Introduction to edited volume on vitalism and/in the life sciences, 1800-2010.

Normal 0 21 Cet article s’attache à montrer la persistance au XVIIIe siècle d’un problème né en sol cartésien – le solipsisme – afin d’atténuer la distinction trop abrupte que l’on fait habituellement entre le rationalisme classique et l’empirisme des Lumières, notamment au plan épistémologique. Après avoir montré l’importance du débat au XVIIIe siècle et répertorié les arguments pro et contra la position solipsiste, l’article se conclut par un plaidoyer en faveur d’une relecture de la philosophie des Lumières, et propose (...) de relier le pessimisme épistémologique qui caractérise les grandes théories philosophiques de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à la prégnance du cartésianisme sur un siècle qui croyait pourtant s’être débarrassé de l’esprit de système du siècle précédent. (shrink)

TOC -/- 0. Introduction (SN/CW) -/- I. Revisiting vitalist themes in 19th-century science -/- 1. Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute) – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability 2. in the History of Life and Death 3. Joan Steigerwald (York) – Rethinking Organic Vitality in Germany at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century 4. Juan Rigoli (Geneva) –The “Novel of Medicine” 5. Sean Dyde (Cambridge) – Life and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Somaticism in the Wake of Phrenology. -/- II. Twentieth (...) century debates on vitalism in science and philosophy -/- 6. Brian Garrett (McMaster) – Vitalism versus Emergent Materialism 7. Christophe Malaterre (Paris) – Life as an Emergent Phenomenon: from an Alternative to Vitalism to an Alternative to Reductionism 8. Sebastian Normandin (Montreal) – Wilhelm Reich: Vitalism and Its Discontents 9. Chiara Elettra Ferrario (Wellington) and Luigi Corsi (Pisa) – Kurt Goldstein: Vitalism and the Organismic Approach 10. Giuseppe Bianco (Paris/Warwick) – The Origins of Canguilhem’s “Vitalism”. Against the Anthropology of Irritation -/- III. Vitalism and contemporary biological developments -/- 11. William Bechtel (UCSD) — Dynamic Mechanistic Explanation: Addressing the Vitalists’ Objections to Mechanistic Science 12. John Dupré and Maureen O’Malley (Exeter) – Varieties of living things: Life at the intersection of lineage and metabolism 13. J. Scott Turner (Syracuse) – Homeostasis and the forgotten vitalist roots of adaptation -/- . (shrink)

Wie lässt sich der Bereich des Privaten heute genau beschreiben? Welchen Wert besitzt Privatheit in digitalisierten Gesellschaften für den Einzelnen und die Gesellschaft als Ganzes? Welche Werte und Lebensformen werden durch Privatheit geschützt, welche eingeschränkt? Entstehen durch die Informationsasymmetrie zwischen Technologieunternehmen, staatlichen Verdatungsinstitutionen und Verbrauchern/Bürgern möglicherweise neue Machtstrukturen? Welche rechtlichen Implikationen ergeben sich hieraus? Dieser Band geht diesen und anderen Fragen, die sich im Hinblick auf die etablierte Gleichung von Freiheit und Privatheit stellen, nach und versucht Antworten zu finden.

Charles Taylor's attempt to map the complexity and fullness of the modern identity has led him to recuperate its moral sources. This paper explores the zone of ontological contestation Taylor has engaged by defending a notion of the self that does not succumb to a narrowing or partiality of vision. Taylor's criticisms of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas are examined to draw out the features of his project and its own limitations.

SEBASTIÁN RUDAS | : Moralized secularism is the view that “secularism” is defined in relation to certain moral values. Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor’s “liberal pluralism” is an influential version of moralized secularism, for it states that freedom of conscience and equal respect are the fundamental moral values of secularism. I present the objection that secularism is a redundant category because it carries no distinctive normative content that cannot be found in the more general, and less divisive, terminology of (...) liberalism and democracy. In order to avoid this objection, I argue for conceiving secularism in a nonmoralized way. According to my view, secularism refers solely to the institutional arrangements that a state can put in place in order to address conflicts with organized religion that might emerge at the moment of advancing its ideological political project. Through this interpretation, it is possible to conceptualize expressions of secularism that are either not liberal or not motivated by the acknowledgment of new forms of pluralism as being the prime challenge a state faces for advancing its political project. As the redundancy objection shows, this is a possibility that moralized accounts of secularism preclude. | : Les versions moralisées de la laïcité définissent la « laïcité » par rapport à des valeurs morales. Le « pluralisme libéral » de Jocelyn Maclure et Charles Taylor est un exemple influent de la laïcité moralisée, car il affirme que la liberté de conscience et l’égal respect sont les valeurs morales fondamentales de la laïcité. Je propose l’objection selon laquelle la laïcité est une catégorie redondante, car elle ne comporte aucun contenu normatif distinctif qui ne peut être trouvé dans la terminologie plus générale et moins controversée du libéralisme et de la démocratie. Pour répondre à cette objection, je soutiens qu’il faut concevoir la laïcité de manière non moralisée. Selon moi, la laïcité se réfère seulement aux arrangements institutionnels qu’un État peut mettre en place pour répondre aux conflits avec les religions organisées qui pourraient surgir au moment de faire avancer son projet politique idéologique. Dans cette interprétation, il est possible de conceptualiser des expressions de laïcité qui sont non libérales, ou qui ne sont pas motivées par la reconnaissance de nouvelles formes de pluralisme à titre de principal défi auquel un État est confronté pour faire avancer son projet politique. Comme le montre l’objection de redondance, c’est une possibilité que la laïcité moralisée exclut. (shrink)

In Of Apes and Ancestors, Ian Hesketh attempts to de-mythologize the famous Oxford debate between Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, and Charles Darwin’s friends, Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker. Hooker and Huxley clashed publicly with Wilberforce at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in June of 1860. At issue was the scientific content and general implication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Hesketh argues that this event is best understood as a minor episode (...) in a complex web of personal and professional rivalries between two generations of naturalists. He further argues that Huxley aggressively reinterpreted the actual events of the debate for years afterwards, turning them into a “Galileo moment” for the nineteenth century, a moment in which science bravely stood up to religious authority and refused to back down. While his treatment of the debate and its context is well supported, the connection Hesketh draws between Huxley’s narrative and modern historiography is somewhat tenuous. (shrink)

This paper considers Aristotle’s distinction between the cause of being and the cause of coming to be. It is intended to show that Aristotle is able to unify both kinds of causes on the basis of the idea that a thing’s substance is its end. He is not confused about the cause of being and of coming to be, as it might seem in several passages. The paper’s focus is on Metaphysics Zeta 17. In contrast to David Charles’ interpretation, (...) my reading of this chapter puts weight on the fact that the end is said to explain both coming to be and being. According to this reading, Zeta 17 is a clue to understanding the unification of both causes in Aristotle. (shrink)

This paper is stimulated by and indebted to a study by Charles Altieri of the ways in which affect is present and articulated in art and literature, which, he argues, hold significance for the philosophy of emotion. I focus on Altieri's thesis that affective states may have aesthetic qualities and value. I pursue this notion first with reference to Nietzsche's attempt to recruit affect as a means of countering Schopenhauer's pessimism. I then attempt to show the coherence of the (...) notion that passion may exhibit an aesthetic dimension, drawing on Richard Wollheim's account of certain ideas in psychoanalytic theory, for which I suggest precedents in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The following paper argues that Husserl’s description of the natural attitude can be used as an alternative to Beck’s cognitive therapy’s understanding of the change process and the perpetuation of an emotional disorder. Conversely this also provides further insight into the natural attitude. Specifically the works of Sebastian Luft and Alfred Schutz are referred to as a means of developing what is termed by the paper as the universalising attitude. The paper extrapolates the incidental, yet significant, phenomenological structures within (...) CBT’s process of guided discovery to support its hypothesis that the change process can be understood as the patient undertaking at various times in therapy, a series of differing epoché. It is argued that CBT ultimately ‘works’ by the patient learning to achieve a rudimentary phenomenological attitude. The patient acquires insight by ‘standing back’ from their factual understanding of self, others and the world. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders semiotic modelling in light of recent scholarship on Charles Peirce, particularly regarding his concept of proposition. Conceived in the vein of Peirce’s phenomenological categories as well as of his taxonomy of signs, semiotic modelling has mostly been thought of as ascending from simple, basic sign types to complex ones. This constitutes the backbone of most currently accepted semiotic modelling theories and entails the further acceptance of an unexamined a priori coherence between complexity of cognition and complexity (...) of signification. Following recent readings of Peirce’s post-1900 semiotic, we engage in a discussion as to what are the limits of this approach. From Stjernfelt’s conception of the dicisign in nature, we derive a perspective that affords understanding the practice of modelling as a reciprocal interplay between decomposition of complexity and recombination into further complexity. This discussion is facilitated by the recent extrapolation of the constructivist concept of scaffolding in biosemiotics research. Cognition, we argue, begins with a fundamental irritation of trying to make sense of a structure that is more complex than what can directly be derived from experience and, in so doing, urges meaning-seeking processes. The yet unknown object is decomposed into more tangible objects and is subsequently reassembled from these more manageable conceptions of the object. In support of our argument, we discuss the notions of semiotic competences and resources in light of such a naturalized account of meaning-making. (shrink)

This paper argues for the normative significance of attention. Attention plays an important role when describing an individual’s mind and agency, and in explaining many central facts about that individual. In addition, many in the public want answers and guidance with regard to normative questions about attention. Given that attention is both descriptively central and the public cares about normative guidance with regard to it, attention should be central also in normative philosophy. We need an ethics of attention: a field (...) of study of which normative pressures, if any, govern attention. Like the ethics of belief, the ethics of attention will connect those normative questions to issues regarding the nature of attention, i.e. to what is subject to such normative pressures. Philosophers should develop an ethics of attention that helps to provide normative guidance and that is commensurate in its richness to the descriptive significance of attention. The second half of the paper sketches a framework that may help us to get started at developing the ethics of attention. (shrink)

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first (...) aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and in ethics. Yet its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. Responsibility for Rationality is the first book that connects recent debates on responsibility and on rationality in a unifying dialectic. It achieves four main goals: first, it reinterprets the problem of responsibility (...) for attitudes as a problem about the normativity of rationality; second, it breaks the stalemate between rationalist and voluntarist accounts of mental responsibility by defending a hybrid view; third, it provides novel support to recent accounts of the normativity of rationality by arguing that epistemic reasons and other ‘right-kind’ reasons are genuine normative reasons; fourth, it sets the foundations and the research agenda for an ‘ethics of mind’, including an illustration of how to approach applied issues in epistemology within the presented framework. After spelling out connections between responsibility and rationality (part I), the book engages in debates in normative epistemology (part II) and brings them to bear on the broader field of an ethics of mind (part III). -/- Full draft of current version available on request, comments welcome! (shrink)

This book compares and contrasts publicly espoused security concepts in the Nordic region, and explores the notion of societal security. Outside observers often assume that Nordic countries take similar approaches to the security and safety of their citizens. This book challenges that assumption and traces the evolution of 'societal security', and its broadly equivalent concepts, in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. The notion of societal security is deconstructed and analysed in terms of its different meanings and implications for each country, (...) through both country- and issue-focused studies. Each chapter traces the evolution of key security concepts and related practices, allowing for a comparison of similarities and differences between these four countries. Using discourses and practices as evidence, this is the first book to explore how different Nordic nations have conceptualised domestic security over time. The findings will be valuable to scholars from across the geographical and theoretical spectrum, while highlighting how Nordic security discourses and practices may deviate from traditional assumptions about Nordic values. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, Nordic politics and International Relations. (shrink)

In the traditional understanding, human dignity is often portrayed as a «final», «inherent», and «absolute» value. If human dignity as the core of the status of a human being did indeed have thos characteristics, this would yield a severe limitation for obligations that stem from the moral status of non-human animals, plants, eco systems and other entities discussed in environmental ethics; for obligations that arise from human dignity standardly take priority over the duties toward entities with non-human moral status. Yet, (...) many theorists of human dignity nowadays have given up the traditional picture in favour of a more «contingent» understanding of human dignity that abandons one or more of its traditional characteristics.In this paper, I argue that to the contrary, we have good reasons to think that the three characteristics of human dignity just mentioned can indeed be attributed to a value that deserves the name «human dignity». In a first part, I argue for a specific understanding of the three value characteristics under consideration. After these preliminaries, I show in a second part that given such an understanding, we have ample evidence that we can indeed say that human dignity is an inherent, absolute and final value; and also that these three characteristics are properties of a single value. (shrink)

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

One of science's greatest intellects examines how people and animals display fear, anger, and pleasure. Darwin based this 1872 study on his personal observations, which anticipated later findings in neuroscience. Abounding in anecdotes and literary quotations, the book is illustrated with 21 figures and seven photographic plates. Its direct approach, accessible to professionals and amateurs alike, continues to inspire and inform modern research in psychology.

In developing a theory of consciousness, one of the main problems has to do with determining what distinguishes conscious states from non-conscious ones—the delimitation problem. This paper explores the possibility of solving this problem in terms of self-awareness. That self-awareness is essential to understanding the nature of our conscious experience is perhaps the most widely discussed hypothesis in the study of consciousness throughout the history of philosophy. Its plausibility hinges on how the notion of self-awareness is unpacked. The idea that (...) consciousness involves self-awareness has been understood in two different ways: either as awareness of oneself—the subject of experience—or as awareness of the conscious episode itself. In this paper I argue (i) that every experience concerns the subject in a very specific way, involving what I will call ‘perspectival de se representation’, and (ii) that there is no need to appeal to the experience itself in order to characterize the awareness within that experience. The view I articulate explains the subjective nature of experience without over-intellectualizing it, accommodates the phenomenology of experience, and dispels any doubt about the need to find the self in introspection. (shrink)

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another (...) element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective. (shrink)

It is often claimed that a minimal form of self-awareness is constitutive of our conscious experience. Some have considered that such a claim is plausible for our ordinary experiences but false when considered unrestrictedly on the basis of the empirical evidence from altered states. In this paper I want to reject such a reasoning. This requires, first, a proper understanding of a minimal form of self-awareness – one that makes it plausible that minimal self-awareness is part of our ordinary experiences. (...) I will argue that it should be understood as Perspectival First-Person Awareness : a non-conceptual identification-free self-attribution that defines the first-person perspective for our conscious experience. I will offer a detailed characterization of PFP-Awareness in semantic and epistemological terms. With this tool in hand, I will review the empirical literature on altered states. I will focus on psychedelics, meditation and dreams, as they have been claimed to present the clearest cases in favor of a radical disruption of self-awareness. I will show that the rejection of the idea that minimal self-awareness is constitutive of our experience on the basis of this evidence is unfounded, for two main reasons. First, although there are good grounds to think that some forms of self-awareness that typically accompany our ordinary experiences are compromised, they do not support the claim that PFP-Awareness is absent. Secondly, the reports that could make us think of a radical disruption of self-awareness are most probably due to a confirmation bias – and hence we should mistrust them – derived from the expectations and metaphysical views of their subjects. (shrink)

Charles Taylor has been one of the most original and influential figures in contemporary philosophy: his 'philosophical anthropology' spans an unusually wide range of theoretical interests and draws creatively on both Anglo-American and Continental traditions in philosophy. A selection of his published papers is presented here in two volumes, structured to indicate the direction and essential unity of the work. He starts from a polemical concern with behaviourism and other reductionist theories (particularly in psychology and the philosophy of language) (...) which aim to model the study of man on the natural sciences. This leads to a general critique of naturalism, its historical development and its importance for modern culture and consciousness; and that in turn points, forward to a positive account of human agency and the self, the constitutive role of language and value, and the scope of practical reason. The volumes jointly present some two decades of work on these fundamental themes, and convey strongly the tenacity, verve and versatility of the author in grappling with them. They will interest a very wide range of philosophers and students of the human sciences. (shrink)

This new edition of Charles Fried's 'Medical Experimentation' includes a general introduction by Franklin Miller and the late Alan Wertheimer, a reprint of the 1974 text, an in-depth analysis by Harvard Law School scholars I. Glenn Cohen and D. James Greiner, and a new essay by Fried reflecting on the original text and how it applies to the contemporary landscape of medicine and medical experimentation.

In this revised edition of his 1979 classic Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international (...) politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state’s domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

Sowohl in der analytischen Philosophie als auch im verwandten Projekt einer erneuerten Praxisphilosophie gewinnt sinnkritisches Philosophieren derzeit eine neue Dringlichkeit. Beide begreifen die menschliche, vernünftige Praxis als primäre Quelle von Sinn und als privilegierten Gegenstand philosophischer Analyse. Der Band vereint Beiträge zu zentralen Aspekten sinnkritischer, praxisformanalytischer Philosophie: von der Frage nach dem Sinn religiöser Rede und Praxis über das Problem der Struktur und die Form menschlichen Handelns bis hin zu Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Wahrnehmung. Beiträge u. a. von (...) Robert Brandom, James Conant, Christoph Demmerling, Thomas Rentsch, Sebastian Rödl, Hans Julius Schneider, Henning Tegtmeyer und Holm Tetens. (shrink)

The concept of "life" has always been part of the basic philosophical topoi. In Greek antiquity, the question of what constitutes a "good" or "successful" life was regarded as a fundamental question of philosophy. As a result, early philosophers engaged in practice-oriented philosophizing which regarded philosophy as a form of life. In Modern philosophy, the term "life" became a technical term in different philosophical traditions such as the philosophy of life, philosophy of existence, and phenomenology. This volume brings together contributions (...) in German and French that explore the concept of "life" historically and systematically, focusing on metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical issues. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Don't Laugh at “Slow” Sailing: Average Versus Instantaneous Motion Motion Relative to What? – Galilean Relativity But There are No Fixed Reference Frames – Special Relativity General Relativity – Can it Really Matter?

Lässt sich der Einsatz militärischer Gewalt zum Schutz der Menschenrechte innerhalb fremder Staaten rechtfertigen? Die Arbeit beleuchtet die Frage nach der Rechtfertigung humanitärer Interventionen. Dazu werden Interventionsargumente in der Geschichte des politischen Denkens ausgehend von Wurzeln in Antike und Mittelalter über die Kriegsethik der spanischen Spätscholastik, das politische Denken der Neuzeit bis zur Kritik jeglicher Form von Interventionen vor dem Hintergrund der Dominanz des Souveränitätsprinzips im politischen Denken des 18. Jahrhunderts rekonstruiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund argumentiert der Autor dafür, dass die (...) Souveränität der Staaten nicht unabhängig vom Schutz der grundlegenden Menschenrechte ihrer Bürger gedacht werden kann. Staaten haben eine primäre Verantwortung für den Schutz ihrer Bürger, die, wenn der einzelne Staat sie nicht erfüllt, als sekundäre Verantwortung auch der Staatengemeinschaft als Schutzverantwortung (responsibility to protect) zukommt und militärische Interventionen im Falle massiver Menschenrechtsverletzungen als letztes Mittel erlaubt. (shrink)

Für Aristoteles ist das Kontinuum ein potentiell Unendliches. Dieser Unendlichkeitsbegriff, den er neben dem prozessualen und aktualen einführte, wurde im Laufe der Philosophiegeschichte nicht mehr berücksichtigt. So verwenden ihn u.a. weder Kant noch Weyl in ihren Kontinuumsbetrachtungen, obwohl ihr Kontinuumsverständnis ihn geradezu nahelegt. - In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen die ontologischen Kontinuumslehren des Aristoteles und späterer Philosophen und Mathematiker behandelt, zum anderen erfährt die von Aristoteles im 6. Buch der «Physik» vorgelegte strukturelle Kontinuumsuntersuchung eine eingehende Würdigung.

Perhaps the most readable and accessible of the great works of scientific imagination, The Origin of Species sold out on the day it was published in 1859. Theologians quickly labeled Charles Darwin the most dangerous man in England, and, as the Saturday Review noted, the uproar over the book quickly "passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture-room into the drawing-room and the public street." Yet, after reading it, Darwin's friend and colleague T. H. Huxley had a different (...) reaction: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that." Based largely on Darwin's experience as a naturalist while on a five-year voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle, The Origin of Species set forth a theory of evolution and natural selection that challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the immutability of species. A landmark contribution to philosophical and scientific thought, this edition also includes an introductory historical sketch and a glossary Darwin later added to the original text. Charles Darwin grew up considered, by his own account, "a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect." A quirk of fate kept him from the career his father had deemed appropriate--that of a country parson--when a botanist recommended Darwin for an appointment as a naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle from 1831 to 1836. Darwin is also the author of the five-volume work Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and The Descent of Man (1871). (shrink)

The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 ignited a public storm he neither wanted nor enjoyed. Having offered his book as a contribution to science, Darwin discovered to his dismay that it was received as an affront by many scientists and as a sacrilege by clergy and Christian citizens. To answer the criticism that his theory was a theory only, and a wild one at that, he published two volumes in 1868 to demonstrate that evolution was (...) obvious to anyone who cared to look at a bull in a pasture or a dog on a hearth. In response to those who insisted that species were distinct since creation, Darwin pointed to breeders of pigs and pigeons. In reply to those who protested that human intervention is one thing and natural selection another, he argued, "If organic beings had not possessed an inherent tendency to vary, man could have done nothing." To counter those who scorned his descriptions of species in exotic places, he submitted local evidence of cabbages and cauliflower. Based on a wide array of sources, from ancient pictographs to Polish roosters, from skins and from skeletons, from scientific journals and breeding manuals, Darwin assembled a mass of proof--and a hypothesis about species reversion that risked his reputation anew. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is a two-volume compilation of his thorough and intensive research and the revolutionary conclusions that resulted. The first portion of his work is dedicated to a meticulous analysis of various aspects of plant and animal life, including an inventory of varieties and their physical and behavioral characteristics, investigation of the impact of a species' surrounding environment and the role that both natural and forced changes in this environment have had. Darwin then turns to a richly detailed discussion of the roles of inheritance and crossing in the development of species. A wealth of illustrations further support and enhance his findings. This fascinating, invaluable, and courageous undertaking eventually formed the foundation for our current understanding of evolution. "In science as in politics the victors tend to write the history books. As a result, the record of the past is edited, intentionally or unintentionally, so that it focuses mainly on the precursors of contemporary orthodoxy. Such a focus may accurately represent the genealogy of modern ideas, but it almost inevitably misrepresents the historical experience of their progenitors... Even the powerful, persuasive, and ultimately triumphant theory of evolution by natural selection required not only defense, but repeated buttressing and revision. Variation showed Darwin hard at work on this rearguard action, using the materials he had at hand... His information was gleaned from the observations of fanciers, breeders, and amateur naturalists, as well as from the treatises of those on the cutting edge of zoology and botany. As hindsight narrows the historical spotlight, it imposes its own sense of hierarchy on the preoccupations of the past. But Darwin was interested in all of these topics, valued all of these sources, and belonged, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of these communities."--from the Introduction. (shrink)

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine raises fundamental ethical issues. As one example, AI systems in the field of mental health successfully detect signs of mental disorders, such as depression, by using data from social media. These AI depression detectors (AIDDs) identify users who are at risk of depression prior to any contact with the healthcare system. The article focuses on the ethical implications of AIDDs regarding affected users’ health-related autonomy. Firstly, it presents the (ethical) discussion of AI (...) in medicine and, specifically, in mental health. Secondly, two models of AIDDs using social media data and different usage scenarios are introduced. Thirdly, the concept of patient autonomy, according to Beauchamp and Childress, is critically discussed. Since this concept does not encompass the specific challenges linked with the digital context of AIDDs in social media sufficiently, the current analysis suggests, finally, an extended concept of health-related digital autonomy. (shrink)

Schools in Germany are frequently named after people. Thus, these persons are remembered in the public sphere. This article answers the question to what extent the school names in the federal state of Thuringia correspond with the history of scientific pedagogy. For this purpose, in a first step, the controversial discussion about key figures in pedagogy and history of education is presented. In a second step the entirety of all school names in Thuringia is considered and individual results are discussed. (...) As a rule, it is not pedagogues who lend their names to schools but writers, artists and political figures. Only one fifth of all schools named after a person are named after educators. It is found that the key figures in pedagogy are rarely available as namesakes, whereas in practice successful school founders are preferred as name-givers. Accordingly, the history of pedagogy is represented in a filtered way in school names. Based on these results, further research perspectives for research on school names are formulated. (shrink)

Kistler, Sebastian/Puzio, Anna/Riedl, Anna-Maria/Veith (Hrsg.) Digitale Transformationen der Gesellschaft Sozialethische Perspektiven auf den technologischen Wandel -/- Die Digitalisierung bewirkt Transformationsprozesse, die die Formen unseres Zusammenlebens grundlegend verändern. Dies betrifft nicht nur die Art, wie wir leben, Partner suchen, arbeiten, wohnen, konsumieren oder uns selbst präsentieren – auch die gesellschaftlichen Lebensbereiche wie Politik, Bildung, Wirtschaft und Gesundheit befinden sich in einem digitalen Wandel. Mit diesen Veränderungsprozessen sind nicht nur Hoffnungen, sondern auch Ängste verbunden, die die Ambivalenzen der Digitalisierung zum Ausdruck (...) bringen. Die Komplexität und die Wirkungstiefe digitaler Transformationsprozesse werfen Fragen nach deren Steuerbarkeit, nach ihren Zwecken bzw. nach möglichen Orientierungen auf: • Welche technologischen Entwicklungen müssen reguliert werden? • Wie kann eine entsprechende Legitimation erfolgen? • Wer übernimmt Verantwortung? • Wie und nach welchen Kriterien sind ethische Bewertungen vorzunehmen? • Und nicht zuletzt: Gibt es Grenzen für diese Entwicklungen oder haben die Möglichkeiten des Machbaren die ethischen Fragen längst überholt und erledigt? -/- Die Texte des Sammelbandes nähern sich den digitalen Transformationen aus verschiedenen Perspektiven. Anhand unterschiedlicher Zugänge werden die Themenfelder „Digitalisierung und Gesellschaft“, „Körper und Technologie“ sowie „Digitalisierung und Demokratie“ entfaltet. Darüber hinaus werden die Konsequenzen für die Pflegearbeit und für den Umgang mit modernen Waffentechnologien als anwendungsbezogene Konkretionen diskutiert. (shrink)

This chapter argues that both Berkeley and Vasubandhu accept a kind of metaphysical idealism: while Berkeley’s theistic idealism claims that all of reality exists only in the mind of God, Vasubandhu teaches that external objects have no intrinsic existence and exist only as objects of perception; mind is the ultimate reality. This chapter explores the possibility of reading both these doctrines as a kind of idealist panentheism. Specifically, it will address two questions: (1) in what sense are Berkeley’s and Vasubandhu’s (...) theories idealist philosophies? (2) Is it justified to interpret them as panentheists? More precisely, the second question has two parts: (2a) Should Berkeley’s idealism be regarded as a kind of panentheism? (2b) Can the theism-part of panentheism justly be applied to Vasubandhu’s notion of mind as ultimate reality? The answer will be mostly negative: Berkeley is not a panentheist, and labeling Vasubandhu as a panentheist stretches the concept of God beyond the limits of reasonable application. Finally, though, it is argued that a Yogācārin reading of Berkeley’s idealism opens an interesting possibility for idealist panentheism. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on a theory of the ideological public sphere in the age of digital media. It describes the public sphere as an initially ascending and then descending communication process that includes both polarising and integrating publics, which are organised by antagonistic media and compromise-building mass media. This framework allows us to distinguish between hegemonic, populist, and popular-oriented flows of communication, as well as register changes in the interplay of different publics driven by digital media platforms. Digital transformations of (...) the public sphere give rise to antagonistic and networked-individualistic flows of populist communication that put public hegemony under constant pressure. The challenge is to find ways to strengthen popular communications that enable democratic learning processes and the flourishing of communicative competences of all citizens. (shrink)

A new understanding of political philosophy from one of its leading thinkers What is political philosophy? What are its fundamental problems? And how should it be distinguished from moral philosophy? In this book, Charles Larmore redefines the distinctive aims of political philosophy, reformulating in this light the basis of a liberal understanding of politics. Because political life is characterized by deep and enduring conflict between rival interests and differing moral ideals, the core problems of political philosophy are the regulation (...) of conflict and the conditions under which the members of society may thus be made subject to political authority. We cannot assume that reason will lead to unanimity about these matters because individuals hold different moral convictions. Larmore therefore analyzes the concept of reasonable disagreement and investigates the ways we can adjudicate conflicts among people who reasonably disagree about the nature of the human good and the proper basis of political society. Challenging both the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill, and more recent theories of political realism proposed by Bernard Williams and others, Larmore argues for a version of political liberalism that is centered on political legitimacy rather than on social justice, and that aims to be well suited to our times rather than universally valid. Forceful and thorough yet concise, What Is Political Philosophy? proposes a new definition of political philosophy and demonstrates the profound implications of that definition. The result is a compelling and distinctive intervention from a major political philosopher. (shrink)

Oswald Spenglers Kulturmorphologie diente als Ausgangspunkt einer internationalen und interdisziplinär angelegten Tagung, deren Beiträge in diesem Band vorliegen. Sie behandeln eine Vielfalt an Themen, die von der Menschwerdung, über die Kulturen des Altertums bis hin zu aktuellen politischen und sozialen Fragestellungen reichen. Schließlich sind auch Studien zur Spenglerforschung im engeren Sinne vertreten.