This paper presents a concept for pattern matching based on a parameter optimization system for approximative numerical calculation of some parameter combination under soft and hard constraints. The concept uses a non-linear parameter optimization method with an iterative variation of parameters. The paper focuses on the information modeling process to migrate problem-domain specific criteria into optimization-compatible objects suitable for a standardized parameter optimization procedure. A step-by-step transformation process is presented and implemented in object-oriented programming: classes and interfaces. The method is (...) applicable to a wide range of pattern-matching problems due to its flexibility and extensibility. (shrink)

I like Cowan's review of STM properties and especially his suggestions on the role of attention. I missed, however, a consideration of studies which provide evidence for STM properties in animals. In my commentary, I argue that such evidence can elucidate the biological basis of storage limitations, validating this view by discussing mechanisms which constrain the acquisition of serial information in songbirds.

The central question of this book is whether the assignment of government functions to the individual jurisdictions in a federal state can ensure an optimal allocation of resources and a fair income distribution. The analysis thereby gives a new answer to the old question about the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization in a federal state. It shows that fiscal decentralization is a method to disclose the preferences of currently living and future generations for local public goods, to limit the size (...) of the government, and to avoid excessive public debt finance. While the allocative branch of the government benefits from fiscal decentralization, it is difficult to obtain a distribution of incomes that differs from the outcome that the market brings along. (shrink)

We investigate the expressive power of Parikh's Game Logic interpreted in Kripke structures, and show that the syntactical alternation hierarchy of this logic is strict. This is done by encoding the winning condition for parity games of rank n. It follows that Game Logic is not captured by any finite level of the modal -calculus alternation hierarchy. Moreover, we can conclude that model checking for the -calculus is efficiently solvable iff this is possible for Game Logic.

This article improves our understanding of the reasons underlying the intellectual migration of scientists from existing cognitive domains to nascent scientific fields. To that purpose we present, first, a number of findings from the sociology of science that give different insights about scientific migration. We then attempt to bring some of these insights together under the conceptual roof of an actor-based approach linking expected utility and diffusion theory. Intellectual migration is seen as the choice of scientists who decide under uncertainty (...) and on the base of estimations about probabilities, costs, and benefits of the migration. The resulting choice model can be used as a heuristic base for further exploration of the subject. (shrink)

Dietmar Mieth (* 1940), profilierter Moraltheologe, Wissenschaftsorganisator und Meister Eckhart-Spezialist, schildert in diesem Buch seine Erfahrungen in Kirche und Gesellschaft. Die Auseinandersetzungen aus 50 Jahren, an denen der Autor selbst intensiv beteiligt war, werden dabei lebendig: von der Kindheit und Jugend in der vorkonziliaren Kirche, uber das Tubingen der spaten 60er-Jahre, die Diskussionen um die autonome Moral Alfons Auers, den Fall Pfurtner und die Kolner Erklarung, bis hin zur Grundung des Tubinger Internationalen Zentrums fur Ethik in den Wissenschaften und (...) zur ethischen Politikberatung. Ein spannendes Stuck Zeitgeschichte im Spiegel einer aussergewohnlichen Biographie! (shrink)

Normative ethics concerns the criticism and justification of morality, law, and other systems of norms. This book develops a normative ethical theory based on individuals and offers a third way beyond the dominant paradigms of Kantianism and Utilitarianism. This theory can assist us in answering concrete ethical questions. The book discusses, for example, the existence of duties to oneself, the permissibility of paternalistic decisions for others, and the status of supererogatory actions. It also considers various problems in bioethics. Key features: (...) Development of a new normative ethical theory Up-to-date overview of the topic Written in clear and comprehensible style Provides answers to concrete ethical problems Also of interest for doctors, lawyers, and economists ". (shrink)

The constitutions of the decolonized new nations were marked by the process of the devolution of power. This process had an impact on the agenda setting and arena setting embedded in these constitutions. ‘Agenda’ refers to the conduct of political affairs and ‘arena’ to the delimitation of the powers of Parliament, the design of constituencies, etc. As a special feature, federalism was introduced by several constitutions. It emerged as a device for the gradual devolution of power. In some instances it (...) proved to be a permanent asset (India), in others it was contested (Nigeria) or rejected (Rhodesia). None of the new constitutions contained adequate provisions for the civilian control of the armed forces. The armed forces were simply taken for granted and their potential political role disregarded. But in many new nations political power was soon usurped by the armed forces and constitutional government was suspended. (shrink)

Mündigkeit, verstanden als vernünftige Selbstbestimmung im Sinne einer Handlungsdisposition, sich ohne Anleitung von außen seiner Vernunft, Freiheit und Sprache zu bedienen, drückt sich in überlegungszugänglichen Entschlussfähigkeiten aufgrund eigener Willensbildungsprozesse aus. Gegenstand der in Grundzügen zu entwickelnden pädagogischen Theorie des Willens ist jene Kommunikation, die in allen Erziehungsbereichen (wie z. B. Umwelt-, Sexual- oder Spielerziehung) stattfinden kann. Ihr Ziel ist die Personwerdung. Als Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, also zur und durch Vernunft, Freiheit und Sprache, will und soll sie rationale Überlegungs- und Entschlussfähigkeiten (...) aufgrund emotionaler Bedingungen vermitteln, wobei sich - so die These - der Zu-Erziehende in jedem Erziehungsbereich einen freien und vernünftigen Willen aneignen kann. Grenzen dieser in Form von Sprachspielen stattfindenden Willenserziehung bestehen darin, dass die tatsächliche Aneignung im Sinne sozialisierender Willensbildung von außen nicht bewirkt, dagegen von Aporien der Vernunft und gesellschaftlichen Zwängen ständig behindert werden kann. (shrink)

: In the early twentieth century, psychoanalysis tries to investigate a specific logic of the appearance and the incident of what is taken to be unintended in everyday communication and human behavior. What before hardly seemed to be worth systematic research, now becomes a privileged field, in which the meaningful signs of a hidden and unwelcome past appear. For representing this new field of research Freud often makes use of archaeological metaphors. But in quoting the knowledge and the techniques of (...) archaeology, he evokes imaginary landscapes of a reappearing human past, which is not depraved and repressed but glorious and precious. This contradiction or gap between the character of analytical objects and their representation gives reason for an 'archaeological' investigation of psychoanalysis itself. To this end one of the heroes of nineteenth century archaeology, Heinrich Schliemann, will be confronted with two little works of Rudolf Virchow, in which he follows up the astonishing idea of an archaeology of refuse. Relating treasure troves and rubbish dumps it can be asked whether 'archaeological' practices in the late nineteenth century constituted a type of historical knowledge which runs counter to contemporary historicism and is crucial not only for Freud but also for today's theoretical reflections on archaeological perspectives in cultural studies. (shrink)

Dietmar Wetzel unternimmt eine diskurskritisch-vergleichenden Lektüre zweier Theorielinien der neueren Sozialphilosophie: identitäts- versus alteritätsorientierte Konzepte. Das Denken des Ethischen und des Politischen wird dabei anhand einer Beschäftigung mit Schlüsselbegriffen, Konstellationen und Figuren der Gegenwartsgesellschaft thematisch an Gerechtigkeit, Geschlecht, Dritte(m) und Gemeinschaft ausgerichtet. Soziologische Essays, dem Intellektuellen, der Hausfrau, dem Grenzpolizisten und dem Flüchtling gewidmet sind, komplementieren die Analysen. So kann gezeigt werden, daß differenztheoretische Positionen (Lévinas/Derrida) den Begriff der Gerechtigkeit um Aspekte der Fürsorge und der moralischen Gefühle erweitern müssen (...) (Benhabib, Cornell). Da im Übergang der Ich-Anderer-Beziehung zu "ordentlichen Bezügen" das Dritte eine grundlegende Rolle spielt, läßt sich Gemeinschaftsbildung nicht mehr im Sinne natural bzw. religiös begründeter Nachbarschaft (Kommunitarismus), sondern nur als stets neu zu legitimierende und variierende Kultivierung von Andersheit begreifen. (shrink)

Realism takes many forms. The aim of this paper is to show that the “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism and that to the present-day Kant’s discussion of realism has shaped the theoretical landscape of the debates over realism. Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality. The paper explores this by analysis (...) of Kant’s methodological procedure to distinguish between empirical and transcendental realism. This methodological procedure is still of great help in contemporary philosophy, although it has its limits. (shrink)

The prospect of creating and using human–animal chimeras and hybrids that are significantly human-like in their composition, phenotype, cognition, or behavior meets with divergent moral judgments: on the one side, it is claimed that such beings might be candidates for human-analogous rights to protection and care; on the other side, it is supposed that their existence might disturb fundamental natural and social orders. This paper tries to show that both positions are paradoxically intertwined: they rely on two kinds of species (...) arguments, “individual species arguments” and “group species arguments,” which formulate opposing demands but are conceptually interdependent. As a consequence, the existence of HACHs may challenge exactly those normative standards on which the protection of HACHs may eventually be based. This ethical paradox could constitute the ultimate source of the “moral confusion” that some authors have suspected HACHs to provoke. (shrink)

I present the arguments Hegel puts forward in favor of this rather challenging account of skepticism. In Section 2, I discuss the celebrated conception of “self-fulfilling skepticism” of the Phenomenology of Spirit that is supposed to overcome untrue types of cognition in order to promote “absolute knowing.” In Section 3, I debate Hegel’s more advanced view according to which genuine skepticism must be construed as dialectic.

On the Habermasial Argument of Parasitism. In this article it is argued that throughout Habermas' various treatments of the problem of 'simple imperatives' one can find a remaining contradiction: namely between identifying them on the one hand, for logical reasons, as the 'unsocial' acts they are . On the other hand, for fitting into sociological descriptions, Habermas tries to rearrange threats etc. within a so-called 'continuum' of all social actions. These difficulties can only be avoided by recognizing the entirely unsocial (...) character of certain ways of acting. This premiss is applied in an alternative analysis of perlocutions and simple imperatives. It leads to the conclusion that for the sake of logical consistency the possibility of ethical ignorance - the Kantian 'evil'? - must be brought into the categorical account of a grammatical analysis of practical statements. (shrink)

In the paper we present completeness theorems for hybrid logics, discuss the problem of finite axiomatization and study term rewriting and unification for the variety of distributive lattices and the variety of groups of exponent 2.

First we give an overview about variants of visibility and related problems. Then we prove that some guarding and covering problems are NP-hard for ortho-polygons with holes, using a so-called vertex cover technique.

In der 1970 gegründeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien veröffentlicht. Gründungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe, Günther Patzig und Wolfgang Wieland. Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von Jürgen Mittelstraß mitherausgegeben.

Conceptualism is the view that cognizers can have mental representations of the world only if they possess the adequate concepts by means of which they can specify what they represent. By contrast, non-conceptualism is the view that mental representations of the world do not necessarily presuppose concepts by means of which the content of these representations can be specified, thus cognizers can have mental representations of the world that are non-conceptual. Consequently, if conceptualism is true then non-conceptualism must be false, (...) and vice versa. This incompatibility makes the current debate over conceptualism and non-conceptualism a fundamental controversy since the range of conceptual capacities that cognizers have certainly has an impact on their mental representations of the world, on how sense perception is structured, and how external world beliefs are justified. Conceptualists and non-conceptualists alike refer to Kant as the major authoritative reference point from which they start and develop their arguments. The appeal to Kant attempts to pave the way for a robust answer to the question of whether or not there is non-conceptual content. Since the incompatibility of the conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings of Kant indicate a paradigm case, hopes have risen that the answer to the question of whether Kant is a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist might settle the contemporary controversy across the board. This volume searches for that answer. This book is based on a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies. (shrink)

The article tries to inquire a third way in normative ethics between consequentialism or utilitarianism and deontology or Kantianism. To find such a third way in normative ethics, one has to analyze the elements of these classical theories and to look if they are justified. In this article it is argued that an adequate normative ethics has to contain the following five elements: (1) normative individualism, i. e., the view that in the last instance moral norms and values can only (...) be justified by reference to the individuals concerned, as its basis; (2) consideration of the individuals’ concerns and interests—aims, desires, needs, strivings—insofar as they have a justificatory function; (3) a pluralism of references of these concerns and hence of moral norms and values to all possible elements of actions; (4) the necessity of a principle of aggregation and weighing with regard to these concerns; (5) finally, as a central principle of aggregation and weighing, the principle of relative reference to self and others, operating as a generalizing meta-principle that guides the application of concrete principles and decisions. (shrink)