Rankings have dramatically proliferated over the past several decades. An often-overlooked impact of this proliferation is that it has facilitated the institutionalization of an imaginary of the modern world as a stratified order, whose actors are imagined as continuously striving to perform better than others. To better understand this impact, we need to take a closer look at rankings’ premises and the way these resonate with the broader institutional environment of which rankings are a part.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

In his most significant work in the field of philosophy of education, Personhood and Education (1932), Vuk-Pavlović criticizes Schelerʼs claim that love cannot be an educational principle. According to Vuk-Pavlović, this claim is based on Schelerʼs two misconceptions: the first is related to Schelerʼs misunderstanding of education, and the second to his misunderstanding of love. In this text, we examine aspects of Vuk-Pavlovićʼs criticism and ask a broader question about the potentials and limits of love in education. When defining the (...) concept of love, Scheler indeed opposes it to education, which for him implies changing the object of education. In this sense, education is an attempt to change the person being raised. On the other hand, according to Scheler, love means accepting the loved one without trying to change him. Therefore, the purpose of love is not to transform the loved object. However, through a genuine act of love, Scheler claims, change can occur as the appearance of higher values. Schelerʼs criticism of education is based on the understanding of education in the negative sense of imposing external values, where the individuality and value potential of the one being educated is not recognized. With regard to the aforementioned conception of love, one could theorize about a different type of education, which implies love in the sense of the development of one’s self. (shrink)

In the world of rapid general-social development, due to the emergence of questions about new holders of legal rights and the emergence of new forms of legal rights in general, the discussion about moral and legal rights has always been, is and will be an increasingly topical issue. It is not, however, disputed that law per se, in enabling a wide range of legal rights, has always been centred around the issue of human life and health in the first place. (...) The achievement of human welfare is undoubtedly predicated upon good health, and fostered by a unique “mechanism” – the right to health. Although we live in an era of great glorification of the cult and value of health (healthism), the current epoch raises a series of human-health-focused questions and controversies. However, the primary and very crucial question we can ask ourselves is – what would health even be? Precisely because of the great questionability of the above question, the protection of human health and the exercise of the right to health may represent one of the most challenging matters of law itself. The right to health, as a legal and inclusive right, epitomizes not only the rights asserted by human beings as such, but also environmental and nature protection as an inseparable denominator of the status of human health. Although prominent legal/political philosophers and theorists were pessimist about the realisation and enforcement of the right to (the highest attainable standard of) health, this paper elaborates on the possibility of its realisation, which largely depends on the way in which the concept of health is understood. Health should be understood exclusively as an idea-value category to be aspired to, as a should (sollen), by no means as a pure and categorical reflection of reality (sein). Given the inclusiveness specific to the legal right to health, which undoubtedly contains certain problematic elements, this paper aims to grasp and consider the right to health in its conceptual and normative entirety premised upon the following question: how does law protect human health and its constitutive elements? The same question invokes interesting interdisciplinary (legal and philosophical) points of view. (shrink)

The objective of this article was to review existing research to assess the evidence for predictive processing in sign language, the conditions under which it occurs, and the effects of language mastery on the neural bases of PP. This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses framework. We searched peer-reviewed electronic databases and gray literature. We also searched the reference lists of records selected for the review and forward citations to identify all relevant publications. We searched (...) for records based on five criteria. To reduce the risk of bias, the remaining two authors with expertise in sign language processing and a variety of research methods reviewed the results. Disagreements were resolved through extensive discussion. In the final review, 7 records were included, of which 5 were published articles and 2 were dissertations. The reviewed records provide evidence for PP in signing populations, although the underlying mechanism in the visual modality is not clear. The reviewed studies addressed the motor simulation proposals, neural basis of PP, as well as the development of PP. All studies used dynamic sign stimuli. Most of the studies focused on semantic prediction. The question of the mechanism for the interaction between one’s sign language competence and PP in the manual-visual modality remains unclear, primarily due to the scarcity of participants with varying degrees of language dominance. There is a paucity of evidence for PP in sign languages, especially for frequency-based, phonetic, and syntactic prediction. However, studies published to date indicate that Deaf native/native-like L1 signers predict linguistic information during sign language processing, suggesting that PP is an amodal property of language processing.Systematic Review Registration[https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42021238911], identifier [CRD42021238911]. (shrink)

The International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms was established in 1989 as the Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms. As a consequence of the workshop's success in attracting mathematicians and computer scientists from around the world, it was decided at the 2006 meeting to go global, to change the workshop's name, and to hold it in appropriate venues around the world. The workshop supports basic research on the interface between mathematics and computing, specifically * Algorithms & Data Structures * Complexity Theory * (...) Algorithms on Graphs & Strings * Combinatorial Optimization * Cryptography & Information Security * Computational Biology * Communications Networks and many other related areas. This is Volume 1 in the series of IWOCA proceedings. See http: //www.iwoca.org/. (shrink)

In this paper it is exactly proved that the standard transformations of the three-dimensional (3D) vectors of the electric and magnetic fields E and B are not relativistically correct transformations. Thence the 3D vectors E and B are not well-defined quantities in the 4D space-time and, contrary to the general belief, the usual Maxwell equations with the 3D E and B are not in agreement with the special relativity. The 4-vectors E a and B a , as well-defined 4D quantities, (...) are introduced instead of ill-defined 3D E and B. The proof is given in the tensor and the Clifford algebra formalisms. (shrink)

In contemporary debates about the nature of bioethics there is a widespread view that bioethical decision making should involve certain knowledge of and respect for cultural diversity of persons to be affected. The aim of this article is to show that this view is untenable and misleading. It is argued that introducing the idea of respect for cultural diversity into bioethics encounters a series of conceptual and empirical constraints. While acknowledging that cultural diversity is something that decision makers in bioethical (...) contexts should try to understand and, when possible, respect, it is argued that this cultural turn ignores the typically normative role of bioethics and thus threatens to undermine its very foundations. (shrink)

Different approaches to special relativity (SR) are discussed. The first approach is an invariant approach, which we call the “true transformations (TT) relativity.” In this approach a physical quantity in the four-dimensional spacetime is mathematically represented either by a true tensor (when no basis has been introduced) or equivalently by a coordinate-based geometric quantity comprising both components and a basis (when some basis has been introduced). This invariant approach is compared with the usual covariant approach, which mainly deals with the (...) basis components of tensors in a specific, i.e., Einstein's coordinatization of the chosen inertial frame of reference. The third approach is the usual noncovariant approach to SR in which some quantities are not tensor quantities, but rather quantities from “3+1” space and time, e.g., the synchronously determined spatial length. This formulation is called the “apparent transformations (AT) relativity.” It is shown that the principal difference between these approaches arises from the difference in the concept of sameness of a physical quantity for different observers. This difference is investigated considering the spacetime length in the “TT relativity” and spatial and temporal distances in the “AT relativity.” It is also found that the usual transformations of the three-vectors (3-vectors) of the electric and magnetic fields E and B are the AT. Furthermore it is proved that the Maxwell equations with the electromagnetic field tensor Fab and the usual Maxwell equations with E and B are not equivalent, and that the Maxwell equations with E and B do not remain unchanged in form when the Lorentz transformations of the ordinary derivative operators and the AT of E and B are used. The Maxwell equations with Fab are written in terms of the 4-vectors of the electric Ea and magnetic Ba fields. The covariant Majorana electromagnetic field 4-vector Ψa is constructed by means of 4-vectors Ea and Ba and the covariant Majorana formulation of electrodynamics is presented. A Dirac like relativistic wave equation for the free photon is obtained. (shrink)

In the article it is argued that contemporary evolutionary ethics – to the extent it accepts sociobiological strategies of naturalizing human morality – faces some serious conceptual and explanatory difficulties. Conceptual difficulty consists in recognizing that “morality” is not the same as “altruism”, but rather comprises several specific elements which distinguish it from both evolutionary and psychological altruism. Explanatory difficulty consists in recognizing that the phenomenon of morality appropriately conceptualized cannot be incorporated into standard sociobiological explanations without endangering some basic (...) assumptions of those explanations, primarily the assumption of “gene selectionism”, as well as the assumption of “evolutionarily stable strategies”. The basic argument is that one cannot retain both the appropriate concept of human morality and key assumptions of sociobiological explanations. (shrink)

In this paper, we will try to present the problems of education as they were seen by the Croatian philosopher Gordana Bosanac (Varaždin, 1936 – Zagreb, 2019). Although these problems do not fall within the narrowest circle of her interests, the author has been intensively engaged with them throughout her life and has left a significant impact on thinking about the key aspects and scope of the issues we find in the philosophy of education. The central thesis of the article (...) is as follows: G. Bosanac’s thinking is still very relevant today from at least two perspectives. Firstly, as a chronology of various interventions in the education system, and secondly, as an expression of innovative thinking about education that focuses on the individual and his or her intellectual capacities rather than on any social or productive purpose or requirement. We will present some lines of thought of G. Bosanac together with the most important biographical data. First, we will discuss the general content of the subject of education, with particular reference to the relationship between the individual and the social in education. Then, following the thoughts of G. Bosanac, we will rethink the issue of labour, with a special effort to rethink the content of education as labour. In the third part, with significant consideration of the thoughts of G. Bosanac, we will deal with the question of ideology and its negative effects on the education system and especially on the actors of this system. Ultimately, or as the key task of the paper, we will try to answer the question of why education is a fundamental social activity. (shrink)

Not the least noticeable is the fact that the ancient Greek compound euthanasia, formed by Francis Bacon, has retained its original terminological form since it was first used in the 17th century. Among all other controversial ethical issues, however, the conceptual notion of euthanasia categorically evokes rather important controversies. The questions that arise in this context are whether there is a definition, or at least a determination, of the term euthanasia and whether we are aware of its use in scientific (...) discourse, what exactly is euthanasia. The paper offers a terminological elaboration of the term euthanasia in a linguistic, but mainly legal and medical-procedural context, in order to examine the coherence in defining the term between these categories and, consequently, to determine the key determinants of euthanasia according to categorical sections. The key facts stated are the primary determination or the possible definition of the term for any further scientific study of euthanasia as one of the most controversial issues within bioethical doctrine. (shrink)

A genesis of media didactics was deconstructed through a theoretical-comparative and historical methodological approach, with the aim of gaining insight into its history and characteristics, defining the discipline, and recent development trends. The study elaborates the role of media in education, schooling, teaching, and learning. The anatomy of the social circumstances of the emergence of certain curriculum innovations and their consequences for global education as well as the development of media didactics is systematically explained. A synthesis of the facts obtained (...) from the analysed concept makes it evident that the development of media didactics was influenced by the concept of instructional technology transferred from the USA, as well as several social and technological factors. Theoretical and practical essence of media didactics is established in the application of various media with the purpose of arranging individualized, i.e., student-centred teaching. Over time, the characteristics and role of media in teaching have changed in accordance with the dominant didactic theories. A crucial challenge for media didactics is foreseen in the form of the application of artificial intelligence in education and schooling. (shrink)

This article discusses the view that bioethics should become ‘‘culturally sensitive’’ and give more weight to various cultural traditions and their respective moral beliefs. It is argued that this view is implausible for the following three reasons: it renders the disciplinary boundaries of bioethics too flexible and inconsistent with metaphysical commitments of Western biomedical sciences, it is normatively useless because it approaches cultural phenomena in a predominantly descriptive and selective way, and it tends to justify certain types of discrimination.

Sex reassignment surgery is a therapy for gender dysphoria standardly provided only upon a psychiatric authorization. Transgender scholars criticize this practice as unjustified medicalization and stigmatization of transsexual people. By demanding that sex reassignment surgery is not classified as therapy, they imply it should be classified as some kind of a biomedical enhancement. It is argued in this article that this reclassification is empirically and morally implausible because sex reassignment surgery is incompatible with two major views of enhancement. It is (...) incompatible with the nontherapeutic view because it does not improve or augment, above average, any physical or mental trait or function. It is incompatible with the welfarist view because this view, contrary to the transgender scholars’s demands, is compelled to retain the standard practice of providing sex reassignment surgery in order to ensure the optimal balance between its availability, beneficence, and possible harmfulness. (shrink)

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are expected to improve road traffic safety and save human lives. It is also expected that some AVs will encounter so-called dilemmatic situations, like choosing between saving two passengers by sacrificing one pedestrian or choosing between saving three pedestrians by sacrificing one passenger. These expectations fuel the extensive debate over the ethics settings of AVs: the way AVs should be programmed to act in dilemmatic situations and who should decide about the nature of this programming in the (...) first place. In the article, the ethics settings problem is analyzed as a trilemma between AVs with personal ethics setting (PES), AVs with mandatory ethics setting (MES) and AVs with no ethics settings (NES). It is argued that both PES and MES, by being programmed to choose one human life over the other, are bound to cause serious moral damage resulting from the violation of several principles central to deontology and utilitarianism. NES is defended as the only plausible solution to this trilemma, that is, as the solution that sufficiently minimizes the number of traffic fatalities without causing any comparable moral damage. (shrink)

Is it possible to speak about the unspeakable as it is represented in music, lyric poetry, and tragedy? The answer is yes, if we adopt a purely aesthetic perspective. The answer is no, if we adopt the perspective of the transcendental subject as the metaphysical source of music, lyric poetry, and tragedy. In this paper, I conceptualize the nondiscursivity of music, lyric poetry, and Attic tragedy in the philosophical aesthetics of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. I also make a few incidental (...) remarks to Plato's Socrates and Aristotle as well as the Theban plays by Sophocles. (shrink)

Doctoral dissertations in philosophy in Croatia (1880-1989).

Integrative bioethics is a predominantly Croatian school of thought whose proponents claim to have initiated an innovative and recognizably European concept of bioethics capable of dealing with the most pressing issues of our time. In this paper, a critical overview of the integrative bioethics project is undertaken to show that it is, in fact, a poorly articulated and arguably pseudoscientific enterprise fundamentally incapable of dealing with practical challenges. The first section provides the basic outline of integrative bioethics: its historical development, (...) major proponents, geographical context and philosophical foundations. The second section considers its main theoretical shortcomings: the absence of normativity, collapse into ethical relativism and frequent intratheoretical inconsistencies. The third section addresses the issue of typically pseudoscientific features of integrative bioethics: verbose language, constant self- glorification and isolation from mainstream science. The fourth and concluding section of the paper argues that integrative bioethics––regarding its quality, reception and identity––does not merit the “European bioethics” label and is better described as a blind alley of European bioethics. (shrink)

Review of Igor Kardum's book Evolucija i ljudsko ponašanje (Evolution and Human Behavior).

Hugh LaFollette has proposed that in order to prevent statistically expected harm that many parents inflict on their children prospective parents should be licensed. This article evaluates his proposal by looking at various facts, statistical data and probability estimates related to sex differences in human mating and parenting behaviour provided by evolutionary psychology. It is suggested that these evolutionary considerations create a serious stalemate between certain basic moral principles to which LaFollette subscribes, thus rendering the entire proposal morally impracticable. It (...) is also argued along similar lines that parental licensing would endanger some of the most personal and intimate human relationships that, in LaFollette’s view, are essential for developing one’s capacity for impartial morality. (shrink)

The analysis of cognitive-ontological and especially ethical concepts in Nietzscheʼs philosophy shows deprivation as an important component that compromises their status. The emptiness, in the form of purity, inevitably appears during the decomposition of Nietzsche’s thought. Under the influence of perspectivism, epistemology, along with the question of truth, have undergone radical deconstruction. The results significantly affect the existence of morality, values and the notion of good in general. Deprivation appears in values, which leads to pessimism. Pessimistic values move away from (...) the intensity of life instinct. As a reflection of life, man strives and destroys the aspirations for life. The whole reality, on the other hand, is in opposition and thus, necessarily, in dialectic and conflict. Nietzsche, however, does not strive for reconciliation opposites, but requires their enduring, which is, at the same time, overcoming. Conflict between pessimistic and life valuesinevitably arises. Pessimism precedes nihilism, which alternates the notion of truth, meaning, and foundation. In the concluding analysis, it becomes clear how the value creator is placed in relation to the concept of eternal return and overcoming nihilism. Emptiness and lack of sense are replaced by a dynamic and conflicting conception of life, i.e. existence, where the dynamics of life must not be understood in an organic or other bio-morphological sense, but in relation to the individual and his creative potential only in the form of change and reestablishment of reality. This, in turn, means that, ultimately, the focus is on the subject, man as will and his existential acts. (shrink)