Behavioural phenotypes have been explained by genetic and environmental factors (E) and their interaction. Here we suggest a rethinking of the E factor. Passively incurred environmental influences (E pass) and actively copied information and behaviour (E act) may be distinguished at shared and non-shared level. We argue that E act underlies mutation and selection and is the base of gene-independent heritability.

In aging humans, aerobic exercise interventions have been found to be associated with more positive or less negative changes in frontal and temporal brain areas, such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and hippocampus, relative to no-exercise control conditions. However, individual measures such as gray-matter (GM) probability may afford less reliable and valid conclusions about maintenance or losses in structural brain integrity than a latent construct based on multiple indicators. Here, we established a latent factor of GM structural integrity based (...) on GM probability assessed by voxel-based morphometry, magnetization transfer saturation, and mean diffusivity. Based on this latent factor, we investigated changes in structural brain integrity during a six-month exercise intervention in brain regions previously reported in studies using volumetric approaches. Seventy-five healthy, previously sedentary older adults aged 63–76 years completed an at-home intervention study in either an exercise group (EG;n= 40) or in an active control group (ACG;n= 35). Measures of peak oxygen uptake (VO2peak) taken before and after the intervention revealed a time-by-group interaction, with positive average change in the EG and no reliable mean change in the ACG. Significant group differences in structural brain integrity changes were observed in the right and left ACC, right posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and left juxtapositional lobule cortex (JLC). In all instances, average changes in the EG did not differ reliably from zero, whereas average changes in the ACG were negative, pointing to maintenance of structural brain integrity in the EG, and to losses in the ACG. Significant individual differences in change were observed for right ACC and left JLC. Following up on these differences, we found that exercising participants with greater fitness gains also showed more positive changes in structural integrity. We discuss the benefits and limitations of a latent-factor approach to changes in structural brain integrity, and conclude that aerobic fitness interventions are likely to contribute to brain maintenance in old age. (shrink)

Contrary to popular assumption, Kant's theory of state experienced a major transformation during the period between "On the Common Saying" of 1793 and the "Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right" of 1797. This transformation is primarily expressed in the systematic new formulation of the relationship between "noumenal state" and "phenomenal state". Kant's new system permits him, on the one hand, to develop the idea of state a priori from his theory of private right and thus to systematically incorporate (...) central elements of the modern tradition, including Rousseau's "Contrat Social". On the other hand, it allows him to formulate the theory of state forms as a theory of the "phenomenal state", which in turn provides a tool for legal evaluation of the then current political events in revolutionary France. This article considers the differences between the Doctrine of Right and Kant's earlier works as well as the role Schlegel's review of Perpetual Peace played in stimulating Kant's new conception of the state. Kants Staatsphilosophie ist - entgegen der gängigen Auffassung - in der Zeit zwischen der Schrift zum 'Gemeinspruch' von 1793 und den 'Metaphysischen Anfangsgründen der Rechtslehre' von 1797 einer grundsätzlichen Wandlung unterworfen, welche in einer systematischen Neufassung des Verhältnisses von 'Staat in der Idee' und 'Staat in der Erscheinung' ihren entscheidenden Ausdruck findet. Diese neue Systematik ermöglicht es Kant einerseits, die Staatsidee a priori aus dem Privatrecht zu entwickeln und damit zentrale Bestandstücke der modernen Tradition - darunter das Rousseausche 'Ideal des Bürgerbundes' - systematisch einzubinden. Andererseits erlaubt sie es, die Staatsformenlehre als eine Lehre des 'Staates in der Erscheinung' zu fassen, womit sie ein Instrumentarium für die rechtliche Einordnung der aktuellen politischen Vorgänge im revolutionären Frankreich bereitstellt. - Auf die Differenzen der Rechtlehre gegenüber den früheren Schriften , sowie auf die Rolle der Schlegelschen Rezension des 'Ewigen Frieden' als Anlaß für Neukonzeption wird hingewiesen. (shrink)

The authors of this volume — all of them recognized representatives of a wide range of academic disciplines — agree that Locke’s work must have had a considerable influence both on English and German literature and the visual arts of Great Britain, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the perspective of interdisciplinarity and intertextuality, the essays presented here deal with Locke as a source of ideas for Archibald Alison, John Constable, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Johann Timotheus (...) Hermes, William Hogarth, Immanuel Kant, Martin Knutzen, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, George Lillo, Edward Moore, Johann Gottwerth Müller, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Richardson, John Ruskin, Joseph Spence, Laurence Sterne, J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Whately, among others. (shrink)

In this book, Martin Lenz provides the first reconstruction of intersubjective accounts of the mind in early modern philosophy. Some phenomena are easily recognised as social or interactive: certain dances, forms of work and rituals require interaction to come into being or count as valid. But what about mental states, such as thoughts, volitions, or emotions? Do our minds also depend on other minds? The idea that our minds are intersubjective or social seems to be a recent one, developed (...) mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries against the individualism of early modern philosophers. By contrast, this book argues that well-known early modern philosophers often started from the idea that minds are intersubjective. How then does a mind depend on the minds of others? Early modern philosophers are well known to have developed a number of theories designed to explain how we cognize external objects. What is hardly recognized is that early modern philosophers also addressed the problem of how our cognition is influenced by other minds. This book provides a historical and rational reconstruction of three central, but different, early modern accounts of the influence that minds exert on one another: Spinoza's metaphysical model, Locke's linguistic model, and Hume's medical model. Showing for each model of mental interaction (1) why it was developed, (2) how it construes mind-mind relations, and (3) what view of the mind it suggests, this book aims at uncovering a crucial part of the unwritten history of intersubjectivity in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This volume describes features of biological autonomy and integrates them into the recent discussion of factors in evolution. In recent years ideas about major transitions in evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. They include questions about the origin of evolutionary innovation, their genetic and epigenetic background, the role of the phenotype, and of changes in ontogenetic pathways. In the present book, it is argued that it is likewise necessary to question the properties of these innovations and what was qualitatively generated (...) during the macroevolutionary transitions. The author states that a recurring central aspect of macroevolutionary innovations is an increase in individual organismal autonomy whereby it is emancipated from the environment with changes in its capacity for flexibility, self-regulation and self-control of behavior. The first chapters define the concept of autonomy and examine its history and its epistemological context. Later chapters demonstrate how changes in autonomy took place during the major evolutionary transitions and investigate the generation of organs and physiological systems. They synthesize material from various disciplines including zoology, comparative physiology, morphology, molecular biology, neurobiology and ethology. It is argued that the concept is also relevant for understanding the relation of the biological evolution of man to his cultural abilities. Finally the relation of autonomy to adaptation, niche construction, phenotypic plasticity and other factors and patterns in evolution is discussed. The text has a clear perspective from the context of systems biology, arguing that the generation of biological autonomy must be interpreted within an integrative systems approach. (shrink)

Trustful interaction serves the interests of those involved. Thus, one could reason that trust itself may be analyzed as part of rational, goaloriented action. In contrast, common sense tells us that trust is an emotion and is, therefore, independent of rational deliberation to some extent. I will argue that we are right in trusting our common sense. My argument is conceptual in nature, referring to the common distinction between trust and pure reliance. An emotional attitude may be understood as some (...) general pattern in the way the world or some part of the world is perceived by an individual. Trust may be characterized by such a pattern. I shall focus on two central features of a trusting attitude. First, trust involves a participant attitude (Strawson) toward the person being trusted. Second, a situation of trust is perceived by a trusting person as one in which shared values or norms motivate both his own actions as well as those of the person being trusted. As an emotional attitude, trust is, to some extent, independent of objective information. It determines what a trusting person will believe and how various outcomes are evaluated. Hence, trust is quite different from rational belief and the problem with trust is not adequately met in minimizing risk by supplying extensive information or some mechanism of sanctioning. Trust is an attitude that enables us to cope with risk in a certain way. If we want to promote trustful interaction, we must form our institutions in ways that allow individuals to experience their interest and values as shared and, thus, to develop a trusting attitude. (shrink)

Going beyond the theory/practice and discourse/matter divides -- Learning and becoming in an onto-epistemology -- The tool of pedagogical documentation -- An intra-active pedagogy and its dual movements -- Transgressing binary practices in early childhood teacher education -- The hybrid-writing-process: going beyond the theory/practice divide in academic writing -- An ethics of immanence and potentialities for early childhood education.

Increasingly used in social and behavioral science research, implicit measures aim to assess attitudes that respondents may not be willing to report directly, or of which they may not even be aware. This timely book brings together leading investigators to review currently available procedures and offer practical recommendations for their implementation and interpretation. The theoretical bases of the various approaches are explored and their respective strengths and limitations are critically examined. The volume also discusses current controversies facing the field and (...) highlights promising avenues for future research. (shrink)

This volume contains his programmatic essay 'Towards an Analytic Pragmatism', in which Brandom shows how analytic philosophy can broaden its perspective so as ...

This paper relates Arendt's critique of a labor society to her thoughts on the “good life.” I begin with the claim that in the post-mass production era, Western societies, traditionally centered around gainful employment, encounter a decrease in the relevance of labor and can thus no longer rely on it as a resource for individual or social meaning. From Arendt's perspective, however, the current situation allows for the possibility of a transition from a society based on labor to a society (...) centered around activities. I explore Arendt's different types of activities—labor, work, action—with respect to the question of justice between the genders. (shrink)

Normativity has long been conceived as more properly pertaining to the domain of thought than to the domain of nature. This conception goes back to Kant and still figures prominently in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind and ethics. By offering a collection of new essays by leading scholars in early modern philosophy and specialists in contemporary philosophy, this volume goes beyond the point where nature and normativity came apart, and challenges the well-established opposition between these all too neatly separated realms. (...) It examines how the mind’s embeddedness in nature can be conceived as a starting point for uncovering the links between naturally and conventionally determined standards governing an agent’s epistemic and moral engagement with the world. The original essays are grouped in two parts. The first part focuses on specific aspects of theories of perception, thought formation and judgment. It gestures towards an account of normativity that regards linguistic conventions and natural constraints as jointly setting the scene for the mind’s ability to conceptualise its experiences. The second part of the book asks what the norms of desirable epistemic and moral practices are. Key to this approach is an examination of human beings as parts of nature, who act as natural causes and are determined by their sensibilities and sentiments. Each part concludes with a chapter that integrates features of the historical debate into the contemporary context.​. (shrink)

Brecht hat im Laufe seiner geistigen Entwicklung eine ganze Reihe von ideologischen Positionen eingenommen und für sein poetisches Werk fruchtbar gemacht, von denen die marxistische nur eine von vielen war. Deshalb stellt dieser neue Blick auf Brecht sein Werk als einzelne Stationen einer nach allen Seiten offenen Entwicklung dar und konzentriert sich dabei auf die Positionen, die bisher in der Forschung zu kurz gekommen, übersehen oder schlichtweg geleugnet worden sind: die nationalprotestantischen Anfänge des jungen Dichters, die enge Orientierung an der (...) Philosophie von Max Stirner in den frühen Augsburger Dramen und die ebenso enge Orientierung an Lao-Tse in den späten klassischen Werken. (shrink)

Having evolved as an ethical top priority issue for the churches within less than a decade, yet »homosexuality« shares in its more recent treatment some of the older debate's perplexities. The lack of distinguishing theologically between »nature« and »creation« lies at the heart of a problematic focus on the question of the coming into being of homosexuality, as well as for a rather uncritical use of the notion of its »irreversibility« as a dogmatic starting point for further argument. lnstead a (...) prior task in terms of ethical judgement yet hardly begun must be to do justice to the varity of personal witness of faith such as how people experience Iiberation, some towards the acceptance of their homosexual orientation and others as a process of change. (shrink)

This open access collection of AI ethics case studies is the first book to present real-life case studies combined with commentaries and strategies for overcoming ethical challenges. Case studies are one of the best ways to learn about ethical dilemmas and to achieve insights into various complexities and stakeholder perspectives. Given the omnipresence of AI ethics in academic, policy and media debates, the book will be suitable for a wide range of audiences, from scholars of different disciplines (e.g. AI science, (...) ethics, politics, philosophy, economics) to policy-makers, lobbying NGOs, teachers and the educated public. (shrink)

Biographical note: Bernd Seidensticker, Freie Universität Berlin; Martin Vöhler, Freie Universität Berlin.

The increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to help facilitate neuroscience adds a new level of complexity to the question of how ethical issues of such research can be identified and addressed. Current research ethics practice, based on ethics reviews by institutional review boards (IRB) and underpinned by ethical principalism, has been widely criticised and even called ‘imperialist’. In this paper, we develop an alternative way of approaching ethics in neuro-ICT research, based on discourse ethics, which implements responsible (...) research and innovation through dialogues. We draw on our work in Ethics Support, using the Human Brain Project as empirical evidence of the viability of this approach. (shrink)

The ethics of artificial intelligence is a widely discussed topic. There are numerous initiatives that aim to develop the principles and guidance to ensure that the development, deployment and use of AI are ethically acceptable. What is generally unclear is how organisations that make use of AI understand and address these ethical issues in practice. While there is an abundance of conceptual work on AI ethics, empirical insights are rare and often anecdotal. This paper fills the gap in our current (...) understanding of how organisations deal with AI ethics by presenting empirical findings collected using a set of ten case studies and providing an account of the cross-case analysis. The paper reviews the discussion of ethical issues of AI as well as mitigation strategies that have been proposed in the literature. Using this background, the cross-case analysis categorises the organisational responses that were observed in practice. The discussion shows that organisations are highly aware of the AI ethics debate and keen to engage with ethical issues proactively. However, they make use of only a relatively small subsection of the mitigation strategies proposed in the literature. These insights are of importance to organisations deploying or using AI, to the academic AI ethics debate, but maybe most valuable to policymakers involved in the current debate about suitable policy developments to address the ethical issues raised by AI. (shrink)

One of Ockham's fundamental tenets about the human intellect is that its acts constitute a mental language. Although this language of thought shares some of the features of conventional language, thought is commonly considered as prior to conventional language. This paper tries to show that this consensus is seriously challenged in Ockham's early writings. I shall argue that, in claiming the priority of conventional language over mental language, Ockham established a novel explanation of the systematicity of thought—an explanation which anticipates (...) the idea that thought becomes systematic through the acquisition of conventional language. (shrink)

Future state maximisation offers a clear departure from both fixed reactive systems and systems that learn models based on reactive experience. In this commentary, I argue that FSX is not ….

This paper addresses the question of how it is to be explained that an action or object X counts as Y. I argue that John Searle's notion of a constitutive rule should not be employed because it involves a confusion. Instead, I propose an explanatory framework containing the following three elements: 1) The X-action or object is involved in certain social practices. 2) These practices confer properties on the X-items, in addition to their physical properties. 3) In virtue of these (...) additional properties the X-items fall under the Y-concept. Moreover, I stress that the social practices mentioned under 1) look differently from case to case and involve various constellations of prescriptive rules and interpersonal patterns of intentions. To illustrate and corroborate these claims, I discuss several cases of socially constituted actions and objects, in particular, the case of money, where I reject Searle's claim that something counts as money in virtue of giving its owner the right to buy something. (shrink)

In his critical writings before 1786 Kant argues that trans¬cendental freedom is a problem for speculative philosophy – and that this problem was solved satisfyingly in 1781 by his own Transcendental Idealism. In the Groundwork, 1785, after having linked the moral law inseparably to transcendental freedom by his discovery of autonomy, Kant claimed that the moral law can be deduced from freedom thus established. But in May 1786 he was persuaded by a review-article that his 1781/85-deduction of freedom was incompatible (...) with his critical philosophy. Hence Kant had to shift the epistemic priority from freedom to the moral law. He thus replaced the deduction of freedom and morality given in the Third Part of the Groundwork by his Doctrine of the “fact of pure practical reason” in the 2nd Critique. By this move Kant established an entirely new and dominant role for practical reason in metaphysics, a role which already shows up in the second edition of the 1st Critique – and which leads to Kant′s unprecedented conception of a “praktisch-dogmatische Metaphyik” in the 1790ties. (shrink)

The placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens is a tiny hairy plate and more simply organized than any other living metazoan. After its original description by F.E. Schulze in 1883, it attracted attention as a potential model for the ancestral state of metazoan organization, the “Urmetazoon”. Trichoplax lacks any kind of symmetry, organs, nerve cells, muscle cells, basal lamina, and extracellular matrix. Furthermore, the placozoan genome is the smallest (not secondarily reduced) genome of all metazoan genomes. It harbors a remarkably rich diversity of (...) genes and has been considered the best living surrogate for a metazoan ancestor genome. The phylum Placozoa presently harbors three formally described species, while several dozen “cryptic” species are yet awaiting their description. The phylogenetic position of placozoans has recently become a contested arena for modern phylogenetic analyses and view‐driven claims. Trichoplax offers unique prospects for understanding the minimal requirements of metazoan animal organization and their corresponding malfunctions. (shrink)

There has been much debate whether computers can be responsible. This question is usually discussed in terms of personhood and personal characteristics, which a computer may or may not possess. If a computer fulfils the conditions required for agency or personhood, then it can be responsible; otherwise not. This paper suggests a different approach. An analysis of the concept of responsibility shows that it is a social construct of ascription which is only viable in certain social contexts and which serves (...) particular social aims. If this is the main aspect of responsibility then the question whether computers can be responsible no longer hinges on the difficult problem of agency but on the possibly simpler question whether responsibility ascriptions to computers can fulfil social goals. The suggested solution to the question whether computers can be subjects of responsibility is the introduction of a new concept, called “quasi-responsibility” which will emphasise the social aim of responsibility ascription and which can be applied to computers. (shrink)