This article inquires whether and to which degree some fundamental traits of the World Wide Web may encourage us to revise traditional conceptions of what constitutes scientific information and knowledge. Turning to arguments for `open access' in scientific publishing and its derivatives (open content, open archives, etc.), contemporary tendencies in `social software' and knowledge sharing, the authors project a new look on knowledge, dissociated with linear notions of cumulation, progression, and hierarchy (e.g. of scientific argument), but related to circularity, heterarchy, (...) and evolution. Arguing from a medium theoretical perspective, they illustrate their ideas with developments in library science, current debates in epistemology and theories about information architecture, with a particular focus on `unsystematic' folksonomies. (shrink)

Modern biomedical technologies managed to revolutionise the End-of-Life Care (EoLC) in many aspects. The dying process can now be "engineered" by managing the accompanying physical symptoms or by "prolonging/hastening" death itself. Such interventions questioned and problematised long-established understandings of key moral concepts, such as good life, quality of life, pain, suffering, good death, appropriate death, dying well, etc. This volume examines how multifaceted EoLC moral questions can be addressed from interdisciplinary perspectives within the Islamic tradition. Contributors Amir Abbas Alizamani, Beate (...) Anam, Hamed Arezaei, Asma Asadi, Pieter Coppens, Hans Daiber, Khalid Elzamzamy, Mohammed Ghaly, Hadil Lababidi, Shahaboddin Mahdavi, Aasim Padela, Rafaqat Rashid and Ayman Shabana. (shrink)

For many years, M. Jean d'Ormesson has been doing me the honor of asking me to write for Diogenes. More recently, he suggested that I should coordinate an issue of this review that would be devoted to my extended discipline, History, but history in the way in which I understand it. It was certainly not for lack of interest that I did not reply to the first request but, no doubt, because of the sense of a chronic lack of time (...) - almost a pleonasm - from which I, like everyone else, suffer. It was not because I was cured that I accepted the second invitation but probably because I allowed myself, with full knowledge of the facts, to entertain the idea that editing an issue would take up less time than simply contributing. … In fact, as everyone knows, the opposite is true, especially when the occasional editor also volunteers to be one of the contributors. This issue is now completed and I sincerely thank M. Jean d'Ormesson for having wished to entrust me with this task that I have enjoyed very much. (shrink)

In order to tell the story of Man and understand our emergence better, we can readily follow on from Heinz Tobien, though we do not need to go back so far in time - just a few million years.Clearly, our fundamental origin is animal. Thus it is easy to understand that in the great genealogy (known as phylogeny), there was one vital (geological) moment when our line was forever detached from the animal “kingdom.” The evidence of palaeontology, like that of (...) molecular biology, today locates this point - which is, by definition, the very point of origin of our family, the hominids - in Eastern Africa around 8 million years ago. In order to state this, palaeontology rests on two sets of results. All the most ancient hominids, without exception, are East African, and the oldest of all goes back more than 7 million years. Through the study of various characteristics of the cells of contemporary primates, having arranged them in an order of increasing complexity and having hypothesized that this contemporary complexity may be a reflection of that which developed through time, molecular biology has, on the basis of palaeontological dating, calibrated this transformation and its different stages and constructed what is called a molecular clock. In this way, it has arrived at two conclusions. The primates closest to Man are by far the great African apes (chimpanzees, gorillas), and the “distance” that separates us - in other words the degree of difference that exists between them and us - situates the divergence of our two branches at just over 7 million years. (shrink)

This study examined linguistic patterns in mothers’ reports about their toddlers’ involvement in everyday household work, as a way to understand the parental ethnotheories that may guide children’s prosocial helping and development. Mothers from two cultural groups – US Mexican-heritage families with backgrounds in indigenous American communities and middle-class European American families – were interviewed regarding how their 2- to 3-year-old toddler gets involved in help with everyday household work. The study’s analytic focus was mothers’ responses to interview questions asking (...) about the child’s efforts to help with a variety of everyday household work tasks. Results showed that mothers responded with linguistic patterns that were indicative of ethnotheoretical assumptions regarding children’s agency and children’s prosocial intentions, with notable contrasts between the two cultural groups. Nearly all US Mexican-heritage mothers reported children’s contributions and participation using linguistic forms that centered children’s agency and prosocial initiative, which corresponds with extensive evidence suggesting the centrality of both children’s autonomy and supportive prosocial expectations in how children’s helpfulness is supported in this and similar cultural communities. By contrast, middle-class European American mothers frequently responded to questions about their child’s efforts to help with linguistic forms that “pivoted” to either the mother as the focal agent in the child’s prosocial engagement or to reframing the child’s involvement to emphasize non-help activities. Correspondence between cultural differences in the linguistic findings and existing literature on socialization of children’s prosocial helping is discussed. Also discussed is the analytic approach of the study, uncommon in developmental psychology research, and the significance of the linguistic findings for understanding parental ethnotheories in each community. (shrink)

Being able to categorize objects as similar or different is an essential skill. An important aspect of learning to categorize is learning to attend to relevant features and ignore irrelevant features of the to-be-categorized objects. Feature variability across objects of different categories is informative, because it allows inferring the rules underlying category membership. In this study, participants learned to categorize fictitious creatures. We measured attention to the aliens during learning using eye-tracking and calculated the attentional focus as the ratio of (...) attention to relevant versus irrelevant features. As expected, participants’ categorization accuracy improved with practice; however, in contrast to our expectations, their attentional focus did not improve with practice. When computing the attentional focus, attention to the aliens’ eyes was disregarded, because while eyes attract a lot of attention, they did not vary across aliens. Yet, an explorative analysis of attention to eyes suggested that participants’ attentional focus did become somewhat more efficient in that over time they learned to ignore the eyes. Results are discussed in the context of the need for instructional methods to improve attentional focus in learning to categorize. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach, a philosopher of science who was one of five students in Einstein's first seminar on the general theory of relativity, became Einstein's bulldog, defending the theory against criticism from philosophers, physicists, and popular commentators. This book chronicles the development of Reichenbach's reconstruction of Einstein's theory in a way that clearly sets out all of its philosophical commitments and its physical predictions as well as the battles that Reichenbach fought on its behalf, in both the academic and popular (...) press. The essays include reviews and responses to philosophical colleagues, such as Moritz Schlick and Hugo Dingler; polemical discussions with physicists Max Born and D. C. Miller; as well as popular articles meant to clarify aspects of Einstein's theories and set out their philosophical ramifications for the layperson. At a time when physics and philosophy were both undergoing revolutionary changes in content and method, this book is a window into the development of scientific philosophy and the role of the philosopher. (shrink)

Comment sommes-nous devenus humains? Quelle est la place de l'homme dans le vivant au XXIe siècle, vers quoi tend son devenir? Fort de son expérience de paléoanthropologue, mais aussi d'homme ancré dans son siècle et curieux de tout, le découvreur de Lucy interroge les grands enjeux de demain : l'écologie, la démographie, et bien sûr l'éthique. Etre humain et le rester est une aventure, une énigme, un défi qui nous concernent tous. Yves Coppens nous convie à un voyage dans (...) le temps et l'espace, à la découverte d'une matière en perpétuelle évolution : l'Homme. Chacun de ses invités, en livrant le récit de ses expériences et de ses recherches dans des domaines aussi variés que la philosophie, les sciences sociales ou la génétique, propose une vision singulière de l'humain en déroulant le fil lumineux de son devenir. (shrink)

Das Buch gibt einen Überblick über die Arbeiten von Hans Albert und behandelt ausgewählte Konsequenzen seines Werks für die Philosophie des Kritischen Rationalismus und ihre Anwendungen in Gebieten der Soziologie, Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Rechtswissenschaften und weiteren Wissenschaften.

La correspondance de Spinoza comprend six lettres remarquables sur le thème des spectres. On se demande s’ils existent et si on peut reconnaître à certains d’entre eux un sexe féminin. Cet échange qui s’est noué à l’instigation de Hugo Boxel est une curiosité dans cette correspondance mais pas dans son contexte historique, et cela même si, aux Pays-Bas, les procès en sorcellerie avaient moins de succès qu’ailleurs. C’est alors dans l’éclairage de la littérature qui s’est développée autour des choses superstitieuses (...) que ces lettres peuvent être placées. À cet égard, l’œuvre maîtresse de Balthasar Bekker De Betoverde Wereld (Le Monde enchanté), est une référence importante. Cet ouvrage qui cherche à purifier la foi en combattant la superstition avec des arguments cartésiens permet d’établir les deux points suivants. Boxel est plus du côté de la superstition que de la raison, malgré les nombreuses autorités qu’il cite. Spinoza, lui, a avec Bekker des positions communes, mais ceci ne peut faire oublier qu’il défend au sujet d’une question d’actualité une position unique qui peut l’en éloigner en raison de son identité de philosophe. (shrink)

History, Metaphors, and Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or his studies (...) of literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated. (shrink)

Erasmus: rechtzinnig of vrijzinnig theoloog, door J. Coppens.--Erasmus: wereldburger en pacifist, door A. Gerlo.--Het humanisme van Erasmus, door J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink.--Erasmus en de muziek, door R. B. Lenaerts.

The Hans Reichenbach Papers comprise published and unpublished manuscripts, lectures, correspondence, photographs, drawings, and related materials from his early student days until his death. The correspondence contains about 9000 pages to and from Reichenbach; it ranges over his entire career. Those with whom Reichenbach maintained lifelong contact include Rudolf Carnap, Ernst Cassirer, Herbert Feigl, Philip Frank, Carl Hempel, Sidney Hook, Paul Oppenheim and Wolfgang Pauli. In addition, there is significant correspondence with von Astor, Bergmann, Bertalanffy, Dingler, Dubislav, Einstein, Fraenkel, (...) Frank, Freundlich, Grelling, Grünbaum, Paul Hertz, Hutten, Jordan, Landé, von Laue, Lewin, C.I. Lewis, Charles Morris, Nagel, Neurath, Northrop, Planck, Quine, Regener, Rougier, Salmon, Schillp, Schlick, Scholz, Schrödinger, Martin Strauss, Tarski, Vaihinger, Weiss, Williams, Zawarski, and Zilsel. The correspondence provides a valuable source of information about Reichenbach’s personal and philosophical development. It also provides primary source material for research into one of the 20th century most influential philosophical movements. Reichenbach’s manuscripts include many of his own notes as a student. Some go as far back as his university days in science and mathematics. Some of the most significant of these notes are those taken by him as a student of Albert Einstein on the special and general theories of relativity. There are four such notebooks dating from 1918. In addition there are his student notes on astronomy, Planck and electricity, Hilbert’s “Statistical Mechanics” and “Problems and Principles.” He also kept many of his lecture notes from Germany, Turkey, and the United States. The number of lectures runs to over 100 and provides a glimpse into the problems of philosophy and how he presented them to his students. Many of his lectures discussed principles of radio and issues in philosophy and modern science, often in form of popularizations of questions in relativity and quantum theory delivered on radio programs for a wider audiences. In addition to this there are an abundance of notes, calculations, and diagrams used to draft both published and unpublished papers. (shrink)

This paper presents Hans Ulrich's account of Christian ethics as an ethics of `vocation'. It is interested in how Ulrich's account of vocational ethics is developed as a critique of professional ethics. Professional ethics is seen as reflecting the structures of ethical deliberation of the social order that produces it, thereby failing to move beyond the realm of `works'. In contrast, the distinguishing characteristic of Ulrich's vocational ethics is shown to be that it is a response to the Word (...) `from outside'. Consequently, a Christian account of professional ethics needs to show how it can retain a `theological difference' that enables it to respond to the Word that `breaks in' to start something new. The paper discusses the transformation of professionalism in a neo-liberal service economy in order to find out how this `breaking in' actually proceeds. Its test case is providing services to people with intellectual disabilities. (shrink)

Should we consider irony as a good thing for democratic life? As it is portrayed in the classical texts through which we know Socrates, eirōneia appears as a humble manifestation of self-consciousn...