BackgroundThe West African Ebola virus epidemic from 2014 to 2016 is unprecedented in its scale, surpassing all previous and subsequent Ebola outbreaks since 1976. This epidemic provoked a humanitarian emergency that extended to different spheres of life, making visible ethical challenges in addition to medical, economic, and social ones. The present article aims to identify and differentiate the scope of ethical issues associated with the Ebola epidemic.MethodsAn online media analysis was performed on articles published from March 2014 to September 2015 (...) in ten preselected academic journals (scientific press) and two online newspapers (lay press). Two methodological approaches were combined: a systematic literature search and a qualitative content analysis. An additional keyword search was conducted on the PubMed database for the period after the end of the Ebola epidemic (2016-2020) to obtain an overview of research dealing with medical ethics due to the epidemic and to compare these results with the identified ethical challenges.ResultsA total of 389 articles dealing with the subject fields “Ebola epidemic” and “ethics” were researched. For qualitative content analysis, the time span with the highest article density was selected and a total of 64 articles were included (15 scientific articles, 49 popular articles). Five core ethical challenges of the Ebola epidemic emerged: 1. Responsibility and Accountability, 2. Spillover Effects, 3. Research and Development, 4. Health Communication, and 5. Resource Allocation. Articles in academic journals were dominated by the discussion of normative aspects in the area of “research and development”, while newspaper articles focused on aspects of “responsibility and accountability”.ConclusionAn ethical discussion of the Ebola epidemic requires an examination of as many of the ethical dimensions involved as possible. The presented investigation of the two types of media with regard to the Ebola epidemic offers this possibility of a more comprehensive insight into this diversity as a basis for ethical discussions. (shrink)

Bestattungen im Friedwald, Plastination oder der Versuch, durch Einfrieren den Leichnam zu konservieren: All dies sind neue Phänomene der Bestattungs- und Erinnerungskultur, die in diesem Band diskutiert werden. Der Tod, so die These, soll durch den gezielten Einsatz des eigenen toten Körpers gefügig gemacht und durch eine spezifische Vorstellung von Unsterblichkeit umgangen werden.

Since the development of the first neural prosthesis, that is, the cochlear implant in 1957, neural prosthetics have been one of the highly promising, yet most challenging areas of medicine, while having become a clinically accepted form of invasiveness into the human body. Neural prosthetic devices, of which at least one part is inserted into the body, interact directly with the nervous system to restore or replace lost or damaged sensory, motor, or cognitive functions. This field is not homogenous and (...) encompasses a variety of technologies, which are in various stages of development. Some devices are well established in clinical practice and have become routine, such as cochlear implants. By comparison, other technologies are in experimental phases and still need to be further developed to achieve the desired results. (shrink)

On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as “one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers.” Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. In this masterly biography, Neil Gross explores the path of Rorty’s thought over the decades in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to that (...) prominence. The child of a pair of leftist writers who worried that their precocious son “wasn’t rebellious enough,” Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen. There he came under the tutelage of polymath Richard McKeon, whose catholic approach to philosophical systems would profoundly influence Rorty’s own thought. Doctoral work at Yale led to Rorty’s landing a job at Princeton, where his colleagues were primarily analytic philosophers. With a series of publications in the 1960s, Rorty quickly established himself as a strong thinker in that tradition—but by the late 1970s Rorty had eschewed the idea of objective truth altogether, urging philosophers to take a “relaxed attitude” toward the question of logical rigor. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, he argued that philosophers should instead open themselves up to multiple methods of thought and sources of knowledge—an approach that would culminate in the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , one of the most seminal and controversial philosophical works of our time. In clear and compelling fashion, Gross sets that surprising shift in Rorty’s thought in the context of his life and social experiences, revealing the many disparate influences that contribute to the making of knowledge. As much a book about the growth of ideas as it is a biography of a philosopher, Richard Rorty will provide readers with a fresh understanding of both the man and the course of twentieth-century thought. (shrink)

Many have claimed that epistemic rationality sometimes requires us to have imprecise credal states (i.e. credal states representable only by sets of credence functions) rather than precise ones (i.e. credal states representable by single credence functions). Some writers have recently argued that this claim conflicts with accuracy-centered epistemology, i.e., the project of justifying epistemic norms by appealing solely to the overall accuracy of the doxastic states they recommend. But these arguments are far from decisive. In this essay, we prove some (...) new results, which show that there is little hope for reconciling the rationality of credal imprecision with accuracy-centered epistemology. (shrink)

Drawing upon research in philosophical logic, linguistics and cognitive science, this study explores how our ability to use and understand language depends upon our capacity to keep track of complex features of the contexts in which we converse.

This paper addresses the ongoing debate over the relation between belief and credence. A proposal is made to reverse the currently predominant order of analysis, by taking belief as conceptually basic and credence as the phenomenon to be clarified. In brief, the proposal is to explicate an agent’s credence in a proposition P as the agent’s tendency toward believing P. Platitudinous as this reduction may seem, it runs counter to all of the major positions in the debate, including the Threshold (...) View, the Certainty View as conventionally understood, Dualism, Eliminativism, as well as Credence Primitivism. Section 1 gives an overview on the current state of the debate. Section 2 considers unsuccessful predecessors of the proposed belief-first approach to credence. Section 3 motivates and lays out the basics of a conceptual framework for thinking about doxastic states that characterizes such states in terms of two formally independent dimensions, one pertaining to the agent’s tendency toward believing P, the other to the level of resilience with which the agent manifests that tendency. Against this backdrop, it is argued in Sect. 4 that the present reduction satisfies a set of standard, theoretically neutral criteria of adequacy for theories of credence, at least once they are purged of a quite common conflation of tendency and resilience. Section 5 argues against all of the above competing accounts. (shrink)

Student relativism is a widespread phenomenon in philosophy classes. While the exact nature of student relativism is controversially discussed, many authors agree on two points: First, it is widely agreed that SR is a rather problematic phenomenon, because it potentially undermines the very purpose of doing philosophy—if there is no objective truth, arguing seems to be pointless. Second, it is widely agreed that there will be some close connection between SR and a tolerant attitude towards conflicting opinions. In this paper, (...) I will argue that if these two assumptions are true, then discussing some basic philosophical insights about the concept of tolerance with students will be a promising new strategy of dealing with SR. (shrink)

"Evidence of a flight from reason is as old as human record-keeping: the fact of it certainly goes back an even longer way. Flight from science specifically, among the forms of rational inquiry, goes back as far as science itself... But rejection of reason is now a pattern to be found in most branches of scholarship and in all the learned professions."--from the introduction In the widely acclaimed Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. (...) class='Hi'>Gross and Norman Levitt offered a spirited response to the "science bashers," raising serious questions about the growing criticism of scientific practice from humanists and social scientists on the academic left. Now, in The Flight from Science and Reason, Gross and Levitt are joined by Martin W. Lewis to bring together a diverse and distinguished group of scholars, scientists, and experts to engage these questions from a wide variety of perspectives. The authors take on critics of science whose views range from moderate to extreme, from social constructivists to deconstructionists, from creationists and feminists to Afro-centrists. They discuss the rise of "alternative medicine" and radical environmentalism (here skewered as "ecosentimentalism"). They explain why the "uncertainty principle" does not work as a metaphor for ambiguity, and why "chaos theory" cannot be invoked without an understanding of mathematics. Throughout, they grapple with the paradox inherent in arguing with opponents who contend that reason itself, and thus logic, is suspect. Distributed for the New York Academy of Sciences. (shrink)

Dass das Verständnis von und die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit argumentativen Zusammenhängen für den Philosophie- und Ethikunterricht von besonderer Bedeutung ist, ist unumstritten. Ebenso unumstritten ist es, dass es sich bei der schulischen Vermittlung von Argumentationskompetenzen um keinen Selbstzweck handelt, sondern dass Lernende vor dem Hintergrund der erworbenen Fähigkeiten und Kenntnisse zu einer fundierten Meinungsbildung befähigt werden sollen. In diesem Artikel argumentiere ich vor dem Hintergrund neuerer Ergebnisse der erkenntnistheoretischen Forschung dafür, dass das soeben skizzierte Bild jedoch einer grundlegenden Ergänzung bedarf, (...) da im spezifischen Kontext des Philosophie- und Ethikunterrichts nicht die Bildung, sondern vielmehr die Aufgabe eines eigenen Urteils das epistemisch wünschenswerte Ergebnis darstellt. (shrink)

This study illuminates how a cross-sector social partnership legitimizes itself toward multiple internal and external stakeholders. Within a single-case study design, we collected retrospective and real time data on the partnership between Deutsche Post DHL and The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Within this partnership, Deutsche Post DHL provides corporate volunteers that support disaster response after natural disasters on a pro bono basis. The main objects that needed legitimacy as well as the audiences from which legitimacy (...) was mainly sought changed over time. In addition, we identified legitimation work as occurring across objects, audiences, and time. Thus, we introduce legitimation work as the purposeful effort of the legitimacy seeker to avoid certain issues while ensuring other issues that are of importance to the conferrer of legitimacy. These findings contribute to micro-level considerations within institutional theory which view legitimacy as socially constructed between legitimacy seeker and conferrer. Hence, we add another perspective on legitimation to the previously existing conceptualizations of legitimacy as a deterministic consequence of institutionalization. (shrink)

Dem Autor geht es in erster Linie darum, einen in Deutschland weitgehend vergessenen Philosophen in den Mittelpunkt des Wissenschaftsdiskurses zu stellen. Der Thuringer Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, Schuler von Fichte und Schelling in Jena, entwickelte eine eigenstandige Philosophie, die sich einerseits der epochalen abendlandischen Geistestradition verpflichtet weiss, zugleich aber auch von der Kantischen Philosophie und ihrem kritischen Geist beeinflusst wurde. Krause ist einerseits Systemphilosoph, der immer wieder die Thematik des Absoluten oder Gottes in den Vordergrund stellt - in dieser Hinsicht (...) ist er spekulativer Idealist. Andererseits muss alle Philosophie beim Ich beginnen, sofern zeigt er sich als Denker des Transzendentalen. Krauses Philosophie ist zweistrahlig aufgebaut: Zum einen will er die endliche Welt aus Gott ableiten, andererseits soll das Ich zur Erkenntnis Gottes aufsteigen. Ausgehend von der Metaphysik wird dieser Aufstieg des Ich zum Absoluten in den verschiedenen Regionalphilosophien, in der Religion, Ethik und Asthetik thematisiert.". (shrink)

This paper discusses a scenario borrowed from Williamson (2000) and repurposes it to argue for the possibility of conflict between two prima facie categorical norms of epistemic rationality: the norm to respect one’s evidence and the norm to be coherent. It is argued, pace Williamson, that in the conflict defining the scenario, the evidence norm overrides the coherence norm; that a rational agent with our evidence would lack evidence about some of their own credences; and that for agents whose evidence (...) is limited in this way, incoherence fails to entail irrationality. The above possibility claim has also been defended by Worsnip (2018), albeit on a quite different premise set and in conjunction with a coherence-centered account of epistemic rationality that issues predictions incompatible with those licensed by the evidence-centered account recommended here, as illustrated towards the end of the paper. (shrink)

Consider where κ is an uncountable regular cardinal. By a result of Shelah's we have for almost all witnessing this. Here we consider the question if there could be a similar result for. We will discuss some basic facts implying that this cannot hold in general. We will use these facts to construct an interesting example of a pseudo Prikry forcing, answering a question of Sinapova.

In the past several years, observational entropy has been developed as both a quantum generalization of Boltzmann entropy, and as a rather general framework to encompass classical and quantum equilibrium and non-equilibrium coarse-grained entropy. In this paper we review the construction, interpretation, most important properties, and some applications of this framework. The treatment is self-contained and relatively pedagogical, aimed at a broad class of researchers.

All medieval philosophers agreed that emotions ought to be controlled by reason, but they gave different accounts of the control that is possible. Aquinas took emotions to be sensory states that are under immediate rational control because both sensory and rational states are produced by a single soul. By contrast, Ockham distinguished two souls and two types of emotions, namely sensory ones that inevitably arise, and rational ones that can be changed by the will. This chapter examines the mechanisms of (...) control in both cases, paying particular attention to the metaphysical framework the two authors chose. Moreover, it looks at the way they dealt with cases of internal emotional conflict. Whereas Aquinas ruled out permanent conflict in a well-functioning soul, Ockham conceded that some rational emotions could coexist with opposing sensory emotions, thus agreeing that true conflict is possible. (shrink)

In dem vorliegenden Beitrag möchte ich an aktuelle argumentationsdidaktische Überlegungen anknüpfen und einen spezifischen Aspekt genauer untersuchen, der von der philosophiedidaktischen Forschung bisher ein Stück weit vernachlässigt worden ist. Dieser Aspekt betrifft die Vermittlung sogenannter argumentativer Metakompetenzen, worunter ich grob gesprochen Fähigkeiten des angemessenen Gebrauchs bzw. der verantwortungsvollen Regulation von argumentativen Kompetenzen verstehe. Die grundlegende Idee ist in diesem Zusammenhang, dass die Ausbildung basaler argumentativer Fähigkeiten zwar grundsätzlich durchaus wichtig und wünschenswert ist, dass aber gleichzeitig ein Einsatz dieser Fähigkeiten in (...) unterschiedlichen Situationen ganz unterschiedliche Funktionen erfüllt. Dementsprechend müssen Lernende nicht nur mit argumentativen Kompetenzen ausgestattet, sondern darüber hinaus auch zu einem reflektierten und situativ angemessenen Gebrauch dieser Kompetenzen befähigt werden. (shrink)

The files that have just recently been made available from Roman archives make it possible to shed new light on and relativize the often asserted,,Pope's silence." It can be seen, that there was no agreement within the Vatican on how to deal with National Socialism. Recent publications have constructed an antagonism between Cardinal Secretary Eugenio Pacelli and Alois Hudal, the politically active principal of the Collegio Santa Maria dell'Anima and supposedly a representative of,appeasement'. However, it can be shown that both (...) men initially agreed in principle with their assessment of National Socialism, even though they pursued different strategies. Hudal insisted on the public denunciation of National Socialism, on a clear positioning of the school, yet without success. Pacelli, a diplomat by training, was the one who thwarted nearly all of the Vatican's public proclamations against National Socialism. (shrink)

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa (...) Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life? (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are significant instances of educational injustice in the context of philosophy teaching that can be effectively reduced by an increased implementation of digital technologies. More specifically, I show that there are good reasons to believe that testimonial injustices constitute serious instances of educational injustice that will frequently occur in philosophy classes. Using digital tools to anonymize student contributions opens up a promising way of dealing with these injustices. If convincing, my arguments give reason (...) to perceive epistemic injustices in educational settings as a serious threat to educational justice and to reconsider the implications of increased digitalization for issues of educational justice. (shrink)

Toleranz – eine Haltung, die in westlichen Gesellschaften wie kaum eine andere mit Nachdruck gefordert und mit Vehemenz verteidigt wird. Insbesondere eine tolerante Haltung gegenüber fremden Ansichten, Standpunkten und Überzeugungen wird von vielen als unverzichtbare Bedingung für das Gelingen eines demokratischen Miteinanders angesehen. Gleichzeitig wird kontrovers diskutiert, wo eigentlich die Grenzen einer toleranten Pluralität verschiedener Meinungen gezogen werden sollen. Welche Ansichten sind noch tolerabel, und welche nicht? Mit Blick auf aktuelle gesellschaftliche Diskurse und vor dem Hintergrund umfassender Kenntnisse der philosophischen (...) Toleranzforschung überprüft Dominik Balg kontrovers diskutierte Minderheitenpositionen auf ihre Tolerierbarkeit und entwickelt vor diesem Hintergrund einen klaren Kriterienkatalog, mit Hilfe dessen sich die Grenzen einer toleranten Haltung sinnvoll ziehen lassen. Darüber hinaus widmet er sich der Frage, was eigentlich jenseits unserer Toleranzgrenzen liegen sollte und wie man verantwortungsvoll mit Positionen umgehen kann, die nicht mehr tolerabel sind. (shrink)

Traite de la conception philosophique de Jacques Maritain qui a développé tout au long de sa carrière un système de pensée proche de celui de Saint Thomas d'Aquin. Cette étude s'inscrit dans la tentative de mettre en lumière les aspects fondamentaux de la quête de l'homme et de son rapport à la beauté d'après le philosophe Maritain.

How did the reception of Aristotelian logic in the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages shape the development of theology? And how did theological issues influence the debates about logic and theories of argumentation? The contributions in this volume examine these questions on the basis of key texts, thus shedding new light on the problematic relationship between logic and theology.

Focusing on the period between Albertus Magnus and Descartes, the ten contributions examine various Aristotelian theories of the soul.

The practice of early modern natural history depended on the collective collecting activities of a great variety of people. Among them, artisans played a major role in acquiring and distributing knowledge about the natural world and they contributed significantly to the scholarly labour in natural history. This distributed labour was both acknowledged by contemporaries as well as hidden from sight, reflecting the period′s dominant norms for class and gender. By combining an interpretation of the visual representation of labour in European (...) insect studies with an examination of written sources about natural history practices from about 1680 to 1810, this article decodes the often‐codified frontispieces and other more symbolic illustrations to offer new insights into the labour of natural history. Those who identified as scholars and artisans (or both) conceptualised their own intellectual and practical engagement with natural history within the semantic field of work. Some seemed to have even envisioned a new social role for academics as well as artisans. This article analyses the diversity of the “productive forces” in insect studies as they changed over time and it reconstructs what I will call the social imaginaries of participation. (shrink)

Zenon Pylyshyn argues that cognitively driven attentional effects do not amount to cognitive penetration of early vision because such effects occur either before or after early vision. Critics object that in fact such effects occur at all levels of perceptual processing. We argue that Pylyshyn’s claim is correct—but not for the reason he emphasizes. Even if his critics are correct that attentional effects are not external to early vision, these effects do not satisfy Pylyshyn’s requirements that the effects be direct (...) and exhibit semantic coherence. In addition, we distinguish our defense from those found in recent work by Raftopoulos and by Firestone and Scholl, argue that attention should not be assimilated to expectation, and discuss alternative characterizations of cognitive penetrability, advocating a kind of pluralism. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the effects of using thought experiments for the purpose of conceptual clarification on students’ hermeneutical abilities. On the one hand, by providing opportunities to explore the scope of normatively loaded concepts, thought experiments can effectively help students to interpret their social and moral reality more adequately, which in some cases might even help to reduce existing hermeneutical injustices. On the other hand, given their notorious susceptibility to distorting factors that are philosophically irrelevant, they can also (...) push students into accepting idiosyncratic intuitions that they don’t really share and thereby further impair their hermeneutical abilities. After setting out this dilemma in more detail, I will propose various strategies for facilitating the safe use of thought experiments that instructors can use to effectively exploit the empowering potential of thought experiments. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 22 Heft: 2 Seiten: 456-461.

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into (...) oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronisław Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification. (shrink)

The influence of Latin texts on Greek literature of the Imperial period remains somewhat understudied. However, there are some Greek texts that seem to depend from a Latin pretext, from works of Vergil in particular. This article discusses an epigram by Apollonides (Anth. Gr. 6.239), in which an old beekeeper named Kleiton is presented in much the same way as the old Corycian in Vergil’s “Georgics” (4.116-148). Vergil’s famous digression might therefore be a pretext for Apollonides’ poem. Moreover, Apollonides apparently (...) alludes to an epigram by Leonidas of Tarentum (Anth. Gr. 6.226) which features another old farmer named Kleiton. Apollonides’ poem could thus serve as an ‘appendix’ to Leonidas’ epigram based on the model of Vergil’s senex Corycius. (shrink)

How should political leaders address the emerging climate crisis if citizens are reluctant to accept costly but necessary climate action? In this article, I address this question by harnessing insights from the realist tradition in political theory. I propose that the realist legitimacy framework provides action guidance by offering two broadly applicable heuristics for political agents: responsibility and responsiveness. These heuristics collide if citizens are unwilling to accept policies designed to secure a nation's long-term stability. Faced with this problem, some (...) authors make the supposedly realist argument that policymakers in liberal democracies should prioritise responsibility over responsiveness and embrace eco-authoritarianism to address the climate emergency. Against this line of argument, I maintain that the realist legitimacy framework entails no such commitment. Instead, realists must emphasise that responsible climate action entails a sufficient degree of responsiveness. I conclude by sketching how this insight may guide democratic leaders and climate activists in the future. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag möchte ich die These vertreten, dass die Vermittlung moralischen Wissens, also Wissen über den moralischen Status von Handlungen, ein zentrales Ziel moralischer Bildungsprozesse darstellen sollte. Vor dem Hintergrund einer genaueren Erläuterung dieser These werde ich zunächst drei naheliegende Einwände diskutieren und zurückweisen, um so die grundsätzliche Idee einer unterrichtlichen Vermittlung moralischen Wissens auf einer theoretischen Ebene zu plausibilieren. Hieran anschließend werde ich dann einige unterrichtspraktische Implikationen dieser Idee skizzieren.