Following the announcement in 1949 in the USA that cortisone offered rheumatoid arthritis sufferers effective treatment for their crippling disease, the Ministry of Health came under considerable pressure from the medical profession and the public to make cortisone available in Britain. The Ministry, therefore, urged British companies to start manufacturing cortisone. Among the several pharmaceutical firms responding to the Ministry’s request, Glaxo’s expertise in the field of vitamins gave them a head start. This paper describes the varied and flexible strategy (...) that enabled Glaxo to maintain this head start, and the scientific and technical capabilities which the company subsequently built up, enabling them to dominate the market for corticosteroids in Britain.Among the drugs to emerge out of the Glaxo project to manufacture cortisone, which began in 1950 and later became a wider R&D programme on steroids, was the topical steroid Betnovate, launched in 1963, which remains a best-seller today. However, although it led to successful new products, Glaxo’s programme had limitations. The paper identifies a missed opportunity, in the shape of the biosynthetic route to steroid drugs, often considered as a milestone in the development of the new biotechnology. Whether or not this missed opportunity proved costly to the company is uncertain. However, it illustrates the role of technological path-dependence, and the importance of the integration between different scientific disciplines, in this case chemistry and biology, in pharmaceutical innovation. (shrink)

Limited distribution phenomena related to negation and negative polarity are usually thought of in terms of affectivity where affective is understood as negative or downward entailing. In this paper I propose an analysis of affective contexts as nonveridical and treat negative polarity as a manifestation of the more general phenomenon of sensitivity to (non)veridicality (which is, I argue, what affective dependencies boil down to). Empirical support for this analysis will be provided by a detailed examination of affective dependencies in Greek, (...) but the distribution of any will also be shown to follow from (non)veridicality. (shrink)

This unique volume explores what ethics has to offer the practicing physician, nurse, and allied health care worker. The authors introduce the basic vocabulary of ethics and present and discuss the most commonly used ethical theories, using case studies to illustrate how ethics work within the context of health care. Newcomers to the field will learn what ethics is all about and how it relates to the pragmatic concerns of the health care professional. Those who already have a working knowledge (...) of the field will find a new approach to ethical theory--personalism--which the authors believe can make the practical use of ethics more effective and reliable. (shrink)

This essay assess the compatibility of Eva Kittay's dependency critique with Rawlsian political liberalism. I argue for the inclusion of a modified version of Kittay's revisions within Rawlsian theory in order to yield a theory that suppports a substantial subset of dependency work. Beyond these selected changes, however, I argue that Kittay's other proposed changes should not be included because they are incompatible with Rawls, and furthermore, their incorporation does not yield a theory that includes utter dependents.

Dependence is the most general notion under which a host of familiar metaphysical relations between entities – causation, supervenience, grounding, realisation etc. – fall. In the first section of this chapter, I offer offer some preliminary clarifications to outline the territory in a little more detail. Some years back this would have primarily involved differentiating kinds of dependence in terms of the strength of the modal operators used, and the other details of an analysis deploying them. Now, there has been (...) a proliferation of non-purely modal accounts of dependence. The second section identifies the various reasons that have been offered for this proliferation. The third section discusses a notion of ontological dependence and grounding, each of which draws on an appeal to the essence of the depending, or depended upon, entities. In spite of their popularity, we will see that such notions are of little assistance in capturing a central case of interest to us: the proper understanding of emergence. In the light of this, the fourth section defends a purely modal treatment of some of the problem cases outlined in the first section and also discussed a non-modal notion of construction. I close with a hypothesis that the combination of three features: a non-dependence account of fundamentality, various notions of construction and purely modal properties remove the motivation for appeal to an independent account of grounding in this, and perhaps any, area. (shrink)

Contrary to much Kant interpretation, this article argues that Kant's moral philosophy, including his account of charity, is irrelevant to justifying the state's right to redistribute material resources to secure the rights of dependents (the poor, children, and the impaired). The article also rejects the popular view that Kant either does not or cannot justify anything remotely similar to the liberal welfare state. A closer look at Kant's account of dependency relations in “The Doctrine of Right” reveals an argumentative (...) structure sufficient for a public institutional protection of dependents and evidence that Kant identifies concerns of economic justice as lying at the heart of the state's legitimacy. (shrink)

The purpose of the book is to clarify the notion of existential dependence and cognate notions, such as supervenience and the notion of an internal relation. I defend the view that such notions are best understood in terms of the concept of metaphysical grounding, i.e. the concept of one fact obtaining in virtue of other facts, where ‘in virtue of’ has a distinctively metaphysical meaning.

Metaphysical orthodoxy maintains that the relation of ontological dependence is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. The goal of this paper is to challenge that orthodoxy by arguing that ontological dependence should be understood as non- symmetric, rather than asymmetric. If we give up the asymmetry of dependence, interesting things follow for what we can say about metaphysical explanation— particularly for the prospects of explanatory holism.

Object identification via a perceptual-demonstrative mode of presentation has been studied in cognitive science as a particularly direct and context-dependent means of identifying objects. Several recent works in cognitive science have attempted to clarify the relation between attention, demonstrative identification and context exploration. Assuming a distinction between ‘ demonstrative reference' and ‘perceptual-demonstrative identification', this article aims at specifying the role of attention in the latter and in the linking of conceptual and non conceptual contents while exploring a spatial context. First, (...) the analysis presents an argument to the effect that selection by overt and covert attention is needed for perceptual-demonstrative identification since overt/covert selective attention is required for the situated cognitive access to the target object. Second, it describes a hypothesis that makes explicit some of the roles of attention: the hypothesis of identification by epistemic attention via the control of perceptual routines. (shrink)

A well‐established principle of language is that there is a preference for closely related words to be close together in the sentence. This can be expressed as a preference for dependency length minimization (DLM). In this study, we explore quantitatively the degree to which natural languages reflect DLM. We extract the dependencies from natural language text and reorder the words in such a way as to minimize dependency length. Comparing the original text with these optimal linearizations (and also (...) with random linearizations) reveals the degree to which natural language minimizes dependency length. Tests on English data show that English shows a strong effect of DLM, with dependency length much closer to optimal than to random; the optimal English grammar also has many specific features in common with English. In German, too, dependency length is significantly less than random, but the effect is much weaker than in English. We conclude by speculating about some possible reasons for this difference between English and German. (shrink)

Writers on metaethics divide over two conceptions of what moral realism comes to. The first of these —the “Modest” conception — commits to the truth-aptness of moral judgments. The second —the “Robust” conception — commits to the mind- or stance- or response-dependence of such judgments. In this paper I take up the relationship of response-dependent (RD) moral theories to these conceptions of realism. Some proponents of RD views see themselves as opponents of realism. On the Modest conception they are not, (...) I argue. And the resources they have to respond to the challenges of the Robust conception are considerable. A capably mounted form of RD, responsive to the motivations for Robust realism, puts pressure on the resources Robust realism has for resisting response-dependence. If so, the theoretical distance between RD views and Robust realist views may be smaller than one might suppose. (shrink)

An important element in the criticism of liberalism by some communitarians and feminists is the notion of our embeddedness in relationships of dependence. The criticism in general is that liberal theory is deficient in that it generally attaches no special meaning to such relations, thus justifying a social structure that weakens them. However, the questions of precisely what sort of moral significance these relationships have, why they are morally significant, and what types of dependence relationships possess this significance, have largely (...) gone unasked. This article attempts to explore these questions. I will begin by considering duties that may arise from being depended on by others. (shrink)

Caring for Liberalism brings together chapters that explore how liberal political theory, in its many guises, might be modified or transformed to take the fact of dependency on board. In addressing the place of care in liberalism, this collection advances the idea that care ethics can help respond to legitimate criticisms from feminists who argue that liberalism ignores issues of race, class, and ethnicity. The chapters do not simply add care to existing liberal political frameworks; rather, they explore how (...) integrating dependency might leave core components of the traditional liberal philosophical apparatus intact, while transforming other aspects of it. Additionally, the contributors address the design of social and political institutions through which care is given and received, with special attention paid to non-Western care practices. This book will appeal to scholars working on liberalism in philosophy, political science, law, and public policy, and it is a must-read for feminist political philosophers. (shrink)

Political philosophy presents a static conception of childhood as a state of lack, a condition where intellectual, physical, and moral capacities are undeveloped. This view, referred to by David Kennedy as the deficit view of childhood, is problematic because it systematically disparages certain universal features of humanity—dependency and growth—and incorrectly characterizes them as features of childhood only. Thus there is a strict separation between childhood and adulthood because adults are characterized as fully autonomous agents who have reached the end (...) of their moral and cognitive development. I argue that this view is mistaken, and limits both the developmental abilities of adults and ongoing moral development within an organized state. I propose that we view dependency as a human condition. By doing so, children and adults form the kind of relationship with one another that encourages the growth and development of our moral sense in both childhood and adulthood. (shrink)

This paper describes a system for extracting typed dependency parses of English sentences from phrase structure parses. In order to capture inherent relations occurring in corpus texts that can be critical in real-world applications, many NP relations are included in the set of grammatical relations used. We provide a comparison of our system with Minipar and the Link parser. The typed dependency extraction facility described here is integrated in the Stanford Parser, available for download.

Weak measurements offer new insights into the behavior of quantum systems. Combined with post-selection, quantum mechanics predicts a range of new experimentally testable phenomena. In this paper I consider weak measurements performed on time-dependent pre- and post-selected ensembles, with emphasis on the decay of excited states. The results show that the standard exponential decay law is a limiting case of a more general law that depends on both the time of post-selection and the choice of final state. The generalized law (...) is illustrated for two interesting choices of post-selection. (shrink)

If I decide to disclose information about myself, this act may undermine other people’s ability to conceal information about them. Such dependencies are called privacy dependencies in the literature. Some say that privacy dependencies generate moral duties to avoid sharing information about oneself. If true, we argue, then it is sometimes justified for others to impose harm on the person sharing information to prevent them from doing so. In this paper, we first show how such conclusions arise. Next, we show (...) that the existence of such a dependency between the moral significance you are inclined to attribute to privacy dependencies and judgments about permissible self-defense puts pressure on at least some ways of spelling out the idea that privacy dependencies ought to constrain our data-sharing conduct. (shrink)

In this paper, I make three points. The first is that there is indeed a distinctive approach to moral methodology, different from standard moral reasoning, that can be described as “practice-dependence”. I argue that its distinctness lies in recommending an aptness claim , namely that moral principles for regulating social practices must be principles for better fulfilling the point of those practices, a point discoverable in shared understandings of the practice. Participants treat domestic political societies as having a different point (...) to the practice of international relations. On this approach, then, different moral principles apply in each case: principles of distributive justice between citizens in the former and principles of cooperative fairness between states in the latter. My second point is that this approach fails, however, an important test which I call the justifiability constraint . Any formulation of a moral principle assigning rights and duties, benefits and burdens, to people should be justifiable to those persons by reference to a moral value. Yet, as I show, the practice-dependence view cannot offer any justification based on moral value for the aptness claim. My last point is that both endorsers and critics of practice-dependence have mistakenly attributed this approach to theorists who restrict the scope of justice on the basis of moral justification. Such views are, in fact, incompatible with the aptness claim given that they offer plausible independently derived moral grounds for restricting the scope of justice. They are also compatible with the justifiability constraint. For these reasons, I conclude that practice-dependence is a red herring for debates on global justice. (shrink)

La croissance de la population vieillissante en Amérique du Nord a un impact significatif sur nos politiques sociales. Ainsi, l’État québécois met à la disposition des personnes âgées une aide afin de faciliter le maintien à domicile. Qui a maintenant la responsabilité de répondre aux besoins des personnes âgées; est-ce la famille ou l’État? Si la réponse peut nous aider à formuler des politiques sociales équitables, elle nous pousse aussi à repenser le lien social à la lumière de la dépendance. (...) Dans un premier temps nous nous pencherons sur l’évolution de l’éthique de la sollicitude pour ensuite analyser les apports des études sur la production du handicap. Puisque la problématique de la dépendance s’avère cruciale dans ce débat, les écrits de deux théoriciens français, Albert Memmi et Bernard Ennuyer, nous aideront à élucider la question de la dépendance. Nous verrons par la suite comment ces divers apports peuvent nous amener à reconceptualiser le lien social.In this paper I examine whether care ethics can help to conceptualize a richer social ontology which would include a variety of individuals, not only productive ones, under the auspices of justice. In the first part of the paper, I consider the reasons why care ethics has not had a profound impact in political theorizing. Next I examine the troubled relationship of care ethics and disability. Recent writings on social contract theory, in particular those of Anita Silvers and Leslie Pickering as well as Lawrence Becker, argue that social contract theory can include profoundly disabled individuals and I contrast their proposals with that of care ethicists. By examining critical writings on dependency, I show that a strategy for a more inclusive social space needs to include social structures that recognize dependency as a human reality. I argue that care ethics, even if it may not be critical enough of the foundational concept of dependence, is helpful in understanding the role of the state in facilitating the recognition and the contribution of all persons within society. (shrink)

This essay provides an opinionated survey of some recent developments in the literature on ontological dependence. Some of the most popular definitions of ontological dependence are formulated in modal terms; others in non-modal terms (e.g., in terms of the explanatory connective, ‘because’, or in terms of a non-modal conception of essence); some (viz., the existential construals of ontological dependence) emphasise requirements that must be met in order for an entity to exist; others (viz., the essentialist construals) focus on conditions that (...) must be satisfied in order for an entity to be the very entity it is at each time at which it exists; some are rigid, in the sense that they concern a relation between particular entities; others are generic, in the sense that they involve only a relation between an entity and some entities or other, which bear certain characteristics. I identify three potential measures of success with respect to which these different definitions of ontological dependence can be evaluated and consider the question of how well they in fact meet these desiderata. I end by noting that certain challenges face even the most promising essentialist construals of ontological dependence. (shrink)

This author’s reply addresses critiques by Daniel Engster, Kelly Gawel, and Andrea Westlund about my 2020 book, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture. I begin with a statement of my commitment to liberalism. In section two, I defend the value of a distinction between conceptions of persons in the real world and in contract theory to track inequalities in care when indexed to legitimate needs. I argue, as well, that my variety of contract theory supplies the normative (...) content needed to reject the subordination of women of color. Acknowledging the enduring danger of expressive subordination, I emphasize my theory’s compatibility with the full social inclusion of people with disabilities. Section three then defends liberal dependency care’s compatibility with radical critique and transformative change by emphasizing the abstract nature of its core theoretical module. Finally, in section four, I reaffirm conceptual distinctions between autonomy skills, care skills, and a sense of justice by explicating their theoretical roles. In that section, I also embrace Westlund’s insight that theorists of justice need to have skills enabling responsiveness to other perspectives. To this new requirement for actual theorists of justice, I further add that we must attain capacities to engage critically with our society’s norms. Thus, the final section of this article supplements the justificatory module of liberal dependency care, building from the necessary conditions specified as two-level contract theory toward an account of necessary and sufficient conditions for this liberalism’s justificatory module. (shrink)

In (1990), Jerry Fodor has defended a naturalized conception of meaning for Mentalese expressions which relies on the notion of asymmetric dependence. According to this conception, any naturalized theory of meaning must be able to account for the fact that meaning is robust, namely that any token of a certain Mentalese expression “x” retains the expression’s meaning, X, for any Y (≠ X) which happens to cause it. Now, this robustness of “x”‘s meaning can precisely be explained in terms of (...) the subsistence of an asymmetric dependence of any nomic connection between Ys and “x”‘s tokens on another nomic connection between Xs and “x”‘s tokens. According to Fodor, then, this relation between nomic connections can account in perfectly naturalistic terms for “x” meaning X, by providing a sufficient condition for such a meaning. In what follows, however, I will try to show, first, that the subsistence of asymmetric dependencies of the kind envisaged by Fodor is not enough for assigning meaning to a certain expression. Indeed, there are dependencies of this kind which are meaning-irrelevant. Secondly, I will claim that asymmetric dependence relations are not able even to support for the robustness of meaning. For there are cases in which according to the structure of these relations we would have to conclude that meaning is altered although robustness would require to have it unchanged. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide and defend what may be the first actual argument in support of P. F. Strawson's merely stated vision of a response-dependent theory of moral responsibility. It does so by way of an extended analogy with the funny. In part 1, it makes the easier and less controversial case for response-dependence about the funny. In part 2, it shows the tight analogy between anger and amusement in developing the harder and more controversial case for response-dependence about (...) a kind of blameworthiness. It then defends the view from three serious skeptical challenges. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s well known and thoroughly discussed criticism of the cosmological argument, hereafter ‘CA’, is that it presupposes or depends upon the cogency of the ontological argument, hereafter ‘OA’. Call this criticism ‘the Dependency Thesis’. It is fair to say that the received view on the matter is that Kant failed to establish the Dependency Thesis.1 In what follows, I argue that the received view is mistaken. I begin by rehearsing the standard objection to what is typically taken (...) to be Kant’s primary argument for the Dependency Thesis. I defend Kant by presenting a different argument for his thesis. This argument is not vulnerable to the standard objection, and there is good reason to think that Kant had such an argument in mind. (shrink)

Epistemic dependence refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in practices of knowledge production. Epistemic oppression concerns persistent and unwarranted exclusions from those practices. This article examines the relationship between these two frameworks and demonstrates that attending to their relationship is a fruitful practice for applied epistemology. Paying attention to relations of epistemic dependence and how exclusive they are can help us track epistemically oppressive practices. In order to show this, I introduce a taxonomy of epistemic dependence. I argue that (...) this particular taxonomy is useful for tracking epistemically oppressive practices in institutional contexts. This is because, first, the forms of epistemic dependence in this taxonomy yield, what I call, diagnostic questions. These are questions that help us track how relations of epistemic dependence could become exclusive and that thus help reveal epistemic oppression in institutional contexts. Second, the forms of epistemic dependence in the taxonomy are interrelated. Paying attention not just to each of three forms of epistemic dependence but also to the way in which they are interrelated is useful for illuminating epistemically oppressive practices. I conclude by demonstrating how the diagnostic questions can be used in analyses of concrete institutional practices in asylum law and higher education. (shrink)

We introduce an atomic formula ${\vec{y} \bot_{\vec{x}}\vec{z}}$ intuitively saying that the variables ${\vec{y}}$ are independent from the variables ${\vec{z}}$ if the variables ${\vec{x}}$ are kept constant. We contrast this with dependence logic ${\mathcal{D}}$ based on the atomic formula = ${(\vec{x}, \vec{y})}$ , actually equivalent to ${\vec{y} \bot_{\vec{x}}\vec{y}}$ , saying that the variables ${\vec{y}}$ are totally determined by the variables ${\vec{x}}$ . We show that ${\vec{y} \bot_{\vec{x}}\vec{z}}$ gives rise to a natural logic capable of formalizing basic intuitions about independence and dependence. (...) We show that ${\vec{y} \bot_{\vec{x}}\vec{z}}$ can be used to give partially ordered quantifiers and IF-logic an alternative interpretation without some of the shortcomings related to so called signaling that interpretations using = ${(\vec{x}, \vec{y})}$ have. (shrink)

This paper compares the four national electronic Identity Management Systems (eIDMS), which have been described in the previous chapters. The section Similarities and differences between four national eIDMS will highlight the differences between these systems conceived as socio-technical systems with regard to the eID itself, the eID cards as tokens, the authentication processes as well as the procedures for distribution and personalisation, the support provided for installing the technology and any provider-related regulation. The section A three-fold path dependency , (...) according to the conceptual framework presented in the introductory chapter to this special issue, compares the new electronic systems with the previous ones in each country, in order to assess the continuation or changes with regard to the organisational, technological and regulatory path of development. The following sections explain the differences between the paths chosen and the path-related changes by analysing the actor constellation of the institutional actors, in particular the policy field and the power structure, as well as the context in which the policy makers made their choices, looking at privacy and Staatsverständnis in particular. Finally the diffusion and usage of the eID function will be compared and analysed, discussing to what extent the new institution has made a contribution to solving the policy problem it was developed for, e.g. providing a stronger authentication in order to meet security concerns regarding e-government and e-commerce transactions and avoiding new privacy infringements. Using grounded theory, the explanations provided have the status of generalisations derived from the four cases. They have to be considered as hypotheses, which will be checked for other countries in the following papers of this special issue. The comparison of the four cases in this article shows a high degree of path dependency. Most of the differences between the new systems are just a continuation of differences between the previous systems although they are to solve the same problem and can draw on the same technologies. But most astonishing is the finding that these differences between the systems do not influence diffusion and use of the eID function in the respective countries. (shrink)

The contemporary industrialized global food system has sustained an onslaught of criticism from diverse parties—academic and popular, scientists and social justice advocates, activists and intellectuals—criticism that has only intensified in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Feminist voices have made substantial contributions to these critiques, calling attention to the cultural politics of food and health ; to the impact of the corporatization of agriculture on food quality, the environment, and the people of the Global South, especially women ; and (...) to the complicated relationship among cooking, eating, and gender, including how food.. (shrink)

I argue that perception is necessarily situation-dependent. The way an object is must not just be distinguished from the way it appears and the way it is represented, but also from the way it is presented given the situational features. First, I argue that the way an object is presented is best understood in terms of external, mind-independent, but situation-dependent properties of objects. Situation-dependent properties are exclusively sensitive to and ontologically dependent on the intrinsic properties of objects, such as their (...) shape, size, and color, and the situational features, such as the lighting conditions and the perceiver’s location in relation to the perceived object. Second, I argue that perceiving intrinsic properties is epistemically dependent on representing situation-dependent properties. Recognizing situation-dependent properties yields four advantages. It makes it possible to embrace the motivations that lead to phenomenalism and indirect realism by recognizing that objects are presented a certain way, while holding on to the intuition that subjects directly perceive objects. Second, it acknowledges that perceptions are not just individuated by the objects they are of, but by the ways those objects are presented given the situational features. Third, it allows for a way to accommodate the fact that there is a wide range of viewing conditions or situational features that can count as normal. Finally, it makes it possible to distinguish perception and thought about the same object with regard to what is represented. (shrink)

This paper calls for a paradigm shift in studying academic dependency, towards the paradigm of brokered dependency. Using Chinese academia as an example, I demonstrate how the neocolonial condition of academic dependency is always mediated through blockage-brokerage mechanisms. The two most salient blockage-brokerage mechanisms of dependency in the Chinese context are linguistic barrier and authoritarian malepistemization, and the effects of the latter consist of three layers: institutional, informational and incorporational. On top of their domestic impacts, those (...) mechanisms jointly exacerbate spectacularized postcoloniality in anglophone-hegemonic global academic publishing. The paradigm of brokered dependency not only represents a more nuanced approach to the study of academic dependency, but also underscores the fact that the dismantling of the neocolonial condition cannot be conceived and pursued in isolation from comprehending and confronting the authoritarian condition, especially when the latter pertains under the disguise of anticolonialism. (shrink)

'Ontological dependence' is a term of philosophical jargon which stands for a rich family of properties and relations, often taken to be among the most fundamental ontological properties and relations. Notions of ontological dependence are usually thought of as 'carving reality at its ontological joints', and as marking certain forms of ontological 'non-self-sufficiency'. The use of notions of dependence goes back as far as Aristotle's characterization of substances, and these notions are still widely used to characterize other concepts and to (...) formulate metaphysical claims. This paper first gives an overview of the varieties of these notions, and then discusses some of their main applications. (shrink)

I argue that scientific knowledge is collective knowledge, in a sense to be specified and defended. I first consider some existing proposals for construing collective knowledge and argue that they are unsatisfactory, at least for scientific knowledge as we encounter it in actual scientific practice. Then I introduce an alternative conception of collective knowledge, on which knowledge is collective if there is a strong form of mutual epistemic dependence among scientists, which makes it so that satisfaction of the justification condition (...) on knowledge ineliminably requires a collective. Next, I show how features of contemporary science support the conclusion that scientific knowledge is collective knowledge in this sense. Finally, I consider implications of my proposal and defend it against objections. (shrink)

The paper discusses from a metaphysical standpoint the nature of the dependence relation underpinning the talk of mutual action between material and spatiotemporal structures in general relativity. It is shown that the standard analyses of dependence in terms of causation or grounding are ill-suited for the general relativistic context. Instead, a non-standard analytical framework in terms of structural equation modeling is exploited, which leads to the conclusion that the kind of dependence encoded in the Einstein field equations is a novel (...) one. (shrink)

This paper is the sequel to Part 1, which appeared in this Journal, Vol. 46 No. 2, 2012. Following Cavell and his insistence that we should not try to escape from the existential conditions we find ourselves in and look for false certainties, the relevance of embracing a particular stance is elaborated. A commitment to giving substance to an ideal of the good life is neither an injustice towards the other nor an ignorance of her freedom. On the contrary, here (...) responsibility is accepted and at the same time it is acknowledged that we always have only the particular points of departure that we contingently start from. Coming to terms with this kind of dependency constitutes living out the scepticism that is implied by our being human: the logic of this is given along with our human condition. (shrink)

Time, space, causality, communicating and acting together set limits on our freedom. Starting from the position of Wittgenstein, who advocates neither a position of pure subjectivity nor of pure objectivity, and taking into account what is implied by initiation into the symbolic order of language and culture, it is argued that the limitations on our freedom are not to be deplored. The problems of conservatism, relativism and scepticismwhich confront us often in the context of education and child rearingare inadequately dealt (...) with if attention is primarily focused on ways to resist or act differently. Following Cavell and his insistence that we should not try to escape from the existential conditions we find ourselves in and look for false certainties, the relevance of embracing a particular stance is elaborated. A commitment to giving substance to an ideal of the good life is neither an injustice towards the other nor an ignorance of her freedom. On the contrary, here responsibility is accepted, and at the same time it is acknowledged that we always have only the particular points of departure that we contingently start from. Coming to terms with this kind of dependency constitutes living out the scepticism that is implied by our being human: the logic of this is given along with our human condition. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a nudge for public–private cooperation in healthcare to rapidly cope with limited resource. However, Vietnam’s historical reliance on a public healthcare system, combined with a traditional emphasis on socialization in the Polanyian sense, hindered the swift integration of the private sector. This research investigates path dependency in Vietnam’s public health sector, using theories including path dependency, Karl Polanyi’s double movement with legal analysis method to analyze the interplay of historical decisions, and socialist policies in (...) healthcare. Recognizing these institutional and market governance flaws, a deeper understanding of the role of law becomes vital in crafting strategies for a more resilient and sustainable healthcare system in Vietnam. In this article, Ho Chi Minh City is chosen as a case study due to its notable mix of public–private healthcare facilities and its status as a leading area in infection cases during the third COVID-19 wave. The article suggests that there should be a change in the way public and private sectors work together, one that is more in line with market-driven solutions which requires solid legal framework for cooperation beyond merely mobilizing resources. (shrink)

Priority Monism, as defined by Jonathan Schaffer, has a number of components. It is the view that: the cosmos exists; the cosmos is a maximal actual concrete object, of which all actual concrete objects are parts; the cosmos is basic—there is no object upon which the cosmos depends, ontologically; ontological dependence is a primitive and unanalysable relation. In a recent attack, Lowe has offered a series of arguments to show that Monism fails. He offers up four tranches of argument, with (...) different focuses. These focal points are: being a concrete object; aggregation and dependence; analyses of ontological dependence; Schaffer’s no-overlap principle. These are all technical notions, but each figures at the heart of a cluster of arguments that Lowe puts forward. To respond, I work through each tranche of argument in turn. Before that, in the first section, I offer a cursory statement of Monism, as Schaffer presents it in his 2010 paper, Monism: The Priority of the Whole. I then respond to each of Lowe’s criticisms in turn, deploying material from Schaffer’s 2009 paper Spacetime: the One Substance, as well as various pieces of conceptual machinery from Lowe’s own works to deflect Lowe’s attacks. In the process of defending Monism from Lowe, I end up offering some subtle refinements to Schaffer’s view and explain how the resulting ‘hybrid’ view fares in the wider dialectic. (shrink)

Dependent Rational Animals consists of a revision of the three Paul Carus Lectures delivered by MacIntyre at the 1997 Pacific Division meeting of the APA. The book is rather different from MacIntyre's work since After Virtue in that it proceeds systematically rather than historically to develop a Thomistic-Aristotelian view of ethics that takes its departure from the continuities in human and nonhuman animal nature and the role of dependence in human life. These issues lead to a consideration of the distinctive (...) virtues required of us if we are to become independent practical reasoners able to acknowledge our dependence on others in arriving at that state of independence as well as continuing dependence on others with whom we participate in the relationships of giving and receiving through which we pursue the goods that constitute human flourishing. The argument proceeds in roughly three stages. (shrink)

Foreign language anxiety has been identified as a crucial affective factor in language learning. Similar to the situation in language classes, university students in interpretation classes are required to perform in a foreign language when their language skills are inadequate. Investigations are needed to determine the specific impact of FLA on interpretation learning. This study investigated the effects of the specific interpretation classroom FLA on interpretation learning and dependency distance as an indicator of learners’ cognitive load. The participants were (...) 49 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in English–Chinese interpretation classes at a university in Hong Kong. The results showed a significant negative correlation between ICFLA levels and consecutive interpretation achievement scores. ICFLA was also negatively correlated with DD in consecutive interpretations. Four factors underlying ICFLA were identified. The findings of this study would provide useful insights for researchers and educators to understand the nature and effect of FLA in different settings. (shrink)

The paper demonstrates that dependency-based syntax is in a strong position to produce principled and economical accounts of the syntax of constructs. The difficulty that constituency-based syntax has in this regard is that very many constructs fail to qualify as constituents. The point is evident with the box diagrams and attribute value matrices (AVMs) that some construction grammars (CxGs) use to formalize constructions; these schemata often represent fragments rather than constituents. In dependency-based syntax in contrast, constructions are catenae, (...) whereby a catena is a chain of words linked together by dependencies. The catena is a novel but well-defined unit of syntax associated with dependency grammar (DG). The constructs of CxGs are more amenable to analyses in terms of the catenae of dependency-based syntax than to analyses in terms of the constituents of constituency-based syntax. (shrink)