I propose in this essay to briefly describe some of the main current stakeholders who issue guidance on the ethics of human subjects research. This will be preceded by a very brief historical introduction.Prior to World War II, as far as I have been able to ascertain, there were no international efforts to regulate human experimentation. National activities were few and far between. One exception was a Directive on Human Experimentation issued in December 1900 by the then Prussian Minister of (...) Religious, Educational and Medical Mairs. This was followed by a Circular on innovative therapy and scientific experimentation promulgated by the then Reich Minister of the Interior in February 1931. Just over five years later, in April 1936, the Bureau of the Medico-Scientific Council of the People’s Commissariat for Health of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, the main constituent Republic of the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, issued an Advisory Resolution on the procedures for testing new medicinal substances and methods which may present a hazard for the health and life of patients. (shrink)

Based on worldwide consultations with experts in science and ethics the revised CIOMS 2002 International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects provide guidance on when the use of placebo as a comparator in clinical research is ethically acceptable. The article reviews the main points of the CIOMS Guidelines and commentaries including the use of placebo in situations where the best current method is available and the relation of placebo to established effective intervention. It discusses the use of placebo (...) in externally sponsored research in low-resource countries and requirements for informed consent related to placebo studies. (shrink)

South Korea created miracles out of a mess in the second half of the twentieth century. They have built an industrial production and export giant called Han Miracle and a democratic culture. They also began to create a cultural fever worldwide called the Korean Wave. However, what makes the Korean modernisation story unique compared to other development experiences in Asia is neither its industrial development nor its democratisation. The rapid Christianisation, especially the Protestantisation of Korea, which walks alongside modernisation, is (...) what makes this story special. Catholics entered Korea first, but they failed due to various reasons. Then, a peasant movement called Tonghak, which is organised around a syncretic religion named Cheondogyo, began to rise. They even started a nationwide uprising and gained massive supporters, but they could not succeed in expanding aggressively after the Japanese occupation. The latest comers, the Protestants, eventually became the largest religious group in South Korea. The Protestants studied the Catholics’ failure and the Tonghak movement’s success well and created a syncretic folk religion that did not exclude local religious elements. This syncretism was the key to their mind-blowing success in South Korea. (shrink)

This paper will set out in plain language the basic ontology of “Deleuze’s Spinoza”; it will then critically examine whether such a Spinoza has, or indeed could have, ever truly existed. In this, it will be shown that Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza involves the imposition of three interlocking, formal principles. These are (1) Necessitarianism, (2) Immanence, and (3) Univocity. The uncovering of Deleuze’s use of these three principles, how they relate to one another, and what they jointly imply in terms (...) of ontology, will occupy Part 1 of this paper. The critique of these principles from a Spinozist perspective, i.e. that their use by Deleuze is incompatible with Spinoza’s own metaphysics, will occupy Part 2 of this paper. (shrink)

On a simple and neat view, sometimes called the Relational Analysis of Attitude Ascriptions, a belief ascription on the form ‘S believes that x is F’ is correct if, and only if, S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition designated by ‘that x is F’, i.e., the proposition that x is F. It follows from this view that, for a person to believe, say, that x is a boat, there is one unique proposition that she has to believe. This (...) paper argues against this view. It fails, I contend, to make sense of peripheral concept variation. As we attribute and individuate concepts, two people’s concepts C1 and C2 count as e.g., concepts of boats even if their concepts have different extensions in peripheral, or borderline, cases of boats. Thus, A and B can believe that x is a boat through believing peripherally different propositions. It follows that there is no unique proposition that a person has to believe in order to believe e.g., that x is a boat. (shrink)

Die Welt, in der wir leben, andert sich rasant. Doch nicht nur sie, sondern auch die Religionen, die Gottesvorstellungen. Nach christlicher Vorstellung ist Gott selbst in die Dynamik der Welt verstrickt. Gerade die Prozesstheologie macht Gott im Fluss der Zeit denkbar. Welches ware der Gott, den wir brauchen? Welche Konsequenzen haben mogliche Antworten fur Religion und Politik, Okonomie und Okologie, Gesellschaft und Kultur? Diesen Fragen geht der Band nach.

Husserl's Absolute-Flow-Model (AFM) represents an approach to a coherent phenomenological description of time-consciousness. Within the AFM framework the streaming of every real moment in the flow of time-consciousness is necessarily concomitant with some retentional or protentional modifications of time-consciousness modes. These modifications of consciousness, i.e. all retentions and protentions, are characterized here as "temporal apprehension." By means of this distinctive function of time-consciousness, all constituents of one and the same consciousness phase are assigned an intentional sense as their temporal index, (...) so that all these constituents can be temporally represented and distinguished by time-consciousness. In this way, the AFM can overcome some of the difficulties in describing the flow of consciousness. (shrink)

Immer öfter werden der Natur eigene Rechte zugesprochen. Rund um den Globus helfen sie gefährdeten Ökosystemen, sich gegen schädliche Wirtschaftsinteressen zu verteidigen. Seit ihrer Einführung in die ecuadorianische Verfassung im Jahre 2008 wurden Rechte der Natur unter anderem in Bolivien, Kanada, Kolumbien, Neuseeland und den USA eingeführt. Zuletzt in Spanien zum Schutz einer Salzwasserlagune. Dieses Buch zeigt, wie die Idee der Rechte der Natur entstand, wie sie immer mehr an Fahrt aufnahm und wie sie uns künftig helfen kann, die Natur (...) und gefährdete Ökosysteme zu schützen. Dabei begibt es sich auf die Reise durch verschiedene Länder und Kontinente und stellt konkrete Anwendungsfälle und Initiativen vor. (shrink)

Die Fröbliche Wissenschaft umschließt mit ihren ersten IV Büchern von 1882 und ihrem V. Buch von 1887 Also sprach Zarathustra. Im "Excelsior!" überschribenen, vond er Kraft zur Entsagung handelnden Aphorismus Nr. 285 des IV. Buchs führt Nietzsche die Metapher vom See des Menschen ein, der einen Darmm der Entsagung aufwirft, um nicht mehr in einen Gott auszufließen. In Za bringt er die Metaphorik des Sees in Fluss. Der scheinbar noch unmataphorische See der Heimat Zarathustra schwillt zur Matapher des Stromes (...) an und fließt in die Metapher des Meeres aus. Im Fluss dieser Metaphern spielt Nietzsche das Thema des Übermenschen durch: es könnte aus eben diesen Metaphers zu verstehen sein. Im Aphorismus Nr. 378 des V. Buchs der FW fasst Nieszche die Übermensh-Metapher in die eines Brunners der "Freigebigen und Reichen des Geiste". Der Begriff "Geist" ersetzt in der Prosa des Aphorismus die dichterische Metapher des Übermenschen - und wird dabei selbst zur Metapher.With the first four parts published in 1882 and the final part in 1887, the Gay Science surrounds Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In Aphorism 285, dealing with the strength of self-renunciation, Nietzsche introduces the metaphor of the "sea of man," in which is erected a dam to prevent water flowing into a God. In Zarahtustra, this sea metaphor appears again. The seemingly unmetaphorical sea of Zarathustra's home country flows into a metaphor of the current and flows out as a metaphor of the ocean. In the flow of these metaphors, Nietzsche considers the overman, and these images offer a key to understanding this central concept in Nietzsche's thought. In Aphorism 378 of GS, Nietzsche considers the metaphor of Overman by examining the metaphor of a fountain of "the bounty and riches of the spirit." The concept of "spirit" in prose replaces the poetic metaphor of the Overman - and in so doing becomes a metaphor itself. (shrink)

In diesem Buch stellt sich die Frage nach der Wahrheit nicht über den Gegensatz von wahr und falsch, sondern im Zusammenhang mit verschiedenen Modi der Gewißheit: Wahrheit in ihren komplexen Beziehungen zu praktischen Fragen und der Notwendigkeit von Urteilen. Diese Fragen werden systematisch differenziert und historisch diskutiert. Die Autorin verdeutlicht mit dem Nachweis der entscheidenden Funktion der Urteilskraft die Verbindungen und Bruchstellen zwischen theoretischer und praktischer Philosophie. Der Urteilskraft kommt als einer individuellen Fähigkeit die Aufgabe zu, die Reaktion Anderer auf (...) das eigene Fürwahrhalten ohne eine letzte allgemeine Regel einzuschätzen. Theoretische Philosophie geht hier in politische Philosophie (Kant) bzw. in Philosophie der Psychologie (Wittgenstein) über. (shrink)

The usual metaphor for time is a flow. Edmund Husserl, in describing experience of our inner temporality, uses the term often: Fluss. In the final three decades of his life (1900s to 1930s), he gives us a well-articulated theory of time, especially the experience of its ongoingness and of our- selves in the processing of time. He refers to this latter, our immanent temporality, as a "flux" or flow and thus calls up the image of the river moving along (...) with its contents comprised in that flowing, gaining their fluent qualities from it. Yet Husserl's theory is not limited to a mechanistic understanding of flow as pure series, but in fact incorporates both a serial- ized aspect and a decentering, highly complex aspect of inner time-con- sciousness. The theory, then, requires a new metaphor, a re-mapping from serialistic diagrams to more dynamic ones. The challenge lies not only in achieving this re-mapping, but in showing the relation of dynamic diagrams to the serialistic ones that are still vital to the full descriptions of inner time- consciousness. (shrink)

Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of (...) acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The out- side world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the gov- erning laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Sev- eral lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual “filling in,” visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to show that we can extract an elaborate account of phe- nomenal consciousness from Leibniz’s (1646-1716) writings. Against a prevalent view, which attributes a higher-order reflection account of phenomenal consciousness to Leibniz, it is argued that we should understand Leibniz as holding a first-order concep- tion of it. In this conception, the consciousness aspect of phenomenal consciousness is explained in terms of a specific type of attention. This type of attention, in turn, is (...) accounted for in terms of cognitive appetites aiming at knowledge about a repre- sented object by means of initiating cognitive operations on representational content. Furthermore, against the view that Leibniz holds a reifying account, it is argued that Leibniz accepts an epistemic account of phenomenal character. According to this view, the phenomenal character of phenomenally conscious states rests on the con- fusing effect of imperfect acts of attention directed towards representational contents. Holding this view, Leibniz finds fruitful middle ground between contemporary stan- dard positions like higher-order theories, representationalist conceptions, and qualia accounts of phenomenal consciousness. His position possesses resources to meet sev- eral objections these standard accounts are confronted with. (shrink)

Unser Wissen von Sprache können wir in Form von Begriffen, Erzählungen oder Bildern objektivieren, wobei die begriffliche Repräsentation üblicherweise als höchste Stufe der Wissensbildung gilt. Gleichwohl sollten wir die narrativen und sinnbildlichen Objektivierungen von Sprache keineswegs nur als defizitäre Vorstufen der begrifflichen ansehen, sondern eher als ergänzende Formen. Die begriffliche Erschließung von Sprache hilft uns, Sprache als Erfahrungsgegenstand kategorial einzuordnen und uns argumentativ über sie zu verständigen. Die narrative hilft uns, das pragmatische Funktionspotenzial der Sprache in konkreten Lebenszusammenhängen kennenzulernen. Die (...) sinnbildliche hilft uns, die komplexen Strukturen und Funktionen von Sprache über Analogien zu empirisch fassbaren Erfahrungsgegenständen in den Blick zu bekommen. Deshalb lassen sich Sinnbilder über Sprache als hermeutisch-heuristische Hypothesen verstehen, die mehr als ornamentale Funktionen haben. Sie gehen aus einem experimentellen Denken hervor und wollen unserer Nachdenken über Sprache dialektisch in Fluss halten. Sie veranschaulichen uns die Genese und die Substrukturen unseres Wissens von Sprache und wollen dieses nicht abschließend auf statische Begriffe bringen. (shrink)