The physical boundaries of office work have become increasingly flexible. Work is conducted at multiple locations outside the office, such as at clients’ premises, at home, in cafés, or when traveling. However, the boundary between indoor and outdoor environment seems to be strong and normative regarding how office work is performed. The aim of this study was to explore how office work may be conducted outdoors, understanding how it is being experienced by office employees and identifying its contextual preconditions. Based (...) on a two-year interactive research project, the study was conducted together with a Swedish municipality. Fifty-eight participants engaged in the collaborative learning process, including 40 half-day workshops and reflective group discussions, co-interviews, and participants’ independent experimentation of bringing work activities outdoors. Data was collected via interviews, group discussions and a custom-made mobile application. The results showed that a wide range of work activities could be done outdoors, both individually and in collaboration with others. Outdoor work activities were associated with many positive experiences by contributing to a sense of well-being, recovery, autonomy, enhanced cognition, better communication, and social relations, but also with feelings of guilt and illegitimacy. Conditions of importance for outdoor office work to happen and function well were found in the physical environment, where proximity to urban greenspaces stood out as important, but also in the sociocultural and organizational domains. Of crucial importance was managers’ attitudes, as well as the overall organizational culture on this idea of bringing office work outdoors. To conclude, if working life is to benefit from outdoor office work, leaders, urban planners and policymakers need to collaborate and show the way out. (shrink)

Studies investigating differences in mental health problems between self-employed and employed workers have provided contradictory results. Many of the studies utilized scales validated for employed workers, without collecting validity evidence for making comparisons with self-employed. The aim of this study was to collect validity evidence for three different scales assessing depressive symptoms, emotional exhaustion, and sleep disturbances for employed workers, and combinators; and to test if these groups differed. We first conducted approximate measurement invariance analysis and found that all scales (...) were invariant at the scalar level. Self-employed workers had least mental health problems and employed workers had most, but differences were small. Though we found the scales invariant, we do not find them optimal for comparison of means. To be more precise in describing differences between groups, we recommend using clinical cut-offs or scales developed with the specific purpose of assessing mental health problems at work. (shrink)

The trilogy Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition investigates how Aristotle and his ancient and medieval successors understood the relation between the external world and the human mind. It gives an equal footing to the three most influential linguistic traditions - Greek, Latin, and Arabic - and offers insightful interpretations of historical theories of perception, dreaming, and thinking. This first volume focuses on sense perception and discusses philosophical questions concerning the external senses, their classification, and their functioning, from Aristotle (...) to Brentano. (shrink)

The rapidly growing research on hybrid organizations in recent years suggests that these organizations may have particular abilities to facilitate institutional change. This article contributes to our understanding of change and, in particular, sustainable transformation in society by highlighting the importance of organizational forms. Looking more closely at the role of hybrid organizations in processes of path generation, we analyze the conditions under which hybrid organizations may enable path generation. A retrospective exploratory case study of the Swedish hybrid organization The (...) Natural Step confirms how hybrids can take part in- and may facilitate the early phases of path generation: assimilation and coalescence. The conclusion drawn is that hybrids have multivocal abilities that enable them to earn trust and authority to open up “neutral” spaces for orientation and connection between actors in separated sub-paths, and that this in turn may ease tensions and trigger dialogue and exchange, also between former opponents. Yet, as also seen in the case, this enabling position of the hybrid may be both fragile and temporary. (shrink)

There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.

This chapter discusses the reception of Avicenna’s well-known “flying man” thought experiment in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin philosophy. The central claim is that the argumentative role of the thought experiment changed radically in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The earlier authors—Dominicus Gundissalinus, William of Auvergne, Peter of Spain, and John of la Rochelle—understood it as an ontological proof for the existence and/or the nature of the soul. By contrast, Matthew of Aquasparta and Vital du Four used the flying (...) man as an argument for the soul’s ability to be directly aware of itself. A detailed analysis of the views of these authors shows interesting philosophical differences between them and reveals how one of the crucial premises of the original thought experiment—namely that the flying man is unaware of his body—loses its importance due to the changes in the argumentative role that is assigned to it. The most radical example of a new way of understanding bodily self-awareness is Peter Olivi’s so-called ‘man before the creation.’. (shrink)

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then introduces (...) a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. (shrink)

Perception of the external world is an essential part of the animal (including human) life, both as a source of knowledge and as a way to survive. Medieval authors accepted this view, and despite general concerns about the reliability of the senses in the acquisition of certain and objective knowledge, they thought that for the most part our perceptual system gets things right when it comes to the perceptual features of things—but not always. Our article focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century (...) philosophical discussions of illusions and other types of perceptual errors. Reception of incorrect information, misjudgments concerning perceptual objects, the binding problem, and similar cases that explain perceptual errors will be analyzed. We discuss what might be called medieval Aristotelian/Avicennian theories of perception and the internal senses (drawing mainly from Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas), as well as the so-called perspectivist accounts of perception, especially that by Alhacen. Finally, we take up a debate between Peter Auriol and his critics, which contains elements that can be seen as precursors of later skeptical worries. The concern here is that, just like in contemporary discussions leading to disjunctivism, the absence of a secure way to distinguish between veridical and non-veridical perception leads to a general worry about the reliability of our experience of the world. (shrink)

The introduction of social distancing, as part of efforts to try and curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, has brought about drastic disruption to the world of the performing arts. In the UK the majority of professional orchestral musicians are freelance and therefore self-employed. These players, previously engaged in enjoyable, busy, successful, portfolio careers, are currently unable to earn a living carrying out their everyday work of performing music, and their future working lives are surrounded by great uncertainty. The (...) aim of the present study was to examine how established professional musicians are experiencing this period, and to look for similarities and differences between the experiences of musicians in the middle of their performing careers, with those of older players. Single semi-structured interviews were carried out over Zoom with 24 freelance, self-employed orchestral musicians; 12 mid-career musicians aged 35–45, and 12 seasoned musicians aged 53 and over. Thematic analysis identified themes common to both groups: the loss of a much-loved performing career, missing music making and colleagues, and anxiety about the future of the music profession. It also identified differences between the two groups: challenges to their identity as a musician, the extent of their anxiety about finances, the extent of their emotional distress, attitudes toward practicing and engaging in collaborative music making, and confusion over future career plans. Findings are discussed with reference to lifespan models of musicians' career development, the PERMA model of wellbeing, and the concept of resilience. (shrink)

This introductory chapter delineates the purpose and content of the edited volume. It reflects on how the potential tension and compatibility between self-interest and the common good have been addressed in the history of philosophy, and it elaborates on the theoretical conditions that must be met in order for a real distinction between these two notions to emerge. The introduction also underscores the advantages of exploring this subject over the transitional period from medieval to early modern philosophy, and suggests ways (...) in which historical views may be useful for contemporary discussions. The chapter concludes by outlining the structure of the book and summarizing the arguments presented in individual chapters. (shrink)

This article discusses the theories of perception of Robert Kilwardby and Peter of John Olivi. Our aim is to show how in challenging certain assumptions of medieval Aristotelian theories of perception they drew on Augustine and argued for the active nature of the soul in sense perception. For both Kilwardby and Olivi, the soul is not passive with respect to perceived objects; rather, it causes its own cognitive acts with respect to external objects and thus allows the subject to perceive (...) them. We also show that Kilwardby and Olivi differ substantially regarding where the activity of the soul is directed to and the role of the sensible species in the process, and we demonstrate that there are similarities between their ideas of intentionality and the attention of the soul towards the corporeal world. (shrink)

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our (...) environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? -/- This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence. (shrink)

The subject matter of this essay is Peter of John Olivi’s (ca.1248–98) conception of reason from the viewpoint of human action.

In this paper I argue that certain type of first-personal causal property, efficacy, is represented in perceptual experience.

This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the contents of perception.

Inquiry is guided, in the minimal sense that it is not haphazard. It is also often thought to have as a natural stopping point ceasing to inquire, once inquiry into a question yields knowledge of an answer. On this picture, inquiry is both telic and guided. By contrast, mind-wandering is unguided and atelic, according to the most extensively developed philosophical theory of it. This paper articulates a puzzle that arises from this combination of claims: there seem to be plenty of (...) examples of inquiry progressing within mind-wandering, yet theories of inquiry and mind-wandering can make wandering inquiry seem impossible or incoherent. I offer several solutions to this puzzle and make the case that taken together, they illuminate a prevalent form of inquiry that the burgeoning literature on that topic overlooks: inquiry that progresses spontaneously. (shrink)

In discussions of perception and its relation to knowledge, it is common to distinguish what one comes to believe on the basis of perception from the distinctively perceptual basis of one's belief. The distinction can be drawn in terms of propositional contents: there are the contents that a perceiver comes to believe on the basis of her perception, on the one hand; and there are the contents properly attributed to perception itself, on the other. Consider the content.

This article consists of critical editions of a selection of medieval commentaries on the chapter seven of Aristotle’s De sensu et sensato, which pertains to a particular philosophical problem, namely, the possibility of perceiving many perceptual qualities simultaneously. The commentaries included are written by Adam of Buckfield, Anonymous of Merton, Radulphus Brito, Anonymous of Paris, John Felmingham(?), Walter Burley, John of Jandun, and John Buridan. The most significant discovery made in the course of preparing the editions concerns Walter Burley’s commentary. (...) Previous studies indicate that he wrote only an exposition commentary on De sensu, but a more careful examination of the existing manuscripts shows that at least one of them contains a different work, here dubbed Quaestiones super librum De sensu et sensato. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis des Seneca philosophus zum Seneca tragicus ist für die Interpretation von Senecas Tragödien noch immer entscheidend. Die Autorin widmet sich dem Problem im Bereich der Theologie. Als zentrale theologische Problemfelder untersucht sie in Senecas philosophischen Schriften und Tragödien sein Verständnis von providentia und damit die Theodizeefrage sowie sein Verständnis des fatum und damit die Willensfreiheit. Anders als die bisherigen Untersuchungen, deren Interesse vorrangig den Dramen galt und die die philosophischen Schriften nur am Rande berücksichtigten, bildet in dieser Studie (...) die Theologie der philosophischen Schriften den Ausgangspunkt, um deren Problemstellungen auch für eine Deutung der Dramen fruchtbar zu machen. Im Gegensatz zu den Forschungspositionen, die Senecas Dramen entweder als philosophische Lehrstücke oder als Negation der stoischen Philosophie verstehen, erhellt die von der Autorin gewählte Vorgehensweise Senecas Bezugnahme auf philosophische Fragestellungen innerhalb der Dramen. In ihnen setzt sich Seneca im Gedankenexperiment mit Problemen und Aporien auseinander, die auch im philosophischen Diskurs der Stoa nicht zufriedenstellend aufzulösen sind. (shrink)

An association between age-related hearing loss and Alzheimer's Disease has been widely reported. However, the nature of this relationship remains poorly understood. Quantification of hearing loss as it relates to AD is imperative for the creation of reliable, hearing-related biomarkers for earlier diagnosis and development of ARHL treatments that may slow the progression of AD. Previous studies that have measured the association between peripheral hearing function and AD have yielded mixed results. Most of these studies have been small and underpowered (...) to reveal an association. Therefore, in the current report, we sought to estimate the degree to which AD patients have impaired hearing by performing a meta-analysis to increase statistical power. We reviewed 248 published studies that quantified peripheral hearing function using pure-tone audiometry for subjects with AD. Six studies, with a combined total of 171 subjects with AD compared to 222 age-matched controls, met inclusion criteria. We found a statistically significant increase in hearing threshold as measured by pure tone audiometry for subjects with AD compared to controls. For a three-frequency pure tone average calculated for air conduction thresholds at 500–1,000–2,000 Hz, an increase of 2.3 decibel hearing level was found in subjects with AD compared to controls. Likewise, for a four-frequency pure tone average calculated at 500–1,000–2,000–4,000, an increase of 4.5 dB HL was measured, and this increase was significantly greater than that seen for 0.5–2 kHz PTA. There was no difference in the average age of the control and AD subjects. These data confirm the presence of poorer hearing ability in AD subjects, provided a quantitative estimate of the magnitude of hearing loss, and suggest that the magnitude of the effect is greater at higher sound frequencies.Systematic Review Registration:https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/, identifier: CRD42021288280. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relationship between punishment and regulation as represented in Richard Price's 1992 novel, Clockers. In particular, it considers how obedience to regulation promises avoidance of punishment, even as regulation is often imposed as part and parcel of punishment. It explores how that variable relationship acts on individual subjects and considers how it is replicated and elucidated through narrative construction.

Human beings are not only self-conscious minds but embodied and social beings, whose subjectivity is conditioned by their social surroundings. From this point of view, it is natural to suppose that the development and existence of a subject that is distinctively human requires contact with other people. The present contribution discusses medieval ideas concerning the intersubjective constitution of human being by looking at the medieval reception of two ideas, which Aristotle presents at the beginning of his Politics: (1) human beings (...) are political animals by nature, which means that those who live outside of political communities due to their nature are either deficient or above humanity – they are beasts or gods; and (2) human beings are parts of political communities, and as such, comparable to hands in a body. When medieval philosophers consider these ideas from metaphysical and normative perspectives, they distinguish different senses in which human beings are naturally political. In effect, they draw a nuanced picture of the relation between an individual human being and the political community, and in so doing they distance themselves from a literal reading of Aristotle. An analysis of the medieval discussions reveals how the social aspect of human subjectivity emerges in medieval political philosophy and how medieval philosophers conceptualise the Aristotelian distinction into three kinds of beings – the beast, the human, and the god. (shrink)

The estimative power has been widely discussed in modern scholarly literature. This chapter complements the existing picture by analysing medieval Latin views concerning its role as the explanans of the social behaviour of humans and other animals. Although medieval authors rarely focus on this function, the chapter shows that the estimative power plays an important explanatory role both in philosophical psychology and political philosophy.

The first full philological edition in English of the Roman philosopher Seneca's De Clementia. It includes the Latin text with apparatus criticus, a new English translation, a substantial introduction, and a commentary on matters of textual and literary criticism and issues of socio-political, historical, cultural, and philosophical significance.

This paper defends a principle I call Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of a belief is determined in precisely the same way as the rationality of any other state. For example, if wearing a raincoat is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value, then believing some proposition P is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value. This contrasts with the popular view that the rationality of belief is determined by evidential support. It also contrasts (...) with the common idea that in the case of belief, there are two different incommensurable senses of rationality, one of which is distinctively epistemic. I present considerations that favor Equal Treatment over these two alternatives, reply to objections, and criticize some arguments for Evidentialism. I also show how Equal Treatment opens the door to a distinctive kind of response to skepticism. (shrink)

Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques of that concept in political, social, and ethical life. They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays—which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North (...) America, Africa, and New Zealand—address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self. Contributors Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that it's possible that the contents of some visual experiences are influenced by the subject's prior beliefs, hopes, suspicions, desires, fears or other mental states, and that this possibility places constraints on the theory of perceptual justification that 'dogmatism' or 'phenomenal conservativism' cannot respect.

I argue that there are phenomenological constraints on what it is to see an object, and that these are overlooked by some theories that offer allegedly sufficient causal and counterfactual conditions on object-seeing.

I offer an explanation of how subjects are able to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects, given that subjects always perceive from a particular location. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that a conception of space is necessary to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects. This conception of space is spelled out by showing that perceiving intrinsic properties requires perceiving objects as the kind of things that are perceivable from other locations. Second, I show that (...) having such a conception of space presupposes that a subject represent her location in relation to perceived objects. More precisely the thesis is that a subject represents her location as the location from which she both perceives objects and would act in relation to objects were she to act. So I argue that perception depends on the capacity to know what it would be to act in relation to objects. (shrink)

Includes a summary of my book *The Rationality of Perception* (Oxford, 2017) and replies to commentaries on it by Endre Begby, Harmen Ghijsen, and Katia Samoilova. These commentaries and my summary and replies will be published soon in Analysis Reviews. Begby focuses on my analysis of the epistemic features of the interface between individual minds and their cultural milieu (discussed in chapter 10 of *The Rationality of Perception*), Ghijsen focuses on the notion of inference and reliabilism (chapters 5 and 6), (...) and Samoilova focuses on the relationship between epistemic charge (chapter 3) and shifts in the amount of justification needed for knowledge. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the question “What should I believe?” is to be answered in the same way as the question “What should I do?,” a view I call Equal Treatment. After clarifying the relevant sense of “should,” I point out advantages that Equal Treatment has over both simple and subtle evidentialist alternatives, including versions that distinguish what one should believe from what one should get oneself to believe. I then discuss views on which there is a distinctively epistemic sense (...) of should. Next I reply to an objection which alleges that non-evidential considerations cannot serve as reasons for which one believes. I then situate Equal Treatment in a broader theoretical framework, discussing connections to rationality, justification, knowledge, and theoretical vs. practical reasoning. Finally, I show how Equal Treatment has important implications for a wide variety of issues, including the status of religious belief, philosophical skepticism, racial profiling and gender stereotyping, and certain issues in psychology, such as depressive realism and positive illusions. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that causal relations between objects are represented in visual experience, and contrast my argument and its conclusion with Michotte's results from the 1960's.

Increasing public knowledge of science is a widely recognized goal, but what that knowledge might consist of is rarely unpacked. Existing measures of science literacy tend to focus on textbook knowledge of science. Yet constructing a meaningful list of facts, even facts in application, is not only difficult but less than satisfying as an indicator of what people actually know—or need to know—as citizens. Revisiting this concept from a more sociological perspective yields a rather different concept that is here termed (...) “critical science literacy.” The implications of this reconsideration for thinking about citizen perspectives, for the work of science journalists and other professional interpreters, and for the design and evaluation of new approaches to science communication are explored. (shrink)

Apin's cabinet of printed curiosities -- Thinking through plural images of logic -- The visible order of student lecture notebooks -- Visual thinking in logic notebooks and Alba amicorum -- The generation of art as the generation of philosophy.