Max Horkheimer, the founder of the critical theory of the ‘Frankfurt School’, died in July 1973. In his essay dedicated to this great thinker, sociologist and philosopher, the author attempts to uncover the theoretical roots of this critical thinking in the philosopher's early work. He analyses Horkheimer's early commitment to the cause of the victims of social, economic and political oppression as well as all systems that trample on the freedom and dignity of the individual and that discriminate against and (...) persecute minorities. He also pays special attention to Horkheimer's struggle against the authoritarian state, against totalitarianism as well as anti-Semitism. (shrink)

Thesis--Fribourg. Cf. Das Schweizer Buch. Serie B. 1966.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 1 Seiten: 19-54.

Background: Gait analysis after total ankle replacement and ankle arthrodesis is usually measured barefoot. However, this does not reflect reality. The purpose of this study was to compare patients barefoot and with footwear. Methods: We compared 126 patients (total ankle replacement 28, ankle arthrodesis 57, and tibiotalocalcaneal arthrodesis 41) with 35 healthy controls in three conditions (barefoot, standardized running, and rocker bottom shoes). Minimum follow-up was 2 years. We used dynamic pedobarography and a light gate. Main outcome measures: relative midfoot (...) index, forefoot maximal force, walking speed. Findings: The relative midfoot index decreased in all groups from barefoot to running shoes and again to rocker bottom shoes (p < 0.001). The forefoot maximal force increased wearing shoes (p < 0.001), but there was no difference between running and rocker bottom shoes. Walking speed increased by 0.06 m/s with footwear (p < 0.001). Total ankle replacement and ankle arthrodesis were equal in running shoes but both deviated from healthy controls (total ankle replacement/ankle arthrodesis smaller RMI p = 0.07/0.017; increased forefoot maximal force p = 0.757/0.862; slower walking speed p < 0.001). In rocker bottom shoes, this ranking remained the same except the relative midfoot index merged to similar values. Tibiotalocalcaneal arthrodesis were inferior in both shoes. Interpretation: Runners are beneficial and the benefit is greater for fusions and replacements. Rocker bottom shoes have little added benefit. Total ankle replacement and ankle arthrodesis were equal but inferior to healthy controls. Tibiotalocalcaneal arthrodesis has an inferior outcome. (shrink)

The comic book hero Superman grew from a social crusader and a “champion of the oppressed” in the 1930s, to a patriotic and paternalistic fighter for “Truth, Justice, and the American way” in the 1940s and 1950s, to a compassionate Christ‐like savior in the latter part of the twentieth century – and always defending the Judeo‐Christian values upheld by the American majority. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “superman,” on the other hand, firmly rejects the very same values its superhero namesake upholds. While it (...) has been a common trope in the superhero genre and popular culture in general to characterize figures explicitly based on Nietzsche’s Übermensch as inhuman monsters, this chapter argues that Nietzsche’s concept can be reinstated through the character of Superman himself. Like Übermensch, Superman is strong, creative, noble, independent, and life‐affirming, but unlike him, Superman is compassionate and looks out for the little guy. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Exploration of the political roles firms play in society is a flourishing stream within corporate social responsibility research. However, few empirical studies have examined multiple levels of political CSR at the same time from a critical perspective. We explore both how the motivations of managers and internal organizational practices affect a company’s choice between competing CSR approaches, and how the different CSR programs of corporate and civil society actors compete with each other. We present a qualitative interpretative case study of (...) how a French children’s clothing retailer develops CSR practices in response to accusations of poor working conditions and child labor in its supply chain. The company’s CSR approach consists of superficial practices, such as supplier audits by a cooperative business-organized nongovernmental organization and philanthropic activities, which enable managers to silence more radical alternative models defended by other NGOs, activists, and trade unions. By this approach, the core business model based on exploitative low-cost country sourcing remains intact through self-regulated CSR. Through the case study, we develop a framework of dynamism in competing CSR programs. We discuss the implications of our study for CSR researchers, company managers, and policy makers. (shrink)

Continuous reducibilities are a proven tool in Computable Analysis, and have applications in other fields such as Constructive Mathematics or Reverse Mathematics. We study the order-theoretic properties of several variants of the two most important definitions, and especially introduce suprema for them. The suprema are shown to commutate with several characteristic numbers.

Einleitung: Die französischen Materialisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, von A. Baruzzi.--La Mettrie, von A. Baruzzi.--Helvétius, von E. Voegelin und P. Leuschner.--Diderot, von T. Schabert.--Sade, von A. Baruzzi.--Bibliographisches Stichwort (p. 168-174).

Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of culture has been much discussed in recent years. However, it remains unclear how it evolved from his older theory of knowledge. This study deals with this question on the basis of Cassirer's 'disposition' of a 'philosophy of the symbolic', reconstructed here for the first time. This text shows that the 'symbolic' refers to culture as a whole and to its inherent diversity. Therefore, 'the symbolic' includes the relationship between the general transcendental conditions of culture and its (...) empirical specificities in language and languages, art and the arts, myth and myths, science and disciplines. Cassirer does not comprehend this empirical and specific reality of symbolization depending on pre-existing transcendental conditions. Instead, he proceeds from the empirical diversity of the symbolisations and reflects on their simultaneously general and specific conditions. Thus, Cassirer embarks on a path that he finds paved in Kant's "Critique of Judgement": He consequently defines 'the symbolic' as the horizon for a reflective approach based on empirical findings - and not as the foundation of a systematic derivation of the diversity of culture in the style of the idealistic tradition. (shrink)

Although machine learning has been successful in recent years and is increasingly being deployed in the sciences, enterprises or administrations, it has rarely been discussed in philosophy beyond the philosophy of mathematics and machine learning. The present contribution addresses the resulting lack of conceptual tools for an epistemological discussion of machine learning by conceiving of deep learning networks as ‘judging machines’ and using the Kantian analysis of judgments for specifying the type of judgment they are capable of. At the center (...) of the argument is the fact that the functionality of deep learning networks is established by training and cannot be explained and justified by reference to a predefined rule-based procedure. Instead, the computational process of a deep learning network is barely explainable and needs further justification, as is shown in reference to the current research literature. Thus, it requires a new form of justification, that is to be specified with the help of Kant’s epistemology. (shrink)

We define and investigate a family of local–global principles for fields involving both orderings and p-valuations. This family contains the PAC, PRC and PpC fields and exhausts the class of pseudo classically closed fields. We show that the fields satisfying such a local–global principle form an elementary class, admit diophantine definitions of holomorphy domains, and their orderings satisfy the strong approximation property.

This paper reviews the debate on the notion of biological function and on functional explanation as this takes place in philosophy. It describes the different perspectives, issues, intuitions, theories and arguments that have emerged. The author shows that the debate has been too heavily influenced by the concerns of a naturalistic philosophy of mind and argues that in order to improve our understanding of biology the attention should be shifted from the study of intuitions to the study of the actual (...) practice of biological inquiry. (shrink)

The work [11] deals with questions of first-order definability in algebraic function fields. In particular, it exhibits new cases in which the field of constant functions is definable, and it investigates the phenomenon of definable transcendental elements. We fix some of its proofs and make additional observations concerning definable closure in these fields.

The term “translation” has three meanings: the practice of the translator, the textual outcome of this practice, and the relationship it creates between texts and languages. In this article, I would like to draw attention to this third aspect, translation as a relation. To do so, I will first propose a historical overview of the first two meanings, as well as of the normative or descriptive aims associated to them. Secondly, I identify three motives for thinking about translation that are (...) primarily concerned with its relational dimension: the lack of a language to speak about the relationship between languages, i.e. about what’s incomparable and what gets subtracted. I conclude this article with the hypothesis that translation as a relation constitutes a refuge event for the plurality of languages. (shrink)

Promoting translational research as a means to overcoming chasms in the translation of knowledge through successive fields of research from basic science to public health impacts and back is a central challenge for research managers and policymakers. Organizational leaders need to assess baseline conditions, identify areas needing improvement, and to judge the impact of specific initiatives to sustain or improve translational research practices at their institutions. Currently, there is a lack of such an assessment tool addressing the specific context of (...) translational biomedical research. To close this gap, we have developed a new survey for assessing the organizational climate for translational research. This self-assessment tool measures employees’ perceptions of translational research climate and underlying research practices in organizational environments and builds on the established Survey of Organizational Research Climate, assessing research integrity. Using this tool, we show that scientists at a large university hospital perceive translation as a central and important component of their work. Importantly, local resources and direct support are main contributing factors for the practical implementation of translation into their own research practice. We identify and discuss potential leverage points for an improvement of research climate to foster successful translational research. (shrink)

I argue that there are at least four different ways in which the term ‘function’ is used in connection with the study of living organisms, namely: function as activity, function as biological role, function as biological advantage, and function as selected effect. Notion refers to what an item does by itself; refers to the contribution of an item or activity to a complex activity or capacity of an organism; refers to the value for the organism of an item having a (...) certain character rather than another; refers to the way in which a trait acquired and has maintained its current share in the population. The recognition of a separate notion of function as biological advantage solves the problem of the indeterminate reference situation that has been raised against a counterfactual analysis of function, and emphasizes the importance of counterfactual comparison in the explanatory practice of organismal biology. This reveals a neglected problem in the philosophy of biology, namely that of accounting for the insights provided by counterfactual comparison. (shrink)

I argue that there are at least four different ways in which the term ‘function’ is used in connection with the study of living organisms, namely: function as activity, function as biological role, function as biological advantage, and function as selected effect. Notion refers to what an item does by itself; refers to the contribution of an item or activity to a complex activity or capacity of an organism; refers to the value for the organism of an item having a (...) certain character rather than another; refers to the way in which a trait acquired and has maintained its current share in the population. The recognition of a separate notion of function as biological advantage solves the problem of the indeterminate reference situation that has been raised against a counterfactual analysis of function, and emphasizes the importance of counterfactual comparison in the explanatory practice of organismal biology. This reveals a neglected problem in the philosophy of biology, namely that of accounting for the insights provided by counterfactual comparison. (shrink)

Dieses Buch schlägt - unter dem Titel "synthetischer Materialismus" - einen neuen Weg zur Klärung des Geist-Materie-Problems vor. Ausgangspunkt ist die These, dass wir als Betrachter der Welt frei sind, dieselben Gegenstände in unterschiedlich komplexe raum-zeitliche Zusammenhänge einzuordnen, und dass sich daraus unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten der Klassifikation von Gegenständen ergeben können: Wenn wir von "Lebewesen", "Handlungssubjekten" und "Personen" sprechen, und ihnen psychische Phänomene zuschreiben, nutzen wir den Umstand, dass die Konstellationen von Kohlehydraten, Eiweißen, Wasser und Nukleinsäuren, die jene Entitäten auch sind, (...) in einer besonderen Weise mit Teilen ihrer Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft in Verbindung gebracht werden können. Der synthetische Materialismus vermag so zu zeigen, dass es zwischen einem ausschließlich "materialistischen" Verständnis der Welt und jenen Sichtweisen, innerhalb derer wir manche Komplexe von materiellen Phänomenen als Individuen mit ihnen selbst bewussten Empfindungen, Absichten und Überzeugungen verstehen, Übergänge gibt, die methodisch-wissenschaftlich nachvollzogen werden können und die nicht zu nutzen töricht wäre. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with reasonings that purport to explain why certain organisms have certain traits by showing that their actual design is better than contrasting designs. Biologists call such reasonings 'functional explanations'. To avoid confusion with other uses of that phrase, I call them 'design explanations'. This paper discusses the structure of design explanations and how they contribute to scientific understanding. Design explanations are contrastive and often compare real organisms to hypothetical organisms that cannot possibly exist. They are not (...) causal but appeal to functional dependencies between an organism's different traits. These explanations point out that because an organism has certain traits, it cannot be alive if the trait to be explained were replaced by a specified alternative. They can be understood from a mechanistic point of view as revealing the constraints on what mechanisms can be alive. (shrink)

This contribution investigates the idea that an act of signification can be understood in terms of the self-referentiality that is typical of the biological organization. The capacity of a living being to interpret and appreciate its own environment can be understood as being grounded in its ability to perform self-referential experiences. We may call this the living being’s capacity of sense. In any act that generates sense, it is possible to distinguish a process of signification from its outcome, but such (...) a distinction between logical levels inevitably demands an external observer’s point of view. Hence, the concept of ‘subjectivity’ can be defined in terms of an absence of such distinction between logical levels. This absence is considered pivotal both for the self-referential organization of the living and for the generation of sense. A case example from the field of psychotherapy is added to illustrate the distinction as well as the non-distinction between logical levels of description. (shrink)

Nice i Bergson spadaju medju glavne autore koji ispituju socio-afektivne uslove i istorijsku evoluciju pravde. Ali oni to cine na dva radikalno razlicita nacina, cija nespojivost, kako izgleda, jos nije dovoljno istaknuta: Nice objasnjava pravdu izdvajajuci socio-afektivne elemente koji su se medjusobno povezali da bi proizveli nesto takvo kao sto je "pravda", dok Bergson posmatra evoluciju pravde kao niz razlikovanja u prirodi. To Bergsona navodi da utvrdi temeljno razlikovanje izmedju dve pravde, jedne koja je visa i druge koja je niza, (...) jedne "otvorene" a druge "zatvorene", tamo gde Nice misli da zadovoljava monisticki zahtev postavljajuci jednu jedinu pravdu. Mozda se, ipak, Niceu moze uputiti Bergsonov prigovor da je "iznova sastavio evoluciju od fragmenata onoga sto je evoluiralo", i, bez sumnje, u svakom slucaju treba suprotstaviti Niceov postupak, koji je izvesna "genealogija", Bergsonovom postupku, koji je odista, "geneza". (shrink)