Seit über hundert Jahren wartet eine interessierte Öffentlichkeit auf eine umfassende, kritische, kommentierte Edition der Briefe Wilhelm von Humboldts. Die lange Reihe prominenter Akteure der Goethe-Zeit (bzw. der Napoleonischen Ära), die zu den Briefpartnern dieses Staatsmannes, Bildungsreformers und Sprachforschers zählen, sowie die Vielfalt der Themen – neben den bereits genannten sind dies vor allem Philosophie, Literatur, Philologie, bildende Kunst, Politik, diplomatische Korrespondenz, Geschichte – und nicht zuletzt die literarischen Qualitäten der Brieftexte selbst machen dieses umfangreiche Briefcorpus zu einem der bedeutendsten (...) der Epoche: ein Zeitgemälde auf höchstem Niveau. Die Ausgabe wird in drei Abteilungen erscheinen: I. Jugendbriefe, Brautzeit, erste Ehejahre (1781–1802) II. Amtszeit (1802–1819) III. Altersmuße (1820–1835). Die I. Abteilung wird fünf Bände umfassen. Band 1 beginnt mit Briefen des 13-jährigen Knaben; erster Schwerpunkt ist die Reihe schwärmerischer Briefe an Henriette Herz und weitere Mitglieder der „Verbindung“, einer Vereinigung zur gegenseitigen moralischen Vervollkommnung, die Humboldt bis zur Verlobung mit Karoline von Dacheröden intensiv beschäftigte; danach stehen die Briefe an die Braut im Vordergrund. Außerdem spielen die Briefe an Georg Forster und Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi eine wichtige Rolle; auch die später umfangreiche Korrespondenz mit Carl Gustaf von Brinkman beginnt bereits in dieser Periode. Mit der Eheschließung im Juni 1791 wird der Band abgeschlossen. Der Band enthält 198 Briefe, davon 21 bisher ungedruckte. (shrink)

Festschrift for prof. Helge Malmgren. -/- Contents: • Kristoffer Ahlström: Two Levels of Epistemic Inquiry; • Jan Almäng: Till frågan om trancendentala argument; • Kent Gustavsson: Perceptionens gåta; • Björn Haglund: Some Notes on Induction; • Ingvar Johansson: Money and Fictions; • Frank Lorentzon: Intuition och kunskap; • Ingmar Persson: Double Effect Troubles; • Filip Radovic: Wittgenstein om tautologier och andra logiska satser; • Claes Strannegård: Anthropomorphic Artificial Intelligence; • Bolof Stridbeck: Den motbjudande slutsatsen & den plågade filosofen; • Christer (...) Svennerlind: Armstrong on Instantiation as Partial Identity; • Anders Tolland: Mr Darcys berättigade stolthet; • Björn Vickhoff: H-speech: the Musical Self - A Phenomenological Approach to Music & Emotion; • Dag Westerståhl: On the Aristotelian Square of Opposition; • Carl-Gustaf Wikstrand: On Pain States & Mental Causation;. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism— individualized indexical contextualism —I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement ; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that (...) attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement -data and is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of how democratic governance is possible. It analyses democracy as a laminated system consisting of three interdependent levels – the political/institutional, the social/interactional, and the psychological/intrapsychic – each of which is necessary for the others to exist. Each level is subject to a regulatory principle that is necessary for it to function appropriately. At the political/institutional level, competing political parties must be governed by the regulatory principle of ‘loser’s consent,’ in which the losing party must (...) agree to cede power to the winning party. At the social/interactional level individuals from opposing political parties must be governed by the regulatory principle of a superordinate identity as citizen, which allows them to transcend their partisan political identities. At the psychological/intrapsychic level individuals must be governed by the regulatory principle of mutuality/thirdness which allows the possibility of an alternative to the binary identities that result from the doer/done-to position. (shrink)

BackgroundThe state of the world is one with scarce medical resources where longevity is not equally distributed. Given such facts, setting priorities in health entails making difficult yet unavoidable decisions about which lives to save. The business of saving lives works on the assumption that longevity is valuable and that an early death is worse than a late death. There is a vast literature on health priorities and badness of death, separately. Surprisingly, there has been little cross-fertilisation between the academic (...) fields of priority setting and badness of death. Our aim is to connect philosophical discussions on the badness of death to contemporary debates in health priorities.DiscussionTwo questions regarding death are especially relevant to health priorities. The first question is why death is bad. Death is clearly bad for others, such as family, friends and society. Many philosophers also argue that death can be bad for those who die. This distinction is important for health priorities, because it concerns our fundamental reasons for saving lives. The second question is, ‘When is the worst time to die?’ A premature death is commonly considered worse than a late death. Thus, the number of good life years lost seems to matter to the badness of death. Concerning young individuals, some think the death of infants is worse than the death of adolescents, while others have contrary intuitions. Our claim is that to prioritise between age groups, we must consider the question of when it is worst to die.ConclusionsDeprivationism provides a more plausible approach to health priorities than Epicureanism. If Deprivationism is accepted, we will have a firmer basis for claiming that individuals, in addition to having a health loss caused by morbidity, will have a loss of good life years due to mortality. Additionally, Deprivationism highlights the importance of age and values for health priorities. Regarding age, both variants of Deprivationism imply that stillbirths are included in the Global Burden of Disease. Finally, we suggest that the Time-Relative Interest Account may serve as an alternative to the discounting and age weighting previously applied in the Global Burden of Disease. (shrink)

At least seven orphan members of the nuclear receptor superfamily are transcriptionally regulated by the steroid hormone ecdysone and expressed during the onset of Drosophila metamorphosis. A recent paper provides functions for two of these receptors, E75B and DHR3, through trans‐regulation and heterodimerization(1). DHR3 appears to function as a switch that defines the transition from a late larva to a prepupa, and E75B functions as a timer that modulates this transition. This study provides a biological function for orphan receptor interactions (...) during development. (shrink)

This article investigates the media lives of a particular class taxonomy in the Swedish press from 1945 to 1976. Invented by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 1911, the ‘social group division’ system was abandoned in the early post-war period. Around the same time, however, it gained popularity in Swedish culture and political debate. While earlier research has noted that such bureaucratic class taxonomies – as in several other Western countries – conditioned how actors understood and created new knowledge about (...) the population, this process of wider circulation remains understudied. Using insights from literature on ‘the social life of methods’ and the history of knowledge, which underline that knowledge is transformed by and transforms the contexts it circulates in, I show that print media was an arena for circulating and producing new meaning around class taxonomies. Although editorials shunned the social group division for incorrectly representing Swedish society and creating artificial class boundaries, journalists used the taxonomy to explain social structures. Furthermore, by interviewing ‘typical’ members of the different social groups, journalists made the system relatable and personal for their readers. In this context, the social groups were imagined as cultural communities, sharing cultural behaviours and preferences. Lastly, I analyse usages of the social group division in letters to the editor, which reveal that people felt they were being classified and wanted to offer their views of society, using the taxonomy in ways the experts had not intended. This study thereby contributes to the history of social taxonomies and class languages in the post-war period. (shrink)

I argue that Quine’s naturalization of Lewis’s Kantian pragmatism should be understood in terms of Lewis’s attempt to de-psychologize pragmatist epistemology. Lewis wants epistemology to be a priori in order to be distinct from psychology. Quine’s criticisms of Lewis result in a picture that weakens the distinction between epistemology and psychology. Nevertheless, Quine’s naturalized Kantian pragmatism remains far more Kantian than is widely recognized, due to what Quine retains from Lewis.

The fifteen essays in this volume represent the state of the art when it comes to the contemporary study of medieval philosophy of mind. The contributors are well-established scholars in the field who build on their previous work, and most advance an original argument in these essays. The focus is on western Christian philosophers and theologians from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and “the intricacies and varieties of the conceptual relationships among intentionality, cognition, and mental representation” in their thought. As (...) editor Gyula Klima points out, intentionality plays a role in non-cognitive as well as cognitive processes for the medievals. But when these thinkers attempted to explain the.. (shrink)

As the two comprehensive humanistic disciplines, philosophy and history have a complex interface. By ‘comprehensive’, I mean that only philosophy and history have the prerogative of being immediately and justifiably relevant to all domains of human endeavor. Thus, there is the history and philosophy of mathematics, the history and philosophy of art, the history and philosophy of religion, the history and philosophy of politics, not to mention the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, and, in qualified senses, the history (...) of history and the philosophy of philosophy. History is always immediately relevant to human endeavor because the latter aims at a coherence beyond simple behavior, yet necessarily leaves a spatio-temporal trace; philosophy is always immediately relevant because all forms of human endeavor have their primary principles—noetic, ethical, and metaphysical. Philosophy and history are necessarily interconnected not only because both are themselves human endeavors, but also because history’s orientation about coherence and philosophy’s about primacy both face, at a fundamental level, the dialectic of universal and particular induced by the hunt for intelligibility. The two are therefore led to quarrel about which really is the magistra vitæ, for both hope to be wise, i.e., intelligent and accomplished, about τἀνθρώπινα, the human things. (shrink)

A mutual fund family incubates a fund when it creates a privately subsidized fund not available to the general investing public. It destroys unsuccessful incubator funds. The few successful funds will report higher incubation returns than the market return in advertisements intended to attract money from individual investors. This practice is currently allowed by the SEC. The evidence is that incubation returns are not a good predictor of subsequent fund performance and likely serve to mislead unsuspecting investors.

This article examines implications of computer-sifted information: What happens when that information is reshuffled and used for other purposes than originally intended? Historical concepts of the philosophy of privacy are examined, essentially to demonstrate that a lack of clear precedent further confuses a fast-changing situation. The author argues that, a 100-odd years ago, advancing media technology prompted Louis Brandeis to proclaim a right to be let alone - but in the intervening years we have not been particularly effective in developing (...) proactive ethics and policy to deal with privacy issues. One case, a bill to restrict access to motor vehicle information, is cited as an example of proactive legislation; without advocating specific legislation, the author calls for increased foresight in the issue of technology and privacy. (shrink)