This book represents a considerable revision and expansion of Public Choice II. Six new chapters have been added, and several chapters from the previous edition have been extensively revised. The discussion of empirical work in public choice has been greatly expanded. As in the previous editions, all of the major topics of public choice are covered. These include: why the state exists, voting rules, federalism, the theory of clubs, two-party and multiparty electoral systems, rent seeking, bureaucracy, interest groups, dictatorship, the (...) size of government, voter participation, and political business cycles. Normative issues in public choice are also examined including a normative analysis of the simple majority rule, Bergson–Samuelson social welfare functions, the Arrow and Sen impossibility theorems, Rawls's social contract theory and the constitutional political economy of Buchanan and Tullock. (shrink)

Die Studie untersucht Gottesbilder von Kindern und Jugendlichen. Im Zentrum stehen Zeichnungen von Sechst- und Zehntklässlern, die Brüche und Spannungen enthalten. Ungewohnte Darstellungen kommen zum Vorschein: Gott nimmt beispielsweise eine Auszeit, er beschützt und überwacht die Welt oder er erscheint als Fata Morgana. Die Untersuchung orientiert sich methodologisch an der dokumentarischen Bild- und Textinterpretation: Sie schafft erstmals Einsichten in das Ringen von Kindern und Jugendlichen um die eigene Gottesvorstellung. Im Fokus steht die Frage, inwiefern Kinder und Jugendliche von sich aus (...) theologisieren. Ermöglicht der empirische Zugriff, besondere Typen des Gottesbildes zu identifizieren, so greifen exemplarisch ausgewählte systematisch-theologische Modelle diese Problemstellungen auf. Deren reflektierte Anwendung eröffnet die Möglichkeit, ein passgenaues Setting für ein weiteres Theologisieren zu konturieren. (shrink)

In the 21st century, we increasingly live in a Nietzschean world. What was once feared as ‘nihilism,’ the loss of all final certainties and absolutes, or ‘relativism,’ that everything relates to a standpoint, has become a lived reality for many people today. Especially younger generations have learned to affirm the living conditions of uncertainty and temporality by eclectically adopting ways of life, routines, and orientations in individual ways for only certain periods of time. Digital technologies, especially the smart phone, have (...) widened our horizons permitting immediate access to different cultures and orientation worlds. Never before have we lived in a world that is as multi-perspectival, fast-paced, and uncertain, while never before have there been so many opportunities for actions. At the same time, people increasingly orient themselves in similar ways to a dominant morality that abbreviates reality and narrows down opportunities of action according to the guiding values of equality and reciprocity, as Nietzsche predicted it. Under these conditions, Nietzsche’s art of living is particularly relevant in many orientation worlds today, especially those of entrepreneurship, business, and our everyday life. -/- This contribution focuses on three aspects of Nietzsche’s art of living that have become relevant today especially in the United States (but not only here): first, regarding some facets of the economic-political conditions of any contemporary art of living; second, the widespread adoption of Nietzsche’s notion of self-overcoming and artistic self-design in entrepreneurship and individual’s lives; and third, how his notion of ‘incorporation’ has been further developed in current approaches to habit design. Eventually I will show via the example of Anthony Robbins that some notions of Nietzsche’s art of living have become most popular outside of academia, namely in the commercial industries of what has been called ‘self-growth’ or ‘self-development.’. (shrink)

Marx’s theory of ground rent has been widely used to help understand the trinity of land, labor, and capital. However, limited attention has been paid to the role of water within the Marxian rent framework. This lack of attention proves troubling due to the role of surface waters as an essential means of production throughout capitalism. Here I restate Marxian ground rent in the form of water rent and discuss the function of water-rent in the two dominant surface water rights (...) doctrines of the United States—the riparian doctrine and the doctrine of prior appropriation. In doing so, I revise the distinction between differential rent 1 and differential rent 2 to provide more analytically useful categories. Paying special attention to issues of drought and scarcity, I fully articulate the function of Marxian rent and its four forms for both surface water rights doctrines, while clearly stating where they do and do not differ. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Utopias in Africa is an emerging academic field. While we are witnessing an increasing number of fictional and ideological utopias, little attention is paid to lived utopias. The Green Camp Gallery Project is such a lived utopia, which predominantly strives for realizing desired future imaginations in daily practices. Localized in the urban context of Durban, in a derelict house in the industrial area, the Green Camp strives for a “simple post-growth life,” which is closely related to nature and the (...) philosophy of Ubuntu. In so doing, the Green Camp responds to the overlapping crisis of urbanity and offers an alternative future aspiration. The Green Camp is not perfect and it is not able to solve the deep problems of South African society, but it offers an “island” of hope and imagination in a challenging urban environment. At the same time the lived utopia reveals the agency of the urban marginalized and contradicts widespread assumptions concerning environmentalism. Based on a qualitative study, the article takes an unusual perspective by analyzing the imagination of lived utopia in an emerging utopian hotspot—Africa. (shrink)

"As a 'rhetoric of the mean' (mesotes ideal), sensibility provides a positive catalog of emotionalization. This is because ethos as an emotional level is viewed as being able, through gentle emotions, to please, placate and achieve sympathy and virtue (Quintilian). Sensibility in literature creates a bridge between an 'art of the soul' that developed into a major subjective and personal factor in the 18th century and a sense of sociability that aimed to integrate the individual into the community. The goal (...) of this study is to provide, through a structural linking of the ethos of virtue and the 'rhetoric of the mean', a reading of literature of sensibility based on rhetoric and cultural history that can explain both its public success 'with the people' and the reasons for why it failed to meet its own claims."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

How is it possible to develop an identity that lives from the meaningful relationship to a concrete tradition without falling into fundamentalist self-closure when trying to maintain this relationship? The present study addresses this question by interpreting Alasdair MacIntyre's traditional concept in response to the lack of orientation in contemporary society. The American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre assumes that modern societies can only convey identity through the traditions they contain. He defines "tradition" as a discussion about the correct interpretation of the (...) traditional content. MacIntyre sees coexistence in plural societies as a permanent encounter of different, traditional identities that struggle to convince each other of the truthfulness of their own worldview. The consequence is not blind conflict, but rather the acquisition of cultural language skills: Real encounters occur when a tradition learns to understand its counterpart from its genuine perspective. In this way, MacIntyre makes communicative competence the guiding factor of its model. In conversation with Karl Barth's theology, the study further develops this model from a Protestant perspective. Barth is received as the 20th century theologian who most consistently thought of Christian identity in particular terms. Even more than for Barth, the self-assurance of Christian tradition is being put to the test today. The study develops a model of Christian orientation in pluralism, which is based on the interplay of cultural competence and trust in the sustainability of one's own religious identity. (shrink)

Band 1. Bücher 1, 3, 7 und 8 -- Band 2. Bücher 2, 4, 5 und 6.

Das neue Versorgungsrecht für Beamte, Richter und Pensionäre Erhebliche Kostensteigerungen der öffentlichen Haushalte, die zunehmende Zahl der Versorgungsempfänger und deren längere Lebensdauer, aber auch die politische Fortentwicklung der Beamtenversorgung im Einklang mit dem Rentenrecht haben zu zahlreichen und gravierenden Änderungen - aus der Sicht der Beamten und Pensionäre meist Verschlechterungen - des für alle Dienstherrn in Bund und Ländern einheitlichen Rechts der Beamtenversorgung geführt. Dieser Praxiskommentar enthält zahlreiche Anwendungshilfen, Beispiele und Modellrechnungen. Bestens geeignet für jeden Beamten, insbesondere für die mit (...) der Beamtenversorgung befassten Personalleiter und Sachbearbeiter sowie Gewerkschaften des öffentlichen Dienstes. (shrink)

The basic hypothesis of this book is that linguistic reference to kinds should be seen as reference to sortal concepts, i.e. cognitive categories for identifying and classifying objects. Viewed that way, kinds serve as the interface between the conceptual system and the grammatical system. Kind-level predicates differ as to whether they presuppose (e.g. to be extinct) or entail (e.g. to invent) the existence of objects, with crucial consequences for the interpretation of indefinite argument noun phrases. Moreover, object reference always involves (...) underlying kind reference, but kind reference does not always involve object reference. This asymmetry, once recognized, proves useful in solving otherwise puzzling problems in semantic composition. (shrink)

This book comprises a series of essays exploring the transformative insights of Fichte, Herder, Humboldt and the Romantics into the seminal role of language and imagination in shaping human experience and art, including how language, self-consciousness and understanding arise through speech. Along with topics concerning the literary work of art, the philosophy of history, German humanities, philology, and semiotics, the author also discusses the place of phenomenology and the concept of interpretation in literary theory. In highlighting ideas from A. W. (...) Vico, F. Schlegel, Novalis, Germaine de Staël, and Schleiermacher, the author also elucidates romantic poetics, translation, discourse and cultural transfer themes. Das vorliegende Werk umfasst eine Reihe hermeneutischer Abhandlungen des Autors, in deren Fokus die Deutung der Sprachauffassungen Fichtes, Herders, Humboldts und der Romantiker steht. Der Autor untersucht dabei die Formierung von Erfahrung und Kunst durch Sprache und Einbildungskraft sowie die Entstehung von Sprache, Selbstbewusstsein und Verstehen in der Rede. Desgleichen behandelt er Semiotik, Philologie und Philosophie der Geschichte, sowie die Rolle der Phänomenologie und des Interpretationsbegriffs in der Literaturkritik. Im Besonderen hebt der Autor die Auffassungen von Vico, A.W. und F. Schlegel, Novalis, Germaine de Staël, F. Schleiermacher hervor und beleuchtet Übersetzungs-, Diskurs- und Kulturtransfertheorien sowie die Poetik der Romantiker. (shrink)

Wie kam der Mensch zu der Vorstellung, dass es Götter gibt? Enthält die Sprache des Mythos Hinweise auf Ursprung und Entwicklung des religiösen Denkens? In einer wissenschaftshistorischen Studie wird hier die Theorie des Klassischen Philologen Hermann Usener (1834-1905) vom Ursprung der Religion (1896) und deren Rezeption in den Werken von Albrecht Dieterich, Ludwig Radermacher, Aby Warburg und Walter F. Otto untersucht. Mit seiner strukturanalytisch entwickelten Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung hat Usener die seit der Romantik geführte Ursprungsdebatte neu aufgerollt und (...) dazu inspiriert, sein Projekt aufzugreifen und kritisch fortzuschreiben. (shrink)

Applied philosophy is experiencing its “golden days,” as Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen says in his insightful introduction to A Companion to Applied Philosophy. Applied philosophy seems to be distinguished from its opposite, pure philosophy, usually understood as traditional philosophy, which deals with subjects such as free will, consciousness, or knowledge in philosophical subdisciplines like ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. To embrace applied philosophy could thus mean to advocate for a philosophy that deals with questions “relevant to ‘the important questions of everyday life,’” as (...) Leslie Stevenson puts it, as opposed to questions that arise from within the subdisciplines of pure philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a novel propositional semantics based on the framework of branching time. The basic idea is to replace the moment-history pairs employed as parameters of truth in the standard Ockhamist semantics by pairs consisting of a moment and a consistent, downward closed set of so-called transitions. Whereas histories represent complete possible courses of events, sets of transitions can represent incomplete parts thereof as well. Each transition captures one of the alternative immediate future possibilities open at a (...) branching point. The transition semantics exploits the structural resources a branching time structure has to offer and provides a fine-grained picture of the interrelation of modality and time. In addition to temporal and modal operators, a so-called stability operator becomes interpretable as a universal quantifier over the possible future extensions of a given transition set. The stability operator allows us to specify how and how far time has to unfold for the truth value of a sentence at a moment to become settled and enables a perspicuous treatment of future contingents. We show that the semantics developed along those lines generalizes and extends extant approaches: both Peirceanism and Ockhamism can be viewed as limiting cases of the transition approach that build on restricted resources only, and on both accounts, stability collapses into truth. (shrink)

The globalization of production and trade has contributed to the rise in complex global value chains where the reach of state regulation is limited. As an alternative, private regulation, developed and administered by companies, industry associations, and nongovernmental organizations, has emerged to safeguard economic, environmental, and social sustainability in producer countries and along the value chain. The academic literature on private regulation in global value chains has grown over the last decade, but currently few major reviews of the research have (...) been undertaken. This paper examines peer-reviewed research in the relevant disciplines published in academic journals up to December 2011. Our goal is to identify and classify the topics and theories in the global value chain literature. We conclude that the number of articles explicitly examining private regulation, in a global value chain context, is relatively small when considering the importance and growth of these chains in the world’s economy. We also conclude that agriculture, forestry, and apparel manufacturing are the most often studied economic sectors; in contrast, other sectors, such as the information, communication and technology, with their complex global value chains, and often problematic environmental and social conditions, are understudied. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a thorough discussion and reconstruction of Bernard Bolzano’s theory of grounding and a detailed investigation into the parallels between his concept of grounding and current notions of normal proofs. Grounding (Abfolge) is an objective ground-consequence relation among true propositions that is explanatory in nature. The grounding relation plays a crucial role in Bolzano’s proof-theory, and it is essential for his views on the ideal buildup of scientific theories. Occasionally, similarities have been pointed out between Bolzano’s (...) ideas on grounding and cut-free proofs in Gentzen’s sequent calculus. My thesis is, however, that they bear an even stronger resemblance to the normal natural deduction proofs employed in proof-theoretic semantics in the tradition of Dummett and Prawitz. (shrink)

The internet could be an efficient political instrument if it were seen as part of a democracy where free and open discourse within a vital public sphere plays a decisive role. The model of deliberative democracy, as developed by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, serves this concept of democracy best. The paper explores first the model of deliberative democracy as a ‘two-track model’ in which representative democracy is backed by the public sphere and a developing civil society. Secondly, it outlines (...) the normative concept of the public sphere and its basic ideas, namely the uncoerced communication of equal participants with equal access and equal rights to intervene or propose themes. The third part for discussion shows how the internet could fit into this concept of public sphere and influence the quality of political debates, and emphasizes the important role it can play in the political process. (shrink)

To be a prisoner either in Plato's cave or in the Beast's castle is a form of existence no one would desire. And yet the story of Disney's Beauty and the Beast – in particular, the spell that imprisoned the Beast and his servants – is a tale as old as time. It is one's common human experience: one's recognition that he/she is shackled by ignorance and unfulfilled potential, and his/her desperate desire to escape. Unfortunately, however, breaking the chains and (...) ending the spell is no easy feat. For just as the Beast and his household companions represent a cave‐like imprisonment, Belle represents in her person the two ideals necessary to break the spell: love (which drew her to the castle to find her father) and beauty (which can compel the love of another). Love never happens without an encounter with beauty. (shrink)

Quipus, knotted structures of woollen or cotton cords, were used as a bureaucratic tool in the Inca state. In the absense of a writing system, numerals and possibly other pieces of information were encoded on the quipus by tying knots into elaborately structured coloured cords. Though interpretation of the quipu contents is far from complete, some information on Inca mathematics can be deducted from the analysis of ancient specimen, especially when combined with the results of anthropological and linguistic research in (...) contemporary Andean societies. In this paper, the quipus are introduced, their structure is explained, and some results on mathematical concepts of the Incas are presented based on a comparison of mathematical and anthropological literature on the subject. (shrink)

The case describes the developments of an ethics code observed in the local government of Suffolk County, New York, USA. In Suffolk County, there is now a dedicated Board of Ethics Agency (“Board”) within the local government to ensure that business operations and government operations run as ethically compliant as possible. This Board was created in 2012 in order to follow compliance with a law that established a replacement for the Ethics Commission (previously existing within Suffolk County) because this Ethics (...) Commission had been involved in a serious controversy. The former County Executive, Steve Levy, was found guilty of compromising the “integrity of an ethics commission”. Suffolk County government prescribed various measures in order to ensure that the citizens of Suffolk County were protected from business ethical violations. The Board also preemptively created laws that discouraged businesses from acting unethically. (shrink)

"Examines Western culture's... alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon--weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest"--Amazon.com.

While readers of Euripides' Hippolytus have long regarded Phaedra's deltos as a mechanism of punitive revenge, I argue here that the tablet models itself on a judicial curse (defixio) and that its main function is to ensure victory for Phaedra in the upcoming “trial” over her reputation. In support of my thesis I examine three interrelated phenomena: first, Hippolytus' infamous assertion that his tongue swore an oath while his mind remains unsworn (612); second, Phaedra's status as a biaiothanatos; and third, (...) Phaedra's claim that Hippolytus “will learn sophrosune” (731), a speech act that, I conclude, anticipates the silencing effect on Hippolytus of Phaedra's death and her writing. (shrink)

The transition semantics presented in Rumberg (J Log Lang Inf 25(1):77–108, 2016a) constitutes a fine-grained framework for modeling the interrelation of modality and time in branching time structures. In that framework, sentences of the transition language L_t are evaluated on transition structures at pairs consisting of a moment and a set of transitions. In this paper, we provide a class of first-order definable Kripke structures that preserves L_t-validity w.r.t. transition structures. As a consequence, for a certain fragment of L_t, validity (...) w.r.t. transition structures turns out to be axiomatizable. The result is then extended to the entire language L_t by means of a quite natural ‘Henkin move’, i.e. by relaxing the notion of validity to bundled structures. (shrink)

Abstract State Machines (ASMs) provide a formal method for transparent design and specification of complex dynamic systems. They combine advantages of informal and formal methods. Applications of this method motivate a number of computability and decidability problems connected to ASMs. Such problems result for example from the area of verifying properties of ASMs. Their high expressive power leads rather directly to undecidability respectively uncomputability results for most interesting problems in the case of unrestricted ASMs. Consequently, it is rather natural to (...) ask whether there exist expressive classes of ASMs for which we can prove positive decidability and computability results. In this work, we introduce such a class of ASMs. The concept is similar to the one of the guarded fragment of first-order logic. We analyze the expressive power of this class and prove that it is stronger than Datalog LITE and the guarded fragment of first-order fixed point logic. Some decidability and computability results have been proven in earlier works. (shrink)