Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die Entwicklung der Austauschverhältnisse im Alten China" verfügbar.

The 2015 Disneyland outbreak of measles in the US unequivocally brought to light what had been brewing below the surface for a while: a slow but steady decline in vaccination rates resulting in a rising number of outbreaks. This can be traced back to an increasing public questioning of vaccines by an emerging anti-vaccination movement. This article argues that, in the face of diminishing vaccination rates, childhood vaccinations should not be seen as part of the domain of parental choice but, (...) instead, as a non-negotiable legal obligation. The first part of the article formulates and defends two arguments in favour of unqualified mandatory childhood vaccination laws. First, government should not permit parents to put their children at avoidable risk of death and suffering; second, government should guard the common good of herd immunity to protect vulnerable persons. The second part rejects legal and pragmatic objections against such mandatory vaccination laws. (shrink)

Background The worldwide increase in older persons demands technological solutions to combat the shortage of caregiving and to enable aging in place. Smart home health technologies (SHHTs) are promoted and implemented as a possible solution from an economic and practical perspective. However, ethical considerations are equally important and need to be investigated. Methods We conducted a systematic review according to the PRISMA guidelines to investigate if and how ethical questions are discussed in the field of SHHTs in caregiving for older (...) persons. Results 156 peer-reviewed articles published in English, German and French were retrieved and analyzed across 10 electronic databases. Using narrative analysis, 7 ethical categories were mapped: privacy, autonomy, responsibility, human vs. artificial interactions, trust, ageism and stigma, and other concerns. Conclusion The findings of our systematic review show the (lack of) ethical consideration when it comes to the development and implementation of SHHTs for older persons. Our analysis is useful to promote careful ethical consideration when carrying out technology development, research and deployment to care for older persons. Registration We registered our systematic review in the PROSPERO network under CRD42021248543. (shrink)

With robots being introduced into caregiving, particularly for older persons, various ethical concerns are raised. Among them is the fear of replacing human caregiving. While ethical concepts like well-being, autonomy, and capabilities are often used to discuss these concerns, this paper brings forth the concept of social dignity to further develop guidelines concerning the use of robots in caregiving. By social dignity, we mean that a person’s perceived dignity changes in response to certain interactions and experiences with other persons. In (...) this paper, we will first present the concept of social dignity, and then identify a niche where robots can be used in caregiving in an ethical manner. Specifically, we will argue that, because some activities of daily living are performed in solitude to maintain dignity, a care recipient will usually prefer robotic assistance instead of human assistance for these activities. Secondly, we will describe how other philosophical concepts, which have been commonly used to judge robotic assistance in caregiving for the elderly so far, such as well-being, autonomy, and capabilities, are less useful in determining whether robotic assistance in caregiving is ethically problematic or not. To conclude, we will argue that social dignity offers an advantage to the other concepts, as it allows to ask the most pressing questions in caregiving. (shrink)

It is proved in this paper that the positive abstraction scheme is consistent with extensionality only if one drops equality out of the language. The theory obtained is then compared with GPK, a wellknown set theory based on an extended positive comprehension scheme.

Definition of the problem: The connection between time and the good life has already been worked out for a number of medical specialties and practices. However, what role does the temporality of the good life play for medicine as a whole? That is the central question of this article. Arguments: The good life is here understood as a meaningful life. Living meaningfully is only possible through present action. A fulfilled presence in this sense is therefore an essential aspect of the (...) temporality of the good life. Illness tends to prevent a fulfilled presence. In this respect, medical treatments aim to enable a fulfilled presence. A second structure of time, that is central to the good life, consists in the chronobiological rhythms, upon the maintenance and restoration of which health is critically dependent. Conclusion: The temporality of the good life has a twofold relevance for medicine as a whole. First, the purpose of medical treatment is to enable a fulfilled present. Second, this can and should be done by maintaining and restoring chronobiological rhythms. ++++ Der Zusammenhang von Zeit und gutem Leben wurde bereits für eine Reihe medizinischer Disziplinen und Praktiken herausgearbeitet. Doch welche Rolle spielt die Zeitlichkeit des guten Lebens für die Medizin insgesamt? Das ist die leitende Frage dieses Artikels. Dabei wird das gute Leben als sinnvolles Leben verstanden. In diesem Sinne wird für eine zweifache medizinische Relevanz der Zeitlichkeit des guten Lebens argumentiert: Erstens besteht der Sinn medizinischer Behandlungen in der Ermöglichung erfüllter Gegenwart. Zweitens kann und sollte ebendies u. a. durch die Wahrung und Wiederherstellung der chronobiologischen Rhythmen geschehen. (shrink)

Definition of the problem: Contemporary bioethics as an academic discipline mainly focuses on moral questions – according to its articulated self-concept and the explicit arguments in most areas of bioethical reflection. Concepts and theories of the good life are hardly considered. Arguments: In reality the ‘good life’ plays a much more important role than it is assumed, but mostly only in an implicit way. The article demonstrates this by referencing three selected fields of bioethical discussion. Hence the article argues that (...) bioethics should turn the ‘good life’ into an issue of intense, explicit and systematic consideration. Furthermore, the article provides an initial answer to the questions as to why the ‘good life’ has been marginalized within bioethics up to this point and which function it can assume in future bioethical reflection. Conclusion: The ‘good life’ is the blind spot of bioethics. A more intensive and systematic consideration of the ‘good life’ is a challenge for contemporary and future bioethics. (shrink)

The concept of hope—as used in ordinary language in assertions of (for example) the form ›Person S hopes that p‹—can be analysed in terms of belief, desire, and, as I claim, affective quality. According to my analysis, one feature of hope is that what S hopes for has some subjective probability for S. Hope thus has an epistemic component on which demands of rationality can be (and, as a matter of fact, are) placed. Ordinary language distinguishes various types of deficient (...) hoping. On the basis of my explication of ›hope‹, it can be shown that types of deficient hope differ in the way in which they violate rationality. A particularly interesting type of deficient hoping is self-deceptive hope. Self-deception centrally involves the formation or retention of beliefs under the influence of biasing motivational factors. And hope, through its conative component, contains just such a motivation for self-deception. Hope is thus closely, if only contingently, connected with self-deception: not all hope is self-deceptive, but it is natural and presumably rather common for hopes to involve self-deception. Hope’s susceptibility to self-deception is one of the primary reasons why hope has been the subject of ambivalent or even negative valuation, the main conflict being the one between (important) benefits of hoping and the value of truth. (shrink)

Supposons qu'il soit possible de transplanter les centres de Ia douleur de Jones dans le cerveau de Smith. A mi-chemin pendant!'operation, on teste ces centres de Ia douleur en les stimulant électriquement in vitro. Y aurait-il de Ia douleur? L'argument de cet article est qu'il n'y en aurait pas, parce que Ia douleur doit avoir un possesseur. Sinon, il ne peut arriver que les centres de Ia douleur se déchargeant dans un cerveau soient en eux-mêmes Ia douleur. On peut logiquement (...) transférer le mécanisms de Ia douleur, mais non Ia douleur elle-mêmes. Ainsi le materialisme est faux.Suppose we live in a very advanced age of neurosurgical skills. We have a patient, Jones, with intractable pain. We have a second patient, Smith, with a long history of unintentional self-injury due to congenital absence of pain centres. So we decide to do double service by transplanting Jones's pain centres into Smith's brain. (shrink)

A woman is found lying dead on the floor of the living room of her house in Leiden, the Netherlands, and because of a swollen and a slightly wounded eyelid, an autopsy is performed on the body the day after it is found. Behind the wound, there is a whole ballpoint pen, which entered the head of the deceased through her right eye causing mortal brain damage. How did it get there? This question was to cause a stir in Dutch (...) society, holding a group of police detectives and several scientists in its grip for several years. In this article, the ballpoint case is analyzed as to the boundary work between credible and noncredible expertise. As it is often assumed that boundary work in continental law is preempted by the structure of these law models, this case study adds a comparative note to the growing literature about science and the law. (shrink)

The Lorentz transformation of space and time between two reference frames is one of the pillars of the special relativity theory. As a result of the Lorentz transformation, space and time are only relative and are entangled, while the Minkowski metric is Lorentz invariant. For this reason, the Lorentz transformation is one of the major obstructions in the development of physical theories with quantized space and time. Here is described the Lorentz transformation of a physical system with a discrete dynamical (...) time and a continuous space that fulfills Lorentz invariance while approximating the Lorentz transformation at the time continuous limit and the Galilei transformation at the classical limit. Furthermore, the discreteness of time is not mixed with the continuous nature of space, making time distinct from space. (shrink)

Although postmodernist thought has become prominent in some educational circles, its influence on science education has until recently been rather minor. This paper examines the proposal of Michalinos Zembylas, published earlier in this journal, that Lyotardian postmodernism should be applied to science educational reform in order to achieve the much sought after positive transformation. As a preliminary to this examination several critical points are raised about Lyotard's philosophy of education and philosophy of science which serve to challenge and undermine Zembylas’ (...) project. Subsequently, the three main theses of Lyotard that Zembylas considers beneficial and wishes to transpose onto science classrooms and pedagogy are scrutinized and found to be more of a hindrance than a help to curriculum reformers. (shrink)

The contribution focuses on Neo-Confucian texts as collected by Zhu Xi and Lü Zuqian and is a look from the ‘outside’, from the perspective of German theories of Bildung. It aims at demonstrating that among other insights that today’s readers may gather from Neo-Confucian literature, one aspect protrudes from others: that learning can be considered as a virtue—even a meta-virtue—a form of life and mode of self-formation of the person. It does not seem exaggerated, from this perspective, to state that (...) Neo-Confucian philosophy is—to a large extent—a philosophy of learning and self-transformation which offers fruitful irritants for questioning the widespread habits of thinking about skills and their development in today’s strong and problematic discourses and corresponding educational policies. (shrink)

Although neglected by psychology, self-respect has been an integral part of philosophical discussion since Aristotle and continues to be a central issue in contemporary moral philosophy. Within this tradition, self-respect is considered to be based on one's capacity for rationality and leads to behaviors that promote autonomy, such as independence, self-control and tenacity. Self-respect elicits behaviors that one should be treated with respect and requires the development and pursuit of personal standards and life plans that are guided by respect for (...) self and others. In contrast, the psychological concept of self-esteem is grounded in the theories of self-concept. As such, self-esteem is a self-evaluation of competency ratios and opinions of significant others that results in either a positive or negative evaluation of one's worthiness and inclusionary status. The major distinction between the two is that while competency ratios and others' opinions are central to self-esteem, autonomy is central to self-respect. We submit that not only is self-respect important in understanding self-esteem, but that it also uniquely contributes to individual functioning. Research is needed to establish the central properties of self-respect and their effects on individual functioning, developmental factors, and therapeutic approaches. (shrink)

Drawing on mostly ignored texts, this book thoroughly reassesses Marx and Engels's engagement with theology.

This article addresses the role of science and science advisory bodies in modeling practices for the support of policy-making procedures in the Netherlands in the field of health care. The authors show, based on a detailed investigation of a prestigious interdisciplinary modeling project in which an economic care model was developed for governmental use, that science advisory bodies are entangled with the policy actors they advise in what we call boundary configurations. Boundary configurations are strongly situated interconnections between science advisory (...) institutes and policy institutions that share a specific approach to problem definitions and methods and that are embedded in specific social, discursive, and material elements. Importantly, as the case study shows, such boundary configurations shape the kind of science, and related, the kind of social and political theories about the world, that is effectuated in modeling practices. In this case study, the boundary configuration in which economic experts and policy makers participated contributed to the articulation of health care in terms of a market-based policy program for the health care sector. (shrink)

Folter gilt weithin als paradigmatisches Beispiel einer Verletzung der Menschenwürde. Doch was macht Folter zu einem so eindeutigen Fall einer Menschenwürdeverletzung? Das ist die Leitfrage dieses Beitrags. Dazu werden zwei Menschenwürdetheorien herangezogen und auf ihr Potential hin untersucht, die Folter als paradigmatische Menschenwürdeverletzung verständlich zu machen: zum einen Ralf Stoeckers Theorie, die die individuelle Identität und die darauf aufbauende kontingente Würde in den Mittelpunkt stellt; zum anderen meine Theorie, die die menschliche Orientierung an einem sinnvollen Leben ins Zentrum rückt.

My title refers to a very modern problem, for what else is modernization than a process of rational differentiation of society in autonomous, mutually isolated sub-spheres, to the point where no one any longer knows what the unity of it all is? We differentiate, we specialize, we hyperspecialize, and then we get puzzled over the fragmentation we have produced around us, between ourselves and even within ourselves. Look at our own area. You cannot even specialize in practical ethics any more. (...) You have to limit your attention to medical ethics, for example, the ethics of engineering, or business ethics. And within business ethics, my own field of research, the homo universalis is also threatened with extinction. You can do marketing ethics, ethics of finance or computer ethics, until you finally become the typical ‘expert’: someone who knows almost everything about almost nothing.From the despair over hyper-differentiation, the call for integration arises: the call for meaning, for reconfiguration, for making sense of our world and our lives again, the call for reconnection with the great traditions of our culture, the call for community.If we read the great theorists of modernization — Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Habermas, Münch — we learn that the quest for integration is in fact an equally important aspect of modernization as is differentiation. They are two sides of the same coin. In this sense, I think, the integrative endeavour of the EEN can still be considered a modern one.We are presently facing an escalation, or a climax, of modernity. We live in a state of hypermodernity, in which technological, economic and cultural forces dynamize our society on an unprecedented scale. We are really living high up on the dazzling slopes of the exponential growth curves that the Club of Rome predicted over 25 years ago. Everyone speaks of change. Everything is changing, and with institutionalized change, everything has become uncertain. Within uncertainty, however, social disintegration is lurking. Does not the structural uncertainty that we are introducing in our society bring us back to a state of nature, to a state outside the hypothetical social contract on which modern social communities are based? Is not the life of the individualized, flexible wanderers on the labour market again resembling the pledge of man which Hobbes described as ‘solitary, nasty and brutish’ . Has not the life of many in our society again become ‘very unsafe and very insecure, full of fears and continual dangers’, in the way that Locke depicted the state of nature .I understand business ethics as an integrative undertaking in our society, integrative in particular with respect to the economy and the realm of formal organization, integrative also at the interface between life-world and system, to use the terminology of Habermas.Integrative endeavours in our society have an ambiguous relation to change. Change is a key challenge to business ethics. Should we accept disruptive forms of change as inevitable, in order to remain on speaking terms with the economy and its spokesmen? Or should we fiercely resist certain changes? Is change on our side, perhaps? Business ethics is sometimes presented as a way to help managers cope with the many paradoxes of our time. One-dimensional technological rationality, we say, is no longer adequate to grasp the complexities, ambiguities and paradoxes of our world. Successful management requires more flexible, more creative forms of thinking. Philosophy and ethics are then presented as alternatives. But then aren’t we, the philosophers, simply promoting ourselves as the new masters of change for our time? Isn’t the so-called postmodern consciousness in fact an ideological underpinning of hyper differentiation, and in this sense the ultimate self-realization of the spirit of modernity? What sense of direction do we offer, as business ethicists?I would like to speak about the integration of micro, meso and macro-levels in business ethics, from the perspective of social change. My basic thesis is that only an adequate ethics of responsibility can integrate a highly differentiated and ultra-complex society like ours. This integration through responsibility opens up new directions of social change, that proceed simultaneously at the micro, meso and macro-level.In order not to complicate matters too much, I will limit myself to two dimensions of change which are important for business ethics at the moment: economic change ; organizational change . In relation to these changes, I will conclude with some reflections on changes in business ethics itself, the ones that I think are needed. (shrink)

Researchers are increasingly expected to deliver “socially robust knowledge” that is not only scientifically reliable but also takes into account demands from societal actors. This article focuses on an empirical example where these additional criteria are explicitly organized into research settings. We investigate how the multiple “accountabilities” are managed in such “responsive research settings.” This article provides an empirical account of such an organizational format: the Dutch Academic Collaborative Centres for Public Health. We present a cross-case analysis of four collaborative (...) research projects conducted within this context. We build on Miller’s notion of “hybrid management.” The article shows that the extended concept of hybrid management is useful to study the different accountabilities encountered in such settings. We analyze how the collaboration developed and which conflicts or dilemmas arose. We then focus on the different hybrid management strategies used in the collaboration. The empirical material shows how the different aspects of hybrid management feature in various configurations in the four projects. We highlight that hybrid management strategies may be used by different groups or at different moments, may reinforce or contradict each other, and may be more or less effective at different points in time. (shrink)

Concrete Causation centers about theories of causation, their interpretation, and their embedding in metaphysical-ontological questions, as well as the application of such theories in the context of science and decision theory. The dissertation is divided into four chapters, that firstly undertake the historical-systematic localization of central problems (chapter 1) to then give a rendition of the concepts and the formalisms underlying David Lewis' and Judea Pearl's theories (chapter 2). After philosophically motivated conceptual deliberations Pearl's mathematical-technical framework is drawn on for (...) an epistemic interpretation and for emphasizing the knowledge-organizing aspect of causality in an extension of the interventionist Bayes net account of causation (chapter 3). Integrating causal and non-causal knowledge in unified structures ultimately leads to an approach towards solving problems of (causal) decision theory and at the same time facilitates the representation of logical-mathematical, synonymical, as well as reductive relationships in efficiently structured, operational nets of belief propagation (chapter 4). (shrink)

This paper argues that Philip Kitcher's epistemology of mathematics, codified in his Naturalistic Constructivism, is not naturalistic on Kitcher's own conception of naturalism. Kitcher's conception of naturalism is committed to (i) explaining the correctness of belief-regulating norms and (ii) a realist notion of truth. Naturalistic Constructivism is unable to simultaneously meet both of these commitments.

That the Eudemian Ethics is a genuine work of Aristotle, belonging to a middle stage in his development, is now widely accepted on the various grounds advanced by Jaeger and others from 1909 onwards. I want to show that, quite apart from those considerations, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of E.E. on the ground of peculiarities in its vocabulary, as these can be explained in various ways. A presentation of the evidence as regards special vocabulary may in (...) any case be of interest, and may throw some light eventually on its position among Aristotle's writings, if it belongs among them; and for this reason I add a further section on words in E.E. uncommon in Aristotle. (shrink)

The possibility of consistency between the basic quantum principles of quantum mechanics and wave function collapse is reexamined. A specific interpretation of environment is proposed for this aim and is applied to decoherence. When the organization of a measuring apparatus is taken into account, this approach leads also to an interpretation of wave function collapse, which would result in principle from the same interactions with environment as decoherence. This proposal is shown consistent with the non-separable character of quantum mechanics.

Duncan Pritchard has argued that his basis-relative anti-luck construal of a safety condition on knowing avoids the problem with necessary truths that safety conditions are often thought to have, viz., that beliefs the contents of which are necessarily true are trivially safe. He has further argued that adding an ability condition to truth, belief, and his anti-luck safety conditions yields an adequate account of knowledge. In this paper, we argue that not only does Pritchard’s anti-luck safety condition have a problem (...) with necessary truths, adding an ability condition is of no help. Indeed, the same sort of case that precipitates Pritchard’s introduction of an ability condition shows the inadequacy of his completed anti-luck account of knowledge. Moreover, reconstruing safety as an anti-risk condition as Pritchard has recently done does not fix the problem we’ve identified. We conclude by entertaining a radical suggestion to the effect that the failures of safety-based accounts of modal knowledge are due to failures of doxastic success rather than failures to satisfy an anti-luck (or anti-risk) condition. Accepting this radical suggestion makes available the view that there is, after all, no special problem between safety and necessary truths. (shrink)