The first English translation of Fichte’s second set of 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre.

The texts collected in this volume, which was originally published in 1969, contain Herder's most original and stimulating ideas on politics, history and language. They had for the most part not been previously available in English. In his introduction, Professor Barnard analyses the basic premises of Herder's political thought against the background of the Enlightenment. He examines Herder's concepts of language, community and culture, his theory of historical interaction, and his approach to the problem of change and progress. Finally, he (...) provides a brief comparative analysis of traditionalist thought following the French Revolution, showing how substantive writers like Burke differed from Herder despite the close similarity of political vocabulary. (shrink)

This commentary examines the role of sustainability in the latest draft of the WHO pandemic accord, highlighting its notable absence from the official list of guiding principles despite being mentioned frequently throughout the text. It argues that sustainability should be explicitly acknowledged as a core principle and given a clear definition tailored to pandemic preparedness, and proposes defining sustainability as ensuring that immediate emergency responses don't compromise future pandemic preparedness and response capabilities. Including sustainability as a guiding principle would serve (...) two key purposes: validating the relevance of ethical principles in the accord's provisions and emphasizing the importance of long-term planning in pandemic preparedness. The commentary notes that while humans naturally discount future consequences, sustainable pandemic planning requires considering impacts beyond the next pandemic. It recommends coupling any reforms, such as intellectual property changes, with alternative innovation incentives to maintain a balanced approach to pandemic preparedness and response. (shrink)

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the (...) term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us. (shrink)

Relatively congruence regular quasivarieties and quasivarieties of logic have noticeable similarities. The paper provides a unifying framework for them which extends the Blok-Pigozzi theory of elementarily algebraizable (and protoalgebraic) deductive systems. In this extension there are two parameters: a set of terms and a variable. When the former is empty or consists of theorems, the Blok-Pigozzi theory is recovered, and the variable is redundant. On the other hand, a class of membership logics is obtained when the variable is the only (...) element of the set of terms. For these systems the appropriate variant of equivalent algebraic semantics encompasses the relatively congruence regular quasivarieties. (shrink)

This article focuses mainly on (1) the policy of Delft University of Technology since 1992 as regards the university-wide introduction of a compulsory course on ethics and engineering, and (2) the ideal structure of such a course, including the educational goals of the course.

The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We do (...) so by investigating four historical episodes of radical moral change in which technology plays a noteworthy role. Our case-studies illustrate the plurality of mechanisms involved in technomoral revolutions, but also suggest general patterns of technomoral change, such as technology’s capacity to stabilize and destabilize moral systems, and to make morally salient phenomena visible or invisible. We find several leads to expand and refine conceptual tools for analysing moral change, specifically by crystallizing the notions of ‘technomoral niche construction’ and ‘moral payoff mechanisms’. Coming to terms with the role of technology in radical moral change, we argue, enriches our understanding of moral revolutions, and alerts us to the depths of which technology can change our societies in wanted and unwanted ways. (shrink)

During the last decade neurotransplantation has developed into a technique with the possible potential to repair damaged or degenerating human brain. Effective neurotransplantation has so far been based on the use of fetal brain tissue derived from aborted embryos or fetuses. The ethical issues related to this new therapeutic approach therefore not only concern the possible adverse side effects for a neural graft-receiving patient, but also the relationship between the requirements for fetal tissue and the decision-making process for induced abortion. (...) Although for decades human embryos and fetuses have been the subject of biomedical studies, and, in principle, their use has therefore not been seen as ethically objectionable, the above points made it necessary to reconsider the moral issues. The present paper points out several of these issues, both from the donor and acceptor (patient) point of view. The conclusion is that under a series of restrictions intended to prevent the use of grafts from encouraging induced abortions and to maintain high standards of respect for life and human dignity, neurotransplantation using embryonic or fetal brain tissue parts cannot be rejected on moral grounds. (shrink)

We present here a direct elementary construction of continuous utility functions on perfectly separable totally preordered sets that does not make use of the well-known Debreu’s open gap lemma. This new construction leans on the concept of a separating countable decreasing scale. Starting from a perfectly separable totally ordered structure, we give an explicit construction of a separating countable decreasing scale, from which we show how to get a continuous utility map.

In the most recent edition of Language, Truth and Logic , Professor A. J. Ayer still maintains that pure mathematics is analytic, being in fact merely a vast system of tautology. He is much more confident about this than are most contemporary professional mathematicians who have investigated the foundations of their subject. Following the breakdown of the efforts both of Frege and of Russell and Whitehead to derive pure mathematics from logic, i.e. to prove that the denial of any one (...) proposition of mathematics would necessarily be self-contradictory, Hilbert attempted to prove the more modest thesis that pure mathematics is consistent, i.e. that no two propositions of mathematics can contradict each other; but in 1931 Gödel discovered that even this thesis was undecidable according to the “rules of the game.” As Weyl has recently lamented, “From this history one thing should be clear: we are less certain than ever about the ultimate foundations of mathematics.” The sense in which Ayer uses the terms analytic and tautology implies also that in his view the activities of pure mathematicians lead to nothing new. It is true that he remarks that “there is a sense in which analytic propositions do give us new knowledge. They call attention to linguistic usages of which we might otherwise not be conscious, and they reveal unsuspected implications in our assertions and beliefs.” But, he continues, “we can also see that there is a sense in which they may be said to add nothing to our knowledge. For they may be said to tell us what we know already. ” This denial of novelty in mathematics is as typical of contemporary positivism as the prophecy of Comte that the composition of the stars would never be revealed to us and the objections of Mach to the atomic hypothesis were characteristic of nineteenth century positivism. Indeed, one wonders why the term positivism should have been appropriated by successive philosophers whose common outlook could be so much more fittingly described as negativism. (shrink)

It is proved that the relevance logic \ has no structurally complete consistent axiomatic extension, except for classical propositional logic. In fact, no other such extension is even passively structurally complete.

This article reviews the strengths and limitations of five major paradigms of medical computer-assisted decision making (CADM): (1) clinical algorithms, (2) statistical analysis of collections of patient data, (3) mathematical models of physical processes, (4) decision analysis, and (5) symbolic reasoning or artificial intelligence (Al). No one technique is best for all applications, and there is recent promising work which combines two or more established techniques. We emphasize both the inherent power of symbolic reasoning and the promise of artificial intelligence (...) and the other techniques to complement each other. (shrink)