Excerpt from Schicksale der Volker (der Schauplatz und Sein Zwang)Ettur bebeutenoe altenfchen haben sbrofile, bei unbebeuten= oen fuchi man fie umfonft, ober vielmehr, man fucht fie gar nicht, man traut ihnen fein Srofil au.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. (...) In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In this thesis, I investigate realist, anti-realist and pluralist views in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of complexity. The philosophy of science can inform the philosophy of complexity and vice versa because we can consider scientific inquiry to largely involve the study of complex systems. I however find that the relevant realist, anti-realist and pluralist views are problematic in various ways, and that a version of pragmatism suggests a promising alternative. This version of pragmatism incorporates elements of pluralism, (...) but maintains a commitment to epistemic hierarchy, convergence and progress. The way to develop such a version of pragmatism is, I argue, by rebooting William Whewell’s 19th century philosophy of science. Whewell however held to the following two transcendental claims: 1. Empirical inquiry undertaken in science properly practiced can reveal necessary truths. 2. The revelation of such necessary truths grants us a glimpse of the mind of God. Such transcendental claims are obviously at odds with pragmatism. There are however core features of Whewell’s view that are notably pragmatist in nature, features that explicitly inspired Charles Sanders Piece’s convergent pragmatism. These are as follows: 3. Subject and object (or mind and world) are inextricably entwined during scientific inquiry; they are not separated by anything like a correspondence relationship. 4. Science progresses via what Whewell calls the consilience of inductions (an ongoing merging of scientific theories, a merging that increases our understanding of the world over time). I modify Whewell’s view by stripping away its transcendental elements while maintaining its pragmatist elements. What remains is, I argue, a robust and novel kind of pragmatism suitable for being introduced into the contemporary philosophy of science. Whewell suitably-pragmatised can offer new insights into ongoing debates, particularly those around the nature of scientific progress, scientific truth and scientific understanding. (shrink)

Dans sa violente charge contre la Révolution française, Edmund Burke avait élevé le débat politique à un niveau philosophique. Son argument le plus profond consistait à reprocher aux révolutionnaires de pécher par apriorisme, en cherchant à déduire, comme des géomètres, une nouvelle constitution à partir des principes abstraits énoncés dans la Déclaration des droits de l’homme. Reprise par les disciples allemands de Burke, cette critique de la méthode adoptée par la Constituante tirait des postulats empiristes des Lumières anglo-écossaises toutes les (...) implications conservatrices que recelaient déjà les textes politiques et historiques de Hume. Or c’est d’emblée sur ce terrain spéculatif que se joue, chez Fichte, la défense du droit de révolution. Reprochant à l’empirisme de réduire l’esprit au « mécanisme aveugle de l’association des idées », passivement déterminé par une extériorité en soi, Fichte entend au contraire fonder l’expérience elle-même sur l’activité d’un « Moi-en-soi », absolument indépendant. Conçu comme causalité libre, pouvant donc s’affranchir des « conjonctions coutumières » humiennes pour commencer une nouvelle série dans l’ordre des phénomènes, l’homme, pour Fichte, n’a pas seulement la « faculté de se perfectionner », mais la loi de sa liberté lui en fait même un devoir. Au regard de cet impératif catégorique de perfectionnement, il n’y a pas de Common Law qui tienne. Aussi Fichte ne recule-t-il pas devant la révolution, si les institutions du passé font obstacle à la destination de l’homme. (shrink)

Welches Recht ist gerecht? So lautet die Grundfrage der Rechtsethik. Die Rechtsethik fragt also nach der Rechtfertigung und Kritik des Rechts. Dabei geht es ihr nicht nur wie der dogmatischen Rechtsanwendung um die Analyse der Normen und Wertungen des geltenden Rechts, sondern um einen ethischen Maßstab des Rechts.

Despite the longstanding debate on definitions of health and disease concepts, and the multitude of accounts that have been developed, no consensus has been reached. This is problematic, as the way we define health and disease has far-reaching practical consequences. In recent contributions it is proposed to view health and disease as practical- and plural concepts. Instead of searching for a general definition, it is proposed to stipulate context-specific definitions. However, it is not clear how this should be realized. In (...) this paper, we review recent contributions to the debate, and examine the importance of context-specific definitions. In particular, we explore the usefulness of analyzing the relation between the practical function of a definition and the context it is deployed in. We demonstrate that the variety of functions that health and disease concepts need to serve makes the formulation of monistic definitions not only problematic but also undesirable. We conclude that the analysis of the practical function in relation to the context is key when formulating context-specific definitions for health and disease. At last, we discuss challenges for the pluralist stance and make recommendations for future research. (shrink)

Although the change of beliefs in the face of new information has been widely studied with some success, the revision of other mental states has received little attention from the theoretical perspective. In particular, intentions are widely recognised as being a key attitude for rational agents, and while several formal theories of intention have been proposed in the literature, the logic of intention revision has been hardly considered. There are several reasons for this: perhaps most importantly, intentions are very closely (...) connected with other mental states—in particular, beliefs about the future and the abilities of the agent. So, we cannot study them in isolation. We must consider the interplay between intention revision and the revision of other mental states, which complicates the picture considerably. In this paper, we present some first steps towards a theory of intention revision. We develop a simple model of an agent’s mental states, and define intention revision operators. Using this model, we develop a logic of intention dynamics, and then investigate some of its properties. (shrink)

Since it was first proposed by Moses, Shoham, and Tennenholtz, the social laws paradigm has proved to be one of the most compelling approaches to the offline coordination of multiagent systems. In this paper, we make four key contributions to the theory and practice of social laws in multiagent systems. First, we show that the Alternating-time Temporal Logic (atl) of Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman provides an elegant and powerful framework within which to express and understand social laws for multiagent systems. (...) Second, we show that the effectiveness, feasibility, and synthesis problems for social laws may naturally be framed as atl model checking problems, and that as a consequence, existing atl model checkers may be applied to these problems. Third, we show that the complexity of the feasibility problem in our framework is no more complex in the general case than that of the corresponding problem in the Shoham–Tennenholtz framework (it is np-complete). Finally, we show how our basic framework can easily be extended to permit social laws in which constraints on the legality or otherwise of some action may be explicitly required. We illustrate the concepts and techniques developed by means of a running example. (shrink)

This paper is on the update semantics for might of Veltman. Threeconsequence relations are introduced and studied in an abstract setting.Next we present sequent-style systems for each of the consequence relations.We show the logics to be complete and decidable. The paper ends with asyntactic cut elimination result.

The precautionary principle is often invoked in relation to pregnant women and may be one of the underlying reasons for their continuous underrepresentation in clinical research. The principle is appealing, because potential fetal harm as a result of research participation is considered to be serious and irreversible. In our paper, we explore through conceptual analysis whether and if so how the precautionary principle should apply to pregnant women. We argue that the principle is a decision-making strategy underlying risk-benefit decisions in (...) clinical research, which can be applied to pregnant women. However, the current application is a strong one, leading to the promotion of absolute exclusion or, less often, absolute inclusion of pregnant women. In order to change this paralyzing situation, a shift toward weak precautionary thinking is necessary. Instead of automatic extreme precaution, a balance will be found between harms and potential benefits of including pregnant women in clinical research. (shrink)

Some alethic pluralists maintain that there are two kinds of truths operant in our alethic discourse: a realist kind and an anti-realist kind. In this paper, we argue that such a binary conception cannot accommodate certain social truths, specifically truths about race. Most alethic pluralists surprisingly overlook the status of racial truths. Douglas Edwards is, however, an exception. In his version of alethic pluralism—Determination Pluralism—racial truths are superassertible (anti-realist) true rather than correspondence (realist) true. We argue that racial truths exhibit (...) features of both superassertibility (anti-realism) and correspondence (realism). This suggests a fuzzy boundary between realist and anti-realist kinds of truth. There may be a continuum rather than a dichotomy of truths. We conclude by sketching one way for alethic pluralists to accommodate such a notion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The traditional view holds that political philosophy should aim at the truth. By contrast, Avner de Shalit argues that political philosophers should do something different. According to him, they should work in direct consultation with “the people” in order to think through their theories about political institutions. This article defends the traditional aim of truth-seeking and shows the mistakes in De Shalit’s alternative approach.

In line with recent proposals for experimental philosophy and philosophy of science in practice, we propose that the philosophy of medicine could benefit from incorporating empirical research, just as bioethics has. In this paper, we therefore take first steps towards the development of an empirical philosophy of medicine, that includes investigating practical and moral dimensions. This qualitative study gives insight into the views and experiences of a group of various medical professionals and patient representatives regarding the conceptualization of health and (...) disease concepts in practice and the possible problems that surround them. This includes clinical, epistemological, and ethical issues. We have conducted qualitative interviews with a broad range of participants (n = 17), working in various health-related disciplines, fields and organizations. From the interviews, we highlight several different practical functions of definitions of health and disease. Furthermore, we discuss 5 types of problematic situations that emerged from the interviews and analyze the underlying conceptual issues. By providing theoretical frameworks and conceptual tools, and by suggesting conceptual changes or adaptations, philosophers might be able to help solve some of these problems. This empirical-philosophical study contributes to a more pragmatic way of understanding the relevance of conceptualizing health and disease by connecting the participants’ views and experiences to the theoretical debate. Going back and forth between theory and practice will likely result in a more complex but hopefully also better and more fruitful understanding of health and disease concepts. (shrink)

Unconsented episiotomies and other procedures during labour are commonly reported by women in several countries, and often highlighted in birth activism. Yet, forced caesarean sections aside, the ethics of consent during labour has received little attention. Focusing on episiotomies, this paper addresses whether and how consent in labour should be obtained. We briefly review the rationale for informed consent, distinguishing its intrinsic and instrumental relevance for respecting autonomy. We also emphasise two non-explicit ways of giving consent: implied and opt-out consent. (...) We then discuss challenges and opportunities for obtaining consent in labour and birth, given its unique position in medicine.We argue that consent for procedures in labour is always necessary, but this consent does not always have to be fully informed or explicit. We recommend an individualised approach where the antenatal period is used to exchange information and explore values and preferences with respect to the relevant procedures. Explicit consent should always be sought at the point of intervening, unless women antenatally insist otherwise. We caution against implied consent. However, if a woman does not give a conclusive response during labour and the stakes are high, care providers can move to clearly communicated opt-out consent. Our discussion is focused on episiotomies, but also provides a useful starting point for addressing the ethics of consent for other procedures during labour, as well as general time-critical medical procedures. (shrink)

This essay attempts to develop a psychologically informed semantics of perception reports, whose predictions match with the linguistic data. As suggested by the quotation from Miller and Johnson-Laird, we take a hallmark of perception to be its fallible nature; the resulting semantics thus necessarily differs from situation semantics. On the psychological side, our main inspiration is Marr's (1982) theory of vision, which can easily accomodate fallible perception. In Marr's theory, vision is a multi-layered process. The different layers have filters of (...) different gradation, which makes vision at each of them approximate. On the logical side, our task is therefore twofold - to formalise the layers and the ways in which they may refine each other, and. (shrink)

Health technology assessment consists of thesystematic study of the consequences of theintroduction or continued use of the technology in aparticular context, with the explicit objective toarrive at a judgment of the value or merit of thetechnology. Ideally, it is aimed at assessing allaspects of a given technology or group oftechnologies, including non-technical, e.g.socio-ethical, aspects. However, methods for assessingsocio-ethical implications of health technology arerelatively undeveloped and few mechanisms exist totake action based on the results of such evaluations.Still, the examples of cochlear (...) inplants and other cases illustratethat HTA is not a matter of merely collecting thefacts about a technology. The facts must beplausible and relevant from a particular framework,which is not always shared by different groups. It ishere that socio-ethical aspects are encountered. Ifhealth technology assessment aims to enhance theaccountability of the decision making processregarding funding and use of health technology, it isa major challenge to assessors of health technologiesto deal adequately with existing value pluralism. Inthis respect interactive evaluation may have somethingto offer. (shrink)

Few assumptions, argues Mara van der Lugt, are so stagnant, so rigid, so deeply walled in as the assumption that the decision to have children is by default a good thing; that having children is one of the most elevated aspects of human activity, and, indeed, of the human condition. This book is conceived as an open and reflective challenge to that assumption. The author argues that there are two questions in life that every person needs to answer for themselves: (...) one is the question of religion; the other is the question of begetting, a term which she chooses deliberately to restore a sense of 'strangeness and magnitude' to the idea. What does it mean to bring a new creature into the world? Or rather what does it mean to decide to perform an act of creation? What does it mean to make the decision that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted? To ask this question is to interrogate one's own responsibility and commitments, morally, philosophically, and personally. The question of begetting can never be purely one of preference or inclination, however we might wish it to be. This book is the author's attempt to raise some of these questions, if not fully to answer them. It is both a personal and philosophical exercise of filling out that moral background, in full awareness of the things that are at stake, and not in judgment but out of concern and compassion both for creators and created, and for those who are not yet created and those who are not (or not yet) creators. (shrink)

Josef Bocheski, pioneer of the discipline ofphilosophical sovietology and one of the firstto criticize Eurocentric attitudes, emphasizedthe central role of logic and sound argument inacademic philosophy. This helped him todemonstrate both the general flaws of and thedifferences in quality within Sovietphilosophy. His endeavors and results areindispensable for the yet-to-be-written historyof Soviet philosophy. By the same token, itmade him less perceptive of the centralpolitical, not just philosophical, role of thepartijnost'-principle. More recent developmentshave shown both Soviet philosophy andBocheski's own, Neo-Thomist position to (...) bepart of a fundamentally outdated idea ofscientific philosophy. However, the criteria oflogical scrutiny and sound argument have notlost their force within globalizingphilosophical culture. (shrink)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has already caused large amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and will continue to do so for manyyears after hostilities have ceased mainly because of the emissions linked to the rebuilding of destroyed or damaged housing, public buildings, infrastructure, factories, and the like. My aim in this paper is to discuss how in a time of climate emergency such emissions of war should impact the political morality of states initiating, continuing, and (...) ending war (through a just and enduring peace) as understood by just war theory (JWT). My point of departure is a study by Lennard de Klerk and six co-authors detailing the emissions of the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian war. (shrink)

How can a realistic ethical imagination about the future of a technology take shape? This article contains a reflection which is based on the experiences of an embedded ethicist in the context of biophysical research conducive to the development of photoacoustic mammography, which is intended for the non-invasive detection of breast cancer. Imagination in this context already informs the activities of the biophysical researchers, but its role is limited: biophysical future scenarios concentrate on the technological advances that photoacoustics could bring (...) about. In this article it is argued that it is advisable to also consider the medical practice and the ways in which this practice is likely to change as an effect of the introduction of photoacoustic mammography into it. On the basis of this more encompassing imaginative endeavor it is possible to get a clearer idea about how new technologies are able to contribute to human well being, which is informative for the setting of research-goals/priorities and a responsible implementation of new technologies into the world. (shrink)

In pleas for the recognition of cultural minority rights, claims to educational authority often figure as concrete examples. The right to educational authority is said to be an exemplary minority right. This is striking, for of all minority rights this is one which is impossible to justify. Difficulties invovled in recent attempts to reconcile cultural minority rights with liberal democracy demonstrate that educational minority rights in particular cannot be justified without underestimating civic and liberal risks and ignoring the complicated nature (...) of the relationships between communities and ‘their’ children and between parents and ‘their’ children. (shrink)

Rawls’ notion of reflective equilibrium has a hybrid character. It is embedded in the pragmatist tradition, but also includes various Kantian and other non-pragmatist elements. I argue that we should discard all non-pragmatist elements and develop reflective equilibrium in a consistently pragmatist manner. I argue that this pragmatist approach is the best way to defend reflective equilibrium against various criticisms, partly by embracing the critiques as advantages. I begin with discussing how each of the three versions of reflective equilibrium in (...) Rawls’ work combines pragmatist and non-pragmatist elements. For Rawls, the primary purpose of reflective equilibrium is epistemic: namely, to construct moral theories or judgments. In a pragmatist approach, there are three connected purposes for moral inquiry: right action, reliable understanding and self-improvement. Depending on the specific context of a reflective equilibrium process, these general purposes can give rise to a variety of specific purposes. In the next sections, I develop a pragmatist approach to reflective equilibrium and discuss the implications of this approach for core elements of reflective equilibrium. These elements are: the initial convictions, facts, personal commitments and comprehensive views of life, coherence and additional methods for critical scrutiny. (shrink)

John Rawls wrote that people can voluntarily acquire political obligations to institutions only on the condition that those institutions are at least reasonably just. When an institution is seriously unjust, by contrast, attempts to create political obligation are “void ab initio.” However, Rawls's own explanation for this thought was deeply problematic, as are the standard alternatives. In this paper, I offer an argument for why Rawls's intuition was right and trace its implications for theories of authority and political obligation. These, (...) I claim, are more radical than is often thought. (shrink)

Abstract‘Social inclusion’ is the leading ideal in services and care for people with intellectual disabilities in most countries in the Global North. ‘Social inclusion’ can refer simply to full equal rights, but more often it is taken to mean something like ‘community participation’. This narrow version of social inclusion has become so ingrained that it virtually goes unchallenged. The presumption appears to be that there is a clear moral consensus that this narrow understanding of social inclusion is good. However, that (...) moral consensus is not clear in the case of people with profound intellectual and/or multiple disabilities (PIMD), who are not able to express their needs and preferences verbally. Moreover, social inclusion has proven to be difficult to conceptualize and implement for people with PIMD. Therefore, it becomes imperative to ask about the ethical rationale of the narrow understanding of social inclusion. For what reasons do we think social inclusion is good? And do those reasons also apply for people with PIMD? This article addresses these questions by providing an ethical analysis of the ideal of social inclusion for people with PIMD. It discusses four ethical arguments for social inclusion and probes their relevance for people with PIMD. The article argues that none of these arguments fully convince of the value of the narrow understanding of social inclusion for people with PIMD. It ends with advocating for an ethical space for imagining a good life for people with PIMD otherwise. (shrink)

Medical technology assessment deals with the evaluation of novel or existing health care procedures. This paper addresses the interdependence between factual and normative issues, using the controversies about acceptability and desirability of reduced-size liver transplantations with living donors as example.

These last years, the development of AI robots for agriculture, livestock farming and food processing industries is rapidly increasing. These robots are expected to help produce and deliver food more efficiently for a growing human population, but they also raise societal and ethical questions. As the type of questions raised by these AI robots in society have been rarely empirically explored, we engaged in four case studies focussing on four types of AI robots for agri-food ‘in the making’: manure collectors, (...) weeding robots, harvesting robots and food processing robots which select and package fruits, vegetables and meats. Based on qualitative interviews with 33 experts engaged in the development or implementation of these four types of robots, this article provides a broad and varied exploration of the values that play a role in their evaluation and the ethical questions that they raise. Compared to the recently published literature reviews mapping the ethical questions related to AI robots in agri-food, we conclude that stakeholders in our case studies primarily adopt a relational perspective to the value of AI robots and to finding a solution to the ethical questions. Building on our findings we suggest it is best to seek a distribution of tasks between human beings and robots in agri-food, which helps to realize the most acceptable, good or just collaboration between them in food production or processing that contributes to realizing societal goals and help to respond to the 21 century challenges. (shrink)

Emotional peer support systems have benefits for student-student relationships and allow for children and adolescents' participation in schools. For students with specific educational needs and disabilities, positive relationships seem to be more difficult to attain and these students are more vulnerable to suffer negative peer experiences such as bullying and social exclusion. Systems in which peers can show helpful behavior are beneficial for schools in order to create a positive, supportive climate. Emotional peer support entails social interaction through emotional or (...) practical help based on what these peers have in common and many times with benefits for both. This systematic review identified interventions of emotional peer support in schools for students with SEND. Twenty-three studies were identified that involved four types of befriending: circle of friends, peer buddying, peer networks, and social lunch clubs. Studies reported mainly positive outcomes for both focus students and peer supporters in terms of increased social interaction and social acceptance, as well as enhanced self-esteem and empathy on the individual level. Further bonding of the students by friendship was also perceived, but more precise data is required to draw further conclusions. Support by the school as an institution, the specific role of the teacher, and family participation are important factors related to the impact of peer support systems. Information on these aspects was scarce, and it is recommended to include variables of this nature in future research. Intervention descriptions revealed students' active participation through suggestions for activities, however their involvement in organizing the systems was limited. More research is needed to learn about the opportunities of emotional peer support to improve student-student relationships including the active involvement of the peers themselves in this support. (shrink)

This book advances our understanding of the nature, grounds and limits of human dignity by connecting it with Kant's notion of an ideal moral community, or Kingdom of Ends. It features original essays by leading Kant scholars and moral and political philosophers from around the world. Although Kant's influential injunction to treat humanity as an end in itself and never merely as a means has garnered the most attention among those interested in analyzing human dignity with a Kantian lens, Kant (...) himself places much more emphasis on the Kingdom of Ends as crucial for defining human dignity. The chapters in this collection focus not only on interpretive issues related to the Kingdom of Ends, but also on practical applications that have the potential to advance discussions about the nature and foundations of rights, the content of moral principles, the importance of moral ideals and attitudes and the nature of moral motivation. Exploring and connecting the ideas of human dignity and the Kingdom of Ends significantly deepens our moral understanding, advances discussions in moral and political philosophy and enhances our appreciation of Kant's moral theory. Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends: Kantian Perspectives and Practical Applications will appeal to scholars and advanced students of Kant, moral philosophy, political philosophy, and political theory. (shrink)

Evolutionary ethics has recently become popular again. Some of its representatives elaborate new attempts to derive ethics from evolutionary biology. The attempts, like previous ones, fail because they commit the naturalistic fallacy. Premises from evolutionary biology together with normative premises also do not justify ethical principles. Other representatives argue that evolutionary considerations imply that ethics cannot be justified at all. Their arguments presuppose an unacceptable form of foundationalism. In principle, evolutionary biology might explain some aspects of morality, but in practice (...) explanations are hard to come by. All this does not imply that evolutionary theory is irrelevant in normative settings. To the contrary, it may help us devise guidelines in environmental policy and health care policy. It is to be hoped that evolutionary ethicists will divert their research efforts to the elaboration of such guidelines. (shrink)

In South Africa, race has been subverted by the fall of official apartheid. Specifically, the “invisibilization” of black others is overturned and white-black relationality problematized, thereby deeply troubling whiteness. However, the logic of race continues to reverberate through social relations against a global backdrop in which this category proves remarkably adaptable as purveyor of inequality. The end of official apartheid is not the end of the power effects of the apartheid discourse. The postapartheid field is a site of contestation over (...) previously normalized hierarchies, including over gender and class. Applying a discourse analysis to texts generated in research interviews with respondents who self-identified as women, white, Afrikaans-speaking, and middle class, this study finds attempts at re-securing race. First, the strategy of “elision and misattribution” seeks to recuperate apartheid's racial binaries to bolster present-day whiteness. Second, “intersectional shifting” of social markers aims at ameliorating the secondary status of femininity through the wielding of whiteness and middle classness. These strategies are complicated by affective practices. Particularly the social emotion shame holds transformative potential, but with a caveat. Shame brings self into relation with the other and the social and can usher white subjects into an expanded conception of being human, but only if acknowledged. (shrink)

Sober and Brandon et al. disagree about the role of screening-off in the appraisal of theories of natural selection. Some problems disregarded by them are unearthed in this discussion note.

It is well-known that the early Heidegger offers important reflec­tions on the Christian experience of life in his accounts of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. Yet, what is the systematic meaning of Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion? This essay aims to discuss this question by connecting themes from Die Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens to Heidegger’s attempt to provide his own version of phenomenology in Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Heidegger’s position with respect to Husserl’s phenomenology becomes clearer, I argue, when his (...) problematization of the onto-theological structures he discerns at the heart of the philosophers he discusses, such as Descartes and Augustine, is taken into account and when it is shown how the phenomenology of religion exceeds the boundaries of a phenomenology that studies consciousness alone. In fact, the explication of the (purified) Christian experience of life and the concep­tion of God at stake in this experience allows Heidegger to articulate a form of phenomenology purified from onto-theological tendencies. (shrink)

A fair share of change problematics in organizations can be led back to the human factor. In earlier days the problem used to be that the worker was considered as a mechanical element, as ‘a pair of hands’ (Henry Ford). Nowadays we know that people want to be taken seriously and, if so, in general perform better. But when you concentrate on the worker’s sense of meaning for the sake of better achievements, do you really take him seriously? Or does (...) he get, be it in a subtle way, again enlisted in other man’s target schemes? The widespread cynicism about what happens in organizations, in spite of extensive Human Resource Management, and the high percentage of failing change trajectories call for a closer examination of man in organizations and his resistance. -/- For such an examination this thesis turns to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, namely to his treatment of rationality. Rational thought according to Levinas has the merit of making the world lucid and controllable. But at the same time it strips things and people of their identity and incorporates them in a homogenized rational order. Illusory, but nonetheless oppressive. Rationality’s totalitarian character can provoke resistance and grief with people who are enlisted by it. This can lead to a shameful confrontation in which the thinker is being confronted with his victim’s resistance and sees himself and his thinking made questionable. By proceeding along this route, thinking can be brought to self-criticism and to revision of standpoints. -/- This description by Levinas of rational thinking shows similarity to what managers do in organizations. They make their business controllable, but at the same time with their planning and schemes they create a totalitarian straitjacket. This similarity suggests that also the reactions to imperialistic rationality from Levinas’ description ought to be found in organizations. Is it indeed possible to indicate there the kind of resistance and grief Levinas speaks about? Does that give rise to confrontations between managers and their co-workers who are supposed to subordinate to their schemes? Do managers then feel shame? And do those shameful confrontations consequently lead to self-reflection and change? -/- Desk research suggests that the above elements are partly to be found in the literature of management theory. Interviews with managers show that Levinas’ line of thought can also be found in its completeness within organizations. At the same time it becomes clear that becoming conscious of the elements of that line of thought – that rationality is all-conquering, that it provokes resistance, that that can lead to shame as well as to a new beginning – this is a difficult path to travel. The related experiences are easily forgotten and sometimes difficult to excavate. Translation of Levinas’ thinking into terms of management and organization can help us spot them where they play their role in organizations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues for the contemporary relevance of melancholy as something different than depression or a state of mental illness. Instead, through examples of a literary, philosophical, and artistic nature, it is shown that melancholy functions as a force-field – a topos where the finite and the infinite, the earthly and the heavenly, the physical and the spiritual come together and meet in huge tension. By means of an exploration of the historical notion of melancholy and a revisit of (...) Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), coupled to a much more recent example, Lars von Trier’s film melancholia (DK/se/fr/de 2011), this paper shows how the melancholic motif continues to play an essential role in our contemporary society. The melancholic is described as a person who lives a life on the border: who intuits the point where two worlds meet and who longs for a revelation of the beyond – an apocalypse (literally: ‘an uncovering’). It is this longing – a nostalgia for being – that increasingly pervades our contemporary world, a world that represses the heterogeneous through numerous social and political conditions. The study of melancholy here undertaken therefore provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of melancholy in our (post-) modern time. (shrink)

Is the law good? How can it be improved? These questions are frequently addressed, both in traditional doctrinal research and in interdisciplinary legal research. In this article, I elaborate a general argumentative framework for justifying evaluations and recommendations for legislative reform, and I identify the chains of argument for making evaluations and recommendations. This may help researchers to make their arguments explicit and transparent, and then to justify the choices made for each of the steps in the argument. This enables (...) readers - as well as authors - to assess whether the argument’s conclusions are sound and convincing. A key problem in making these arguments concerns the choice of standards for evaluation. I suggest that they can be best understood in terms of the underlying values. In order to make all-things-considered evaluations and normative recommendations, interdisciplinary cooperation between doctrinal, socio-legal, and legal-philosophical researchers is necessary. Therefore, individual researchers will usually have to settle for pro tanto evaluations and recommendations. (shrink)