In June 1947 Paul Tillich signed a contract with The University of Chicago Press for a “Systematic Theology” in two volumes. Having published the first volume in April 1951, he asked the publisher to split the second volume into two parts, which were published in 1957 as volume II and 1963 as volume III. In this article the different editions of “Systematic Theology” are described, and the economic aspects of writing and publishing this very influential academic book are explained. Many (...) unknown sources are presented. Some of them show Tillich as an author in real despair. (shrink)

By the end of April 1923, Paul Tillich’s Das System der Wissenschaften nach Gegenständen und Methoden (1981: The System of the Sciences according to Objects and Methods) was published by the German publishing house Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen. Based on numerous source documents from the publishers’ archives and particularly on the correspondence between the publishers Wilhelm and Gustav Ruprecht, hitherto unknown but now edited and commented on here, the present article explains that Tillich wrote his System of the Sciences (...) primarily for the publisher. It was Emanuel Hirsch who established the connection between them as the publishing house was looking for a new editor for their popular series Wege zur Philosophie (Ways to Philosophy), published since 1911. After Hirsch having brought Tillich into play, Wilhelm Ruprecht could convince the Berlin “Privatdozenten” to become the new editor of the series. As to the series, Tillich unfolded the concept of a comprehensive system design which covered 65 topics, i. e. forthcoming volumes. When the publisher then demanded that Tillich prove his abilities to write comprehensively in common language by providing a sample of a first issue of the series, he began to work on his System der Wissenschaften. Although this text contained all sorts of ideas and concepts, it was certainly not very well suited as an introduction to a series of popular accounts of the central themes and matters of philosophy. In the end, the System was published, although not as a volume of the series as having been announced by the publishing house in 1922, but as a text in its own right. (shrink)

Die University of Tokyo hatte mich zu einem Vortrag über die im Rahmen der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe als Band 9 (in drei Teilbänden) erscheinende Neuausgabe von Ernst Troeltschs “Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen” eingeladen. Das mir vorgegebene Thema lautete: “The Significance of Troeltsch’s Soziallehren for the Present”’. Im ersten Teil skizziere ich die Genese von Troeltschs christentumshistorischem Hauptwerk. Im zweiten Teil geht es um die zentralen Themen seines “Lieblingsbuches”. Im dritten Teil werden einige seiner handschriftlichen Zusätze und Marginalien kurz vorgestellt, (...) die die 2020 erscheinende Kritische Ausgabe der “Soziallehren” erstmals zugänglich macht. Abschließend entfalte ich eine Antwort auf die Frage, warum es sich auch heute noch lohnt, Ernst Troeltsch zu lesen. (shrink)

Definition of the problemThe concept of privacy has been astonishingly absent in the discussion about dementia care. In general, questions of privacy receive a lot of attention in nursing ethics; however, when it comes to dementia care, hardly any systematic ethical debate on the topic can be found. It almost seems as though people with dementia had lost any comprehensible interest in privacy and no longer had any private sphere that needed to be considered or protected. However, this not only (...) contradicts widespread moral intuitions but also ignores the views and needs of those affected.ArgumentsWe first outline the origins and dimensions of the concept of privacy and point out problems and limitations in the context of dementia. Especially the prevalent liberal conceptions’ dependence on the idea of autonomy poses significant challenges to an adequate conceptualization of the moral significance of privacy for people with dementia. Therefore, we subsequently explore alternative ways of conceptualizing the “value of privacy” in the context of dementia care.ConclusionAutonomy-based concepts of privacy may still be valid in the early stages of dementia. However, in the further course of the syndrome, the relevance of other normative aspects comes to the fore, especially respect for remaining personal preferences as well as objective criteria of dignity and well-being. Thus, we outline in a differentiated manner how and to what extent privacy can be of normative importance beyond the purview of autonomy and should consequently be taken into consideration in dementia care. (shrink)

Eike Bohlken stellt entsprechend der Methodik transzendentaler Philosophie die Rückfrage nach den Bedingungen von »Interkulturalität«, die er als allen Menschen zuzusprechenden Hintergrund von einer anthropologischen, semantischen und handlungsbezogenen Dimension her begreift. Der entsprechende Ansatz, der auch Fragen interkultureller Ethik mit einbezieht, versteht sich als »hypothetischer Universalismus«, der sich auf die strukturellen Voraussetzungen interkulturellen Verstehens bezieht, ohne inhaltliche Vorgaben zu machen.

This paper is an attempt to think through paranoia’s epistemic and affective features, which pervade both the worldview presented in Senecan tragedy and the inner life of many of its protagonists. Drawing upon recent literary-critical work, I argue that paranoia is temporally and epistemically ambivalent: subjects simultaneously attempt to “get ahead” of a looming cataclysm—looking to the future in an attempt to avert disaster—while inevitably “falling behind,” failing to predict or preempt the future in time to protect themselves. Much of (...) Senecan tragedy plays out paranoia’s future-oriented vigilance on the formal level. Foreshadowing, allusions, and meta-literary flourishes serve to render both readers and characters hyperaware of the earth-shattering horrors to come; however, in doing so, they also reveal that this forward-oriented bracing only serves to dredge up negative affect in advance. By contrast, I argue that Seneca’s Phoenissae thematizes in the character of Oedipus not only paranoia’s future-looking vigilance but also its inherent lagging, the failure to know and act in advance. These elements of slowness, stuckness, and delay open a space for stillness, relief, and intimacy, even within a narrative which hurtles toward cataclysm. (shrink)

In diesem Aufsatz stelle ich mir die Aufgabe, den Einfluß von Leibniz' Idee einer lingua characterica und eines calculus ratiocinator auf Gottlob Freges Projekt einer Begriffsschrift im groben Aufriß auf Grund begrifflicher Parallelen darzulegen.

Der Beitrag diskutiert, wie eine gemeinwohlorientierte Ethik der Stadt- und Raumentwicklung aussehen müsste und wie ihre Antwort auf die Probleme von Obdachlosigkeit, Wohnungsnot und Gentrifizierung lauten sollte. Um diese Fragen anzugehen, wird ein zweistufiger Begriff des Gemeinwohls zugrunde gelegt, der mit existenznotwendigen Gütern der Daseinsvorsorge einen substanziellen Kern besitzt, aber hinreichend offen ist, um den freiheitlichen und demokratischen Anforderungen prozeduralistischer Gemeinwohlauffassungen gerecht zu werden. Einem kurzen Abschnitt zu basalen Gemeinwohlpflichten der Politik und der öffentlichen Verwaltung folgt die Erörterung der Frage, (...) ob sich das Recht auf Wohnen und das viel diskutierte Recht auf Stadt auf Gemeinwohlgüter beziehen, deren Bereitstellung Mitglieder eines Gemeinwesens von Politik und öffentlicher Verwaltung erwarten dürfen. Dabei geht es auch um die Verhältnisbestimmung von politischen und wirtschaftlichen Aspekten und die Kontroverse zwischen einer moralisch-ethischen und einer ökonomisch-funktionalen Auffassung des Gemeinwohls.Das Ergebnis lautet zum einen, dass das Recht auf Wohnen als subjektives, d. h. als individuell einklagbares Recht auf Bundesebene installiert werden sollte. Zudem bedarf es der Verbesserung des Instruments der ordnungsrechtlichen Unterbringung. Dem Recht auf Stadt kann hingegen nur eine schwächere normative Kraft zugesprochen werden. Es könnte allenfalls auf kommunaler Ebene Berücksichtigung finden. Für die Ethik der öffentlichen Verwaltung lassen sich aus der Diskussion von Maßstäben wie empowerment, special assistance und Bedarfsgerechtigkeit konkrete Anhaltspunkte gewinnen: So gilt es, Menschen aus besonders verletzlichen und sozial benachteiligten Gruppen besonders darin zu unterstützen, den Zugang zu ihnen zustehenden Leistungen und Gütern auch tatsächlich wahrzunehmen. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Zum organisationalen Wandel existieren verschiedene theoretische Ansätze, welche sich u.a. durch ihren Umweltbezug unterscheiden. Der populationsökologische Ansatz erweitert diese intraorganisationale Perspektive um die Analyseebene des Kollektivs gleichartiger Organisationen. Auf dieser theoretischen Grundlage wird systematisch zwischen den drei Analyseebenen des einzelnen Sportvereins, dem Kollektiv bestehender Sportvereine sowie der Sportvereinspopulation unterschieden und werden Paneldaten aus zwei Befragungen pfälzischer Sportvereine hypothesengeleitet analysiert. Die Ergebnisse bestätigen zum einen die populationsökologischen Annahmen stabiler Kernmerkmale bei hochgradig wandlungs-, d.h. anpassungsfähigen peripheren Merkmalen in bestehenden Sportvereinen. Zum (...) anderen deuten sie darauf hin, dass sich organisationaler Wandel primär durch den Austausch von Vereinen, also auf der Populationsebene, vollzieht. (shrink)

The title of Renaud Gagné’s book hides as much as it reveals. Hyperborea, R.G.’s name for the country of the Hyperboreans, is attested in a wide variety of ancient texts on those fascinating and enigmatic people of the farthest North, of which the A. proposes a “slow reading”: this reading is also a test case in which he tries out his “anthropological philology”. “Philology” might seem too narrow a term, since R.G. does not only look at the texts that talk (...) about the Hyperboreans from Hesiod t... (shrink)

Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of ‘crisis’ tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept’s constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept of crisis (...) is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of ‘downfall’ and ‘decline’, or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis’s outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography. (shrink)

Browne, Gillett and Tweeddale propose that the use of non‐therapeutic elective ventilation (EV) to secure transplantable organs is ethically indefensible. Their argument centres around several propositions: that explicit patient consent for EV is essential, but since it is not included in the consent process for donation from the patient, using it constitutes assault; that inferring consent for EV from the consent to donate itself is ethically and logically indefensible; and that explicit consent from next‐of‐kin should neither be sought nor honoured (...) in view of the stress EV may cause to staff and families. This article examines their reasoning and suggests that it is fatally flawed. It argues further that in most cases of donation, not using EV may itself be unethical. (shrink)

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body (...) of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, I will make use of epistemic permissivism to provide a general recipe for generating so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge. I will call this class of cases permissive divergence cases. While other divergence cases have been discussed in the literature, permissive divergence cases prove themselves to be less susceptible to many of the worries raised against their competitors, while being directly built on an often-defended epistemological thesis. (shrink)

Public appeals for organ donation to an identified individual raise serious ethical questions about the role of the media, the physician, the prospective recipient, and the donor in the procurement process.

Friedrich Wilhelm Graf skizziert die Biographie des in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren uberaus einflussreichen Hamburger Systematischen Theologen Helmut Thielicke, um dann dessen Aktivitaten zur Grundung einer Zeitschrift fur Theologische Ethik zu rekonstruieren. Dabei untersucht er auch Thielickes Kontakte zu dem amerikanischen Theologen Reinhold Niebuhr und zu Paul Tillich. Vorgestellt werden die von Thielicke zunachst in den Blick genommenen Herausgeber, seine Programmentwurfe zu Aufgabe und Profil der seit Januar 1957 erscheinenden Zeitschrift fur Evangelische Ethik und das tatsachliche Herausgebergremium, dem neben (...) Thielicke protestantische Universitatstheologen wie Heinz-Dietrich Wendland, Hendrik van Oyen, Wolfgang Schweitzer sowie der kirchlich vielfaltig engagierte rheinische Unternehmer Friedrich Karrenberg und der spatere WDR-Intendant Klaus von Bismarck angehorten. Durch die dichte Analyse der in den ersten Jahrgangen der Zeitschrift fur Evangelische Ethik gefuhrten Kontroversen uber die atomare Bewaffnung sowie den Institutionenbegriff zeigt Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, dass die ZEE primar ein Organ innerprotestantischer Verstandigung sein und zugleich die politisch-soziale Gestaltungskraft des bundesdeutschen Protestantismus starken sollte. Trotz ihres dezidiert internationalen Anspruchs wurde die Zeitschrift schon bald zu einem Organ, in dem hauptsachlich nur noch deutschsprachige protestantische Theologen publizierten. (shrink)

This thesis is an investigation into the nature of epistemic justification. It brings together themes from traditional, individual-centred epistemology, and collective, group-centred epistemology. The first half of the thesis is concerned with the question of whether rationality is epistemically permissive; that is, whether one body of evidence can rationalise more than one doxastic attitude. In chapter 1, I argue that permissive cases are best understood as epistemic standard conflicts. Doing so provides us with a novel understanding of the arbitrariness objection (...) against permissivism and enables us to reduce questions about epistemic permissibility to questions about the nature of incommensurability. In chapter 2, I show that the defended understanding of permissive cases generalises by defending it against an objection from self-fulfilling beliefs. In chapter 3, I demonstrate that we can use this view of epistemic rationality to generate so-called divergence arguments which show that the epistemic status of group-level attitudes and member-level attitudes can rationally diverge. In the second half of the thesis, I develop a novel evidentialist theory of epistemic justification, called Continuous Evidentialism. Continuous Evidentialism is inspired by some general methodological reflections (chapter 4), which suggest that we should opt for a theory of epistemic justification that analyses the epistemic status of group-level attitudes and member-level attitudes continuously. According to Continuous Evidentialism, to have a justified belief is to possess sufficient evidence and utilise that evidence in an epistemically responsible way when forming the belief. While I argue that we can reduce epistemic responsibility to higher-order evidentialist requirements. In chapter 5, I develop a theory of evidence, evidence possession and epistemic basing. Chapters 6 - 8, discuss various complications of the proposed theory, having to do with the alleged defeasibility of justification (chapter 6), epistemic responsibility (chapter 7), and the proposed reduction of epistemic responsibility (chapter 8). In chapter 9, I compare Continuous Evidentialism to various extant accounts. (shrink)

Rational or epistemically justified beliefs are often said to be defeasible. That is, beliefs that have some otherwise justification conferring property can lose their epistemic status because they are defeated by some evidence possessed by the believer or due to some external facts about the believer’s epistemic environment. Accordingly, many have argued that we need to add a so-called no defeater clause to any theory of epistemic justification. In this paper, I will survey various possible evidentialist as well as responsibilitst (...) no-defeater clauses and develop a general taxonomy of defeater cases against which these clauses can be tested. Despite influential arguments that evidentialist understandings of justification are ill-equipped to handle the full spectrum of defeater cases, I will demonstrate that evidentialism has the right tools to make sense of all kinds of defeaters, including propositional and normative defeaters. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the proposed solution avoids recently influential objections against the notion of defeat. (shrink)

Es ist allgemein bekannt, daß Frege stark von Leibniz beeinflußt worden ist; jedoch behauptet Patzig (Frege, Leibniz u. d. sogenannte ,lingua characteristica universalis', in: Studia Leibnitiana, Suppl., vol. III no. 3 (1969), pp. 103-112), daß seine Leibniz-Kenntnisse nur auf indirekten Quellen fußten und im Grunde äußerst gering waren. Dieser Aufsatz soll zeigen, daß solche und ähnliche Behauptungen auf ungenügender Kenntnis von Freges Schriften beruhen.

Substitute decision-makers for severely disabled neonates who can be kept alive but who will require constant medical interventions and will die at the latest in their teens are faced with a difficult decision when trying to decide whether to keep the infant alive. By and large, the primary focus of their decision-making centers on what is in the best interests of the newborn. The best-interests criterion, in turn, is importantly conditioned by quality-of-life considerations. However, the concept of quality of life (...) is logically and ethically different for patients with a developing as opposed to a developed awareness. Unfortunately, this difference is ignored by current quality-of-life considerations, there are no quality-of-life measures that take this difference into account, and decision-making proceeds entirely without acknowledging this fact. This note outlines why this is a problem and why there is a need for a new set of tools that incorporates this distinction if the substitute decision-makers are to apply the best-interest criterion in a meaningful way. (shrink)

Monitoring and assistive technologies (MATs) are being used more frequently in healthcare. A central ethical concern is the compatibility of these systems with the moral preferences of their users—an issue especially relevant to participatory approaches within the ethics-by-design debate. However, users’ incapacity to communicate preferences or to participate in design processes, e.g., due to dementia, presents a hurdle for participatory ethics-by-design approaches. In this paper, we explore the question of how the value preferences of users in the field of dementia (...) care can be integrated into AI-based MATs. First, we briefly introduce different ethics-by-design approaches and explain the challenges they face in dementia care. Next, we introduce a novel approach for addressing these challenges. Through a qualitative content analysis of interviews with persons with dementia and their family caregivers (n = 27), we identified multiple ideal–typical value preference profiles. We then applied these profiles in a computer simulation, by which we also introduce the concept of ethical compliance quantification to scale the moral preferences of the interviewees for the simulation. Finally, we discuss study results, the advantages of using computer simulations, and general study limitations before drawing conclusions for further research. The study contributes to the ongoing debate on participatory ethics-by-design by defining on the basis of empirical data ideal–typical value preference frameworks that can be used to guide MAT actions and their outcomes. Going forward, MAT end-users with dementia and other communication-impaired persons could be enabled to choose a value profile that best fits their moral preferences. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzscheforschung Jahrgang: 21 Heft: 1 Seiten: 197-208.