There has been much interest in group judgment and the so-called 'wisdom of crowds'. In many real world contexts, members of groups not only share a dependence on external sources of information, but they also communicate with one another, thus introducing correlations among their responses that can diminish collective accuracy. This has long been known, but it has-to date-not been examined to what extent different kinds of communication networks may give rise to systematically different effects on accuracy. We argue that (...) equations that relate group accuracy, individual accuracy, and group diversity are useful theoretical tools for understanding group performance in the context of research on group structure. In particular, these equations may serve to identify the kind of group structures that improve individual accuracy without thereby excessively diminishing diversity so that the net positive effect is an improvement even on the level of collective accuracy. Two experiments are reported where two structures are investigated from this perspective. It is demonstrated that the more constrained network outperforms the network with a free flow of information. (shrink)

This, the 21st volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, is more than Sir Alfred Ayer's final word on the philosophical issues that preoccupied him for more than sixty years; the list of contributors is a roll-call of some of the greatest living figures in philosophy, each expertly addressing a key problem arising in Ayer's work. Most of the critical papers are answered directly and in detail by Sir Alfred-he completed his replies to 21 of the 24 papers before his (...) death. Contributors include: A. J. Ayer, Evandro Agazzi, James Campbell, David S. Clarke, Michael Dummett, Elizabeth Eames, John Foster, Dimitri Ginev, Paul Gochet, Martin Hollis, Ted Honderich, Tscha Hung, Peter Kivy, Arne Naess, D. J. O'Connor, Desiree Park, David Pears, Azarya Polikarov, Hilary Putnam, Francisco Miró, Quesada C., A. Anthony Quinton, Emanuele Riverso, Ernest Sosa, T. L. S. Sprigge, Barry Stroud, and David Wiggins. (shrink)

Contents: K. Ludeking, The Body and the Letters Albrecht Durer s self-portrait from 1500; E. Osterkamp, Spartacus under the Germans on the history of a literary legacy; F. Forster-Hahn, German, Modern and Jewish Max Liebermann s 1906 exhibitions in Berlin and London; U. Haselstein, A Genealogy of Modernity Flaubert, Cezanne, and Gertrude Stein; C. Asendurf, Bodies in Force Fields Art War and Spatial Theory in Classical Modernity.".

The main response to the multiple crises besetting Western societis in the past decades has been the attempt of the academic and scientific as well as political circles to gain a sense of orientation—and of social cohesion—by two main modes of thinking: identity politics and evidence-based knowlegde. Regarding the latter, I argue that if scientific knowledge is reduced to facts, data and numbers, as the basis for political decisions without any alternatives, it would become a dogma propagating the truth—that is, (...) a new religion. Politicians will no longer have to struggle with other perspectives, once there is a consensus about following the line that “the numbers or the facts speak for themselves.” While many people would perhaps find in this new religion a guarantee of security in an insecure world, this sense would be illusionary. I argue that the role intellectuals should play in a spiritual crisis of this kind is paradoxically to cultivate a sense of more security by strengthening a culture of “insecureness” or docta ignorantia against the dogmas within science and religion. To create and encourage a new art of questioning and listening, and of learning to appreciate non-knowledge as the basis of coming together. This notion is found in the Greek and Christian as well as the Jewish tradition of European thought, and it continues in the works of modern thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Hartmut Rosa, and of philosophers who focus on the question of the ineffable. My aim is to present this quality of certainty within uncertainty by examples from different fields, including philosophy, art and psychotherapy, and to elaborate on the paradoxical question: does a troubled Geist need more trouble in order to help us find a sense of orientation through disorientation? (shrink)

This anthology on creativity represents a lifetime of reading and study by the late Charles Dewey Tenney, a philosopher who had been a student of Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. In a series of fourteen essays Tenney considers the various factors that can be identified in creativity, followed by the recorded testimony of philosophers, artists, historians, explorers, scientists and others, both theorists and practitioners. The contributors extend in time from Aristotle and Sophocles to Buckminster Fuller and May Sarton. They include (...) such diverse thinkers as Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Lewis Carroll, Julian Huxley, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Gertrude Stein, Henry Nelson Wieman and Alfred North Whitehead. In all, more than 300 of the world's most creative individuals are included. Contents: Discovery, Invention and Creation; Roots of Discovery; Environs of Discovery; Agents of Discovery; Hinderances to Discovery; Observation and Discovery; Reason in Discovery; Reverie Discovery; Imagination in Discovery; Sensibility and Discovery; Method in Discovery; Artistry in Discovery; Diffusion; and Foresight and Discovery. (shrink)

The well-documented history of the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938/1939 has been distorted during the last decade by a fictitious biography of Lise Meitner (1878–1968).

It is shown in more detail how the well-documented history of nuclear fission in 1938/9 has been distorted by a legend.

Die Wildtierethik beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, ob moralische Akteure empfindungsfähigen wildlebenden Tieren aus ethischer Sicht positive Pflichten in der Form von Rettungs-, Hilfs- und Unterstützungspflichten schulden, und falls ja, was diese Pflichten genau beinhalten. Haben wir die Verpflichtung, Wildtiere aus Naturkatastrophen wie Buschfeuern und aus den Fängen von Raubtieren zu retten? Sollen wir die Lebensqualität wilder Tiere beispielsweise durch Impfungen verbessern? Oder haben diese das Recht auf ein Leben frei jeglicher menschlicher Einmischung?In der Literatur finden sich verschiedene Vorschläge, was (...) man unter einem ›Wildtier‹ verstehen soll. Ortsorientierten Definitionen zufolge leben Wildtiere in von Menschen unberührten Gebieten. Nicht-domestizierte Tiere, welche sich in Städten wiederfinden, wie beispielsweise migrierende Vögel, Waschbären oder Füchse, fallen diesem Verständnis zufolge nicht in die Gruppe der Wildtiere. Dispositionelle Definitionen beziehen sich auf das Verhalten von Tieren. Wildtiere sind demzufolge Tiere, welche nicht gezähmt sind. Hunde und Hähne, welche vom Menschen gezielt mit unkontrollierbaren und aggressiven Charakterzügen gezüchtet wurden, zählen somit zu den Wildtieren. Konstitutiven Definitionen zufolge sind Wildtiere nicht-domestizierte Tiere, also Tiere, in deren Physiologie und Wesensart nicht durch Züchtung eingegriffen wurde und welche nicht vom Menschen abhängig sind. Die meisten Autorinnen und Autoren beziehen sich auf letztere Definition wenn sie von Wildtieren sprechen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Lewis E. HahnGeorge C. H. Sun, President, John Howie, Professor Emeritus, Thomas Alexander, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Professor and Chair, Randall Auxier, Professor, Robert Hahn, Professor, Joseph Wu, Professor Emeritus, Elizabeth R. Eames, Professor Emeritus, Martin Lu, Professor of Philosophy, George Kimball Plochmann, Professor Emeritus, Matt Sronkoski, Philosophy Graduate and Academic Adviser, Dave Clarke, Professor Emeritus, Eugenie Gatens-Robinson, Professor Emerita, Hans H. (...) Rudnick, Professor Emeritus, Stephen Bickham, Professor EmeritusPresident, and Don Mikula (bio)The following testimonials were offered on the occasion of a memorial gathering for Dr. Lewis E. Hahn held on February 19, 2005, and were compiled for presentation here by Sharon (Hahn) Crowell.A Tribute to Dr. Lewis E. Hahn (1908-2004) from a Global PerspectiveGeorge C. H. Sun President, Thomé H. Fang Institute, Inc., Mobile, AlabamaAmong the philosophical community in both the East and the West, no word of introduction is needed for our beloved Master, who was the recipient of numerous distinctions and honors, with titles that included "Man of the Year in Philosophy" and "Award of Lifetime Achievement." The very name "Lewis E. Hahn" itself already stands now for genuineness, dedication, and fulfillment.A great work is a dialogue with eternity; a great person is such a work. In less than thirty years he succeeded in developing Carbondale from what had been a small college town in the Midwest into the Mecca of American philosophy. His most important achievements were the Dewey Center and the Pepper Archives that he helped install at SIUC These, among other such institutions, will remain a unique contribution, a glory of American philosophy, and a monument in the history of human thought.For posterity Lewis E. Hahn will remain an object of wonder and amazement. How is it possible for one human being to have accomplished so much, so well, and in so short a span of time—less than one century—in breadth, depth, and diversity? Some one hundred years ago, by bridging the gap between the New World and the Old, William James was hailed as the great genius of international friendship among philosophical thinkers, but we now find a greater genius in Lewis E. Hahn, who succeeded in bringing together the peoples of East and West from at least four continents: Europe, Australia, America (both North and Latin America), and Asia. To my knowledge, few of his predecessors and contemporaries have been half so widely read and liberal-minded as he was, in view of the range and scope of the Library of Living Philosophers that he helped continue after the passing of its founder, Dr. Paul A. Schilpp.What type of man was Hahn, our younger generation will wonder? Only a pluralist approach can help us understand the true character of such a legendary pluralist-contextualist. In short, he was "a full personality." As I recall, while working on my dissertation with him in the 1970s, we had a brief discussion on Confucius, the sage of ancient China. "A full personality!" was his laconic assessment. Suddenly I realized, to quote the Analects: "The Master is talking about himself!" For, as the Buddhists put it, only a Buddha can understand a Buddha. Or, as William James put it, only one who has philosophy can appreciate philosophy. Many friends [End Page 1] of my generation admire him so much; Te Chen of Hong Kong calls him "a great Confucian in America." Those who regret the loss of many precious Confucian virtues in China today have now rediscovered them in the person of Lewis E. Hahn! If Nietzsche called Kant "a great Chinese in Königsberg," it is simply because he had not encountered our own Master.A paradigm of academic leadership, Dr. Hahn is simply irreplaceable—this is a tribute I personally heard in Carbondale in the late 1960s. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a superb administrator, and he could have been the best Secretary of the State we ever had, for he possessed more in the way of philosophical wisdom than all his predecessors put together! As a great teacher, he was no less "serene, good, learned, wise, and ardent" than... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 83-101 [Access article in PDF] Martin Heidegger and his Japanese InterlocutorsAbout A Limit of Western Metaphysics Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht 1 Quite obviously, the central position that Western philosophical discourses have assigned, over the past two centuries, to the concept of "sense" hinges upon the epistemological dominance of the Subject/Object paradigm. In whichever specific ways this concept has been defined (and we all know how confusing (...) the range of those proposals has become), 1 it always ends up referring to the modalities in which an "Observer-Subject" can refer to what (s)he is observing as the "World of Objects." "Making sense," then, may be described as the selection, performed by an observer, of a specific object of reference among all the objects of which the world is believed to consist; or as the drawing of a line by which (s)he makes a distinction, at every given moment, between those parts of the world that (s)he is observing and those that (s)he is not observing; or as the positioning of a chosen topic within a preexisting context of possible associations. All these different descriptions can be turned into definitions of "sense making" as long as they point to the awareness that whatever has been chosen, divided, or contextualized could have been chosen, divided, or contextualized differently. Another way of evoking the same type of relation between what remains "potential" and what becomes "actual" would be to say that the concept of "sense" always refers to cases of entropy transformed into structure—under the condition that alternative patterns of transforming entropy into structure remain available. What we call the Subject's consciousness (Bewusstsein) is the place where these selections take place and where their alternatives are held available.If we consider the Subject/Object paradigm as the core element of that style of philosophizing which has been called (sometimes from a purely descriptive and sometimes from a critical angle) "Western metaphysics," then it is a both true and trivial conclusion to say that, within Western metaphysics, sense making is inevitable (that is, that Subjects cannot help producing sense and, also, that there can be no effects of sense without pointing to a Subject). An interesting case that proves the point of this implicational relationship is Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. Despite Luhmann's sustained effort to be epistemologically eccentric, despite all his great conceptual ambition to bypass the instance of the Subject, 2 his books (and, above all, their reception) make it [End Page 83] very clear how a philosophical discourse that gives as central a position to the concept of "sense" as Luhmann's cannot help producing Subject-effects. The frequently used everyday expression, on the other hand, that "something makes no sense" is not in conflict with our point about the inevitability of sense making within the metaphysical—and also within our Western everyday—framework of discursive presuppositions.For if we say that "something makes no sense," we are not using the word "sense" in accordance with the conventional philosophical meaning of "sense making," and we are thus not referring to individual phenomena that would "resist" individual acts of sense attribution. 3 Rather, when we say that "something makes no sense," we react to situations where a (shorter or longer) sequence of those elementary and inevitable acts of sense attribution does not produce an impression of "coherence" or "consistency"; we refer to situations where we lack a larger perspective from which we could subsume the results of different individual acts of sense making [see Hahn]. Astonishingly enough (or not astonishingly at all), all those loud intellectual slogans from a decade or two ago about the "death of the Subject" never reached this—altogether unsurprising—point: that any attempt at (or the mere historical process of) overcoming a Subject-centered epistemological tradition (or, with the more Heideggerian concept, of overcoming "metaphysics") would have to ask how one could—begin to—avoid sense making. On the contrary, that "weak subject" and that so-called "weak thinking" as which the Subject/Object paradigm seems to... (shrink)

Recent developments in Continental philosophy have included the emergence of a school of “speculative realism,” which rejects the human-centered orientation that has long dominated Continental thought. Proponents of speculative realism differ on several issues, but many agree on the need for an object-oriented ontology. Some speculative realists identify realism with materialism, while others accord equal reality to objects that are non-material, even fictional. Several thinkers retain a focus on difference, a well-established theme in Continental thought. This paper looks at speculative (...) realism from the perspective of systems theory. Many of the tenets of speculative realism have long been features of systems metaphysics and are expressed clearly in a systems framework. However, some views of some speculative realists differ substantially from systems theoretic ideas. (shrink)

The phenomenon of altruism extends from the biological realm to the human sociocultural realm. This article sketches a coherent outline of multiple types of altruism of progressively increasing scope that span these two realms and are grounded in an ever-expanding sense of “self.” Discussion of this framework notes difficulties associated with altruism at different levels. It links scientific ideas about the evolution of cooperation and about hierarchical order to perennial philosophical and religious concerns. It offers a conceptual background for inquiry (...) into societal challenges that call for altruistic behavior, especially the challenge of environmental and social sustainability. (shrink)

In this lively collection ten philosophers tackle the notoriously elusive issues raised by religious discourse in a series of linked debates. The debates focus on reason and faith; the logic of mysticism; the meaning of the word 'God'; language, biblical interpretation and worship; and religion and ethics. Through contemporary philosophical analysis it is possible to shed new light on teh status and language of religion, and in many ways the contributors to Religion and Philosophy break new ground in this perennially (...) controversial field. The collection is addressed to philosophers, theologians and anyone with a general intellectual interest in religion. Certainly it will be a valuable addition to the reading list of all teachers or students of the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Martin Wrights original ground-breaking and influential analysis of the defects of the adversarial system of justice, plus the arguments in favour of a more ...

Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. However, it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of (...) the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously. (shrink)