While the possibility of enacting a sui generis Biobank Act has been debated in Germany at great length, as of yet the country has not implemented any biobankspecific legislation. Instead, oversight is available via a network of research and privacy laws, including those of the European Union. The Nationale Kohorte, Germany's large-scale, population-based epidemiological research biobank, is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and there are currently 108 registered bio-banks throughout Germany. The current system, including the structure (...) and study design of the Nationale Kohorte, privileges the protection of personal information even at the cost of socially desirable research; it remains to be seen if forthcoming legislation will shift this balance. (shrink)

Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 experts and stakeholders using the World Café method to identify key governance challenges and explore how public involvement can (...) meet these challenges. This brief report discusses four cross-cutting themes from the study: the need to move beyond individual consent; issues in benefit and data sharing; the challenge of delineating and understanding publics; and the goal of clarifying justifications for public involvement. The report aims to provide a starting point for making sense of the relationship between public involvement and the governance of population-level biomedical research, showing connections, potential solutions and issues arising at their intersection. We suggest that, in population-level biomedical research, there is a pressing need for a shift away from conventional governance frameworks focused on the individual and towards a focus on collectives, as well as to foreground ethical issues around social justice and develop ways to address cultural diversity, value pluralism and competing stakeholder interests. There are many unresolved questions around how this shift could be realised, but these unresolved questions should form the basis for developing justificatory accounts and frameworks for suitable collective models of public involvement in population-level biomedical research governance. (shrink)

Review of Nils Hoppe book, Bioequity--Property in the Body.

This paper presents the outlines of a phenomenological theory of foundational or non-inferential knowledge according to which the facts or states of affairs towards which our beliefs are intentionally directed can sometimes serve as reasons or evidence for what we believe. This occurs in acts of fulfillment, in which an object or state of affairs is given as it is thought to be. Hopp further argues that the sorts of empirical facts that can serve as reasons for noninferentially justified beliefs (...) are not confined to facts about one’s own occurrent mental states, but include facts about the physical world as well. In the course of defending the view against objections, Hopp argues that we should be internalists about the reasons in virtue of which what we believe is justified but externalists about the factors in virtue of which our states of believing have the status of being justified. He also argues against the claim that mental states, such as perceptual experiences, constitute our evidence for empirical beliefs. (shrink)

In the course of history, the doctrine of just war has proven to be susceptible to political misuse. Furthermore, it features a number of conceptual deficiencies. In the leading perspective of ‘just peace’, peace ethics primarily emphasises the task of violence prevention, for which the realisation and protection of human rights gain central importance. Even the traditional term ‘common good’ can be reformulated in this context. The concept of ‘just peace’ critically confronts the discussion on the legitimacy of pre-emptive wars. (...) With regard to ‘humanitarian interventions’, it calls for a sophisticated catalogue of criteria that helps to define the presuppositions under which such interventions can be deemed legitimate. (shrink)

Unesco and the International Council of Music have begun work on a musicological project of considerable extent, since it is a universal history of music in ten volumes. At present, the provisional title is Music as a Language of Man: A World History of Music.

Phenomenology has primarily been concerned with conceptual questions about knowledge and ontology. However, in recent years the rise of interest and research in applied phenomenology has seen the study of political phenomenology move to a central place in the study of phenomenology generally. The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology is the first major collection on this important topic. Comprising 35 chapters by an international team of expert contributors, the Handbook is organised into six clear parts, each with its own Introduction (...) by the editors: Founders of Phenomenology Existentialist Phenomenology Phenomenology of the Social and Political World Phenomenology of Alterity Phenomenology in Debate Contemporary Developments. Full attention is given to central figures in the phenomenological movement, including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas as well as those whose contribution to political phenomenology is more distinctive, such as Arendt, De Beauvoir and Fanon. Also included are chapters on gender, race and intersectionality, disability, and technology. Ideal for those studying phenomenology, continental philosophy and political theory, The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology bridges an important gap between a major philosophical movement and contemporary political issues and concepts. (shrink)

This print textbook is available for students to rent for their classes. The Pearson print rental program provides students with affordable access to learning materials, so they come to class ready to succeed. For courses in Introductory Philosophy An active approach to philosophy While most introduction to philosophy courses focus on reading philosophical texts, Ultimate Questions: Thinking about Philosophy pushes students toward an active learning approach. The text is designed to instigate meaningful discussions between students and instructors, relying on more (...) than 100 "Food for Thought" exercises throughout. These exercises are based on the author's own experience engaging students in lecture environments and are designed to help students discover how well they understand philosophical concepts and how to apply them to real-life scenarios. The 4th Edition has been extensively updated with a new chapter, chapter expansions, and more. (shrink)

This chapter examines autonomism. Autonomism is roughly the view that an artwork’s ethical properties do not bear on its aesthetic or artistic value. The author sketches some of the view’s history before describing various versions of it defended over the last quarter-century. These are divided into ‘radical’, ‘robust’, and ‘moderate’ forms of autonomism. The author considers the strengths and weaknesses of each. The author also devotes some space to the ‘interactionist’ views against which contemporary autonomism is typically opposed. In doing (...) so, he considers the so-called ‘qua problem’ at some length, as well its bearing on these various autonomist positions. (shrink)

This contribution traces the parallel development of two distinct approaches to peasant agroecological education: the peasant-to-peasant horizontal method that disseminated across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean beginning in the 1970s, and the political-agroecological training schools of combined consciousness-building and skill-formation that have been at the heart of the educational processes of member organizations of La Via Campesina since the 1990s. Applying a theoretical framework that incorporates territorial struggle, agroecology and popular education, we examine spatial and organizational aspects of each of these (...) models for peasant education and movement-building. Recognizing that the models, their respective contexts, and the dialectical relationships therein have been in constant evolution, we share findings on the movement-place as a territorial system with socio-historical subjectivity, that is, peasant movements as territorially-embedded, collective historical actors. This leads to some conclusions in moving past educational theory that has centered upon individual subjects, and approaching a conception of territory as a subject of learning processes. (shrink)

The focus of this paper are Dummett's meaning-theoretical arguments against classical logic based on consideration about the meaning of negation. Using Dummettian principles, I shall outline three such arguments, of increasing strength, and show that they are unsuccessful by giving responses to each argument on behalf of the classical logician. What is crucial is that in responding to these arguments a classicist need not challenge any of the basic assumptions of Dummett's outlook on the theory of meaning. In particular, I (...) shall grant Dummett his general bias towards verificationism, encapsulated in the slogan 'meaning is use'. The second general assumption I see no need to question is Dummett's particular breed of molecularism. Some of Dummett's assumptions will have to be given up, if classical logic is to be vindicated in his meaning-theoretical framework. A major result of this paper will be that the meaning of negation cannot be defined by rules of inference in the Dummettian framework. (shrink)

This note corrects an error in my paper 'Normalisation and Subformula Property for a System of Classical Logic with Tarski's Rule' (Archive for Mathematical Logic 61 (2022): 105-129, DOI 10.1007/s00153-021-00775-6): Theorem 2 is mistaken, and so is a corollary drawn from it as well as a corollary that was concluded by the same mistake. Luckily this does not affect the main result of the paper.

ABSTRACTEvaluative aesthetic discourse communicates that the speaker has had first-hand experience of what is talked about. If you call a book bewitching, it will be assumed that you have read the book. If you say that a building is beautiful, it will be assumed that you have had some visual experience with it. According to an influential view, this is because knowledge is a norm for assertion, and aesthetic knowledge requires first-hand experience. This paper criticizes this view and argues for (...) an alternative view, according to which aesthetic discourse expresses affective states of mind, analogously to how assertions express beliefs. It is because these affective states require first-hand experience that aesthetic discourse communicates that such acquaintance is at hand. The paper furthermore argues that the lack of an experience requirement for aesthetic belief ascriptions constitutes a problem for the kind of expressivist who claims that evaluative belief states are covert non-cognitive states. (shrink)

Ausgehend von einer Gegenüberstellung der erkenntnistheoretischen Grundpositionen des Empirismus und der Transzendentalphilosophie (Apriorismus) will der Autor am Beispiel der Probleme «Begriffsbildung» und «Kausalität» zeigen, wie sich klassische philosophische Kontroversen (Hume-Kant) unter Zuhilfenahme erkenntnistheoretisch relevanter biologisch-psychologischer Forschungsergebnisse (J. Piaget, K. Lorenz) lösen lassen.

Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is (...) made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find”. Moreover, it is argued that the widespread notion that moral discourse bears all the marks of fact-stating discourse is rooted in a blinkered focus on examples from English. Cross-linguistic considerations suggest that subjective attitude verbs are actually the default terms by which we ascribe moral views to people. Impressions to the contrary in English have to do with some unfortunate quirks of the term “think”. (shrink)

It is widely held within contemporary metaethics that there is a lack of linguistic support for evaluative expressivism. On the contrary, it seems that the predictions that expressivists make about evaluative discourse are not borne out. An instance of this is the so-called problem of missing Moorean infelicity. Expressivists maintain that evaluative statements express non-cognitive states of mind in a similar manner to how ordinary descriptive language expresses beliefs. Conjoining an ordinary assertion that p with the denial of being in (...) the corresponding belief state famously gives rise to Moorean infelicity:?? It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining. If expressivists are right, then conjoining evaluative statements with the denial of being in the relevant non-cognitive state of mind should give rise to similar infelicity. However, as several theorists have pointed out, this does not seem to be the case. Statements like the following are not infelicitous: Murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it. In this paper, I argue that evaluative statements express the kind of states that are attributed by ‘find’-constructions in English and that these states are non-cognitive in nature. This addresses the problem of missing Moorean infelicity and, more generally, goes to show that there are linguistic facts which support expressivism about evaluative discourse. (shrink)

Rumfitt has given two arguments that in unilateralist verificationist theories of meaning, truth collapses into correct assertibility. In the present paper I give similar arguments that show that in unilateral falsificationist theories of meaning, falsehood collapses into correct deniability. According to bilateralism, meanings are determined by assertion and denial conditions, so the question arises whether it succumbs to similar arguments. I show that this is not the case. The final section considers the question whether a principle central to Rumfitt's first (...) argument, ‘It is assertible that if and only if it is assertible that it is assertible that ’, is one that bilateralists can reject, and concludes that they cannot. It follows that the logic of assertibility and deniability, according to a result by Williamson, is the little known modal logic K4 studied by Sobociński. The paper ends with a plaidoyer for bilateralists to adopt this logic. (shrink)

Wer ist der existenzielle Republikaner? Er ist ein exemplarisches Beispiel für jemanden, der das »Wagnis der Öffentlichkeit« (Karl Jaspers) eingeht - das beste Beispiel eines Citoyens. Getrieben von einer Liebe zur Welt, die er allerdings nur durch seine Freiheit und in seinem Handeln ausdrücken kann. Gerade diese liebende Handlung ist heute gefordert - egal ob auf Demonstrationen gegen Donald Trump oder für eine gerechtere Welt, egal ob durch Parteibeitritte oder dem Schreiben von Essays für Zeitungen. Es ist Zeit, sich für (...) eine bessere Welt einzusetzen. Nils Heisterhagen muntert zur republikanischen Freiheit auf. (shrink)

In bilateral logic formulas are signed by + and –, indicating the speech acts assertion and denial. I argue that making an assumption is also speech act. Speech acts cannot be embedded within other speech acts. Hence we cannot make sense of the notion of making an assumption in bilateral logic. Attempts to solve this problem are considered and rejected.