Spiel und Arbeit gelten oft als Gegensätze: Das Spiel als freie Betätigung menschlicher Vermögen, die Arbeit als deren Subordination unter einen äußeren Zweck. Die Festlegung des Spiels auf konsequenzlose Wiederholbarkeit hat ihm den Ruf des Unernsten eingetragen, während das Abzwecken der Arbeit auf die Nützlichkeit ihres Resultats im Bund mit der Sorge ums Dasein steht. Auf einen zweiten Blick scheint dieser Gegensatz jedoch, gerade in den hochentwickeltsten Ausprägungen beider Tätigkeitsformen, zu verschwinden. So kann eine hochgradige Rationalisierung von Spielpraktiken in Arbeit (...) umschlagen, wie etwa im Leistungssport, oder ein komplexer Arbeitsvorgang selbstzweckhafte Momente und Eigendynamiken gewinnen, die ihm Spielcharakter verleihen. Auch andere technologische Entwicklungen geben Anlass dazu, das Verhältnis von Spiel und Arbeit noch einmal grundsätzlich zu bedenken, etwa im Hinblick auf: adaptive Systeme in der Robotik, serious games, Kreativitätstechniken in Unternehmenskulturen, wissenschaftliche Experimentalanordnungen, Online-Rollenspiele oder die Kommodifizierung nicht-zweckrationaler Lebensvollzüge, die traditionell vom Begriff produktiver Arbeit ausgeschlossen waren – einschließlich der Spielräume, die durch neue Umwelt- und Biotechniken erschlossen werden. Die Beschaffenheit der jeweils zum Einsatz kommenden Mittel und Verfahren sowie die Setzung, Variation oder Preisgabe von Zwecken können den Charakter von Spiel und Arbeit sowie ihr Verhältnis zueinander bestimmen oder verändern. Mit Beiträgen von Francesco Amigoni, Andreas Brenneis, Petra Gehring, Armin Grunwald, Florian Heßdörfer, Wolfram Ette, Christoph Hubig, Andreas Kaminski, Nicole C. Karafyllis, Christian Klager, Alexander Kluge, Uwe Küster, Oliver Laas, Hildrun Lampe, Pieter Lemmens, Stefan Meißner, Alfred Nordmann, Felix Raczkowski, Markus Rautzenberg, Michael Resch, Nicole J. Saam, Viola Schiaffonati, Alexander Schmidl, Jan C. Schmidt und G. Günter Voß. (shrink)

This source book provides new information about a much neglected aspect of the scientific tradition of the Islamic Middle Ages, focusing on folk astronomy and its relations to religious duties ).

Bd. 1. Absicht -Gemeinwohl -- Bd. 2. Gerechtigkeit-Praxis -- Bd. 3. Quantität-Zweifel.

Taking regular walks when living with Parkinson’s disease has beneficial effects on movement and quality of life. Yet, patients usually show reduced physical activity compared to healthy older adults. Using auditory stimulation such as music can facilitate walking but patients vary significantly in their response. An individualized approach adapting musical tempo to patients’ gait cadence, and capitalizing on these individual differences, is likely to provide a rewarding experience, increasing motivation for walk-in PD. We aim to evaluate the observance, safety, tolerance, (...) usability, and enjoyment of a new smartphone application. It was coupled with wearable sensors and delivered individualized musical stimulation for gait auto-rehabilitation at home. Forty-five patients with PD underwent a 1-month, outdoor, uncontrolled gait rehabilitation program, using the BeatWalk application. The music tempo was being aligned in real-time to patients’ gait cadence in a way that could foster an increase up to +10% of their spontaneous cadence. Open-label evaluation was based on BeatWalk use measures, questionnaires, and a six-minute walk test. Patients used the application 78.8% of the prescribed duration and enjoyed it throughout the program. The application was considered “easy to use” by 75% of the patients. Pain, fatigue, and falls did not increase. Fear of falling decreased and quality of life improved. After the program, patients improved their gait parameters in the six-minute walk test without musical stimulation. BeatWalk is an easy to use, safe, and enjoyable musical application for individualized gait rehabilitation in PD. It increases “walk for exercise” duration thanks to high observance.Clinical Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02647242. (shrink)

BackgroundCurrently, intensive care medicine strives to define a generally accepted way of dealing with end-of-life decisions, therapy limitation and therapy discontinuation.In 2006 a new advance directive legislation was enacted in Austria. Patients may now document their personal views regarding extension of treatment. The aim of this survey was to explore Austrian intensive care physicians' experiences with and their acceptance of the new advance directive legislation two years after enactment (2008).MethodsUnder the aegis of the OEGARI (Austrian Society of Anaesthesiology, Resuscitation and (...) Intensive Care) an anonymised questionnaire was sent to the medical directors of all intensive care units in Austria. The questions focused on the physicians' experiences regarding advance directives and their level of knowledge about the underlying legislation.ResultsThere were 241 questionnaires sent and 139 were turned, which was a response rate of 58%. About one third of the responders reported having had no experience with advance directives and only 9 directors of intensive care units had dealt with more than 10 advance directives in the previous two years. Life-supporting measures, resuscitation, and mechanical ventilation were the predominantly refused therapies, wishes were mainly expressed concerning pain therapy.ConclusionA response rate of almost 60% proves the great interest of intensive care professionals in making patient-oriented end-of-life decisions. However, as long as patients do not make use of their right of co-determination, the enactment of the new law can be considered only a first important step forward. (shrink)

While action selection strategies in well‐defined domains have received considerable attention, little is yet known about how people choose what to do next in ill‐defined tasks. In this contribution, we shed light on this issue by considering everyday tasks, which in many cases have a multitude of possible solutions (e.g., it does not matter in which order the items are brought to the table when setting a table) and are thus categorized as ill‐defined problems. Even if there are no hard (...) constraints on the ordering of subtasks in everyday activities, our research shows that people exhibit specific preferences. We propose that these preferences arise from bounded rationality, that is, people only have limited knowledge and processing power available, which results in a preference to minimize the overall physical and cognitive effort. In the context of everyday activities, this can be achieved by (a) taking properties of the spatial environment into account to use them to one's advantage, and (b) employing a stepwise‐optimal action selection strategy. We present the Opportunistic Planning Model as an explanatory cognitive model, which instantiates these assumptions, and show that the model is able to generalize to new everyday tasks, outperforming machine learning models such as neural networks during generalization. (shrink)

English summary: How can something which is absolutely unrepresentable be represented for the senses? In her studies of historical semantics of the concept of representation between 1750 and 1800, Petra Bahr shows that in the fields of aesthetics and religious theory this was a central question in the 18th century. From the perspective of the philosophy of religion, the significance of Baumgarten's Aesthetica and Kant's Critique of Judgment, two works which as a rule are perceived as competing philosophies of (...) art, has been reconstructed here in such a manner that Kant's lasting reference to Baumgarten's insights remains visible even in his overcoming of them. The discussion concerning the role of the productive power of imagination and the redefinition of the understanding of symbols functions as a link between the two philosophers. German description: Wie wird das schlechthin Undarstellbare sinnlich darstellbar? Petra Bahr zeigt in ihren Studien zur historischen Semantik des Darstellungsbegriffs zwischen 1750 und 1800, dass diese Frage das 18. Jahrhundert nicht nur in asthetischer, sondern auch in religionstheoretischer Perspektive beschaftigt. Die religionsphilosophische Dignitat von Baumgartens Aesthetica und Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft, zweier in der Regel nur als konkurrierende Philosophien der Kunst wahrgenommenen Werke, wird dabei so rekonstruiert, dass der bleibende Bezug Kants auf die Einsichten Baumgartens auch noch in deren Uberwindung sichtbar bleibt: die Rolle der produktiven Einbildungskraft, die Neubestimmung des Symbolverstandnisses und die Umbesetzung des Begriffs der sinnlichen Reprasentation. Mit einem sinngeschichtlichen Zugang wird die reiche und wechselvolle Vorgeschichte rekonstruiert, die die Kritik der Urteilskraft zu allererst als die Antwort Kants auf ausstehende Probleme der sinnlichen Darstellung des Undarstellbaren verstehbar macht. (shrink)

German description: Wie wird das schlechthin Undarstellbare sinnlich darstellbar? Petra Bahr zeigt in ihren Studien zur historischen Semantik des Darstellungsbegriffs zwischen 1750 und 1800, dass diese Frage das 18.

This paper advances a framework for modeling the component interactions between cognitive and social aspects of scientific creativity and technological innovation. Specifically, it aims to characterize Innovation Networks; those networks that involve the interplay of people, ideas and organizations to create new, technologically feasible, commercially-realizable products, processes and organizational structures. The tri-partite framework captures networks of ideas (Concept Level), people (Individual Level) and social structures (Social-Organizational Level) and the interactions between these levels. At the concept level, new ideas are the (...) nodes that are created and linked, kept open for further investigation or closed if solved by actors at the individual or organizational levels. At the individual level, the nodes are actors linked by shared worldviews (based on shared professional, educational, experiential backgrounds) who are the builders of the concept level. At the social-organizational level, the nodes are organizations linked by common efforts on a given project (e.g., a company–university collaboration) that by virtue of their intellectual property or rules of governance constrain the actions of individuals (at the Individual Level) or ideas (at the Concept Level). After describing this framework and its implications we paint a number of scenarios to flesh out how it can be applied. (shrink)

Corporate social reporting, while not mandatory in most countries, has been adopted by many large companies around the world and there are now a variety of competing global standards for non-financial reporting, such as the Global Reporting Initiative and the UN Global Compact. However, while some companies (e. g., Henkel, BHP, Johnson and Johnson) have a long standing tradition in reporting non-financial information, other companies provide only limited information, or in some cases, no information at all. Previous studies have suggested (...) that there are, country and industry-specific, differences in the extent of CSR reports (e. g., Kolk et al.: 2001, Business Strategy and the Environment 10, 15-28; Kolk: 2005, Management International Review 45, 145-166; Maignan and Ralston: 2002, Journal of International Business Studies 33(3), 497-514). However, findings are inconclusive or contradictory and it is often difficult to compare previous studies owing to the idiosyncratic methods used in each study (Graafland et al.: 2004, Journal of Business Ethics 53, 137-152). Furthermore, previous studies have relied mainly on simple measures, such as word counts and page counts of reports, to compare the extent of reporting that may not capture significant differences in the content of the reports. In this article, we seek to overcome some of these deficiencies by using textual analysis software and a more robust statistical method to more objectively and reliably compare the CSR reports of firms in different industries and countries. We examine a sample of leading companies in four countries (US, UK, Australia, and Germany) and test whether or not membership of the Global Compact makes a difference to CSR reporting and is overcoming industry and country specific factors that limit standardization. We conclude that GlobalCompact membership is having an effect only in certain areas of CSR reporting, related to the environment and workers, and that businesses from different countries vary significantly in the extent to which they promote CSR and the CSR issues that they choose to emphasize in their reports. These country differences are argued to be related to the different institutional arrangements in each country. (shrink)

This essay attempts to characterize the “strict” methodology of Michel Serres, a structuralist philosopher of knowledge, science and culture. On the one hand his works seem to be playful, even literary. On the other hand – and above all, so the author’s thesis – in its consequence they are quite uncompromising: Serres follows a structuralist, if not mathematical, paradigm. Methodically important leitmotifs of Serres’ thinking – for the epistemic context, these are, e. g. the detour, the wandering, the journey, the (...) creation of connections – appear as micrological scenes or narrations. They offer small phenomenologies and at the same time explore and expose structures: the interplay between disorder and order. In recent years, Serres has become known for his writings on Internet and digitization. But there is also something like Serres’ legal, social, and ecological philosophy – which is well worth looking into. (shrink)

Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers (premarkers, e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers (postmarkers, e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous systems for marking grammatical categories exist in natural languages, it follows that a better understanding of these findings can shed light on the factors underlying this diversity. In two discriminative learning simulations and an artificial language learning experiment, (...) we identify two factors that modulate linear order effects in linguistic category learning: category structure and the level of abstraction in a category hierarchy. Regarding category structure, we find that postmarking brings an advantage for learning category diagnostic stimulus dimensions, an effect not present when categories are non‐confusable. Regarding levels of abstraction, we find that premarking of super‐ordinate categories (e.g., noun class) facilitates learning of subordinate categories (e.g., nouns). We present detailed simulations using a plausible candidate mechanism for the observed effects, along with a comprehensive analysis of linear order effects within an expectation‐based account of learning. Our findings indicate that linguistic category learning is differentially guided by pre‐ and postmarking, and that the influence of each is modulated by the specific characteristics of a given category system. (shrink)

Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers (premarkers, e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers (postmarkers, e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous systems for marking grammatical categories exist in natural languages, it follows that a better understanding of these findings can shed light on the factors underlying this diversity. In two discriminative learning simulations and an artificial language learning experiment, (...) we identify two factors that modulate linear order effects in linguistic category learning: category structure and the level of abstraction in a category hierarchy. Regarding category structure, we find that postmarking brings an advantage for learning category diagnostic stimulus dimensions, an effect not present when categories are non‐confusable. Regarding levels of abstraction, we find that premarking of super‐ordinate categories (e.g., noun class) facilitates learning of subordinate categories (e.g., nouns). We present detailed simulations using a plausible candidate mechanism for the observed effects, along with a comprehensive analysis of linear order effects within an expectation‐based account of learning. Our findings indicate that linguistic category learning is differentially guided by pre‐ and postmarking, and that the influence of each is modulated by the specific characteristics of a given category system. (shrink)

Problem: Visions of technology, future scenarios, guiding visions represent imaginations of future states of affairs that play a functional role in processes of technological research, development and innovation—e.g. as a means to create attention, communication, coordination, or for the strategic exertion of influence. Since a couple of years there is a growing attention for such imaginations of futures in politics, the economy, research and the civil society. This trend concerns technology assessment as an observer of these processes and a consultant (...) on the implications of technology and innovation. TA faces increasing demands to assess imaginations of futures that circulate in the present and to participate in shaping these through scenarios or foresights. More than ever, this raises the question, which propositions can be made based on these imaginations by TA and how this can be used in advisory practices. Imaginations of futures are relevant for TA not as predictions but in their significance and effectiveness in the present, which need to be understood and assessed.Contents: This discussion paper outlines how present significance and effects of imagined futures in technological research and innovation processes can be conceived and analyzed. In this paper, all forms of imaginations of technology futures will be called “socio-technical futures” because within them technological developments and social changes are interwoven and inseparably interrelated. In this paper, we discuss why TA should analyze socio-technical futures, how such analyses can grasp the societal conditions that are expressed in the imagined futures and how these become effective in processes of technology development, communication, decision making etc. We raise the question which self-reflexive positioning or possible realignment of TA is needed as a response to its increased concern with assessing and even co-producing socio-technical futures. The latter is often demanded regarding the growing attention by politics and publics to imaginations of futures with wide temporal and spatial reach.Addressee of this paper is the TA community in a broader sense. The aim is to sensitize colleagues for the topic and its challenges, to consolidate discussions and to provide theoretical and methodical suggestions for research in TA and related advisory practices with respect to socio-technical futures. This paper has been originally initiated during the workshop “The present of technological futures-theoretical and methodical challenges for Technology Assessment”, in which all of the paper’s authors participated. The contents of this discussion paper are preliminary results that shall initiate and guide further discussions. (shrink)

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade‐off between the informativity of a form and the prominence of its referent. For example, Italian adults generally interpret informationally empty null pronouns as in the sentence Corre (meaning “He/She/It runs”) as referring to the most prominent referent (...) in the discourse, and more informative overt pronouns (e.g., lui in Lui corre, “He runs”) as referring to less prominent referents. Although children acquiring Italian are known to experience difficulties interpreting pronouns, it is unclear how they acquire this division of pragmatic labor between null and overt subject pronouns, and how this relates to the development of their cognitive capacities. Here we show that cognitive development can account for the general interpretation patterns displayed by Italian‐speaking children and adults. Using experimental studies and computational simulations in a framework modeling bounded‐rational behavior, we argue that null pronoun interpretation is influenced by working memory capacity and thus appears to depend on discourse context, whereas overt pronoun interpretation is influenced by processing speed, suggesting that listeners must reason about the speaker's choices. Our results demonstrate that cognitive capacities may constrain the acquisition of linguistic forms and their meanings in various ways. The novel predictions generated by the computational simulations point out several directions for future research. (shrink)

Die Sculpturen des Vaticanischen Museums, im Auftrage und unter Mitwirkung des kaiserlick deutschen archaeologischen Instituts beschrieben von Walter Amerlung. Berlin: In Kommission bei Georg Reimer. Vol. I., 1903; Vol. II., 1908. Text, 8vo, pp. x + 935, 768. Plates, 4to, 121 + 83. M. 50 per vol.Guida illustrata del Museo Nazionale di Napoli; approvata dal Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione. Compilata da D. Bassi, E. Gábrici, L. Mariani, O. Maruchhi, G. Patroni, G. de Petra, A. Sogliano; per cura di A. (...) Ruesch. Naples: Richter & Co.; Munich: Buchholz, 1908. 8vo. Pp. 500. 129 illustrations in the text. Lire 25. (shrink)

Conflicts in Interpretation applies novel methods of constraint interaction, derived from connectionist theories and implemented in linguistics within the framework of Optimality Theory, to core semantic and pragmatic issues such as polysemy, negation, (in) definiteness, focus, anaphora, and rhetorical structure. It explores the hypothesis that a natural language grammar is a set of potentially conflicting constraints on forms and meanings. Moreover, it hypothesizes that competent language users not only optimize from an input form to the optimal output meaning for this (...) form, or vice versa, but also consider the opposite direction of optimization, thus taking into account the speaker as a hearer and taking into account the hearer as a speaker. The book aims to show that such a bidirectional constraint-based grammar sheds new light on the relation between form and meaning, within a sentence as well as across sentence boundaries, within a single language as well as across languages, and within competent adult language users as well as during language development. An important dimension of the book is the structured investigation of issues at the interface of semantics with syntax and pragmatics, such as the effects of distinguishing between speaker's perspective and hearer's perspective in comprehension and production, stable and instable patterns of form and meaning across languages, and the development of a coherent pattern of form and meaning in children. Conflicts in Interpretation will be of interest to any researcher or advanced student in linguistics, cognitive science, language typology, or psycholinguistics who is interested in the capacity of our human mind to map meaning onto form, and form onto meaning. (shrink)

There is substantial support for the general idea that a formalization of comprehenders' expectations about the likely next word in a sentence helps explaining data related to online sentence processing. While much research has focused on syntactic, semantic, and discourse expectations, the present event‐related potentials (ERPs) study investigates neurolinguistic correlates of pragmatic expectations, which arise when comprehenders expect a sentence to conform to Gricean Maxims of Conversation. For predicting brain responses associated with pragmatic processing, we introduce a formal model of (...) such Gricean pragmatic expectations, using an idealized incremental interpreter. We examine whether pragmatic expectancies derived from this model modulate the amplitude of the N400, a component that has been associated with predictive processing. As part of its parameterization, the model distinguishes genuine pragmatic interpreters, who expect maximally informative true utterances, from literal interpreters, who only expect truthfulness. We explore the model's non‐trivial predictions for an experimental setup which uses picture‐sentence verification with ERPs recorded at several critical positions in sentences containing the scalar implicature trigger some. We find that Gricean expectations indeed affect the N400, largely in line with the predictions of our model, but also discuss discrepancies between model predictions and observations critically. (shrink)

Our article explores the repair practices pilots use to correct various troubles during flights. The intersubjective understanding of action is a salient part of the time-critical activities of aviation. Repairs solve troubles before any accident risk emerges, thus contributing to flight safety. In repair practices, the social and technical environment is interwoven. If remedies concern faulty lines of action, they target the techno-material condition of the aircraft. Such repair practices are not repairs of talk, but remedies of action in a (...) socio-material interaction. We discuss remedies of action as a particular type of repair practice, and outline their role in socio-material interactions. The aim is to continue building a holistic analysis of social action, not just to add a multimodal layer over an analysis of talk. The rethinking of social action contributes to the exploration of social actions anchored to their socio-material environment. (shrink)

The article briefly introduces an academic debate between two different responses to the predicament of the human in the ecological crisis, namely the object-oriented ontology and the vitalist response to that approach. Based on that introduction, it argues for the need of a complementing analytical tool and sketches the contours of such a tool by suggesting an epistemological tactic for a decolonizing human distinctiveness. The article suggests an analytical maneuver to be used by scholars who aim at decolonizing nature from (...) human oppression, a tool that enables illumination and critical scrutiny of the epistemological role of the human as one stage toward destabilizing the notion of human distinctiveness. The article, thus, introduces an approach where human distinctiveness is not understood as a factual distinctiveness—not an essential difference between the human and the nonhuman world—but where human distinctiveness is critically viewed as a discursive role in theoretical work, a role that can be temporarily put to use by the scholar as a decolonizing epistemological tactic. In other words, human distinctiveness is here tactically used as a tool to critically scrutinize the idea of human distinctiveness rather than to safeguard it. (shrink)

The present event‐related potential (ERP) study used picture–sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the online processing of compositional‐semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification likeJana war jeden Morgen schwimmen an den Arbeitstagen (“Jana went for a swim every morning during the working week”). We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present study replicated previous (...) results relating to quantification over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting how a sentence continues. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible. (shrink)

An argument evaluation inventory distinguishing between different levels of theory-evidence differentiation was designed corresponding to the levels of argument observed in argument generation tasks. Five scenarios containing everyday theories about a social problem, and arguments to support those theories were presented to 170 participants from two age groups (15 and 22 years) and different educational tracks. Participants had to rate the validity of arguments proposed by a story figure, to support the theory, to choose the best argument, and to justify (...) their choice. The rating task proved to be very difficult for all age groups, with only 49% of the university students consistently rating valid evidence-based arguments higher than flawed arguments. Competence improved with age and educational level. In the choice task more than 80% of the adults preferred an argument that reflected theory-evidence differentiation over mere theory elaboration or flawed reasoning. However, only adults with a university education were able to also explicitly justify their choice. Overall, these findings imply that laypersons have similar conceptual problems in differentiating theory from evidence as it has been reported for evidence generation tasks (Kuhn, 1991). Performance on the choice task suggests that some implicit awareness of differences between theory and evidence may precede a full, explicit understanding. Implications for education are discussed. (shrink)

Substance-abusing women are vulnerable to specific kinds of epistemic injustice, including stigmatization and discrimination. This article examines the development of the epistemic agency of female substance abusers by asking: How does the use of a formal discussion protocol in community rehabilitation interaction alleviate epistemic injustice and strengthen the epistemic agency of substance abusers? The data were collected in a Finnish rehabilitation center by videotaping six group discussions between social workers, peer support workers, and rehabilitation clients with substance abuse problems. Of (...) these data, one recorded group discussion between four female participants—two rehabilitation clients, a peer support worker, and a social adviser—was used in this paper. Using conversational analysis, the findings indicate that, through the collaborative activities of sharing experiential knowledge about substance abuse and discussing the experiences of abuse in the rehabilitation interaction, substance abusers can develop novel ways to strengthen their epistemic agency by enhanced self-awareness. The discussion protocol is an epistemic tool that professionals and clients can learn to use in ethically and epistemologically successful ways in interaction. The use of a discussion protocol is an example of social professionals’ clinical knowledge of intensifying collaboration and sharing experiential knowledge in community rehabilitation and other substance abuse services. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis, Heidelberg, 1977.

According to Longtermism, our acts’ expected influence on the expected value of the world is mainly determined by their effects in the far future. There is, given total utilitarianism, a straightforward argument for Longtermism due to the enormous number of people that might exist in the future, but this argument does not work on person-affecting views. In this paper, we will argue that these views might also lead to Longtermism if Prudential Longtermism is true. Prudential Longtermism holds for a person (...) if and only if our acts’ overall influence on that person’s expected well-being is mainly determined by the acts’ effects in the far future. We argue that (due to a small chance of anti-ageing and uploading) there could be an enormous amount of prudential value for some contemporary person in the far future and that value may be so large that it dominates their overall expectation of lifetime well-being. (shrink)

Die interdisziplinäre Forschungsgruppe "Poetik und Hermeneutik" und ihre Mitglieder haben die geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Landschaft der alten Bundesrepublik geprägt wie vielleicht sonst nur noch die Kritische Theorie. Zahlreiche Interviews mit den wichtigsten noch lebenden Akteuren erlauben einen ebenso erkenntnisreichen wie unterhaltsamen Blick hinter die Kulissen von Poetik & Hermeneutik. Unter welchen Bedingungen und mit welchen Absichten wurde die Gruppe von Hans Blumenberg, Clemens Heselhaus, Wolfgang Iser und Hans Robert Jauß ursprünglich gegründet? Wie entfalteten sich Diskussionen und Kontroversen? Wie kam P&H (...) zur Blüte und warum scheiterte ein möglicher Generationenwechsel? Als Zeitzeugen gehört werden unter anderen Aleida und Jan Assmann, Ferdinand Fellmann, Manfred Frank, Gerhart von Graevenitz, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Anselm Haverkamp, Dieter Henrich, Helga Jauss-Meyer, Renate Lachmann, Thomas Luckmann, Hermann Lübbe, Christian Meier, Jürgen Schlaeger, Gabriele Schwab, Wolf-Dieter Stempel, Karlheinz Stierle, Rainer Warning und Harald Weinrich. (shrink)

Can gender equality quality criteria developed for assessing EU internal policies be used unequivocally for evaluating EU external policies? Or might a methodological adaptation be necesary? To engage with this dilemma, the author evaluates the two-dimensional quality model of Krizsan and Lombardo and examines what a reorientation of the model would entail to better allow for the analysis of gender policy implemented outside of Europe. The author argues that to allow for an in-depth analysis of EU gender policy abroad, the (...) model’s procedural criteria ‘empowerment of women’s rights advocates’ and ‘transformation with reference to the prevailing context’ need to be brought centre stage and mainstreamed throughout the research design. The author suggests doing this by explicitly involving the views of gender activists from the national context in the analysis and using their perspectives as a touchstone for the evaluation of quality. To examine the proposed methodological model’s suitability for analysing the quality of gender policies in EU external relations, this operationalization is applied to the case of EU–South African development cooperation. The article concludes that the inclusion of gender advocates’ perspectives is necessary to avoid stereotypical, paternalist and Eurocentric ideas about the meaning of gender equality abroad and allow for a contextually grounded reflexivity on the quality of gender policy. Finally, it is argued that it is the role of feminist research to enhance women’s capacity for self-determination methodologically and to hear the voices of national actors that might otherwise not be heard in EU external relations. (shrink)