Some research is too risky to be conducted on anyone whose life expectancy is more than a few hours. Yet sometimes, the research can still be carried out using subjects who are brain dead or are soon to undergo a terminal wean, and who have articulated values that inclusion in the study can honor. So argues a team of ethicists and researchers at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where such research was recently undertaken.

The systems view on life and its emergence from complex chemistry has remarkably increased the scientific attention on metabolism in the last two decades. However, during this time there has not been much theoretical discussion on what constitutes a metabolism and what role it actually played in biogenesis. A critical and updated review on the topic is here offered, including some references to classical models from last century, but focusing more on current and future research. Metabolism is considered as intrinsically (...) related to the living but not necessarily equivalent to it. More precisely, the idea of “minimal metabolism”, in contrast to previous, top‐down conceptions, is formulated as a heuristic construct, halfway between chemistry and biology. Thus, rather than providing a complete or final characterization of metabolism, our aim is to encourage further investigations on it, particularly in the context of life's origin, for which some concrete methodological suggestions are provided. Also see the video abstract here:https://youtu.be/DP7VMKk2qpA. (shrink)

_Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation_ offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his successors: How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions? Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism (...) and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought. (shrink)

While it seems obvious that the embodied self is both a subject of experience and an object in the world, it is not clear how, or even whether, both of these senses of self can refer to thesameself. According to Husserl, the relation between these two senses of self is beset by the “paradox of human subjectivity.” Following Husserl’s lead, scholars have attempted to resolve the paradox of subjectivity. This paper categorizes the different formulations of the paradox according to the (...) dimension each pertains to and considers the prospects of each proposed resolution. It will be shown that, contrary to the claims of the respective authors, their attempted resolutions do not really resolve the paradox, but instead rephrase it or push it to the next dimension. This suggests that there is something deeper at work than a mere misunderstanding. This paper does not aim to resolve the paradox but instead initiates a new approach to it. Instead of seeing the paradox as a misapprehension that needs to be removed, I dig deeper to reveal its roots in ordinary consciousness. Investigating the proposed resolutions will reveal the fundamental role of the natural attitude, and I will argue that already the general thesis of the natural attitude makes the decisive cut that leads to what Sartre calls a “fissure” in pre-reflective self-awareness. The phenomenological reduction deepens the cut into what Husserl calls the “split of the self,” which in turn engenders the paradox of subjectivity. The paradox’s roots in the structure of ordinary consciousness not only constitute a reason for its persistence, but also suggest a new way to further investigate the embodied self. (shrink)

Process reliabilism -- Virtue reliabilism: justified belief -- Virtue reliabilism: knowledge -- Knowledge first virtue reliabilism -- The competition -- The safety dilemma -- Lottery cases.

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 66 Heft: 5 Seiten: 650-652.

We introduce combinatorial principles that characterize strong compactness and supercompactness for inaccessible cardinals but also make sense for successor cardinals. Their consistency is established from what is supposedly optimal. Utilizing the failure of a weak version of a square, we show that the best currently known lower bounds for the consistency strength of these principles can be applied.

Paradigms of anthropology -- Evolution-hominization-anthropology -- Philosophical anthropology -- Anthropology in the historical sciences: historical anthropology -- Cultural anthropology -- Historical cultural anthropology -- Core issues of anthropology -- The body as a challenge -- The mimetic basis of cultural learning -- Theories and practices of the performative -- The rediscovery of rituals -- Language-the antinomy between the universal and the particular -- Images and imagination -- Death and recollection of birth -- Future prospects.

The "Subject" of Nietzsche's Perspectivism CHRISTOPH COX FORMERLY TAKEN TO ENDORSE a profound skepticism and relativism, Nietz- sche's "doctrine of perspectivism" recently has been seen to fit within tradi- tional conceptions of epistemology and ontology? In the most recent and influential study of the matter, Maudemarie Clark maintains that, properly understood, perspectivism is "an obvious and nonproblematic doctrine. ''~ In a similar vein, Brian Leiter has recently argued that "perspectivism turns out to be much less radical than is usually (...) supposed," that, with this doctrine, "Nietz- sche.., is merely rehashing familiar Kantian themes, minus the rigor of Kant's exposition."~ According to both Clark and Leiter, perspectivism simply ' With occasional alterations, Nietzsche's texts will be quoted from the Kaufmann/Hollingdale translations and cited in the text according to standard abbreviations of their English titles fol- lowed by the section and/or paragraph number. The exception is "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," which is cited by page number from Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietz- sche's Notebooks of the Early x87os, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale , 79-9 x. Abbreviations are as follows: A: The Antichrist; BGE: Beyond Good and Evil; BT/SC: Birth of Tragedy, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism"; D: Daybreak; GM: On the Genealogy of Morals; GS: The Gay Science; TI: Twilight of the Idols;.. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant quotes the traditional view of the relation between the ethical and the aesthetical ('the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good'). However, he elaborates this view in a radically new way: as equivalence between two forms of reflection, between ethical and aesthetic reflection. The article distinguishes three different aspects of aesthetic reflection in Kant and discusses their respective ethical meaning. It shows the unresolved tension between Kant's program of an 'aesthetics of autonomy' on (...) the one hand, and his reference to sensualistic and vitalist motifs of an aesthetic 'energetism' on the other. (shrink)

Art is not only autonomous, following its own law, different from nonaesthetic reason, but sovereign: it subverts the rule of reason.In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling ...

The ethics of autonomous cars and automated driving have been a subject of discussion in research for a number of years :28–58, 2016). As levels of automation progress, with partially automated driving already becoming standard in new cars from a number of manufacturers, the question of ethical and legal standards becomes virulent. For exam-ple, while automated and autonomous cars, being equipped with appropriate detection sensors, processors, and intelligent mapping material, have a chance of being much safer than human-driven cars in (...) many regards, situations will arise in which accidents cannot be completely avoided. Such situations will have to be dealt with when programming the software of these vehicles. In several instances, internationally, regulations have been passed, based on legal considerations of road safety, mostly. However, to date, there have been few, if any, cases of a broader ethics code for autonomous or automated driving preceding actual regulation and being based on a broadly composed ethics committee of independent experts. In July 2016, the German Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, Alexander Dobrindt, appointed a national ethics committee for automated and connected driving, which began its work in September 2016. In June 2017, this committee presented a code of ethics which was published in German and in English. It consists of 20 ethical guidelines. Having been a member of this committee, I will present the main ethical topics of these guidelines and the discussions that lay behind them. (shrink)

Forms and Concepts is the first comprehensive study of the central role of concepts and concept acquisition in the Platonic tradition. It sets up a stimulating dialogue between Plato s innatist approach and Aristotle s much more empirical response. The primary aim is to analyze and assess the strategies with which Platonists responded to Aristotle s (and Alexander of Aphrodisias ) rival theory. The monograph culminates in a careful reconstruction of the elaborate attempt undertaken by the Neoplatonist Proclus (6th century (...) AD) to devise a systematic Platonic theory of concept acquisition.". (shrink)

A interlocution containing a stimulating lead essay on the relationship between law and violence by one of the key third-generation Frankfurt School philosophers, Christoph Menke, and engaged responses by a variety of influential critics.

In this paper we re-examine the semantics of classical higher-order logic with the purpose of clarifying the role of extensionality. To reach this goal, we distinguish nine classes of higher-order models with respect to various combinations of Boolean extensionality and three forms of functional extensionality. Furthermore, we develop a methodology of abstract consistency methods (by providing the necessary model existence theorems) needed to analyze completeness of (machine-oriented) higher-order calculi with respect to these model classes.

This book dispels popular understandings of Buddhism as a religion that emphasizes the renunciation of worldly goods, by examining how Buddhist temples and the monastic community (the sangha) require tangible resources in order to sustain themselves. The first book to focus on the material and financial relations of contemporary Buddhist monks, nuns, temples, and laypeople, it shows that rather than being peripheral, economic exchanges are often central to the relations between Buddhist monastics and laity, and are a key topic of (...) religious debate. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork from India over Russia to Japan, and including all three major Buddhist traditions, the book focuses on the flows of goods and services between clergy and laity, the management of resources, the treatment of cash, and the role of the state in temple economies. Along with documenting ritual and economic practices, these accounts engage with the anxieties and challenges facing Buddhist societies in the contemporary era and dispel the romantic notion of the Buddhist monk. (shrink)

Logik ist ein unveranderter, hochwertiger Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1873. Hansebooks ist Herausgeber von Literatur zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten wie Forschung und Wissenschaft, Reisen und Expeditionen, Kochen und Ernahrung, Medizin und weiteren Genres.Der Schwerpunkt des Verlages liegt auf dem Erhalt historischer Literatur.Viele Werke historischer Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler sind heute nur noch als Antiquitaten erhaltlich. Hansebooks verlegt diese Bucher neu und tragt damit zum Erhalt selten gewordener Literatur und historischem Wissen auch fur die Zukunft bei.".

(2003). Perfecting the Individual: Wilhelm von Humboldt's concept of anthropology, Bildung and mimesis. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 241-249.

The ArgumentThe text analyzes the related semantics of bacteriology and politics in imperial Germany. The rapid success of bacteriology in the 1880s and 1890s was due not least to the fact that scientific concepts of bacteria as “the smallest but most dangerous enemies of mankind” resonated with contemporary ideas about political enemies. Bacteriological hygiene was expected to provide answers to social and political problems. At the same time metaphors borrowed from bacteriological terminology were incorporated into the political language of the (...) time. While the “high command of our doctors” fought diseases, some contemporaries were identified with members of the evil species of “bacillus communis odii.”Both imperialistic politics and bacteriological science relied on images of inferior and invisible but potent enemies. Both were able to increase their prestige via a mutual interchange of their vocabularies. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to develop general criteria of argumentative validity and adequacy for probabilistic arguments on the basis of the epistemological approach to argumentation. In this approach, as in most other approaches to argumentation, proabilistic arguments have been neglected somewhat. Nonetheless, criteria for several special types of probabilistic arguments have been developed, in particular by Richard Feldman and Christoph Lumer. In the first part (sects. 2-5) the epistemological basis of probabilistic arguments is discussed. With regard to (...) the philosophical interpretation of probabilities a new subjectivist, epistemic interpretation is proposed, which identifies probabilities with tendencies of evidence (sect. 2). After drawing the conclusions of this interpretation with respect to the syntactic features of the probability concept, e.g. one variable referring to the data base (sect. 3), the justification of basic probabilities (priors) by judgements of relative frequency (sect. 4) and the justification of derivative probabilities by means of the probability calculus are explained (sect. 5). The core of the paper is the definition of '(argumentatively) valid derivative probabilistic arguments', which provides exact conditions for epistemically good probabilistic arguments, together with conditions for the adequate use of such arguments for the aim of rationally convincing an addressee (sect. 6). Finally, some measures for improving the applicability of probabilistic reasoning are proposed (sect. 7). (shrink)

Oscar Wilde reacts to the predicament of art in the face of an increasingly blasé public. He reverses the roles and sees his art as the reception of those who were formerly the recipients – according to the topos of the ›seeing work of art‹ (Früchtl). To receive Wilde means, first of all, to know oneself received. Wilde looks back colder than he or his art could be looked at. As the one being looked at, the audience is suddenly placed (...) in the position of the work of art. It is confronted with aesthetic expectations that it cannot meet for systematic reasons. To aestheticize existence is to disavow it. Wilde does not educate his audience in this way, however. Instead, he educates them to become an audience. Nothing better should happen to the audience than to remain an audience. The cold look has been interpreted as amoralism. Yet Wilde is no good as an example of how even the morally reprehensible can be aesthetically legitimate. Instead, he demonstrates that the aesthetic is far less permissible than the ethical. Unethical things are already – and only – forbidden aesthetically. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag stellt zum einen die These auf, dass das Hildebrandslied den erzählten Vater-Sohn-Kampf aus Hildebrands heroischer Exorbitanz ableitet, die im Figurendialog analytisch vorgeführt wird. Die darin zum Ausdruck kommende Reflexionsdistanz des Liedes zu seinem Gegenstand kann als postheroische Perspektive stricto sensu bezeichnet werden. Da diese Perspektive somit bereits in einem frühesten Zeugnis europäischer Heldenepik konstitutiv für die narrative Sinngebung ist, schlägt der Beitrag zum anderen vor, die postheroische Perspektive als ein heuristisches Instrument zu gebrauchen, mit dem nicht nur Erscheinungsweisen (...) und Entwicklungen der europäischen Heldenepik neu beurteilt werden können, sondern auch das gesellschaftliche Relevanzpotenzial von ›Heldentum‹ bis heute im Rückbezug auf jene Heldenepik erklärt werden kann.The article, on the one hand, proposes that the OHG Hildebrandslied derives the narrated battle between father and son from Hildebrand’s heroic exorbitance, which is analytically explained in the characters’ dialogue before. That implies a deliberating distance of the lay’s narration from its subject matter, a distance which can be referred to as a post-heroic perspective in the strict sense. Thus, this perspective is a constitutive component of heroic poetry already in one of its earliest testimonies. Therefore, on the other hand, the article suggests to employ the post-heroic perspective as a heuristic device, which allows us not only to reevaluate the appearances and evolutions of European heroic poetry, but also to explain the persistent social and cultural relevance associated with the idea of ›heroism‹ by tracing it back to pre-modern heroic poetry. (shrink)

Leben und Werk des Berner Staatstheoretikers und politischen Schriftstellers Karl Ludwig von Haller sind bisher nur ungenugend untersucht. Die fruhere wissenschaftliche Betrachtung beschrankte sich einseitig auf sein Restaurationswerk. Weiter fehlt bis heute eine Biographie Hallers. Eine erneute Betrachtung seiner Anschauungen und eine Biographie erfordern aber zuerst eine vollstandige Sichtung und Auswertung der vorhandenen Quellen. Die Untersuchung von Hallers publizistischem Wirken bis 1815 zeigt, wie viele unbekannte und unbeachtete Quellen der Forschung bisher verschlossen waren. Weiter weist die Darstellung nach, dass Haller (...) zuerst als Gegenrevolutionar zu verstehen ist, der seine Staatstheorie als Antwort auf die Zerstorung der alten Ordnung durch Revolution formulierte.". (shrink)

Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his successors: How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions? -/- Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between (...) relativism and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought. (shrink)

This article consists of three parts, two introductory, in which the limits and the methods of analysis of dialogues are expounded, and the major part, in which the main features of a philosophical theory of disputation are outlined.It was an essential aim of the philosophical analysis of argumentative dialogues to develop tools of substantiation for cases in which logic doesn't help any more. In the first part of this paper I show that such tools can and will be developed only (...) by analyzing argumentations (“argumentation” in the sense of a monologue in which arguments for a thesis are brought forward), and that the analysis of argumentative dialogues doesn't contribute anything to the development of such tools.The systematically first task of the philosophical analysis of dialogues consists in understanding the general practical aims of philosophically interesting types of dialogue. Only subsequently the rules of the dialogue can be reconstructed as good means for reaching these aims. Dialogical games constructed without referring to such a purpose are externally senseless and useless.The third part is an outline of a philosophical theory of disputation (“disputation” here will mean: (learned) dialogue in which the participants cooperatively though perhaps controversially attempt to find out by means of arguments and mutual criticism whether a thesis is true or false). Disputations contain argumentations, and many functions of a disputation can also be fulfilled by argumentations alone. Certifying the truth of convictions is the specific aim of disputation. This is accomplished by eliminating errors of substantiation and foundation as effectively as possible, in revising false convictions and their foundations, thereby making the remaining convictions more certain. Based on this analysis of the aim of disputation, the basic rules of disputations will be critically reconstructed: possible moves, rules of sequence, and the internal aim and ends of disputations. (shrink)

: This article analyzes German debates on the microbiology of infectious diseases from 1865 to 1875 and asks how and when organic pollution in tissues became noteworthy for aetiology and pathogenesis. It was with Ernst Hallier's pleomorphistic microbiology that the organic character of alien material in tissues came to be regarded as important for pathology. The process that followed saw both vigorous biological critique and a number of medical applications of Hallier's work. Around 1874 contemporaries reached the conclusion that pleomorphous (...) vegetation was most likely of little importance if not accidental in relation to the aetiology of infectious diseases whereas the idea of monomorphous micro-organisms facilitated a causal explanation. It was only then that notions such a pure cultures, bacterial specificity, etc. favored by Ferdinand Julius Cohn and his school became popular in medical circles. (shrink)

RATIONAL ALTRUISM. A PRUDENTIAL THEORY OF RATIONALITY AND ALTRUISM - STRUCTURE: "Rational altruism" is the attempt to develop and rationally justify moral principles - with a very strong emphasis on this justification. The concept of justification is developed in a metaethical part (ch. 2); it requires recourse to prudential decisions and to information about our decision-making procedures. The actual normative ethics (Ch. 6 and especially 7) is therefore still based on a prudential desirability theory (Ch. 4 and Sections 5.5-5.6) and (...) this in turn on an empirical action theory (Ch. 3 and Sections 5.1-5.4). - METAETHICS (Ch. 2): In the metaethical part of the book, conditions of adequacy for cogent moral justifications are first developed and justified, which demand, among other things, an information-stable motivation through cogent moral justifications (internalist moral justification). After an examination of various approaches to justification in ethics with regard to this adequacy condition and the negative outcome of this examination, an alternative solution strategy is presented. Among other things, the rationality requirements of profane rational reasoning approaches in ethics are to be systematically reinforced by a prudential desirability theory that aims at information-stable evaluations. - EMPIRICAL THEORY OF ACTION (Chapter 3 and Sections 5.1-5.4): The empirical theory of action developed here therefore provides a detailed analysis of the regularities and leeway of our decisions, especially the influence of information on decision-making paths. - PRUDENTIAL DESIRABILITY THEORY (Chapter 4 and Sections 5.5-5.6): In the prudential desirability theory, the 'individual desirability' of events, especially actions, is then defined in such a way that, of the various evaluation possibilities, the one that is stable in terms of information is always chosen. This procedure far exceeds the rationality requirements of rational decision theory, for example. - NORMATIVE ETHICS (chap. 6 and especially 7): Finally, in the actual normative ethics, a prioritarian standard for the moral evaluation of actions, norms and entire social orders is developed, called "Utilex". Utilex is based on compassion and, like compassion, is partial to the worse off, the poor and unfortunate, but without neglecting the interests of the better off. (shrink)

This study offers a detailed systematic comparison of Fichte's and Hegel's philosophies with regard to their conceptions of freedom. It explains and compares the place of practical freedom within the two thinkers' overarching systems of ethical, legal, and political philosophy. In the process, it shows not only Hegel's debt to Fichte but also the essential difference between understanding freedom as origin as opposed to result.

We present a computer-supported approach for the logical analysis and conceptual explicitation of argumentative discourse. Computational hermeneutics harnesses recent progresses in automated reasoning for higher-order logics and aims at formalizing natural-language argumentative discourse using flexible combinations of expressive non-classical logics. In doing so, it allows us to render explicit the tacit conceptualizations implicit in argumentative discursive practices. Our approach operates on networks of structured arguments and is iterative and two-layered. At one layer we search for logically correct formalizations for each (...) of the individual arguments. At the next layer we select among those correct formalizations the ones which honor the argument’s dialectic role, i.e. attacking or supporting other arguments as intended. We operate at these two layers in parallel and continuously rate sentences’ formalizations by using, primarily, inferential adequacy criteria. An interpretive, logical theory will thus gradually evolve. This theory is composed of meaning postulates serving as explications for concepts playing a role in the analyzed arguments. Such a recursive, iterative approach to interpretation does justice to the inherent circularity of understanding: the whole is understood compositionally on the basis of its parts, while each part is understood only in the context of the whole. We summarily discuss previous work on exemplary applications of human-in-the-loop computational hermeneutics in metaphysical discourse. We also discuss some of the main challenges involved in fully-automating our approach. By sketching some design ideas and reviewing relevant technologies, we argue for the technological feasibility of a highly-automated computational hermeneutics. (shrink)

À la suite de Penser l’Europe , la thèse suivante est avancée : aujourd’hui, la formation culturelle en Europe n’est plus seulement une tâche nationale mais bien une tâche interculturelle. Ce n’est qu’en s’adonnant à celle-ci que les systèmes culturels européens peuvent donner à la génération suivante la capacité de concevoir de manière productive les deux tendances qui déterminent la mondialisation : l’homogénéisation et la diversité culturelle. Dans ce processus, il s’agit avant tout d’apprendre à affronter l’étrangéité ou bien encore (...) l’altérité. Il faut comprendre que les formes européennes du logocentrisme, de l’égocentrisme et de l’ethnocentrisme véhiculent un danger, celui de réduire la rencontre avec l’étranger à quelque chose de connu au lieu de nous y apprendre quelque chose, d’y apprendre à supporter un certain degré de non compréhension de l’étranger et de non-identité, d’y apprendre une pensée hétérologique. Dans le processus de formation interculturelle, il y va d’incertitude et de complexité, de différence et de transgression, il s’agit de vivre avec un nombre croissant de formes culturelles hybrides.Following Thinking Europe , the thesis is advanced today, cultural training in Europe is not only a national task but a task intercultural. It is only engaged in this European cultural systems that can give the next generation the ability to develop into productive two trends that shape globalization and homogenization of cultural diversity. In this process, it is first of all learn to face or even the strangeness of otherness. It is understood that the European forms of logocentrism, of egocentrism and ethnocentrism carry a danger of reducing the encounter with the stranger knew something instead of us learn something, learn to withstand a certain degree of understanding of non abroad and non-identity, learn heterological thinking. In the process of intercultural training, there is uncertainty and complexity, difference and transgression, he is living with a growing number of hybrid cultural forms. (shrink)