Upon separation of the protein from the nucleic acid component of tobacco mosaic virus by phenol, using a fast and gentle procedure, the nucleic acid is infective in assays on tobacco leaves. A series of qualitative and quantitative control experiments demonstrates that the biological activity cannot depend on residual proteins in the preparation, but is a property of isolated nucleic acid which is thus the genetic material of the virus.

Psychopathy has been the subject of investigations in both philosophy and psychiatry and yet the conceptual issues remain largely unresolved. This volume approaches psychopathy by considering the question of what psychopaths lack. The contributors investigate specific moral dysfunctions or deficits, shedding light on the capacities people need to be moral by examining cases of real people who seem to lack those capacities. -/- The volume proceeds from the basic assumption that psychopathy is not characterized by a single deficit--for example, the (...) lack of empathy, as some philosophers have proposed—but by a range of them. Thus contributors address specific deficits that include impairments in rationality, language, fellow-feeling, volition, evaluation, and sympathy. They also consider such issues in moral psychology as moral motivation, moral emotions, and moral character; and they examine social aspects of psychopathic behavior, including ascriptions of moral responsibility, justification of moral blame, and social and legal responses to people perceived to be dangerous. -/- As this volume demonstrates, philosophers will be better equipped to determine what they mean by “the moral point of view” when they connect debates in moral philosophy to the psychiatric notion of psychopathy, which provides some guidance on what humans need in order be able to feel the normative pull of morality. And the empirical work done by psychiatrists and researchers in psychopathy can benefit from the conceptual clarifications offered by philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay, I exploit an ambiguity in the concept of self-determination. Self-de Green termination can mean to determine oneself in choices and actions or to determine one’s self. The second kind of self-determination leads to our capacity to imagine alternative selves of ourselves, which are to be actualized. This creates the basis for a normative conception of self-determination, i.e. a conception that incorporates the aspect of a right or good way to determine oneself. I defend a normative interpretation of (...) self-determination, which is illustrated by reference to three theorists: Harry Frankfurt, Thomas Hill Green and John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

The chapter focuses on cases of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia in relation to the rarely discussed notion of indirect paternalism. Indirect paternalism involves not just a paternalistic intervener and a person whose welfare is supposed to be protected, but also another party, whom I call “assistant.” Indirect paternalism interferes with an assistant in order to prevent harm to another person. I will introduce a strategy that paternalists can pursue to justify indirect paternalism. It specifically targets an element of assistance (...) cases, namely the fact that people do not necessarily have a justified claim or entitlement to demand such assistance. To prevent people from providing assistance seems normatively different from preventing a person to do something to herself by her own means. I critically discuss arguments from the goals of medicine and from the conscientious objection. These aspects are not deemed decisive when considering the case of indirect paternalistic intervention. Finally, I argue against the rationale of indirect paternalism by showing that there are at least two situations where it does not succeed. One such situation that undermines the justification of indirect paternalism is present when the offered service is itself harmless, another pertinent situation consists of a person necessarily requiring assistance to be really free. At least in some cases, these very conditions are given when contemplating assistance to die. (shrink)

Misunderstanding other people can be interpreted as the result of an insufficient performance of people’s skills to understand other persons and their experiences. But what does understand mean in these contexts? And what are the relevant skills that need to be engaged to successfully understand other people? I argue that understanding other people is a form of recognition of the epistemic validity of another person’s perspective. I claim that minimal understanding does not require an endorsement of another person’s perspective. This (...) makes the avoidance of lack of understanding a feasible achievement in almost all cases, though it often requires effort in the interactive process of understanding. I specifically analyse the epistemic and normative roles of empathy in this process. In pursuing this aim, I also defend empathy against recent philosophical arguments that point at moral dangers of empathic processes. (shrink)

English summary: This volume contains controversial views and discussions on the purpose, function, analysis and justification of value judgments and norms in the social sciences and humanities.

Decision-making capacity or mental competence is one of the most intensively discussed concepts in contemporary bioethics and medical ethics. In this paper I argue that anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder primarily afflicting adolescent girls and young women, seriously challenges what I label the traditional account of decision-making capacity. In light of these results, it may in addition be necessary to rethink a certain popular type of paternalistic argumentation that grounds the justification of compulsory treatment, for example of anorexic persons who (...) refuse treatment, on a lack of decision-making capacity. (shrink)

The article outlines the Multiple-Field-Approach ("Mehr-Felder-Ansatz") in Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy and in psychotherapy in general. This Gestalt theory based approach deals 1) with the conditions under which a secondary phenomenal field (containing a secondary phenomenal ego and a secondary phenomenal environment) segregates within the primary phenomenal field, 2) with the dynamic field interaction between primary and secondary field and their role in psychotherapy, 3) with psychotherapeutic techniques favouring the segregation and favouring the dissolution of a secondary field . Some of (...) these phenomena have been discussed as mind-wandering, daydreaming, or - in a pathological context - as dissociation. But it seems that the Gestalt psychological approach presented in this paper has to offer a more promising framework for these phenomena and their dynamics. (shrink)

The paper presents basic Gestalt psychological concepts of ego and self. They differ from other concepts in the way that they do not comprehend ego and self as fixed entities or as central controlling instances of the psyche, but as one specific organized unit in a psychological field in dynamic interrelation with the other organized units—the environment units—of this field. On this theme, well-known representatives of Gestalt theory have presented some general and special theories since the early days of this (...) approach that could partly be substantiated experimentally. They illuminate the relationship between ego and world in everyday life as well as in the case of mental disorders. Not only the spatial extension of the phenomenal ego is subject to situational changes, but also its place in the world, its functional fitting in this world, its internal differentiation, its permeability to the environment, and much more. The German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger emphasizes the significant functional role that this dynamic plasticity of the phenomenal world and its continuously changing segregation of ego and environment have for human life by designating the phenomenal world as a “Central Steering Mechanism.” In this article, ego and self as part of this field in their interrelation with the total psychological field will be illuminated from the perspective of the thinking of the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Lewin, Wolfgang Metzger, Mary Henle, Edwin Rausch, and Giuseppe Galli. (shrink)

This is the first wide-ranging, multi-authored handbook in the field of philosophy of medicine, covering the underlying conceptual issues of many important social, political and ethical issues in health care. It introduces and develops over 70 topics, concepts, and issues in the field. It is written by distinguished specialists from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, health sciences, nursing, sociology, political theory, and medicine. Many difficult social and ethical issues in health care are based on conceptual problems, most prominently on the definitions (...) of health and disease, or on epistemological issues regarding causality or diagnosis. Philosophy is the discipline that deals with such conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, methodological, and axiological matters. (shrink)

We discuss several ontological properties of explicit mathematics and operational set theory: global choice, decidable classes, totality and extensionality of operations, function spaces, class and set formation via formulas that contain the definedness predicate and applications.

Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking study argues that the concept of "afterness" is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to "follow" something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, (...) is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred? The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Kant, Kafka, Heidegger, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno, Arendt, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed "after Auschwitz." The study's various analyses—across a heterogeneous collection of modern writers and thinkers, diverse historical moments of articulation, and a range of media—conspire to illuminate Lyotard's apodictic statement that "after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the 'after.'" As Richter's intricate study demonstrates, much hinges on our interpretation of the "after." After all, our most fundamental assumptions concerning modern aesthetic representation, conceptual discourse, community, subjectivity, and politics are at stake. (shrink)

Although Walter Benjamin's writings are considered to be among the most powerful theoretical enterprises of the twentieth century, his ideas are resistant to cooptation by the doctrines of various critical programs. These essays engage this resistance by examining the ghostly in Benjamin's work. The contributors show that the haunting truths Benjamin offers point towards new forms of responsibility. These truths reside in a figurative elsewhere, a ghostly space that his texts delimit but never fully inhabit, and these essays seek to (...) do justice to the ghosts of Benjamin. Issues explored include: the status of the image in Benjamin's literary reflections and in his meditations on cinema and visual culture; abiding Benjaminian notions of messianism, aura, reproducibility, semblance, and melancholy; Benjamin's relation to Freud; his innovative rethinking of history, virtuality, and translation; and his reflections on tragedy and prophecy, the geometrical dimensions of writing, and the relation between eros and language. (shrink)

The project of renewing childhood by transforming one's life -- Critical theory -- Reason's self-criticism -- Defined negation -- The two faces of enlightenment -- Rescuing what is beyond hope -- Philosophy from the perspective of redemption -- Primacy of the object -- The totally socialized society -- The concept of society -- Liquidation of the individual -- Critical theory on morality -- The goal of the emancipated society -- The powerless utopia of beauty -- The destruction and salvation of (...) art -- The silence of music -- The transition from art to knowledge -- Theorizing art and culture in the institute for social research -- Benjamin and kracauer: theorizing mass art -- Anarchistic and bourgeois romanticism: Adorno's critique of Benjamin -- The work of art and the concept of truth -- The failure of culture -- The radically pathetic and guilty culture -- Enlightenment as mass deception. (shrink)

Proceedings of a symposium held Sept. 24-28, 1996 in Vienna, Austria.

Critical Rationalism has become an influential philosophy in many areas including a great number of scientific disciplines. Yet only few studies have been devoted to the role of the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper in the vast field of education. This volume undertakes to fill this gap. Leading scholars in the educational science and in the philosophy of education have critically written for this volume in an attempt to elaborate Popper's methodological and socio-political views and confront them with a globally (...) relevant spectrum of scientific objectives and cultural values. Among the topics discussed are moral values, education for freedom and its consequences for the student, and the critical attitude in political education. Attention is also paid to the historiography of this significant philosophical movement. Regarding pedagogical research, the empirical paradigm, the falsificatory approach to educational research, the complex relationship between educational theory and practice as well as the problem of value-neutrality in educational science are objects of critical analysis. (shrink)

Enthält: Gesichtspunkte zur Beurteilung von Wissenschaftsbegriffen / von Gerhard Funke. Kriterien zur Beurteilung der Naturwissenschaften / von Erhard Scheibe.

In this book the author gives a broad overview of different areas of research in nonmonotonic reasoning, and presents some new results and ideas based on his research. The guiding principles are: clarification of the different research activities in the area, which have sometimes been undertaken independently of each other; and appreciation of the fact that these research activities often represent different means to the same ends, namely sound theoretical foundations and efficient computation. The book begins with a discussion of (...) the various types of nonmonotonic reasoning, their applications and their logics. Theorem proving techniques for these logics are also described. The following chapters deal with formulations of nonmonotonic inheritance, and nonmonotonic reasoning based on nonmonotonic rules. The final chapter discusses the achievements in the field in the light of the Yale shooting example. The book will be welcomed by researchers in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. (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)

The volume contains the written versions of all papers given at the workshop, divided into five chapters and followed by Alvin Goldman's replies in the sixth.

Das Buch bietet einen hervorragenden Einstieg in die Theorie von Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. Es werden die zentralen Theorieannahmen dargestellt und die Bedeutung für die Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften der Gegenwart aufgezeigt.

Der Titel Eudämonie verspricht Schönes, Angenehmes, Erbauliches, und alles das will und soll dieses Buch auch leisten. Wer von uns wünschte sich nicht ein gutes und gelingendes Leben, ohne allerdings so mir nichts, dir nichts sagen zu können, woraus denn dieses Gute, Schöne und Wahre besteht. Wer von uns kennt nicht den intensiven Wunsch nach Glück und Zufriedenheit, und wem begegneten bei seiner oder ihrer Suche nach Glück und Zufriedenheit aber nicht schon Hürden und Herausforderungen aller Art, die uns bisweilen (...) rat- und hilflos haben werden lassen? Allein schon aufgrund dieser persönlichen Kalamitäten, die jeder von uns oftmals zu gewärtigen hat, scheint es gerechtfertigt, über Eudämonie und damit über die Möglichkeiten eines gelingenden Lebens nachzudenken. Leben zwischen... Kunst und Spiel / Ich und Du / verbaler Sprache und beredtem Leib / Vergangenheit und Zukunft / Kontemplation und Tat / Sinnlichkeit und Form. Der Autor Gerhard Danzer ist Facharzt für Innere Medizin, Facharzt für Psychosomatik und Psychotherapie (Tiefenpsychologie) sowie Diplompsychologe. Jahrzehntelang war er als Professor an der Charité und an der Medizinischen Hochschule Brandenburg (MHB) sowie als Honorarprofessor an der Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (Psychologie) und an der Universität Potsdam (Philosophie) tätig. 2019 wurde ihm der renommierte Preis der Dr. Margrit Egnér-Stiftung (Zürich) für sein bisheriges literarisches Oeuvre verliehen. Seine jüngsten Buchpublikationen bei Springer sind Wie wäre es, ein Mensch zu sein? (2020), Personale Medizin (2021) und Shakespeare auf der Couch (2021) sowie Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit - Mythos, Logos und Person (2022). (shrink)

Zusammenfassung In Deutschland verlangt das Transplantationsgesetz die Zuteilung von postmortal gespendeten Organen nach den Kriterien der Dringlichkeit und der Erfolgsaussicht. Der herrschenden Auffassung zufolge darf die Erfolgsaussicht hierbei jedoch lediglich den Charakter einer Minimalnutzenschwelle annehmen. Eine darüber hinausgehende Gewichtung von Erfolgsaussichten soll zudem nicht mit der Lebenswertindifferenzkonzeption des Bundesverfassungsgerichts zu vereinbaren sein, die aus dem Gleichheitsgrundsatz sowie aus der Menschenwürde abgeleitet wird. Gerhard Dannecker argumentiert, diese im juristischen Schrifttum überwiegend vertretene Auffassung sei weniger zwingend, als es auf den ersten (...) Blick scheinen mag. Seiner Auffassung zufolge lässt sich aus der Lebensschutzgarantie in Artikel 2 der Verfassung eine Pflicht ableiten, die vorhandenen Ressourcen möglichst effektiv einzusetzen. Zwar dürfe Effizienz hier tatsächlich nicht bedeuten, dass die Funktionsdauer der vorhandenen Organe über das Gesamtkollektiv aller Patienten hinweg utilitaristisch zu maximieren sei - eine Pflicht zur Rettung einer möglichst großen Anzahl an Menschen lässt sich ihres Erachtens jedoch durchaus rechtfertigen. (shrink)

In many European countries, the explicit discussion of race as a biological phenomenon has long been avoided. This has not meant that race has become obsolete or irrelevant all together. Rather, it is a slippery object that keeps shifting and changing. To understand its slippery nature, we suggest that race in Europe is best viewed as an absent presence, something that oscillates between reality and nonreality, which appears on the surface and then hides underground. In this special issue, we explore (...) how race has been configured in different practices and how race-based identities and technologies are entwined in various European settings. (shrink)

During a conference entitled “_Un logicien consciencieux. La philosophie de Evert Willem Beth_,” held in Nancy in 1998 and published in this journal, volume 3, cahier 4 [Barth, Heinzmann _et al._ 1998-1999], the participants regretted that a reasoned biography of Beth was not available. In view of the efforts made since then in this direction, in particular by Paul van Ulsen in his PhD thesis in Dutch [2000], this article attempts to provide an overview of Beth’s work for a broader (...) community of philosophers of science. However, my focus is not so much on Beth’s widely discussed and important contributions to mathematical logic, where his most creative merits reside. My aim is to emphasize Beth’s philosophical and cultural background. Both are also discussed in the first two chapters of Ulsen’s thesis, which globally focuses on Beth’s work in logic. Of course, philosophical and scientific aspects cannot be systematically separated, but Beth’s influence on the philosophy of mathematics be... (shrink)

Human beings need communication. During the development of mankind, a multitude of communication technologies have been invented and used. Some of them had a dramatic impact on society in general and on the way scientific knowledge was disseminated. In this article we discuss some of the effects of each of these changes to teaching as a way of disseminating scientific knowledge. We discuss some of the potential effects caused by the new revolution of communication due to the World Wide Web (...) and the potential of ubiquitous computing. We discuss the evolution of communication technology followed by a discussion of the achievements of each technology. Next, the effects of these achievements on teaching are discussed. Finally, we set these considerations into a broader context and discuss the effects on two important parameters: lead time of the teacher and verifiability of the teacher's claims. (shrink)

Wer hat sich nicht schon gefragt, was es mit unseren moralischen Überzeugungen auf sich hat: Spiegeln diese die Wahrheit in Sachen Moral wieder? Gibt es eine solche Wahrheit überhaupt? Oder sind moralische Überzeugungen eher das Produkt unserer Interessen und Neigungen, Ausdruck unserer Wünsche oder Mittel der Machtausübung, das bloße Ergebnis unserer Erziehung, unseres sozialen Umfelds oder gar eine List der Evolution? Ist es eine Illusion, wenn man glaubt, echte moralische Erkenntnisse gewinnen zu können? Kurzum: Kann die Moral Objektivität beanspruchen? Die (...) vorliegende Arbeit versucht, eine Antwort auf diese zentrale Frage der Metaethik zu geben. Dazu wird zunächst gezeigt, dass uns der Status der Moral ein Rätsel ist, weil wir dazu neigen, drei Thesen für wahr zu halten, die nicht zugleich wahr sein können. Die drei prinzipiell möglichen Strategien zur Auflösung dieses Trilemmas geraten jedoch in Schwierigkeiten, weil es bisher nicht gelungen ist, ein passendes Vergleichsobjekt für die Moral zu finden. In dieser Arbeit wird dafür argumentiert, dass die Moral in genau der gleichen Weise wie die Wissenschaft Objektivität beanspruchen kann. (shrink)

Territorial borders just like other boundaries are involved in a politics of belonging, a politics of “us” and “them”. Border management regimes are thus part of processes of othering. In this article, we use the management of borders and populations in Europe as an empirical example to make a theoretical claim about race. We introduce the notion of the phenotypic other to argue that race is a topological object, an object that is spatially and temporally folded in distributed technologies of (...) governance. To elaborate on these notions, we first examine a number of border management technologies through which both race and Europe are brought into being. More specifically we focus on how various such technologies aimed at monitoring the movement of individuals together with the management of populations have come to play crucial roles in Europe. Different border management regimes, we argue, do not only enact different versions of Europe but also different phenotypic others. We then shift the focus from border regimes to internal practices of governance, examining forensic DNA databanks to unravel articulations of race in the traffic between databases and societies. (shrink)

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)

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Universitèat Tèubingen, 1993.