Friedrich Wilhelm Graf skizziert die Biographie des in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren uberaus einflussreichen Hamburger Systematischen Theologen Helmut Thielicke, um dann dessen Aktivitaten zur Grundung einer Zeitschrift fur Theologische Ethik zu rekonstruieren. Dabei untersucht er auch Thielickes Kontakte zu dem amerikanischen Theologen Reinhold Niebuhr und zu Paul Tillich. Vorgestellt werden die von Thielicke zunachst in den Blick genommenen Herausgeber, seine Programmentwurfe zu Aufgabe und Profil der seit Januar 1957 erscheinenden Zeitschrift fur Evangelische Ethik und das tatsachliche Herausgebergremium, dem (...) neben Thielicke protestantische Universitatstheologen wie Heinz-Dietrich Wendland, Hendrik van Oyen, Wolfgang Schweitzer sowie der kirchlich vielfaltig engagierte rheinische Unternehmer Friedrich Karrenberg und der spatere WDR-Intendant Klaus von Bismarck angehorten. Durch die dichte Analyse der in den ersten Jahrgangen der Zeitschrift fur Evangelische Ethik gefuhrten Kontroversen uber die atomare Bewaffnung sowie den Institutionenbegriff zeigt Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, dass die ZEE primar ein Organ innerprotestantischer Verstandigung sein und zugleich die politisch-soziale Gestaltungskraft des bundesdeutschen Protestantismus starken sollte. Trotz ihres dezidiert internationalen Anspruchs wurde die Zeitschrift schon bald zu einem Organ, in dem hauptsachlich nur noch deutschsprachige protestantische Theologen publizierten. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:I argue that there are, according to Aristotle, two importantly different kinds of goals or ends in the domain of human agency and that one of these two kinds has been frequently, though not universally, overlooked. Apart from psychological goals, goals that agents adopt as their purposes, there are also, I submit, goals that actions have by being the kinds of actions they are and, in some cases, by occurring in the circumstances in which they do. These latter goals belong (...) to suitable actions whether or not agents adopt them as purposes and whether or not agents are aware of them. There is evidence both in Aristotle's ethical writings and in his discussion of chance and luck in Physics II.4–6 that he recognizes goals of this latter kind. (shrink)

An architect and architectural philosopher, Berlage created a series of buildings and a body of writings that probed the problems and possibilities of Modernism. His principal texts, given here in English for the first time, present a vital chapter in the history of European Modernism.

“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America (...) came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace. “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times “Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society “Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft.... The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction. (shrink)

In this paper, we first classify different types of second opinions and evaluate the ethical and epistemological implications of providing those in a clinical context. Second, we discuss the issue of how artificial intelligent could replace the human cognitive labour of providing such second opinion and find that several AI reach the levels of accuracy and efficiency needed to clarify their use an urgent ethical issue. Third, we outline the normative conditions of how AI may be used as second opinion (...) in clinical processes, weighing the benefits of its efficiency against concerns of responsibility attribution. Fourth, we provide a ‘rule of disagreement’ that fulfils these conditions while retaining some of the benefits of expanding the use of AI-based decision support systems in clinical contexts. This is because the rule of disagreement proposes to use AI as much as possible, but retain the ability to use human second opinions to resolve disagreements between AI and physician-in-charge. Fifth, we discuss some counterarguments. (shrink)

Hendrik Lorenz presents a comprehensive study of Plato's and Aristotle's conceptions of non-rational desire. They see this as something that humans share with animals, and which aims primarily at the pleasures of food, drink, and sex. Lorenz explores the cognitive resources that both philosophers make available for the explanation of such desires, and what they take rationality to add to the motivational structure of human beings. In doing so, he finds conceptions of the mind that are coherent and deeply (...) integrated with both philosophers' views about such topics as the relation between body and soul, or the nature of the virtues. (shrink)

The revised edition contains a new chapter which provides an elegant description of the semantics. The various classes of lambda calculus models are described in a uniform manner. Some didactical improvements have been made to this edition. An example of a simple model is given and then the general theory (of categorical models) is developed. Indications are given of those parts of the book which can be used to form a coherent course.

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain well-known problems associated withcompositionality. This will become particularly clear in the context of incomplete expressions. Our approach takes as a point of departure total freedom ofinterpretation in combination with the parallel application (...) of soft constraints on possible interpretations. These constraints can be contextual, intonational or syntactic in nature. The integration of pragmatic andsyntactic/semantic information in a system of ranked constraints is proposed to correctly derive the optimal interpretations in cases of nominal anaphorization, determiner quantification and elliptical comparatives. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain well-known problems associated with compositionality. This will become particularly clear in the context of incomplete expressions. Our approach takes as a point of departure total freedom of interpretation in combination with the (...) parallel application of soft constraints on possible interpretations. These constraints can be contextual, intonational or syntactic in nature. The integration of pragmatic and syntactic/semantic information in a system of ranked constraints is proposed to correctly derive the optimal interpretations in cases of nominal anaphorization, determiner quantification and elliptical comparatives. (shrink)

The reliability of clinical practice guidelines has been disputed because guideline panel members are often burdened with financial conflicts of interest. Current recommendations for COI regulation advise not only detailed declaration but also active management of conflicts. To continuously assess COI declaration and management in German guidelines we established the public database LeitlinienWatch. We analyzed all German guidelines at the highest methodological level that included recommendations for pharmacological therapy according to five criteria: declaration and assessment of COI, composition of the (...) guideline development group, independence of the coordinators and lead authors, imposed abstentions because of COI and public external review. Each criterion was assessed using predefined outcome categories. Most guidelines contained a detailed declaration of COI. However, none of the guidelines provided full transparency of COI assessment results. The guideline group was composed of a majority of participants with COI in 55% of the guidelines, no guideline was free of participants with COI. Only 9% of guidelines had coordinators and lead authors without any financial COI. Most guidelines did not provide a rule for abstentions for participants with COI. In 21% of guidelines there was a rule, but abstentions were either not practiced or not documented, whereas in 7% partial abstentions and in 2% complete abstentions were documented. Two thirds of the guideline drafts were not externally reviewed via a public website. COI are usually documented in detail in German guidelines of the highest methodological level. However, considerable improvement is needed regarding active management of COI, including recruitment of independent experts for guideline projects, abstention from voting for participants with COI and external review of the guideline draft. We assume that the publicly available ratings on GuidelineWatch will improve the handling of conflicts of interest in guideline development. (shrink)

Forthright and realistic, [this book] discusses the inevitability of social conflict, the brutal behavior of human collectives of every sort, the inability of ...

This festschrift collects a number of insightful essays by a group of accomplished Christian scholars, all of who have either worked with or studied under Hendrik Hart during his 35-year tenure as Senior Member in Systematic Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, Canada.

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V.

Pragma-dialectical approaches to legal argumentation seem to be rather different from traditional approaches appealing to standards of propositional logic. Pragma-dialectical analysis of arguments by analogy and e contrario seem to fall foul to the rigors of logical analysis, in which problems or even concepts of analogy and e contrario seem to disappear. The brunt of both types of special legal argumentation appears to be borne by often implicit general principles and an appeal to the system of the law as a (...) whole. Still, pragma-dialectics and logical analysis of legal argument are best seen as fruitfully supplementing each other in ongoing research of ever evolving legal argument. (shrink)

Aristotle takes practical wisdom and arts or crafts to be forms of knowledge which, we argue, can usefully be thought of as ‘empiricist’. This empiricism has two key features: knowledge does not rest on grasping unobservable natures or essences; and knowledge does not rest on grasping logical relations that hold among propositions. Instead, knowledge rests on observation, memory, experience and everyday uses of reason. While Aristotle’s conception of theoretical knowledge does require grasping unobservable essences and logical relations that hold among (...) suitable propositions, his conception of practical and productive knowledge avoids such requirements and is consistent with empiricism. (shrink)

The central theme of this essay concerns the historical character of human nature and especially of human reason. This theme I will develop first of all by discussing briefly that aspect of the present-day philosophical debate, in which this theme takes pride of place. Thus, in the first section, I will try to show which predicament the participants of this debate face in the defense of their position. In the second section, I will discuss the main ideas of Herman Dooyeweerd’s (...) transcendental critique of theoretical thought. This critique, which Dooyeweerd himself considered to be a Christian critique on the whole tradition of philosophical thought, is closely tied up with the theme of this chapter. The problem of the historical character of human rationality — or in the words of Dooyeweerd, ‘the problem of historicism’ — formed for a large part the setting in which he developed his critique. Although I fully accord with the main thrust of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy and especially endorse that which motivated him in his transcendental critique, there are, nevertheless, elements in his conception which have dissatisfied me for a long time. His critique needs to be revised, in my opinion. In section three, I shall attempt such a revision, by taking as a starting point the idea of the ‘answering nature of humankind,’ an idea which I have worked out elsewhere. (shrink)

Although Darwinian concepts have largely been banned from the social sciences of the last century, they have recently seen a revival in several disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, or economics. Most of the current proponents of evolutionary theorizing in the social sciences avoid references to the older literature on social evolution. On that background, this article presents a contribution to Darwinist thinking in early American sociology that has mainly been overlooked in the literature. As the leading figure of the Human (...) Ecology Approach, which was established during the 1920s and 1930s, Robert Ezra Park drew heavily on evolutionary concepts to explain human evolution. A systematic presentation of these concepts in the light of the modern discussion on sociocultural evolution is given, followed by a conclusion about what can be learned from Park today. (shrink)

New fetal therapies offer important prospects for improving health. However, having to consider both the fetus and the pregnant woman makes the risk–benefit analysis of fetal therapy trials challenging. Regulatory guidance is limited, and proposed ethical frameworks are overly restrictive or permissive. We propose a new ethical framework for fetal therapy research. First, we argue that considering only biomedical benefits fails to capture all relevant interests. Thus, we endorse expanding the considered benefits to include evidence-based psychosocial effects of fetal therapies. (...) Second, we reject the commonly proposed categorical risk and/or benefit thresholds for assessing fetal therapy research. Instead, we propose that the individual risks for the pregnant woman and the fetus should be justified by the benefits for them and the study’s social value. Studies that meet this overall proportionality criterion but have mildly unfavorable risk–benefit ratios for pregnant women and/or fetuses may be acceptable. (shrink)

We analyze investors’ perception and long-term effects of board gender diversity on firms’ stock market performance in an international setting. Our results, controlling for the endogenous nature of board compositions, indicate that female board representation neither improves nor reduces firms’ long-term stock performance. Hence, we argue that it is imperative to go beyond the conventional thinking in terms of the business case for gender diversity and broaden the perspective also to incorporate societal and ethical aspects in the strive to board (...) gender equality. Even more so, as our results show that it does not entail reduced shareholder value, which the literature on mandatory gender quotas commonly seems to suggest. (shrink)

The project 'Facing Forward' started with a collaboration between five institutions: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, De Appel arts centre, W139, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the art magazine Metroplis M. Having previously organized the lecture series and publications 'Right About Now: Art & Theory in the 1990s' (2005/2006) and 'Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century' (2008/2009), the organizing committee decided to take the final (...) step in this timeline and turn its attention to the far horizon. Informed by a shared interest in the role that history, speculation, and utopianism play in the field of contemporary art and design (as well as the larger context of global, socio-economic and political developments), a selection of seven themes emerged from the conversations of the initial organizers. These would eventually shape the seven lecture and discussions events - collected in this volume of essays - publicized under the banner Art & Theory From a Future Perspective. A great number of internationally renowned speakers were invited to reflect on the proposed themes during often sold-out events, which were presented at the Oude Lutherse Kerk in Amsterdam in 2011/2012. Yet, however compelling our desire as organizers to go beyond the framework of contemporary events and the current interest, well-nigh obsession, with history, it is obviously an illusion to think that we can escape the past by means of a turn towards the future."--Page 8. (shrink)

When heterogeneous players make strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests, they might conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in a subsequent contest, if the degree of heterogeneity in the current contest is sufficiently large. We confirm these predictions using data from German professional soccer, in which players are subject to a one-match ban if they accumulate five yellow cards. Players with four yellow cards facing the risk of being suspended for the next match are less likely to (...) be fielded when the heterogeneity in the current match increases and more likely to receive a fifth yellow card in the current match when heterogeneity in the next match increases or heterogeneity in the next match but one decreases. (shrink)

Arguably his most famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society is Reinhold Niebuhr's important early study (1932) in ethics and politics. Widely read and continually relevant, this book marked Niebuhr's decisive break from progressive religion and politics toward a more deeply tragic view of human nature and history. Forthright and realistic, Moral Man and Immoral Society argues that individual morality is intrinsically incompatible with collective life, thus making social and political conflict inevitable. Niebuhr further discusses our inability to imagine (...) the realities of collective power; the brutal behavior of human collectives of every sort; and, ultimately, how individual morality can mitigate the persistence of social immorality. This new edition includes a foreword by Cornel West that explores the continued interest in Niebuhr's thought and its contemporary relevance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 122-123 [Access article in PDF] Andreas Kamp. Philosophiehistorie als Rezeptionsgeschichte. Die Reaktion auf Aristoteles' De Anima-Noetik. Der frühe Hellenismus. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 2001. Pp. viii + 315. Cloth, $82.00. This book is the first installment of an extraordinarily ambitious project. The plan is to investigate the reception of Aristotle's conception of the intellect, set out in De Anima 3.4-5, in (...) the subsequent history of philosophy, from Theophrastus to the present.The current volume deals with the natural starting-point for this project, philosophy in the early Hellenistic period, centering on Theophrastus and his tenure as head of the Peripatos, the school that Aristotle founded.Kamp begins with an engaging, somewhat lengthy introduction, which remains curiously remote from what one might expect it to concentrate on, namely Aristotle's conception of the intellect. Apart from presenting an outline of the reception of Aristotle's philosophical work in general from Theophrastus to Sigmund Freud, the introduction includes only one short paragraph specifically on the topic of the intellect (12). This paragraph, which comes closest to revealing Kamp's reason for focusing, of all things, on Aristotle's discussion of the intellect in De Anima3.4-5, simply makes two unsubstantiated claims. First, Kamp claims that the conception of the intellect, as presented in those chapters, is at the center of the Aristotelian system; and secondly, that this is, of all Aristotelian and perhaps all philosophical theories, the one that received the highest level of attention in the subsequent history of philosophy. The reader might be content to wait and let the second claim be borne out, in the present volume and beyond; but the first claim—concerning the centrality of the intellect, and of De Anima3.4-5, to Aristotle's thought—should at least have received some specification and illustration.The central part of the book, and philosophically by far the most interesting, concerns Theophrastus. Kamp begins with an extensive discussion of the political, social, and economic circumstances of Theophrastus's biography and of the history of the Peripatos. He then offers a reconstruction of Theophrastus's remarks on the nature of the intellect in the fifth book of his Physics. This reconstructive effort is based on a number of fragments [End Page 122] preserved in Themistius's De Anima paraphrase (written at about 350ad) and in Priscianus Lydus's Metaphrasis in Theophrastum (about 530ad). Kamp's discussion of these fragments is well informed, judicious, and illuminating throughout.It may be in order, though, to indicate one misgiving. One of the problems that Theophrastus addresses is that it might appear as if thinking were a matter of the intellect being changed by intelligibles, much as perceiving is, or may appear to be, a matter of sense being changed by sensibles. (If so, the question arises as to what the principle of thought is, the intellect itself or the intelligibles.) Kamp reconstructs the train of thought as follows (124-5).(1) The intellect stands to intelligibles the way sense stands to sensibles (intellect-sense analogy).(2) Sense is changed by sensibles.Therefore, the intellect is changed by intelligibles.Kamp proceeds to suggest (126) that Theophrastus attempted to avoid the conclusion by denying the first premise. According to Kamp, Theophrastus rejected the intellect-sense analogy by drawing attention to significant differences between (the activity of) the intellect and sense perception, one of these being that the intellect (in thinking) is changed only in a special sense, namely inasmuch as it undergoes a transition to activity, energeia. Kamp is right that the notion of a special kind of change that consists in a transition to activity is Aristotelian; it is presented in considerable detail in De Anima2.5 (417b2-16). But it would surely be puzzling if Theophrastus thought that one significant difference between (the activity of) the intellect and sense perception was that the intellect (in thinking) was changed in a special sense (whereas sense perception, to complete the... (shrink)

When Immanuel Bekker, the editor to whom Aristotle owes his page numbers, travelled to Paris in search of manuscripts between 1810 and 1812, Theognis had been a mainstay of classical scholarship for many hundreds of years. Even so, the small tenth-century parchment volume Bekker discovered there came as a surprise. Not only did it contain a text of theTheognideawhich was four hundred years older than the earliest codex known so far; it also added an entirely new section of 176 lines. (...) Presented by the scribe as ‘book 2’ of theElegiac Poemsby Theognis, they revolved around the theme of pederastic love – until then a topic not usually associated with the moralist from Megara. In spite of their similarities to what had now turned into ‘book 1’, they were dismissed as a late forgery almost instantly after Bekker's 1815 edition. Although that view came to be challenged later and can now be considered obsolete, even van Groningen's first comprehensive commentary to theTheognidea, published in 1966 and not superseded since, breaks off where the second book would have begun. Until today, research on this part of the Theognidean corpus has not grown much beyond a trickle flowing at some distance from the classical mainstream. (shrink)

Ancient philosophical theories of soul are in many respects sensitive to ways of speaking and thinking about the soul psuchê] that are not specifically philosophical or theoretical. We therefore begin with what the word ‘soul’ meant to speakers of Classical Greek, and what it would have been natural to think about and associate with the soul. We then turn to various Presocratic thinkers, and to the philosophical theories that are our primary concern, those of Plato (first in the Phaedo, then (...) in the Republic), Aristotle (in the De Anima or On the Soul ), Epicurus, and the Stoics. These are by far the most carefully worked out theories of soul in ancient philosophy. Later theoretical developments — for instance, in the writings of Plotinus and other Platonists, as well as the Church Fathers — are best studied against the background of the classical theories, from which, in large part, they derive. (shrink)

This paper explores the role and resolution of disagreements between physicians and their diagnostic AI-based decision support systems. With an ever-growing number of applications for these independently operating diagnostic tools, it becomes less and less clear what a physician ought to do in case their diagnosis is in faultless conflict with the results of the DSS. The consequences of such uncertainty can ultimately lead to effects detrimental to the intended purpose of such machines, e.g. by shifting the burden of proof (...) towards a physician. Thus, we require normative clarity for integrating these machines without affecting established, trusted, and relied upon workflows. In reconstructing different causes of conflicts between physicians and their AI-based tools—inspired by the approach of “meaningful human control” over autonomous systems and the challenges to resolve them—we will delineate normative conditions for “meaningful disagreements”. These incorporate the potential of DSS to take on more tasks and outline how the moral responsibility of a physician can be preserved in an increasingly automated clinical work environment. (shrink)

The central theme of this essay concerns the historical character of human nature and especially of human reason. This theme I will develop first of all by discussing briefly that aspect of the present-day philosophical debate, in which this theme takes pride of place. Thus, in the first section, I will try to show which predicament the participants of this debate face in the defense of their position. In the second section, I will discuss the main ideas of Herman Dooyeweerd’s (...) transcendental critique of theoretical thought. This critique, which Dooyeweerd himself considered to be a Christian critique on the whole tradition of philosophical thought, is closely tied up with the theme of this chapter. The problem of the historical character of human rationality — or in the words of Dooyeweerd, ‘the problem of historicism’ — formed for a large part the setting in which he developed his critique. Although I fully accord with the main thrust of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy and especially endorse that which motivated him in his transcendental critique, there are, nevertheless, elements in his conception which have dissatisfied me for a long time. His critique needs to be revised, in my opinion. In section three, I shall attempt such a revision, by taking as a starting point the idea of the ‘answering nature of humankind,’ an idea which I have worked out elsewhere. (shrink)