Zu keiner Zeit hat Potsdam auf die europäische Kultur einen größeren Einfluss ausgeübt als im 18. Jahrhundert, als Friedrich der Große, der Philosophenkönig, den Absolutismus und die Aufklärung miteinander in Einklang zu bringen versuchte. Seit dem Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts setzte der Aufstieg des Bürgertums in Verbindung mit den neuen Ideen der Aufklärung das höfische Monopol immer stärker unter Druck. Friedrich der Große nahm die Herausforderung an und wollte als König und Bürger der Leserepublik, als Herrscher und Intellektueller, Macht und (...) Geist zueinander führen. Der Hof in Potsdam, die Residenz am Rande der Metropole, wurde zum Ort dieses komplexen und spannungsreichen Rollenspiels, in dem die alte Welt der ererbten Herren und die neue Welt der kritischen Bürger ihre Grenzen auslotete. Das geschah unter den Augen Europas. Denn Friedrich der Große hatte dem Experiment Potsdam von Anfang an einen europäischen Rahmen gegeben. In Potsdam traf sich und auf Potsdam blickte die aufgeklärte Intelligenz aus ganz Europa. Die deutschen Aufklärer betrachteten das Rollenspiel vor den Toren Berlins dagegen skeptischer, weil sie der kulturellen Konstellation misstrauten und der europäische Hof quer lag zum großen Ziel einer deutschen Nationalkultur, für die der Philosoph von Sans-Souci so wenig Sinn zeigte. (shrink)

Ästhetische und politische Diskurse standen im späten 18. Jahrhundert in einem untrennbaren Wechselverhältnis. Die ästhetischen Entwürfe und literarischen Fiktionen von Autoren wie Karl Philipp Moritz, Salomon Maimon, Daniel Jenisch, Johann Friedrich Reichardt oder dem jungen Wilhelm von Humboldt sind sowohl Reflexionen als auch normative Vorwegnahmen des Wandels von der noch weitgehend höfisch dominierten Residenzkultur der friderizianischen Epoche zur emanzipierten Stadtkultur des Reformzeitalters. Der in der Studie verfolgte topographische methodische Zugang ermöglicht es, die untersuchten ideellen Diskurse institutionen- und mediengeschichtlich zu verankern (...) und als Argumentationsstrategien innerhalb konkreter Debatten zu verstehen. Durch die lokale und temporale Konzentration lässt sich der Gegenstand zudem quer zur disziplinären Arbeitsteilung (Geschichte, Literatur, Philosophie) und zu literatur- und kulturgeschichtlichen Epochengrenzen untersuchen. (shrink)

- Diskussion von Epochenbegriff und Epochengrenzen - Autor, Markt und Publikum: Strukturwandel der literarischen Öffentlichkeit - Die Epoche im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Debatten, z. B.: Nationalliteratur, Antike, Ästhetik, Religion - Popularisierung von Wissen und literarische Wissensvermittlung - Kulturtransfer und Fremderfahrung - Gattungsinnovationen und Gattungswandel: Drama, Roman, Publizistik und Literaturkritik, Fabel und Prosaerzählung, Dialog und Essay.

Legislation that authorises controversial organ procurement strategies but ignores respect for autonomy is flawed in principle and predictably unworkable in practiceThe UK Human Tissue Act 2004,1 designed to regulate all activity involving human tissue, organs, or bodies, was introduced in the House of Commons in December 2003, received Royal Assent on 15 November 2004,2 and has been partially implemented by Commencement Orders from April 2005. The new act, which repeals and replaces the Human Tissue Act 1961, the Anatomy Act 1984, (...) and the Human Organ Transplants Act 1989, has its origins in events of serious public concern, namely the retained organs scandals at Bristol Royal Infirmary3 and the Royal Liverpool Childrens’ Hospital.4 The act is correspondingly dominated by regulation of postmortem examinations and retention of human tissue, with consistent emphasis on the need for fully informed consent. Compliance with these requirements is now mandatory with the threat of up to three years’ imprisonment and/or fines for any deviation.The impact of the original proposals within the bill on research and the clinical practice of pathology have been carefully considered and documented,5 with subsequent amendments to ameliorate professional concerns.6 The act, however, also carries significant implications for medical practice in areas where donor recruitment for transplantation can take place, and representations on these aspects during readings of the bill7 have produced neither clarification, justification, nor amendment within the final legislation.Section 43 will make it lawful for hospital authorities “to take steps for the purpose of preserving the part for use for transplantation and to retain the body for that purpose”. The original explanatory notes for the bill8 while it proceeded through parliament implied that such action, prior to consent to transplantation being sought, was then lawful, clause 44 as section 43 …. (shrink)

The primary objective was to review pediatric ethics consultations at a large academic health center over a nine year period, assessing demographics, ethical issues, and consultant intervention. The secondary objective was to describe the evolution of PECs at our institution. This was a retrospective review of Consultation Summary Sheets compiled for PECs at our Academic Health Center between January 2008 and April 2017. There were 165 PECs reviewed during the study period. Most consult requests came from the inpatient setting, with (...) the Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care Units being the highest utilizers. Consultation utilization increased over the study period. The most common patient age was less than one year. Physicians were most likely to request consultation. Patient Best Interest, Withholding/Withdrawing of Life Sustaining Therapy, and Provider Moral Distress were ethical issues most commonly identified by the consultants. Making recommendations was the most common consultant intervention. The ethics consultation process evolved over time from informal provider discussions, to a hospital infant care review committee, to a pediatric only consultation service, to a combined adult/pediatric consultation service, with variable levels of salary support for consultants. Ethics consultation requests are growing at our institution. Similarities in identified ethical issues exist between our findings and existing literature, however meaningful comparisons remains elusive secondary to variability in approaches to investigation and reporting. A combined paid/volunteer/trainee ethics consultation service model appears sustainable and real time ethics consultation is feasible using this approach. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S83-S88, March‐April 2022.

Respect for patients’ autonomy has taken a central place in the practice of medicine. Received wisdom holds that respect for autonomy allows overriding a patient’s treatment preferences only if the patient has been found to lack capacity. This understanding of respect for autonomy requires a dichotomous approach to assessing capacity, whereby a patient must be found either to have full capacity to make some particular treatment decision or must be found to lack capacity to make that decision. However, clinical reality (...) is more complicated, and, in borderline cases, different physicians may arrive at disparate judgments of capacity. In such cases, when capacity-determination protocols fail to achieve consensus, physicians would benefit from guidance regarding the clinical decision-making process necessary to elucidate the most ethically sound course of action. This article considers one such case and argues that, in a limited number of cases, respect for autonomy may require overriding a patient’s stated treatment preference when a capacity determination is equivocal, even though the patient has not clearly demonstrated a lack of capacity. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about sensory experience is frequently put forward in defence of a particular conception of perception and perceptual experience known as naïve realism. In this paper, I present an argument against naïve realism that proceeds through a rejection of disjunctivism. If the naïve realist must also be a disjunctivist about the phenomenal nature of experience, then naïve realism should be abandoned.

The received theories of epistemology identify abductive inferences with the cognitive patterns of speculation (hypothesis formation) and insist that they cannot verify or confirm hypotheses. I criticize various descriptions of abduction, offer a structural analysis of abductive inference,, characterize abduction without alluding to its putative role in inquiry, and then demonstrate that some abductions do provide evidence and that not all scientific hypotheses derive from abductive inferences. This result challenges those notions of scientific k knowledge that dismiss some central scientific (...) ideas (for example, evolution) as ‘meta-physical research programs’ or ‘just theories’ when they are instead well substantiated by abductive evidence. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre–post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

How ought the historian to reconcile themselves philosophically with the fact of evental contingency and of its relationship to structural determination? Does the existence of contingent causation undermine the very concept of historical necessity, or do the two instead in dialectical entanglement? In this essay, I engage with the problem of historical contingency from a transcendental-materialist perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, tendering a philosophically serious response to the famous Pascalian conundrum of Cleopatra’s nose and its challenge to (...) structuralist accounts of historical causation. The position associated with Laplace – that is to say, that the course of history would be entirely predictable were one provided with a complete account of initial conditions – is firmly rejected. Instead, I revive Althusser’s attempt to craft a theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, in which the determinative power of structural forces nevertheless leave space for the radical and unpredictable transformation of a situation by the chance crystallisation of events and encounters. In this effort, I recruit conceptual architecture not only from the fields of historiography and philosophy, but also quantum physics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

Objective: The field of clinical ethics is relatively new and expanding. Best practices in clinical ethics against which one can benchmark performance have not been clearly articulated. The first step in developing benchmarks of clinical ethics services is to identify and understand current practices.Design and setting: Using a retrospective case study approach, the structure, activities, and resources of nine clinical ethics services in a large metropolitan centre are described, compared, and contrasted.Results: The data yielded a unique and detailed account of (...) the nature and scope of clinical ethics services across a spectrum of facilities. General themes emerged in four areas—variability, visibility, accountability, and complexity. There was a high degree of variability in the structures, activities, and resources across the clinical ethics services. Increasing visibility was identified as a significant challenge within organisations and externally. Although each service had a formal system for maintaining accountability and measuring performance, differences in the type, frequency, and content of reporting impacted service delivery. One of the most salient findings was the complexity inherent in the provision of clinical ethics services, which requires of clinical ethicists a broad and varied skill set and knowledge base. Benchmarks including the average number of consults/ethicist per year and the hospital beds/ethicist ratio are presented.Conclusion: The findings will be of interest to clinical ethicists locally, nationally, and internationally as they provide a preliminary framework from which further benchmarking measures and best practices in clinical ethics can be identified, developed, and evaluated. (shrink)

The following questions arising in connection with the géométrisation of modern physics are discussed: is the physical theory a bicomponent one or everything can be reduced to space? Whether the hypothesis of the macroscopic nature of space and time deals with the theoretical or empirical structure of physical theory? Is there géométrisation of quanta or quantisation of geometry?

LIFE offers various amusements, and anyone these days who can choose among them will come late to the study of hiatus in Greek prose. Germany in the 1880s, so it seems, was less fortunate, and few greater excitements were known to young or old than the hunt for hiatus; but now that we no longer strait-waistcoat our classical authors and the austerity of those times is discredited, few collectors of hiatus are to be found, and there are people even in (...) Germany who have never identified a single specimen. Yet there is nothing to be said for underrating an author' stylistic pretensions, still less for encouraging others to do the same; and the textual critic, whose path is slippery enough at the best of times, can ill afford to dispense with footholds. There has been no broad study of hiatus in Greek prose since 1841, when Benseler in a long and original book De hiatu in oratoribus et historicis Graecis went through the text of 27 authors and attempted to determine their practice. (shrink)

In a brief article under the present title, Adam Parry raised a simple but profound question: were there certain things that the inherited vocabulary of oral poets did not allow them to sayF; The mere raising of this question, whatever his answer, is enough to make the article one of the more important contributions to Homeric studies in the last fifty years. As it happens, his answer was affirmative, and it has not been contested. Contested it will now be.