Search results for "0603 philosophy"

The role of civil society organisations in European responsible research and innovation

2018

EC policy reveals a strong conviction that CSO’s main function in EU-funded research and innovation projects is to take care of the ‘societal perspective’, which would not be adequately represented otherwise. With this, CSOs are supposed to be the main advocates of RRI in project consortia and are supported by all kinds of EC policy measures to fulfil this role. This conviction is not only problematic due to definition problems concerning CSO as such. Empirical data about the role of CSOs in high-tech/high-innovation research projects and the distribution of RRI activities among consortia members reveal that the role of CSOs is much more multi-faceted (data providers, providers of access to…

Conversion as Negotiation. Converts as Actors of Civil Society

2020

This article focuses on the religious movement of the Ahmadiyya and its civil society organization, Humanity First, in West-Africa and in Europe. Particular attention is paid to the place of converts within these two institutions. Conversions to an Islamic minority and the actions of this minority are studied through the prism of social commitment. I examine the intersections between religious values, the ideas of solidarity in the societies under scrutiny and, the kaleidoscopic range of Muslim charities. The paper investigates conversion as negotiation in regard to gender, social mobility, and power. Conversion is approached here as a matter of social relations and not personal belief. I a…

Religious Engagement and the Migration Issue: Towards Reconciling Political and Moral Duty

2020

The increasingly acknowledged post-secular perspective has resulted in the emergence of some new approaches theorizing this phenomenon. One such approach has been the concept of religious engagement, which calls for the redefinition of the perception of religious non-state actors towards including them as important partners in the process of identifying and realizing political goals. According to this view, due to the multidimensional role played by religious communities and non-state religious actors, they need to be recognized as pivotal in creating a new form of knowledge generated through encounter and dialogue of the political decision-makers with these subjects. Among numerous others,…

A blended-learning programme regarding professional ethics in physiotherapy students.

2018

Background: In the university context, assessing students’ attitude, knowledge and opinions when applying an innovative methodological approach to teach professional ethics becomes fundamental to know if the used approach is enough motivating for students. Research objective: To assess the effect of a blended-learning model, based on professional ethics and related to clinical practices, on physiotherapy students’ attitude, knowledge and opinions towards learning professional ethics. Research design and participants: A simple-blind clinical trial was performed (NLM identifier NCT03241693) (control group, n = 64; experimental group, n = 65). Both groups followed clinical practices for 8 mont…

2018

This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity. Among these examples are conscious experience itself, “Bayesian” and social VR, amnestic re-embodiment, merging human-controlled avatars and virtual agents, virtual ego-dissolution, controlling the reality/virtuality continuum, the confluence of VR and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as of VR and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), VR-based social hallucinations…

On how to legitimately constrain a semantic theory

2021

Abstract Semanticists often restrict their theories by imposing constraints on the parameters that can be employed for interpreting the expressions of a language. Such constraints are based on non-logical features of actual contexts of utterance, but they often have important effects on issues that do pertain to logic, like analyticity or entailment. For example, Kaplan’s restriction to so-called “proper contexts” was required in order to count “I am here now” as valid. In this paper I argue that constraints of this kind are often posited in an arbitrary and non-consistent way, and that they yield the intended results only at the price of imposing ad hoc principles whose justification could…

What can the concept of affective scaffolding do for us?

2020

The concept of affective scaffolding designates the various ways in which we manipulate the environment to influence our affective lives. In this article, I present a constructive critique of recent discussion on affective scaffolding. In Part 1, I summarize how the theories of situated mind and niche construction contribute to a multidimensional notion of scaffolding. In Part 2, I focus specifically on affective scaffolding and argue that current ambiguity over its distinctive criteria causes uncertainty as to how the concept can and should be used. In Part 3, I identify and examine two possible responses to the suggested state of conceptual ambiguity. The first, restrictive option is to k…

Political and religious aspects of community according to Kant

2016

Based on the concept of community, Kant's conception of religion may be connected, on my view, to the question of which mental attitude is suitable for the collective life of human society. It is possible to imagine a successful community, even if such a community does not exist in the empirical world, and to be oriented toward this ideal without ever being able to realize it. According to Kant, human moral self-understanding is developed by human reason, and this explains the structural similarity between the secular republic and the Kingdom of God under the specific conditions of the enlightened consciousness of a person who thinks for herself. Thus the anthropological "fact": the self-un…

What Can Linguistics Do to Technology Design?

2021

Intelligent technologies have already revolutionized the economy, and they will continue to do so via autonomous, AI-based systems and artefacts. Artefacts can handle much more intellectually complicated tasks than was possible before. However, the technological transformation will set new demands for technology design and designers. Designing electromechanical technologies has been based on natural science, but intelligent technologies will extensively use knowledge of human research and information processing to create new artefacts. Intelligent information processing has so far been possible only for biological systems and especially for human minds. Therefore, their functions and behavi…

Concept Analysis in Programming Language Research : Done Well It Is All Right

2017

Programming language research is becoming method conscious. Rigorous mathematical or empirical evaluation is often demanded, which is a good thing. However, I argue in this essay that concept analysis is a legitimate research approach in programming languages, with important limitations. It can be used to sharpen vague concepts, and to expose distinctions that have previously been overlooked, but it does not demonstrate the superiority of one language design over another. Arguments and counter-arguments are essential to successful concept analysis, and such thoughtful conversations should be published more. peerReviewed