Regarding awareness as a consistent concept has contributed to the controversy about implicit learning. The present study emphasized the importance of distinguishing aspects of awareness in order to determine whether learning is implicit. By decomposing awareness into awareness of contingencies, of the procedure being a learning task, and of the reinforcing stimuli, it was demonstrated that implicit operant learning modulated pain sensitivity. All of these aspects of awareness were demonstrated to not be necessary for learning. Additionally, discrimination of contingencies was (...) not necessary on different levels of processing as demonstrated by a verbal and a behavioral method. It was demonstrated that explicit cognitive processes about one’s own behavior, impaired learning, even though these cognitions were not immediately related to the learning process. The results of this study are of special interest in the context of pain, since implicit operant learning can explain the gradual development of hypersensitivity in chronic pain. (shrink)

Research on dyscalculia in neurodegenerative diseases is still scarce, despite high impact on patients’ independence and activities of daily living function. Most studies address Alzheimer’s Disease; however, patients with Parkinson’s Disease also have a higher risk for cognitive impairment while the relation to arithmetic deficits in financial contexts has rarely been studied. Therefore, the current exploratory study investigates deficits in two simple arithmetic tasks in financial contexts administered within the Clinical Dementia Rating in a sample of 100 PD patients. Patients (...) were classified as cognitively normal or mildly impaired according to Level I consensus criteria, and assessed using a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery, neurological motor examination, and sociodemographic and clinical questionnaires. In total, 18% showed arithmetic deficits: they were predominately female, had longer disease duration, more impaired global cognition, but minor signs of depression compared to PD patients without arithmetic deficits. When correcting for clinical and sociodemographic confounders, greater impairments in attention and visuo-spatial/constructional domains predicted occurrence of arithmetic deficits. The type of deficit did not seem to be arbitrary but seemed to involve impaired place × value processing frequently. Our results argue for the importance of further systematic investigations of arithmetic deficits in PD with sensitive tests to confirm the results of our exploratory study that a specific subgroup of PD patients present themselves with dyscalculia. (shrink)

Examines men's efforts to escape from the fear of death by performing acts of human wickedness through socially-sanctioned institutions.

Chapter Introduction. Syntactic focus theory and the phenomenon of secondary predication The primary goal of this monograph is to examine the interaction of ...

Drawing from religion and the human sciences, particularly psychology after Freud, the author attempts to demonstrate that the fear of death is man's central ...

Zwischen den Schriften "Was ist Metaphysik?", " Vom Wesen des Grundes", "Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik", 1929, und "Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit", 1942, hat Heidegger nichts publiziert außer zwei kurzen Hölderlin-Vorträgen und seiner Rektoratsrede von 1933. In diesen dreizehn Jahren hat sowohl Heideggers Denkansatz als auch seine Denkhaltung eine Veränderung erfahren; es ist die in der Heidegger-Forschung so genannte "Kehre". Seit der 1976 aus dem Nachlaß begonnenen Herausgabe von Heideggers Vorlesungen fällt von Mal zu Mal mehr Licht auf (...) seinen Denkweg in besagter Zeitspanne. Zu Recht wurde die Vorlesung als die "Heideggers philosophisches Schaffen zentral prägende Darstellungsform" bezeichnet. Studiert man die Vorlesungen, so wird klar, wie es dazu kommt, daß Heideggers Denkwege in dieser Zeit oft "jäh im Unbegangenen aufhören"; so das Motto des Buches "Holzwege", das, 1950 erschienen, Vorträge und Aufsätze aus der Zeit von 1935 bis 1946 enthält.Die These der Autorin lautet: Der Grund für Heideggers gewandeltes Denken am Ende der genannten Zeitspanne besteht in Erfahrungen, die er im Gespräch mit Hölderlin seit der Vorlesung von 1934/35 gemacht hat. Was sich zwischen 1934/35 und der Heraklit-Vorlesung von 1944 abspielt und als "Kehre" angesprochen wird, bereitet Heideggers Denken vor, wie es in "Vorträge und Aufsätze", "Unterwegs zur Sprache" und in allen späteren Schriften zum Ausdruck kommt.Die Vorlesungen ab 1934/35 zeigen drei Schwerpunkte: die Auseinandersetzung mit Hölderlin, mit Nietzsche und mit den griechischen Denkern am Anfang der abendländischen Geschichte. Während die Philosophie Nietzsches in Heideggers Augen die Vollendung des mit Platon beginnenden Zeitalters der Metaphysik artikuliert, kündigt sich in der Dichtung Hölderlins der Anfang einer anderen Geschichte an. Diesen anderen Geschichtsanfang sieht Heidegger in einem Spannungsverhältnis zu dem, was die griechischen anfänglichen Denker gesagt haben. Ihre Gedanken legt er als ein Sprechen aus dem Erfahrungsbereich der Ἀλήθεια aus. Hölderlin und die Ἀλήθεια stehen also, in je verschiedener, jedoch aufeinander bezogener Weise, für den Anfang von Geschichte. Es ist Heideggers Überzeugung, daß sich Geschichte aus ihrem Anfang bleibend bestimmt. In der Untersuchung wird die Herkunft dieser Überzeugung aufgespürt, was auch irn Hinblick auf die unveröffentlichte Abhandlung von 1941 "Über den Anfang" von Bedeutung ist.Die Verfasserin legt den Boden frei, aus dem das Denken von Heideggers Spätschriften erwächst. Dazu analysiert sie die Freiburger Vorlesungen zwischen 1934/35 und 1944. Es geht ihr darum, die zentralen Gedanken Heideggers in statu nascendi und in ihrer Entfaltung, in ihrer Kontinuität und Veränderung zu verfolgen. Eine solche Verfahrensweise ist um so mehr geboten, als in vielen bisherigen Forschungsarbeiten der Wegcharakter von Heideggers Denken nicht ernst genommen wird und frühere Positionen mit späteren unachtsam vermischt werden. Beachtet man dagegen das Weghafte dieses Denkens, so kann eine Reihe gängiger Forschungsmeinungen korrigiert werden. Zum Beispiel tritt die Zeit-Thematik in Heideggers Spätphilosophie keineswegs "deutlich in den Hintergrund", sie hält sich vielmehr unter gewandelten Namen bis ans Ende seines Denkweges durch. (shrink)

This book presents a study of human intelligence beginning with a semantic theory and leading into a critique of music.

This book offers a new account of what it is to act for a normative reason. The first part of the book examines the problems of causal accounts of acting for reasons and suggests to solve them by a dispositional approach. The author argues for a dispositional account which unites epistemic, volitional, and executional dispositions in a complex normative competence. This ‘Normative Competence Account’ allows for more and less reflective ways of acting for normative reasons. The second part of the (...) book clarifies the relation between the normative reason that an agent acts for and his or her motivating reasons. It refutes the widely held ‘identity view’ that acting for a normative reason requires the normative reason to be identical with a motivating reason. The author describes how normative reasons are related to motivating reasons by a relation of correspondence, and proposes a new understanding of how normative reasons explain those actions that are performed for them. Determined by Reasons engages with current debates from a wide range of different philosophical areas, including action theory, metaethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and ontology, to develop a new account of acting for normative reasons. (shrink)

On March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization classified COVID‐19, caused by Sars‐CoV‐2, as a pandemic. Although not much was known about the new virus, the first outbreaks in China and Italy showed that potentially a large number of people worldwide could fall critically ill in a short period of time. A shortage of ventilators and intensive care resources was expected in many countries, leading to concerns about restrictions of medical care and preventable deaths. In order to be prepared for (...) this challenging situation, national triage guidance has been developed or adapted from former influenza pandemic guidelines in an increasing number of countries over the past few months. In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of triage recommendations from selected national and international professional societies, including Australia/New Zealand, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Pakistan, South Africa, Switzerland, the United States, and the International Society of Critical Care Medicine. We describe areas of consensus, including the importance of prognosis, patient will, transparency of the decision‐making process, and psychosocial support for staff, as well as the role of justice and benefit maximization as core principles. We then probe areas of disagreement, such as the role of survival versus outcome, long‐term versus short‐term prognosis, the use of age and comorbidities as triage criteria, priority groups and potential tiebreakers such as ‘lottery’ or ‘first come, first served’. Having explored a number of tensions in current guidance, we conclude with a suggestion for framework conditions that are clear, consistent and implementable. This analysis is intended to advance the ongoing debate regarding the fair allocation of limited resources and may be relevant for future policy‐making. (shrink)

Chapter One THE MAN-APES A Lesson for Thomas Hobbes Probably the most exciting development in modern anthropology is the discovery of the australopithecines ...

This book sets out first to explain how two fairly recent developments in philosophy, externalism and modalism, provide the basis for a promising account of knowledge, and then works through the different modalized epistemologies extant in the literature, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the author proposes the theory that knowledge is reliably formed, sensitive true belief, and defends the theory against objections.

This paper examines whether an agent becomes liable to defensive harm by engaging in a morally permissible but foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. It first clarifies the notion of a foreseeably risk-imposing activity by proposing that an activity should count as foreseeably risk-imposing if an agent may morally permissibly perform it only if she abides by certain duties of care. Those who argue that engaging in such an activity can render an agent liable to defensive harm (...) ground this liability in the luck egalitarian thought that we may justly hold individuals responsible for the consequences of their voluntary choices. Against this, I argue that a luck egalitarian commitment to holding people responsible cannot, by itself, ground liability to defensive harm. It can help ground such liability only against the backdrop of a distributively just society, and only if further considerations speak morally in favour of attaching certain well-defined costs to individuals’ risk-imposing choices. I conclude by suggesting that if an account of liability applies robustly across distributively just and unjust contexts alike, then what grounds an agent’s liability is plausibly not her responsibility for threatening objectively unjustified harm, but her culpability for doing so. (shrink)

Non-invasive neuroimaging in humans permits direct investigation of the potential role for mesodiencephalic structures in consciousness. Activity in the superior colliculus can be correlated with the contents of consciousness, but it can be also identified for stimuli of which the subject is unaware; and consciousness of some types of visual stimuli may not require the superior colliculus. (Published Online May 1 2007).

Although artificial intelligence has been given an unprecedented amount of attention in both the public and academic domains in the last few years, its convergence with other transformative technologies like cloud computing, robotics, and augmented/virtual reality is predicted to exacerbate its impacts on society. The adoption and integration of these technologies within industry and manufacturing spaces is a fundamental part of what is called Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The impacts of this paradigm shift on the human operators (...) who continue to work alongside and symbiotically with these technologies in the industry bring with it novel ethical issues. Therefore, how to design these technologies for human values becomes the critical area of intervention. This paper takes up the case study of robotic AI-based assistance systems to explore the potential value implications that emerge due to current design practices and use. The design methodology known as Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is proposed as a sufficient starting point for designing these technologies for human values to address these issues. (shrink)

I argue for the view that there are important similarities between knowledge and acting for a normative reason. I interpret acting for a normative reason in terms of Sosa’s notion of an apt performance. Actions that are done for a normative reason are normatively apt actions. They are in accordance with a normative reason because of a competence to act in accordance with normative reasons. I argue that, if Sosa’s account of knowledge as apt belief is correct, this means that (...) acting for a normative reason is in many respects similar to knowledge. In order to strengthen Sosa’s account of knowledge, I propose to supplement it with an appeal to sub-competences. This clarifies how this account can deal with certain Gettier cases, and it helps to understand how exactly acting for a normative reason is similar to apt belief. (shrink)

There is a trade-off between specificity and accuracy in existing models of belief. Descriptions of agents in the tripartite model, which recognizes only three doxastic attitudes—belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment—are typically accurate, but not sufficiently specific. The orthodox Bayesian model, which requires real-valued credences, is perfectly specific, but often inaccurate: we often lack precise credences. I argue, first, that a popular attempt to fix the Bayesian model by using sets of functions is also inaccurate, since it requires us to (...) have interval-valued credences with perfectly precise endpoints. We can see this problem as analogous to the problem of higher order vagueness. Ultimately, I argue, the only way to avoid these problems is to endorse Insurmountable Unclassifiability. This principle has some surprising and radical consequences. For example, it entails that the trade-off between accuracy and specificity is in-principle unavoidable: sometimes it is simply impossible to characterize an agent’s doxastic state in a way that is both fully accurate and maximally specific. What we can do, however, is improve on both the tripartite and existing Bayesian models. I construct a new model of belief—the minimal model—that allows us to characterize agents with much greater specificity than the tripartite model, and yet which remains, unlike existing Bayesian models, perfectly accurate. (shrink)

Hobbes's political theory has traditionally been taken to be an endorsement of state power and a prescription for unconditional obedience to the sovereign's will. In this book, Susanne Sreedhar develops a novel interpretation of Hobbes's theory of political obligation and explores important cases where Hobbes claims that subjects have a right to disobey and resist state power, even when their lives are not directly threatened. Drawing attention to this broader set of rights, her comprehensive analysis of Hobbes's account of (...) political disobedience reveals a unified and coherent theory of resistance that has previously gone unnoticed and undefended. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in the nature and limits of political authority, the right of self-defense, the right of revolution, and the modern origins of these issues. (shrink)

This paper sets out from the hypothesis that the embodied competences and expertise which characterise dance and sports activities have the potential to constructively challenge and inform phenomenological thinking. While pathological cases present experiences connected to tangible bodily deviations, the specialised movement practices of dancers and athletes present experiences which put our everyday experiences of being a moving body into perspective in a slightly different sense. These specialised experiences present factual variations of how moving, sensing and interacting can be like (...) for us as body-subjects. To use of these sources inevitably demands that qualitative research methodologies – especially short-term ethnographical fieldwork – form part of the research strategy and qualify the way the researcher involves a second-person perspective when interviewing dancers and athletes about their experiences. In the subsequent phases analysing the data generated, I argue that researchers first strive to achieve internal consistency of empirical themes identified in the case of movement practices in question thus keeping to a contextualised and lived perspective, also denoted as an emic perspective. In subsequent phases phenomenological insights are then actively engaged in the exploration and discussion of the possible transcendental structures making the described subjective experiences possible. The specialised and context-defined experiences of ‘what a moving body can be like’ are accordingly involved as factual variations to constructively add to and potentially challenge phenomenological descriptions. Lastly, I exemplify how actual research strategies have been enacted in a variety of projects involving professional dancers’, golfers’ and sports dancers’ practices and experiences, respectively. (shrink)

There is resistance to policies that would reduce overall consumption levels to promote sustainability. In part, this resistance is aided by the economic concept of consumer sovereignty (CS) and its presumption that choice promotes wellbeing. We investigate the concept of consumer sovereignty in the context of deepening concerns about sustainability and scrutinise whether the two concepts are compatible. We draw on new findings in psychology on human decision-making traits; we take into account increasing awareness about human dependencies on 'functioning' ecosystems (...) and uncertainties on how ecosystems, human activities and human wellbeing are interlinked. We conclude that commitment to the concept of consumer sovereignty is incompatible with sustainability due to human characteristics, the difficult-to-predict behaviour of ecological systems and ignorance about the impact of human action on natural systems. We propose that the choice-set of available goods and services on markets should be constrained when consumption patterns can be linked to degradation of services provided by nature when those services are seen as crucial for human wellbeing. We advocate constraining the available choice-set through established governmental institutions aided by deliberative processes that engage members of the general public. Finally, we acknowledge that such processes are imperfect; nevertheless, we foresee that they will be essential for fostering wise decision-making and moving towards sustainability. (shrink)

In this article I advocate a worldly account of normative reasons according to which there is an ontological gap between these and the premises of practical thought, i.e. motivating considerations. While motivating considerations are individuated fine-grainedly, normative reasons should be classified as coarse-grained entities, e.g. as states of affairs, in order to explain certain necessary truths about them and to make sense of how we count and weigh them. As I briefly sketch, acting for normative reasons is nonetheless possible if (...) the connection between normative reasons and motivating considerations is a competence-based correspondence. (shrink)

Many apps request access to users’ contacts or photos and many consumers agree to these requests. However, agreeing is ethically questionable as it also gives apps access to others’ data. People thus regularly infringe each other’s information privacy. This behavior is at odds with offline practices and still poorly understood. Introducing a novel application of the theory of neutralization, we explore how people justify the giving away of others’ data and the emerging norms surrounding this behavior. To obtain a deeper (...) understanding of the potentially ambiguous norms surrounding the behavior, we investigate how people justify, i.e., neutralize, the behavior from both offender and victim perspectives. Across four studies, offenders appear more likely to admit to moral wrongdoing than victims assume. This suggests moral disagreement between offenders and victims. The discrepancy appears to be reasonably robust across different samples, apps and whether the other is identified, but diminishes when people learn how easily others’ data could be protected. These insights offer suggestions for businesses, consumers and public policy. (shrink)

Uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.

A good reputation is one of the most valuable assets a company can have. A problematic reputation can hinder companies in their performance. In competitive markets where products differ little in price, technology, or availability, reputation can make a difference. Petroleum companies are frequently associated with environmental issues such as oil spills and climate change. Since environmental performance rankings remain inconclusive due to methodological shortcomings, those issues may affect the sector’s reputation. This paper examines whether the observation of a problematic (...) reputation for multinationals in the petroleum sector is sustained by empirical data for the period 1990–2002. Taking in account methodological limitations, the analysis shows two downward trends for all companies, indicating a common reputation effect. The effect of catalyst events is observed for individual companies. However, the contribution of the paper is not only empirical. Conceptually, the results show the complexity of measuring the multidimensional concept of reputation, as well as the importance of the reputation commons, catalyst events, and a reputation mechanism. (shrink)

In this article, we inquire into Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Michele Merritt’s descriptions and use of dance improvisation as it relates to “thinking in movement.” We agree with them scholars that improvisational practices present interesting cases for investigating how movement, thinking, and agency intertwine. However, we also find that their descriptions of improvisation overemphasize the dimension of spontaneity as an intuitive “letting happen” of movements. To recalibrate their descriptions of improvisational practices, we couple Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. (...) Barandiaran’s enactive account of the constitution of agency with case studies of two expert performers of improvisation: a dancer and a musician. Our analyses hereof show that their improvisations unfold as a sophisticated oscillation of agency between specialized forms of mental and bodily control and, indeed, a more spontaneous “letting things happen.” In all, this article’s conclusions frame thinking in movement concerning improvisational practices as contextually embedded, purposively trained, and inherently relational. (shrink)

In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge as Regius Professor of Modern History in 1895, Lord Acton urged that the historian deliver moral judgments on the figures of his research. Acton declaimed: I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on (...) wrong.1 In 1902, the year after Acton died, the president of the American Historical Association, Henry Lea, in dubious celebration of his British colleague, responded to the exordium with a contrary claim about the historian’s obligation, namely to render the facts of history objectively without subjective moralizing. Referring to Acton’s lecture, Lea declared: I must confess that to me all this seems to be based on false premises and to lead to unfortunate conclusions as to the objects and purposes of history, however much it may serve to give point and piquancy to a narrative, to stimulate the interests of the casual reader by heightening lights and deepening shadows, and to subserve the purpose of propagating the opinions of the writer.2 As our colleague Peter Novick has detailed in his great account of the American historical profession, by the turn of the century historians in the United States had begun their quest for scientific status, which for most seemed to preclude the leakage of moral opinion into the objective recovery of the past—at least in an overt way. Peter also catalogues the stumbling failures of this noble dream, when political partisanship and rampant nationalism sullied the ideal.3 Historians in our own time continue to be wary of rendering explicit moral pronouncements, thinking it a derogation of their obligations. On occasion, some historians have been moved to embrace the opposite attitude, especially when considering the horrendous events of the twentieth century—the Holocaust, for instance.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper offers a generic revenge-proof solution to the Sorites paradox that is compatible with several philosophical approaches to vagueness, including epistemicism, supervaluationism, psychological contextualism and intuitionism. The solution is traditional in that it rejects the Sorites conditional and proposes a modally expressed weakened conditional instead. The modalities are defined by the first-order logic QS4M+FIN. (This logic is a modal companion to the intermediate logic QH+KF, which places the solution between intuitionistic and classical logic.) Borderlineness is introduced modally as (...) usual. The solution is innovative in that its modal system brings out the semi-determinability of vagueness. Whether something is borderline and whether a predicate is vague or precise is only semi-determinable: higher-order vagueness is columnar. Finally, the solution is based entirely on two assumptions. (1) It rejects the Sorites conditional. (2) It maintains that if one specifies borderlineness in terms of the ‒suitably interpreted‒ modal logic QS4M+FIN, then one can explain why the Sorites appears paradoxical. From (1)+(2) it results that one can tell neither where exactly in a Sorites series the borderline zone starts and ends nor what its extension is. Accordingly, the solution is also called agnostic. (shrink)

Martin Heideggers Denken nach 1938 ist vor allem durch drei große Themen geprägt: den Wandel des Menschenbildes, die Einführung eines neuen Begriffes vom Denken und den Nachweis, dass Sein ›Seyn in Beziehung‹ ist. Dabei stützt er sich auf das Denken Franz Rosenzweigs, das bereits in der Formulierung von »Sein und Zeit« erkennbar ist, in den Schriften der 40er und 50er Jahre aber in besonders intensiver Weise nachwirkt.

Imagine that, through no fault of your own, you nd yourself at the bottom of a deep well. Thugs have picked up an innocent person | call him Bob | and have thrown him down the well. Bob is now falling towards you. If you do nothing, your body will cushion Bob's otherwise lethal fall. This will guarantee his survival, but it will kill you. If you shoot your ray gun, you vaporize and kill Bob, thereby saving your life. Are (...) you morally permitted to shoot your ray gun?Most people believe that self-defence against an innocent threat such as Bob is permissible. Judith Thomson (1991) and Frances Kamm (1987) have tried to justify this widely held belief. Jeff McMahan (2002) and Michael Otsuka (1994) have argued against it. In this paper, I contend that arguments from both sides of the debate mistakenly take the existence of an important asymmetry between Bob and you for granted. That way, they miss how similar Bob and you are, in that both of you happen to nd yourselves, undeservingly and through no fault of your own, in a situation in which you can secure your own survival only if you kill an innocent person. In this paper, I argue that despite certain differences, we are justi ed in focusing on the simliarities between Bob and you, and that you should thus flip a coin to decide who should live (cf. Broome, 1991). By flipping a coin, you ensure that an indivisible good -- continuing one's life -- is distributed as fairly as is possible without wasting it. (shrink)

Author Susanne Claxton offers a new ecophenomenological perspective to Heidegger and his engagement with the Greeks, and an alternative to the ruling binary in environmental ethics of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.

Based on an empirical study of a research team in natural science, the author argues that collaborating scientists do not trust each other completely. Due to the inherent incompleteness of trust, epistemic trust among scientists is not sufficient to manage epistemic dependency in research teams. To mitigate the limitations of epistemic trust, scientists resort to specific strategies of indirect assessment such as dialoguing practices and the probing of explanatory responsiveness. Furthermore, they rely upon impersonal trust and deploy practices of hierarchical (...) authorship. (shrink)

We frequently engage in activities that impose a risk of serious harm on innocent others in order to realise trivial benefits for ourselves or third parties. Many moral theories tie the evidence-relative permissibility of engaging in such activities to the size of the risk that an individual agent imposes. I argue that we should move away from such a reliance on quantified individual risks when conceptualising morally permissible risk imposition. Under most circumstances of interest, a conscientious reasoner will identify a (...) gap between the factors they deem potentially relevant to the riskiness of an agent’s behaviour, and the factors they are reasonably able to quantify. This then leads a conscientious reasoner to conclude that they cannot, in good faith, come up with a quantitative risk estimate that is genuinely tailored to the agent’s particular situation. Based on this, I argue that principles of morally permissible risk imposition fail to provide us with practical guidance if they ask us to take into account our agent-specific risks in a quantified manner. I also argue that principles of permissible risk imposition which appeal to quantified individual risks implausibly imply that it is frequently indeterminate whether engaging in some risky activity is morally permissible. For both of these reasons, I contend that principles of morally permissible risk imposition should make no reference to quantified individual risks. They should instead acknowledge that any quantitative estimates that an agent might usefully be able to consider will likely not be tailored to the agent’s idiosyncratic situation. (shrink)

When Locke mentions polygamy in his writings, he does not condemn the practice and, even seems to endorse it under certain conditions. This attitude is out of step with many of his contemporaries. Identifying the philosophical reasons that lead Locke to have this attitude about polygamy motivates our project. Because Locke never wrote a treatise on ethics, we look to number of different texts, but focus on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Essays on the Law of Nature, in order (...) to outline his basic ethical theory. We argue that this theory, the elements of which include moral mixed modes, the law of nature, and the comparison of these modes with this law, is broad enough to accommodate practices like polygamy. Our interpretation shows that Locke’s line of thought on marriage is strikingly flexible for the 17th century, and even compared to some contemporary public debates on marriage. (shrink)

Weit über das Fach hinaus prägen sie unser Denken und Sprechen und damit auch öffentliche Auseinandersetzungen. Die Autorin geht den geschlechterpolitischen Dimensionen dieser Biophilosophien nach.

This book investigates how collaborative scientific practice yields scientific knowledge. At a time when most of today’s scientific knowledge is created in research groups, the author reconsiders the social character of science to address the question of whether collaboratively created knowledge should be considered as collective achievement, and if so, in which sense. Combining philosophical analysis with qualitative empirical inquiry, this book provides a comparative case study of mono- and interdisciplinary research groups, offering insight into the day-to-day practice of scientists. (...) The book includes field observations and interviews with scientists to present an empirically-grounded perspective on much-debated questions concerning research groups’ division of labor, relations of epistemic dependence and trust. (shrink)

This paper offers an analytic perspective on epistemic dependence that is grounded in theoretical discussion and field observation at the same time. When in the course of knowledge creation epistemic labor is divided, collaborating scientists come to depend upon one another epistemically. Since instances of epistemic dependence are multifarious in scientific practice, I propose to distinguish between two different forms of epistemic dependence, opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. A scientist is opaquely dependent upon a colleague if she does not possess (...) the expertise necessary to independently carry out, and to profoundly assess, the piece of scientific labor which her colleague is contributing. If the scientist does possess the necessary expertise, I argue, her dependence is translucent. However, the distinction between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence does not exhaust dependence relations in scientific practice, because many dependence relations are neither entirely opaque nor translucent. I will discuss why this is the case, and show how we can make sense of the gray zone between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. (shrink)