In social cognition, knowledge-based validation of information is usually regarded as relying on strategic and resource-demanding processes. Research on language comprehension, in contrast, suggests that validation processes are involved in the construction of a referential representation of the communicated information. This view implies that individuals can use their knowledge to validate incoming information in a routine and efficient manner. Consistent with this idea, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that individuals are able to reject false assertions efficiently when they have validity-relevant (...) beliefs. Validation processes were carried out routinely even when individuals were put under additional cognitive load during comprehension. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the rejection of false information occurs automatically and interferes with affirmative responses in a nonsemantic task. Experiment 4 also revealed complementary interference effects of true information with negative responses in a nonsemantic task. These results suggest the existence of fast and efficient validation processes that protect mental representations from being contaminated by false and inaccurate information. (shrink)

Although Walter Benjamin's writings are considered to be among the most powerful theoretical enterprises of the twentieth century, his ideas are resistant to cooptation by the doctrines of various critical programs. These essays engage this resistance by examining the ghostly in Benjamin's work. The contributors show that the haunting truths Benjamin offers point towards new forms of responsibility. These truths reside in a figurative elsewhere, a ghostly space that his texts delimit but never fully inhabit, and these essays seek to (...) do justice to the ghosts of Benjamin. Issues explored include: the status of the image in Benjamin's literary reflections and in his meditations on cinema and visual culture; abiding Benjaminian notions of messianism, aura, reproducibility, semblance, and melancholy; Benjamin's relation to Freud; his innovative rethinking of history, virtuality, and translation; and his reflections on tragedy and prophecy, the geometrical dimensions of writing, and the relation between eros and language. (shrink)

Published posthumously in 1908, Ecce Homo was written in 1888 and completed just a few weeks before Nietzsche’s complete mental collapse. Its outrageously egotistical review of the philosopher’s life and works—featuring chapters called Why I Am So Wise and Why I Write Such Good Books—are redeemed from mere arrogance by masterful language and ever-relevant ideas. In addition to settling scores with his many personal and philosophical enemies, Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of questioning traditional morality, establishing autonomy, and making a commitment (...) to creativity. Essential reading for students of philosophy, this unique memoir is crucial to an understanding of Nietzsche’s other works. (shrink)

Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking study argues that the concept of "afterness" is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to "follow" something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, (...) is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred? The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Kant, Kafka, Heidegger, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno, Arendt, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed "after Auschwitz." The study's various analyses—across a heterogeneous collection of modern writers and thinkers, diverse historical moments of articulation, and a range of media—conspire to illuminate Lyotard's apodictic statement that "after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the 'after.'" As Richter's intricate study demonstrates, much hinges on our interpretation of the "after." After all, our most fundamental assumptions concerning modern aesthetic representation, conceptual discourse, community, subjectivity, and politics are at stake. (shrink)

Introduction : the art of reading -- Adorno and the uncoercive gaze -- Buried possibility : Adorno and Arendt on tradition -- The inheritance of the constellation : Adorno and Hegel -- Judging by refraining from judgment : Adorno's artwork and its Einordnung -- The literary artwork between word and concept : Adorno and Agamben reading Kafka -- The artwork without cardinal direction : notes on orientation in Adorno -- False life, living on : Adorno with Derrida -- Conclusion : (...) a kind of leave-thinking. (shrink)

Reinhart Koselleck is among the most original German theorists of history and historiography. His international reputation is due in part to his contributions as theorist and editor of the remarkable lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (GG). The GG is an exceptional reference work that goes far towards realizing Koselleck's program and distinctive version of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts, conceptual history). What is presented here is a translation in full of Koselleck's own entry on Krise (crisis). Few articles in the GG demonstrate (...) more successfully Koselleck's theoretical concerns, his method, and innovative use of sources. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno's multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. His analysis of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives "after Auschwitz," of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the manipulation of consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly-conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human suffering, (...) all speak to central concerns of our time. The essays collected here analyze the full range of implications emanating from Adorno's demand that the task of critical thinking be to imagine a mode of being in the world that occurs in and through a language that has liberated itself from the spell of an alleged historical and political inevitability, what he once tellingly called a "language without soil." Adorno' s finely chiseled sentences perform a ceaseless gesture of thoughtful vigilance, a vigilance understood not in the sense of moralizing or ethical normativity but of a rigorous attention to the presuppositions of thinking itself. The volume's fresh readings conspire to yield a refractory and unorthodox Adorno, a suggestive and at times infuriating thinker of the first order, whose intellectual gestures sponsor politically conscious modes of theoretical speculation in a late modernity that may still have a future because its language and aspirations are without soil. Also included is an annotated translation of a seminal interview Adorno gave in 1969 concerning the relationship of Critical Theory to political activism. In it, the dialectical interplay between thought and action forcefully emerges. (shrink)

Discussions of reproducibility are casting doubts on the credibility of experimental outcomes in the life sciences. Although experimental evolution is not typically included in these discussions, this field is also subject to low reproducibility, partly because of the inherent contingencies affecting the evolutionary process. A received view in experimental studies more generally is that standardization (i.e., rigorous homogenization of experimental conditions) is a solution to some issues of significance and internal validity. However, this solution hides several difficulties, including a reduction (...) of external validity and reproducibility. After explaining the meaning of these two notions in the context of experimental evolution, we import from the fields of animal research and ecology and suggests that systematic heterogenization of experimental factors could prove a promising alternative. We also incorporate into our analysis some philosophical reflections on the nature and diversity of research objectives in experimental evolution. (shrink)

Twenty years ago, the biopsychosocial model was proposed by George Engel to be the new paradigm for medicine and psychiatry. The model assumed a hierarchical structure of the biological, psychological and social system and simple interactions between the participating systems. This article holds the thesis that the original biopsychosocial model cannot depict psychiatry's reality and problems. The clinical validity of the biopsychosocial model has to be questioned. It is argued that psychiatric interventions can only stimulate but not determine their target (...) systems, because intervention and outcome are only loosely coupled. Thus, psychiatric interventions have in principle limited ranges which differ according to the type of intervention and according to the system to be stimulated. Psychosocial interventions face far more obstacles to be overcome than psychopharmacogical therapy. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe's paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ 1 seems clearly to have failed in its task. Kurt Baier describes the paper as ‘widely discussed and much admired’ 2 and Peter Winch has called one of its three theses ‘enormously influential’ 3 within moral philosophy.

To examine the ethical issues involved in governmental decisions with potential health risks, we review the history of the decision to raise the interurban speed limit in Israel in light of its impact on road death and injury. In 1993, the Israeli Ministry of Transportation initiated an “experiment” to raise the interurban speed limit from 90 to 100 kph. The “experiment” did not include a protocol and did not specify cut-off points for early termination in the case of adverse results. (...) After the raise in the speed limit, the death toll on interurban roads rose as a result of a sudden increase in speeds and case fatality rates. The committee's decision is a case study in unfettered human experimentation and public health risks when the setting is non-medical and lacks a defined ethical framework. The case study states the case for extending Helsinki type safeguards to experimentation in non-medical settings. (shrink)

Objectives—The study was performed in order to investigate how end-of-life decisions are influenced by cultural and sociopolitical circumstances and to explore the compliance of doctors with patient wishesParticipants and measurement—Five hundred and thirty-five physicians were surveyed in Sweden , Germany , and in Russia by a questionnaire. The participants were recruited according to availability and are not representative. The questionnaire is based on the one developed by Molloy and co-workers in Canada which contains three case vignettes about an 82-year-old Alzheimer (...) patient with an acute life-threatening condition; the questionnaire includes different levels of information about his treatment wishes. We have added various questions about attitudes determining doctors' decision making process .Results—Swedish physicians chose fewer life-prolonging interventions as compared with the Russian and the German doctors. Swedish physicians would perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the event of a cardiac arrest less frequently, followed by the German doctors. More than half the Russian physicians decided to perform CPR irrespective of the available information about the patient's wishes. Level of dementia emerged as the most powerful determining attitude-variable for the decision making in all three countries.Conclusions—The lack of compliance with patient wishes among a substantial number of doctors points to the necessity of emphasising ethical aspects both in medical education and clinical practice. The inconsistency in the treatment decisions of doctors from different countries calls for social consensus in this matter. (shrink)

Rule-following is a normative doing and therefore needs to be reconsidered in a metaethical framework. Rule-following will be discussed in the light of cognitivism and non-cognitivism. It will be shown that neither cognitivism nor non-cognitivism are sufficiently good accounts for conceptualizing rule-following, because they are held captive by a quasi-mechanistical picture of rule-following. This idea stems from Stanley Cavell´s and John McDowell´s approach to rule-following. McDowell appeals to the idea that we participate in “shared forms of life” and therefore are (...) able to follow rules correctly. I believe that his quietist view can be amplified by conceptualizing different modes of following a rule. We can also follow a rule e.g. ironically and still grasp the conceptual content of the rule adequately. (shrink)

The relevance of Wittgenstein for ethics depends on which Wittgenstein we mean. I argue that we should distinguish not only between Wittgenstein's personal opinions and his philosophy, but also, within his philosophical work, between broadly methodological remarks and what Wittgenstein might call genuinely philosophical remarks (which are not about philosophy but try to bring clarity to the mind bewitched by language). Wittgenstein's personal opinions will be considered irrelevant by most philosophers (although I try to show that they are not as (...) crazy as some people might think), and his philosophical remarks consist only of what he calls ?boring truisms?. It is to his methodology, therefore, that we might expect philosophers to look for ethical implications. If that methodology is well conceived, though, it should be ethically neutral. I argue that it is neutral in this way, that Wittgensteinian philosophy says nothing about ethics, but that its proper use will not likely leave our philosophical beliefs about ethics unscathed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Benjamin ReduxGerhard RichterProfane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen; 271 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00 cloth, $14.00 paper.Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, by John McCole; xiii & 329 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.Walter Benjamin’s Passages, by Pierre Missac, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson; xvii & 221 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, $25.00.Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: (...) Destruction and Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne; xiv & 298 pp. London: Routledge, 1994, $65.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success,” writes Emerson in his 1860 essay “Culture.” 1 Perhaps at no point since the publication of Emerson’s essay has the diagnosis it advances been more relevant than today, some 136 years later, when “Culture,” at least in the methodological and political struggles within the academy, has again become the word of ambition. As in Emerson’s nineteenth-century America, those who today pursue that word most ardently also tend—in their struggle to explicate history and culture—to shy away from the persistent instability of meaning with which the texts that they take as their objects of study are vexed. In other words, they are afraid of earthquakes. For Emerson continues: [End Page 200] “There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your word, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.” 2It has become one of the methodological orthodoxies of the new contextualism, the increasingly prominent engine driving a continuing metamorphosis of what is perhaps no longer usefully called “Humanities,” to posit a relatively transparent, unproblematic relationship between a textual artifact and its larger cultural or historical context. It is precisely this complex relationship between text and culture—and the theoretical possibility of doing justice to it—that this review of four new publications on Walter Benjamin will revisit.The urgent promise to think through the complicated relationship between text and culture, between the idiomatic artifact and its historical formation, has yet to be fulfilled. How does one account for the singularity of a specific instance of signification, be it a literary text, a film, or a neon sign, articulating the relationship between it and the cultural paradigm that gave rise to it and to which it gave rise? How might one talk about a text’s historicity without forcing a hasty assimilation of it into a crudely mimetic model? One way out of the difficulty, of course, is to suppress the vicissitudes of language altogether, with an eye to hastening the assimilation of a text, seen primarily as illustrative or evidential material, into pre-established assumptions. An example of such a dissatisfactory answer can be found in the introduction to a recent programmatic publication, in which the editors triumphantly proclaim: “Thus, for example, although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required.” 3 A marked dislike of earthquakes is at work here. What is more, the logic of such a statement goes as follows: because close reading is no longer necessary, it is dispensable, and therefore eventually no longer performed at all. One is tempted to invoke the famous language of Kafka’s chaplain in The Trial who reprimands Joseph K. for his failure to read closely: “You have not enough respect for writing and you are altering the story.” 4Such methodological difficulties only get worse when one considers the particular problem posed to scholarship by the case of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish critic, writer, and philosopher now widely regarded as one of the most significant theorists of our century. On the [End Page 201] one... (shrink)

In defeasible reasoning, initially drawn conclusions can be withdrawn in light of new information. In this paper, we examine how the conclusions drawn from conditionals describing positive or negative situations can be defeated by subsequent negative or positive information, respectively. Participants were confronted with conditionals of the form “If [situation], then I am happy/sad” which were either followed by no additional information or by additional information describing situations of the same or the opposite valence. The participant's task was to decide (...) on a question asking for a possible conclusion (“Am I happy?” vs. “Am I sad?”). We found a negativity bias in defeasible reasoning: negative information defeated positively charged conclusions more strongly than positive information defeated negatively charged conclusions. We discuss our results in relation to the new psychology of reasoning. (shrink)

This article focuses on the transformation of the female reproductive body with the use of assisted reproduction technologies under neo-liberal economic globalisation, wherein the ideology of trade without borders is central, as well as under liberal feminist ideals, wherein the right to self-determination is central. Two aspects of the body in western medicine—the fragmented body and the commodified body, and the integral relation between these two—are highlighted. This is done in order to analyse the implications of local and global transactions (...) in women’s reproductive body parts for their right to self-determination and individual agency and what this means for their embodiment. We conclude by exploring whether women can become embodied subjects by exercising their proprietary right to their bodies through directing technology to achieve their own goals, while at the same time being fragmented into parts and losing their personhood and bodily integrity. (shrink)

In their development of causal decision theory, Allan Gibbard and William Harper advocate a particular method for calculating the expected utility of an action, a method based upon the probabilities of certain counterfactuals. Gibbard and Harper then employ their method to support a two-box solution to Newcomb’s paradox. This paper argues against some of Gibbard and Harper’s key claims concerning the truth-values and probabilities of counterfactuals involved in expected utility calculations, thereby disputing their analysis of Newcomb’s Paradox. If we are (...) right, then Gibbard and Harper’s method of calculating expected utility does not adequately represent rational choice. (shrink)

Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze two of Facebooks’s more recent features, Applications and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen Nissenbaum’s treatment of privacy as “contextual integrity.” Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social contexts. Online contexts, including social networking sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps are at the root of many of the sites’ (...) privacy issues. Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a users’, but a user’s friends’ information with third parties, clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of the meaning of “friendship” online. In both cases, many of the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues, which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the flows of information more transparent to users. (shrink)

Ethical questions surrounding withdrawal of life support can be complex. When life support therapies are the result of a suicide attempt, the potential ethical issues take on another dimension. Duties and principles that normally guide clinicians’ actions as caregivers may not apply as easily. We present a case of attempted suicide in which decisions surrounding withdrawal of life support provoked conflict between a patient’s family and the medical team caring for him. We highlight the major unresolved philosophical questions and contradictory (...) normative values about suicide that underlie this conflict. Finally, we show how these considerations were practically applied to this particular case. (shrink)

Gigerenzer and Brighton (2009) have argued for a “Homo heuristicus” view of judgment and decision making, claiming that there is evidence for a majority of individuals using fast and frugal heuristics. In this vein, they criticize previous studies that tested the descriptive adequacy of some of these heuristics. In addition, they provide a reanalysis of experimental data on the recognition heuristic that allegedly supports Gigerenzer and Brighton’s view of pervasive reliance on heuristics. However, their arguments and reanalyses are both conceptually (...) and methodologically problematic. We provide counterarguments and a reanalysis of the data considered by Gigerenzer and Brighton. Results clearly replicate previous findings, which are at odds with the claim that simple heuristics provide a general description of inferences for a majority of decision makers. (shrink)

The engineering-based approach of synthetic biology is characterized by an assumption that ‘engineering by design’ enables the construction of ‘living machines’. These ‘machines’, as biological machines, are expected to display certain properties of life, such as adapting to changing environments and acting in a situated way. This paper proposes that a tension exists between the expectations placed on biological artefacts and the notion of producing such systems by means of engineering; this tension makes it seem implausible that biological systems, especially (...) those with properties characteristic of living beings, can in fact be produced using the specific methods of engineering. We do not claim that engineering techniques have nothing to contribute to the biotechnological construction of biological artefacts. However, drawing on Descartes’s and Kant’s thinking on the relationship between the organism and the machine, we show that it is considerably more plausible to assume that distinctively biological artefacts emerge within a paradigm different from the paradigm of the Cartesian machine that underlies the engineering approach. We close by calling for increased attention to be paid to approaches within molecular biology and chemistry that rest on conceptions different from those of synthetic biology’s engineering paradigm. (shrink)

_Beyond the Pleasure Principle_ is Freud’s most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces the fundamental concepts of the “repetition compulsion” and the “death drive,” according to which a perverse, repetitive, self-destructive impulse opposes and even trumps the creative drive, or Eros. The work is one of Freud’s most intensely debated, and raises important questions that have been discussed by philosophers and psychoanalysts since its first publication in 1920. The (...) text is presented here in a contemporary new translation by Gregory C. Richter. Appendices trace the work’s antecedents and the many responses to it, including texts by Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among many others. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, declared that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis in his famous work of 1927, _The Future of an Illusion_. This work provoked immediate controversy and has continued to be an important reference for anyone interested in the intersection of philosophy, psychology, religion, and culture. Included in this volume is Oskar Pfister’s critical engagement with Freud’s views on religion. Pfister, a Swiss pastor and lay analyst, defends mature religion from Freud’s “scientism.” Freud’s and Pfister’s texts (...) have been updated in Gregory C. Richter’s translations from the original German. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_ Freud extends and clarifies his analysis of religion; analyzes human unhappiness in contemporary civilization; ratifies the critical importance of the death drive theory; and contemplates the significance of guilt and conscience in everyday life. The result is Freud’s most expansive work, one wherein he discusses mysticism, love, interpretation, narcissism, religion, happiness, technology, beauty, justice, work, the origin of civilization, phylogenetic development, Christianity, the Devil, communism, the sense of guilt, remorse, and ethics. A classic, important, accessible (...) work, Freud reminds us again why we still read and debate his ideas today. Todd Dufresne’s introduction expands on why, according to the late Freud, psychoanalysis is the key to understanding individual and collective realities or, better yet, collective truths. The Appendices include related writings by Freud, contemporary reviews, and scholarly responses from Marcuse, Rieff, and Ricoeur. (shrink)

This paper describes a holistic approach and an interdisciplinary curriculum in enhancing critical thinking and education for democracy at the junior-high schools and highschools levels. The curriculum includes academic subjects such as the humanities, sciences, social sciences and art. The aim of this curriculum is not to teach an additional lesson in history, political sciences, art, etc., but to fostercritical thinking and democratic behavior. The theoretical framework has two bases. The first derives from eighteenth century rationalism and scientific thinking, while (...) the second is from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Both produced social economies and a political structure of mass democracy. The focal point here is that critical thinking is a prerequisite for the existence of democratic values and principles in a post-modern society. The program integrates McPeck’s strategies on the conception of critical thinking and the dialectic technique of Richard Paul. The curriculum is designed forone or two semesters (14 to 28 meetings). It is built in a modular fashion, in which each subject stands on its own and is presented by various lecturers from different domains. The curriculum was implemented in junior high and high schools in Haifa and vicinity."It is this consensus around liberal democracy as the final form of government that I have called “the end of history.”(Fukuyama, F (1990) in Fortune, January 15, 1990, p. 75). (shrink)

BackgroundThe EU’s 2006 Paediatric Regulation aims to support authorisation of medicine for children, thus effectively increasing paediatric research. It is ethically imperative to simultaneously establish procedures that protect children’s rights.MethodThis study endeavours (a) to evaluate whether a template consent form designed by the Standing Working Group of the German-Research-Ethics-Committees (AKEK) adequately informs adolescents about research participation, and (b) to investigate associated phenomena like therapeutic misconception and motives for research participation. In March 2016 a questionnaire study was conducted among 279 pupils (...) (mean age 13.1 years) of a secondary school in northern Germany.ResultsA majority of participants showed a general good understanding of foundational research ethics concepts as understood from the AKEK consent form. Nevertheless, our data also suggests possible susceptibility to therapeutic misconception. Own health concerns and pro-social considerations were found to be significant motivational factors for participating in research, while anticipation of pain lessens likelihood of participation. Advice from trusted others is an important decisional influence, too. Furthermore, data security was found to be a relevant aspect of adolescents’ decision-making process.ConclusionBearing in mind adolescents’ generally good understanding, we infer the lack of knowledge about medical research in general to be one source of therapeutic misconception. To further improve the quality of consent we propose a multi-staged approach whereby general research education is completed before an individual becomes a patient or potential participant. To the best of our knowledge this is the first German questionnaire-study addressing issues of informed consent in a large under-age sample. (shrink)

BackgroundThe EU’s 2006 Paediatric Regulation aims to support authorisation of medicine for children, thus effectively increasing paediatric research. It is ethically imperative to simultaneously establish procedures that protect children’s rights.MethodThis study endeavours (a) to evaluate whether a template consent form designed by the Standing Working Group of the German-Research-Ethics-Committees (AKEK) adequately informs adolescents about research participation, and (b) to investigate associated phenomena like therapeutic misconception and motives for research participation. In March 2016 a questionnaire study was conducted among 279 pupils (...) (mean age 13.1 years) of a secondary school in northern Germany.ResultsA majority of participants showed a general good understanding of foundational research ethics concepts as understood from the AKEK consent form. Nevertheless, our data also suggests possible susceptibility to therapeutic misconception. Own health concerns and pro-social considerations were found to be significant motivational factors for participating in research, while anticipation of pain lessens likelihood of participation. Advice from trusted others is an important decisional influence, too. Furthermore, data security was found to be a relevant aspect of adolescents’ decision-making process.ConclusionBearing in mind adolescents’ generally good understanding, we infer the lack of knowledge about medical research in general to be one source of therapeutic misconception. To further improve the quality of consent we propose a multi-staged approach whereby general research education is completed before an individual becomes a patient or potential participant. To the best of our knowledge this is the first German questionnaire-study addressing issues of informed consent in a large under-age sample. (shrink)

This paper looks at a dispute decision theory about how best to characterize expected utility maximization and express the logic of rational choice. Where A1, … , An are actions open to some particular agent, and S1, … , Sn are mutually exclusive states of the world such that the agent knows at least one of which obtains, does the logic of rational choice require an agent to consider the conditional probability of choice Ai given that some state Si obtains, (...) Prob(Ai/Si). Or, is the logic of choice better represented by considering the probability of the counterfactual if Ai then Si, Prob(Ai ⟥-> Si). Causal decision theory, developed by Allan Gibbard, William Harper, and David Lewis defend the counterfactual analysis; whereas, Richard Jeffrey and others defend the conditional probability analysis, evidential decision theory. I argue that the problems posed by cases of decision instability favor evidential decision theory. (shrink)

& The functional equivalence of overt movements and dynamic imagery is of fundamental importance in neuroscience. Here, we investigated the participation of the neocortical motor areas in a classic task of dynamic imagery, Shepard and Metzler's mental rotation task, by time-resolved single-trial functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The subjects performed the mental-rotation task 16 times, each time with different object pairs. Functional images were acquired for each pair separately, and the onset times and..

A layoff is a threatening yet common event which employees might face at some point in their working lives. In two scenario-based experiments, we investigated which actions of a layoff agent during a dismissal notification meeting may contribute to laid-off employees’ fairness judgments and negative attitudes toward the employer. In general, the extent to which layoff victims were treated with respect was consistently found to increase perceptions of interpersonal and procedural fairness and to mitigate negative attitudes toward the employer. Further (...) results showed that layoff victims preferred to be given an adequate explanation of the reasons for the layoff and to receive notice from the direct supervisor. Relationships between the layoff agent’s actions and layoff victims’ negative attitudes toward the employer were mediated by perceptions of procedural fairness. In addition, delegating the layoff agent’s task to an external consultant increased perceived psychological contract breach. Our findings have important implications for organizational justice research and for the managerial practice of implementing fair layoffs. In particular, small actions, such as treating employees with respect, might be of benefit both to humans and organizations. (shrink)

How does the human brain link relational concepts to perceptual experience? For example, a speaker may say “the cup to the left of the computer” to direct the listener's attention to one of two cups on a desk. We provide a neural dynamic account for both perceptual grounding, in which relational concepts enable the attentional selection of objects in the visual array, and for the generation of descriptions of the visual array using relational concepts. In the model, activation in neural (...) populations evolves dynamically under the influence of both inputs and strong interaction as formalized in dynamic field theory. Relational concepts are modeled as patterns of connectivity to perceptual representations. These generalize across the visual array through active coordinate transforms that center the representation of target objects in potential reference objects. How the model perceptually grounds or generates relational descriptions is probed in 104 simulations that systematically vary the spatial and movement relations employed, the number of feature dimensions used, and the number of matching and nonmatching objects. We explain how sequences of decisions emerge from the time‐ and state‐continuous neural dynamics, how relational hypotheses are generated and either accepted or rejected, followed by the selection of new objects or the generation of new relational hypotheses. Its neural realism distinguishes the model from information processing accounts, its capacity to autonomously generate sequences of processing steps distinguishes it from deep neural network accounts. The model points toward a neural dynamic theory of higher cognition. (shrink)

In discussions surrounding epistemology and rationality, it is often useful to assume an agent is rational or ideally rational. Often, this ideal rationality assumption is spelled out along the following lines: -/- 1. The agent believes everything about a situation which the evidence entitles her to believe and nothing which it does not. -/- 2. The agent believes all the logical consequences of any of her beliefs. -/- 3. The agent knows her own mind: if she believes P, she believes (...) that she believes P; and if she doesn't believe P, she believes that she doesn't believe P. -/- 4. The agent believes nothing of the form 'P and it is not the case that P.' -/- 5. If an agent's background belief-set satisfies 1-4 and if rationality requires the agent to add P to her belief-set, then the resulting belief-set will also satisfy 1-4. -/- While individually plausible, there are cases in which holding on to 1-5 generates paradox. Some resolve such paradoxical cases by granting 1-5 but arguing while ideally rational agents can exist, they can't possibly ever find themselves in such a situation: such case descriptions are epistemically incoherent. Others allow that rational agents can coherently find themselves in such odd circumstances, and argue that it's more reasonable to weaken our concept of ideal rationality and give up premise (2) above. However, this strategy has also been rejected. My aim in this paper is to defend the utility of positing an ideally rational agent in such paradoxical circumstances. I argue in such cases we should give up (2), in particular the assumption that (necessarily) if an ideally rational agent believes both P and the conditional, if P then Q, then she believes Q.. What's important is to hold on to the goal of positing ideal rationality: to maximize the amount of true or probably true information a thinker can justifiably believe in a given circumstance. Normally that will mean holding on to (2), but these unusual paradoxical cases are best handled by giving up (2). (shrink)

The program of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, formulated primarily by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, calls for relating conceptual change to structural transformations of government, society, and economy in German-speaking Europe. J. G. A. Pocock, of Cambridge, identified the range of alternative and competing political discourses available to early modern writers, while Quentin Skinner, also of Cambridge, treated political theories in terms of those historical contexts and linguistic conventions which both facilitate and circumscribe legitimations of political arrangements, and he (...) described such theories as intentional speech acts. Despite the differences in the German and Anglophone modes of treating political language, however, there are no major obstacles in bringing them together. The GG could profit from Pocock's technique of analysis and comparison in identifying early modern political languages, and the issues raised by Skinner about political thought and theorizing as forms of linguistic action, as well as the effect of general linguistic conventions upon available modes of legitimating political arrangements. The Anglophone mode might profit from considering the GG's non-reductive use of social history in conjunction with that of concepts, and from the GG's systematic use of contemporary sources of language and linguistic definitions. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is not Wittgensteinian ethics but Wittgenstein’s own ethical beliefs, specifically as these are revealed in the so-called Koder diaries. While the Koder Diaries, also known as Manuscript 183, do contain the kind of thing that one would expect to find in a diary (e.g. accounts of travel and personal relationships), they also contain more obviously philosophical remarks, sometimes as reflections on these personal remarks. Wittgenstein’s diaries illustrate well a point that Iris Murdoch has emphasized, that (...) a person’s inner life can have an ethical dimension not necessarily directly related to overt action or to other people. The kind of ethical concern that we see in these diaries is one with what we might call global implications. Not in the sense that they might affect the whole planet but in the sense that, for Wittgenstein (or anyone else involved in such struggles or deliberations), they might affect every aspect of his life in the way that a religious conversion might change one’s whole life. This ethical ubiquity is another idea that Murdoch has brought to attention. (shrink)

This chapter offers a close reading of a passage from the literary and philosophical work Minima Moralia that enacts Theodor W. Adorno's radical concept of nonpropositional truth content in philosophical aesthetics after Auschwitz. Readers of Adorno's texts, especially those devoted to philosophical aesthetics, can hardly fail to be struck by their chiastic structure. The aesthetic theory that Adorno develops constitutes not only a theory of the aesthetic but also a theory that is itself aesthetic, hence a theory of literature that (...) exhibits qualities associated with literary texts, and a theory of music that harbors within itself traces of musical composition. The rhetorically self-conscious tropes of his posthumous Aesthetic Theory, the stylized literary studies of his Notes to Literature, his musically inflected meditations on musicological questions from Ludwig van Beethoven to Arnold Schönberg, and so many of his other texts perform this provocative inversion in a variety of registers and conceptual modulations. (shrink)

This paper aims at explaining and defending some of Cora Diamond's thinking about the role of a kind of guides to thinking about ethics. Aids to thinking of this type can take a very general form but can also be applied in context‐sensitive ways. Maria Balaska has raised the question whether Diamond manages to avoid relativism. Oskari Kuusela also criticises Diamond, focussing on whether talk of human equality can be said to correspond to reality. I will consider these objections in (...) turn and try to show that Diamond is not committed either intentionally or otherwise to relativism. (shrink)