Most of the existing literature on social preferences either tests whether certain characteristics of the social context influence individual decisions, or tries to estimate parameters of social preference functions describing such behavior at the level of the entire population. In the present paper, we are concerned with measuring parameters of social preference functions at the individual level. We draw upon concepts developed for eliciting other types of utility functions, in particular the literature on decision making under incomplete information. Our method (...) derives parameters of social preference functions from indifference statements about the distribution of payoffs a group. We apply our method in a controlled social preference experiment to establish the external validity of estimated parameters. Our results show the expected relationships to some external factors and also a strong correspondence between parameter estimates and factors that, according to the subjects’ own descriptions, influenced their behavior. We also find that some concepts discussed in the literature on social preferences, in particular envy toward players receiving a larger payoff, have very diverse and complex effects at the individual level. (shrink)

This volume contributes to the ongoing interdisciplinary controversies about the moral, legal and political status of children and childhood. It comprises essays by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds on diverse theoretical problems and public policy controversies that bear upon different facets of the life of children in contemporary liberal democracies. The book is divided into three major parts that are each organized around a common general theme. The first part (“Children and Childhood: Autonomy, Well-Being and Paternalism”) focusses on key concepts (...) of an ethics of childhood. Part two (“Justice for Children”) contains chapters that are concerned with the topics of justice for children and justice during childhood. The third part (“The Politics of Childhood”) deals with issues that concern the importance of `childhood´ as a historically contingent political category and its relevance for the justification and practical design of political processes and institutions that affect children and families. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Graf skizziert die Biographie des in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren uberaus einflussreichen Hamburger Systematischen Theologen Helmut Thielicke, um dann dessen Aktivitaten zur Grundung einer Zeitschrift fur Theologische Ethik zu rekonstruieren. Dabei untersucht er auch Thielickes Kontakte zu dem amerikanischen Theologen Reinhold Niebuhr und zu Paul Tillich. Vorgestellt werden die von Thielicke zunachst in den Blick genommenen Herausgeber, seine Programmentwurfe zu Aufgabe und Profil der seit Januar 1957 erscheinenden Zeitschrift fur Evangelische Ethik und das tatsachliche Herausgebergremium, dem (...) neben Thielicke protestantische Universitatstheologen wie Heinz-Dietrich Wendland, Hendrik van Oyen, Wolfgang Schweitzer sowie der kirchlich vielfaltig engagierte rheinische Unternehmer Friedrich Karrenberg und der spatere WDR-Intendant Klaus von Bismarck angehorten. Durch die dichte Analyse der in den ersten Jahrgangen der Zeitschrift fur Evangelische Ethik gefuhrten Kontroversen uber die atomare Bewaffnung sowie den Institutionenbegriff zeigt Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, dass die ZEE primar ein Organ innerprotestantischer Verstandigung sein und zugleich die politisch-soziale Gestaltungskraft des bundesdeutschen Protestantismus starken sollte. Trotz ihres dezidiert internationalen Anspruchs wurde die Zeitschrift schon bald zu einem Organ, in dem hauptsachlich nur noch deutschsprachige protestantische Theologen publizierten. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to think through paranoia’s epistemic and affective features, which pervade both the worldview presented in Senecan tragedy and the inner life of many of its protagonists. Drawing upon recent literary-critical work, I argue that paranoia is temporally and epistemically ambivalent: subjects simultaneously attempt to “get ahead” of a looming cataclysm—looking to the future in an attempt to avert disaster—while inevitably “falling behind,” failing to predict or preempt the future in time to protect themselves. Much of (...) Senecan tragedy plays out paranoia’s future-oriented vigilance on the formal level. Foreshadowing, allusions, and meta-literary flourishes serve to render both readers and characters hyperaware of the earth-shattering horrors to come; however, in doing so, they also reveal that this forward-oriented bracing only serves to dredge up negative affect in advance. By contrast, I argue that Seneca’s Phoenissae thematizes in the character of Oedipus not only paranoia’s future-looking vigilance but also its inherent lagging, the failure to know and act in advance. These elements of slowness, stuckness, and delay open a space for stillness, relief, and intimacy, even within a narrative which hurtles toward cataclysm. (shrink)

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body (...) of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, I will make use of epistemic permissivism to provide a general recipe for generating so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge. I will call this class of cases permissive divergence cases. While other divergence cases have been discussed in the literature, permissive divergence cases prove themselves to be less susceptible to many of the worries raised against their competitors, while being directly built on an often-defended epistemological thesis. (shrink)

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...

Einleitung -- I. Teil : Theorie. Verwandlung des Klaviertons ; Die Entdeckung der Objektivität der Musik ; Die Vergegenwärtigung der dynamischen Ordnung der Musik ; Handwerk und Kunst--Meisterschaft und Inspiration des Augenblicks--Verwesentlichung und Individualisierung -- II. Teil : Praxis. Übergang : Erkenntnis im Vollzug ; Sechs Grundmaximen für die Arbiet am Klavier ; Zwölf praktische Übungen zur fortschreitenden Erschliessung der musikalischen Dynamik in ihrer Vielschichtigkeit ; Supplement : Wilde Jagd--eine zusammengesetzte Zusatzübung für Fortgeschrittene -- Schlussbetrachtung.

Was haben Gerechtigkeit, Frieden, Glück und Wertebildung miteinander zu tun? Der Band beantwortet diese Frage interdisziplinär. Die BeiträgerInnen untersuchen Lernprozesse hinter gerechtem Urteilen, setzen sich mit Projekten zur Friedensstiftung durch Konfliktberatung auseinander und analysieren schulische Programme zur Förderung von Zufriedenheit und Glück. Sie erläutern darüber hinaus die Relevanz von Wertebildung in einem fachspezifischen Curriculum und denken Gerechtigkeits-, Friedens- und Glücks-bildung historisch und systematisch weiter. Die AutorInnen kommen aus den Erziehungswissenschaften, der Philosophie und aus den Theologien oder sind FachpädagogInnen und -didaktikerInnen.

Patrick Lenta’s Corporal Punishment: A Philosophical Assessment provides a thorough, well-researched, accessible, and philosophically convincing examination of the normative status of the corporal...

Dieses letzte große Buch Troeltschs entstand in einem komplizierten Arbeitsprozess zwischen 1915 und 1922 und gilt als der zentrale Text im geschichtsphilosophischen Diskurs der 20er Jahre. Der gefeierte Berliner Kulturphilosoph verarbeitete hier die traumatischen Erfahrungen des Ersten Weltkriegs und suchte durch sein Konzept der „europäischen Kultursynthese“ ethische Potentiale europäischer Integration und die Aussöhnung der Deutschen mit der westlichen Demokratie zu fundieren. Dazu verarbeitete er weit über 1000 Titel aus dem zeitgenössischen geschichtsphilosophischen Diskurs. Diese erste kritische Edition des Textes bietet neben (...) allen Entwicklungsstufen erstmals auch eine präzise Dokumentation der reichen Diskussionslage. (shrink)

The coherence objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that it is impossible for one individual to have both the attributes of God and the attributes of a human being. This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s answer to this objection. I challenge the dominant, mereological interpretation of Aquinas’s position and, in light of this challenge, develop and defend a new alternative interpretation of Aquinas’s response to this important objection to Christian doctrine.

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It is this function that (...) supports a central norm of assertion according to which a good assertion is one that has the disposition to generate knowledge in others. The book uses this functionalist approach to motivate further norms of assertion on both the speaker and the hearer side and investigates ramifications of this view for other questions about assertion. (shrink)

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)

This book addresses the endangerment of children’s bodies in affluent societies. Bodily integrity is an important part of a child’s physical and mental well-being, but it can also be violated through various threats during childhood; not only affecting physical health but also causing mental damage and leading to distortions in the development of the self. The authors give an account of three areas, which present different serious dangers: (1) body and eating, (2) body and sexuality, and (3) body and violence. (...) Through an in-depth examination of the available theoretical and empirical knowledge, as well as a thorough ethical analysis, the central injustices in the mentioned areas are identified and the agents with responsibilities towards children displayed. The authors conclude by providing invaluable insight into the necessity of an ethical basis for policies to safeguard children and their bodies. (shrink)

This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and (...) I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

This paper is built around a single, simple idea. It is widely agreed that there is a distinctive kind of awareness each of us has of his own bodily actions. This action-awareness is different from any perceptual awareness a subject may have of his own actions; it can exist in the absence of such perceptual awareness. The single, simple idea around which this paper is built is that the distinctive awareness that subjects have of their own mental actions is a (...) form of action-awareness. Subjects’ awareness of their own mental actions is a species of the same genus that also includes the distinctive awareness of bodily actions. More specifically, I claim. (shrink)

_Focused on existentialism, this issue explores current writers, thinkers, and texts affiliated with the movement_ In 1948, _Yale French Studies_ devoted its inaugural issue to existentialism. This anniversary issue responds seventy years later. In recent years, new critical and theoretical approaches have reconfigured existentialism and refreshed perspectives on the philosophical, literary, and stylistic movement. This special issue restores the writers, thinkers, and texts of the movement to their subversive strength. In so doing, it illustrates existentialism’s present relevance, revealing how the (...) concerns of the past urgently bristle into our own times. (shrink)

How does good combine with bad? Most creatures are neither so blessed as to only enjoy good nor so cursed as to only suffer bad. Rather, the good and bad they receive throughout their lives combine to produce their overall quality of life. But it’s not just whole lives that have combined good and bad. Many stretches within contain both positive and negative occurrences whose value is joined to form the overall quality of that span of time. In a single (...) morning someone might wake up, brush their teeth, stub their toe groggily lumbering down the stairs, and have a sip of coffee that’s tasty but so hot they burn their tongue. These events are good and bad for them to various degrees, and their value comes together to form an overall value for them of that morning. A single moment, even, can have combined value from distinct pockets of good and bad that occur simultaneously. The tastiness of the coffee is good, but the pain of the heat is bad. They combine to form an overall value of the sipping moment – negative if the pain outweighed the flavor. Thus, wellbeing and illbeing combine. But how? How can someone rightly chastise themselves for sipping the overly hot coffee when it was, in fact, good because it was tasty? To pose the question starkly, a life can be bad, even so bad to not be worth living, and yet it can have many instances of good, where these goods are, in themselves, pure of any negativity. But how can good make something bad? (shrink)

A number of cases involving self-locating beliefs have been discussed in the Bayesian literature. I suggest that many of these cases, such as the sleeping beauty case, are entangled with issues that are independent of self-locating beliefs per se. In light of this, I propose a division of labor: we should address each of these issues separately before we try to provide a comprehensive account of belief updating. By way of example, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order (...) to accommodate these issues. Then, putting these other issues aside, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order to accommodate self-locating beliefs. Finally, I propose a constraint on updating rules, the "Learning Principle", which rules out certain kinds of troubling belief changes, and I use this principle to assess some of the available options. (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)

In this paper, I aim to develop a novel virtue reliabilist account of justified belief, which incorporates insights from both process reliabilism and extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Like extant virtue reliabilist accounts of justi- fied belief, the proposed view takes it that justified belief is a kind of competent performance and that competent performances require reliable agent abilities. However, unlike extant versions of virtue reliabilism, the view takes abilities to essentially involve reliable processes. In this way, the proposed takes (...) a leaf from process reliabilism. Finally, I will provide reason to believe that the view compares favourably with both extant versions of virtue reliabilism and process reliabilism. In particular, I will show that in taking abilities to essentially involve reliable processes, the view has an edge over extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Moreover, I will argue that the proposed view can either solve or defuse a number of classical problems of process reliabilism, including the new evil demon problem, the problem of clairvoyant cases and the generality problem. (shrink)

Essentialists claim that at least some individuals or kinds have essences. This raises an important but little-discussed question: how do we come to know what the essence of something is? This paper examines Aristotle’s answer to this question. One influential interpretation (viz., the Explanationist Interpretation) is carefully expounded, criticized, and then refined. Particular attention is given to what Aristotle says about this issue in DA I.1, APo II.2, and APo II.8. It is argued that the epistemological claim put forward in (...) DA I.1 differs from that put forward in APo II.2 and II.8, contrary to what has been claimed by Explanationists, and that each of these distinct epistemological claims rests on a distinct non-epistemological thesis about essence. Consequently, an ‘Enriched Explanationist Interpretation’ is developed which takes into account both of the aforementioned elements in Aristotle’s epistemology of essence. The paper concludes by highlighting an insight the preceding exegetical discussion offers to contemporary essentialists seeking to explain how we come to know what something’s essence is. (shrink)

A critical interrogation of elements of Hobbes's political and natural philosophy and its capacity to enrich our understanding of the natural of democratic life.

This book offers a broad-based critical survey of recent anti-realist arguments in the philosophy of science, cultural theory, hermeneutics, the sociology of knowledge and the interpretation of quantum-mechanics.

An epistemic agent A is a false epistemic authority for others iff they falsely believe A to be in a position to help them accomplish their epistemic ends. A major divide exists between what I call "epistemic quacks", who falsely believe themselves to be relevantly competent, and "epistemic charlatans", i.e., false authorities who believe or even know that they are incompetent. Both types of false authority do not cover what Lackey (2021) calls "predatory experts": experts who systematically misuse their social-epistemic (...) status as a cover for predatory behavior. Qua experts, predatory experts are competent and thus could (and maybe sometimes do) help their clients. But should we count them as genuine epistemic authorities? No, I argue, they are false epistemic authorities because, in addition to their practical and moral misconduct, such experts systematically deceive their clients, thereby thwarting the clients’ epistemic ends. (shrink)

An influential thought-experiment by Derek Parfit sought to establish that people have a preference for unpleasant events to lie in the past rather than the future. In recent discussions of Parfit’s argument, this purported preference is modelled as a discounting phenomenon, as is the tensed emotion of relief, which Arthur Prior argued demonstrated that there is an objective metaphysical difference between the past and the future. Looking at recent work demonstrating some psychological past/future asymmetries that are more clearly instances of (...) discounting I argue that this existing philosophical literature fails to distinguish between what are clearly two quite different psychological phenomena. This affects recent attempts to respond to Prior’s metaphysical argument, because it is not clear that they have identified the right phenomenon to be explained. It also affects Parfit’s thought-experiment, because the purported unitary ‘preference’ may in fact be an amalgam of these two quite different psychological phenomena. (shrink)

Die Überlieferung des Briefwechsels zwischen Christian Wolff (1679–1754) und Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel (1676–1749) ist ein singulärer Glücksfall. Die in der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig aufbewahrten Bände enthalten den nahezu geschlossen und damit am umfangreichsten erhaltenen Briefwechsel in der Gesamtkorrespondenz Christian Wolffs. Die historisch-kritische Edition des Briefwechsels stellt Materialien bereit, die die Wolff- und Aufklärungsforschung auf eine neue Grundlage stellen. Der Briefwechsel erlaubt neben bisher unbekannten biographischen Details aus Wolffs Marburger Zeit und den ersten Jahren seines Wirkens nach der Rückkehr an (...) die Universität Halle Einblicke in Wolffs und Manteuffels Positionen innerhalb der politischen, philosophischen, theologischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Debatten der Zeit. Darüber hinaus eröffnet der Briefwechsel einen innovativen Einblick in die Funktionen eines wissenschaftspolitischen und epistolären Netzwerks, das von Graf Manteuffel zum Zwecke der europaweiten Verbreitung des Wolffianismus unterhalten und gepflegt wurde. Das Editionsprojekt wurde im Rahmen eines Kooperationsvertrags zwischen der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg und der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig am Internationalen Zentrum für die Erforschung der europäischen Aufklärung (IZEA) der Universität Halle durchgeführt. ************ The survival of the correspondence between Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Christoph von Manteuffel (1676–1749) is a singular piece of luck. The volumes preserved in Leipzig University Library contain the almost complete and thus largest surviving exchange of letters in all of Wolff’s correspondence. This historical-critical edition presents material which sets the study of Wolff and of the Enlightenment on a new footing. As well as previously unknown biographical details about Wolff’s time in Marburg and his first years of activity after his return to the University of Halle, it provides insights into Wolff’s and Manteuffel’s positions within the political, philosophical, theological and scientific debates of the period. In addition the correspondence opens up an innovative perspective on the functions of a scholarly political and epistolary network which Count Manteuffel maintained and nurtured in order to spread Wolffianism throughout Europe. The edition is part of a collaborative project between the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Saxon Academy of Sciences, based at the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies at the University of Halle. (shrink)

ISBN 3110150077 (paperback) DEM 58.00 A collection of invited papers on the role of preferences and desires in practical reasoning: including rational decision making, the concept of welfare, and ethics. With a substantial introduction and a bibliographical survey. culture-specific and universal factors.

Can we discover morality in nature? Flowers and Honeybees extends the considerable scientific knowledge of flowers and honeybees through a philosophical discussion of the origins of morality in nature. Flowering plants and honeybees form a social group where each requires the other. They do not intentionally harm each other, both reason, and they do not compete for commonly required resources. They also could not be more different. Flowering plants are rooted in the ground and have no brains. Mobile honeybees can (...) communicate the location of flower resources to other workers. We can learn from a million-year-old social relationship how morality can be constructed and maintained over time. (shrink)

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These three robust volumes make available in its entirety a collection of correspondence, held at the University of Leipzig library and comprising nearly five hundred letters, between Christian Wolff and Ernst Christoph, Graf von Manteuffel. At the time of the correspondence, Wolff was the most famous philosopher of the German Enlightenment, having taken a position in Marburg after his exile from Prussia in 1723. Manteuffel was a Saxon diplomat, advocate for the Wolffian philosophy at the Prussian court, and (...) a cofounder of the Societas Alethophilorum, a group of thinkers devoted to propagating and defending the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy. The decade covered by the correspondence would... (shrink)

This chapter offers an interpretation of Jaspers’ distinction between explaining and understanding, which relates this distinction to that between general and singular causal claims. Put briefly, I suggest that when Jaspers talks about (mere) explanation, what he has in mind are general causal claims linking types of events. Understanding, by contrast, is concerned with singular causation in the psychological domain. Furthermore, I also suggest that Jaspers thinks that only understanding makes manifest what causation between one element of a person’s mental (...) life and another ultimately consists in – that is, the particular way in which one psychic event can emerge from or arise out of another. I contrast the resulting view both with a view on causation in psychiatry recently put forward by John Campbell, and also with another view that is the target of Campbell’s attack, which is due to Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. (shrink)

This article discusses Harvey Siegel’s general justification of the epistemological theory of argumentation in his seminal essay “Arguing with Arguments." On the one hand, the achievements of this essay are honoured—in particular, a thorough differentiation of the different meanings of ‘argument’ and ‘argumentation,’ the semantic justification of the fundamentality of arguments as sequences of propositions, and the detailed critiques of alternative theories of argumentation. On the other hand, suggestions for strengthening the theory are added to Siegel's expositions, which make different (...) perspectives within the epistemological theory of argumentation recognisable. (shrink)