Der Schwerpunkt der Reihe liegt auf thematisch fokussierten Auseinandersetzungen mit Nietzsches Werken, seinen Quellen und seiner Rezeption. Die gehen meist auf Veranstaltungen der Nietzsche-Forschungsstelle Freiburg sowie der Friedrich-Nietzsche-Stiftung Naumburg zurück. Die Reihe ist ideen-, kultur-, literatur- und philosophiegeschichtlich orientiert und - bei Offenheit für disziplinäre Vielfalt - dem Ideal genauer Textlektüren verpflichtet.

The relationship between tax authorities and taxpayers is essential for tax compliance. The aim of the present paper was to explore systematically the determinants of this relationship and related tax compliance behaviors based on the extended slippery slope framework. We used in-depth qualitative interviews with 33 self-employed taxpayers and 30 tax auditors. Interviewees described the tax relationship along the extended slippery slope framework concepts of power and trust. However, also novel sub-categories of power (e.g., setting deadlines) and trust (e.g., personal (...) assistance) were mentioned. Furthermore, also little-studied categories of tax behavior emerged, such as accepting tax behavior e.g., being available to the tax authorities, or stalling tax behavior e.g., the intentional creation of complexity. The results comprehensively summarize the determinants of the tax relationship and tax compliance behaviors. Additionally, results highlight future research possibilities and illustrate policy interventions. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much talk of impact investing. Around the world, specialized intermediaries have appeared, mainstream financial players and governments have become involved, renowned universities have included impact investing courses in their curriculum, and a myriad of practitioner contributions have been published. Despite all this activity, conceptual clarity remains an issue: The absence of a uniform definition, the interchangeable use of alternative terms and unclear boundaries to related concepts such as socially responsible investment are being criticized. This article aims (...) to contribute to a better understanding of impact investing, which could help foster this specific investment style and guide further academic research. To do so, it investigates a large number of academic and practitioner works, highlighting areas of similarity and inconsistency on three levels: definitional, terminological, and strategic. Our research shows that, on a general level, heterogeneity—especially definitional and strategic—is less pronounced than expected. Yet, our research also reveals critical issues that need to be clarified to advance the field and increase its credibility. First and foremost, this includes the characteristics required of impact investees, notably whether they need to be organizations that prioritize their non-financial mission over the business side. Our results indicate that there may be different schools of thoughts concerning this matter. (shrink)

Im Mittelpunkt des Bandes steht mit Nietzsches Nachlass derjenige Teil seines Schaffens, von dem seit jeher eine besondere Faszination ausging. Sein Status ist bis heute höchst umstritten. Handelt es sich bei den nachgelassenen Aufzeichnungen um Skizzen und Vorstufen, um Bausteine für neue Werke oder gar – wie etwa Martin Heidegger meinte – um das ‚eigentliche‘ Werk Nietzsches? Außer Frage steht, dass der Nachlass besondere editorische und interpretatorische Schwierigkeiten aufwirft. Zugleich herrscht aber weitgehender Konsens darüber, dass er für das Verständnis von (...) Nietzsches Denken und Schreiben unverzichtbar ist, denn viele seiner zentralen Gedanken sind im Nachlass anders, mitunter scheinbar deutlicher, bisweilen überhaupt nur hier formuliert. Die Beiträge gehen diesen Spannungsverhältnissen nach, indem sie sowohl am Beispiel konkreter Einzelfälle als auch grundsätzlich den angemessenen Umgang mit Nietzsches nachgelassenen Schriften diskutieren. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche, den Gottfried Benn als das "grosste Ausstrahlungsphanomen der Geistesgeschichte" bezeichnete, steht im Zentrum dieses Buches. Es enthalt die Vortrage der Ringvorlesung, welche die Freiburger Forschungsstelle "Nietzsche-Kommentar" zum 100. Geburtstag der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften organisierte. - In der konstruktiven Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche beleuchten die Aufsatze Nietzsches Bedeutung als Leitfigur moderner Lebensphilosophie, Kulturdiagnose und Anthropologie. Nietzsches Kritik an der philosophischen Tradition, sein Konzept der Umwertung, seine Psychologie, sein Geschichtsdenken, seine Beziehung zu Darwin, Schopenhauer, Wagner und Heidegger, seine Lyrik sowie (...) die Charakteristika seines Stils gehoren zum breitgefacherten Themenspektrum.Der Band enthalt Beitrage von Dieter Borchmeyer, Gunter Figal, Hans-Martin Gauger, Volker Gerhardt, Katharina Gratz, Lore Huhn, Helmuth Kiesel, Ludger Lutkehaus, Klaus Monig, Barbara Neymeyr, Annemarie Pieper, Jochen Schmidt und Andreas Urs Sommer. (shrink)

This paper critically comments on Katharina Felka's book "Talking about numbers". I question her assumption that specifying sentences are a semantically unified class. The paper is part of a symposium on the book (in German).

. This descriptive study discusses cognitive mapping as a technique for analyzing ethical sensitivity, examines whether the method allows comparisons between people, compares the ethical sensitivity levels of participants from three organizations, examines which indicators of ethical sensitivity are most salient to members of specific organizations, and examines whether education level or organizational membership is the best predictor of an individual’s ethical sensitivity level. Subjects from three organizations read background information, listened to two audiotaped scenarios containing multiple ethical issues related (...) to organizational communication, responded to focused interview questions, and completed questionnaires. The interviews were taped, transcribed, and analyzed using cognitive mapping techniques. Significant differences in levels of ethical sensitivity were found between the members of the three organizations. However, a hierarchical regression model demonstrated that the difference was likely due to the differences in level of education in each organization. Organizational membership seemed to affect the particular aspects of the scenarios that participants noticed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLittle research has been done to examine users’ perceptions of ethical issues related to communication on social media. This exploratory, descriptive study examines undergraduate students’...

Katharina D. Giesel befasst sich mit den Fragen, was in den verschiedensten Sozialwissenschaften unter Leitbildern verstanden wird, wie diese Kategorie konzeptionell in Forschungs- und Handlungskonzepte eingebunden wird und inwiefern ...

The phrase "natural kind term" has come into the linguistic and philosophical literature in connection with well-known work of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975a). I use that phrase here in the sense it has acquired from those and subseqnent works on related topics. This is not the transparent sense of the phrase. That is, if I am right in what follows there are words for kinds of things existing in nature which are not natural kind terms in the current (...) sense - e.g. planet, woman, and weed. I use the term "nondescriptional", following Salmon (1981), to mean "lacking a Fregean sense", where a Fregean sense is taken to be a property or group of properties semantically associated with an expression which determines its denotation. I hope that the term "nondescriptional" will be clarified in subsequent discussion, but perhaps a few words about it and its opposite, "descriptional", would be useful here. These terms (as Salmon notes (p.15, n. 11)) should be taken as technical terms. The idea is that descriptional words, of which bachelor is the overwhelmingly favorite example, express a semantic content, or sense, which is what mediates their denotation. Entities fall in their denotation in virtue of possessing the property or properties expressed as their sense. (It is not necessary, however, that this sense be as easily paraphrasable with descriptive synonyms as it is typically held to be in the case of bachelor, or even that it be paraphrasable at all.) In the case of nondescriptional words there is no Fregean sense to mediate the link between word and object. Hence such terms are described by what Salmon, following Kaplan, calls "the theory of direct reference". What it is that does associate such terms with their denotations is another question which will be touched on briefly at the end. I have several aims in this paper. The first is to defend a conservative position on nondescriptionality. I will argue that relatively few natural language words have this property. My other aims are primarily clarificatory. Among the issues I would like to clarify are those connected with the determination of this property and flae explanation of why it exists, its relationship with other properties such as rigid designation and essentiality, and its significance for lexical semantics. The organization of the paper is as follows. The first section identifies the position taken here on the question of which expressions are nondescriptional and provides a general defense of it. The second section is a critical examination of criteria associated with nondescriptionality. In the third section provide further defense for the conservative position, and in the fourth section we turn to related issues in lexical semantics. (shrink)

Many legal, social, and medical theorists and practitioners, as well as lay people, seem to be concerned with the harmfulness of discriminative practices. However, the philosophical literature on the moral wrongness of discrimination, with a few exceptions, does not focus on harm. In this paper, I examine, and improve, a recent account of wrongful discrimination, which divides into a definition of group discrimination, and a characterisation of its moral wrong-making feature in terms of harm. The resulting account analyses the wrongness (...) of discrimination in terms of intrapersonal comparisons of the discriminatee’s actual, and relevantly counterfactual, well-being levels. I show that the account faces problems from counterfactuals, which can be traced back specifically to the orthodox - comparative, counterfactual, welfarist - concept of harm. I argue that non-counterfactual and non-comparative harm concepts face problems of their own, and don’t fit easily with our best understanding of discrimination; hence they are unsuitable to replace the orthodox concept here. I then propose a non-orthodox - comparative, counterfactual, hybrid - concept of harm, which relies on counterfactual comparisons of ways of being treated. I suggest how such a concept can help us handle the problems from counterfactuals, at least for my account of discrimination. I also show that there are similar proposals in other harm-related debates. An upshot of the paper is thus to corroborate the case for a non-orthodox, hybrid concept of harm, which seems better able to fulfil its functional roles in a variety of contexts. (shrink)

A realist view of numbers often rests on the following thesis: statements like ‘The number of moons of Jupiter is four’ are identity statements in which the copula is flanked by singular terms whose semantic function consists in referring to a number (henceforth: Identity). On the basis of Identity the realists argue that the assertive use of such statements commits us to numbers. Recently, some anti-realists have disputed this argument. According to them, Identity is false, and, thus, we may deny (...) that the relevant statements commit us to numbers. The present paper argues that the correct linguistic analysis of the relevant number statements supports the anti-realist view that Identity is false. However, as will further be shown, pace the anti-realist, this analysis does not establish that such statements do not commit us to numbers after all. (shrink)

Szabó follows Heim in viewing familiarity, rather than uniqueness, as the essence of the definite article, but attempts to derive both familiarity and uniqueness implications pragmatically, assigning a single semantic interpretation to both the definite and indefinite articles. I argue that if there is no semantic distinction between the articles, then there is no way to derive these differences between them pragmatically.

In this paper, we argue that ‘good care’ in residential nursing homes is enacted through different care practices that are either inspired by a ‘professional logic of care’ that aims for justice and non-maleficence in the professional treatment of residents, or by a ‘relational logic of care’, which attends to the relational quality and the meaning of interpersonal connectedness in people’s lives. Rather than favoring one care logic over the other, this paper indicates how important aspects of care are constantly (...) negotiated between different care practices. Based on the intricate everyday negotiations observed during an ethnographic field study at an elderly nursing home in Germany, the paper puts forth the argument that care is always a matter of tinkering with different, sometimes competing ‘goods’. This tinkering process, which unfolds through ‘intuitive deliberation’, ‘situated assessment’ and ‘affective juggling’ is then theorized along the conceptualization of a ‘practical ethics of care’: an ethics which makes no a priori judgments of what may be considered as good or bad care, but instead calls for momentary judgments that are pliable across changing situations. (shrink)

In today’s highly dynamic societies, moral norms and values are subject to change. Moral change is partly driven by technological developments. For instance, the introduction of robots in elderly care practices requires caregivers to share moral responsibility with a robot (see van Wynsberghe 2013 ). Since we do not know what elements of morality will change and how they will change (see van der Burg 2003 ), moral education should aim at fostering what has been called “moral resilience” (Swierstra 2013 (...) ). We seek to fill two gaps in the existing literature: (i) research on moral education has not paid enough attention to the development of moral resilience; (ii) the very limited literature on moral resilience does not conceptualise moral resilience in relation to new technological developments. We argue that philosophical accounts of moral education need to do justice to the importance of moral resilience, and that a specific form of moral resilience should be conceptualised as “technomoral resilience” to underline the added value of cultivating moral resilience in relation to technomoral change. We illustrate the role of technomoral resilience in practice by looking at the context of elderly care. To make the first step towards an account of how technomoral resilience can be fostered in moral education, we propose that moral education shall focus on a triangle of capacities: (1) moral imagination, (2) a capacity for critical reflection, and (3) a capacity for maintaining one’s moral agency in the face of disturbances. (shrink)

Bioethicists tend to focus on the individual as the relevant moral subject. Yet, in highly complex and socially differentiated healthcare systems a number of social groups, each committed to a common cause, are involved in medical decisions and sometimes even try to influence bioethical discourses according to their own agenda. We argue that the significance of these collective actors is unjustifiably neglected in bioethics. The growing influence of collective actors in the fields of biopolitics and bioethics leads us to pursue (...) the question as to how collective moral claims can be characterized and justified. We pay particular attention to elaborating the circumstances under which collective actors can claim ‘collective agency.’ Specifically, we develop four normative-practical criteria for collective agency in order to determine the conditions that must be given to reasonably speak of ‘collective autonomy’. For this purpose, we analyze patient organizations and families, which represent two quite different kinds of groups and can both be conceived as collective actors of high relevance for bioethical practice. Finally, we discuss some practical implications and explain why the existence of a shared practice of trust is of immediate normative relevance in this respect. (shrink)

It has recently been pointed out that the cloudiness of the concept of authenticity as well as inflated ideologies of the ‘true self’ provide good reasons to criticize theories and ideals of authenticity. Nevertheless, there are also good reasons to defend an ethical ideal of authenticity, not least because of its critical and oppositional force, which is directed against experiences of self-abandonment and self-alienation. I will argue for an elaborated ethical ideal of authenticity: the ambitious ideal of a continuous self-reflective (...) process of ‘self-authentication’. For this purpose, the ideal of being authentic in expressing and unfolding one’s individual personality and characteristics will be combined with the ideal of being ‘an authentic person’ - whereby ‘a person’ is to be understood in a Kantian sense as an autonomous person who is reasonable and morally responsible. (shrink)

As the pre-eminent Enlightenment philosopher, Kant famously calls on all humans to make up their own minds, independently from the constraints imposed on them by others. Kant's focus, however, is on universal human reason, and he tells us little about what makes us individual persons. In this book, Katharina T. Kraus explores Kant's distinctive account of psychological personhood by unfolding how, according to Kant, we come to know ourselves as such persons. Drawing on Kant's Critical works and on his (...) Lectures and Reflections, Kraus develops the first textually comprehensive and systematically coherent account of our capacity for what Kant calls 'inner experience'. The novel view of self-knowledge and self-formation in Kant that she offers addresses present-day issues in philosophy of mind and will be relevant for contemporary philosophical debates. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of philosophy, as well as of philosophy of mind and psychology. (shrink)

Katharina Dück widmet sich in diesem Buch dem umfangreichen Doktrinenschatz des Begriffs „Materia prima“ im Spannungsfeld von Theorie und wiederholbarer Praxis in deutschsprachigen alchemisch-naturkundlichen Sachschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts. Sie trägt damit neue Aspekte zur Debatte des Materialismus in der Frühen Neuzeit bei. Untersucht werden Texte sogenannter Meisterdenker als auch Zeugnisse derer, die bisher wenig berücksichtigt wurden. Dem Corpus Paracelsicum und der Strömung des Paracelsismus wird besondere Beachtung gezollt. Drei rasterartig umrissene Grundmuster, denen die „Materia prima“-Vorstellungen zugeordnet sind, werden ausführlich (...) vorgestellt und dabei Kontinuitäten sowie Transformationen von vorhandenen Materie-Konzepten festgestellt.​. (shrink)

Problems arise when applying the current procedural conceptualization of decision-making capacity to paediatric healthcare: Its emphasis on content-neutrality and rational cognition as well as its implicit assumption that capacity is an ability that resides within a person jeopardizes children’s position in decision-making. The purpose of the paper is to challenge this dominant account of capacity and provide an alternative for how capacity should be understood in paediatric care. First, the influence of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget upon the notion of capacity (...) is discussed, followed by an examination of Vygostky’s contextualist view on children’s development, which emphasizes social interactions and learning for decision-making capacity. In drawing parallels between autonomy and capacity, substantive approaches to relational autonomy are presented that underline the importance of the content of a decision. The authors then provide a relational reconceptualization of capacity that leads the focus away from the individual to include important social others such as parents and physicians. Within this new approach, the outcome of adults’ decision-making processes is accepted as a guiding factor for a good decision for the child. If the child makes a choice that is not approved by adults, the new conceptualization emphasizes mutual exchange and engagement by both parties. (shrink)

When facing a choice between saving one person and saving many, some people have argued that fairness requires us to decide without aggregating numbers; rather we should decide by coin toss or some form of lottery, or alternatively we should straightforwardly save the greater number but justify this in a non-aggregating contractualist way. This paper expands the debate beyond well-known number cases to previously under-considered probability cases, in which not (only) the numbers of people, but (also) the probabilities of success (...) for saving people vary. It is shown that, in these latter cases, both the coin toss and the lottery lead to what is called an awkward conclusion, which makes probabilities count in a problematic way. Attempts to avoid this conclusion are shown to lead into difficulties as well. Finally, it is shown that while the greater number method cannot be justified on contractualist grounds for probability cases, it may be replaced by another decision method which is so justified. This decision method is extensionally equivalent to maximising expected value and seems to be the least problematic way of dealing with probability cases in a non-aggregating manner. (shrink)

Recent social‐psychological research suggests that a considerable amount of, for example, racial and gendered discrimination may be connected to implicit biases: mental processes beyond our direct control or endorsement, that influence our behaviour toward members of socially salient groups. In this article I seek to improve our understanding of the phenomenon of implicit bias, including its moral status, by examining it through the lens of a theory of discrimination. In doing so, I also suggest ways to improve this theory of (...) discrimination, by creating conceptual space for implicit bias discrimination. I explore two ways of distinguishing direct and indirect discrimination and spell out the resulting four different forms of discrimination. The resulting taxonomy provides some room for implicit bias discrimination. I also deal with four challenges to my proposal for capturing implicit bias within discrimination theory: the metaphysical challenge, the moral insignificance challenge, the causal connection challenge, and the challenge from irreducibly collective bias. (shrink)

Developmental psychology currently faces a deep puzzle: most children before 4 years of age fail elicited-response false-belief tasks, but preverbal infants demonstrate spontaneous false-belief understanding. Two main strategies are available: cultural constructivism and early-belief understanding. The latter view assumes that failure at elicited-response false-belief tasks need not reflect the inability to understand false beliefs. The burden of early-belief understanding is to explain why elicited-response false-belief tasks are so challenging for most children under 4 years of age. The goal of this (...) article is to offer a pragmatic framework whose purpose is to discharge this burden. (shrink)

Because it is often argued that surrogacy should not be treated as contractual, the question arises in which terms this practice might then be couched. In this article, I argue that a phenomenology of surrogacy centering on the notion of trust provides a description that is illuminating from the moral point of view. My thesis is that surrogacy establishes a complex and extended reproductive unit––the “surrogacy triad” consisting of the surrogate mother, the child, and the intending parents––whose constituents are bound (...) together by mutual trustful commitments. Even though a trust-based approach does not provide an ultimate answer to whether surrogacy should be sanctioned or prohibited, it allows for at least some practical suggestions. In particular, I will argue that, under certain conditions, surrogacy is tenable within familial or other significant relationships, and I will stress the necessity of acknowledging the new relationships and moral commitments that result from this practice. (shrink)

Hume's explanation of our tendency to confuse calm passions with reason due to lack of feeling appears to present a tension with his claim that we cannot be mistaken about our own impressions. I argue that the calm/violent distinction cannot be understood in terms of presence/absence of feeling. Rather, for Hume the presence or absence of disruption and disordering of natural and/or customary modes of thought is the key distinction between the calm and violent passions. This reading provides new explanations (...) of our confusion of calm passions with reason, and the potential for calm passions to prevail over violent. (shrink)

Purpose: To explain physical activity behavior, social-cognitive theories were most commonly used in the past. Besides conscious processes, the approach of dual processes additionally incorporates non-conscious regulatory processes into physical activity behavior theories. Habits are one of various non-conscious variables that can influence behavior and thus play an important role in terms of behavior change. The aim of this review was to examine the relationship between habit strength and physical activity behavior in longitudinal studies.Methods: According to the PRISMA guidelines, a (...) systematic search was conducted in three databases. Only peer-reviewed articles using a longitudinal study design were included. Both, habit and physical activity were measured at least once, and habit was related to physical activity behavior. Study quality was evaluated by assessment tools of the NHLBI.Results: Of 3.382 identified publications between 2016 and 2019, fifteen studies with different study designs were included. Most studies supported that positive correlations between habit and physical activity exist. Some positive direct and indirect effects of habit on physical activity were detected and only a minority of studies showed the influence of physical activity on habit strength. Studies differentiating between instigation and execution habit found positive correlations and revealed instigation habit as a stronger predictor of physical activity. The quality of studies was rated as reasonable using assessment tools of the NHLBI.Conclusion: This review revealed a bidirectional relationship between habit and physical activity. Whether habit predicts physical activity or vice versa is still unclear. The observation of habit influencing physical activity may be most appropriate in studies fostering physical activity maintenance while the influence of physical activity on habit may be reasonable in experimental studies with physical activity as intervention content to form a habit. Future investigations should differentiate between habit formation and physical activity maintenance studies depending on the research objective. Long-term study designs addressing the complexity of habitual behavior would be beneficial for establishing cue-behavior associations for the formation of habits. Furthermore, studies should differentiate between instigation and execution habit in order to investigate the influence of both variables on physical activity behavior independently. (shrink)

Lassen sich für die Kunst noch begriffliche Grenzen ziehen? Oder ist sie in einer Zeit, in der alles Kunst sein kann, letztlich an ihr Ende gelangt? In diesem Spannungsfeld bewegen sich die kunsttheoretischen Schriften des amerikanischen Philosophen Arthur C. Danto. Einerseits hat er unablässig die These verfochten, die Entwicklung der Kunst sei mit künstlerischen Strömungen wie der Pop Art an ihr Ende gelangt. Andererseits hat er um eine überzeugende Konturierung des Kunstbegriffs gerungen und eine der vielversprechendsten Kunstphilosophien des 20. Jahrhunderts (...) vorgelegt. Erstmals werden hier Dantos Schriften zur Bestimmung des Kunstbegriffs sowie zum Ende der Kunst zusammengelesen. Die Autorin nimmt die begrifflichen und zeitlichen Grenzen der Kunst in den Blick und fragt zugleich nach einer produktiven Bestimmung dieser 'Enden' innerhalb des nicht stillzustellenden Fortschreitens künstlerischer Praxis. (shrink)

In the article “The Socio-Political Roles of Neuroethics and the Case of Klotho,” we proposed a socio-political approach to neuroethics, inspired by John Rawls’s roles for political philosophy. In...

BackgroundThe bioethical debates concerning living donation and surrogacy revolve around similar ethical questions and moral concepts. Nevertheless, the ethical discourses in both fields grew largely isolated from each other.MethodsBased on a review of ethical, sociological and anthropological research this paper aims to link the ethical discourses on living kidney donation and surrogacy by providing a comparative analysis of the two practices’ relational dimension with regard to three aspects, i.e. the normative role of relational dynamics, social norms and gender roles, and (...) reciprocity. Based on this analysis, we derive conclusions for the framing of living organ donation and surrogacy in ethical theory and practice.ResultsFirst, our analysis emphasizes the relevance of acknowledging the complex relational implications of living kidney donation and surrogacy. Underestimating this relational dimension may not only lead to individual crises but endanger existing as well as newly emerging familial relationships. Second, we point out differences in the normative assessment of social norms and gender roles in the ethical debates about living kidney donation and surrogacy. In particular, we show how different evaluations of altruism affect the understanding of autonomy in both contexts. In addition, we sensitize for biased perceptions of gender roles. Finally, we argue that challenges resulting from unresolved reciprocity are an issue in living kidney donation and surrogacy independent of whether the exchange of body parts or bodily services is framed as a gift or commercial exchange. By pointing out the limits of financial compensation, we stress the relevance of non-material, relational rewards as potential remedy. (shrink)