The History of Ideas is presently enjoying a certain renaissance after a long period of disrepute. Increasing quantities of digitally available historical texts and the availability of computational tools for the exploration of such masses of sources, it is suggested, can be of invaluable help to historians of ideas. The question is: how exactly? In this paper, we argue that a computational history of ideas is possible if the following two conditions are satisfied: (i) Sound Method . A computational history (...) of ideas must be built upon a sound theoretical foundation for its methodology, and the only such foundation is given by the use of models , i.e., fully explicit and revisable interpretive frameworks or networks of concepts developed by the historians of ideas themselves. (ii) Data Organisation. Interpretive models in our sense must be seen as topic-specific knowledge organisation systems (KOS) implementable (i.e. formalisable) as e.g. computer science ontologies. We thus require historians of ideas to provide explicitly structured semantic framing of domain knowledge before investigating texts computationally, and to constantly re-input findings from the interpretive point of view. In this way, a computational history of ideas maximally profits from computer methods while also keeping humanities experts in the loop. We elucidate our proposal with reference to a model of the notion of axiomatic science in 18th -19th century Europe. (shrink)

Vulnerability and politics are among the relevant and key topics of discussion in the Ethiopian healthcare context. Attempts by the formal bioethics structure in Ethiopia to deliberate on ethical issues relating to vulnerability and politics in healthcare have been limited, even though the informal analysis of bioethical issues has been present in traditional Ethiopian communities. This is reflected in religion, social values, and local moral underpinnings. Thus, the aim of this paper is to discuss the bioethical implications of vulnerability and (...) politics for healthcare in Ethiopia and to suggest possible ways forward. First, we will briefly introduce what has been done to develop bioethics as a field in Ethiopia and what gaps remain concerning its implementation in healthcare practice. This will give a context for our second and main task – analyzing the healthcare challenges in relation to vulnerability and politics and discussing their bioethical implications. In doing so, and since these two concepts are intrinsically broad, we demarcate their scope by focusing on specific issues such as poverty, gender, health governance, and armed conflicts. Lastly, we provide suggestions for the ways forward. (shrink)

Personal recovery entails the idea of learning to live a good life in the face of mental illness. It takes place in a continuous dynamic between change and acceptance and involves the existential dimension in the broadest sense. With cognitive self-regulation and empowerment as central elements, however, current models of recovery mostly have an individual focus instead of a relational one. Furthermore, there seems to be an emphasis on the component of change. Little attention is payed to the role and (...) integration of dealing with loss in personal recovery. In this paper, the role of loss in mental illness will be elaborated from an existential perspective. This will be done by relating existential changes to possibly disruptive experiences of loss in wider experience. With the help of several perspectives on dealing with loss it will be argued this can be integrated in processes of recovery. Then, it will be elaborated how reexperiencing a state of being surrounded, or being included, being held is a necessary part of recovery. The result consists of a refinement of the view on personal recovery. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold: (1) to arrive at a better understanding of what existential loss and loss in wider experience in the context of psychopathology entails, and (2) to further develop perspectives on recovery in mental health care. (shrink)

The untrained early childhood development education (ECDE) teacher tends to escape from children’s problems instead of dealing with them. They do not know how to deal with different age groups since they do not know what tasks to give which group of children. The type of training enables a teacher to escape the constraints of a curriculum. Once this issue can be established, preferably by research, it will ease the inconsistencies in the ECDE teacher training in Kenya. The purpose of (...) this study was to establish teacher factors that influence the choice of teaching methods used by ECDE teachers in Keiyo South District. This study was guided by the Learning Styles theory by McCarthy (1980) and adopted a descriptive survey design. The study targeted 126 public ECDE centres, 252 ECDE teachers and 126 ECDE head teachers in the public EDCE centres in the district. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 38 public ECDE centres. The study used the questionnaire, interview schedule and observation checklist to collect data. Data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics and presented using frequencies and percentages. The availability of teaching /learning materials, age of the ECDE child, mastery of content and teacher’s experience influenced the choice of teaching method. Others such as teacher motivation, number of children and the school locality also tend to influence the choice of the teaching method. It was also established that there was a relationship between the factors and choice of teaching method. A teacher should embrace the use of a variety of teaching methods; they should appropriately choose the teaching methods in consideration of the learners’ needs. (shrink)

In this position paper, we describe a number of methodological and philosophical challenges that arose within our interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project CatVis, which is a collaboration between applied geometric algorithms and visualization researchers, data scientists working at OCLC, and philosophers who have a strong interest in the methodological foundations of visualization research. The challenges we describe concern aspects of one single epistemic need: that of methodologically securing (an increase in) trust in visualizations. We discuss the lack of ground truths in (...) the (digital) humanities and argue that trust in visualizations requires that we evaluate visualizations on the basis of ground truths that humanities scholars themselves create. We further argue that trust in visualizations requires that a visualization provides provable guarantees on the faithfulness of the visual representation and that we must clearly communicate to the users which part of the visualization can be trusted and how much. Finally, we discuss transparency and accessibility in visualization research and provide measures for securing transparency and accessibility. (shrink)

Background The worldwide increase in older persons demands technological solutions to combat the shortage of caregiving and to enable aging in place. Smart home health technologies (SHHTs) are promoted and implemented as a possible solution from an economic and practical perspective. However, ethical considerations are equally important and need to be investigated. Methods We conducted a systematic review according to the PRISMA guidelines to investigate if and how ethical questions are discussed in the field of SHHTs in caregiving for older (...) persons. Results 156 peer-reviewed articles published in English, German and French were retrieved and analyzed across 10 electronic databases. Using narrative analysis, 7 ethical categories were mapped: privacy, autonomy, responsibility, human vs. artificial interactions, trust, ageism and stigma, and other concerns. Conclusion The findings of our systematic review show the (lack of) ethical consideration when it comes to the development and implementation of SHHTs for older persons. Our analysis is useful to promote careful ethical consideration when carrying out technology development, research and deployment to care for older persons. Registration We registered our systematic review in the PROSPERO network under CRD42021248543. (shrink)

In this special issue we will investigate, from the perspective of agricultural ethics the potential to develop a Responsible Research and Innovation approach to agriculture, and the limitations to such an enterprise. RRI is an emerging field in the European research and innovation policy context that aims to balance economic, socio-cultural and environmental aspects in innovation processes. Because technological innovations can contribute significantly to the solution of societal challenges like climate change or food security, but can also have negative societal (...) consequences, it is assumed that social and ethical aspects should be considered during the R&I process. For this reason, the emerging concept of RRI calls for ethical reflection on the nature, scope and applicability of responsibility and innovation in innovation practices in general, and the way social–ethical issues can be applied and addressed in agriculture. (shrink)

A distorted representation of one's own body is a diagnostic criterion and core psychopathology of both anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Despite recent technical advances in research, it is still unknown whether this body image disturbance is characterized by body dissatisfaction and a low ideal weight and/or includes a distorted perception or processing of body size. In this article, we provide an update and meta-analysis of 42 articles summarizing measures and results for body size estimation (BSE) from 926 (...) individuals with AN, 536 individuals with BN and 1920 controls. We replicate findings that individuals with AN and BN overestimate their body size as compared to controls (ES= 0.63). Our meta-regression shows that metric methods (BSE by direct or indirect spatial measures) yield larger effect sizes than depictive methods (BSE by evaluating distorted pictures), and that effect sizes are larger for patients with BN than for patients with AN. To interpret these results, we suggest a revised theoretical framework for BSE that accounts for differences between depictive and metric BSE methods regarding the underlying body representations (conceptual vs. perceptual, implicit vs. explicit). We also discuss clinical implications and argue for the importance of multimethod approaches to investigate body image disturbance. (shrink)

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our (...) participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (69.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change. (shrink)

Sacrificial dilemmas such as the trolley problem play an important role in experimental philosophy (x-phi). But it is increasingly argued that, since we are not likely to encounter runaway trolleys in our daily life, the usefulness of such thought experiments for understanding moral judgments in more ecologically valid contexts may be limited. However, similar sacrificial dilemmas are experienced in real life by animal research decision makers. As part of their job, they must make decisions about the suffering, and often the (...) death, of many non-human animals. For this reason, a context-specific investigation of so-called “3R dilemmas” (i.e., dilemmas where there is a conflict between the principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement of the use of animals in research) is essential to improve the situation of both non-human animals and human stakeholders. An approach well suited for such investigation is experimental philosophical bioethics (“bioxphi”), which draws on methods similar to x-phi to probe more realistic, practical scenarios with an eye to informing normative debates and ethical policy. In this article, we argue for a need to investigate 3R dilemmas among professional decision-makers using the tools of bioxphi. In a first step, we define 3R dilemmas and discuss previous investigations of professionals’ attitudes in such cases. In a second step, we show how bioxphi is a promising method to investigate the whys and hows of professional decision-making in 3R dilemmas. In a last step, we provide a bioxphi template for 3R dilemmas, give recommendations on its use, explore the normative relevance of data collected by such means, and discuss important limitations. (shrink)

Background: Mental health professionals working in correctional contexts engage a double role to care and control. This dual loyalty conflict has repeatedly been criticized to impede the development of a high-quality alliance. As therapeutic alliance is a robust predictor of outcome measures of psychotherapy, it is essential to investigate the effects of this ethical dilemma. Methods: This qualitative interview study investigates patients’ perceptions of their therapists’ dual role conflict in court-mandated treatment settings. We interviewed 41 older incarcerated persons using a (...) semi-structured interview guide, the interviews were subsequently analyzed following thematic analysis. Results: We first present the patients’ perceptions of their treating psychotherapist’s dual loyalty conflict, which was linked to their overall treatment experience. In a second step, we outline the study participants’ reasons for this judgment, which were most commonly linked to feelings of trust or betrayal. More specifically, they named certain therapist characteristics and activities that enabled them to develop a trustful therapeutic alliance, which we grouped into four topics: respecting the patient’s pace and perceived coercion; patient health needs to be first priority; clarity in roles and responsibilities; and the art of communication – between transparency and unchecked information sharing. Discussion: Developing a high quality alliance in mandatory offender treatment is central due to its relationship with recovery and desistance. Our findings show that some therapists’ characteristics and activities attenuate the negative impact of their double role on the development and maintenance of the alliance. To increase the effectiveness of court-mandated treatments, we need to support clinicians in dealing with their dual role to allow the formation of a high quality therapeutic alliance. Our qualitative interview study contributed to this much-needed empirical research on therapist’ characteristics promoting a trustful relationship in correctional settings. (shrink)

In the context of climate change, this study uncovers the role of green airlines’ social responsibility in conjunction with the consumers’ switching behavior while considering the effects of latent variables, including green psychology, airline corporate image, green experimental behavior, green service fairness, green alternative attractiveness and switching intention, were examined in the study.

Faust is one of the most famous literary character: reshaped in different ways throughout the centuries, my goal here is to reformulate its figure with the tools of Kantian transcendentalism. This reinterpretation brings home the possibility to investigate in a new way the transhumanist logic: if Faust is a character that desperately wants to overcome in a trascendental way its condition for a more complete perspective of things, transhumanists can be seen as Fausts and, therefore, logical transcendentalists.

This is an extension of my earlier work, How in the World Are There Many Worlds and it's a lot more interesting! This paper explores personal identity and persistence through time in the many-worlds framework, governed by the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics (QM). First, I will motivate our consideration of the MWI in this context. Second, I will introduce endurantism, which is one answer to the puzzle concerning persistence through time. Third, I will explain the foundational physics (...) underlying the MWI that lends itself to branching worlds. In turn, I will explain what exactly a world amounts to in this picture. Then, I will present three views on personal identity and persistence through time: the bye-bye Betty view, the every-branch view, and the privileged branch view. I will argue that the privileged branch view is the most attractive of the bunch for determining the best candidate among close continuers. Finally, I will discuss knowledge, attitudes, and moral responsibility within the privileged branch view. (shrink)

Is art and wrting a pagan manifestation of profane thoughts and feelings? What about the sacred art? Is there a link between the two? In other hand, the social status of the artist and semo processes of artistic creation, his strategy, his willing, his fundamentals.

In Byron, Shelley, and Goethe’s Faust, author Ben Hewitt has provided us with a carefully done and convincing study. Given this, it would have been interesting to see Hewitt’s effort to integrate Mary Shelley’s work into his narrative. Apart from any similarities between Faust and Frankenstein, it bears remembering that Goethe himself remained unconvinced by efforts to clearly demarcate works as “tragic” or “epic”; a fact that becomes especially clear in the number of works he’d devoted to rewriting (...) the story of Prometheus. One cannot help but wish that Hewitt had considered the connection between these works and Shelley’s own “Modern Prometheus” in juxtaposition to his reading of P.B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, for this would have made for an especially good ending to Hewitt’s story. Wayne Deakin’s consideration of Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition does indeed close with a brief consideration of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus, but this comes only at the end of a much longer set of considerations. In this book Deakin adopts a similar strategy as that of Hewitt, namely, foregoing any historical recovery of Hegel’s direct influence on the English Romantics—in Deakin’s case, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley—to focus instead on a reading of key poetic works in concert with their Hegelian framework. This reading essentially flows from Deakin’s effort to rethink Hegel’s relatively early notion of self-consciousness through his late lectures on aesthetics. For Deakin, this leads to “aesthetic recognition”; a situating of the self in relation to the world that remains in tension so far as the subject’s drive for autonomy will automatically be humbled by its reception of and to alterity—be that other “Nature” or other subject. (shrink)

Review of David Faust, The Limits of Scientific Reasoning.

This article explains Kant’s claim that sciences must take, at least as their ideal, the form of a ‘system’. I argue that Kant’s notion of systematicity can be understood against the background of de Jong & Betti’s Classical Model of Science (2010) and the writings of Georg Friedrich Meier and Johann Heinrich Lambert. According to my interpretation, Meier, Lambert, and Kant accepted an axiomatic idea of science, articulated by the Classical Model, which elucidates their conceptions of systematicity. I show that (...) Kant’s critique of the mathematical method is compatible with his adherence to this axiomatic conception of science. I further show that systematicity furthers traditionally accepted logical ideals of scientific knowledge, which explains why Meier and Kant think that sciences must be ‘systematic’. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and discusses Mephisto's famous remark in Goethe's FAUST. It turns out that he is being incoherent in interesting ways.

Synthetic cells spark intriguing questions about the nature of life. Projects such as BaSyC (‘Building a Synthetic Cell’) aim to build an entity that mimics how living cells work from basic components. But what kind of entity would a synthetic cell really be? I assess this question from a philosophical perspective, and show how early fictional narratives of artificial life – such as the laboratory scene in Goethe’s Faust – can help us to understand the challenges faced by synthetic (...) biology researchers. (shrink)

This book is a collection of all the papers published in the special issue "Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol. 5: Selected Papers from the Tohoku Conference," Journal of Philosophy of Life Vol. 14 , No.1, 2024 , 1-53 . -/- Perfectionism and Vulgarianism About a Meaningful Life David Matheson -/- What’s the Point If We’re All Going to Die?: Pessimism, Moderation, and the Reality of the Past Matthew Pianalto -/- Meaning in Life in the Context of Psychopathology and Personal (...) Recovery Bernice Brijan. (shrink)

We will flip a fair coin infinitely many times. Al calls the first flip, claiming it will land heads. Betty calls every odd numbered flip, claiming they will all land heads. Carl calls every flip bar none, claiming they will all land heads. Pre-theoretically, it seems that Al's claim is infinitely more likely than Betty's, and that Betty's claim is infinitely more likely than Carl's. But standard, real-valued probability theory says that, while Al's claim is infinitely more (...) likely than Betty's, Betty's claim is exactly as likely as Carl's. I use John Conway's surreal numbers to capture these pre-theoretic judgements about the relative probabilities of Al's, Betty's, and Carl's claims. Surreal-valued probabilities also allow us to calculate precise numerical values for those claims. For instance, we will see that Betty's claim has a probability equal to the reciprocal of the product of the square root of cardinality of the continuum and the fourth root of 2. The article provides a 'user's guide' to surreal-valued probabilities and raises questions for further research. (shrink)

In this paper, the author examines the concept of "demonic" in Thomas Mann’s novel, Doctor Faustus, under a historical and philosophical perspective. The demonic represents Mann’s attempt to interpret the German history and its tragic turn in 20th century through the fictional mask of the main character’s life, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who, as Faust before him, made a deal with the devil, losing his soul in exchange for genius and success. The work proceeds from a comparison between Mann’s (...) character of Satan and the theologian Paul Tillich’s idea of demonic expressed in his 1926 essay Das Dämonische. Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte, where it is interpreted as a dialectic and ambiguous concept: not merely negative, but also positive in its existing. Tillich’s concept of demonic is strongly connected to Mann’s, who elected music as a mean to express the demonic, precisely for its supreme ambiguity: on one hand it is mathematically structured, on the other it voluptuously attracts the listener to an inarticulate ancient chaos. (shrink)

One of the most widely debated and influential implications of the "demise" of positivism was the realization, now a commonplace, that philosophy of science must be firmly grounded in an understanding of the history of science, and/or of contemporary scientific practice. While the nature of this alliance is still a matter of uneasy negotiation, the principle that philosophical analysis must engage "real" science has transformed philosophical practice in innumerable ways. This short paper is the introduction to a symposium presented at (...) the 1994 PSA Biennial meetings that focused attention on recent developments at the interface between various disciplinary science studies fields. It brought together two philosophers who explore the implications of sociological and historical contextualization for philosophical studies of science, Brian Baigrie and Joseph Rouse; and a sociologist and historian, Andy Pickering and Betty Smocovitis, whose work raises philosophical questions about the sciences and about science studies. Each argued for ways of reconceptualizing our subject domains, our purposes, and our conventional strategies of inquiry that promise much richer understanding of the sciences, but necessarily challenge discipline-specific traditions of science studies quite profoundly. If there is a common theme to be discerned in these discussions it is that, in the spirit of Rouse's recommendations, science studies should be understood to be an essentially open ended and dynamic enterprise, like the sciences they study. (shrink)

As Francis Bacon put it on the frontispiece of his Novum Organum, grafting an apocalyptic vision on a research program, multi pertransibunt et multiplex erit scientia. The development of science becomes steadily associated with the end of earthly life, a theme that would resound deeply in Western thought up until Goethe’s Faust. What grounds then the multiplicity of knowledge? What is the common trunk out of which all realms of knowledge unfold, like the burgeoning branches of the celebrated tree? (...) After the Augustinian imprint of the first Christian centuries and after the admirable effort of the high scholastics’ Aristotelian and Christian synthesis, the seventeenth century undertakes new scientific work with the need of a new steady ground. All the big names of the modern era, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Robert Boyle, Spinoza or Leibniz, found themselves engaged in the search for a common trunk of wisdom, each of them nourishing the intimate conviction that they possessed the philosophical core which would satisfy the learned men’s newly found appetite for indefinitely extending knowledge. In doing this, all of these masters needed to confront the philosophical tradition that they received, reworking and merging together the old structures of science through this epistemological prism of the search for the unity of knowledge. (Vlad Alexandrescu). (shrink)

This article tries to establish the scopes and limits of the main interpretations on Newton during the 20th century, highlighting on the one hand the textual evidence at disposal, and on the other hand the philosophical and epistemological currents that defines the main features of those interpretations. It will be shown that the rejection of positivism is not sufficient condition for establishing an adequate interpretation and, together with the strengthening of the research from Newton’s manuscript, it is necessary a wider, (...) and more detailed model that those established by some of the most outstanding scholars like Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen, Betty Dobbs, and Richard Westfall. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende establecer los límites y alcances de las principales interpretaciones de Newton en el siglo XX, resaltando, de un lado, la evidencia textual de la que disponían los intérpretes y, de otro, las corrientes filosóficas y epistemológicas que definen los rasgos principales de sus interpretaciones. Se verá que el rechazo al positivismo no es condición suficiente para establecer una interpretación adecuada y que, de la mano del fortalecimiento de la investigación a partir de los manuscritos de Newton, se (...) hace necesario un modelo interpretativo más amplio, flexible y detallado que los establecidos por algunos de los más importantes estudiosos como Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen, Betty Dobbs y Richard Westfall. (shrink)

This is the English translation (with a brief introduction and relatively detailed commentary) of a long excerpt from Mikhail Bakhtin's notes titled "Additions and changes to Rabelais", written in the mid-1940s with reworking his then unpublished manuscript on François Rabelais in mind. This excerpt is most notable for being the only extant text in which Bakhtin discusses and analyses Shakespear's tragedies at relative length—a discussion interesting not only as a reading of Shakespeare, but also as an unusual and revealing example (...) of Bakhtin's thought. In addition to Shakespeare, the text deals briefly with Dostoevsky's novels and with Goethe's Faust, as well as with several themes Bakhtin develops in his better-known works, such as Menippean satire, seriousness, and laughter. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to show how the functionalist standards assumed in the AI debate are, in fact, the assumptions of a capitalist, ableist society writ large. The already established argument against the proposed humanity of AI systems implies a wider critique of the entire ideology of functionalism under which the notion of intelligent machines has taken root.