Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents (...) in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern. (shrink)

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents (...) in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/Protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/Proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern. (shrink)

Overtreatment is when medical or dental services are provided with a higher volume or cost than is appropriate. This study aimed to investigate how a group of dentists in Switzerland, a wealthy country known to have high standards of healthcare including dentistry, evaluated the meaning of unnecessary treatments from an ethical perspective and, assessed the expected frequency of different possible behaviors among their peers.

Drawing on a rich digitalized corpus of early modern texts, Hans-Juergen Diller argues that the concepts expressed by the English words >passion emotion emotion passion emotion<. But there are two concepts of a concept. According to the first, the meaning of a word expressing a concept is not sharply distinguished from the complete discourse in which it figures. According to the second, meaning is more narrow. For instance, it is restricted to the explicit definition an author provides. I show (...) that Descartes provides an explicit definition of passion and emotion in purely physical, a-moral terms. So Diller's method is not apt to trace concepts in the second, more restricted sense which Descartes himself has in mind. (shrink)

Argument quality has consistently been shown to have strong and lasting persuasive effects. The question is what criteria people use to distinguish strong from weak arguments and how these criteria relate to the ones proposed in normative argumentation theory. In an experiment 235 participants without training in argumentation theory rated the acceptance of 30 claims about the desirability of a consequence that were supported by either an argument from analogy, from authority, or from consequences. The supporting arguments were systematically manipulated (...) to violate argument type specific criteria. Participants proved sensitive to the violation of most, but not all, argument type specific criteria. From a normative perspective these findings suggest that people act in a fairly adequate way. These findings also enable a more precise description of what people may do when critically appraising arguments, which has important implications for the use of argument quality as a methodological tool in persuasion research. (shrink)

This article compares situated cognition to contemporary Neo-Aristotelian approaches to the mind. The article distinguishes two components in this paradigm: an Aristotelian essentialism which is alien to situated cognition and a Wittgensteinian “capacity approach” to the mind which is not just congenial to it but provides important conceptual and argumentative resources in defending social cognition against orthodox cognitive science. It focuses on a central tenet of that orthodoxy. According to what I call “encephalocentrism,” cognition is primarily or even exclusively a (...) computational process occurring inside the brain. Neo-Aristotelians accuse this claim of committing a “homuncular” or “mereological fallacy”. The article explains why the label “fallacy” is misleading, reconstructs the argument to the effect that encephalocentric applications of psychological predicates to the brain and its parts amount to a category mistake, and defends this argument against objections by Dennett, Searle, and Figdor. At the same time it criticizes the Neo-Aristotelian denial that the brain is the organ of cognition. It ends by suggesting ways in which the capacity approach and situated cognition might be combined to provide a realistic and ecologically sound picture of cognition as a suite of powers that flesh-and-blood animals exercise within their physical and social environments. (shrink)

This essay argues that non-linguistic animals qualify not just for externalist notions of rationality (maximizing biological fitness or utility), but also for internal ones. They can act for reasons in several senses: their behaviour is subject to intentional explanations, they can act in the light of reasons - provided that the latter are conceived as objective facts rather than subjective mental states - and they can deliberate. Finally, even if they could not, it would still be misguided to maintain that (...) animals are capable only of (mechanical) behaviour, not of (intentional) action. (shrink)

Social Justice, Health Inequities, and Access to New Age-Related Interventions Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 281-295 DOI 10.1007/s12376-009-0027-3 Authors Hans-Jörg Ehni, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Baden-Württemberg Germany Georg Marckmann, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Baden-Württemberg Germany Journal Medicine Studies Online ISSN 1876-4541 Print ISSN 1876-4533 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 3.

Many of the "counterintuitive" features of relativistic quantum field theory have their formal root in the Reeh-Schlieder theorem, which in particular entails that local operations applied to the vacuum state can produce any state of the entire field. It is of great interest then that I.E. Segal and, more recently, G. Fleming (in a paper entitled "Reeh-Schlieder meets Newton-Wigner") have proposed an alternative "Newton-Wigner" localization scheme that avoids the Reeh-Schlieder theorem. In this paper, I reconstruct the Newton-Wigner localization scheme and (...) clarify the <em>limited</em> extent to which it avoids the counterintuitive consequences of the Reeh-Schlieder theorem. I also argue that there is no coherent interpretation of the Newton-Wigner localization scheme that renders it free from act-outcome correlations at spacelike separation. (shrink)

This paper presents the model of ‘bounded revision’ that is based on two-dimensional revision functions taking as arguments pairs consisting of an input sentence and a reference sentence. The key idea is that the input sentence is accepted as far as (and just a little further than) the reference sentence is ‘cotenable’ with it. Bounded revision satisfies the AGM axioms as well as the Same Beliefs Condition (SBC) saying that the set of beliefs accepted after the revision does not depend (...) on the reference sentence (although the posterior belief state does depend on it). Bounded revision satisfies the Darwiche–Pearl (DP) axioms for iterated belief change. If the reference sentence is fixed to be a tautology or a contradiction, two well-known one-dimensional revision operations result. Bounded revision thus naturally fills the space between conservative revision (also known as natural revision) and moderate revision (also known as lexicographic revision). I compare this approach to the two-dimensional model of ‘revision by comparison’ investigated by Fermé and Rott (Artif Intell 157:5–47, 2004 ) that satisfies neither the SBC nor the DP axioms. I conclude that two-dimensional revision operations add substantially to the expressive power of qualitative approaches that do not make use of numbers as measures of degrees of belief. (shrink)

For centuries, the ancient Chinese philosophical text the _Daodejing (Tao Te Ching)_ has fascinated and frustrated its readers. While it offers a wealth of rich philosophical insights concerning the cultivation of one's body and attaining one's proper place within nature and the cosmos, its teachings and structure can be enigmatic and obscure. Hans-Georg Moeller presents a clear and coherent description and analysis of this vaguely understood Chinese classic. He explores the recurring images and ideas that shape the work and (...) offers a variety of useful approaches to understanding and appreciating this canonical text. Moeller expounds on the core philosophical issues addressed in the _Daodejing_, clarifying such crucial concepts as Yin and Yang and Dao and De. He explains its teachings on a variety of subjects, including sexuality, ethics, desire, cosmology, human nature, the emotions, time, death, and the death penalty. The _Daodejing_ also offers a distinctive ideal of social order and political leadership and presents a philosophy of war and peace. An illuminating exploration, The _Daodejing_ is an interesting foil to the philosophical outlook of Western humanism and contains surprising parallels between its teachings and nontraditional contemporary philosophies. (shrink)

We propose a dynamic logic of lying, wherein a ‘lie that $$\varphi $$ ’ is an action in the sense of dynamic modal logic, that is interpreted as a state transformer relative to the formula $$\varphi $$. The states that are being transformed are pointed Kripke models encoding the uncertainty of agents about their beliefs. Lies can be about factual propositions but also about modal formulas, such as the beliefs of other agents or the belief consequences of the lies of (...) other agents. We distinguish two speaker perspectives: an outside observer who is lying to an agent that is modelled in the system, and an agent who is lying to another agent, and where both are modelled in the system. We distinguish three addressee perspectives: the credulous agent who believes everything that it is told, the skeptical agent who only believes what it is told if that is consistent with its current beliefs, and the belief revising agent who believes everything that it is told by consistently revising its current, possibly conflicting, beliefs. The logics have complete axiomatizations, which can most elegantly be shown by way of their embedding in what is known as action model logic or in the extension of that logic to belief revision. (shrink)

Die naturrechtlichen Begründungsversuche der Menscherechte sind nicht schlüssig. Statt die Menschenrechte aus Freiheit rechtfertigen zu können, wird Freiheit als Resultat eines liberalen Verrechtlichungsprozesses gesehen. Die politische Forderung nach globaler Durchsetzung der Menschenrechte macht also aus dem Modell der liberalen Gesellschaft eine in ihren Augen alternativlose Freiheitsordnung, die auch mit Gewalt durchgesetzt werden dürfte.

Theoretical works in economics usually have a core consisting of proofs that a “model-economy” has certain properties. The economist constructs a model that can be looked on as a description of an economy, and then proves that certain relations hold in this economy and/or that certain relations in this economy depend on certain specific characteristics. The model-economy is usually described as simplified or idealized.

As a relational concept, responsible innovation can be made more tangible by asking innovation of what and responsibility of whom for what? Arranging the scattered field of responsible innovation comprehensively, starting from an anthropological point of view, into five fields of tension and five categories of spearheads, may be theoretically and practically helpful while offering suggestions for both research and management.

This article addresses the two most important areas of potential conflict between inferentialism and naturalism, namely normativity and rationality. Concerning the first, it sides with inferentialism, while at the same time developing a normativist position less vulnerable to naturalistic objections. There is nothing problematic or mysterious about semantic normativity or normativity in general. But one needs to distinguish different types of normativity and recognize that statements of norms can be perfectly truth-apt. Concerning the second area of conflict, my verdict is (...) partly naturalistic. It rejects overly intellectualist accounts of the normative practices that underlie meaning and content. The article ends with a plea for an ‘anthropological’ naturalism that eschews both ontological supernaturalism and epistemological naturalism. (shrink)

Spatial neglect is a disorder of space-related behaviour. It is characterized by failure to explore the side of space contralateral to a brain lesion, or to react or respond to stimuli or subjects located on this side. Research on spatial neglect and related disorders has developed rapidly inrecent years. These advances have been made as a result of neuropsychological studies of patients with brain damage, behavioural studies of animal models, as well as through functional neurophysiological experiments and functional neuroimaging.The Cognitive (...) and Neural Bases of Spatial Neglect provides an overview of this wide-ranging field of scientific endeavour, providing a cohesive synthesis of the most recent observations and results. As well as being a fascinating clinical phenomenon, the study of spatial neglect helps us tounderstand normal mechanisms of directing and maintaining spatial attention and is relevant to the contemporary search for the cerebral correlates of conscious experience, voluntary action and the nature of personal identity itself.The book is divided into seven sections covering the anatomical and neurophysiological bases of the disorder, frameworks of neglect, perceptual and motor factors, the relation to attention, the cognitive processes involved, and strategies for rehabilitation.Chapters have been written by a team of the leading international experts in this field.This will be essential reading for neuropsychologists, neurologists, neurophysiologists, cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists. (shrink)

Pour la plupart, les membres du cercle de Vienne se sentaient investis d’une mission philosophique et aussi culturelle: poursuivre la tradition française des Lumières et l’adapter aux exigences du temps. Si l’on se demande dans quelle mesure l’objectif a été atteint, la réponse est double. Quand ils ont cherché à élaborer une encyclopédie empiriste, à savoir l’Encyclopédie internationale de la science unifiée, qui serait comme l’équivalent de la Grande Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert, l’échec a été flagrant. À cela, il (...) y a des raisons externes, comme la seconde guerre mondiale, ou la mort d’Otto Neurath, le principal éditeur et aussi le moteur de toute l’entreprise. Mais cela tient aussi à des facteurs internes, comme l’insistance de Neurath sur un Index verborum prohibitorum, qui a empêché certaines contributions importantes d’aboutir. Si maintenant l’on élargit l’horizon pour considérer le mouvement dans son ensemble, un bon point de départ se trouve dans la critique très polémique formulée par Max Horkheimer en 1937. L’examen des arguments avancés montre que les positions défendues par l’empirisme logique étaient beaucoup plus solides que ne l’imaginaient Horkheimer et l’École de Francfort: la prise en compte des faits et théories scientifiques est et reste un ingrédient important de toute politique éclairée. (shrink)

Hoewel René Descartes zijn leven lang onderdaan bleef van de Franse koning, verbleef hij vele jaren in de Republiek der Nederlanden. In veel opzichten paste hij zich aan de Nederlanden aan: hij beheerste de taal, kleedde zich naar de gewoonten van het land, had een groot aantal Nederlandse boezemvrienden en invloedrijke relaties en trad uitvoerig in discussie met Nederlandse geleerden. De bekendheid die hij in Frankrijk had verworven, zorgde ervoor dat hij voortdurend in de belangstelling stond. Terwijl zijn denken juist (...) gebaat was bij rust. Die omstandigheden vond hij in Nederland.0Filosoof en schrijver Hans Dijkhuis herleidt aan de hand van vele bronnen zo exact mogelijk de verblijfplaatsen van Descartes en beschrijft diens omgang met tijdgenoten. Veel van de episodes en gebeurtenissen komen in andere biografieën niet of nauwelijks aan de orde, maar zijn van belang voor een vollediger inzicht in zijn leven en denken. Zijn verblijf in Alkmaar is bijvoorbeeld grotendeels onbekend, maar vormde in zekere zin een keerpunt in zijn leven. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap hat nur im Vorwort zum „Logischen Aufbau der Welt“ Bemerkungen zum Verhältnis seiner wissenschaftlichen Arbeit zur Kunst und Architektur seiner Zeit veröffentlicht. Aber sein emphatisches Bekenntnis zur Moderne der 20er-Jahre hat bisher nur selten Aufmerksamkeit in der philosophiegeschichtlichen Sekundärliteratur gefunden. In meinem Beitrag versuche ich in den ersten beiden Abschnitten, seinen kulturellen Hintergrund seit seiner Schul- und Studentenzeit zu skizzieren und dann seine persönlichen Kontakte und Austauschbeziehungen mit Vorkämpfern der Moderne wie Franz Roh und Siegfried Giedion zu beschreiben. (...) Nach diesen Vorbereitungen wird die Frage gestellt, ob und in wieweit Carnaps Philosophie selbst als ein Teil der Bewegung der Neuen Sachlichkeit verstanden werden kann oder sogar muss. Zur Beantwortung werden eine Reihe von Charakteristika dieses Zeitgeist-Phänomens aus den – gleichzeitig mit Carnaps „Aufbau“ erschienenen Werken der Genannten – herauspräpariert und dann untersucht, ob diese Kriterien sich auch im Werk Carnaps finden. Das Ergebnis ist, dass man ihn mit Fug und Recht als „Philosoph der Neuen Sachlichkeit“ bezeichnen kann. (shrink)

Die Herausforderung der modernen Technik für die ethische Orientierung des menschlichen Handelns wurde und wird in immer brisanterer Form zum Thema einer Theorie von einer erweiterten Verantwortlichkeit. Besonders Jonas’ Buch Das Prinzip Verantwortung ist hierzu als Vorreiter gewürdigt worden. Es war in der Tat Jonas, dem es gelang, mit seinem Buch weit über die Fachzirkel hinaus die größere Öffentlichkeit zu erreichen. Er stellte zu Recht fest, durch das Übermaß der wissenschaftlich multiplizierten technologischen Macht wachse dem Menschen »eine neue, nie zuvor (...) erträumte Dimension der Verantwortung « zu. (shrink)

In recent years, the relation between studying and learning has been a topic of debate. This article is mainly interested in a concept of study practices, conceived of as practices that are strongly engaged with issues of living together in a superdiverse city. Such practices firstly require to think the relation between studying and learning in other-than-oppositional terms, and secondly, to raise questions concerning the political role of education. The aim of the article is double in that it wants to (...) further elaborate the concept of study practices in relation to a concrete practice on the one hand, and, on the other, that it has the objective to rethink in educational terms the notion of solidarity—deeply entwined with matters of living together in superdiversity. These aims are pursued based on an analysis of the study practice of System_D, a film festival in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Brussels, drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway. (shrink)

A selection from the correspondence of the logician Wilhelm Ackermann (1896?1962) is presented in this article. The most significant letters were exchanged with Bernays, Scholz and Lorenzen, from which extensive passages are transcribed. Some remarks from other letters, with quotations, are also included.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Metaphysik der Natur" verfügbar.