Professional didactic engineering is essentially based on didactic analyses of work activities in order to design or improve training devices, focusing on the problem of competencies in characteristic situation classes. This article proposes an enrichment of this approach by focusing on professional concerns, either in a pedagogical adjustment approach or to understand specific organizers of the activity. In this second perspective, this contribution submits a multi-agenda generic analysis model of professional concerns, with a view to professional didactics.

This book considers how observations about the past influence future behaviour, as expressed in language. Focusing on information gathered from speech and other evidence sources, the author offers a model of how judgements about reliability can be made, and how such judgements factor into how people treat information they acquire via those sources.

From Clouds to Corsair: Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, and Socrates -- The pure fool and the knight of faith: Wolfram's Parzival and the stages of existence -- From romantic aesthete to Christian analogue: Don Quixote's sallies in Kierkegaard's authorship -- Saying not quite "everything just as it is": Shakespeare on life's way -- "Sorrow's changeling": irony, humor, and laughter in Kierkegaard and Carlyle.

Bellʼs 1964 theorem causes a severe problem for the notion that correlations require explanation, encapsulated in Reichenbachʼs principle of common cause. Despite being a hallmark of scientific thought, dropping the principle has been widely regarded as much less bitter medicine than the perceived alternative—dropping relativistic causality. Recently, however, some authors have proposed that modified forms of Reichenbachʼs principle could be maintained even with relativistic causality. Here we break down Reichenbachʼs principle into two independent assumptions—the principle of common cause proper and (...) factorization of probabilities. We show how Bellʼs theorem can be derived from these two assumptions plus relativistic causality and the law of total probability for actual events, and we review proposals to drop each of these assumptions in light of the theorem. In particular, we show that the non-commutative common causes of Hofer-Szabó and Vecsernyés fail to have an analogue of the notion that the common causes can explain the observed correlations. Moreover, we show that their definition can be satisfied trivially by any quantum product state for any quantum correlations. We also discuss how the conditional states approach of Leifer and Spekkens fares in this regard. (shrink)

Kant’s philosophy is often treated as a closed system, without reference to how it was written or how Kant arrived at its familiar form, the critique. In fact, the style of the critique seems so artless that readers think of it as an unfortunate by-product—a style of stylelessness. In _Constituting Critique_, Willi Goetschel shows how this apparent gracelessness was deliberately achieved by Kant through a series of writing experiments. By providing an account of the process that culminated in his three (...) _Critiques_, this book offers a new perspective on Kant’s philosophical thought and practice. _Constituting Critique_ traces the stages in Kant’s development to reveal how he redefined philosophy as a critical task. Following the philosopher through the experiments of his early essays, Goetschel demonstrates how Kant tests, challenges, and transforms the philosophical essay in his pursuit of a new self-reflective literary genre. From these experiments, critique emerges as the philosophical form for the critical project of the Enlightenment. The imperatives of its transcendental style, Goetschel contends, not only constitute and inform the critical moment of Kant’s philosophical praxis, but also have an enduring place in post-Kantian philosophy and literature. By situating the _Critiques_ within the context of Kant’s early essays, this work will redirect the attention of Kant scholars to the origins of their form. It will also encourage contemporary critical theorists to reconsider their own practice through an engagement with its source in Kant. (shrink)

This essay examines the connection between the concept of autonomy and the concept of an ideal, moral self in Kant’s practical philosophy. Its central thesis is that self-legislation does not rest on the capacity to exempt oneself from nature’s causal network. Instead, it rests on the practical capacity for identification with what Kant calls an individual’s “moral personality.” A person’s ability to identify with this morally ideal version of himself gives shape to his will, enabling him to decide how to (...) act on the basis of reasons that do not stem from desires or inclinations. It thus makes possible a form of volition that is autonomous rather than heteronomous. (shrink)

This book is a readers' companion to Simone Weil's The Need for Roots. It includes comprehensive and illuminating essays from recognized Weil scholars from the United States, Canada, England, France, and Germany, addressing the most pressing historical and contemporary aspects of Weil's thought and striking proposals. These include her substituting obligations for rights as the moral basis of society, her critique of our uprootedness and her proposals for rootedness, her critique of our dangerous understanding of greatness, the importance of work (...) for society, and her critique of modern science. This companion reader relies on the latest and most reliable work on the history of the Weil manuscript as provided by French scholars. It is unique in its thorough examination of the book's issues, which center around a spiritual renewal, first of France, but more broadly of western democracies. It includes a comprehensive introduction to the issues important to understanding The Need for Roots. Also included in the appendices are a new translation of Weil's preliminary study of obligations that was meant as an introduction to her work (but always published separately) as well as a translation of an address by Free French leader Andre Philippe-an address that helped set the moral issues that Weil would come to address. The book is both a scholarly contribution to understanding Weil's book and a striking set of conversations about many of the most pressing contemporary issues surrounding the possibilities of a spiritual and moral renewal of Western norms. The ultimate point of this companion is to stress the importance of Weil's The Need for Roots. In a time of clashing ideologies, politics of identity, and a desire, somehow in all that, to find a path to community and a way of respecting all human beings, The Need for Roots is now, more than ever, a timely book and one that needs careful examination and reflection. (shrink)

In continuation of [JOH04, OH07], we prove that existentially closed CSA-groups have the independence property. This is done by showing that there exist words having the independence property relative to the class of torsion-free hyperbolic groups.

In this paper I call attention to Adam Smith’s “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages” in order to facilitate understanding Adam Smith from a Darwinian perspective. By ‘Darwinian’ I mean a position that explains differential selection over time through natural mechanisms. First, I argue that right near the start of Wealth of Nations Smith signals that human nature has probably evolved over a very long amount of time. Second, I connect this evidence with an infamous passage on infanticide in (...) The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to argue that Smith is committed to group selection. Third, I argue that in Dissertation on Languages one can find building blocks for the claim that mind and language co-develop over time. More controversially I claim that in TMS there is a distinction between natural sentiments and moral sentiments. Natural sentiments are evolved (presumably through cultural selection) and moral sentiments are developed (through acculturation within society). Along the way, I argue that this distinction would have improved Darwin’s Descent of Man by blocking a move toward eugenics. (shrink)

Though hippocampal volume reduction is a pathological hallmark of schizophrenia, the molecular pathway responsible for this degeneration remains unknown. Recent reports have suggested the potential role of impaired blood-brain barrier function in schizophrenia pathogenesis. However, direct evidence demonstrating an impaired BBB function is missing. In this preliminary study, we used immunohistochemistry and serum immunoglobulin G antibodies to investigate the state of BBB function in formalin-fixed postmortem samples from the hippocampus and surrounding temporal cortex of patients with schizophrenia and controls without (...) schizophrenia matched for age, sex, and race. Since a functional BBB prevents the extravasation of IgGs, detection of IgGs in the parenchyma is used as direct evidence of BBB breakdown. We also developed a semi-quantitative approach to quantify the extent of IgG leak and therein BBB breach. Analysis of our immunohistochemistry data demonstrated a significantly higher incidence of IgG leak in patients with schizophrenia compared to controls. Further, BBB permeability was significantly higher in advanced-age patients with schizophrenia than both advanced-age controls and middle-aged patients with schizophrenia. Male patients with schizophrenia also demonstrated a significant increase in IgG permeability compared to control males. Interestingly, the extravasated IgGs also demonstrated selective immunoreactivity for neurons. Based on these observations, we suggest that BBB dysfunction and IgG autoantibodies could be two key missing pathoetiological links underwriting schizophrenia hippocampal damage. (shrink)

The prosaic content of these sayings is that events change from future to present and from present to past. Your next birthday is in the future, but with the passage of time it draws nearer and nearer until it is present. 24 hours later it will be in the past, and then lapse forever deeper into history. And things get older: even if they don’t wear out or lose their hair or change in any other way, their chronological age is (...) always increasing. These changes are universal and inescapable: no event could ever fail to be first future, then present, then past, and no persisting thing can avoid growing older. We call this process time’s passage. (shrink)

Assuming the position that takes properties to be tropes rather than universals and takes ordinary objects as bundles of tropes, the essay first argues that the Law of the Identity of Indiscernibles survives the challenge raised by Black's "two-sphere universe". It is because the Law of Indiscernibles becomes a trivialconsequence of the assumed trope ontology. The essay then considers four construals of the thesis of Uniqueness differing in strength. The construals are developed in terms of both the possibility that tropes (...) of an object may be transferred to another object and the possibility that objects may survive cross-worldproperty changes. Finally, the essay argues that a trilemma arises from three intuitively innocent claims: (1) that same world objects do not share tropes, (2) that cross world objects may share some (but not all) tropes, and (3) that objects may survive cross-world property changes. And, unfortunately, Indiscernibles plays a role in giving rise to one horn of the trilemma. The essay suggests "ultraessentialism" as a possible way out of the trilemma. (shrink)

Contrary to Vaesen's argument that humans are unique with respect to nine cognitive capacities essential for tool use, we suggest that although such cognitive processes contribute to variation in tool use, it does not follow that these capacities arenecessaryfor tool use, nor that tool use shaped cognition per se, given the available data in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral biology.

This second part of a two-part article (the first part of which appeared in the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2022) surveys the varying uses made of Kierkegaard’s writings by four twentieth- and, in two of their cases, also twenty-first-century contributors to Religionswissenschaft: Joachim Wach, Mircea Eliade, Wendy Doniger, and Bruce Lincoln, all four of whom happen to have taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Far from being irrelevant or being regarded as a theologically-inclined persona non grata by comparatists of (...) religion, Kierkegaard was embraced in three main capacities by these influential contributors to the field: as a datum (mostly in the history of theology and/or philosophy), as a theorist, and, in one case, as an existential soulmate. In Lincoln’s case, the reduction to memes—the memeification—of certain ideas ascribed to Kierkegaard comes under consideration. (shrink)