was I?), present (who am I?) and a possible future (who do I want to become?). This article will describe the themes and various stimuli that were proposed during the meetings and will present and discuss the results achieved. (shrink)

Pollution results from humankind’s failure to be good stewards of creation. Guided by Catholic environmental bioethics, Catholic health care organizations have reduced their contribution to this pollution, but they also encounter its human cost. Catholic hospitals treat countless patients sickened by pollution, which most strongly impacts the poor and disenfranchised—those whom the Church expresses a preferential responsibility to care for, in part via the charity care that Catholic health care provides. The poor encounter another cost of pollution: the financial cost (...) of seeking health care, particularly in the US. The authors argue that Catholic health care institutions should take the moral harm of pollution seriously by reducing the financial burden on those sickened by pollution. As an example, they highlight the situation of those sickened by lead exposure in the US and outline how Catholic health care institutions could consider lessening the financial burden of treating this sickness. (shrink)

The emergence of systems biology raises many fascinating questions: What does it mean to take a systems approach to problems in biology? To what extent is the use of mathematical and computational modelling changing the life sciences? How does the availability of big data influence research practices? What are the major challenges for biomedical research in the years to come? This book addresses such questions of relevance not only to philosophers and biologists but also to readers interested in the broader (...) implications of systems biology for science and society. The book features reflections and original work by experts from across the disciplines including systems biologists, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars investigating the social and educational aspects of systems biology. In response to the same set of questions, the experts develop and defend their personal perspectives on the distinctive character of systems biology and the challenges that lie ahead. Readers are invited to engage with different views on the questions addressed, and may explore numerous themes relating to the philosophy of systems biology. This edited work will appeal to scholars and all levels, from undergraduates to researchers, and to those interested in a variety of scholarly approaches such as systems biology, mathematical and computational modelling, cell and molecular biology, genomics, systems theory, and of course, philosophy of biology. (shrink)

Introduces the sociology of music to those who may not be familiar with it and provides a historical perspective on popular music.

The coronavirus disease 2019 lockdown meant a greatly reduced social and economic activity. Sound is of major importance to people’s perception of the environment, and some remarked that the soundscape was changing for the better. But are these anecdotal reports based in truth? Has traffic noise from cars and airplanes really gone down, so that more birdsong can be heard? Have socially distanced people quietened down? This article presents a case study of the human perception of environmental sounds in an (...) urban neighborhood in the Basque Country between 15 March and 25 May 2020. The social restrictions imposed through national legislation divided the 69-day period into three phases. We collected observations, field audio recordings, photography, and diary notes on 50 days. Experts in soundscape and architecture were presented with the recordings, in randomized order, and made two separate perceptual analyses. One group rated the recordings for pleasantness and eventfulness using an adapted version of the Swedish Soundscape Quality Protocol, and a partly overlapping group annotated perceived sound events with free-form semantic labels. The labels were systematically classified into a four-level Taxonomy of Sound Sources, allowing an estimation of the relative amounts of Natural, Human, and Technological sounds. Loudness and three descriptors developed for bioacoustics were extracted computationally. Analysis showed that Eventfulness, Acoustic Complexity, and Acoustic Richness increased significantly over the time period, while the amount of Technological sounds decreased. These observations were interpreted as reflecting changes in people’s outdoor activities and behavior over the whole 69-day period, evidenced in an increased presence of Human sounds of voices and walking, and a significant shift from motorized vehicles toward personal mobility devices, again evidenced by perceived sounds. Quantitative results provided a backdrop against which qualitative analyses of diary notes and observations were interpreted in relation to the restrictions and the architectural specifics of the site. An integrated analysis of all sources pointed at the temporary suspension of human outdoor activity as the main reason for such a change. In the third phase, the progressive return of street life and the usage of personal mobility vehicles seemed to be responsible for a clear increase in Eventfulness and Loudness even in the context of an overall decrease of Technological sounds. Indoor human activity shared through open windows and an increased presence of birdsong emerge as a novel characteristic element of the local urban soundscape. We discuss how such changes in the acoustic environment of the site, in acoustic measurements and as perceived by humans, point toward the soundscape being a crucial component of a comprehensive urban design strategy that aims to improve health and quality of life for increasingly large and dense populations in the future. (shrink)

Whenever the legitimacy of a new or ethically contentious medical intervention is considered, a range of influences will determine whether the treatment becomes accepted as lawful medical treatment. The development and introduction of abortion, organ donation, gender reassignment, and non-therapeutic cosmetic surgery have, for example, all raised ethical, legal, and clinical issues. This book examines the various factors that legitimatise a medical procedure. Bringing together a range of internationally and nationally recognised academics from law, philosophy, medicine, health, economics, and sociology, (...) the book explores the notion of a treatment, practice, or procedure being proper medical treatment, and considers the range of diverse factors which might influence the acceptance of a particular procedure as appropriate in the medical context. Contributors address such issues as clinical judgement and professional autonomy, the role of public interest, and the influence of resource allocation in decision-making. In doing so, the book explores how the law, the medical profession, and the public interact in determining whether a new or ethically contentious procedure should be regarded as legitimate. This book will be of interest and use to researchers and students of bioethics, medical law, criminal law, and the sociology of medicine. (shrink)

El mal no es. El significado del mal es revisado, desde la perspectiva spinozista, para teorizar al mal como carencia. El espacio que genera el uso inadecuado de las palabras es ocupado por una realidad que se concibe a sí misma por comparación. Las categorías bueno y malo dejan de tener sentido en el momento en el que el conocimiento prescinde de la imaginación para entender. Lo malo lo es para mí, pero el mal no es más que una negación (...) de lo particular, luego como tal no existe. (shrink)

Persuaded by the observed positive link between the flow of appropriately skilled and trained female talent and female presence at the upper echelons of management, this study has examined current trends on women’s uptake of graduate and executive education programs in the world’s top 100 business schools and explored the extent to which these business schools promote female studentship and career advancement. It contributes by providing pioneering research insight, albeit at an exploratory level, into the emerging best practice on this (...) important aspect of business school behavior, an area which is bound to become increasingly appreciated as more global economic actors wise up to the significant diseconomies inherent in the under-utilization of female talent, particularly in the developing world. Among the study’s main findings are that female graduate students averaged 30% in the sample business schools, a figure not achieved by a majority of the elite schools, including some of the highest ranked. Only 10% of these business schools have a specialist center for developing women business leaders, and only a third offered women-focused programs or executive education courses, including flextime options. A higher, and increasing, percentage of business schools, however, reported offering fellowships, scholarships or bursaries to prospective female students, and having affiliations with pro-women external organizations and networks that typically facilitate career-promoting on-campus events and activities. The implications of the foregoing are discussed, replete with a call on key stakeholder groups to more actively embrace the challenge of improving the supply of appropriately trained female talent, or top management prospects. Future research ideas are also suggested. (shrink)

_The Promise of Happiness_ is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which (...) is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including_ Mrs. Dalloway_, _The Well of Loneliness_, _Bend It Like Beckham_, and _Children of Men_, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy. (shrink)