Was in Theorien an Auflösungsvermögen verkraftet werden kann und muß, findet in der Welt, die durch Theorie rekonstruiert werden soll, eine Parallele: Was der Mensch sei, ist nicht einmal menschen- und lebensweltlich eine klare Kante. In den Humankatastrophen der letzten hundert Jahre wird er zu einer verfeuerungsfähigen Biomasse. Man kann kaum den Eindruck gewinnen, daß sich daran etwas wirklich geändert hat. Es wird Tag für Tag hekatombenweise gestorben, gemordet, gefoltert. Der Mensch wird definiert als das Wesen, das man töten kann (...) durch Hunger, Krankheit, Folter, Mord und Krieg, namenlos, zahllos, heute hier, morgen dort. Man könnte sich denken, daß die Lehre vom Menschen, die Anthropologie, ihren Grund verliert und eigentlich zur Thanatologie konvertieren müßte. Und dank Gentechnologie erscheint am Horizont die Vision, der Mensch sei nicht mehr jemand, der nach dem Bilde eines Gottes geformt sei, sondern nunmehr jemand, der in den Stand versetzt wurde, sich ein machbares Bild von sich selber zu schaffen, die Exemplare der humanen Population so zu formatieren, daß sie dem alten Ideal der Kalokagathia entsprechen: tugendhaft, schön, alters- und behinderungslos, krankheits-, rausch- und drogenfrei, angemessenen Verstandes eine Idee der Devianzausmerzung, könnte man sagen, die Idee einer leid- und schicksalsfreien Ruhewelt, einer Re-Animation des Paradiesgedankens ohne Adam und ohne Eva. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas vertritt die These, dass sich das Konsensprinzip des kommunikativen Handelns in den Meinungs- und Willensbildungsprozess der Politik übertragen lasse. In der vorliegenden grundlegenden Kritik zeigt die Autorin, dass diese These nicht haltbar ist. Anders als Habermas annimmt, findet kommunikatives Handeln keinen Eingang in die Prozeduralität der Politik. Das politische Handeln wird vielmehr durch systemische Vorgaben bestimmt. Diese ergeben sich im Wesentlichen aus der Prozeduralität des ökonomischen Systems sowie aus der über Macht bestimmten Prozeduralität des politischen Systems selbst.

D'où vient cette réalité historique particulière qu'est la morale protestante? C'est pour répondre à cette question que les deux premières parties de ce livre sont consacrées à une présentation des sources de l'éthique protestante, celles de la Réforme du 16e siècle (Luther et Calvin), et celles du puritanisme anglais. On découvrira à ce propos le lien étroit du protestantisme et de la modernité, pour le meilleur (démocratie) et pour le pire (utilistarisme). Dès lors, la question de l'avenir d'un tel lien (...) se pose et deux enjeux prioritaires sont ici mis en évidence : comment, dans une société sécularisée, faire valoir l'importance et la valeur d'une morale de conviction théologique? Comment, face à des phénomènes de retour régressif d'une religiosité irrationnelle, maintenir l'exigence d'une relation positive entre foi et raison, sagesse éthique et intelligences? Comment rester à la fois solidaire et critique de notre culture? Enfin l'auteur propose trois engagements spécifiques par quoi le protestantisme pourra prendre utilement sa part au débat contemporain sur la morale nécessaire à notre société actuelle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 195-198 [Access article in PDF] Implicit and Explicit Temporality Thomas Fuchs Keywords implicit/explicit temporality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, desynchronization, melancholia, schizophrenia Since Minkowski (1970), Strauss (1966), v. Gebsattel (1954), and Tellenbach (1980), temporality has been a main subject of phenomenological psychiatry. Drawing on philosophical concepts of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, these authors have analyzed psychopathologic deviations of time experience, mainly from an individual point (...) of view, for example, as a slowing down or inhibition of lived time in depression or obsessive–compulsive disorder. Their analyses are still most valuable today, but may be carried further by introducing concepts such as embodied and intersubjective temporality into psychopathology. Martin Wyllie (2005), by opening up a wide scope of temporal phenomena and related concepts, makes a laudable effort to contribute to such a progress.In my commentary, I would like to propose a distinction that is suggested by much of Wyllie's analysis and may shed further light on psychopathology, namely between implicit and explicit temporality. If we look at a child while obliviously playing with his toys, lost to the world, we may assume that there is no sense of the time passing. Lived time runs with the movement of life, implicit in the child's experience of being engaged in his play and directed toward his goals. It "unfolds through the processes of bodily activity" (Wyllie 2005). Future and past do not stand out against the pure presence of "becoming." This implicit mode of temporality is retrieved every time that we are absorbed in what we are doing, and may even reach the climax of "flow experiences" (Csikszentmihalyi 1988) where the sense of time is lost in unimpeded, fluent performance.However, this changes when a gap arises between need and satisfaction, desire and fulfillment, or plan and execution. Now the future appears as a "not yet" or "yet to come," experienced as the temporality of awaiting, striving, or longing for. Time is felt as passing by and refusing the desired fulfillment; it becomes conscious or explicit. A similar gap arises between the present and something irretrievably lost, bringing the past to consciousness as a "no more." Again time is experienced explicitly, but now as moving on relentlessly and separating us from the lost object. The gap to the past may not be bridged any more: this is the temporality of missing or mourning. In both cases, explicit time arises as a negation of implicit or lived time (here my use of the term is a bit divergent from Wyllie's); it is experienced as a "not yet" or "no more," often with a component of displeasure or suffering (Fuchs 2001a, 2003)."Implicit" versus "explicit time" thus come near to another distinction well known in phenomenology, namely between the "lived" and [End Page 195] the "corporal body" (Leib versus Koerper). The first term refers to the body functioning in the tacit mode, as the medium of everyday performance. The second term points to the body as turning into the object of attention, for example, when it puts up resistance to our purposes, or is used as an instrument deliberately (Fuchs 2001b). In fact, implicit temporality and tacit performance of the body are nearly synonymous: Lived time may be regarded as a function of the lived body, opened up by its potentiality and capability. The more we are engaged in our tasks, the more we forget time as well as the body; we are, as it were, "inside time." On the other hand, in explicit temporality the body often appears in the corporal or explicit mode as well. For example, when falling ill, we experience our body no more as a tacit medium but rather as an object or obstacle, while we notice the slowing down of time and may even feel excluded from the movement of life. Thus, embodiment and temporality have a parallel background–foreground structure.I now try to carry these considerations further by including the intersubjective dimension of time. In an earlier paper, I describe the attunement of the living being to its environment as a continuous synchronization on the biological as... (shrink)

v. 1. Úvod do filosofie. 1. Filosofická logika.

v. 1. Úvod do filosofie. 1. Filosofická logika.

According to QBism, quantum states, unitary evolutions, and measurement operators are all understood as personal judgments of the agent using the formalism. Meanwhile, quantum measurement outcomes are understood as the personal experiences of the same agent. Wigner’s conundrum of the friend, in which two agents ostensibly have different accounts of whether or not there is a measurement outcome, thus poses no paradox for QBism. Indeed the resolution of Wigner’s original thought experiment was central to the development of QBist thinking. The (...) focus of this paper concerns two very instructive modifications to Wigner’s puzzle: One, a recent no-go theorem by Frauchiger and Renner, and the other a thought experiment by Baumann and Brukner. We show that the paradoxical features emphasized in these works disappear once both friend and Wigner are understood as agents on an equal footing with regard to their individual uses of quantum theory. Wigner’s action on his friend then becomes, from the friend’s perspective, an action the friend takes on Wigner. Our analysis rests on a kind of quantum Copernican principle: When two agents take actions on each other, each agent has a dual role as a physical system for the other agent. No user of quantum theory is more privileged than any other. In contrast to the sentiment of Wigner’s original paper, neither agent should be considered as in “suspended animation.” In this light, QBism brings an entirely new perspective to understanding Wigner’s friend thought experiments. (shrink)

Can events that take place after an individual’s death affect that person’s weIl-being? Aristotle apparently thought that they could, but Mark Overvold disagrees. Like other contemporary moral theorists, Overvold analyzes the notion of a person’s utility or welfare in terms of the fulfillment of the individual’s desires, but he adds the important qualification that the desites must be for states-of-affairs in which the agent is an essential constituent. The clear implication of such a view is that our welfare cannot be (...) affected by the post-mortem satisfaction of any of the interests which we had while alive.I shall defend Overvold against his critics who insist that at least some posthumous satisfactions can contribute to a person’s welfare. I shall also argue against Brad Hooker’s proposal that we revise Overvold’s theory in order to account for such cases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 323-326 [Access article in PDF] The Tacit Dimension Thomas Fuchs Thirty years after its appearance, Blankenburg's "Psychopathology of common sense" has not lost its relevance. In my commentary I will try to illustrate the fruitfulness of his approach by pointing to some connections with the phenomenology of the body as well as with recent memory and infant research.As Blankenburg himself indicates, the (...) notion of common sense developed by a shift of meaning from the classical sensus communis and thus has its original basis in the sensual-bodily experience. By the koinè aísthesis, Aristoteles meant a central sense organ integrating all single modalities of sensation (which he localized in the heart). In German physiology and psychiatry of the nineteenth century, the sensus communis was still translated as "Gemeingefühl" ("common feeling") or "cenesthesia" (Fuchs 1995). This term denoted the inner, proprioceptive bodily sensations, but also an original unity of the senses, which has been rediscovered by recent infant research as intermodal sensory perception. The affection of the body was thus regarded as the common basis of all sensation.Looking on this track for a bodily basis of the common sense, we find it in the habitual structure of the lived-body as analysed by Merleau-Ponty (1945). The body is the primary "matter-of-course," namely, the tacitly functioning medium of our everyday being-in-the-world prior to any subject-object split. The body schema, in Merleau-Ponty's view, is not only a system of familiar units of movement or "kinetic melodies," it also incorporates the surrounding things, tools, and spaces that are familiar to us and that we "inhabit." Thus, the musician "does not only manipulate the instrument like a separate object, but lives in it like a limb and inhabits the expressive musical space it opens" (Behnke 1997). But for Merleau-Ponty, the body schema is also the basis of "intercorporeity," i.e., a prepersonal sphere of reciprocal comportment and understanding prior to any explicit consensus and symbolic communication. In this sphere of elementary contact, the "atmospheric" senses play a major role: The sense of smell (as shown, e.g., by the expression "to scent treason" or in German, "jemand nicht riechen können" [not be able to "smell" or stand someone]) as well as the sense of taste whose ambiguous meaning, mentioned by Blankenburg, points to the bodily basis of the feeling for what is suitable, decent, or aesthetically pleasing. Even the designation of homo sapiens that we give to ourselves is derived from the latin sapere (to taste/to know), and thus shows that the knowledge characteristic for man is not an explicit one, but an intuitive, implicit knowing or "feel" for his surroundings, or as Kant says, an "aesthetic rather than intellectual judgment" (cited by Blankenburg).Polanyi (1967) has analysed this knowledge at the roots of common sense as "tacit knowledge." It is based on processes of Gestalt formation that enable us to grasp unified wholes through their constituting elements without still being aware of the latter. Thus, we understand the facial expression of others immediately but cannot tell from which details. Or we know how [End Page 323] to waltz without knowing the single movements or being able to explain it. Tacit knowledge implies all the taken-for-granted that we have forgotten once it has become our second nature and part of our bodily habits. It is mainly based on the neuronal coupling of single sensori-motor units by repeated perception or action. This unconscious knowing has only recently come to be explored by psychology under the heading of "implicit" or "procedural memory" (Schacter 1987, 1996). It contains familiar styles or "melodies" of moving, perceiving, and being-with-others in which our whole bodily and emotional experience is engaged. There is an atmospheric, "felt" quality about them that cannot be analysed into single elements. Implicit knowledge may, therefore, never be wholly expressed by words—it is only realized in the concrete situation. It may only be circumscribed by expressions such as "how it feels...," "how it is...," e.g., how it is... (shrink)

We prove that there are groups in the constructible universe whose automorphism towers are highly malleable by forcing. This is a consequence of the fact that, under a suitable diamond hypothesis, there are sufficiently many highly rigid non-isomorphic Souslin trees whose isomorphism relation can be precisely controlled by forcing.

The notion of embodiment is central to the phenomenological approach to schizophrenia. This paper argues that fundamental concepts for the understanding of schizophrenia have a bodily dimension. We present two single cases of first-onset schizophrenic patients and analyze the reports of their experiences. Problems such as loss of self, loss of common sense, and intentionality disorders reveal a disconnectedness that can be traced back to a detachment from the lived body. Hyperreflectivity and hyperautomaticity are used as coping mechanisms, but reflect (...) the same problem of the split between body and mind. It is argued that the sole focus on cognitive impairments leads to a distorted image of schizophrenia, and that the acknowledgment of its fundamental bodily roots enables one to see the coherence between the diverse symptoms. As for the practical implications of the phenomenological approach, further research is needed to investigate if and how body- and movement-oriented therapies might strengthen the embodiment of schizophrenic patients. (shrink)

In the Bayesian approach to quantum mechanics, probabilities—and thus quantum states—represent an agent’s degrees of belief, rather than corresponding to objective properties of physical systems. In this paper we investigate the concept of certainty in quantum mechanics. Particularly, we show how the probability-1 predictions derived from pure quantum states highlight a fundamental difference between our Bayesian approach, on the one hand, and Copenhagen and similar interpretations on the other. We first review the main arguments for the general claim that probabilities (...) always represent degrees of belief. We then argue that a quantum state prepared by some physical device always depends on an agent’s prior beliefs, implying that the probability-1 predictions derived from that state also depend on the agent’s prior beliefs. Quantum certainty is therefore always some agent’s certainty. Conversely, if facts about an experimental setup could imply agent-independent certainty for a measurement outcome, as in many Copenhagen-like interpretations, that outcome would effectively correspond to a preexisting system property. The idea that measurement outcomes occurring with certainty correspond to preexisting system properties is, however, in conflict with locality. We emphasize this by giving a version of an argument of Stairs [(1983). Quantum logic, realism, and value-definiteness. Philosophy of Science, 50, 578], which applies the Kochen–Specker theorem to an entangled bipartite system. (shrink)

The articles in this volume offer a fresh perspective on the important role of the concept of law (lex) in the moral and political philosophy of the 'School of Salamanca'.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 261-264 [Access article in PDF] Mind, Meaning, and the Brain Thomas Fuchs, MD, PhD Keywords: Mind, brain, meaning, translation, depression. A Systemic View of the Mind Progress in brain research over the past two decades demonstrates the power of the neurobiological paradigm. However, this progress is connected with a restricted field of vision typical of any scientific paradigm. The psychiatrist should be (...) aware of this restriction, because, unlike the brain scientist, he deals with patients, not with brains. The restricted view may be described by the terms of (1) reductionism, (2) reification, and (3) isolation.Reductionism: Neurobiology tends to regard subjectivity as a mere by-product of the brain's activity as a symbol-manipulating machine or an information processor. Consciousness becomes an epiphenomon of the neuronal machinery that, operating behind our back, creates the illusion of a continuous self and of an autonomous will (Churchland 1995; Roth 1996).Reification: Mental or subjective states seem to be localizable in the brain; thoughts or feelings, it appears, may be observed in the colored illumination of cortical and subcortical structures. This results in the belief that brain images could also show the cause of a mental illness, or even the illness itself, which then manifests, for instance, in a reduced metabolic activity in certain areas of the cortex.Isolation: As a further consequence, this view isolates the individual patient and considers his illness separated from the interconnections with his environment. However, on these interconnections his personal experiences and dispositions are founded, and it is the actual interpersonal situation that has triggered his present illness.Walter Glannon's paper successfully counters these tendencies toward a neurobiological reductionism with an extended view of the mind: "... the mind is not located in any one place but is distributed among the brain, the body, and the environment." Of course, who observes someone's brain will never see his thoughts, his pain, or his anxiety. For consciousness is not a localizable object or state at all but a process of relating to something: a perceiving of, remembering of, wishing for, aiming at, and so on. Thus on the phenomenological level, there is nothing like a "mental event" that could be isolated from the world and from the stream of conscious experiences. The mind exists only embedded in the world and in the temporal process of life.The same applies to the biological level: Consciousness is based on the continuous interaction of the brain with the organism, and of the organism as a whole with the environment. The role of the brain for mental phenomena is thus comparable to the role of the heart in the circulatory system or of the lung in the respiratory system. Of course, the lung is the central organ of breathing, but respiration may not be restricted to the [End Page 261] lung, nor to the organism as a whole. It means constant exchange with the environment, and there is no sense in asking whether the air taken in still belongs to the surroundings or already to the organism. The same systemic unity is found in the circle of perception and action mediated by the brain: When I am writing a letter, there is no place in the unity of action where my "self" ends and the "world" begins, no border that separates inner and outer worlds.There is another argument to be raised against the reification of the mind if we consider the aspect of a historical biology. From birth on, our mind as well as the correlated brain structures are essentially formed by social and cultural influences. The brain is not inserted into the world as a prefabricated apparatus but through its plastic development in and from the world. Thus it adapts epigenetically to its specific natural and social environment like a key to a lock. This complementarity makes it impossible to restrict one's view to the anatomic organ and requires an interdisciplinary approach to brain-environment investigation, as for example, under the heading of a "social cognitive neuroscience" (Ochsner and Lieberman 2001).As Glannon goes on to argue, to overcome... (shrink)

2013 sees the centenary of Jaspers' foundation of psychopathology as a science with the publication of his magnum opus the Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology), Many of the issues concerning methodology and diagnosis are today the subject of much discussion and debate. This volume brings together leading psychiatrists and philosophers to discuss the impact of this volume, its relevance today, and the legacy it left.

The appearance of negative terms in quasiprobability representations of quantum theory is known to be inevitable, and, due to its equivalence with the onset of contextuality, of central interest in quantum computation and information. Until recently, however, nothing has been known about how much negativity is necessary in a quasiprobability representation. Zhu :120404, 2016) proved that the upper and lower bounds with respect to one type of negativity measure are saturated by quasiprobability representations which are in one-to-one correspondence with the (...) elusive symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements. We define a family of negativity measures which includes Zhu’s as a special case and consider another member of the family which we call “sum negativity.” We prove a sufficient condition for local maxima in sum negativity and find exact global maxima in dimensions 3 and 4. Notably, we find that Zhu’s result on the SICs does not generally extend to sum negativity, although the analogous result does hold in dimension 4. Finally, the Hoggar lines in dimension 8 make an appearance in a conjecture on sum negativity. (shrink)

Special Issue on Quantum Information and Computation.

We prove a Gleason-type theorem for the quantum probability rule using frame functions defined on positive-operator-valued measures, as opposed to the restricted class of orthogonal projection-valued measures used in the original theorem. The advantage of this method is that it works for two-dimensional quantum systems and even for vector spaces over rational fields—settings where the standard theorem fails. Furthermore, unlike the method necessary for proving the original result, the present one is rather elementary. In the case of a qubit, we (...) investigate similar results for frame functions defined upon various restricted classes of POVMs. For the so-called trine measurements, the standard quantum probability rule is again recovered. (shrink)

Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement is an interdisciplinary volume with contributions from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and movement therapists. Part one provides the phenomenologically grounded definition of body memory with its different typologies. Part two follows the aim to integrate phenomenology, conceptual metaphor theory, and embodiment approaches from the cognitive sciences for the development of appropriate empirical methods to address body memory. Part three inquires into the forms and effects of therapeutic work with body memory, based on the integration of theory, (...) empirical findings, and clinical applications. It focuses on trauma treatment and the healing power of movement. The book also contributes to metaphor theory, application and research, and therefore addresses metaphor researchers and linguists interested in the embodied grounds of metaphor. Thus, it is of particular interest for researchers from the cognitive sciences, social sciences, and humanities as well as clinical practitioners. (shrink)

Recent neuroscientific evidence brings into question the conclusion that all aspects of consciousness are gone in patients who have descended into a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Here we summarize the evidence from human brain imaging as well as neurological damage in animals and humans suggesting that some form of consciousness can survive brain damage that commonly causes PVS. We also raise the issue that neuroscientific evidence indicates that raw emotional feelings (primary-process affects) can exist without any cognitive awareness of those (...) feelings. Likewise, the basic brain mechanisms for thirst and hunger exist in brain regions typically not damaged by PVS. If affective feelings can exist without cognitive awareness of those feelings, then it is possible that the instinctual emotional actions and pain "reflexes" often exhibited by PVS patients may indicate some level of mentality remaining in PVS patients. Indeed, it is possible such raw affective feelings are intensified when PVS patients are removed from life-supports. They may still experience a variety of primary-process affective states that could constitute forms of suffering. If so, withdrawal of life-support may violate the principle of nonmaleficence and be tantamount to inflicting inadvertent "cruel and unusual punishment" on patients whose potential distress, during the process of dying, needs to be considered in ethical decision-making about how such individuals should be treated, especially when their lives are ended by termination of life-supports. Medical wisdom may dictate the use of more rapid pharmacological forms of euthanasia that minimize distress than the de facto euthanasia of life-support termination that may lead to excruciating feelings of pure thirst and other negative affective feelings in the absence of any reflective awareness. (shrink)

Ever since the inception of its academic career, sociology has approached its subject-matter in two different ways; one positivist, the other critical. Important theories, such as those of Karl Marx or Emile Durkheim, have always emphasized either one of these perspectives, but could never completely ignore the other one. The result was that as an empirical science, sociology has been interested in latent structures, while as critical theory, it has pointed out that social reality is not what it seems to (...) be. Therefore, all attempts at building a unified theory of society on the basis of the critical/positivist distinction had to lead into the paradox of treating appearance and reality, or latent and manifest structures, as one and the same thing. This situation is now changing in radical ways which sociology has yet to appreciate. I am referring to recent interdisciplinary discussions about theories of self-referential systems, autopoietic system closure, the second-order cybernetics of observing systems, and constructivist epistemology and information processing. We can draw upon these recent discussions in order to understand society as a self-observing system that defines its own identity while, at the same time, leaving an "unmarked space" for the possibility to describe society in quite different ways. (shrink)

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe disturbances in a subject’s sense of identity. Persons with BPD suffer from recurrent feelings of emptiness, a lack of self-feeling, and painful incoherence, especially regarding their own desires, how they see and feel about others, their life goals, or the roles to which they commit themselves. Over the past decade or so, clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists have turned to philosophical conceptions of selfhood to better understand the borderline-specific ruptures in the sense (...) of identity, which are frequently associated with severe affective instability and turbulence in interpersonal relationships. Fuchs (2007) has suggested that these disturbances in self-experience can best be described and explained by using notions—widely discussed in philosophy and psychology—ofnarrativityandnarrative identity. On such a narrative view, key features of BPD present significant modifications of proto-narrative structures and inhibit the development of a narrative identity, resulting in a disturbed sense of identity. Although the role of narrativity in BPD has been acknowledged by many researchers, some have voiced dissatisfaction with what they take to be limitations of a narrativistic understanding of the disorders of identity characterizing BPD, and have proposed alternative, allegedly non-narrativistic, accounts. In this paper, we critically examine an example of the latter, viz. Gold and Kyratsous’ (2017) account ofthe person as an intrapersonal team reasoner. We defend a narrativistic understanding of BPD identity disorder against their objections. To this end, we propose a broader, and more finely-differentiated, concept of narrativity. On this account, four aspects of narrativity are distinguished, the disordering of which can affect those with BPD. As it turns out, our account implies that even Gold and Kyratsous—in order to ground their approach—must either make use of these aspects or propose an as-yet unarticulated alternative. This casts doubt upon whether their approach is non-narrativistic after all. (shrink)

Background: Informed consent is a legal as well as ethical prerequisite in clinical research. For dementia research, informed consent can be a problem if subjects with dementia, whose capacity for understanding and thus also decision making might be limited, are to be exam- ined. This might result in exclusion of dementia patients from research, as capacity for understanding and decision making are often equated with the ability for rational decision making. However, this valuation has been criticized at times for attaching (...) too much impor- tance to the cognitive aspect of decision making. -/- Methods: This qualitative study investigates the actual consent procedure of a clini- cal research study in Germany with regard to dementia patients’ subjective and objective understanding of informed consent information. Research participants were ten dementia patients, who volunteered in two clinical research studies, as well as their caregivers. Data were collected by use of semi-structured interviews. -/- Results: It was determined that the patients’ comprehension of informed consent infor- mation was rather limited. However, a number of patients were quite aware of this. In con- trast, all caregivers claimed to have fully understood the provided information, while their objective comprehension was also incomplete. Several participants indicated that they did not attach much importance to the information given in the consent procedure and that their consent did not primarily depend on this information. Rather, participation in the research study for them seemed to be more of a problem-focused coping strategy for dealing with their diagnosis of dementia. -/- Conclusion: For research ethics these results raise the question whether the currently prevailing emphasis on the cognitive aspect of autonomous decision making, i.e., compre- hension, may be too one-sided, and to what extent the “volitional” aspect in giving consent should be given greater consideration. (shrink)