This book is the first comprehensive study on Moses Mendelssohn's (1729-1786) language philosophy. While guiding the reader throughhis oeuvre, a new perspective is gained that brings Mendelssohn closer to the skeptical currents of Enlightenment. The dialectics of human and sacred language play a constitutive role for his language theory as well as for his aesthetics and metaphysics, and finally lead into the political idea of a just, social order. Thus, he developed an important alternative to monolingual, national language concepts.

This paper examines relationships between teaching critical thinking and teaching philosophy to adolescents (ages 12–17). The focus is on argumentation, especially on the method used to determine how well the premises of an argument support its conclusion. The method is the method of counterexamples. This article describes the results of teaching this method to adolescents (ages 12–17) who were participants in a summer enrichment program at Rutgers University-Newark, the Rutgers-Merck Summer Bioethics Institute. The participants were to learn about the philosophical (...) ideas underlying current biomedical technologies. The article discusses the basic ideas of argumentation and the method of counterexamples for determining the support that premises give to conclusion for a given argument, and it discusses teaching this method to adolescents. The article describes how to assess that they have properly learned it, and, finally, it closes with a discussion of the cognitive skills adolescents acquire in learning philosophy. Teaching a reliable method of determining argument support for a conclusion prior to teaching philosophy to adolescents results in their achieving a deeper understanding of philosophy. (shrink)

Background Policy instruments based on the working of markets have been introduced to empower consumers of healthcare. However, it is still not easy to become a critical consumer of healthcare. Objectives The aim of this study is to analyse the possibilities of the state to strengthen the position of patients with the aid of a new financial regime, such as personal health budgets. Methods Data were collected through in-depth interviews with executives, managers, professionals and client representatives of six long-term care (...) institutions. Results With the introduction of individual budgets the responsibility for budgetary control has shifted from the organisational level to the individual level in the caregiver-client relationship. Having more luxurious care on offer necessitates a stronger demarcation of regular care because organisations cannot simultaneously offer extra care as part of the standard care package. New financial instruments have an impact on the culture of receiving and giving care. Distributive justice takes on new meaning with the introduction of financial market mechanisms in healthcare; the distributing principle of ‘need’ is transformed into the principle of ‘economic demand’. Conclusion Financial instruments not only act as a countervailing power against providers insufficiently client-oriented, but are also used by providers to reinforce their own positions vis-à-vis demanding clients. Tailor-made finance is not the same as tailor-made care. (shrink)

Every price is set by someone; this is where economics begins. Building on that fundamental idea and on Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, Objective Economics transforms economics. The thesis of this book is that Ayn Rand's concept of "objective" is the indispensible base of valid economic thought. Consistently applying this idea across the board, the author reaches a general theory of price for the first time in the history of economic thought. This theory of price then provides a valid base (...) for explaining how a free economy functions. Based on facts everyone knows, presented without graphs or higher mathematics, Objective Economics makes accessible to the intelligent layman a clear understanding of how the economy works. For everyone who found college economics impenetrable--and that is just about everyone--this is the book.The thesis of Objective Economics changes everything about economics, including economics' method, the conception of the economy, the meaning of competition, the idea of price, the nature of business costs, the concept of supply, the concept of demand, the law of supply and demand, the theory of price, and the theory of total national output. Overall, as the result of all the preceding, Objective Economics demonstrates that capitalism is the practical economic system. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 2 Seiten: 247-269.

Corporate citizenship challenges the foundations and working of the basic institutions market, state and civil society. These institutional changes complicate the work of the manager, because the responsibilities of management are not only increasing, they are also becoming vaguer and more elusive. In this paper, I will analyze the new, complex responsibilities of management in terms of the scope and the legitimizationof corporate citizenship. What may we expect of individual organizations? Which wishes of which stakeholders should be honored? How can (...) we legitimize the new societal and public role of business firms? The outcome of this analysis will be translated to the practice of management; how can we strengthen the social responsibility of managers? Four options will be discussed. (1) Market regulation, which binds the actions of managers. (2) Professionalization of management, which seeks for better information. (3) Moral management, which incorporates norms and values from outside the market. (4) Stakeholder management, which leaves room for the participation of stakeholders. These options can be schematized according to an internal-external axis and an objective-subjective axis. I will show that stakeholder management fits the best with the idea of corporate citizenship, but has serious risks of failing. (shrink)

With mind-brain identity theories no longer dominant in philosophy of mind in the late 1950s, scientific materialists turned to functionalism, the view that the identity of any mental state depends on its function in the cognitive system of which it is a part. The philosopher Hilary Putnam was one of the primary architects of functionalism and was the first to propose computational functionalism, which views the human mind as a computer or an information processor. But, in the early 1970s, Putnam (...) began to have doubts about functionalism, and in his masterwork _Representation and Reality_, he advanced four powerful arguments against his own doctrine of computational functionalism. In Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism, Jeff Buechner systematically examines Putnam's arguments against functionalism and contends that they are unsuccessful. Putnam's first argument uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem to refute the view that there is a computational description of human reasoning and rationality; his second, the "triviality argument," demonstrates that any computational description can be attributed to any physical system; his third, the multirealization argument, shows that there are infinitely many computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state; his fourth argument buttresses this assertion by showing that there cannot be local computational reductions because there is no computable partitioning of the infinity of computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state into a single package or small set of packages. Buechner analyzes these arguments and the important inferential connections among them -- for example, the use of both the Gödel and triviality arguments in the argument against local computational reductions -- and argues that none of Putnam's four arguments succeeds in refuting functionalism. _ Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism_ will inspire renewed discussion of Putnam's influential book and will confirm Representation and Reality as a major work by a major philosopher. Jeff Buechner is Director of the Bioethics Institute and Lecturer in Philosophy at Rutgers University-Newark. (shrink)

Many Western countries have introduced market principles in healthcare. The newly introduced financial instrument of “care-intensity packages” in the Dutch long-term care sector fit this development since they have some characteristics of a market device. However, policy makers and care providers positioned these instruments as explicitly not belonging to the general trend of marketisation in healthcare. Using a qualitative case study approach, we study the work that the two providers have done to fit these instruments to their organisations and how (...) that enables and legitimatises market development. Both providers have done various types of work that could be classified as market development, including creating accounting systems suitable for markets, redefining public values in the context of markets, and starting commercial initiatives. Paradoxically, denying the existence of markets for long-term care and thus avoiding ideological debates on the marketisation of healthcare has made the use of market devices all the more likely. Making the market invisible seems to be an operative element in making the market work. Our findings suggest that Dutch long-term care reform points to the need to study the ‘making’ rather than the ‘liberalising’ of markets and that the study of healthcare markets should not be confined to those practices that explicitly label themselves as such. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a key issue affecting trust in the context of a computing environment, as it affects human agents and artificial agents. Specifically, the paper focuses on the role that "resource conservation" plays in an analysis of moral trust and epistemic trust involving agents. I will argue that resource conservation is a necessary condition in the definition of a moral trust relation, that there is a conceptual relationship between a moral trust relation and epistemic trust---that epistemic trust (...) is a necessary condition for moral trust---, and that a moral trust relation might provide a basic mechanism for the realization of ecological rationality in human agents. (shrink)

Kripke’s argument against functionalism extended to physical computers poses a deep philosophical problem for understanding the standard view of what computers are. The problem puts into jeopardy the definition in the standard view that computers are physical machines for performing physical computations. Indeed, it is entirely possible that, unless this philosophical problem is resolved, we will never have a good understanding of computers and may never know just what they are.

We argue that the notion of trust, as it figures in an ethical context, can be illuminated by examining research in artificial intelligence on multi-agent systems in which commitment and trust are modeled. We begin with an analysis of a philosophical model of trust based on Richard Holton’s interpretation of P. F. Strawson’s writings on freedom and resentment, and we show why this account of trust is difficult to extend to artificial agents (AAs) as well as to other non-human entities. (...) We then examine Margaret Urban Walker’s notions of “default trust” and “default, diffuse trust” to see how these concepts can inform our analysis of trust in the context of AAs. In the final section, we show how ethicists can improve their understanding of important features in the trust relationship by examining data resulting from a classic experiment involving AAs. (shrink)

Today’s fast-moving, media lifeworld embodies many of the metaphors of its analog predecessors – including those of warfare and conflict. The metaphor of warfare is used to describe everything from corporate marketing strategies to political campaigns, often with harmful consequences. In one way of exploring the front lines of the resulting war on truth, we describe some lessons learned from the experience of military veterans who have actually endured the liminality of combat, and who emerge with what is increasingly termed (...) moral injuries. We use their experience as an analogy for competing narratives in cyberspace, where objective standards of truth and facticity are apparent casualties, and where fake news is emerging as victorious. We then apply models of social construction, specifically the practical theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning, and the metaphor of jazz improvisation in the context of Schutz’s lifeworld phenomenology as possibly useful, helpful, and hopeful ways of acting into the complexity of truth together. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band gibt in neunzehn Beiträgen den aktuellen Stand der wissenschaftlichen Diskussion zu Willensfreiheit, Determinismus und Verantwortlichkeit in praktischen Kontexten wieder. Er klärt zunächst die genannten Begriffe, um dann die wichtigsten Methoden und Ergebnisse der Hirnforschung zu präsentieren. Diese Forschungsergebnisse werden im Weiteren philosophisch interpretiert und innerhalb ethischer Koordinaten bestimmt. Abschließende Beiträge reflektieren ihre Anwendung auf die Gebiete der Rechtssprechung und Demenzforschung. Damit eröffnet der Band ein breites Spektrum interdisziplinärer Perspektiven auf ein vieldiskutiertes Thema.

Scientific communities expect early career researchers to become intellectually independent and to develop longer-term research plans. How such programs emerge during the early career phase is still poorly understood. Drawing on semistructured interviews with German ECRs in plant biology, experimental physics, and early modern history, we show that the development of such a plan is a research process in itself. The processes leading to IRPs are conditioned by the fields’ epistemic practices for producing new knowledge. By linking the conditions under (...) which ECRs work to the epistemic properties of their IRPs, we identify mechanisms that produce these programs and conditions facilitating or hindering the operation of these mechanisms. (shrink)

Recent studies suggest that vertebrate genetic material ingested by invertebrates (iDNA) can be used to investigate vertebrate ecology. Given the ubiquity of invertebrates that feed on vertebrates across the globe, iDNA might qualify as a very powerful tool for 21st century population and conservation biologists. Here, we identify some invertebrate characteristics that will likely influence iDNA retrieval and elaborate on the potential uses of invertebrate‐derived information. We hypothesize that beyond inventorying local faunal diversity, iDNA should allow for more profound insights (...) into wildlife population density, size, mortality, and infectious agents. Based on the similarities of iDNA with other low‐quality sources of DNA, a general technical framework for iDNA analyses is proposed. As it is likely that no such thing as a single ideal iDNA sampler exists, forthcoming research efforts should aim at cataloguing invertebrate properties relevant to iDNA retrieval so as to guide future usage of the invertebrate tool box. (shrink)

The past three decades have witnessed a sharp reduction in the rate of growth of public research funding, and sometimes an actual decline in its level. In many countries, this decline has been accompanied by substantial changes in the ways that such funding has been allocated and monitored. In addition, the institutions governing how research is directed and conducted underwent significant reforms. In this paper we examine how these changes have affected scientists’ research goals and practices by comparing the development (...) of three scientific innovations in four European countries, namely Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden. We find that the increased number of actors exercising authority over research goals does not necessarily lead to a greater diversity of interests funding research. A narrowing of goals and frameworks is especially probable when the increasing importance of external project funding is combined with reductions in state financing of universities and public research institutes. Finally, the growing standardisation of project cycle times and resource packages across funding agencies and scientific communities make it more difficult for researchers to pursue projects that deviate from these norms, especially, if they challenge mainstream beliefs and assessment criteria. (shrink)

Surveys of the German public have revealed a high acceptance of social freezing, i.e. oocyte conservation without medical indication. Up to now, there are no investigations available on the experiences and attitudes of health professionals towards social freezing. Between August 2015 and January 2016, we surveyed gynecologists Germany-wide on the topic social freezing. Five gynecologists specialized in reproductive medicine and five office-based gynecologists in standard care were chosen for the survey. The survey was conducted with an explorative, qualitative research design. (...) The demand for social freezing in Germany is low. With regard to their fertility age, most women attend consultations too late, they have only little previous knowledge and false expectations. The gynecologists consider it the duty of society and politics to provide for the compatibility of family and work. They relate late parenthood to disadvantages primarily for the children. A majority of the gynecologists interviewed tend to advise natural reproduction. Social freezing is often mistaken as a kind of fertility insurance. Thus, it is necessary that physicians inform women early about the possibilities and limitations of social freezing. In the first place, social freezing is not a medical or medical-ethical topic. Women consider the method as a possibility to ensure the compatibility of family and work. This compatibility should be mostly perceived as a political topic. It cannot be a medical task to solve this issue. In fact, a debate in society as a whole is necessary that includes all relevant actors. (shrink)