In this series of essays the author argues that the mission of Greece and Rome to defend and promote freedom and the rule of law had a religious foundation.

Nous reproduisons ici, avec l’aimable autorisation de la Hofbibliothek Aschaffenburg (Allemagne), la courte correspondance inédite entre Dingler et Henri Poincaré. Cette correspondance, conservée aux Archives Dingler dans la Hofbibliothek Aschaffenburg (et mentionnée dans le catalogue du Nachlass de Dingler [Wolters & Schroeder-Heister 1979]), consiste en trois documents : un brouillon en allemand de la main de Dingler, sa traduction française par une autre plume, mais avec des corrections ef...

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Outlining both historical foundations and the latest research trends, this Research Handbook offers a unique and cutting-edge overview of the numerous avenues to responsible management.Opening with a conceptual mapping of the field, thought leaders such as Henry Mintzberg and Archie Carroll present foundational and controversial views. Frameworks such as sustainability management, responsible leadership, humanistic and biomimetic management are introduced. Glocal approaches include responsible management with Chinese characteristics, West African Yoruba, and American Pragmatism. Exploring frameworks for the responsible management process, (...) such as theories of practice, and for responsible management learning and innovation, readers are introduced to key methods responsible management research, such as participatory action research. Groundbreaking in scope and depth, this Handbook caters to the responsible management research community, particularly to the Academy of Management and to United Nations PRME signatory business schools. Policymakers and practitioners will benefit from its insight into the latest advances in responsible management research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature, Politics, and CharacterOliver Conolly and Bashshar HaydarWhat is the relationship between literature and politics? We might interpret this question in terms of causality. For example, we might ask whether literature has any effects in the world of politics and if so how. Auden famously proclaimed that poetry makes nothing happen, while it was central to Brecht's dramaturgy that theatre has certain political effects on its audience. Conversely, we (...) might see literature as an effect of political causes and claim that certain political environments give rise to certain types of literature, and that those political backgrounds thereby explain certain aspects of literary phenomena. Both kinds of causal relationship are at the heart of Marxist literary criticism, and of the many schools of academic criticism which share the Marxist assumption that individual consciousness, and its literary manifestations, are subordinate to political environment.These causal questions are important and interesting, particularly if approached with requisite critical tact. However, in this paper we would like to focus on the epistemological and normative questions of whether literature is suited to communicate political knowledge or insights, and whether we value, or rather ought to value, literature for such communication. These two questions are in our view intimately related. While there is no doubt that literary works can be made to communicate virtually all kinds of knowledge, from knowledge about the Big Bang to knowledge how to smuggle illegal immigrants into First World countries, these kinds of knowledge are not what we go to literature for. We go to literature and value it for giving us knowledge which it is peculiarly suited to communicate. It is natural to praise a novel for its insight into, say, character but odd to praise a novel for its [End Page 87] insight into, say, meteorology. This is because literature is suited at communicating insights into character, and is not suited at communicating insights into meteorology.The suitability of literature to explore the inner life derives from the expressive and imaginative possibilities inherent in the very medium of literature. For example, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady reveals the inner logic (or psychologic) that underlies the self-destructive behavior of its heroine, Isabel Archer, her disastrous choice of husband being dictated by a desire to prove a point to herself—that she is indifferent to his poverty relative to that of the other suitors—rather than an informed sense of her true interests.1 This is not to say that literature is the only medium in which insight into character can be communicated, but that this is one of the kinds of insight which literature is suited at communicating.The question of whether literature is suited to impart political insights is thus determinative of the question of whether its doing so counts towards its value as literature.2 This is the question to which we now turn.IThe question of whether literature is suited to impart political insights presupposes an understanding of the scope of the political, and the kinds of phenomena that can properly be called political. The scope of the political can be conceived more or less broadly. The narrow view is that politics is concerned with the nature and legitimacy of the state, government, legal and other coercive institutions. The broad view is that politics is concerned with power relations between social groups that are mediated not through institutions but through attitudes.The distinction can be illustrated with reference to two kinds of feminist argument. Feminist arguments for laws on sex discrimination and equal pay, and their proper implementation, are political in the narrow sense. However, feminists may also argue, irrespective of such institutional changes, that social attitudes towards women—the attitudes of a given society, including those of women—should be changed in certain ways. For example, a generally held view that emphasizes the importance of women's appearance, their role as adjuncts to their husbands—the kinds of views that were prevalent in the 1950's, say—is open to challenge by feminists outside a narrow institutional framework. The reason this [End Page 88] stance is political is that it concerns systemic attitudes which underpin power relations between one group... (shrink)

Der Sammelband vereint Beitrage, die dem Andenken an den Philosophiehistoriker Thomas Ricklin gewidmet sind und an dessen Arbeit anschlieaen. Die Texte befassen sich mit der Erforschung der Philosophie- und Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, der Renaissance und der Fruhen Neuzeit und bieten ein Panorama der verschiedenen Dimensionen dessen, was Weisheit und Philosophie in diesen Epochen bedeuteten. Im Zentrum stehen Dante und Boccaccio, wobei insbesondere deren Lehre vom "Schleier" der poetischen Sprache, unter dem die Wahrheit verhullt sei, in einer Reihe von Studien untersucht (...) wird. In diesem Kontext widmen sich weitere Beitrage den Konzepten einiger der wichtigsten Denker des Mittelalters, wie Boethius von Dacien, Roger Bacon, Johannes von Wales, Meister Eckhart und Pietro d'Abano, dessen "Differentia prima" hier zum ersten Mal in einer kritischen Edition vorgelegt wird. Auaerdem wird die Uberlieferung und Auslegung der antiken Exempla als viel zu lange vernachlassigter Teil der Philosophiegeschichte in den Fokus geruckt. Des Weiteren thematisieren die Beitrage Autoren und Texte, die philosophische Fragen verhandeln, ohne den paradigmatischen Formen des Kommentars oder der Summa zugerechnet werden zu konnen, weil sie Sprach- und Genregrenzen uberschreiten, wie Giordano da Pisa, Jodocus Eichmann und Henry More. Weitere Beitrage, die sich mit Philosophinnen und Historikerinnen der Renaissance und Fruhen Neuzeit beschaftigen, verschaffen den weiblichen Stimmen in von Mannern dominierten Diskursen Gehor. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

Sir Henry Vane the younger was highly critical of Oliver Cromwell's ecclesiastical policy. The article explores the idioms in which Vane conducted his attack on Cromwell, and shows how Vane spun a conception of both the politics of the present and the politics of the future out of various fibres of religious discourse. Vane cultivated a theologically based doctrine of liberty of conscience, and thus insisted that there were significant reasons of a religious nature for limiting magisterial power. (...) Thomas Hobbes and Richard Baxter, among others, thought otherwise, and the article presents Vane as a contributor to a robust mid-seventeenth-century debate. (shrink)

This Hackett edition, first published in 1981, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the seventh edition as published by Macmillan and Company, Limited. From the forward by John Rawls: In the utilitarian tradition Henry Sidgwick has an important place. His fundamental work, The Methods of Ethics, is the clearest and most accessible formulation of what we may call 'the classical utilitarian doctorine.' This classical doctrine holds that the ultimate moral end of social and individual action is the greatest (...) net sum of the happiness of all sentient beings. Happinesss is specified by the net balance of pleasure over pain, or, as Sidgwick preferred to say, as the net balance of agreeable over disagreeable consciousness.... (shrink)

The Reputation of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., one of the chief architects of twentieth century American law, has gone through a number of phases, changing from being altogether praiseworthy in the last years of his life and the first years after his death in 1935 to that of more sober evaluations. Writing at mid-century Henry Steele Commager offered the judgment that Holmes had had about him “much of the Olympian [and] something of the Mephistophelean.” The most useful (...) account of how the winds of change swept along Holmes' reputation is an article by G. Edward White, “The Rise and Fall of Justice Holmes,” which appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1971. White examined the myth of Justice Holmes as it obtained from 1932 to 1940 and then proceeded to describe the demythologizing of Holmes from 1941 through 1949. (shrink)

One of the most influential of the Victorian philosophers, Henry Sidgwick also made important contributions to fields such as economics, political theory, and classics. An active promoter of higher education for women, he founded Cambridge's Newnham College in 1871. He attended Rugby School and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained his whole career. In 1859 he took up a lectureship in classics, and held this post for ten years. In 1869, he moved to a lectureship in moral philosophy, (...) the subject where he left arguably his greatest mark when he produced this work, regarded as his masterpiece. Published in 1874, the book argues the utilitarian approach to ethics, and a systematic and historically sensitive approach to ethical research that influenced utilitarian philosophers well into the twentieth century. It remains a valuable introduction to the philosophy, practice and history of ethics. This reissue includes the 1877 supplement. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem, it addresses a new problem, and he traces the line of thought that led Kant to the recognition of the significance of this problem in his 'pre-critical' period. In addition to the developmental nature of the account of Kant`s views presented (...) here, two distinctive features of Allison's reading of the deduction are a defense of Kant`s oft criticized claim that the conformity of appearances to the categories must be unconditionally rather than merely conditionally necessary and an insistence that the argument cannot be separated from Kant`s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Henry Allison is one of the foremost interpreters of the philosophy of Kant. This new volume collects all his recent essays on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. All the essays postdate Allison's two major books on Kant, and together they constitute an attempt to respond to critics and to clarify, develop and apply some of the central theses of those books. Two are published here for the first time. Special features of the collection are: a detailed defence of the (...) author's interpretation of transcendental idealism; a consideration of the Transcendental Deduction and some other recent interpretations thereof; further elaborations of the tensions between various aspects of Kant's conception of freedom and of the complex role of this conception within Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)

Der Artikel spürt den subtilen Veränderungen nach, die bei Patienten, die mit tiefer Hirnstimulation behandelt werden, möglicherweise beobachtet werden können. Dabei sollen im Rückgriff auf Konzeptionen zur narrativen Identität mittels einer möglichst genauen Beschreibung und Analyse der Selbstwahrnehmung der Patienten sowie der Wahrnehmung ihres Umfelds die Änderungen im praktischen Selbstverhältnis untersucht werden, u. a. am Beispiel technomorpher Metaphern, die von den Patienten in ihren Selbstbeschreibungen verwendet werden. Ziel ist es, die Neuartigkeit und das Spezifische der Neurotechnologien – über die bisherigen (...) Untersuchungen hinaus – hinsichtlich des Umgangs mit sich selbst herauszuarbeiten und greifbar zu machen. Abschließend werden auf Basis der Analyse der Patienten-Narrationen die entsprechenden normativen Implikationen für eine ethische Bewertung des Einsatzes von Neurotechnologien benannt. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Allison pays special attention to the structure of the work and its historical and intellectual context. He argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the single most important work in modern moral philosophy.

Der Artikel spürt den subtilen Veränderungen nach, die bei Patienten, die mit tiefer Hirnstimulation behandelt werden, möglicherweise beobachtet werden können. Dabei sollen im Rückgriff auf Konzeptionen zur narrativen Identität mittels einer möglichst genauen Beschreibung und Analyse der Selbstwahrnehmung der Patienten sowie der Wahrnehmung ihres Umfelds die Änderungen im praktischen Selbstverhältnis untersucht werden, u. a. am Beispiel technomorpher Metaphern, die von den Patienten in ihren Selbstbeschreibungen verwendet werden. Ziel ist es, die Neuartigkeit und das Spezifische der Neurotechnologien – über die bisherigen (...) Untersuchungen hinaus – hinsichtlich des Umgangs mit sich selbst herauszuarbeiten und greifbar zu machen. Abschließend werden auf Basis der Analyse der Patienten-Narrationen die entsprechenden normativen Implikationen für eine ethische Bewertung des Einsatzes von Neurotechnologien benannt. (shrink)

Henry Sidgwick,, philosopher, classicist, lecturer and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and supporter of women's university education, is well known for his Method of Ethics, a significant and influential book on moral theory. First published in 1883, this work considers the role the state plays in economic life, and whether economics should be considered an Art or a Science. Sidgwick applies his utilitarian views to economics, defending John Stuart Mill's 1848 treatise of the same name. The book calls for (...) a return to traditional political economy by eliminating 'needless polemics'. Sidgwick also outlines the need to bridge the gap between his analytical or deductive method and the inductive method employed by Mill's critics, the new generation of economic philosophers including John Elliot Cairnes and William Stanley Jevons. The second edition, reissued here, was published in 1887. (shrink)

Ontologies, as the term is used in informatics, are structured vocabularies comprised of human- and computer-interpretable terms and relations that represent entities and relationships. Within informatics fields, ontologies play an important role in knowledge and data standardization, representation, integra- tion, sharing and analysis. They have also become a foundation of artificial intelligence (AI) research. In what follows, we outline the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), which covers multiple areas in the domain of coronavirus diseases, including etiology, transmission, epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, (...) prevention, and treatment. We emphasize CIDO development relevant to COVID-19. (shrink)

Although the biological bases of forgetting remain obscure, the consensus among cognitive psychologists emphasizes interference processes, rejecting decay in accounting for memory loss. In contrast to this view, recent advances in understanding the neurobiology of long-term memory maintenance lead us to propose that a brain-wide well-regulated decay process, occurring mostly during sleep, systematically removes selected memories. Down-regulation of this decay process can increase the life expectancy of a memory and may eventually prevent its loss. Memory interference usually occurs during certain (...) active processing phases, such as encoding and retrieval, and will be stronger in brain areas with minimal sensory integration and less pattern separation. In areas with efficient pattern separation, such as the hippocampus, interference-driven forgetting will be minimal, and, consequently, decay will cause most forgetting. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to make two main points. The first point is methodological: Instead of attempting to give a classical analysis or reductive definition of the term “expertise”, we should attempt an explication and look for what may be called symptoms of expertise. What this comes to will be explained in due course. My second point is substantial: I want to recommend understanding as an important symptom of expertise. In order to give this suggestion content, I begin to (...) develop an account of understanding. Finally, I will draw attention to some consequences of this approach. (shrink)

If it is ethically wrong to hold some beliefs, there may be a conflict between the demands of morality and the demands of rationality. A recent theory holds that no such conflict exists: any morally wrong belief is also irrational to hold, made irrational through a phenomenon of radical moral encroachment. In this paper, I argue that radical moral encroachment fails to coordinate ethical and epistemic norms, given plausible epistemological principles and various substantive accounts of which beliefs are morally wrong, (...) including those endorsed by radical moral encroachment theorists themselves. (shrink)

One of the most influential of the Victorian philosophers, Henry Sidgwick was the author of the masterpiece of utilitarianism, The Methods of Ethics. He also made important contributions to fields such as economics, political theory, and classics. An active champion of higher education for women, he founded Cambridge's Newnham College in 1871. He attended Rugby School and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained his whole career. In 1859 he accepted a lectureship in classics, and held this post for (...) ten years. He then changed direction and in 1869 took up a lectureship in moral philosophy. In this book, published in 1886, Sidgwick gives an objective summary of ethical philosophies throughout history. He considers general issues in ethics and then gives a detailed critique of the work of major philosophers from early Greek thinkers through to his nineteenth-century contemporaries. (shrink)

One of the most influential of the Victorian philosophers, Henry Sidgwick also made important contributions to fields such as economics, political theory and classics. A proponent of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which he analysed in his classic work The Methods of Ethics , he later turned to the practical side of politics in this work, published in 1891. His aim was to have a 'rational discussion of political questions in modern states', and he offers (...) a thorough examination of Victorian politics, beginning with a discussion of political theory before moving on to more concrete matters such as property and law. The later chapters discuss the function of government through themes such as procedural matters, international affairs, war, political parties, and public participation, giving a comprehensive account of both ideas about and the functioning of late-nineteenth-century government. (shrink)

On virtue ethical grounds, Barbro Fröding and Martin Peterson recently recommended that near-future AIs should be developed as ‘Friendly AI’. AI in social interaction with humans should be programmed such that they mimic aspects of human friendship. While it is a reasonable goal to implement AI systems interacting with humans as Friendly AI, I identify four issues that need to be addressed concerning Friendly AI with Fröding’s and Peterson’s understanding of Friendly AI as a starting point. In a first step, (...) I briefly recapitulate Fröding’s and Peterson’s arguments for Friendly AI. I then highlight some issues with Fröding’s and Peterson’s approach and line of reasoning and identify four problems related to the notion of Friendly AI, which all pertain to the role and need for humans’ moral development. These are that one should consider the moral tendencies and preferences of the humans interacting with a friendly AI, it needs to be considered whether the humans interacting with a Friendly AI are still developing their virtues and character traits, the indirect effects of replacing humans with Friendly AI should be considered with respect to the possibilities for humans to develop their moral virtues and that the question whether the AI is perceived as some form of Artificial General Intelligence cannot be neglected. In conclusion, I argue that all of these four problems are related to humans moral development and that this observation strongly emphasizes the role and need for humans moral development in correlation to the accelerating development of AI-systems. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals . Allison pays special attention to the structure of the work and its historical and intellectual context. He argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the single most important work in modern moral philosophy.

This paper pursues a thorough-going instrumentalist, or means-ends, approach to the theory of inductive inference. I consider three epistemic aims: convergence to a correct theory, fast convergence to a correct theory and steady convergence to a correct theory (avoiding retractions). For each of these, two questions arise: (1) What is the structure of inductive problems in which these aims are feasible? (2) When feasible, what are the inference methods that attain them? Formal learning theory provides the tools for a complete (...) set of answers to these questions. As an illustration of the results, I apply means-ends analysis to various versions of Goodman's Riddle of Induction. (shrink)

This paper uses a schema for infinite regress arguments to provide a solution to the problem of the infinite regress of justification. The solution turns on the falsity of two claims: that a belief is justified only if some belief is a reason for it, and that the reason relation is transitive.