The Bologna process forces a reframing of the theological education. In the autor's mind, it affords chances for an improved quality during the first two cycles. The change from an input-oriented to an output-oriented leaming provides a better professional competences. In addition, the Bologna process provokes to profile theology in an interdisciplinary context. The article outlines the profile of Theological Ethics as a self-contained discipline, connectedwith both, the other theolgical disciplines and the adjacent sciences, such as medicine, law, and sociology. (...) According to this, the authors discuss the advantages and the risks ofthe two-cylcle, BA/ma education and draw the conclusions for the further curriculas in theological ethics. A coml)lon competence-based core-curriculum is presented in order to get joint standards and to improve student's mobility. (shrink)

The demand for a right to military tax refusal aims at the protection from those conflicts of conscience that are resulting from an indirect involvement of the citizen in a state's capability of warfare. This raises the generat question of the relevance of conscience for public law. Normative and functional theories of conscience can only insufficiently explain the experience ofthe human conscience. The protestant concept of a freed conscience includes the possibility, that a Christian takes the responsibility for non-intended effects (...) ofhis actions. In the case of a legal right to refuse military tax, an equal right ought tobe granted to persans whose conscience is worried by other kinds of conflicts. But this would be hardly compatible with the principle of democracy. The burden of conscience of those who refuse military taxes should be taken into account by individual regulations but not regulated by law. (shrink)

Today the radical as well as the organizing pacifism have become compatible in the engagement for an universal legal system, which is based on the acknowledgement of human rights and a general prohibition of the use of force. The classical doctrines of just war have become obsolete, but their implicit elements concerning moral criticism of violence are indispensable. The author critisizes the misuse of the human rights argument for the justification of military interventionism. A legitimate policy of peace and security (...) has to depend on the development of a collective security system as proposed by the UN-Charter. It cannot be based on traditional military alliances of defence. To intervene in domestic conflicts, if any, peacekeeping operations are qualified, when and as far as they bind themselves to the principles of consensus of all parties concerned, of strict neutrality and of deescalation. There is a special obligation for Germany to restrain herself in military actions and toset an example in developing an international culture of nonviolence. (shrink)

The universal applicability of human rights outside the circle of European culture is not only a subject of political controversy, but a challenge to political and moral theory, too. The contribution argues with three types of relativistic criticism of human rihgts' universality: ethical particularism, political realism, and cultural contextualism. Defending the intercultural validity of the human rights' concept, the author pleads for a threefold distincion: between the right and the good, between basic and derivative rights, between penultimate reasons of human (...) rights and ultimate foundations to them. (shrink)

About forty years ago- in 1959- the »Heidelberger Thesen« were published. In (West) German Protestantism, this document was soon accepted as a basis for peace ethics during the Cold War. After the East-West conflict came to an end, nuclear weapons at first appeared irrelevant. But ultimately this did not prove to be the case. One could therefore assume that the Heidelberg compromise formulae would still be valid. The essay disputes this view, referring to the original document's lack of clarity and (...) also to the current political and strategic situation. (shrink)

A selection from the correspondence of the logician Wilhelm Ackermann (1896?1962) is presented in this article. The most significant letters were exchanged with Bernays, Scholz and Lorenzen, from which extensive passages are transcribed. Some remarks from other letters, with quotations, are also included.

Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed from (...) subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution. (shrink)

The commercialization of ‘big science’ is in full swing, leading to situations in which the ethical principles of academia are beginning to be compromised. This is exemplified by the profitable business of genetic ancestry testing. The goals of this sort of ‘big science’ are not necessarily in any way novel, however. In particular, large genotyping projects have a certain start‐up time when their design is frozen in, so that the projects often lag behind the development of genetic knowledge. On the (...) other hand, extremely provisional knowledge about potential disease markers is being rapidly turned into questionable ‘tests’, purporting to determine risk factors for complex disorders, by private companies that are eager to get their share of a profitable market of the future. The flow of money generated by such concerns looks likely to erode traditional research operations and small‐scale projects, which risk becoming pebbles on the ‘big science’ landscape. BioEssays 30:1246–1251, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This essay was Gadamer 's position paper in the April 1981 “debate” with Derrida at a conference on “Text and Interpretation” held at the Sorbonne in Paris. In it he discusses his approach to texts and several elements of Derrida's philosophy,..

Strohal, R. Parmenides und das "Sein".--Erismann, T. Erkenntnis und Sein.--Jacoby, G. Die ontologischen Grundlagen des psychophysischen Problems.--Kohler, I. Grenzen der Psychologie.--Mayer-Hillebrand, F. Über Bedeutung und Berechtigung der Normwissenschaften.--Meister, R. Handlungen, Taten, Werke als psychische Objektivationen.--Oberhammer, G. Metaphysik und Mystik bei Plotin.--Pechhacker, A. Vérités de fait, vérités éternelles.--Scheffler, P. Wohlklang und physikalische Gesetzmässigkeiten.--Schlismann, A. Wort und Wirklichkeit.--Windischer, H. Das Transzendieren als Problem der neueren Ontologie.--Wohlgenannt, R. Politische Wirklichkeit und philosophische Erkenntnis.

Book reviewed in this article: Prison Health Care. By Richard Smith. London: British Medical Association, 1984.