Despite the effort on DSM-5 and ICD-11, few appear satisfied with these classification systems. We suggest that the core reason for dissatisfaction is expecting too much from them; they do not provide discrete categories that map to specific causes of disease, they describe clinical syndromes intended to guide treatment choices. Here we review work on anxiety and anxiety disorders to argue that while clinicians draw a pragmatic distinction between normal and abnormal emotions based on considerations such as severity and duration, (...) understanding the evolutionary origins and utility of the emotions, including the adaptive value of adverse emotions, is key for formulating comprehensive assessments of an individual patient’s symptoms and for providing a conceptual foundation for pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, and public health. (shrink)

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, this work presents a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year. It includes stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology.

The United States has recently made significant and positive civil rights gains for LGB people, including expanded recognition of marriages between people of the same sex. Among the central tropes that have emerged in the struggle for the rights of LGB people are that they are “born that way,” that sexual orientations cannot change, and that one's sexual orientation is not affected by choice. Writer Andrew Sullivan put it this way: “[H]omosexuality is an essentially involuntary condition that can neither be (...) denied nor permanently repressed.… [S]o long as homosexual adults as citizens insist on the involuntary nature of their condition, it becomes politically impossible to deny or ignore the fact of homosexuality.… [The strategy for obtaining LGB rights is to] seek full public equality for those who, through no fault of their own, happen to be homosexual.”This idea of linking LGB rights to empirical claims about sexual orientations has become so central that casting doubt on these claims is, in many circles, tantamount to opposing LGB rights. Nonetheless, claims about innateness, immutability, and lack of choice about sexual orientation should not be the primary basis for LGB rights. (shrink)

After publishing the first part of Democracy in America, Tocqueville travelled through England and Ireland. With his impressions of the early industrial revolution still fresh, he read and annotated Machiavelli's Florentine Histories. Tocqueville's interest was present-minded: could Florence be used 'as an argument for or against democracy in our time?' Rejecting charges that modern democracies share the defects that bought down the Florentine Republic, Tocqueville contrasted late medieval and modern republicanisms; direct and representative democracies; the politics of city states to (...) those of larger modern nations with substantial urban and rural populations. Comparing renaissance Florence to industrial revolution Manchester and Birmingham led Tocqueville to consider redefining equality in economic rather than purely social terms. These notes suggest that in 1836, he held a view of the relationships between manufacturers and workers different from that of his later chapter 'How Industry could Give Rise to Aristocracy' in the 1840 Democracy. (shrink)

In der Öffentlichkeit häufig als Auswanderungsland wahrgenommen, unternahm China in den letzten Jahren verstärkt Bemühungen, qualifizierte Fachkräfte aus dem Ausland für den chinesischen Arbeitsmarkt zu gewinnen. Die Einführung eines Fachkräfteeinwanderungssystem mit abgestuften Rechten für Arbeitsmigrant:innen sollte diese Entwicklung fördern. Die vorliegende Analyse zeigt, dass diese Reform des Einwanderungssystems die Gerichtspraxis nicht verändert hat. Abseits der politischen Diskurse um die Anwerbung von internationalen Talenten und der Propagierung Chinas als Wissenssupermacht, bleibt China aufgrund der existierenden Probleme im bestehenden Rechtssystems für Arbeitsmigrant:innen unattraktiv.

This article examines the rise of modern secular, individualistic and rational legal thought from a historical point of view. It will be argued that the well known assumption needs to be critized, that the philosophical background of this development can only be traced back to Hobbes, Locke and Kant. Instead, the two authors of this article will point out that it was rather Ockham who first mentioned notions of modern liberal democracy in his philosophical opus. Furthermore, it will be shown (...) that the traditional interdisciplinary discourse on Thomas Hobbes falls short of a serious discussion of the most critical arguments. On a normative level it will be asked, what a Hobbesian (or for example Kantian discourse-ethical) conception can do for a normative justification of liberal democracy, nationally and transnationally. (shrink)