Using placebos in day-to-day practice is an ethical problem. This paper summarises the available epidemiological evidence to support this difficult decision. Based on these data we propose to differentiate between placebo and “knowledge framing”. While the use of placebo should be confined to experimental settings in clinical trials, knowledge framing — which is only conceptually different from placebo — is a desired, expected and necessary component of any doctor-patient encounter. Examples from daily practice demonstrate both, the need to investigate the (...) effects of knowledge framing and its impact on ethical, medical, economical and legal decisions. (shrink)
Using placebos in day-to-day practice is an ethical problem. This paper summarises the available epidemiological evidence to support this difficult decision. Based on these data we propose to differentiate between placebo and “knowledge framing”. While the use of placebo should be confined to experimental settings in clinical trials, knowledge framing — which is only conceptually different from placebo — is a desired, expected and necessary component of any doctor-patient encounter. Examples from daily practice demonstrate both, the need to investigate the (...) effects of knowledge framing and its impact on ethical, medical, economical and legal decisions. (shrink)
The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance.
Current moral philosophy is often seen as essentially a debate between the two great traditions of consequentialism and deontology. Although there has been considerable work clarifying consequentialism, deontology is more often attacked or defended than analyzed. Just how we are to understand the very idea of a deontological ethic? We shall see that competing conceptions of deontology have been advanced in recent ethical thinking, leading to differences in classifying ethical theories. If we do not focus on implausible versions, the idea (...) of a deontological ethic is far more attractive than most philosophers have thought. Indeed, I shall argue that in an important sense, only a deontological ethic can be plausible. (shrink)
Part One of this essay considered familiar ways of characterizing deontology, which focus on the notions of the good and the right. Here we will take up alternative approaches, which stress the type of reasons for actions that are generated by deontological theories. Although some of these alternative conceptualizations of deontology also employ a distinction between the good and the right, all mark the basic contrast between deontology and teleology in terms of reasons to act.
Liberal political theory is all too familiar with the divide between classical and welfare-state liberals. Classical liberals, as we all know, insist on the importance of small government, negative liberty, and private property. Welfare-state liberals, on the other hand, although they too stress civil rights, tend to be sympathetic to “positive liberty,” are for a much more expansive government, and are often ambivalent about private property. Although I do not go so far as to entirely deny the usefulness of this (...) familiar distinction, I think in many ways it is misleading. In an important sense, most free-market liberals are also “welfare-state” liberals. I say this because the overwhelming number of liberals, of both the pro-market and the pro-government variety, entertain a welfarist conception of political economy. On this dominant welfarist view, the ultimate justification of the politico-economic order is that it promotes human welfare. Traditional “welfare-state liberals” such as Robert E. Goodin manifestly adopt this welfarist conception. But it is certainly not only interventionists such as Goodin who insist that advancing welfare is the overriding goal of normative political economy. J. R. McCulloch, one of the great nineteenth-century laissez-faire political economists, was adamant that “freedom is not, as some appear to think, the end of government: the advancement of public prosperity and happiness is its end.” To be sure, McCulloch would have disagreed with Goodin about the optimal welfare-maximizing economic policy: the welfarist ideal, he and his fellow classical political economists believed, would best be advanced by provision of a legal and institutional framework — most importantly, the laws of property, contract, and the criminal code — that allows individuals to pursue their own interests in the market and, by so doing, promote public welfare. In general, what might be called the “classical-liberal welfare state” claims to advance welfare by providing the framework for individuals to seek wealth for themselves, while welfarists such as Goodin insist that a market order is seriously flawed as a mechanism for advancing human welfare and, in addition, that government has the competency to “correct market failures” in the provision of welfare. (shrink)
William Perm summarized the Magna Carta thus: “First, It asserts Englishmen to be free; that's Liberty. Secondly, they that have free-holds, that's Property.” Since at least the seventeenth century, liberals have not only understood liberty and property to be fundamental, but to be somehow intimately related or interwoven. Here, however, consensus ends; liberals present an array of competing accounts of the relation between liberty and property. Many, for instance, defend an essentially instrumental view, typically seeing private property as justified because (...) it is necessary to maintain or protect other, more basic, liberty rights. Important to our constitutional tradition has been the idea that “[t]he right to property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” Along similar lines, it has been argued that only an economic system based on private property disperses power and resources, ensuring that private people in civil society have the resources to oppose the state and give effect to basic liberties. Alternatively, it is sometimes claimed that only those with property develop the independent characters that are necessary to preserve a regime of liberty. But not only have liberals insisted that, property is a means of preserving liberty, they have often conceived of it as an embodiment of liberty, or as a type of liberty, or indeed as identical to liberty. This latter view is popular among contemporary libertarians or classical liberals. Jan Narveson, for instance, bluntly asserts that “Liberty is Property,” while John Gray insists that “[t]he connection between property and the basic liberties is constitutive and not just instrumental.”. (shrink)
Justificatory liberalism is liberal in an abstract and foundational sense: it respects each as free and equal, and so insists that coercive laws must be justified to all members of the public. In this essay I consider how this fundamental liberal principle relates to disputes within the liberal tradition on “the extent of the state.” It is widely thought today that this core liberal principle of respect requires that the state regulates the distribution of resources or well-being to conform to (...) principles of fairness, that all citizens be assured of employment and health care, that no one be burdened by mere brute bad luck, and that citizens' economic activities must be regulated to insure that they do not endanger the “fair value” of rights to determine political outcomes. I argue in this essay: a large family of liberal views are consistent with the justificatory liberals project, from classical to egalitarian formulations ; overall, the justificatory project tilts in the direction of classical formulations. (shrink)
Public justification-based accounts of liberal legitimacy rely on the idea that a polity’s basic structure should, in some sense, be acceptable to its citizens. In this paper I discuss the prospects of that approach through the lens of Gerald Gaus’ critique of John Rawls’ paradigmatic account of democratic public justification. I argue that Gaus does succeed in pointing out some significant problems for Rawls’ political liberalism; yet his alternative, justificatory liberalism, is not voluntaristic enough to satisfy the desiderata (...) of a genuinely democratic theory of public justification. So I contend that—pace Gaus, but also Rawls—rather than simply amending political liberalism, the claims of justificatory liberalism bring out fatal tensions between the desiderata of any theory of liberal-democratic legitimacy through public justification. (shrink)
The paper places the work of G. Gaus into the tradition of political thought experimenting. In particular, his strategy of modeling moral decision by the heuristic device of idealized Members of the Public is presented as an iterated thought experiment, which stands in marked contrast with more traditional devices like the veil of ignorance. The consequences are drawn, and issues of utopianism and realism briefly discussed.
This paper considers the charge that—contrary to the current widespread assumption accompanying the near-universal neglect of his work—Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923) cannot count as one of the founders of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge. In order to elucidate the matter, Jerusalem’s “sociology of cognition” is here reconstructed in the context of his own work in psychology and philosophy as well as in the context of the work of some predecessors and contemporaries. It is argued that while it shows clear discontinuities (...) with the present-day understanding of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge, Jerusalem’s sociology of cognition was not only distinctive in its own day but also anticipated in nuce a much-discussed theme in current history of science. (shrink)
This essay analyzes one of Germany's former premier research institutions for biomedical research, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWIA) as a test case for the way in which politics and human heredity served as resources for each other during the Third Reich. Examining the KWIA from this perspective brings us a step closer to answering the questions at the heart of most recent scholarship concerning the biomedical community under the swastika: (1) How do we (...) explain why the vast majority of German human geneticists and eugenicists were willing to work for the National Socialist state and, at the very least, legitimized its exterminationist racial policy; and (2) what accounts for at least some of Germany's most renowned medically trained professionals' involvement in forms of morally compromised science that wholly transcend the bounds of normal scientific practice? Although a complete answer to this question must await an examination of other German biological research centers, the present study suggests that during the Nazi period the symbiotic relationship between human genetics and politics served to radicalize both. The dynamic between the science of human heredity and Nazi politics changed the research practice of some of the biomedical sciences housed at the KWIA. It also simultaneously made it easier for the Nazi state to carry out its barbaric racial program leading, finally, to the extermination of millions of so-called racial undesirables. (shrink)
This is the third of a series of essays on the development and reception of Wilhelm Ostwald’s energetics. The first essay described the chemical origins of Ostwald’s interest in the energy concept and his motivations for seeking a comprehensive science of energy. The second essay and the present one discuss his various attempts, beginning in 1891 and extending over almost 3 years, to develop a consistent and coherent energetic theory. A final essay will consider reactions to this work and (...) Ostwald’s replies, and will also seek to evaluate his program of research. Ostwald’s project—to reconstruct physics and chemistry “as a pure energetics”—is worth attending to for several reasons: first, because Ostwald did ground-breaking work in chemistry (he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1909 for his studies in catalysis and rates of reaction); second, because an important school of physical chemistry formed around him at Leipzig, a school that promoted his ideas; and, finally, because he was a prominent and vigorous participant in debates at the end of the nineteenth century concerning the proper course of physical theory. (shrink)
This study examines the sources of human divergence as arise from Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings. While Dilthey assigns a central role to the human subject, he never synthesizes his major ideas on subjectivity into a unified theory of subjective uniqueness. I will show that such a theory can be derived from his writings through the combination of three ideas that appear in them. These ideas are: (1) the thesis that human understanding is possible because of psychological content that is shared (...) by both the creator and the interpreter; (2) the belief that this shared content is the only content that exists within human beings, meaning that there is no unique psychological content; and (3) the perception of this inner universal content as an accumulation of life-possibilities. When joined together, these ideas create an inspiring theory of human divergence, according to which the uniqueness of an individual is determined through partial realization of universal possibilities. (shrink)
Wilhelm Müller's lyric cycle "Die Winterreise", superficially the depiction of the end of an unhappy erotic relationship, can be interpreted as a negation of the promises of deliverance which, during the early Romantic period, were associated with the spheres of dreams, death, nature, contemplation, and love. Even art, Müller's own medium, seems susceptible to this negation.
This paper analyzes the shifts in Wilhelm Windelband’s ‘critical philosophy of values’ as it developed hand in hand with his understanding of relativism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by analyzing the role that relativism played in his philosophical project, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Windelband's intellectual development in the context of historicism and Neo-Kantianism. On the other hand, by highlighting Windelband’s contribution to the understanding of relativism, it sheds light on an (...) important episode in the history of that problem. The paper distinguishes between three phases in Windelband’s thinking and shows that his views about relativism changed in close connection with his conception of history. The early Windelband thought that historicism was compatible with absolute validity because he was firmly convinced of historical progress. The mature Windelband rejected progress as a means for justifying validity and put the problem of relativism into sharp relief. In response to the failure of his mature philosophy to fend off relativism, the later Windelband strengthened the role of history again. The paper concludes that Windelband’s significance lies not in his arguments against relativism, but rather in having furthered philosophical understanding of the problems at stake. (shrink)
This study seeks to provide a new resolution to an old controversy regarding Wilhelm Dilthey's methodological writings, written from 1880 to 1911. This controversy concentrates on the relations of Dilthey's early psychology and his late hermeneutics. On one side of this controversy stand interpreters who claim that the appearance of the late hermeneutics marks a dramatic change in Dilthey's thought, and even creates an internal paradox in his thinking. On the other side, stand interpreters who view his thought as (...) a unified whole, by claiming that these methods were meant to work in tandem and complement each other. I largely agree with the latter group of interpreters regarding the unity of Dilthey's writings; however, instead of basing my view on the methodological level of Dilthey’s writings, I will concentrate on the object of these two methods. According to my new answer to the question of the continuity of Dilthey’s thought, Dilthey did intend to replace his early psychology with his late hermeneutics; even so, his thought should still be viewed as consistent and stable because he continued to apply both different methods to the same object: inner-universal content, that is, the inner psychological source of outer human reality. In this way, I will try show that the consistency of Dilthey's thought is derived from the stable destination he aspired to reach with the help of the different methods. (shrink)
Christian social thinkers who strongly support the free-market system often have drawn connections between the social values of their faith and the ideas of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Hayek's comments on religion, however, seem to predict its demise for the sake of progress, whereas his colleague Wilhelm Röpke posits “transcendent” religion and established moral traditions as essential to a humane economy. This essay contends that what Röpke described as “enmassment” has similarities to the present “financialization” of society, which involves (...) the rising influence of financial values in all institutions, exaggerated emphasis on quantitative performance measures, and reliance on technical processes in lieu of human relationships. Röpke's “Christian humanist” philosophy advances the kind of ethical entrepreneurialism needed to morally sustain a global society experiencing enmassment and financialization simultaneously. (shrink)
Wilhelm von Humboldt's classic study of human language was first published in 1836, as a general introduction to his three-volume treatise on the Kawi language of Java. It is the final statement of his lifelong study of the nature of language, exploring its universal structures and its relation to mind and culture. Empirically wide-ranging - Humboldt goes far beyond the Indo-European family of languages - it remains one of the most interesting and important attempts to draw philosophical conclusions from (...) comparative linguistics. This 1999 volume presents a translation by Peter Heath, together with an introduction by Michael Losonsky that places Humboldt's work in its historical context and discusses its relevance to contemporary work in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology. (shrink)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was one of the seventeenth century's most important thinkers. A philosopher, mathematician and scientist, his work is comparable in scope and importance only to that of Newton and Descartes. His work dominated German philosophy until Kant, and was revived in the early part of this century when his important work on logic was re-discovered. This four volume set contains 97 of the most important essays ever written about Leibniz's work. The selection has been made to (...) bring out the scope of Leibniz's work in all the areas he wrote upon, as well as its importance to contemporary philosophy and the history of philosophy. It will be an essential reference work for anyone concerned with seventeenth century philosophy and science, as well as to all Leibniz specialists. (shrink)
This is the second of a series of essays on the development and reception of Wilhelm Ostwald’s energetics. The first essay described the chemical origins of Ostwald’s interest in the energy concept and his motivations for seeking a comprehensive science of energy. The present essay and the next discuss his various attempts, beginning in 1891 and extending over almost 3 years, to develop a consistent and coherent energetic theory. A final essay will consider reactions to this work and Ostwald’s (...) replies, and will also seek to evaluate his program of research. Ostwald’s project – to reconstruct physics and chemistry “as a pure energetics” – is worth attending to for several reasons: first, because Ostwald did ground-breaking work in chemistry (he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1909 for his studies in catalysis and rates of reaction); second, because an important school of physical chemistry formed around him at Leipzig, a school that promoted his ideas; and, finally, because he was a prominent and vigorous participant in debates at the end of the nineteenth century concerning the proper course of physical theory. (shrink)
This paper describes the historical background and early formation of Wilhelm Johannsen's distinction between genotype and phenotype. It is argued that contrary to a widely accepted interpretation his concepts referred primarily to properties of individual organisms and not to statistical averages. Johannsen's concept of genotype was derived from the idea of species in the tradition of biological systematics from Linnaeus to de Vries: An individual belonged to a group - species, subspecies, elementary species - by representing a certain underlying (...) type. Johannsen sharpened this idea theoretically in the light of recent biological discoveries, not least those of cytology. He tested and confirmed it experimentally combining the methods of biometry, as developed by Francis Galton, with the individual selection method and pedigree analysis, as developed for instance by Louis Vilmorin. The term "genotype" was introduced in W. Johannsen's 1909 treatise, but the idea of a stable underlying biological "type" distinct from observable properties was the core idea of his classical bean selection experiment published 6 years earlier. The individual ontological foundation of population analysis was a self-evident presupposition in Johannsen's studies of heredity in populations from their start in the early 1890s till his death in 1927. The claim that there was a "substantial but cautious modification of Johannsen's phenotype-genotype distinction" from a statistical to an individual ontological perspective derives from a misreading of the 1903 and 1909 texts. The immediate purpose of this paper is to correct this reading of the 1903 monograph by showing how its problems and results grow out of Johannsen's earlier work in heredity and plant breeding. Johannsen presented his famous selection experiment as the culmination of a line of criticism of orthodox Darwinism by William Bateson, Hugo de Vries, and others. They had argued that evolution is based on stepwise rather than continuous change in heredity. Johannsen's paradigmatic experiment showed how stepwise variation in heredity could be operationally distinguished from the observable, continuous morphological variation. To test Galton's law of partial regression, Johannsen deliberately chose pure lines of self-fertilizing plants, a pure line being the descendants in successive generations of one single individual. Such a population could be assumed to be highly homogeneous with respect to hereditary type, and Johannsen found that selection produced no change in this type. Galton, he explained, had experimented with populations composed of a number of stable hereditary types. The partial regression which Galton found was simply an effect of selection between types, increasing the proportion of some types at the expense of others. (shrink)
This paper describes the historical background and early formation of Wilhelm Johannsen's distinction between genotype and phenotype. It is argued that contrary to a widely accepted interpretation his concepts referred primarily to properties of individual organisms and not to statistical averages. Johannsen's concept of genotype was derived from the idea of species in the tradition of biological systematics from Linnaeus to de Vries: An individual belonged to a group - species, subspecies, elementary species - by representing a certain underlying (...) type. Johannsen sharpened this idea theoretically in the light of recent biological discoveries, not least those of cytology. He tested and confirmed it experimentally combining the methods of biometry, as developed by Francis Galton, with the individual selection method and pedigree analysis, as developed for instance by Louis Vilmorin. The term "genotype" was introduced in W. Johannsen's 1909 treatise, but the idea of a stable underlying biological "type" distinct from observable properties was the core idea of his classical bean selection experiment published 6 years earlier. The individual ontological foundation of population analysis was a self-evident presupposition in Johannsen's studies of heredity in populations from their start in the early 1890s till his death in 1927. The claim that there was a "substantial but cautious modification of Johannsen's phenotype-genotype distinction" from a statistical to an individual ontological perspective derives from a misreading of the 1903 and 1909 texts. The immediate purpose of this paper is to correct this reading of the 1903 monograph by showing how its problems and results grow out of Johannsen's earlier work in heredity and plant breeding. Johannsen presented his famous selection experiment as the culmination of a line of criticism of orthodox Darwinism by William Bateson, Hugo de Vries, and others. They had argued that evolution is based on stepwise rather than continuous change in heredity. Johannsen's paradigmatic experiment showed how stepwise variation in heredity could be operationally distinguished from the observable, continuous morphological variation. To test Galton's law of partial regression, Johannsen deliberately chose pure lines of self-fertilizing plants, a pure line being the descendants in successive generations of one single individual. Such a population could be assumed to be highly homogeneous with respect to hereditary type, and Johannsen found that selection produced no change in this type. Galton, he explained, had experimented with populations composed of a number of stable hereditary types. The partial regression which Galton found was simply an effect of selection between types, increasing the proportion of some types at the expense of others. (shrink)
