In his new book, Fred Schauer adopts a prototypical approach to the law in order to reestablish the importance of “The Force of Law”, and I strongly support his claim that there are interesting things to be said about the relationship between law and force. One aspect concerns the special kind of force to which the law is related. In the tradition of political philosophy, this kind of force has often been characterized with the state's monopoly on legitimate force. Whereas (...) the essay will support the idea that the law has a monopoly of force, it will challenge the idea that it is its legitimacy that makes it characteristic. It is a monopoly not so much on legitimate, but on ultimate force. The robustness of the force the law is—prototypically—related to, however, should not obscure the fact that the relation between law and force is quite delicate and precarious. Three strategies of the law to manage this fundamental precariousness are pointed out. (shrink)

Recently, metaphysical coherentism has been propounded as an alternative to metaphysical foundationalism and infinitism. The view replaces the picture of reality as a hierarchy of levels with that of a network of objects or facts standing in symmetric or, more generally, cyclic relations of metaphysical dependence. This paper defends the orthodox picture of a well-founded hierarchy against the claimed superiority of coherentism. First, it will be argued that alleged theoretical advantages of coherentism do not hold up to scrutiny. Secondly, examples (...) that are claimed to support coherentism are either misdescribed as involving metaphysical interdependence, or foundationalist treatments fare at least as good and often better than coherentist interpretations. Thirdly, a similar diagnosis applies to a recently proposed coherentist interpretation of quantum entanglement. The more general diagnosis is that claims of metaphysical dependence are convincing only if there is a detailed account of how one item metaphysically explains another. While foundationalists can resort to various specific explanatory relations, coherentism seems to be incapable of providing detailed explanations. (shrink)

Currently, two frameworks of causal reasoning compete: Whereas dependency theories focus on dependencies between causes and effects, dispositional theories model causation as an interaction between agents and patients endowed with intrinsic dispositions. One important finding providing a bridge between these two frameworks is that failures of causes to generate their effects tend to be differentially attributed to agents and patients regardless of their location on either the cause or the effect side. To model different types of error attribution, we augmented (...) a causal Bayes net model with separate error sources for causes and effects. In several experiments, we tested this new model using the size of Markov violations as the empirical indicator of differential assumptions about the sources of error. As predicted by the model, the size of Markov violations was influenced by the location of the agents and was moderated by the causal structure and the type of causal variables. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie traditionsreiche Deutsche Gesellschaft für Innere Medizin war durch ihr Agieren in der NS-Zeit belastet. Vor ihrem ersten Nachkriegskongress 1948 in Karlsruhe fiel dem Bonner Klinikdirektor Paul Martini die Rolle eines Reorganisators zu. Martini, der während der NS-Zeit in Opposition zum Regime gestanden hatte, wählte einen Kurs umfassender Integration. Verfolgte des NS-Staats versuchte er ebenso in die DGIM einzubinden wie einstige gemäßigte Nationalsozialisten. Zugleich bemühte er sich um die Bewahrung des gesamtdeutschen Charakters der Kongresse sowie um einen zügigen Anschluss an (...) die internationale Forschung. Dennoch führte der eingeschlagene Weg die DGIM in nur scheinbar unpolitische Wissenschaftlichkeit und Jahrzehnte weitgehender Kritiklosigkeit gegenüber ihrer NS-Geschichte. (shrink)

A “multifactorial” model should accommodate a psychological perspective, aiming to relate the phenomenology of complex visual hallucinations not only to neurobiological findings but also an understanding of the patient's psychological problems and situation in life. Greater attention needs to be paid to the role of the “lack of insight” patients may have into their hallucinations and its relationship to cognitive impairment.

The least common subsumer of a set of concept descriptions is the most specific concept description that subsumes all of the concept descriptions in the given set. By computing the lcs, commonalities between concept descriptions can be made explicit. This is an important inference task useful in several applications, including, for instance, the bottom-up construction of description logic knowledge bases. Previous work on the lcs has concentrated on description logics that either allow for number restrictions or for existential restrictions. Many (...) applications, however, require to combine these constructors. In this work, we present an algorithm for computing the lcs in the description logic ALEN which comprises both constructors—number and existential restrictions—as well as concept conjunction, primitive negation, and value restrictions. To prove correctness of our lcs algorithm, we develop a structural characterization of subsumption in ALEN. (shrink)

For ordinals α beginning a Σ1 gap in equation image, where equation image is closed under number quantification, we give an inner model-theoretic proof that every thin equation image equivalence relation is equation image in a real parameter from the hypothesis equation image.

Do we sometimes know what will happen in the future? There are two intuitively plausible answers. The prognostic thesis says that we frequently know what will happen, the agnostic thesis says that we never do. Examining the question in the light of different conditions of knowledge supports the prognostic thesis. Yet there is still room for the agnostic intuition, as an expression of oUf necessarily suboptimal epistemic situation with respect to the future, but also of our freedom, in principle, to (...) shape the world as we like to. (shrink)

I offer a justification for the received view that the characteristic feature of agents is to be found in the particular way their behaviour is explainable. Agents are people who have acquired three skills: (i) to act in accordance with inner or public deliberation; (ii) to do many things almost as if they had deliberated; and (iii) to recognize situations where it is worthwhile to switch from the second to the first skill. We can therefore assume that agents behave as (...) if they were accompanying their behaviour by constant thinking although they don't actually deliberate all the time. This view allows for some attractive solutions for notorious problems in action theory but has the surprising ontological consequence that, although there are agents in action, there are no actions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne prestudy based on a corpus analysis and four experiments in which participants had to invent novel names for persons or objects investigated how the valence of a face or an object affects the phonological characteristics of the respective novel name. Based on the articulatory feedback hypothesis, we predicted that /i:/ is included more frequently in fictional names for faces or objects with a positive valence than for those with a negative valence. For /o:/, the pattern should reverse. An analysis (...) of the Berlin Affective Word List – Reloaded yielded a higher number of occurrences of /o:/ in German words with negative valence than in words with positive valence; with /i:/ the situation is less clear. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants named persons showing a positive or a negative facial expression. Names for smiling persons included more /i:/s and fewer /o:/s than names for persons with a negative facial expression. In Experiments 3 and 4, participant... (shrink)

Let 0 < n < ω. If there are n Woodin cardinals and a measurable cardinal above, but $M_{n+1}^{\#}$ doesn't exist, then the core model K exists in a sense made precise. An Iterability Inheritance Hypothesis is isolated which is shown to imply an optimal correctness result for K.

MoralischePrinzip(ien)DoppelwirkungsprinzipBewertungenBewertung, moralischekönnenTun, Unterlassen, Zulassen sich auf Unterschiedliches beziehen, beispielsweise auf Personen, Gesetze oder ganze Gesellschaften. Im Zentrum der Moral stehen aber Handlungen und Handlungsweisen, denn durch Handlungen greifen Menschen in die Welt ein und müssen sich folglich auch dafür verantworten (s. Kap. 31). Während sich konsequentialistischeKonsequentialismus Ethiken darauf beschränken, Handlungen allein an ihren Folgen zu messen, legen nicht-konsequentialistische Ethiken andere oder zusätzliche Maßstäbe an.

The present paper investigates the power of proper forcings to change the shape of the universe, in a certain well-defined respect. It turns out that the ranking among large cardinals can be used as a measure for that power. However, in order to establish the final result I had to isolate a new large cardinal concept, which I dubbed “remarkability.” Let us approach the exact formulation of the problem—and of its solution—at a slow pace.Breathtaking developments in the mid 1980s found (...) one of its culminations in the theorem, due to Martin, Steel, and Woodin, that the existence of infinitely many Woodin cardinals with a measurable cardinal above them all implies that AD, the axiom of determinacy, holds in the least inner model containing all the reals, L. One of the nice things about AD is that the theory ZF + AD + V = L appears as a choiceless “completion” of ZF in that any interesting question seems to find an at least attractive answer in that theory. Beyond that, AD is very canonical as may be illustrated as follows.Let us say that L is absolute for set-sized forcings if for all posets P ∈ V, for all formulae ϕ, and for all ∈ ℝ do we have thatwhere is a name for the set of reals in the extension. (shrink)

Let L[E] be an iterable tame extender model. We analyze to which extent L[E] knows fragments of its own iteration strategy. Specifically, we prove that inside L[E], for every cardinal K which is not a limit of Woodin cardinals there is some cutpoint t K > a>ω1 are cardinals, then ◊$_{K.\lambda }^* $ holds true, and if in addition λ is regular, then ◊$_{K.\lambda }^* $ holds true.

Is self-respect a necessary condition for human dignity ? On the one hand, if it were a necessary condition, we could neither respect nor violate the human dignity of small children, severely mentally disabled and unconscious persons, which would certainly be an absurd consequence. On the other hand, it seems to be characteristic for violations of human dignity that they are humiliating for the victim, and humiliation usually is construed as a violation of self-respect. The dilemma is solved when we (...) realize that self-respect is a disposition to take care of one’s personal dignity, and that human dignity basically consists in having the opportunity of maintaining one’s personal dignity. Since personal dignity does not disappear when a person looses her ability to take care of it, respecting human dignity may consist in taking care of someone’s personal dignity who has lost self-respect. Therefore, self-respect is not necessary for human dignity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the problem of opaque sweetening and argues that one should use stochastic dominance in comparing lotteries even when dealing with incomplete orderings that allow for non-comparable outcomes.

Inhalt Einfuhrung - Staat im Wandel. Rudiger Voigt zum 65. Geburtstag I. Konzeptualisierung und Systematisierung von Staatswandel Ralf Walkenhaus: Entwicklungslinien moderner Staatlichkeit.

If we call something ‘natural’ that occurs by itself without human intervention, and if cultural philosophy is interested precisely in what depends on human poiesis (production), praxis (action) and synthesis (conceptualization), then cultural philosophy refers ex negativo to the other of human intervention in the world. In this specific sense cultural philosophy can be understood as a negative philosophy of nature and is important for any kind of positive philosophy of nature insofar as it provokes natural facts to show themselves (...) in human poiesis, praxis and synthesis. (shrink)