In diesem Beitrag kommentieren die Autor:innen zunächst den von Drerup entwickelten Orientierungsrahmen und folgen den basalen Schlüssen des Autoren, zeigen aber auch Leerstellen und eigene Schwerpunktsetzungen auf. Der kritische Teil des Beitrags konzentriert sich auf die Kommentierung der Leitlinien für die Unterrichtspraxis für Lehrkräfte, die von Johannes Drerup zur als Hilfestellung für Lehrkräfte als Basis für einen am Kontroversitätsgebot orientierten Unterricht entwickelt wurden. Das diesen Leitlinien inhärente Vorhaben Drerups, den zweiten Grundsatz des Beutelsbacher Konsens’ zu konkretisieren, wird aus Sicht der (...) Autor:innen diskutiert. Sie zeigen auf, welche Grenzen gültiger Meinungen in der Rezeption des Beutelsbacher Konsens’ bereits formuliert wurden, um „radikal offene Kontroversitätspostulate” zu vermeiden. Die Autor:innen argumentieren außerdem gegen das von Drerup angelegte Bildungsverständnis der Demokratieerziehung und dem darin angelegten Rollenkonzept von Lehrer:innen als wissen(schaft)svermittelnde Akteure, die im Zentrum des Unterrichts stehen. Diese zugrundeliegende Prämisse hat aus Sicht der Autor:innen ungünstige Konsequenzen und führt zu einer verengten Perspektive auf die Lehrkraft. Die Autor:innen plädieren vielmehr für eine subjektorientierte Bildung, die die Lernenden und ihre mitgebrachten Konzepte und Vorstellungen in den Mittelpunkt stellt und nicht die Rolle der Lehrkraft. So kann der Blick geweitet werden für die Potenziale, die die Demokratiebildung bereit hält. (shrink)

philosophische Untersuchungen zur ersten innermarxistischen Grundlagendiskussion W. Schrader. 15. Theorie als Weltentwurf Wir wollen nun in den folgenden Überlegungen das positive Bedeutungsfeld des Ideologiebegriffes abstecken ...

In a recent book onThe Publics of Science; Experts and Laymen Through History, Agustí Nieto-Galan introduced his subject of a (mostly Western) history of public science, covering the times from the Scientific Revolution to the twenty-first century, with reference to Sigmund Freud. In one of his essays of cultural critique, Freud had, so to speak, put culture itself on his couch, and this session also featured talk about science and technological application.Civilization and Its Discontentsidentified a factor of disillusionment in the (...) progress of science and technology, which gave rise to “The Uneasiness in Culture” (the literal translation of the title of Freud's German essayDas Unbehagen in der Kultur), and this uneasiness tainted a great deal of the happiness science and technology were intended to cultivate (Nieto-Galán 2011; Freud 1930). New technology and inventions like telephones, ocean liners, or drugs, Freud argued, were mostly remedies for negative developments technology had just created; for instance, without modern transportation people would stay close to each other and not need any telephone. (However, he did not address the issue of whether scientific knowledge itself may have provided some satisfaction.) The modern individual, as analyzed by Freud, was therefore constantly ill at ease with modern scientific and technological culture. (shrink)

Dass man eine musikalische Form auberschaubaro - und nicht etwa auberhorbaro - nennt, mutet ebenso selbstverstandlich an wie der immer wieder formulierte Vergleich zwischen Musik und Architektur.

Contrary to assumptions that changes in brain networks are possible only during crucial periods of development, research in the past decade has supported the idea of a permanently plastic brain. Novel experience, altered afferent input due to environmental changes and learning new skills are now recognized as modulators of brain function and underlying neuroanatomic circuitry. Given findings in experiments with animals and the recent discovery of increases in gray and white matter in the adult human brain as a result of (...) learning, the old concept of cognitive reserve, that is the ability to reinforce brain volume in crucial areas and thus provide a greater threshold for age-dependent deficits, has been reinforced. The challenge we face is to unravel the exact nature of the dynamic structural alterations and, ultimately, to be able to use this knowledge for disease management. Understanding normative changes in brain structure that occur as a result of environmental changes and demands is pivotal to understanding the characteristic ability of the brain to adapt. (shrink)

Many consumers implicitly associate sustainability with lower product strength. This so-called ethical = less strong intuition (ELSI) poses a major threat for the success of sustainable products. This article explores this pervasive lay theory and examines whether it is a key barrier for sustainable consumption patterns. Even more importantly, little is known about the underlying mechanisms that might operate differently at the implicit and explicit levels of the consumer’s decision-making. To fill this gap, three studies examine how the implicit judgments (...) that consumers activate automatically shape their consumption behaviors, in concert with their more controlled explicit beliefs about sustainable products. The Main Study investigates the ELSI’s imprint on actual shopping patterns and disentangles the implicit and explicit mechanisms of the lay theory. This paper also asks how this negative influence can be attenuated by examining whether the consumer’s interest in sustainable consumption reduces reliance on the ELSI. Two follow-up studies confirm the robustness from different methodological and practical perspectives. Implications for companies and policy makers are derived. (shrink)

Thepurpose of Wissenschaft und Weltanschaunng,1 by Aloys Wenzl, is to provide a rational explanation of the world which shall give us greater insight into its nature than either common sense or the natural sciences can give us. Philosophy, Professor Wenzl says in his introduction, springs from the desire for a weltanschaunng, for insight into the significance of life. But it also springs from a desire for rational explanation, and aims at objective validity. It proposes to give a truer, more complete, (...) and more intelligible account of reality than appearances provide. This idea of a more intelligible explanation underlies the whole of Professor Wenzl's book. We want more than knowledge of empirical facts, we want knowledge of reasons, or, as he often puts it, insight. We want to see that though things seem to be contingent, they are really necessary. (shrink)

Introduction: Expressions of dignity as a clinical phenomenon in nursing homes as expressed by caregivers were investigated. A coherence could be detected between the concepts and phenomena of existence and dignity in relationships and caring culture as a context. A caring culture is interpreted by caregivers as the meaning-making of what is accepted or not in the ward culture. Background: The rationale for the connection between existence and dignity in relationships and caring culture is that suffering is a part of (...) existence, as well as compassion in relieving suffering, and ontological interdependency. Aim: To describe different expressions of dignity in relationships and existence in context of caring cultures from the perspective of the caregivers. Research design: The methodology and method are hermeneutic. The method used was to merge the theoretical preunderstanding as one horizon of understanding with empirical data. Participants and research context: Focus group interviews with caregivers in nursing homes. Ethical considerations: The principles of the Helsinki Declaration have been followed to, for example, preserve self-determination, integrity, dignity, confidentiality and privacy of the research persons. Findings: Data interpretation resulted in four themes: Encountering existential needs that promote dignity in a caring culture; To amplify dignity in relationships by the creative art of caring in a caring culture; Violation of dignity by ignorance or neglect in a non-caring culture and The ethic of words and appropriated ground values in a caring culture. Discussion: Dignity-promoting acts of caring, or dignity-depriving acts of non-caring are adequate to see from the perspective of dignity in relationships and existence and the caring culture. Conclusions: Dignity in relationships seems to touch the innermost existential life, as the existential life is dependent on confirmation from others. (shrink)

_In Perception, Empathy, and Judgment_ Arne Johan Vetlesen focuses on the indispensable role of emotion, especially the faculty of empathy, in morality. He contends that moral conduct is severely threatened once empathy is prevented from taking part in an interplay with cognitive faculties in acts of moral perception and judgment. Drawing on developmental psychology, especially British "object relations" theory, to illuminate the nature and functioning of empathy, Vetlesen shows how moral performance is constituted by a sequence involving perception, judgment, (...) and action, with an interplay between the agent's emotional and cognitive faculties occurring at each stage. In the powerful tradition from Kant to present-day theorists such as Kohlberg, Rawls, and Habermas, reason is privileged over feeling and judgment over perception, in such a way that basic philosophical questions remain unasked. Vetlesen focuses our attention on these questions and challenges the long-standing assertion that emotions are damaging to moral response. In the final chapter he relates his argument to recent feminist critiques that have also castigated moral theorists in the Kantian tradition for their refusal to recognize a role for emotion in morality. While the book's argument is philosophical, its method and scope are interdisciplinary. In addition to critiques of such philosophers as Arendt, MacIntyre, and Habermas, it contains discussions of specific historical, ideological, and sociological factors that may cause "numbing"—selective or broad-ranging, pathological insensitivity—in humans. The Nazis' mass killing of Jews is studied to illuminate these and other relevant empirical aspects of large-scale immoral action. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for an account of the evolution of human values according to which it is only through the resolution of local conflicts that broader social values develop. Global issues can only be understood as issues of increasingly broadening our understanding of the local, our understanding of who are the neighbors with whom we must productively and amicably engage. My analysis argues primarily for open dialogue based on listening carefully and maintaining a strong awareness of our own (...) areas of systematic blindness to those with whom we disagree. While my approach offers no recipe here to guarantee successful resolution to value conflict, any other approach is far more likely to lead to failure. (shrink)

Environmental ethics uniquely challenges us to re-examine the foundations of ethical thought. Ethical frameworks that focus on individual ethical agents and ethical patients, ignoring their status as parts of interrelated communities, lead to strongly counterintuitive results in important cases. Ideas only hinted at in Aldo Leopold’s idea of “land ethic” can be developed fruitfully by extending a pragmatist ethical framework drawn from the work of William James. Such a framework is not without difficulties, but does offer a potentially valuable way (...) of framing our ethical obligations toward the encompassing environment within which we live. (shrink)

Until comparatively recently the complete text of the Opus Postutmum has not been available to students of the Kantian philosophy.Prior to the publication of Adickes’ commentary on this material in 1920, students of Kant were almost wholly dependent upon Reicke's incomplete and markedly inadequate edition of 1882–84. 2 Adickes’ commentary, with its abundance of quoted passages, provided an access to a great deal of material hitherto unavailable. But it was not until the publication of the Academy Edition in 1936 that (...) the complete text became available for independent study. Because of the recent publication of the full text, most accounts of Kant's position in the Opus Postumum have depended upon Reicke's inadequate edition or, as has been more frequently the case, upon Adickes’ commentary. 3 In view of the considerable influence it has had upon Kant interpretation, Adickes’ analysis of the Opus Postumum warrants a careful and critical examination. (shrink)

When the social relevance of robotic applications is addressed today, the use of assistive technology in care settings is almost always the first example. So-called care robots are presented as a solution to the nursing crisis, despite doubts about their technological readiness and the lack of concrete usage scenarios in everyday nursing practice. We inquire into this interconnection of social robotics and care. We show how both are made available for each other in three arenas: innovation policy, care organization, and (...) robotic engineering. First, we analyze the discursive “logics” of care robotics within European innovation policy, second, we disclose how care robotics is encountering a historically grown conflict within health care organization, and third we show how care scenarios are being used in robotic engineering. From this diagnosis, we derive a threefold critique of robotics in healthcare, which calls attention to the politics, historicity, and social situatedness of care robotics in elderly care. (shrink)

Heidegger is noted for his concern with the nothing, das Nichts, and this may be partially due to the way in which his ideas were first introduced. Whereas the positivists regarded his writings as nonsense, employing his references to nothingness to prove them so, other of his interpreters took his thought seriously but regarded it as fundamentally nihilistic. He was pictured as an irrationalist philosopher, preoccupied with death and negativity. It is this representation of Heidegger which still prevails to a (...) large extent among philosophers in this country. Unlike the positivists, they accept what he says as meaningful and important but as having consequences which must be rejected not only as mistaken but, perhaps, as immoral. That this appraisal requires careful examination is indicated by the fact that not a few theologians have borrowed heavily from Heidegger and found in his writings important positive suggestions. The impression that Heidegger is a nihilist or even an irrationalist is mistaken from the ground up; it is difficult to understand how it could be sustained by anyone who had struggled through any one of Heidegger's essays. (shrink)

Considering a growing nurse shortage and the need for qualified nurses to handle increasingly complex patient care situations, how ethical beliefs are influenced and the consequences that can occur when moral conflicts of right and wrong arise need to be explored. The aim of this study was to explore influencers identified by nurses as having the most impact on the development of their ethical beliefs and whether these influencers might impact levels of moral distress and the potential for conscientious objection. (...) Nurses whose ethical beliefs were most influenced by their religious beliefs scored higher in levels of moral distress and demonstrated greater differences in areas of conscientious objection than did nurses who developed their ethical beliefs from influencers such as family values, life and work experience, political views or the professional code of ethics. (shrink)

Ecologically responsible policies are concerned only in part with pollution and resource depletion. There are deeper concerns which touch upon principles of diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness.

Recent theoretical and empirical work in cognitive science and neuroscience is brought into contact with the concept of the flow experience. After a brief exposition of brain function, the explicit–implicit distinction is applied to the effortless information processing that is so characteristic of the flow state. The explicit system is associated with the higher cognitive functions of the frontal lobe and medial temporal lobe structures and has evolved to increase cognitive flexibility. In contrast, the implicit system is associated with the (...) skill-based knowledge supported primarily by the basal ganglia and has the advantage of being more efficient. From the analysis of this flexibility/efficiency trade-off emerges a thesis that identifies the flow state as a period during which a highly practiced skill that is represented in the implicit system’s knowledge base is implemented without interference from the explicit system. It is proposed that a necessary prerequisite to the experience of flow is a state of transient hypofrontality that enables the temporary suppression of the analytical and meta-conscious capacities of the explicit system. Examining sensory-motor integration skills that seem to typify flow such as athletic performance, writing, and free-jazz improvisation, the new framework clarifies how this concept relates to creativity and opens new avenues of research. (shrink)

Covering a period from the Middle Ages through the 1990s, and addressing phenomena overlooked by Rokkan such as statebuilding and nationalism, this book demonstrates that Rokkan's models continue to be relevant to modern political science and sociology. Kommisrud's study is a valuable contribution to Rokkanian approaches and the understanding of Eastern European development within the historical and geographic context of Europe as a whole.

Evil is a poorly understood phenomenon. In this provocative 2005 book, Professor Vetlesen argues that to do evil is to intentionally inflict pain on another human being, against his or her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm. Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited, into collective evildoing. He argues that such evildoing, pitting whole groups against each other, springs from a combination of character, situation, and social (...) structure. By combining a philosophical approach inspired by Hannah Arendt, a psychological approach inspired by C. Fred Alford and a sociological approach inspired by Zygmunt Bauman, and bringing these to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Vetlesen shows how closely perpetrators, victims, and bystanders interact, and how aspects of human agency are recognized, denied, and projected by different agents. (shrink)

Excessive fear generalisation is a feature characteristic of clinical anxiety and has been linked to its aetiology. Previous animal studies have shown that the mere passage of time increases fear generalisation and that brief exposure to training cues prior to long-term testing reverses this effect. The current study examined these phenomena in humans. Healthy participants learned the relationship between the presentation of a picture of a neutral male face and the delivery of a mild shock. One group was immediately tested (...) with a novel picture of a somewhat different male face (generalisation test). Another group was tested one week later. A third group was also tested one week later and was additionally exposed to the training picture prior to testing. During picture presentations, shock-expectancy ratings were obtained as a measure of fear. Fear generalisation increased from the immediate test to the 1-week follow-up test. This result could not be attributed to level of neuroticism or a general increase in fear (incubation). Furthermore, the time-dependent increase in fear generalisation vanished following brief exposure to the training picture. Results indicate that human fear generalisation is a temporally dynamic process and that memory for stimulus details can be re-established following a reminder treatment. (shrink)

The increasingly ubiquitous use of technology has led to the concomitant rise of intensified data collection and the ethical issues associated with the privacy and security of that data. In order to address the question of how these ethical concerns are discussed in the literature surrounding the subject, we examined articles published in IEEE Security and Privacy, a magazine targeted towards a general, technically-oriented readership spanning both academia and industry. Our investigation of the intersection between the ethical and technological dimensions (...) of privacy and security is structured as a bibliometric analysis. Our dataset covers all articles published in IEEE Security and Privacy since its inception in 2003 to February 06, 2014. This venue was chosen not only because of its target readership, but also because a preliminary search of keywords related to ethics, privacy, and security topics in the ISI Web of Knowledge and IEEE Xplore indicated that IEEE Security and Privacy has published a preponderance of articles matching those topics. In fact, our search returned two-fold more articles for IEEE Security and Privacy than the next most prolific venue. These reasons, coupled with the fact that both academia and industry are well-represented in the authorship of articles makes IEEE Security and Privacy an excellent candidate for bibliometric analysis. Our analysis examines the ways articles in IEEE Security and Privacy relate ethics to information technology. Such articles can influence the development of law, policy and the future of information technology ethics. We employed thematic and JK-biplot analyses of content relating privacy and ethics and found eight dominant themes as well as the inter-theme relationships. Authors and institutional affiliations were examined to discern whether centers of research activity and/or authors dominated the overall field or thematic areas. Results suggest avenues for future work in critical areas, especially for closing present gaps in the coverage of ethics and information technology privacy and security themes particularly in the areas of ethics and privacy awareness. (shrink)

We are living in a time of acute vulnerability. From climate change to drone warfare, terrorist attacks to mass shootings, safe spaces to trigger warnings, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, homo vulnerabilis is once again coming to terms with the fact that it can be wounded, or even killed. Against such finitude, sovereignty is now reasserting itself as a political power that might save us from our ontological state. The irony is, of course, that such sovereignty – for example (...) through camps, walls, police violence, or drones – is also the underlying, historical cause of many of our most intense contemporary experiences of vulnerabilization. Interrupting the dialectic by which sovereignty manages to be both the cause of our vulnerabilization and the phantasmatic tool of its prevention, in Being Vulnerable Arne De Boever explores how today’s experiences of vulnerabilization can be translated into a collective human power that dismantles the form of sovereignty that is producing this state of affairs. Focused on theories, paradigms, and alternative formations of sovereignty, Being Vulnerable reconsiders the tradition of thinking through a political concept in order to approach it anew. (shrink)

Michael S. Gazzaniga, a pioneer and world leader in cognitive neuroscience, has made an initial attempt to develop neuroethics into a brain-based philosophy of life that he hopes will replace the irrational religious and political belief-systems that still partly govern modern societies. This article critically examines Gazzaniga’s proposal and shows that his actual moral arguments have little to do with neuroscience. Instead, they are based on unexamined political, cultural and moral conceptions, narratives and values. A more promising way of interpreting (...) the belief-forming system of the brain is to say that we cannot avoid thinking in terms of wider frameworks and narratives that are socially embedded and historically developed; consequently, any moral discussion has to be in terms of these frameworks and narratives. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss an approach called grounded action cognition, which aims to provide a theory of the interdependencies between motor control and action-related cognitive processes, like perceiving an action or thinking about an action. The theory contrasts with traditional views in cognitive science in that it motivates an understanding of cognition as embodied, through application of Barsalou’s general idea of grounded cognition. To guide further research towards an appropriate theory of grounded action cognition we distinguish between grounding qua (...) acquisition and grounding qua constitution. On this basis, we distinguish three possible theoretical conceptions of grounded action cognition. In addition to these methodological and conceptual analyses, we draw on recent empirical evidence to motivate our inclination towards a particular theory. According to this theory certain representations are involved in action cognition and action perception that are not modality-specific as usually proposed by advocates of grounded cognition. Further, the evidence is in favor of our more specific theory stating that for some cognitive abilities, some motor abilites are constitutive. (shrink)