The physical activity-related health competence model assumes that individuals require movement competence, control competence, and self-regulation competence to lead a healthy, physically active lifestyle. Although previous research has already established some measurement factors of the three dimensions, no attempts have so far been made to statistically aggregate them on the sub-competence level. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to test two additional factors for PAHCO and subsequently model the second-order structure with two samples from the fields of rehabilitation (...) and prevention. We conducted two questionnaire surveys with persons with multiple sclerosis and teaching students undergoing a basic qualification course in physical education. After performing exploratory items analysis, we used second-order confirmatory factor analysis and multidimensional scaling to investigate whether the scales could be bundled in accordance with the PAHCO model. The CFAs with 10 factors demonstrated a good model fit. In contrast, the second-order analysis with a simple loading structure on the three sub-competencies revealed an unacceptable model fit. Instead, a second-order model variant was preferred [comparative fit index = 0.926, root mean square error of approximation = 0.048, standardized root mean square residual = 0.065] in which body awareness and self-efficacy had theory-conform cross-loadings. The results of multidimensional scaling were in line with the extracted second-order structure. The present results suggested that the extension of the measurement instrument to 10 first-order factors was psychometrically justified for the two populations. The results from the second-order analyses provided the basis for the creation of sum scores, representing manifest indicators of movement competence, control competence, and self-regulation competence. Future studies are needed that cross-validate the extended measurement model with other populations and that relate the sub-competencies of PAHCO to indicators of health-enhancing physical activity. (shrink)

Suppose that an altruistic agent who is uncertain between evidential and causal decision theory finds herself in a situation where these theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one's bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of (...) these theories are not very different, then it is appropriate to choose the option that performs best on the high-stakes theory. Second, we show that, given the assumption of altruism, the existence of correlated decision makers will increase the stakes for EDT but leave the stakes for CDT unaffected. Together these two claims imply that whenever there are sufficiently many correlated agents, the appropriate response is to act in accordance with EDT. (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Habermas fragt vor dem Hintergrund geschwächter Kräfte der sozialen Integration in kritischem Bezug auf Carl Schmitt nach dem vernünftigen Sinn der alteuropäischen Kategorie des Politischen. Schmitt versteht seinen Begriff des Politischen im Sinne des jus reformandi, mit dem sich die Reformatoren für das Politische in seiner klassischen Gestalt und für religiösen Zwang entscheiden. Habermas erhofft sich einen komplementären Lernprozess von religiösen und säkularen Bürgern und vom eschatologischen Denken einer unter demokratischen Bedingungen erneuerten Politischen Theologie, dass es gegenüber einem (...) idealisierenden, normativen Denken ‚Zeitempfindlichkeit‘ einklagt. Sein Ansatz bei der in Geschichte und Sprache inkarnierten Vernunft ist einer am Ereignis des Wortes Gottes und der Kommunikation des Evangeliums orientierten Theologie eng verbunden und hilft deren Bedeutung für das Politische zu klären. (shrink)

Accounts of ontic explanation have often been devised so as to provide an understanding of mechanism and of causation. Ontic accounts differ quite radically in their ontologies, and one of the latest additions to this tradition proposed by Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver reintroduces the concept of activity. In this paper I ask whether this influential and activity-based account of mechanisms is viable as an ontic account. I focus on polygenic scenarios—scenarios in which the causal truths depend (...) on more than one cause. The importance of polygenic causation was noticed early on by Mill (1893). It has since been shown to be a problem for both causal-law approaches to causation (Cartwright 1983) and accounts of causation cast in terms of capacities (Dupré 1993; Glennan 1997, pp. 605-626). However, whereas mechanistic accounts seem to be attractive precisely because they promise to handle complicated causal scenarios, polygenic causation needs to be examined more thoroughly in the emerging literature on activity-based mechanisms. The activity-based account proposed in Machamer et al. (2000, pp. 1-25) is problematic as an ontic account, I will argue. It seems necessary to ask, of any ontic account, how well it performs in causal situations where—at the explanandum level of mechanism—no activity occurs. In addition, it should be asked how well the activity-based account performs in situations where there are too few activities around to match the polygenic causal origin of the explanandum. The first situation presents an explanandum-problem and the second situation presents an explanans-problem—I will argue—both of which threaten activity-based frameworks. (shrink)

The facts are known: The death of the queen seems imminent, while the decision on her successor has not yet been made. And while Queen Elizabeth's end, and with it the transition of power, is anticipated, political complications arise: the most apt successor of the childless heir is the Scottish prince James, whose great-grandmother was a daughter of Charles VII of England. But his mother's lover, the Earl of Bothwell, has killed James's father, Lord Darnley. And Maria Stewart has married (...) her husband's assassin three months later. It is a story that is known to all and that puts considerable…. (shrink)

Volume I, Substance, contains, under the heading Substance, the writings of Plato, Plotinus, Boethius, Marsilio Ficcino, Tommaso Campanella, Johannes Kepler, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Feruccio Busoni. Under the heading Essence and Distinctness are found the writings of Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Philodemus, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W.J. Schelling, George W.F. Hegel, Johann Herbart, and Eduard Hanslick.

In this article I examine whether an influential theory of mechanisms proposed by Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver can accommodate polygenic effects. This theory is both interesting and problematic, I will argue, because it ascribes a central role to activities. In it, activities are needed not only to constitute mechanisms but also to perform their causal role. These putative functions of activities become problematic in certain situations where several causes or elements of a mechanism contribute simultaneously, i.e. (...) with certain forms of polygenic causation. The problematic form of polygeny, polygeny 2, occurs when the polygenic contribution concerns one and the same property or aspect of the affected object. When the result of such causation is that nothing happens, the theory suggested by Machamer and his colleagues cannot be applied. More generally, it seems that, whenever polygeny 2 is involved, the Machamer approach leads to an impoverished conception of mechanism. (shrink)

Polygenic effects have more than one cause. They testify to the fact that several causal contributors are sometimes simultaneously involved in causation. The importance of polygenic causation was noticed early on by Mill (1893). It has since been shown to be a problem for causal-law approaches to causation and accounts of causation cast in terms of capacities. However, polygenic causation needs to be examined more thoroughly in the emerging literature on causal mechanisms. In this paper I examine whether an influential (...) theory of mechanisms proposed by Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver can accommodate polygenic effects and other forms of causal interaction. This theory is problematic, I will argue, because it ascribes a central role to activities. In it, activities are needed not only to constitute mechanisms but also to perform the causal role of mechanisms. Any such mechanism-as-activity will be incompatible with causal situations where either no or merely another kind of activity occurs. But, as I will try to illustrate in this paper, both kinds of situation may be frequent. If I am right, the view that Machamer and colleagues suggest leads to an impoverished conception of mechanism. (shrink)

The idea of free trade in Grotius's Mare liberum and his legal opinion De iure praedae has a strong theological basis. Grotius called the right to travel and trade freely a ius sanctissimum, a 'sacrosanct law'. He also perceived the Freedom of the Seas as being a direct result of the will of God. This theological background was strategically necessary because Grotius developed the Mare liberum and the De iure praedae to argue against Spanish-Portuguese claims to a trade monopoly that (...) also had theological underpinnings. But the theological aspect of Grotius's theory was also emphasized by the references he made to the Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria's ius communicationis. This precursor to Grotius's Freedom of the Seas, which Vitoria had developed in his De indis, is connected to the legal justification of Christian mission and so has a clear theological connotation. In Grotius's work, Vitoria's concept of a universal right to Christian mission supervised by the pope was transformed into a theologically supported right to free trade. With this transformation of the ius communicationis into the principle of the Mare liberum, Grotius develops a theological basis not for politics but for economics. One can speak therefore, following Giorgio Agamben, of an 'economic theology' in regard to Grotius, a term that is, in turn, derived from Carl Schmitt's notion of 'political theology'. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of the majority of Fichte’s 1807 essay on Machiavelli, which has been hailed as a masterpiece and was important for the development of German idealist political thought, as well as for its reception by figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Max Weber, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt. Fichte’s essay attempts to resuscitate Machiavelli as a legitimate political thinker and an “honest, reasonable, and meritorious man.” It tacitly critiques Napoleon, who was occupying Prussia (...) when Fichte composed the piece, and calls on the Germans to resist the French. And some have argued that it marks a shift in Fichte’s political thought toward a more realist position. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of the majority of Fichte’s 1807 essay on Machiavelli, which has been hailed as a masterpiece and was important for the development of German idealist political thought, as well as for its reception by figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Max Weber, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt. Fichte’s essay attempts to resuscitate Machiavelli as a legitimate political thinker and an “honest, reasonable, and meritorious man.” It tacitly critiques Napoleon, who was occupying Prussia (...) when Fichte composed the piece, and calls on the Germans to resist the French. And some have argued that it marks a shift in Fichte’s political thought toward a more realist position. (shrink)

Friedrick Carl Beiser's Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy stands out as it is the inaugural English-language monograph on Herbart, an almost ‘forgotten’ thinker in the En...

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Carl von Linné, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Christian Wilhelm Büttner attempted to realize the old idea of deciphering the alphabet of the world, which Francis Bacon had raised as a general postulate of science. This article describes these attempts and their interrelations. Linné used the model of the alphabet to classify plants according to the characters of this fruiting body. Gatterer, one of the leading German historians during the Enlightenment, adopted the botanical (...) method of classification by genus and species to classify the history of scripts. He used the forms of the alphabetic characters to measure the age of manuscripts and to map the process of history as a genealogy of culture. Gatterer collaborated closely with Büttner, the first Göttingen professor of natural history. Büttner constructed a general alphabet of languages which connected the phonetics of language with the historically known alphabets. Early on, diplomatics and ethnography combined the natural order of natural history and the cultural order of the alphabet with the attempt to register development and to document development by the evolution of forms. Based on the shared model of the alphabet and on the common necessity to classify their empirical material, natural history and the description of culture were related attempts in the middle of the eighteenth century to comprehend the alphabetically organized nature and a naturally ordered culture. (shrink)

Reflecting on the fact of pluralism and the extent to which Christianity appeared to be fragmenting in the wake of the Second Vatican Council , the French Jesuit Michel de Certeau wrote that “in the past, everything that was not in agreement with the teaching of the magisterium was classed as ‘ignorance,’ ‘superstition,’ or even as ‘heresy.’ This state of absolute certainty is now wavering. An unknown world stands before us, which calls itself Christian and yet is quite unlike our (...) picture of what Christian is: ‘another country,’ one that is huge and many-sided beneath the forms of expression (whether…. (shrink)

Carl Heinrich Seibt’s Prague Lectures on the Schöne Wissenschaften: The Beginnings of Aesthetics in Bohemia Carl Heinrich Seibt (1735–1806) was the founder of modern Bohemian aesthetics, that is, thinking about taste, beauty, and fine art, which he developed in a living language. Yet little is known about the content of his lectures on the Schöne Wissenschaften or his views on aesthetics. The following article aims to fill this gap in four respects. It explains why the topic has so (...) far been neglected; it gives a summary of the now known sources from which we may draw our knowledge of the topics of art theory, the individual kinds of art, and general aesthetics, with which Seibt was concerned in his lectures. It presents the standpoints which he held in them, and it puts them into the European context of the period, particularly German aesthetics. It aims primarily to determine whether the accessible sources contain traces of influences other than those of his teachers at Leipzig, who are mentioned in the secondary literature: Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) and Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–1769), including the important authorities recognized by them, in particular Charles Batteux (1713–1780). The article shows that Seibt’s views were also influenced by Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, representatives of a generation of German aestheticians younger than his teachers. (shrink)

In 1825, Johann Theodor Voemel published Nicholas of Methone’s Refutatio institutionis theologicae Procli Platonici. Thus, for the first time an important document of Byzantine philosophy became accessible to researchers, which also allowed important insights into the medieval history of the reception of Proclus’ Institutio theologica in the Byzantine Empire. The essay reconstructs the genesis of this edition and the history of its early reception. While it focuses on Creuzer’s contribution to the publication of Refutatio, it also takes the achievements of (...) Johann Theodor Voemel and Carl Ullmann into consideration. In so doing, the essay provides new findings concerning the study of Neoplatonism during the classical period of German philosophy. (shrink)

Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. (...) Standard cost-benefit analysis implies that governments should spend much more on reducing catastrophic risk. We argue that a government catastrophe policy guided by cost-benefit analysis should be the goal of longtermists in the political sphere. This policy would be democratically acceptable, and it would reduce existential risk by almost as much as a strong longtermist policy. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and (...) contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford (1812–77) was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 2 runs from September 1827 to 1832. (shrink)

Carl Craver investigates what we are doing when we sue neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain.

Jung has never pursued the "psychology of religion" apart from general psychology. The unique importance of his work lies rather in his discovery and treatment of religious, or potentially religious, factors in his investigation into the unconscious as a whole and in his general therapeutic practice. In Answer to Job , first published in Zurich in 1952, Jung employs the familiar language of theological discourse. Such terms as "God," "wisdom," and "evil" are the touchstones of his argument. And yet, Answer (...) to Job , perhaps Jung's most controversial work, is not an essay in theology as much as it is an examination of the symbolic role that theological concepts play in a person's psychic life. (shrink)

Carl F. Craver investigates what we are doing when we use neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain. When does an explanation succeed and when does it fail? Craver offers explicit standards for successful explanation of the workings of the brain, on the basis of a systematic view about what neuroscientific explanations are.

Discrimination, understood as differential treatment of individuals on the basis of their respective group memberships, is widely considered to be morally wrong. This moral judgment is backed in many jurisdictions with the passage of equality of opportunity legislation, which aims to ensure that racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, sexual-orientation, disability and other groups are not subjected to discrimination. This chapter explores the conceptual underpinnings of discrimination and equality of opportunity using the tools of analytical moral and political philosophy.

This book is an introduction to the esthetics of music. Aesthetics, which were of prime importance in thinking about music in the nineteenth century, are today sometimes suspected of being idle speculation. Yet judgments about music and every sort of musical activity are based on aesthetic presuppositions. Carl Dahlhaus gives an account of developments in the aesthetics of music from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. He combines a historical and systematic approach. Central themes in music are grouped together to illustrate (...) both the historical course of events and a systematic unity of the essential elements in the aesthetics of music. For this edition, the late Carl Dahlhaus provided an annotated bibliography. William Austin has added books for the English-speaking reader, and has also supplied notes to the text to help the student. (shrink)

Written three years before his death, The Undiscovered Self combines acuity with concision in masterly fashion and is Jung at his very best. Offering clear and crisp insights into some of his major theories, such as the duality of human nature, the unconscious, human instinct and spirituality, Jung warns against the threats of totalitarianism and political and social propaganda to the free-thinking individual. As timely now as when it was first written, Jung's vision is a salutary reminder of why we (...) should not become passive members of the herd. With a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani. (shrink)

In this systematic introduction to the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, the author focuses on four of Peirce's fundamental conceptions: pragmatism and Peirce's development of it into what he called 'pragmaticism'; his theory of signs; his phenomenology; and his theory that continuity is of prime importance for philosophy. He argues that at the centre of Peirce's philosophical project is a unique form of metaphysical realism, whereby continuity and evolutionary change are both necessary for our understanding of experience. In his final (...) chapter Professor Hausman applies this version of realism to contemporary controversies between anti-realists and anti-idealists. Peirce's views are compared to those of such contemporary figures as Davidson, Putnam, and Rorty. The book will be of particular interest to philosophers concerned with American philosophy and current debates on realism as well as linguists working in semiotics. (shrink)

Under what conditions are people responsible for their choices and the outcomes of those choices? How could such conditions be fostered by liberal societies? Should what people are due as a matter of justice depend on what they are responsible for? For example, how far should healthcare provision depend on patients' past choices? What values would be realized and which hampered by making justice sensitive to responsibility? Would it give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality? The (...) explosion of philosophical interest in such questions has been fuelled by increased focus on individual responsibility in political debates. Political philosophers, especially egalitarians, have responded to such developments by attempting to map out the proper place for responsibility in theories of justice. This book both reflects on these recent developments in normative political theory and moves the debate forwards. (shrink)