At the beginning of the year, the Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR) was published. The text is the result of the work of a broad range of private law scholars from the Member States of the European Union, and it presents itself as an ‘academic’ document, committed to the precepts of scholarship rather than politics. Notwithstanding its unwieldy name, the text is nothing less than the draft of the central components of a European Civil Code. The following article aims (...) to inform the reader about this potentially important document and to initiate further academic debate about it. Following an overview of the genesis and content of the DCFR (Part 1), the discussion focuses on whether, and to what extent, it is based upon consistent and convincing core aims and values (Part 2). The article then proceeds to address, more specifically, the significance of private autonomy, and it examines the extent to which the proposed rules satisfy the requirements of legal certainty and legal clarity (Part 3). Thereafter, the DCFR is measured against the criteria of internal consistency and systematic integrity (Part 4). Also (Part 5) the question is asked whether the Draft critically reflects and convincingly integrates the sources on which it is based (that is the Lando Commission's Principles of European Contract Law and the Acquis Principles, as well as the private law traditions of the Member States). Also deserving of attention is the inclusion of more than 120 definitions of central concepts of private law, which are not to be found in this form or level of detail in either the Lando Principles or the national private laws (Part 6). (shrink)

On March, 24, 2020, 818 cases of COVID-19 had been reported in New South Wales, Australia, and new cases were increasing at an exponential rate. In anticipation of resource constraints arising in clinical settings as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, a working party of ten ethicists was convened at the University of Sydney to draft an ethics framework to support resource allocation decisions. The framework guides decision-makers using a question-and-answer format, in language that avoids philosophical and medical technicality. The (...) working party met five times over the following week and then submitted a draft Framework for consideration by two groups of intensivists and one group of academic ethicists. It was also presented to a panel on a national current affairs programme. The Framework was then revised on the basis of feedback from these sources and made publicly available online on April 3, ten days after the initial meeting. The framework is published here in full to stimulate ongoing discussion about rapid development of user-friendly clinical ethics resources in ongoing and future pandemics. (shrink)

We investigate risk attitudes when the underlying domain of payoffs is finite and the payoffs are, in general, not numerical. In such cases, the traditional notions of absolute risk attitudes, that are designed for convex domains of numerical payoffs, are not applicable. We introduce comparative notions of weak and strong risk attitudes that remain applicable. We examine how they are characterized within the rank-dependent utility model, thus including expected utility as a special case. In particular, we characterize strong comparative risk (...) aversion under rank-dependent utility. This is our main result. From this and other findings, we draw two novel conclusions. First, under expected utility, weak and strong comparative risk aversion are characterized by the same condition over finite domains. By contrast, such is not the case under non-expected utility. Second, under expected utility, weak comparative risk aversion is characterized by the same condition when the utility functions have finite range and when they have convex range. By contrast, such is not the case under non-expected utility. Thus, considering comparative risk aversion over finite domains leads to a better understanding of the divide between expected and non-expected utility, more generally, the structural properties of the main models of decision-making under risk. (shrink)

Contemporary business often encompasses or aspires towards the automated, networked production of industrial goods across transnational supply chains that have many digitalized interfaces. This allows competitive operations in time, costs, and quality, which have been widely discussed. On the downside, it entails cyber threats with significant risks for society in areas including business, environment, and health. Hence, to adequately manage these risks in the emerging digital world, there is a vital necessity to raise awareness, establish, maintain, and further develop cyber-security (...) measures to ensure an appropriate level of protection along the entire value chain and supply chain. Blockchain capabilities are introduced to improve the technical and organizational basis for secured operations in industrial networks. Its advantages are explained by a simple USB-device use case, that has often been the root cause to subsequent security incidents, especially in the Stuxnet incident. (shrink)

Digitalization has become a cornerstone of competitiveness in the industrial arena, especially in the cases of small lot sizes with many variants in the goods produced. Managers of industrial facilities have to handle the complexity that comes along with Industry 4.0 in diverse dimensions to leverage the potentials of digitalization for their sites. This article describes major drivers of this complexity in current industrial automation to outline the environment of today’s challenges for managers of this technical transition—and shows how managed (...) industrial security services can contribute to stabilize the industrial system. An outlook is given to future automation scenarios as well as the major concepts involved in their protection. (shrink)

Was ist der Mensch? Das ist eine der "großen" philosophischen Fragen, und immer wieder werden bei der Beantwortung dieser Frage antike Denker zitiert. Das vorliegende Buch ist die erste Gesamtdarstellung des anthropologischen Denkens in der Antike. In fünfzehn Beiträgen behandelt der Band alle wichtigen antiken Philosophen und Philosophenschulen, von den Vorsokratikern bis zu Augustinus. Bewusst schaut der Band dabei über die Grenzen dessen hinaus, was wir heute "Philosophie" nennen, und wendet sich auch Denkern aus den Gebieten der antiken Literatur, Theologie (...) und Medizin zu. Der Band richtet sich an Philosophen und Altphilologen ebenso wie Historiker und Theologen. Die Beiträge eignen sich auch als Einführung in die jeweiligen Autoren und Schulen für Studierende und interessierte Leser aus anderen Disziplinen. Speziell für diesen Leserkreis liefern die Beiträge Hinweise für die weitere Lektüre. (publisher) -/- Mit Beiträgen von Ursula Bittrich, Yves Bossart, Jan N. Bremmer, Thomas Buchheim, Christoph Horn, Ludger Jansen, Christoph Jedan, Geurt Henk van Kooten, Zbigniew Nerczuk, Matthias Perkams, Joachim Söder, Niko Strobach, Hartmut Westermann und Jula Wildberger. (shrink)

The 2013 Rostock Symposium on Systems Biology and Bioinformatics in Aging Research was again dedicated to dissecting the aging process using in silico means. A particular focus was on ontologies, as these are a key technology to systematically integrate heterogeneous information about the aging process. Related topics were databases and data integration. Other talks tackled modeling issues and applications, the latter including talks focussed on marker development and cellular stress as well as on diseases, in particular on diseases of kidney (...) and skin. (shrink)

Introducing formal causation / Ludger Jansen and Petter Sandstad -- Form, intention, information : from scholastic logic to artificial intelligence / Gyula Klima -- Formal causation : accidental and substantial / David S. Oderberg -- A non-hylomorphic account of formal causation / Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen -- Formal causes for powers theorists / Giacomo Giannini and Stephen Mumford -- Away with dispositional essences in trope theory / Jani Hakkarainen and Markku Keinänen -- Functional powers / Michele Paolini (...) Paoletti -- An Aristotelian approach to existential dependence / Benjamin Schnieder and Jonas Werner -- Finean feature dependence and the Aristotelian alternative / Wolfgang Sattler -- A problem for natural-kind essentialism and formal causes / José Tomás Alvarado and Matthew Tugby -- Form as cause and the formal cause : Aristotle's answer / James G. Lennox -- Form, cause, and explanation in biology : a neo-Aristotelian perspective / Christopher J. Austin -- Formal explanation and mechanisms of conceptual representation / Sandeep Prasada. (shrink)

""Catching Ourselves in the Act" is no less than an attempt to explain intelligence. Delightful how the author dismantles traditional views in.

Lærdom der lyser -- Calderón : livet er en drøm -- Carl von Linné : Nemesis Divina -- Friedrich Schlegel -- Grundtvig og Kierkegaard -- F.C. Sibbern : meddelelser af indholdet af et skrift fra aar 2135 -- Sjælens triumf -- Fantasiens Janushoved : den historiske roman og fremtidsvisionen -- Når oldtid bliver til nutid -- Angsten der helbreder : David Lodge og Kierkegaard som terapeut.

In an age where issues like climate change and the unintended consequences of technological innovation are high on the ethical and political agenda, questions about the nature and extent of our responsibilities to future generations have never been more important, yet simultaneously so difficult to answer. This book takes a unique approach to the problem by drawing on diverse traditions of thinking about care (including developmental psychology, phenomenology and feminist ethics) to explore the nature and meaning of our relationship with (...) the future. Demonstrating that many influential perspectives on intergenerational ethics, including positions advanced by John Rawls, Brian Barry, and Ulrich Beck are undermined by problems relating to uncertainty, it shows that an approach based on care ethics can confront the uncertain future successfully and give a viable account of the nature and scope of future-oriented responsibilities. (shrink)

The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth, content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content.To show how these (...) principles are realized in specific domains, Peacocke applies the theory in detail to several classical problems of philosophy, including the nature of perceptual entitlement, induction, and the status of moral thought. These discussions involve an elaboration of the structure of entitlement in ways that have applications in many other areas of philosophy. He also relates the theory to classical and recent rationalist thought, and to current issues in the theory of meaning, reference and explanation. In the course of these discussions, he proposes a general theory of the a priori.The focus of the work lies in the intersection of epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of meaning, and will be of interest both to students and researchers in these areas, and to anyone concerned with the idea of rationality. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

After a short sketch of Lowe’s account of his four basic categories, I discuss his theory of formal ontological relations and how Lowe wants to account for dispositional predications. I argue that on the ontic level Lowe is a pan-categoricalist, while he is a language dualist and an exemplification dualist with regard to the dispositional/categorical distinction. I argue that Lowe does not present an adequate account of disposition. From an Aristotelian point of view, Lowe conflates dispositional predication with hôs epi (...) to poly statements about what is normally or mostly the case. (shrink)

Suppose we believe that God created the world. Then surely we want it to be the case that he intended, in some sense at least, to create THIS world. Moreover, most theists want to hold that God didn't just guess or hope that the world would take one course or another; rather, he KNEW precisely what was going to take place in the world he planned to create. In particular, of each person P, God knew that P was to exist. (...) Call this the "standard" conception. Most theists find the standard conception appealing. Unfortunately, the view seems to conflict with the equally appealing idea — call it "temporal actualism" — that there are no "future" individuals beyond those that already exist in the present moment. For, on this view, for any historical person P, prior to creation, there was no such person as P and hence nothing about P for God to know. Hence, in particular, God couldn't have known that P was to exist. This is of course not a new problem. But past solutions to it are highly problematic. In this paper, after canvassing previous approaches, I will propose a solution that seems to preserve both temporal actualism and a suitably robust form of the standard conception while avoiding the pitfalls of the past. (shrink)

Hidden in Historicism considers how the nineteenth-century philosophy of historicism depicts three "forgotten time regimes": a time of rise and fall, an ambiguous time of synchronicity of the non-synchronous, and a time in which decisive moments dominate. Before the eighteenth century, time was past-oriented. This inversed in the Enlightenment, when the future became dominating. Today, this time of progress continues to be embraced as a "time of the modern". Yet, inequality, increasing violence and climate change lead to doubts over a (...) bright future. In this book, Harry Jansen moves away from the heritage of Reinhart Koselleck and his single time of the modern towards a historicist, threefold temporal approach to history writing. In the time regime of the twenty-first century past, present and future coexist. It is a heterogeneous time that takeson the three forms of historicism. Jansen's study shows how all three times exist together in current historiography and contribute to a better understanding of the world today. Based on the idea that an incarnated time rules everything that happens it reality, the book offers a fresh perspective on the ongoing discussion about time and time regimes in contemporary philosophy and theory of history for students and scholars, both time specialists and the non-specialist. (shrink)

This paper questions the widespread supposition that artifact kinds are kinds of artifacts. I will argue that this supposition rests on a one-sided diet of examples taken from inanimate physical things and the neglect of social and biological artifacts. I will argue that belonging to an artifact kind and being an artifact are independent Features: The first divides off artifacts from non-artifacts, the second rests on the distinction between instances of artifacts kinds and instances of natural kinds. I claim that (...) these two distinctions are orthogonal to each other, and besides the two canonical combinations of artificial instances of artifact kinds and non-artificial instances of natural kinds there are also non-artificial instances of artifact kinds and artificial instances of natural kinds. Moreover, as some artificial living beings are self-reproducing, some instances of an artifact kind are not themselves artifacts. Hence artifact kinds are not of necessity kinds of artifacts. (shrink)

In February 54b.c. Cicero concludes a missive to his brother with a passing and – for us – tantalizing remark:Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. sed cum veneris. virum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris; hominem non putabo. Quintus had, it seems, readDe rerum natura, or at least parts thereof, just before he left Rome for an undisclosed location nearby, and he shared his enthusiasm with his brotherper codicillos. Meanwhile, he was corresponding with Julius (...) Caesar, whose staff in Gaul he was about to join. When, a few months later, he was stationed with Caesar, he was involved in another literary affair, this time concerning his brother who wrote to him, inquiring about his autobiographicalDe temporibus suis:quo modo nam, mi frater, de nostris versibus Caesar? nam primum librum se legisse scripsit ad me ante, et prima sic ut neget se ne Graeca quidem meliora legisse; reliqua ad quendam locum ῥᾳθυμότερα (hoc enim utitur verbo). dic mihi verum: num aut res eum aut χαρακτὴρ non delectat?(Q.fr.2.15.5). (shrink)

What standard or principle should guide decisionmaking concerning the permissibility of allowing children to be organ donors? For a long time, it has been widely assumed that the best interest of the child is the appropriate standard. But recently, several critics have charged that this standard fails to give due weight to the interests of the family and the intimate relationships that the family makes possible.1,2 This article reviews and rejects both the best-interest standard and the alternative standard recommended by (...) the critics. I then propose a new standard to help parents, healthcare professionals, and judges decide when it is and is not permissible for children to serve as organ donors. This new standard modifies and broadens the best-interest standard to allow it to account adequately for the contribution that intimate relationships make to the well-being of children. (shrink)

Aristotle attaches particular significance to the homonymy of many central concepts in philosophy and science: that is, to the diversity of ways of being common to a single general concept. His preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to almost every subject that he considers, and it clearly structures the philosophical methodology that he employs both when criticizing others and when advancing his own positive theories. Where there is homonymy there is multiplicity: Aristotle aims to find the order within this multiplicity, (...) and believes that doing so is crucial to scientific inquiry and philosophical progress.Christopher Shields investigates and evaluates Aristotle's approach to questions about homonymy, characterizing the metaphysical and semantic commitments necessary to establish the homonymy of a given concept. Then, in a series of case-studies, Shields examines in detail some of Aristotle's principal applications of homonymy--to the body, sameness and oneness, life, goodness, and being. Shields's aim is not only to give a fuller understanding of Aristotle's methodology and to illuminate his specific doctrines in a variety of areas, but to show that this methodology remains fruitful today. (shrink)

Expressives like damn and bastard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of (...) expressive indices. These determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation. Expressives morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment. (shrink)

The essays in this volume illuminate a central topic in ethical theory: moral dilemmas. Some contemporary philosophers dispute the traditional view that a true moral dilemma -- a situation in which a person has two irreconcilable moral duties -- cannot exist. This collection provides the historical background to the ongoing debate with selections from Kant, Mill, Bradley, and Ross. The best recent work on the question is represented in essays by Donagan, Foot, Hare, Marcus, Nagel, van Fraassen, Williams, and others.

The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive. Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes. As these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis. The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena and provide a preliminary assessment of (...) the initial resistance to a truth-conditional analysis. (shrink)

Moral error theories are often rejected by appeal to ‘companions in guilt’ arguments. The most popular form of companions in guilt argument takes epistemic reasons for belief as a ‘companion’ and proceeds by analogy. I show that this strategy fails. I claim that the companions in guilt theorist must understand epistemic reasons as evidential support relations if her argument is to be dialectically effective. I then present a dilemma. Either epistemic reasons are evidential support relations or they are not. If (...) they are not, then the companions in guilt argument fails. If they are, then a reduction of epistemic reasons to evidential support relations becomes available and, consequently, epistemic reasons cease to be a viable ‘companion’ for moral reasons. I recommend this structure of argument over existing strategies within the literature and defend my claims against recent objections from companions in guilt theorists. (shrink)

No existing normative decision theory adequately handles risk. Expected Utility Theory is overly restrictive in prohibiting a range of reasonable preferences. And theories designed to accommodate such preferences (for example, Buchak's (2013) Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory) violate the Betweenness axiom, which requires that you are indifferent to randomizing over two options between which you are already indifferent. Betweenness has been overlooked by philosophers, and we argue that it is a compelling normative constraint. Furthermore, neither Expected nor Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory (...) allow for stakes‐sensitive risk‐attitudes—they require that risk matters in the same way whether you are gambling for loose change or millions of dollars. We provide a novel normative interpretation of Weighted‐Linear Utility Theory that solves all of these problems. (shrink)

Fallacies and Argument Appraisal presents an introduction to the nature, identification, and causes of fallacious reasoning, along with key questions for evaluation. Drawing from the latest work on fallacies as well as some of the standard ideas that have remained relevant since Aristotle, Christopher Tindale investigates central cases of major fallacies in order to understand what has gone wrong and how this has occurred. Dispensing with the approach that simply assigns labels and brief descriptions of fallacies, Tindale provides fuller treatments (...) that recognize the dialectical and rhetorical contexts in which fallacies arise. This volume analyzes major fallacies through accessible, everyday examples. Critical questions are developed for each fallacy to help the student identify them and provide considered evaluations. (shrink)

Discusses Derrida's writings on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Christopher Hookway presents a series of studies of themes from the work of the great American philosopher and pragmatist, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1913). These themes center on the question of how we are to investigate the world rationally. Hookway shows how Peirce's ideas about this continue to play an important role in contemporary philosophy.

In recent years, many states in the United States have passed legislation requiring laboratories to report the names of patients with low CD4 cell counts to their state Departments of Health. This name reporting is an integral part of the growing number of “HIV Reporting and Partner Notification Laws” which have emerged in response to recently revised guidelines suggested by the National Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Name reporting for patients with low CD4 cell counts allows for a more accurate (...) tracking of the natural history of HIV disease. However, given that this test is now considered to be an “indicator” of HIV, should it be subject to the same strict consent required for HIV testing? While the CDC has recommended that each state develop its own consent requirements for CD4 cell testing, most states have continued to rely on the presumed consent standards for CD4 cell testing that were in place before the passage of name reporting statutes. This allows physicians who treat patients who refuse HIV testing to order a CD4 cell blood analysis to gather information that is indicative of their patient’s HIV status. This paper examines the ethical and legal issues associated with the practice of “conscientious subversion” as it arises when clinicians use CD4 cell counts as a surrogate for HIV testing. (shrink)