This article reflects on the research required in biographical studies. The biographical focus is on the role of three generations of the Schreiner family: W.P. Schreiner (one-time Prime Minister of the Cape Colony), Justice O.D. Schreiner (judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court) and Professor G.D.L. Schreiner (scientist, academic, liberal and early conceptualiser of alternative models to apartheid). All three were involved in developing, defending and sustaining liberal policies and values in South Africa from (...) the late 19th century until the advent of democracy in 1994. The clarifications and contradictions within and between oral and written sources are examined, and individual cases are discussed in which they are highlighted. The research sources include family papers, official archives, publications and, crucially, oral testimony. The oral testimony includes formal and informal interviews. This study is a contribution to the history of a family, a university and a set of values. It covers a long period in South African history during which colonialism tightened into apartheid, resistance developed and the eventual vision of a democratic South Africa came to fruition. Contribution: The primary scientific contribution is the exploration of liberal policies and values in South African political and academic history through the prism of biography. Methodologically, the article discusses possible shortcomings with oral testimony when relied on as a sole source and examines how oral evidence can be utilised in conjunction with research based on archival and published sources to develop a fuller and more nuanced picture in biographical research. (shrink)

Der Herausgeber der BZ gibt in jugendlichem Elan einen gewichtigen Anstoß, um endlich über das sechsbändige Quellenkompendium von Phaidon Kukules (1948–55) hinauszukommen, das freilich mehr einer enzyklopädischen Kultur- und Alltagsgeschichte gleichkommt und von den kulturhistorischen Konstellationen der Zwischenkriegszeit in Griechenland geprägt ist. Für die kulturhistorische Auswertung ekklesialer und profaner byzantinischen Quellen wäre vielleicht auch das «Dokimion» von K. Sathas zu nennen (1878) und noch manch andere ältere oder auch neuere Arbeit, die in Griechenland selbst veröffentlicht worden ist. Es sollte dem (...) kulturhistorischen Verständnis heute aber nicht schwerfallen, zu akzeptieren, daß Kukules von «unseren byzantinischen Vorfahren» spricht, waren doch weite Teile der neugriechischen und «philhellenischen» Wissenschaft in ganz Europa (vor allem Deutschland) nach dem Fallmerayer-Schock bemüht, das Kontinuitätstheorem besser zu untermauern, dem immerhin die offizielle Staatsideologie aus heute einsichtigen politischen Gründen verpflichtet war, unter anderem eben auch die Historiographie und Volkskunde (vgl. G. Veloudis, «Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer und die Entstehung des neugriechischen Historismus», Südost-Forschungen 39, 1970, S. 43ff. und W. Puchner, «Ideologische Dominanten in der wissenschaftlichen Beschäftigung mit der griechischen Volkskultur im 19. Jahrhundert». Zeitschrift für Balkanologie 35/1, 1999, S. 46–62.). Schreiner's gewichtiger Anstoß ist vor allem ein Vorschlag und ein Versuch, eine historische Volkskunde von Byzanz methodisch auf die Beine zu stellen, ist doch die Kultur, die sich in den Quellen niederschlägt und von der Forschung behandelt wird, vorwiegend eine Elitekultur, die kaum ein Prozent der Reichsbevölkerung betrifft. Aber mit der Quellensituation beginnen auch die Schwierigkeiten: wo endet das Byzantinische Reich (Misch- und Randkulturen) und wer ist das «Volk» dieser Volkskunde? Aus der eher profillosen Bevölkerungsmasse (ein Produkt der Quellen) hebt sich nur die Hofkultur und die monastische und ekklesiale Kultur ab; deutliche Standes- und Klassengrenzen sind nicht auszumachen, eine eigene Stadtkultur beschränkt sich auf Konstantinopel und ist in anderen Städten erst spät nachzuweisen bzw. wird von der osmanischen Landnahme im Keim erstickt. Schreiner macht sich einige Grundgedanken der rezenten Volkskunde und Kulturtheorie zu eigen, die die Alltagskultur als Grundlage ihres Forschungsgegenstandes betrachtet, nachdem das «Volk» der traditionellen Volkskunde sich schon lange in die Museen zurückgezogen hat. Somit geht es um die Dokumentation der Alltagkultur von Mittel- und Unterschichten, wobei auch die Elite duchaus miteinbezogen wird, da sich ihr Alltag kaum unterschiedlich gestaltet. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against InauthenticityChristopher S. SchreinerScars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, by Geoffrey Hartman; xii & 260 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. $17.95 paper.Geoffrey Hartman is now an emeritus faculty member at Yale. All but the youngest readers of this journal will recognize him as a member of the now defunct Yale School of Criticism, which in its glory days included (...) Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Among these accomplished individuals, Hartman distinguished himself as the one most engaged with discussing the role of style in theoretically propelled criticism, and this remains his lasting contribution. The question he kept asking was the following: what demands do the books we read and the theories we use make on our own critical practice, and in particular, on our style? Works such as Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) and Saving the Text (1981) were concerned with promoting a philosophical criticism that is as creative as the literature it seeks to criticize, in opposition to the Arnoldian standard of a disinterested criticism that respects and preserves the canonical hauteur of literary classics and doesn't seek to imitate them. Yet over the decades Hartman's own prose, except when it lapsed into copying Derrida's, seemed more that of the Doctor and less the Explorer, to borrow the terms Lionel Trilling used to describe Matthew Arnold's criticism. This is an irony we are grateful for.Hartman's most recent book, Scars of the Spirit, takes up the problem of authenticity in the context of postmodern culture, seeking to reestablish its legitimacy as a serious topic and unmask what merely poses as authentic in the global marketplace. Today his agenda ignominiously crosses paths with the likes of Jane Fonda, whose autobiography is replete with New Age claims to recover "the authentic me." One of the issues never resolved by Hartman's book and which taunts his project behind its back is whether his Continental erudition makes his project any more authentic than Fonda's celebrity psychobabble. Authenticity was the Heideggerian concept that Adorno ruthlessly and ironically attacked in his The Jargon of Authenticity, and it has an old-fashioned existential ring to it to this day. For those readers who haven't read Being and Time lately, authenticity (Jemeinigkeit) was the resolute impetus of making time one's own, taking it back from the instrumental public world that had appropriated it so that one can live a sincerely mortal life and die one's own death, as it were properly. Professors valiantly conjured an ethic out of this retrieval of selfhood, of one's personal property of time and destiny in the Lost and Found of culture, not fully cognizant of its Nietzschean roots. The absence of altruism in this existential ethic inspired Emmanel Levinas's patient attempt to persuade us to demote our egoism in an insatiable responsibility to and for others, for whom we can never do enough.There is surely irony in the fact that the anachrony of authenticity as a concept was accelerated by the deconstructive theory that Hartman helped [End Page 501] promulgate. Hence his new book reads a bit like someone having to gingerly retrace his steps in a field of landmines planted by the Yale School of Criticism. The question of propriety, what is right and proper, what is one's own, stamped with one's unique or authentic properties, was deconstructed by Derrida, and Hartman reverently recorded the results in the incongruously titled Saving the Text, an analysis of Derrida's attempt to promote textual intercourse between Hegel and Jean Genet by setting them in parallel columns on one page. In a nutshell, the original source of an event or text, its material advent, is untraceable due to its derivativeness, the forces of semiosis (or textuality) at play in and between texts. In parallel to this discovery, Jean Baudrillard spoke of the simulacrum as a media-generated version behind which the original "thing itself" was forever irrecoverable. The very idea of authenticity came to sound illusory, denoting a mirage sought in a hopeless regressive inquiry or Ruckfrage which Husserl (with... (shrink)

Certainty : a contemporary question -- Beginnings: questions and debates in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries -- Abba Father: the certainty of salvation -- The spiritual man judges all things: the certainty of exegetical authority -- Are you alone wise?: the Catholic response -- Experientia: the great age of the Spirit -- Unmasking the angel of light: the discernment of the spirits -- Men should be what they seem: appearances and reality.

While digitization claims to provide efficiency, accessibility, expansion, speediness, and profit accumulation, it is actually colonizing every human activity. It has even become a purpose in itself. In this essay we focus on the digitization of legal practices and contents. We describe what digitization encompasses, how digitalization processes work, and to what extent they are able to replace juristic processes and produce legal outcomes. We are inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay on the influence of mechanical reproduction of the works of (...) Art. Parallel to Benjamin’s work on Art, we will analyze Law and the consequences of innovations such as mechanical mass (re)production and computerized digitization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:AbusesC. S. SchreinerAbuses, by Alphonso Lingis; 268 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, $25.00 paper.Long ago and far away it seemed that academia served as a way station for inventive figures whose nonconformism, demonstrated in their work and lifestyles, was welcomed with graceful suspicion by their colleagues. Philosophy has had its share: one thinks of Wittgenstein and C. S. Peirce, but many lesser Wittgensteins and Peirces somehow (...) adapted and became tenured. In regard to such figures “eccentric” meant outside the circle or off center; “radical” meant surprising, original, sincere. Today radical has a murky political sense. Most radicality takes place in a discourse, or as a discourse—in the title of a university press book—which when invoked aligns the writer with the orthodoxy of a speech community. No surprise; only a dull echo as membership is [End Page 516] confirmed and the circle remains unbroken. Contrary to almost everyone’s intentions, never has so much “identity politics” been melded with the writing act in a metaphysical proof. We write about pragmatism, therefore we are new pragmatists. We write eco-feminism, therefore we are radical eco-feminists.Yet the nonconformist self-image of many philosophers is belied less by the uniformity of their discourse than of their lives, constrained as they are by professional protocol. This situation has become especially painful for phenomenologists whose credos “to the things themselves” and “towards the concrete” mandate a method of worldbound description confirmed by first-person evidence. It is a longstanding embarrassment that most phenomenological studies are either studies about phenomenology, or phenomenologies of books. In this regard even before Of Grammatology it was obvious that there was nothing outside the text.The rare exception is Alphonso Lingis, author of Excesses (1983), Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985), and The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994). So much is obvious to anyone who leafs through his Abuses. The vistas and catastrophes we access through this book cannot be easily disengaged from the personality that guides us to Tenochtitlan, Matagalpa, Kuta, Bali, the Sambodromo in Rio de Janeiro, Khlong Toei, and Chichicastenango. From these places and others Lingis reports the sometimes macabre longings and vulnerabilities of those who have nothing in common except violent changes in heritage and landscape. He speaks to their wounds and of his own ailments he acquires by exposing himself to forsaken circumstances: it is all material for his philosophy. In this work speech is primary, as it was for phenomenologists before Derrida.Merleau-Ponty’s writing remains unsurpassed as an eloquent transcript of perceptual life as expression and bodily engagement. Lingis, who translated The Visible and the Invisible, has from the start of his career been the most interesting and outlandish promulgator of this style of phenomenology. But his focus was decisively turned by Emmanuel Lévinas (whom Lingis has also translated) towards alterity relations, intimate events in which persons defer to and ennoble strangers by taking responsibility for them. Speech and physical contact are precious components of these relations, allowing persons to disburden themselves, to exchange pain and betrayal for tenderness and trust.Lingis shows how alterity relations suffer abuses at the face-to-face level and in the global network of electronic media. We enter his work breathlessly, as into a deep valley where there is gunfire and tropical birds. Spy satellites pass overhead. The human beings are strangely quiet. Women and children are being herded into canvas-covered trucks by youthful militia with oversized weapons. The volatile prose lifts up the voices of the damned just before they vanish around the bend in the jungle. Lingis speaks for them. This is the mandate of his research: “One has to speak for the silenced” (p. 36).How does highly educated thought speak for the tortured and dispossessed [End Page 517] without looking absurd or merely pretentious? Here it won’t do to speak of the world as a text. In this regard the kind of work we find in Abuses is at a vast remove from something like Susan Suleiman’s recently published Risking Who One Is: Encounters With Contemporary Art and Literature. There is nothing peculiar... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary HistoryC. S. SchreinerThe Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, by Susan Howe; 189 pp. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993, $40.00.In the interview which concludes The Birth-Mark, Susan Howe says that during childhood her Boston household was visited by such pioneers of American studies as Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen. Career-wise, however, Howe’s path to academia has be (...) en indirect: born in 1937, she gained her first professorship in 1989 in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. A visual artist by [End Page 192] training, Howe veered into a genre of writing in the 1970s that seeks to “install certain narrativ es somewhere between history, mystic speech, and poetry” (p. 44). Her poetry includes Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978), Pythagorean Silence (1982), and Defenestration of Prague (1983). In 1985 she published an original criti cal study, My Emily Dickinson, which criticized editors for having homogenized the format and typography of Dickinson’s manuscripts, taming the unruly rigor of poems which were originally “multifaceted visual and verbal productions.” Howe also argu ed that the Amherst poet should not be viewed as a victim of repression, as many feminists see her, but as a refuser of congregations, a powerful will-to-reclusion in art—“One unchosen American women alone at home and choosing.” Emily’s home was a nomadi c space between orthodoxies.An understanding of Howe’s kinship with Dickinson’s poetic daring is helpful for reading The Birth-Mark, whose prose is poetic, and whose protagonist, Mary Rowlandson, shared Dickinson’s “stubborn strength in isolation.” The captivity narratives ar e portals into the antinomian controversy of New England, which was “the primordial struggle of North American literary expression” (p. 4). It is not Gilbert and Gubar to whom Howe has recourse in her analyses of hostage consciousness. She cites the philo sophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. As with feminism, which she extends rather than follows, Howe takes up the philosophy of alterity without its orthodoxy. (In the face of frontier brutality she cannot discern the “Father of orphans and defender of widows” of Psalm 68.) Encounters in the wilderness of tribes, woods, and waters aroused an immodest otherness within the American literary unconscious, unsettling the styles of expression and selfhood which the puritan colonies were trying to instantiate. The literary awakening of Dickinson, Rowlandson, Melville, Hawthorne, and other writers was not due to the Great Awakening urged by churches, but to the traumatic transfer of sovereignty from God to frontier, a permanent revolution to which these writers’ imaginations would remain exposed.Howe’s new foray into criticism tracks the textual marginalia which yield the visionary utterances of Rowlandson and Hutchinson. A self-confessed “library cormorant,” Howe gathers a quiet spectacle of testimonies, those of separated loved ones dragged int o “Removes” by tribes of Native Americans. These resonant texts from New England village libraries and major collections at Harvard, are melded together by Howe’s intuitive, almost telepathic sensibility into a kind of spiritual drama informed by critical acumen. Howe takes her bearings from Patricia Caldwell’s essay “The Antinomian Language Controversy,” which appeared in the Harvard Theological Review in 1976. The dislocating frontier experience for Hutchinson, Rowlandson, and others forced the c reation of a different language. It is with this antinomian language that Howe develops a sensitive rapport, echoing its myriad haunting voices in her commentaries. What Gadamer calls effective history broods and rustles inside her [End Page 193] writing with lyrical unease. Indeed, Howe’s work is a creative example of the fusion of horizons which Gadamer says epitomizes the hermeneutic event. Howe’s personal method as revealed in her interview: “Not to explain the work, not to trans late it, but to meet the work with writing... Not just to write a tribute, but to meet her [Dickinson] in the tribute. And that’s a kind of fusion” (p. 158). Some scholars will find her method obscure. But it’s hard to find anything negative at this height. Howe would have us meet others at their most exposed, delicate point, where their vulnerability... (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Die Rekrutierung von guten Trainern ist eine der zentralen Herausforderungen für Vereine, Verbände und Olympiastützpunkte. Über die strukturellen Bedingungen der Trainerrekrutierung im Spitzensport liegen bislang jedoch nur wenige Erkenntnisse vor. Ziel des vorliegenden Artikels ist es, den Prozess der Trainerrekrutierung im deutschen Spitzensport und die zugrunde liegenden organisationsstrukturellen Bedingungen zu analysieren. Die Analyse zeigt, dass für die Trainerrekrutierung im Spitzensport insbesondere Netzwerke funktional sind. Deren Nachteil liegt darin, dass sie formale Vorgaben aushebeln können und persönlichen Präferenzen ein zum Teil (...) unangemessenes Gewicht verschaffen. Formalisierte Rekrutierungsmittel haben vor diesem Hintergrund vor allem die symbolische Funktion, eine Gerechtigkeitsillusion im Hinblick auf bereits getroffene Entscheidungen zu erzeugen. (shrink)

Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. Criticism is furthermore said to refute dogmatism, by (...) which Fichte means Spinozism. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s position in his Philosophical Letters by reviving Kant’s distinction. First, ‘critique’ for Schelling names a canon that is valid for all systems—including Spinozism—and thus favours none—not even the Wissenschaftslehre. Second, Schelling coins ‘dogmaticism’ to refer to what Kant calls ‘dogmatism’: reason’s uncritical claim to doctrine. Hence, he says all systems—even Fichte’s—are susceptible to the ‘enthusiasm’ of mistaking themselves for doctrines or ‘objects of knowledge’, instead of subjectively valid ‘objects of freedom’. I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for reviving Kant’s distinction, while noting two consequences for German idealism. First, if criticism favours no system, a system’s origin cannot be an act of knowledge, e.g., intellectual intuition, but only an act of endorsement. Second, if dogmaticism entails enthusiasm, a system’s goal cannot be absolute knowledge, but only infinite striving. Hence, by retrieving Schelling’s notion of dogmaticism, we can both gain a better understanding of the Letters and register the impact of a core Kantian distinction on the German idealist project. (shrink)

Este estudo objetivou conhecer o pensamento de toxicômanos sobre o uso de maconha durante o tratamento para abuso do crack. Participaram 10 sujeitos do sexo masculino, entre 15 e 36 anos, em tratamento nos CAPSi e CAPSad na cidade de Santa Maria/RS. Foram realizadas entrevistas semi-estruturadas e s..

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 2 Seiten: 943-994.

This book presents G. A. Cohen's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen draws a connection between these thought systems and the choices that shape a person's life. In the case of Marxism, the relevant life is his own: a communist upbringing in the 1940s in Montreal, which induced a belief in a strongly socialist egalitarian doctrine. The narrative of Cohen's reckoning with that inheritance develops through a series of sophisticated (...) engagements with the central questions of social and political philosophy. In the case of Rawlsian doctrine, Cohen looks to people's lives in general. He argues that egalitarian justice is not only, as Rawlsian liberalism teaches, a matter of rules that define the structure of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice. Personal attitude and choice are, moreover, the stuff of which social structure itself is made. Those truths have not informed political philosophy as much as they should, and Cohen's focus on them brings political philosophy closer to moral philosophy, and to the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, than it has recently been. (shrink)

A highly original reading of Immanuel Kant that demonstrates his interest in the social realm of human interaction.

Containing selected papers on the fundamentals and applications of Complexity Science, this multi-disciplinary book presents new approaches for resolving complex issues that cannot be resolved using conventional mathematical or software models. Complex Systems problems can occur in a variety of areas such as physical sciences and engineering, the economy, the environment, humanities and social and political sciences. Complexity Science problems, the science of open systems consisting of large numbers of diverse components engaged in rich interaction, can occur in a variety (...) of areas such as physical sciences and engineering, the economy, the environment, humanities and social and political sciences. The global behaviour of these systems emerges from the interaction of constituent components and is unpredictable but not random. The key attribute of Complex Systems is the ability to self-organise and adapt to unpredictable changes in their environment. (shrink)

A leading figure in neuroaesthetics makes the case that aesthetic experience can be meaningfully measured by the tools of neuroscience.

Fichte assigns ‘intellectual intuition’ a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte’s doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the ‘spirit’ of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte’s redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads (...) only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte’s three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. (shrink)

G.E. Moore, more than either Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein, was chiefly responsible for the rise of the analytic method in twentieth-century philosophy. This selection of his writings shows Moore at his very best. The classic essays are crucial to major philosophical debates that still resonate today. Amongst those included are: * A Defense of Common Sense * Certainty * Sense-Data * External and Internal Relations * Hume's Theory Explained * Is Existence a Predicate? * Proof of an External World (...) In addition, this collection also contains the key early papers in which Moore signals his break with idealism, and three important previously unpublished papers from his later work which illustrate his relationship with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII Coda Appendix Acknowledgements.

A model for the ideal state includes discussions of the nature and application of justice, the role of the philosopher in society, the goals of education, and the effects of art upon character.

This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the person chooses or acts as he (...) does. In such situations the person may well be morally responsible for what he chooses or does despite his inability to choose or to do otherwise. Finally the author considers certain suggestions for revising the principle he rejects or for replacing it with a principle of an altogether different kind. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the use of neurointerventions to reduce the risk that criminal offenders will reoffend. Commentators have raised several ethical concerns regarding this practice. One prominent concern is that, when imposed without the offender’s valid consent, neurointerventions might infringe offenders’ right to bodily integrity. While it is commonly held that we possess a moral right to bodily integrity, the extent to which this right would protect against such neurointerventions is as-yet unclear. In this paper, we will assess (...) whether, why, and how severely three forms of neurointervention might infringe the right to bodily integrity. We show that the severity of the infringement of the right to bodily integrity differs across different forms of neurointervention. Moreover, we argue that mental and behavioral effects of neurointerventions could in some cases be relevant to determining the severity of infringements of the right to bodily integrity. (shrink)

In the Vocation of Man, Fichte makes the striking claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature in general and of death in particular. How can we make sense of this claim? I argue that the public lectures that compose the Vocation are a popular expression of Fichte’s pre-existing commitment to what I call immortalism, the view that life is the unconditioned condition of intelligibility. Casting the I as an absolutely self-active or living (...) power enables his philosophical account of both the intelligibility of objects and of what it means to die. This explains his characterization of the Wissenschaftslehre as a system in which ‘all is act, movement, and life’. In Sect. 1, I explain the context of Jacobi’s use of ‘caput mortuum’ as a term for the thing in itself. In Sects. 2 and 3, I reconstruct two immortalist arguments from Fichte’s Jena period. The first is that the I’s self-activity rules out the existence of the thing in itself and thereby vanquishes ‘death’s head’. The second is that, insofar as the I charges us with the moral perfection of nature, it is the final cause of our entire life, including its end. This is to say that the I puts our every moment into question, even our last. In Sect. 4, I use these immortalist arguments to interpret the striking claim from the Vocation. (shrink)