Thomas Edison's incandescent lamp was one of four that were displayed at the first international exhibition of electricity in Paris in 1881. By the end of the exhibition, most observers believed that Edison had taken a clear lead over his rivals: Maxim, Swan, and Lane-Fox. In reality, his victory was a narrow one that owed much to the skilful management of public opinion by his aides in Paris. Nevertheless, it reinforced Edison's view of Paris as the (...) natural starting point for the implantation of his system in continental Europe. Almost immediately, however, the three companies that he established for the purpose in Paris were in difficulties as the financial crash of January 1882 hardened into sustained recession. Quickly Edison's favour turned to Milan and, more particularly, Berlin, leaving the once central Parisian venture to become a minor element in his European strategy. (shrink)

Historians of technology have provided important accounts of technological innovation, but they rarely employ concepts which permit a rigorous analysis ofinvention as a mental or cognitive process. This article seeks to address this theoretical lacuna by using concepts adapted from cognitive psychology to compare the mental processes of two telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Specifically, we suggest that invention may be seen as a process in which inventors combine ideas with objects, or what we call (...) mental models and mechanical representations. The strategies by which inventors generate and manipulate these mental models and mechanical representations are what we refer to as heuristics. Using these concepts to narrate the development of the telephone, this article shows how invention can be interpreted as being much more than simply a mysterious act of individual genius. (shrink)

The ArgumentMany inventors, engineers, and scientists think in verbal images. Elmer Sperry (1860–1930), a noted American inventor, was able to “operate” in his mind's eye the machines he was developing. For inventors, engineers, and experimental scientists, visualization is often followed by construction of a physical model of the invention, which can be an experimental apparatus. The model, or apparatus, is then tested in increasingly complex environments and changes are made in the physical artifact until it is ready to be used. (...) Examples of this process of development are Sperry's development of a ship stabilizer for the U.S. Navy and a revolving mirror to be used by Albert Michelson in the determination of the speed of light. Thomas Edison called experimentation his development of an invention through the building and testing of a series of models. So, both scientists and inventors experiment. They are not discovering the “secrets of nature”: they are observing how artifacts – their physical creations – behave. These physical models of thought reflect the characteristics of the tools with which they were made. They are socially constructed, as well. (shrink)

In November 1875, Thomas Edison made the sensational announcement that he had discovered a new force of nature, etheric force. It was to emerge some years later that the phenomenon Edison described was a form of wireless transmission, but Edison failed both to advance his theory and to exploit his discovery in new inventions. I contrast Edison’s approach to doing science with what he did when inventing, and also with the approach used by his principal (...) scientific opponents. This contrast reveals that he failed, not so much because he was an inventor who did science badly, but because when he ventured into scientific theory-making he abandoned key techniques that made him America’s most successful inventor. From this I argue that we can identify artefact creation processes in science that parallel the process of invention, and that Edison failed because his opponents created better artefacts.Keywords: Thomas Edison; Invention; Artefact; Experiment; Etheric force; Failure. (shrink)

Summary For Thomas Edison, experiencing a failure did not mean that he had failed. Through an examination of the process that led to his invention of the carbon microphone, I argue that his positive approach to failure contributed both to his success as an inventor and to the functional success of his inventions. Edison's laboratory notebooks and legal testimony reveal that his seemingly erratic approach and reliance on trial and error methods in fact had a consistent direction (...) and a rational basis, well suited to the under-determined problems he faced. The outcome of this process, the carbon microphone, contributed significantly to the commercial success of the telephone and remains in use today. Thomas Hughes has observed that nineteenth century inventors made use of the unexpected behaviour of their inventions as sources of novel phenomena to exploit in new inventions. This paper identifies other ways in which Edison made use of failure and proposes that, paradoxically, the success of technological artefacts can be determined by the thoroughness with which failure is pursued in their creation. It also notes a parallel between Edison's instrumentalizing of failure and the way in which recent philosophers of science have proposed that scientists should make use of error. (shrink)

Science is a force for good in the world--at least usually. But sometimes, when obsession gets the better of scientists, they twist a noble pursuit into something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn't everything, it's the only thing--no matter the cost. Bestselling author Sam Kean tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process. The (...) Icepick Surgeon masterfully guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra's dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison's mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren't all safely buried in the past. Many of them, Kean reminds us, still affect us today. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to current vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care. Kean even takes us into the future, when advanced computers and genetic engineering could unleash whole new sways to do one another wrong. Unflinching, and exhilarating to the last page, The Icepick Surgeon fuses the drama of scientific discovery with the illicit thrill of a true-crime tale. With his trademark wit and precision, Kean shows that, while science has done more good than harm in the world, rogue scientists do exist, and when we sacrifice morals for progress, we often end up with neither. (shrink)

abstract: This essay explores the connections between speculation, spectacle, and the death penalty, particularly insofar as they bear on what is “proper to man” and on the man–animal distinction. Returning to a scene of death from Derrida's seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, specifically the scene of an elephant's autopsy, we see how what he calls “the globalization of the autopsic model” of sovereignty requires the death of the animal (Derrida 2009, 296). Following Derrida, we see how man's dominion over (...) other animals is built on a model of sovereignty as necropsy that erects itself through the autopsic model of power, which ultimately is built on the scaffolding of death and the death penalty. Following the history of the death penalty, however, we see that it becomes the property of man through its exercise on animals, particularly through the capital punishment of animals, which inaugurated the codification of law in Europe, and Thomas Edison's electrocution of animals, which inaugurated the electric chair as a form of execution in the United States. Moreover, the case of Edison (who invented both the electric chair and the first moving pictures, many of which were images of execution) makes manifest the connection between spectacle, animals, and the death penalty. (shrink)

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) is surely one of the more remarkable figures in the story of global electrification. Rivalling Thomas Edison for the title of chief Wizard, both in his own time and ours, almost every invention of modern life has at some point been attributed to Tesla: from the communications media of telephone, fax, radio, and television, through the military utilities of radar and remote-control weapons, and (most plausibly) the systems of alternate current generation and transmission that power (...) our world. And yet Tesla died impoverished and alone in a New York hotel room with his greatest plans for wireless power transmission abandoned and derided, if they were remembered at all. Tesla’s image as something of a martyr to an ungrateful world has indeed generated a cult following in recent decades, doubtless fired in part by the Serbian nationalism that has justly helped raise the profile of Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić (e.g. M. Popović, In Albert’s Shadow: The L .. (shrink)

The technological breakthroughs and entrepreneurial adventures of Frank J. Sprague during the transformative years of the early electrical industry. Over the course of a little less than twenty years, inventor Frank J. Sprague achieved an astonishing series of technological breakthroughs--from pioneering work in self-governing motors to developing the first full-scale operational electric railway system--all while commercializing his inventions and promoting them to financial backers and the public. In Engineering Invention, Frederick Dalzell tells Sprague's story, setting it against the backdrop of (...) one of the most dynamic periods in the history of technology. In a burst of innovation during these years, Sprague and his contemporaries--Thomas Edison, Nicolas Tesla, Elmer Sperry, George Westinghouse, and others--transformed the technologies of electricity and reshaped modern life. After working briefly for Edison, Sprague started the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company; designed and built an electric railroad system for Richmond, Virginia; sold his company to Edison and went into the field of electric elevators; almost accidentally discovered a multiple-control system that could equip electric train systems for mass transit; started a third company to commercialize this; then sold this company to Edison and retired. Throughout his career, Dalzell tells us, Sprague framed technology as invention, cast himself as hero, and staged his technologies as dramas. He toiled against the odds, scraped together resources to found companies, bet those companies on technical feats--and pulled it off, multiple times. The idea of the "heroic inventor" is not, of course, the only way to frame the history of technology. Nevertheless, as Dalzell shows, Sprague, Edison, and others crafted the role consciously and actively, using it to generate vital impetus behind the process of innovation. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time a significant number of Reid's manuscript papers on natural history, physiology and materialist metaphysics. An important contribution not only to Reid studies but also to our understanding of eighteenth-century science and its context.

The coming of bioethics to Singapore / W. Calvin Ho and Sylvia S.N. Lim -- The impact of the bioethics advisory committee on the research community in Singapore / Charmaine K.M. Chan and Edison T. Liu -- Engaging the public : the role of the media / Chang Ai-Lien and Judith Tan -- Confucian trust and the biomedical regulatory framework in Singapore / Anh Tuan Nuyen -- The clinician-researcher : a servant of two masters? / Alastair V. Campbell, Jacqueline (...) Chin, and Teck Chuan Voo -- The US model for oversight of human stem cell research / Lindsay Parham and Bernard Lo -- Genetics and stem cell research : models of international policy-making / Bartha Maria Knoppers, Emily Kirby and Rosario Isasi -- Public engagement and bioethics commissions / Thomas H. Murray and Ross S. White -- Norm-making on human-animal chimeras and hybrids in Singapore, the United Kingdom and the international domain / W. Calvin Ho and Martin Bobrow -- How will future bioethical issues engage Singapore? / John Elliott. (shrink)

Autism research is increasingly moving to a view centred around sensorimotor atypicalities instead of traditional, ethically problematical, views predicated on social-cognitive deficits. We explore how an enactivist approach to autism illuminates how social differences, stereotypically associated with autism, arise from such sensorimotor atypicalities. Indeed, in a state space description, this can be taken as a skewing of sensorimotor variables that influences social interaction and so also enculturation and habituation. We argue that this construal leads to autism being treated on a (...) par with other sensorimotor atypicalities such as blindness or atypical height. This leads to our conclusion that, insofar there is an ethical call to inclusion in our public sphere regardless of contingent bodily difference, an enactivist take on autism naturally leads to extending such inclusion to autism. Moreover, our analysis suggests a concrete way forward to achieve inclusion of autistics: by being more attentive to autistic sensorimotor specifics. (shrink)

In the United States, hate speech sits at the intersection of ethical and legal debates and has a complex relationship with journalism. The First Amendment provides broad legal protections for hate...

When infrastructural technology is functioning correctly, it is often considered to recede from view and become invisible. According to this perspective, visibility is restored in cases of breakdown and malfunction, which for this reason, are often understood to represent important epistemic opportunities for grasping previously hidden aspects of infrastructure. This article seeks to outline the limitations of the idea that infrastructural failure has a positive epistemic function by distinguishing between two fundamentally different ways in which the nature of technological function (...) can be conceptualised; the first understands function as stemming primarily from the way a technology was designed and produced, the second as a process sustained by constant human activities of maintenance and repair. After illustrating how a number of recent studies of infrastructure build upon insights granted by the latter process perspective, this article aims to demonstrate how the experience of breakdown itself does little to facilitate a shift towards understanding infrastructure in this way. For this reason, this article ends with a suggestion for a shift in emphasis in studies of infrastructure, away from breakdown and towards a sustained examination of everyday practices of maintenance, repair and modification of infrastructural technologies. (shrink)

Ellen Fox and collaborators have produced the most detailed description of healthcare ethics practices in the United States available. Some findings are shocking for anyone committed to promoting q...

Organisationen spielen in modernen Gesellschaften eine zentrale Rolle. Der Beitrag geht davon aus, dass in den mittlerweile etablierten Formen von Ethik und Ethikberatung in Einrichtungen des Gesundheitssystems eine angemessene Reflexion des Organisationsbezugs oft ausbleibt bzw. eine besondere Herausforderung darstellt. Wir konzipieren deshalb eine „prozedurale Organisationsethik“, die sich kritisch mit der organisationalen Passung der Prozesse ethischer Reflexion auseinandersetzt. Daraus lassen sich als Anregung für Theorie und Praxis von ethischen Prozessen praktische Schlussfolgerungen ableiten. Sie betreffen die Orte der Differenzsetzung für die Frage (...) nach dem Guten; die ethischen Hintergrundtheorien und die Frage nach der organisatorischen Verknüpfung der Reflexionssettings. (shrink)

Definition of the problem Organisations play a vital role in modern societies. This article presumes a lack of sufficient organisational reflection of well-established forms of ethics and ethics counselling in institutions belonging to the health sector or sees particular challenges where it is implemented. Arguments We have therefore conceived a procedural type of organisational ethics which critically examines the organisational fit of processes in terms of ethical reflection, leading to practicable suggestions. Conclusions On the one hand they relate to where (...) differences are established when asking for the good; on the other hand they are concerned with background theories and the organisational fit of the reflection settings. (shrink)

Current COVID-19 pandemic and previous SARS/MERS outbreaks have caused a series of major crises to global public health. We must integrate the large and exponentially growing amount of heterogeneous coronavirus data to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechanisms, in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs. Ontologies have emerged to play an important role in standard knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. We have initiated the development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). (...) As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is an open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. In this article, the general architecture and the design patterns of the CIDO are introduced, CIDO representation of coronaviruses, phenotypes, anti-coronavirus drugs and medical devices (e.g. ventilators) are illustrated, and an application of CIDO implemented to identify repurposable drug candidates for effective and safe COVID-19 treatment is presented. (shrink)

Robots equipped with artificial intelligence pose a huge challenge to traditional ontological differentiations between the spheres of the human and the non-human. Drawing mainly from neo-animistic and perspectivist approaches in anthropology and science and technology studies, the paper explores the potential of new forms of interconnectedness and rhizomatic entanglements between humans and a world transcending the boundaries between species and material spheres. We argue that intelligent robots meet virtually all criteria Western biology came up with to define ‘life’ and that (...) it ultimately makes sense to recognize them as a new species that is part of our social universe. Contrasting dualistic concepts of man and nature with a monistic approach, we show that traditional properties of life (agency, self-replication, etc.) may apply to artefacts and that, once we accept the idea that social relationships are ultimately open connections to matter of any kind, the seemingly strict boundaries between species and material spheres can no longer be sustained. Instead, we propose to include ‘matter’ and ideas into the sphere of the social as agents in their own right to form a _relational ontology of multi-species assemblages_ (ROMA). (shrink)

Mechanistic approaches are very common in the causal interpretation of biological and neuroscientific experimental work in today’s philosophy of science. In the mechanistic literature a strict distinction is often made between causal relations and constitutive relations, where the latter cannot be causal. One of the typical reasons for this strict distinction is that constitutive relations are supposedly synchronic whereas most if not all causal relations are diachronic. This strict distinction gives rise to a number of problems, however. Our end goal (...) in this paper is to argue that it should be given up, at least in the context of the biological and the psychological sciences. To that effect, we argue that constitutive relations in this context are diachronic, thus undermining the aforementioned reason. We offer two cases from scientific practice in which constitutive relations are regarded as both diachronic and causally efficacious, review three existing ways of dealing with the apparent diachronic nature of interlevel relations in mechanisms and propose a new account of diachronic, causal constitutive relevance. (shrink)

Crutchfield and Redinger argue that consciousness-altering chemical restraints are less “liberty-intrusive” (or as we will sometimes put it, just less “intrusive”) than physical restraints. Physica...

Within the scope of the POPULISMUS research project, we have engaged in a methodological cross-fertilization between Essex School-inspired methods of analysis and computer-assisted text analysis. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on the Greek case and the material analyzed involves newspaper articles from the 2014–5 period. In particular, the analysis focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around representations of ‘the people’ and ‘populism’. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, something that has not attracted much attention in (...) the relevant bibliography, and focusing on their mutual constitution from a discourse-theoretical as well as lexicometric perspective, we articulate a comprehensive analysis of the populist and anti-populist press in Greece, with broader implications for populism research globally. (shrink)

Public participation is well known for its practitioner insights and wealth of case reports. This knowledge is essential and has been well employed. Likewise, the theoretical literature on public participation is growing rapidly. The need for better conceptual and theoretical understandings of public participation has become clear. Public participation theories have not received great attention, and few have been proposed or tested. Yet theory offers much to practitioners of various interventions. The authors summarize work toward developing a public participation theory (...) and propose a way to conceptualize its skeletal components. The authors recognize that any theory must acknowledge that different people have different beliefs about what public participation should accomplish. Further, contextual variables affect a process’s character and outcomes. The authors begin with a discussion of theory’s importance to scholars, practitioners, and participants and provide an overview of existing approaches. The authors present findings from two empirical case studies used to further develop their theory of fair and competent public participation. They conclude with some observations about challenges and ways forward. (shrink)

Background: The parent of a child with profound cognitive disability will have complex decisions to consider throughout the life of their child. An especially complex decision is whether to place a tracheotomy to support the child’s airway. The decision may involve the parent wanting a tracheotomy and the clinician advising against this intervention or the clinician recommending a tracheotomy while the parent is opposed to the intervention. This conflict over what is best for the child may lead to a bioethics (...) consult. Objective: The study explores the conflicts that may arise around tracheotomy placements. Research design: This study is a retrospective cohort study of pediatric patients for whom a tracheotomy decision required a bioethics consult. Participants and research context: Pediatric patients aged birth to 18 years old with a bioethics consult for a tracheotomy decision conflict between April 2010 and December 2016. A standardized data collection tool was used to review notes entered by the palliative care team, social workers, primary clinical team interim summaries, and the bioethics consult service. Ethical considerations: The study was reviewed and approved by the medical center’s institutional review board. Results: There were 248 clinical bioethics consults during the identified study period. There were 31 consults involving 21 children where the word tracheotomy was mentioned in the consult, and 13 of the 21 consults were for children with profound cognitive disability. Discussion and conclusion: Clinicians need to be aware of their own biases when discussing a child’s prognosis and treatment options while also understanding the parents’ values and what the parent might consider to be burdensome in the care of their child and the acceptable burden for the child to experience. (shrink)

The Russian Cards Problem has been extensively studied as an example of a problem of an unconditionally secure protocol where the sender and receiver are able to transmit secret information safely over a public non-secure channel without the secret being learned by a third party with access to the channel. Epistemic logic in general and public announcement logic in particular have been very useful in this study, as it involves careful analysis of subtle properties of nested knowledge. A long standing (...) open problem is whether or not there exist protocols of length strictly greater than two for the original problem. In this paper we finally settle this problem, answering the question in the affirmative, by presenting a new solution to the original Russian Cards Problem that involves more than two steps. It starts with an initial announcement with so-called crossing hands, after which it is not common knowledge that the protocol can terminate in one more step. (shrink)

In this discussion I argue that Peter Sullivan is wrong to suggest that Wittgenstein's position in the Philosophical Investigations involves a commitment to transcendental idealism. I show that Sullivan's interpretation involves holding that transcendental idealism was employed by Wittgenstein in the attempt to combat a Platonist mythology. I show, through a detailed appraisal of Wittgenstein's discussion of samples, that Wittgenstein's approach to Platonism does not involve any such employment of transcendental idealism. I conclude that there is no such motivation as (...) Sullivan finds in Wittgenstein for endorsing transcendental idealism, and that we ought not, therefore, ascribe to him such a view. (shrink)

It has often been observed that color is a highly preferred attribute for use in distinguishing descriptions, that is, referring expressions produced with the purpose of identifying an object within a visual scene. However, most of these observations were based on visual displays containing only colors that were maximally different in hue and for which the language of experimentation possessed basic color terms. The experiments described in this paper investigate whether speakers’ preference for color is reduced if the color of (...) the target referent is similar to that of the distractors. Because colors that look similar are often also harder to distinguish linguistically, we also examine the impact of the codability of color values. As a third factor, we investigate the salience of available alternative attributes and its impact on the use of color. The results of our experiments show that, while speakers are indeed less likely to use color when the colors in a display are similar, this effect is mostly due to the difficulty in naming similar colors. Color use for color with a basic color term is affected only when the colors of target and distractors are very similar (yet still distinguishable). The salience of our alternative attribute size, manipulated by varying the difference in size between target and distractors, had no impact on the use of color. (shrink)

In the European Enlightenments it was often argued that moral conduct rather than adherence to certain theological doctrines was the true measure of religious belief. Thomas Ahnert argues that this characteristically “enlightened” emphasis on conduct in religion was less reliant on arguments from reason alone than is commonly believed. In fact, the champions of the Scottish Enlightenment were deeply skeptical of the power of unassisted natural reason in achieving “enlightened” virtue and piety. They advocated a practical program of “moral (...) culture,” in which revealed religion was of central importance. Ahnert traces this to theological controversies going back as far as the Reformation concerning the key question of early modern theology, the conditions of salvation. His findings present a new point of departure for all scholars interested in the intersection of religion and Enlightenment. (shrink)

For successful goal-directed behavior, a performance monitoring system is essential. It detects behavioral errors and initiates behavioral adaptations to improve performance. Two electrophysiological potentials are known to follow errors in reaction time tasks: the error-related negativity, which is linked to error processing, and the error positivity, which is associated with subjective error awareness. Furthermore, the correct-related negativity is linked to uncertainty about the response outcome. Here we attempted to identify the involvement of the nucleus accumbens in the aforementioned performance monitoring (...) processes. To this end, we simultaneously recorded cortical activity and local field potentials during a flanker task performed by four patients with severe opioid abuse disorder who underwent electrode implantation in the NAc for deep brain stimulation. We observed significant accuracy-related modulations in the LFPs at the time of the ERN/CRN in two patients and at the time of Pe in three patients. These modulations correlated with the ERN in 2/8, with CRN in 5/8 and with Pe in 6/8, recorded channels, respectively. Our results demonstrate the functional interrelation of striatal and cortical processes in performance monitoring specifically related to error processing and subjective error awareness. (shrink)

At a time of COVID-19 pandemic, universal basic income (UBI) has been presented as a potential public health ‘upstream intervention’. Research indicates a possible impact on health by reducing poverty, fostering health-promoting behaviour and ameliorating biopsychosocial pathways to health. This novel case for UBI as a public health measure is starting to receive attention from a range of political positions and organisations. However, discussion of the ethical underpinnings of UBI as a public health policy is sparse. This is depriving policymakers (...) of clear perspectives about the reasons for, restrictions to and potential for the policy’s design and implementation. In this article, we note prospective pathways to impact on health in order to assess fit with Rawlsian, capabilities and perfectionist approaches to public health policy. We suggest that Raz’ pluralist perfectionist approach may fit most comfortably with the prospective pathways to impact, which has implications for allocation of resources. (shrink)

We argue that providing cumulative risk as an estimate of the uncertainty in dynamically changing risky environments can help decision-makers meet mission-critical goals. Specifically, we constructed a simplified aviation-like weather decision-making task incorporating Next-Generation Radar images of convective weather. NEXRAD radar images provide information about geographically referenced precipitation. NEXRAD radar images are used by both pilots and laypeople to support decision-making about the level of risk posed by future weather-hazard movements. Using NEXRAD, people and professionals have to infer the uncertainty (...) in the meteorological information to understand current hazards and extrapolate future conditions. Recent advancements in meteorology modeling afford the possibility of providing uncertainty information concerning hazardous weather for the current flight. Although there are systematic biases that plague people’s use of uncertainty information, there is evidence that presenting forecast uncertainty can improve weather-related decision-making. The current study augments NEXRAD by providing flight-path risk, referred to as the Risk Situational Awareness Tool. RSAT provides the probability that a route will come within 20 NMI radius of hazardous weather within the next 45 min of flight. The study evaluates four NEXRAD displays integrated with RSAT, providing varying levels of support. The “no” support condition has no RSAT. The “baseline” support condition employs an RSAT whose accuracy is consistent with current capability in meteorological modeling. The “moderate” support condition applies an RSAT whose accuracy is likely at the top of what is achievable in meteorology in the near future. The “high” support condition provides a level of support that is likely unachievable in an aviation weather decision-making context without considerable technological innovation. The results indicate that the operators relied on the RSAT and improved their performance as a consequence. We discuss the implications of the findings for the safe introduction of probabilistic tools in future general aviation cockpits and other dynamic decision-making contexts. Moreover, we discuss how the results contribute to research in the fields of dynamic risk and uncertainty, risk situation awareness, cumulative risk, and risk communication. (shrink)

The essays in this book began as a contributions to a Summer Workshop arranged by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, and haled at the University of Calgary from July 7 to 14, 1978. The Institute, which was founded by the University in 1976 for the encouragement of humanistic studies, has held such conferences each summer as a part of its programme of research.

The consideration of ethics in social research has gained increasing prominence in the past few years, particularly research which seeks to inform public policy. This book presents an examination of issues relating to research ethics in planning for an international audience.

Verschwindet die Religiosität in der Moderne oder ist im Gegenteil eine Rückkehr der Religionen zu verzeichnen? Das Handbuch beleuchtet die Dialektik von Säkularisierung und Revitalisierung der Religionen aus philosophischer, soziologischer und religionswissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Vorgestellt werden grundlegende Konzepte, z. B. von Durkheim, Weber, Habermas, Blumenberg und Luhmann. Der zweite Teil untersucht Begriffe wie das Böse, das Heilige, Pluralismus etc. in ihrer Bedeutung im Kontext der Säkularisierung. Abschließend geht es um Konflikte wie Glauben und Wissen, Religion und Menschenrechte oder Säkularisierung und die (...) Weltreligionen. (shrink)