Seit etwa 50 Jahren prägt der Identitätsbegriff die Religionspädagogik. Die Grundlage dafür lieferte maßgeblich das Konzept der psychosozialen Identität von Erik H. Erikson. Trotz spätmoderner Kritik und Dekonstruktion geht die Rede von Identität weiter und ist der "Abschied von Erikson" (Keupp) bis heute gesellschaftlich und wissenschaftlich nicht gelungen. Barbara Pühl untersucht die Hintergründe für die bleibende Bedeutung des Begriffs und schreibt ihm eine neue Rolle in der Religionspädagogik zu.

Abilities are in many ways central to what being an agent means, and they are appealed to in philosophical accounts of a great many different phenomena. It is often assumed that abilities are some kind of dispositional property, but it is rarely made explicit exactly which dispositional properties are our abilities. Two recent debates provide two different answers to that question: the new dispositionalism in the debate about free will, and virtue reliabilism in epistemology. This paper argues that both answers (...) fail as general accounts of abilities, and discusses the ramifications of this result. (shrink)

It is a familiar point that many ordinary dispositions are multi-track, that is, not fully and adequately characterisable by a single conditional. In this paper, I argue that both the extent and the implications of this point have been severely underestimated. First, I provide new arguments to show that every disposition whose stimulus condition is a determinable quantity must be infinitely multi-track. Secondly, I argue that this result should incline us to move away from the standard assumption that dispositions are (...) in some way importantly linked to conditionals, as presupposed by the debate about various versions of the ‘conditional analysis’ of dispositions. I introduce an alternative conception of dispositionality, which is motivated by linguistic observations about dispositional adjectives and links dispositions to possibility instead of conditionals. I argue that, because of the multi-track nature of dispositions, the possibility-based conception of dispositions is to be preferred. (shrink)

Combining knowledge of social policy and practice with insights from poststructural and feminist theory, the text demonstrates how democratic citizens and the political are continually recreated.

Williamsonian modal epistemology is characterized by two commitments: realism about modality, and anti-exceptionalism about our modal knowledge. Williamson’s own counterfactual-based modal epistemology is the best known implementation of WME, but not the only option that is available. I sketch and defend an alternative implementation which takes our knowledge of metaphysical modality to arise, not from knowledge of counterfactuals, but from our knowledge of ordinary possibility statements of the form ‘x can F’. I defend this view against a criticism indicated in (...) Williamson’s own work, and argue that it is better connected to the semantics of modal language. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the various guidelines presented in the literature for instituting an ethics curriculum and to empirically study their effectiveness. Three questions are addressed concerning the trainability of ethics material and the proper integration and implementation of an ethics curriculum. An empirical study then tested the effect of ethics training on moral awareness and reasoning. The sample consisted of two business classes, one exposed to additional ethics curriculum (experimental), and one not exposed (control). For (...) the experimental group, ethics exercises and discussion relevant to each topic were completed. Findings suggested gender differences such that, relative to other groups, women in the experimental group showed significantly improved moral awareness and decision-making processes. An explanation of the underlying cognitive processes is presented to explain the gender effect. (shrink)

Introduction The contributors to this volume were asked to write on some aspect of a problem area which has been the focus of much controversy, ...

Although people can take spatial perspectives different from their own, it is widely assumed that egocentric perspectives are natural and have primacy. Two studies asked respondents to describe the spatial relations between two objects on a table in photographed scenes; in some versions, a person sitting behind the objects was either looking at or reaching for one of the objects. The mere presence of another person in a position to act on the objects induced a good proportion of respondents to (...) describe the spatial relations from that person’s point of view. When the query about the spatial relations was phrased in terms of action, more respondents took the other’s perspective than their own. The implication of action elicits spontaneous spatial perspective-taking, seemingly in the service of understanding the other’s actions. (shrink)

Metaphysicians of modality are increasingly critical of possible-worlds talk, and increasingly happy to accept irreducibly modal properties – and in particular, irreducible dispositions – in nature. The aim of this paper is to provide the beginnings of a modal semantics which uses, instead of possible-worlds talk, the resources of such an 'anti-Humean' metaphysics. One central challenge to an anti-Humean view is the context-sensitivity of modal language. I show how that challenge can be met and a systematic modal semantics provided, given (...) an independently plausible metaphysics of dispositional properties or potentialities. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, modal epistemology has turned its attention to ordinary modal knowledge. This paper brings to the fore a neglected but central form of ordinary modal knowledge: knowledge of agentive modality, and in particular of our own abilities, which I call ‘ability knowledge’. I argue that modal epistemology as it is does not account for ability knowledge, by looking at the most promising candidate theories: perception-based, counterfactual-based, and similarity-based modal epistemologies. I then outline a more promising epistemology (...) for our ability knowledge, which relies on the experience of our own agency, and draw out some lessons for modal epistemology in general. (shrink)

Male aggression against females in primates, including humans, often functions to control female sexuality to the male’s reproductive advantage. A comparative, evolutionary perspective is used to generate several hypotheses to help to explain cross-cultural variation in the frequency of male aggression against women. Variables considered include protection of women by kin, male-male alliances and male strategies for guarding mates and obtaining adulterous matings, and male resource control. The relationships between male aggression against women and gender ideologies, male domination of women, (...) and female sexuality are also considered. (shrink)

This paper takes a critical look at the idea that evolutionary theory is a statistical theory. It argues that despite the strong instrumental motivation for statistical theories, they are not necessary to explain deterministic systems. Biological evolution is fundamentally a result of deterministic processes. Hence, a statistical theory is not necessary for describing the evolutionary forces of genetic drift and natural selection, nor is it needed for describing the fitness of organisms. There is a computational advantage to the statistical theory (...) of population genetics, but population genetics succeeds only by eliminating causes from its account of evolutionary change. (shrink)

I am going to argue that it is time to come to terms with the difficulty of understanding what it means to be physical and start thinking about the mind-body problem from a new perspective. Instead of construing it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally nonmental world, a world that is at its most fundamental level (...) entirely nonmental. The mind-body problem, I want to argue, is the problem of determining whether mentality can be accounted for in terms of nonmental phenomena. In other words, it is the question, ‘is mentality a fundamental feature of the world’. (shrink)

This paper makes a plea for more reflexive attempts to develop and anchor the emerging concept of responsible research and innovation. RRI has recently emerged as a buzzword in science policy, becoming a focus of concerted experimentation in many academic circles. Its performative capacity means that it is able to mobilise resources and spaces despite no common understanding of what it is or should be ‘made of’. In order to support reflection and practice amongst those who are interested in and (...) using the concept, this paper unpacks understandings of RRI across a multi-disciplinary body of peer-reviewed literature. Our analysis focuses on three key dimensions of RRI that remain particularly opaque. A total of 48 publications were selected through a systematic literature search and their content was qualitatively analysed. Across the literature, RRI is portrayed as a concept that embeds numerous features of existing approaches to govern and assess emerging technologies. Our analysis suggests that its greatest potential may be in its ability to unify and provide political momentum to a wide range of long-articulated ethical and policy issues. At the same time, RRI’s dynamism and resulting complexity may represent its greatest challenge. Further clarification on what RRI has to offer in practice—beyond what has been offered to date—is still needed, as well as more explicit engagement with research and institutional cultures of responsibility. Such work may help to realise the high political expectations that are attached to nascent RRI. (shrink)

Although corporate decision makers may justify charitable contributions on strategic grounds, extremely large corporate philanthropic contributions may beperceived by shareholders as unnecessary. If stockholders attempt to limit corporate philanthropy, then governance mechanisms should put a cap on giving amounts. Using a matched-paired sample to control for industry and company size, theauthors compared big givers and small givers. The authors find that blockholders and institutional owners limit corporate philanthropy. This suggests that high levels of corporate philanthropy may be perceived as excessive (...) by influentialstockholders, and some governance mechanisms act to curtail it. (shrink)

To reduce sex differences in employment outcomes, we must examine them in the context of the sex-gender hierarchy. The conventional explanation for wage gap—job segregation—is incorrect because it ignores men's incentive to preserve their advantages and their ability to do so by establishing the rules that distribute rewards. The primary method through which all dominant groups maintain their hegemony is by differentiating the subordinate group and defining it as inferior and hence meriting inferior treatment. My argument implies that neither sex-integrating (...) jobs nor implementing comparable worth will markedly improve women's employment status because men can subvert these mechanisms or even change the rules by which rewards are allocated. As evidence, I show that occupational integration has failed to advance women appreciably, and I argue that comparable worth is not likely to be much more effective. Instead, we must seek political analyses and political solutions. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs)1 determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categories definites have received rather more attention, and more than one researcher has characterized the category of definite (...) NPs by enumerating NP types. Westerståhl (1985), who is concerned only with determiners in the paper cited, gives a very short list: demonstrative NPs, possessive NPs, and definite descriptions. Prince (1992) lists proper names and personal pronouns, as well as NPs with the, a demonstrative, or a possessive NP as determiner. She notes, in addition, that “certain quantifiers (e.g. all, every) have been argued to be definite” (Prince 1992: 299). This list, with the quantifiers added, agrees with that given by Birner & Ward (1998, 114). Ariel (1988, 1990) adds null anaphoric NPs. (shrink)

Might the world be structured, as Leibniz thought, so that every part of matter is divided ad infinitum? The Physicist David Bohm accepted infinitely decomposable matter, and even Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the idea that science is converging on a final theory, admits the possibility of an endless chain of ever more fundamental theories. However, if there is no fundamental level, physicalism, thought of as the view that everything is determined by fundamental phenomena and that all fundamental phenomena (...) are physical, turns out false, for in such a world, there are no fundamental phenomena, and so fundamental phenomena determine nothing. While some take physicalism necessarily to posit a fundamental level, here I present a thesis of physicalism that allows for its truth even in an infinitely decomposable world. (shrink)

Essays by Jurgen Habermas on truth, objectivity, normativity, naturalism, and realism after the linguistic turn.

With the advent of legalized medical assistance in dying [MAiD] in Canada in 2016, nursing is facing intriguing new ethical and theoretical challenges. Among them is the concept of conscientious objection, which was built into the legislation as a safeguard to protect the rights of healthcare workers who feel they cannot participate in something that feels morally or ethically wrong. In this paper, we consider the ethical complexity that characterizes nurses' participation in MAiD and propose strategies to support nurses' moral (...) reflection and imagination as they seek to make sense of their decision to participate or not. Deconstructing the multiple and sometimes conflicting ethical and professional obligations inherent in nursing in such a context, we consider ways in which nurses can sustain their role as critically reflective moral agents within a context of a relational practice, serving the diverse needs of patients, families, and communities, as Canadian society continues to evolve within this new way of engaging with matters of living and dying. (shrink)

Chronic and current epistemological controversies, with particular attention to the development of pragmatist/historicist/constructivist reconceptions of knowledge and science in the 20th century and the scandalized responses to them by defenders of more traditional rationalist/objectivist/realist conceptions. Individual chapters deal with complex and confused relations among epistemic skepticism, relativism, and constructivist epistemology ; 20th-century "postmodern" relativism and anti-relativism; Ludwik Fleck and constructivist views of truth, science, and knowledge; attacks on and disavowals of constructivism and/or relativism by established and feminist philosophers; the Science (...) Wars and fraught relations between the humanities and the sciences; the problematic claims of Evolutionary Psychology; and chronic problems and contemporary views of animal-human relations. (shrink)

This paper presents problems for Stalnaker’s common ground theory of presupposition. Stalnaker (Linguist and Philos 25:701–721, 2002) proposes a 2-stage process of utterance interpretation: presupposed content is added to the common ground prior to acceptance/rejection of the utterance as a whole. But this revision makes presupposition difficult to distinguish from assertion. A more fundamental problem is that the common ground theory rests on a faulty theory of assertion—that the essence of assertion is to present the content of an utterance as (...) new information. Many examples are presented of utterances which are felicitous but not informative in this way. (shrink)

The conservation of energy law, a law of physics that states that the total energy of any closed system is always conserved, is a bedrock principle that has achieved both broad theoretical and experimental support. Yet if interactive dualism is correct, it is thought that the mind can affect physical objects in violation of the conservation of energy. Thus, some claim, the conservation of energy grounds an argument for physicalism. Although critics of the argument focus on the implausibility of causation (...) requiring the transference of energy, I argue that even if causation requires the transference of energy, once we accept the other required premises of the argument that lie behind any supposed argument from the conservation of energy the law of the conservation of energy is revealed as irrelevant to the question of whether the mental is physical. (shrink)

Die in PU § 199 formulierte These von der Mehrfachanwendung wird als Konsequenz der von Wittgenstein in seiner Diskussion des Regelfolgens geübten Kritik an der platonischen Hypostasiemng der Normativität von Regeln (Bedeutungen) und damit ihres Meinens und Verstehens interpretiert. Am Beispiel der von Colin McGinn vertretenen Gleichsetzung des Verstehens mit einer Fähigkeit wird gezeigt, daß man, wenn man den Zusammenhang zwischen der Forderung derMehrfachanwendung und der Kritik am Piatonismus vemachlässigt, den konstitutiven Charakter des Verstehens voraussetzen muß. Die Abhängigkeit des Praxischarakters (...) des Verstehens von der Falschheit des Piatonismus und damit von der konstitutiven Lesart der These von der Mehrfachanwendung wird dann - am Beispiel Malcolms - für die Kritik der kommunalen Analyse des Regelfolgens fruchtbar gemacht. Die kommunale Analyse identifiziert zwei Positionen - dieFrage eines sozial isolierten und die eines privaten Regelfolgens, die Wittgenstein in unveröffentlichten Manuskripten explizit auseinandergehalten hat und von denen nur die Möglichkeit eines privaten Regelfolgens den Piatonismus voraussetzt. Wenn also die These der Mehrfachanwendung eine Konsequenz des Antiplatonismus ist, kann mit ihr noch nicht die Möglichkeit sozial isolierten Regelfolgens verworfen sein. (shrink)

First, we argue that Dummett, in his accusing Husserl of psychologism, does not pay sufficient attention to the phenomenological framework of Husserl's philosophy. This framework must be taken into account for understanding why Husserl is not a psychologist in the theory of meaning. Second, it is shown that the thoughts required by Evans' theory of understanding indexical utterances are not to be identified with mental events as understood by psychologism. We then emphasize what Husserl's and Evans' explanation of the mind (...) share, and finally argue that Dummett's anti-psychologism is based on a psychologistic view of consciousness which is not questioned by Dummett. (shrink)

In what follows, I will concentrate on the type of temporality which structures Wittgenstein's method of a perspicuous representation, or of a synoptic overview (übersichtliche Darstellung). I will argue that the temporal order which applies to (giving) a perspicuous representation is best to be described as retroactivity, deferred action or afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit), a concept which calls into question the ordinary conception of time as a linear and irreversible process as well as of a clear break between present and past. First, (...) I will turn to Sigmund Freud and the way he developed the concept of Nachträglichkeit or retroactivity in some of his case-studies. The basic idea here is that the meaning or content of a past experience is constituted by repeating it in a different or disguised way. I will then argue that the relation between a perspicuous representation and what is made perspicuous is best interpreted as a relation of Nachträglichkeit. This interpretation also accounts for the involvement of the subject in the object made perspicuous—as it is stressed by Wittgenstein and illustrated by his discursive method. (shrink)

Nosso objetivo neste trabalho é, em primeiro lugar, apresentar o modelo de liberalismo proposto por John Stuart Mill como relevante para o construtivismo da teoria política de John Rawls. Para tal, vamos mostrar que o contratualista americano em alguma medida subscreve o liberalismo do utilitarista inglês. Vamos aproximar ambos os autores no tocante ao método intuicionista e verificar se ainda há alguma vantagem no consequencialismo de Mill. Para Rawls, um procedimento intuicionista é ligado a um conjunto de princípios que não (...) pode ser reduzido. Mill se encaixa na definição, portanto, na medida em que advoga um tipo de hedonismo, característica que o americano descarta, por poder ser listada como teoria moral abrangente. Mesmo assim, precisamos verificar até que medida é possível considerar o utilitarismo de Mill como tendo influenciado o liberalismo de Rawls. Assim, levaremos em conta que ele autorizou, pelo menos parcialmente, um método intuicionista e mostraremos que isso se deu por influência da filosofia política de Mill. Fica assim admitido que o apelo à intuição está na base da teoria da justiça, mas tudo somado pode ficar perfeitamente claro onde reside o equilíbrio lógico proposto por Rawls. Mesmo com o desacordo final, é possível notar a influência do projeto liberal do londrino em torno da teoria política que resultou na _Teoria da Justiça_. Restará ainda tentar saber se realmente é possível se afastar de um consequencialismo e se há alguma vantagem teórica em se manter filiado a uma teoria política e ética como a de Mill do ponto de vista jurídico institucional. Isso porque o consequencialismo com um viés estritamente constitucional, como aquele sugerido por Rawls, não parece ser capaz de solucionar um problema jurídico externo ao hermético sistema teórico proposto nas teorias da justiça contemporâneas. (shrink)