This volume examines the multifaceted origins of Paul Tillich s critical theology during the Frankfurt years from the perspectives of source and reception history. In this way, it provides a compelling picture of the rich interactions between Tillich and his academic environment as well as the spiritual situation at the University of Frankfurt just before the National Socialist takeover.".

Was ist Natur oder was könnte sie sein? Diese und weitere Fragen sind grundlegend für Naturdenken und -handeln. Das Lehr- und Studienbuch bietet eine historisch-systematische und zugleich praxisbezogene Einführung in die Naturphilosophie mit ihren wichtigsten Begriffen. Es nimmt den pluralen Charakter der Wahrnehmung von Natur in den philosophischen Blick und ist auch zum Selbststudium bestens geeignet.

BackgroundTo prevent the planet from catastrophic global warming a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero is required. Thus, divestment from fossil fuels must be a strategic interest for health insurers. The aim of this study was to analyse the implementation of environmental, social and governance criteria in German private health insurers’ investments.MethodsIn 2019 a survey about ESG strategies was sent to German private health insurance companies. The survey evaluated investment strategies and thresholds for the exclusion of sectors and (...) business practices, as well as company strategies for sustainable business development.FindingsGiven their business reports, German private health insurers manage assets of more than €350 billion. 11 of 40 insurance companies provided quantitative data, 10 refused to answer. According to quantitative data, €66 billion of assets is managed according to any ESG criteria; this equals an average of 76% of each company’s bonds. None of these insurers excluded the production and sale of fossil fuels. All excluded coal mining but only at high thresholds. For €226 billion, no data were provided.InterpretationThe findings are in contrast to the expected intrinsic economic interest of the insurers to stop global warming and improve public health. The majority of assets are managed in a highly problematic manner, especially the absence of capital allocated in fields contrary to medical ethics cannot be presumed. Lack of transparency is a major problem that limits clients in choosing the insurer who has the most advanced ESG criteria. (shrink)

English summary: This volume contains controversial views and discussions on the purpose, function, analysis and justification of value judgments and norms in the social sciences and humanities.

Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, (...) we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical. (shrink)

This paper deals with the recent policies introduced in Brazil in order to foster a public interest towards science. Persuasive messages and strategies aiming at increasing a public awareness of the importance of scientific literacy for the development of the country are introduced at different levels and targeting different kinds of publics. These policies are analysed in view of classical models of social influence and persuasion.

The present paper argues that, despite appearance to the contrary, Kierkegaard’s writings offer promising argumentational resources for addressing the problem of evil. According to Kierkegaard, however, in order to make use of these resources at all, one must necessarily be willing to shift the battleground, so to speak: from a third- to a genuine first-person perspective, namely the perspective of what Climacus dubs Religiousness A. All (yet also only) those who seek deliberate self-annihilation before God—a God in relation to whom (...) they perceive themselves always in the wrong—shall discover the ideal that an unwavering and in fact unconditional thankfulness (namely, for being forgiven) is to be considered the only appropriate attitude towards God and as such both necessary and sufficient for coming to terms with evil and suffering, at least in the life of someone making that discovery. I will argue that Kierkegaard’s (non-)pseudonymous writings provide reasons, at times unwittingly, for adopting the perspective of Religiousness A; however, I will also and ultimately argue that the principle of infinite thankfulness as a corollary of that perspective flounders when it comes to making sense of (the eschatological implications of) the suffering of others. (shrink)

Statements about the behavior of biochemical entities (e.g., about the interaction between two proteins) abound in the literature on molecular biology and are increasingly becoming the targets of information extraction and text mining techniques. We show that an accurate analysis of the semantics of such statements reveals a number of ambiguities that have to be taken into account in the practice of biomedical ontology engineering: Such statements can not only be understood as event reporting statements, but also as ascriptions of (...) dispositions or tendencies that may or may not refer to collectives of interacting molecules or even to collectives of interaction events. (shrink)

The pressures that led to the evolution of episodic memory have recently seen much discussion, but a fully satisfactory account of them is still lacking. We seek to make progress in this debate by taking a step backward, identifying four possible ways that episodic memory could evolve in relation to simulationist future planning—a similar and seemingly related ability. After distinguishing each of these possibilities, the paper critically discusses existing accounts of the evolution of episodic memory. It then presents a novel (...) argument in favor of the view that episodic memory is a by-product of the evolution of simulationist future planning. The paper ends by showing that this position allows for the maintenance of the traditional view that episodic memory operates on stored memory traces, as well as explaining a number of key features of episodic memory: its being subject to frequent and systematic errors, its neural co-location with the capacity for simulationist future planning, and the potential existence of non-human episodic memory. (shrink)

Eine Kritik der Hoffnung ist nicht nur nicht unzeitgemäß, sondern überhaupt zeitlos. Denn die existentielle Erfahrung, zu hoffen und enttäuscht zu werden, ist mit der menschlichen Situation untrennbar verknüpft. Der Grund, warum Schopenhauer als Gewährsmann einer solchen bemüht wird, ist, dass er vielfältige Ansätze dazu vorgelegt hat, die in diesem Buch zusammengefasst sind. Die vorliegende Untersuchung lässt sich in den größeren Rahmen von Schopenhauers «Pessimismus» einordnen, stellt aber den Begriff der Hoffnung in Nahaufnahme dar. Das Nachdenken über die Hoffnung vereinigt (...) Aspekte von Wahrheit und Irrtum, Wille und Intellekt, Wahrscheinlichkeit und Erwartung, und verdeutlicht die im Zusammenhang zwischen Sicherheit und Zweifel sich manifestierenden Seelenzustände von Hoffnung und Verzweiflung. Über Begriffsklärung und Analyse hinaus wird nach dem Wert oder Unwert der Hoffnung für das Leben gefragt. (shrink)

Während die bisherige Forschung überwiegend auf Rekonstruktion und Analyse des philosophischen und pädagogischen Werkes von Theodor Litt bezogen war, konzentrieren sich gegenwärtige Untersuchungen bedingt durch die Zunahme von ...

The book series Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) publishes high-quality work in linguistics that addresses current issues in synchrony and diachrony, theoretically or empirically oriented.

During much of the past century, it was widely believed that phonemes--the human speech sounds that constitute words--have no inherent semantic meaning, and that the relationship between a combination of phonemes (a word) and its referent is simply arbitrary. Although recent work has challenged this picture by revealing psychological associations between certain phonemes and particular semantic contents, the precise mechanisms underlying these associations have not been fully elucidated. Here we provide novel evidence that certain phonemes have an inherent, non-arbitrary emotional (...) quality. Moreover, we show that the perceived emotional valence of certain phoneme combinations depends on a specific acoustic feature--namely, the dynamic shift within the phonemes' first two frequency components. These data suggest a phoneme-relevant acoustic property influencing the communication of emotion in humans, and provide further evidence against previously held assumptions regarding the structure of human language. This finding has potential applications for a variety of social, educational, clinical, and marketing contexts. (shrink)

In this book the author gives a broad overview of different areas of research in nonmonotonic reasoning, and presents some new results and ideas based on his research. The guiding principles are: clarification of the different research activities in the area, which have sometimes been undertaken independently of each other; and appreciation of the fact that these research activities often represent different means to the same ends, namely sound theoretical foundations and efficient computation. The book begins with a discussion of (...) the various types of nonmonotonic reasoning, their applications and their logics. Theorem proving techniques for these logics are also described. The following chapters deal with formulations of nonmonotonic inheritance, and nonmonotonic reasoning based on nonmonotonic rules. The final chapter discusses the achievements in the field in the light of the Yale shooting example. The book will be welcomed by researchers in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

We propose that children employ specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map” of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or “Bayes nets”. Children’s causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children (...) construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism. (shrink)

Humans are standouts in their propensity to trade. More specially, the kind of trading found in humans—featuring the exchange of many different goods and services with many different others, for the mutual benefit of all the involved parties—far exceeds anything that is found in any other creature. However, a number of important questions about this propensity remain open. First, it is not clear exactly what makes this propensity so different in the human case from that of other animals. Second, it (...) is not clear why other animals did not acquire this propensity to the extent that humans did. Third, it is not clear what explains the fact that the extent to which humans engage in trade is culturally highly variable. The paper argues that at the heart of the human-animal divergence in this propensity is the particular socio-cultural environment in which humans evolved. This has led them to sometimes, but not always, acquire the cognitive technology (writing, algebra, tallying devices, money, etc.) to support a sophisticated disposition and capacity for reciprocal cooperation, and deep and wide concepts of property and exchange value. (shrink)

Die jetzt vorliegende ungekürzte Korrespondenz zwischen Sigmund Freud und Karl Abraham in originalem Deutsch erlaubt Einblicke in den wissenschaftlichen Austauschprozess bei der Entwicklung ihrer psychoanalytischen Konzepte. Abrahams einseitig-genetische Vorstellungen über die destruktiv-sadistischen Aspekte der Oralität und über die frühen Objektbeziehungen sind bei Freud auf Widerspruch gestoßen. Freud erweist sich einerseits als geduldiger Lehrer und Supervisor für Abraham. Andererseits ist er auch kritischer Mahner, der Abraham bis in die letzten Briefe daran erinnert, die Grundbedingungen der Neurosenentstehung zu beachten. Die Ergebnisse von (...) Abrahams klinischen Beobachtungen sind für Freud wiederum wertvolle Bestätigungen für seine eigenen Überlegungen zur Pathologie früher Störungen. Der Autor zeichnet die Entwicklung der unterschiedlichen Ansätze am wissenschaftlichen Briefwechsel nach. Der Akzent liegt auf dem ätiologischen Problem der Neurosengenese im kausalen Denken bzw. im Denken vor dem Hintergrund von Nachträglichkeit. Die weitere Entwicklung der Konzeptionen nach Abrahams Tod wird kurz skizziert. (shrink)

The volume contains the written versions of all papers given at the workshop, divided into five chapters and followed by Alvin Goldman's replies in the sixth.

Statements about the behavior of biological entities, e.g. about the interaction between two proteins, abound in the literature on molecular biology and are increasingly becoming the targets of information extraction and text mining techniques. We show that an accurate analysis of the semantics of such statements reveals a number of ambiguities that is necessary to take into account in the practice of biomedical ontology engineering. Several concurring formalizations are proposed. Emphasis is laid on the discussion of biological dispositions.

Der Titel Eudämonie verspricht Schönes, Angenehmes, Erbauliches, und alles das will und soll dieses Buch auch leisten. Wer von uns wünschte sich nicht ein gutes und gelingendes Leben, ohne allerdings so mir nichts, dir nichts sagen zu können, woraus denn dieses Gute, Schöne und Wahre besteht. Wer von uns kennt nicht den intensiven Wunsch nach Glück und Zufriedenheit, und wem begegneten bei seiner oder ihrer Suche nach Glück und Zufriedenheit aber nicht schon Hürden und Herausforderungen aller Art, die uns bisweilen (...) rat- und hilflos haben werden lassen? Allein schon aufgrund dieser persönlichen Kalamitäten, die jeder von uns oftmals zu gewärtigen hat, scheint es gerechtfertigt, über Eudämonie und damit über die Möglichkeiten eines gelingenden Lebens nachzudenken. Leben zwischen... Kunst und Spiel / Ich und Du / verbaler Sprache und beredtem Leib / Vergangenheit und Zukunft / Kontemplation und Tat / Sinnlichkeit und Form. Der Autor Gerhard Danzer ist Facharzt für Innere Medizin, Facharzt für Psychosomatik und Psychotherapie (Tiefenpsychologie) sowie Diplompsychologe. Jahrzehntelang war er als Professor an der Charité und an der Medizinischen Hochschule Brandenburg (MHB) sowie als Honorarprofessor an der Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (Psychologie) und an der Universität Potsdam (Philosophie) tätig. 2019 wurde ihm der renommierte Preis der Dr. Margrit Egnér-Stiftung (Zürich) für sein bisheriges literarisches Oeuvre verliehen. Seine jüngsten Buchpublikationen bei Springer sind Wie wäre es, ein Mensch zu sein? (2020), Personale Medizin (2021) und Shakespeare auf der Couch (2021) sowie Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit - Mythos, Logos und Person (2022). (shrink)

Zusammenfassung In Deutschland verlangt das Transplantationsgesetz die Zuteilung von postmortal gespendeten Organen nach den Kriterien der Dringlichkeit und der Erfolgsaussicht. Der herrschenden Auffassung zufolge darf die Erfolgsaussicht hierbei jedoch lediglich den Charakter einer Minimalnutzenschwelle annehmen. Eine darüber hinausgehende Gewichtung von Erfolgsaussichten soll zudem nicht mit der Lebenswertindifferenzkonzeption des Bundesverfassungsgerichts zu vereinbaren sein, die aus dem Gleichheitsgrundsatz sowie aus der Menschenwürde abgeleitet wird. Gerhard Dannecker argumentiert, diese im juristischen Schrifttum überwiegend vertretene Auffassung sei weniger zwingend, als es auf den ersten (...) Blick scheinen mag. Seiner Auffassung zufolge lässt sich aus der Lebensschutzgarantie in Artikel 2 der Verfassung eine Pflicht ableiten, die vorhandenen Ressourcen möglichst effektiv einzusetzen. Zwar dürfe Effizienz hier tatsächlich nicht bedeuten, dass die Funktionsdauer der vorhandenen Organe über das Gesamtkollektiv aller Patienten hinweg utilitaristisch zu maximieren sei - eine Pflicht zur Rettung einer möglichst großen Anzahl an Menschen lässt sich ihres Erachtens jedoch durchaus rechtfertigen. (shrink)

Human beings need communication. During the development of mankind, a multitude of communication technologies have been invented and used. Some of them had a dramatic impact on society in general and on the way scientific knowledge was disseminated. In this article we discuss some of the effects of each of these changes to teaching as a way of disseminating scientific knowledge. We discuss some of the potential effects caused by the new revolution of communication due to the World Wide Web (...) and the potential of ubiquitous computing. We discuss the evolution of communication technology followed by a discussion of the achievements of each technology. Next, the effects of these achievements on teaching are discussed. Finally, we set these considerations into a broader context and discuss the effects on two important parameters: lead time of the teacher and verifiability of the teacher's claims. (shrink)

Nonmonotonic reasoning in its broadest sense is reasoning to conclusions on the basis of incomplete information. Given more information, previously drawn inferences may be retracted. Commonsense reasoning has a nonmonotonic component; it has been argued that almost all commonsense inferences are of this sort. From the end of the 1980s to the present there has been an explosion in research in nonmonotonic reasoning. It is now possible to understand more clearly the properties of the major formalisms from a metatheoretical point (...) of view, the relationships among the formalisms and their connection to independently developed proof methods. The goal of this monograph is to make this understanding more accessible. (shrink)

Wer hat sich nicht schon gefragt, was es mit unseren moralischen Überzeugungen auf sich hat: Spiegeln diese die Wahrheit in Sachen Moral wieder? Gibt es eine solche Wahrheit überhaupt? Oder sind moralische Überzeugungen eher das Produkt unserer Interessen und Neigungen, Ausdruck unserer Wünsche oder Mittel der Machtausübung, das bloße Ergebnis unserer Erziehung, unseres sozialen Umfelds oder gar eine List der Evolution? Ist es eine Illusion, wenn man glaubt, echte moralische Erkenntnisse gewinnen zu können? Kurzum: Kann die Moral Objektivität beanspruchen? Die (...) vorliegende Arbeit versucht, eine Antwort auf diese zentrale Frage der Metaethik zu geben. Dazu wird zunächst gezeigt, dass uns der Status der Moral ein Rätsel ist, weil wir dazu neigen, drei Thesen für wahr zu halten, die nicht zugleich wahr sein können. Die drei prinzipiell möglichen Strategien zur Auflösung dieses Trilemmas geraten jedoch in Schwierigkeiten, weil es bisher nicht gelungen ist, ein passendes Vergleichsobjekt für die Moral zu finden. In dieser Arbeit wird dafür argumentiert, dass die Moral in genau der gleichen Weise wie die Wissenschaft Objektivität beanspruchen kann. (shrink)