A radical reform of the agri-food biotech regulation in the EU is considered in many quarters as a pressing necessity. Indeed, two important decisions on the legal status of the so-called New Breeding Techniques are expected shortly. In order to clarify some basic aspects of the complex scenario, after a brief introduction regarding the “GMO” fallacy, we offer our point of view on the following facets: A faulty approach is frequent in the discussion of the agri-food regulation; NBTs, genome editing (...) may lead to the disappearance of the “GMO” meme; Beyond health and safety issues: socio-economic considerations; Sustainability: the comprehensive, meaningful starting point of a positive reform; The theoretical and legal basis for the reform are already contained in the EU’s general guidelines to legislation. (shrink)

Bd. 1. Einleitung, mittelhochdeutscher Text -- Bd. 2. Lateinische Quellen.

Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is not a mere egology, but gets its concrete accomplishment only as a phenomenology of 'transcendental intersubjectivity'. However, the subjective centers of any transcendentality and thus of every constitution — even of intersubjectivity itself — have to be such unities as Leibniz' 'monads', that is, individually concrete subjects producing all their representations of one another completely out of themselves, respectively. Thus the problem arises, how the genuine transcendental status of each monadic subject in all its constitutive achievements (...) could be maintained so that they develop their own intentional lives in a universal mutual accordance, without presupposing again a supra-monadic ground for their 'harmony', i.e. a higher-levelled ordering unity. I shall argue that th peculiar Husserlian 'transcendental monadology' is inevitably bound to this intrinsic paradox which can at best be reduced to a mere postulate but never be resolved. (shrink)

Societies change; and sociology has, since its inception, described and evaluated these changes. This article proposes a revised theory of collective learning processes, a conceptual framework which addresses ways in which people make sense of and cope with change. Drawing on Habermas’ classic proposal, but shifting the focus from argumentation towards storytelling, it explains how certain articulations allow for collective learning processes (imagining more inclusive orders), while others block learning processes (imagining more exclusive orders). More specifically, the article points to (...) narrative genres (romance, tragedy, comedy and irony) which organize feelings and shape the social bond, proposing that ironic and tragic stories have the potential to trigger collective learning processes, while romantic and comic stories tend to block them. (shrink)

Utopian imagination and the principle of hope have fallen on hard times. It has become almost a commonplace that utopian visions are obsolete. The present state of world affairs seems to paralyze utopian thinking. In an age of worldwide exploitation and destruction of nature (the greenhouse effect), epidemic diseases (AIDS), and Bush's “War on Terror,” the future of mankind appears bleak and apocalyptic images dominate our imagination. Especially the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, if that was supposed to be (...) a utopia at all, has shattered all dreams of century-old social utopias. Utopia is draped in a mourning veil,…. (shrink)

Ubiquitous Computing bezeichnet keine konkrete Technologie, sondern eine informatische Vision allgegenwärtiger Datenverarbeitung und Nutzung informatischer Systeme, bei der es weder nennenswerte Bedienungsanforderungen noch Hardwarebelastungen für den Nutzer gibt. Ubiquitäre Systeme agieren quasi unsichtbar im Hintergrund unseres Handlungsfeldes. Die bisherigen Realisierungen sind in unterschiedlichen informatischen und nachrichtentechnischen Technologien konkretisiert.

This article argues for a robust notion of collective identity which is not reduced to a psychological conception of identity. In the first part, the debate on the concept of identity raised by several authors is taken up critically with the intention of defending a strong sociological conception of identity which by definition is a collective identity. The basic assumption is that collective identities are narrative constructions which permit the control of the boundaries of a network of actors. This theory (...) is then applied to the case of Europe, showing how identity markers are used to control the boundaries of a common space of communication. These markers are bound to stories which those within such a space of communication share. Stories that hold in their narrative structures social relations provide projects of control. National identities are based on strong and exclusive stories. Europeanization (among other parallel processes at the global level) opens this space of boundary constructions and offers opportunities for national as well as sub-national as well as transnational stories competing with each other to shape European identity projects. The EU — this is the hypothesis — provides a case in which different sites offer competing opportunities to continue old stories, to start new stories or to import old stories from other sites, thus creating a narrative network on top of the network of social relations that bind the people in Europe together. European identity is therefore to be conceived as a narrative network embedded in an emerging network of social relations among the people living in Europe. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The (...) book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias,1 Abelard distinguishes the form of an expression2 (oratio) from what it says, that is, its content. The content of an expression is its understanding (intellectus). This distinction is surely the most well-known and central idea in Abelard’s commentary. It provides him with the opportunity to distinguish statements (enuntiationes) from other kinds of expressions without implying a diference in their content, since the ability of a statement to signify something true or false (verum vel (...) falsum)3 cannot be found in its content. More precisely, Abelard distinguishes statements both from complete expressions (orationes perfectae) that are not statements but rather questions, requests, commands, etc. and from incomplete expressions, that is, mere word strings (orationes imperfectae), such as homo albus. These kinds of expressions, according to Abelard, do not differ in the understanding they present but in the way they present it. (shrink)

Anhand dreier paradigmatischer Positionen des bioethischen Diskurses wird dargestellt, inwiefern diese von ihren Leitbegriffen abhängig sind. Dabei darf eine Ansicht nicht vom bioethischen Diskurs exkludiert werden, nur weil sie metaphysische Begründungsweisen impliziert. Vielmehr ist auf einer moralphilosophischen Ebene jede Position zunächst allein theorieimmanent danach zu beurteilen, ob sie ihre Kriterien konsistent aus den rational zu begründenden Leitbegriffen entwickelt. Dann können die Ansichten in ein Gespräch miteinander gebracht werden, das mögliche Einseitigkeiten zutage treten lässt. Erst in einem zweiten Schritt geht es (...) um eine rechtsethische Engführung, wobei eine moralphilosophische Korrektur nach ethischen Kriterien angebracht ist, wenn es bei rechtsethischer Betrachtung nicht möglich ist, der Instrumentalisierungsgefahr hinreichend vorzubeugen; dann kann es Aufgabe sein, religiöse Bedeutungspotentiale, die säkularistischen Ansichten verborgen bleiben müssten, in eine öffentliche Sprache zu übersetzen. Jedenfalls sollte eine Rechtsethik ihre Ergebnisse anhand moralphilosophisch relevanter Intuitionen überdenken, sodass ein Ansatz, der vorwiegend an Interessen orientiert ist, hinterfragt werden kann. (shrink)

The manipulation of materials, and to some extent also their systematic classification, form an integral part of the skills and culture of all societies. Yet it took long for proper sciences to develop out of many processing procedures, tapping the accumulated knowledge about specific material characteristics. In the late 20th century an overarching science of workable materials emerged: materials science. This concept and term originated from major boosts in materials research during WWII and the Cold War, first financed by the (...) U.S. Department of Defense and the Advanced Research Project Agency. The COSMAT-Report from 1974, written by the American Presidential Science Advisory Committee’s „Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering" four years after its inception, and subsequent reports heralded in the second institutionalization phase of materials science in the USA and with some delay also elsewhere. As the field continued to expand, the demand grew from within in the late 1990s for disciplinary status. This article sorts these claims from the various camps and sets them in the context of unfolding institutional change. The developments within the German-speaking realm, thus far unduly neglected in these debates, are added. I close with a systematic discussion of eight indicator arguments for or against a convergence of this complex field of research into a single coherent discipline. Against Bensaude-Vincent’s thesis that materials science still is an “aggregation of fragments of knowledge", I argue that by 2010 materials science did indeed achieve disciplinary status in a historically rare and enduring process of discipline formation through “emergence by integration" rather than by differentiation. (shrink)

The transition from morality to the morals involves the dissolution of the antagonism of the moral, the overcoming of the antinomy of constant obligation. In his Wissenschaft der Logik, Hegel focuses on the logical defect of endless progress “mostly in its ap­plication to morality“ (RPh, § 268). Pure will and the moral law on the one hand, and nature and empiricality on the other “presuppose each other as fully independent and mutually indifferent“, and thus the opposition is postulated as an (...) axiom, which excludes its overcoming the antagonism. The antagonism “does not dissolve in infinite progress. It is, on the contrary, depicted as unsolved and unsolvable, and thus confirmed“. The result is “the very same antagonism that stood at the beginning“ (RPh, § 269 an.). The progress ad infinitum exhibits itself as antagonism that unjustly points to itself as a solution of what contradicts itself (WdL 5, p. 166). The real overcoming of this antinomy fails; the idea of the Judgment Day solution owes the answer and is only an expression of excessive gentleness towards the world. Antinomies and collisions in moral action in the end separate, which implies the persistence in insuperable antinomy. Another topic would be a detailed exposition of Hegel’s solution proposal. In any case, Hegel sees the naturalness of speculative thought in the necessity to think the ideality of both of the opposing sides, that is, to understand them beforehand as the moment of the concept of moral action, see them as opposing in their moving unity and think them as the transition from morality to the moral action, the morals, in which the antagonism of the moral is not abstractly lost, but elevated, guarded and overcome. (shrink)