This collection takes stock of J.M. Coetzee's impact from a number of interesting angles, Including animals, sexuality, race, and reason. The time is truly ripe for such a volume.

Se indagó sobre el desarrollo de la Investigación Acción Participativa en Psicología. Se observó que en América y Europa, esta metodología se utiliza en una variedad de áreas disciplinares, principalmente en la Psicología Comunitaria. Aborda fundamentalmente problemáticas sociales, comunitarias y ps..

The book illustrates the concept of action in three different contexts - the justification of actions, people's life history, and pragmatism.Because of ...

When we want to justify claims against one another, we discover that conceptual thought alone is not sufficient to legitimize property and income in the relative and proper proportions among members of a productive group. Instead, the basis for justification should also be seen in motivational states, validated less by rational thought than by an effective behaviour. To circumnavigate otherwise dangerously utopian claims to justice, the social sciences, and especially behavioural economics, are the most reliable basis for normative distributive justice. (...) This article builds on recent findings of experiments, first of all in order to give proof of the extent to which a general behavioural tendency towards equality is widespread among people, and second of all in order to highlight ‘desert’ and ‘need’ as the crucial criteria of just distribution, which will then sum up to justified inequality in the economic sphere. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 16 Heft: 1 Seiten: 159-178.

With emotional motivation the organism prepares the body to obtain a goal. There is an anticipatory sensitization of the sensory systems in the body and the brain. Presynaptic facilitation of the sensory afference in the spinal cord is probably involved. In a second stage the higher centers develop an action image/plan to realize the goal, modifying the initial preparations in the body. The subject experiences the changes in the body as a feeling. Three empirical studies supporting this description are summarized. (...) This description of how feelings develop from emotion circuits is discussed from a phenomenological viewpoint. (shrink)

This critical review concentrates on four important parts of Raimo Tuomela’s analytical theory of social action. It examines the book’s reconstructions of social action, of practical reasoning in this context, of social norms and it investigates its claim to a conceptual individualism. The result is critical in several aspects. Tuomela’s most original idea in the analysis of joint action, that of we-intentions, is not broad enough to cover more than a part of social action in the commonly understood sense. His (...) ‘social’ practical reasoning incorporates an implausible premiss. The game-theoretical reconstruction of social norms strikes one as unlikely to be fulfilled in social reality. Hardly any of these analyses back up the individualist claims of Tuomela’s project. (shrink)

Ernst Fehr’s experimental research on altruistic behaviour aims at superseding the classical homo oeconomicus in micro-economic behaviour theory. This essay discusses Fehr’s results from two points of view: first, in regard to the understanding of social action associated with the term “altruism”; second, in regard to the ‘anthropological’ strategy of research that is based on the laboratory method. Against the emphasis on altruism it will be argued that it misleads into providing a distorted description of social acting, and that, due (...) to insufficient clarity about motives for acting, Fehr’s empirical results give evidence not of altruism but rather of phenomena of social recognition. The objection against the anthropological strategy will be that it makes visible only local phenomena within prevailing social conditions and that it thus assumes more than it explains. (shrink)

The degradation of natural resources in the environment is, technically speaking, a form of depleting a public good. Public goods are notorious for free-riding among egoists, but the marginality of individual contributions provides no less an obstacle, both to moral duty and motivation. This article discusses the problems of minimized and missing causal involvement on the empirical side; and, in the applicability of classical moral arguments, on the ethical side. It. suggests that individual responsibility is derived on the basis of (...) implicit advantage-taking from participation in collective action. (shrink)

Die analytische Handlungstheorie ist gegenwärtig in einem Stadium, in dem sie sich anschickt, ihre vor allem von D. Davidson fixierte Programmatik zu verlassen. Unter den zwei Bedingungen, Beschreibungsabhängigkeit und Gründe-Ursachen-Synthese, gewinnt, anders als bei Davidson, die Erstere zunehmend größeres Gewicht. Den hoffnungsvollen Übergang zu einer holistisch-kontextuellen Handlungstheorie belegen drei neuere Diskussionen, deren Verlauf geschildert wird: das Wiedergewinnen der Absichten in Bratmans Plänetheorie, die Suche nach nicht auf Glauben/Wünsche-Paare reduzible Handlungsgründe und das Entdecken der Akteursaktivität, einschließlich der Rolle des normativ rekonstruierten (...) Akteurs. (shrink)

Some goods cannot, according to MacLean, be dealt with adequately by cost-benefit analysis. An explanation for this thesis is given, linking these goods to the altruism implied in intimate social relations. MacLean’s argument is then shown to be insufficient when extended to matters of public relevance. The integration of political values and economic costs should be possible, on a level doing justice to both.

Myers' offer of cooperation as a medicine for ailing moral theories is welcomed as potentially helpful, even if his handling of it is diagnosed as implicitly one-sided consequentialist. His search for an ethically “substantive way of engaging with others” is shown as not coherent with his remarks on the tasks cooperation as an ethical concept has to fulfil. Instead, it is proposed that the concept be disentangled from the micro- problems Myers' wants it to solve, and that it be read (...) more freely, from the perspective of Rawls' conception of cooperation. (shrink)

Die Kantische Ethik gilt bis heute als die dominante Theorie der Moral, und das nicht nur mit Blick auf ihre moralischen Inhalte, sondern mehr noch mit Bezug auf ihre Begründung der moralischen Prinzipien aus der Vernunft. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Kant führt jedoch zu der Einsicht, daß wir unsere Vorstellungen vom Verhältnis zwischen Ethik und Moral, sowie von der Verbindung von Moral und sozialer Realität reformulieren müssen. Die im vorliegenden Buch gesammelten Artikel verbindet die Erwartung, daß die Moral statt über die (...) Vernunft über ihre Funktion im Rahmen sozialer Beziehungen besser zu verstehen und gestalten sein sollte. Den konkreten Reichtum unserer Handlungsziele, Beziehungsmöglichkeiten und sozialen Fähigkeiten sind wir nur dann in der Lage zu erschließen, wenn wir das Werkzeug der abstrakten Vernunft als unbrauchbar beiseite legen und statt dessen mit den alltäglichen, persönlichen und überpersönlichen, Erfahrungen arbeiten, nit denen wir uns auskennen. Weil einzig aus den Beziehungsformen Normativität erwächst, sollten uns diese selbst, ihre Bedeutungen und ihre Wandelbarkeit interessieren, weniger kodifizierbare moralische Pflichten und Regeln. Gegenstand der Ethik der Beziehungen sind die konkreten Spielräume und Kräfte der sozialen Verhältnisse zwischen Menschen, nicht die abstrakten Fingerzeige eines von den Beziehungen unabhängigen ‚moralischen Gesetzes'. (shrink)

Es soll die These begründet werden, daß die Suche nach Wahrheitskriterien als philosophische Anstrengung sinnlos ist, weil einerseits mit Wahrheit ein Absolutheitsanspruch der Erkenntnis erhoben werden muß, andererseits aber ein solcher Anspruch mit Hilfe von Wahrheitskriterien nicht eingelöst werden kann. Die Begründung faßt den spezifischen Geltungscharakter des Wahrheitsanspruchs und einen unausweichlichen Regreß bei Wahrheitsfragen als geeignete Hinweise auf, daß und wieso Wahrheitskriterien logisch unmöglich sind; daß und wieso die Erkenntnispraxis darunter keinen Schaden erleidet; daß und wieso Wahrheit als die regulative (...) Rolle verstanden werden soll, welche der Wahrheitsanspruch in der Erkenntnis hat. (shrink)

Morality and society in moral philosophy are rarely brought into direct contact, at least not at a fundamental level of justification. David Copp develops an account of practical and moral rationality that could constitute a radical change. According to Copp moral theory has tobe ‘society-centered’ rather than focussing on the individual. This article is devoted to the moral content and structural features of a socially centered moral theory, and along those lines to its critical assessment. Concluding, it will seek to (...) present an argument why moral philosophy ought not place society at the centre of its view. (shrink)

During the last years Anglosaxon discussion about Marx and Marxism has been characterized by an intensified interest in historical materialism as a general theory of history. The most extensive, careful and analytically rigorous among several new treatments is the one by G.A. Cohen, which is the subject of four critical articles in the present issue of Analyse & Kritik. To make these articles and Cohen’s project understandable to the German reader, an attempt is made in the following to summarize the (...) main arguments of Cohen’s defence of historical materialism and of the ensuing comprehensive and detailed discussion. (shrink)

Among philosophers and social scientists, Hume’s idea of justice is generally identified with a system of rules based on mutual advantage, their moral quality playing either an insignificant or no part at all. This conventional or contractarian model, respectively, is not adequate to the special institution of morality or, in Hume, to the virtues, artificial or natural. It is not self-interest but sympathy in combination with the indirect passions of pride and humility that gives conventions their moral quality and social (...) relevance. This article suggests exegetic and systematic reasons for the normative importance of Hume’s moral psychology, which should open the way to a developing morality much more in agreement with actual Western societies than a static morality based on self-interest would allow. (shrink)

Today philosophy falls apart into a “theoretical” and a “practical” sub-discipline, a situation to the detriment of both. On the back of a sketch of three stages of Western philosophy a diagnosis is made as to the practical origin of the theoretical/practical split, which also already contains within it the clue for a therapy. Both parts of philosophy could be set on a convergent path by recognizing two practical conflicts underlying philosophical problems: the biographical conflict of accepting the world and (...) the social conflict of accepting others. A non-reductivist study of these conflicts might mitigate the present alienation within philosophy. (shrink)

Foucault’s twofold attack on the modem concept of power gives us something to think about. Backed by ingenious historical analyses he devises an idea of systemic and productive power, abstracted from the conceptual connections between power and individual power-sources, viz. power and restrictions of freedom. The article probes Foucault’s historical sketches on. these two tasks. It defends the less radical view of power as constraining interests and freedom.

In acting within large groups the single actor typically suffers from the symptom of irrelevance of his contribution. A single contributory effect may be extremely small or, due to ‘threshold effects’, even non-existent. Given such conditions not only self-interested action, also purely altruistically motivated contribution seems to be rendered irrational. The article reasons that the famous ‘principles of generalization’ are of no help on this problem. However, a ‘principle of division’ could be used in showing, that in many situations of (...) collective action altruistically motivated contribution is rationally sound. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 1 Seiten: 106-129.