DIE REIHE: SCHRIFTENREIHE ZU ORDNUNGSFRAGEN DER WIRTSCHAFT herausgegeben von Thomas Apolte, Martin Leschke, Albrecht F. Michler, Christian Müller, Rahel Schomaker und Dirk Wentzel Die Reihe diskutiert aktuelle ordnungspolitische und institutionenökonomische Fragestellungen. Durch die methodische Vielfalt richtet sie sich an Fachleute, an die Öffentlichkeit und an die Politikberatung.

Pragmatism is ever more popular amongst those who study international relations. Its emphasis on practice is generally acknowledged as a defining characteristic. There is, however, a general tension within pragmatist thought concerning practice, for pragmatism may emphasize the theorizing of practice. It is, then, distinguished from other theories in International Relations (IR) such as neo-realism or constructivism as a contender in their midst. We delineate a pragmatist theory of IR in the first part of this article, but insist on going (...) beyond merely establishing the next paradigm, for pragmatism may also emphasize the practice of theorizing. Theories are, then, considered different tools useful for dealing with the social world. This will be corroborated in the second part by a close reading of William James. Finally, we submit that instead of a paradigm war, a metaphor such as that of the Papini hotel is needed in IR — a metaphor that accounts for theory competition without neglecting the limitations set by the practice of theorizing itself. (shrink)

Although stakeholder theory is widely accepted in environmental disclosure research, empirical evidence about the role of stakeholders in firms’ disclosure is still scarce. The authors address this issue for a setting of carbon disclosure. Our international sample comprises the Carbon Disclosure Project Global 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 350 reports from 2008 to 2011, resulting in a total of 1,120 firms with 3,631 firm-year observations. The authors apply Tobit regressions to analyze the relationship between carbon disclosure and the relevance of (...) the following stakeholder groups: government, general public, media, employees, and customers. Our results confirm that in addition to carbon performance, all stakeholders are associated with carbon disclosure. Only one stakeholder group acts as a moderator for the relationship between carbon performance and carbon disclosure. Furthermore, the authors find that carbon performance but not the affiliation to a carbon-intensive industry acts as a moderator between stakeholder relevance and carbon disclosure. (shrink)

In addition to ethical aspects Citizen Science projects also involve social, economic and—not least—regulatory challenges that arise from their very openness and opportunities for participation. So...

The main results of the present paper are the following theorems: 1. There is no e ∈ ω such that for any A, B ⊆ ω, SA = Wmath image is simple in A, and if A′ [TRIPLE BOND]TB′, then SA =* SB. 2 There is an e ∈ ω such that for any A, B ⊆ ω, MA = We is incomplete maximal in A, and if A =* B, then MA [TRIPLE BOND]TMB.

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag baut auf Niklas Luhmanns Unterscheidung zwischen verschiedenen Typen sozialer Systeme auf, nämlich Interaktionen, Organisationen und einer durch funktionale Teilsysteme strukturierten Gesellschaft. Auf dieser Basis wird der Fall zweier Schüler in einer Schweizer Sekundarschule analysiert, die ihren Lehrerinnen mit religiöser Begründung den Handschlag verweigerten. Gezeigt wird, wie dieses Ereignis von verschiedenen Systemtypen als Problem bearbeitet und jeweils unterschiedlich beobachtet wurde, wobei speziell auch die Frage nach dem Stellenwert des Teilsystems Religion gestellt wird. Insbesondere der Zeitbedarf und der Stellenwert schriftlicher (...) Kommunikation der verschiedenen Systeme erweisen sich als Faktoren, über die sich die unterschiedliche Rolle verschiedener Systemtypen in der Affäre verstehen lässt. Religion beeinflusste zunächst zwar die Interaktion im Klassenzimmer, schließlich fungierte sie aber eher als Thema von Recht, Politik und Massenmedien, als dass sich religiöse Kommunikation über den ursprünglichen Interaktionszusammenhang hinaus als einflussreich erwiesen hätte. (shrink)

How has reason, believed since the Enlightenment to be the ally of freedom in the search for a better, more humanly satisfying world, been reduced to a technical rationality that has actually impoverished the bases of human freedom? What might be the options and obligations for sociologists who wish to restore reason to its proper status? -/- Working within the tradition of C. Wright Mills and Jurgen Habermas, Frank Hearn sets out to answer these questions. He surveys the treatment (...) of the relation between reason and freedom in both the classical tradition (especially the writings of Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Freud) and an increasingly significant segment of social thought and criticism (and, for example, in the contrasting visions of Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch.) He then analyses both the concrete social and historical forms of expression taken by what Mills calls 'rationality without reason' and their impact on individual autonomy and the freedoms associated with democratic politics. Finally, he develops Mills's and Habermas's claims that the cultivation of democratic publics and a critical social theory committed to a vibrant public life are indispensable to the protection and revitalization of the values of reason and freedom and of the practices they entail. -/- This book updates and enriches Mills's influential argument by demonstrating its affinity with critical theory, by showing its contributions to a critical understanding of the classical tradition, and by showing its implications for contemporary social, political, and economic developments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 144-147 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Welcoming Flowers from Across the Cleansed Threshold of Hope: An Answer to the Pope's Criticism of Buddhism Welcoming Flowers from Across the Cleansed Threshold of Hope: An Answer to the Pope's Criticism of Buddhism. By Thinley Norbu. New York: Jewel Publishing House, 1997. 93 pp. Welcoming Flowers is a short and tightly written critique of the Buddhism chapter (...) of Pope John Paul II's 1994 best-seller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope. It is a strong, barbed, personal essay from a highly respected Buddhist teacher who expresses shock and dismay that the Pope's actual words about Buddhism that are read as absolute truth by millions of people around the world had "serious, gratuitous misrepresentations of Buddhist doctrine."The book is ostensibly a response to requests from Polish readers and a Polish publishing company to comment on "what the Pope clearly said about Buddhism." The author of Welcoming Flowers, Thinley Norbu, paints himself as a kind of efficient, spiritual cleaning maid who, with tongue in cheek despite his long admiration for the Catholic leader, has to tidy up after the Vicar of Rome: "It is as though the Pope suddenly vomited insolently and uncontrollably in a cathedral, so I hastily had to clean it up, as the Polish people asked me to do."The Pope's negative assessment of Buddhism inspired Thinley Norbu to match [End Page 144] his attack with even more exalted teachings of the Buddha: "I am grateful to the Pope for being like a hit-hitting drumstick that has given me the good opportunity to be like a drum myself, resonating with the sound of profound Dharma. I am grateful to the Pope for yelling with negative words in a valley, letting me return the answer of its transformation into the positive echo of Buddhist hymns."Thinley Norbu in fact uses the Pope's chapter to clarify some basic teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism and how it differs from Mahayana and Hinayana (note: Norbu's term, not this reviewer's) in a concise and instructive manner from the point of view of a practitioner. In this regard,Welcoming Flowers can be considered a kind of introductory, primary source ofTibetan (Nyingma)Vajrayana Buddhist doctrine for those who are unfamiliar with the various schools of Buddhism. The Pope's seriously outdated (reminiscent of Max Weber or early missionaries), limited, and unsympathetic understanding of one school of Buddhism is used by Thinley Norbu as a platform to expound his rich understanding of Buddhist traditions toWestern readers of comparative religion and specifically to Catholics. The book's twenty-nine footnotes can also function as a brief glossary of transliterated TibetanVajrayana Buddhist terms (but without use of diacritical marks for Sanskrit or Pali terms).Thinley Norbu is careful to mitigate his condemnation of the Pope's unwarranted ignorance of Buddhism by sharing the onus with the Pope's not-so-sapient preceptors. He generously suggests that the Pope may not bear all the blame for the chapter's shortcomings in the following paragraph: The misrepresentations of Buddhism in his book may have come from listening to advisors who were unfamiliar with Buddhism, from simply glancing at books at the Hinayana level, or by being shown books by misinformed authors. Perhaps he only looked at negative conceptions about Buddhism written by followers of other doctrines who had malicious intentions, or by idiots who wrote books for money without caring that they were full of mistakes. In any case, the Pope definitely heard about Buddhism from sources that did not know anything about it. It seems... as though he... scooped a few drops of water from an immeasurable ocean with a piece of grass and even misunderstood these few drops (p. 2). Norbu reprimands the Pope for not doing his required homework, a fault that can lead to serious disharmony among religions."Without studying and understanding other doctrines deeply, to say many things about them is not wise," Norbu continues; "it... (shrink)

Some social scientists and philosophers (e.g., James Coleman and Jon Elster) claim that all social facts are best explained by means of a micro-explanation. They defend a micro-reductionism in the social sciences: to explain is to provide a mechanism on the individual level. The first aim of this paper is to challenge this view and defend the view that it has to be substituted for an explanatory pluralism with two components: (1) structural explanations of P-, O- and T-contrasts between social (...) facts are more efficient than the competing micro-explanations; and (2) whether a plain social fact (as opposed to a contrast) is best explained in a micro-explanation or a structural explanation depends on the explanatory interest. The second aim of the paper is to show how this explanatory pluralism is compatible with ontological individualism. This paper is motivated by our conviction that explanatory pluralism as defended by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit is on the right track, but must be further elaborated. We want to supplement their contribution, by (1) introducing the difference between explanations of facts and explanations of contrasts; (2) giving examples from the social sciences, instead of mainly from the natural sciences or common sense knowledge; and (3) emphasizing the pragmatic relevance of explanations on different levels –social, psychological, biological, etc. – which is insufficiently done by Jackson and Pettit. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, (...) and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

Die Idee zu der in diesem Band dokumentierten Tagung ist im Rahmen des disziplinübergreifenden Nachwuchswissenschaftsnetzwerkes THESIS entstanden. Der Dialog über die fachlichen und disziplinären Grenzen hinweg hat bei THESIS seit dessen Gründung im Jahre 1990 stets einen großen Raum eingenommen. Anderen Fächern Respekt und Interesse entgegenzubringen und sich nicht von stereotypen Vorurteilen leiten zu lassen, ist konstitutiver Bestandteil im Selbstverständnis des Netzwerkes. Selbstverständlich gibt es in einem solchen Verbund eine Reihe von Gelegenheiten (darunter auch den einen oder anderen entwicklungsfördernden Konflikt), (...) das eigene Bild vom Anderen und das andere Bild vom Eigenen zur Sprache zu bringen und zu hinterfragen. Auf der Basis dieser bestehenden Kommunikationsstrukturen trafen sich am 11. Oktober 2003 in Göttingen 12 junge Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler zwischen, über und auch auf den Grenzen ihrer eigenen Herkunftsdisziplinen, um den Trendbegriff [alpha]Transdisziplinarität" auf seine Substanz zu prüfen. (shrink)

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases (...) into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

The recent literature on causality has seen the introduction of several distinctions within causality, which are thought to be important for understanding the widespread scientific practice of focusing causal explanations on a subset of the factors that are causally relevant for a phenomenon. Concepts used to draw such distinctions include, among others, stability, specificity, proportionality, or actual-difference making. In this contribution, I propose a new distinction that picks out an explanatorily salient class of causes in biological systems. Some select causes (...) in complex biological systems, I argue, have the property of enabling coherent causal control of these systems. Examples of such control variables include hormones and other signaling molecules, e.g., TOR (target of rapamycin), morphogens or the products of homeotic selector genes in embryonic pattern formation. I propose an analysis of this notion based on concepts borrowed from causal graph theory. (shrink)

Max Weber (1864-1920), generally known as a founder of modern social science, was concerned with political affairs throughout his life. The texts in this edition span his career and include his early inaugural lecture The Nation State and Economic Policy, Suffrage and Democracy in Germany, Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order, Socialism, The Profession and Vocation of Politics, and an excerpt from his essay The Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia, as well as other shorter (...) writings. Together they illustrate the development of his thinking on the fate of Germany and the nature of politics in the modern western state in an age of cultural 'disenchantment'. The introduction discusses the central themes of Weber's political thought, and a chronology, notes and an annotated bibliography place him in his political and intellectual context. (shrink)

A defense of material implication as implication.

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this "beautiful question." With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek's groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. In fact, every major advance in his career came from this intuition: to assume that the universe (...) embodies beautiful forms, forms whose hallmarks are symmetry--harmony, balance, proportion--and economy. There are other meanings of "beauty," but this is the deep logic of the universe--and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring. As he reveals here, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who was the first to argue that "all things are number," to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentieth-century physics. Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. Yes: the world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.--From publisher description. (shrink)

One of our great contemporary scientists presents ten insights that illuminate what every thinking person needs to know about what the world is and how it works. Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek's Fundamentals is built around a simple but profound idea: the models of the world we construct as children are practical and adequate for everyday life, but they do not bring in the surprising and mind-expanding revelations of modern science. To do that, we must look at the world (...) anew, combining clear thinking with an openness to wonder. This "born again" world is in many ways larger, fuller, and much stranger than it appears. Through an exploration of space, time, matter, and ideas--and equipped with facts, questions, and brilliant speculations--Wilczek guides us through the past, present, and future of fundamental science. Readers will emerge with an expanded vision of our universe. Author Bio: Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student. He was among the earliest MacArthur fellows, and has won many awards both for his scientific work and his writing. He is the author of A Beautiful Question, The Lightness of Being, Fantastic Realities, Longing for the Harmonies, and hundreds of articles in leading scientific journals. His "Wilczek's Universe" column appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal. Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founding director of the T. D. Lee Institute and chief scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center in Shanghai, China, and a distinguished professor at Arizona State University and Stockholm University. (shrink)

Logical paradoxes – like the Liar, Russell's, and the Sorites – are notorious. But in Paradoxes and Inconsistent Mathematics, it is argued that they are only the noisiest of many. Contradictions arise in the everyday, from the smallest points to the widest boundaries. In this book, Zach Weber uses “dialetheic paraconsistency” – a formal framework where some contradictions can be true without absurdity – as the basis for developing this idea rigorously, from mathematical foundations up. In doing so, (...) class='Hi'>Weber directly addresses a longstanding open question: how much standard mathematics can paraconsistency capture? The guiding focus is on a more basic question, of why there are paradoxes. Details underscore a simple philosophical claim: that paradoxes are found in the ordinary, and that is what makes them so extraordinary. (shrink)

A complete collection of Frank Sibley's articles on philosophical aesthetics, this volume includes five, remarkable, hitherto unpublished papers written in Sibley's later years. It addresses many topics, among them the nature of aesthetic qualities versus non-aesthetic qualities, the relation of aesthetic description to aesthetic evaluation, the different levels of evaluation, and the objectivity of aesthetic judgement. The later papers constitute both a significant development of Sibley's individual approach to aesthetics, such as his discussion of the distinction between attributive and (...) predicative uses of adjectives and of the aesthetic significance of tastes and smells, a topic Sibley considered to be much neglected. (shrink)

Several authors have used the notion of causal specificity in order to defend non-parity about genetic causes (Waters 2007, Woodward 2010, Weber 2017, forthcoming). Non-parity in this context is the idea that DNA and some other biomolecules that are often described as information-bearers by biologists play a unique role in life processes, an idea that has been challenged by Developmental Systems Theory (e.g., Oyama 2000). Indeed, it has proven to be quite difficult to state clearly what the alleged special (...) role of genetic causes consists in. In this paper, I show that the set of biomolecules that are normally considered to be information-bearers (DNA, mRNA) can be shown to be the most specific causes of protein primary structure, provided that causal specificity is measured over a relevant space of biological possibilities, disregarding physical as well as logically possible states of the causal variables. (shrink)

This article rebuts Ramsey's earlier theory, in 'Universals of Law and of Fact', of how laws of nature differ from other true generalisations. It argues that our laws are rules we use in judging 'if I meet an F I shall regard it as a G'. This temporal asymmetry is derived from that of cause and effect and used to distinguish what's past as what we can know about without knowing our present intentions.

This is the first book in which contemporary scientists and mystics share with us-in their own words-their views on space, time, matter, energy, life, consciousness, creation and on our place in the scheme of things. The book is also the story of an American philosopher who-with these dialogues-ventures into ground-breaking territory, and of her search in America, Europe, India and Nepal for people whose work is at the center of our understanding of reality.

In this book, Frank Griffel presents the most comprehensive examination to date of the life and thought of this important figure.

Recent years have witnessed intensive efforts to specify which requirements ethical artificial intelligence (AI) must meet. General guidelines for ethical AI consider a varying number of principles important. A frequent novel element in these guidelines, that we have bundled together under the term explicability, aims to reduce the black-box character of machine learning algorithms. The centrality of this element invites reflection on the conceptual relation between explicability and the four bioethical principles. This is important because the application of general ethical (...) frameworks to clinical decision-making entails conceptual questions: Is explicability a free-standing principle? Is it already covered by the well-established four bioethical principles? Or is it an independent value that needs to be recognized as such in medical practice? We discuss these questions in a conceptual-ethical analysis, which builds upon the findings of an empirical document analysis. On the example of the medical specialty of radiology, we analyze the position of radiological associations on the ethical use of medical AI. We address three questions: Are there references to explicability or a similar concept? What are the reasons for such inclusion? Which ethical concepts are referred to? (shrink)

I examine different arguments that could be used to establish indeterminism of neurological processes. Even though scenarios where single events at the molecular level make the difference in the outcome of such processes are realistic, this falls short of establishing indeterminism, because it is not clear that these molecular events are subject to quantum mechanical uncertainty. Furthermore, attempts to argue for indeterminism autonomously (i.e., independently of quantum mechanics) fail, because both deterministic and indeterministic models can account for the empirically observed (...) behavior of ion channels. (shrink)

In this book, Frank Griffel presents the most comprehensive examination to date of the life and thought of this important figure.

This book takes up the central themes of Aristotle's metaphysical theory and the various transformations they undergo prior to their full expression in the Metaphysics. Aristotle's metaphysics is bedevilled by classic puzzles involving such notions as form, predication, universal, and substance, which result from his attempt to adapt the various requirements on primary substance developed in his earlier works so that they fit the very different metaphysical picture in his later work. Professor Lewis argues that Aristotle is himself aware of (...) most if not all of these difficulties and in the Metaphysics works hard to ensure the coherence of his theory. He presents Aristotle's views as a formal theory complete with axioms, definitions, and theorems. (shrink)

There are several theses in political science that are usually explicitly called ‘laws’. Other theses are generally thought of as laws, but often without being explicitly labelled as such. Still other claims are well-supported and arguably interesting, while no one would be tempted to call them laws. This situation raises philosophical questions: which theses deserve to be called laws and which not? And how should we decide about this? In this paper we develop and motivate a strategy for thinking about (...) laws in political science which integrates two core concepts: spatio-temporal stability and social mechanisms. The proposed strategy is a set of guidelines that political scientists can use to reflect on and argue about specific cases within their discipline, not a clear-cut demarcation criterion. We defend and motivate this strategy and apply it to two cases (one with respect to state repression, one about parliamentary elections). After we have developed and motivated our strategy for political science, we show that our proposal is relevant for other disciplines in the social sciences. We explain how our views fit into critical realism and embed them in the debate on laws in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.