A series of dialogues with the most exciting and controversial German philosopher writing today. Peter Sloterdijk first became known in this country for his late 1980s Critique of Cynical Reason, which confronted headlong the “enlightened false consciousness” of Habermasian critical theory. Two decades later, after spending seven years in India studying Eastern philosophy, he is now attracting renewed interest for his writings on politics and globalization and for his magnum opus Spheres, a three-volume archaeology of the human attempt to dwell (...) within spaces, from womb to globe: Bubbles, 1998; Globes, 1999; Foam, 2004, all forthcoming from Semiotext. In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk answers questions posed by German writer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, commenting on such issues as technological mutation, development media, communication technologies, and his own intellectual itinerary. Iconoclastic and provocative, alternatively sparkling and bombastic, a child of '68 and a libertarian, Sloterdijk is the most exciting and controversial German philosopher to appear on the world scene since Nietzsche and Heidegger. Like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk remains convinced that contemporary philosophers have to think dangerously and let themselves be “kidnapped” by contemporary “hypercomplexities”; they must forsake our present humanist and nationalist world for a wider horizon at once ecological and global. Neither Sun nor Death is the best introduction available to Sloterdijk's philosophical theory of globalization. It reveals a philosophe extraordinaire, encyclopedic and provocative, as much at ease with current French Theory as with Heidegger and Indian mystic Osho Rajneesh. (shrink)

Aus ganz unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln, sei es aus musikhistorischer oder ethnomusikologischer Sicht, umkreisen zehn Beitrage das Thema aMusik - Zu Begriff und Konzepteno. Unter dieses Thema ein internationales Symposion in Berlin zu stellen, das zum Gedenken an Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (1919-1999) veranstaltet wurde, erschien umso naheliegender, zumal Eggebrecht die Frage aWas ist Musik'o existenziell beruhrte, sie grundierte und sein Forscherleben als Musikwissenschaftler von den fruhen Veroffentlichungen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zu den letzten Arbeiten durchzog. Inhalt Bruno Nettl: Was ist Musik? (...) Ethnomusikologische Perspektive Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort: Die Kantate. Musik zwischen asthetischer Autonomie und Ideologie Christian Berger: aMusiko nach Kant Erich Reimer: aMusikanto und aMusiko. Zur Geschichte einer wechselvollen Beziehung Christian Kaden: Musik bei denen, die keine aMusiko haben Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen: Hugo Riemann und der Musikbegriff der Musikwissenschaft Klaus-Jurgen Sachs: Musik - erfahren und erortert durch Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) Wolf Frobenius: Gestische Musik. Zur Fruhgeschichte des Begriffs Albrecht von Massow: Tonkorper - ein eigenstandiger Parameter der Wesensbestimmung und der Analyse von Musik Christian Thorau: Symphony in White - Musik als modus der Referenz. (shrink)

Das systematische Gewicht dieser These ist bekannt. Mit ihr hat Fichte eine Überzeugung zum Ausdruck gebracht, die er als Entfaltung einer ursprünglichen Evidenz verstand, die am Beginn seines philosophischen Lebensweges stand. In ihr sind der Sache nach auch jene Einreden gegen die frühe Fassung der Wissenschaftslehre berücksichtigt und aufgenommen, wie sie vor allem von Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Friedrich Hölderlin und Friedrich von Hardenberg vorgebracht worden sind. Sie alle kommen darin überein, daß das Fichtesche Prinzip des Wissens nicht selbstgenügsam ist und (...) seinen Grund in einem Sein hat, das dem Wissen und der Reflexion entzogen ist. Darüber hinaus steht Fichtes These von der Grenze des Wissens für die Alternative zu Hegels Überzeugung von der Reichweite und Leistungskraft der Philosophie. (shrink)

Peter Sloterdijk first became known in this country for his late 1980s Critique of Cynical Reason, which confronted headlong the "enlightened false consciousness" of Habermasian critical theory. Two decades later, after spending seven years in India studying Eastern philosophy, he is now attracting renewed interest for his writings on politics and globalization and for his magnum opus Spheres, a three-volume archaeology of the human attempt to dwell within spaces, from womb to globe: Bubbles, 1998; Globes, 1999; Foam, 2004, all forthcoming (...) from Semiotext. In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk answers questions posed by German writer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, commenting on such issues as technological mutation, development media, communication technologies, and his own intellectual itinerary.Iconoclastic and provocative, alternatively sparkling and bombastic, a child of '68 and a libertarian, Sloterdijk is the most exciting and controversial German philosopher to appear on the world scene since Nietzsche and Heidegger. Like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk remains convinced that contemporary philosophers have to think dangerously and let themselves be "kidnapped" by contemporary "hypercomplexities"; they must forsake our present humanist and nationalist world for a wider horizon at once ecological and global.Neither Sun nor Death is the best introduction available to Sloterdijk's philosophical theory of globalization. It reveals a philosophe extraordinaire, encyclopedic and provocative, as much at ease with current French Theory as with Heidegger and Indian mystic Osho Rajneesh. (shrink)

Neuroenhancement concerns the improvement of a person’s mental properties, abilities, and performance. The various techniques of neuroenhancement offer new opportunities of such improvement, but also come with substantive perils. Neuroenhancement thus involves significant normative challenges for individual persons as well as for society as a whole. This expert report provides a concise overview of the contemporary debate on neuroenhancement. It discusses the definition, techniques and targets of neuroenhancement and examines arguments for and against it at the level of individual persons, (...) social interaction, and social policy. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the question of whether AI should be used for suicide prevention on social media data. We focus on algorithms that can identify persons with suicidal ideation based on their postings on social media platforms and investigate whether private companies like Facebook are justified in using these. To find out if that is the case, we start with providing two examples for AI-based means of suicide prevention in social media. Subsequently, we frame suicide prevention as an (...) issue of beneficence, develop two fictional cases to explore the scope of the principle of beneficence and apply the lessons learned to Facebook’s employment of AI for suicide prevention. We show that Facebook is neither acting under an obligation of beneficence nor acting meritoriously. This insight leads us to the general question of who is entitled to help. We conclude that private companies like Facebook can play an important role in suicide prevention, if they comply with specific rules which we derive from beneficence and autonomy as core principles of biomedical ethics. At the same time, public bodies have an obligation to create appropriate framework conditions for AI-based tools of suicide prevention. As an outlook we depict how cooperation between public and private institutions can make an important contribution to combating suicide and, in this way, put the principle of beneficence into practice. (shrink)

Unterschiedlichste Anwendungsformen künstlicher Intelligenz bestimmen schon heute den Alltag vieler Menschen – von Einsatz von KI-Systeme in Finanzgeschäften über die Vergabe von Studienplätzen bis hin zur Steuerung von Pflegerobotern, Autos und Waffensystemen. Diese vielfältigen neuen Möglichkeiten und Visionen wecken einerseits Hoffnungen auf persönlichen und gesellschaftlichen Nutzen und Fortschritt; andererseits rufen sie aber auch Bedenken, Ängste und gelegentlich auch grundsätzliche Ablehnung hervor. Angesichts dieser Ambivalenz sind ethische Analysen gefordert, die ausloten, wie ein verantwortungsvoller Umgang mit KI gestaltet werden sollte. Der Band (...) greift viele dieser Probleme auf und unterzieht sie einer eingehenden philosophischen Analyse. Die Auseinandersetzung ist nach klassischen Teilbereichen der Philosophie gegliedert, aus deren Perspektive heraus jeweils spezielle Teilaspekte oder einzelne Anwendungsformen von KI beleuchtet werden. Das Themenspektrum reicht entsprechend von Fragen der Handlungstheorie und Philosophie des Geistes über wissenschaftstheoretische Problemstellungen bis hin zu ethischen Fragen die beispielsweise den Einsatz von KI in der Medizin und im Wirtschafts- und Arbeitsleben betreffen. In Auseinandersetzung mit aktuellen Debatten werden eigenständige Positionen entwickelt. (shrink)

In this paper, we use some elements of the philosophical theories of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom for examining the interactions between humans and machines. In particular, we adopt the concept of the space of reasons for analyzing the status of artificial intelligent agents. One could argue that AIAs, like the widely used recommendation systems, have already entered the space of reasons, since they seem to make knowledge claims that we use as premises for further claims. This, in turn, can (...) lead to a sense of alienation because AIAs do not quite play by the rules of the space of the reason. We, therefore, ask somewhat pointedly whether aliens have entered the space of reasons. A closer look reveals that it is a misconception to consider AIAs as being in the space of reasons. In fact, they should be seen as very sophisticated tools. Since these tools affect our own acting in the space of reasons, special regulations are required for their proper use. (shrink)

BackgroundAdvance research directives (ARD) have been suggested as a means by which to facilitate research with incapacitated subjects, in particular in the context of dementia research. However, established disclosure requirements for study participation raise an ethical problem for the application of ARDs: While regular consent procedures call for detailed information on a specific study (“token disclosure”), ARDs can typically only include generic information (“type disclosure”). The introduction of ARDs could thus establish a double standard in the sense that within the (...) context of ARDs, type disclosure would be considered sufficient, while beyond this context, token disclosure would remain necessary.Main bodyThis paper provides an ethical analysis of ARDs, taking into account the results of numerous empirical studies that have been performed so far. It will be argued that a revised understanding of informed consent can allow for context-sensitive disclosure standards. As a consequence, ARDs that include type disclosure can be acceptable under suitable circumstances. Such an approach raises a number of objections. A thorough examination shows, however, that they are not sufficient to justify a rejection of the approach.ConclusionThe approach presented in this paper avoids introducing a double standard. It is, therefore, more suitable for the implementation of ARDs than established approaches. (shrink)

Although the principle of informed consent is well established and its importance widely acknowledged, it has met with criticism for decades. Doubts have been raised for a number of different reasons. In particular, empirical data show that people regularly fail to reproduce the information provided to them. Many critics agree, therefore, that the received concept of informed consent is no more than a myth. Strategies to overcome this problem often rest on a flawed concept of informed consent. In this paper, (...) it is suggested that informed consent is a communicative act between two persons. The challenge is to elucidate the norms and constraints for successfully performing such a communicative act. The view developed here has major consequences with regard to the standards for information disclosure as well as for the general scope of informed consent. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that applied ethics originated in the United States in the 1960s as a reaction to new social challenges (particularly in the field of medicine), to some extent superseding the metaethical analyses of moral language dominant at that time. This widespread portrayal of applied ethics as an unforeseen reaction of philosophy to new social challenges is inaccurate. In this article, I seek to show that applied ethics should be regarded as a philosophical innovation whose origins can be (...) traced back to the ethics of Kant and the Neokantianism of Hermann Cohen. It is my central thesis that the key step in its development occurred with American Pragmatism, or, to be precise, in the intellectual environment around American Pragmatism. (shrink)

The fission of ethics into two systematically distinct parts has its roots in the architectonics that Kant has developed in his moral philosophy. Despite noticeable differences between “Kant’s applied moral philosophy” (M. Gregor) and contemporary applied ethics this architectonics provides important insights which can contribute to a systematically rigorous and historically mindful self-assurance of contemporary applied ethics.

This is the second paper in a three-part series on the state of the enhancement debate. We report current trends and give an overview of established positions in the field of neuroenhancement. Unlike a number of articles on the bioethics of enhancement, we try to highlight connections between the contemporary debate and established positions in philosophical ethics. This specific perspective inspired the breakdown of our three-part series into consequentialist, deontological and virtue-ethical arguments.

Die im Dialektik-Buch aufgezeigten 16 Quell-Typen von Dialektik werden auf das große Thema Liebe angewandt, woraus sich ebenso viele differenzierte Antworten auf die Frage ergeben, ob denn Liebe logisch sein könne. Die dialogische Denkströmung im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert (Jacobi, Hölderlin, Feuerbach, Buber, Ebner, Rosenzweig, Marcel usw.) war nur teilweise im Recht mit ihrer schroffen Opposition gegen die Subjekt-Objekt-Dialektik Kants und Hegels. Dialektik wie Dialogik sind beide Denken in Relationen und Gegensätzen. Auf der sehr innovativen Grundlage seiner kürzlich entwickelten Typen (...) von Dialektik legt Heinrichs eine dialogische Dialektik dar, die zugleich dialektische Dialogik ist. Der bisher unfruchtbare Gegensatz zwischen liebevoller Zwischenmenschlichkeit und logischer Schärfe wird fruchtbar gemacht, auch durch starkes Eingehen auf Hegels Jugendfreund und Mit-Jubilar Hölderlin Das Buch enthält im 1. Teil frühere Arbeiten des Verfassers, die in prominenten Sammelwerken verstreut waren, während der 2. Teil das innovative Niveau des Dialektik-Buches in überraschender Weise hält, ja steigert. (shrink)

Although dominated by consequentialist and deontological thinking, the debate about human enhancement has been enriched by several arguments from virtue theory and from virtue ethics. This article provides an overview of the virtue ethical arguments in the debate and identifies several topics in the ethics of human enhancement where the argumentative resources of virtue ethics have not yet been sufficiently considered.

Reliabilism suffers from a problem with long sequences of justifications. The theory of justification provided in process reliabilism allows for an implausibly large extension of ‘justified belief’. According to process reliabilist theory, it is possible that a justifying cognitive process has an arbitrarily low probability of being successful and a justified belief an arbitrarily low probability of being true. This result violates reliabilism’s aims as well as our ordinary standards of justification.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool for several healthcare tasks. AI tools are suited to optimize predictive models in medicine. Ethical debates about AI’s extension of the predictive power of medical models suggest a need to adapt core principles of medical ethics. This article demonstrates that a popular interpretation of the principle of justice in healthcare needs amendment given the effect of AI on decision-making. The procedural approach to justice, exemplified with Norman Daniels and James Sabin’s accountability for reasonableness (...) conception, needs amendment because, as research into algorithmic fairness shows, it is insufficiently sensitive to differential effects of seemingly just principles on different groups of people. The same line of research generates methods to quantify differential effects and make them amenable for correction. Thus, what is needed to improve the principle of justice is a combination of procedures for selecting just criteria and principles and the use of algorithmic tools to measure the real impact these criteria and principles have. In this article, the author shows that algorithmic tools do not merely raise issues of justice but can also be used in their mitigation by informing us about the real effects certain distributional principles and criteria would create. (shrink)

It is important to be able to offer an account of which activities count as scientific research, given our current interest in promoting research as a means to benefit humankind and in ethically regulating it. We attempt to offer such an account, arguing that we need to consider both the procedural and functional dimensions of an activity before we can establish whether it is a genuine instance of scientific research. By placing research in a broader schema of activities, the similarities (...) and differences between research activities and other activities become visible. It is also easier to show why some activities that do not count as research can sometimes be confused with research and why some other activities can be regarded only partially as research. Although the concept of research is important to delimit a class of activities which we might be morally obliged to promote, we observe that the class of activities which are regarded as subject to ethical regulation is not exhausted by research activities. We argue that, whether they be research or not, all the activities that are likely to affect the rights and interests of the individuals involved and impact on the rights and interests of other individuals raise ethical issues and might be in need of ethical regulation. (shrink)

This is Jürgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociological book and one of the key contributions to political thought in the postwar period. It will be a revelation to those who have known Habermas only through his theoretical writing to find his later interests in problems of legitimation and communication foreshadowed in this lucid study of the origins, nature, and evolution of public opinion in democratic societies.

Can an artificially intelligent tool be a part of a human’s extended mind? There are two opposing streams of thought in this regard. One of them can be identified as the externalist perspective in the philosophy of mind, which tries to explain complex states and processes of an individual as co-constituted by elements of the individual’s material and social environment. The other strand is normative and explanatory atomism which insists that what is to be explained and evaluated is the behaviour (...) of individuals. In the present contribution, it is argued that counterintuitive results turn up once atomism tries to appropriate insights from psychological externalism and holism. These results are made visible by technological innovations, especially artificially intelligent systems, but they do not result from these innovations alone. They are rather implicit in situated cognition approaches which join both theoretical strands. This has repercussions for explanatory as well as ethical theorising based on situated cognition approaches. It is a fairly rare constellation that new technological options, namely artificial intelligence, raise doubts concerning a philosophical theory, namely extended mind theory. (shrink)

In this thought-provoking article, a number of very valid and serious ethical concerns are raised about the potential application of research in neuro-circuitry to future treatment devices in clinical psychiatry. Rainey elaborates the basis for his concerns within the framework of a hypothetico-deductive notion of science,, and in his characterization.) From this perspective, the critical source of problems derives from an interposed step C in which “techniques are applied to extract relevant signals from the complicated raw signal.” The resulting characteristics (...) of brain recordings can be taken to be “deduced by algorithms, though they are themselves inductive engines through and through”... (shrink)

Der Begriff ‚Bioethik‘ bezeichnet zumeist denjenigen Teilbereich der Angewandten Ethik, der sich mit dem Umgang mit Leben bzw. Lebewesen beschäftigt. Die Bioethik lässt sich ihrerseits in die Teilbereiche Medizinethik, Tierethik und Umweltethik untergliedern. Auch wenn diese Untergliederung durchaus gebräuchlich ist, zeigt sie doch, dass thematische Zuordnungen und disziplinäre Grenzziehungen in der Angewandten Ethik nicht unproblematisch sind.

Die Forschungs- und Wissenschaftsethik ist diejenige Teildisziplin der Angewandten Ethik, die sich mit ethischen Problemen von Forschung und Wissenschaft beschäftigt. Man kann die Forschungsethik in drei Bereiche gliedern: Ein erster Bereich hat Prinzipien und Normen zum Gegenstand, die für alle Wissenschaftler als Wissenschaftler gelten. Ein zweiter Bereich ist mit Methoden befasst, die in der Wissenschaft zur Anwendung kommen. Ein dritter Bereich der Forschungsethik beschäftigt sich schließlich mit den Zielen von Forschung bzw. mit ethischen Fragen, die solche Ziele aufwerfen.