A selection from the correspondence of the logician Wilhelm Ackermann (1896?1962) is presented in this article. The most significant letters were exchanged with Bernays, Scholz and Lorenzen, from which extensive passages are transcribed. Some remarks from other letters, with quotations, are also included.

The demand for a right to military tax refusal aims at the protection from those conflicts of conscience that are resulting from an indirect involvement of the citizen in a state's capability of warfare. This raises the generat question of the relevance of conscience for public law. Normative and functional theories of conscience can only insufficiently explain the experience ofthe human conscience. The protestant concept of a freed conscience includes the possibility, that a Christian takes the responsibility for non-intended effects (...) ofhis actions. In the case of a legal right to refuse military tax, an equal right ought tobe granted to persans whose conscience is worried by other kinds of conflicts. But this would be hardly compatible with the principle of democracy. The burden of conscience of those who refuse military taxes should be taken into account by individual regulations but not regulated by law. (shrink)

Today the radical as well as the organizing pacifism have become compatible in the engagement for an universal legal system, which is based on the acknowledgement of human rights and a general prohibition of the use of force. The classical doctrines of just war have become obsolete, but their implicit elements concerning moral criticism of violence are indispensable. The author critisizes the misuse of the human rights argument for the justification of military interventionism. A legitimate policy of peace and security (...) has to depend on the development of a collective security system as proposed by the UN-Charter. It cannot be based on traditional military alliances of defence. To intervene in domestic conflicts, if any, peacekeeping operations are qualified, when and as far as they bind themselves to the principles of consensus of all parties concerned, of strict neutrality and of deescalation. There is a special obligation for Germany to restrain herself in military actions and toset an example in developing an international culture of nonviolence. (shrink)

The universal applicability of human rights outside the circle of European culture is not only a subject of political controversy, but a challenge to political and moral theory, too. The contribution argues with three types of relativistic criticism of human rihgts' universality: ethical particularism, political realism, and cultural contextualism. Defending the intercultural validity of the human rights' concept, the author pleads for a threefold distincion: between the right and the good, between basic and derivative rights, between penultimate reasons of human (...) rights and ultimate foundations to them. (shrink)

About forty years ago- in 1959- the »Heidelberger Thesen« were published. In (West) German Protestantism, this document was soon accepted as a basis for peace ethics during the Cold War. After the East-West conflict came to an end, nuclear weapons at first appeared irrelevant. But ultimately this did not prove to be the case. One could therefore assume that the Heidelberg compromise formulae would still be valid. The essay disputes this view, referring to the original document's lack of clarity and (...) also to the current political and strategic situation. (shrink)

The Bologna process forces a reframing of the theological education. In the autor's mind, it affords chances for an improved quality during the first two cycles. The change from an input-oriented to an output-oriented leaming provides a better professional competences. In addition, the Bologna process provokes to profile theology in an interdisciplinary context. The article outlines the profile of Theological Ethics as a self-contained discipline, connectedwith both, the other theolgical disciplines and the adjacent sciences, such as medicine, law, and sociology. (...) According to this, the authors discuss the advantages and the risks ofthe two-cylcle, BA/ma education and draw the conclusions for the further curriculas in theological ethics. A coml)lon competence-based core-curriculum is presented in order to get joint standards and to improve student's mobility. (shrink)

The isolation principle rests on defining internal and external differentiation for each subset of at least two objects. Subsets with larger external than internal differentiation form isolated groups in the sense that they are internally cohesive and externally isolated. Objects that do not belong to any isolated group are termed solitary. The collection of all isolated groups and solitary objects forms a hierarchical (encaptic) structure. This ubiquitous characteristic of biological organization provides the motivation to identify universally applicable practical methods for (...) the detection of such structure, to distinguish primary types of structure, to quantify their distinctiveness, and to simplify interpretation of structural aspects. A method implementing the isolation principle (by generating all isolated groups and solitary objects) is proven to be specified by single-linkage clustering. Basically, the absence of structure can be stated if no isolated groups exist, the condition for which is provided. Structures that allow for classifications in the sense of complete partitioning into disjoint isolated groups are characterized, and measures of distinctiveness of classification are developed. Among other primary types of structure, chaining (complete nesting) and ties (isolated groups without internal structure) are considered in more detail. Some biological examples for the interpretation of structure resulting from application of the isolation principle are outlined. (shrink)

When applied to a family of sets, the term differentiation designates a measure of the totality of those members which appear in only one of the sets. This basic set theoretic concept involves the formation of intersections, unions, and complements of sets. However, populations as special kinds of sets may share types, but they do not share the carriers of these types; intersections of different populations are thus always empty. The resulting conceptual dilemma is resolved by considering the joint representation (...) of members of different populations that have the same type; populations then intersect with respect to joint representation of types. Two forms of representation reflect relative and absolute characteristics of differentiation by accounting for the distributions of types as relative frequencies within populations (as is commonly done) and as absolute frequencies (including effects of population sizes on differentiation), respectively. Corresponding classes of differentiation measures are developed, and existing measures are discussed in relation to these classes. In particular, the affinity of the measurement of distances between populations and the special case of differentiation of two-population families is examined in order to distinguish between the notions of distance and differentiation. (shrink)

A measure of association is introduced that is based on a conceptual rather than a model approach in order to ensure its broad applicability. The basis of the concept involves two variables or traits and of members of a population. The association of the -state with the -state is measured by the degree to which members of given -state share their -state. This formulation yields an index of association, which is applicable to all categories of traits, including discontinuous and continuous (...) traits as well as combinations of these. Complete association of one trait with the other is equivalent to the existence of a functional relationship of the second to the first trait. Therefore, the degree of association can be understood as the closeness of the relations between two variables to a non-specified functional relationship. This feature in connection with the asymmetry of the index attests its suitability for cause-effect analyses. In fact, the conceptual approach to the measurement of association yields a conclusive method of detection and description of functional relationships between variables together with a method for quantification of the strictness of these relationships. The legitimacy of the correlation coefficient and of disequilibrium indices as measures of association is briefly addressed. (shrink)

Because of their elementary significance in almost all fields of science, measures of association between two variables or traits are abundant and multiform. One aspect of association that is of considerable interest, especially in population genetics and ecology, seems to be widely ignored. This aspect concerns association between complex traits that show variable and arbitrarily defined state differences. Among such traits are genetic characters controlled by many and potentially polyploid loci, species characteristics, and environmental variables, all of which may be (...) mutually and asymmetrically associated. A concept of directed association of one trait with another is developed here that relies solely on difference measures between the states of a trait. Associations are considered at three levels: between individual states of two variables, between an individual state of one variable and the totality of the other variable, and between two variables. Relations to known concepts of association are identified. In particular, measures at the latter two levels turn out to be interpretable as measures of differentiation. Examples are given for areas of application (search for functional relationships, distribution of variation over populations, genomic associations, spatiogenetic structure). (shrink)

The crucial phase of speciation is argued to be the evolution of mating cross-incompatibility (prezygotic incompatibility) between the genotypes distinguishing the prospective species populations. Based on this idea, a single-locus model of speciation is presented, which is shown to be biologically plausible and may help to settle the controversy as to the biological significance of single-locus modes of speciation. The model involves three alleles, two of which characterize in homozygous state the prospective species populations and in heterozygous state their hybrids. (...) The third allele represents a mutant which is equivalent to one of the first two alleles with the exception that it inhibits mating with carriers of the third allele. This third allele is fixed in one population and immigrates into a second population which contains the mutant inhibiting matings with members of the former population. Migration in the reverse direction does not occur. Proceeding from a widely applicable concept of fitness and mating preference it is shown that postzygotic incompatibility (hybrid or heterozygote disadvantage) alone suffices to trigger evolutionary replacement of the extant mating relations in the population receiving immigrants by any arbitrary degree of prezygotic incompatibility. This corroborates Wallace's hypothesis and emphasizes the potential biological relevance of speciation by reinforcement (parapatric speciation) at single gene loci. (shrink)

T. 1. Synthese und Theorie. Trägerschichten.

Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed from (...) subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Prison Health Care. By Richard Smith. London: British Medical Association, 1984.