In this article, we explore the worldview of the pilgrim and how it relates to the drama of human existence. The worldview of the pilgrim is the starting point in our explorations of the postmodern conundrum and interrelated subjects such as epistemology, ethics, religious symbolism, hospitality and practical life strategies from a narrative and confessional perspective. These elaborations will serve the ultimate goal of this article, which is to contribute to the philosophy of education (including educators and educationists) and consequently (...) to equip individuals with skills and substantial knowledge that would allow them to understand, define and pursue their own life goals as well as to participate with integrity in their community as full-fledged, responsible citizens. (shrink)

Citation: Braun G, Hellwig MK, Byrnes WM (2007) Global Climate Change and Catholic Responsibility: Facts and Faith Response. Journal of Catholic Social Thought 4(2): 373-401. Abstract: The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that human activity is causing the Earth’s atmosphere to grow hotter, which is leading to global climate change. If current rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue, it is predicted that there will be dramatic changes, including flooding, more intense heat waves and storms, and an increase in disease. (...) Indigenous peoples and the poor will be most severely affected, as will Earth’s wild animals and plants, a quarter of which could become extinct in fifty years. We urgently need to switch to renewable (non-GHG emitting) energy sources, and try to live in a simpler, more sustainable way. In this article, a renewable energy expert, a biochemist, and a theologian have come together to describe the situation in which we find ourselves, and present ideas for a solution that incorporates Catholic social teaching. (shrink)

This article discusses the famous Popperian terms of 'empirical content' and 'falsifiability' or 'refutability'. They are all synonymous with another and are all fundamental principles, not for Popper's philosophy exclusively, but for Lakatos's and for Sneed's rational reconstruction of the ideas of Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In dem vorliegenden Artikel wird die auf falschen Voraussetzungen beruhende Ausbeutung der Sozialphilosophie des Kritischen Rationalismus für die Zwecke der Sozialdemokratie zurückgewiesen. Diese Sozialphilosophie kann keinesfalls für eine bestimmte parteipolitische Richtung und nur für jene in Anspruch genommen werden, ist sie doch von ihrem Selbstverständnis her auf allgemeingültigere Aussagen angelegt, als sie in der Programmatik der SPD zu finden sind. Daneben wird eine neue Strukturierung der kritizistischen Sozialphilosophie vorgeschlagen, die sich die Unterteilung in Meta- und Objektsprache zunutze macht. Die Sozialphilosophie (...) thematisiert dabei das politische Handeln selbst, während sich die Sozialphilosophie das Reden über das politische Handeln zum Gegenstand setzt. Geht es beim ersten Ansatz um politische Normen, so beim zweiten darum, welchen methodologischen Kriterien solche Normen zu genügen haben. (shrink)

Summary Hans Albert's famous principle ‘Sollen impliziert Können’, which should bridge the two disparate domains of normative decisions and empirical informations is a constitutive one of the Popperian metaethical philosophy of social relations.

Great progress to digitize the world’s available Biodiversity and Biogeography data have been made recently, but managing data from many different providers and research domains still remains a challenge. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in Biodiversity sciences suggests that existing standards, such as the Darwin Core terminology, are inadequate for describing Biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. As a contribution to fill this gap, we present an ontology-based system, called BiGe-Onto, (...) designed to manage data together from Biodiversity and Biogeography. As data sources, we use two internationally recognized repositories: the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Ocean Biogeographic Information System. BiGe-Onto system is composed of BiGe-Onto Architecture a conceptual model called BiGe-Onto specified in OntoUML, an operational version of BiGe-Onto encoded in OWL 2, and an integrated dataset for its exploitation through a SPARQL endpoint. We will show use cases that allow researchers to answer questions that manage information from both domains. (shrink)