This volume gives an overview of the rising field of Experimental Ethics. It is organized into five main parts: PART I – Introduction: An Experimental Philosophy of Ethics? // PART II – Applied Experimental Ethics: Case studies // PART III – On Methodology // PART IV – Critical Reflections // PART V – Future Perspectives. Among the contributors: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Eric Schwitzgebel, Ezio di Nucci, Jacob Rosenthal, and Fernando Aguiar.

The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. We investigate the empirically accessible question of whether the imposition of harm by an agent is systematically judged differently when the agent is artificial and not human. The results of a laboratory experiment suggest that decision-makers can actually avoid punishment more easily by delegating to machines than by delegating (...) to other people. Our results imply that the availability of artificial agents could provide stronger incentives for decision-makers to delegate sensitive decisions. (shrink)

Departing from the claim that AI needs to be trustworthy, we find that ethical advice from an AI-powered algorithm is trusted even when its users know nothing about its training data and when they learn information about it that warrants distrust. We conducted online experiments where the subjects took the role of decision-makers who received advice from an algorithm on how to deal with an ethical dilemma. We manipulated the information about the algorithm and studied its influence. Our findings suggest (...) that AI is overtrusted rather than distrusted. We suggest digital literacy as a potential remedy to ensure the responsible use of AI. (shrink)

We explore aversion to the use of algorithms in moral decision-making. So far, this aversion has been explained mainly by the fear of opaque decisions that are potentially biased. Using incentivized experiments, we study which role the desire for human discretion in moral decision-making plays. This seems justified in light of evidence suggesting that people might not doubt the quality of algorithmic decisions, but still reject them. In our first study, we found that people prefer humans with decision-making discretion to (...) algorithms that rigidly apply exogenously given human-created fairness principles to specific cases. In the second study, we found that people do not prefer humans to algorithms because they appreciate flesh-and-blood decision-makers per se, but because they appreciate humans’ freedom to transcend fairness principles at will. Our results contribute to a deeper understanding of algorithm aversion. They indicate that emphasizing the transparency of algorithms that clearly follow fairness principles might not be the only element for fostering societal algorithm acceptance and suggest reconsidering certain features of the decision-making process. (shrink)

Teaching experiments are valuable when it comes to sensitizing students for business ethics that addresses the behavior of agents in modern societies. Many students are coined by the often predominantly individualistic ethical reasoning that they are accustomed to from their living environments. In our classes, we confront them with the volatility of their own ethical behavior by the use of experiments that ideally work with real incentives. We believe experiments to be a powerful tool not only to illustrate theoretical concepts, (...) but also to make students experience the compulsion of economic incentives first-hand. This may lead to the insight that one is more prone to the contingencies of the situation than expected. Experiments may make students question their own behavior and re-evaluate the implementability of their moral ideals - as consumers, citizens and managers. (shrink)

In this chapter, we present supporting arguments for the claim that Order Ethics is a school of thought within ethics which is especially open to empirical evidence. With its focus on order frameworks, i.e., incentive structures, Order Ethical advice automatically raises questions on implementability, efficacy, and efficiency of such recommended institutions, all of which are empirical questions to a good extent. We illustrate our arguments by presenting a small selection of experiments from economics that we consider highly informative for Order (...) Ethics. These experiments vary in their details but share one common theme: individual decision-making and its aggregate results are tested against the background of incentive structures. In particular, these studies provide first insights on how unregulated markets influence moral behavior over time, how trial-and-error experiences convince subjects to migrate to more efficient institutions, and how default rules can influence fundamental choices of people. We argue that Order Ethics, for which implementability of any moral claim is an essential requirement, can largely benefit from the use of such experimental methods. Finally, we suggest the provision of self-commitment devices as one example of smart policy design that avoids paternalistic intrusions into individual liberty. (shrink)

We address the considerations of the European Commission Expert Group on the ethics of connected and automated vehicles regarding data provision in the event of collisions. While human drivers’ appropriate post-collision behavior is clearly defined, regulations for automated driving do not provide for collision detection. We agree it is important to systematically incorporate citizens’ intuitions into the discourse on the ethics of automated vehicles. Therefore, we investigate whether people expect automated vehicles to behave like humans after an accident, even if (...) this behavior does not directly affect the consequences of the accident. We find that appropriate post-collision behavior substantially influences people’s evaluation of the underlying crash scenario. Moreover, people clearly think that automated vehicles can and should record the accident, stop at the site, and call the police. They are even willing to pay for technological features that enable post-collision behavior. Our study might begin a research program on post-collision behavior, enriching the empirically informed study of automated driving ethics that so far exclusively focuses on pre-collision behavior. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate about genetic engineering (GE) in food production. Supporters argue that it makes crops more resilient to stresses, such as drought or pests, and should be considered by researchers as a technology to address issues of global food security, whereas opponents put forward that GE crops serve only the economic interests of transnational agrifood-firms and have not yet delivered on their promises to address food shortage and nutrient supply. To address discourse failure regarding the GE debate, (...) research needs to understand better what drives the divergent positions and which moral attitudes fuel the mental models of GE supporters and opponents. Hence, this study investigates moral attitudes regarding GE opposition and support in Germany. Results show that GE opponents are significantly more absolutist than supporters and significantly less likely to hold outcome-based views. Furthermore, GE opponents are more willing to donate for preventing GE admission than supporters are willing to donate for promoting GE admission. Our results shed light on why the divide between opponents and supporters in the German GE debate could remain stark and stable for so long. (shrink)

Ethics is a field in which the gap between words and actions looms large. Game theory and the empirical methods it inspires look at behavior instead of the lip service people sometimes pay to norms. We believe that this special issue comprises several illustrations of the fruitful application of this approach to ethics.

In a representative vignette study in Germany with 1,653 respondents, we investigated laypeople’s attribution of moral responsibility in collaborative medical diagnosis. Specifically, we compare people’s judgments in a setting in which physicians are supported by an AI-based recommender system to a setting in which they are supported by a human colleague. It turns out that people tend to attribute moral responsibility to the artificial agent, although this is traditionally considered a category mistake in normative ethics. This tendency is stronger when (...) people believe that AI may become conscious at some point. In consequence, less responsibility is attributed to human agents in settings with hybrid diagnostic teams than in settings with human-only diagnostic teams. Our findings may have implications for behavior exhibited in contexts of collaborative medical decision making with AI-based as opposed to human recommenders because less responsibility is attributed to agents who have the mental capacity to care about outcomes. (shrink)

It would be unkind but not inaccurate to say that most experimental philosophy is just psychology with worse methods and better theories. In Experimental Ethics: Towards an Empirical Moral Philosophy, Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch, and Matthias Uhl set out to make this comparison less invidious and more flattering. Their book has 16 chapters, organized into five sections and bookended by the editors’ own introduction and prospectus. Contributors hail from four countries (Germany, USA, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and five (...) disciplines (philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, economics, and sociology). While the chapters are of mixed quality and originality, there are several fine contributions to the field. These especially include Stephan Wolf and Alexander Lenger’s sophisticated attempt to operationalize the Rawlsian notion of a veil of ignorance, Nina Strohminger et al.’s survey of the methods available to experimental ethicists for studying implicit morality, Fernando Aguiar et al.’s exploration of the possibility of operationalizing reflective equilibrium in the lab, and Nikil Mukerji’s careful defusing of three debunking arguments about the reliability of philosophical intuitions. (shrink)

Über Jahrhunderte hatten Ärzte die Aufgabe, Krankheiten zu verhindern und zu behandeln. Nun stehen sie immer häufiger im Dienst der Selbstverwirklichung und Lebensplanung gesunder Menschen, besonders in der Fortpflanzungsmedizin und der ästhetischen Chirurgie. Welche Konsequenzen hat dies für die Zukunft der Medizin? Die Autoren beleuchten diesen Wandel von der krankheitsbekämpfenden zur wunscherfüllenden Medizin unter ärztlichen, rechtlichen und ethischen Aspekten.

Traditionally, the manufacturer/operator of a machine is held (morally and legally) responsible for the consequences of its operation. Autonomous, learning machines, based on neural networks, genetic algorithms and agent architectures, create a new situation, where the manufacturer/operator of the machine is in principle not capable of predicting the future machine behaviour any more, and thus cannot be held morally responsible or liable for it. The society must decide between not using this kind of machine any more (which is not a (...) realistic option), or facing a responsibility gap, which cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility ascription. (shrink)

Alois Riehl was one of the few Kantian-inspired philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who argued for a realist approach to Kant’s original doctrine. He therefore rejected prevailing idealist reconstructions and attempted to establish a view of Kant as an important forerunner of what he programmatically called ‘critical realism.’ In the present paper it will be shown what this exactly meant for the interpretation of Kant’s and especially Riehl’s own critique of idealism as a systematic position. In (...) particular, it is stated that anti-idealism in Riehlian terms amounts to a ‘realistic rehabilitation’ of Kantian things-in-themselves. Furthermore, some connections are drawn to early-twentieth century American realism. (shrink)

:In a recent paper in Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics on the necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research David DeGrazia and Jeff Sebo claim that the key requirements for morally responsible animal research are an assertion of sufficient net benefit, a worthwhile-life condition, and a no-unnecessary-harm condition. With regards to the assertion of sufficient net benefit, the authors claim that morally responsible research offers unique benefits to humans that outweigh the costs and harms to humans and animals. In this (...) commentary we will raise epistemic, practical, and ethical challenges to DeGrazia and Sebo’s emphasis on benefits in the prospective assessment of research studies involving animals. We do not disagree with DeGrazia and Sebo that, at the theoretical level, the benefits of research justify our using animals. Our contribution intends to clarify, at the practical level, how we should understand benefits in the prospective assessment and moral justification of animal research. We argue that ASNB should be understood as an assessment of Expectation of Knowledge Production in the prospective assessment and justification of animal research. EKP breaks down into two further claims: that morally responsible research generates knowledge worth having and that morally responsible research is designed and executed to produce generalizable knowledge. We understand the condition called knowledge worth having as scientists’ testing a hypothesis that, whether verified or falsified, advances an important interest, and production of generalizable knowledge in terms of scientific integrity. Generalizable knowledge refers to experimental results that generalize to a larger population beyond the animals studied. Generalizable scientific knowledge is reliable, replicable, and accurately descriptive. In sum, morally responsible research will be designed and carefully executed to successfully test a hypothesis that, whether verified or falsified, advances important interests. Our formulation of EKP, crucially, does not require further showing that an experiment involving animals will produce societal benefits. (shrink)

A major part of philosophical work is engagement with argumentative texts. Engaging with an argumentative text involves correctly identifying the arguments presented in this text. In the context of teaching philosophy in school, the difficulty of correctly identifying arguments in philosophical texts is often underestimated. In this paper, I focus on one specific problem with argument identification that has been neglected in philosophy didactics thus far: the problem that there are many non-argumentative phenomena in an argumentative text that are easily (...) misidentified as expressing (part of) an argument. It is easy to fall for such phenomena if one is not aware of this problem, thereby misinterpreting the author’s intentions. This paper aims to present and discuss such phenomena, as well as to provide guidelines on how to help students recognize them. (shrink)

The main claim of this paper is that notions of implementation based on an isomorphic correspondence between physical and computational states are not tenable. Rather, ``implementation'' has to be based on the notion of ``bisimulation'' in order to be able to block unwanted implementation results and incorporate intuitions from computational practice. A formal definition of implementation is suggested, which satisfies theoretical and practical requirements and may also be used to make the functionalist notion of ``physical realization'' precise. The upshot of (...) this new definition of implementation is that implementation cannot distinguish isomorphic bisimilar from non-isomporphic bisimilar systems anymore, thus driving a wedge between the notions of causal and computational complexity. While computationalism does not seem to be affected by this result, the consequences for functionalism are not clear and need further investigations. (shrink)

The main claim of this paper is that notions of implementation based on an isomorphic correspondence between physical and computational states are not tenable. Rather, ``implementation'' has to be based on the notion of ``bisimulation'' in order to be able to block unwanted implementation results and incorporate intuitions from computational practice. A formal definition of implementation is suggested, which satisfies theoretical and practical requirements and may also be used to make the functionalist notion of ``physical realization'' precise. The upshot of (...) this new definition of implementation is that implementation cannot distinguish isomorphic bisimilar from non-isomporphic bisimilar systems anymore, thus driving a wedge between the notions of causal and computational complexity. While computationalism does not seem to be affected by this result, the consequences for functionalism are not clear and need further investigations. (shrink)

This volume explores the relation between legal reasoning and logic from both a historical and a systematic perspective. The topics addressed include, among others, conditional legal acts, disjunctions in legal acts, presumptions and conjectures, conflicts of values, Jørgensen´s Dilemma, the Rhetor´s Dilemma, the theory of legal fictions and the categorization of contracts. The unifying problematic of these contributions concerns the conditional structures and, more particularly, the relationship between legal theory and legal reasoning in the context of conditions.

Opponents to consciousness in fish argue that fish do not feel pain because they do not have a neocortex, which is a necessary condition for feeling pain. A common counter-argument appeals to the multiple realizability of pain: while a neocortex might be necessary for feeling pain in humans, pain might be realized differently in fish. This paper argues, first, that it is impossible to find a criterion allowing us to demarcate between plausible and implausible cases of multiple realization of pain (...) without running into a circular argument. Second, opponents to consciousness in fish cannot be provided with reasons to believe in the multiple realizability of pain. I conclude that the debate on the existence of pain in fish is impossible to settle by relying on the multiple realization argument. (shrink)

Studying consciousness requires contrasting conscious and unconscious perception. While many studies have reported unconscious perceptual effects, recent work has questioned whether such effects are genuinely unconscious, or whether they are due to weak conscious perception. Some philosophers and psychologists have reacted by denying that there is such a thing as unconscious perception, or by holding that unconscious perception has been previously overestimated. This article has two parts. In the first part, I argue that the most significant attack on unconscious perception (...) commits the criterion content fallacy: the fallacy of interpreting evidence that observers were conscious of something as evidence that they were conscious of the task-relevant features of the stimuli. In the second part, I contend that the criterion content fallacy is prevalent in consciousness research. For this reason, I hold that if unconscious perception exists, scientists studying consciousness could routinely underestimate it. I conclude with methodological recommendations for moving the debate forward. (shrink)

According to William Alston, we lack voluntary control over our propositional attitudes because we cannot believe intentionally, and we cannot believe intentionally because our will is not causally connected to belief formation. Against Alston, I argue that we can believe intentionally because our will is causally connected to belief formation. My defense of this claim is based on examples in which agents have reasons for and against believing p, deliberate on what attitude to take towards p, and subsequently acquire an (...) attitude A towards p because they have decided to take attitude A. From the possibility of intentional belief, two conclusions follow. First, the kind of control we have over our propositional attitudes is direct; it is possible for us to believe at will. Second, the question of whether what we believe is under our control ultimately depends on whether our will itself is under our control. It is, therefore, a question of the metaphysics of free will. (shrink)

Transdisciplinarity includes the assumption that within new institutional settings, scientific research becomes more closely responsive to practical problems and user needs and is therefore often subject to considerable application pressure. This raises the question whether transdisciplinarity affects the epistemic standards and the fruitfulness of research. Case studies show how user-orientation and epistemic innovativeness can be combined. While the modeling involved in all cases under consideration was local and focused primarily on features of immediate practical relevance, it was informed by theoretical (...) insights from basic research. Conversely, industrial research turns out sometimes to produce theoretical understanding. These findings highlight an interactive relationship between science and technology (moderate emergentism), which is distinct from the traditional view of a one-sided dependence of technology on science (cascade model) and from the newly received independence account (emergentism). (shrink)

Traditionally, the manufacturer/operator of a machine is held (morally and legally) responsible for the consequences of its operation. Autonomous, learning machines, based on neural networks, genetic algorithms and agent architectures, create a new situation, where the manufacturer/operator of the machine is in principle not capable of predicting the future machine behaviour any more, and thus cannot be held morally responsible or liable for it. The society must decide between not using this kind of machine any more (which is not a (...) realistic option), or facing a responsibility gap, which cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility ascription. (shrink)

As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, i.e., the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure. I focus on the case of the Perceptual Awareness Scale to illustrate how ignoring this problem leads to ambiguous interpretations of subjective reports in consciousness science. In turn, I show that empirical results based on this measurement procedure might be systematically misinterpreted.

In this paper, I argue that the rejection of doxastic voluntarism is not as straightforward as its opponents take it to be. I begin with a critical examination of William Alston's defense of involuntarism and then focus on the question of whether belief is intentional.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Does It Mean to "Speak Truth to Power"?Christian UhlPolitical Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity. By Christopher S. Goto-Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. 192.Ever since the end of the "Great East Asian War" in Japan a debate has been smoldering over the contamination of philosophy by politics. This debate was sparked by a series of writings through which the "father of Japanese (...) philosophy," Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), and some thinkers affiliated with him—the so-called Kyoto School—became involved in the politics connected with the war to establish a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." The debate over Nishida and the Kyoto School has repeatedly been overshadowed by the debate over Heidegger. Aside from the strategic considerations of those engaged in the prosecution of the Kyoto School, one reason for the "Heidegger factor"1 may have something to do with the fact that philosophical parallels can indeed be drawn between Nishida and Heidegger, and that there are also direct links between Nishida and some of his disciples who studied in Germany. Questions concerning Heidegger's political engagement are still explosive, even twenty years after Farias' attempt to prove Heidegger's entanglement with National Socialism. The publication of Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger—L'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie has fired up the debate in French philosophical circles.2 And in the debate concerning Nishida and the Kyoto School there is also recent news: the publication of Christopher S. Goto-Jones' ambitious study Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co Prosperity."Every inquiry," Heidegger says, "is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought for."3 Goto-Jones' inquiry seeks to explain the nature of Nishida's political engagement in the 1930s and 1940s, and his inquiry is guided by the conviction that Nishida should be exonerated from the charges regarding his alleged complicity with a Japanese wartime regime that was at least militarist if not "fascist." However, the declared intention of Goto-Jones' study is not just another exoneration of Nishida. Goto-Jones contends that Nishida, influenced "particularly [by] Kant" (p. 7), has left behind a still relevant political philosophy that, as some other authors have argued,4 is not only not tainted by any form of narrow-minded nationalism but also provides a philosophical framework for a theory of a globalizing, multicentered, intercultural world:Hence, for Nishida, the nation should not be a rigid institutional structure or an artificially... constructed culture, but rather a moral personality formed through the mutual self-determination [End Page 469] determination of its constituents and in a dynamic relationship with other nations. International relations should be characterized by the development of greater levels of unity, as nations creatively interact with each other, producing public goods and increasing the similarities in their personalities, thus decreasing the salience of their national boundaries. In this model, nationalism, like egoism, becomes a nonsense.(p. 134 n)This political model is what Goto-Jones seeks to recover in Nishida, and this recovery is "what is really intended" (Heidegger) by his book.5Nishida's political philosophy needs to be recovered, because it is buried under false accusations and misunderstandings, produced primarily by Nishida's detractors, whose criticism, as Goto-Jones suggests, is in most cases at best based on a rough selection of citations, torn out of the coherence of their original context. Nishida's defenders, on the other hand, have attempted to safeguard the philosopher against the arguments of his critics by simply calling him a "liberal," a seemingly agreeable but in fact rather misleading label. Furthermore, Nishida's defenders have based their arguments only on biographical material, diary entries, letters, and so on. While the apologists "are right to observe a contradiction between... [Nishida's] private condemnation of the regime and his apparent public complicity, this is not in itself enough to conclude that his public writings meant the opposite of what they seem to say" (p. 4).In fact, this conclusion by Nishida's apologists does raise certain questions. Why did Nishida never give vent to his divergent opinions? Should he not rather have remained... (shrink)

In this paper, I shall discuss several topics related to Frege’s paradigms of second-order abstraction principles and his logicism. The discussion includes a critical examination of some controversial views put forward mainly by Robin Jeshion, Tyler Burge, Crispin Wright, Richard Heck and John MacFarlane. In the introductory section, I try to shed light on the connection between logical abstraction and logical objects. The second section contains a critical appraisal of Frege’s notion of evidence and its interpretation by Jeshion, the introduction (...) of the course-of-values operator and Frege’s attitude towards Axiom V, in the expression of which this operator occurs as the key primitive term. Axiom V says that the course-of-values of the function f is identical with the course-of-values of the function g if and only if f and g are coextensional. In the third section, I intend to show that in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) Frege hardly could have construed Hume’s Principle (HP) as a primitive truth of logic and used it as an axiom governing the cardinality operator as a primitive sign. HP expresses that the number of Fs is identical with the number of Gs if and only if F and G are equinumerous. In the fourth section, I argue that Wright falls short of making a convincing case for the alleged analyticity of HP. In the final section, I canvass Heck’s arguments for his contention that Frege knew he could deduce the simplest laws of arithmetic from HP without invoking Axiom V. I argue that they do not carry conviction. I conclude this section by rejecting an interpretation concerning HP suggested by MacFarlane. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall discuss several topics related to Frege's paradigms of second-order abstraction principles and his logicism. The discussion includes a critical examination of some controversial views put forward mainly by Robin Jeshion, Tyler Burge, Crispin Wright, Richard Heck and John MacFarlane. In the introductory section, I try to shed light on the connection between logical abstraction and logical objects. The second section contains a critical appraisal of Frege's notion of evidence and its interpretation by Jeshion, the introduction (...) of the course-of-values operator and Frege's attitude towards Axiom V, in the expression of which this operator occurs as the key primitive term. Axiom V says that the course-of-values of the function f is identical with the course-of-values of the function g if and only if f and g are coextensional. In the third section, I intend to show that in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik Frege hardly could have construed Hume's Principle as a primitive truth of logic and used it as an axiom governing the cardinality operator as a primitive sign. HP expresses that the number of Fs is identical with the number of Gs if and only if F and G are equinumerous. In the fourth section, I argue that Wright falls short of making a convincing case for the alleged analyticity of HP. In the final section, I canvass Heck's arguments for his contention that Frege knew he could deduce the simplest laws of arithmetic from HP without invoking Axiom V. I argue that they do not carry conviction. I conclude this section by rejecting an interpretation concerning HP suggested by MacFarlane. (shrink)

Consciousness scientists have not reached consensus on two of the most central questions in their field: first, on whether consciousness overflows reportability; second, on the physical basis of consciousness. I review the scientific literature of the 19th century to provide evidence that disagreement on these questions has been a feature of the scientific study of consciousness for a long time. Based on this historical review, I hypothesize that a unifying explanation of disagreement on these questions, up to this day, is (...) that scientific theories of consciousness are underdetermined by the evidence, namely, that they can be preserved “come what may” in front of (seemingly) disconfirming evidence. Consciousness scientists may have to find a way of solving the persistent underdetermination of theories of consciousness to make further progress. (shrink)

"Rechtsphilosophie zwischen Ost und West" ist das erste Buch, das systematisch das frA1/4he Werk des bedeutenden chinesischen Rechtsgelehrten, Richters, Diplomaten und Schriftstellers John C.H. Wu (1899-1986) behandelt. Die Arbeit setzt sich in chronologischer Reihenfolge kritisch mit den VerAffentlichungen Wus im Zeitraum von 1921 bis 1936 auseinander. Wu, spAter Verfechter einer dynamischen Naturrechtslehre, versucht, die mehr pragmatisch-funktionale Rechtsauffassung der fA1/4hrenden amerikanischen Rechtsgelehrten mit dem von Kant geprAgten Denken R. Stammlers zu einer inneren Begegnung zu bringen. Gleichzeitig ist die Thematik chinesischen Rechtsdenkens (...) und Philosophierens immer gegenwArtig. Die Arbeit legt ein besonderes Augenmerk auf den EinfluA von Wus kulturellem Hintergrund auf die Auseinandersetzung mit westlichem Denken und umgekehrt auf den EinfluA seiner westlichen Ausbildung auf seine Analyse der chinesischen Gedankenwelt. Das Buch will verstArkt auf diesen wichtigen Denker aufmerksam machen und den Grundstein fA1/4r eine wissenschafliche Auseinandersetzung mit ihm legen. Der Leser bekommt nicht nur einen interessanten Einblick in die zeitgeschichtlichen, rechtsphilosophischen Auseinandersetzungen, er bekommt auf einem wenig begangenen Weg Zugang zur chinesischen Kultur. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno is a widely-studied figure, but most often with regard to his work on cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics. The Sociology of Theodor Adorno provides the first thorough English-language account of Adorno's sociological thinking. Matthias Benzer reads Adorno's sociology through six major themes: the problem of conceptualising capitalist society; empirical research; theoretical analysis; social critique; the sociological text; and the question of the non-social. Benzer explains the methodological and theoretical ideas informing Adorno's reflections on sociology and illustrates Adorno's (...) approach to examining social life, including astrology, sexual taboos and racial prejudice. Benzer clarifies Adorno's sociology in relation to his work in other disciplines and the inspiration his sociology took from social thinkers such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Kracauer and Benjamin. The book raises critical questions about the viability of Adorno's sociological mode of procedure and its potential contributions and challenges to current debates in social science. (shrink)

In: M. Carrier, D. Howard & J. Kourany (eds), Science and the Social: Knowledge, Epistemic Demands, and Social Values, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (im Erscheinen).

Rational drug design is a method for developing new pharmaceuticals that typically involves the elucidation of fundamental physiological mechanisms. It thus combines the quest for a scientific understanding of natural phenomena with the design of useful technology and hence integrates epistemic and practical aims of research and development. Case studies of the rational design of the cardiovascular drugs propranolol, captopril and losartan provide insights into characteristics and conditions of this integration. Rational drug design became possible in the 1950s when theoretical (...) knowledge of drug-target interaction and experimental drug testing could interlock in cycles of mutual advancement. The integration does not, however, diminish the importance of basic research for pharmaceutical development. Rather, it can be shown that still in the 1990s, linear processes of innovation and the close combination of practical and epistemic work were interdependent. (shrink)

It has been suggested that a rational being stands in what is called a “second-personal relation” to herself. According to philosophers like S. Darwall and Ch. Korsgaard, being a rational agent is to interact with oneself, to make demands on oneself. The thesis of the paper is that this view rests on a logical confusion. Transitive verbs like “asking”, “making a demand” or “obligating” can occur with the reflexive pronoun, but it is a mistake to assume that the reflexive and (...) the non-reflexive use exhibit the same logical grammar. The thesis that they do is in part motivated by the assumption that to show that my relation to you bears the same form as my practical self-relation is to show that, fundamentally, you are not an object for me to think about and act on, but a subject with whom to think and act together. I argue, to the contrary, that if my addressing you exhibited the same form as a relation I could literally be said to stand in to myself, then the nexus between us would be such that I am irretr.. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic and up-to-date account of the landscape of contemporary epistemology. It presupposes only a minimum of prior philosophical knowledge, and includes an account of the logical and conceptual tools needed for philosophical analysis. Focuses on the writings and ideas of W. Alston, R. Audi, L. BonJour, R. Chisholm, A. Goldman. H. Kornboith, K. Lehrer. A. Plantinga, W. V. Quine, E. Sosa, and B Stroud, among others; links particular theories and arguments to their chief proponents and critics.