The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. In this book Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, and an international group of philosophers address the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers from (...) the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy. (shrink)

There is a tension between the idea of popular sovereignty and our understanding that basic constitutional rights and liberties have a normative authority which is independent from the results of democratic decision‐making procedures. On the one hand there is the claim that the content of political justice, at least as far as the basic liberties are concerned, is to be fixed solely by substantive moral and political argument, while on the other there is the claim that it is the people (...) who determine the specific scheme of basic liberties that they live under. The apparent tension between the two claims can be resolved by introducing, firstly, a distinction between the concept of justice and the concept of legitimacy and, secondly, between proto‐rights and constitutional rights. Unlike constitutional rights, proto‐rights are moral, not legal, rights, and they are less specific than constitutional rights: one set of proto‐rights allows for various schemes of legal constitutional rights. Proto‐rights are part of the principles of justice and can be established only by substantive argument while constitutional rights have to be established by the procedures of democratic legitimization, and, therefore, they are a result of the exercise of popular sovereignty. The correlated distinctions between justice and legitimacy, and between proto‐rights and constitutional rights, allow us to specify the scope of the two claims and, hence, to affirm both simultaneously. The philosophical and legal relevance of the distinctions made is elucidated by a brief discussion of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech in the US and Germany. (shrink)

Imagine you are walking down a city street. It is windy and raining. Amidst the bustle you see a young woman. She sits under a railway bridge, hardly protected from the rain and holds a woolen hat containing a small number of coins. You can see that she trembles from the cold. Or imagine seeing an old woman walking in the street at dusk, clutching her bag with one hand and a walking stick with the other. A group of male (...) youths walk behind her without overtaking, drunk and in the mood for mischief. It doesn't need an academic to say what vulnerability is. We can all see it, much more often than we care to. (shrink)

In his classic paper On Computable Numbers Turing analyzed what can be done by a human computor in a routine, “mechanical” way. He argued that mechanical op-erations obey locality conditions and are carried out on configurations satisfying boundedness conditions. Processes meeting these restrictive conditions can be shown to be computable by a Turing machine. Turing viewed memory limitations of computors as the ultimate reason for the restrictive conditions. In contrast, Gandy analyzed in his paper Church’s Thesis and Principles for Mechanisms (...) what can be done by “discrete deterministic mechanical devices” and appealed to physical considerations to motivate restrictive principles. These devices include, crucially, ones that carry out parallel processes, e.g., cellular automata. Following Turing’s methodological ways and guided by Conway’s “Game of Life” as a paradigm, Gandy formulated four restrictive principles and proved that devices satisfying them are computationally equivalent to Turing machines. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel (...) when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of racism and sexism. Yet it is puzzling to many philosophers how we could wrong one another by virtue of what we believe about them. This paper defends the idea that we can morally wrong one another by what we believe about them from two such puzzles. The first puzzle concerns whether we have the right sort of control over our beliefs for them to be subject to moral evaluation. And the second concerns whether moral wrongs would come into conflict with the distinctively epistemic standards that govern belief. Our answer to both puzzles is that the distinctively epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. This account of moral encroachment explains how epistemic norms governing belief are sensitive to the moral requirements governing belief. (shrink)

Benefit sharing has been a recurrent theme in international debates for the past two decades. However, despite its prominence in law, medical ethics and political philosophy, the concept has never been satisfactorily defined. In this conceptual paper, a definition that combines current legal guidelines with input from ethics debates is developed. Philosophers like boxes; protective casings into which they can put concisely-defined concepts. Autonomy is the human capacity for self-determination; beneficence denotes the virtue of good deeds, coercion is the intentional (...) threat of harm and so on. What about benefit sharing? Does the concept have a box and are the contents clearly defined? The answer to this question has to be no. The concept of benefit sharing is almost unique in that various disciplines use it regularly without precise definitions. In this article, a definition for benefit sharing is provided, to eliminate unnecessary ambiguity. (shrink)

Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. This volume, the fifteenth publication in the Lecture Notes in Logic series, collects papers presented at the symposium 'Reflections on the Foundations of Mathematics' held in celebration of Solomon Feferman's 70th birthday (The 'Feferfest') at Stanford University, California in 1988. (...) Feferman has shaped the field of foundational research for nearly half a century. These papers reflect his broad interests as well as his approach to foundational research, which emphasizes the solution of mathematical and philosophical problems. There are four sections, covering proof theoretic analysis, logic and computation, applicative and self-applicative theories, and philosophy of modern mathematical and logic thought. (shrink)

The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience, “what it’s like,” is determined by the contents of a select group of special intentional states of the subject. Fred Dretske (1995), Mike Thau (2002), Michael Tye (1995) and many others have embraced intentionalism, but these philosophers have not generally appreciated that, since we are intimately familiar with the qualitative character of experience, we thereby have special access to the nature of these contents. In this paper, we take advantage (...) of this fact to show that intentionalism is incompatible with the idea that these contents are singular or general propositions, and thus that intentionalism is incompatible with one dominant trend in thinking about contents in general. In particular, there appear to be insoluble difficulties in explaining how the phenomenology of place and time can be explained by any intentionalist theory appealing to singular or general propositions. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...) for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

Thema der vorliegenden Arbeit ist der dialektische Gehalt der wichtigsten bildungstheoretischen Abhandlungen des padagogischen Theoretikers Josef Derbolav. Ergebnis der zum grossten Teil immanent durchgefuhrten Analyse ist der Aufweis, dass Derbolav die dialektische Fassung didaktischer, anthropologischer und handlungstheoretischer Prinzipien aufgrund metaphysischer Denkstrukturen nicht oder nur teilweise gelingt. Inwieweit einige dieser Prinzipien dialektisches Potential enthalten konnten, zeigt der Verfasser anhand der Entwicklung eines eigenen, an der hermeneutischen Philosophie orientierten dialektischen Standpunktes.".

Based on the author's thesis, Freiburg i. B., 1969.

In this rapid commentary, a mini-review is given of the present state-of-knowledge regarding the etiology and epidemiology of the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV and the risks for developing Acute respiratory distress syndrome. The available knowledge on the viral genomics, molecular biology and pathogenicity of viruses of the Coronaviridae family and other Nidovirales, forms a helpful template for understanding the present pandemic outbreak. However, important questions remain unanswered about the underlying mechanism causing the very high case fatality ratios and mechanisms regarding severe (...) reactions like ARDS, fatal cardiac and renal failures, associated with a number of important comorbidity factors. Immunological reactions to lung alveoles in particular in late phase ARDS in SARS-like CoV diseases, so far may not have received enough attention. Finally a shortlist of questions for high priority further research is suggested. (shrink)

As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive (...) tract, feels an impressive number of the sensations felt by someone who is gut-wrenchingly sad. Yet, unless she feels bad, the way she feels is only a pale echo of the feeling of sadness. If she feels good in spite of the burrito and the wind, then she does not feel at all the way she would if she were sad. Likewise, a man falling asleep can hardly fail to feel his muscles relax, his heart rate fall, and so on, but unless he feels good his state is only a shadow of feeling content. This paper will begin with a sketch of the nature of pleasure and displeasure, and the relation between them and the feelings that are characteristic of emotions. It will then argue that the capacity to feel pleased and displeased is, quite literally, a sense modality: one allowing us to perceive net change in the satisfaction of our intrinsic desires. As with any sense modality, the capacity to feel pleased and displeased displays substantial modularity. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the modularity of pleasure and displeasure contributes to effects that might reasonably be called “the modularity of the emotions.”. (shrink)

In this article we give a unifying approach to the theory of fundamental sequences and their related Hardy hierarchies of number-theoretic functions and we show the equivalence of the new approach with the classical one.

Moral error theory is the doctrine that our first-order moral commitments are pervaded by systematic error. It has been objected that this makes the error theory itself a position in first-order moral theory that should be judged by the standards of competing first-order moral theories :87–139, 1996) and Kramer. Kramer: “the objectivity of ethics is itself an ethical matter that rests primarily on ethical considerations. It is not something that can adequately be contested or confirmed through non-ethical reasoning” [2009, 1]). (...) This paper shows that error theorists can resist this charge if they adopt a particular understanding of the presuppositions of moral discourse. (shrink)

[1] Textteil : Grundlagen, Prozeduren, Evaluation -- [2] Anhang : Interviewleitfaden, Tonbandtranskript und Auswertungsbeispiele.

1. Bd. Einleitung. Der altarische Himmelsgott, das höchste gute Wesen. -- 2. Bd. Naturverehrung und Lebensfeste.

Zuerst im 2CV, dann im umgebauten VW-Bus: Das Zürcher Fotografenpaar Margrit und Ernst Baumann, 1929 bzw. 1928 geboren, begann in den 1950er-Jahren rund um den Erdball zu reisen. Ihre Fotografien publizierten sie in Zeitschriften und Zeitungen wie Stern, Neue Zürcher Zeitung oder Das gelbe Heft und brachten so die Welt in die Wohnzimmer. Kosmopolitan und neugierig kamen sie zu Motiven mit Seltenheitswert: Farbporträts von Che Guevara gehören ebenso dazu wie Reportagen über die letzten Kopfjäger im ecuadorianischen Urwald. Ein Schwerpunkt dieser (...) reich bebilderten Doppelmonografie ist ihre Reise entlang der “Panamericana” 1957-1959, die Süd- und Nordamerika verbindet. Sie fotografierten Reportagen, Porträts und Landschaftsbilder und drehten den wohl ersten Farbfilm über den legendären Verkehrsweg. Dieser Film und ein Filporträt über die beiden Fotografen sind dem Buch auf DVD beigefügt. Das Buch präsentiert Funde aus ihrem Fotoarchiv - viele Bilder erstmals im Originalausschnitt - sowie Publikationen in Zeitschriften. Der Historiker und Schriftsteller Wilfried Meichtry erzählt vom ereignisreichen Leben des Paars, das sich zeitlebens als journalistische Handwerker verstanden hat. Der Fotohistoriker Markus Schürpf ordnet ihr Werk in die Foto- und Pressegeschichte ein, Nadine Olonetzky verfasst Begleittexte zu den Bildern. Eine Entdeckung in der Schweizer Fotogeschichte. (shrink)

Global bioethics is a bold project. In its moderate form, it aims to find solutions to the dilemmas posed by modern medicine and the biological sciences through intercultural understanding of human obligations and opportunities. In its more ambitious form, it endeavors to cover all possible ethical problems arising with regard to life and living things on earth. Given the ambitiousness of even the moderate aim, it is unsurprising that disputes are frequent and agreements are scarce. One of the most contentious (...) issues is whether human rights should play an important role in global bioethics or not. a. (shrink)

This article considers how we should frame the ethical issues raised by current proposals for large-scale genebanks with on-going links to medical and lifestyle data, such as the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council's 'UK Biobank'. As recent scandals such as Alder Hey have emphasised, there are complex issues concerning the informed consent of donors that need to be carefully considered. However, we believe that a preoccupation with informed consent obscures important questions about the purposes to which such collections are (...) put, not least that they may be only haphazardly used for research —an end that would not fairly reflect the original altruistic motivation of donors, and the trust they must invest. We therefore argue that custodians of such databases take on a weighty pro-active duty, to encourage public debate about the ends of such collections and to sponsor research that reflects publicly agreed priorities and provides public benefits. (shrink)

On September 28, 2002, 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler, a banker's son, was abducted on the way to his parents' house in Frankfurt. A sum of one million Euro was demanded for his release. Three days after Jakob's disappearance, Magnus Gäfgen, a 32-year-old law student, collected the ransom from the arranged tram stop in Frankfurt during the night. While under observation by the police, he ordered a new Mercedes and booked a holiday abroad. Seventy-six hours after Jakob's disappearance, the police arrested (...) Gäfgen and his 16-year-old girlfriend while simultaneously searching his flat. There they found the missing ransom, but no sign of Jakob. a b. (shrink)

The Hygiene Hypothesis has been recognized as an important cornerstone to explain the sudden increase in the prevalence of asthma and allergic diseases in modernized culture. The recent epidemic of allergic diseases is in contrast with the gradual implementation of Homo sapiens sapiens to the present-day forms of civilization. This civilization forms a gradual process with cumulative effects on the human immune system, which co-developed with parasitic and commensal Helminths. The clinical manifestation of this epidemic, however, became only visible in (...) the second half of the twentieth century. In order to explain these clinical effects in terms of the underlying IgE-mediated reactions to innocuous environmental antigens, the low biodiversity of antigens in the domestic environment plays a pivotal role. The skewing of antigen exposure as a cumulative effect of reducing biodiversity in the immediate human environment as well as in changing food habits, provides a sufficient and parsimonious explanation for the rise in allergic diseases in a highly developed and helminth-free modernized culture. Socio-economic tendencies that incline towards a further reduction of environmental biodiversity may provide serious concern for future health. This article explains that the “Hygiene Hypothesis”, the “Old Friends Hypothesis”, and the “Skewed Antigen Exposure Hypothesis” are required to more fully explain the rise of allergy in modern societies. (shrink)

The role of "skillful means" is examined in relation to the important Mahāyāna philosopher Nāgārjuna, and it is argued that the doctrine of "emptiness" is best understood as a critical reflection on the nature of Buddhist praxis. Whereas traditional Western scholarship sees Nāgārjuna as struggling with certain metaphysical problems, a "skillful means" reading situates his philosophy within a debate about the nature and efficacy of Buddhist practice. Thus, a "skillful means" reading of Nāgārjuna does not ask what it means for (...) causality, the self, or consciousness to be "empty" in a very general sense, but how "emptiness" relates to the soteriological practices of Buddhism and what it means for these practices to be "empty" of inherent nature. It is argued that this situates Nāgārjuna's philosophy within a highly critical, self-reflective movement in the Buddhist tradition. (shrink)

Like much in this book, the title and dust jacket illustration are clever. The first evokes Hume's remark in the Treatise that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’ The second, which represents a cross between a dance-step and a clinch, links up with the title and anticipates an example used throughout the book to support its central claims: that Ronnie, unlike Bradley, has a reason to go to a party – namely, that there will (...) be dancing at the party – because Ronnie, unlike Bradley, loves dancing. So, the explanation of why Ronnie's and Bradley's reasons differ lies in their respective psychologies.Schroeder argues for a version of the Humean Theory of Reasons he calls Hypotheticalism, which says that every reason is explained by a desire in the same way as Ronnie's is. Schroeder argues that on almost every count, Hypotheticalism is as good as, or preferable to, the Humean and non-Humean alternatives; and he defends it against an array of objections. For example, he explains that while Hypotheticalism claims that ‘desires have to serve in the explanation of every reason because desires are part of the correct analysis of reasons’, it does not claim that a desire that explains a reason is part of that reason: rather it is a background condition for it. This, Schroeder argues, allows him to rebut a variety of objections that depend on conflating reasons with their background conditions. Other …. (shrink)

The Federation of Belgian companies is a confederation which groups 36 branch associations covering 30. 000 individual firms. About 85 % are small and medium-sizedfirms occupying less than 50 employees. The VBO/FEB is the most important exponent of the high degree of affiliation on the employers' side. The process of decision making reflects the structure of the federation. The mandate is defined in the board of the VBO/FEB, composed by a representative ofeach branch association. This representative holds his mandate on (...) the basis of the deliberations held in the elected board of his association. The guiding principle is consensus, which is not synonymous of unanimity. When a consistent and representative majority emerges from the debate, the members holding another opinion join that majority in a spirit ofemployers' solidarity. The decision making process aims in this way to combine efficiency and democracy. This is particularly important for the VBO/FEB, as that organisation not only acts as a lobby but also as a social partner able to conclude agreements. In the Belgian system, social partners are consulted by the authorities, because of their representativeness. It must however be clear that they may not interfere with the political decisions which in our democratic system rest with government and parliament. (shrink)