Nonmonotonic reasoning in its broadest sense is reasoning to conclusions on the basis of incomplete information. Given more information, previously drawn inferences may be retracted. Commonsense reasoning has a nonmonotonic component; it has been argued that almost all commonsense inferences are of this sort. From the end of the 1980s to the present there has been an explosion in research in nonmonotonic reasoning. It is now possible to understand more clearly the properties of the major formalisms from a metatheoretical point (...) of view, the relationships among the formalisms and their connection to independently developed proof methods. The goal of this monograph is to make this understanding more accessible. (shrink)

Do members of democratic societies have a moral right that others not actively prevent them from engaging in wrongdoing? Many political theorists think that they do. “It is a feature of democratic government,” Michael Walzer writes, “that the people have a right to act wrongly—in much the same way that they have a right to act stupidly”. Of course, advocates of a democratic right to do wrong may believe that the scope of this right is limited. A majority in a (...) democratic society, for example, may not have a moral right against being prevented from enslaving or arbitrarily disenfranchising a minority, or if it were to launch a wrongful aggressive war against another society. But many join Walzer in asserting that it would be wrong in principle to intervene to prevent some wrongs that democratic societies would inflict. This thesis, which we call the democratic right to do wrong thesis (DRTDWT), can be formulated as follows: DRTDWT – For democratic societies A and agents B, there is a class of wrongful policies and institutions X, such that if A chooses to implement members of this class pursuant to democratic procedures, B has a duty not to actively intervene to prevent the implementation of X. Our goal in this essay is to show that the DRTDWT should be rejected. (shrink)

Die jetzt vorliegende ungekürzte Korrespondenz zwischen Sigmund Freud und Karl Abraham in originalem Deutsch erlaubt Einblicke in den wissenschaftlichen Austauschprozess bei der Entwicklung ihrer psychoanalytischen Konzepte. Abrahams einseitig-genetische Vorstellungen über die destruktiv-sadistischen Aspekte der Oralität und über die frühen Objektbeziehungen sind bei Freud auf Widerspruch gestoßen. Freud erweist sich einerseits als geduldiger Lehrer und Supervisor für Abraham. Andererseits ist er auch kritischer Mahner, der Abraham bis in die letzten Briefe daran erinnert, die Grundbedingungen der Neurosenentstehung zu beachten. Die Ergebnisse von (...) Abrahams klinischen Beobachtungen sind für Freud wiederum wertvolle Bestätigungen für seine eigenen Überlegungen zur Pathologie früher Störungen. Der Autor zeichnet die Entwicklung der unterschiedlichen Ansätze am wissenschaftlichen Briefwechsel nach. Der Akzent liegt auf dem ätiologischen Problem der Neurosengenese im kausalen Denken bzw. im Denken vor dem Hintergrund von Nachträglichkeit. Die weitere Entwicklung der Konzeptionen nach Abrahams Tod wird kurz skizziert. (shrink)

Two conditions guiding permissible use of force in self-defence are proportionality and success. According to the proportionality condition the means used to prevent an attack can be permissible only if they are proportional to the interest at stake.1 According to the success condition, otherwise impermissible acts can be justified under the right to self-defence only if they are likely to succeed in preventing the perceived threat.2 These requirements should not always be interpreted narrowly. Sometimes people are permitted to kill culpable (...) aggressors in order to avoid a non-lethal harm. Sometimes people are permitted to take up arms to defend themselves against culpable aggressors they have little or no hope of .. (shrink)

ArgumentAccording to Hermann von Helmholtz, free mobility of bodies seemed to be an essential condition of geometry. This free mobility can be interpreted either as matter of fact, as a convention, or as a precondition making measurements in geometry possible. Since Henri Poincaré defined conventions as principles guided by experience, the question arises in which sense experiential data can serve as the basis for the constitution of geometry. Helmholtz considered muscular activity to be the basis on which the form of (...) space could be construed. Yet, due to the problem of illusion inherent in the subject’s self-assessment of muscular activity, this solution yielded new difficulties, in that if the manifold is abstracted from rigid bodies which serve as empirical justification of the geometrical notion of space, then illusionary bodies will produce fictive manifolds. The present article is meant to disentangle these difficulties. (shrink)

Two conditions guiding permissible use of force in self-defence are proportionality and success. According to the proportionality condition the means used to prevent an attack can be permissible only if they are proportional to the interest at stake. According to the success condition, otherwise impermissible acts can be justified under the right to self-defence only if they are likely to succeed in preventing the perceived threat. These requirements should not always be interpreted narrowly. Sometimes people are permitted to kill culpable (...) aggressors in order to avoid a non-lethal harm. Sometimes people are permitted to take up arms to defend themselves against culpable aggressors they have little or no hope of defeating. (shrink)

The article outlines the development and most important features of the religious constitutional law of the Federal Republic of Germany, as constituted in the Grundgesetz and the decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court. Under the basic principle of neutrality, it constitutes a system of separation with single aspects of cooperation of the state and religious communities. It is also a system of wide freedom and of kindness to religion. Non-religious worldviews are explicitly equated for individuals as well as for religious (...) and non-religious associations. This system is in theory exemplary, but holed by contradictory laws, church-state-treaties and one-sided financial subventions in a huge dimension. The indirect influence of the large Christian churches is remarkable. Christian institutions dominate the social services – with unpleasing consequences for over 1 million employees, who are subject to a special employment law. Meanwhile, low-level discrimination of small religious communities continues. (shrink)

Das Religionsrecht hat angesichts der veränderten religionspolitischen Lage Konjunktur. Das Buch gibt eine kompakte Einführung in die theoretisch und praktisch wichtigsten Bereiche des Religionsrechts und greift vernachlässigte Fragen auf. Es will überzeugen durch klare rechtliche Grundbegriffe und eine Abkehr von einer einseitig kirchenzentrierten Sichtweise. Normtexte und Rechtsprechungsübersichten runden das leserfreundliche, auch für Nichtjuristen interessante Buch ab.

Thomas Pogge argues that affluent people in the developing world have contribution-based duties to help protect the poor. And it follows from Pogge's most general thesis that affluent people are contributing to most, if not all, instances of global poverty. In this article I explore two problems with Pogge's general thesis. First, I investigate a typical way in which affluent people would be contributing to global poverty according to Pogge: that affluent countries use their superior bargaining power to get poor (...) countries to accept trading schemes that are unduly favourable to the affluent. I suggest that this type of relation is best understood as exploitation, and that Pogge's general thesis is better understood as a thesis about how affluent people exploit poor people rather than about how they contribute to poverty. Second, I argue that the exploitation does not have the normative content of doing harm. Although exploiting people is often morally wrong, it is not at all clear how demanding exploitation-based duties are. (shrink)

The psychological and religious implications of alchemy were Jung's major preoccupation during the last thirty years of his life. The essays composing the present volume complete the publication of his alchemial researches, to which three entire volumes have been devoted ^DDL the monumental _Mysterium Coniunctionis_,_ Psychology and Alchemy_, and _Aion_ ^DDL besides shorter papers in other volumes. This collection of shorter _Alchemial Studies_ has special value as an introduction to Jung's work on alchemy. The first study, on Chinese alchemy, marked (...) the beginning of his interest in the subject, and was originally published in a volume written jointly with Richard Wilhelm. The other four are now published for the first time completely in English. (shrink)

After joining the staff of the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in 1900, Jung developed and applied the word-association tests for studying normal and abnormal psychology. The studies have remained a significant phase in the development of Jung's conceptions and an important contribution to diagnostic psychology and psychiatry. Between 1904 and 1907 he published nine studies on the tests. These studies, together with two lectures on the association method given in 1909 at Clark University and three articles on psychophysical researches from American (...) and English journals in 1907-1908, compose this volume. Jung's association studies showed the definite influence of Bleuler and also of Freud, with whom he worked closely for several years. With this volume, the Collected Works are complete except for the Miscellany, Bibliography and Index volumes. (shrink)

Sixteen studies in religious phenomena, including _Psychology and Religion _and _Answer to Job_.

At the turn of the last century C.G. Jung began his career as a psychiatrist. During the next decade, three men whose names are famous in the annals of medical psychology influenced his professional development: Pierre Janet, under whom he studied at the Sappetriere Hospital in Paris; Eugen Bleuler, his chief at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurick; and Sigmund Frued, whom Jung met in 1907. It is Bleuler, and to a lesser extent Janet, whose influence is to be found (...) in the descriptive experimental psychiatry composing Volume I of the _Collected Works_. These papers appeared between 1902 and 1905l most of them are now being published in English for the first time. The volume opens with Jung's dissertation for the medical degree: 'On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena', a study that foreshadows much of his later work, and as such is indispensable to all serious students of his work. It is the detailed analysis of the case of an hysterical adolescent girl who professed to be a medium. The volume also includes papers on cryptomnesia, hysterical parapraxes in reading, manic mood disorder, simulated insanity, and other subjects. (shrink)

In 1911 Jung published a book of which he says: '...it laid down a programme to be followed for the next few decades of my life.' It was vastly erudite and covered innumerable fields of study: psychiatry, psychoanalysis, ethnology and comparitive religion amongst others. In due course it became a standard work and was translated into French, Dutch and Italian as well as English, in which language it was given the well-known but somewhat misleading title of _The Psychology of the (...) Unconscious_. In the Foreword to the present revised edition which first appeared in 1956, Jung says: '...it was the explosion of all those psychic contents which could find no room, no breathing space, in the constricting atmosphere of Freudian psychology... It was an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider setting for medical psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomena within its purview.' For this edition, appearing ten years after the first, bibliographical citations and entries have been revised in the light of subsequent publications in the _Collected Works_ and in the standard edition of Freud's works, some translations have been substituted in quotations, and other essential corrections have been made, but there have been no changes of substance in the text. (shrink)

_The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche_ first appeared in the _Collected Works_ in 1960. In this new edition bibliographical citations and entries have been revised in the light of subsequent publications in the _Collected Works_, and essential corrections have been made. The book traces an important line of development in Jung's thought from 1912 onwards. The earliest of the papers elaborates Freud's concept of sexual libido into that of psychic energy. In those that follow we see how, Jung, discarding (...) one by one the traditional 'philosophical' hypotheses, gradually arrived at a concept which is even more controversial than psychic energy was in its day ^DDL namely, psychic reality. The book contains the first mention of the archetype in Jung's writings as well as his later views on its nature. There is also a valuable account of the therapeutic uses of 'active imagination' first described in an essay written in 1916. (shrink)