The present debate on constitutional rights aims to protect the individual against the intrusive power of the state. Analysing the precarious relationship between art and money, the authors argue that constitutional rights need to be extended into the regimes of private governance. This requires four fundamental changes. (1) Constitutional rights can no longer be limited to the protection of individual actors. Instead, they need to be extended to guarantees of freedom of discourses. (2) The new experience of the twentieth century (...) is that totalizing tendencies have their origin not only in politics, but also in other fields of action, especially in technology, science, and the economy. Thus, a discursive concept of constitutional rights should be directed against any social system with totalizing tendencies. (3) Instead of concentrating on centres of economic and social power, constitutional rights in the private sphere should focus on the specific communicative medium of the expansionist social system involved. (4) This excludes the direct analogy of a ‘right’ as a quasispatial exclusion zone. More significant guarantees of discursive autonomy could be found in a ‘proceduralization’ of constitutional rights. (shrink)

This paper outlines the development and implementation of a new course in Engineering Ethics at the University of Tennessee. This is a three-semester-hour course and is jointly taught by an engineering professor and a philosophy professor. While traditional pedagogical techniques such as case studies, position papers, and classroom discussions are used, additional activities such as developing a code of ethics and student-developed scenarios are employed to encourage critical thinking. Among the topics addressed in the course are engineering as a profession (...) and its role in society; ethical successes and failures; risk, safety, and the environment; professional responsibilities; credit and intellectual property; and international concerns. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 112 Heft: 1 Seiten: 233-238.

No discussion of when an individual is dead is meaningful in the absence of a definition of death. If human death is defined as the irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness combined with the irreversible loss of the capacity to breathe spontaneously (and hence to maintain a spontaneous heart beat) the death of the brainstem will be seen to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the death of the individual. Such a definition of death is not something (...) radically new. It is merely the reformulation -- in the language of the neurophysiologist -- of much older concepts such as the 'departure of the (conscious) soul from the body' and the 'loss of the breath of life'. All death -- in this perspective -- is, and always has been, brainstem death... (shrink)

Nach der ersten Publikation der Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen von Amorium (M. GILL u. a., Amorium Reports, Finds I: The Glass (1987-1997). BAR Int. Series, 1070), Oxford 2002) liegt nun der zweite Band vor, der neben Forschungsberichten (Teil A) auch technische Untersuchungen (Teil B) verschiedener Bearbeiter umfaßt.

From the Tin Pan Alley 32-bar form, through the cyclical forms of modal jazz, to the more recent accumulation of digital layers, beats, and breaks in Electronic Dance Music, repetition as both an aesthetic disposition and a formal property has stimulated a diverse range of genres and techniques. From the angles of musicology, psychology, sociology, and science and technology, Over and Over reassesses the complexity connected to notions of repetition in a variety of musical genres. The first edited volume on (...) repetition in 20th- and 21st-century popular music, Over and Over explores the wide-ranging forms and use of repetition - from large repetitive structures to micro repetitions - in relation to both specific and large-scale issues and contexts. The book brings together a selection of original texts by leading authors in a field that is, as yet, little explored. Aimed at both specialists and neophytes, it sheds important new light on one of the fundamental phenomena of music of our times. (shrink)

Evolutionary scepticism holds that the evolutionary account of the origins of the human cognitive apparatus has sceptical implications for at least some of our beliefs. A common target of evolutionary scepticism is moral realism. Scientific realism, on the other hand, is much less frequently targeted, though the idea that evolutionary theory should make us distrustful of science is by no means absent from the literature. This line of thought has received unduly little attention. I propose to remedy this by advancing (...) what I will call an evolutionary sceptical challenge to scientific realism. I argue that, given standard evolutionary theory, our possession of sound innate metaphysical intuitions would have taken an epistemically problematic ‘lucky accident’. This, as I will show, entails that scientific realism is a self-undermining position. I discuss objections to my argument’s two premises, including ones that appeal to the success of the sciences and to the possibility that sound innate metaphysical intuitions evolved as an evolutionary ‘by-product’. I then draw out an advantage of my argument over a similar one recently put forward by Graber and Golemon. I finish by submitting that scientific realism, given the soundness of my argument, is faced with a new ‘Darwinian Dilemma’, and briefly address the significance of this for the debate between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Material objects play a central role in the development of human beings. The following paper reconstructs their importance in the testimony of a holocaust survivor. Materials play an important role in the formation of the lifeworld. In a concentration camp, they often gain an unexpected existential importance. According to the context clothes, wood, food, earth change their meaning for the detainees. The kind of clothes corresponds with the type of camp and may be an indicator for the chances to survive. (...) In a concentration camp, a piece of wood can either be used to heat a room in extreme cold and contribute to the survival of a detainee or to beat and torture a prisoner. Finally, the materiality of food is experienced as a prerequisite of life; its absence is a threat, its availability a hope for survival. (shrink)

This article examines the racial politics that reshaped psychoanalytic psychotherapy and ushered in a community mental health paradigm during the U.S. Civil Rights Era. Policymakers in the 1960s adopted the language of social justice to condemn psychoanalysis for its inability to treat psychotics and its unwillingness to treat black patients; yet the community psychiatry model of treatment that replaced it compounded the denial of the black subject’s clinical needs. Challenging the extant historiography that appraises psychoanalysis as a victim of neoliberalism (...) and psychopharmacology, this paper examines how and why Freudian practitioners beat their own retreat from the specter of desegregation. (shrink)

Expounds on the relationship between theory and practice as applied, adjusted, and inaugurated in health care.

While protection of autonomy is crucial to the practice of medicine, there is the persistent risk of a disconnect between the notion of self-determination and the need for a socially responsible medical system. An example of unbridled autonomy is the preferential use of costly medications without an appreciation of the impact of using these more expensive drugs on the resource pool of others. In the USA, costly medications of questionable incremental benefit are frequently prescribed with the complicity of both doctors (...) and patients. Limiting self-determination in medication choices via an appreciation of the principle of justice reaches a better moral balance, while at the same time acknowledging the goals of doing good and avoiding harm in patient care. (shrink)

The disagreement between defenders and opponents of extended cognition is often framed in terms of constitution. The underlying principle of this discussion is what I will call the co-location principle: cognition is located where its constituents are located. The crucial question is under which conditions something is to be counted as a constituent of cognition. I will formulate three criteria of adequacy that an account of constitution must satisfy to be applicable to the dispute on extended cognition. I will evaluate (...) different accounts of constitution as to whether they satisfy the criteria of adequacy. Three different accounts of constitution can be identified in the literature on extended cognition, which I will call property-based constitution, diachronic constitution, and mechanistic constitution. I will show that none of the accounts satisfies all three criteria. Thus, the search for the mark of constitution does not seem to be a promising strategy for defending extended cognition. I will briefly sketch a new strategy of how to deal with this situation. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis, Cologne, 1989.

Long description: Welche Betrachtungsmöglichkeiten ergeben sich aus den vielfältigen Verknüpfungen von Musik, Medien und Kunst? Der Band widmet sich dieser Frage aus wissenschaftlicher ebenso wie aus künstlerischer Perspektive. Zentrale Angelpunkte dabei sind Kommunikation, Technologie und Wahrnehmung als Gegenstände und/oder methodische Konzepte in Wissenschaft und Kunst. Die Beiträge machen unterschiedliche Blickwinkel auf gemeinsame Themenfelder sichtbar, um darin mögliche Schnittmengen, Übergänge und Bruchlinien zu erschließen.

The relationship between topological explanation and mechanistic explanation is unclear. Most philosophers agree that at least some topological explanations are mechanistic explanations. The crucial question is how to make sense of this claim. Zednik (Philos Psychol 32(1):23–51, 2019) argues that topological explanations are mechanistic if they (i) describe mechanism sketches that (ii) pick out organizational properties of mechanisms. While we agree with Zednik’s conclusion, we critically discuss Zednik’s account and show that it fails as a general account of how and (...) when topological explanations are mechanistic. First, if topological explanations were just mechanism sketches, this implies that they could be enriched by replacing topological terms with mechanistic detail. This, however, conflicts how topological explanations are used in scientific practice. Second, Zednik’s account fails to show how topological properties can be organizational properties of mechanisms that have a place in mechanistic explanation. The core issue is that Zednik’s account ignores that topological properties often are _global_ properties while mechanistic explanantia refer to _local_ properties. We demonstrate how these problems can be solved by a recent account of mechanistic completeness (Craver and Kaplan in Br J Philos Sci 71(1):287–319, 2020; Kohár and Krickel in Calzavarini and Viola (eds) Neural mechanisms—new challenges in the philosophy of neuroscience, Springer, New York, 2021) and use a multilayer network model of Alzheimer’s Disease to illustrate this. (shrink)

In an age where issues like climate change and the unintended consequences of technological innovation are high on the ethical and political agenda, questions about the nature and extent of our responsibilities to future generations have never been more important, yet simultaneously so difficult to answer. This book takes a unique approach to the problem by drawing on diverse traditions of thinking about care (including developmental psychology, phenomenology and feminist ethics) to explore the nature and meaning of our relationship with (...) the future. Demonstrating that many influential perspectives on intergenerational ethics, including positions advanced by John Rawls, Brian Barry, and Ulrich Beck are undermined by problems relating to uncertainty, it shows that an approach based on care ethics can confront the uncertain future successfully and give a viable account of the nature and scope of future-oriented responsibilities. (shrink)

The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth, content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content.To show how these (...) principles are realized in specific domains, Peacocke applies the theory in detail to several classical problems of philosophy, including the nature of perceptual entitlement, induction, and the status of moral thought. These discussions involve an elaboration of the structure of entitlement in ways that have applications in many other areas of philosophy. He also relates the theory to classical and recent rationalist thought, and to current issues in the theory of meaning, reference and explanation. In the course of these discussions, he proposes a general theory of the a priori.The focus of the work lies in the intersection of epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of meaning, and will be of interest both to students and researchers in these areas, and to anyone concerned with the idea of rationality. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Suppose we believe that God created the world. Then surely we want it to be the case that he intended, in some sense at least, to create THIS world. Moreover, most theists want to hold that God didn't just guess or hope that the world would take one course or another; rather, he KNEW precisely what was going to take place in the world he planned to create. In particular, of each person P, God knew that P was to exist. (...) Call this the "standard" conception. Most theists find the standard conception appealing. Unfortunately, the view seems to conflict with the equally appealing idea — call it "temporal actualism" — that there are no "future" individuals beyond those that already exist in the present moment. For, on this view, for any historical person P, prior to creation, there was no such person as P and hence nothing about P for God to know. Hence, in particular, God couldn't have known that P was to exist. This is of course not a new problem. But past solutions to it are highly problematic. In this paper, after canvassing previous approaches, I will propose a solution that seems to preserve both temporal actualism and a suitably robust form of the standard conception while avoiding the pitfalls of the past. (shrink)

One assumption of the new mechanistic approach is that there are two kinds of mechanistic explanations: etiological and constitutive ones. While the former explain phenomena in terms of their preceding causes, the latter are supposed to refer to mechanisms that constitute phenomena. Based on arguments by Kaiser and Krickel (Br J Philos Sci 68(3):745–779, 2017) and Krickel (The mechanical world, vol. 13, Springer International Publishing, 2018), I will show that this view is too narrow. Indeed, three different types of explanation (...) are usually subsumed under the label “constitutive explanation”. However, one of those types of explanation is not a version of constitutive explanation. Rather it is a variant of etiological explanation. As a result, I will show that there are four types of mechanistic explanation, two variants of etiological explanation—which I will call output mechanistic explanations and input-output mechanistic explanations—and two variants of constitutive explanation—which I will call filler mechanistic explanations and dimensioned mechanistic explanations. Keeping these apart is crucial as they come with different ontological implications. An evaluation of the mechanistic approach regarding its stance on reduction, levels, and interlevel causation crucially depends on which notion of mechanistic explanation one has in mind. (shrink)

In February 54b.c. Cicero concludes a missive to his brother with a passing and – for us – tantalizing remark:Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. sed cum veneris. virum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris; hominem non putabo. Quintus had, it seems, readDe rerum natura, or at least parts thereof, just before he left Rome for an undisclosed location nearby, and he shared his enthusiasm with his brotherper codicillos. Meanwhile, he was corresponding with Julius (...) Caesar, whose staff in Gaul he was about to join. When, a few months later, he was stationed with Caesar, he was involved in another literary affair, this time concerning his brother who wrote to him, inquiring about his autobiographicalDe temporibus suis:quo modo nam, mi frater, de nostris versibus Caesar? nam primum librum se legisse scripsit ad me ante, et prima sic ut neget se ne Graeca quidem meliora legisse; reliqua ad quendam locum ῥᾳθυμότερα (hoc enim utitur verbo). dic mihi verum: num aut res eum aut χαρακτὴρ non delectat?(Q.fr.2.15.5). (shrink)

Written by a select international group of leading privacy scholars, Social Dimensions of Privacy endorses and develops an innovative approach to privacy. By debating topical privacy cases in their specific research areas, the contributors explore the new privacy-sensitive areas: legal scholars and political theorists discuss the European and American approaches to privacy regulation; sociologists explore new forms of surveillance and privacy on social network sites; and philosophers revisit feminist critiques of privacy, discuss markets in personal data, issues of privacy in (...) health care and democratic politics. The broad interdisciplinary character of the volume will be of interest to readers from a variety of scientific disciplines who are concerned with privacy and data protection issues. (shrink)

In this short commentary, I will first show why Kiverstein & Kirchhoff's (this volume) analysis of the CC-fallacy is inadequate in an important way and show why their strategy for avoiding the CC-fallacy based on diachronic constitution is problematic. Second, I will reply to their criticism of the mechanistic account of constitution.

Explanation is the name for both the process we use to answer questions raised by observed ambiguities and for the conclusion we offer others. This divergence hints at the many conflicting approaches used to create our contemporary understanding of explanation. Modes of Explanation is the first book in decades to attempt to bring these conflicting approaches together and to offer a compelling narrative to explore how those conflicts can converge. In May 2013, fifty philosophers of science, cognitive scientists, systems scientists, (...) cyberneticists, semioticians, and humanities scholars gathered for three full days of debate. These scholars - including the contributors to this volume - compared insights into a variety of conceptions of explanation and their associated worldviews. Through examples such as the creationism/evolution debate, this volume illustrates the major issues regarding explanation through the dual lenses of scientific realism and pragmatic constructivism. Modes of Explanation is about how we make sense of, and create results in, our world. (shrink)

Aristotle attaches particular significance to the homonymy of many central concepts in philosophy and science: that is, to the diversity of ways of being common to a single general concept. His preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to almost every subject that he considers, and it clearly structures the philosophical methodology that he employs both when criticizing others and when advancing his own positive theories. Where there is homonymy there is multiplicity: Aristotle aims to find the order within this multiplicity, (...) and believes that doing so is crucial to scientific inquiry and philosophical progress.Christopher Shields investigates and evaluates Aristotle's approach to questions about homonymy, characterizing the metaphysical and semantic commitments necessary to establish the homonymy of a given concept. Then, in a series of case-studies, Shields examines in detail some of Aristotle's principal applications of homonymy--to the body, sameness and oneness, life, goodness, and being. Shields's aim is not only to give a fuller understanding of Aristotle's methodology and to illuminate his specific doctrines in a variety of areas, but to show that this methodology remains fruitful today. (shrink)

Expressives like damn and bastard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of (...) expressive indices. These determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation. Expressives morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment. (shrink)

The processing, representation, and perception of bodily signals (interoception) plays an important role for human behavior. Theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that concept use involves reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. Similarly, activation of interoceptive representations and meta-representations of bodily signals supporting interoceptive awareness are profoundly associated with emotional experience and cognitive functions. This article gives an overview over present findings and models on interoception and (...) mechanisms of embodiment and highlights its relevance for disorders that are suggested to represent a translation deficit of bodily states into subjective feelings and self-awareness. (shrink)

The essays in this volume illuminate a central topic in ethical theory: moral dilemmas. Some contemporary philosophers dispute the traditional view that a true moral dilemma -- a situation in which a person has two irreconcilable moral duties -- cannot exist. This collection provides the historical background to the ongoing debate with selections from Kant, Mill, Bradley, and Ross. The best recent work on the question is represented in essays by Donagan, Foot, Hare, Marcus, Nagel, van Fraassen, Williams, and others.

The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive. Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes. As these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis. The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena and provide a preliminary assessment of (...) the initial resistance to a truth-conditional analysis. (shrink)