ZusammenfassungAusgehend von zwei Texten Simone Weils und Charles Baudelaires untersucht der Beitrag die religiöse Signatur der literarischen und politischen Moderne des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Manifest wird sie in einem genuin allegorischen Sprach- und Weltverständnis, das sich gegen die schlechte Unendlichkeit einer techno-wissenschaftlich verdinglichten Welt richtet, die sich jeder Alteritätserfahrung verschließt. Religiöse Begriffe und Figuren sind in der literarischen Moderne nicht je schon uneigentliche Rede, sondern verlangen nach einer vorurteilsfreien Lektüre, die theologische Fragen nicht aus-, sondern miteinschließt. Dafür steht nicht (...) zuletzt auch Walter Benjamins Lektüre Baudelaires ein.On the basis of two texts by Simone Weil and Charles Baudelaire, the article examines the religious signature of literary and political modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries. This signature manifests itself in a genuinely allegorical understanding of language and the world, which is directed against the bad infinity of a techno-scientifically reified worldview insulating itself against any experience of alterity. In literary modernity, religious concepts and figures are not to be categorized a priori as inauthentic speech, but demand an unprejudiced reading that does not exclude theological questions. Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire bears witness to this. (shrink)

Die Abwesenheit des Unbekannten bleibt unbemerkt -- Historische Einbildungen : zu Olivier Rolins "Tigre en papier" -- Leben und denken wie die Schweine : Kleine Dialektik des Poststrukturalismus (von Gilles Châtelet zu Michel Houellebecq) -- Das Verschwinden der leerlaufenden Gegenwart aus der Geschichte : zu Maurice Dantecs Trivialroman "La sirène rouge" -- Tartuffe desakralisiert : zur Krise des frazösischen Bildungssystems -- "Les princes sont des dieux" : zum Religionsbegriff des französischen Staates -- Die Demokratie gegen ihre Liebhaber verteidigt : zum (...) Denken Claude Leforts -- Totale Marktwirtschaft : zu Alain Supiots Kritik am Ultraliberalismus -- Warum Gesetze? : zu Pierre Legendres "Abhnadlung über den Vater" -- Wem gehören die Töchter? : zum sexuellen Machtanspruch der Konsumgesellschaften -- Kleine Illusionen : Anmerkungen zu den deutsch-französischen Kulturbeziehungen. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche hat Frankreich ein Leben lang geschätzt. Es war gleichzeitig das Land, in dem er sichfrühestens verstanden zu wissen glauben durfte.Nietzsche und Frankreich umreißteine Vielzahl und Vielfalt unterschiedlicher Begegnungen, die sich jeweils durch ihre Wechselwirkung auszeichnen und in ihrer historischen wie systematischen Tiefendimensionund Aktualität ausgelotet werden.

Wie kommt es, dass die Freiheit im Selbstverständnis der meisten europäischen Nationen eine so große Rolle spielt? Welche Traditionen haben das unterstützt, welche behindert? Dieses Problemfeld, das von großer Aktualität ist, wird hier von renommierten Theologen und Philosophen dargestellt. Die Freiheit des Einzelnen und das liberale, tolerante Zusammenleben im Respekt vor der Freiheit anderer musste erst philosophisch begründet werden, bevor es politische Realität werden konnte. Die Grundlagen dieses Prozesses und der damit verbundenen Probleme zu verstehen, ist zentral für jeden zeitgeschichtlich (...) interessierten Menschen. Zum ersten Mal wird die Entwicklung der europäischen Freiheitsidee hier im Zusammenhang gewürdigt. (shrink)

Ethical concerns regarding agricultural practices can be found to co-evolve with technological developments. This paper aims to create an understanding of ethics that is helpful in debating technological innovation by studying such a co-evolution process in detail: the development and adoption of the milking robot. Over the last decade an increasing number of milking robots, or automatic milking systems (AMS), has been adopted, especially in the Netherlands and a few other Western European countries. The appraisal of this new technology in (...) ethical terms has appeared to be a complicated matter. Compared to using a conventional milking parlor, the use of an AMS entails in several respects a different practice of dairy farming, the ethical implications and evaluation of which are not self-evident but are themselves part of a dynamic process. It has become clear that with its use, the entire practice of dairy farming has been reorganized around this new device. With a robot, cows must voluntarily present themselves to be milked, whereby an ethical norm of (individual) freedom for cows can be seen to emerge together with this new technology. But adopting a robot also implies changes in what is considered to be a good farmer and an appropriate relation between farmer and cow. Through interviews, attending “farmers’ network” meetings in the Netherlands, and studying professional literature and dedicated dairy farming web forums, this paper traces the way that ethical concerns are a dynamic part of this process of rearranging a variety of elements of the practice of dairy farming. (shrink)

A plethora of ethical issues in livestock agriculture has emerged to public attention in recent decades, of which environmental and animal welfare concerns are but two, albeit prominent, themes. For livestock agriculture to be considered sustainable, somehow these interconnected themes need to be addressed. Ethical debate on these issues has been extensive, but mostly started from and focused on single issues. The views of farmers in these debates have been largely absent, or merely figured as interests, instead of being considered (...) morally worthwhile themselves. In this paper the relevance for ethical debates of the ways farmers discuss and engage with moral concerns is explored. The variety of norms that figure in contemporary farming practices is sketched in its multifarious complexity, illustrated by ethnographic fieldwork, and systematized in terms of “orders of worth.” Reviewing the practical arguments and commitments of farmers within this framework reveals that farming practices are subject to mixed motives, in which an amalgam of types of concerns play a role. Recognition of the peculiarly entangled nature of the ethics of farming practices could counter the tendency in policy making, technological innovation, and ethical thought to compartmentalize our moral landscape. Understanding farming practice as the integration of a mosaic of concerns in the light of a variety of moral experiences would foster public appreciation of positions of farmers in debates on improving the sustainability and societal acceptability of livestock agriculture. (shrink)

Next SectionBy discussing a novel paradigm, it is shown that the likeliness of an operator to trigger an intervention effect in a wh-in-situ question is determined by the logical properties of that operator (contra Beck 1996a, 2006, for instance). A new empirical generalization accounting for the differences between operators in their ability to cause intervention and improving on existing analyses is suggested. This generalization is fully predictive and allows one to not have to list in the lexicon whether an intervener (...) is problematic or not. It is implemented as a formal condition on wh-questions in a version of Hamblin 1973's/Karttunen 1977's question semantics that makes crucial use of Chierchia 2006's domain alternatives. (shrink)

In this paper we study the termination behavior of Russell’s description elimination rewrite system. We discuss certain claims made by Kripke (2005) in his paper concerning the possible nontermination of elimination of descriptions.

This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with (...) Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order. (shrink)

In 1878, as a consequence of an international Balkan summit in Berlin, Austria–Hungary was given permission to occupy the troubled Ottoman provinces Bosnia and Hercegovina. A gory invasion campaign ensued, followed by four decades of civil administration. Finally, the territories were annexated by the Habsburg Monarchy in 1908 as an appendix of sorts, which almost caused the premature outbreak of a great war in Europe. This article will sketch the background for this last – and lethal – expansion of the (...) empire and pursue the research questions of (a) whether this constitutes a case of colonialism within Europe and (b) what its repercussions were, critically challenging the alleged ‘civilising mission’ that would legitimise the whole undertaking. (shrink)

The influence of movement skill on action representations and identification of agency was investigated. Point-light displays were created of highly skilled gestures of thirteen orchestral conductors in visual, auditory, and audiovisual versions and compared to two control conditions . In subsequent experimental sessions, participants indicated whether displays presented them or other conductors, whether the soundtrack contained their or others’ musical interpretations, and rated the quality and emotional content of the gestures. Self-recognition was more accurate in conditions presenting highly skilled conducting (...) movements as compared to other displays. Participants judged the quality of their own movements to be better than those of others, independently of whether or not they recognized movement agency. Emotional content was perceived accurately across conditions both for own and others’ actions. These results point to the influence of dynamical characteristics of motor skill, rather than merely type of movement or emotional content, on action representations and self-other identification. (shrink)

The presence of contrastive focus on pronouns interpreted as bound variables is puzzling. Bound variables do not refer, and it is therefore unclear how two of them can be made to contrast with each other. It is argued that this is a problem for both alternative-based accounts such as Rooth’s (Nat Lang Semantics 1:75–116, 1992) and givenness-based ones such as Schwarzschild’s (Nat Lang Semantics 7:141–177, 1999). The present paper shows that previous approaches to this puzzle face an empirical problem, namely (...) the co-occurrence of additive too and focus on bound pronouns. Our account is based on the idea that the alternatives introduced by focused bound pronouns denote individuals. Putting forward the novel concept of compositional reconstruction, we show that a suitably modified Roothian analysis of focus licensing allows us to get bound pronouns to contrast with other bound pronouns. The reason for this is that the number of potential alternatives increases. We also suggest a modification of Rooth’s ~-operator: contrastiveness becomes a requirement of the operator, which is modelled as a definedness condition. It is argued that in the case of focused bound pronouns a ~-operator is necessarily inserted in the scope of the quantifier. If this is on the right track, it follows that the phenomenon of focused bound pronouns warrants both an operator interpreting focus as well as a semantic value for the contribution of focus. Any givenness-based analysis must include these two ingredients as well; we suggest a way in which this can be implemented more or less straightforwardly. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Compassionate Use beschreibt die Anwendung zulassungsüberschreitender Arzneimittel für Patient*innengruppen, die an einer lebensbedrohlichen oder zu einer schweren Behinderung führenden Erkrankung leiden, ohne dass eine alternative Therapieoption besteht. An Ärzt*innen vorbei werden solche Programme ausschließlich von Pharmaunternehmen initiiert, was viele ethische Konflikte mit sich bringt. Eine neue Dimension erreichte das 2020 gestartete Programm für _Onasemnogenum abeparvovecum_ zur Therapie von Spinaler Muskelatrophie bei Kindern, welches die Krankheit nach nur einmaliger Gabe stoppen sollte. Die globale Allokation von nur 100 zur Verfügung gestellten (...) Dosierungen per Losverfahren stellte ein Novum bei der Allokation in Compassionate Use-Programmen dar und wurde vielfach kritisiert. Diese Arbeit untersucht mögliche alternative Allokationsprinzipien auf das Beispiel von _Onasemnogenum abeparvovecum_. Für jedes in Frage kommende Prinzip der Allokation medizinischer Güter bestehen Aspekte, die im Hinblick auf die drängende Zeit und die globale Verteilung bedacht werden müssen. Dies lässt einige Prinzipien wie First-Come-First-Served vernachlässigbar erscheinen. Verbliebene Prinzipien werden hierarchisch geordnet, um einen Algorithmus abzuleiten, der eine Alternative zum Losverfahren darstellen kann. Eine Kombination von Teilnahmebereitschaft bei Forschung, Dringlichkeit und Erfolgsaussicht (bezogen auf die Existenz supportiver Therapieoptionen) kann in ähnlichen Fällen bei zukünftigen globalen Compassionate Use-Programmen bei Kindern erwogen werden. Da universelle Algorithmen nur schwer definierbar sind, sollten Allokationskriterien in jedem Fall durch ein unabhängiges Expert*innengremium diskutiert werden. Sowohl die Konstitution eines solchen Gremiums sowie deren verpflichtende Konsultierung sind gefordert, um für Entlastung aller Beteiligten zu sorgen und Willkür vorzubeugen. (shrink)

Definition of the problem Compassionate use is the use of unapproved drugs in groups of patients suffering from a disease that, in the absence of an alternative treatment option, is life-threatening or leads to severe disability. Physicians are not in charge because access to the drug is only granted by pharmaceutical companies, which comes along with many ethical issues. Launched in 2020, the program of Onasemnogenum abeparvovecum against spinal muscular atrophy in children reached a new dimension. The intent of this (...) drug is to stop the progression of the disease with just a single dose, but the company limited the doses in the program to only 100. The global allocation was by lottery, which was considered a novelty in compassionate use history and therefore widely criticized. This paper investigates alternative allocation principles. Arguments Each possible principle is accompanied by many aspects that need to be considered with regard to urgency and global distribution. This makes some principles like first-come-first-served seem negligible. Remaining principles are ordered hierarchically to derive an algorithm that can represent an alternative to a lottery. A combination of willingness to participate in research, urgency, and likelihood of success (relative to the availability of supportive treatment options) may be considered in similar cases in future global compassionate use programs with children. Conclusion Since universal algorithms are difficult to define, allocation criteria should always be discussed by an independent panel of experts. Both the constitution of such a panel and its mandatory consultation are necessary in order to decrease the burden for all those involved and to prevent arbitrariness. (shrink)

It has always been a mantra of Habsburg history that Austria-Hungary never had colonies. This article investigates why Bosnia-Herzegovina can be regarded as such indeed, developing a check list of factors from critical colonial history, showing that it is a Eurocentric view actually that prevents us from recognizing colonialism on European soil.