Wann habe ich zu existieren begonnen? Mit der Geburt? Mit der "Empfangnis"? Oder noch davor? Wenige Fragen beruhren unser Selbstverstandnis so sehr wie diese. Diesen Fragen wird transdisziplinar theologisch-philosophisch-naturwissenschaftlich nachgegangen. Gezeigt wird, welcher Status dem Vorgeburtlichen in Geschichte und Gegenwart zugeschrieben wurde bzw. wird; Begriffe wie "biologisches Individuum", "Spezies" und "aktive Potenz" werden geklart; sodann wird diskutiert, welche ontogenetischen Ereignisse als "Beginn" - sei es des Organismus, des Individuums, des Menschen oder der Person - taugen.

In this article, we examine the link between board composition and an enterprise strategy outcome, stakeholder relations. Because a firm’s enterprise strategy is set at the highest level of the organization, we expect the presence of stakeholder directors (suppliers, customers, employees, and community representatives) to be positively associated with stakeholder performance.Results from an analysis of 3,268 board members representing 250 firms are discussed in the context of both corporate governance and stakeholder management literatures.

Background:Moral distress is recognized as a problem affecting healthcare professionals globally. Unaddressed moral distress may lead to withdrawal from the moral dimensions of patient care, burnout, or leaving the profession. Despite the importance, studies related to moral distress are scant in Thailand.Objective:This study aims to describe the experience of moral distress and related factors among Thai nurses.Design:A convergent parallel mixed-methods design was used. The quantitative and qualitative data were collected in parallel using the Measure of Moral Distress for Healthcare Professionals (...) and interview guide. The analysis was conducted separately and then integrated.Participants:Participants were Thai nurses from two large tertiary care institutions in a Southern province of Thailand.Ethical considerations:This study was approved by our organization's Institutional Review Board for Health Sciences Research, and by the Institutional Review Boards of the two local institutions in Thailand. Permission from the publisher was received to translate and utilize the Measure of Moral Distress (MMD-HP) under the license number: 4676990097151.Results:A total of 462 participants completed the survey questions. The top 7 causes of moral distress were related to system-level root causes and end-of-life care situations. Hierarchical multiple regression showed that work units, considering leaving position, and number of moral distress episodes in the past year were significant predictors of moral distress. Twenty interviews demonstrated three main themes of distressing causes: (1) powerlessness (at patients/family-, team-, and organizational-levels), (2) end-of-life issues, and (3) poor team function (poor communication and collaboration, incompetent healthcare providers, and inappropriate behavior of colleagues). The integration of data from both components indicated that the qualitative interviews enrich the quantitative findings, especially as related to the top 7 causes of moral distress.Discussion:Although the experience of moral distress among Thai nurses is similar to studies conducted elsewhere, the patient’s and family’s religious perspective that ties into the concept of moral distress needs to be explored.Conclusions:Although the root causes of moral distress are similar among different cultures, the experience of Thai nurses may vary according to culture and context. (shrink)

How should you decide what to do when you’re uncertain about basic normative principles? A natural suggestion is to follow some "second-order:" norm: e.g., obey the most probable norm or maximize expected choiceworthiness. But what if you’re uncertain about second-order norms too—must you then invoke some third-order norm? If so, any norm-guided response to normative uncertainty appears doomed to a vicious regress. This paper aims to rescue second-order norms from the threat of regress. I first elaborate and defend the claim (...) some philosophers have made that the regress problem forces us to accept normative externalism, the view that at least one norm is incumbent on all agents regardless of their normative beliefs. But, I then argue, we need not accept externalism about first-order norms, thus closing off any question of how agents should respond to normative uncertainty. Rather, we can head off the threat of regress by ascribing external force to a single second-order norm: the enkratic principle. (shrink)

Les disciplines historiques, littéraires et philosophiques font un emploi abondant des catégories historiographiques. Parmi celles-ci, les termes en ismes sont très fréquents pour référer à une doctrine, un courant artistique, une idéologie ou des événements spécifiques. On fait cependant remarquer que ces désignations posent de nombreux problèmes d’interprétation. En particulier, que l’origine exacte d’une catégorie est souvent méconnue et que sa signification est plus équivoque qu’on ne le croit habituellement. La formation d’un terme en isme s’explique souvent dans un contexte (...) polémique et sert à condamner ou critiquer plutôt qu’à comprendre une pensée, un mouvement ou des faits historiques. Les catégories d’athéisme, de classicisme ou de féminisme en sont de bons exemples. Le présent volume vise à contribuer à l’étude critique des catégories historiographiques et des notions en isme en s’attardant à l’époque moderne (XVI e XVIII e siècles). Il s’agit d’un moment clef de l’histoire européenne pendant laquelle nombre de ces notions apparaissent ou pour laquelle l’historiographie en a fait un emploi abondant. Les chapitres en examinent la valeur théorique par rapport à une origine ou des usages, et déterminent de quelles manières elles contribuent à l’interprétation de l’histoire, de la littérature ou de la philosophie, de la Renaissance jusqu’à la Révolution française. (shrink)

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the (...) vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

Singularites: le mot ne se dit pas tant des individus que des relations qui les lient contingentement au monde. Car l'harmonie universelle n'est pas si performante que le laisse entendre son auteur, sur des questions fondamentales pour la coherence du Systeme - en particulier celle du mal, reprise au siecle d'apres dans un leibnitianisme reste incompris. On concluerait a l'echec, si la loi d'harmonie n'etait capable d'engendrer des relations qui, en ecart a son fonctionnement ordinaire, la modulent diversement, l'inflechissent, l'enrichissent, (...) pour produire localement des effets de cohesion inesperes aux lieux memes ou elle restait inoperante. Mais, pour reperer ces endroits singuliers, il faut plonger dans le labyrinthe sous-jacent au reseau: prendre en compte le multiple dans ses varietes, les personnages qui tissent le monde choisi et racontent son histoire, les choses humaines en ce qu'elles ont d'irreductibilite au rationalisme - et qui pourtant sont, par la suffisance des raisons, le comble de la rationalite. Intervient alors, pour la connaissance, un autre modele que la demonstration more geometrico, embleme ordinaire de l'Age classique: l'Ars rationis des juristes, arpenteurs de la contingence et mathematiciens du plausible, maitres d'une technique d'argumentation ou la philosophie apprend que les sciences humaines peuvent aussi atteindre a la plus grande certitude. (shrink)

Decision-making under normative uncertainty requires an agent to aggregate the assessments of options given by rival normative theories into a single assessment that tells her what to do in light of her uncertainty. But what if the assessments of rival theories differ not just in their content but in their structure -- e.g., some are merely ordinal while others are cardinal? This paper describes and evaluates three general approaches to this "problem of structural diversity": structural enrichment, structural depletion, and multi-stage (...) aggregation. All three approaches have notable drawbacks, but I tentatively defend multi-stage aggregation as least bad of the three. (shrink)

The perception of meaningful patterns in random arrangements and unrelated events takes place in our everyday lives, coined apophenia, synchronicity, or the experience of meaningful coincidences. However, we do not know yet what predicts this phenomenon. To investigate this, we re-analyzed a combined data set of two daily diary studies with a total of N = 169 participants (mean age 29.95 years; 54 men). We investigated if positive or negative affect (PA, NA) predicts the number of meaningful coincidences on the (...) following day (or vice versa). By means of a cross-lagged multilevel modelling approach (Bayesian estimation) we evaluated with which of two theoretical assumptions the data are more in line. First, if meaningful coincidences are facilitated by a broader and more flexible thinking style, PA should positively predict meaningful coincidences at the following day. However, if the experience of meaningful coincidences signifies a strategy to cope with negative feeling states, NA should predict the experience of meaningful coincidences during the following day. In favour of a more flexible thinking style, we found that PA predicted the number of perceived coincidences the following day. We did not find any effect for NA, and therefore, no evidence arguing for the coping mechanism hypothesis of meaningful coincidences. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

At its heart, The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is a plea not to take doubt at its word—a plea for the return of a vanished philosophical intelligence..

Este texto se caracteriza como debate alinhado com os esforços para lidar com o fenômeno biológico, ecológico e social desencadeado pelo vírus Corona 19 tendo como foco a abordagem amparada na Fenomenologia Schiller-Goethiana, e na Pedagogia da Pachamama/Tayta Inti com a decorrente posição anti-colonial e a abordagem trans e inter educativa sustentada em conhecimentos ancestrais e originários e nas abordagens teóricas da física contemporânea. Tem o propósito de debater possibilidades teóricas e práticas que proporcionem vida futura que atenda ao desafio (...) pós pandêmico de forma a romper fronteiras e promover emancipação a favor da vida com dignidade. (shrink)

Excerpt from Helvetius: Sa Vie Et Son uvre, d'Apres Ses Ouvrages, des Ecrits Divers Et des Documents Inedits Je dois d'abord quelques explications sur cet ouvrage, sur la methode employee, le but poursuivi. Psychologue, moraliste, poete epicurien, ideologue, economiste, Helvetius, avec ses tendances encyclopediques, peut etre considere a des titres divers. Mais on s'apercoit bientot que ce disciple de Locke et de Hobbes, ce continuateur systematique de La Rochefoucauld, ce contemporain de Voltaire, de Buffon et de Montesquieu, dont il est (...) l'ami, se presente surtout comme un philosophe politique. Sa philosophie, c'est-a-dire sa pensee, sous ses aspects varies, s'oriente de plus en plus vers un but defini, vers un but pratique et social. Je me suis efforce d'avoir recours a tous les documents importants (et ils sont nombreux) qui pouvaient servir a ma tache d'historien, pour reconstituer, en cette tentative de biographie psychologique, la vie intellectuelle d'un auteur mal connu et meconnu. J'ai multiplie, pendant quelques annees, les recherches et les efforts afin de me renseigner d'une maniere aussi precise, aussi scrupuleuse que possible, mais en n'oubliant jamais que l'erudition, la recherche complexe des causes et des effets demeurent steriles si l'on n'y joint sans cesse les ressources de la sympathie et de l'evocation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This 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)

The authors take as undefined the expression, "p is epistemically preferable to q for s at t", Which they interpret as referring to a relation that may hold among a man's believings ("he believes h"), His disbelievings ("he believes not-H"), And his withholdings ("he believes neither h nor not-H"). Seven axioms of epistemic preferability are set forth from which the authors deduce some 60 theorems. Some of these theorems are described as "pyrrhonistic." several fundamental epistemic concepts are defined in terms (...) of epistemic preferability. Among them are those suggested by the terms "some presumption in its favor", "acceptable", "beyond reasonable doubt", "evident", "certain", And "counterbalanced". (shrink)

Franciscus de Prato hat sich immer wieder mit der Philosophie Ockhams auseinandergesetzt. Diese Arbeit zeigt auf, wie bedeutsam fur beide Philosophen die Sprachtheorie ist. Der Angelpunkt ist dabei die Annahme entweder eines Satzes im Geiste oder einer Proposition, die aus Dingen besteht. Diese Entscheidung wirkt sich dann auf verschiedenste Gebiete der Philosophie aus. Am Beispiel der Kategorienlehre wird dies deutlich: Kategorien sind Aussagbares. In Satzen aussagbar sind aber fur Ockham nur mentale Begriffe, keine Dinge. Also ist fur ihn die Kategorienordnung (...) keine Ordnung von extramentalen Dingen, sondern nur von mentalen Zeichen. Anders Franciscus: Fur ihn sind Gegenstande, nicht Zeichen primar aussagbar. Also ist fur ihn die kategoriale Ordnung eine reale Hierarchie. Welches Licht wirft diese Auseinandersetzung auf das Verstandnis der Philosophie Ockhams und der des Franciscus? Weitaus wichtiger als der universalientheoretische Unterschied zwischen Nominalismus und Realismus ist fur beide Denker ihre satztheoretische Ausrichtung. Ausgezeichnet mit dem Preis an Studierende der Ruhr-Universitat Bochum. (shrink)

Our aim in this survey article is to provide an accessible overview of some key results and questions in the theory of judgment aggregation. We omit proofs and technical details, focusing instead on concepts and underlying ideas.

Nudge is a popular public policy tool that harnesses well-known biases in human judgement to subtly guide people’s decisions, often to improve their choices or to achieve some socially desirable outcome. Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) methods new possibilities emerge of how and when our decisions can be nudged. On the one hand, algorithmically personalized nudges have the potential to vastly improve human daily lives. On the other hand, blindly outsourcing the development and implementation of nudges to (...) “black box” AI systems means that the ultimate reasons for why such nudges work, that is, the underlying human cognitive processes that they harness, will often be unknown. In this paper, we unpack this concern by considering a series of examples and case studies that demonstrate how AI systems can learn to harness biases in human judgment to reach a specified goal. Drawing on an analogy in a philosophical debate concerning the methodology of economics, we call for the need of an interdisciplinary oversight of AI systems that are tasked and deployed to nudge human behaviours. (shrink)

Recent estimates indicate that over 40,000 children die annually in the United States and a majority have life-limiting conditions. Children at end of life require extensive healthcare resources, including multiple hospital readmissions and emergency room visits. Yet, many children still suffer from symptoms at end of life—including fatigue, pain, dyspnea, and anxiety—with less than 10% of these children utilizing hospice care services. A critical barrier to pediatric hospice use was the original federal regulations associated with the hospice care that required (...) a diagnosis of 6 months to live and the discontinuation of all curative treatments. The Concurrent Care Provision of the United States’ Affordable Care Act eliminated the need to forgo curative therapies in order to enroll in hospice for children in Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program. Concurrent care for children can help mitigate the tension families experience in choosing between essential forms of care, as well as contribute to improved end-of-life outcomes for the child and possibly bereavement outcomes for the family. Understanding concurrent care for children from a social justice perspective has important advocacy and research implications for hospice and palliative care clinicians providing care for children and their families. We apply Powers and Faden’s theory of social justice “as the moral foundation of public health and health policy” to the provision of concurrent care to children near end of life and families in the United States. The goals of applying this theory are to explore additional insights and perspectives into concurrent care policy may provide and to assess the usefulness of this theory when applied to end-of-life health policy. We argue that concurrent care policy is socially just since it has potential to promote well-being in vulnerable children and families and can limit the inequity children at end-of-life experience in access to high-quality hospice care. (shrink)

What is free will? Why is it important? Can the same act be both free and determined? Is free will necessary for moral responsibility? Does anyone have free will, and if not, how is creativity possible and how can anyone be praised or blamed for anything? These are just some of the questions considered by Joseph Keim Campbell in this lively and accessible introduction to the concept of free will. Using a range of engaging examples the book introduces the problems, (...) arguments, and theories surrounding free will. Beginning with a discussion of fatalism and causal determinism, the book goes on to focus on the metaphysics of moral responsibility, free will skepticism, and skepticism about moral responsibility. Campbell shows that no matter how we look at it, free will is problematic. Thankfully there are a plethora of solutions on offer and the best of these are considered in full in the final chapter on contemporary theories of free will. This includes a rigorous account of libertarianism, compatabilism, and naturalism. _Free Will_ is the ideal introduction to the topic and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students seeking to understand the importance and relevance of the concept for contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict — perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism. To that (...) end, I develop two simple models for comparing ‘longtermist’ and ‘neartermist’ interventions, incorporating the idea that it is harder to make a predictable difference to the further future. These models yield mixed conclusions: if we simply aim to maximize expected value, and don’t mind premising our choices on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, the case for longtermism looks robust. But on some prima facie plausible empirical worldviews, the expectational superiority of longtermist interventions depends heavily on these ‘Pascalian’ probabilities. So the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism. (shrink)

Contrary to a widespread belief, this book establishes that ontological and epistemological reductionism stand or fall together.

One of the hallmark themes of Karl Popper’s approach to the social sciences was the insistence that when social scientists are members of the society they study, then they are liable to affect that society. In particular, they are liable to affect it in such a way that the claims they make lose their validity. “The interaction between the scientist’s pronouncements and social life almost invariably creates situations in which we have not only to consider the truth of such pronouncements, (...) but also their actual influence on future developments. The social scientist may be striving to find the truth; but, at the same time, he must always be exerting a definite influence upon society. The very fact that his pronouncements do exert an influence destroys their objectivity.” (Popper 1963. (shrink)

This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment (...) gave way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled. (shrink)

What is free will? Why is it important? Can the same act be both free and determined? Is free will necessary for moral responsibility? Does anyone have free will, and if not, how is creativity possible and how can anyone be praised or blamed for anything? These are just some of the questions considered by Joseph Keim Campbell in this lively and accessible introduction to the concept of free will. Using a range of engaging examples the book introduces the problems, (...) arguments, and theories surrounding free will. Beginning with a discussion of fatalism and causal determinism, the book goes on to focus on the metaphysics of moral responsibility, free will skepticism, and skepticism about moral responsibility. Campbell shows that no matter how we look at it, free will is problematic. Thankfully there are a plethora of solutions on offer and the best of these are considered in full in the final chapter on contemporary theories of free will. This includes a rigorous account of libertarianism, compatabilism, and naturalism. _Free Will_ is the ideal introduction to the topic and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students seeking to understand the importance and relevance of the concept for contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

_If you were free in doing something and morally responsible for it, you could have done otherwise. That_ _has seemed a pretty firm proposition among the old, new, clear, unclear and other propositions in the_ _philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism. If you were free in what you did, there was an_ _alternative. It is also at least natural to think that if determinism is true, you can never do otherwise than_ _you do. G. E. Moore, that Cambridge reasoner in (...) whose shadow Wittgenstein ought to be standing,_ _considered the matter. He pointed out that even if determinism is true, there remains a sense in which you_ _can still do otherwise than you do: you will do otherwise if you so choose. That, on reflection, is consistent_ _with determinism. The doctrine of the compatibility of freedom and determinism is saved. Joseph Keim_ _Campbell, strong philosopher at Washington State University, provides the latest thinking on this seemingly_ _unavoidable dispute. You do not have to agree that either compatibilism or incompatibilism must be true in_ _order to appreciate the carefulness of his reasoning in this piece of ongoing American philosophy. It_ _requires and repays attention._. (shrink)