Book reviewed in this article: The Concept of Moral Consensus: The Case of Technological Interventions into Human Reproduction. Edited by Kurt Bayertz. Deciding Together: Bioethics and Moral Consensus. By Jonathan D. Moreno.

Constructive Realism, an increasingly discussed philosophy of science founded by the Viennese philosopher of science Fritz G. Wallner, is the core issue of the texts gathered in this volume. The authors either discuss the constructive-realistic view philosophically or present their research interpreted by the constructive-realistic doctrine. Constructive Realism inspires philosophy as well as natural science and humanities. This volume proves this inspiring feature of Constructive Realism. All texts are written by colleagues, friends and scholars of Fritz G. Wallner to honour (...) his 60th birthday. (shrink)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS "Success has a thousand fathers" is a familiar expression. And while it is for the readers to judge the success of what follows, ...

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the interdependency of healthcare systems and research organizations on manufacturers and suppliers of personnel protective equipment and the need for well-trained personnel who can react quickly to changing working conditions. Reports on challenges faced by research laboratory workers are rare in contrast to the lived experience of hospital health care workers. We report on experiences gained by RLWs who significantly contributed to combating the pandemic under particularly challenging conditions due to increased workload, sickness and interrupted (...) PPE supply chains. RLWs perform a broad spectrum of work with SARS-CoV-2 such as autopsies, establishment of virus cultures and infection models, development and verification of diagnostics, performance of virus inactivation assays to investigate various antiviral agents including vaccines and evaluation of decontamination technologies in high containment biological laboratories. Performance of autopsies and laboratory work increased substantially during the pandemic and thus led to highly demanding working conditions with working shifts of more than eight hours working in PPE that stressed individual limits and also the ergonomic and safety limits of PPE. We provide detailed insights into the challenges of the stressful daily laboratory routine since the pandemic began, lessons learned, and suggest solutions for better safety based on a case study of a newly established HCBL designed for autopsies and research laboratory work. Reduced personal risk, increased resilience, and stress resistance can be achieved by improved PPE components, better training, redundant safety measures, inculcating a culture of safety, and excellent teamwork. (shrink)

This article aims to describe the main features of Kurt Goldstein’s philosophical anthropology, also showing how the project of such an anthropology found its form in the rereading of clinical material. We underline the originality of an anthropology rooted in the description of pathology and care, following a critical method which refuses other possible ways of drawing the figure of man from clinical experience. We thus attempt to show how a renewed reading of Goldstein is possible that is less (...) dependent on the Canguilhemian and Merleau-Pontian readings which were fundamental for French-speaking readers. (shrink)

Die berühmte Philosophin Hannah Arendt, deren Name heute in Deutschland Schulen, Straße, Institute und auch ICE-Züge tragen, wurde 1906 in Hannover als Kind einer jüdischen Familie geboren. Sie las Philosophie in Heidelberg bei Martin Heidegger, mit dem sie auch eine heimliche Liebesbeziehung verband. Nach der Flucht vor den Nazis 1933 über Frankreich in die USA wurde Arendt mit einem Schlag berühmt, als sie 1963 ihr Buch "Eichmann in Jerusalem" veröffentlichte. Sie machte sich über die Grundlagen politischen Handelns vor allem (...) anhand totalitärer Systeme Gedanken und hielt dabei stets betont Abstand zu allen Denkschulen der Linken oder Rechten.Diese Unabhängigkeit, die sie selbst gerne als "Denken ohne Geländer" umschrieb, ist laut Sontheimer eine der wichtigsten Ursachen für ein nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges wieder stark gestiegenes Interesse an Arendts Texten. Anhand des Lebenslaufs der Philosophin zeichnet Sontheimer ihre Denkansätze nach. "Das Hohelied der Freundschaft" überschreibt er ein sehr eindrucksvolles Kapitel über die intensiven, zum Teil über viele Jahrzehnte über hunderte von Briefen gepflegten Beziehungen der Autorin zu Zeitgenossen wie dem jüdischen Gelehrten Gershom Scholem, ihrem deutschen Lehrer und Kollegen Karl Jaspers und der US-Schriftstellerin Mary McCarthy. Am 4.12.2005 jährte sich der Todestag von Hannah Arendt zum 30. Mal. (shrink)

Stoicism has had a diverse reception in German philosophy. This is the first interpretive study of shared themes and dialogues between late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century experts on classical antiquity and philosophers. Assessing how modern philosophers have incorporated ancient resources with the context of German philosophy, chapters in this volume are devoted to philosophical giants such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and Peter Sloterdijk. Among the ancient Stoics, the focus is (...) on Seneca, Epictetus, and doxography, but reference will also be made to texts that have so far been neglected by non-specialists. Often references to Stoic texts are playful, making it hard for non-specialists to reconstruct their understanding of the sources; by illuminating and enhancing the philosophical significance of these receptions, this book argues that they can change our understanding of Greek and Roman Stoic doctrines and authors, twentieth-century continental philosophy, and the themes which coordinate their ongoing dialogues. Some of these themes are surprising for Stoicism, such as the poetics of tragic drama and the anthropological foundations of hermeneutics. Others are already central to Stoic reception, such as the constitution of the subject in relation to various ethical, ecological, and metaphysical powers and processes; among these are contemplation and knowledge; identity and plurality; temporality, facticity, and fate; and personal, social, and planetary forms of self-cultivation and self-appropriation. Addressing the need for a synoptic vision of related continental readings of Stoicism, this book brings ancient texts into new dialogues with up-to-date scholarship, facilitating increased understanding, critical evaluation, and creative innovation within the continental response to Stoicism. (shrink)

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) is generally known as one of the two great German existentialists together with Martin heidegger (see Article 18), but Jaspers's existentialist approach is very different from that of Heidegger. While Heidegger intends to construct a fundamental ontology of Being by means of phenomenological method and to highlight some fundamental existentials of human being (Dasein), Jaspers rejects every kind of ontology. His existentialist approach is therapeutic: By his philosophizing he intends to appeal to every human being to (...) realize his or her genuine existential possibilities, “possible Existenz” or “true selfhood.” The formative influences on his basic thinking include Plato, Plotinus, hegel (Article 6), schelling (Article 5), nietzsche (Article 11), kierkegaard (Article 9), dilthey (Article 37) and husserl (Article 15). In contrast to Heidegger, Jaspers also developed a political philosophy in the liberal tradition that draws particularly upon the thought of Kant and Max Weber. (shrink)

Das wachsende wissenschaftliche Interesse an Tieren, ihren Fähigkeiten und Interaktionen mit den Menschen sowie verhaltensbiologische Erkenntnisse und tierphilosophische Einsichten führen zu einer Neubewertung der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung. Dies bleibt nicht ohne Konsequenzen für die Theologie. Sie muss nach den philosophischen und theologischen Ursachen für ihre weitgehende „Tiervergessenheit“ fragen sowie die Potenziale entfalten, die zum Beispiel die Heilige Schrift und die Schöpfungsspiritualität für die Gestaltung der Beziehung zu den Tieren bieten. Dabei balanciert sie auf dem schmalen Grat, den Mensch-Tier-Differentialismus zu überwinden, ohne das (...) je Eigene von Menschen und Tieren zu verwischen. Dieser Band leistet eine interdisziplinäre Annäherung an eine christliche Tierethik, die sich nicht als isolierte binnenphilosophische oder -theologische Bereichsethik versteht, sondern Antworten sucht auf gesamtgesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen mit Fragen der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung. Mit Beiträgen von Andreas Aigner, Heike Baranzke, Martina Besler, Julia Blanc, Katharina Ebner, Matthias Eggel, Julia Enxing, Matthias Gauly, Herwig Grimm, Anita Idel, Kurt Kotrschal, Peter Kunzmann, Martin M. Lintner, Susana Monsó, Ute Neumann-Gorsolke, Jakob Ohm, Christina Potschka, Kurt Remele, Michael Rosenberger, Markus Vogt und Markus Wild. (shrink)

In his later thought, Martin Heidegger disclaimed the possibility of a philosophical history of philosophy. In his view, the history of philosophy tends to remain bound to a specißc philosophical orientation and offer merely a philosophical position, not philosophy itself, presenting at best nothing more than an assemblage of doctrinal positions. In contrast, Heidegger developed in his early Freiburg lectures of 1919-1923 an historical-phenomenological program of philosophical history directed against the historical school of Dilthey, whose objekthi-storisch perspective he meant (...) to replace with his own vollzugshistorisch method. For Heidegger, there is no perfected subject at the basis of historical investigation, but rather it is the temporality of the observer which makes possible historical knowledge in the ßrst place. Heidegger's later abandonment of this notion is a significant reason for the lack of a philosophical approach to writing the history of philosophy after 1945 in Germany. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introducing persons and the psychology of personhood Jack Martin and Mark H. Bickhard; Part I. Philosophical, Conceptual Perspectives: 2. The person concept and the ontology of persons Michael A. Tissaw; 3. Achieving personhood: the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology Charles Guignon; Part II. Historical Perspectives: 4. Historical psychology of persons: categories and practice Kurt Danziger; 5. Persons and historical ontology Jeff Sugarman; 6. Critical personalism: on its tenets, its historical obscurity, and its future prospects (...) James T. Lamiell; Part III. Social-Developmental Perspectives: 7. Conceiving of self and others as persons: evolution and development John Barresi, Chris Moore and Raymond Martin; 8. Position exchange theory and personhood: moving between positions and perspectives within physical, sociocultural and psychological space and time Jack Martin and Alex Gillespie; 9. The emergent ontology of persons Mark H. Bickhard; 10. Theorising personhood for the world in transition and change: reflections from a transformative activist stance on human development Anna Stetsenko; Part IV. Narrative Perspectives: 11. Identity and narrative as root metaphors of personhood Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson; 12. Storied persons: the double triad of narrative identity Mark Freeman. (shrink)

Kurt Gödel is almost as famous—one might say “notorious”—for his extreme platonist views as he is famous for his mathematical theorems. Moreover his platonism is not a myth; it is well-documented in his writings. Here are two platonist declarations about set theory, the first from his paper about Bertrand Russell and the second from the revised version of his paper on the Continuum Hypotheses.Classes and concepts may, however, also be conceived as real objects, namely classes as “pluralities of things” (...) or as structures consisting of a plurality of things and concepts as the properties and relations of things existing independently of our definitions and constructions.It seems to me that the assumption of such objects is quite as legitimate as the assumption of physical bodies and there is quite as much reason to believe in their existence.But, despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception also of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don't see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception.The first statement is a platonist declaration of a fairly standard sort concerning set theory. What is unusual in it is the inclusion of concepts among the objects of mathematics. This I will explain below. The second statement expresses what looks like a rather wild thesis. (shrink)

The dominant unspoken philosophical basis of medical care in the United States is a form of Cartesian reductionism that views the body as a machine and medical professionals as technicians whose job is to repair that machine. The purpose of this paper is to advocate for an alternative philosophy of medicine based on the concept of healing relationships between clinicians and patients. This is accomplished first by exploring the ethical and philosophical work of Pellegrino and Thomasma and then by connecting (...) Martin Buber's philosophical work on the nature of relationships to an empirically derived model of the medical healing relationship. The Healing Relationship Model was developed by the authors through qualitative analysis of interviews of physicians and patients. Clinician-patient healing relationships are a special form of what Buber calls I-Thou relationships, characterized by dialog and mutuality, but a mutuality limited by the inherent asymmetry of the clinician-patient relationship. The Healing Relationship Model identifies three processes necessary for such relationships to develop and be sustained: Valuing, Appreciating Power and Abiding. We explore in detail how these processes, as well as other components of the model resonate with Buber's concepts of I-Thou and I-It relationships. The resulting combined conceptual model illuminates the wholeness underlying the dual roles of clinicians as healers and providers of technical biomedicine. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that health care should be focused on healing, with I-Thou relationships at its core. (shrink)

In 1934 Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödei, S. C. Kleene, and J. B. Rosser were all to be found in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1936 Church founded The Journal of Symbolic Logic. Shortly thereafter Alan Turing arrived for a two year visit. The United States had become a world center for cutting-edge research in mathematical logic. In this brief survey1 we shall examine some of the writings of American logicians during the 1920s, a period of important beginnings and remarkable insights (...) as well as of confused gropings.The publication of Whitehead and Russell's monumental Principia Mathematica [18] during the years 1910-1913 provided the basis for much of the research that was to follow. It also provided the basis for confusion that remained a factor during the period we are discussing. In 1908, Henri Poincaré, a famous skeptic where mathematical logic was concerned, wrote pointedly :It is difficult to admit that the word if acquires, when written ⊃, a virtue it did not possess when written if.Principia provided no very convincing answer to Poincaré. Indeed the fact that the authors of Principia saw fit to place their first two “primitive propositions”*1.1: Anything implied by a true proposition is true.*1.2: ⊢ p ⋁ p ⊃ punder one and the same heading suggest that they had thought of what they were doing as just such a translation as Poincare had derided. (shrink)

Hans Wagner (1917-2000) hat Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts eine systematische Erneuerung der Transzendentalphilosophie in Angriff genommen: eine an Kants subjektheoretischem Geltungsbegriff orientierte und Problementwicklungen des deutschen Idealismus, des Neukantianismus und der Phanomenologie integrierende Transzendentalphilosophie. Diese Gedenkschrift zu seinem hundertsten Geburtstag enthalt Beitrage von Reinhold Aschenberg, Reinhold Breil, Martin Bunte, Werner Flach, Klaus Ganglbauer, Bernward Grunewald, Reinhard Hiltscher, Christian Krijnen, Peter Michael Lippitz, Steinar Mathisen, Gerhard Seel, Manfred Wetzel und Kurt Walter Zeidler, welche die Philosophie Wagners in ihrem historischen (...) und systematischen Gehalt erkunden. (shrink)

The views of John Dewey and Kurt Vonnegut are often criticized for opposite reasons: Dewey’s philosophy is said to be naively optimistic while Vonnegut’s work is read as cynical. The standard debates over the views of the two thinkers cause readers to overlook the similarities in the way each approaches tragic experience. This paper examines Dewey’s philosophic account of time and meaning and Vonnegut’s use of time travel in his autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse-Five to illustrate these similarities. This essay demonstrates (...) how both Dewey and Vonnegut embrace the ameliorative possibilities of art for preserving individuality and meaning in the face of tragic experience. (shrink)

In his 1951 Gibbs Memorial Lecture, Kurt Gödel put forth his famous disjunction that either the power of the mind outstrips that of any machine or there are absolutely unsolvable problems. The view that there are no absolutely unsolvable problems is optimism, the view that there are such problems is pessimism. In his 1995—and, revised in 2013—Verificationism Then and Now, Per Martin-Löf presents an illustrative argument for a constructivist form of optimism. In response to that argument, Solomon Feferman (...) points out that Martin-Löf’s reasoning relies upon constructive understandings of key philosophical notions. In the vein of Feferman’s analysis, one might be object to Martin-Löf’s argument for either its reliance upon constructivist considerations, or for its appeal to non-unproblematically mathematical premises. We argue that both of these responses fall short. On one hand, to be critical of Martin-Löf’s reasoning for its constructiveness is to reject what would otherwise be a scientific advance on the basis of the assumption of constructivism’s falsehood or implausibility, which is of course uncharitable at best. On the other hand, to object to the argument for its use of non-unproblematically mathematical premises is to assume that there is some philosophically neutral mathematics, which is implausible. Martin-Löf’s argument relies upon his third law, the claim that from the impossibility of a proof of a proposition we can construct a proof of its negation. We close with a discussion of some ways in which this claim can be criticized from the constructive point of view. Specifically, we contend that Martin-Löf’s third law is incompatible with what has been called “Poincaré’s Principle of Epistemic Conservation”, the thesis that genuine increase in mathematical knowledge requires subject-specific insight. (shrink)

Schlusslogische Letztbegründung is a collection of essays in honor of Kurt Walter Zeidler. Mr. Zeidler is a distinguished Kant- and Neo-Kantian-scholar who has reconstructed Kant's concept of transcendental logic in connection with the logic of the concept of Hegel and the logic of symbolization of Peirce. (cf. Zeidler: Grundriss der transzendentalen Logik, 3rd ed., Wien 2017) He has most notably inquired intensively into the relation of transcendental logic to philosophy of science (cf. Zeidler: Prolegomena zur Wissenschaftstheorie, Wien 2000) and (...) to phenomenology (cf. Zeidler: Vermittlungen. Zum antiken und neueren Idealismus, Wien 2016). He has also published several studies on Neo-Kantianism (cf. Zeidler: Provokationen. Zu Problemen des Neukantianismus, Wien 2018). This is refelected in the collection of essays by distinguished scholars who discuss and critically examine Zeidler's work. It includes contributions by Steinar Mathisen (Oslo), Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Vienna), Werner Flach (Lichtenau), Thomas Knoppe (Straberg), Geert Edel (Wyk/Föhr), Martin Bunte (Münster), Reinhard Hiltscher (Dresden), Walter Tydecks (Bensheim), Christian Krijnen (Amsterdam), Hartwig Wiedebach (Zürich), Max Gottschlich (Linz), Thomas Sören Hoffmann (Hagen), Rudolf Meer (Kaliningrad), Hans-Jürgen Müller (Frankfurt am Main), Robert König (Vienna), Ulrich Blau (Marburg), Karen Gloy (Luzern/Munich), Reinhold Breil (Aachen), Erhard Oeser (Vienna), Hans-Dieter Klein (Vienna), Hans Martin Dober (Tübingen), Kurt Walter Zeidler (Vienna) and Lois Marie Rendl (Vienna). (shrink)