Politicians and engineers are increasingly realizing that values are important in the development of technological artefacts. What is often overlooked is that different conceptualizations of these abstract values lead to different design-requirements. For example, designing social media platforms for deliberative democracy sets us up for technical work on completely different types of architectures and mechanisms than designing for so-called liquid or direct forms of democracy. Thinking about Democracy is not enough, we need to design for the proper conceptualization of these (...) values. As we see it, we cannot responsibly engineer and innovate and shape technology in accordance with our moral values without engaging in systematic and continuous conceptual engineering: This is not only an academic, or theoretical issue, it is also not simply an issue for public policy or politics, or regulators, it has become a central problem for engineering and the world of technology. In this paper, we present a framework for doing the necessary conceptual work in the context of requirement engineering. We draw on the literature on conceptual engineering to lay out a methodology to (1) assess different conceptions and (2) to develop new conceptions. Moreover, we integrate this methodology with extant approaches in the philosophy of technology which aim at designing technological artefacts ethically. In the final section we apply this integrated framework to freedom in the context of social media networks. (shrink)

This book explores how physicists, astronomers, chemists, and historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed ‘epistemic virtues’ such as accuracy, objectivity, and intellectual courage. In doing so, it takes the first step in providing an integrated history of the sciences and humanities. It assists in addressing such questions as: What kind of perspective would enable us to compare organic chemists in their labs with paleographers in the Vatican Archives, or anthropologists on a field trip with mathematicians poring (...) over their formulas? While the concept of epistemic virtues has previously been discussed, primarily in the contexts of the history and philosophy of science, this volume is the first to enlist the concept in bridging the gap between the histories of the sciences and the humanities. Chapters research whether epistemic virtues can serve as a tool to transcend the institutional disciplinary boundaries and thus help to attain a ‘post-disciplinary’ historiography of modern knowledge. Readers will gain a contextualization of epistemic virtues in time and space as the book shows that scholars themselves often spoke in terms of virtue and vice about their tasks and accomplishments. This collection of essays opens up new perspectives on questions, discourses, and practices shared across the disciplines, even at a time when the neo-Kantian distinction between sciences and humanities enjoyed its greatest authority. Scholars including historians of science and of the humanities, intellectual historians, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of science will all find this book of particular interest and value. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars, artists and politicians have accused each other of "historicism." But what exactly did this mean? Judging by existing scholarship, the answers varied enormously. Like many other "isms," historicism could mean nearly everything, to the point of becoming meaningless. Yet the questions remain: What made generations of scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences worry about historicism? Why did even musicians and members of parliament warn against historicism? And what explains this remarkable career of the term (...) across generations, fields, regions, and languages? Focusing on the "travels" that historicism made, this volume uses historicism as a prism for exploring connections between disciplines and intellectual traditions usually studied in isolation from each other. It shows how generations of sociologists, theologians, and historians tried to avoid pitfalls associated with historicism and explains why the term was heavily charged with emotions like anxiety, anger, and worry. While offering fresh interpretations of classic authors such as Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss, this volume highlights how historicism took on new meanings, connotations, and emotional baggage in the course of its travels through time and place. (shrink)

Spatial evolutionary game theory explains how cooperative traits can survive the intense competition in biological systems. If the spatial distribution allows cooperators to interact with each other frequently, the benefits of cooperation will outweigh the losses due to exploitation by selfish organisms. However, for a cooperative behavior to get established in a system, it needs to be found initially in a sufficiently large cluster to allow a high frequency of intracooperator interactions. Since mutations are rare events, this poses the question (...) of how cooperation can arise in a biological system in the first place. We present a simple model which captures two concepts from genetics that can explain how evolution overcomes the emergence problem. The first concept is, often in nature, a gene may not express its phenotype except under specific environmental conditions, rendering it to be a “silent” gene. The second key idea is that a neutral gene, one that does not harm or improve an organism’s survival chances, can still spread through a population if it is physically near to another gene that is positively selected. Through these two ideas, our model offers a possible solution to the fundamental problem of emergence of cooperation in biological systems. (shrink)

Positive frequency dependent selection is a natural selection regime where the fitness of a phenotype increases with its frequency in the population. Examples can be typically found in the spread of disease tolerance strategies in a population. A characterizing feature of PFDS is that the focal allele may experience favorable selection only when it becomes more frequent in the population, while being selected against when it is rare. In this paper, by applying a solution concept from evolutionary game theory, we (...) hypothesize that the process of emergence of such alleles triggers selection for silence, where the emergence of alleles that can stay unexpressed for a period of time will be favored by selection forces. We illustrate our hypothesis using a mathematical model of a population of single locus diploid organisms with two alleles where a single mutant of an allele that experiences positive frequency dependent selection appears in a population where the other allele is a dominant. The model results show that the longer the silence interval of the new mutant before its expression, the better its chances of getting fixed in the population. However, this effect will be observable only to a certain limit after which further increase in the interval will not have an effect on the expected fixation rate. Two divergences from the simple scenario are also investigated: the nonsynchronous expression of the focal allele and its emergence in a spatial grid limited by a migration bottleneck. In all cases, it is shown that there is an evolutionary pressure inherent in the dynamics of positive frequency dependent selection on the genes to have a delayed expression. It is hypothesized that the regulation systems of such traits will be under selection for either internal silencing mechanisms or to be triggered by an external environmental condition. (shrink)

Inleiding tot de wijsgerige ethiek, met bijzondere aandacht voor het kantiaanse perspectief.

Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten is popular as an introduction into his philosophy and into fundamental ethics in general. Its third chapter is, nevertheless, a notoriously difficult text. According to many interpreters, it raises questions rather than answering them. This article tries to answer some questions which often remain unclear even in the secondary literature: how is the logical structure of the chapter; what exactly is the synthetic character of the categorical imperative; how does freedom function as the third, (...) connecting term in this synthesis; what is the relationship between questions concerning the possibility and the validity of the categorical imperative? In his own words, Kant wants to give here 'a deduction of the principle of morality' but also of the concept of freedom. The double use of the term 'deduction' needs an accurate interpretation. One thesis of the article is that the deduction of freedom must not be identified with the problematic deduction of the categorical imperative. The deduction of the concept of freedom has a more modest function within the proof of the possibility of the categorical imperative. This means that the question concerning the proof of its validity is still open; but the very idea that such a proof is neither possible nor necessary evokes already the notion of the factum der Vernunft. (shrink)

Im Nietzsche-Wörterbuch werden etwa 300 Begriffe aus Nietzsches Vokabular eingehend erläutert, davon 67 imersten Band. Berücksichtigt werden u. a.: Anzahl der Belege, Schwerpunkte im Gebrauch, Synonyme, die verschiedenen Bedeutungen, Bedeutungskomponenten und bedeutungsrelevanten Kontexte, sprachgeschichtliche und philosophiehistorische Lokalsierung von Nietzsches Gebrauch des Wortes, Nietzsche-Forschung und -Rezeption. Das gesamte Wörterbuch umfaßt 4 Bände.

Sigmund Freud's 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a founding text of psychoanalysis and yet it remains to a large extent an "unknown" text. In this book Freud's 1905 theory of sexuality is reconstructed in its historical context, its systematic outline, and its actual relevance. This reconstruction reveals a non-oedipal theory of sexuality defined in terms of autoerotic, non-objectal, physical-pleasurable activities originating from the "drive" and the excitability of erogenous zones. This book, consequently, not only calls for (...) a reconsideration of the development of Freudian thinking and of the status of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis but also has a strong potential for supporting contemporary non-heteronormative theories of sexuality. It is as such that the 1905 edition of Three Essays becomes a highly relevant document in contemporary philosophical discussions of sexuality. This book also explores the inconsistencies and problems in the original theory of sexuality, notably the unresolved question of the transition from autoerotic infantile sexuality to objectal adult sexuality, as well as the theoretical and methodological shifts present in later editions of Three Essays. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and those with an academic interest in the history of psychoanalysis and sexuality. (shrink)

NG van Kampen is a well-known theoretical physicist who has had a long and distinguished career. His research covers scattering theory, plasma physics, statistical mechanics, and various mathematical aspects of physics. In addition to his scientific work, he has written a number of papers about more general aspects of science. An indefatigable fighter for intellectual honesty and clarity, he has pointed out repeatedly that the fundamental ideas of physics have been needlessly obscured. As those papers appeared in various journals, partly (...) in Dutch, it was felt that it would be worthwhile to collect them (translating the Dutch material into English) and make them available to a larger audience. This is a book of major importance to scientists and university teachers. (shrink)

Bundel opstellen over de belangrijkste stromingen in en auteurs over politieke filosofie, waarin thema's als het zoeken naar waarheid en rechtvaardigheid centraal staan.

Historical fiction set in Judea of the first century CE. Amos, a young Judean searching for his religious identity, travels and debates famous figures representing the main religious and ideological movements of the time. The conclusion Amos reaches is that the quest for the understanding of God's intentions and motives is eternal.

Mazur & Booth's (1998) target article concerns basal and reciprocal relations between testosterone and dominance, and has its roots in Mazur's (1985; 1994) model of primate dominance-submissiveness interactions. Threats are exchanged in these interactions and a psychological stress-manipulation mechanism is suggested to operate, making sure that face-to-face dominance contests are usually resolved without aggression. In this commentary, a recent line of evidence from human research on the relation between testosterone, cortisol, and vigilant (dominant) and avoidant (submissive) responses to threatening “angry” (...) faces is discussed. Findings, to a certain extent, converge with Mazur & Booth's theorizing. However, the strongest relations have been found in subliminal exposure conditions, suggesting that biological instead of psychological mechanisms are involved. (shrink)