Artikelen over intersubjectiviteit in ethiek, spiritualiteit en filosofie.

De Long's criticisms of our explanation of unemployment patterns in the United States are empirically false. His assertion that we have the direction of causation reversed collapses in light of the lag between artificially high wages and unemployment. Nor are his claims about the nature of cyclical movements in productivity and real wages consistent with the data. Finally, his contention that the model we present does not work in the post‐World War II era is, at best, misleading. The evidence shows (...) with remarkable consistency that government attempts to prop up wages have caused twentieth‐century increases in U.S. employment. (shrink)

PROSPERITY AND UPHEAVAL: THE WORLD ECONOMY 1945?1980 by Herman Van der Wee translated by Robin Hogg and Max R. Hall Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 621pp., $14.95 Van der Wee uncritically accepts that Keynesianism is responsible for post?war economic stability. Against this belief, it is argued that an analysis of the historical record shows no significant efforts at countercyclical fiscal management in the post?war era, while efforts to control the economy via monetary policy were associated with increasing instability, culminating (...) in the crisis years of the 1970s. Thus, in the American case at least, post?war stability has been the result of self?correcting market tendencies, while instability has followed government macroeconomic intervention. (shrink)

For researchers who study technology designs, the application and execution of so-called design-oriented research projects are a common way of funding their research. Against this background, we propose a new methodical approach with which VSD can easily be implemented in such projects and which we call “value declaration”. We share our experience with this method which we gained in two design-oriented research projects.

Big data and Machine learning Techniques are reshaping the way in which food safety risk assessment is conducted. The ongoing ‘datafication’ of food safety risk assessment activities and the progressive deployment of probabilistic models in their practices requires a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of these advances. In particular, the low level of trust in EU food safety risk assessment framework highlighted in 2019 by an EU-funded survey could be exacerbated by novel methods of analysis. The variety of processed (...) data raises unique questions regarding the interplay of multiple regulatory systems alongside food safety legislation. Provisions aiming to preserve the confidentiality of data and protect personal information are juxtaposed to norms prescribing the public disclosure of scientific information. This research is intended to provide guidance for data governance and data ownership issues that unfold from the ongoing transformation of the technical and legal domains of food safety risk assessment. Following the reconstruction of technological advances in data collection and analysis and the description of recent amendments to food safety legislation, emerging concerns are discussed in light of the individual, collective and social implications of the deployment of cutting-edge Big Data collection and analysis techniques. Then, a set of principle-based recommendations is proposed by adapting high-level principles enshrined in institutional documents about Artificial Intelligence to the realm of food safety risk assessment. The proposed set of recommendations adopts Safety, Accountability, Fairness, Explainability, Transparency as core principles (SAFETY), whereas Privacy and data protection are used as a meta-principle. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Questions regarding the moral responsibility of Internet accessand service providers relating to information on the Internetcall for a reassessment of the ways in which we think aboutattributing blame, guilt, and duties of reparation andcompensation. They invite us to borrow something similar to theidea of strict liability from the legal sphere and to introduceit in morality and ethical theory. Taking such a category in thedistribution of responsibilities outside the domain of law andintroducing it into ethics, however, is a difficult thing. Doingso (...) seems to conflict with some broadly shared and deeply feltintuitions regarding the individuality of responsibility and therelationship between responsibility and guilt. These convictionscoincide with some basic ideas in Kantian moral theory and theascriptive theory based on these ideas. Nevertheless, theproblems to which the proposed liabilities / responsibilitiesrelate are so serious that they do not seem to leave room foraloofness. At least, they encourage us to reconsider the idea ofstrict liability carefully and to assess its merits. (shrink)

We present a developmental perspective regarding the difference in perceptions toward privacy between young and old. Here, we introduce the notion of privacy conceptions, that is, the specific ideas that individuals have regarding what privacy actually is. The differences in privacy concerns often found between young and old are postulated as the result of the differences found in their privacy conceptions, which are subsequently linked to their developmental life stages. The data presented have been obtained through a questionnaire distributed among (...) adolescents, young adults, and adults and provide support for this developmental perspective. This study is one of the first to include adolescents when investigating the privacy concerns among young and old. The results show that the privacy conceptions held by adolescents indeed differ from those held by young adults and adults in keeping with the expectations as seen from a developmental perspective. In addition, the areas in which the differences in privacy conceptions are found also reflect the strongest relationship with concerns. As such, these findings present an alternative perspective to the commonly held notion that young people are less concerned about privacy. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

In this contribution, we identify and clarifysome distinctions we believe are useful inestablishing the reliability of information onthe Internet. We begin by examining some of thesalient features of information that go intothe determination of reliability. In so doing,we argue that we need to distinguish contentand pedigree criteria of reliability and thatwe need to separate issues of reliability ofinformation from the issues of theaccessibility and the usability of information.We then turn to an analysis of some commonfailures to recognize reliability orunreliability.

This article discusses some rather formal characteristics of possible obligations to enhance. Obligations to enhance can exist in the absence of good moral reasons. If obligation and duty however are considered as synonyms, the enhancement involved must be morally desirable in some respect. Since enhancers and enhanced can, but need not coincide, advertency is appropriate regarding the question who exactly is addressed by an obligation or a duty to enhance: the person on whom the enhancing treatment is performed, or the (...) controller or the operator of the enhancement. Especially, the position of the operator is easily overlooked. The exact functionality of the specific enhancement, is all-important, not only for the acceptability of a specific form of enhancement, but also for its chances of success for becoming a duty or morally obligatory. Finally and most importantly, however, since obligations can exist without good moral reasons, there can be obligations to enhance that are not morally right, let alone desirable. (shrink)

While Susan Moller Okin found much to celebrate in Rawls's earlier articulation of his theory of justice, she worried that his later turn to political liberalism evacuated his theory of its feminist potential. Here, I argue that we need not be so pessimistic: some of the strongest arguments for pursuing certain feminist projects can and should be made from within a politically liberal framework. In advancing this claim, I develop Rawls's idea of primary goods—namely those goods that all citizens need (...) qua citizens—as a key conceptual resource for arguing for the elimination of the gendered division of labor using public reason. Drawing on recent empirical literature, I point out that the gendered division of labor continues to distribute to women an unfair allocation of primary goods. I then advocate for a specific public policy, which I call Gender Egalitarian Daddy Quota—a parental leave policy that sets aside time specifically for fathers to encourage men and women to engage in childcare related leave-taking to similar extents—on the grounds that this policy would help secure a fairer distribution of primary goods, and thus is required as a matter of justice. (shrink)

This article examines Gadamer's claim that language is fundamentally metaphorical from the perspective of Ricoeur's complementary analysis of metaphor. I argue that Gadamer's claim can only be understood in relation to a broader understanding of metaphor in which metaphor is not regarded as secondary to literal meaning. From this context one is better able to understand the connection Gadamer makes between language and ontology, which is found in his statement "Being that can be understood is language.".

One of the distinctive developments of the postwar era in the United States has been the relative decline in the economic significance of labor unions. Melvyn Dubofsky offers the hypothesis that this has resulted from a shift in public policy that represents a return to pre‐New Deal notions of the proper relationship between government and unions. But a much more likely explanation lies in the changing nature of American life. Increases in education and advances in transportation and communications have weakened (...) greatly the traditional worker‐versus‐capitalist paradigm that is at the core of Dubofsky's thinking. As this has happened, labor unions have increasingly become relics of a previous age. (shrink)

In this article is presented a reading of Heidegger in relation to the conception of desire, and its relation to various terms he uses frequently. I argue that the genesis of desire lies in the gap between the fullness of possibility and the poverty of actualization; that inauthentic desire aims at presence, possession, actualization (always insufficient); and that authentic desire aims at the conservation of the possibility-character of being. I also pay attention to the temporality of desire; to the analogy (...) between Kant's emphasis on respect for the law one has freely postulated and Heidegger's emphasis on Dasein's subjection to the possibilities it projects; to possibility as original abundance; and, in principle, to the turning in which desire is evoked in the event of granting, rather than simply produced in the act of projection. Special attention is paid on the German word 'Verlangen', which is related etymologically to the English 'long for', which stands for wanting something very much. But the word is also connected to the word 'long' which is important to get a grip on the notion of desire in Heidegger. (shrink)

Nie war Freundschaft populärer als heute. Sie gilt als entscheidende Zutat für ein gutes und glückliches Leben. Viele haben auch viele Freunde - jedoch will sich das versprochene Glück nicht so recht einstellen. Woran liegt das? Björn Vedder verknüpft in seiner Zeitdiagnose der Freundschaft philosophische Überlegungen mit der Analyse von popkulturellem Material sowie literarischen Klassikern. Er zeigt, was Freundschaft heute bedeutet, wie sie (auch zu uns selbst) gelingen kann und warum Facebook-Freunde echte Freunde sind. Dabei nimmt er die (...) pessimistischen Kulturkritiken der Gegenwart ernst, teilt deren Defätismus aber nicht, sondern zeigt Wege aus den Pathologien der modernen Freundschaft auf. (shrink)

Without suggesting that Kant is responsible for the rise of hermeneutical philosophy, there are some developments in his philosophy which are important in relation to hermeneutics. Kant made the distinction between things‐in‐themselves and phenomena or appearances (see Article 2, kant). The world we know depends on a conceptual projection of categories of our mind; we do not have access to the things‐in‐themselves, but only to interpretations of things such as they appear to us, after they have been edited by the (...) understanding. This domestication of rationality led to the fideism of Jacobi: if reason can not bring us to reality, the only instance that can give us any sense of an objective and real world is faith with a kind of “knowledge” which is higher than our rational knowledge. In his early On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) followed Jacobi in denying the pretensions of rational knowledge and determined religious sentiment to be a source of “knowledge” which transcends rational understanding (Vedder 1994). This background of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is important to acknowledge. Therefore in this essay I will emphasize the fragility of hermeneutical knowledge for Schleiermacher. First I shall explain the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher; then I shall examine the relation between hermeneutics and dialectics. (shrink)

Informed consent bears significant relevance as a legal basis for the processing of personal data and health data in the current privacy, data protection and confidentiality legislations. The consent requirements find their basis in an ideal of personal autonomy. Yet, with the recent advent of the global pandemic and the increased use of eHealth applications in its wake, a more differentiated perspective with regards to this normative approach might soon gain momentum. This paper discusses the compatibility of a moral duty (...) to share data for the sake of the improvement of healthcare, research, and public health with autonomy in the field of data protection, privacy and medical confidentiality. It explores several ethical-theoretical justifications for a duty of data sharing, and then reflects on how existing privacy, data protection, and confidentiality legislations could obstruct such a duty. Consent, as currently defined in the General Data Protection Regulation – a key legislative framework providing rules on the processing of personal data and data concerning health – and in the recommendation of the Council of Europe on the protection of health-related data – explored here as soft-law – turns out not to be indispensable from various ethical perspectives, while the requirement of consent in the General Data Protection Regulation and the recommendation nonetheless curtails the full potential of a duty to share medical data. Also other legal grounds as possible alternatives for consent seem to constitute an impediment. (shrink)

This paper poses the question of how to understand Heidegger’s notion of the holy in its relevance to a phenomenology of religion. I show that the holy is connected with Heidegger’s notion of the “whole” as it is analysed in anxiety, boredom, and wonder. Insofar as there is no experience of the whole in our time, there is also no experience of the holy. The notion of the whole and the holy are linked with Heidegger’s analysis of the contemporary era, (...) which is a time in which the gods have fled. Religions have a history because the way that the holy appears (hierophany) is connected with the openness of the situation in which it appears. The notion of the holy is therefore historical because it is taken up into the destiny and historicity of being. As long as there is no hierophany, there is no understanding of the gods in a religion. (shrink)

In this paper, we attempt to provide starting points for a discussion on immediate and longer term consequences of COVID-19-induced uses of digital technologies for the distinction of the public an...

One of the most significant aspects of Internet, in comparison with other sources of information, such as libraries, books, journals, television, radio etcetera, is that it makes expert knowledge much more accessible to non‐experts than the other traditional sources. This phenomenon has often been applauded for its democratizing effects. Unfortunately, there is also a disadvantage. Expert information that was originally intended for a specific group of people ‐ and not in any way processed or adapted to make it fit for (...) a broader audience ‐ can easily be misunderstood and misinterpreted by non‐experts and, when used as a basis for decisions, lead to unhappy consequences. Can these risks be diminished without limiting the informational freedoms of the information providers and without imposing paternalistic measures regarding the receivers of the information? (shrink)

In topical philosophy of religion the word 'given' plays an important role. However the meaning of this word is ambiguous. The word refers not only to the factual reality (datum) but also to what is given as a gift to someone (donum). This ambiguity leads toan unclear mixture of philosophical and religious positions. Therefore an analysis of such mixture is necessary. The main question of this analysis is how faith and religion on the one hand, and ontology and reason on (...) the other hand, influence each other? Isn'tit so that in the religious domain nobody can be convinced with and by rational means? In the first section, the question on the reality of the ultimate meaning as the momentfrom where man is motivated to lead his life, is explored. In the second section the idea is developed that philosophical insights are meaningful with regard to religious meaning only if they are referred back to religious faith. In the third section the question posited is whether philosophical reflection does not loose its original motivationalcontext if it isn't referred back to its original point of departure. This analysis is worked out against the background of I. Verhack's book: De mens en zijn onrust. Over het raadsel van de beweging. (shrink)

The leading question of this article is the way Gadamer interpreted Schleiermacher. Already in Truth and Method Gadamer interpreted Schleiermacher trough the eyes of Dilthey. This resulted in the idea that Schleiermacher was interested in restoring the original meaning of a text. Gadamer never abandoned this psychological interpretation of Schleiermacher. This is a result from the fact that Gadamer did not involve Schleiermacher’s dialectic in his hermeneutics. Because of this Gadamer never mentioned the kinship between Schleiermacher and his own theory (...) of interpretation. In Schleiermacher dialectic and hermeneutics are connected in the same way text constitution and text interpretation are connected. The art of speaking and of understanding are joined together in such a way that they imply each other. They are linked to each other like speaking and hearing . This means that a text is always the result of both. The other, the reader, the interpreter is already there in the constitution of the text. Schleiermacher writes, as a predecessor of Gadamer, in his Dialektik “The more a text is dialogic, the more complete it is” . In this way constitution and interpretation of a text are dependent on each other. By emphasizing the dialogical structure of our knowledge, Schleiermacher opens the way to a broader insight into the world. Through dialogue we can go beyond the limits of our selves and attain a relative universality. We learn to see things from different points of view. We can find traces of this in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, but Gadamer was not able to see that. (shrink)

Gezeigt wird wie Heideggers Denken des Seins interpretiert werden kann als sein Denken des Verlangens. Es wird darauf hingewiesen dass beim frühen Heidegger Begriffe wie „ὂρµξις“ und „Wille“ anwesend sind, und bestimmt werden als Bewegung der Transzendenz im Entwurf auf Möglichkeit als Möglichkeit. Auch wird gezeigt dass Begriffe wie „das Ungenügende“ und „der Überfluss“ im Entwurf auf Möglichkeiten eine Bedeutung haben. Im eigentlichen Entwurf auf Möglichkeit ist der Überfluss an Möglichkeiten unüberholbar. Dagegen ist die Neugier eine Bewegung die das Mögliche (...) nicht sein lässt‚ sondern das Mögliche nur noch als Wirklichkeit begehrt. Beim späteren Heidegger wird das Sein verstanden als Mögen. Dieses Mögen wird ausgelegt als Verlangen weil das Mögen enerseits eine Zuneigung ist und andererseits das Austragen der Differenz ist. Gezeigt wird wie beim späteren Heidegger der eigentliche Entwurf auf Möglichkeit substantiviert wird als Mögen des Seins. Um diese Zuneigung zu dem Sein anzudeuten braucht Heidegger Begriffe wie „Lange-Zeit“‚ „Langen“‚ „Langmut“‚ und „Langeweile“. Diese Wörter sind verwandt mit dem Wort „Verlangen“ das ursprünglich „differre“ bedeutet. (shrink)

In his very early work, Heidegger was already fascinated by the problem of time, which became more and more radicalized in his thinking. The experience of time, and its connection to the status of philosophical concepts, forms the background of Heidegger’s reading of Paul in his 1920-21 lecture course, 'Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.' In discussing the peculiarity of philosophical concepts, Heidegger points out that their uncertainty is by no means accidental, but is in fact endemic to them. This (...) amounts to a definitive step away from the Platonic, Cartesian and Hegelian tradition and its ideal of certainty. In this article the author begins by presenting Heidegger’s description of the phenomenon of time. Then he presents his reformulation of the status of philosophical concepts, and he ends by showing how this is present in Heidegger’s analysis of the letters of Saint Paul. Especially in Heidegger’s interpretation of the letters to the Thessalonians, he shows how the actualization of factical life is understood on the basis of the ‘parousia,’ the second coming of Christ. An essential moment of the orientation of factical life appears in the articulation of the actualization of the lived life; this is historicality. The meaning of human existence appears in existence as historicality. The way in which factical life lives time is the actualization of historicality. (shrink)