The concept of “translational bioethics” has received considerable attention in recent years. Most publications draw an analogy to translational medicine and describe bioethical research that aims at implementing and evaluating ethical interventions. However, current accounts of translational bioethics are often rather vague and seem to differ with regard to conceptual and methodological assumptions. It is not clear and scarcely analyzed what exactly “translation” in the field of bioethics means, in particular regarding goals and processes so that it is justified to (...) appeal to translational medicine. In this article, we thus explore possible analogies and disanalogies between translational medicine and translational bioethics to establish whether the often occurring reference to concepts of translational medicine in the field of bioethics can be justified by substantial analogies. We will first provide an account of different models of translational medicine. In a second step, we will propose an analytic definition that explicitly articulates the essential characteristics of “translational research” irrespective of the research field (i.e., biomedicine, bioethics). Subsequently, we will explore whether and in how far general characteristics and phases of translational research in medicine can be applied to translational research in bioethics. Based on our analyses, we will come to the skeptical conclusion that at present there are considerable conceptual disanalogies and unsolved conceptual problems that disallow using “translational bioethics” in a meaningful analogy to respective accounts in biomedicine. Nevertheless, we will demonstrate that some insights gained by the conceptual accounts of translational medicine can contribute to advance current research activities in bioethics. (shrink)

The “model argument” against action-theories of causation is a reply to a strategy for avoiding the “argument of unmanipulable causes”. The critics follow the action- theorists in a certain shift of topic – leaving the explication debate towards one of justified assertion of causal claims – and end up at a wrong position concerning the role of practical knowledge for justifying causal claims about events that are not under technical control. Following them the justification would take the form of “analogy (...) arguments“, which can not guarantee the truth of the conclusion in a non-circular way. Contrary to their position I present a reconstruction of causal inference in which practical knowledge about manipulation does play the role of a necessary condition for justifiying causal claims about unmanipulable relations. (shrink)

The “model argument” against action-theories of causation is a reply to a strategy for avoiding the “argument of unmanipulable causes”. The critics follow the action-theorists in a certain shift of topic - leaving the explication debate towards one of justified assertion of causal claims - and end up at a wrong position concerning the role of practical knowledge for justifying causal claims about events that are not under technical control. Following them the justification would take the form of “analogy arguments“, (...) which can not guarantee the truth of the conclusion in a non-circular way. Contrary to their position I present a reconstruction of causal inference in which practical knowledge about manipulation does play the role of a necessary condition for justifiying causal claims about unmanipulable relations. (shrink)

Welche Rolle spielt Handlungswissen bei der Erkenntnis von Ursachen und Wirkungen? Wie argumentiert man etwa mit Experimentalergebnissen in der Evolutionsbiologie oder therapeutischem Wissen in der Medizin? Lassen sich Grenzen kausaler Erkenntnis gerade auch an Moglichkeiten des Eingreifens festmachen? Diesen Fragen geht das Buch nach - mit einer Diskussion der philosophischen Kausalitatstheorie des Interventionismus und einer Reihe wissenschaftstheoretischer Fallstudien aus der Physik, Biologie, Evolutionsbiologie, Psychologie, Medizin sowie psychiatrischer und psychoanalytischer Forschung.

This paper is a case study. After formulating three norms for critical assessment of argumentation (section 1), I give a brief overview of Galileo’s argumentative strategy in his Dialogue and present his argument for the cause of the tides, which appears as an argument by analogy (section 2). I then discuss possible reconstructions of this argumentation, with one particular suggestion in detail. These arguments seem to fall short, given the aforementioned set of norms (section 3). This leads to my own (...) proposal of Galileo’s argument. I defend this proposal and it’s general idea - that is, the argument’s pattern. It will be classified as ‘interventionist’ and useful regarding the goals of critical assessment (section 4). Finally, I suggest that the pattern of argument is applicable to other cases and useful for applied theory of science (section 5). (shrink)

Researchers in applied ethics, and some areas of bioethics particularly, aim to develop concrete and appropriate recommendations for action in morally relevant real-world situations. When proceeding from more abstract levels of ethical reasoning to such concrete recommendations, however, even with regard to the very same normative principle or norm, it seems possible to develop divergent or even contradictory recommendations for action regarding a certain situation. This may give the impression that such recommendations would be arbitrary and, hence, not well justified. (...) Against this background, we, first, aim at showing that ethical recommendations for action, although being contingent in some sense, are not arbitrary if developed appropriately. For this purpose, we examine two types of contingencies arising in applied ethics reasoning based on recent examples of recommendations for action in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, we refer to a three-step model of ethical reasoning towards recommendations for actions. This, however, leaves open the question of how applied ethics may cope with contingent recommendations for action. Therefore, in a second step, we analyze the role of bridge principles for developing ethically appropriate recommendations for action, i.e., principles which connect normative claims with relevant empirical information to justify certain recommendations for action in a given morally relevant situation. Finally, we discuss some implications for reasoning and reporting in empirically informed ethics. (shrink)

Academic publications of empirical public health research often entail recommendations for moral action that address practitioners and policy makers. These recommendations are regularly based on implicit moral judgments with the underlying reasons not explicitly stated. In this paper, we elaborate on the moral relevance of such judgments and the need to explain them in order to account for academic argumentation. We argue for an explicit reporting of bridge principles to increase the transparency of the reporting of public health research. The (...) reporting of bridge principles can inform readers, support them in understanding the relationship between empirical and normative claims in a specific paper, and may pave new ways for the rigorous reporting of empirical research that has moral implications. Furthermore, it can be used to classify studies to systematically address the justification for their argumentation. (shrink)

Needs play a key role in many fields of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, different conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a normatively relevant need) have been proposed. Many of them include (in one way or the other) needs for survival, decency, belonging, and autonomy. Little work has been done on how these kinds of needs are evaluated in terms of (...) their significance for distributive justice. To begin closing this gap, we investigate the role of the four aforementioned kinds of needs for impartial observers. We do so in two empirical studies. The first study asks participants to evaluate the importance of each of the four kinds of needs separately. We find that different levels of importance are attributed to the kinds of needs, which places them in a hierarchy. The second study asks participants to make distributive decisions. Results further support the hierarchy found in the first study and, additionally, reveal that participants tend to make coherent allocation decisions. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse how GPS-based navigation systems are transforming some of our intellectual virtues and then suggest two strategies to improve our practices regarding the use of such epistemic tools. We start by outlining the two main approaches in virtue epistemology, namely virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. We then discuss how navigation systems can undermine five epistemic virtues, namely memory, perception, attention, intellectual autonomy, and intellectual carefulness. We end by considering two possible interlinked ways of trying to remedy (...) this situation: [i] redesigning the epistemic tool to improve the epistemic virtues of memory, perception, and attention; and [ii] the cultivation of cognitive diligence for wayfinding tasks scaffolding intellectual autonomy and carefulness. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider two different attempts to make an end run around the experimentalist challenge to the armchair use of intuitions: one due to Max Deutsch and Herman Cappelen, contending that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions, but rather to arguments, in canonical philosophical texts; the other due to Joshua Knobe, arguing that intuitions are so stable that there is in fact no empirical basis for the experimentalist challenge in the first place. We show that a closer attention (...) to philosophical practices reveal, in turn, that we cannot make sense of these philosophical texts as arguments all the way down; and that our methods are so sensitive to error that even a modest amount of instability is enough to raise deep methodological concerns. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science are ontologically committed to a lush rainforest of special science entities ), but are often reticent about the criteria that determine which entities count as real. On the other hand, the metaphysics literature is much more forthcoming about such criteria, but often links ontological commitment to irreducibility. We argue that the irreducibility criteria are in tension with scientific realism: for example, they would exclude viruses, which are plausibly theoretically reducible and yet play a sufficiently important role (...) in scientific accounts of the world that they should be included in our ontology. In this paper, we show how the inhabitants of the rainforest can be inoculated against the eliminative threat of reduction: by demonstrating that they are emergent. According to our account, emergence involves a screening off condition as well as novelty. We go on to demonstrate that this account of emergence, which is compatible with theoretical reducibility, satisfies common intuitions concerning what should and shouldn't count as real: viruses are emergent, as are trouts and turkeys, but philosophically gerrymandered objects like trout-turkeys do not qualify. (shrink)

Background: Many people with aphasia and people without brain injury talk to themselves in their heads, i.e., have “inner speech.” Inner speech may be more preserved compared with spoken speech for some people with aphasia and may serve a variety of functions (e.g., emotion regulation), which motivates us to provide a high-fidelity characterization of it. Researchers have used multiple methods to measure this internal phenomenon in the past, which we combine here for the first time in a single study. -/- (...) Aims: We compare performance between individuals with and without aphasia on inner speech tasks that assess inner speech “inthe- moment” to general subjective impressions of inner speech to tease apart the relationship of aphasia severity to inner speech. Methods and Procedures: Twenty people with mild-moderate aphasia and twenty neurotypical controls completed several inner speech tasks, including objective silent rhyme judgements (picture, written, and auditory), subjective reports of inner speech during naming, and subjective rating scales about inner speech experience more generally. -/- Outcomes and Results: In-the-moment inner speech during silent rhyming tasks was associated with aphasia severity only for picture and written rhyming but not auditory rhyming. In-the-moment inner speech reports during silent naming were not associated with aphasia severity, nor were the subjective ratings about general inner speech experience. Individuals with and without aphasia demonstrated a variety of subjective general inner speech experiences, demonstrating heterogeneity of this phenomenon more broadly. -/- Conclusions: Methods of measuring inner speech complement each other and speak to different facets of the inner speech phenomenon, and clinicians and researchers must carefully choose the method(s) that will provide the information about inner speech that they desire. (shrink)

We examine the role of need satisfaction in non-comparative justice ratings about endowments with goods. As normative approaches, we discuss utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism. Using a vignette experiment, we show that a need context increases the prevalence of prioritarianistic and sufficientarianistic justice ratings, which leads to an ethically problematic sigmoid shape of the justice evaluation function.

Could it be true that even though we as a group ought to do something, you as an individual ought not to do your part? And under what conditions, in particular, could this happen? In this article, I discuss how a certain kind of case, introduced by David Copp, illustrates the possibility that you ought not to do your part even when you would be playing a crucial causal role in the group action. This is because you may have special (...) agent-relative reasons against participating that are not shared by the group as a whole. I defend the claim that these are indeed cases in which you ought not to do your part in what the group ought to do. I then argue that we can expect these cases to produce a troubling kind of rational conflict. (shrink)

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., a guard might accept (...) the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question. (shrink)

We report the results of a vignette study with an online sample of the German adult population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distribution decisions. We asked participants to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The study systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that (...) participants distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is partially compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is given a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of participants being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need. (shrink)

One shortcoming of the chain rule is that it does not iterate: it gives the derivative of f(g(x)), but not (directly) the second or higher-order derivatives. We present iterated differentials and a version of the multivariable chain rule which iterates to any desired level of derivative. We first present this material informally, and later discuss how to make it rigorous (a discussion which touches on formal foundations of calculus). We also suggest a finite calculus chain rule (contrary to Graham, Knuth (...) and Patashnik's claim that "there's no corresponding chain rule of finite calculus"). (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 601-607, July 2022. Ayelet Shachar's The Shifting Border deploys a powerful map metaphor to support rethinking of borders and their functions. I interrogate this metaphor, developing some of the representational, constructive, and normative functions of maps, along with their connections to legal mechanisms for decoupling migration from territory. I survey three responses to the extra-territorialization of migration: a cynical response that rejects the possibility of migration justice, an abolitionist response connected (...) to open borders, and a revisionist response that advocates for widescale institutional reform. The revisionist response illuminates how Shachar's essay challenges us to reflect on what sorts of maps and accompanying social and political organizations would best support migrant justice. (shrink)

Before, during, and after the global financial crisis of 2008, executive pay practices were widely debated and criticized. Economists, philosophers, as well as the man on the street all seem to have strong feelings towards how much, in what ways, and on what grounds executives are paid. This thesis asks whether it is possible to morally justify current executive pay practices and, if so, on what grounds they are justified. It questions those who find no quarrel with pay practices due (...) to their minimally moralized view of the market and – perhaps more importantly – it asks for a sophisticated critique from those who criticize current pay practices. The discussion on just pay is clearly one of distributive justice. One reason for why some people consider CEO pay practices to be (fairly) unproblematic while others find them objectionable stems from the availability of different understandings of, and principles for, just pay. We tend to associate justice in pay with such things as proper incentivization, being the outcome of a fair procedure, being deserved on the basis of effort or contribution, and/or satisfying the ideal of equality. Parts of this thesis are devoted to these different understandings and what they entail for the moral justification of CEO pay. Another reason for the conflicting views on CEO pay stems from how issues of justice go beyond the confines of economics and applied ethics, extending all the way into the domain of political philosophy. Parts of this thesis explore this connection, in particular how the concept of economic desert relates to the broader concept of moral desert. Lastly, I discuss the criticism that the superrich (including executives) are being paid too much and are in possession of too much wealth. The issue at hand here is how to morally justify the interventions that seem suitable to rectify the situation. (shrink)

James Mill - A Biography is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1882. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare (...) and historical knowledge for the future. (shrink)

A fundamental question asked in modal logic is whether a given theory is consistent. But consistent with what? A typical way to address this question identifies a choice of background knowledge axioms (say, S4, D, etc.) and then shows the assumptions codified by the theory in question to be consistent with those background axioms. But determining the specific choice and division of background axioms is, at least sometimes, little more than tradition. This paper introduces generic theories for propositional modal logic (...) to address consistency results in a more robust way. As building blocks for background knowledge, generic theories provide a standard for categorical determinations of consistency. We argue that the results and methods of this paper help to elucidate problems in epistemology and enjoy sufficient scope and power to have purchase on problems bearing on modalities in judgement, inference, and decision making. (shrink)

While it is a point of agreement in contemporary republican political theory that property ownership is closely connected to freedom as non-domination, surprisingly little work has been done to elucidate the nature of this connection or the constraints on property regimes that might be required as a result. In this paper, I provide a systematic model of the boundaries within which republican property systems must sit and explore some of the wider implications that thinking of property in these terms may (...) have for republicans. The boundaries I focus on relate to the distribution of property and the application of types of property claims over particular kinds of goods. I develop this model from those elements of non-domination most directly related to the operation of a property regime: (a) economic independence, (b) limiting material inequalities, and (c) the promotion of common goods. The limits that emerge from this analysis support intuitive judgments that animate much republican discussion of property distribution. My account diverges from much orthodox republican theory, though, in challenging the primacy of private property rights in the realization of economic independence. The value of property on republican terms can be realized without private ownership of the means of production. (shrink)

Inspired by recent progress in multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL), in this work we examine the collective intelligent behaviour of theoretical universal agents by introducing a weighted mixture operation. Given a weighted set of agents, their weighted mixture is a new agent whose expected total reward in any environment is the corresponding weighted average of the original agents' expected total rewards in that environment. Thus, if RL agent intelligence is quantified in terms of performance across environments, the weighted mixture's intelligence is (...) the weighted average of the original agents' intelligences. This operation enables various interesting new theorems that shed light on the geometry of RL agent intelligence, namely: results about symmetries, convex agent-sets, and local extrema. We also show that any RL agent intelligence measure based on average performance across environments, subject to certain weak technical conditions, is identical (up to a constant factor) to performance within a single environment dependent on said intelligence measure. (shrink)

We propose that, for the purpose of studying theoretical properties of the knowledge of an agent with Artificial General Intelligence (that is, the knowledge of an AGI), a pragmatic way to define such an agent’s knowledge (restricted to the language of Epistemic Arithmetic, or EA) is as follows. We declare an AGI to know an EA-statement φ if and only if that AGI would include φ in the resulting enumeration if that AGI were commanded: “Enumerate all the EA-sentences which you (...) know.” This definition is non-circular because an AGI, being capable of practical English communication, is capable of understanding the everyday English word “know” independently of how any philosopher formally defines knowledge; we elaborate further on the non-circularity of this circular-looking definition. This elegantly solves the problem that different AGIs may have different internal knowledge definitions and yet we want to study knowledge of AGIs in general, without having to study different AGIs separately just because they have separate internal knowledge definitions. Finally, we suggest how this definition of AGI knowledge can be used as a bridge which could allow the AGI research community to import certain abstract results about mechanical knowing agents from mathematical logic. (shrink)

In the study of modal and nonclassical logics, translations have frequently been employed as a way of measuring the inferential capabilities of a logic. It is sometimes claimed that two logics are “notational variants” if they are translationally equivalent. However, we will show that this cannot be quite right, since first-order logic and propositional logic are translationally equivalent. Others have claimed that for two logics to be notational variants, they must at least be compositionally intertranslatable. The definition of compositionality these (...) accounts use, however, is too strong, as the standard translation from modal logic to first-order logic is not compositional in this sense. In light of this, we will explore a weaker version of this notion that we will call schematicity and show that there is no schematic translation either from first-order logic to propositional logic or from intuitionistic logic to classical logic. (shrink)

We provide an intuitive motivation for the hyperreal numbers via electoral axioms. We do so in the form of a Socratic dialogue, in which Protagoras suggests replacing big-oh complexity classes by real numbers, and Socrates asks some troubling questions about what would happen if one tried to do that. The dialogue is followed by an appendix containing additional commentary and a more formal proof.

Hyperlogic is a hyperintensional system designed to regiment metalogical claims (e.g., “Intuitionistic logic is correct” or “The law of excluded middle holds”) into the object language, including within embedded environments such as attitude reports and counterfactuals. This paper is the first of a two-part series exploring the logic of hyperlogic. This part presents a minimal logic of hyperlogic and proves its completeness. It consists of two interdefined axiomatic systems: one for classical consequence (truth preservation under a classical interpretation of the (...) connectives) and one for “universal” consequence (truth preservation under any interpretation). The sequel to this paper explores stronger logics that are sound and complete over various restricted classes of models as well as languages with hyperintensional operators. (shrink)

Many authors have noted that there are types of English modal sentences cannot be formalized in the language of basic first-order modal logic. Some widely discussed examples include “There could have been things other than there actually are” and “Everyone who is actually rich could have been poor.” In response to this lack of expressive power, many authors have discussed extensions of first-order modal logic with two-dimensional operators. But claims about the relative expressive power of these extensions are often justified (...) only by example rather than by rigorous proof. In this paper, we provide proofs of many of these claims and present a more complete picture of the expressive landscape for such languages. (shrink)

We present a vignette study conducted with a quota sample of the German population (n = 400). Subjects had to redistribute a good between two hypothetical persons who contributed equally to the available amount but differed in quantity needed and the reason for their neediness. On a within-subjects level, we tested for the effects of need, accountability, and resource availability on their third-party distribution decisions. Between subjects, we further varied the kinds of needs: The persons either needed the good as (...) a means to survive, to live a decent life, to participate in society, or to be autonomous. Despite equal productivity, the mean share allocated to the needier person was significantly higher than an equal share. However, this share turned out significantly smaller when the needier person was accountable for needing more than the other. Nonetheless, even if accountable, the needier person still got a share larger than their contribution would suggest. When there was a surplus of resources, the needier person got an even higher share than when resources were scarce. (shrink)

In this volume, leading scholars present new and original essays to address controversies raised regarding the focus, structure and justification of the capabilities approach to equality.

The role that need plays in dealing with problems of distributive justice is examined in a series of vignette studies. Among other things, it becomes clear that impartial observers make gradual assessments of justice that depend on the extent to which the observed individuals are endowed with a good. If it is known how high their need for that good is, the assessments are made relative to this reference point. In addition, impartial decision-makers make hypothetical distribution decisions that take into (...) account need, productivity, and accountability. The need of individuals is partially compensated even if they have contributed less to the available amount than they themselves require. However, the willingness to do so decreases if they are accountable for needing more than others or for having contributed less than others. Lastly, both impartial observers and impartial decision-makers distinguish between different types of needs, the fulfillment of which is given different levels of importance. (shrink)

Bedürfnisse sind etwas, das uns als Menschen grundlegend bestimmt. Der vorliegende Band fasst eine Reihe von Vignettenstudien zusammen, in denen untersucht wird, welche Rolle Bedürfnisse im Umgang mit Problemen der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit spielen. Während sie in Diskussionen zur Verteilungsgerechtigkeit häufig eher unterrepräsentiert sind, wird hier gezeigt, dass sie eine fundamentale Bedeutung im Denken der Menschen haben. Es wird unter anderem deutlich, dass unparteiischen Beobachter*innen graduelle Gerechtigkeitseinschätzungen von Verteilungssituationen vornehmen, die davon abhängig sind, wie umfangreich die beobachteten Parteien mit einem Gut ausgestattet (...) sind. Wenn außerdem bekannt ist, wie hoch deren Bedarf an jenem Gut ist, finden die Einschätzungen relativ zu diesem Referenzpunkt statt. Außerdem werden in der Rolle von unparteiischen Entscheider*innen hypothetische Verteilungsentscheidungen getroffen, die den Bedarf, die Leistung sowie die Verantwortung der betroffenen Parteien berücksichtigen. Hierbei wird der Bedarf einer Partei auch dann zumindest teilweise kompensiert, wenn diese weniger zu der zur Verfügung stehenden Gütermenge beigetragen hat, als sie selbst benötigt. Die Bereitschaft, den Bedarf einer Partei teilweise zu kompensieren, sinkt jedoch, wenn sie dafür verantwortlich ist, mehr als andere zu benötigen oder weniger als andere beigetragen zu haben. Und sowohl in der Rolle von unparteiischen Beobachter*innen als auch in der Rolle von unparteiischen Entscheider*innen wird zwischen unterschiedlichen Bedarfsarten unterschieden, deren Erfüllung verschiedene Wichtigkeit beigemessen wird. (shrink)

Paradoxes evoke astonishment, confusion, and delight in the extraordinary. But that is not all: They point to fundamental problems of philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. This volume presents a number of the most important paradoxes from an analytical-philosophical perspective. -/- German abstract: Paradoxien rufen Staunen, Verwirrung und die Lust am Außergewöhnlichen hervor. Aber nicht nur das: Es sind Paradoxien, die bis heute auf Grundprobleme der Philosophie, der Mathematik sowie der Naturwissenschaften hinweisen und uns zu revolutionären Lösungsvorschlägen herausfordern. -/- Einige (...) Paradoxien markieren dabei vielleicht sogar unüberwindbare Grenzen unseres Wissens. Dieser Band stellt eine Reihe der wichtigsten Paradoxien – Paradoxien der Wahrheit, des Infiniten, der Bestätigung, der Vagheit, der Quantenmechanik, der Zeit, des Visuellen und des Auditiven – sowie Überlegungen zu allgemeinen Lösungswegen aus einer analytisch-philosophischen Perspektive vor. Dabei richtet er sich an interessierte Einsteiger in die Thematik, ohne den Gegenstand dabei zu sehr zu verkürzen. (shrink)

Nahezu jede naturwissenschaftliche Epoche befasste sich mit der Frage, ob oder unter welchen Umstanden der Mensch als willensfrei und mental verursachend beschrieben werden kann. Was zwischen Descartes, den Influxionisten, Husserl und der modernen Neurophysiologie zu verhandeln gewesen ware, will somit als Leit- und Grundmotiv der Fragen nach mentaler Verursachung und Willensfreiheit immer wieder in die Welt treten. Neu sind heute aber das Vokabular und die Daten, die der Gegenwartsdebatte ihre Gestalt verleihen. In diesem Zusammenhang wird insbesondere Libets Experiment zur Willkurmotorik (...) als empirisch eingelautetes "Ende der mentalen Verursachung" ins Treffen gefuhrt. In diesem Buch werden diese Befunde diskutiert und allgemeiner die Rolle, die das Bereitschaftspotential in Hinblick auf intentionale Handlungen einnimmt. Diese Diskussion zeigt, dass die freiheitsskeptische Deutung der Befunde von Libet (und einiger Nachfolgestudien) einer Analyse der Gesamtbefunde nicht standhalten kann. (shrink)