Service-Robotic—mainly defined as “non-industrial robotics”—is identified as the next economical success story to be expected after robots have been ubiquitously implemented into industrial production lines. Under the heading of service-robotic, we found a widespread area of applications reaching from robotics in agriculture and in the public transportation system to service robots applied in private homes. We propose for our interdisciplinary perspective of technology assessment to take the human user/worker as common focus. In some cases, the user/worker is the effective subject (...) acting by means of and in cooperation with a service robot; in other cases, the user/worker might become a pure object of the respective robotic system, for example, as a patient in a hospital. In this paper, we present a comprehensive interdisciplinary framework, which allows us to scrutinize some of the most relevant applications of service robotics; we propose to combine technical, economical, legal, philosophical/ethical, and psychological perspectives in order to design a thorough and comprehensive expert-based technology assessment. This allows us to understand the potentials as well as the limits and even the threats connected with the ongoing and the planned implementation of service robots into human lifeworld—particularly of those technical systems displaying increasing grades of autonomy. (shrink)

The ribosomal polypeptide tunnel exit is the site where a variety of factors interact with newly synthesized proteins to guide them through the early steps of their biogenesis. In mitochondrial ribosomes, this site has been considerably modified in the course of evolution. In contrast to all other translation systems, mitochondrial ribosomes are responsible for the synthesis of only a few hydrophobic membrane proteins that are essential subunits of the mitochondrial respiratory chain. Membrane insertion of these proteins occurs co‐translationally and is (...) connected to a sophisticated assembly process that not only includes the assembly of the different subunits but also the acquisition of redox co‐factors. Here, we describe how mitochondrial translation is organized in the context of respiratory chain assembly and speculate how alteration of the ribosomal tunnel exit might allow the establishment of a subset of specialized ribosomes that individually organize the early steps in the biogenesis of distinct mitochondrially‐encoded proteins. (shrink)

The need for character education for those in public leadership is of unquestionable importance. Professor Christoph Stückelberger has recently argued that ‘structural ethics’ have their merits, and that ‘there are no virtuous institutions, there are only virtuous people’. Stückelberger calls for the cultivation of virtues, especially the virtue of integrity. In recent decades, character education has received new attention. Those who call for character education most often draw from Greek traditions, especially from Aristotle. This article will explore a different source (...) for the discussion of virtues and character. About 80 years ago, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber proposed character education, based on what he called ‘Hebrew humanism’, as the foundation of nation-building. I will explore the continuing relevance of Buber’s view of character and character formation, taking his famous Tel Aviv speech on ‘The Education of Character’ of 1939 as a point of departure. (shrink)

I remember the first time that I heard James Cone's voice. A well-established, white scholar had just given what I thought to be a solid presentation on Martin Luther King Jr.'s notion of the "beloved community." When he had finished, Cone was one of the first to speak in the question and answer period. His strong tenor was piercing: "You can't talk about the dream, if you're not going to talk about the nightmare." He went on to clarify his (...) worry that the heart of King's message was too often lost when white scholars failed to put his thought in the context of the history and reality of the oppression of and violence against blacks in America. I have become afraid that my own thinking and writing about King's... (shrink)

Appeal to standard set theory in minimalist syntax is shown to be in conflict with the goal of analyzing dependency formation, a.k.a. movement, as involving genuine constituent copies. The underlying tension is due to extensionality, which—other things being equal—favors a perspective on dependencies in terms of multidominance. The above argument is developed against the backdrop of a recent exposition of minimalist syntax :229–261, 2019), which can be seen as exemplary. The resulting critical assessment should be taken as removing obstacles on (...) the way toward proper minimalist foundations for syntactic theory. (shrink)

Wandlung und Bestand, von H. Jonas.--Die Bedeutung von Martin Heideggers Denken für die Methode der Theologie, von H. Ott.--Das befreite Nichts, von K. Harries.--Bevestigter Gesang; Bemerkungen zu Heideggers Hölderlin-Auslegung, von R.E. Schulz-Seitz.--Heidegger und das Problem einer "philosophischen" Anthropologie, von H. Fahrenbach.--"Das Sein und das Nichts," von E. Tugendhat.--Der Logos-Gedanke des Heraklit, von K. Held.--Platon und das Problem der Wahrheit, von W. Hirsch.--Sein und Cogitationes, von Fr.-W. von Herrmann.--Die Zeitlichkeit der Repräsentation, von W. Janke.--Wandlungen in der Kant-Auffassung Heideggers, von H. (...) Hoppe.--Dialectique et difference. par J. Taminiaux.--Nietzsche im Denken Heideggers, von E. Heftrich.--Remarques sur le rapport de Sein und Zeit et de la phénoménologie husserlienne, par G. Granel.--chiasma (romanized); Merleau-Ponty und Heidegger, von R. Boehm.--Heidegger vom anderen Ufer, von H. Patočka.--Der Spruch des Heidegger, von G. Petrović. (shrink)

This compact profile by the co-translator of Sein und Zeit is one in a series of introductory studies of major contemporary theologians and philosophers who have influenced theology. This study of Heidegger is a remarkably lucid general introduction to his thought. Macquarrie considers in turn Heidegger's "life", "thought", and "significance." Macquarrie accepts for the most part Heidegger's own self-interpretation of his development--that his thought represents a continuous progressive path, all along guided by the problem of being. As one might expect, (...) there are a number of illuminating comparisons between Heidegger and other theological literature, including gnosticism, Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, and Heinrich Ott. The account of Heidegger on God is among the most meritorious features of the book. The references to Heidegger are to the English translations. There is no bibliography, but there is an excellent glossary which explicates clearly, simply, and accurately many important words in Heidegger's vocabulary.--J. D. C. (shrink)

Heideggers Verstrickung in den Nationalsozialismus war schon immer Gegenstand großer Kontroversen, doch gab es seit den Forschungen von Hugo Ott von vor 20 Jahren keine neuen Materialien mehr, auf deren Basis Heideggers Wirken beurteilt werden konnte. Holger Zaborowski hat nun erstmals umfassend bisher unbekannte Dokumente gesichtet und kann ein ganz neues und nüchternes Bild des großen Philosophen im Nationalsozialismus zeichnen.

Dennis Ott: In a recent interview you quoted Thorstein Veblen, who contrasted “substantial people†and “underlying population.â€[1] At a shareholder’s meeting of Allianz AG, major shareholder Hans-Martin Buhlmannn expressed the view that there is only one limit to the increase of the dividend: “The inferiors must not be bled so much that they can no longer consume. They must survive as consumers.â€[2] Is this the guiding principle of our economic system? And if so, is there any substance to the (...) notion of a “social market economyâ€? (shrink)

A revised translation of Heidegger's most important work.

From the perspective of a contemporary German reader, one consideration is particularly important from the start. Illumination of the political conduct of Martin Heidegger cannot and should not serve the purpose of a global depreciation of his thought. As a personality of recent history, Heidegger comes, like every other such personality, under the judgment of the historian. In Farias’ book as well, actions and courses of conduct are presented that suggest a detached evaluation of Heidegger’s character. But in general, (...) as members of a later generation who cannot know how we would have acted under conditions of a political dictatorship, we do well to refrain from moral judgments on actions and omissions from the Nazi era. Karl Jaspers, a friend and contemporary of Heidegger, was in a different position. In a report that the denazification committee of the University of Freiburg at the end of 1945, he passed judgment on Heidegger’s “mode of thinking”: it seemed to him “in its essence unfree, dictatorial, uncommunicative.”7 This judgment is itself no less informative about Jaspers than about Heidegger. In making evaluations of this sort Jaspers, as can be seen from his book on Friedrich Schelling, was guided by the strict maxim that whatever truth a philosophical doctrine contains must be mirrored in the mentality and lifestyle of the philosopher. This rigorous conception of the unity of work and person seems to me inadequate to the autonomy of thought and, indeed, to the general history of the reception and influence of philosophical thought. I do not mean by this to deny all internal connection between philosophical works and the biographical contexts from which they come—or to limit the responsibility attached to an author, who during his lifetime can always react to unintended consequences of his utterances. 7. Ott, “Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus,” p. 65. Jürgen Habermas is professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His most recent books include the two-volume work Theory of Communicative Action and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures . John McCumber is an associate professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of (...) veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world. (shrink)

In the domain of the Ukrainian history of philosophy one can clearly observe symptoms of eclecticism, contamination, and corruption. Such situation is rooted in continuous insufficiency of the methodological framework of Ukrainian philosophy, split by the demise of Soviet ideological structures. Critical condition of humanitarian epistemology is aggravated by the urgent need to overtake foreign studies in the corresponding field, which constantly increase in number and evolve in character. All of the aforementioned symptoms are indicative for historical and philosophical reception (...) of Martin Heidegger's legacy by the Ukrainian academy. Heidegger studies have already formed a separate trend in the world philosophical discourse. We focus on critical assessment of certain reflexes, i.e. definite interpretative strategies providing different transcriptions of the same referents, i.e. definite philosophical forms, texts, or problems. In the general contour of Heidegger studies I differentiate the following reflexes: reflex of immanent hermeneutics, reflex of reductive interpretation, reflex of genetic historiography, and reflex of ideological historiography. In this paper I continue to identify transcriptions of "Heidegger's controversy" (the referent of historico-philosophical thought), provided by the reflex of ideological historiography. As I have recently identified the transcription of political implications of Heidegger's philosophy in the terms of sociology of knowledge, so now it comes to biographical transcription of Heidegger's political engagement, elaborated by Hugo Ott and Victor Farias. Critical assessment of their methodological approach revealed imposition of biographical objectivity on philosophy discourse, simplification of the complexity of philosophical form, and the pathos of elementary humanism as the ideological criterion of their research. (shrink)

A landmark discussion between two great thinkers, vital to an understanding of twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual history.

We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then, we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher’s view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second factor in the (...) aetiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows. But we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

A contribution to the renewed German and French discussion about the important German philosopher of this century, Martin Heidegger, and about his relation to national socialism. To deal with the ideological and personal partake of the thinker in the activity of NSDAP is deserves our attention from the two points of view. First, Heidegger's attitude towards his own past after 1945 is typical for the spiritual position that continually shaped the history of the Federal Republic of Germany up to (...) the 60's. Second, each tradition, which made people blind to the nazi regime, is to be critically adopted. J. Habermas asks if there was an inner connection between Heidegger's philosophy and his political perception of the situation. He summarizes the views of O. Poggeler, W. Franzen, H. Ott, and he refers to other writings and newspaper articles as well. The author emphasizes that any moral evaluation of the behaviour and the acting during the nazi epoch is possible only when based on a historical approach. Heidegger's work, on the other hand, disconnected itself from his personality already long time ago, and especially the Being and Time is placed so eminently in the philosophical thought of our century, that it cannot be discredited at all by his engagement on the part of fascism. (shrink)

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Article copyright 2002. We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher's view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second (...) factor in the etiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows, but we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

Wie kein anderer Philosoph vor oder nach ihm thematisierte Heidegger die metaphysischen Denkschemata, die der abendländisch-neuzeitlichen Technikentwicklung zugrunde liegen. Auf verständliche Weise rekonstruiert dieses Buch Heideggers radikal metaphysikkritischen Ansatz vor dem Hintergrund seiner frühen und mittleren Schriften. Dabei wird nicht nur deutlich, wie sehr sein spätes Denken der Technik in Kontinuität zu seinem frühen fundamentalontologischen Projekt (und dessen Scheitern) steht, sondern es werden auch die Alternativen zum rechnenden Denken und Handeln in Kunst und Dichtung aufgezeigt. (Quelle: www.buchhandel.de).

My concern in this paper is with the claim that knowledge is a mental state – a claim that Williamson places front and centre in Knowledge and Its Limits. While I am not by any means convinced that the claim is false, I do think it carries certain costs that have not been widely appreciated. One source of resistance to this claim derives from internalism about the mental – the view, roughly speaking, that one’s mental states are determined by one’s (...) internal physical state. In order to know that something is the case it is not, in general, enough for one’s internal physical state to be a certain way – the wider world must also be a certain way. If we accept that knowledge is a mental state, we must give up internalism. One might think that this is no cost, since much recent work in the philosophy of mind has, in any case, converged on the view that internalism is false. This thought, though, is too quick. As I will argue here, the claim that knowledge is a mental state would take us to a view much further from internalism than anything philosophers of mind have converged upon. (shrink)

A moral requirement R1 is said to be lexically prior to a moral requirement R2 just in case we are morally obliged to uphold R1 at the expense of R2 – no matter how many times R2 must be violated thereby. While lexical priority is a feature of many ethical theories, and arguably a part of common sense morality, attempts to model it within the framework of decision theory have led to a series of problems – a fact which is (...) sometimes spun as a ‘decision theoretic critique’ of lexical priority. In this paper, I develop an enriched decision theoretic framework that is capable of modelling lexical priority while avoiding all extant problems. This will involve introducing several new ingredients into the standard decision theoretic framework, including multidimensional utilities, de minimis risks, and the means to represent two different conceptions of risk. (shrink)

I consider the question of how literally one can construe the “gauge argument,” which is the canonical means of understanding the putatively central import of local gauge symmetry principles for fundamental physics. As I argue, the gauge argument must be afforded a heuristic reading. Claims to the effect that the argument reflects a deep “logic of nature” must, for numerous reasons I discuss, be taken with a grain of salt.

This article develops an ecological framework for understanding collective action. This is contrasted with approaches familiar from the collective intentionality debate, which treat individuals as fundamental units of collective action. Instead, we turn to social ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory and argue that they provide a promising framework for understanding collectives as the central unit in collective action. However, we submit that these approaches do not yet appreciate enough the relevance of social identities for collective action. To analyze this (...) aspect, we build on key insights from social identity theory and synthesize it with embodied and ecological accounts of perception and action. This results in the proposal of two new types of affordances. For an individual who enacts her "embodied social identity" of being a member of a particular collective, there can be what we call embodied social identity affordances. Moreover, when several individuals dynamically interact with each other against the background of their embodied social identities, this might lead to the emergence of a collective, which we understand as a dynamically constituted and ecologically situated perception-action system consisting of several individuals enacting relevant embodied social identity affordances. Building on previous work in social ecological psychology, we suggest that there can be genuine collective affordances, that is, affordances whose subject is not an individual, but a collective. (shrink)

Recent empirical findings from social psychology, ecological psychology, and embodied cognitive science indicate that situational factors crucially shape the course of human behavior. For instance, it has been shown that finding a dime, being under the influence of an authority figure, or just being presented with food in easy reach often influences behavior tremendously. These findings raise important new questions for the philosophy of action: Are these findings a threat to classical conceptions of human agency? Are humans passively pushed around (...) by situational factors, or are there agential aspects in the way we spontaneously experience and react to situations? How can one conceptualize the pervasive influence of situational factors on human action? What are situations in the first place, and how should the influence of these situations on action be thought of? This paper sets out to develop a new conceptual repertoire for thinking about the influence of situations on action, drawing on research from ecological psychology as well as from embodied and enactive cognitive science. The key proposal is the development of a philosophical sensorimotor account of agency: Action, it is proposed, should be conceived of as constant dynamical interaction of agential and environmental factors – factors which should all be conceptualized in new ways. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a na.

Explores the moral dimensions of the current global role of the U.S. military.

Two more or less standard methods exist for the systematic, logical construction of classical mathematics, the so-called theory of types, due in the main to Russell, and the Zermelo axiomatic set theory. In systems based upon either of these, the connective of membership, “ε”, plays a fundamental role. Usually although not always it figures as a primitive or undefined symbol.Following the familiar simplification of Russell's theory, let us mean by alogical typein the strict sense any one of the following: (i) (...) the totality consisting exclusively of individuals, (ii) the totality consisting exclusively of classes whose members are exclusively individuals, (iii) the totality consisting exclusively of classes whose members are exclusively classes whose members in turn are exclusively individuals, and so on. Any entity from (ii) is said to beone type higherthan any entity from (i), any entity from (iii), one type higher than any entity from (ii), and so on. In systems based upon this simplified theory of types, the only significant atomic formulae involving “ε” are those asserting the membership of an entity in an entity one type higher. Thus any expression of the form “(x∈y)” is meaningless except where “y” denotes an entity of just one type higher than the type of the entity denoted by “x” It is by means of general type restrictions of this kind that the Russell and other paradoxes are avoided. (shrink)

A noted author defends his personal attitudes toward the fundamental issues of classical philosophy, discussing the awesome mystery surrounding science and life and explaining why he considers himself a theist.