This paper explores the epistemic status of models and simulations between theory, on the one hand, and observations, on the other. In particular, I will argue that the interpretation of an essentially invariant astrophysical model structure can change substantially over time. I will illustrate this claim using as an example the first 20 years (1985–2004) of development of the Paris-Durham shock code—a numerical model of slow interstellar shock waves (i.e. a disturbance of the medium that travel faster than the local (...) speed of sound). I will show that the model’s interpretation and, in particular, its underlying representational ideal—the modeler’s (often implicit) goal governing the development and the use of the model—changed notably during this period. Whereas the code was originally used in a purely exploratory fashion, it was later taken to represent and encompass the target phenomenon as completely as possible. It is noteworthy that during this transition the model’s change of epistemic status was never explicitly acknowledged or in any way articulated. However, the impetus for the change can, I claim, be found in the role that observational data came to play in the later publications. (shrink)

Food retailers are powerful actors of the agro-industrial food system. They exert strong lock-in effects that hinder transitions towards more sustainable agri-food systems. Indeed, their marketing practices generally result in excluding the most sustainable food products, such as local, low-input, small-scale farmers’ products. Recently in Belgium, several initiatives have been created to enable the introduction of local products on supermarket shelves. In this article, we study three of those initiatives to analyse if the development of local sourcing in supermarkets opens (...) up an opportunity for a transition towards more sustainable agri-food systems. We conceptualise transitions as a shift in governance and ethical values and adopt a pragmatist approach of ethics combined with the systemic perspective of transition studies, to evaluate the impact of these initiatives. Our analysis shows that they mainly contribute to the reproduction of the incumbent agri-food system. It also highlights that first, to be a driver for sustainability transitions, food ethics need to be systemic i.e. relate to a systemic understanding of problems and perspective of sustainability, including social justice. And second, it highlights that governance arrangements involving not only representative organisations of the various agri-food and non-agricultural actors, but also actors upholding ethical values that are currently missing in conventional supply chains and representing excluded and marginalised interests, favour the uptake of such systemic ethics by incumbent actors. Hence, systemic ethics and inclusive governance are key features for initiatives to contribute to a sustainability transition. (shrink)

Investigators agree that hope is an important coping skill for patients. Hope is stronger than optimism and influences one's physical well being. Suggestions and strategies that can be used in the clinical setting to increase hope begin with an admission of its important role.

With the ever-growing quality of observational data in astronomy, the complexity of astrophysical models has been increasing in turn. This trend raises the question: Are there still reasons to prefer simpler models if the final goal is an actual model-target comparison? I argue for two aspects in which astrophysical research may favor models having reduced complexity: first, to address the problem of determining the values of adjustable parameters and, second, to pave the way for a validation of the model based (...) on the modeler’s understanding of the scope of the model and the critical processes on the target’s side. (shrink)

In the eighteenth century, the sciences and their applications adopted a new attitude based on quantification and, increasingly, on a notion of precision. Within this process, instruments played a significant role. However, while new devices such as the micrometer, telescope, and pendulum clock embodied a formerly unknown potential of precision, this could only be realized by defining a set of practices regulating their application and control. The paper picks up the case of pendulum clocks used in eighteenth-century observatories in order (...) to show the process of learning in the course of which the pendulum clock first became a precision instrument. By examining the results of an especially developed statistical analysis, conducted to compare the performance of eighteenth-century clocks, it highlights the diversity of conditions, attitudes, and manners of handling that are characteristic for the epoch. In this way, it underlines the necessity of standardization of timekeeping practices rather than exclusively focusing on the technological development of clocks. Ultimately, the paper discusses the role of makers and users in order to show the evolution of a “precision instrument.”. (shrink)

This paper explores the epistemic status of models and simulations between theory, on the one hand, and observations, on the other. In particular, I will argue that the interpretation of an essentially invariant astrophysical model structure can change substantially over time. I will illustrate this claim using as an example the first 20 years (1985–2004) of development of the Paris-Durham shock code—a numerical model of slow interstellar shock waves (i.e. a disturbance of the medium that travel faster than the local (...) speed of sound). I will show that the model’s interpretation and, in particular, its underlying representational ideal—the modeler’s (often implicit) goal governing the development and the use of the model—changed notably during this period. Whereas the code was originally used in a purely exploratory fashion, it was later taken to represent and encompass the target phenomenon as completely as possible. It is noteworthy that during this transition the model’s change of epistemic status was never explicitly acknowledged or in any way articulated. However, the impetus for the change can, I claim, be found in the role that observational data came to play in the later publications. (shrink)

This article notes differences in legislation in Germany and Great Britain regarding human embryo research and looks for an explanation in their divergent intellectual traditions. Whereas the German Stem Cell Act invokes an anthropological concept of human dignity to ground its ban on using embryos for research, there is no definition of what it means to be human in either the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act or in the advisory Warnock-Report. After studying the differences and providing some philosophical background, (...) the essay distinguishes two notions that are significant for understanding human dignity. It then proposes from a theological point of view a basic understanding within a relational anthropology, and comes to the conclusion that because of continuity in development and their relational constitution, humans embryos should be accepted as human from the moment of conception. (shrink)

The study investigates the »Four Principles of Biomedical Ethics« published by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress with a particular concern for the principle of respect for autonomy. The leading question is in which philosophical background autonomy is dealt with by Beauchamp/childress and by the enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, while the more emipirical theoretical framework of Beauchamp/childress and the rationalistic framework of Kant are being analyzed. After having considered the foundation of autonomy both in Beauchamp/childress and Kant, the study turns to (...) the relationship of autonomy and human dignity by exploring the implicit extension of autonomy, human dignity and being human, and asks which consequences have to be drawn from a theological point of view. (shrink)

Sibylle Moser untersucht am Beispiel des Handlungsbegriffs die argumentative Komplexität der Empirischen Theorie der Literatur (ETL) und stellt den Entwurf einer konstruktivistischen Methodologie vor.

The daughter of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tries to make sense of her relationship with her father. “When I was born, my father was already no longer there.” Sibylle Lacan's memoir of her father, the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is told through fragmentary, elliptical episodes, and describes a figure who had defined himself to her as much by his absence as by his presence. Sibylle was the second daughter and unhappy last child of Lacan's first marriage: the (...) fruit of despair (“some will say of desire, but I do not believe them”). Lacan abandoned his old family for a new one: a new partner, Sylvia Bataille (the wife of Georges Bataille), and another daughter, born a few months after Sibylle. For years, this daughter, Judith, was the only publicly recognized child of Lacan—even if, due to French law, she lacked his name. In one sense, then, A Father presents the voice of one who, while bearing his name, had been erased. If Jacques Lacan had described the word as a “presence made of absence,” Sibylle Lacan here turns to the language of the memoir as a means of piecing together the presence of a man who had entered her life in absence, and in his passing, finished in it. In its interplay of absence, naming, and the despair engendered by both, A Father ultimately poses an essential question: what is a father? This first-person account offers both a riposte and a complement to the concept (and the name) of the father as Lacan had defined him in his work, and raises difficult issues about the influence biography can have on theory—and vice versa—and the sometimes yawning divide that can open up between theory and the lives we lead. (shrink)

We argue that by neglecting the fact that procedural memory may also have episodic qualities, and by considering only a systems approach to memory, Walker's account of consolidation of learning during subsequent sleep ignores alternative accounts of how sleep stages may be interdependent. We also question the proposition that sleep-based consolidation largely bypasses hippocampal structures.

This article presents an analytic critique of the predominant revisionist theoretical paradigm of just war (henceforth: revisionism). This is accomplished by means of a precise description and explanation of the practicability problem that confronts it, namely that soldiers that revisionism would deem “unjust” are bound to fail to fulfil the duties that revisionism imposes on them, because these duties are overdemanding. The article locates the origin of the practicability problem in revisionism’s overidealized conception of a soldier as an individual rational (...) agent analogous to the aggressor or defender in a case of lethal self-defense, who is capable of reflecting on the morality of his status in war and of the killing he performs and thus of recognizing his revisionist duties. Revisionism, however, ignores the following fact: Killing in war is not a natural human behavior. This is why training soldiers to kill is—and arguably always has been—a necessity for the existence of war and the killing that occurs in it. Moreover, this training involves a certain level of moral desensitization to violence whose goal is to prevent soldiers from thoroughly reflecting on the morality of the killing they engage in. Hence, war and killing can only exist if soldiers are trained in such a way that they do not reflect on whether they could be addressees of revisionist duties in the first place. This means that military training is a “constitutive condition” of soldiers and war, which is why it cannot excuse their noncompliance with revisionist duties, thus making these duties categorically overdemanding. The argument here draws on the paradigmatic example of modern US military killing conditioning (MC), but embeds it into a broader military-historical perspective that describes how soldiers have always needed to be mentally and morally influenced in order to enable war and killing. The article’s explanation of revisionism’s practicability problem has a constructive consequence for future theory-building in the ethics of war: It implies that a potentially revised ethical theory of war must necessarily analyze the institutions that allocate belligerent resources, if it aims to morally assess battlefield behavior in a practicable manner. (shrink)

1. In June 1737, Jean Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678–1771) informed Joseph-Nicolas Delisle (1688–1768) about the dispatch from Paris of six pendulum clocks and one seconds counter designed for the...

In 2017 a clock from the collection of the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in Dresden was dismantled. This clock had been made around 1767 by Johann Gottfried Köhler (1745–1800), who was then in...

"Das Konzept der ›operativen Ontologien‹ ist nicht einfach zu verstehen. Dieser Artikel versucht Potenzial und Schranken dieser Idee auszuloten. Der methodische Ansatz der operativen Ontologie zielt darauf, dass das ›Ontische‹ im Sinne des phänomenal je Gegebenen das ›Ontologische‹ im Sinne der Erklärbarkeit und Verstehbarkeit von Welt bedingt und aus sich hervortreibt: Das Ontische gebiert das Ontologische. Was das bedeutet, wird einerseits anhand von Bernhard Siegerts Begriff ›Kulturtechnik‹ sowie andererseits anhand von Lorenz Engells Begriff der ›Ontographie‹ rekonstruiert sowie kritisch kommentiert. The (...) concept of ‘operative ontologies’ is not easy to understand. The article tries to explore the potential and limitations of this idea. The methodological approach of operative ontology aims at the fact that the ‘ontic’ (in the sense of the phenomenally given) deter- mines and produces the ‘ontological’ (in the sense of the comprehensibility of the world): The ontic gives birth to the ontological. The meaning of this statement is reconstructed with reference to Bernhard Siegert’s concept of ‘cultural technique’ as well as Lorenz Engell’s notion of ‘ontography’ and is further- more critically commented upon. ". (shrink)

A growing literature examines the organizational factors that promote women’s access to positions of organizational power. Fewer studies, however, explore the implications of women in leadership positions for the opportunities and experiences of subordinates. Do women leaders serve to undo the gendered organization? In other words, is women’s greater representation in leadership positions associated with less gender segregation at lower organizational levels? We explore this question by drawing on Cohen and Huffman’s conceptual framework of women leaders as either “change agents” (...) or “cogs in the machine” and analyze a unique multilevel data set of workplaces nested within Fortune 1000 firms. Our findings generally support the “agents of change” perspective. Women’s representation among corporate boards of directors, corporate executives, and workplace managers is associated with less workplace gender segregation. Hence, it appears that women’s access to organizational power helps to undo the gendered organization. (shrink)

This book contains contributions by leading scholars from the fields of history, international relations, law, and philosophy. It includes novel research findings on the crusades, detention and interrogation policies in Northern Ireland, the Chechnya conflict, and the impact of Western detention policies on Al-Qaeda's tactics and narratives.

The nature, extent and validity of the modern institution of private ownership remains a major source of contention between libertarian, liberal and socialist positions in political theory. The thesis contributes to current debates by ways of an analysis of historically significant theories of property, viewed in connection with their underlying conceptions of the person. ;The dissertation consists of three parts. Part One is an exposition of J. Locke's natural rights theory, together with Hegel's criticism of it. Chapter One argues that (...) Locke's famous labor theory of property presupposes an essentially "acquisitive" conception of the person. Chapter Two analyzes Hegel's transformation of Locke's basic model within the framework of an argument no longer derived from the paradigm of natural rights; Hegel introduces instead his notion of the historical and cultural achievements of "Geist". Hegel's theory presupposes, we argue, an essentially "purposeful" self. Property is viewed no longer as an incentive to labor, but now primarily as an instrument for the realization of distinctive human capacities. ;Part Two presents Marx's critique of Hegel's conception of ownership. Chapter Three sets forth the early normative critique: in the realm of labor the acquisitive self remains primary in Hegel's theory. Marx, in turn, proposes that the criterion of "care" for the development of human capacities be introduced within the economic realm. Chapter Four argues that his project in the Grundrisse becomes an investigation of the social conditions of the possibility of this new form of ownership. We argue, moreover, that Marx's notion of "communal property" entails a form of Rawl's difference principle, and juxtapose his theory to the utilitarian view of J. S. Mill, on the one hand, and that of Rawls himself, on the other. ;The final part presents the outlines of a new conception of socialist ownership. We conclude that Marx's theory remains utopian given that it lacks an adequate conception of other-directed, socialist motivation. At the same time, we argue that Rawls's scepticism in regard to the possibility of socialist ownership remains unfounded, by way of drawing on yet a third model of personality and labor: that derived from the traditional female realm of child-care. We conclude that Rawls's theory, when taken in conjunction with our analysis of "reproductive labor", presents us with a new conception of socialist property arrangements which is at once highly feasible. (shrink)

Die Figur des Zeugen, der von einem vergangenen Ereignis berichtet, verkörpert eine für die menschliche Lebenswelt fundamentale Wissenspraxis. Ohne Zeugenschaft wären weder Rechtsprechung, noch Wissenschaft oder Geschichtsschreibung denkbar. Erstaunlicherweise haben Philosophen dieses Thema lange Zeit nur unter der erkenntnistheoretischen Fragestellung erörtert, ob das Wissen durch Zeugen überhaupt wirkliches Wissen sei. Doch gerade die Berichte von Überlebenden der Shoah werfen die Frage auf: Ist das Problem des Zeugnisablegens damit erschöpft? Die Arbeit versucht mit Rekurs auf Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben und Hannah (...) Arendt, das Phänomen in seiner ethischen und politischen Brisanz auszuloten, und schlägt ein Modell für eine «Ethik der Zeugenschaft» vor. (shrink)