In the history of zoology the English anatomist Morrison Watson (1845-1885) is considered to be the discoverer of the masculinized sexual organs of the spotted hyena. Beginning in 1877, Watson had published a series of anatomical studies on the spotted hyena (Watson, 1877, 1878, 1881, Watson and Young, 1879), in which he, in which he for the first time made public the anatomical peculiarities of the female spotted hyena's genitalia. This scientific achievement is well documented. But now we can also (...) state that a hundred years before Watson the Dutch amateur zoologist Robert Jacob Gordon (1743-1795), while serving in the Scots Brigades at the Cape of Good Hope, had already made the same discovery and merely unfortunate personal circumstances prevented publication. During his stay at the Cape, Gordon had studied spotted hyenas intensively and recorded his observations in accurate drawings and comments. These drawings have been preserved as part of a large collection of animal drawings entitled Gordon Atlas. With his discovery, Gordon actually was the first to provide empirical evidence of a '' curious and inexplicable case of dimorphism" (Darwin on a beetle) in mammalians, long before Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (Cours de l'histoire naturelle des mammifères, 1829) started examining masculinized sexual organs in the mole or Darwin recognized the importance of sexual dimorphism (Descent of Man, 1871). In this paper we reproduce for the first time all hyena drawings from the Gordon Atlas, including Gordon's handwritten notes in the margins in the original Dutch and in translation. Additionally, we briefly delineate the knowledge about the South African spotted hyena in Gordon's time and indicate that we doubt Watson's explanation for the age-old confusion about the hyena. (shrink)

In the history of zoology the English anatomist Morrison Watson (1845–1885) is considered to be the discoverer of the masculinized sexual organs of the spotted hyena. Beginning in 1877, Watson had published a series of anatomical studies on the spotted hyena (Watson, 1877, 1878, 1881, Watson and Young, 1879), in which he, in which he for the first time made public the anatomical peculiarities of the female spotted hyena’s genitalia. This scientific achievement is well documented. But now we can also (...) state that a hundred years before Watson the Dutch amateur zoologist Robert Jacob Gordon (1743–1795), while serving in the Scots Brigades at the Cape of Good Hope, had already made the same discovery and merely unfortunate personal circumstances prevented publication. During his stay at the Cape, Gordon had studied spotted hyenas intensively and recorded his observations in accurate drawings and comments. These drawings have been preserved as part of a large collection of animal drawings entitled Gordon Atlas. With his discovery, Gordon actually was the first to provide empirical evidence of a “curious and inexplicable case of dimorphism” (Darwin on a beetle) in mammalians, long before Étienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (Cours de l’histoire naturelle des mammifères, 1829) started examining masculinized sexual organs in the mole or Darwin recognized the importance of sexual dimorphism (Descent of Man, 1871). In this paper we reproduce for the first time all hyena drawings from the Gordon Atlas, including Gordon’s handwritten notes in the margins in the original Dutch and in translation. Additionally, we briefly delineate the knowledge about the South African spotted hyena in Gordon’s time and indicate that we doubt Watson’s explanation for the age-old confusion about the hyena. (shrink)

Platonic Patterns is a reprint collection of many of Holger Thesleff's studies in Plato—spanning from 1967 to 2003. It includes three books, four articles and a new introduction by the author, which sets the general outline of his interpretation of Plato. Whereas much of the scholarship on Plato has tended to operate within the frame of one language and/or a single school of thought, Thesleff constructively combines several discoveries and theories of various scholars with his own research, focusing on (...) how Plato can be understood in his own context. The work represents small but significant breakthroughs in research on Plato from an internationally inclusive standpoint. Having previously been published mainly in Finland by scholarly societies, availability outside the Nordic countries has, up until now, been minimal. Thesleff employs his singular expertise of Greek language and literature to make innovative contributions to the study and interpretation of Plato. He thematically stresses the significance of the less overt elements found in Plato's dialogues, such as Plato's use of humor and his linguistic expression, while taking into account the chronology and/or the intended audience. (shrink)

We aim to devise a Ramsey test analysis of actual causation. Our method is to define a strengthened Ramsey test for causal models. Unlike the accounts of Halpern and Pearl ([2005]) and Halpern ([2015]), the resulting analysis deals satisfactorily with both over- determination and conjunctive scenarios.

In this paper, we analyse actual causation in terms of production. The latter concept is made precise by a strengthened Ramsey Test semantics of conditionals: \ iff, after suspending judgement about A and C, C is believed in the course of assuming A. This test allows us to verify or falsify that an event brings about another event. Complementing the concept of production by a weak condition of difference-making gives rise to a full-fledged analysis of causation.

The paper provides a formal representation of goal systems. The focus is on three properties: consistency, conflict, and coherence. An aim is to attain conceptual clarity of these properties. It is argued that consistency is adequately regarded as a property relative to the decision situation or, more specifically, the set of alternatives that the agent faces. Moreover, as a condition of rationality, consistency is stronger than some writers have claimed. Conflict is adequately regarded as a relation over subsets of a (...) given goal system and should likewise be regarded as relative to the set of alternatives that the agent faces. Coherence is given a probabilistic interpretation, based on a support relation over subsets of goal systems. (shrink)

The German philosopher Robert Spaemann provides an important contribution to a number of contemporary debates in philosophy and theology, opening up possibilities for conversation between these disciplines. He engages in a dialogue with classical and contemporary positions and often formulates important and original insights which lie beyond common alternatives. In this study Holger Zaborowski provides an analysis of the most important features of Spaemann's philosophy and shows the unity of his thought. The question 'Who is a person?' is of (...) increasing significance: Are all human beings persons? Are there animals that can be considered persons? What does it mean to speak of personal identity and of the dignity of the person? Spaemann provides an answer to these questions: Every human being, he argues, is a person and, therefore, 'has' his nature in freedom. In order to understand the person, Spaemann explains, we have to think about the relation between nature and freedom and avoid the reductive accounts of this relation prevalent in important strands of modern thought. Spaemann develops a challenging critique of modernity, incorporating analysis of modern anti-modernisms and showing that these are also subject to a dialectical development, perpetuating the problematic shortcomings of many features of modern reasoning. If we do not want to abolish ourselves as persons, Spaemann reasons, we need to find a way of understanding ourselves that evades the dialectic of modernity. Thus, he reminds his readers of 'self-evident' knowledge: insights that we have once already known, but tend to forget. (shrink)

Background: Informed consent is a legal as well as ethical prerequisite in clinical research. For dementia research, informed consent can be a problem if subjects with dementia, whose capacity for understanding and thus also decision making might be limited, are to be exam- ined. This might result in exclusion of dementia patients from research, as capacity for understanding and decision making are often equated with the ability for rational decision making. However, this valuation has been criticized at times for attaching (...) too much impor- tance to the cognitive aspect of decision making. -/- Methods: This qualitative study investigates the actual consent procedure of a clini- cal research study in Germany with regard to dementia patients’ subjective and objective understanding of informed consent information. Research participants were ten dementia patients, who volunteered in two clinical research studies, as well as their caregivers. Data were collected by use of semi-structured interviews. -/- Results: It was determined that the patients’ comprehension of informed consent infor- mation was rather limited. However, a number of patients were quite aware of this. In con- trast, all caregivers claimed to have fully understood the provided information, while their objective comprehension was also incomplete. Several participants indicated that they did not attach much importance to the information given in the consent procedure and that their consent did not primarily depend on this information. Rather, participation in the research study for them seemed to be more of a problem-focused coping strategy for dealing with their diagnosis of dementia. -/- Conclusion: For research ethics these results raise the question whether the currently prevailing emphasis on the cognitive aspect of autonomous decision making, i.e., compre- hension, may be too one-sided, and to what extent the “volitional” aspect in giving consent should be given greater consideration. (shrink)

Heideggers Verstrickung in den Nationalsozialismus war schon immer Gegenstand großer Kontroversen, doch gab es seit den Forschungen von Hugo Ott von vor 20 Jahren keine neuen Materialien mehr, auf deren Basis Heideggers Wirken beurteilt werden konnte. Holger Zaborowski hat nun erstmals umfassend bisher unbekannte Dokumente gesichtet und kann ein ganz neues und nüchternes Bild des großen Philosophen im Nationalsozialismus zeichnen.

The well-known formal semantics of conditionals due to Stalnaker Studies in logical theory, Blackwell, Oxford, 1968), Lewis, and Gärdenfors The logic and 1140 epistemology of scientific change, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978, Knowledge in flux, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1988) all fail to distinguish between trivially and nontrivially true indicative conditionals. This problem has been addressed by Rott :345–370, 1986) in terms of a strengthened Ramsey Test. In this paper, we refine Rott’s strengthened Ramsey Test and the corresponding analysis of explanatory relations. We (...) show that our final analysis captures the presumed asymmetry between explanans and explanandum much better than Rott’s original analysis. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work in developmental and comparative psychology, this paper argues that demonstratives function to coordinate the interlocutors' joint focus of attention, which is one of the most basic functions of human communication. The communicative importance of demonstratives is reflected in a number of properties that together characterize them as a particular word class: In contrast to other closed-class expressions, demonstratives are universal, they are generally so old that their roots cannot be traced back to other linguistic items, they (...) are among the earliest words that children learn, and they are closely tied to a particular gesture. Moreover, demonstratives play an important role in the organization of discourse and the diachronic evolution of grammar, which arguably is also motivated by their communicative function to establish joint attention. (shrink)

The well-known formal semantics of conditionals due to Stalnaker Studies in logical theory, Blackwell, Oxford, 1968), Lewis, and Gärdenfors The logic and 1140 epistemology of scientific change, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978, Knowledge in flux, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1988) all fail to distinguish between trivially and nontrivially true indicative conditionals. This problem has been addressed by Rott :345–370, 1986) in terms of a strengthened Ramsey Test. In this paper, we refine Rott’s strengthened Ramsey Test and the corresponding analysis of explanatory relations. We (...) show that our final analysis captures the presumed asymmetry between explanans and explanandum much better than Rott’s original analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a regularity theory of causation. The theory aims to be reductive and to align with our pre‐theoretic understanding of the causal relation. We show that our theory can account for a wide range of causal scenarios, including isomorphic scenarios, omissions, and scenarios which suggest that causation is not transitive.

ABSTRACT A necessary condition for news to be produced under conditions of ‘negative’ freedom is for newspapers to become ‘reporter codetermined newspapers’, where reporters, along with editors and publishers, have a collective ‘positive’ freedom to vote on news‐policy, select editors and hire reporters. ‘Publisher‐controlled’ newspapers systematically prevent reporters from reporting some news‐stories and coerce and manipulate reporters into reporting others. It is argued here that all newspapers should be legally required to become reporter codetermined newspapers. This change is also required (...) by Rawls’ and Mill's arguments for freedom of the press. On the basis of empirical data it is unlikely that the demands of freedom or justice can be met within existing institutional structures. (shrink)

This commentary argues for the inclusion of the neurophysiological arousal concept to help understanding the brain mechanisms of emotions and reward and the cognitive mechanisms involved.

Little is known about the consequences of moral distress. The purpose of this study was to identify clinical situations that caused nurses to experience moral distress, to understand the consequences of those situations, and to determine whether nurses would change their practice based on their experiences. The investigation used a descriptive approach. Open-ended surveys were distributed to a convenience sample of 204 critical care nurses employed at a university medical center. The analysis of participants’ responses used an inductive approach and (...) a thematic analysis. Each line of the data was reviewed and coded, and the codes were collapsed into themes. Methodological rigor was established. Forty-nine nurses responded to the survey. The majority of nurses had experienced moral distress, and the majority of situations that caused nurses to experience moral distress were related to end of life. The nurses described negative consequences for themselves, patients, and families. (shrink)

Whether meaning is compositional has been a major issue in linguistics and formal philosophy of language for the last 2 decades. Semantic holism is widely and plausibly considered as an objection to the principle of semantic compositionality therein. It comes as a surprise that the holistic peculiarities of scientific language have been rarely addressed in formal accounts so far, given that semantic holism has its roots in the philosophy of science. For this reason, a model-theoretic approach to semantic holism in (...) the language of science is presented here. This approach preserves compositionality to a large extent. *Received September 2009; revised February 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Seminar for Philosophy, Logic, and Theory of Science, Hauspostfach 49, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich 80539, Germany; e-mail: holger[email protected]. (shrink)

Ein Vergleich zwischen Fichte und Nietzsche mag zunächst überraschend anmuten. Nietzsches Beschäftigung mit Fichtes Philosophie war nur marginal und seine Äußerungen fielen dann auch eher polemisch aus. Eine Einflußphilologie ist sicherlich kein weitreichendes Unterfangen. Warum also den Lebensbegriff gerade dieser beiden Philosophen gegenüberstellen?

In this note we consider register-machines with symbol manipulation capabilities. They can form words over a given alphabet in their registers by appending symbols to the strings already stored. These machines are similar to Post's normal systems and the related machine-models discussed in the literature. But unlike the latter devices they are deterministic and are not allowed to read symbols from the front of the registers. Instead they can compare registers and erase them. At first glance it is surprising that (...) in general these devices are as powerful as the seemingly stronger models. Here we investigate the borderline of universality for these machines. (shrink)

Martin Heideggers Holzwege erschien 1950 und präsentierte dem Publikum seine Überlegungen zum "Ursprung des Kunstwerkes", zur "Zeit des Weltbildes", zu "Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung", zu "Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot'", zur Frage "Wozu Dichter?" und zum "Spruch des Anaximander". Damit liegen in diesem Band einige der wichtigsten Beiträge aus Heideggers Spätwerk vor, in dem er sich kritisch mit der Geschichte der Metaphysik auseinandersetzt und sich in der Begegnung mit Kunst, Dichtung und der vorsokratischen Philosophie um neue Wege des Denkens bemüht. (...) Seit seinem Erscheinen hat dieser Band, der in zahlreichen Übersetzungen vorliegt, die Rezeption von Heideggers Denken maßgeblich geprägt. Mittlerweile liegen zahlreiche andere Texte Heideggers gerade aus den 1930er und 1940er Jahren vor. Diese erlauben eine bessere Einordnung der in Holzwege veröffentlichten Texte und somit auch eine vertiefte Interpretation des Heidegger'schen Spätwerkes. Genau darum bemüht sich der vorliegende Band, der die Aufsätze aus Holzwege sowohl vor dem Hintergrund von Heideggers eigenem Denkweg als auch im weiteren Rahmen der Philosophiegeschichte diskutiert Dieser Band eignet sich zur allgemeinen Einführung in Heideggers Spätwerk als auch zu einer vertieften Auseinandersetzung mit Detailfragen zu seinem Denken. (shrink)

Most recent accounts of personal autonomy acknowledge that the social environment a person lives in, and the personal relationships she entertains, have some impact on her autonomy. Two kinds of conceptualizing social conditions are traditionally distinguished in this regard: Causally relational accounts hold that certain relationships and social environments play a causal role for the development and on-going exercise of autonomy. Constitutively relational accounts, by contrast, claim that autonomy is at least partly constituted by a person’s social environment or standing. (...) The central aim of this paper is to raise the question how causally and constitutively relational approaches relate to the fact that we exercise our autonomy over time. I argue that once the temporal scope of autonomy is opened up, we need not only to think differently about the social dimension of autonomy. We also need to reconsider the very distinction between causally and constitutively relational accounts, because it is itself a synchronic (and not a diachronic) distinction. (shrink)

The desideratum of semantic interoperability has been intensively discussed in medical informatics circles in recent years. Originally, experts assumed that this issue could be sufficiently addressed by insisting simply on the application of shared clinical terminologies or clinical information models. However, the use of the term ‘ontology’ has been steadily increasing more recently. We discuss criteria for distinguishing clinical ontologies from clinical terminologies and information models. Then, we briefly present the role clinical ontologies play in two multicentric research projects. Finally, (...) we discuss the interactions between these different kinds of knowledge representation artifacts and the stakeholders involved in developing interoperational real-world clinical applications. We provide ontology engineering examples from two EU-funded projects. (shrink)

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, was es heißt, verwundet zu leben. Was auf den ersten Blick als eine mehr als gewöhnliche und kaum spektakuläre Frage erscheinen mag, wird nach Untersuchung der dominanten Phantasmen der Unverletzlichkeit als eine Grundfrage der historischen Anthropologie erkennbar: Wie entsteht und wandelt sich der tägliche Umgang mit eigener Verletzlichkeit und Verwundung im Menschenbild? Welche Wunden des Gewöhnlichen werden in den meisten Lebens- und Arbeitsumgebungen im Allgemeinen ignoriert und ausgeblendet? Worin bestehen die Idiosynkrasien eines empfindsamen Leibes, eines sensorisches Corpus? (...) Und in welchem Zusammenhang stehen die Begehren eines bestimmten Menschen zu seinen Wunden? Eine Körperanthropologie der Wunden bezieht die Verletzungen eines Menschen im Laufe seines Lebens als integraler Teil eines Menschenbildes mit ein. (shrink)

In this paper, a new account of empirical claims in structuralism is developed. Its novelty derives from the use that is made of the linguistic approach to scientific theories despite the presumed incompatibility of structuralism with that approach. It is shown how the linguistic approach can be applied to the framework of structuralism if the semantic foundations of that approach are refined to do justice to the doctrine of indirect interpretation of theoretical terms. This doctrine goes back to Carnap but (...) has been advanced until the present day without a proper semantic explanation. (shrink)