Wir haben die Covid-19 Pandemie nicht nur als eine medizinische Krise erlebt, sondern auch als eine Krise der Freiheit. Die Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung des Corona-Virus waren Ergebnisse politischer Abwägungen, in denen auch Grundfreiheiten zur Disposition standen. Die Pandemie und die auf sie reagierenden politischen Strategien der Gegenwehr haben auf eine ungewohnte Weise in unser Erleben von Räumen individueller und interpersonaler Freiheit eingewirkt. Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, wie die Strategien zur Bewältigung der Pandemie politisch vermittelt wurden, welche Wahrnehmungen sie (...) hervorriefen und was sich an ihnen über die globale Krise des Liberalismus und ein global sich wandelndes Verständnis von Governance ablesen lässt. (shrink)

Für den interkulturellen Dialog zwischen den europäischen Ländern und ihren muslimischen Nachbarn spielen die Künste eine zentrale Rolle. Jede Kunst hat eine ihr eigene Sprache entwickelt, die den Menschen hilft, in Beziehung zueinander zu treten und sich auszutauschen. Die Künste geben den Kulturen die Möglichkeit sich auszudrücken und tragen zur Entstehung kultureller Identität bei. Sie formen die Wahrnehmungen, Erinnerungen, Vorstellungen und damit das individuelle und kollektive Imaginäre. In ihnen erfahren die Menschen die Alterität anderer Kulturen und ihrer selbst und werden (...) dadurch gebildet. Die Künste sind nicht nur den Angehörigen ihrer Kultur, sondern allen Menschen zugänglich. Sie vermitteln heterologische Erfahrungen und haben daher für die Verständigung zwischen den verschiedenen Kulturen eine große Bedeutung. Zu den Autoren gehören Kulturwissenschaftler und Philosophen aus europäischen und muslimischen Ländern: Radwa Ashour, Hans Belting, Benmeziane Bencherki, Roland Bernecker, Christina von Braun, Paolo Fabbri, Lydia Goehr, Gertrud Koch, Klaus Krüger, Mustapha Larissa, Reyés Mate, Hamdi Mehrez, Marie-José Mondzain, Angelika Neuwirth, Ludgar Schwarte, Antoine Seif, Philippe Tancelin, Jacques Poulain, Fathi Triki, Rachida Triki, Hassan Wahibi,Christoph Wulf, Mohamed Zouzi-Chebbi. (shrink)

That believing truly as a matter of luck does not generally constitute knowing has become epistemic commonplace. Accounts of knowledge incorporating this anti-luck idea frequently rely on one or another of a safety or sensitivity condition. Sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge have a well-known problem with necessary truths, to wit, that any believed necessary truth trivially counts as knowledge on such accounts. In this paper, we argue that safety-based accounts similarly trivialize knowledge of necessary truths and that two ways of responding (...) to this problem for safety, issuing from work by Williamson and Pritchard, are of dubious success. (shrink)

The debate on how an individual human life can be understood as being more or less meaningful has been pursued for a considerable time now. Despite extensive discussion some important aspects remain under-explored, namely the relation between meaningfulness and morality – even though many authors implicitly assume a connection between these two value dimensions. But how does morality contribute to a meaningful life? Is it a necessary condition? Or is it not necessary but sufficient or contributive? Or is there, when (...) explored further, no connection at all? This article discusses the relation between morality and meaning by outlining the central positions in the debate, explains the main arguments for and against, and offers some indications for future work in the field. (shrink)

It is proved in this paper that the positive abstraction scheme is consistent with extensionality only if one drops equality out of the language. The theory obtained is then compared with GPK, a wellknown set theory based on an extended positive comprehension scheme.

Folter gilt weithin als paradigmatisches Beispiel einer Verletzung der Menschenwürde. Doch was macht Folter zu einem so eindeutigen Fall einer Menschenwürdeverletzung? Das ist die Leitfrage dieses Beitrags. Dazu werden zwei Menschenwürdetheorien herangezogen und auf ihr Potential hin untersucht, die Folter als paradigmatische Menschenwürdeverletzung verständlich zu machen: zum einen Ralf Stoeckers Theorie, die die individuelle Identität und die darauf aufbauende kontingente Würde in den Mittelpunkt stellt; zum anderen meine Theorie, die die menschliche Orientierung an einem sinnvollen Leben ins Zentrum rückt.

The aim of psychology is to understand the human mind and behavior. In contemporary psychology, the method of choice to accomplish this incredibly complex endeavor is the experiment. This dominance has shaped the whole discipline from the self-concept as an empirical science and its very epistemological and theoretical foundations, via research practice and the scientific discourse to teaching. Experimental psychology is grounded in the scientific method and positivism, and these principles, which are characteristic for modern thinking, are still upheld. Despite (...) this apparently stalwart adherence to modern principles, experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are hardly acknowledged as such. Many psychologists take pride in being “real natural scientists” because they conduct experiments, but it is particularly difficult for psychologists to evade certain elements of postmodern thinking in view of the specific nature of their subject matter. Postmodernism as a philosophy emerged in the 20th century as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the modern approach and as a means to understand the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the times. Therefore, postmodernism offers both valuable insights into the very nature of experimental psychology and fruitful ideas on improving experimental practice to better reflect the complexities and ambiguities of human mind and behavior. Analyzing experimental psychology along postmodern lines begins by discussing the implications of transferring the scientific method from fields with rather narrowly defined phenomena—the natural sciences—to a much broader and more heterogeneous class of complex phenomena, namely the human mind and behavior. This ostensibly modern experimental approach is, however, per se riddled with postmodern elements: creating phenomena in an experimental setting, including the hermeneutic processes of generating hypotheses and interpreting results, is no carbon copy of “reality” but rather an active construction which reflects irrevocably the pre-existing ideas of the investigator. These aspects, analyzed by using postmodern concepts like hyperreality and simulacra, did not seep in gradually but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology, and they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science. We illustrate this theoretical analysis with the help of two examples, namely experiments on free will and visual working memory. The postmodern perspective reveals some pitfalls in the practice of experimental psychology. Furthermore, we suggest that accepting the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs in psychology and thinking more along postmodern lines would actually clarify many theoretical problems in experimental psychology. (shrink)

In his recent book, National responsibility and global justice, David Miller conceptualizes and justifies a model of national responsibility. His conceptualization proceeds in two steps: he starts by developing two models of collective responsibility, the like?minded group model and the cooperative practice model. He then proceeds to discuss national responsibility, a species of collective responsibility, and argues that nations have features such that the two models of collective responsibility also apply to them. In this article I focus on the question (...) whether Miller?s like?minded group model and the cooperative practice model are plausible and convincing models of collective responsibility. I will argue that the like?minded model does not provide a plausible conceptualization of collective responsibility, while the collective practice model provides a good model for collective responsibility but is not particularly helpful in conceptualizing national responsibility. (shrink)

C. S. Jenkins has recently proposed an account of arithmetical knowledge designed to be realist, empiricist, and apriorist: realist in that what’s the case in arithmetic doesn’t rely on us being any particular way; empiricist in that arithmetic knowledge crucially depends on the senses; and apriorist in that it accommodates the time-honored judgment that there is something special about arithmetical knowledge, something we have historically labeled with ‘a priori’. I’m here concerned with the prospects for extending Jenkins’s account beyond arithmetic—in (...) particular, to set theory. After setting out the central elements of Jenkins’s account and entertaining challenges to extending it to set theory, I conclude that a satisfactory such extension is unlikely. (shrink)

How does meaningfulness relate to morality? Despite several works on this topic, the relationship remains not only controversial but also strangely undefined within the field of objectivist theories of meaning in life. Moreover, some authors define the relationship contradictorily: on one hand, moral action is understood as a branch of a meaningful life, and on the other, meaningfulness is understood as a distinct dimension of value that stands alongside morality. In this paper, I examine this contradiction to redefine the relationship (...) between meaningfulness and morality. I resolve the contradiction by rejecting the distinctness claim and developing an understanding of meaningfulness as a comprehensive value that includes morality. The paper will also present the advantages that this approach offers and its defences against various possible objections. (shrink)

‘Globalization’ has become in recent years one of the central themes of social scientific debates. Social theories of globalization may be regarded as specific academic and analytic manifestations of wider forms of ‘global consciousness’ to be found in the social world today. These are ways of thinking and perceiving which emphasize that the whole world should be seen as ‘one place’, its various geographically disparate parts all being interconnected in various complex ways. In this article we set out how both (...) a general ‘ecumenical sensibility’ involving such ways of thinking, and its specifically academic variant, an ‘ecumenical analytic’, are simultaneously responses to ‘globalizing conditions’ and also products of the latter. We demonstrate how social theories of globalization, locatable in the overall set we call the ‘ecumenical analytic’, are reflexive thought-products, in that they both seek to investigate, and are made possible by, ‘globalizing conditions’. Rejecting the view that both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic are solely products of modernity, we show how such modes of consciousness and analysis were present in the period of Greek history between the death of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire. We show how at that period a socio-political situation akin in certain ways to modern ‘globalizing conditions’ generated both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic, the latter most forcefully represented by a revolutionary new genre in historiography called Universal History. By examining the ideas of its most famous practitioner, the historian Polybius, we demonstrate that Universal History both provided a framework for understanding what we today would call ‘globalization’, and exhibited a remarkable degree of reflexive awareness about its own conditions of possibility. We seek to show that an attentiveness to ‘global’ processes and a reflexive understanding of what makes that form of thinking possible in the first place, are not solely confined to modernity but were identifiable features of intellectual production in the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. In this way we argue that scholars today should not imagine that the contemporary ‘global turn’ in social thought is either unique or wholly historically unprecedented. (shrink)

This is a study of the set of the Malitz-completions of a given infinite first-order structure, put in relation with properties of directed sets.

Il y a un peu plus d'un siècle, le 4 août 1879, Léon XIII publiait l'encyclique «Aeterni Patris», pour recommander à l'Église entière l'étude de saint Thomas d'Aquin, «inter Scholasticos Doctores omnium princeps et magister». Peu après, le 18 janvier 1880, le pape décidait par le motu proprio «Placere nobis» la mise en chantier d'une édition nouvelle des œuvres complètes de Thomas. Du point de vue du Magistère suprême, les doctrines du Venerabilis Doctor et Doctor Ecclesiae Thomas d'Aquin sont alors (...) et depuis plusieurs siècles, à l'abri de tout soupçon. (shrink)

Site‐specific recombination events are of fundamental importance in many biological systems. In vitro experiments using purified proteins and DNA sub‐strates are yielding insights into strand exchange mechanisms and synapsis of recombination sites. By examining results across a range of systems ‐ prokaryotic and eukaryotic ‐ two distinct classes of site‐specific recombinase enzymes can be defined.

Definition of the problem: The ethical debate about assisted suicide remains controversial and is also based in part on assumptions that are taken for granted, but which, on closer inspection, lack a justification. Arguments: The article develops a new approach by focusing on the social dimension of the denial of meaning in life, which is often expressed by suicides. For a fundamental social connection is included in the human orientation towards the goal of a meaningful life, namely an implicit appreciation (...) of human beings as potential sources of meaning and as subjects of judgments about the meaningfulness. Suicides tend to deny this connection. Conclusion: This understanding of suicide can, among other things, adequately understand the meaning of (assisted) suicide and justify the widely shared assumptions of a primacy of suicide prevention and a conscientious objection right of doctors. (shrink)

Protein complexes perform many important functions in the cell. Large‐scale studies of protein–protein interactions have not only revealed new complexes but have also placed many proteins into multiple complexes. Whilst the advocates of hypothesis‐free research touted the discovery of these shared components as new links between diverse cellular processes, critical commentators denounced many of the findings as artefacts, thus questioning the usefulness of large‐scale approaches. Here, we survey proteins known to be shared between complexes, as established in the literature, and (...) compare them to shared components found in high‐throughput screens. We discuss the various challenges to the identification and functional interpretation of bona fide shared components, namely contaminants, variant and megacomplexes, and transient interactions, and suggest that many of the novel shared components found in high‐throughput screens are neither the results of contamination nor central components, but appear to be primarily regulatory links in cellular processes. BioEssays 26:1333–1343, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In C.Q. 42 551–2 E. J. Kenney impugned the appropriateness of femina in 28 on the grounds that it sabotages the poet's disclaimer to be treating not of women generally, but only of women not ruled out of bounds by the stola and uittae. Hesitantly he proposed to read in its place non or nee proba. It should be borne in mind that when a word has intruded itself from a nearby line and expelled the authentic reading, the ductus litterarum (...) is no guide to emendation. The door stands open to bold measures. I propose to read Thais. The name of the famous courtesan well serves as the type with which Ovid proposes to deal. But what advantage has she over, say, Lais or even Phryne, whose names would fit here as well as hers? The answer comes from Remedia Amoris 385–6 Thais in arte mea est: lasciuia libera nostra est; nil mihi cum uitta; Thais in arte mea est. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher has advanced an epistemology of science that purports to be naturalistic. For Kitcher, this entails that his epistemology of science must explain the correctness of belief-regulating norms while endorsing a realist notion of truth. This paper concerns whether or not Kitcher's epistemology of science is naturalistic on these terms. I find that it is not but that by supplementing the account we can secure its naturalistic standing.

Das Buch etabliert, vor dem Hintergrund einer Darstellung der herkömmlichen Begriffe und Vorstellungen, eine - als phänomenologisch bezeichnete - Konzeption des Lebens als Erleben und des Todes als Nichterleben und entwickelt und exemplifiziert auf dieser Grundlage eine Erweiterung einerseits des Konzepts des Lebens und andererseits des Konzepts des Todes, des letzteren in Form von phänomenologischem Tod innerhalb des biologischen Lebens und des ersteren in Form von - allerdings nur sekundärem - phänomenologischem Leben vor dem biologischen. Flucht- und Zielpunkt des Buches (...) aber ist die Entwicklung einer - auf die Erkenntnis der Janusköpfigkeit von Leben und Tod gegründeten - Konzeption von biologischem Leben nach dem biologischen Tod, einer Konzeption von Wiedergeburt und Folgeleben unter Beibehaltung nur des innersten Kerns unseres Ichbewußtseins. (shrink)