The definition of precision medicine has continued to evolve, partly in response to criticism of the original concept. However, whatever the definition or current state of the brand, it fundamentally relies on a putatively tight linkage between genotype and complex human traits. If such a linkage is truly robust, then it should be possible to predict the occurrence of complex traits, both good and bad. If such prediction is possible, it should also be feasible to intervene to prevent or preempt (...) disease-related traits. There are of course many potential barriers to this sort of genomic medicine two-step. For example, a number of statistical considerations make generating biomarker (including gene... (shrink)

In One of the few thoughtful essays that have come out of the controversy about the Republic's political theory, Renford Bambrough draws attention to the basic philosophical issue underlying the controversy in the following manner.

The study examines the original work An Attempt to Get Lenin Back on His Feet (Berlin, 1974) by Rudi Dutschke, the well-known German political philosopher and leader of the youth movement in 1968, as well as the influence of the famous Hungarian philosopher György Lukács on the ideas of Dutschke. Dutschke revealed the reasons for the impossibility of socialist ideals being feasible in the 20th century, despite the heroic attempts of the Bolsheviks and Western radical socialists to realize them. The (...) revolution occurred in a country of semi-Asian stagnating capitalism and was not supported by the European anti-capitalist revolution. As a result, after the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the social system was revived with the dominance of the state bureaucracy (the fused party-state apparatus) over society. There were no universal forms of social movement (Verkehr), which led to the fact that socialism became local, up to the danger of its abolition. At the same time, according to Dutschke, it is precisely an equal alliance between the progressive intelligentsia and the working masses that can open up new ways for the transition from a society of necessity to a society of freedom, provided that the intelligentsia renounces leaderism (which was the mistake the Bolsheviks fell into). Therefore, the figure of György Lukács is most important for Dutschke since studying his creative path makes it possible to realize the basic principles of such an equal union. The study shows that the creative path of Lukács before he entered the Comintern as one of the leaders of the section of the Hungarian Communists is characterized by the desire to find a way to solve the fundamental dilemma of the revolutionary, as he believed: either, like the Bolsheviks, strive for an uncompromising victory and the implementation of their program at the cost of violence; or to make compromises with the social democratic and even bourgeois parties, at the same time being in danger of defeat and the impossibility of implementing their ideas, primarily because the socialist intellectuals fail to establish strong ties with the working masses, and the latter may not be thoroughly imbued with anti-capitalist consciousness. Thus, Lukács can survey a spokesperson for the views of the intelligentsia, and through the criticism of these views, it will be possible to comprehend how educated people can better understand the actual needs and interests of the working people in order to pursue policies that would be more in line with them and learn how to lead the masses indeed. (shrink)

The article deals with the notion of générosité, an important concept of the 17th century moral philosophy, as well as with the metamorphosis of the meaning of this passion and/or virtue. The starting point of this metamorphosis is générosité as a virtue of the late medieval and early modern French noble man, whereas the end point is générosité as the passion/virtue of Descartes’ rational beings. The paper analyses this phenomenon in Molière’s play Don Juan, and in Descartes’ and Spinoza’s texts.

BackgroundHIV cure research involving cell and gene therapy has intensified in recent years. There is a growing need to identify ethical standards and safeguards to ensure cell and gene therapy (CGT) HIV cure research remains valued and acceptable to as many stakeholders as possible as it advances on a global scale.MethodsTo elicit preliminary ethical and practical considerations to guide CGT HIV cure research, we implemented a qualitative, in-depth interview study with three key stakeholder groups in the United States: (1) biomedical (...) HIV cure researchers, (2) bioethicists, and (3) community stakeholders. Interviews permitted evaluation of informants’ perspectives on how CGT HIV cure research should ethically occur, and were transcribed verbatim. We applied conventional content analysis focused on inductive reasoning to analyze the rich qualitative data and derive key ethical and practical considerations related to CGT towards an HIV cure.ResultsWe interviewed 13 biomedical researchers, 5 community members, and 1 bioethicist. Informants generated considerations related to: perceived benefits of CGT towards an HIV cure, perceived risks, considerations necessary to ensure an acceptable benefit/risk balance, CGT strategies considered unacceptable, additional ethical considerations, and considerations for first-in-human CGT HIV cure trials. Informants also proposed important safeguards to developing CGT approaches towards an HIV cure, such as the importance of mitigating off-target effects, mitigating risks associated with long-term duration of CGT interventions, and mitigating risks of immune overreactions.ConclusionOur study identified preliminary considerations for CGT-based HIV cure across three key stakeholder groups. Respondents identified an ideal cure strategy as one which would durably control HIV infection, protect the individual from re-acquisition, and eliminate transmission to others. Known and unknown risks should be anticipated and perceived as learning opportunities to preserve and honor the altruism of participants. Preclinical studies should support these considerations and be transparently reviewed by regulatory experts and peers prior to first-in-human studies. To protect the public trust in CGT HIV cure research, ethical and practical considerations should be periodically revisited and updated as the science continues to evolve. Additional ethics studies are required to expand stakeholder participation to include traditionally marginalized groups and clinical care providers. (shrink)

Le philosophe canadien Charles Taylor est un des penseurs contemporains qui jouit d’une reconnaissance mondiale : il a initié et participé à plusieurs débats relatifs au libéralisme, au communautarisme et au multiculturalisme. Son œuvre est pluridimensionnelle puisque ses travaux portant, entre autres, sur la théorie de science, la théorie du langage, la théorie de l’action et de la personne, la théorie de la modernité.La pensée de Charles Taylor s’est élaborée non seulement en se nourrissant des traditions aussi bien phénoménologique qu’analytique, (...) mais, très concrètement, en prise directe avec les problèmes soulevés dans la société canadienne par la très grande diversité des immigrations. Sa pensée mérite d’autant plus à être méditée que les tentations de repli communautaire, si ce n’est de purification ethnique, semblent aujourd’hui croissantes. Les contributions – pour moitié en anglais – de ce colloque organisé à Budapest en 2012 en l’honneur et en présence de Charles Taylor invitent au contraire à interroger et à poursuivre son analyse des conditions qui permettraient l’avènement d’un monde véritablement pluriel. (shrink)

Although Olympic athletes are celebrated for their sports achievements, they often face serious difficulties in their post-sport career employment. Factors of development that are affecting the quality of post-sport career transition of Olympic athletes are important to acknowledge in the dual career (DC) development perspective. Due to the side lining of academic activities, athletes are often not well prepared for the labor market. If they do not gain sufficient financial background in their careers, it can lead to a lack of (...) proper economic inclusion of athletes in their post-sport career employment and further impact their lives. Career transitions of athletes have been the subject of research in different aspects of DC support (e.g., athletic, psychological, psychosocial, academic/vocational, financial), but most research is linked to the student-athlete DC perspective. Therefore, the aim of our research was to examine the impact of factors directly contributing to the quality of the post-sport career transition in Slovenian elite and Olympic athletes and the social class position and employment of these athletes after the termination of their sports career. From DC support practice, we learned that although athletes often have a proper level of education, their post-sport career transitions were not successful. To fill this gap, 168 elite athletes (Mage= 33.34, SD = 13.1) from Slovenia were asked to complete online questionnaires. The results showed a significant contribution of education and DC support-related finances (e.g., employment of athletes in public administration) to the quality of post-sport career transition. Regarding developing a national DC model and based on empirical research, this study identifies the social class position and employment status of former elite athletes from Slovenia. It also identifies opportunities for further research on the quality of the post-sport career transitions and perspectives on DC support. Understanding how different factors contribute to the integrated development of individual athletes to reach their potential in sports, education, and their post-sport career employment is important for theorists, DC practitioners, and stakeholders working with DC athletes. To develop a sufficient mechanism, DC support providers should consider supporting education along with the financial support of athletes during their sports careers and recognizing study-training ecosystems, based on good practices to successfully transition to their post-sport careers. These findings can also be useful for athletes and their athletic triangle support network (e.g., coaches and parents) as a support in the decision-making. (shrink)

Science, and with it our understanding of evolutionary processes, is itself undergoing evolution. The evolutionary framework still most frequently used by the general public to describe and guide processes of societal development is erroneously grounded in Darwinian perspectives or, at the very least, draws facile analogies from biological evolution. The present inquiry incorporates fresh insights on the general systemic nature of developmental dynamics from the most recent advances in the transdisciplinary realm of the sciences of complexity (e.g., general evolution theory, (...) cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics). The description of the evolutionary trajectory of complex dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear agrees with certain features of the historical processes of societal development. But there are additional features of the evolutionary dynamic of natural systems that are seldom portrayed as part of human developmental deportment. These features include elements such as the convergence of existing systems at progressively higher levels of organization, the increasingly efficient utilization of environmental energy, and the complexification of system structures in states that are progressively further removed from chemical and thermodynamic equilibria. The sciences of complexity offer insight into the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems across a variety of disciplinary areas of investigation. Through a study of the isomorphisms across disciplinary constructs in the theoretical analyses of the principles governing the evolution of human societies, it is possible to enrich the account of developmental dynamics at the socio-civilizational level. Such an account would further our understanding of the phenomenon of societal development and provide the means for the purposeful guidance of this phenomenon in accordance with general evolutionary principles. This article sets forth the type of considerations, and outlines a general research agenda, for inquiry toward an operational model of the evolutionary development of social systems. (shrink)

Although the free will debate of contemporary analytic philosophy lacks almost any kind of historical perspective, some scholars have pointed out a striking similarity between Stoic approaches to free will and Frankfurt’s well-known hierarchical theory. However, the scholarly agreement is only apparent because they disagree about the kind of similarity between the Stoic and the Frankfurtian theories. The main thesis of my paper is that so far, commentators have missed the crucial difference between the Stoics’ approach to free will and (...) Frankfurt’s, a difference that makes the former the superior approach. (shrink)

The need to establish a research field within psychology didactics at secondary level has recently been voiced by several researchers internationally. An analysis of a Swedish case coming out of secondary level education in psychology presented here provides an illustration that complexity thinking – derived from complexity theory – is uniquely placed to consider and indicate possible solutions to challenges, described by researchers as central to the foundation of a new field. Subject-matter didactics is defined for the purpose of this (...) paper as a combination of general didactics and subject- matter content, and considering the international nature of research traditions coming out of psychology, the implications of the results presented here cannot be regarded as limited solely to national concerns. An on-line survey was sent to secondary schools in Sweden. Discussions and lectures along with teaching to the book – alternatively used as inspiration – emerged as central from the thematic analysis of the results, providing the first mapping of teaching practices in secondary level psychology in Sweden. An analysis, founded on complexity thinking – combined with a model enabling a delimitation of the scope of study – focused on time use and the importance placed on self-knowledge, along with the transformation of theory into practice. The former pointing to a teacher centred nested subsystem (e.g. asymmetric relations between teachers and students), the latter pointing to student centred nested subsystems coming out of embodied knowledge (e.g. students as node) where psychological perspectives are learnt through self-reflexion, case studies and everyday life experiences (turning theory to practice), implying a holistic approach. The analysis applied to the Swedish case provides an illustration of how complexity theory has the potential to address challenges at micro and macro level to the establishment of a new research field in psychology didactics and to indicate possible solutions. Psychologies high relevance to everyday life, multi-causality, perspective pluralism, dynamic systems character and scientific character, makes complexity thinking a relevant approach in the consideration of challenges to the establishment of a research field in didactics of psychology. (shrink)

The paper sets out to offer an alternative to the function/argument approach to the most essential aspects of natural language meanings. That is, we question the assumption that semantic completeness (of, e.g., propositions) or incompleteness (of, e.g., predicates) exactly replicate the corresponding grammatical concepts (of, e.g., sentences and verbs, respectively). We argue that even if one gives up this assumption, it is still possible to keep the compositionality of the semantic interpretation of simple predicate/argument structures. In our opinion, compositionality presupposes (...) that we are able to compare arbitrary meanings in term of information content. This is why our proposal relies on an ‘intrinsically’ type free algebraic semantic theory. The basic entities in our models are neither individuals, nor eventualities, nor their properties, but ‘pieces of evidence’ for believing in the ‘truth’ or ‘existence’ or ‘identity’ of any kind of phenomenon. Our formal language contains a single binary non-associative constructor used for creating structured complex terms representing arbitrary phenomena. We give a finite Hilbert-style axiomatisation and a decision algorithm for the entailment problem of the suggested system. (shrink)

Laszlo separates this book into two major sections: Schematization and Analyses. In the former, he seeks to schematize the relationship between "official" political theory, the political ideas of the common citizen and political institutions and activities. He also tries to elucidate the basic metaphysical premisses of "collectivism" and "individualism" as the two irreducibly opposing political conceptions. The second part is then designed to be a concrete analysis of contemporary, especially communistic, political theory and practice, making use of the elements (...) schematized earlier. Unfortunately, the schematization is too schematic and simplistic, too full of hoary truisms and excessive generalizations, to offer any genuinely new or very helpful analyses or explanations of the realities to be analyzed.—W. G. E. (shrink)

Die Frage nach der Seele der Tiere ist so alt wie die Frage nach der Seele des Menschen und die nach der Welt. Die 18 Beitrage des Bandes geben einen Uberblick von der Antike bis in das 20. Jahrhundert, beschreiben den Stand der Forschung zu philosophischen sowie rechtsphilosophischen Fragen nachder Seele der Tiere und werfen zugleich die Frage nach dem Recht der Tiere auf.Aus dem InhaltJ.-C. Wolf, Haben Tiere Rechte?J.-H. Michel, Le droit romain et les animauxH. Schmidt-Glintzer, "Seid freundlich zu (...) den Tieren!". Tier, Mensch und Individualitat in ChinaE. Hornung, Die Vieldeutigkeit der Tiere im alten AgyptenE. Nicolay, Homere et l'ame des betesC. Frenzel, Tier, Mensch und Seele bei den VorsokratikernU. Perez-Paoli, Porphyrios' Gedanken zur Gerechtigkeit gegenuber TierenA. Giese, "Vier Tieren auch verheissen war, ins Paradies zu kommen" - Betrachtungen zur Seele der Tiere im islamischen MittelalterWeitere Beitrage von: D. Arendt, H. Breger, G. Boros, J.-L. Seban, G. Frank, M. Kowalewicz, H.W. Ingensiep, H. Baranzke, M. Linnemann, R. D. Precht. (shrink)

Introductory essay / Peter Jones -- The usefulness of the arts and the humanities : the case of Descartes / Gábor Boros -- Roads of remembrance : the treatment of imagination and memory in Gerard's Essay on genius / Zsolt Komáromy -- Diderot's untimeliness / László Kisbali ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Melody vs. harmony : Rousseau, or, The aesthetics of vowels / Mária Ludassy ; transl. Zsolt Komáromy -- Judgement and taste : from Shakespeare to Shaftesbury / Ferenc (...) Hörcher -- Lord Shaftesbury's "aesthetic freedom" / Endre Szécsényi -- Why one should imitate the Greeks : on Winckelmann / Sándor Radnóti ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Beauty or beast, or, Monstrous regiments? : Robertson and Burke on women and the public scene / László Kontler -- The concept of nature and the theodicy problem in the Malebranche-Arnauld-Leibniz debate / Dániel Schmal -- Lessing's anti-candide : between reason and revelation / Krisztina Utasi ; transl. Márton Dornbach. (shrink)

Welt und Unendlichkeit sind nicht nur Grundbegriffe der Philosophiegeschichte, sondern stehen auch im Zentrum gegenwartiger Debatten um die Moglichkeit und Grenzen von Metaphysik uberhaupt. Versteht man unter Welt die Gesamtheit dessen, was ist, dann stellt sich die Frage nach dem ontologischen Status dieser Seinstotalitat selbst. Wie, wenn uberhaupt, kann die Existenz der Welt sinnvoll gedacht werden? Der Begriff der Unendlichkeit konturiert und verscharft diese ontologische Frage dadurch, dass wir die Ganzheit namens Welt als unendlich erfahren, d. h. so, dass sie (...) unsere in epistemischer Hinsicht endlichen Weltbezuge grundsatzlich ubersteigt. Mit Welt und Unendlichkeit ist daher ein begrifflicher Spannungsraum eroffnet, bei dem es im wortlichen Sinne ums Ganze geht. Einen der bedenkenswertesten Gegenwartsbeitrage zu dieser durch die Begriffe Welt und Unendlichkeit abgesteckten Grundfrage der Philosophie hat Laszlo Tengelyi (1954-2014) geleistet. Der vorliegende Band versammelt insgesamt elf im Andenken an Laszlo Tengelyi und in Anlehnung an sein letztes Buch Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phanomenologischer Metaphysik (2014, 32015) verfasste Beitrage deutscher und ungarischer Philosophinnen und Philosophen. Mit Beitragen von Bianka Boros, Gabor Boros, Michael N. Forster, Markus Gabriel, Anton Friedrich Koch, Csaba Olay, Sebastian Ostritsch, Inga Romer, Sandor Sajo, Andras Schuller und Tamas Ullmann. (shrink)

Over the course of only a few decades during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, part of mainstream Buddhist education underwent a striking shift in China. From being a secluded practice within monastery walls taught by monastics for monastics with a strict focus on Buddhist scripture, it became one where monastics and laypeople study together, guided by teachers, both monastic and lay, studying a curriculum of both Buddhist and secular subjects. Although general reforms within the Buddhist community of the (...) times received considerable scholarly attention, the topic of education development was discussed in only a few instances. Therefore, the present article sets out to explore why this radical methodological shift happened, and more concretely, how the individual learning trajectories of the reforms’ leading actors, and their involvement in specific communities, influenced the way the reforms unfolded. The author analyses the work and life of three generations of Buddhist reformers, namely the layman Yang Wenhui, and the monastic masters Taixu, Hsing Yun and Cheng Yen, employing Étienne Wenger’s social theory of learning. The theory’s main assertion that communities of practice provide the main fora of learning for individuals, and its description of the concrete ways in which this learning takes place can provide new insights regarding the specific unfolding of late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century Buddhist education reforms in China. (shrink)

Surprising artistic interventions in the landscape of the public everyday are psychologically, socially, and politically beneficial to individuals as well as their communities. Such interventions enable their audiences to access moments of surprising inspiration, self-reflection, and revitalization. These spontaneous moments may offer access to the experience of distance from the rational “self,” allowing the irrational and purely emotive that resides within all of us to assert itself. It is this sensual instinct that all we too frequently push aside, particularly in (...) the public realm, for the sake of our responsibilities. Urban communities in particular are persistently accosted by visual and aural advertisements and consumerist lures, that further discourage individuals from accessing their non-rational selves. Yet, I argue that it would improve the health and vibrancy of our communal lives if we encountered among others in public, even for a moment, the strong feelings of sudden elation or confusion that we generally consider to be private. I also argue that an addition could be made to the already diverse oeuvre of artistic approaches that comprise the realm of “sound art” and that it may be termed “musical intervention art” – or, simply put, music played in a circumscribed area in the form of an outdoor installation, that is designed to accost, surprise, overwhelm, and through this, actively engage. This article will describe an imaginary example of musical installation art. (shrink)

Am Beispiel der im dritten Teil der Abhandlung über die Methode entworfenen "provisorischen Moral" soll gezeigt werden, wie Descartes den Versuch unternimmt, die zwei wichtigsten zeitgenössischen Denkanstöße, die mechanistische Philosophie und die traditionelle christliche Moral, zu Ende zu denken, ihren Gegensatz scharf hervorzuheben und sie miteinander zu versöhnen. Die Analyse des Sinns der Vorläufigkeit, des Vorwurfs des Konformismus, der traditionellen Unterscheidung von Negation und Privation - auch mit Blick auf ihre weitere Entwicklung im Briefwechsel zwischen Spinoza und Blyenbergh - führt (...) zu dem Ergebnis, daß der Versöhnungsversuch, dessen Ziel die Ausarbeitung einer "definitiven" Ethik war, am Ende gescheitert ist. Descartes leitet eine Ära ein, in der nach Maßstäben und Beweggründen nur noch innerhalb einer provisorischen Ethik - dessen wahrer Gegensatz eine providenzielle Ethik ist - Ausschau gehalten werden kann. (shrink)

My “Letter” collects some facts concerning the 20th century history of Hungarian Philosophy as a basis for understanding its situation now. Progressive and conservative systems of thought dominated the first half of the century alternately, until the post-war communist regime refused to tolerate independent thinking. The new regime after 1956 was unpredictably hostile or tolerant towards philosophical dissenters. All this resulted in a multifaceted philosophical life in the period after 1989. Its basic tendency has been a historical approach issuing in (...) various disciplines like phenomenology and hermeneutics, analytical philosophy, postmodern thought, philosophy of religion, while ethics and aesthetics became disciplines in their own right. The “Letter” maps out some of the institutional bases of philosophizing as well as some of the dangers threatening independent philosophy. (shrink)

Eine aus der Zusammenarbeit der Herzog August Bibliothek mit der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften hervorgegangene Tagung beschaftigte sich mit einem sehr komplexen Traditionszusammenhang, der unter der Leitmetapher Einfluss thematisiert wurde. Ausgehend von Philosophen wie Hegel und Dilthey, die insbesondere die philosophiegeschichtliche Rolle des Stoizismus eingehender untersucht hatten, setzen sich die zehn Beitrager dieses Bandes mit dem Wesen einer sich wiederholenden Geschichte, mit bestimmten geschichtsphilosophischen Schemata auseinander. Sie legen Grenzen des zu untersuchenden Feldes fest und beziehen neue Stromungen in die Untersuchung (...) ein. Zugleich werden neue Quellen fur die fruhneuzeitliche Philosophie nutzbar gemacht, die durch ihre kaum beachteten Interpretationen des ursprunglich hellenistischen Gedankengutes den Neuanfang der Philosophie im 17. Jahrhundert massgeblich beeinflussten. (shrink)

The paper’s main task is to show how much Hume’s philosophy of passions is indebted to and continues the tradition of the philosophy of affects of the 17th century, in spite of the obvious fact that he departed from the main philosophical project of the 17th century, the tripartite unity of mathematics, metaphysics, and mechanical physics. A restructuring of Hume’s order of passions and its comparison to the order followed by Descartes will show up a special „cognitivist” character of Hume’s (...) thinking on emotion, even if the special experimental framework of Hume’s theory of passions prevents him from theorizing about the free will’s distinguished role in our lives or about the will’s grounding in the concept of a providentially active biblical God. (shrink)