Gnothi sauton - Erkenne dich selbst! Das Streben nach Erkenntnis und Selbsterkenntnis, das nach antiker Auffassung der Gott selbst in dieser Aufforderung dem Menschen ans Herz legt, bildet ein zentrales Moment von Arbogast Schmitts jahrzehntelanger Beschaftigung mit antiker Literatur und Philosophie, die zugleich immer auch eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit modernen Konzepten und Positionen darstellt. Die vorliegende Festschrift vereint zwolf neue Beitrage zur antiken Philosophie, Literatur und Literaturtheorie, in denen Schuler, Freunde und Weggefahrten Arbogast Schmitts dieses Erkenntnisstreben beantworten und fortsetzen. Mit (...) Beitragen von: Wolfgang Bernard, Stefan Buttner, Sabine Follinger, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Andreas Kablitz, Michael Krewet, Joachim Latacz, Thomas Leinkauf, Christian Pietsch, Ernst-Richard Schwinge, Rainer Thiel und Gregor Vogt-Spira. (shrink)

Nach dem Erscheinen der beiden Vorlesungsbände zur Psychologie (KGA II/13) und zur Ästhetik (KGA II/14) im Rahmen der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe der Werke Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermachers liegen verbindliche und vollständige Textgrundlagen vor, die dazu einladen, sich den anthropologischen und ästhetischen Themen Schleiermachers neu zuzuwenden. Von DER Anthropologie Schleiermachers kann nicht gesprochen werden. Er selbst hat eine solche Disziplin nur randständig und wenig konturiert beschrieben. Gleichwohl durchziehen Menschenbildannahmen sein philosophisches und theologisches Werk. Entsprechend breit fächern sich die Beiträge auf und (...) beleuchten anthropologische Fragen aus pädagogischer, theologischer oder psychologischer Sicht und bauen Brücken zu zeitgenössischen (etwa Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi) oder späteren (Ernst Cassirer) Entwürfen. Ästhetik ist die letzte philosophische Disziplin, die Schleiermacher in den Zyklus seiner philosophischen Vorlesungen aufnahm, wobei er über ihre ethische Fundierung bereits in seinen ersten Hallenser Vorlesungen reflektierte. Die Beiträge zur Ästhetik schlagen einen Bogen von der Urbildtheorie, der Praktischen Theologie und der Musikrezeption Schleiermachers bis hin zur Kunsttheorie von Aby Warburg. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to reflect on the complex practice of responsibility within the context of a globalised world and contemporary means of action. Levinas' exploration of the ethical serves as point of entry and is shown to be seeking inter-cultural political relevance through engagement with the issues of postcoloniality and humanism. Yet, Levinas fails to realise the ethical implications of the inevitable instrumental mediation between ethical meaning and political practice. With recourse to Weber, Apel and Ricoeur, (...) class='Hi'>Ernst Wolff proposes a theory of strategic co-responsibility for the uncertain global context of practice. (shrink)

Machine intelligence already helps medical staff with a number of tasks. Ethical decision-making, however, has not been handed over to computers. In this proof-of-concept study, we show how an algorithm based on Beauchamp and Childress’ prima-facie principles could be employed to advise on a range of moral dilemma situations that occur in medical institutions. We explain why we chose fuzzy cognitive maps to set up the advisory system and how we utilized machine learning to train it. We report on the (...) difficult task of operationalizing the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence and patient autonomy, and describe how we selected suitable input parameters that we extracted from a training dataset of clinical cases. The first performance results are promising, but an algorithmic approach to ethics also comes with several weaknesses and limitations. Should one really entrust the sensitive domain of clinical ethics to machine intelligence? (shrink)

We investigated the competition between automatic and controlled processes in a word stem completion task. Prime-display duration and the prime-target interval were manipulated. On each trial a masked prime was displayed briefly, followed either immediately or after a delay by a word stem. The subjects were required to complete each stem with the first word that came to mind, to report any prime they could identify, and not to give as completion any identified prime. By the assumption that automatic processes (...) require less stimulus input and can be completed faster than consciously controlled processes we expected a stronger performance contribution from automatic processes with the shorter prime-display durations and in the immediate stems condition. The results confirmed this expectation. The findings highlight that consciously controlled processes require more time to run their course than unconscious automatic processes. (shrink)

We can hardly know for certain how strongly a scholarly discipline like history is able to affect politics and society, popular views and morals. Whatever its impact, it's influence also varies from epoch to epoch. During a few decades of the nineteenth century, historians were overwhelmed by so many questions and by such high expectations that there existed a large public space for them that they merely had to occupy. At other times, they have had to conquer this space first (...) if they wanted to gain continued attention.To be sure, a differentiation has to be introduced: any society has particular interests, e.g., in parts of its more recent past or in events that society sees as having something like a “mythical quality” about then, events that represent a major divide, that are deeply imprinted on that society's memory, that have attained a special role through tradition. There is, of course, always a space commanding wider public attention for these aspects. However, they are no more than small specks on the large canvas of history. (shrink)

The right to health was codified in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as an individual right, focusing on individual health services at the expense of public health systems. This article assesses the ways in which the individual human right to health has evolved to meet collective threats to the public's health. Despite its repeated expansions, the individual right to health remains normatively incapable of addressing the injurious societal ramifcations of economic globalization, advancing individual (...) rights to alleviate collective inequalities in underlying determinants of health. By examining modern changes to underlying determinants of health, this article concludes that responding to globalized health threats necessitates a collective right to public health. (shrink)

In confronting the insalubrious ramifications of globalization, human rights scholars and activists have argued for greater national and international responsibility pursuant to the human right to health. Codified seminally in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the right to health proclaims that states bear an obligation to realize the “highest attainable standard” of health for all. However, in pressing for the highest attainable standard for each individual, the right to health has been ineffective in (...) compelling states to address burgeoning inequalities in underlying determinants of health, focusing on individual medical treatments at the expense of public health systems. This article contends that the paradigm of individual health, focused on a right to individual medical care, is incapable of responding to health inequities in a globalized world and thereby hampers efforts to operationalize health rights through public health systems. While the right to health has evolved in international discourse over time, this evolution of the individual right to health cannot address the harmful societal ramifications of economic globalization. Rather than relying solely upon an individual right to medical care, envisioning a collective right to public health – a right applied at the societal level to address underlying determinants of health – would alleviate many of the injurious health inequities of globalization. (shrink)

Although machine intelligence is increasingly employed in healthcare, the realm of decision-making in medical ethics remains largely unexplored from a technical perspective. We propose an approach based on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs), which builds on Beauchamp and Childress’ prima-facie principles. The FCM’s weights are optimized using a genetic algorithm to provide recommendations regarding the initiation, continuation, or withdrawal of medical treatment. The resulting model approximates the answers provided by our team of medical ethicists fairly well and offers a high degree (...) of interpretability. Possible applications of such a system include informal guidance on medical ethics dilemmas as well as educational purposes. (shrink)

The Planteome project provides a suite of reference and species-specific ontologies for plants and annotations to genes and phenotypes. Ontologies serve as common standards for semantic integration of a large and growing corpus of plant genomics, phenomics and genetics data. The reference ontologies include the Plant Ontology, Plant Trait Ontology, and the Plant Experimental Conditions Ontology developed by the Planteome project, along with the Gene Ontology, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Phenotype and Attribute Ontology, and others. The project also provides (...) access to species-specific Crop Ontologies developed by various plant breeding and research communities from around the world. We provide integrated data on plant traits, phenotypes, and gene function and expression from 95 plant taxa, annotated with reference ontology terms. (shrink)