Often denied scientific status, Völkerpsychologie was set forth as a psychological program endeavoring to find insights into the structure and content of the ‘mind’ of social groups, especially ‘peoples’, which were regarded as the prototypical manifestation of those groups. This article examines how Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal’s nineteenth-century Völkerpsychologie came to be regarded as having the status of a science, by analyzing its scientific program. I claim that these founders of Völkerpsychologie developed a moderate methodological materialism by embracing a (...) historical turn in psychology, which—to a degree—enabled a synthesis of the methodologies of the social and the natural sciences. This approach is correlated with their modus operandi, collaboration through the medium of a journal. (shrink)

This paper responds to the reform agenda of Reiner Eichenberger who proposes the deregulation of the voting system in order to enhance the competition among the candidates and to improve the responsiveness of elected representatives. Based on the theory of parliamentary representation the paper argues that a simple transfer of economic principles into the realm of politics comes to its limits where the differences between the economic and political systems are significant. Regulation in politics is necessary and unavoidable where the (...) abuse of political power is to be prevented. (shrink)

This is not a work of mine. For some reason, I am unable to remove it from my page. It is a list of Dr. Reiner Schürmann's lecture notes for courses that he taught at the New School for Social Research (aka The New School).

Stefan Collini challenges the common claim that universities need to show that they help to make money in order to justify getting more money.

Ecologists use a remarkable range of methods and techniques to understand complex, inherently variable, and functionally diverse entities and processes across a staggering range of spatial, temporal and interactive scales. These multiple perspectives make ecology very different to the exemplar of science often presented by philosophers. In Philosophical Foundations for the Practices of Ecology, designed for graduate students and researchers, ecology is put into a new philosophical framework that engages with this inherent pluralism while still placing constraints on the ways (...) that we can investigate and understand nature. The authors begin by exploring the sources of variety in the practice of ecology and how these have led to the current conceptual confusion. They argue that the solution is to adopt the approach of constrained perspectivism and go on to explore the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological aspects of this position and how it can be used in ecological research and teaching"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

It is often said that knowledge is power, but more often than not relevant knowledge is not used when political decisions are made. This book examines how political decisions relate to scientific knowledge and what factors determine the success of scientific research in influencing policy. The authors take a comparative and historical perspective and refer to well-known theoretical frameworks, but the focus of the book is on three case studies: the discourse of racism, Keynesianism, and climate change. These cases cover (...) a number of countries and different time periods. In all three the authors see a close link between 'knowledge producers' and political decision makers, but show that the effectiveness of the policies varies dramatically. This book will be of interest to scientists, decision makers and scholars alike. (shrink)

According to an increasingly popular view among philosophers of science, both causal and non-causal explanations can be accounted for by a single theory: the counterfactual theory of explanation. A kind of non-causal explanation that has gained much attention recently but that this theory seems unable to account for are grounding explanations. Reutlinger :239-256, 2017) has argued that, despite these appearances to the contrary, such explanations are covered by his version of the counterfactual theory. His idea is supported by recent work (...) on grounding by Schaffer and Wilson who claim there to be a tight connection between grounding and counterfactual dependence. The present paper evaluates the prospects of the idea. We show that there is only a weak sense in which grounding explanations convey information about counterfactual dependencies, and that this fact cannot plausibly be taken to reveal a distinctive feature that grounding explanations share with other kinds of explanations. (shrink)

Einleitung -- Charismatische Herrschaft -- Traditionale Herrschaft -- Traditionale und charismatische Herrschaft im vorrationalen Okzident: Antike -- Traditionale und charismatische Herrschaft im vorrationalen Okzident: Mittelalter -- Legale Herrschaft.

The article presents the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). SKAD, which has been in the process of development since the middle of the 1990s, is now a widely used framework among social scientists in discourse research in the German-speaking area. It links arguments from the social constructionist tradition, following Berger and Luckmann, with assumptions based in symbolic interactionism, hermeneutic sociology of knowledge, and the concepts of Michel Foucault. It argues thereby for a consistent theoretical and methodological grounding of (...) a genuine social sciences perspective on discourse interested in the social production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, that is in social relations and politics of knowledge in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Distancing itself from Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Ethnomethodology inspired discourse analysis and the Analysis of Hegemonies, following Laclau and Mouffe, SKAD’s framework has been built up around research questions and concerns located in the social sciences, referring to public discourse and arenas as well as to more specific fields of (scientific, religious, etc.) discursive struggles and controversies around problematizations (Foucault). (shrink)

With great sympathy for Roman Ingarden and his work, Edith Stein edited his book project The Literary Work Of Art. In the letters she exchanges with him shereflects on relationship between reality and ideality: she writes that those who do not see the world as a reality must be fools. The political events in the 1930s had an impact on phenomenology. While Edmund Husserl dissociates himself from his protégé Martin Heidegger with regard to the content of his philosophy as well (...) as with regard to his ideology, Edith Stein distances herself more and more from the phenomenological method, seeing it as removed from reality, and she eventually become a Carmelite nun. Roman Ingarden, on the other hand, reconsiders interpreting phenomenology as aesthetic theory. Literature and film are being re-analysed in terms of phenomenological mediality and as factors of human communication. (shrink)

The desideratum of semantic interoperability has been intensively discussed in medical informatics circles in recent years. Originally, experts assumed that this issue could be sufficiently addressed by insisting simply on the application of shared clinical terminologies or clinical information models. However, the use of the term ‘ontology’ has been steadily increasing more recently. We discuss criteria for distinguishing clinical ontologies from clinical terminologies and information models. Then, we briefly present the role clinical ontologies play in two multicentric research projects. Finally, (...) we discuss the interactions between these different kinds of knowledge representation artifacts and the stakeholders involved in developing interoperational real-world clinical applications. We provide ontology engineering examples from two EU-funded projects. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Reflexion und Gefühl" verfügbar.

The pivotal role of the relation part-of in the description of living organisms is widely acknowledged. Organisms are open systems, which means that in contradistinction to mechanical artifacts they are characterized by a continuous flow and exchange of matter. A closer analysis of the spatial relations in biological organisms reveals that the decision as to whether a given particular is part-of a second particular or whether it is only contained-in the second particular is often controversial. We here propose a rule-based (...) approach which allows us to decide on the basis of well-defined criteria which of the two relations holds between two anatomical objects, given that one spatially includes the other. We discuss the advantages and limitations of this approach, using concrete examples from human anatomy. (shrink)

Mehr noch als bei einem anderen Text mag für ein Vorwort gelten, daß die Schwierigkeit darin besteht, alles das, was einem nach Fertigstellung eines Buches zunächst dazu einfällt - und am liebsten würde man nur darüber schreiben! - wegzulassen, um dann dennoch auf einige wenige Punkte zurückzukommen, die der Autor als für das Lesepublikum wichtig erachtet. Mein Interesse für Hellerentstand aus einem universitären Rahmen heraus. Ich kam an der FU Berlin Anfang der 80er Jahre über Svetozar Stojanovic, der einige Gastvorträge (...) am Otto-Suhr-Institut hielt, mit der Philosophie der jugoslawischen "Praxis-Gruppe" in Kontakt, deren Grundlegung eines Hu manistischen Marxismus mich interessierte: Praxis als Schlüsselbegriff, Selbsterschaffung des Menschen, Verbindung von mittelbarer und unmittel barer Demokratie, auch die -wenn auch skeptische -Handhabung solcher wertgeladenen Begriffe wie Entfremdung und deren mögliche Überwindung, das waren, so empfand ich damals, Fingerzeige für einen neuen Dritten Weg zwischen Ost und West, denn die "Praxis-Gruppe" kritisierte mit existentiellem Einsatz den damals bestehenden Sozialismus, ohne das westliche Gesellschaftsmodell zu glorifizieren. Die Ideen der "Praxis-Gruppe" waren nicht eigentlich falsch; aber wahr scheinlich ist es mit Theorien wie mit Lebensaltern: sie haben ihre Phase, dann kommt etwas Neues. Nur daß bei der "Praxis-Gruppe" theoretisch nichts wesentlich Neues mehrkam. Für den an Theorie Interessierten glänztejedoch, aus dem Spektrum des Humanistischen Marxismus hervorkommend, schon bald ein neuer Name, nämlich derjenige von Agnes Heller. (shrink)

The topic of this thesis is axiological uncertainty – the question of how you should evaluate your options if you are uncertain about which axiology is true. As an answer, I defend Expected Value Maximisation (EVM), the view that one option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. More precisely, I explore the axiomatic foundations of this view. I employ results from state-dependent utility theory, extend them in various ways and interpret (...) them accordingly, and thus provide axiomatisations of EVM as a theory of axiological uncertainty. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a theoretical framework for the analysis of expertise and experts in contemporary societies. It argues that while prevailing approaches have come to see expertise in various forms and functions, they tend to neglect the broader historical and societal context, and importantly the relational aspect of expertise. This will be discussed with regard to influential theoretical frameworks, such as laboratory studies, regulatory science, lay expertise, post-normal science, and honest brokers. An alternative framework of expertise is introduced, showing (...) the limitations of existing frameworks and emphasizing one crucial element of all expertise, which is their role in guiding action. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted in society, creating numerous opportunities but at the same time posing ethical challenges. Many of these are familiar, such as issues of fairness, responsibility and privacy, but are presented in a new and challenging guise due to our limited ability to steer and predict the outputs of AI systems. This chapter first introduces these ethical challenges, stressing that overviews of values are a good starting point but frequently fail to suffice due to the context (...) sensitivity of ethical challenges. Frequently, additional (ethical) values emerge for specific applications, as e.g. challenges with fraud detection are very different from those around language technologies. Second, methods to tackle these challenges are discussed. Main ethical theories (virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) are shown to provide a starting point, but often lack the details needed for actionable AI Ethics. Instead, mid-level philosophical theories coupled to design-approaches such as Design for Values, together with interdisciplinary working methods, offer the best way forwards. The chapter aims to show how these approaches can lead to an ethics of AI that is actionable and that can be proactively integrated in the design of AI systems. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to help people understand black box algorithms, particularly of their outputs. But what are these explanations and when is one explanation better than another? The manipulationist definition of explanation from the philosophy of science offers good answers to these questions, holding that an explanation consists of a generalization that shows what happens in counterfactual cases. Furthermore, when it comes to explanatory depth this account holds that a generalization that has more abstract variables, is broader in (...) scope and/or more accurate is better. By applying these definitions and contrasting them with alternative definitions in the XAI literature I hope to help clarify what a good explanation is for AI. (shrink)

This imaginative and unusual book explores the moral sensibilities and cultural assumptions that were at the heart of political debate in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the role of intellectuals as public moralists and suggests ways in which their more formal political theory rested upon habits of response and evaluation that were deeply embedded in wider social attitudes and aesthetic judgments. Collini examines the characteristic idioms and strategies of argument employed in periodical and polemical writing, and reconstructs (...) the sense of identity and of relation to an audience exhibited by social critics from John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold to J.M. Keynes and F.R. Leavis. (shrink)

Examines widespread myths about transhumanism and explores the most pressing ethical issues in the debate over technologically assisted human enhancement.

Towards a critical posthumanism -- Genealogy of posthumanism -- Our posthuman humanity and the multiplicity of its forms -- Posthumanism and science fiction -- Interdisciplinarity and the posthumanities -- Posthumanism, digitalization, and new media -- Posthumanity, subject, and system -- Other side of life.

This study defends the legitimacy of the Enlightenment project by way of its different realizations in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Today, Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan project with a global claim is often considered synonymous with Western chauvinism. The assertion of a universally binding reason is all too obviously inconsistent with the much-cited recognition of cultural differences. In contrast, it is the conviction brought forward in this book that an adequately understood Enlightenment is an unconditional right (...) of every person taking an active interest in a self-determined way of life. Only the realization of this conception of Enlightenment can provide the required space for the reciprocal recognition of human differences to freely unfold. (shrink)

On Heidegger's Being and Time is an outstanding exploration of Heidegger's most important work by two major philosophers. Simon Critchley argues that we must see Being and Time as a radicalization of Husserl's phenomenology, particularly his theories of intentionality, categorial intuition, and the phenomenological concept of the a priori. This leads to a reappraisal and defense of Heidegger's conception of phenomenology. In contrast, Reiner Schürmann urges us to read Heidegger 'backward', arguing that his later work is the key to unravelling (...) Being and Time . Through a close reading of Being and Time Schürmann demonstrates that this work is ultimately aporetic because the notion of Being elaborated in his later work is already at play within it. This is the first time that Schürmann's renowned lectures on Heidegger have been published. The book concludes with Critchley's reinterpretation of the importance of authenticity in Being and Time . Arguing for what he calls an 'originary inauthenticity', Critchley proposes a relational understanding of the key concepts of the second part of Being and Time : death, conscience and temporality. (shrink)

Die Begegnung von Buddhismus und Christentum fordert ein verwandeltes Selbstverständnis philosophischen Denkens. Der japanische Philosoph Keiji Nishitani sieht in der existenziellen Radikalisierung der Frage «Was ist Religion?» bis zum buddhistischen Standpunkt der Leere die Möglichkeit der Überwindung des Nihilismus. Seine Geschichtsinterpretation öffnet in dieser Arbeit den Zugang zu Nietzsches Leib-Denken in seinem Zarathustra. In diesem Rahmen versucht der Verfasser, mit einer Methodenvielfalt und in Auseinandersetzung mit wichtigen abendländischen Denkern die Fraglichkeit jener Frage an ihre Grenze zu treiben.

Der Autor: Reiner Ruffing ist promovierter Philosoph, gibt in der Erwachsenenbildung und an Universitäten Lehrveranstaltungen und ist seit mehr als 20 Jahren Lehrer.

Am Leitfaden des Begriffs Malum oeconomicum fuhrt das Buch seine Leser in einen Dialog mit klassischen und zeitgenossischen Denkern uber die abgrundigen Seiten der Wirtschaft und ihre Spiegelungen in der Seele. In der Wirtschaft erscheinen Menschen tendenziell fureinander als blosse Werkzeuge ihrer Bedurfnisbefriedigung, andererseits wird wirtschaftliche Leistung mit Bedeutungen aufgeladen, die an das Heil in der religiosen Sphare gemahnen. Im Kapitalismus der Moderne entfaltet sich aus der Wechselwirkung zwischen einer entfesselten Produktion und den Antrieben des Innenlebens eine zuvor unbekannte Dynamik. (...) Ist diese in liberalen Theorien ein Anlass, das Malum oeconomicum fur verschwunden zu erklaren, so machen Fundamentalkritiker des globalen Kapitalismus geltend, dass dieser illusionare Bedurfnisse weckt und unversohnliche Gegensatze zwischen Arm und Reich hervorruft, deren Sprengkraft jeden sozialen Zusammenhalt gefahrdet. Aus der Lekture von Platon, Aristoteles, Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, John Maynard Keynes, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, John Rawls und Amartya Sen ergeben sich Aussichten auf das Wirtschaftsgeschehen, die uber die Engfuhrungen heutiger Debatten weit hinausweisen. (shrink)

Nietzsches Aufforderung Bleibt der Erde treu! aus dem Zarathustra wollte er als eine Art Arznei gegen den drohenden Werteverfall in Europa verstanden wissen. Wie ein Arzt die korperlichen, so versuchte Nietzsche die Ursachen fur die geistigen Leiden in unserer Kultur aufzuspuren. Uberdruss und Langeweile, obwohl es den meisten Menschen in der westlichen Zivilisation nicht schlecht gehe, kamen ihm wie ein Frevel am Sinn der Erde vor. Mit seiner dionysischen Philosophie glaubte Nietzsche das Grundproblem seines Lebens losen zu konnen: wie es (...) namlich moglich sei, trotz der pessimistischen Einsicht in den leidvollen und letztlich unergrundlichen Charakter des Daseins einen praktischen Optimismus zu entwickeln. Im Fokus des Buches stehen so erkenntnistheoretische Aspekte und ihre Bedeutung fur Fragen der Lebensfuhrung. Nach einem Uberblick uber Leben und Werk orientiert sich der Aufbau des Bandes an Nietzsches Hauptbegriffen. Vergleiche mit anderen Autoren machen Nietzsches Philosophie aus dem Kontext heraus besser verstandlich, ein Glossar schlusselt zentrale Begriffe auf. (shrink)

Pathogenic variants occurring in protein‐coding regions underlie human genetic disease through various mechanisms. They can lead to a loss of function (LOF) such as in recessive conditions or in dominant conditions due to haploinsufficiency. Dominant‐negative (DN) effects, counteracting the activity of the normal gene‐product, and gain of function (GOF) are also mechanisms driving dominance. Here, I discuss a few papers on these specific mechanisms. In short, there is accumulating evidence pointing to differences between LOF versus non‐LOF variants (DN and GOF). (...) The latter are thought to have milder effects on protein structure and, as expected, DN variants are enriched at protein interfaces. This tendency to cluster in 3D space can help improve the ability of computational tools to predict the pathogenicity of DN variants, which is currently a challenging issue. More recent results support the hypothesis whereby cotranslational assembly of macromolecular complexes can buffer deleterious consequences of variants that would otherwise lead to DN effects (DNEs). Indeed, subunits the variants of which are responsible for DNEs tend to elude cotranslational assembly, thus poisoning complexes involving wild‐type subunits. The constraints explaining why the buffering of DNEs is not universal require further investigation. (shrink)

Testis determination in most mammals is regulated by a genetic hierarchy initiated by the SRY gene. Early ovarian development has long been thought of as a default pathway switched on passively by the absence of SRY. Recent studies challenge this view and show that the ovary constantly represses male‐specific genes, from embryonic stages to adulthood. Notably, the absence of the crucial ovarian transcription factor FOXL2 (alone or in combination with other factors) induces a derepression of male‐specific genes during development, postnatally (...) and, even more interestingly, during adulthood. Strikingly, in the adult, targeted ablation of Foxl2 leads to a molecular transdifferentiation of the supporting cells of the ovary, which acquire cytological and transcriptomic characteristics of the supporting cells of the testes. These studies bring many answers to the field of gonadal determination, differentiation and maintenance, but also open many questions. (shrink)

Expression of most genes is regulated by the interaction of multiple transcription factors with cis‐regulatory sequences. Many studies have focused on how changes in promoters and enhancers alter gene expression and phenotype. Recently, Hare et al., using elegant wet and computational approaches uncovered a series of enhancers driving the expression of the even‐skipped gene in scavenger flies (Sepsidae).1 Despite the strong sequence divergence between the enhancers in sepsids and drosophilids, they lead to remarkably similar patterns of gene expression in transgenic (...) Drosophila embryos. This can be explained by the existence of intra‐enhancer compensatory mutations and the presence of overlapping/near binding sites for activators and repressors. BioEssays 30:1052–1057, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)