ZusammenfassungDie forensische Psychiatrie und insbesondere ihr klinischer Bereich, der Maßregelvollzug, sind im Hinblick auf Forschung noch weitgehend eine terra incognita. Steigende Unterbringungszahlen und Gesetzesreformen belasten die klinische Arbeit des Maßregelvollzugs. Zugleich hat der Fall Mollath Fragen an der Zuverlässigkeit forensisch-psychiatrischer Prognosen aufgeworfen. Gerade im zentralen Arbeitsbereich der Kriminal- und Gefährlichkeitsprognose fehlen epidemiologische und Verlaufsdaten. Auch zur Effizienz der Therapieprogramme und der Frage, welche Maßnahmen letztlich zu einer Verbesserung der Prognose bei Maßregelvollzugspatienten führen, gibt es keine einheitlichen Daten. Vor dem Hintergrund (...) des Doppelmandates der Besserung und Sicherung und des Anspruchs der Gesellschaft, vor gefährlichen, psychisch kranken Straftätern geschützt zu werden, ist es sowohl fachlich wie ethisch geboten, über die Frage der Effizienz der forensisch-psychiatrischen Arbeit zu forschen. Hiermit will sich die vorliegende Arbeit auseinandersetzen und die fachlichen sowie ethischen Aspekte diskutieren. Ansätze aus der Sozialethik können hier Argumente für eine ethisch verantwortbare Forschung auf diesem Gebiet liefern. (shrink)

Die forensische Psychiatrie und insbesondere ihr klinischer Bereich, der Maßregelvollzug, sind im Hinblick auf Forschung noch weitgehend eine terra incognita. Steigende Unterbringungszahlen und Gesetzesreformen belasten die klinische Arbeit des Maßregelvollzugs. Zugleich hat der Fall Mollath Fragen an der Zuverlässigkeit forensisch-psychiatrischer Prognosen aufgeworfen. Gerade im zentralen Arbeitsbereich der Kriminal- und Gefährlichkeitsprognose fehlen epidemiologische und Verlaufsdaten. Auch zur Effizienz der Therapieprogramme und der Frage, welche Maßnahmen letztlich zu einer Verbesserung der Prognose bei Maßregelvollzugspatienten führen, gibt es keine einheitlichen Daten. Vor dem Hintergrund (...) des Doppelmandates der Besserung und Sicherung und des Anspruchs der Gesellschaft, vor gefährlichen, psychisch kranken Straftätern geschützt zu werden, ist es sowohl fachlich wie ethisch geboten, über die Frage der Effizienz der forensisch-psychiatrischen Arbeit zu forschen. Hiermit will sich die vorliegende Arbeit auseinandersetzen und die fachlichen sowie ethischen Aspekte diskutieren. Ansätze aus der Sozialethik können hier Argumente für eine ethisch verantwortbare Forschung auf diesem Gebiet liefern. (shrink)

Many theories of social justice maintain that concern for the social bases of self-respect grounds demanding requirements of political and economic equality, as self-respect is supposed to be dependent on continuous just recognition by others. This paper argues that such views miss an important feature of self-respect, which accounts for much of its value: self-respect is a capacity for self-orientation that is robust under adversity. This does not mean that there are no social bases of self-respect that such theories ought (...) to incorporate. It means that they are different: they consist of the motivational and epistemic resources needed to develop and maintain such robustness. (shrink)

Nudge is a popular public policy tool that harnesses well-known biases in human judgement to subtly guide people’s decisions, often to improve their choices or to achieve some socially desirable outcome. Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) methods new possibilities emerge of how and when our decisions can be nudged. On the one hand, algorithmically personalized nudges have the potential to vastly improve human daily lives. On the other hand, blindly outsourcing the development and implementation of nudges to (...) “black box” AI systems means that the ultimate reasons for why such nudges work, that is, the underlying human cognitive processes that they harness, will often be unknown. In this paper, we unpack this concern by considering a series of examples and case studies that demonstrate how AI systems can learn to harness biases in human judgment to reach a specified goal. Drawing on an analogy in a philosophical debate concerning the methodology of economics, we call for the need of an interdisciplinary oversight of AI systems that are tasked and deployed to nudge human behaviours. (shrink)

Globalization arguably generated a governance gap that is being filled by transnational rule-making involving private actors among others. The democratic legitimacy of such new forms of governance beyond nation states is sometimes questioned. Apart from nation-centered democracies, such governance cannot build, for example, on representation and voting procedures to convey legitimacy to the generated rules. Instead, alternative elements of democracy such as deliberation and inclusion require discussion to assess new instruments of governance. The recently published standard ISO 26000 is an (...) interesting example of transnational governance. ISO 26000 was developed in a lengthy multiorganizational process for the purpose of giving guidance on the social responsibility of organizations. By assessing the specific case of ISO 26000, this study sheds light on the question of how legitimacy beyond nation-state democracy is ensured or constricted. Centering on the idea of deliberate democracy and democratic legitimacy, the study offers in-depth insights on the normative legitimacy of the development process of ISO 26000. Positioned on the interface of business studies and public policy, this article contributes to the academic literature on transnational governance and on the role of multistakeholder processes in shaping the role of business in society. (shrink)

Most approaches to quantum gravity suggest that relativistic spacetime is not fundamental, but instead emerges from some non-spatiotemporal structure. This paper investigates the implications of this suggestion for the possibility of time travel in the sense of the existence of closed timelike curves in some relativistic spacetimes. In short, will quantum gravity reverse or strengthen general relativity’s verdict that time travel is possible?

»[W]hile one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s ›ancestors‹.« These words lead to the heart of a dispute between Ralph Ellison and the Dissent editor Irving Howe in the early sixties which had an impact far beyond literary criticism and scholarship. From this well documented controversy we can learn something about both the power of attributions of belonging and the art of evading them.

In the 150 years since Schöll's seminal work, the Prytaneion Decree has been studied frequently. Of the groups of honourees mentioned in the decree, the agonistic victors have received the least attention. Most scholars have simply attributed them, without further discussion, to the sphere of war or to the sphere of religion. In this article, athletics is understood as a sphere of action with its own logic: the passages on athletes in the decree are examined in detail and situated within (...) the debate in classical Athens about whether victors of the Panhellenic Games should be honoured by the polis and to what extent. The strange duplication in the decree, which first regulates honours for agonistic victors in general and, in a second paragraph, honours for hippic victors, is related to some texts that viewed hippic victories more critically than gymnic ones. A precise dating of the decree is not possible, but there were several events in the fifth century that might have created the desire among Athenians for a general regulation of sitêsis for athletes. (shrink)

Nöthige Zugabe zu den Anmerckungen über Herrn D. Buddens Bedencken von der Wolffischen Philosophie -- Klarer Beweiss, dass Herr D. Budde die Ihm gemachten Vorwürffe einräumen und gestehen muss.

T. 1. Préface-Einleitung, 1705-1710 -- T. 2. 1711-1718 -- T. 3. 1719-1724 -- T. 4. 1725-1731 -- T. 5. Supplemente Register.

Cette étude formule l'hypothèse critique d'une opération de remythologisation par une réactualisation théologico-politique de la tragédie chez Heidegger. Cette opération ne saurait simplement coïncider avec une revalorisation " irrationnelle " du mythe, car elle procède d'abord d'une mise en question, non moins problématique, de la dualité supposée entre muthos et logos pour culminer dans ce qu'une note des années 1950 appellera la " mytho-logie de l'événement ". La réélaboration de la notion de mythe s'accomplit à partir du poème de Hölderlin (...) qui doit préfigurer les dieux de l'" autre commencement " post-judéo-chrétien, selon le projet spéculatif d'une " religion " censée relier le peuple à ses dieux nouveaux via l'être comme événement. L'hypothèse d'une remythologisation théologico-politique doit ainsi permettre d'éclairer non seulement le rôle matriciel de Hölderlin pour la pensée de l'être, mais aussi le surinvestissement illusoire du national-socialisme censé donner lieu au " peuple de Hölderlin ". Pour interroger cette réactualisation théologico-politique du mythe, l'étude se concentre sur les cours que Heidegger consacra à Hölderlin, tout en sollicitant l'intégralité du corpus des années 1933-1945, c'est-à-dire les cours fribourgeois, les traités inédits rédigés dans le sillage des Contributions (Beiträge) et les Cahiers noirs (Schwarze Hefte). (shrink)

The essay discusses the claim and the attempt to theoretically grasp the entire artistic production of the present, the possibility of which is suggested by a philosophical concept of art in the singular. On the basis of Umberto Eco’s reconceptualization of the code of a language as a heuristic fiction, it analyzes various attempts of mapping and categorizing certain historic developments and fields in the arts and contemporary attempts of writing a global history of art and music, respectively. Finally, it (...) turns to theoretical projects that claim to be able to capture the heterogeneous field of contemporary art. Even though there is a fundamental difference between encyclopedic and clearly normative approaches, any totalization must be recognized as situated. In this sense, it is a speculative fiction that may be productive but is in danger of becoming ideologic if this situatedness is forgotten or obscured. (shrink)

The essay draws on Paul Valéry’s motif of the »white thing« young Socrates finds on the beach, taking it as a paradigmatic description of the objects of art. It conceptualizes these as transitory objects in the sense of Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory which stresses their undecidability concerning their status as being inside or outside, real or imaginary. This does not entail a fixation on works nor their – theoretical or practical – rejection. The transitoriness of art is pursued from its (...) realization within reception through the transition between simultaneity and succession, the objects’ indeletable relations to other spheres within and outside the world of art, and the blurring of borders between different art genres, eventually turning to explicit interventions into other contexts. Finally, undecidability is posited even concerning the difference between culture and nature. (shrink)

Einer verbreiteten Auffassung zufolge schenkte Mill der utilitaristischen Tradition mit der Unterscheidung zwischen höheren und niederen Vergnügen („pleasures“) eine begriffliche Innovation und stützte seinen Utilitarismus ganz wesentlich auf die daraus erwachsene Axiologie, den sogenannten ‚qualitativen Hedonismus‘. Dieser sei jedoch inkonsistent, intellektualistisch und – wegen des lexikalischen Vorrangs höherer Vergnügen – letztlich absurd. Dieses philosophiegeschichtliche Vorurteil ist in mehreren Hinsichten verzerrt. Es ignoriert den ideengeschichtlichen Rahmen, missversteht den Gehalt des ‚qualitativen Hedonismus‘ und überschätzt dessen systematische Rolle in Mills Werk.

Research in quantum gravity strongly suggests that our world in not fundamentally spatiotemporal, but that spacetime may only emerge in some sense from a non-spatiotemporal structure, as this paper illustrates in the case of causal set theory and loop quantum gravity. This would raise philosophical concerns regarding the empirical coherence and general adequacy of theories in quantum gravity. If it can be established, however, that spacetime emerges in the appropriate circumstances and how all its relevant aspects are explained in fundamental (...) non-spatiotemporal terms, then the challenge is fully met. It is argued that a form of spacetime functionalism offers the most promising template for this project. (shrink)

Die künstlerische Produktion der Gegenwart ist äußerst divers und kaum mehr auf klare Kategorien festlegbar. Es ist eine geläufige Diagnose, dass sich Disziplinengrenzen auflösen und dass letztlich alles in einer Kunst im Singular aufgeht. Das Buch vertritt die These, dass bei allen Überschreitungs- und Hybridisierungsbewegungen disziplinäre Logiken weiterhin bedeutsam sind und dass die Begriffe der Kunst im Singular und der Künste im Plural nur schlecht geeignet sind, diese Situation zu beschreiben: Sie unterschätzen die Heterogenität der künstlerischen Arbeiten bzw. suggerieren, die (...) verschiedenen Disziplinen ließen sich sauber nebeneinander sortieren und folgten im Großen und Ganzen derselben Logik, was offensichtlich nicht der Fall ist. Als alternative Beschreibungsmöglichkeiten werden die Begriffe des Materials und des Ortes angeboten, mit denen jeweils konkrete, aber systematisch verankerte Analysen an die Stelle klarer Kategorisierungen gesetzt werden. Der Begriff des künstlerischen Materials wird von Theodor W. Adorno übernommen, aber flexibilisiert: Er ist produktiv darin, dass er die innere Historizität von Kunstwerken zu denken erlaubt und sie auf Vorläufer und Traditionslinien beziehbar macht. Er muss allerdings von der Vorstellung eines klaren Fortschritts befreit und von der Fixierung auf einzelne, getrennte Disziplinen gelöst werden. Mit dem Begriff des Ortes wird der disziplinären, architektonischen, institutionellen und geopolitischen Situierung künstlerischer Arbeiten Rechnung getragen. Die beiden Begriffe funktionieren komplementär, indem sie Materiallinien auch über Grenzen hinweg verfolgbar und die Interferenzen beschreibbar machen, die sich bei Ortswechseln ergeben. Dies ist ein Open-Access-Buch. (shrink)

Der Begriff der Musik ist problematisch, insofern seine Anwendung auf Praktiken, die nicht von vornherein unter seiner Ägide stattfi nden, diese auf eine bestimmte Weise interpretiert und zuschneidet, die ihnen nicht unbedingt gemäß ist. Gleichzeitig.

Musical hermeneutics is a controversial issue. Today it is primarily associated with historical research into musical meanings in the context of cultural studies. Besides this, there is an everyday hermeneutics where understanding is inextricably linked to the daily use of music. Meg Stuart’s dance piece Built to last is interpreted as a reflection of this everyday hermeneutics. It applies Stuart’s technique of researching and distorting expressive movement to the movement of and to music, and its decidedly “wrong” way of doing (...) this reveals more about classical music’s presence than a more formal, “right” approach. (shrink)

We formulate a critique of the Future State Maximization umbrella term and its connection to von Foerster’s Ethical Imperative by considering the relationship between Empowerment and other ….

La presente comunicación tiene como principal objetivo poner sobre la mesa algunos de los problemas que latían de fondo en algunas de las charlas del anterior VII Congreso sobre Pensamiento Filosófico Contemporáneo de la Sociedad Asturiana de Filosofía. No pretendo, sin embargo, exponer tesis alguna, sino que procuraré dialogar con las ideas del pasado Congreso de la SAF, y así poder ganar distancia para orientar mejor la mirada o proponer una actitud diferente ante las cuestiones. Comenzaré centrándome en una de (...) las comunicaciones, concretamente la de Virginia Ballesteros. A continuación, procuraré señalar los presupuestos fundamentales que latían de fondo a partir de las investigaciones de Felipe Martínez Marzoa, con el que intentaré mostrar qué elementos se encuentran a la base de la violencia ontológica en nuestras sociedades. Finalmente, y sólo para señalar posibles líneas de investigación, indicaré brevemente una probable relación alternativa entre fenomenología y medicina. (shrink)

Approaches to quantum gravity often involve the disappearance of space and time at the fundamental level. The metaphysical consequences of this disappearance are profound, as is illustrated with David Lewis's analysis of modality. As Lewis's possible worlds are unified by the spatiotemporal relations among their parts, the non-fundamentality of spacetime---if borne out---suggests a serious problem for his analysis: his pluriverse, for all its ontological abundance, does not contain our world. Although the mere existence---as opposed to the fundamentality---of spacetime must be (...) recovered from the fundamental structure in order to guarantee the empirical coherence of the non-spatiotemporal fundamental theory, it does not suffice to salvage Lewis's theory of modality from the charge of rendering our actual world impossible. (shrink)

In the framework of his transcendental philosophy, Kant strictly separates morality from aesthetics. The pleasure in the good and the pleasure in the beautiful are two different kinds of pleasure (Arten des Wohlgefallens). As a consequence, a moral act as such cannot be beautiful. It is only in a second step that Kant indicates possible connections, in his comments on aesthetic ideas, symbolism, the sensus communis, and education in general. In Confucius on the other hand we do not find such (...) a radical separation between beauty and morality. Ritual is a source of both. Moral acts can be beautiful. One might wonder whether Confucius missed a point, or whether Kant overdid the separation. Or is it that their conceptions are so fundamentally different that they cannot easily be translated and identified across different philosophical traditions? (shrink)

This essay is about Wittgenstein, first about his views on ethics, second about his conception of language games. Third, it combines the two and shows how problems arise from this. Wittgenstein rejects theories of ethics and emphasises the variety of language games. Such language games are marked by what I call “inner relativity”. Wittgenstein himself was not a relativist, but it seems to me his views easily lead to what I call “outer relativism”. In matters of ethics this is particularly (...) problematic. (shrink)

Es ist ein Gemeinplatz, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit dem moralischen Intuitionismus ein Leitmotiv in Mills Werk ist und ihm persönlich viel bedeutete. So ist z. B. der Autobiography zu entnehmen, dass Mill im Intuitionismus seiner Zeit eine Hauptwurzel für gesellschaftliche Übel, schlechte Institutionen und vorurteilsbeladene Praktiken, kurzum ein großes Fortschrittshindernis sah, dem er mit seinem Werk (v. a. auch den theoretischeren Schriften A System of Logic und An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy) den Nährboden entziehen wollte. Demnach hatte Mill (...) es sich zur Lebensaufgabe gemacht, die (aus seiner Sicht schädlichen) praktischen Auswirkungen des Intuitionismus einzudämmen, indem er dessen philosophisches Fundament attackierte. (shrink)

In this essay I point out parallels between Kant’s theory of aesthetics and Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule following. Although Wittgenstein did not write an aesthetics and Kant did not discuss Wittgensteinian rule-following problems, and although both Kant and Wittgenstein begin at very different starting points and use different methods, they end up dealing with similar issues, namely issues about rules, particularity, exemplarity, objectivity, practice, and as-if statements.

English summary: During his time inWurzburg from 1803 to 1806 Schelling read his lectures on the System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere several times. They are the only complete exposition of Schellings identity philosophy, which comprises the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of mind. The articles discuss the Wurzburger System in the context of problem history and in light of the history of Schellings works and of the history of debates concerning them. With contributions by Christopher Arnold, (...) Ulrich Barth, Christoph Binkelmann, Christian Danz, Georg Essen, Michael Hackl, Patrick Leistner, Jan Rohls, Alexander Schuhbach, Sebastian Schwenzfeuer, Clemens Tangerding and Paul Ziche. German description: In seiner Wurzburger Zeit von 1803 bis 1806 hat Schelling mehrfach sein System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere vorgetragen. Hierbei handelt es sich um die einzige Gesamtdarstellung der identitatsphilosophischen Konzeption, welche sowohl Natur- als auch Geistphilosophie umfasst. Die Beitrage des Bandes thematisieren das Wurzburger System vor seinem werk- und problemgeschichtlichen Hintergrund sowie in seinem debattengeschichtlichen Kontext. Mit Beitragen von Christopher Arnold, Ulrich Barth, Christoph Binkelmann, Christian Danz, Georg Essen, Michael Hackl, Patrick Leistner, Jan Rohls, Alexander Schubach, Sebastian Schwenzfeuer, Clemens Tangerding und Paul Ziche.Mit Beitragen von Christopher Arnold, Ulrich Barth, Christoph Binkelmann, Christian Danz, Georg Essen, Michael Hackl, Patrick Leistner, Jan Rohls, Alexander Schuhbach, Sebastian Schwenzfeuer, Clemens Tangerding und Paul Ziche. (shrink)

Les descriptions de la fin des temps et de l'Apocalypse dans le Coran n'ont pas seulement nourri un messianisme temporel, annonçant les événements qui départagent les amis et les ennemis de Dieu. Le philosophe Christian Jambet présente ici une oeuvre du penseur shiite Mullâ Sadrâ qui, au XVIIe siècle," neutralise les conflits de la fin des temps en leur donnant un sens permanent et spirituel, qui en apaise l'urgence, en défait les prestiges temporels au profit du combat spirituel." L'essai (...) qui précède la traduction de L'Epître du rassemblement dévoile ainsi une éthique de la résurrection. Il éclaire également les influences néoplatonicienne et soufie qui parcourent cette oeuvre, dont Christian Jambet restitue ici toute la puissance. (shrink)

Hans Wagner (1917-2000) hat Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts eine systematische Erneuerung der Transzendentalphilosophie in Angriff genommen: eine an Kants subjektheoretischem Geltungsbegriff orientierte und Problementwicklungen des deutschen Idealismus, des Neukantianismus und der Phanomenologie integrierende Transzendentalphilosophie. Diese Gedenkschrift zu seinem hundertsten Geburtstag enthalt Beitrage von Reinhold Aschenberg, Reinhold Breil, Martin Bunte, Werner Flach, Klaus Ganglbauer, Bernward Grunewald, Reinhard Hiltscher, Christian Krijnen, Peter Michael Lippitz, Steinar Mathisen, Gerhard Seel, Manfred Wetzel und Kurt Walter Zeidler, welche die Philosophie Wagners in ihrem historischen und (...) systematischen Gehalt erkunden. (shrink)

Christian Pfeiffer explores an important, but neglected topic in Aristotle's theoretical philosophy: the theory of bodies. A body is a three-dimensionally extended and continuous magnitude bounded by surfaces. This notion is distinct from the notion of a perceptible or physical substance. Substances have bodies, that is to say, they are extended, their parts are continuous with each other and they have boundaries, which demarcate them from their surroundings. Pfeiffer argues that body, thus understood, has a pivotal role in Aristotle's (...) natural philosophy. A theory of body is a presupposed in, e.g., Aristotle's account of the infinite, place, or action and passion, because their being bodies explains why things have a location or how they can act upon each other. The notion of body can be ranked among the central concepts for natural science which are discussed in Physics III-IV. (shrink)

It has often been said that the Chinese script is pictorial or ideographic, and that this is one of the reasons why Chinese tend to think more analogically than logically, and why in the past the natural sciences developed to a lesser degree in China than in the West. These are strong claims. They have often been oversimplified and exaggerated, but I think there is something to be said for them. Here I will focus on the first question. I will (...) argue that Chinese characters still have semantic features that create image-like qualities in a wider sense: not mere resemblances between sign and object, but family resemblances in semantic fields. The fact that Chinese is an isolating and monosyllabic language is essential in this. (shrink)

Notre travail dont cet article est un bilan partiel entend explorer les débats historiques et actuels, réels ou virtuels, entre l’anthropologie philosophique (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen) et les phénoménologies husserliennes et post-husserliennes au XXe siècle en France et en Allemagne et au-delà. L’un de nos fils conducteurs pour traverser cet héritage théorique complexe est l’hypothèse de Blumenberg qui dans la Description de l’homme situe le germe d’un « tournant anthropologique » de la phénoménologie en 1913, tournant que l’anthropologie philosophique et « (...) empirique » de Gehlen viendra radicaliser et parachever en 1940 dans L’Homme. Ce tournant est associé à un déplacement paradigmatique (de l’ontologie et de la métaphysique vers l’anthropologie) qui permet d’envisager la condition anthropologique de la phénoménologie, c’est-à-dire du phénoménologue. (shrink)

Nebraska University Studies, V25, No. 2-4.

Over the last 25 years, there has been an increasing fascination with the “dark” side of leadership. The term “destructive leadership” has been used as an overarching expression to describe various “bad” leader behaviors believed to be associated with harmful consequences for followers and organizations. Yet, there is a general consensus and appreciation in the broader leadership literature that leadership represents much more than the behaviors of those in positions of influence. It is a dynamic, cocreational process between leaders, followers, (...) and environments, the product of which contributes to group and organizational outcomes. In this paper, we argue that, despite this more holistic recognition of leadership processes within the broader leadership literature, current conceptualizations and analyses of destructive leadership continue to focus too heavily on behaviors and characteristics of “bad” leaders. In our view, to achieve a more balanced understanding of destructive leadership, it is important to adopt more integrative approaches that are based in the contemporary leadership discourse and that recognize flawed or toxic leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments as interdependent elements of a broader destructive leadership process. To this end, we offer a critique of the destructive leadership literature, propose a broader definition of destructive leadership, and highlight gaps in our understanding of leaders, followers, and environments in contributing to destructive leadership processes. Finally, we conclude by discussing strategies for examining destructive leadership in a broader, more holistic fashion. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

The phrase after Auschwitz plays a central role in Adorno's oeuvre. To him, the industrialized genocide of Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Slavic people at death camps like Auschwitz, the systematic mass killing of human beings labeled “life unworthy of life” by their murderers and the ideologues behind them, the ruthlessness and utter contempt for humanity of the Nazi German perpetrators of these unimaginable crimes, give those who live after Auschwitz certainties about the extent of human cruelty as well as (...) human torment that undermine any trust in civilization and social progress, in traditional appeals to meaning, beauty, truth, or goodness. The clearest theoretical expression of these certainties can be found in Adorno's impossibility claims about poetry and art, about the good life, about metaphysical fundamentals. This contribution will examine these impossibility claims in order to clarify the philosophical role of Adorno's phrase after Auschwitz in his own works, but also in order to place Adorno's reflections on life and thought after Auschwitz with respect to our contemporary situation. (shrink)