BackgroundValue sensitivity – the ability to recognize value-related issues when they arise in practice – is an indispensable competence for medical practitioners to enter decision-making processes related to ethical questions. However, the psychological competence of value sensitivity is seldom an explicit subject in the training of medical professionals. In this contribution, we outline the traditional concept of moral sensitivity in medicine and its revised form conceptualized as value sensitivity and we propose an instrument that measures value sensitivity.MethodsWe developed an instrument (...) for assessing the sensitivity for three value groups in a four step procedure: 1) value identification ; 2) value representation ; 3) vignette construction and quality evaluation ; and 4) instrument validation by comparing nursing professionals with hospital managers.ResultsWe find that nursing professionals recognize and ascribe importance to principle-related issues more than professionals from hospital management. The latter are more likely to recognize and ascribe importance to strategy-related issues.ConclusionsThese hypothesis-driven results demonstrate the discriminatory power of our newly developed instrument, which makes it useful not only for health care professionals in practice but for students and people working in the clinical context as well. (shrink)

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) represents a key area of neuromodulation that has gained wide adoption for the treatment of neurological and experimental testing for psychiatric disorders. It is associated with specific therapeutic effects based on the precision of an evolving mechanistic neuroscientific understanding. At the same time, there are obstacles to achieving symptom relief because of the incompleteness of such an understanding. These obstacles are at least in part based on the complexity of neuropsychiatric disorders and the incompleteness of DBS (...) devices to represent prosthetics that modulate the breadth of pathological processes implicated in these disorders. Neuroprostheses, such as an implanted DBS system, can have vast effects on subjects in addition to the specific neuropsychiatric changes they are intended to produce. These effects largely represent blind spots in the current debate on neuromodulation. Anthropological accounts can illustrate the broad existential dimensions of patients’ illness and responses to neural implants. In combination with current neuroscientific understanding, neuropsychiatric anthropology may illuminate the possibilities and limits of neurodevices as technical “world enablers”. (shrink)

I describe a thought experiment in which an agent must choose between suffering a greater pain in the past or a lesser pain in the future. This case demonstrates that the ‘temporal value asymmetry’ – our disposition to attribute greater significance to future pleasures and pains than to past – can have consequences for the rationality of actions as well as attitudes. This fact, I argue, blocks attempts to vindicate the temporal value asymmetry as a useful heuristic tied to the (...) asymmetry of causation. Since the two standard arguments for the rationality of the temporal value asymmetry appeal to causal asymmetry and the passage of time respectively, the failure of the causal asymmetry explanation suggests that the B-theory, which rejects temporal passage, has substantial revisionary implications concerning our attitudes toward past and future experience. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

The Paris Climate Agreement is an important step for international climate policy, but the compensation for negative effects of climate change based on clear assignment of responsibilities remains highly debated. From both a policy and a science perspective, it is unclear how responsibilities should be defined and on what evidence base. We explore different normative principles of justice relevant to climate change impacts, and ask how different forms of causal evidence of impacts drawn from detection and attribution research could inform (...) policy approaches in accordance with justice considerations. We reveal a procedural injustice based on the imbalance of observations and knowledge of impacts between developed and developing countries. This type of injustice needs to be considered in policy negotiations and decisions, and efforts strengthened to reduce it. (shrink)

In komplexen Gesellschaften muss man sich im Arbeits- und Privatleben auf weit mehr Personen verlassen, als man deren Vertrauenswürdigkeit jemals überprüfen könnte. Dies steht im scharfen Kontrast zum wachsenden Misstrauen in die Leistungsträger*innen aus Wissenschaft, Medien und Politik. Im Zentrum dieses Gegensatzes steht die Figur des Experten. Doch was sind Experten*innen und wie kann man sie erkennen? Christian Quast widmet sich diesen Fragen aus philosophischer Perspektive. Eine zentrale These lautet, dass trotz des unvermeidlichen Vertrauens in Expert*innen, sich diese auch (...) dem ihnen entgegengebrachten Vertrauen als »würdig« erweisen müssen. Expertise ist also nicht einfach mit dem Besitz bestimmter Kompetenzen zu verwechseln, sondern ist ein provisorischer Status, der entzogen werden kann, sobald Expert*innen sich nicht in verantwortlicher Weise verhalten. (shrink)

This article presents how the act of falling has been used as a metaphor for invention within avant-garde art and aesthetics. It takes Lars von Trier’s documentary The Five Obstacles (2003) as its point of departure and seeks to historically contextualize the figure of falling by discussing Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques’/‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (1955 [1855–1857]). The article also discusses the fascination with falling in early cinema, stressing how (...) cinematic representations of the fall highlight the new medias potential for grasping general modern conditions like motion, speed and contingency. To think of art in terms of falling makes it possible to see a link between cinematic popular culture and so called high modernism. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationship between control and contingency within film aesthetics in the digital age. I will also discuss the aesthetics of Oulipo writers like George Perec and Raymond Queneau, and artists like Jackson Pollock and John Cage as exponents of what can be called an aesthetics of contingency. (shrink)

Ellen Furlong and Laurie Santos helpfully summarize a number of fascinating studies of certain influences on both human and monkey behavior. As someone who works primarily in philosophy, I am not in a position to dispute the details of the studies themselves. But in this brief commentary I do want to raise some questions about the inferences Furlong and Santos make on the basis of those studies. In general, I worry that they may be overreaching beyond what their own data (...) suggests. (shrink)

This book presents adaptive logics as an intuitive and powerful framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. It examines various contexts in which defeasible reasoning is useful and offers a compact introduction into adaptive logics. The author first familiarizes readers with defeasible reasoning, the adaptive logics framework, combinations of adaptive logics, and a range of useful meta-theoretic properties. He then offers a systematic study of adaptive logics based on various applications. The book presents formal models for defeasible reasoning stemming from different contexts, (...) such as default reasoning, argumentation, and normative reasoning. It highlights various meta-theoretic advantages of adaptive logics over other logics or logical frameworks that model defeasible reasoning. In this way the book substantiates the status of adaptive logics as a generic formal framework for defeasible reasoning. (shrink)

Revanche und Rache im Kleinen und Großen sind alltägliche Phänomene, die sich bis hin zu stabilen Feindschaftsbeziehungen ausweiten können. Sie beruhen auf Prinzipien des Tauschhandels, wie der Autor darlegt, allerdings mit der Neigung, exzessiv zu entgleisen. In Auseinandersetzung mit Freuds Konzept des »narzisstischen Typus der Objektwahl« und mit seinem zentralen Begriff der »Ersetzbarkeit« entwickelt der Autor die Hypothese, dass die im Rachemodus stattfindende spiegelbildliche Umkehrung von Schmerz und Verlust als Versuch aufgefasst werden kann, jenem inkommensurablen Rest in uns selbst und (...) im Gegenüber nicht begegnen zu müssen, der sich weder aneignen noch ersetzen lässt, den Freud als »Ding« bezeichnet hat und der mit Kants Begriff der »Würde« zusammengedacht werden kann. (shrink)

Am Vorabend von Nietzsches 175. Geburtstag scheint eine Zwischenbilanz angebracht, eine Art Einfuhrung in das Wichtigste an seinem Werk, dasjenige also, was dabei hilft, Nietzsche als langst noch nicht ausgeschopften "Philosophen der Zukunft" auszuweisen im Blick auf seine Intention. Dies geschieht - in Teil I - mit Blick auf Nietzsches Wahrheitstheorie; seine Metaphysikkritik und das ihr innewohnende Konzept einer "anderen Vernunft"; seinem Konzept einer "neuen Aufklarung" a la Voltaire; sowie die implizite Padagogik in seiner Philosophie, zutage tretend in seinem Ubermenschenkonstrukt (...) als Teil einer "Philosophie der Zukunft". In Teil II interessiert die Nietzscherezeption von ihren Anfangen in den 1890er Jahren uber das Nietzschebild im Dritten Reich bis nach 1945 unter besonderer Beachtung von Nietzsches - von seiner Schwester unterschlagenen - Position gegenuber dem "Hitlervorlaufer" Theodor Fritsch. Damit sind die Grundlagen gelegt fur ein Kapitel zum Thema Nietzsche und die Neue Rechte, dem abschliessend ein Kapitel zu Nietzsche und Donald Trump folgt. (shrink)

The proteins that are implicated in the basal transcription of protein coding genes have now been identified. Although little is known about their function, recent data demonstrate the ability of these proteins, previously called class II transcription factors, to participate in other reactions: TBP, the TATA‐box binding factor, is involved in class I and III transcription, while TFIIH has been shown to possess components that are involved in the DNA repair mechanism. The involvement of some if not all of the (...) TFIIH subunits in transcription and repair may explain the heterogeneity of the various and sometimes completely unrelated symptoms observed in xeroderma pigmentosum, Cockayne Syndrome and trichothiodystrophy disorders. (shrink)

My object is to suggest some ways of amplifying and applying Bochenski's account, 1 in order to bring out its value for philosophical investigation of the doctrines of particular religious communities.

This book explores the influence of ubuntu on South Africa’s post-apartheid transitional justice mechanism, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and—in contrast to ethnophilosophy—takes differences, historical developments, and social contexts seriously.

ʻDurch Dein Wort ward jegliches Ding!ʼ / ʻThrough Thy Word All Things Were Made!ʼ: 2. Mandäistische und samaritanistische Tagung. Edited by Rainer Voigt. Mandäistische Forschungen, vol. 4. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. x + 393, illus. €98.