Epistemic arguments play a significant role in the foundations of market liberalism as exemplified, in particular, by the work of F. A. Hayek. Competition in free markets is claimed to be the most effective device both to utilize the knowledge dispersed throughout society as well as create new knowledge through innovation competition. The fast pace with which new economic opportunities are discovered and costs are reduced is considered proof of the benefits of free markets to the common good. However, with (...) its inherently unpredictable consequences, innovation competition is actually ambiguous in this respect. This feature raises questions over the stringency of market liberal pleas that oppose quests for redistribution and environmental concerns in an absolute fashion. (shrink)

If a quest for universal ethical standards in journalism is to be productive, we should first be able to articulate an overarching set of universal ethical standards that can apply across cultures, across ethical schools of thought, across professions. In this article I offer 4 likely universal standards that have relevance to journalism, suggesting universal journalism standards can also be identified. Although these and other standards will not be panaceas for the ethical dilemmas journalists often face, they provide needed anchors (...) for decision making. (shrink)

Ulrich Meyer defends a novel theory about the nature of time, and argues against the consensus view that time and space are fundamentally alike. He presents the first comprehensive defense of a 'modal' account, which emphasizes the similarities between times and possible worlds in modal logic, and is easily reconciled with the theory of relativity.

Looking back, the process in which Ulrich Beck’s epoch-making work of Risikogesellschaft was introduced and translated into Japanese attracted great public interest there. This paper revisits the significance of the concept ‘risk society’ in the context of postwar Japan. Facing both the natural and artificial disasters caused by the huge earthquake in Fukushima in 2011, Japanese society was compelled to reconsider its atomic energy policy implemented after the end of the Second World War. While the general public has strongly (...) embraced an anti-nuclear sentiment after witnessing the 3/11 disasters, the government and leading LDP are still eager to restart the atomic plants that have been suspended since the tragedy in Fukushima. Considering those complicated sociopolitical conditions concerning the legitimacy of the atomic energy policy in Japan, Risikogesellschaft redux might be a useful way through which we can envisage a future direction to take. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Herb FingaretteMichael Nylan (bio)Over the years, several people have remarked to me that Herb "disappeared" or "disengaged" after his retirement. His standing, at the time of his retirement, was beautifully captured in the 1999 volume Rules, Rituals, and Responsibility: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette, edited by his student Mary Bockover.But remembering Herb Fingarette, I recall the first two times I spoke with him, by email (...) and eventually in person. I wrote, while preparing the Norton Critical Edition of the Analects, the brief sketch I had devised, mainly on the basis of Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, in which I described him as a New Confucian and a pragmatist. He promptly wrote back to deny both philosophical affiliations. (Hans Sluga's remarks below suggest that Herb did not see himself as a joiner or partisan.) But I got the rest right, apparently, as my sketch of him circled around the opening to his book, a work that changed many people's lives, including those of two friends of mine, Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames:When I began to read Confucius, I found him to be a prosaic and parochial moralizer. … Later, and with increasing force, I found him a thinker with profound insight and with an imaginative vision of man equal in its grandeur to any I know. … Confucius can be a teacher to us today—a major teacher, not one who merely gives us a slightly exotic perspective on the ideas already current. He tells us things not being said elsewhere; things needing to be said. He has a new lesson to teach.1Herb's contribution in that book lay mainly in his willingness to rethink Confucius from the ground up, "to make him new." To the day before he died, that was Herb, still evolving and reformulating his thoughts. One glimpses this in "Being Ninety-Seven," the documentary about Herb that his grandson Andrew Hasse directed and edited, one short clip of which has drawn no fewer than five million views on YouTube, under the title "The Meaning of Life: A Ninety-Seven Year Old Philosopher Looks at Life."I finally met Herb on a fine spring day in 2010, some three years after he had moved to Berkeley, when Henry Rosemont, Jr. happened to be in town. Henry insisted I meet Herb, and he was plainly immensely proud of being the first to write a good review of Herb's work, which so many [End Page 857] Click for larger view View full resolutionHerbert Fingarette, 1921–2018. Photo © Thomas H. Hahn.eminent Sinologists had panned (Herb being outside the field; Herb saying something that might force a change in their ways of thinking; Herb being so clear about his ideas that there was no academic obfuscation). Herb had always been one of the few gods in my academic pantheon, and I was frankly a bit scared to meet him and sound stupid. But Henry had a genius for bringing people together, and by the end of the first meeting Herb and I were well on our way to becoming fast friends. (It didn't hurt that Herb's only child, Ann Hasse, was about to marry one of the Berkeley colleagues whom I most esteem, Erich Gruen.)A few years later, after his wife Leslie died, I asked him, after a decent interval, whether writing so powerfully about the philosophy of dying had helped him when he was confronting it in the case of Leslie, his beloved wife and astute editor. He said quietly, "Not one bit," and from then on I knew I could absolutely trust him. For such a complex man, he was also a person who embraced radical honesty and full engagement, which meant that Herb, nearly always exquisitely polite, could on rare occasions burst forth with a snarky comment, when particularly frustrated with the world or its inhabitants. He was a human being keenly aware of the responsibility that survival brought, despite the frailties encountered when going through life. One felt always that one was conversing with a lifelong seeker after truths large and small, with the result that many a time he was impatient with my tendency... (shrink)

(2008). In Praise of Top-Down Decision Making in Managerial Hierarchies. World Futures: Vol. 64, Postformal Thought and Hierarchical Complexity, pp. 513-523.

Karlfriedrich Herb shows that the new theory of representation in Leviathan implies a rejection of direct democracy, which was still referred to, and active as a political model, in The Elements of Law and De cive. Since the social contract gives full authority to the sovereign, there is no longer any reason to consider democracy as the original form of all governments. Democracy thus plays no part in the definition of the citizen’s liberty, and consequently the liberty of the (...) subject is not at all a matter of participation in political life. To the contrary, this civil liberty is directly proportional to the independence left to the citizen by the legislator. The famous maxim defining liberty as the silence of the law is therefore to be considered anew in the perspective of the theory of representative sovereignty. The authority of the sovereign has nothing to do, in Hobbes’s thought, with the authoritas of the ancient Romans, since actual peace is its only source of legitimacy. It is not possible, therefore, to include Leviathan in a history of Republicanism. (shrink)

Lack of knowledge about the effects of herbs in pastures and the frequency of their use by today's organic farmers has limited the development of new methods to improve animal health compatible with organic farming principles. Understanding farmers' agricultural practices is an early step in a participatory research process. With this in mind, we conducted a two-tiered, semi-structured survey of Danish organic farmers with dairy cattle to begin documenting their practices. Out of 350 farmers, 255 completed a mailed questionnaire – (...) a response rate of 73%. Of these participating farmers, 66 (26%) confirmed their use of herbs in pastures. Caraway was sown at an average rate of 500 g of seed per hectare by 60 (91%). Of these, 32 used solely caraway, while 7 used it in combination with parsley. Twenty-one used caraway together with herbs other than parsley. Six used one or more herbs, not including caraway, such as chicory, chervil, dill, fenugreek, great burnet, and salad burnet. Further details concerning cultivation, convictions, observed effects, and information sources were obtained through telephone interviews. The results of this study would indicate that more research in this field is called for. (shrink)

Ethological theory standardly attributes representational content to animal signals. In this article I first assess whether Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantic theory accounts for the content of animal signals. I conclude that it does not, because many signals do not exhibit the required sort of cooperation between signal‐producing and signal‐consuming devices. It is then argued that Kim Sterelny’s proposal, while not requiring cooperation, sometimes yields the wrong content. Finally, I outline an alternative view, according to which consumers alone are responsible for conferring (...) representational status and determining content. I suggest that consumer‐based teleosemantics reconstruct the content of both cooperative and noncooperative signals and explain how a given trait can mean different things to different consumers. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, U.K.; e‐mail: ulrich[email protected]. (shrink)

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological ...

Includes articles by: Ulrich Arnswald, Jens Kertscher, Matthias Kross, Thomas Macho, Walter Mesch, Dieter Mersch, Regine Munz, Hans Julius Schneider, Hans-Peter Schutt, Ilse Somavilla, Samuel C. Wheeler III, Anja Weiberg, Rüdiger Zill.

A review of Ulrich Lehner's recent book on Kant's philosophy of history. -/- .