Classical aesthetics cherishes the image of a self‐contained author who expresses himself by creating a work of art. This definition is markedly challenged by authors who create their work in co‐operation with a congenial partner. Twin authors are a rare phenomenon but they show that it is possible to split up a literary project and to write novels in tandem. In 1997 I approached some joint authors, questioning them on their common experience, on the distribution of their work load and (...) the harmonisation of the style and content of their novels, as well as the individual steps of production. The material I accumulated was complemented by investigations on late writers such as the brothers Goncourt and the double author Ellery Queen. The project made it evident that twin authors display a number of common features which are characteristic of their trade. All authors asked reported that writing in tandem required a pervasive internal harmony and mutual calculability. A close personal relationship appears to be vital, in the sense that the partners complement each other in their skills and views. When they assemble the material for their plots, most twin authors draw on journalistic research rather than on inspiration and empathy. Their novels normally appeal to a down‐to‐earth taste and avoid digressions into poetry or copious descriptions of feelings and moods. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap hat nur im Vorwort zum „Logischen Aufbau der Welt“ Bemerkungen zum Verhältnis seiner wissenschaftlichen Arbeit zur Kunst und Architektur seiner Zeit veröffentlicht. Aber sein emphatisches Bekenntnis zur Moderne der 20er-Jahre hat bisher nur selten Aufmerksamkeit in der philosophiegeschichtlichen Sekundärliteratur gefunden. In meinem Beitrag versuche ich in den ersten beiden Abschnitten, seinen kulturellen Hintergrund seit seiner Schul- und Studentenzeit zu skizzieren und dann seine persönlichen Kontakte und Austauschbeziehungen mit Vorkämpfern der Moderne wie Franz Roh und Siegfried Giedion zu beschreiben. (...) Nach diesen Vorbereitungen wird die Frage gestellt, ob und in wieweit Carnaps Philosophie selbst als ein Teil der Bewegung der Neuen Sachlichkeit verstanden werden kann oder sogar muss. Zur Beantwortung werden eine Reihe von Charakteristika dieses Zeitgeist-Phänomens aus den – gleichzeitig mit Carnaps „Aufbau“ erschienenen Werken der Genannten – herauspräpariert und dann untersucht, ob diese Kriterien sich auch im Werk Carnaps finden. Das Ergebnis ist, dass man ihn mit Fug und Recht als „Philosoph der Neuen Sachlichkeit“ bezeichnen kann. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophiegeschichte als philosophisches Problem. Kritische Überlegungen namentlich zu Kant und HegelJoachim LandkammerPetra Kolmer, Philosophiegeschichte als philosophisches Problem. Kritische Überlegungen namentlich zu Kant und Hegel. Freiburg/München: Alber Philosophie, 1998. Pp. 423. Cloth, DM 98.00.Das Thema verführt zu paradoxen und widersprüchlichen Selbstbezüglichkeiten: die systematische Frage, wie sich die Philosophie zu ihrer Geschichte verhält (eine Frage, die so alt ist wie die Geschichte der Philosophie selbst) kommt ihrerseits um philosophiegeschichtliche Erörterungen (...) nicht herum. Der daher eigentlich naheliegenden Einsicht, daß die Philosophie ihre eigene Geschichte ist, bzw. daß „Philosophieren" immer bedeutet, Philosophiegeschichte zu betreiben, möchte Kolmer durch ein Plädoyer für eine sozusagen „philosophiefreie", d.h. - nun in ihren Worten - eine „‚bloße' Philosophiehistorie" (379 u.ö.) entgegentreten. Unter lockerer Anlehnung an die skeptischen und anti-idealistischen Individualitäts- und Endlichkeitsphilosopheme von Odo Marquard und Hans Michael Baumgartner, soll die Philosophiegeschichte „als der Philosophie gegenüber eigenständige Wissenschaft" (57) alternativ und konträr zu einer durchwegs platonistisch-teleologisch konzipierten „Philosophiegeschichtsphilosophie" aufgefaßt werden, um so pluralistische Deutungsmöglichkeiten und weitere philosophische Entwicklungen („offene Zukunft") zuzulassen, zeitbedingte Kontexte mitzuberücksichtigen, [End Page 445] randständige Philosophen vor dem Vergessen zu bewahren (vergleichbar dem Problem der „Kleinmeister" in der Musikgeschichte) sowie das vorrationale und irreduzibel Individuelle zu seinem Recht kommen zu lassen. Warum diese hehren Ziele aber nur durch eine Abkoppelung von „der" Philosophie überhaupt und nicht lediglich durch die Abkehr von einer bestimmten, zum Teil ja vielleicht wirklich geschichtsphilosophisch „verseuchten" Tradition der Philosophiegeschichte zu erreichen sein sollen, bleibt allerdings unklar.Immerhin unternimmt Kolmer beachtenswerte interpretatorische Anstrengungen, um in den philosophiegeschichtlichen Teilen ihrer Arbeit Hintergründe und Vorausssetzungen derjenigen Konzeptionen von Philosophiegeschichte herauszuarbeiten, die das Kontrastprogramm zu ihrem Plädoyer für eine philosophisch abstinente Philosophiegeschichte darstellen: dabei werden drei kurz abgehandelten zeitgenössischen Positionen (H. Lübbe, L. Braun, J. Mittelstraß) die eingehender besprochenen Theorien der Philosophiegeschichte von Hegel und Kant (in dieser Reihenfolge!) an die Seite gestellt. Der letztgenannte scheint v.a. mit seinen in den Nachlaßaufzeichnungen dokumentierten Intentionen einer „philosophierenden Geschichte der Philosophie" die gemeinsame Plattform der genannten Theorien zu bilden; denn zum einen berufen sich die erwähnten zeitgenössischen Philosophiegeschichtstheoretiker explizit auf ihn, zum anderen liegen deutliche Analogien vor zwischen Kants Anspruch auf definitive Schlichtung aller vorausgegangenen (und noch auftauchenden) philosophischen Streitigkeiten durch den endgültigen (weder Fichtesche noch sonstige „Nachbesserungen" erfordernde) Richtspruch der kritischen Vernunft einerseits und Hegels Behauptung der „Aufhebung" der gesamten philosophiegeschichtlichen Vergangenheit im System des absoluten Geistes andererseits. Um nun Kant von diesen idealistischen Vereinnahmungen zu befreien und ihn ihrem eigenen Projekt wieder anzunähern, versucht nun Kolmer, diese Strukturähnlichkeit dadurch einzuschränken und zu differenzieren, daß sie auf der einen Seite die heutigen Theorien der Philosophiehistorie generell unter Hegelismus-Verdacht stellt (es handle sich um implizite „Theorien der geschichtlichen Vernunft"), auf der anderen aber den Graben zwischen Hegel und Kant tiefer zieht (ganz anders die Konstanzer Dissertation von Jung-Min Kang, Philosophische Philosophiegeschichte von 1998.) Dafür muß man aber bei der Kant-Exegese wegen der geringen Textbasis relativ weit ausholen und die Konfrontation mit Hegel auf allgemeinere geschichtsphilosophische Theoreme verlagern. Die Autorin übersieht dabei großzügig, daß diese sich nicht ohne weiteres auf die spezielle Programmatik der Philosophiegeschichte übertragen lassen, weswegen es hier des öfteren zu interpretatorischen Schnellschüssen und Oberflächlichkeiten kommt. Daß aber ein Buch, das für „historische Bildung" und für eine vorurteilslose („nichtkonzeptualistische") „Arbeit an den Texten" (82) plädiert - die monistisch-idealistische Philosophiegeschichtsphilosophie sei der kompensatorische Versuch, „mit allen Texten, die man nicht selbst verfaßt hat, grundsätzlich schon fertig zu sein, noch bevor man sie gelesen hat" (399) - darüberhinaus eine gewisse Schlampigkeit im Umgang mit den interpretierten Schriften an den Tag legt, entzieht dem Plädoyer für die anti-spekulative „literarische Einstellung zu Texten" (81) das historistisch-philologische Fundament. So will die Autorin auf S. 333 die Sicht Kants auf den vorkritischen Zustand der Philosophie u.a. mit einem Zitat aus Kants Streit der Fakultäten [End Page 446] belegen, wo („A 44") die Rede sei vom „Krieg, d.i. Zwietracht aus der Entgegensetzung der Endabsichten in Ansehung des gelehrten Mein und Dein". Im Wortlaut steht bei... (shrink)

Studie over het werk van de Duitse wijsgeer (1762-1814), met een beknopte levensbeschrijving.

Forthcoming guide with brief introductions on methods in analytic philosophy by experts on the relevant topics. With sections on: formal methods, argumentation, inferential methods, thought experiments, intuition, ordinary language philosophy, conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering, naturalism, analytic feminism, experimental philosophy, and progress and disagreement in philosophy.

This paper reports research on the influence of corporate and individual characteristics on managers'' social orientation in Germany. The results indicate that mid-level managers expressed a significantly lower social orientation than low-level managers, and that job activity did not impact social orientation. Female respondents expressed a higher social orientation than male respondents. No impact of the political system origin (former East Germany versus former West Germany) on social orientation was shown. Overall, corporate position had a significantly higher impact on social (...) orientation than did the characteristics of the individuals surveyed. (shrink)

We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on (...) a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments. (shrink)

Mémoire de Mons. Lange contre cette philosophie -- Réponse préliminaire d'un auteur anonimeà ce mémoire -- Sommaire de la réponse de Mr. Wolf mȩme avec un avis au lecteur de l'histoire de ce nouveau différend.

'Philosophische Anthropologie' meint in dieser Studie nicht eine philosophische Subdisziplin, sondern eine besondere Theorierichtung in der deutschsprachigen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, die mit den Namen Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Erich Rothacker, Arnold Gehlen, Adolf Portmann u.v.a. mehr verbunden ist. Der erste Teil erzählt die verwickelte, teils abenteuerliche Entstehungs-, Aufstiegs- und Entfaltungsgeschichte dieser Denkergruppe von 1919 bis 1975 - einschließlich ihrer beachtlichen Wirkungsgeschichte in verschiedenen Disziplinen wie der Soziologie, Psychologie, Biologie und der Philosophie selbst. Im zweiten Teil wird der philosophische Identitätskern (...) dieser Philosophischen Anthropologie als Denkansatz präzisiert. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to offer a reconstruction of a challenge to intuition-based armchair philosophy that has been put forward by experimental philosophers of a restrictionist stripe, which I will call the 'master argument'. I will then discuss a number of popular objections to this argument and explain why they either fail to cast doubt on its first, empirical premise or do not go deep enough to make for a lasting rebuttal. Next, I will consider two more promising (...) objections, the grounding objection and the expertise objection, which aim at the second, epistemic premise of the argument. Against this background, I will then suggest what I call 'conservative restrictionism' as the most reasonable default reaction to the experimentalist challenge, which is a combination of the two views of local restrictionism and methodological conservativism. (shrink)

In this paper, we first briefly survey the main responses to the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to the method of cases, given the common assumption that the latter is crucially based on intuitive judgments about cases. Second, we discuss two of the most popular responses in more detail: the expertise defense and the mischaracterization objection. Our take on the expertise defense is that the available empirical data do not support the claim that professional philosophers enjoy relevant expertise in their (...) intuitive judgments about cases. In contrast, the mischaracterization objection seems considerably more promising than its largely negative reception has suggested. We argue that the burden of proof is thus on philosophers who still hold that the method of cases crucially relies on intuitive judgments about cases. Finally, we discuss whether conceptual engineering provides an alternative to the method of cases in light of the challenge from experimental philosophy. We argue that this is not clearly the case, because conceptual engineering also requires descriptive information about the concepts it aims to improve. However, its primarily normative perspective on our concepts makes it largely orthogonal to the challenge from experimental philosophy, and it can also benefit from the empirical methods of the latter. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that knowledge in health care is a multidimensional dynamic construct, in contrast to the prevailing idea of knowledge being an objective state. Polanyi demonstrated that knowledge is personal, that knowledge is discovered, and that knowledge has explicit and tacit dimensions. Complex adaptive systems science views knowledge simultaneously as a thing and a flow, constructed as well as in constant flux. The Cynefin framework is one model to help our understanding of knowledge as a personal construct (...) achieved through sense making. Specific knowledge aspects temporarily reside in either one of four domains – the known, knowable, complex or chaotic, but new knowledge can only be created by challenging the known by moving it in and looping it through the other domains. Medical knowledge is simultaneously explicit and implicit with certain aspects already well known and easily transferable, and others that are not yet fully known and must still be learned. At the same time certain knowledge aspects are predominantly concerned with content, whereas others deal with context. Though in clinical care we may operate predominately in one knowledge domain, we also will operate some of the time in the others. Medical knowledge is inherently uncertain, and we require a context-driven flexible approach to knowledge discovery and application, in clinical practice as well as in health service planning. (shrink)

Algorithmic predictions are promising for insurance companies to develop personalized risk models for determining premiums. In this context, issues of fairness, discrimination, and social injustice might arise: Algorithms for estimating the risk based on personal data may be biased towards specific social groups, leading to systematic disadvantages for those groups. Personalized premiums may thus lead to discrimination and social injustice. It is well known from many application fields that such biases occur frequently and naturally when prediction models are applied to (...) people unless special efforts are made to avoid them. Insurance is no exception. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of algorithmic fairness in the case of insurance premiums. We ask what “fairness” might mean in this context and how the fairness of a premium system can be measured. For this, we apply the established fairness frameworks of the fair machine learning literature to the case of insurance premiums and show which of the existing fairness criteria can be applied to assess the fairness of insurance premiums. We argue that two of the often-discussed group fairness criteria, independence (also called statistical parity or demographic parity) and separation (also known as equalized odds), are not normatively appropriate for insurance premiums. Instead, we propose the sufficiency criterion (also known as well-calibration) as a morally defensible alternative that allows us to test for systematic biases in premiums towards certain groups based on the risk they bring to the pool. In addition, we clarify the connection between group fairness and different degrees of personalization. Our findings enable insurers to assess the fairness properties of their risk models, helping them avoid reputation damage resulting from potentially unfair and discriminatory premium systems. (shrink)

The extent to which machine metaphors are used in synthetic biology is striking. These metaphors contain a specific perspective on organisms as well as on scientific and technological progress. Expressions such as “genetically engineered machine”, “genetic circuit”, and “platform organism”, taken from the realms of electronic engineering, car manufacturing, and information technology, highlight specific aspects of the functioning of living beings while at the same time hiding others, such as evolutionary change and interdependencies in ecosystems. Since these latter aspects are (...) relevant for, for example, risk evaluation of uncontained uses of synthetic organisms, it is ethically imperative to resist the thrust of machine metaphors in this respect. In addition, from the perspective of the machine metaphor viewing an entity as a moral agent or patient becomes dubious. If one were to regard living beings, including humans, as machines, it becomes difficult to justify ascriptions of moral status. Finally, the machine metaphor reinforces beliefs in the potential of synthetic biology to play a decisive role in solving societal problems, and downplays the role of alternative technological, and social and political measures. (shrink)

This study investigated the perception of Mandarin tonal alternations in disyllabic words. In Mandarin, a low-dipping Tone3 is converted to a high-rising Tone2 when followed by another Tone3, known as third tone sandhi. Although previous studies showed statistically significant differences in F0 between a high-rising Sandhi-Tone3 and a Tone2, native Mandarin listeners failed to correctly categorize these two tones in perception tasks. The current study utilized the visual-world paradigm in eye-tracking to further examine whether acoustic details in lexical tone aid (...) lexical access in Mandarin. Results showed that Mandarin listeners tend to process Tone2 as Tone2 whereas they tend to first process Sandhi-T3 as both Tone3 and Tone2, then later detect the acoustic differences between the two tones revealed by the sandhi context, and finally activate the target word during lexical access. The eye-tracking results suggest that subtle acoustic details of F0 may facilitate lexical access in automatic fashion in a tone language. (shrink)

'Philosophische Anthropologie' meint in dieser Studie nicht eine philosophische Subdisziplin, sondern eine besondere Theorierichtung in der deutschsprachigen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, die mit den Namen Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Erich Rothacker, Arnold Gehlen, Adolf Portmann u.v.a. mehr verbunden ist. Der erste Teil erzählt die verwickelte, teils abenteuerliche Entstehungs-, Aufstiegs- und Entfaltungsgeschichte dieser Denkergruppe von 1919 bis 1975 - einschließlich ihrer beachtlichen Wirkungsgeschichte in verschiedenen Disziplinen wie der Soziologie, Psychologie, Biologie und der Philosophie selbst. Im zweiten Teil wird der philosophische Identitätskern (...) dieser Philosophischen Anthropologie als Denkansatz präzisiert. (shrink)

“Philosophical Anthropology,” which is reconstructed here, does not deal with anthropology as a philosophical subdiscipline but rather as a particular philosophical approach within twentieth-century German philosophy, connected with thinkers such as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen. This paper attempts a more precise description of the core identity of Philosophical Anthropology as a paradigm, observes the differences between the authors within the paradigm, and differentiates the paradigm as a whole from other twentieth-century philosophical approaches, such as transcendental philosophy, evolutionary (...) theory or naturalism, existentialism, and hermeneutic philosophy. In determining the human being as “excentric positionality,” Philosophical Anthropology arrives at unique categorical intertwinings between the biological, social and cultural sciences. (shrink)

This article focuses on a drawing, regarded by 18th-century amateurs as a masterpiece by Michelangelo, and serves as a point of departure to illuminate the amateur’s fascination with the artist's hand. This self-referential representation of the artistic process attracted much comment among connoisseurs. As virtually all amateurs had their say on the meaning of « les mains de Michel-Ange » the drawing sheds further light on the objects of desire which informed the amateur’s discourse and the mediality such discourse needed (...) in order to join word and image. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical appraisal of the recent turn in comparative religious ethics to virtue theory; it argues that the specific aspirations of virtue ethicists to make ethics more contextual, interdisciplinary, and practice-centered has in large measure failed to match the rhetoric. I suggest that the focus on the category of the human and practices associated with self-formation along with a methodology grounded in “analogical imagination” has actually poeticized the subject matter into highly abstract textual studies on normative voices (...) within traditions, largely in isolation from considerations of socio-historical context, political and institutional pressures, and the lived ethics of non-elite moral actors. I conclude with some programmatic suggestions for how the field of comparative religious ethics can move forward. (shrink)

In natural kind debates, Boyd's famous Homeostatic Property Cluster theory (HPC) is often misconstrued in two ways: Not only is it thought to make for a normative standard for natural kinds, but also to require the homeostatic mechanisms underlying nomological property clusters to be uniform. My argument for the illegitimacy of both overgeneralizations, both on systematic as well as exegetical grounds, is based on the misconstrued view's failure to account for functional kinds in science. I illustrate the combination of these (...) two misconstruals with recent entries into the natural kind debate about emotions. Finally, I examine and reject Stich's "Kornblith-Devitt method" as a potential justification of these misconstruals. (shrink)

We are never illness or disease, but, rather, always their sum in the world of day-to-day experience. Disease and illness are not closed systems, but mutually constitutive and continuously interacting worlds. In the patient’s case it is always experience as well. Pain, sickness and death help make that particular experienced identity unavoidable, and at some level ultimately inaccessible to medicine’s changing understanding of disease and tools for managing it. Health—rather than cost containment, specific conditions, or technologies—should be the central focus (...) for health care and health-care reform. A compelling reason to focus on health comes from the observation that the prevalence of disease over the .. (shrink)

Although there is a consensus among philosophers of mathematics and mathematicians that mathematical explanations exist, only a few authors have proposed accounts of explanation in mathematics. These accounts fit into the unificationist or top-down approach to explanation. We argue that these models can be complemented by a bottom-up approach to explanation in mathematics. We introduce the mechanistic model of explanation in science and discuss the possibility of using this model in mathematics, arguing that using it does not presuppose a Platonist (...) view of mathematics and allows one to gain insight into why a theorem is true by answering what-if-things-had-been-different questions. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical appraisal of the recent turn in comparative religious ethics to virtue theory; it argues that the specific aspirations of virtue ethicists to make ethics more contextual, interdisciplinary, and practice-centered has in large measure failed to match the rhetoric. I suggest that the focus on the category of the human and practices associated with self-formation along with a methodology grounded in “analogical imagination” has actually poeticized the subject matter into highly abstract textual studies on normative voices (...) within traditions, largely in isolation from considerations of socio-historical context, political and institutional pressures, and the lived ethics of non-elite moral actors. I conclude with some programmatic suggestions for how the field of comparative religious ethics can move forward. (shrink)

This paper examines the antecedents of organizational commitment for adopting corporate environmental responsibility and green practices in the case of the logistics industry in South Korea. Seven hundred and eighty employees and top management from logistics companies were sampled. The data were analyzed using factor analysis, structural equation modeling techniques, and one-way analysis of variance. The results showed that social expectations, organizational support, and stakeholder pressure were the important antecedents for the adoption of corporate environmental responsibility and green practices. In (...) the path analysis, social expectations had the greatest impact on both stakeholder pressure and green practice adoption. Moreover, we found that the higher the job titles were, the more willing they were to adopt green practices. This indicated that the current top management of Korean logistics companies is well aware of being mandated to make a commitment to corporate environmental responsibility and green practices. (shrink)

The notion of the highest good used to occupy a primary role in ethical theorising, but has largely disappeared from the contemporary landscape. The notion was central to both Aristotle's and Kant's ethical theories, however--a surprising observation given that their approaches to ethics are commonly conceived as being diametrically opposed. The essays in this collection provide a comprehensive treatment of the highest good in Aristotle and Kant and show that, even though there are important differences in terms of content, there (...) are also important similarities in terms of the structural features of Aristotle's and Kant's value theories. By carefully analysing Aristotle's and Kant's theories of the highest good, a team of experts in the field shed light on their respective ethical theories and highlight the richness, complexity, and fruitfulness of the notion of the highest good. (shrink)