Ernst Tugendhat’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s conception of truth is an ongoing topic in Heideggerian scholarship. In this paper, I contribute to the ongoing exchange between defenders of Heidegger and those who are in agreement with Tugendhat. Specifically, I contend that Tugendhat’s criticisms fail to situate Heidegger’s account of truth within his broader phenomenological–hermeneutic project. In the end, Tugendhat’s critique is grounded upon philosophical assumptions that Heidegger is bringing under question by rethinking the concept of truth. I suggest that thinking (...) through Tugendhat’s critique and attempting to formulate an adequate Heideggerian response gives us a richer understanding of both Heidegger’s account of truth and his general philosophical project. (shrink)

Making good decisions in extremely complex and difficult processes and situations has always been both a key task as well as a challenge in the clinic and has led to a large amount of clinical, legal and ethical routines, protocols and reflections in order to guarantee fair, participatory and up-to-date pathways for clinical decision-making. Nevertheless, the complexity of processes and physical phenomena, time as well as economic constraints and not least further endeavours as well as achievements in medicine and healthcare (...) continuously raise the need to evaluate and to improve clinical decision-making. This article scrutinises if and how clinical decision-making processes are challenged by the rise of so-called artificial intelligence-driven decision support systems (AI-DSS). In a first step, this article analyses how the rise of AI-DSS will affect and transform the modes of interaction between different agents in the clinic. In a second step, we point out how these changing modes of interaction also imply shifts in the conditions of trustworthiness, epistemic challenges regarding transparency, the underlying normative concepts of agency and its embedding into concrete contexts of deployment and, finally, the consequences for (possible) ascriptions of responsibility. Third, we draw first conclusions for further steps regarding a ‘meaningful human control’ of clinical AI-DSS. (shrink)

How can one distinguish the concept of second modernity from the concept of postmodernity? Postmodernists are interested in deconstruction without reconstruction, second modernity is about deconstruction and reconstruction. Social sciences need to construct new concepts to understand the world dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century. Modernity has not vanished, we are not post it. Radical social change has always been part of modernity. What is new is that modernity has begun to modernize its own foundations. This is what (...) it means to say modernity has become reflexive. It has become directed at itself. This causes huge new problems both in reality and in theory. There has been a pluralization of the boundaries within and between societies, between society and nature, between Us and Other, between life and death. This pluralization also changes the inherent nature of boundaries. They become not so much boundaries as a variety of attempts to draw of boundaries. Border conflicts become transformed into conflicts over the drawing of boundaries. Where postmodernism simply celebrates this multiplication of boundaries, the theory of second modernity starts with the problem this new reality poses for individual and collective decisions, and with the problem that the continued existence of such decisions poses for theory. Institutions that are capable of such conscious boundary drawing are enabled in a way that those of the first modernity were not. But this process also generates qualitatively new kinds of trouble and crises. To investigate those troubles is to unveil the emergence of the second modernity. (shrink)

‘Transplant’ thought-experiments, in which the cerebrum is moved from one body to another, have featured in a number of recent discussions in the personal identity literature. Once taken as offering confirmation of some form of psychological continuity theory of identity, arguments from Marya Schechtman and Kathleen Wilkes have contended that this is not the case. Any such apparent support is due to a lack of detail in their description or a reliance on predictions that we are in no position to (...) make. I argue that the case against them rests on two serious misunderstandings of the operation of thought-experiments, and that even if they do not ultimately support a psychological continuity theory, they do major damage to that theory’s opponents. (shrink)

There are two currently popular but quite different ways of answering the question of what constitutes personal identity: the one is usually called the psychological continuity theory (or Psychological View) and the other the narrative theory.1 Despite their differences, they do both claim to be providing an account—the correct account—of what makes someone the same person over time. Marya Schechtman has presented an important argument in this journal (Schechtman 2005) for a version of the narrative view (the ‘Self-Understanding View’) over (...) the psychological one, an argument which has received an overwhelmingly positive response from commentators (Gillett 2005; Heinemaa 2005; Phillips 2006). I wish to argue that .. (shrink)

A rapidly growing proportion of health research uses ‘secondary data’: data used for purposes other than those for which it was originally collected. Do researchers using secondary data have an obligation to disclose individual research findings to participants? While the importance of this question has been duly recognised in the context of primary research, it remains largely unexamined in the context of research using secondary data. In this paper, we critically examine the arguments for a moral obligation to disclose individual (...) research findings in the context of primary research, to determine if they can be applied to secondary research. We conclude that they cannot. We then propose that the nature of the relationship between researchers and participants is what gives rise to particular moral obligations, including the obligation to disclose individual results. We argue that the relationship between researchers and participants in secondary research does not generate an obligation to disclose. However, we also argue that the biobanks or data archives which collect and provide access to secondary data may have such an obligation, depending on the nature of the relationship they establish with participants. (shrink)

This article differentiates between three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is global financial crises, which, in a first stage, can be individualized and nationalized. And the third, which suddenly broke upon us on September 11th, is the threat of transnational terror networks, which empowers governments and states. Two sets of implications are drawn: first, there are the political dynamics of world (...) risk society. In an age where trust and faith in God, class and progress have largely disappeared, humanity's common fear has proved the last - ambivalent - resource for making new bonds. Second, the methodological nationalism that preoccupies the sociological imagination has to be overcome and a `methodological cosmopolitism' has to be created. (shrink)

This article differentiates between three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is global financial crises, which, in a first stage, can be individualized and nationalized. And the third, which suddenly broke upon us on September 11th, is the threat of transnational terror networks, which empowers governments and states. Two sets of implications are drawn: first, there are the political dynamics of world (...) risk society. In an age where trust and faith in God, class and progress have largely disappeared, humanity's common fear has proved the last - ambivalent - resource for making new bonds. Second, the methodological nationalism that preoccupies the sociological imagination has to be overcome and a `methodological cosmopolitism' has to be created. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Activists and writers on injustice have highlighted as a structural problem that injustice is experienced differentially. What injustices of privilege lie hidden in my daily academic life? Three deeply discomforting moments relating to Class, climate, and Whiteness privilege, form the core of an account of gradually admitting to my passive acceptance of injustice in the form of privileges from which I benefit. My ignorance has perpetuated privilege despite this not being my conscious will. From this crisis, the paper explores (...) the inner work for healing injustice individually, and the outer work of changing collective habits of dominance within the Academy. A starting point is befriending my will to injustice and facing up to my privileges. Effort needed from White, Middle Class academics ‘like me’ includes uncovering ways in which we benefit from privilege whether or not we want to. Proposals are made for inner growth through building community among academics. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to argue that the recent philosophical defenses of revealed preference theory do not withstand scrutiny. Towards this aim, I will first outline revealed preference theory. I will then briefly present the two most common arguments that the received view offers against it. Afterwards, I will outline three argumentative strategies for rehabilitating revealed preference theory, and successively rebut each of them.

The problem of expertise plays a key role in current scientific and political debates. Dominant approaches to expertise are focused on knowledge as an idealistic content. Given the partial inadequacy of these perspectives, an amended theoretical and methodological approach is needed. This paper aims then at sketching a relational conceptualization of expertise. At this purpose, the connections between recent anthropological theories and pragmatist theories will be highlighted.

Hume distinguished the principle that everything has a cause from the principle of the uniformity of nature, Viz., That like causes have like effects. In the second analogy of experience kant attempts to refute what he (erroneously) believed had been hume's explanation of our acceptance of the first principle. He did not there attempt to establish the second principle, But j dodge has shown that the second analogy implicitly contains a justification of the principle of like cause-Like effect. Kant himself, (...) However, Justified the second principle only as a regulative principle of reflective judgment. (shrink)

I review six bad arguments for banning performance-enhancing drugs from sports--and a seventh good one.

Abstract. A special legal status is accorded to human rights within Western liberal democracies: They enjoy a priority over other human goods and are not subjected to the majoritarian principle. The underlying assumption—the idea that there are some human values that deserve special protection—implies the need for both a normative and a conceptual justification. This paper claims that neither can be provided. The normative justification is needed to support the priority of human rights over other human goods and to rank (...) and balance conflicting human rights, but it can't be provided because of the fact of pervasive value pluralism, the fact that human values are many, incompatible and incommensurable. The conceptual justification is needed to avoid arbitrariness in the interpretation of human rights at the adjudication stage. Such a justification is impossible, however, as the concept of human rights, and the concepts used to justify them and to solve their conflicts are "essentially contested concepts." The paper concludes that, provided that the interpretation of human rights presupposes value judgements and political choices, the special legal status accorded to human rights is not justified. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)