This paper examines one of the most potent contemporaneous criticisms of the German Enlightenment (circa 1790) as well as the lessons that can be learned from such criticism. Specifically, it examines Kant's famous essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment,” and Hamman's objection drawn mainly from his “Letter to Christian Jacob Kraus.” It further argues Hamann’s criticisms are foresighted, especially when read against the subsequent dark imperil history of the ‘West' as seen in post-colonial theory.

Christian Jakob Kraus (1753–1807), political economist and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Königsberg, has long been neglected by historians, dismissed as a translator, a teacher, and a derivative disciple of Adam Smith. This article posits sociability as a useful category for understanding Kraus’s life, thought, and legacy. It aims to thereby reposition him as a meaningful figure in the late German Enlightenment. First, Kraus is presented as a natural Einsiedler who, surrounded by the (...) commercially vibrant Königsberg, comes to champion a methodology foregrounding praxis, lived experience, and the application of ideas for communal benefit. This ‘sociable’ approach to knowledge is contextualised within broader critiques of scholarly esotericism across Germany. Second, his work is treated as a case study elucidating the interdependence of individualism and sociability in the wider European Enlightenment. I argue that Kraus expressed a ‘sociable individualism,’ drawing upon Smith and Immanuel Kant, which harmonised autonomy and community. (shrink)

Is it a requirement of justice to democratize private companies? This question has received renewed attention in the wake of the financial crisis, as part of a larger debate about the role of companies in society. In this article, we discuss three principled arguments for workplace democracy and show that these arguments fail to establish that all workplaces ought to be democratized. We do, however, argue that republican-minded workers must have a fair opportunity to work in a democratic company. Under (...) current conditions, this means that a liberal order must actively promote workplace democracy. (shrink)

Rencontre d’un homme et d’un lieu. Le lieu est la ville de Strasbourg, lieu de passage, ville-frontière, foyer européen à l’intersection de la France et de l’Allemagne. L’homme est Jacques Derrida, philosophe cosmopolite s’il en est, reconnu dans le monde entier comme l’un des penseurs les plus importants du xxe siècle, dont l’œuvre suscite encore et toujours de nombreux commentaires en France et à l’étranger. Des liens très forts l’ont rattaché à Strasbourg pendant plus de trente ans : à plu...

Protein complexes perform many important functions in the cell. Large‐scale studies of protein–protein interactions have not only revealed new complexes but have also placed many proteins into multiple complexes. Whilst the advocates of hypothesis‐free research touted the discovery of these shared components as new links between diverse cellular processes, critical commentators denounced many of the findings as artefacts, thus questioning the usefulness of large‐scale approaches. Here, we survey proteins known to be shared between complexes, as established in the literature, and (...) compare them to shared components found in high‐throughput screens. We discuss the various challenges to the identification and functional interpretation of bona fide shared components, namely contaminants, variant and megacomplexes, and transient interactions, and suggest that many of the novel shared components found in high‐throughput screens are neither the results of contamination nor central components, but appear to be primarily regulatory links in cellular processes. BioEssays 26:1333–1343, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Advanced AI systems are rapidly making their way into medical research and practice, and, arguably, it is only a matter of time before they will surpass human practitioners in terms of accuracy, reliability, and knowledge. If this is true, practitioners will have a prima facie epistemic and professional obligation to align their medical verdicts with those of advanced AI systems. However, in light of their complexity, these AI systems will often function as black boxes: the details of their contents, calculations, (...) and procedures cannot be meaningfully understood by human practitioners. When AI systems reach this level of complexity, we can also speak of black-box medicine. In this paper, we want to argue that black-box medicine conflicts with core ideals of patient-centered medicine. In particular, we claim, black-box medicine is not conducive for supporting informed decision-making based on shared information, shared deliberation, and shared mind between practitioner and patient. (shrink)

The New Alexandrian Library is to be inaugurated at the end of 1998 on the royal site of the great ancient metropolis, that is, on the site of the Museum founded by Ptolemy I to enclose his mythical collection of books. This ambitious project of a “public research library “ was undertaken on the initiative of the Egyptian government and has, since 1986, received the support of UNESCO.

The history of encyclopedism seeks to trace the metamorphoses and various cultural adaptations of three essential components. The first of these is an intellectual endeavor, reflecting the conception, hierarchy, and articulation of knowledge in a given society: How is the map of knowledge organized and defined? How do human thought and memory gather together and master all accessible knowledge? The second component can take the form of a material object, the encyclopedia - whether conceived as a book that unites the (...) knowledge found in all other books, or again as the body of texts that, though not titled as such, belong nevertheless to an encyclopedic genre. The last constituent of the trilogy consists of the group of practices that fan out between these two poles, between the intellectual endeavor and the material object, and contribute to collecting, shaping, and transmitting the knowledge in a given society and time. (shrink)

Our methods of research, duly elaborated hereafter, would benefit from being applied to the realm of the East. For that matter, the examination of Syriac, Armenian, Coptic or Arabic manuscripts does not differ in the least from that of a Greek or Latin manuscript. The rules developed by classical philologists are just as valid for the study of the Maxims of Phtahhotep and the Precepts of Kagemeni…Alphonse Dain (1975), Les Manuscrits (Paris, Les Belles Lettres)One of the objects of a comparative (...) history of the scholarly practices in the West, the Far East, the Arab world and classical antiquity is the role of libraries in the constitution, transmission and transformations of the great textual corpora. To the institutional and social aspects of the politics of social memory should be added the range of intellectual and technical practices which have as their aim the conservation of this inheritance: material conservation and transmission - copying texts, restoring them, transferring them from one medium, one script and one language to another - but also work on the literal level and the meaning, the content and the form. (shrink)

Maps and libraries are ways of externalising memory and knowledge, making them not only concrete, visible and accessible, but also durable, reproducible, communicable and socially active. Both are linked to processes of totalisation. Maps add together and incorporate individual, particular and partial experiences of a space: they provide a summary and synthesis of points of view concerning a given territory, obscuring their empirical content in order to construct a coherent degree of visibility and intelligibility. Libraries represent the sum of the (...) reading and knowledge of the individual readers who frequent them. A library is one of the places that embody the intellectual, literary and spiritual heritage of a community; it is here that written memory, with its importance as a foundation for identity, can be seen in complete and tangible form. (shrink)

The figure of the Palmyrean queen Zenobia plays an important part in three vitae of the Historia Augusta. The discrepancy in her representation was attributed to different sources or different authors. Since the representation of Zenobia even changes within one vita, there is no need to assume different authors. Being a counterpart to Gallienus, Odaenathus and Aurelianus, the figure of Zenobia changes correspondingly to these male figures. Her voluntary submission to the real – male – emperor finds an equivalent in (...) the nation's voluntary submission to the real – male – ruler. The category of gender proves valuable in the analysis of characterisation and text intention. The vita Aureliani is interpreted as deconstructing the panegyric tones of the vitae Gallieni and triginta tyrannorum. (shrink)

The ideal of humanity.--The federation of humanity.--The moral progress of humanity.

The foundations of quantum mechanics are attracting new and significant interest in the scientific community due to the recent striking experimental and technical progress in the fields of quantum computation, quantum teleportation and quantum information processing. However, at a more fundamental level the understanding and manipulation of these novel phenomena require not only new laboratory techniques but also new understanding, development and interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics itself, a mathematical structure whose connection to what happens in physical reality (...) continues to present puzzles and engender debate.The present issue of Foundations of Physics considers, from physical, philosophical and logical perspectives, a range of problems: these range from the meaning of quantum identity and individuality, through probability and complementarity, to decoherence and gauge theories.The idea of preparing this special issue was conceived in connection with the Workshop .. (shrink)

On défend ici la thèse qu’Athénée met en scène dans les Deipnosophistes un cercle réel de grands lecteurs et d’érudits, engagés dans un jeu vertigineux : les citations, échangées sur un rythme infernal, sont autant de pions pour se déplacer sur le damier de la bibliothèque, de la langue, de la culture grecques classiques.

Algorithms are used across a wide range of societal sectors such as banking, administration, and healthcare to make predictions that impact on our lives. While the predictions can be incredibly accurate about our present and future behavior, there is an important question about how these algorithms in fact represent human identity. In this paper, we explore this question and argue that machine learning algorithms represent human identity in terms of what we shall call the statistical individual. This statisticalized representation of (...) individuals, we shall argue, differs significantly from our ordinary conception of human identity, which is tightly intertwined with considerations about biological, psychological, and narrative continuity—as witnessed by our most well-established philosophical views on personal identity. Indeed, algorithmic representations of individuals give no special attention to biological, psychological, and narrative continuity and instead rely on predictive properties that significantly exceed and diverge from those that we would ordinarily take to be relevant for questions about how we are. (shrink)

Clandestine philosophical manuscripts, made up of forbidden works including erotic texts, political pamphlets, satires of court life, forbidden religious texts, and books about the occult, had an avid readership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming objects of historical research by the twentieth century. The purveyors of the clandestine could be found in the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and not least in Paris or London. Despite the heavy risks, including prison, the circulation of these manuscripts was a prosperous venture. (...) After Ira Wade's pioneering contribution (1938), Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment. Topics from philosophy, political and religious thought, and moral and sexual behaviour are addressed by contemporary authors working in both America and Europe. These manuscripts shed light on the birth of pornography and provide an important avenue for investigating philosophical, religious, political, and social critique. (shrink)

The New Alexandrian Library is to be inaugurated at the end of 1998 on the royal site of the great ancient metropolis, that is, on the site of the Museum founded by Ptolemy I to enclose his mythical collection of books. This ambitious project of a “public research library “ was undertaken on the initiative of the Egyptian government and has, since 1986, received the support of UNESCO.

The Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse is a unique and controversial analysis of the genesis and evolution of Judeo-Christian intellectual thought. Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton argue that the Judaic and Christian heirs of Scripture adopted, and adapted to their own purposes, Greek philosophical modes of thought, argument and science. Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse explores how the earliest intellectuals of Christianity and Judaism shaped a tradition of articulated conflict and reasoned (...) argument in the search for religious truth and focuses especially on methods of discourse in the Judaic and Christian intellectual and literary traditions. (shrink)

Dem Autor geht es in erster Linie darum, einen in Deutschland weitgehend vergessenen Philosophen in den Mittelpunkt des Wissenschaftsdiskurses zu stellen. Der Thuringer Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, Schuler von Fichte und Schelling in Jena, entwickelte eine eigenstandige Philosophie, die sich einerseits der epochalen abendlandischen Geistestradition verpflichtet weiss, zugleich aber auch von der Kantischen Philosophie und ihrem kritischen Geist beeinflusst wurde. Krause ist einerseits Systemphilosoph, der immer wieder die Thematik des Absoluten oder Gottes in den Vordergrund stellt - in dieser (...) Hinsicht ist er spekulativer Idealist. Andererseits muss alle Philosophie beim Ich beginnen, sofern zeigt er sich als Denker des Transzendentalen. Krauses Philosophie ist zweistrahlig aufgebaut: Zum einen will er die endliche Welt aus Gott ableiten, andererseits soll das Ich zur Erkenntnis Gottes aufsteigen. Ausgehend von der Metaphysik wird dieser Aufstieg des Ich zum Absoluten in den verschiedenen Regionalphilosophien, in der Religion, Ethik und Asthetik thematisiert.". (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

This essay examines the complex relationship between Christianity and the climate crisis. It first looks at theological convictions found in statements made by church leaders meant to advance Christian engagement. It then examines the now legendary acerbic attacks made by historian Lynn White in the late 1960s, criticizing these same theological convictions for actually disabling environmental engagement. Centrally, it then turns to the progressive, eco-theology of Sallie McFague who, while echoing White’s concerns, offers more recent and thorough criticisms of (...) tradition-based Christian theology, focusing especially on its propagating an outdated anthropology and earth-fleeing spiritualities. Finally, the essay focuses on the tragic immediacy of the climate catastrophe, suggesting that a North American culture of optimism and consumerism is causing millions to respond with indifference and denial, and that an activist-oriented pessimism may be a more mature and constructive response to the dire situation we now face. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Karl Christian Friedrich Krause war ein bemerkenswerter Denker des Deutschen Idealismus. Seine Schriften können ohne Zweifel mit denen Hegels, Schellings und Fichtes konkurrieren. Gerade im Bereich der theoretischen Philosophie bietet das Krausesche Œuvre eine Fundgrube an Einsichten und Argumenten, die der heutigen, oftmals betont postmodernen oder atheistischen Philosophie eine dringend benötigte Kontrastfolie sein können. Sinn und Zweck der Arbeit ist es, den Panentheismus Krauses zeitgemäß darzustellen und Brückenschläge zur heutigen religionsphilosophischen Debatte aufzuzeigen.

This classic work on the Christian message speaks directly to all who seek genuine religious experience.

Panentheism is an often-discussed alternative to Classical theism, and almost any discussion of panentheism starts by way of acknowledging Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832) as the person who coined the term.1 However, apart from this tribute, Krause's own panentheism is almost completely unknown. In what follows, I first present a brief overview of Krause's life and correct some misconceptions of his work before I turn to the core ideas of Krause's own panentheistic system of philosophy. In brief, Krause elaborates (...) a scientific holism that is anchored in intellectual intuition of the Absolute as the one principle of being and recognition. The task of philosophical speculation consequently is twofold: the analytic-ascending part of philosophy proceeds by way of transcendental reflection and according to Krause enables us to obtain intellectual intuition. The synthetic-descending part of philosophy starts by way of showing that science as a whole is an explication of the original union of the Absolute as apprehended in intellectual intuition. Once this is achieved, Krause argues that the emerging philosophy of science is most adequately referred to as “panentheism” since everything is what it is “in and through” the Absolute, while the Absolute itself is not reducible to anything in particular. I end by showing how to relate Krause's panentheism to recent philosophical discussion. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Are evolution and creation irreconcilably opposed? Is 'intelligent design' theory an unhappy compromise? Is there another way of approaching the present-day divide between religious and so-called secular views of the origins of life? Jacob Klapwijk offers a philosophical analysis of the relation of evolutionary biology to religion, and addresses the question of whether the evolution of life is exclusively a matter of chance or is better understood as including the notion of purpose. Writing from a Christian point of (...) view, he criticizes creationism and intelligent design theory as well as opposing reductive naturalism. He offers an alternative to both and an attempt to bridge the gap between them, via the idea of 'emergent evolution'. In this theory the process of evolution has an emergent or innovative character resulting in a living world of ingenious, multifaceted complexity. (shrink)

The notion that appeal to the Judaism contemporary with the writing of the New Testament documents will help solve exegetical problems has characteristically taken the form of an appeal to a Judaism that never existed; the practice should be abandoned.

As COVID-19 emerged as a phenomenon of the total environment, and despite the intertwined and complex relationships that make humanity an organic part of the Bio- and Geospheres, the majority of our responses to it have been corrective in character, with few or no consideration for unintended consequences which bring about further vulnerability to unanticipated global events. Tackling COVID-19 entails a systemic and precautionary approach to human-nature relations, which we frame as regaining diversity in the Geo-, Bio-, and Anthropospheres. Its (...) implementation requires nothing short of an overhaul in the way we interact with and build knowledge from natural and social environments. Hence, we discuss the urgency of shifting from current to precautionary approaches to COVID-19 and look, through the lens of diversity, at the anticipated benefits in four systems crucially affecting and affected by the pandemic: health, land, knowledge and innovation. Our reflections offer a glimpse of the sort of changes needed, from pursuing planetary health and creating more harmonious forms of land use to providing a multi-level platform for other ways of knowing/understanding and turning innovation into a source of global public goods. These exemplary initiatives introduce and solidify systemic thinking in policymaking and move priorities from reaction-based strategies to precautionary frameworks. (shrink)