Commercial success of big data has led to speculation that big-data-like reasoning could partly replace theory-based approaches in science. Big data typically has been applied to ‘small problems’, which are well-structured cases characterized by repeated evaluation of predictions. Here, we show that in climate research, intermediate categories exist between classical domain science and big data, and that big-data elements have also been applied without the possibility of repeated evaluation. Big-data elements can be useful for climate research beyond small problems if (...) combined with more traditional approaches based on domain-specific knowledge. The biggest potential for big-data elements, we argue, lies in socioeconomic climate research. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Steve Awodey and Erich H. Reck. Completeness and Categoricity: 19th Century Axiomatics to 21st Century Senatics.

Heller examines the sense of values embodied in the works of key German writers and thinkers from Goethe to Kafka, particularly the consciousness of life's depreciation.

This article opens with the consequentialist–deontologist debate, with the former concerned about the relevance of punitive measures against their crime reducing potentials, while the latter highlights punishment as censure of wrongful acts and the proportion of the punishment to the degree of crime. The article briefly discusses the empirical research on the impact of penal sanctions and focuses on three main kinds of empirical research into possible general deterrent effects—namely, association studies, quasi-experimental studies, and contextual and perceptual studies. It addresses (...) the methodological issues involved in deterrence research and summarizes the results precisely. This article also discusses reductivism in the view of the possibility that penal sanctions could influence the offender's will. The results suggest that crime preventive aims can justify sentencing policies only to a limited degree, at least for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

Following the publication of the seminal Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm applied his unique vision to a critique of contemporary capitalism in The Sane Society. Where the former dealt with man's historic inability to come to terms with his sense of isolation, and the dangers to which this can lead, The Sane Society took his theories one step further. In doing so it established Fromm as one of the most controversial political thinkers of his generation. Anaylsing how individuals conform (...) to contemporary capitalist and patriarchal societies, the book was published to wide acclaim and even wider disapproval. It was a scathing indictment of modern capitalism and as such proved unwelcome to many. Unwelcome because much of what Fromm had to say was true. Today, as we settle into the challenges of the 21st century, Fromm's writings are just as relevant as when they were first written. Read it and decide for yourself - are you living in a sane society? (shrink)

Priority of the “self” is thought to be evolutionarily advantageous. However, evidence for this priority has been sparse. In this study, subjects performed a gender categorization task on self- and non-self target faces preceded by either congruent or incongruent periliminal or subliminal primes. We found that subliminal primes induced a priming effect only on self target faces. This discovery of a self-specific priming effect suggests that functional specificity for faces may include timing as well as spatial adaptations.

The major focus of the article is on Georg Forster’s mode of elaborating a “science of man” in its theoretical and cultural contexts. The study aims at identifying Forster’s distinct interests in the specificity of mankind and his interpretation of both the reasons for its diversity and its different stages of development. Forster, the article argues, used a historicized version of Enlightenment natural history in order to analyse man as a natural as well as a cultural being. At the same (...) time, put anachronistically, Forster constituted the reciprocity of physical and cultural anthropology. However, he differs from Enlightenment historical thinking in that he interprets history as a contingency. Finally, the article maintains that Forster deliberately conceived of the “science of man” as a multidisciplinary empirical science. (shrink)

From time to time medical ethicists bemoan the loss of a religious perspective in medical ethics. The discipline had its origins in the thinking of explicitly religious thinkers such as Paul Ramsey and Joseph Fletcher. Furthermore, many of those who contributed to the early development of the discipline had training in theology. One thinks of Daniel Callahan, Richard McCormick, Albert Jonsen, Sam. Banks. As the discipline becomes more and more self-reflective, with attention being paid to methodological and conditional concerns, it (...) is only natural that the roots are due for a reexamination. The time has therefore come for some reassessment. The first steps here are taken in the form of a dialogue between the coauthors to clarify authentic contributions and weed out unauthentic ones. (shrink)

Will man dem Lebenswerk Nietzsches gerecht werden, so ist es unerlässlich, vier Schwerpunkten in Nietzsches Leben besondere Beachtung zu schenken, da sie von außerordentlicher Bedeutung sind, nämlich seinem Elternhaus, d.h. seiner Kindheit und Jugend, seiner Beziehung zum griechischen Altertum im Rahmen seiner Bildung, seiner intensiven Beschäftigung mit dem Werk Schopenhauers und dem Einfluss der progressiven Paralyse als Spätstadium einer acquirierten syphilitischen Erkrankung auf sein Werk, was bisher leider zu wenig kompetente Berücksichtigung erfuhr. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche wurde in Röcken bei Lützen (...) als Sohn eines evangelischen Pfarrers geboren. Bereits 5 Jahre danach starb sein Vater. Der Rest der Familie, bestehend aus seiner noch sehr jungen Mutter, seiner um 2 Jahre jüngeren Schwester, zweier Tanten und der sehr dominanten Großmutter, zog nach Naumburg, wo Nietzsche zunächst die Bürgerschule besuchte. Dort wuchs er in fast ausschließlich weiblicher Umgebung ganz im Geiste tiefer evangelisch - christlicher Frömmigkeit auf Die Bibelkenntnisse des sensiblen, musikalisch und literarisch äußerst begabten Knaben waren mit der Zeit so umfangreich geworden, dass man i hn scherzhaft als den kleinen Pastor bezeichnete. In dieser Zeit sind sicherlich die Wurzeln für seinen späteren Antifeminismus zu suchen sowie seine Abneigung gegenüber dem Christentum, das er nahezu ausschließlich in der Form einer naiven, weiblich geprägten, weichlich-frömmelnden Religionsausübung kennen lernte, die ihm dekadent erscheinen musste. Er hatte so keine Gelegenheit, die eigentliche Stärke und Tiefe des Christentums zu erfahren. (shrink)

Will man dem Lebenswerk Nietzsches gerecht werden, so ist es unerlässlich, vier Schwerpunkten in Nietzsches Leben besondere Beachtung zu schenken, da sie von außerordentlicher Bedeutung sind, nämlich seinem Elternhaus, d.h. seiner Kindheit und Jugend, seiner Beziehung zum griechischen Altertum im Rahmen seiner Bildung, seiner intensiven Beschäftigung mit dem Werk Schopenhauers und dem Einfluss der progressiven Paralyse als Spätstadium einer acquirierten syphilitischen Erkrankung auf sein Werk, was bisher leider zu wenig kompetente Berücksichtigung erfuhr. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche wurde in Röcken bei Lützen (...) als Sohn eines evangelischen Pfarrers geboren. Bereits 5 Jahre danach starb sein Vater. Der Rest der Familie, bestehend aus seiner noch sehr jungen Mutter, seiner um 2 Jahre jüngeren Schwester, zweier Tanten und der sehr dominanten Großmutter, zog nach Naumburg, wo Nietzsche zunächst die Bürgerschule besuchte. Dort wuchs er in fast ausschließlich weiblicher Umgebung ganz im Geiste tiefer evangelisch - christlicher Frömmigkeit auf Die Bibelkenntnisse des sensiblen, musikalisch und literarisch äußerst begabten Knaben waren mit der Zeit so umfangreich geworden, dass man i hn scherzhaft als den kleinen Pastor bezeichnete. In dieser Zeit sind sicherlich die Wurzeln für seinen späteren Antifeminismus zu suchen sowie seine Abneigung gegenüber dem Christentum, das er nahezu ausschließlich in der Form einer naiven, weiblich geprägten, weichlich-frömmelnden Religionsausübung kennen lernte, die ihm dekadent erscheinen musste. Er hatte so keine Gelegenheit, die eigentliche Stärke und Tiefe des Christentums zu erfahren. (shrink)

With Hegel’s observations in his Lectures on Aesthetics, on the difference between the epic poetry of the ancients and the novel as the dominant literary form of the present, we are at the center of these meditations. The great epic poems of antiquity, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for instance, or Virgil’s Aeneid, reflect not only the minds of certain poets; they are, at the same time, as are all great literary works, recognizable as the product of an age; and the (...) age of Homer, the age of epic poetry, Hegel characterizes as a “fundamentally poetic state of the world,” that is a world in which poetry is not merely written, but, as it were, lived. The active intervention and participation of gods in the lives of mortals; groves and springs and hills as the habitats of nymphs and fauns; the poetic comprehension of what is, was at that time not a matter of the poetic imagination at work in the minds of a few chosen individuals, of artists whose successors, much later in history, more often than not lamented their separation from their contemporary surroundings, but was “natural,” a matter of fact, of ways of thinking and feeling shared by the whole community. It is not absurd to say that in such a world our distinctions between imagination and fact were of little importance, if not unknown. It is this that led the young Nietzsche to accuse the first great analytical rationalist of Greece, Socrates, the indefatigable questioner, of having destroyed mythology, of having helped to bring about the end of tragedy, indeed, of Greek art. (shrink)

In this book, Eli Hirsch focuses on identity through time, first with respect to ordinary bodies, then underlying matter, and eventually persons.

The principle that a sentence should be proportionate to the seriousness of the offence remains at the centre of penal practice and scholarly debate. This volume explores highly topical aspects of proportionality theory that require examination and further analysis. von Hirsch and Ashworth explore the relevance of the principle of proportionality to the sentencing of young offenders, the possible reasons for departing from the principle when sentencing dangerous offenders, and the application of the principle to socially deprived offenders. They (...) examine the claim that the principle tends to be associated with greater severity in sentencing, and explore the relevance of penance and of restorative justice to proportionality theory. Their examination of arguments and counter-arguments culminates in a re-statement of the main criteria for proportionate sentencing.The authors are well known for their previous writings on proportionality theory, and this volume broadens the theory to deal with important contemporary issues in crime and punishment. (shrink)

The central question in this book is why it seems reasonable for the words of our language to divide up the world in ordinary ways rather than other imaginable ways. Hirsch calls this the division problem. His book aims to bring this problem into sharp focus, to distinguish it from various related problems, and to consider the best prospects for solving it. In exploring various possible responses to the division problem, Hirsch examines series of "division principles" which purport (...) to express rational constraints on how our words ought to classify and individuate. The ensuing discussion deals with a wide range of metaphysical and epistemological topics, including projectibility and similarity, alternative analyses of natural properties and things, the inscrutability of reference, and the relevance of such pragmatic notions as salience and economy. The final chapters of the book develop what Hirsch contends is the most promising response to the division problem: a theory in which constraints on classification and individuation are seen to derive from the necessary structure of "fine-grained" propositions and the necessary dependence of some concepts on others. (shrink)

Two main claims are defended in this paper: first, that typical disputes in the literature about the ontology of physical objects are merely verbal; second, that the proper way to resolve these disputes is by appealing to common sense or ordinary language. A verbal dispute is characterized not in terms of private idiolects, but in terms of different linguistic communities representing different positions. If we imagine a community that makes Chisholm's mereological essentialist assertions, and another community that makes Lewis's four-dimensionalist (...) assertions, the members of each community speak the truth in their respective languages. This follows from an application of the principle of interpretive charity to the two communities. (shrink)

Erich Frauwallners Buch "Die Philosophie des Buddhismus" ist längst zu einem,Klassiker' geworden. Die Form der Darstellung ist glücklich gewählt; sie verknüpft allgemeine Überblicke, Einführungen in das Denken individueller buddhistischer Philosophen und lange Exzerpte aus philosophischen Werken des südasiatischen Buddhismus in wörtlicher Übersetzung. Das Buch bewegt sich also zwischen einem Einführungswerk und einer Anthologie. Die knappen Einleitungen zu den repräsentativen Texten sind informativ und klar und rücken die philosophischen Inhalte in das Licht ihrer historischen Entwicklung; die Übersetzungen aus den relevanten (...) Sprachen (Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetisch, Chinesisch) wiederum sind außerordentlich verlässlich. Der Neuauflage des Bandes wurde ein Vorwort von Eli Franco und Karin Preisendanz zu Frauwallners Leben und Schaffen beigefügt, ergänzt durch eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften und eine kommentierte Liste weiterführender Literatur zum südasiatischen Buddhismus. (shrink)

This book reflects on the variety of ways in which mourning affects political and social life. Through the narrative of the contributors, the book demonstrates how mourning is intertwined with politics and how politics involves a struggle over which losses and whose lives can, or should, be mourned.

We introduce an atomic formula ${\vec{y} \bot_{\vec{x}}\vec{z}}$ intuitively saying that the variables ${\vec{y}}$ are independent from the variables ${\vec{z}}$ if the variables ${\vec{x}}$ are kept constant. We contrast this with dependence logic ${\mathcal{D}}$ based on the atomic formula = ${(\vec{x}, \vec{y})}$ , actually equivalent to ${\vec{y} \bot_{\vec{x}}\vec{y}}$ , saying that the variables ${\vec{y}}$ are totally determined by the variables ${\vec{x}}$ . We show that ${\vec{y} \bot_{\vec{x}}\vec{z}}$ gives rise to a natural logic capable of formalizing basic intuitions about independence and dependence. (...) We show that ${\vec{y} \bot_{\vec{x}}\vec{z}}$ can be used to give partially ordered quantifiers and IF-logic an alternative interpretation without some of the shortcomings related to so called signaling that interpretations using = ${(\vec{x}, \vec{y})}$ have. (shrink)