This paper reflects on the change of relations among participants in nanotechnology governance through their participation in governance processes such as stakeholder dialogues. I show that policymaking in practice—that is, the practice of coming and working together in such stakeholder dialogues—has the potential for two-fold performative effects: it can contribute to the development of trust and mutual responsibility on the part of the involved actors, and it may bring about effects on the formation of boundaries of what is sayable and (...) thinkable in nanotechnology governance. Three vignettes about the work of the German NanoKommission indicate the development of new relations of trust, recognition and mutual responsibility among actors. It is concluded that governance in practice can assemble new collectives in which relations of trust are the glue holding the complex structure together. While such a consensus-based progress may be favourable for smooth technology development, it can be considered problematic if evaluated against the ideals of deliberative democracy, which often form the premises on which public engagement is based. Stakeholder forums were set in place with the intention of including various actors, but this is Janus-faced: if a dialogue becomes encapsulated in new governance networks, new exclusions can arise. For example, a policing of which information is released to a wider audience can occur. (shrink)

In this text, I respond to a paper by Erik Thorstensen entitled “Public Involvement and Narrative Fallacies of Nanotechnologies.” In his paper, Thorstensen critically reviews a previous ELSA project on engagement and nanotechnology known by the acronym DEEPEN. While I agree that the ELSA community could benefit from the critical examination of earlier research, I believe the approach taken by Thorstensen is not a constructive one. My response deals with three main issues: the character of the paper, narrative theory, and (...) interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

The present article shifts the focus and burden of whistleblowing away from an individual to the collective and argues for the necessary incorporation of whistleblowing into an ethical infrastructure in institutions of higher education. The authors argue that institutions of higher learning should be understood as collective agents bestowed with ethical responsibility which obliges them to act in an ethical manner. The fundamental principle guiding the ethical practice of all higher-learning institutions should be a culture of voice because conscientization – (...) the purpose of education – necessitates dialogue to emerge. However, this culture of voice is not self-evident in institutions of higher learning and transpires in the harmful ways in which some of these institutions react to the disclosure of their problematic practices by whistleblowers. In light of this, the authors propose that one should not expect individuals to assume a whistleblower role; it is the higher-education institution’s ethical responsibility to create an infrastructure which integrates channels for critical engagement with problematic practices and supports a culture of voice. This infrastructure should consist of four fundamental elements: whistleblowing’s enablement, whistleblowers’ protection, the correction of problematic practices, and the recognition of the whistleblower’s action. (shrink)

Die naturwissenschaftliche Erkenntnis nimmt die Trennung in ein erkennendes Subjekt und erkanntes Objekt vor, um die Gesetzmäßigkeit natürlicher Abläufe zu erforschen und menschlichen Zwecken dienlich zu machen. Die Naturgegenstände werden zwar begrifflich und funktional bestimmt, jedoch nicht ganzheitlich erfasst. Mit dem Blick auf Mahāyāna-Lehren in Indien und Japan wird eine neue Sicht eröffnet: Nāgārjuna (ca. 2. Jahrhundert) lehrt als Weiterführung des Herz-Sūtras das abhängige Entstehen aller Dinge aufgrund der Leerheit. Der japanische Zen-Denker Dōgen Kigen (1200 -1253) erfasst die Phänomene als (...) Verkörperung der allumfassenden Lehre dharma. In der Einsicht prajñā ist das wahre Wesen der konkreten Wirklichkeit, die Buddha-Natur, mit dem Erkennenden im Augenblick untrennbar verbunden. (shrink)

In the course of history, the doctrine of just war has proven to be susceptible to political misuse. Furthermore, it features a number of conceptual deficiencies. In the leading perspective of ‘just peace’, peace ethics primarily emphasises the task of violence prevention, for which the realisation and protection of human rights gain central importance. Even the traditional term ‘common good’ can be reformulated in this context. The concept of ‘just peace’ critically confronts the discussion on the legitimacy of pre-emptive wars. (...) With regard to ‘humanitarian interventions’, it calls for a sophisticated catalogue of criteria that helps to define the presuppositions under which such interventions can be deemed legitimate. (shrink)

Modern philosophical thought has a manifold tradition of emphasizing "the moment". "The moment" demands questioning all-too-common notions of time, of past, present and future, uniqueness and repetition, rupture and continuity. This collection addresses the key questions posed by "the moment", considering writers such as Nietzsche, Husserl, Benjamin and Badiou, and elucidates the connections between social theory, philosophy, literary theory and history that are opened up by this notion.

"Identity" has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.

Das Handbuch der" Islamischen Philosophie im Mittelalter"präsentiert in einer umfassenden Gesamtdarstellung eine der faszinierendsten Epochen der Geschichte des Denkens. Renommierte internationale Fachleute führen sowohl in die Theorien und Argumente der bedeutendsten islamischen Philosophen als auch in ihre Biographien ein. Überblicksartikel leiten in die Geschichte der islamischen Philosophie, ihre historischen Rahmenbedingungen und den stets wechselnden Austausch mit anderen Wissensgebieten ein. So ermöglicht das Handbuch seinen Lesern, so bedeutende Denker wie Avicenna, Averroes und al-Farabi besser kennenzulernen und sie vor einem ganz neuen, (...) breiteren Hintergrund zu würdigen. Dabei treten nicht zuletzt die philosophisch-rationalen Wurzeln deutlich hervor, die die arabische Kultur mit der europäischen bis heute verbinden. (shrink)

In her article the author shows the relevance of the concept of compromise for protestant ethics after 1945. Coming from the current discussion about the significance of compromise in the german society today she asks for the role of compromises for community building and as a guarantee for plurality in the civil society nowadays. The author illustrates the relation between compromise, plurality and democracy in protestant ethics after World War II by presenting an article of the German pastor Eberhard Müller, (...) who was the founder of the Protestant Academy of Bad Boll in Wuerttemberg/west-germany in 1945. In his article compromise, published in the Evangelisches Soziallexikon (Protestant Encyclopedia of social ethics, Kreuz-Verlag Stuttgart) 1954 Müller emphasizes his conviction, that after the ideology of Nazi-Germany only a culture of communication and exchance, a culture, that is based on compromises could anchor an understanding of democracy in the young German society. (shrink)

Comparative analysis of civilizations has recently revived and has led into a debate about varieties of modernity. This connection between an empirically defined area of study, `civilizations', and a theme that is predominantly seen as conceptual, `modernity', is a peculiar one and raises crucial questions for any social theory. Can `modernity' be located spatio-temporally among the civilizations? Is it itself a civilization (or the successor to all civilizations), or does it not rather refer to a human condition? This article takes (...) its starting point from the observation that civilizational comparison is always some form of cultural analysis and asks if and how a cultural theory of modernity is possible and fruitful under current theoretical and historical conditions. (shrink)

How to hospitably welcome refugees and migrants presents urgent questions for social and political thought. Current debates can be attributed to three discursive fields. Liberal versions hold that there are good reasons for political and legal limits of hospitality, critical perspectives advocate a renewed cosmopolitanism and, finally, deconstructive perspectives focus on the demand of unconditional hospitality as an absolute ethical requirement. These concepts trouble the conventional congruence of citizenship and bounded territory that make up modern nation states, on the one (...) hand. On the other hand, they affirm the rights of political communities to decide on the contents and the extent of the universal duty to host those endangered. Taking the Mediterranean and the local arena (Lampedusa) as the example, the article, which is based on extensive, multi-sited anthropological field research, engages with the tensions and limits inherent in current notions of hospitality. (shrink)

This paper presents the outlines of a phenomenological theory of foundational or non-inferential knowledge according to which the facts or states of affairs towards which our beliefs are intentionally directed can sometimes serve as reasons or evidence for what we believe. This occurs in acts of fulfillment, in which an object or state of affairs is given as it is thought to be. Hopp further argues that the sorts of empirical facts that can serve as reasons for noninferentially justified beliefs (...) are not confined to facts about one’s own occurrent mental states, but include facts about the physical world as well. In the course of defending the view against objections, Hopp argues that we should be internalists about the reasons in virtue of which what we believe is justified but externalists about the factors in virtue of which our states of believing have the status of being justified. He also argues against the claim that mental states, such as perceptual experiences, constitute our evidence for empirical beliefs. (shrink)

The arrival of migrants in search of a better life puts forward urgent questions for social and political thought. Historically, hospitality has been considered as a religious duty, a sacred commandment of charity and generosity to assign strangers a place — albeit ambivalent — in the community. With the development of the modern nation state, these obligations have been inscribed into the procedures of political deliberation and legislation that determine the social spaces of aliens, residents and citizens. Current debates are (...) tied to notions of justice which question borders and undermine the congruence of citizenship, territory and belonging that make up modern nation states. These debates focus on the rights of others and the demands of unconditional hospitality, an absolute requirement on one hand, and political and legal limitations on the other. The paper will critically engage with these debates, and evidence the tensions and limits inherent in current notions of hospitality. (shrink)

Comparative analysis of civilizations has recently revived and has led into a debate about varieties of modernity. This connection between an empirically defined area of study, `civilizations', and a theme that is predominantly seen as conceptual, `modernity', is a peculiar one and raises crucial questions for any social theory. Can `modernity' be located spatio-temporally among the civilizations? Is it itself a civilization (or the successor to all civilizations), or does it not rather refer to a human condition? This article takes (...) its starting point from the observation that civilizational comparison is always some form of cultural analysis and asks if and how a cultural theory of modernity is possible and fruitful under current theoretical and historical conditions. (shrink)

This book offers a provocative, clear and rigorously argued account of the nature of perception and its role in the production of knowledge. Walter Hopp argues that perceptual experiences do not have conceptual content, and that what makes them play a distinctive epistemic role is not the features which they share with beliefs, but something that in fact sets them radically apart. He explains that the reason-giving relation between experiences and beliefs is what Edmund Husserl called 'fulfilment' - in which (...) we find something to be as we think it to be. His book covers a wide range of central topics in contemporary philosophy of mind, epistemology and traditional phenomenology. It is essential reading for contemporary analytic philosophers of mind and phenomenologists alike. (shrink)

Research shows that trained mentors achieve better results than untrained ones. Their training should particularly address their expectations for their future mentoring. Our study involved 190 preservice teachers, potential mentors of ongoing school mentoring for primary and secondary school students of all grades. They were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2-x-2 between-subjects design of mentoring type (traditional mentoring versus e-mentoring) and mentoring context (non-pandemic versus COVID-19 pandemic). Participants assessed mentoring conducted under these four conditions in terms (...) of its appropriateness for achieving four mentoring program targets: learning, key skills, social targets, and problem coping. Participants were also asked to assess the resources available to achieve each program target. Overall, the potential mentors considered the various conditions to be suitable for achieving the four program targets. They were particularly favorable in their assessment of the possibility for the realization of learning targets. Likewise, they assumed that sufficient resources were available to achieve the targets. However, a repeated-measures MANOVA showed that the potential mentors considered more ambitious targets to be possible in traditional mentoring than in e-mentoring and normal (i.e., pre-pandemic) contextual conditions than during the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, they estimated the resources available to achieve the targets to be about the same in the four conditions. This indicates a decoupling of mentoring targets from the consideration of the resources needed to achieve them. This assumption was confirmed in correlation analyses and has implications for mentor training. (shrink)

Children’s fine motor skills link to cognitive development, however, research on their involvement in language processing, also with adults, is scarce. Lexical items are processed differently depending on the degree of sensorimotor information inherent in the words’ meanings, such as whether these imply a body-object interaction or a body-part association. Accordingly, three studies examined whether lexical processing was affected by FMS, BOIness, and body-part associations in children and adults. Analyses showed a differential link between FMS and lexical processing as a (...) function of age. Whereas response latencies indicated that children’s FMS were associated with “hand” words, adults’ FMS linked to the broader concept of BOI. Findings have implications for shared activation theories positing that FMS support lexical processing. (shrink)

Newly accessible source material calls for a revision of our picture of the more technical transmission of sceptical epistemologies in the intellectual landscape of early Islam. Abū al‐Qāsim al‐Balkhīʼs (ninth/tenth century) Book of Doctrines shows that naẓar as the basic argumentative method of kalām is defined by the encounter with a broad spectrum of sceptical strategies. By the beginning of the tenth century, Greek traditions were amalgamated in a complex way with other intellectual traditions, most notably dualist ontologies. This situation (...) has shaped the evolution of kalām methodology decisively. Based on extensive paraphrases in Ibn al‐Malāḥimī (twelfth century) going back to Nawbakhtī (tenth century), it can be seen that arguments of the Greek sceptical tradition were accessible in Arabic in the early tenth century. The scarcity of coherent information on sceptical approaches before that time rather has to do with the problem that in general few sources of this earlier formative period of Islamic theology are preserved. Early Muʿtazilī treatises from this period are superseded by Ashʿarī texts in the later transmission. Sceptical approaches, being systematically involved in the very formation of early Muʿtazilī theology, are particularly invisible due to this process. (shrink)

The thesis that `1968' resulted in the rise of the individual, on the one hand, and the end of politics, on the other, is critically discussed by interpreting the events of 1968 as a project of emancipation and by distinguishing between the individual and the collective aspects of emancipation.

Europe as a political entity is born with the general public disagreement against the Iraqi war, while governments were divided on that point. Those linked with European opinion are going to build politics together while the others will remain in a corm on market. This new political stage is supported by the global movement.