Forgiveness,Representative Judgement and Love of the World: Exploring the Political Significance of Forgiveness in the Context of Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Debates

Philosophia - The article examines the political challenge and significance of forgiveness as an indispensable response to the inherently imperfect and tragic nature of political life through the...     

Emotional Creativity and Real-Life Involvement in Different Types of Creative Leisure Activities

The role of emotional creativity in practicing creative leisure activities and in the preference of college majors remains unknown. This study aims to explore how emotional creativity measured by the Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI; Averill, 1999) is interrelated with the real-life involvement in different types of specific creative leisure activities and with four categories of college majors. Data were collected from 251 university students, university graduates, and young adults (156 women and 95 men). Art students and graduates scored significantly higher on the ECI than other majors. Humanities scored significantly higher than technical/economic majors. Five creative leisure activities were significantly correlated with the ECI, specifically, writing, painting, composing music, performing drama, and do-it-yourself home improvement.     

Work Engagement of Dual-Working Couples: Dissimilarity and Its Relation to Both Partners’ Well-Being

Work engagement is a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. Work engaged individuals not only function better at work, but also transfer these benefits to home - research has shown that work engagement crosses over between marital partners. In previous studies on crossover, this phenomenon was evidenced only by significant correlation between self-reports of partners’ work engagement, while measures of dissimilarity between partners were completely ignored. However, work engagement dissimilarity - with one partner being highly enthusiastic and immersed in his/her work and the other one lowly - could be related to some aspects of both partners’ well-being and might improve its prediction. Hence, the goal of this study was to examine work engagement dissimilarity within dual-earning couples. In addition to self-report measures, we collected partners’ ratings of work engagement and its subdimensions as well. The data collected on 178 dual-working Croatian couples showed significant correlation of overall work engagement, vigor, dedication and absorption between various pairs of self- and other-ratings measures (partners’ self-ratings; self-ratings and partner’s ratings; and partner’s self-ratings and his/her ratings of work engagement of the partner). Moreover, difference in self-ratings and ratings of partner’s work engagement showed negative correlation with life satisfaction of both partners, suggesting that work engagement dissimilarity has a potential to be related to some aspects of partners’ well-being.     

Acquisition of spatial knowledge in different urban areas: evidence from a survey analysis of adolescents

We herein explore the perception of the geographic environment and analyse the mechanisms that constrain the cognitive processing of spatial information in general. Our guiding theoretical background assumption is that the structure of the spatial environment is a cognitively robust and mutually constrained threefold system relating (1) cognitive topology (comprised of a path and place structure of spatial information and constrained by reference frame-based factors), (2) experience-based functional knowledge (including the effects of socio-economic factors, frequency and familiarity) and (3) linguistic representations (primarily encoded in the prepositional system of a natural language). Here, we focus on (2), i.e. the effect of functional knowledge on the process of acquiring spatial knowledge. We empirically tested adolescents aged 12–17 years to explore the interaction between frequency, familiarity and functional knowledge from a developmental point of view. The social factors we explore are precisely defined and parameterized in our results (exposure to a particular urban area, place of residence, gender, age and factors relating to the environmental and social quality of the local area). Our research shows that there are divergences between the so-called objective topology and the cognitive typology of the urban environment that are significantly constrained by intensity of interactions with environment, number of functionally significant places within particular area and age from a developmental perspective in terms of spatial knowledge acquisition.     

Infants’ discrimination of crossed and uncrossed horizontal disparity

In a series of preferential-looking experiments, infants 5 to 6 months of age were tested for their responsiveness to crossed and uncrossed horizontal disparity. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were presented with dynamic random dot stereograms displaying a square target defined by either a 0.5° crossed or a 0.5° uncrossed horizontal disparity and a square control target defined by a 0.5° vertical disparity. In Experiment 3, infants were presented with the crossed and the uncrossed horizontal disparity targets used in Experiments 1 and 2. According to the results, the participants looked more often at the crossed (Experiment 1), as well as the uncrossed (Experiment 2), horizontal disparity targets than at the vertical disparity target. These results suggest that the infants were sensitive to both crossed and uncrossed horizontal disparity information. Moreover, the participants exhibited a natural visual preference for the crossed over the uncrossed horizontal disparity (Experiment 3). Since prior research established natural looking and reaching preferences for the (apparently) nearer of two objects, this finding is consistent with the hypothesis that the infants were able to extract the depth relations specified by crossed (near) and uncrossed (far) horizontal disparity.     

Epistemic justification in the context of pursuit: a coherentist approach

The aim of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic justification suitable for the context of theory pursuit, that is, for the context in which new scientific ideas, possibly incompatible with the already established theories, emerge and are pursued by scientists. We will frame our account paradigmatically on the basis of one of the influential systems of epistemic justification: Laurence Bonjour’s coherence theory of justification. The idea underlying our approach is to develop a set of criteria which indicate that the pursued system is promising of contributing to the epistemic goal of robustness of scientific knowledge and of developing into a candidate for acceptance. In order to realize this we will (a) adjust the scope of Bonjour’s standards—consistency, inferential density, and explanatory power, and (b) complement them by the requirement of a programmatic character. In this way we allow for the evaluation of the “potential coherence” of the given epistemic system.     

Economic,Environmental and Moral Acceptance of Renewable Energy: A Case Study—The Agricultural Biogas Plant at Pěčín

The production of renewable energy in agricultural biogas plants is being widely criticized because—among other things—most of the feedstock comes from purpose-grown crops like maize. These activities (generously subsidized in the Czech Republic) generate competitive pressure to other crops that are used for feeding or food production, worsening their affordability. Unique pretreatment technology that allows substitution of the purpose-grown crops by farming residues (such as husk or straw) was built 6 years ago on a commercial basis in Pě?ín (Czech Republic) under modest funding and without publicity. The design of the concept; financial assessment and moral viewpoint were analyzed based on practical operating data. It showed that the apparatus improves economic, environmental and moral acceptance as well. However, according to the government’s view, public funding for this type of processing was shortened, “because waste materials represent a lower cost”. The impact of such governance was analyzed as well.