A Salutogenic Perspective on Nature-Based Solutions in Ljubljana - Developing the Concept of Collective Sense of Coherence

Cities are the centres of human activity, making them both a source of environmental stressors and the origin of opportunities to enhance collective health and wellbeing. Nature-based solutions (NBS) represent such opportunities; they are solutions inspired and supported by nature that help build resilience and simultaneously provide environmental, social, and economic benefits. This study explores NBS in the Slovenian city of Ljubljana, the European Green Capital 2016 and home to ten NBS and a lot of urban nature. Using the theory of salutogenesis, the main objective is to explore the reciprocal relationship between NBS and collective health and wellbeing in this city. This is done through the exploration of shared environmental threats and stressors, the perceptions of general and resistance resources offered by NBS, their potential to contribute to a collective sense of coherence (SOC), and the effect of this collective SOC on residents’ perceptions and treatment of their environment. Utilising qualitative methods including expert interviews, cognitive mapping focus groups, and individual interviews, shared perceptions of residents of Ljubljana are explored and subsequently analysed through framework analysis. The findings show that NBS contribute to health and wellbeing in a variety of ways, offering resources to cope with environmental stressors, thereby contributing to manageability, comprehensibility, and meaningfulness. NBS are also found to contribute to a collective SOC, a contested and underdeveloped concept within the theory of salutogenesis. The discussion of this study approaches a definition and presents a model that describes how a strong collective SOC allows the collective to respond to collective stressors in a salutary way by providing and internalising resources on a collective level. This is done through collective action, enabled by a strong presence of social cohesion, social inclusion, and social justice. The conclusion establishes a reciprocal relationship between NBS and collective health and wellbeing and demonstrates the relevance of NBS to health promotion and sustainable development.Master's ThesisGLODE33

A Quasi-Fregean Solution to ‘The Concept Horse’ Paradox

In this paper I offer a conceptually tighter, quasi-Fregean solution to the concept horse paradox based on the idea that the unterfallen relation is asymmetrical. The solution is conceptually tighter in the sense that it retains the Fregean principle of separating sharply between concepts and objects, it retains Frege’s conclusion that the sentence ‘the concept horse is not a concept’ is true, but does not violate our intuitions on the matter. The solution is only ‘quasi’- Fregean in the sense that it rejects Frege’s claims about the ontological import of natural language and his analysis thereof

Humility, Listening and ‘Teaching in a Strong Sense’

My argument in this paper is that humility is implied in the concept of teaching, if teaching is construed in a strong sense. Teaching in a strong sense is a view of teaching as linked to students’ embodied experiences (including cognitive and moral-social dimensions), in particular students’ experiences of limitation, whereas a weak sense of teaching refers to teaching as narrowly focused on student cognitive development. In addition to detailing the relation between humility and strong sense teaching, I will also argue that humility is acquired through the practice of teaching. My discussion connects to the growing interest, especially in virtue epistemology discourse, in the idea that teachers should educate for virtues. Drawing upon John Dewey and contemporary virtue epistemology discourse, I discuss humility, paying particular attention to an overlooked aspect of humility that I refer to as the educative dimension of humility. I then connect this concept of humility to the notion of teaching in a strong sense. In the final section, I discuss how humility in teaching is learned in the practice of teaching by listening to students in particular ways. In addition, I make connections between my concept of teaching and the practice of cultivating students’ virtues. I conclude with a critique of common practices of evaluating good teaching, which I situate within the context of international educational policy on teacher evaluation

(Post)Modern Apocrypha as an Epiphany of Sense (on the Basis of Bulgarian Literary Biblical Paraphrases)

The paper is devoted to the author’s concept of modern apocrypha in the context of the two main tendencies of (Post)modernity: unmasking and paraphrasing. On the basis of the literary paraphrases of the Evangelical story, found in the Bulgarian (Post)Modern literary, there is shown a hermeneutic passage from “apocrypha as a literary mystification” (“literary apocrypha”), i.e. a concept often applied in literary studies, to “apocrypha as an epiphany of sense”, i.e. a concept which can be useful in cultural studies and in history of ideas. It is suggested that in the light of the postsecular thought, being an individual interpretation of the canon, the (Post)Modern apocrypha has a great epiphanic potential, which means that hiding minority truths, it reveals in fact some crucial, and crypto-theological, problems of the present. Drawing the axiological difference between “the unmasking apocrypha” (pseudo-gospel) and “the paraphrasing apocrypha” (epiphany of sense), the author claims that only the last one does actually incarnate Charles Taylor’s ideal of the authentic (and poetic) expression (of will), which helps in establishing an individual sense-making horizon as a positive response to the “heretical imperative” of (Post)Modernity

On uniqueness of the Laplace transform on time scales

After introducing the concept of null functions, we shall present a uniqueness result in the sense of the null functions for the Laplace transform on time scales with arbitrary graininess. The result can be regarded as a dynamic extension of the well-known Lerch's theorem

Persons, Virtual Persons, and Radical Interpretation

A dramatic problem facing the concept of the self is whether there is anything to make sense of. Despite the speculative view that there is an essential role for the perceiver in measurement, a physicalist view of reality currently seems to be ruling out the conditions of subjectivity required to keep the concept of the self. Eliminative materialism states this position explicitly. The doctrine holds that we have no objective grounds for attributing personhood to anyone, and can therefore dispense with the concept. That implication would require us to dispense with many of the most basic commitments of our manifest or common sense image of the world. And it would require us to abandon, to maintain as an act of bad faith, or radically to adjust, virtually every significant basic commitment underlying the variety of traditions that have evolved historically from the (natural) platform of common sense. Daniel Dennett’s sympathies seem to be divided over this issue. He is reluctant to eliminate the most fundamental linguistic-conceptual-institutional commitments that have evolved from common sense. Yet, I will argue, the basis of his support for these, beneath the surface of his rhetoric, is a mirage. His view of persons and related (intentional) concepts is a case in point. In place of the eliminative materialist position, Dennett recommends that we regard the self as a highly useful “theorist’s fiction.” He adopts a similar epistemic stance toward intention, belief, mind, and so on. In this paper I aim to show that Dennett’s recommendation is based on a subtle version of the dualism of subject and object (or scheme and content), which he seems to agree that we should transcend. Against Dennett’s view of the self as a “theorist’s fiction,” I argue in favour of a version of Donald Davidson’s realist thesis that, once we properly appreciate the significance of abandoning this pervasive dualism, we can maintain the self and associated intentional items – belief, mind, and so on – within a thoroughly realist ontology

Quantization of edge currents for continuous magnetic operators

For a magnetic Hamiltonian on a half-plane given as the sum of the Landau operator with Dirichlet boundary conditions and a random potential, a quantization theorem for the edge currents is proven. This shows that the concept of edge channels also makes sense in presence of disorder. Moreover, Gaussian bounds on the heat kernel and its covariant derivatives are obtained