Constructibility and complexity play central roles in recent research in computer science, mathematics and physics. For example, scientists are investigating the complexity of computer programs, constructive proofs in mathematics and the randomness of physical processes. But there are different approaches to the explication of these concepts. This volume presents important research on the state of this discussion, especially as it refers to quantum mechanics. This `foundational debate' in computer science, mathematics and physics was already fully developed in 1930 in the (...) Vienna Circle. A special section is devoted to its real founder Hans Hahn, referring to his contribution to the history and philosophy of science. The documentation section presents articles on the early Philipp Frank and on the Vienna Circle in exile. Reviews cover important recent literature on logical empiricism and related topics. (shrink)

One worry about metaethical expressivism is that it reduces to some form of subjectivism. This worry is enforced by subjectivists who argue that subjectivism can explain certain phenomena thought to support expressivism equally well. Recently, authors have started to suggest that subjectivism can take away what has often been seen as expressivism's biggest explanatory advantage, namely expressivism's ability to explain the possibility of moral disagreement. In this paper, I will give a response to an argument recently given by Frank (...) Jackson to this conclusion that will show that it is false that subjectivism could explain disagreement as well as expressivism. (shrink)

Einleitung 1. KULTURPOLITISCHE IMPULSE IN RESTAURATIVER ZEIT. Hermann Lübbe. Deutscher Idealismus als Philosophie Preußischer Kulturpolitik - Walter Jaeschke. Politik, Kultur und Philosophie in Preußen - Kurt Rainer Meist. Zur Rolle der Geschichte in Hegels System der Philosophie - Karlheinz Stierle. Zwei Hauptstädte des Wissens; Paris und Berlin 2. KUNSTTHEORIE UND ÄSTHETIK IN BERLIN. Beat Wyss. Klassizismus und Geschichtsphilosophie im Konflikt. Aloys Hirt und Hegel - Gunter Scholtz. Schleiermachers Theorie der modernen Kultur mit vergleichendem Blick auf Hegel - Frank Jolles. (...) August Wilhelm Schlegel und Berlin: Sein Weg von den Berliner Vorlesungen von 1801-04 zu denen vom Jahre 1827 - Frithjof Rodi. Die Romantiker in der Sicht Hegels, Hayms und Diltheys - Wolfhart Henckmann. Solger und die Berliner Kunstszene - Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert. H. G. Hotho: Kunst als Bildungserlebnis und Kunsthistorie in systematischer Absicht, oder die entpolitisierte Version der ästhetischen Erziehung des Menschen - Gregor Stemmrich. C. Schnaase; Rezeption und Transformation Berlinischen Geistes in der kunsthistorischen Forschung 3. AKTUALITÄT DES LITERARISCHEN UND KÜNSTLERISCHEN ERBES - Hellmut Flashar. Die Entdeckung der griechischen Tragödie für die Deutsche Bühne - Siegfried Grosse. Die Rezeption des Nibelungenliedes im 19. Jahrhundert - Carl Dahlhaus. Hegel und die Musik seiner Zeit - Otto Pöggeler. Der Philosoph und der Maler. Hegel und Christian Xeller - Barbara Stemmrich-Köhler. Die Rezeption von Goethes West-östlichem Divan im Umkreis Hegels. (shrink)

Produced in honor of White's eightieth birthday, _Re-Figuring Hayden White_ testifies to the lasting importance of White's innovative work, which firmly reintegrates historical studies with literature and the humanities. The book is a major reconsideration of the historian's contributions and influence by an international group of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. Individual essays address the key concepts of White's intellectual career, including tropes, narrative, figuralism, and the historical sublime while exploring the place of White's work in the philosophy (...) of history, postmodernism, and ethics. They also discuss his role as historian and teacher and apply his ideas to specific historical events. (shrink)

It has often been argued – especially by historicists – that history deals with the individual where science focuses on the universal. But few philosophers would nowadays express their agreement with the historicist’s demarcation between history and the sciences. A standard criticism is that knowledge of the individual can only be expressed by an appeal to universals. This essay is an effort to rehabilitate the historicist argument by means of a closer and more accurate analysis of the notion of the (...) individual than is given in the traditional historicist account of the nature of historical writing. Leibniz’s conception of the substance or the monad proves to be quite helpful here. (shrink)

According to German theorists historicism was the result of a dynamization of the static world-view of the Enlightenment. According to contemporary Anglo-Saxon theorists historicism resulted from a de-rhetoricization of Enlightenment historical writing. It is argued that, contrary to appearances, these two views do not exclude but support each other. This can be explained if the account of change implicit in Enlightenment historical writing is compared to that suggested by historicism and, more specifically, by the historicist notion of the "historical idea." (...) Aspects of the contemporary debate about the nature and the task of historical writing can be clarified from the perspective of the differences between Enlightenment and historicist historical writing. (shrink)

The discussion of Kuukkanen’s bookPostnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography is presented here in the form of a dialogue. The dialogue addresses the following five issues: 1) the kind of claims typically made in- and by the historical text, 2) narrativism and historical representation, 3) representational holism, 4) representationalism and non-representationalism and 5) the role of argument in historical writing. While agreement is within reach for the two participants in the dialogue in case of the two first issues, opinions begin to diverge (...) with the third one. Disagreement boils down to the hierarchy between representation and argument: is representation the master that argument has to serve, or has representation nothing to add to what argument can and will give us? (shrink)

Im Rahmen des Modellvorhabens „Patienten als Partner—Tumorpatienten und ihr Mitwirken bei medizinischen Entscheidungen“ wurden zwischen März 2002 und August 2003 272 palliativ behandelte Tumorpatienten nach ihrer Einstellung zur Patientenverfügung und zur gewünschten Beteiligung an medizinischen Entscheidungen befragt. Von den Befragten kannten 30% Patientenverfügungen nicht, darunter signifikant mehr Befragte mit formal niedrigerem Bildungsabschluss. Es hatten bereits 11% eine Patientenverfügung abgeschlossen, 22% wollten wahrscheinlich eine abschließen, und 30% wollten keine abschließen. Es fand sich ein statistisch signifikanter Zusammenhang zwischen dem Abschluss einer Patientenverfügung (...) und dem Wunsch nach mehr eigener Entscheidungsverantwortung. Die Einstellung zur Patientenverfügung und der Wunsch nach partizipativer Entscheidungsfindung stehen in keinem statistisch signifikanten Zusammenhang. Patienten mit schriftlichen Vorausverfügungen haben einen erhöhten Kommunikations- und Rückkopplungsbedarf, auf den Ärzte sensibel eingehen sollten. Bei der Information über Patientenverfügungen sollten Menschen mit niedrigerem Bildungsstand mehr als bisher berücksichtigt werden. (shrink)

Over the course of the 20th century the sex differential in life expectancy at birth in the industrialized countries has widened considerably in favour of women. Starting in the early 1970s, the beginning of a reversal in the long-term pattern of this differential has been noted in some high-income countries. This study documents a sustained pattern of narrowing of this measure into the later part of the 1990s for six of the populations that comprise the G7 countries: Canada, France, Germany, (...) Italy, England and Wales (as representative of the United Kingdom) and USA. For Japan, a persistence of widening sex differences in survival is noted. The sex differences in life expectancy are decomposed over roughly three decades (early 1970s to late 1990s) from the point of view of four major cause-of-death categories: circulatory diseases, cancers, accidents/violence/suicide, and (residual) causes. In the six countries where the sex gap has narrowed, this has resulted primarily from reduced sex differences in circulatory disease mortality, and secondarily from reduced differences in male and female death rates due to accidents, violence and suicide combined. In some of the countries sex differentials in cancer mortality have been converging lately, and this has also contributed to a narrowing of the difference in life expectancy. In Japan, males have been less successful in reducing their survival disadvantage in relation to Japanese women with regard to circulatory disease and cancer; and in the case of accidents/violence/suicide, male death rates increased during the 1990s. These trends explain the divergent pattern of the sex difference in life expectation in Japan as compared with the other G7 nations. (shrink)

Inductive inference considers two types of queries: Queries to a teacher about the function to be learned and queries to a non-recursive oracle. This paper combines these two types — it considers three basic models of queries to a teacher (QEX[Succ], QEX[ The results for each of these three models of query-inference are the same: If an oracle is omniscient for query-inference then it is already omniscient for EX. There is an oracle of trivial EX-degree, which allows nontrivial query-inference. Furthermore, (...) queries to a teacher cannot overcome differences between oracles and the query-inference degrees are a proper refinement of the EX-degrees. In the case of finite learning, the query-inference degrees coincide with the Turing degrees. Furthermore oracles can not close the gap between the different types of queries to a teacher. (shrink)

This essay discusses the role of the notions of reference, truth, and meaning in historical representation. Four major claims will be argued. First, conditional for all meaningful discussion of historical representation is that one radically discards from one's mind the paradigm of the true statement and all the epistemological and ontological problems occasioned by it. Second, representation is not a two-place, but a three-place operator: in representation a represented reality is represented by a representation focusing on certain aspects of represented (...) reality . Third, applying the notions of reference, truth, and meaning to historical representations compels us to give them a content basically different from the ones they have in contemporary philosophy of language and science. Fourth, it will be shown that in representation, meaning precedes truth—and not the other way around as in most of contemporary philosophy of language. (shrink)

With the advent of synthetic biology, scientists are increasingly relying on digital sequence information, instead of physical genetic resources. This article examines the potential impact of this shift on the access and benefit-sharing (ABS) regime of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol. These treaties require benefit-sharing with the owners of genetic resources. However, whether “genetic resources” include digital sequence information is unsettled. The CBD conceives genetic resources as genetic material containing functional units of heredity. “Material” implies (...) tangibility, and for some scholars, “functional units of heredity,” undefined in both treaties, mean full-coding sequences. This article argues that digital sequence information obtained from physical genetic resources, full-coding or not, should be treated as genetic resources. Literal construction of the CBD risks eroding its usefulness and the ABS regime. This is because through bioinformatics, sequence information can easily be obtained from genetic resources for utilization, without physically moving them or concluding ABS agreement with owners. The CBD must evolve with scientific progress also because sequence functionality depends on the state of knowledge. These arguments are vindicated by domestic ABS laws equating genetic information with genetic resources; Nagoya Protocol provisions deeming research exploiting the genetic composition of genetic resources as utilization of genetic resources; and CBD provisions requiring the sharing of benefits from the utilization of genetic resources. Moreover, treaty interpretation and case law demand that generic, scientific terms, such as “genetic resources” and “functional units of heredity” be interpreted in an evolutionary manner to capture scientific developments. (shrink)

The terms “politics” and “political” have become so overdetermined that it is difficult to use them in any effective manner. We argue that this has dangerous political consequences, and that this could be addressed by providing a new, sounder, notion of politics. This paper argues that defining politics in relation to the notion of play can provide a notion both intuitively appealing and able to withstand the problematic overdeterminations. We argue that politics is the set of practices through which the (...) indeterminate of Spielraum is made more determinate. This suggests that politics is always partly a matter of play: it is about instituting values without making any claims about the legitimacy of this instituting act. With reference to Huizinga and Nietzsche’s analyses of play, we define play as the living unity of seriousness and frivolity, and non-play as either seriousness without frivolity or frivolity without seriousness. In order to illustrate this, we comparatively analyse the attitudes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the single context of the well-known yearly White House Correspondent’s Dinner. There, we see two opposed attitudes to playfulness. Our analysis allows us to apply our _Spielraum_ model of politics to show that the thrust of Obama’s attitude involves an embrace of the non-foundational nature of politics as play, whereas Trump’s attitude is politicidal: it is animated by a refusal to acknowledge its own lack of foundation, leading to an oscillation between over-seriousness and over-frivolity. (shrink)

Introduction -- The Complexity of Resource Curse -- Resource Curse as a Complex Case of Global Justice -- General Theory of Global Justice -- The Robustness of the General Theory -- Conclusion.

Combining moral philosophy, political philosophy, political theory, and international relations, this book explores the possibility of using normative international relations as a realistic resolution to the problem of domination of, and discrimination against, minorities, specifically or especially migrants on the African continent.

Like many governments in this COVID-19 pandemic, the Nigerian government imposed a lockdown on the country. As a consequence of the lockdown, many businesses shutdown and effectively had no source of revenue. Yet, without receiving any bailout or palliatives from the government, these businesses are required to meet their tax obligations to the government. Bearing in mind that this time (COVID-19 era) is different, one wonders what is required of businesses in view of the taxation problem and the social contract (...) between the businesspersons and the government. In view of social contract obligations, in this COVID-19 pandemic should businesses pay tax to a government that seems to have delegitimised itself by its exploitative actions in terms of taxation and delinquent omission in terms of the provision of public goods and social services? The Nigerian government at all tiers (federal, state and local) seldom respect the essence of taxation. Therefore, businesses often pay tax for nothing. For many businesses, as far as taxation is concerned, to pay or not to pay? that is the question. This article is aimed at teasing out this taxation problem that may or may not be a moral dilemma. In view of certain ethical considerations, this article shows why in spite of social contract obligations, there is no consensus or canonical agreement on whether, as law-abiding citizens and juridical persons (legal entities), businesspersons and businesses ought to or ought not to pay tax to the Nigerian government in this COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The notion of world government is anathema to most political theorists. This is the case due to the arguments that a world government is infeasible, undesirable and unnecessary. This threef...