There is a fine balance between civil liberties and protection of the public’s health.Legislators, especially those in the western United States, are concerned about selling the Model State Act because of the loss of civil liberties. State constitutions give governors broad powers, such as declaring martial law and giving public health leaders the authority to act. State laws should consider issues such as property rights; taking of businesses and supplies; quarantine and isolation; due process; coordination among states, counties and cities; (...) communication systems; conscription of doctors and nurses; and compensation. When two mock emergency response drills were held in New Mexico, concerns arose regarding opening records associated with dams, national laboratories, waste repositories, and three air force bases. (shrink)

The role of contingent contexts in formulating relations between properties of systems at different descriptive levels is addressed. Based on the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions for interlevel relations, a comprehensive classification of such relations is proposed, providing a transparent conceptual framework for discussing particular versions of reduction, emergence, and supervenience. One of these versions, contextual emergence, is demonstrated using two physical examples: molecular structure and chirality, and thermal equilibrium and temperature. The concept of stability is emphasized as a (...) basic guiding principle of contextual property emergence. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es refutar las objeciones de Marc Ramsey a los principios de educación cívica del liberalismo político. Argumento que Ramsey malinterpreta la distinción entre la esfera pública y la esfera privada que emana del liberalismo político, y que su opinión de que, cuando es escrutado, el liberalismo político deriva en un liberalismo comprehensivo o de la «autonomía» carece de fundamento. La relevancia del tema es que la educación de acuerdo con el liberalismo político es más tolerante (...) que la educación conforme al liberalismo comprehensivo. Aquellos padres razonablemente religiosos que no son liberales podrán aceptar un liberalismo político, pero no uno comprehensivo. (shrink)

The Bavarian and the Indian constitutions were developed in almost the same period of time. Because of historic experiences the prospect of legal certainty was the determining factor for the representatives of the people in India and Bavaria. They elaborated functioning constitutions and integrated their fundamental ideological principles quite naturally. The Indian and the Bavarian constitution are characterized by their aspirations to balance social injustice, particularly by striking a balance between individual liberty and social need.The history of political economy demonstrates (...) a broad variety of interpretations regarding the meaning and function of value concepts. When we review all these value concepts we identify two poles of the value-concept that still lack compatibility with each other in economical and philosophical schools to this day. Value systems have to be applied situation-sensitive and are in need of a frequent critical reflection; they need to be refused or changed if necessary.Examining some examples of the Bavarian Constitution, we indicate some concordances with regard to contents of the Indian Constitutional Law. The equivalences in the Bavarian and the Indian Constitution incorporate entitlements which should protect citizens against an unjustified economical assault upon their existence. The social value conflicts that occur more and more because of the hiatus to the constitutionally warranted values, and that cannot be solved simply by law or political adjustment, are therefore up for discussion. We then examine the disparity between entitlements and reality and discuss the hierarchy of our values. (shrink)

A curious feature of Belnap’s “useful four-valued logic”, also known as first-degree entailment (FDE), is that the overdetermined value B (both true and false) is treated as a designated value. Although there are good theoretical reasons for this, it seems prima facie more plausible to have only one of the four values designated, namely T (exactly true). This paper follows this route and investigates the resulting logic, which we call Exactly True Logic.

Scepticism, a philosophical tradition that casts doubt on our ability to gain knowledge of the world and suggests suspending judgment in the face of uncertainty, has been influential since its beginnings in ancient Greece. Harald Thorsrud provides an engaging, rigorous introduction to the central themes, arguments, and general concerns of ancient Scepticism, from its beginnings with Pyrrho of Elis to the writings of Sextus Empiricus in the second century A.D. Thorsrud explores the differences among Sceptics and examines in particular (...) the separation of the Scepticism of Pyrrho from its later form—Academic Scepticism—the result of its ideas being introduced into Plato's Academy in the third century B.C. Steering an even course through the many differences of scholarly opinion surrounding Scepticism, the book also provides a balanced appraisal of the philosophy's enduring significance by showing why it remains so interesting and how ancient interpretations differ from modern ones. _Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited _. (shrink)

1,857 adults rated the grandparental solicitude they received in childhood. Through a simple model based on the evolutionary concepts of ontogenetically differentiated reproductive strategy and paternity confidence, an ordered discriminative pattern of grandparental caregiving was predicted and confirmed by solid main effects, based on 603 complete cases. The maternal grandmother was the most caring. Unlike prevalent gender stereotypes, she was followed by the maternal grandfather, the paternal grandmother, and the paternal grandfather. The preferential grandparental solicitude was not influenced by residential (...) distance, grandparent age, and availability of other grandparents. A predicted higher correlation for male than for female progenitors between solicitude and phenotypic resemblance could be confirmed. (shrink)

The choice of fuels has frequently been at the center of debates about how a future low-carbon mobility system can be achieved. This paper introduces two visions of biogas fuels and electricity using material from interviews and documents in Swedish transport. These visions are analyzed as interrelated sociotechnical imaginaries. To better understand the way visions of biogas and electric vehicles dynamically shape and condition each other, four dimensions of sociotechnical imaginaries are further developed: spatial boundedness, temporality, coherence and contestation, and (...) the socio-material relations they are associated with. Imaginaries of biogas and EVs differ with respect to these characteristics. The biogas imaginary is made up of locally bounded visions of the desirable future, showing how imaginaries can be fragmented and contested, often because of their embeddedness in local socio-material systems of resource use. This local boundedness is exemplified by contrasting cases of contested biogas imaginaries in the Swedish municipalities of Linköping and Malmö. The imaginary of EVs, in contrast, is more uniform nationally and even influenced by international expectations that in the future vehicles will be shared, electric, and autonomous. The qualities of these imaginaries shape the way they interrelate and coevolve as sociotechnical changes of the transport system unfold. (shrink)

If Harr emphasizes that things become social objects only within particular storylines, Pietz makes the reverse point about the essential materiality of social relationships, especially contractual ones, e.g. as expressed in the legal history of the `material consideration'. Departing from a similar conception of the performative micro-reproduction of social order and the communicative objectification of social facts, he argues that a theory of forensic objects as social facts disrupts not only capitalist presumptions about economic objects as the sole origin (...) of monetary value but also enlightenment conceptions of society as a sphere of consequential human action distinct from nature as the sphere of material causality. The material consideration is one such forensic object. A `material consideration' refers to an obscure but important social object that embodies the power to transform subjective promises into objective obligations and thereby establishes the social fact of legal liability. The failed attempt of liberal philosophers and jurists since the eighteenth century to conceive considerations as mere symbolic evidence of subjective moral intent rather as real enactments of social power demonstrates how difficult it is for modern social theory to articulate the idea of social materiality found in social facts such as considerations, at least as long as it sustains a strict separation between society and nature or between the intentional action of humans and the physical causality of material objects. (shrink)

Implementing equity principles in resource allocation is challenging. In one approach, some US states implemented race-based prioritisation of COVID-19 vaccines in response to vast racial inequities in COVID-19 outcomes, while others used place-based allocation. In a nationally representative survey of n=2067 US residents, fielded in mid-April 2021, we explored the public acceptability of race-based prioritisation compared with place-based prioritisation, by offering vaccines to harder hit zip codes before residents of other zip codes. We found that in general, a majority of (...) respondents supported the place-based approach, and a substantial proportion supported the race-based plan. Support was higher among Democrats compared with Republicans. All US residents became eligible for vaccines on 19 April 2021 but as of this writing, equitable uptake of vaccines remains urgent not only for first doses for adults but also for boosters and for children. Our findings also provide a benchmark for future pandemic planning that racial and social justice in vaccine allocation are salient considerations for the public. The findings may furthermore be of interest to policy makers designing vaccine allocation frameworks in countries with comparable health disparities across social, ethnic and racial groups, and more broadly, for those exploring ways of promoting equity in resource allocation outside of a pandemic setting. (shrink)

Following much work in linguistic theory, it is hypothesized that the language faculty has a modular structure and consists of two basic components, a lexicon of (structured) entries and a computational system of combinatorial operations to form larger linguistic expressions from lexical entries. This target article provides evidence for the dual nature of the language faculty by describing recent results of a multidisciplinary investigation of German inflection. We have examined: (1) its linguistic representation, focussing on noun plurals and verb inflection (...) (participles), (2) processes involved in the way adults produce and comprehend inflected words, (3) brain potentials generated during the processing of inflected words, and (4) the way children acquire and use inflection. It will be shown that the evidence from all these sources converges and supports the distinction between lexical entries and combinatorial operations. (shrink)

The internationally renowned physicist Harald Fritzsch deftly explains the meaning and far-flung implications of the general theory of relativity and other mysteries of modern physics by presenting an imaginary conversation among Newton, Einstein, and a fictitious contemporary particle physicist named Adrian Haller--the same device Fritzsch employed to great acclaim in his earlier book An Equation That Changed the World, which focused on the special theory of relativity. Einstein's theory of gravitation, his general theory of relativity, touches on basic questions (...) of our existence. Matter, according to Einstein, has no existence independent of space and time. It is even capable of bending the structure of space and changing the course of time--it introduces a "curvature." Gravity emerges not as an actual physical force but as a consequence of space-time geometry. Even the apple that drops from the tree follows the curvature of time and space. In this entertaining and involving account of relativity, Newton serves as the skeptic and asks the questions a modern reader might ask. Einstein himself does the explaining, while Haller explains the new developments that have occurred since the general theory was proposed. The result is an intellectual roller-coaster ride in which concepts that have entered the vernacular become clear for the first time: the Big Bang, "black holes," elementary particles, and much more. (shrink)

Dieser Titel aus dem De Gruyter-Verlagsarchiv ist digitalisiert worden, um ihn der wissenschaftlichen Forschung zugänglich zu machen. Da der Titel erstmals im Nationalsozialismus publiziert wurde, ist er in besonderem Maße in seinem historischen Kontext zu betrachten. Mehr erfahren Sie.

Withholding or withdrawing life-saving ventilators can become necessary when resources are insufficient. In the USA, such rationing has unique social justice dimensions. Structural elements of dominant allocation frameworks simultaneously advantage white communities, and disadvantage Black communities—who already experience a disproportionate burden of COVID-19-related job losses, hospitalisations and mortality. Using the example of New Jersey’s Crisis Standard of Care policy, we describe how dominant rationing guidance compounds for many Black patients prior unfair structural disadvantage, chiefly due to the way creatinine and (...) life expectancy are typically considered.We outline six possible policy options towards a more just approach: improving diversity in decision processes, adjusting creatinine scores, replacing creatinine, dropping creatinine, finding alternative measures, adding equity weights and rejecting the dominant model altogether. We also contrast these options with making no changes, which is not a neutral default, but in separate need of justification, despite a prominent claim that it is simply based on ‘objective medical knowledge’. In the regrettable absence of fair federal guidance, hospital and state-level policymakers should reflect on which of these, or further options, seem feasible and justifiable.Irrespective of which approach is taken, all guidance should be supplemented with a monitoring and reporting requirement on possible disparate impacts. The hope that we will be able to continue to avoid rationing ventilators must not stand in the way of revising guidance in a way that better promotes health equity and racial justice, both to be prepared, and given the significant expressive value of ventilator guidance. (shrink)

Wolfgang Pauli is well recognized as an outstanding theoretical physicist, famous for his formulation of the two-valuedness of the electron spin, for the exclusion principle, and for his prediction of the neutrino. Less well known is the fact that Pauli spent a lot of time in different avenues of human experience and scholarship, ranging over fields such as the history of ideas, philosophy, religion, alchemy, and Jung's psychology. Pauli's philosophical and particularly his psychological background is not overt in his scientific (...) papers and was unknown even to many specialist scholars until a number of enthralling and perplexing documents of a close interaction between Wolfgang Pauli and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung became publicly available in recent years. Both scholars stressed the inseparability of the physical and the psychical and called upon a sense of more openness toward the unconscious. Decades after his death, Pauli's innovative perspective and his vision of a wholeness of psyche and matter are more than ever before of great relevance. (shrink)

This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and ‘between the lines’ of his major critical essays. Wilde’s implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around ‘decadence’ in art and literature. More specifically, the (...) arch-aesthete preferred to use the word ‘romance’ rather than ‘decadence’ (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the ‘love of things impossible’. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde’s thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

L. M. de Rijk supposed in 1982 that two anonymous logical tracts in the Viennese Codex 4698, fol. 18r–27v, may be the work of Martinus Anglicus to whom a tract on consequences and one on obligations are ascribed in that codex. The tract on supposition of which the Viennese codex hands down only a fragment of the beginning is contained completely in Hs I 613 of the Stadtbibliothek Mainz, fol. 20vb–21vb. This finding ensures the authorship of Martinus Anglicus and allows (...) to ascribe an Introduction into Logic in some seven parts to him. Martin’s tract on supposition and the more detailed one by Thomas Manlevelt show some resemblances in structure and content, the first being presumably the later one. This paper presents an edition of Martin’s Tractatus de suppositione from the Mainz manuscript and an introduction regarding the author and his work. (shrink)

The following discussion aims to illuminate further the way in which morphologically complex words are represented in the mental lexicon. It is argued that the dual-mechanism model can accommodate the linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence currently available, not only on German inflection (as pointed out in the target article) but also on other languages (as presented in several commentaries). Associative single-mechanism models of inflection, on the other hand, provide only partial accounts.

Bioscientists generate far more data than their minds can handle, and this trend is likely to continue. With the aid of a small set of versatile tools for mathematical modeling and statistical assessment, bioscientists can explore their real-world systems without experiencing data overflow. This article outlines an approach for combining modern high-throughput, low-cost, but non-selective biospectroscopy measurements with soft, multivariate biochemometrics data modeling to overview complex systems, test hypotheses, and making new discoveries. From preliminary, broad hypotheses and goals, many relevant (...) samples are selected and measured with respect to many informative variables. The resulting tables represent a “cacophony” of data. From these, the most relevant and reliable “underlying harmonies and rhythms” are extracted and tested statistically, displayed for interpretation, and used for prediction. Outliers are detected automatically. Interesting subsets of samples can then be chosen for in-depth analyses in subsequent research cycles. This pragmatic, top-down approach takes advantage of developments in both “soft,” data-driven modeling and “hard,” knowledge-driven cultures. Data analytical examples show how information-rich biospectroscopy can be used for characterizing and quantifying known and unknown chemical constituents and physical phenomena in intact biosamples. This is based on a combination of deductive “hard” and inductive “soft” modeling. The examples represent NIR spectra of biochemical mixtures, FTIR spectra of a microbiological fermentation process, and FTIR analysis of fatty acids in milk for functional genomics. (shrink)

This book offers fresh perspective on the role of phenomenology in the philosophy of physics which opens new avenues for discussion among physicists, "standard" philosophers of physics and philosophers with phenomenological leanings. Much has been written on the interrelations between philosophy and physics in the late 19th and early 20th century, and on the emergence of philosophy of science as an autonomous philosophical sub-discipline. This book is about the under-explored role of phenomenology in the development and the philosophical interpretation of (...) 20th century physics. Part 1 examines questions about the origins and value of phenomenological approaches to physics. Does the work of classical phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger contain elements of systematic value to both the practice and our philosophical understanding of physics? How did classical phenomenology influence “standard” philosophy of science in the Anglo-American and other traditions? Part 2 probes questions on the role of phenomenology in the philosophies of physics and science: - Can phenomenology help to solve “Wigner’s puzzle”, the problem of the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics in describing, explaining and predicting empirical phenomena? - Does phenomenology allow better understanding of the principle of gauge invariance at the core of the standard model of contemporary particle physics? - Does the phenomenological notion of “Lifeworld” stand in opposition to the “scientific metaphysics” movement, or is there potential for dialogue? Part 3 examines the measurement problem. Is the solution outlined by Fritz London and Edmond Bauer merely a re-statement of von Neumann’s view, or should it be regarded as a distinctively phenomenological take on the measurement problem? Is phenomenology a serious contender in continuing discussions of foundational questions of quantum mechanics? Can other interpretational frameworks such as quantum Bayesianism benefit from implementing phenomenological notions such as constitution or horizonal intentionality? (shrink)

In den Jahrzehnten um 1100 fand ein Mentalitätswandel statt, der mitunter als "Entdeckung des Individuums" bezeichnet wird: Das Verständnis für die Motive, Bedürfnisse und Ansprüche einer Person wuchs ebenso wie die Bereitschaft, ihnen mehr Raum zu geben. Dieser bemerkenswerte Vorgang ist in der Mittelalterforschung unter ganz verschiedenen Aspekten untersucht worden. Das vorliegende Buch versammelt die wichtigsten Argumente und überprüft ihre Tragfähigkeit. Darüber hinaus wird nach der Struktur dieses hochmittelalterlichen Individualisierungsschubes gefragt. Wie Beobachtungen aus der Entwicklungspsychologie und der Ethnologie vermuten lassen, (...) wurde er von einem tiefgreifenden Wandel verursacht, der die Gesellschaft damals erfasst hatte: Dem Einzelnen wurden komplexe Anpassungsleistungen abverlangt, die eine tiefere Einsicht in seine und seiner Mitmenschen Innenwelten begünstigten. (shrink)

Harald Thorsrud - Cicero on his Academic Predecessors: the Fallibilism of Arcesilaus and Carneades - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 1-18 Cicero on his Academic Predecessors: the Fallibilism of Arcesilaus and Carneades Harald Thorsrud IN AN IMPORTANT PAPER, Couissin argued for what has come to be called the dialectical interpretation of Academic skepticism. On this interpretation, Arcesilaus and Carneades practiced the same, purely dialectical method -- they would elicit assent (...) to premises characteristic of their interlocutor's position and then derive unacceptable consequences exclusively on the basis of those premises. This method allowed them to remain uncommitted to the premises as well as the conclusions of their arguments. They would simply draw logical consequences from their opponents' own premises for the sake of refutation. This is in keeping with the current consensus that an ancient skeptic is one who has no beliefs, or at least no beliefs of a problematically dogmatic sort. Consequently, the methods of ancient skeptics, including Academic skeptics, are thought to be strictly negative, seeking only the elimination of belief. So when we come to Cicero's Philonian version of Academic methodology and find that it explicitly includes provisions for the acquisition of fallible beliefs, it is no surprise that commentators who are sympathetic to the dialectical interpretation tend to view.. (shrink)

This book investigates the metaphysical position of dual-aspect monism, with particular emphasis on the concept of meaning as a fundamental feature of the fabric of reality.

The dynamics of neuronal systems, briefly neurodynamics, has developed into an attractive and influential research branch within neuroscience. In this paper, we discuss a number of conceptual issues in neurodynamics that are important for an appropriate interpretation and evaluation of its results. We demonstrate their relevance for selected topics of theoretical and empirical work. In particular, we refer to the notions of determinacy and stochasticity in neurodynamics across levels of microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic descriptions. The issue of correlations between neural, (...) mental and behavioral states is also addressed in some detail. We propose an informed discussion of conceptual foundations with respect to neurobiological results as a viable step to a fruitful future philosophy of neuroscience. (shrink)

Abstract Not much scholarly work is needed in order to stumble across many passages where Edmund Husserl seems to advocate an anti-realist attitude towards the natural sciences. This tendency, however, is not well-received within the secondary literature. While some commentators criticize Husserl for his alleged scientific anti-realism, others argue that Husserl's position is much more realist than the first impression indicates. It is against this background that I want to argue for the following theses: a) The basic outlook of Husserl's (...) epistemology as well as his more substantial comments regarding the natural sciences indeed result in a (sophisticated version of) scientific anti-realism which bears certain resemblances to Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism; b) This scientific anti-realism can be defended against the two most common objections raised in the secondary literature; c) It is only by means of this sophisticated version of scientific anti-realism that phenomenology can circumvent the problem of ?scientific objectivism? (shrink)

It is widely accepted that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the material brain. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, will be surveyed. It will be pointed out that they make different epistemological assumptions, refer to different neurophysiological (...) levels of description, and use quantum theory in different ways. For each of the approaches discussed, problematic and promising features will be equally highlighted. (shrink)

The concept of complementarity, originally defined for non-commuting observables of quantum systems with states of non-vanishing dispersion, is extended to classical dynamical systems with a partitioned phase space. Interpreting partitions in terms of ensembles of epistemic states (symbols) with corresponding classical observables, it is shown that such observables are complementary to each other with respect to particular partitions unless those partitions are generating. This explains why symbolic descriptions based on an ad hoc partition of an underlying phase space description should (...) generally be expected to be incompatible. Related approaches with different background and different objectives are discussed. (shrink)

Two distinct conceptions for the relation between reversible, time-reversal invariant laws of nature and the irreversible behavior of physical systems are outlined. The standard, extrinsic concept of irreversibility is based on the notion of an open system interacting with its environment. An alternative, intrinsic concept of irreversibility does not explicitly refer to any environment at all. Basic aspects of the two concepts are presented and compared with each other. The significance of the terms extrinsic and intrinsic is discussed.

The emergence of mental states from neural states by partitioning the neural phase space is analyzed in terms of symbolic dynamics. Well-defined mental states provide contexts inducing a criterion of structural stability for the neurodynamics that can be implemented by particular partitions. This leads to distinguished subshifts of finite type that are either cyclic or irreducible. Cyclic shifts correspond to asymptotically stable fixed points or limit tori whereas irreducible shifts are obtained from generating partitions of mixing hyperbolic systems. These stability (...) criteria are applied to the discussion of neural correlates of consiousness, to the definition of macroscopic neural states, and to aspects of the symbol grounding problem. In particular, it is shown that compatible mental descriptions, topologically equivalent to the neurodynamical description, emerge if the partition of the neural phase space is generating. If this is not the case, mental descriptions are incompatible or complementary. Consequences of this result for an integration or unification of cognitive science or psychology, respectively, will be indicated. (shrink)