What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers in the (...) processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved. (shrink)

Not only was John Wooden a great basketball coach, he was a master teacher. In fact, he was a great coach because he was a master teacher. What Wooden has learned from others in the classroom and perfected on the practice court are fundamental principles of effective teaching, which areconveyed in You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices. Co-author Swen Nater, one of Wooden's former players at UCLA, provides insightful first-hand accounts on the (...) many life lessons he learned from Wooden that he has applied to his life since becoming a teacher himself. These principles have a timeless and. (shrink)

The theme of the philosopher as therapist dominates Nietzsche's entire opus, from his earliest writings to the Zarathustra period and beyond. Nietzsche wishes to hasten the coming and future sanctification of a new type of synthetic human being, and his entire teaching is shaped by his own struggles against illness.Yet few Nietzsche scholars have paid this crucial therapeutic element of his thought sufficient attention. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field is composed around the Nietzschean insight, which (...) has its roots in the Hippocratic tradition of ancient medicine, that beliefs, behaviours, ideals and patterns of striving are not things for which individuals or even cultures are responsible. Rather, they are symptoms of what an individual or culture is, which symptoms require diagnostic interpretation and evaluation. The book identifies three principal approaches in Nietzsche's philosophy: diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic. Each essay takes up this essential insight into Nietzsche's therapeutic philosophy from a different perspective and collectively they reveal an array of insightful approaches to self-induced enhancement, for both individuals and cultures. (shrink)

An original work of philosophy that highlights the connection between self-understanding and narrative form.

Zusammenfassung Der Inklusionsbegriff hat sich in den letzten Jahren gesellschaftlich etabliert. Inklusion tritt dabei vor allem auf als Forderung. Die Sportwissenschaft und hier insbesondere die Sportpädagogik haben den fordernden Inklusionsbegriff insgesamt eher ungebrochen übernommen. Inklusion versteht man hier vor allem als gesellschaftlichen Auftrag und ist mit dessen Umsetzung befasst. Lange vor dieser Konjunktur hat die soziologische Systemtheorie einen Inklusionsbegriff eingeführt, der dem normativen Verständnis diametral gegenübersteht. Verstanden als Relevanzmarkierung von Menschen für Kommunikation, ist Inklusion systemtheoretisch ein Faktum moderner Gesellschaften. Im (...) sportwissenschaftlich-sportpädagogischen Inklusionsdiskurs spielt die Systemtheorie der Inklusion bislang so gut wie keine Rolle. Der Beitrag setzt hier an. Ziel folgender Überlegungen ist es, dem gesellschaftlich und in der Sportwissenschaft vorherrschenden normativen Begriffsverständnis von Inklusion eine systemtheoretische Gebrauchsform gegenüber zu stellen. Für sportwissenschaftliche und sportpädagogische Inklusionsforschung bietet die Systemtheorie der Inklusion ein bislang kaum genutztes Analyse- und Reflexionspotenzial. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Die empirische Dauerproduktion immer neuer Zahlenkolonnen lässt kaum Zweifel am Ernst der Lage: Deutsche Kinder stecken in einer nie da gewesenen Fett- und Fitnessmisere. Beachtliche Resonanzwerte bezieht diese alarmierende Befundlage nicht zuletzt im Revier sportpädagogischer Kommunikation, die feldgerecht auf unverzichtbare Lösungspotenziale verweisen kann. Der vorliegende Beitrag bringt „inkongruente Perspektiven“ in Anschlag: Nach einer Analyse semantischer und struktureller Voraussetzungen der Kriseninklusion liegt das Augenmerk auf deren Funktionssinn: Dicke Kinder, unfitte Körper - es sind nicht zuletzt die allerneuesten somatogenen Trägheiten, an (...) denen sich Dynamik sportpädagogischer Reformkommunikation gegenwärtig aufschaukelt. Abschließende Reflexionen spielen das Panorama übergangener „Risiken und Nebenwirkungen“ dieses Typs von Krisenkommunikation ein. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungVerbundmodelle von Schule und Spitzensport wie die NRW-Sportschule sind als Netzwerke mit vielfältigen Akteuren und Erwartungen zu beobachten, in denen programmatische Zielvorstellungen in die Gestaltung und Durchführung von Maßnahmen und die Arbeit diverser Organisationen und Personen übertragen werden sollen. Die Herausforderung für eine zielgerichtete Steuerung des Netzwerks liegt deshalb in der Koordination des Handelns einzelner Personen und der Entwicklung systemischen Wissens sowie der Ermöglichung des Lernens des Netzwerks. Der Beitrag präzisiert das Problem der Steuerung im Verbund aus der Perspektive von (...) Netzwerktheorie und Wissensmanagement. Empirische Erkenntnisse aus der Evaluation der NRW-Sportschule dienen als Anwendungsbeispiele der Bearbeitung dieser Herausforderung. Zugleich ist die Evaluation selbst als Steuerungsversuch des Netzwerks kritisch einzuordnen. (shrink)

ABSTRACTResearch that dissociates different types of processes within a given task using a processing tree approach suggests that attitudes may be acquired through evaluative conditioning in the absence of explicit encoding of CS-US pairings in memory. This research distinguishes explicit memory for the CS-US pairings from CS-liking acquired without encoding of CS-US pairs in explicit memory. It has been suggested that the latter effect may be due to an implicit misattribution process that is assumed to operate when US evocativeness is (...) low. In the present research, the latter assumption was supported neither by two high-powered experiments nor by complementary meta-analytic evidence, whereas evocativeness exerted an influence on explicit memory. This pattern of findings is inconsistent with the view that CS-liking acquired without encoding of CS-US pairs in explicit memory reflects an implicit misattribution process at learning. Hence, the underlying learning process is awaiting further empirical scrutiny. (shrink)

Can an agent's intelligence level be negative? We extend the Legg-Hutter agent-environment framework to include punishments and argue for an affirmative answer to that question. We show that if the background encodings and Universal Turing Machine (UTM) admit certain Kolmogorov complexity symmetries, then the resulting Legg-Hutter intelligence measure is symmetric about the origin. In particular, this implies reward-ignoring agents have Legg-Hutter intelligence 0 according to such UTMs.

A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is. The problem is especially acute when we need to consider artificial systems which are significantly different to humans. In this paper we approach this problem in the following way: we take a number of well known informal definitions of human intelligence that have been given by experts, and extract their essential features. These are then mathematically formalised to produce a general measure of intelligence for arbitrary machines. (...) We believe that this equation formally captures the concept of machine intelligence in the broadest reasonable sense. We then show how this formal definition is related to the theory of universal optimal learning agents. Finally, we survey the many other tests and definitions of intelligence that have been proposed for machines. (shrink)

Can humans get arbitrarily capable reinforcement learning agents to do their bidding? Or will sufficiently capable RL agents always find ways to bypass their intended objectives by shortcutting their reward signal? This question impacts how far RL can be scaled, and whether alternative paradigms must be developed in order to build safe artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we study when an RL agent has an instrumental goal to tamper with its reward process, and describe design principles that prevent instrumental (...) goals for two different types of reward tampering. Combined, the design principles can prevent reward tampering from being an instrumental goal. The analysis benefits from causal influence diagrams to provide intuitive yet precise formalizations. (shrink)

The Conference on Artificial General Intelligence is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. Its second installation, AGI-09, in Arlington, Virginia, March 6-9, 2009, attracted 67 paper submissions, which is a substantial increase from the previous year. Of these submissions, 33 (i.e., 49%) were accepted as full papers for presentation at the conference. Additional 13 papers were included as position papers. The program (...) also included a keynote address by Juergen Schmidhuber on 'The New AI', a post-conference workshop on 'The Future of AI', and a number of pre-conference tutorials on various topics related to AGI. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 26 Heft: 1 Seiten: 202-205.

The call for business practices that create benefits for companies, customers, and society is getting louder. This article analyzes a new implementation of such a win–win–win approach: the carrotmob. Activists and managers jointly organize a shopping flashmob in which consumers collectively purchase the products of a target company to reward its intent to act more socially responsible. Given that carrotmobs are only efficient if they are supported by a critical mass of consumers, a survey study of 337 young consumers explores (...) the critical drivers of carrotmob participation. Accordingly, object-oriented, personal, and social motives jointly determine carrotmob participation with social motives having the strongest impact. (shrink)

Das Verhaltnis von Spekulation und Vorstellung in Hegels enzyklopadischem System ist von einer eigentumlichen Spannung gekennzeichnet. Spekulation ist nicht nur die kritische Reinigung der Inhalte der Vorstellung von ihren Vorurteilen und Irrtumern, sondern zugleich Anerkennung des endlichen, vorstellenden Denkens innerhalb seiner Grenzen, sowohl auf dem Gebiet der Erkenntnistheorie als auch der Religion. Wie verhalten sich aber Spekulation und Vorstellung zueinander in verschiedenen Teilen des enzyklopadischen Systems, in der Logik und der Philosophie des Geistes? Diesem Zusammenhang gehen die Beitrage des Tagungsbandes (...) im Detail nach und uberprufen kritisch das enzyklopadische Zusammenspiel von Spekulation und Vorstellung in den Spharen des subjektiven und des absoluten Geistes. Mit Beitragen von: Kazimir Drilo, Markus Gabriel, Christoph Halbig, Gunnar Hindrichs, Axel Hutter, Franz Knappik, Anton Friedrich Koch, Christian Georg Martin, Jan Rohls, Rainer Schafer. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 26 Heft: 1 Seiten: 205-207.

ABSTRACTRecent research into evaluative conditioning shows that information about the relationship between the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli can exert strong effects on the size and di...

Understanding inductive reasoning is a problem that has engaged mankind for thousands of years. This problem is relevant to a wide range of fields and is integral to the philosophy of science. It has been tackled by many great minds ranging from philosophers to scientists to mathematicians, and more recently computer scientists. In this article we argue the case for Solomonoff Induction, a formal inductive framework which combines algorithmic information theory with the Bayesian framework. Although it achieves excellent theoretical results (...) and is based on solid philosophical foundations, the requisite technical knowledge necessary for understanding this framework has caused it to remain largely unknown and unappreciated in the wider scientific community. The main contribution of this article is to convey Solomonoff induction and its related concepts in a generally accessible form with the aim of bridging this current technical gap. In the process we examine the major historical contributions that have led to the formulation of Solomonoff Induction as well as criticisms of Solomonoff and induction in general. In particular we examine how Solomonoff induction addresses many issues that have plagued other inductive systems, such as the black ravens paradox and the confirmation problem, and compare this approach with other recent approaches. (shrink)

A distinguished group of scholars examines the crisis of faith in reason and reason in faith.

Shaping the Future maps out the ascetic practices of a Neitzschean way of life. Hutter argues that Nietzsche's doctrines are attempts and "temptations" that aim to provoke his free-spirited readers into changing themselves by putting philosophy into practice in their lives.

The first decade of this century has seen the nascency of the first mathematical theory of general artificial intelligence. This theory of Universal Artificial Intelligence (UAI) has made significant contributions to many theoretical, philosophical, and practical AI questions. In a series of papers culminating in book (Hutter, 2005), an exciting sound and complete mathematical model for a super intelligent agent (AIXI) has been developed and rigorously analyzed. While nowadays most AI researchers avoid discussing intelligence, the award-winning PhD thesis (Legg, (...) 2008) provided the philosophical embedding and investigated the UAI-based universal measure of rational intelligence, which is formal, objective and non-anthropocentric. Recently, effective approximations of AIXI have been derived and experimentally investigated in JAIR paper (Veness et al. 2011). This practical breakthrough has resulted in some impressive applications, finally muting earlier critique that UAI is only a theory. For the first time, without providing any domain knowledge, the same agent is able to self-adapt to a diverse range of interactive environments. For instance, AIXI is able to learn from scratch to play TicTacToe, Pacman, Kuhn Poker, and other games by trial and error, without even providing the rules of the games. These achievements give new hope that the grand goal of Artificial General Intelligence is not elusive. This article provides an informal overview of UAI in context. It attempts to gently introduce a very theoretical, formal, and mathematical subject, and discusses philosophical and technical ingredients, traits of intelligence, some social questions, and the past and future of UAI. (shrink)

English summary: Philosophy only does justice to its own definition when it understands itself as a mode of human self-knowledge. Axel Hutter attempts to translate this ancient idea for our contemporary understanding by getting to grips with the three ideas that have been at the core of philosophical thinking since time immemorial: freedom, God, and immortality. For this critical appraisal, the author develops a philosophical interpretation of Thomas Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers". He does not wish, however, to talk (...) about the novel, but rather that which the novel itself talks of in narrative form: the thought that it is the meaning of human freedom to live in parables. German description: Philosophie wird ihrem eigenen Begriff nur gerecht, wenn sie sich als Weise der menschlichen Selbsterkenntnis versteht. Axel Hutter versucht, diesen alten Gedanken in die heutige Zeit zu ubersetzen, indem er sich kritisch mit den Ideen auseinandersetzt, die seit jeher zum Kernbestand des philosophischen Nachdenkens gehort haben: Freiheit, Gott und Unsterblichkeit. Der Autor wahlt fur diese Auseinandersetzung den konkreten Weg einer philosophischen Deutung von Thomas Manns "Joseph und seine Bruder". Er will aber nicht uber den Roman schreiben, sondern uber das, woruber Thomas Mann selbst auf narrative Weise spricht: uber den Gedanken, es sei die Bedeutung der menschlichen Freiheit, im Gleichnis zu leben. (shrink)

Increasingly encompassing models have been suggested for our world. Theories range from generally accepted to increasingly speculative to apparently bogus. The progression of theories from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the sizes of the postulated worlds, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. Rather than leading to a true theory of everything, this trend faces a turning point after (...) which the predictive power of such theories decreases (actually to zero). Incorporating the location and other capacities of the observer into such theories avoids this problem and allows to distinguish meaningful from predictively meaningless theories. This also leads to a truly complete theory of everything consisting of a (conventional objective) theory of everything plus a (novel subjective) observer process. The observer localization is neither based on the controversial anthropic principle, nor has it anything to do with the quantum-mechanical observation process. The suggested principle is extended to more practical (partial, approximate, probabilistic, parametric) world models (rather than theories of everything). Finally, I provide a justification of Ockham's razor, and criticize the anthropic principle, the doomsday argument, the no free lunch theorem, and the falsifiability dogma.", . (shrink)

Charles E. Osgood's theory of affective meaning defines affect as interplay of three meaning dimensions – evaluation, potency, and activity – that represent the central constituents of our affective ecology. Based on a rigorous Brunswikian sampling procedure, we selected a representative set of stimuli that mirror this ecology. A germane informative analysis explicates and corroborates the sampling approach. We then report two experiments testing whether these dimensions of affective meaning can be learnt by means of stimulus pairing and stimulus exposure. (...) Our findings yield evidence for (1) stimulus pairing effects on evaluation and activity, and (2) stimulus exposure effects on potency and activity. Overall, the findings reveal that stimulus pairing and stimulus exposure differentially influence the learning of dimensions of affective meaning. We discuss implications of this research for current emotion theories as well as its contribution to research in the cognition–emotion interface. Finally, we argue that the implementation of representative design by virtue of Brunswikian sampling promotes theory development and opens new research avenues for an original and creative science of cognition and emotion. (shrink)

Dem Kantischen Projekt der Vernunftkritik liegt eine »ursprüngliche Einsicht« zugrunde, die schrittweise zu einer begrifflichen Klärung gelangt. Von dieser These ausgehend entwickelt Axel Hutter ein neues Verständnis des systematischen Gesamtzusammenhangs der transzendentalphilosophischen Hauptwerke. Er nimmt dabei Kants bislang auch wenig beachteten Begriff eines Interesses der Vernunft zum Leitfaden. Denn der Sinn einer wahrhaft autonomen Vernunft ist für Kant durchaus nicht der, von jedem Interesse frei zu sein, sondern der, dem eigenen Interesse folgen zu können, und zwar ungehindert durch vernunftfremde (...) Motive, die überhaupt nur deshalb mit Grund »fremd« genannt werden können, weil die Vernunft ein eigenes Interesse kennt. Kants ursprüngliche Einsicht besteht für Hutter darin, dass allein der Mensch (das »Zwischenwesen« par excellence) ein Inter-Esse zu entwickeln vermag: Ein reines Naturwesen kennt nur sinnliche Bedürfnisse, ein reines Vernunftwesen hingegen weder Bedürfnis noch Interesse. Von hier aus ergibt sich der für die Transzendentalphilosophie grundlegende Begriff eines spezifisch menschlichen Vernunftinteresses und einer in sich differenzierten Vernunfteinheit. Über diesen in sich differenzierten Vernunftbegriff verfügt Kant allerdings noch nicht in der »Kritik der reinen Vernunft«. Der philosophischen Revolution, die zur ersten Kritik führt, muss daher eine mindestens ebenso radikale Revolution zur Seite gestellt werden, die über die »Kritik der reinen Vernunft« hinaus zur »Kritik der praktischen Vernunft« und zur »Kritik der Urteilskraft« führt. Kants ursprüngliche Einsicht entfaltet sich dergestalt schrittweise in der Reihe seiner transzendentalphilosophischen Hauptwerke - eine Gedankenentwicklung, die Hutter detailliert nachvollzieht. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Original Sin Revisited:A Recent Proposal on Thomas Aquinas, Original Sin, and the Challenge of EvolutionReinhard Hütter"For some years now, the theological layman has been surprised to note that in Catholic preaching, as well as in the theological literature that comes to his attention, there is either hardly any mention of the peccatum originale, or that this doctrine is even explicitly dismissed—with suppression of the canons of the Council of (...) Trent—as an erroneous path inspired by Augustine."—Robert Spaemann1Original Sin Passé—"after" Original Sin?The doctrine and later dogma of original sin had been a central topic of Catholic dogmatic theology up to the Second Vatican Council.2 One only has to consult the exhaustive bibliographies in the respective volumes Urstand, Fall und Erbsünde (in three parts) of the Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte.3 [End Page 693] Still echoing this long-standing, abiding preoccupation—researched during the Council and published in 1967—is the important tour d'horizon and noteworthy working hypothesis advanced by Henri Rondet, S.J., Original Sin: The Patristic and Theological Background.4 Soon after Vatican II a quite unexpected "sign of the time" found its way into Catholic theology—a widespread allergy to the theological topics of sin in general and of original sin in particular began to affect the post-conciliar mood, an unwillingness to acknowledge sin precisely as sin, let alone original sin and the concomitant original guilt. In polite and enlightened post-Vatican II Catholic theological society, one best ignored what was now seen as an unbecoming topic, unless the intention was, of course, to revise, that is, to "de-dogmatize," the received understanding of the Tridentine dogma of original sin, be it along Schleiermacherian lines (original sin as the sin of the world)5 or along Hegelian lines (the Fall and original sin as the unavoidable entailments of human finitude and freedom)6 or along Heideggerian lines (the co-conditionedness of the fundamental human existential situation of transcendental freedom by the historical facticity of collective human guilt since the inception of human history).7 Other post-conciliar progressive theologians took it upon themselves to go further than that and to "de-mythologize" the Catholic faith as a whole, and thus bring it up to date to the new standards of an [End Page 694] enlightened and increasingly secularized age: original sin, mortal sin, last judgment, hell, and eternal damnation all had to go in one or the other way together with angels, demons, and the evil one—at least the personhood (some sundry metaphysical principle of evil, possibly rooted in God, was, maybe, permissible; a person of a created, purely spiritual subsistence, definitely not)—into the dustbin of bygone theological notions, now thanks to a dynamic progressively transformative development of the understanding of faith, suddenly "untruths," or at best mythological remnants of a bygone pre-scientific age.8 Consequently, from the self-secularizing view of what took itself to be progressive Catholic theology, embracing the normative horizon of the immanent frame together with its immanent transcendence of perpetual human progress, the hamartiological and eschatological horizon brightened up considerably, especially in Germany, Holland, and Belgium, looking increasingly like the non-transcendent, historically immanent eschatology of Immanuel Kant's The End of all Things (1794)—a gradual vertical asymptotic approximation of human cultural and social progress to the ideal of the "kingdom of God." The problems that evolutionary theory and historical-critical exegesis of Genesis 1-3 might have posed for a de facto (salvation-)historical state of original justice became serendipitously immaterial, since the object of contention had been preemptively removed. A radically reinterpreted or simply dismissed doctrine of original sin made any concerns about a historical state of original justice and a historical fall immaterial.With original sin transposed by revisionist systematic theologians and mortal sin abolished by proportionalist moral theologians, it became increasingly unclear what Jesus Christ came to save humanity from, really, besides [End Page 695] offering the gnosis of the sublime all-embracing dynamic of an irresistible universal divine embrace, an unqualified transcendent acceptation and indeed affirmation of the very goodness of de facto human nature ("God accepts and affirms us exactly... (shrink)

The technological singularity refers to a hypothetical scenario in which technological advances virtually explode. The most popular scenario is the creation of super-intelligent algorithms that recursively create ever higher intelligences. It took many decades for these ideas to spread from science fiction to popular science magazines and finally to attract the attention of serious philosophers. David Chalmers' (JCS 2010) article is the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of the singularity in a respected philosophy journal. The motivation of my article is to (...) augment Chalmers' and to discuss some issues not addressed by him, in particular what it could mean for intelligence to explode. In this course, I will (have to) provide a more careful treatment of what intelligence actually is, separate speed from intelligence explosion, compare what super-intelligent participants and classical human observers might experience and do, discuss immediate implications for the diversity and value of life, consider possible bounds on intelligence, and contemplate intelligences right at the singularity. (shrink)