D. D. Martin

La démocratie souffre d'un curieux paradoxe : contrairement à l'aristocratie ou à la monarchie dont les contours institutionnels et symboliques peuvent être tracés avec clarté, la démocratie ne se fige jamais dans une quelconque forme et se maintient plutôt suspendue à sa réinvention permanente. Balibar n'est pas le premier à poser la question du manque d'ambition de la démocratie, mais le seul à refuser de dissocier la question de l'extension démocratique de celle de son intensité. Pages de début Introduction. Le refus de la démocratie finie Race et nation, les angles morts du marxisme Les multiples dimensions du concept de politique Une anthropologie de la citoyenneté Conclusion. La contradiction infinieBibliographie des ouvrages principaux de Balibar Pages de fin.

À ses frontières, la démocratie se heurte à un paradoxe. La liberté individuelle de mouvement s'y confronte à la volonté collective qui se juge souveraine dans ses politiques d'admission. La réconciliation entre le principe d'autodétermination et les normes universelles, opérée tant bien que mal à l'intérieur des États démocratiques, vole alors en éclats. Ce qui ne soulève pas seulement des interrogations quant à la porosité de la démocratie mais la met également face à la question de son horizon. Doit-elle se satisfaire d'un repli sur une autodétermination rassurante entre semblables? Ou faudrait-il réinventer les principes démocratiques en dehors d'un cadre devenu trop étroit?"--Page 4 of cover.

This book is a study in philosophy of religion, which proposes a new inversion model of self-transcendence. At the same time, the study examines the relation between self-transcendence and prosociality in order to broaden our understanding of self-transcendence also as a moral concept relevant to human behavior and its ethical reflection. The inversion model of self-transcendence is based both on the intentionality analysis of consciousness and phenomenological analysis of self-transcendence conducted on examples of great figures of spirituality from the East and the West - an anonymous medieval Christian author of «The Cloud of Unknowing», an Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, and a contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle.

Der Glaube als existentieller Stabilitätsfaktor - dieses Bild macht dieses Buch zu seinem Thema. Es rekonstruiert, in welcher Weise religiöse Überzeugungen auch fragil und vor allem dynamisch und lernbereit zu denken sind. Glaube ist nicht selten mit Ideologieverdacht konfrontiert: Er liefert ein geschlossenes Weltbild, das determiniert, was wir wie beurteilen und für andere Standpunkte und Wahrnehmungen unsensibel macht. Dürnberger bringt dagegen die prinzipielle Dynamik des Glaubens ins Spiel; er legt (offenbarungs-)theologische und v. a. (sprach-)philosophische Möglichkeitsbedingungen eines lernenden Glaubens frei und fragt, wie sich Glaube in der Erforschung der Zeichen der Zeit legitim zu dynamisieren vermag. Wichtigster Referenzdenker dafür ist der US-amerikanische Philosoph Robert B. Brandom, dessen inferentialistischer Pragmatismus zu den prominentesten Positionen der Gegenwartsphilosophie zählt.

This study investigates the determinants of paternal investment by birth fathers and stepfathers. Inclusive fitness theory predicts higher parental investment in birth children than stepchildren, and this has consistently been found in previous studies. Here we investigate whether paternal investment varies with childhood co-residence duration and differs between stepfathers and divorced birth fathers by comparing the investment of (1) stepfathers, (2) birth fathers who are separated from the child’s mother, and (3) birth fathers who still are in a relationship with her. Path analysis was conducted using cross-sectional data from adolescents and younger adults (aged 17–19, 27–29, and 37–39 years) from the German Family Panel (pairfam), collected in 2010–2011 (_n_ = 8326). As proxies of paternal investment, we used financial and practical help, emotional support, intimacy, and emotional closeness, as reported by the children. We found that birth fathers who were still in a relationship with the mother invested the most, and stepfathers invested the least. Furthermore, the investment of both separated fathers and stepfathers increased with the duration of co-residence with the child. However, in the case of financial help and intimacy, the effect of childhood co-residence duration was stronger in stepfathers than in separated fathers. Our findings support inclusive fitness theory and mating effort theory in explaining social behavior and family dynamics in this population. Furthermore, social environment, such as childhood co-residence was associated with paternal investment.

Contemporary epidemiological methods testing the associations between green space and psychological well-being treat all vegetation cover as equal. However, there is very good reason to expect that variations in ecological "quality" (number of species, integrity of ecological processes) may influence the link between access to green space and benefits to human health and well-being. We test the relationship between green space quality and restorative benefit in an inner city urban population in Bradford, UK. We selected 12 urban parks for study where we carried out botanical and faunal surveys to quantify biodiversity and assessed the site facilities of the green space (cleanliness, provision of amenities). We also conducted 128 surveys with park users to quantify psychological restoration based on four self-reported measure of general restoration, attention-grabbing distractions, being away from everyday life, and site preference. We present three key results. First, there is a positive association between site facilities and biodiversity. Second, restorative benefit is predicted by biodiversity, which explained 43% of the variance in restorative benefit across the parks, with minimal input from other variables. Third, the benefits accrued through access to green space were unrelated to age, gender, and ethnic background. The results add to a small but growing body of evidence that emphasise the role of nature in contributing to the well-being of urban populations and, hence, the need to consider biodiversity in the design of landscapes that enhance multiple ecosystem services.

Sleep spindles are frequently studied for their relationship with state and trait cognitive variables, and they are thought to play an important role in sleep-related memory consolidation. Due to their frequent occurrence in NREM sleep, the detection of sleep spindles is only feasible using automatic algorithms, of which a large number is available. We compared subject averages of the spindle parameters computed by a fixed frequency (11-13 Hz for slow spindles, 13-15 Hz for fast spindles) automatic detection algorithm and the individual adjustment method (IAM), which uses individual frequency bands for sleep spindle detection. Fast spindle duration and amplitude are strongly correlated in the two algorithms, but there is little overlap in fast spindle density and slow spindle parameters in general. The agreement between fixed and manually determined sleep spindle frequencies is limited, especially in case of slow spindles. This is the most likely reason for the poor agreement between the two detection methods in case of slow spindle parameters. Our results suggest that while various algorithms may reliably detect fast spindles, a more sophisticated algorithm primed to individual spindle frequencies is necessary for the detection of slow spindles as well as individual variations in the number of spindles in general.

In this work we address the proposition that because it emerges from the contract tradition and so relies upon the assumption of mutual advantage, John Rawls' theory of “Justice as Fairness” cannot accommodate persons with severe mental and/or physical impairments. We respond to this criticism by proposing a revision to Rawls' contracting situation, the Original Position . Specifically, we propose to supplant the traditional understanding of mutual advantage—which we agree does constitute the necessary and sufficient condition for deliberation to come about in the OP, as it stands—with a more modest alternative: a Hobbes-inspired concept that we call minimal mutual advantage. We argue that when this revision is introduced into Justice as Fairness, it reconciles admirably the seeming tension between contractarianism’s insistence on the rational, self-interested actor and the reality of societies in which not all members are capable of meeting a standard of reciprocity understood in terms of productive contributions to the general well-being. In so doing, minimal mutual advantage renders indistinguishable the disabled from the able in the OP, allowing Justice as Fairness to capture successfully problems of disability while leaving intact the more appealing aspects of liberalism that other approaches would dismiss.

The impact of emotion on executive functioning is gaining interest. It has led to the differentiation of “cool” Executive Functioning processes, such as cognitive flexibility, and “hot” EF processes, such as affective flexibility. But how does affective flexibility, the ability to switch between cognitive and affective information, vary as a function of age and sex? How does this construct relate to “cool” executive functioning and cognitive-emotion regulation processes? In this study, 266 participants, including 91 adolescents and 175 adults, completed a cognitive–affective switching task with specific unpredictable switches, as well as measures of inhibition, attention, and cognitive-emotion coping strategies. We expected cognitive to affective switching to be more costly than affective to cognitive switching in females versus males, as well as higher switch costs in adolescents. Using linear mixed modelling, we analysed the effect of age, sex, and types of switching on reaction time. Results show that adolescents are slower switchers than adults, and demonstrate that females, although faster switchers than males, are slower when switching from cognitive to affective content than when they are switching from affective to cognitive content. Multiple regression analyses revealed age-specific associations between cognitive-affective switching and inhibition. These results converge with reported developmental and gender specificities in EF and emotion processing, respectively. Additionally, affective flexibility could relate to differences in vigilance and inhibition.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the way in which art can disrupt the subject’s everyday experience of the world and self. The proposal starts from the hypothesis that art offers experiences of embodied disrupted reality, and this statement is based on the parallelism between certain artistic experiences and certain psychological conditions that are known as dissociative disorders, which challenge the subject’s sense of reality and self, and lead the subject to experience some level of detachment and a sense of loss of familiarity with respect to the world and the self. These aspects are also particularly felt in immersive environments. Immersive technologies offer an important laboratory for perception and sensoriality, taking into consideration the embodied basis and the first-person perspective of the user-experimenter. In this context, art offers a series of strategies that allow the user to undergo a shift in experience, affecting the sense of embodiment and reality. To explore these notions, I refer to some phenomenological implications of the experience of dissociative disorders and the interrelation between art, technology, and dissociative disorders. Finally, I offer an analysis of three artistic interdisciplinary projects, taking into account the particular ways of embodiment and sense of reality they trigger in the user. Based on the parallelism between art and dissociative disorders and its dialogue with immersive technologies, this article aims to contribute to a phenomenology of embodied disrupted reality from art.

Emerging empirical evidence indicates that discrete emotions are associated with teaching practices and professional experiences of university instructors. However, further investigations are necessary given that university instructors often face high job demands and compromised well-being. Achievement goals, which frame achievement-related thoughts and actions, have been found to describe motivational differences in university instructors and are hypothesized to be associated with their discrete emotions. Moreover, as variation exists in how university instructors respond to job demands regarding their emotional experiences, certain goals may moderate this relationship on the basis of framing different interpretations and reactions to stressors. To investigate these links, 439 instructors (46.7% female) from German and Austrian universities completed a survey assessing their achievement goals, discrete emotions (enjoyment, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, and boredom), and job demands. As hypothesized, multiple regression analyses revealed that achievement goals were differentially and meaningfully associated with discrete emotions. Specifically, learning approach goals were positively related to enjoyment and negatively related to anger and boredom, while learning avoidance goals were positively related to anger. Performance (appearance) approach goals were positively related to pride, and performance (appearance) avoidance goals were positively related to anxiety and shame. Lastly, relational goals were positively related to shame and boredom, and work avoidance goals were negatively related to enjoyment and positively related to shame and boredom. Conclusive moderation effects on the relations between job demands and emotions were not found. Future research avenues aimed at further understanding the supportive role that achievement goals can have for university instructors’ emotional experiences and well-being are discussed.