Abstracts These are abstracts of the papers that receive a reply, not of the replies themselves. The abstracts appear in the alphabetical order of the authors' names; for the contributions to the ...

ISBN 3110150077 (paperback) DEM 58.00 A collection of invited papers on the role of preferences and desires in practical reasoning: including rational decision making, the concept of welfare, and ethics. With a substantial introduction and a bibliographical survey. culture-specific and universal factors.

This article explores the role of desires in the ethics of deception. The argument concentrates on intrinsic desires not to have false beliefs and on the resulting role of false beliefs as building-blocks, not just causes, of harm. If there is a duty of beneficence at all and desire fulfilment is at least a component of welfare, there is often a direct wrongness in causing a false belief.

The invention of Bitcoin in 2008 as a new type of electronic cash has arguably been one of the most radical financial innovations in the last decade. Recently, developer communities of blockchain technologies have started to turn their attention towards the issue of governance. The features of blockchain governance raise questions as to tensions that might arise between a strictly “on-chain” governance system and possible applications of “off-chain” governance. In this paper, we approach these questions by reflecting on a long-running (...) debate in legal philosophy regarding the construction of a positivist legal order. First, we argue that on-chain governance shows striking similarities with Kelsen’s notion of a positivist legal order, characterised by Schmitt as the machine that runs itself. Second, we illustrate some of the problems that emerged from the application of on-chain governance, with particular reference to a calamity in a blockchain-based system called the DAO. Third, we reflect on Schmitt’s argument that the coalescence of private interests is a vulnerability of positivist legal systems, and accordingly posit this as an inherent vulnerability of on-chain governance of existing blockchain-based systems. (shrink)

We examine the processes involved in the escalation of a plant closure from a local concern to a perceived organizational moral failure that commands national attention. Our empirical case covers the controversy over the decision of telecommunications giant Nokia to close a plant in Germany, despite having received significant state subsidies, and the relocation of production to Hungary and Romania. We conducted an inductive study that utilizes a semiotic analysis to identify how various actors framed the controversial plant closure and (...) sought to cast it as moral failure. Our analysis uncovered two distinctive moral framings of the plant closure and revealed how key actors used evocative labels to frame these events in moral terms. These moral framings drew in additional stakeholders, generated more widespread media coverage, and turned the case into an organizational moral failure in the eyes of the national public. We contribute to the literature on organizational moral failure by theorizing its escalating process and elaborating why and how local events may become moral issues of interest to broader stakeholder groups. (shrink)

What is risk? How do we assess risk? What are the ethical implications of risk? The concept of risk is important – sometimes even crucial – for many philosophical domains, from philosophy of science and technology to ethics and sustainability. Philosophy and Science of Risk is a clear, wide-ranging introduction to this urgent and fast-growing subject. It covers the following key topics: -/- • The philosophical and historical background to understanding and interpreting risk -/- • The meaning of risk and (...) how it differs from closely related concepts, such as uncertainty or dangers -/- • The social construction of risk -/- • Risk perception and risk as an object of scientific study -/- • The measurement of risk, its probability and severity -/- • Risk and scientific modeling -/- • Risk, value judgments, and expertise -/- • Risk management, including cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary approach -/- • Risk communication, including deliberative models -/- • Ethics of risk, including duties toward nonhuman animals and future generations -/- • Risk and sustainability -/- • Decision-making under risk -/- Including helpful additional features such as text boxes, chapter summaries, review, and discussion questions, Philosophy and Science of Risk: An Introduction is an ideal textbook for students of the philosophy of risk. It is also suitable for students studying the conceptual questions surrounding risk in related subjects, such as sociology, psychology, economics, politics, geography, sustainability, and environmental studies. (shrink)

With his insightful and wide-ranging theory of recognition, Axel Honneth has decisively reshaped the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory. Combining insights from philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political economy, and cultural critique, Honneth’s work proposes nothing less than an account of the moral infrastructure of human sociality and its relation to the perils and promise of contemporary social life. This book provides an accessible overview of Honneth’s main contributions across a variety of fields, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of (...) his thought. Christopher Zurn clearly explains Honneth’s multi-faceted theory of recognition and its relation to diverse topics: individual identity, morality, activist movements, progress, social pathologies, capitalism, justice, freedom, and critique. In so doing, he places Honneth’s theory in a broad intellectual context, encompassing classic social theorists such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Dewey, Adorno and Habermas, as well as contemporary trends in social theory and political philosophy. Treating the full range of Honneth’s corpus, including his major new work on social freedom and democratic ethical life, this book is the most up-to-date guide available. _Axel Honneth_ will be invaluable to students and scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone seeking a clear guide to the work of one of the most influential theorists writing today. (shrink)

This essay seeks to illuminate the ethical concerns that animate Richard Rorty's philosophy. I argue that Rorty's ethics foregrounds as its central priority the issue of responsibility and frame Rorty's work as offering us a picture of ethical comportment in a postfoundational, pluralistic milieu, where citizens not only recognize the contingency of their own deepest beliefs but give up any sense of responsibilities owed to nonhuman authorities. To paraphrase Rorty, from any number of occasions, all we have to be responsible (...) to is each other. Yet Rorty goes even further than antiauthoritarianism in ethics. He not only shifts to thinking about ethics in terms of our relations to others; he specifically attunes this ethics to those who are suffering or excluded or merely previously unnoticed. What emerges is an alternative Rorty to the smirking gadfly blithely shrugging off criticism and incapable of inhabiting a position of moral seriousness. (shrink)

According to embodied theories of language (ETLs), word meaning relies on sensorimotor brain areas, generally dedicated to acting and perceiving in the real world. More specifically, words denoting actions are postulated to make use of neural motor areas, while words denoting visual properties draw on the resources of visual brain areas. Therefore, there is a direct correspondence between word meaning and the experience a listener has had with a word's referent on the brain level. Behavioral and neuroimaging studies have provided (...) evidence in favor of ETLs; however, recent studies have also shown that sensorimotor information is recruited in a flexible manner during language comprehension (e.g., Raposo et al. ; Van Dam et al., ), leaving open the question as to what level of language processing sensorimotor activations contribute. In this study, we investigated the time course of modality-specific contributions (i.e., the contribution of action information) as to word processing by manipulating both (a) the linguistic and (b) the action context in which target words were presented. Our results demonstrate that processes reflecting sensorimotor information play a role early in word processing (i.e., within 200 ms of word presentation), but that they are sensitive to the linguistic context in which a word is presented. In other words, when sensorimotor information is activated, it is activated quickly; however, specific words do not reliably activate a consistent sensorimotor pattern. (shrink)

Das Buch ist eine philosophisch orientierte Einfuhrung in die Logik. Ihm liegt eine Konzeption zugrunde, die sich von mathematischen Einfuhrungen in die Logik unterscheidet, logische Regeln als universelle Sprachregeln versteht und sich bemuht, die Logik den Bedurfnissen der empirischen Wissenschaften besser anzupassen. Ausfuhrlich wird die klassische Aussagen- und Quantorenlogik behandelt. Philosophische Probleme der Logik, die Problematik der logischen Folgebeziehung, eine nichttraditionelle Pradikationstheorie, die intuitionistische Logik, die Konditionallogik, Grundlagen der Terminitheorie, modale Pradikate und ausgewahlte Probleme der Wissenschaftslogik gehen uber die ublichen (...) Einfuhrungen in die Logik hinaus. Das Buch setzt keine mathematischen Vorkenntnisse voraus, kann als Grundlage fur einen einjahrigen Logikkurs, aber auch zum Selbststudium genutzt werden. Der Autor des Buches ist seit 1976 Professor fur Logik am Institut fur Philosophie der Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. (shrink)

This paper examines Rorty's notion of philosophy as cultural politics. Highlighting its explicitly Deweyan origins, I trace this idea to Rorty's call in the 1970s for philosophers to be more involved in the cause of enlarging human freedom. Rorty brings philosophy into his project of expanding the conversation beyond the West to include excluded voices through literature and narrative. After underscoring Rorty's important contributions, I argue that rather than merely assimilating non-Western voices to "our" conversation, cultural politics demands that privileged (...) philosophers start joining the conversations of others. (shrink)

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What makes philosophy on the continent of Europe so different and exciting? And why does it have such a reputation for being 'difficult'? Continental philosophy was initiated amid the revolutionary ferment of the 18th century, philosophers such as Kant and Hegel confronting the extremism of the time with theories that challenged the very formation of individual and social consciousness. Covering the great philosophers of the modern and postmodern eras – from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze right to up Agamben and (...) Žižek – and philosophical movements from German idealism to deconstruction and feminism – Christopher Kul-Want and Piero brilliantly elucidate some of the most thrilling and powerful ideas ever to have been discussed. (shrink)

There is considerable evidence that language comprehenders derive lexical-semantic meaning by mentally simulating perceptual and motor attributes of described events. However, the nature of these simulations—including the level of detail that is incorporated and contexts under which simulations occur—is not well understood. Here, we examine the effects of first- versus third-person perspective on mental simulations during sentence comprehension. First-person sentences describing physical transfer towards or away from the body modulated response latencies when responses were made along a front-back axis, consistent (...) with the action-sentence compatibility effect. This effect was not observed for third-person sentences. The ACE was observed when making responses along a left-right axis for third-person, but not first-person sentences.sentences did not show an ACE along either axis. These results show that perspective is a detail that is simulated during action sentence comprehension, and that motoric activations are flexible and affected by the pronominal perspective used in the sentence. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze's ideas are indispensable to understanding how truth and ethics no longer have theological reference points. Watkin's biblical critique enables us to culturally reengage with our Deleuze-influenced society.

Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life takes a spirited conceptualist look back into the history of our development. The book sets out to explore the ways in which a punditry of human equality continues to lock in unassailably assured logical postures, enabled by the historically intertwined roles played by power and the passage of time, towards the invention and sustenance of social truth. Religion, race, and multiculturalism have been written about many times, and from a variety of academic, discipline-specific perspectives. (...) Nonetheless, these social issues remain ever relevant to any sincere bid to understand the inegalitarian aspects of modern society. Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life was primarily written with serious students of philosophy, sociology, the humanities, and history in mind. The author contends that we should never be too afraid to explore contentious or difficult philosophical and social questions. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation. Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that (...) present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, intra methods, dealing with technology design, and ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I. (shrink)

Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.

The colonial period of Christian expansion was plagued by practices and systems that exploited non-European indigenous populations for the endgame interests of enriching the treasuries of European imperial powers and promoting Eurocentrism. Anderson Jeremiah has written an important paper that explains how the concepts of race and the caste system in South Asia functioned in the context of colonial Christian expansion, and argues that postcolonial Christian actors should prioritise intentionally replacing dehumanising forms of missional activity with the four ethically decolonising (...) paradigms of radical resistance, solidarity, hospitality, and joy in service of promoting racial justice in future global society. My response focuses on Jeremiah's ethical paradigm of hospitality, and engages with the challenge of applying this paradigm. In order for this hospitality paradigm to be applied in ways that lead to optimal missional outcomes, it must answer several questions, especially those linked to the existence of contesting hospitality-focussed frameworks and sociocultural attitudes endorsed by contemporary Christian agents and communities whose norms of hospitality appear radically different. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the role of perceptual knowledge (knowledge by acquaintance) in the development of expertise in professional contexts. It seeks to answer the question of how, if at all, does heightened knowledge by acquaintance inform a high level of professional know‐how. Successful action requires the articulation of various epistemic capacities: to draw on relevant systematic knowledge, to understand the nature of the problem faced, to perceive the essentials in complex situations and to judge and then to act appropriately. The (...) aim is to bring together philosophical and empirical considerations to show how best to understand the ability to perceive the essentials in complex situations and how this ability bears on the ability to judge and to act appropriately in professional contexts. Perceptual concepts are acquired through social intercourse rather than through introspection and labelling. (shrink)

Since Shelly Kagan pointed out the relative neglect of ill-being in philosophical discussions, several philosophers have contributed to an emerging literature on its constituents. In doing so, they have explored possible asymmetries between the constituents of ill-being and the constituents of positive well-being. This paper explores some possible asymmetries that may arise elsewhere in the philosophy of ill-being. In particular, it considers whether there is an asymmetry between the contribution made to prudential value by equal quantities of goods and bads. (...) It then considers a similar question about the contributions made to moral value by equal quantities of ill-being and positive well-being. The paper explores some of the difficulties involved in assessing these questions. It ends by considering broader differences, both practical and theoretical, between the significance of ill-being and of positive well-being. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a critique of value sensitive design (VSD) and to propose an alternative approach that does not depart from a heuristic of value(s), but from virtue ethics, called virtuous practice design (VPD).Design/methodology/approachThis paper develops a philosophical argument, draws from a philosophical method (i.e. virtue ethics) and applies this method to a particular case study that draws from a narrative interview.FindingsIn this paper, authors show how an approach that takes virtue instead of value as (...) the central notion for aiming at a design that is sensitive to ethical concerns can be fruitful both in theory and in practice.Originality/valueThis paper presents the first attempt to ground an approach aimed at ethical technology design on the tradition of virtue ethics. As such, it presents VPD as a potentially fruitful alternative to VSD. (shrink)

Wie kam der Mensch zu der Vorstellung, dass es Götter gibt? Enthält die Sprache des Mythos Hinweise auf Ursprung und Entwicklung des religiösen Denkens? In einer wissenschaftshistorischen Studie wird hier die Theorie des Klassischen Philologen Hermann Usener (1834-1905) vom Ursprung der Religion (1896) und deren Rezeption in den Werken von Albrecht Dieterich, Ludwig Radermacher, Aby Warburg und Walter F. Otto untersucht. Mit seiner strukturanalytisch entwickelten Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung hat Usener die seit der Romantik geführte Ursprungsdebatte neu aufgerollt und (...) dazu inspiriert, sein Projekt aufzugreifen und kritisch fortzuschreiben. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

Abstract Objections to life extension often focus on its effects for individual well-being. Prominent amongst these concerns is the possibility that life extending technologies will extend lifespan without preventing the ageing of the mind. Writers on the subject express the fear that life extending drugs will keep us physically youthful whilst our minds decay, succumbing to dementia, boredom, and loneliness. Generally these fears remain speculative, in part due to the absence of genuine life extending technologies. In this paper, however, I (...) examine the implications of an existing life extension technology. Caloric restriction (CR) and drugs that mimic its effects, such as rapamycin, metformin and resveratrol have been shown to increase average and maximum lifespan in a wide variety of organisms, and seem likely to do so in humans. Moreover, some CR mimetic drugs (CRMs) are already widely used. This means that they present a pressing test case for fears about mental ageing in an extended life. Misgivings about mental ageing can be divided into biomedical factors such as the likelihood of brain ageing, and psychological factors such as loss of meaning and boredom. I argue that studies of CR suggest that brain ageing will be beneficially slowed. However, it is less clear that deleterious aspects of psychological ageing can be similarly retarded. I argue that this reduces the desirability of life extension unless major social changes can be made. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

Abuse, when committed by spiritual authority figures, can have far-reaching consequences for church communities well after perpetrators have been removed and held accountable. In attending to survivors, a host of issues may come to light, including but not limited to, organizational complicity in abuse, institutional marginalization of the vulnerable, and the revelation that worship spaces can be traumatically triggering. The work of scholars like Michelle Panchuk, Elaine Heath, and Katharina von Kellenbach all point to the challenging reality that ecclesial repentance­ (...) may demand dramatic changes to restore a safe environment and righteous expressions of worship that honour God's intentions for all. Glen Kinoshita's ‘ministry of reconciliation’ and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's ‘preparing the way’ and ‘religionless Christianity’ are texts that on the surface address this type of process; however, it is not clear that either scholar fully reckons with the issue of a worshipping community or space that has been so marred by abuse as to become an impediment to a survivor's participation in liturgy. In this article, I modify Bonhoeffer's work to move beyond his claims and make recommendations for further steps towards repentance. (shrink)

Today, a major technological trend is the increasing focus on the person: technical systems personalize, customize, and tailor to the person in both beneficial and troubling ways. This trend has moved beyond the realm of commerce and has become a matter of public governance, where systems for citizen risk scoring, predictive policing, and social credit scores proliferate. What these systems have in common is that they may target the person and her ethical and political dispositions, her virtues. Virtue ethics is (...) the most appropriate approach for evaluating the impacts of these new systems, which has translated in a revival of talk about virtue in technology ethics. Yet, the focus on individual dispositions has rightly been criticized for lacking a concern with the political collective and institutional structures. This paper advocates a new direction of research into civic virtue, which is situated in between personal dispositions and structures of governance. First, it surveys the discourse on virtue ethics of technology, emphasizing its neglect of the political dimension of impacts of emerging technologies. Second, it presents a pluralist conception of civic virtue that enables us to scrutinize the impact of technology on civic virtue on three different levels of reciprocal reputation building, the cultivation of internal goods, and excellence in the public sphere. Third, it illustrates the benefits of this conceptions by discussing some paradigmatic examples of emerging technologies that aim to cultivate civic virtue. (shrink)

The relevance of expertise to professional education and practice is explored in this collection of original contributions from educationalists, philosophers and psychologists. Discusses the increasingly prominent debates about the nature of know-how in mainstream analytical epistemology Illuminates what is involved in professional expertise and the implications of a sound understanding of professional expertise for professional education practice, curriculum design and assessment All contributions are philosophically grounded and reflect interdisciplinary advances in understanding expertise.