The article develops an ecopedagogical-philosophical approach to the creative lifeforce kindergarden as a future kindergarden for a nature-friendly and sustainable development. It draws empirically on an action-research project in Klokkergaarden nature- and culture kindergarden in Drammen, Norway. The focus has been on the good meetings between humans, culture and nature through the three main topics that are to mark kindergardens and schools over the next years: life mastery, democracy and sustainable development. The target group is the leadership and employees of (...) kindergardens, and the target is to make concrete what the creative lifeforce kindergarden is, how it shows in practice and how it can be developed as an actor in sustainable community development. (shrink)

In everyday life we either express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms or we resort to numerical probabilities: I believe it's going to rain or my chance of winning is one in a million. The Stability of Belief develops a theory of rational belief that allows us to reason with all-or-nothing belief and numerical belief simultaneously.

The book examines the emerging approach of using qualitative methods, such as interviews and field observations, in the philosophy of science. Qualitative methods are gaining popularity among philosophers of science as more and more scholars are resorting to empirical work in their study of scientific practices. At the same time, the results produced through empirical work are quite different from those gained through the kind of introspective conceptual analysis more typical of philosophy. This volume explores the benefits and challenges of (...) an empirical philosophy of science and addresses questions such as: What do philosophers gain from empirical work? How can empirical research help to develop philosophical concepts? How do we integrate philosophical frameworks and empirical research? What constraints do we accept when choosing an empirical approach? What constraints does a pronounced theoretical focus impose on empirical work? Nine experts discuss their thoughts and empirical results in the chapters of this book with the aim of providing readers with an answer to these questions. (shrink)

La sensation d'être soumis à une contrainte implacable peut déclencher une souffrance intense, une activité délirante, ou bien une créativité irrépressible. Elle peut prendre la forme d'une "machine" à influencer. Cette figure majeure de la maladie psychique depuis deux cents ans est le point de départ et le fil conducteur pour éclairer la structure complexe et paradoxale de la subjectivité. Loin d'être un outil technique, elle est un enjeu d'abord existentiel et esthétique. De Tausk à Szondi et Maldiney, de Merleau-Ponty (...) à Guattari et Deleuze, de Deligny à Nauman et Duchamp, de Sobchack à Epstein et Godard, et enfin, à nouveau, de Merleau-Ponty à Guattari, on voit émerger les contours d'une subjectivité en tension,toujours déjà habitée d'une altérité qui la garde en mouvement. Et l'ontologie de la chair apparaît finalement comme un champ essentiellement politique. (shrink)

What will your soul's gender be in Heaven? Will your pet Harry be there? Could your clone have a soul? Will eternity be fun? What is it with the ghosts of loved ones? A Natural History of the Soul makes a challenging topic accessible through an entertaining and readable exploration. It begins by reviewing beliefs about the soul and the afterlife in our popular culture, and looks at how they have evolved from the earliest humans. It identifies key concepts in (...) philosophy and major religions, and examines developments in medicine and technology that are shaping our ideas. Throughout the book, provocative questions are raised to help clarify your own beliefs and inform emerging social policy debates. (shrink)

The thesis defended in this article is that by uttering or publishing a great many declarative sentences in assertoric mode, one does not actually assert that their conjunction is true – one rather asserts that the vast majority of these sentences are true. Accordingly, the belief that is expressed thereby is the belief that the vast majority of these sentences are true. In the article, we make this proposal precise, we explain the context-dependency of belief that corresponds to it, we (...) point out why our everyday oral practice of single assertions is not affected by it, and we argue that the proposal leads to a way out of the Paradox of the Preface. (shrink)

Brain Organoids in their current state of development are patentable. Future brain organoids may face some challenges in this regard, which I address in this contribution. Brain organoids unproblematically fulfil the general prerequisites of patentability set forth in Art. 3 (1) EU-Directive 98/44/ec (invention, novelty, inventive step and susceptibility of industrial application). Patentability is excluded if an invention makes use of human embryos or constitutes a stage of the human body in the individual phases of its formation and development. Both (...) do not apply to brain organoids, unless ES-cells are used. Art. 6 (1) EU-Directive 98/44/ec excludes patentability for inventions “the commercial exploitation of which would be contrary to ordre public or morality”. While there is no conceivable scenario, in which the commercial application of current brain organoids violates the ordre public, the same is not necessarily true for future brain organoids. Keeping in mind that a development of consciousness-like abilities in future brain organoids cannot be excluded and that an ability for both physical and psychological suffering has been theorized, both of which are aspects of the ordre public, certain applications of future brain organoids may constitute a violation of the ordre public and therefore lead to an exclusion of patentability. (shrink)

Business scholars have recently proposed that the virtue of personal wisdom may predict leadership behaviors and the quality of leader–follower relationships. This study investigated relationships among leaders’ personal wisdom—defined as the integration of advanced cognitive, reflective, and affective personality characteristics (Ardelt, Hum Dev 47:257–285, 2004)—transformational leadership behaviors, and leader–member exchange (LMX) quality. It was hypothesized that leaders’ personal wisdom positively predicts LMX quality and that intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration, two dimensions of transformational leadership, mediate this relationship. Data came from (...) 75 religious leaders and 1–3 employees of each leader (N = 158). Results showed that leaders’ personal wisdom had a positive indirect effect on follower ratings of LMX quality through individualized consideration, even after controlling for Big Five personality traits, emotional intelligence, and narcissism. In contrast, intellectual stimulation and the other two dimensions of transformational leadership (idealized influence and inspirational motivation) did not mediate the positive relationship between leaders’ personal wisdom and LMX quality. Implications for future research on personal wisdom and leadership are discussed, and some tentative suggestions for leadership development are outlined. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure in an anachronic exhibition, Soulèvements (2016/18), this book is a theoretical exploration of how the notion of contemporaneity understood as the coming together of different times in the same historical present relates to the end of a certain history of art. Critical of hitherto dominant chronological, ahistorical, and/or culturally restricted notions of the contemporary, Lund's overall aim is to make an argument for the contemporary contemporary, as the point of departure for any anachronic relationship (...) with time today, and as the inescapable point of departure for any possible historical imagination. (shrink)

How our experience of presence, time, and history is articulated in contemporary artistic practices. Our present is defined by contemporaneity: the interconnection of heterogeneous times, histories, and temporalities. These many and various times do not merely exist in parallel with one another, simultaneously. Rather, they interconnect and are brought to bear on the same present, forming a sort of planetary present, and—at least in principle—a global sharing of time, although one not shared equally. In The Changing Constitution of the Present: (...) Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity, Jacob Lund explores how the conditions for politically engaged art and aesthetic practice, for questioning the present, have changed in recent decades, while considering how our historical present and its temporal quality differ significantly from previous presents. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis, Bonn, 1976.

Am Beispiel des lutherischen Erbauungsschriftstellers Johann Arndt (1555-1621) läßt sich ein naturtheologisches Frömmigkeitsverständnis aufzeigen, das vom Florentiner Neuplatonismus, von Paracelsus, vom Paracelsismus und von der Alchemie Heinrich Khunraths beeinflußt ist. Der Autor vorliegender Studie zeichnet die relevanten Traditionslinien quellennah nach und analysiert deren Einbindung und Interpretation in Arndts Schriften. Eine systematische Darstellung der Kohärenz von Naturphilosophie und Mystik in der frühen Neuzeit beschließt vorliegende Studie.

Recently, several scholars have argued that scientists can accept scientific claims in a collective process, and that the capacity of scientific groups to form joint acceptances is linked to a functional division of labor between the group members. However, these accounts reveal little about how the cognitive content of the jointly accepted claim is formed, and how group members depend on each other in this process. In this paper, I shall therefore argue that we need to link analyses of joint (...) acceptance with analyses of distributed cognition. To sketch how this can be done, I shall present a detailed case study, and on the basis of the case, analyze the process through which a group of scientists jointly accept a new scientific claim and at a later stage jointly accept to revise previously accepted claims. I shall argue that joint acceptance in science can be established in situations where an overall conceptual structure is jointly accepted by a group of scientists while detailed parts of it are distributed among group members with different areas of expertise, a condition that I shall call a heterogeneous conceptual consensus. Finally, I shall show how a heterogeneous conceptual consensus can work as a constraint against scientific change and address the question how changes may nevertheless occur. (shrink)

This essay discusses the attempt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British writers to achieve a clear definition of "wit." I provide a number of quotations from Hobbes, Locke, Pope, Addison, Dryden, and others to make the point that there was an unresolved tension between wit and judgment, imagination and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy, throughout the period.

One of the fundamental problems of epistemology is to say when the evidence in an agent’s possession justifies the beliefs she holds. In this paper and its prequel, we defend the Bayesian solution to this problem by appealing to the following fundamental norm: Accuracy An epistemic agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs. In the prequel, we made this norm mathematically precise; in this paper, we derive its consequences. We show that the two core tenets of Bayesianism (...) follow from the norm, while the characteristic claim of the Objectivist Bayesian follows from the norm along with an extra assumption. Finally, we consider Richard Jeffrey’s proposed generalization of conditionalization. We show not only that his rule cannot be derived from the norm, unless the requirement of Rigidity is imposed from the start, but further that the norm reveals it to be illegitimate. We end by deriving an alternative updating rule for those cases in which Jeffrey’s is usually supposed to apply. (shrink)

This article investigates the role of historical references and arguments in the current policy debate on non‐invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) in Germany. It analyses major documents and opinion statements, including the recent parliamentary debate (2019). The implementation of NIPT is accompanied by concerns and strong criticism, particularly in Germany. Many perceive the new test to be a problematic step that facilitates selective practices and is reminiscent of eugenics. Analysis of the German policy discourse shows that ‘eugenics’, and even more strongly, (...) ‘selection’, are pivotal terms for rejecting NIPT and its coverage by public health insurance. They touch on a historical dimension in public deliberation, namely the fundamental distancing from the inhuman practices of the National Socialist period and anything that resembles them. However, using these terms to criticize prenatal genetic testing is controversial, and recent discourse demonstrates their avoidance as well, with many supporters of a limited coverage by public health insurance contrasting their approach with more widespread screening. Here, ‘screening’ has a negative connotation, and functions to demarcate the debate in a way that may reflect distance from certain modes of historical reasoning, but still expresses a special need to reconcile prenatal testing with the principles of dignity, inclusion and diversity. This article aims to elucidate the concerns involved in the national debates on prenatal testing and to increase awareness of the historical dimensions of the language and reasoning with which such methods are negotiated today and in future. (shrink)

Was können Eltern und erwachsene Kinder voneinander erwarten? Und welche Verantwortung sollten sie füreinander übernehmen und warum? Durch einen kulturellen und demographischen Wandel sind unsere Vorstellungen von Familie in Bewegung geraten und müssen neu ausgehandelt werden. Hier setzt Hannes Foth mit ethischen und sozialphilosophischen Überlegungen an. Er legt dar, was Eltern-Kind-Beziehungen im Erwachsenenalter auszeichnet, welche Rolle Verantwortung und Freundschaft dabei spielen und welches Verständnis von Familie zeitgemäß ist - ein Perspektivenwechsel, der nicht nur philosophische, sondern auch interdisziplinäre und alltagstaugliche Anknüpfungspunkte (...) aufweist. (shrink)

Leo Strauss famously asserted that the fundamental, defining debate within Western civilization is that between Jerusalem and Athens, piety and philosophy, the Bible and Plato. And yet, surprisingly, Strauss never published any of his thoughts on Plato’s dialogue on piety, the Euthyphro. This volume presents, for the first time, Strauss’s 1948 notebook on the dialogue, written in preparation for a class at the New School for Social Research. Featuring close analysis and line-by-line commentary, the notebook opens a window onto a (...) philosophic mind in action, as Strauss asks questions of the classic text, jots down observations and formulations, and analyzes very specific terms and arguments but also steps back, reviews the overall movement of the dialogue, and reconsiders previous conclusions. Beyond the notebook, the volume also brings together all the known materials that lay out Strauss’s thoughts on the Euthyphro. This includes newly transcribed and edited public lectures, illuminating appendixes, critical essays by volume editors Hannes Kerber and Svetozar Y. Minkov and scholar Wayne Ambler, an account of Strauss’s public lecture, and a new English translation of Plato’s Euthyphro by Seth Benardete, a classicist and one of Strauss’s students. Engaging and inspiring, Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Euthyphro” is a vital resource for scholars and students of political theory, readers interested in the intersection of philosophy and religion, and a must-have for anyone who studies Strauss. (shrink)

The Many-Interacting-Worlds (MIW) approach to a quantum theory without wave functions proposed in [8] leads naturally to numerical integrators of the Schrödinger equation on comoving grids. As yet, little is known about concrete MIW models for more than one spatial dimension and/or more than one particle. In honour of Detlef Dürr, we report on a further development of the MIW approach to treat arbitrary degrees of freedom and provide a numerical proof of concept for ground states in 2d. The latter (...) is part of a systematic numerical study [22] that includes also 1d ground and excited states. With this step towards the treatment of higher degrees of freedom we hope to stimulate their further study. (shrink)

The authors examine empirically the influence of personal and organizational values on marketing professionals'' ethical behavior. The results indicate that personal and organizational values underlie differences in marketing professionals'' ethical behavior, albeit small terms of the proportion of explained variance. The results also suggest the relationship between organizational values and ethical behavior to be significant. However, the same is not the case for the relationship between personal values and ethical behavior.

To what degree can language be acquired from linguistic input alone? This question has vexed scholars for millennia and is still a major focus of debate in the cognitive science of language. The complexity of human language has hampered progress because studies of language–especially those involving computational modeling–have only been able to deal with small fragments of our linguistic skills. We suggest that the most recent generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) might finally provide the computational tools to determine empirically (...) how much of the human language ability can be acquired from linguistic experience. LLMs are sophisticated deep learning architectures trained on vast amounts of natural language data, enabling them to perform an impressive range of linguistic tasks. We argue that, despite their clear semantic and pragmatic limitations, LLMs have already demonstrated that human-like grammatical language can be acquired without the need for a built-in grammar. Thus, while there is still much to learn about how humans acquire and use language, LLMs provide full-fledged computational models for cognitive scientists to empirically evaluate just how far statistical learning might take us in explaining the full complexity of human language. (shrink)

This edited book explores diverse contestations and transformations of sovereignty around the world. Sovereignty plays a central role in modern political thought and practice, but it also remains fundamentally contested. Depending on the context and perspective, it seems either omnipresent or elusive, liberating or oppressive, fading or resilient. Indeed, if in recent decades sovereignty has been expected to wane, today it is back on the agenda; not as the solid bedrock of modern - international - politics, which it never was, (...) but as variations on a concept and institution that are ever contested and, as a result, constantly transforming. Bringing together perspectives from various disciplines, including International Relations (IR), political theory, geography, law, and anthropology, this volume: - goes beyond debates over the resilience or decline of sovereignty to instead emphasize how precisely the inherent ambiguities, tensions, and contestations in scholarship and practice spark sovereignty's manifold transformations; - offers three theoretical chapters that examine the illusions, contradictions, transformation, and lasting appeal of sovereignty and the nation-state; - explores sovereignty from various disciplinary perspectives in 11 empirical chapters that highlight its role in different contexts around the world, from the European Union (EU) to the South China Sea, to Western Sahara and Palestine; - problematizes the interplay between theory and practice of statehood and sovereignty, as in the perception of Northern Cyprus as a 'fake state', scholars' promotion of Kurdish 'statehood' in Iraq, and studies affirming the 'Islamic State'. This book will be of much interest to students of statehood, sovereignty, conflict studies and International Relations. (shrink)

Kant – ein philosophischer Fels – und wir: Der Verfasser versucht die Besteigung dieses Felsens auf einer seiner vielen Seiten, auf der Seite der Ethik. Kants Ethik wird zunächst verständlich gemacht, dann weitet sich der Horizont aus auf gegenwärtige Problemstellungen, in denen wir bei Kant Hilfen oder Antworten finden können. Das Resultat: Es lohnt sich.

In einer Zeit, in der die Menschheit in einem bisher ungekannten Ausmaß nutzend wie zerstörend in die sie umgebende und tragende Natur eingreift, erhält die Frage nach der Stellung des Menschen zu ihr und damit auch nach der menschlichen Natur neue Aktualität. Anlässlich des achtzigsten Geburtstags von Friedrich Tomberg haben sich Vertreter und Vertreterinnen verschiedener Fachdisziplinen im Rahmen eines Kolloquiums zusammengefunden, um sowohl über die gegenwärtigen Gefährdungen zu diskutieren als auch sich der kreativen Potenzen zu besinnen, die den Menschen von (...) Natur aus gegeben sind und die sie zu konstruktiven Antworten auf die epochalen Herausforderungen befähigen könnten. Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge bieten aus unterschiedlichen, ja gegensätzlichen Sichtweisen heraus Anregungen, die Problematik gegenwärtiger conditio humana deutlicher und differenzierter ins Bewusstsein zu heben. (shrink)