Clinical microbiology serves as a partner to clinicians in the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases. Antibiotics are prescribed empirically before the availability of antimicrobial susceptibility testing data, especially when the patient's medical status could deteriorate by suspending the treatment. To investigate the impact of antimicrobial susceptibility testing on the management of outpatients with suspected bacterial infection in Libyan patients, a cross-sectional prospective study concluded on microbial microdroplet culture by including outpatients with suspected bacterial infection, who have done antimicrobial susceptibility (...) testing. Thus, 53 Libyan patients with urinary tract infections and 14 Libyan patients with skin infections were included in this study. Before the availability of antimicrobial susceptibility testing data, 25 patients were appropriately treated while 42 patients were inappropriately treated. After the availability of antimicrobial susceptibility testing data, the number of appropriately treated patients increased to 57 patients. Thus, antimicrobial susceptibility testing improved the management of 41 patients by discontinuing an unnecessary antibiotic in four patients, starting necessary antibiotic therapy in 18 patients, and changing to more appropriate antibiotic in 19 patients. However, the antimicrobial susceptibility testing has no impact on the management of 24 patients and has led to the worsening of the management of two patients. The effect of antimicrobial susceptibility testing of antibiotic de-escalation was assessed in 35 patients; however, antibiotic de-escalation occurred in six patients. Thus, data of antimicrobial susceptibility testing has improved the management of Libyan outpatients with bacterial infection but their role in antibiotic de-escalation was slight. (shrink)

UNRWA’s Mediation Process is a key element in the organization’s efforts to strengthen its internal justice system. The research aims to study the reality of mediator competencies, emotional intelligence and case characteristics variables, (UNRWA) Gaza. The research also aims at identifying the differences between respondents as attributed to their professional and personal traits of age, gender, educational level, distribution of department, dispute resolution experience and representation party. The researchers adopted mixed data collection methods; quantitative and qualitative. For qualitative, a semi-structured (...) interview was conducted with (9) officials including management, staff unions and expert external mediators. (63) Questionnaires were distributed to a systematic random sample population; (56) were received, with a response rate 88.9%. The results proved that there are no significant differences among respondents attributed to personal and professional traits of age, academic background, gender, department, years’ of experience, educational degree and representation party. The research has presented some recommendations concerning the factors affecting the mediation outcomes of workplace disputes resolution. The recommendations include: UNRWA should adopt mediation as a method to resolve disputes at workplace instead of following litigation before the courts, as many organizations today increasingly started to adopt mediation as a method to resolve disputes at workplace. This will help decreasing the high cost, non-flexibility, and threatening features of disputes and conflicts resolution before courts, as well as enhance the relationship between disputant parties. Mediators are essentially recommended to attend regular training such as guiding negotiation processes, employing group sessions properly, overcoming obstacles, summarizing & analytical skills and selecting emotional words and phrases, it is also important to encourage the mediation experts' training workshops and meetings. Regular training sessions will not only improve skills and abilities, but will also imply variety and flexibility. This leads to having competent qualified mediators who are able to resolve organization’s workplace disputes in a way, which satisfies the need of disputants. (shrink)

Abstract: The research also aims at identifying the differences between respondents as attributed to their professional and personal traits of age, gender, educational level, distribution of department, dispute resolution experience and representation party. Researchers adopted mixed data collection methods; quantitative and qualitative. For qualitative, a semi-structured interview was conducted with (9) officials including management, staff unions and expert external mediators. (63) Questionnaires were distributed to a systematic random sample population; (56) were received, with a response rate 88.9%. The results proved (...) that there are no significant differences among respondents attributed to personal and professional traits of age, academic background, gender, department, years’ of experience, educational degree and representation party. The research has presented some recommendations concerning the factors affecting the mediation outcomes of workplace disputes resolution. The recommendations include: Selecting expert mediators to deal with multi-culture groups. Ensuring equal gender representation in working groups, teamwork and committees and encouraging female participation in mediation processes to resolve dispute at work place. Developing the mediation schema in a way that empowers the mediator to increase her/his ability to lead and establish compromise solutions for workplace disputes. (shrink)

Clinical microbiology serves as a partner to clinicians in the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases. Antibiotics are prescribed empirically before the availability of antimicrobial susceptibility testing data, especially when the patient's medical status could deteriorate by suspending the treatment. To investigate the impact of antimicrobial susceptibility testing on the management of outpatients with suspected bacterial infection in Libyan patients, a cross-sectional prospective study concluded on microbial microdroplet culture by including outpatients with suspected bacterial infection, who have done antimicrobial susceptibility (...) testing. Thus, 53 Libyan patients with urinary tract infections and 14 Libyan patients with skin infections were included in this study. Before the availability of antimicrobial susceptibility testing data, 25 patients were appropriately treated while 42 patients were inappropriately treated. After the availability of antimicrobial susceptibility testing data, the number of appropriately treated patients increased to 57 patients. Thus, antimicrobial susceptibility testing improved the management of 41 patients by discontinuing an unnecessary antibiotic in four patients, starting necessary antibiotic therapy in 18 patients, and changing to more appropriate antibiotic in 19 patients. However, the antimicrobial susceptibility testing has no impact on the management of 24 patients and has led to the worsening of the management of two patients. The effect of antimicrobial susceptibility testing of antibiotic de-escalation was assessed in 35 patients; however, antibiotic de-escalation occurred in six patients. Thus, data of antimicrobial susceptibility testing has improved the management of Libyan outpatients with bacterial infection but their role in antibiotic de-escalation was slight. (shrink)

Urban planning as a discipline has been continuously evolving in the past decades, aiming to become the response to diverse issues through transdisciplinarity, innovation, creativity and justice. As a result of an ever- accelerating pace of life, we constantly witness worldwide transitions and turbulences, from environmental crises to socio-economic struggles, that challenge cities, regions, and the nature of the planning discipline itself. Climate change and both natural and man-made disasters render territories fragile and force humans and species to migrate, while (...) the growing urban population requires solutions for sustainable transformation for life in the city and beyond. In this context of increasing uncertainty, the planning discipline attempts to suggest ways forward, yet often lacks in providing tangible examples of how to bridge theory and practice. Within this framework, the conference focuses on the predominant discontinuities that currently characterise the planning field. Those are articulated into two directions of discussion that are in dialogue with and between each other: the urban-rural divide (Track 1 and Track 2) and the academia-practice divide (Track 3 and Track 4). The conference aims to create space for these dialogues to emerge, and to ultimately bridge these gaps by reflecting on our role as researchers, on our position towards, and in relationship with, society and on the effectiveness of practice. The questions that arise are timely and crucial, contemplating on the complexities inherent in a perpetual endeavour for coexistence between humans, species and the environment (Track 5). How can planning reinvent itself? How can we reconcile a holistic perception of territories? Which theories, strategies and methods should planning adopt so as to contribute to a better future for the human and natural species? Which are the tools and practices that will ensure human well-being and coexistence with the world? (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the level of organizational performance in ceramic companies in the Tenth of Ramadan City, where the researchers used the descriptive analytical method, through a questionnaire distributed. The study reached a set of results, the most important of which are: the presence of a clear consensus of the study sample from the members of the senior management that all dimensions of the balanced scorecard variable are largely present in the ceramic companies under study, and the results (...) showed the approval of the study sample of workers in an average way on the application of the financial dimension and that it is applied Well, the approval of the study sample of the employees in an average way that tends to decline on the degree of application of the customer dimension and that it is applied by the senior management in an inappropriate way, the approval of the study sample of the employees in a large way on the degree of application of the internal operations dimension and that it is applied by the senior management in a large and appropriate way, approval The study sample of workers applying the learning and growth dimension is moderately low and it is applied inappropriately by the senior management. The study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: working on clarifying and translating the vision and strategy of the institution, working on clarifying the strategy and linking it to the goals, planning and setting goals and arranging strategic initiatives, promoting strategic feedback. (shrink)

De nos jours, La notion d’intégration urbaine est chargée de sens si différents qu’elle est difficile à l’utiliser de manière rigoureuse. L’objectif de l’introduction de ce concept dans un projet de développement et d’aménagement urbain du secteur El Koudia (situer dans la ville de Marrakech), est de réaliser un nouveau modèle de « projet urbain » par les acteurs territoriaux, qui mettra en cohérence à l’échelle d’un bassin de vie : la planification urbaine, la mobilité, les activités économiques et commerciales, (...) les services et les équipements…, et ce, dans un cadre d’intégration, de cohésion sociale et de durabilité. -/- . (shrink)

Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to (...) social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development results from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that for blame to be appropriate the wrongdoer must be blameworthy. However, blameworthiness is not sufficient for appropriate blame. It has been argued that for blame to be appropriate the blamer must have standing to blame. Philosophers writing on the topic have distinguished several considerations that might defeat someone’s standing to blame. This paper examines the underexplored consideration of how personal relationships can influence who has the standing to express blame. We seem to assume that if (...) we do not stand in the right relation to the wrongdoer, it is not our business to blame them. I identify three challenges to this view. First, we do not know what is wrong with meddling (whether it is morally or prudentially wrong). Second, there are cases where we have no close relation to the wrongdoer, but where we seem to have standing nonetheless – murder and other serious moral offences are examples of this. Third, we don’t seem to have a clear conception of what ‘standing’ means, and this makes it hard to see how discussion on standing can help us determine the propriety of blame. This paper defends the notion of standing as a propriety condition on blame in cases of meddling. I argue that personal relationships influence who has the standing to blame through constitution of relationship-specific norms; and that the role these norms play in developing and regulating our relationships can explain why meddlesome blame is morally wrong. (shrink)

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is added. Causes, functions, (...) and consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided (...) rather than blind, integrating developments from contemporary research on creativity. On that basis, I discuss three compatibility arguments that have been used to answer the critique. These arguments do not deny guided variation but insist that an important analogy exists nonetheless. These compatibility arguments all fail, even though they do so for different reasons: trivialisation, conceptual confusion, and lack of evidence respectively. Revisiting the debate in this manner not only allows us to see where exactly a ‘Darwinian’ account of creative hypothesis formation goes wrong, but also to see that the debate is not about factual issues, but about the interpretation of these factual issues in Darwinian terms. (shrink)

Interview with the author of "why We are in Need of Tails." Iguana Books, Toronto, Canada.

Ergative languages make up a substantial percentage of the world’s languages. They have a case system which distinguishes the subject of a transitive verb from that of an intransitive, grouping the latter with the object — that is, the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb are in the same case, which we refer to as the nominative. However, ergative languages differ from one another in important ways. In Greenlandic Eskimo the nominative, whether it is (...) a subject or an object, is syntactically prominent in the clause, much like a subject in English; but in Warlpiri, the nominative is not prominent, more like an object. The variable prominence of the nominative manifests itself as well in the semantics, e.g., default scope of indefinite and quantified nominals. Using data from Greenlandic Eskimo and Warlpiri, and from Hindi, which represents a split ergative system, this paper develops a general theory of case which explains the observed differences amongst ergative languages. In addition, the theory is designed to account for the accusative language type, represented by English. (shrink)

This paper argues that the so-called ‘paradox’ of dehumanization is a mirage arising from misplaced abstraction. The alleged ‘paradox’ is taken as a challenge that arises from a skeptical stance. After reviewing the history of that skeptical stance, it is reconstructed as an argument with two premises. With the help of an epistemologically structured but pluralistic frame it is then shown how the two premises of the Skeptic’s argument can both be debunked. As part of that it emerges that there (...) are a couple of ways how dehumanization can be realized, and one such realization can be sufficient for affirming the reality of dehumanization for a specific case. (shrink)

Geschlecht und Gewalt, das Thema dieses Bandes, betrifft nicht nur die Frage nach den Charakteristika und Ursachen sexueller Aggression, sondern auch die Frage nach angeblichen geschlechtsspezifischen Formen der Aggression. Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit beidem und diskutiert sie als Teil von begrifflichen Ausweitungen der Kampfzone, d.h. der Erweiterungen des Aggressionsbegriffs im Verlauf der wissenschaftlichen Aggressionsforschung der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Der Beitrag zeigt unter Anderem: was als Aggression wahrgenommen wird und in der Wissenschaft als solche gezählt wird, verändert (...) sich mit der Gesellschaft. Dabei wird aus epistemologischer bzw. wissenschaftsphilosophischer Perspektive gezeigt, wie sich rassistische, Status-, und Geschlechtsstereotype auf begriffliche Entscheidungen in wissenschaftlicher Forschung auswirken und somit die wissenschaftliche Arbeit am Begriff beeinflussen können. (shrink)

Se aborda el problema de qué es una ley científica. Se analiza la concepción tradicional hempeliana sobre la posibilidad de caracterizar una forma lógica para los enunciados de ley científica, que las distinguiría de las regularidades accidentales, concluyendo que ello no es posible. Se analiza entonces el problema de cómo es posible la predicción a partir de enunciados de ley, si no hay diferencia lógica con afirmaciones de regularidad, buscando criterios que permitan el establercimiento de afirmaciones proyectables. Correlativamente se trata (...) el problema de la normatividad de un criterio de identificación de candidatos a enunciados de ley, candidatos que ya no denominamos "lawlike statements" puesto que se ha abandonado la pretensión de que lo que determina los buenos candidatos a leyes sea su forma. A lo largo del texto se analizan de modo argumentado las posiciones filosóficas más tradicionales. Las conclusiones apuntan a la posibilidad de criterios de identificación a leyes sólo parcialmente normativos. (shrink)

This paper spells out the ways in which we need to be pluralists about “human nature”. It discusses a conceptual pluralism about the concept of “human nature”, stemming from post-essentialist ontology and the semantic complexity of the term “nature”; a descriptive pluralism about the “descriptive nature” of human beings, which is a pluralism regarding our self-understanding as human beings that stems from the long list of typical features of, and relations between, human beings; a natural kind term pluralism, which is (...) a pluralism that concerns the choices we have in deciding how to apply the kind term “human”; and an explanatory pluralism that results from the causal complexity of life. Because of the complexity of being human, which gives rise to these pluralisms, being human is, the paper claims, a kaleidoscopic affair, and one far from concerning the life sciences only. (shrink)

Readers are awaiting a new encounter with stories united under the common title Why We Are in Need of Tales. Let me remind you that these deep philosophical books were written by Maria daVenza Tillmanns, a professional philosopher dedicated to the study of philosophizing with children, who has gained valuable experience in this field. Maria’s books are inspired by her work with her students at El Toyon Elementary School in National City (California), with whom Maria held philosophy (...) with children classes for three years before COVID-19. With parental permission, the children provided their drawings, which are used as illustrations for the books. I read Why We Are in Need of Tales, Part III with great pleasure. The focus of this book is on making decisions, sometimes very hard decisions. In Part II, the focus is on dreams — hopes and wishes we have for life. This book looks at how we may best decide how to make those hopes and wishes come true. And the answer Huk and Tuk suggest is deceptively easy: by making decisions “with your eyes wide open.” (5, p. ix). The author of this excellent book managed to describe how to make decisions with your eyes wide open through the playful dialogue between Huk and Tuk. The books are written in dialogue so the reader immediately plunges into the context of a lively conversation. Dialogue not only sharpens attention, but also invites the reader to participate in the conversation. In this way, the reader becomes a listener at the same time. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that a proper understanding of what Leibniz meant by “hypercategorematic infinite” sheds light on some fundamental aspects of his conceptions of God and of the relationship between God and created simple substances or monads. After revisiting Leibniz’s distinction between (i) syncategorematic infinite, (ii) categorematic infinite, and (iii) actual infinite, I examine his claim that the hypercategorematic infinite is “God himself” in conjunction with other key statements about God. I then discuss the issue of whether the (...) hypercategorematic infinite is a “whole”, comparing the four kinds of infinite outlined by Leibniz in 1706 with the three degrees of infinity outlined in 1676. In the last section, I discuss the relationship between the hypercategorematic infinite and created simple substances. I conclude that, for Leibniz, only a being beyond all determinations but eminently embracing all determinations can enjoy the pure positivity of what is truly infinite while constituting the ontological grounding of all things. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner (...) connects historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

In the face of causal complexity, scientists reconstitute phenomena in order to arrive at a more simplified and partial picture that ignores most of the 'bigger picture.' This paper will distinguish between two modes of reconstituting phenomena: one moving down to a level of greater decomposition (toward organizational parts of the original phenomenon), and one moving up to a level of greater abstraction (toward different differences regarding the phenomenon). The first aim of the paper is to illustrate that phenomena are (...) moving targets, i.e., they are not fixed once and for all, but are adapted, if necessary, on the basis of the preferred perspective adopted for pragmatic reasons. The second aim is to analyze in detail the second mode of reconstituting phenomena. This includes an exposition of the kind of pragmatic-pluralistic picture resulting from the fact that phenomena are reconstituted by a move up to a level of greater abstraction. (shrink)

In Francesco Berto’s words, the term “Serious Actualism” is used for the position “that any object must exist in every circumstance in which it has any property – the thesis that predication, or the having of properties as such, entails existence.” (“Modal Meinongianism and Fiction: The Best of Three Worlds”, Philosophical Studies 152, 2011, 324f.) Berto agrees with Nathan Salmon that Serious Actualism is “a confused and misguided prejudice” (Salmon, “Nonexistence”, Noûs 32, 1998, 290). The aim of this paper is (...) to defend the doctrine of Serious Actualism against this verdict. (shrink)

Creativity has often been declared, especially by philosophers, as the last frontier of science. The assumption is that it will defy explanation forever. I will defend two claims in order to oppose this assumption and to demystify creativity: (1) the perspective that creativity cannot be explained wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom; (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of creativity, because it confuses conceptual issues with (...) explanation. I will close with some remarks on the status and differences in some explanations available in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake exculpate. What about agents who have all the relevant facts in view but fail to meet their obligations because they do not have the right moral beliefs? If their ignorance of their obligations derives from mistaken moral beliefs or from ignorance of the moral significance of the facts they have in (...) view, should they be excused for failing to meet their moral obligations? It is not obvious that they should. In this paper we argue that the best non-skeptical accounts of moral responsibility acknowledge that factual ignorance and mistake will diminish moral responsibility in a way that moral ignorance and mistake will not. That is because factual ignorance is often non-culpable so long as it meets certain merely procedural epistemic standards but the same is not true of moral ignorance. Our argument is that the assumption that it is gets the standards of culpability for moral ignorance wrong, and that the mistake is encouraged by the thought that culpability in general requires an instance of known wrongdoing: that acting wrongly requires de dicto unresponsiveness to one’s obligations at some stage. We deny this and conclude that, therefore, ignorance and mistaken belief are indeed often perfectly good excuses – but far less often than some philosophers claim. (shrink)

Human nature is a concept that transgresses the boundary between science and society and between fact and value. It is as much a political concept as it is a scientific one. This chapter will cover the politics of human nature by using evidence from history, anthropology and social psychology. The aim is to show that an important political function of the vernacular concept of human nature is social demarcation (inclusion/exclusion): it is involved in regulating who is ‘us’ and who is (...) ‘them.’ It is a folk concept that is used for dehumanization, for denying (a) membership in humankind or (b) full humanness to certain people in order to include or exclude them from various forms of politically relevant aspects of human life, such as rights, power, etc. (shrink)

Escribir hoy en día un libro sobre hermenéutica, que tal hermenéutica se refiera a la desarrollada por G. Gadamer en su conocido Verdad y método y que se pretenda añadir algo nuevo a lo mucho escrito sobre el tema parecería, a primera vista, empresa irrealizable. Que ambas pretensiones inspiren la sólida monografía de María G. Navarro —titulada Interpretar y argumentar— constituye empresa audaz y arriesgada, plena de coraje innovador, que provoca admiración, curiosidad e interés. Contra lo que pudiera parecer a (...) primera vista, el libro contiene un alto componente de originalidad y creatividad, debido a la estratagema metodoló-gica de que se sirve la autora. A saber, una hermenéutica in obliquo, estrategia consistente en interpretar a la hermenéutica gadameriana a través del prisma de la lógica de la argumentación. (shrink)

The paper discusses the aesthetic aspects of place‑making practices in the urban environment of Western metropoles that are struggling with the progressive undifferentiation of their space and the weakening of communal and personal bonds. The paper starts by describing the general characteristics of an urban environment as distinct from the traditional vision of a city as a well‑structured entity, and in relation to formal and informal aesthetics and participatory design ideas. The author then focuses on two contrary but complementary tactics (...) for translating a space into a positively evaluated p l a ce: by dome ticating it through introducing nature into an urbanscape; and by accentuating its alienness with the example of the urban exploration movement. The growing popularity of the latter is presented in relation to the discourses related to the decline of cities and the romantic endeavours for reaching into the realm of the unknown or the uncanny in order to rediscover and enrich the unique identity of a place. The paper ends with conclusions that present the necessity for the cultivation of a multidimensional aesthetic awareness and an aesthetic engagement as a crucial issue in the complex task of endowing places with a density of meaning. (shrink)

Agonist theorists have argued against deliberative democrats that democratic institutions should not seek to establish a rational consensus, but rather allow political disagreements to be expressed in an adversarial form. But democratic agonism is not antagonism: some restriction of the plurality of admissible expressions is not incompatible with a legitimate public sphere. However, is it generally possible to grant this distinction between antagonism and agonism without accepting normative standards in public discourse that saliently resemble those advocated by (some) deliberative democrats? (...) In this paper we provide an analysis of one important aspect of political communication, the use of slippery slope arguments, and show that the fact of pluralism weakens the agonists’ case for contestation as a sufficient ingredient for appropriately democratic public discourse. We illustrate that contention by identifying two specific kinds of what we call pluralism slippery slopes, i.e. mechanisms whereby pluralism reinforces the efficacy of slippery slope arguments. (shrink)

This article illustrates in which sense genetic determinism is still part of the contemporary interactionist consensus in medicine. Three dimensions of this consensus are discussed: kinds of causes, a continuum of traits ranging from monogenetic diseases to car accidents, and different kinds of determination due to different norms of reaction. On this basis, this article explicates in which sense the interactionist consensus presupposes the innate?acquired distinction. After a descriptive Part 1, Part 2 reviews why the innate?acquired distinction is under attack (...) in contemporary philosophy of biology. Three arguments are then presented to provide a limited and pragmatic defense of the distinction: an epistemic, a conceptual, and a historical argument. If interpreted in a certain manner, and if the pragmatic goals of prevention and treatment are taken into account, then the innate?acquired distinction can be a useful epistemic tool. It can help, first, to understand that genetic determination does not mean fatalism, and, second, to maintain a system of checks and balances in the continuing nature?nurture debates. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, in Leibniz’s mature metaphysics, primary matter is not a positive constituent which must be added to the form in order to have a substance. Primary matter is merely a way to express the negation of some further perfection. It does not have a positive ontological status and merely indicates the limitation or imperfection of a substance. To be sure, Leibniz is less than explicit on this point, and in many texts he writes as if (...) primary matter were a positive constituent of a substance. It seems to me, however, that the view most in keeping with the thrust of his mature philosophical system is that captured by a striking remark of 1695: “Materia rerum est nihilum: id est limitatio [The matter of things is nothing: that is, limitation].” This becomes especially apparent in texts showing that Leibniz’s conception of primary matter corresponds to his conception of creaturely limitation. I start by discussing the notion of primary matter in the scholastic tradition. I then show that although Leibniz places the scholastic terminology of primary matter at a crucial juncture of his metaphysics, he thinks of primary matter in a way which significantly deviates from earlier scholastic views. I conclude that despite his adoption of distinctive terminology of Aristotelian scholasticism, instead of holding a broadly Aristotelian concept of primary matter as the ultimate subject of inherence, Leibniz thinks of primary matter according to a Neoplatonic blue-print in which matter is non-being, privation, mere absence of perfection. (shrink)

Since the 1950`s in Britain, and perhaps in the rest of the world, the term pluralism is almost invariably associated with the name of Isaiah Berlin and his formulation of ‘value pluralism’. The core idea is that values (but also, on some interpretations, ends, duties and obligations) are irreducibly plural and heterogeneous, and nevertheless objective (...).

There are many situations and policies that strike us as unjust and make us look for alternatives. Yet in the absence of a clear definition, we may end up by equating injustice with everything that is evil in the world.

This paper is on the problem of causal selection and comments on Collingwood's classic paper "The so-called idea of causation". It discusses the relevance of Collingwood’s control principle in contemporary life sciences and defends that it is not the ability to control, but the willingness to control that often biases us towards some rather than other causes of a phenomenon. Willingness to control is certainly only one principle that influences causal selection, but it is an important one. It shows how (...) norms make causes. (shrink)

This paper focuses on negative exemplarity-related emotions (NEREs) and on their educational implications. In this paper, we will first argue for the nonexpendability of negative emotions broadly conceived (section 2) by defending their instrumental and intrinsic role in a good and flourishing life. In section 3, we will make the claim more specific by focusing on the narrower domain of NEREs and argue for their moral and educational significance by evaluating whether they fit the arguments provided in the previous section. (...) In section 4, we will propose three educational strategies to foster NEREs’ positive moral role. In conclusion, we will point out that an exemplarist approach to character education would greatly benefit from a more fine-grained account of the emotions involved in the educational process and from a broader perspective on which of these emotions should be taken as valuable for educational purposes. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. In this chapter I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of be- coming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, (...) contextual and dynamic speci- ficity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asym- metry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal- directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor no- tion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework for future empirical and theoretical research on aesthetic perception. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, (...) in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)

Ante ciertos modelos causales del agente libre inspirados en Tomás de Aquino, resulta interesante atender al modelo causal presentado por Tomás mismo, especialmente en un texto a partir del cual se puede rastrear la exposición de la acción libre como el efecto de los cuatro sentidos causales aristotélicos. Se trata de la cuestión sobre los actos imperados (ST I–II, q. 17); en cuyos primeros cuatro artículos –y en sus textos paralelos– determina que la voluntad es causa agente; la razón práctica, (...) causa ordenadora; y el imperium de ambas (razón y voluntad) se relaciona con el acto imperado como lo formal con lo material. (shrink)

Once upon a time, Aesop says, there was a donkey who wanted to be a pet dog. The pet dog was given many treats by the master and the household servants, and the donkey was envious of him. Hence, the donkey began emulating the pet dog. What happened next? The story ends up with the donkey beaten senseless, chased off to the stables, exhausted and barely alive. Who is to blame for the poor donkey’s unfortunate fate? Well, there could be (...) disagreement upon this, but we think emulation is to blame. And it’s on the kinds of envy-related emulation that we focus in this chapter. More analytically, we aim at vindicating the role of envy for moral exemplars within an exemplarist character educational framework. In the first section, we recall the central tenets of an exemplarist account of moral progress, and highlight how negative emotions, in general, have suffered a bad press within character education, with exemplarism being no exception. Then we provide a brief outline of standard strategies of defending envy by appealing to useful taxonomies of envy (e.g., Taylor 1988; Protasi 2016; Fussi 2018). After that, we put forward our 'Donkey Objection' by recalling Aesop’s fable on "foolish imitation", so as to show that when envy triggers mere emulation, it can bear devastating effects such as conformism and a lack of self-worth and personal integrity. In response to this objection, we bring into play a distinction between two rival forms of imitation—emulation and inspiration—and we coin the label of "inspired envy" for those forms of imitation by inspiration triggered by envy that lead to self-improvement avoiding morally detrimental consequences. (shrink)

How and when do we learn to understand other people’s perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we navigate FBs as (...) they relate to (1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to (2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of “sensorimotor priors,” i.e., statistical expectations of own kinesthetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance. (shrink)

The term ‘human nature’ can refer to different things in the world and fulfil different epistemic roles. Human nature can refer to a classificatory nature (classificatory criteria that determine the boundaries of, and membership in, a biological or social group called ‘human’), a descriptive nature (a bundle of properties describing the respective group’s life form), or an explanatory nature (a set of factors explaining that life form). This chapter will first introduce these three kinds of ‘human nature’, together with seven (...) reasons why we disagree about human nature. In the main, this chapter focuses on the explanatory concept of human nature, which is related to one of the seven reasons for disagreement, namely, the scientific authority inherent in the term ‘nature’. I will examine why, in a number of historical contexts, it was attractive to refer to ‘nature’ as an explanatory category, and why this usage has led to the continual contestation of the term within the sciences. The claim is that even if the contents of talk about ‘nature’ varied historically, the term’s pragmatic function of demarcation stayed the same. The term ‘nature’ conveys scientific authority over a territory; ‘human nature’ is a concept used to divide causes, as well as experts, and thereby conquer others who threaten to invade one’s epistemic territory. Analysing this demarcation, which has social as well as epistemic aspects, will help us to understand why the explanatory role has been important and why it is unlikely that people will ever agree on either the meaning or the importance of ‘human nature’ as an explanatory category. (shrink)

The synthetic theory of evolution has gone stale and an expanding or (re-)widening of it towards a new synthesis has been announced. This time, development and culture are supposed to join the synthesis bandwagon. In this article, I distinguish between four kinds of synthesis that are involved when we extend the evolutionary synthesis towards culture: the integration of fields, the heuristic generation of interfields, the expansion of validity, and the creation of a common frame of discourse or ‘big-picture’. These kinds (...) of synthesis are connected to epistemic values that are used to evaluate theories as well as analogies. A review of these epistemic values and the kinds of synthesis connected to them shall illustrate two points. First, that the discussions about culture and evolution exhibit an epistemic bias towards synthesis, even if, as history shows, synthesis and well as isolation can be fruitful epistemic strategies in science. The paper thus contains some critical notes on the value of synthesis in science. Second, reviewing the kinds of synthesis and values involved allows for a new perspective on the analogies involved in theories of cultural evolution. It is a perspective that makes the criteria with which these theories are usually evaluated explicit. With this we can compare the different standpoints people have taken on the usefulness of theories of cultural evolution at a higher level. Differences arise because of different epistemic values assumed. (shrink)

This contribution discusses Leibniz’s conception of the Christian church, his life-long ecumenical efforts, and his stance toward religious toleration. Leibniz’s regarded the main Christian denominations as particular churches constituting the only one truly catholic or universal church, whose authority went back to apostolic times, and whose theology was to be traced back to the entire ecclesiastical tradition. This is the ecclesiology which underpins his ecumenism. The main phases and features of his work toward reunification of Protestants and Roman Catholics, and (...) unification of Protestant churches are briefly explored, before turning to the issue of religious toleration. It is argued that a remarkably inclusive conception of toleration can be gleaned from a broad sample of Leibniz’s writings and correspondence. It is thanks to the philosophical and theological grounds of this conception that toleration can in principle be extended, for Leibniz, to all men and women of good will, including non-Christians, pagans, and atheists. (shrink)

The recent remarkable success of generative AI models to create text and images has already started altering our perspective of intelligence and the “uniqueness” of humanity in this world. Simultaneously, arguments on why AI will never exceed human intelligence are ever-present as seen in Landgrebe and Smith (2022). To address whether machines may rule the world after all, this paper zooms in on one of the aspects of intelligence Landgrebe and Smith (2022) neglected to consider: creativity. Using Rhodes four Ps (...) of creativity as a starting point, this paper evaluates the creative ability in visual generative AI models with respect to the state of the art in creativity theory. The most part of the reflective evaluation is performed through a case study in generating illustrations of dogs using the generative AI tool Midjourney. (shrink)

The current “exemplarist turn” within virtue ethics is increasingly shedding light on the importance of exemplars both as enabling one to identify the virtues and for the importance they bear for orienting one’s conduct, as well as for educating the novice. However, even if categorizations of exemplars have already been proposed, there seems to be a lack of discussion on the kind of imitation different exemplars are supposed to elicit. In order to offer a preliminary answer to this question, in (...) this paper I present three paths to flourishing via imitation of exemplary individuals: The Platonic, the Stoic, and the Aristotelian. Then, I sketch an attempt to reconcile these models. In conclusion, I suggest that, when it comes to education, this reconciliation becomes necessary. Along these lines, I recommend that a multi-step educational program is elaborated. (shrink)

Largely aided by the neurological discovery of so-called “ mirror neurons,” the attention to motor activity during action observation has exploded over the last two decades. The idea that we internally “ mirror ” the actions of others has led to a new strand of implicit simulation theories of action understanding[1][2]. The basic idea of this sort of simulation theory is that we, via an automatic covert activation of our own action representations, can understand the action and possibly the goal (...) and/or intentions of the observed agent. In this way motor “simulation” is seen as the basis for low-level “mind-reading”; i.e. for the ascription of goals and intentional mental states to others. The thought is that one, through mirroring simulations, can get beyond the observable behaviour to the hidden minds of others. I am questioning the idea of an exclusively “mirroring” role of the motor system in social perception, which is tacitly assumed in this sort of simulation theories. Is motor activity during action observation really primarily a simulation, a detailed “echo” of the others action? My point is not that we never simulate what we observe, but rather to question whether such processes are representative of the overall motor contribution to social cognition. More and more studies on the functional properties of mirror neurons and motor facilitation during perception points to a more complex role of the motor system in action perception. Recently, several proposals have been made attempting to reinterpret and critique the function of motor activity in social situations. I shall here briefly touch on a few of these and sketch parts of my own alternative “social affordance” hypothesis of the sensorimotor contribution to social perception. By way of these analyses I highlight how traditional discussions are marred by problematic theoretical assumptions. It seems to me that we need a thorough reinterpretation not just of mirror neurons and mirroring, but also of what we take motor and social cognition to be. In my view the details of the sensorimotor findings underline the need to move beyond the simplistic idea of the motor system as a unitary output system. In terms of social cognition I question the traditional focus on hidden mental states. I suggest that the motor contribution might have more to do with understanding the process of how others choose their actions, navigate the world and relate to others than with simulating specific actual actions or mental states. I conclude that low-level simulation theories, which see the motor role in social perception as passive “mirroring,” are faced with serious empirical challenges, and that the motor system serve a much more proactive and complex cognitive role in social perception and interaction than previously thought. But my claim is also that many empirical tensions have slipped out of focus due to entrenched theoretical assumptions. Narrow theoretical expectations have marked not only the interpretations but the research itself and I propose that we are in dire need of more studies of actual contextual and interactive social perception. (shrink)

Las definiciones de argumentación son tan variadas como las distintas posiciones existentes en torno a la pregunta de qué hacemos exactamente cuando argumentamos y cuándo estamos, de hecho, argumentando. Incluso el mismo autor puede ofrecer más de una definición de lo que entiende por argumentación; en parte, porque el problema de la argumentación no se circunscribe a un solo ámbito, ni del conocimiento ni de la vida práctica.

This paper investigates civility from an Aristotelian perspective and has two objectives. The first is to offer a novel account of this virtue based on Aristotle’s remarks about civic friendship. The proposed account distinguishes two main components of civility—civic benevolence and civil deliberation—and shows how Aristotle’s insights can speak to the needs of our communities today. The notion of civil deliberation is then unpacked into three main dimensions: motivational, inquiry-related, and ethical. The second objective is to illustrate how the post-truth (...) condition—in particular, the spread of misinformation typical of the digital environments we inhabit—obstructs our capacity to cultivate the virtue of civility by impairing every component of civil deliberation. The paper hopes to direct virtue theorists’ attention to the need to foster civic virtues as a means of counteracting the negative aspects of the post-truth age. (shrink)