The essays in this collection have been written for Gerd Buchdahl, by colleagues, students and friends, and are self-standing pieces of original research which have as their main concern the metaphysics and philosophy of science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They focus on issues about the development of philosophical and scientific thought which are raised by or in the work of such as Bernoulli, Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Leibniz, Maclaurin, Priestly, Schelling, Vico. Apart from the initial bio-bibliographical piece and (...) those by Robert Butts and Michael Power, they do not discuss Buchdahl or his ideas in any systematic, lengthy, or detailed way. But they are collected under a title which alludes to the book, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant (1969), which is central in the corpus of his work, and deal with the period and some of the topics with which that book deals. (shrink)

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart invites readers to embark on a new journey into a land of rationality that differs from the familiar territory of cognitive science and economics. Traditional views of rationality tend to see decision makers as possessing superhuman powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and all of eternity in which to ponder choices. To understand decisions in the real world, we need a different, more psychologically plausible notion of rationality, and this book provides it. It is about (...) fast and frugal heuristics--simple rules for making decisions when time is pressing and deep thought an unaffordable luxury. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? Can judgments based simply on one good reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? Simple Heuristics explores these questions, developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analyses. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can produce adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop out rates, and playing the stock market. As an interdisciplinary work that is both useful and engaging, this book will appeal to a wide audience. It is ideal for researchers in cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, as well as in economics and artificial intelligence. It will also inspire anyone interested in simply making good decisions. (shrink)

In the same way as the quantum no-cloning theorem and quantum key distribution in two preceding papers, entanglement-assisted quantum teleportation and Grover’s search algorithm are generalized by transferring them to an abstract setting, including usual quantum mechanics as a special case. This again shows that a much more general and abstract access to these quantum mechanical features is possible than commonly thought. A non-classical extension of conditional probability and, particularly, a very special type of state-independent conditional probability are used instead (...) of Hilbert spaces and wavefunctions. (shrink)

Together, these collected papers develop the idea that human thinking - from scientific creativity to simply understanding what a positive HIV test means - "happens" partly outside the mind.".

This volume collects Gigerenzer's recent articles on the psychology of rationality. This volume should appeal, like the earlier volumes, to a broad mixture of cognitive psychologists, philosophers, economists, and others who study decision making.

A demarcation between kant's general metaphysics (transcendental principles) and his special metaphysics is attempted, through a discussion of kant's three accounts of lawlikeness, 'transcendental', 'empirical' and 'metaphysical'. the distinctions are defended via a number of 'indicators' in kant's writings, and the 'looseness of fit' between the different types of lawlikeness is discussed.

The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but (...) in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines. (shrink)

Humans and animals make inferences about the world under limited time and knowledge. In contrast, many models of rational inference treat the mind as a Laplacean Demon, equipped with unlimited time, knowledge, and computational might. Following H. Simon's notion of satisficing, the authors have proposed a family of algorithms based on a simple psychological mechanism: one-reason decision making. These fast and frugal algorithms violate fundamental tenets of classical rationality: They neither look up nor integrate all information. By computer simulation, the (...) authors held a competition between the satisficing "Take The Best" algorithm and various "rational" inference procedures. The Take The Best algorithm matched or outperformed all competitors in inferential speed and accuracy. This result is an existence proof that cognitive mechanisms capable of successful performance in the real world do not need to satisfy the classical norms of rational inference. (shrink)

“This is surely the ultimate expression of the top-down approach to consciousness, written with Sommerhoff's characteristic clarity and precision. It says far more than other books four times the size of this admirably concise volume. This book is destined to become a pillar of the subject.” —Rodney Cotterill, Technical University of Denmark The problem of consciousness has been described as a mystery about which we are still in a terrible muddle and in Understanding Consciousness: Its Function and Brain Processes, the (...) author attempts to unravel this mystery by offering a clarification of the main concepts related to consciousness, and positing a comprehensive biological explanation. Consequently, this book will be ideal for a wide-range of upper level undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The author interprets consciousness as a property that can be possessed by many creatures lacking a language faculty and comprises all of the following: awareness of the surrounding world; awareness of the self as an entity; and awareness of such things as thoughts and feelings. He argues that a biological approach can achieve both the necessary conceptual clarifications and a joint explanation of these divisions of awareness in terms of just two accurately defined concepts of 'internal representation' and two empirically supported assumptions about the functional architecture of a specific set of brain processes. Despite this striking simplicity, his model covers these divisions of awareness both as objective faculties of the brain and as subjective experience. These conclusions are applied to a broad range of fundamental questions, including the biological rationale of subjective experience and where consciousness resides in the neural networks. (shrink)

Zwischen 1992 und 2008 erschienen in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung 133 Buchbesprechungen aus der Feder von Gerd Roellecke, der 2011 verstarb. Die in diesem Band nachgedruckte Auswahl bietet ein Panorama wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse, philosophischer Gedanken und politischer Standpunkte im Spiegel der pointierten Urteile Roelleckes. Den zeithistorischen Hintergrund bildet die Neuorientierung Deutschlands und Europas in den Jahren zwischen Wiedervereinigung und globaler Finanzkrise. Der Mannheimer Staatsrechtslehrer pruft Bucher aus allen Fachern, die sich im weitesten Sinne mit der Verfassung des sozialen Lebens beschaftigen, (...) von der Rechtsphilosophie bis zur Geschichtswissenschaft. Den roten Faden bildet in Anknupfung an Niklas Luhmann ein gesellschaftstheoretisches Interesse an den Uberlebensbedingungen der modernen Zivilisation. Kuriose Zeitzeugnisse sind fur den Kritiker nicht weniger aufschlussreich als epochemachende Standardwerke. Durch die Kunst der witzigen Zuspitzung ladt Roellecke zum Widerspruch ein - damit die Aufklarung weitergeht. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to analyse whether and to what extent the network concept has become the Leitbild of an emerging new economy. The analysis is based on a company survey conducted in eight European territories. There is empirical evidence that only a minority of companies have applied the network concept as a dominant restructuring model, while various types of Fordism are still influencing companies' view on efficient techno-organisational forms. The regional analysis demonstrates that there is not only (...) one path into an informational economy. Some territories still stick to low-tech Fordism, while others apply a technology-based flexi-Fordism, in which ICT functions as a key mechanism to make Fordist structures more flexible. Only in a minority of territories is an informational network economy emerging in which ICT has the function of enabling and supporting communication and co-operation within decentralised organisational forms. (shrink)

In this volume the author tackles this problem in a rigorous analysis which begins with the general dynamics of living systems and leads the reader step-by-step ...

Business ethics of innovation strives to give orientation in settings where new products, new markets, new environments are predominant. The provision of new products and solutions is inseparably intertwined with the consequences of their use. These can be manifold and in some cases an (unwanted) consequence might even preclude them from being used. A case in point is illustrated by an example from the pharmaceutical industry.

Der Aufsatz stellt Leben und Werk des bedeutenden deutschen Rechtswissenschaftlers und Philosophen Arthur Baumgarten dar, der neben Gustav Radbruch einer der führenden sozialliberalen Juristen und Philosophen in der Weimarer Republik war und gegen die nationale Isolierung der deutschen Philosophie seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg früh die angloamerikanische Philosophie aufgenommen hatte. So zeichnete er intellektualistische und utilitaristische Theorielinien vor, die in der deutschen Philosophie erst seit den sechziger Jahren Einfluss gewannen. In engem kollegialem Kontakt war Baumgarten mit Hans Driesch und Helmuth Plessner (...) verbunden.Seine Philosophie verband Baumgarten gemäß empiristischer Tradition vor allem mit der Psychologie. Daraus ergab sich auf der Grundlage einer sich auf Schopenhauer beziehenden Antinomik die Konzentration der Philosophie in einer sensualistischen Moralphilosophie, deren empiristische Partikularität Baumgarten in einer erfahrungsgeleiteten Metaphysik zusammenfasste. In seiner Rechtsphilosophie bietet die Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von Geltung der Positivität des Rechts gegenüber der Geltung moralischer Normen besonderes Interesse. (shrink)

El presente artículo describe el impacto en las universidades del impulso aportado por la Conferencia sobre “Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo” de Río de Janeiro en el año 1992, que incorporó un capítulo sobre el rol de la “ciencia al servicio del Desarrollo Sustentable”. Tras esto, el primer intento por incorporar este tema lo emprendió la Conferencia Europea de Rectores de Universidades (CRE) a través del programa COPERNICUS, que se convirtió para más de 300 universidades europeas en la base para una (...) política universitaria sustentable. El artículo ejemplariza este proceso en la Universidad de Lüneburg. (shrink)