BackgroundEverybody has the right to decide whether to receive specific medical treatment or not and to provide their free, prior and informed consent to do so. As dementia progresses, people with Alzheimer’s dementia (PwAD) can lose their capacity to provide informed consent to complex medical treatment. When the capacity to consent is lost, the autonomy of the affected person can only be guaranteed when an interpretable and valid advance directive exists. Advance directives are not yet common in Germany, and their (...) validity is often questionable. Once the dementia diagnosis has been made, it is assumed to be too late to write an advance directive. One approach used to support the completion of advance directives is ‘Respecting Choices’®—an internationally recognised, evidence-based model of Advance Care Planning (ACP), which, until now, has not been evaluated for the target group of PwAD. This study’s aims include (a) to investigate the proportion of valid advance directives in a memory clinic population of persons with suspected AD, (b) to determine the predictors of valid advance directives, and (c) to examine whether the offer of ACP can increase the proportion of valid advance directives in PwAD.MethodWe intend to recruit at leastN = 250 participants from two memory clinics in 50 consecutive weeks. Of these, the first 25 weeks constitute the baseline phase (no offer of ACP), the following 25 weeks constitute the intervention phase (offer of ACP). The existence and validity of an advance directive will be assessed twice (before and after the memory clinic appointment). Moreover, potential predictors of valid advance directives are assessed.DiscussionThe results of this study will enhance the development of consent procedures for advance directives of PwAD based on the ACP/Respecting Choices (R) approach. Therefore, this project contributes towards increasing the autonomy and inclusion of PwAD and the widespread acceptance of valid advance directives in PwAD.Trial RegistrationDRKS, DRKS00026691, registered 15th of October 2021,https://www.drks.de/drks_web/navigate.do?navigationId=trial.HTML&TRIAL_ID=DRKS00026691. (shrink)

BackgroundThe UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the reformed guardianship law in Germany, require that persons with a disability, including people with dementia in Alzheimer’s disease (PwAD), are supported in making self-determined decisions. This support is achieved through communication. While content-related communication is a deficit of PwAD, relational aspects of communication are a resource. Research in supported decision-making (SDM) has investigated the effectiveness of different content-related support strategies for PwAD but has only succeeded in improving understanding, (...) which, although one criterion of capacity to consent, is not sufficient to ensure overall capacity to consent. The aim of the ‘spatial intervention study’ of the DECIDE project is to examine an innovative resource-oriented SDM approach that focuses on relational aspects. We hypothesise that talking to PwAD in their familiar home setting (as opposed to a clinical setting) will reduce the complexity of the decision-making process and enhance overall capacity to consent. MethodsPeople with a suspected or confirmed diagnosis of dementia in Alzheimer’s disease will be recruited from two memory clinics (N = 80). We will use a randomised crossover design to investigate the intervention effect of the decision-making place on capacity to consent. Besides reasoning capacity, which is part of overall capacity to consent and will be the primary outcome, various secondary outcomes (e.g., other aspects of capacity to consent, subjective task complexity, decisional conflict) and suspected moderating or mediating variables (e.g., meaning of home, demographic characteristics) will be assessed.DiscussionThe results of the study will be used to develop a new SDM strategy that is based on relational resources for PwAD. If a change in location achieves the anticipated improvement in capacity to consent, future research should focus on implementing this SDM strategy in a cost-effective manner in clinical practice.Trial registration: DRKS00030799. (shrink)

1. I am, in fact, a person – Moralischer Status von KI 2. Superintelligenz – Ende oder Rettung der Menschheit? 3. Diskriminierung – KI als Ursache oder Lösung? -/- Authors: Dominik Balg, Larissa Bolte, Anne Burkard, Jan Constantin, Leonard Dung, Jürn Gottschalk, Kerstin Gregor-Gehrmann, Isabelle Guntermann und Katharina Schulz.

Der enorme Erfolg der Naturwissenschaften fuhrte zugleich zu der vorherrschenden Auffassung, dass alles Wesentliche in der Welt naturwissenschaftlich erfasst werden kann. Auch lebensweltliche Phanomene sollen sich in dieser Perspektive prinzipiell auf kausal-funktionale Strukturen der Natur zuruckfuhren lassen. Die Beitrager dieses Bandes diskutieren diese reduktionistische Auffassung kritisch und zeigen, wie differenziert das Verhaltnis von Lebenswelt und naturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive ist. Mit Beitragen von Stefan Bauberger, Wolf-Jurgen Cramm, Thomas Fuchs, Stephan Gratzel, Michael Hampe, Matthias Jung, Anton Friedrich Koch, Uwe Meixner, Tobias Muller, Hans-Dieter (...) Mutschler und Gregor Schiemann. (shrink)

Indem dieser Band sich auf das Verhältnis von Naturerkennen und Natursein konzentriert, thematisiert er einen wesentlichen Ausschnitt aus dem weiten Spektrum von Böhmes philosophischer Arbeit. Um die Naturthematik möglichst breit zu entfalten und für Querverbindungen offenzuhalten, ist der vorliegende Band in drei Abschnitte gegliedert. Im ersten Abschnitt stehen Charakter und Reichweite der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis von Natur im Mittelpunkt. Der zweite Teil des Bandes stellt alternative Perspektiven auf Natur vor. Im dritten Teil schließlich stehen der Mensch und sein Verhältnis zu sich (...) selbst im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchungen. Inhaltsverzeichnis Krohn, Wolfgang: Wissenschaftsentwicklung zwischen Dezentrierung und Dekonstruktion. Stehr, Nico: Von den Grenzen der Macht wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis. Schäfer, Wolf: Zweifel am Ende des Baconschen Zeitalters. Kamper, Dietmar: Wissen ist Ohnmacht. Macht ist Unwissen. Gamm, der Technik. Janich, Peter: Zeit und Natur. Kimmerle, Heinz: »Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird«. Wie kann Zeit Zeit werden? Schiemann, Gregor: Natur auf dem Rückzug. Zur Relevanz der aristotelischen Unterscheidung von Natur und Technik. Hauskeller, Michael: Ist Schönheit eine Atmosphäre?. Zur Bestimmung des landschaftlich Schönen. Schmitz, Hermann: Situationen und Atmosphären. Zur Ästhetik und Onthologie bei Gernot Böhme. Rehmann-Sutter, Christoph: Über Relationalität. Was ist das »Ökologische« in der Naturästhetik? Meyer-Abich, Klaus Michael: Erinnerung an die natürliche Mitwelt. Andreas-Griesebach, Manon: Idee plus Erfahrung. Goethes Begründung eines neuen Typs von Naturwissenschaft. Engelhardt, Dietrich von: Madame de Stael über Naturphilosophie, Naturwissenschaft und Medizin in De l'Allemagne. Deneke, Michael: Schramm, Engelbert: »Soziale Naturwissenschaft«. Zwischen Sozialwissenschaften und Naturwissenschaften. Böhme, Hartmut: Enthüllen und Verhüllen des Körpers. Biblische, mythische und künstlerische Deutungen des Nackten. Lippe, Rudolf zur: Eine Logik des gestischen Wissens. Müller, Rudolf Wolfgang: Gernot Böhme - Anima naturaliter japonica. Hoffmann, Gisbert: Das menschliche Sein als mediales. Martens, Ekkehard: »Natürlich« denken?. Heideggers Pseudosokratismus als Irrationalismus. Fleischer, Helmut: Naturalität ohne Naturalismus. Zum lebensweltlichen Fundus jeder höheren Erkenntnis-Artistik. Gerhard: Technik als Medium. Grundlinien einer Philosophie. (shrink)

Prompted by recent recognitions of the omnipresence of horizontal gene transfer among microbial species and the associated emphasis on exchange, rather than isolation, as the driving force of evolution, this essay will reflect on hybridization as one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century biology. I will argue that an emphasis on horizontal exchange was already endorsed by ‘biology’ when it came into being around 1800 and was brought to full fruition with the emergence of genetics in 1900. The true revolution (...) in nineteenth-century life sciences, I maintain, consisted in a fundamental shift in ontology, which eroded the boundaries between individual and species, and allowed biologists to move up and down the scale of organic complexity. Life became a property extending both ‘downwards’, to the parts that organisms were composed of, as well as ‘upwards’, to the collective entities constituted by the relations of exchange and interaction that organisms engage in to reproduce. This mode of thinking was crystallized by Gregor Mendel and consolidated in the late nineteenth-century conjunction of biochemistry, microbiology and breeding in agro-industrial settings. This conjunction and its implications are especially exemplified by Wilhelm Johannsen’s and Martinus Beijerinck’s work on pure lines and cultures. An understanding of the subsequent constraints imposed by the evolutionary synthesis of the twentieth century on models of genetic systems may require us to rethink the history of biology and displace Darwin’s theory of natural selection from that history’s centre. (shrink)

The cell is not only the structural, physiological, and developmental unit of life, but also the reproductive one. So far, however, this aspect of the cell has received little attention from historians and philosophers of biology. I will argue that cell theory had far-reaching consequences for how biologists conceptualized the reproductive relationships between germs and adult organisms. Cell theory, as formulated by Theodor Schwann in 1839, implied that this relationship was a specific and lawful one, that is, that germs of (...) a certain kind, all else being equal, would produce adult organisms of the same kind, and vice versa. Questions of preformation and epigenesis took on a new meaning under this presupposition. The question then became one of whether cells could be considered as autonomous agents producing adult organisms of a given species, or whether they were the product of external, organizing forces and thus only a stage in the development of the whole organism. This question became an important issue for nineteenth-century biology. As I will demonstrate, it was the view of cells as autonomous agents which helped both Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to think of inheritance as a lawful process. (shrink)

Summary In 1979, Robert C. Olby published an article titled ?Mendel no Mendelian??, in which he questioned commonly held views that Gregor Mendel (1822?1884) laid the foundations for modern genetics. According to Olby, and other historians of science who have since followed him, Mendel worked within the tradition of so-called hybridists, who were interested in the evolutionary role of hybrids rather than in laws of inheritance. We propose instead to view the hybridist tradition as an experimental programme characterized by (...) a dynamic development that inadvertently led to a focus on the inheritance of individual traits. Through a careful analysis of publications on hybridization by Carl Linnaeus (1707?1778), Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter (1733?1806), Carl Friedrich Gärtner (1772?1850), and finally Mendel himself, we will show that this development consisted in repeated reclassifications of hybrids to accommodate anomalies, which in the end allowed Mendel to draw analogies between whole organisms, individual traits, and ?elements? contained in reproductive cells. Mendel's achievement was a product of normal science, and yet a revolutionary step forward. This also explains why, in 1900, when the report he gave on his experiments was ?rediscovered?, Mendel could be read as a ?Mendelian? (shrink)

Média a priori étranger à l’univers d’un cours universitaire en gestion des ressources humaines, la bande dessinée peut pourtant constituer un outil précieux permettant une distanciation et un décalage des représentations habituelles des étudiants. L’objectif de cet article est de décrire l’utilisation de l’album Obélix et Compagnie comme métaphore de la place du travail dans la société, et d’en discuter les apports et les limites.Although comic strips are, on the face of it, alien to the world of university classes in (...) human resources management, they can become a valuable tool in helping students to achieve the necessary distance from their usual representations. This article describes the use of the album “Obélix et Compagnie” as a metaphor of the workplace in society, and to discuss its contributions and limitations. (shrink)

This volume draws on an expanded field of bioethical, sociological and anthropological research, to set a new agenda for discussing the ethics of disclosing prognostic genetic information.

Die Herausforderung durch "das Neue" hat sich zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts noch einmal entscheidend verschärft. Bio-, Nano- und Medienwissenschaftler verkünden zum wiederholten Male Veränderungen, die das Gesicht und die Ordnung der "Welt" tiefgreifend umgestalten werden. Futurologen sprechen sogar von einer "zweiten Evolution", die sich bereits jetzt ankündige. Die Wahrnehmung des Neuen ist aber selbst eine historische Variable. Deshalb werden in diesem Bande zwei paradigmatische Typen von Gesellschaften auf ihren Umfang mit dem Neuen hin untersucht: eine traditionale, die Antike, und (...) eine modernisierende, die Renaissance. Inhaltlich geht es in beiden Bereichen um Fragen der Kunst- und Literaturtheorie, der ästhetischen und politischen Praxis, der gesellschaftlichen Herausforderungen, die das Neue begleiten, bis hin zu dem direkten Vergleich zweier herausragender Gestalten der beiden Epochen: Augustus und Cosimo di Medici. Dabei werden in den Aufsätzen von Altertumswissenschaftlern und Spezialisten für die Renaissance Konzepte unterschiedlicher historischer Gesellschaften nach ihren mentalen Dispositionen und Methoden befragt, um Traditionsbrüche, Innovationen sowie Imaginationen "des Neuen" zu reflektieren. (shrink)

Summary According to the Redundance Theory of Truth, the utterance it is true thatp means nothing more than simply ‘p’. So the utterance is true would be meaningless, redundant. The Redundance Theory overlooks that the the predicate true can be used in two applications: (a) as anassertion of the justness of a proposition, (b) as ajudgement of the justness of a proposition. (The word justness in this context means the correspondance of a proposition with reality according to the Theory of (...) Correspondence.) The explicitassertion of the justness is indeed superfluous as it is implicitly included in the proposition. Thejudgement of the justness of a proposition, however, cannot be included in the proposition analytically. In this way, the utterance it is true thatp does not only mean ‘p’ but the assertion that is implicitly included in the proposition ‘p’ (= ‘p’ is true ) is true . Analogous: the utterance it is false that ‘p’ means the assertion that is implicitly included in the proposition ‘p’ (= ‘p’ is true ) is false . A judgement like this exceeds the content of a proposition and so cannot be redundant. Although in some context the words true and false may be used in their application an an assertion because of stylistic reasons, they are relevant for any theory of truth only in their application as a judgment, which cannot be contested by the reproach of redundance. The claim of the Redundance Theory that the concept of truth is meaningless and superfluous must be refused. (shrink)

Thomas & Karmiloff- Smith provide evidence from computational modeling against modular assumptions of “Residual Normality” in developmental disorders. Even though I agree with their criticism, I find their choice of empirical evidence disappointing. Cognitive neuroscience cannot as yet provide a complete understanding of most developmental disorders, but what is known is more than enough to debunk the idea of RN.

The logical theory of branching space-times, which is intended to provide a framework for studying objective indeterminism, remains at a certain distance from the discussion of space-time theories in the philosophy of physics. In a welcome attempt to clarify the connection, Earman has recently found fault with the branching approach and suggested ``pruning some branches from branching space-time''. The present note identifies the different---order theoretic vs. topological---points of view of both discussion as a reason for certain misunderstandings, and tries to (...) remove them. Most importantly, we give a novel, topological criterion of modal consistency that usefully generalizes the order-theoretic criterion of directedness, and we introduce a differential-geometrical version of BST based on the theory of non-Hausdorff manifolds. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 1 Seiten: 387-388.

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag behandelt die Phylenreform von 307/06 v. Chr. in Athen und Attika, die durch die Einführung von zwei neuen Phylen, Antigonis und Demetrias, veranlasst wurde, so dass es fortan zwölf Phylen gab. Dies zog die Neuverteilung etlicher Demen nach sich. Gefragt wird zum einen nach dem konkreten administrativen Ablauf dieser Umstellung, zum anderen nach einem möglichen Muster hinter der Zuweisung der Demen an die neuen Phylen bzw. der damit verbundenen Rolle topographischer und prosopographischer Faktoren. Zudem ist von Interesse, (...) worin die Folgen aus der Umstrukturierung, etwa für das Monument der Phylenheroen oder für die Verwaltungspraxis, bestanden und warum das neue System so lang Bestand hatte. Von der Umstellung vom Dezimal- auf das Duodezimalsystem waren in jedem Fall alle Bürger betroffen; ein Vorteil der Reform dürfte auch darin bestanden haben, Korrekturen innerhalb der Demenverteilung mit Blick auf die Bouleutenzahl anbringen zu können. Die neue Untergliederung spricht dafür, dass trotz einer nachlassenden inschriftlichen Praxis von einem Niedergang der Demen und Phylen seit dem ausgehenden 4. Jh. keine Rede sein kann. (shrink)

Publication du matériel amphorique recueilli dans le remblai au moyen duquel on a comblé vers 330 le puits monumental de la place au Nord-Est du Passage des Théores. Exceptés de rares fragments du ve siècle, l'ensemble du matériel date du ive siècle. On a dénombré près de 1500 amphores, dont 82 % sont d'origine thasienne, avec une nette prédominance de l'amphore biconique par rapport à l'amphore «en toupie». Les amphores importées viennent surtout de Grèce de l'Est (Chios et Samos) et (...) de Grèce du Nord (Mendè essentiellement), et, à un degré moindre, de la Mer Noire (Sinope notamment). (shrink)

Resumen: El siguiente estudio da cuenta de los resultados preliminares de una investigación acerca de las experiencias como lectores de los estudiantes que ingresan a la carrera de Pedagogía en Lengua Castellana y Comunicaciones de una universidad estatal del sur de Chile. El objetivo fue conocer y caracterizar el capital de lectura y las motivaciones que poseen los estudiantes hacia la lectura, entendiendo por capital de lectura, el acervo y repertorio de obras de la literatura reportadas por los/las estudiantes y (...) por motivaciones hacia la lectura, el impulso que dirige activamente la conducta hacia el logro de un objetivo como lector/a (Aragón y Arias, 2013). La investigación se desarrolló desde el paradigma cualitativo. En la recolección de datos se utilizaron encuestas, entrevistas semiestructuradas y grupos focales con dos cohortes de estudiantes. El procesamiento de los datos se realizó mediante análisis de contenido, estableciendo categorías devenidas de los discursos y testimonios de los sujetos de estudio. Los hallazgos dejan traslucir la diversidad del capital cultural heredado y coincidencias entre cohortes en relación con la importancia de la literatura en el desarrollo de la imaginación y la creatividad. Abstract: The following study reports the preliminary results of an investigation into the reading experiences of students entering the Pedagogy program in Spanish Language and Communications at a state university in southern Chile. The objective was to know and characterize the reading capital and the motivations that students have towards reading, understanding by reading capital, the collection, and repertoire of works of literature reported by the students, and by motivations towards reading, the impulse that actively directs behavior towards achieving an objective as a reader (Aragón and Arias, 2013). The research was developed from the qualitative paradigm. Surveys, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups with two cohorts of students were used to collect data. Data processing was carried out through content analysis, establishing categories derived from the speeches and testimonies of the study subjects. The findings reveal the diversity of inherited cultural capital and coincidences between cohorts concerning the importance of literature in the development of imagination and creativity. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville puts forward a cultural critique of modern capitalism in a poetic form. The film subverts the standard classification of cinematographic “genres” and of cinematographic languages, without separating the content of the criticism from its form of expression. Thus, it uses an original language that integrates both philosophical and poetic referents, putting together elements from the dystopic imagination, the science fiction, the romantic film, and other cinematographic “genres”. Unlike Orwell and Huxley’s dystopias, Alphaville depicts a deeper, insidious, invisible (...) and more efficacious form of totalitarianism that invades the so-called “democratic” societies. This type of totalitarianism is dominated by instrumental rationality and techno-science, which expel art and imagery, the poetic and the possible, emotion, feelings and everything that is free. This paper analyzes the construction of this original form and interprets its critical content from the perspective of Godard’s thought. It is an exercise of looking and knowing how to look. (shrink)