Im Rahmen der Popperianischen Bewährungstheorie spielt der Begriff der Strenge eines Tests eine wichtige Rolle. Einige konkurrierende Vorschläge zur Bestimmung der Teststrenge werden vorgestellt, auf ihre Konsequenzen hin analysiert und miteinander verglichen. Gegen Vorschläge von Popper und Watkins bzw. Lakatos und Musgrave werden schwerwiegende Einwände vorgebracht; durch die Erweiterung einer Idee von Zahar lassen sich deren vertretbare Konsequenzen aber erhalten und sogar erklären. Es wird die Ansicht vertreten, daß es im Zusammenhang mit einer rationalen Theorienpräferenz mehr auf ein Optimum an (...) empirischer Kritik als auf ein Maximum ankommt: ein Test muß zwar streng, aber auch fair sein. (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)

Eusociality is the form of animal social organization with a reproductive division of labor, most prominently known from ants and bees. Here I ask the question why this enormously successful form of social organization is missing in the largest and most diverse group of vertebrates, the teleost fishes. I first briefly review the phylogenetic distribution and likely evolutionary origins of eusociality. Then, after an equally very brief review of the diverse life history strategies of teleosts, I conclude that it is (...) not the lack of evolutionary pre-adaptations which is keeping teleosts from becoming eusocial. Rather, I argue, that the absence of eusocial fish is caused by a number of differences between aquatic (chiefly marine) and terrestrial ecosystems: (1) Greater offspring dispersal in aquatic ecosystems reduces the role of kin-selection. (2) Lesser predictability of the environment at larger timescales in marine ecosystems disfavors eusociality. (3) A briefer impact of resource pulses in aquatic ecosystems will cause less evolutionary pressure towards cooperation, and eventually eusociality. Finally, I conclude by predicting that the most likely places to find eusocial fishes will be the deep-water regions of the ocean and the African rift lakes. (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)

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 riddle of how to democratize the multi-level polity of the EU is answered by pointing to the empirical impact of an unfolding European public sphere. It is argued that there is a self-constituting dynamic of a European public sphere which abets the coupling of transnational spaces of communication with the institutional integration of the EU. From this perspective, democracy is not external to the EU, it is already part of the logic of European institution-building and governance and is fostered (...) by collective learning processes in which definitions of the collective good as well as conditions for appropriate forms of political participation are negotiated. In discussing the case of the EU’s constitutional reform, a theory of democratic functionalism is proposed which accounts for this specific form of democratization of the EU. (shrink)

"Die Bildung muss auf die volle Entfaltung der menschlichen Persönlichkeit und auf die Stärkung der Achtung vor den Menschenrechten und Grundfreiheiten gerichtet sein.

We introduce a new Turing machine based concept of time complexity for functions on computable metric spaces. It generalizes the ordinary complexity of word functions and the complexity of real functions studied by Ko [19] et al. Although this definition of TIME as the maximum of a generally infinite family of numbers looks straightforward, at first glance, examples for which this maximum exists seem to be very rare. It is the main purpose of this paper to prove that, nevertheless, the (...) definition has a large number of important applications. Using the framework of TTE [40], we introduce computable metric spaces and computability on the compact subsets. We prove that every computable metric space has a c-proper c-admissible representation. We prove that Turing machine time complexity of a function computable relative to c-admissible c-proper representations has a computable bound on every computable compact subset. We prove that computably compact computable metric spaces have concise c-proper c-admissible representations and show by examples that many canonical representations are of this kind. Finally, we compare our definition with a similar one by Labhalla et al. [22]. Several examples illustrate the concepts. By these results natural and realistic definitions of computational complexity are now available for a variety of numerical problems such as image processing, integration, continuous Fourier transform or wave propagation. (shrink)

Aristoteles’ Traktat De anima untersucht die Natur der Seele. Unter ›Seele‹ ist dabei jedoch nicht das subjektive Zentrum unseres mentalen Lebens zu verstehen, sondern dasjenige Prinzip, dessen Vorhandensein lebendige von leblosen Körpern unterscheidet. Es umfasst alle Formen des Lebendigen, also pflanzliches, tierisches und menschliches Leben. Ziel der Schrift ist es, die Seele zu definieren, d.h. zu erklären, was es für diese Formen des Lebendigen jeweils heißt, lebendig zu sein. Diskutiert werden: der vegetative Selbsterhalt, Wahrnehmung, menschliches Denken sowie die Ortsbewegung der (...) Lebewesen. De anima gehört zu den faszinierendsten, philosophisch lohnendsten, aber auch schwierigeren Schriften des Aristoteles. -/- Die zweisprachige Studienausgabe bietet eine vollständige Neu­übersetzung. Benutzt wird die Edition des griechischen Textes von Aurelius Förster (Budapest 1912), von der sich die heutzutage sehr verbreitete Ausgabe von W. D. Ross textkritisch hat leiten lassen (OCT 1956 und 1971). Sie ist auch durch die späteren Ausgaben von Siwek (Rom 1965) und Jannone (Paris 1966) nicht ersetzt. Eine Einleitung führt in die Grundlagen und Voraussetzungen der aristotelischen Seelenlehre ein und gibt einen Überblick über den Gedankengang der Schrift. Der Kommentarteil ist so knapp wie möglich gehalten. Im Anhang sind ein Glossar und ein Verzeichnis der Abweichungen von der Ausgabe von Ross beigefügt. (shrink)

T. 1. Philologische Untersuchungen zu den Brahmasūtra-Kommemtaren des Śaṅkara und des Bhāskara.

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.

In as far as every philosophy appears at a certain point in time it later inevitably becomes a historical fact. If its content is then to be recognizable, if it is to be reclaimed as philosophy in the present, then we ourselves must have a philosophical conception of history and, furthermore, a conception of philosophy's own historicity. Only since Kant has modern metaphysics expressly and methodically developed such a conception within its systematic claim to truth. Moreover, for the presentday philosophy (...) and its relationship to a completed metaphysics such a conception is indispensable - under the presupposition that the history of philosophy is to be taken seriously as philosophy. (shrink)