Darwin proposed that evolutionary novelties are environmentally induced in organisms “constitutionally” sensitive to environmental change, with selection effective owing to the inheritance of constitutional responses. A molecular theory of inheritance, pangenesis , explained the cross‐generational transmission of environmentally induced traits, as required for evolution by natural selection. The twentieth‐century evolutionary synthesis featured mutation as the source of novelty, neglecting the role of environmental induction. But current knowledge of environmentally sensitive gene expression, combined with the idea of genetic accommodation of mutationally (...) and environmentally induced change, supports a revival of Darwin's original theory that is consistent with modern molecular and population genetics. †To contact the author, please write to: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, c/o Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Einführung : Was ist Leben?. -- 1. T., Grundlagen der Lebensethik. Theologische Lebensethik und säkulare Bioethik ; Grundlagen der Lebensethik aus philosophischer Sicht ; Grundlagen der Lebensethik aus theologischer Sicht ; Ethische Prinzipien der Lebensethik -- 2. T., Konkrete Problemfelder. Die Verantwortung für das eigene Leben : Gesundheit und Krankheit ; Ethische Probleme im Zusammenhang mit der Ausweitung diagnostischer Verfahren ; Ethische Probleme im Zusammenhang mit der Ausweitung therapeutischer Verfahren ; Ethische Probleme der biomedizinischen Forschung ; Die Verantwortung für das (...) fremde Leben : Abtreibung und Euthanasie ; Die menschliche Verantwortung für das tierische Leben -- Schlussbetrachtung : Christliche Grundhaltungen der Lebensethik. (shrink)

In dieser Untersuchung wird die Instandhaltung technischer Artefakte, neben deren Schaffung und Nutzung die dritte grundlegende Form technischen Handelns, als Teilthema der Technikphilosophie systematisch und umfassend analysiert. Nur durch Instandhaltung können die unermeßlichen und vielfältigen mittels technischer Verfahren erzeugten Werte vor vorzeitigem Verfall und Untergang bewahrt werden. Die Studie erschließt Instandhaltung in phänomenologischer (Grundlagen) und normativer Hinsicht (Instandhaltung und Gesellschaft). Die auf Unumkehrbarkeit des Handelns und ganz allgemein des Geschehens gegründete Endlichkeit seiner Dauer bindet das individuelle technische Artefakt als wesentliches (...) Element in den Verlauf der Allgemein-, Technik-, Kultur-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte ein. (shrink)

A trusted guide into the inner realm where our spirits find strength to master life and live for God. It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Innerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life--from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the title War: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life. Packed in metal boxes and buried at (...) night for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author_s study a year before his death (and again a year after it), Innerland was not openly critical of Hitler_s regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this sense Innerland stands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author_s. At a glance, the focus of Innerland seems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes in The Inner Life:_These are times of distress. We cannot retreat, willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks pressing on society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation...The only justification for withdrawing into the inner self to escape today's confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with eternal powers, a strength of character ready to be tested in the stream of the world._ Innerland, then, calls us not to passivity, but to action. It invites us to discover the abundance of a life lived for God. It opens our eyes to the possibilities of that _inner land of the invisible where our spirit can find the roots of its strength and thus enable us to press on to the mastery of life we are called to by God._ Only there, says Eberhard Arnold, can our life be placed under the illuminating light of the eternal and seen for what it is. Only there will we find the clarity of vision we need to win the daily battle that is life, and the inner anchor without which we will lose our moorings. (shrink)

In his article ‘The Structure of Emptiness’, 467–80. doi: 10.1353/pew.0.0069[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]) Graham Priest examines the concept of emptiness in the Mādhyamaka school of Nāgārjuna and his commentators Candrakīırti and Tsongkhapa from a mathematical point of view. The approach attempted in this article does not involve any commitment to Priest's more controversial dialethic Mādhyamaka interpretation. The purpose of the present paper is to explain Priest's sketchy but very insightful interpretation of objects as non-well-founded sets in greater (...) detail. Some problems concerning his idea to model the Mādhyamaka claim of the emptiness of emptiness by means of this kind of framework will be noted. Moreover, we will also discuss the possibility to represent the Mādhyamika's denial of the existence of irreducible constituents of empirical reality within a well-founded system of set theory. Finally, some slight mistakes in Priest's mathematical construction need to be pointed out. (shrink)

Ethische Fragen der Psychiatrie -- Angst als psychiatrisches Problem.

The article claims that in the current situation there is no need for the Evangelical Church in Germany to create a new ethics of peace. Christian ethics of peace neither tends to bellicism nor to pacifism. Learned by the history of church, the EKD also rejects the traditional concepts of the holy or the just war. War can never be holy, not even just, but in certain situations warfare may be unavoidable or necessary. Cases of self-defense or the so-called humanitarian (...) interventions are examples for the latter. As the war in Kosovo shows, the modern Christi an ethics of a just peace needs clear and distinct criteria in order to decide whether in a certain situation a humanitarian intervention is necessary or not. (shrink)

The starting-point is the distinction between concept and conception. Our conceptions of gold, for instance, are the different understandings we get when we hear the word ‘gold’ whereas the concept of gold consists in the scientific determination of what gold is. It depends on the context whether it is more reasonable to claim a concept or to look for fitting conceptions. By arguing against metaphysical realism and for non-metaphysical realism, I will elaborate on some philosophical reasons for dealing with conceptions (...) instead of concepts of God, and secondly, I will discuss how such conceptions should be critically assessed. (shrink)