G. H. V. Wright möchte die 'typische' Erklärung des Historikers als andersartig gegenüber der subsumptionstheoretischen Auffassung betrachten. Neu dabei ist sein Bemühen, das Schema des praktischen Schlusses als Basis der 'intentionalen Erklärung', die seiner Ansicht nach für die Geschichtswissenschaft charakteristisch ist, in den Vordergrund zu stellen. Doch scheitert sein Versuch, von der Handlungstheorie her ein Erklärungsschema aufzubauen, das logisch als Syllogismus erscheinen, aber ohne generelle Prämissen (über Korrelationen von 'Motivationshintergrund' und Handlung) auskommen soll. Die in der weiteren Diskussion (W. Stegmüller (...) u.a.) herausgestellte Möglichkeit, 'Erklären' in der Historie als eine Art Motiv-Analyse aufzufassen und von der Kausalanalyse zu trennen, kann m.E. zu einer Beschränkung der Forschungs- und Argumentationsmöglichkeiten in der Geschichtswissenschaft führen. (shrink)

G. H. V. Wright möchte die 'typische' Erklärung des Historikers als andersartig gegenüber der subsumptionstheoretischen Auffassung betrachten. Neu dabei ist sein Bemühen, das Schema des praktischen Schlusses als Basis der 'intentionalen Erklärung', die seiner Ansicht nach für die Geschichtswissenschaft charakteristisch ist, in den Vordergrund zu stellen. Doch scheitert sein Versuch, von der Handlungstheorie her ein Erklärungsschema aufzubauen, das logisch als Syllogismus erscheinen, aber ohne generelle Prämissen (über Korrelationen von 'Motivationshintergrund' und Handlung) auskommen soll. Die in der weiteren Diskussion (W. Stegmüller (...) u.a.) herausgestellte Möglichkeit, 'Erklären' in der Historie als eine Art Motiv-Analyse aufzufassen und von der Kausalanalyse zu trennen, kann m.E. zu einer Beschränkung der Forschungs- und Argumentationsmöglichkeiten in der Geschichtswissenschaft führen. (shrink)

Empirical research on counterfactual thinking has found a closeness effect: people report higher negative affect if an actual outcome is close to a better counterfactual outcome. However, it remains unclear what actually is a ?close? miss. In three experiments that manipulate close counterfactuals, closeness effects were found only when closeness was unambiguously defined either with respect to a contrasted alternative, or with respect to a categorical boundary. In a real task people failed to report greater negative affect when encountering a (...) close numerical miss, while they predicted greater negative affect hypothetically. These results show that counterfactual closeness effects on affect depend on closeness being accessible and unambiguously defined. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to ground the notion of cyberethics of co-operation. The evolution of modern society has resulted in a shift from industrial society towards informational capitalism. This transformation is a multidimensional shift that affects all aspects of society. Hence also the ethical system of society is penetrated by the emergence of the knowledge society and ethical guidelines for the information age are needed. Ethical issues and conflicts in the knowledge society are connected to topics of ecological (...) and social sustainability. For information ethics and cyberethics, the sustainable design of society, social, and socio-technological systems is important. In this context the notions of sustainability and co-operation are discussed. Based on these categories, the approach of cyberethics of co-operation can be theoretically grounded. (shrink)

Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power suggests that conventional theories of capitalism, Marxist and liberal alike, are unable to answer the question: what is capital? They argue that the basic units of Marxist economics, abstract labour and value, are unobservable and immeasurable, and hence ‘non-existent’ and ‘fictitious’. Against Marxists, they argue that capital is not an ‘economic’ entity, but a symbolic quantification of power.This review contends that what Nitzan and Bichler present as a critique of Marxism as such (...) pivots on an incomprehension of dialectical thinking, and thus misses the mark. Furthermore, this absence in their readings of Marx is strictly correlative to the limits of their own theory-building. Capital as Power simply inverts the vulgar economism it finds in Marxist theories, presenting us with a theory in which capital is financial rather than productive, and symbolic rather than material. In doing so, it reproduces the one-sidedness it criticises, while discarding the possibility of analysing capitalism dialectically as a totality consisting of contradictory, but mutually presupposing, moments. (shrink)

This review-essay looks at a recent trilogy of works on Israeli history, the political history of the relationship between the United States and Israel, and the effect of the Israel lobby on the relationship between the two states. While the books attempt to construct a narrative that essentially blame the lobby for close to one hundred years of American malfeasance in the Middle East, they falter due to their idealism, their weak grasp of regional political economy and American capital accumulation, (...) and their conspiracism. Instead, this review proposes a reinterpretation of regional political economy, materially grounding the lobby and the Special Relationship while situating the two within the patterns of accumulation pushed by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s ‘weapondollar-petrodollar coalition’, the main determinant of American foreign policy in the Middle East. (shrink)