Kritische Theorie und Philosophische Anthropologie gelten noch immer als grundsätzlich einander widerstreitende Strömungen. Die Philosophien Helmuth Plessners und Theodor W. Adornos jedoch lassen sich, so die These dieses Buches, unter dem Namen der negativen Anthropologie zusammenführen. Edinger begreift negative Anthropologie im systematischen Sinn als strukturell negativ verfasstes Konzept, um elementare und exklusive Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen Adorno und Plessner sichtbar zu machen. Neben den grundsätzlichen Überlegungen, u.a. zum Konzept der Anthropologie bei Sonnemann und Gehlen, widmet sich der Autor auch beispielhaft den (...) Motiven der Kritik der Moderne und die Kritik der Geschichtsphilosophie durch Plessner und Adorno. Damit erreicht er eine neue Sicht auf das Verhältnis der beiden philosophischen Richtungen, die die gemeinhin akzeptierte unversöhnliche Frontstellung von philosophischer Anthropologie und Kritischer Theorie aufhebt. (shrink)

Die Naturphilosophie und die Politische Philosophie werden gemeinhin als Disziplinen aufgefasst, die grundlegend verschiedene Problembereiche zum Gegenstand haben. Die Aporien zu überwinden, welche daraus resultieren, ist die Pointe von Plessners Philosophischer Anthropologie. In dieser Studie wird gezeigt, wie Plessner in der Aneignung elementarer Topoi der klassischen Ontologie eine strukturell neuartige "Ontologie des Organischen" entwickelt. Dieser von Plessner beiläufig verwendete Ausdruck wird in dieser Studie systematisch entwickelt. Was dabei elaboriert wird, ist eine komplexe naturphilosophische "Ontologie des Ausgleichs". In dieser Ontologie des (...) Ausgleichs werden elementare naturphilosophische Ausgleichsleistungen expliziert, die als solche einen Doppelsinn haben: was auf der organismischen Ebene strukturell als Ausgleich des organischen Körpers mit sich selbst und der Umwelt expliziert wird, nimmt im menschlichen Bereich die Gestalt einer Ontologie der Personen an, wo die strukturell identische Ausgleichsleistung als das Spiel der Personalisierung zu vollziehen ist. Plessners Ansatz wird hier als ein auf diese Fragen neuartig antwortender, gleichberechtigt als ontologischer und sozialphilosophischer Ansatz expliziert. (shrink)

Transformative theories of what distinguishes human beings from animals face the problem of conceptually managing the transition from animal to human. This paper will show that this transition contains logical problems that are more rhetorically glossed over than logically solved by the concept of second nature. In the first part, I develop two main concepts of transformative theories, namely that of Hinzutreten (additive capacities occurring in humans) and that of Verwandeltsein (humans already being of a different kind), before outlining in (...) the second part Helmuth Plessner’s anthropological approach as one that elaborates not a transformation, but a holistic difference in the structure of human life as well as a non-metaphysical process of nature’s self-differentiation in human beings as opposed to animals. (shrink)

Im Blickpunkt dieses Bandes steht das Wechselverhältnis zweier prägender Traditionen moderner deutschsprachiger Philosophie: der Kritischen Theorie und der Philosophischen Anthropologie. Über das gesamte 20. Jahrhundert hinweg blieb der Austausch zwischen diesen Ansätzen, wo er überhaupt zu Stande kam, von Vorbehalten geprägt. Gegenwärtig allerdings lässt sich, jenseits überkommener schulpolitischer Gräben, ein neuartiges Interesse beider Strömungen füreinander wahrnehmen. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes treffen sich in dem Versuch, die jeweiligen Hauptanliegen und Gegenstandsfelder der Kritischen Theorie respektive der Philosophischen Anthropologie über deren direkten Dialog (...) produktiv zu aktualisieren: Inwiefern lassen sich die genuinen Themen der einen Tradition auf Seiten der je anderen rekonstruieren? Und worin bleiben sich beide Denkweisen letztlich doch fremd? Das vorliegende Buch stellt in der Forschung den ersten systematischen Versuch dar, diese Fragen für gesellschaftstheoretische und anthropologische Problemstellungen fruchtbar zu machen. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Internationales Jahrbuch für philosophische Anthropologie Jahrgang: 7 Heft: 1 Seiten: 335-348.

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

Departing from the claim that AI needs to be trustworthy, we find that ethical advice from an AI-powered algorithm is trusted even when its users know nothing about its training data and when they learn information about it that warrants distrust. We conducted online experiments where the subjects took the role of decision-makers who received advice from an algorithm on how to deal with an ethical dilemma. We manipulated the information about the algorithm and studied its influence. Our findings suggest (...) that AI is overtrusted rather than distrusted. We suggest digital literacy as a potential remedy to ensure the responsible use of AI. (shrink)

Long presented as a universal policy-recipe for social prosperity and economic growth, the promise of innovation seems to be increasingly in question, giving way to a new vision of progress in which society is advanced as a central enabler of technoeconomic development. Frameworks such as “Responsible” or “Mission-oriented” Innovation, for example, have become commonplace parlance and practice in the governance of the innovation–society nexus. In this paper, we study the dynamics by which this “social fix” to technoscience has gained legitimacy (...) in institutions of global governance by investigating recent projects at two international organizations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Commission, to mainstream “Responsible Innovation” frameworks and instruments across countries. Our analysis shows how the turn to societal participation in both organizations relies on a new deficit logic—a democratic deficit of innovation—that frames a lack of societal engagement in innovation governance as a major barrier to the uptake and dissemination of new technologies. These deficit politics enable global governance institutions to present “Responsible Innovation” frameworks as the solution and to claim authority over the coproduction of particular forms of democracy and innovation as intertwined pillars of a market-liberal international order. (shrink)

In this paper we present a schema for describing dualities between physical theories, and illustrate it in detail with the example of bosonization: a boson-fermion duality in two-dimensional quantum field theory. The schema develops proposals in De Haro : these proposals include construals of notions related to duality, like representation, model, symmetry and interpretation. The aim of the schema is to give a more precise criterion for duality than has so far been considered. The bosonization example, or boson-fermion duality, has (...) the feature of being simple, yet rich enough, to illustrate the most relevant aspects of our schema, which also apply to more sophisticated dualities. The richness of the example consists, mainly, in its concern with two non-trivial quantum field theories: including massive Thirring-sine-Gordon duality, and non-abelian bosonization. This prompts two comparisons with the recent philosophical literature on dualities:--- Unlike the standard cases of duality in quantum field theory and string theory, where only specific simplifying limits of the theories are explicitly known, the boson-fermion duality is known to hold {\it exactly}. This exactness can be exhibited explicitly. The bosonization example illustrates both the cases of isomorphic and {\it non-isomorphic} models: which we believe the literature on dualities has not so far discussed. (shrink)

The Description for this book, Machiavelli in Hell, will be forthcoming.

Although the ethical aspects of transformational leadership have attracted considerable attention, very little is known about followers’ reactions to the moral and immoral conduct of transformational leaders. Against this background, this study examined whether and how transformational leadership interacts with moral and authoritarian leadership behaviors in predicting followers’ in-role and extra-role efforts. Building on attribution theory, we hypothesized that the positive and negative effects of these leadership behaviors would be particularly pronounced for highly transformational leaders given that this leadership style (...) elicits strong attention and sense-making efforts among followers. We tested our model in a sample of 228 individuals comprising 114 leader–follower dyads from a wide range of organizations and industries. In line with our hypotheses, results revealed that for highly transformational leaders, moral leadership behaviors related positively to employees’ in-role and extra-role efforts whereas authoritarian leadership behaviors related negatively to employees’ in-role and extra-role efforts. In contrast, moral and authoritarian leadership behaviors did not significantly affect followers’ reactions to leaders low in transformational leadership. Taken together, these findings suggest that transformational leadership, contrary to its largely positive perception in the literature, can be a rather mixed blessing. Implications for theory, future research, and managerial practice are discussed. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the concept of a spirituality without religion. I argue that spirituality is best understood as a specific attitude that a subject has towards the totality of existence, characterized by a certain emotional, evaluative and noetic quality. The spiritual attitude typically involves a shift in the way a subject interprets their relation to themselves and to the whole of reality. Understood this way, religious and non-religious spiritualities are varieties of the same core phenomenon. Religious beliefs are compatible with, (...) but not necessary for spiritual attitudes. (shrink)

We argue that dualities offer new possibilities for relating fundamentality, levels, and emergence. Namely, dualities often relate two theories whose hierarchies of levels are inverted relative to each other, and so allow for new fundamentality relations, as well as for epistemic emergence. We find that the direction of emergence typically found in these cases is opposite to the direction of emergence followed in the standard accounts. Namely, the standard emergence direction is that of decreasing fundamentality: there is emergence of less (...) fundamental, high-level entities, out of more fundamental, low-level entities. But in cases of duality, a more fundamental entity can emerge out of a less fundamental one. This possibility can be traced back to the existence of different classical limits in quantum field theories and string theories. (shrink)

Due to the frequent occurrence of ethical transgressions and unethical employee behaviors, there has lately been an increasing interest in the ethical foundations of contemporary organizations. However, large-scale comprehensive analyses of organizational ethics are still comparatively limited. Our study contributes to both management control and business ethics literature by empirically examining potential antecedents as well as resulting effects of ethical work climates on organizational-level outcomes. Based on a cross-sectional survey among 295 large- and medium-sized companies, we find that more informal (...) means of control constitute important elements of a broader organizational control context that are strongly related to the emergence of coherent ethical work climates with an increased awareness of ethical issues. Moreover, our results show that the relationship between ethical work climates and organizational performance can be considered as rather indirect as it is fully mediated by increased mutual trust among employees. Overall, our study thus supports the particular importance of ethical work climates and identifies appropriate means to encourage ethical conduct. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman observed that we use only certain ‘good’ (viz. projectible) predicates during reasoning, with no obvious demarcation criterion in sight to distinguish them from the bad and gruesome ones. This apparent arbitrariness undermines the justifiability of our reasoning practices. Inspired by Quine’s 1969 paper on Natural Kinds, Peter Gärdenfors proposes a cognitive criterion based on his theory of Conceptual Spaces (CS). He argues the good predicates are those referring to natural concepts, and that we can capture naturalness in terms (...) of similarity. In contrast to Quine, he does not primarily rely on logic, but geometry. He frames his account as a descriptive project, however, and it is not obvious how it addresses the normative dimension of Goodman’s Riddle. This paper develops a charitable reconstruction of his argument, based on the idea that the instrumental success of our projectible concepts is grounded in their cognitive-pragmatic naturalness. It then explores three lines of reasoning against the argument: Evolutionarily motivated skepticism, the miracles argument, and the relation between instrumental and pragmatic success. I conclude that in its current form, the CS account fails to provide any justification of reasoning beyond appealing to its instrumental success, and that a metaphysically robust notion of naturalness helps to achieve the desired goal. (shrink)

Wenn wir Peter Singers Konklusion in „Famine, Affluence, and Morality“ (1972) akzeptieren, dann handeln wir im Alltag sehr viel häufiger falsch, als es uns lieb ist. Anstatt über die Natur von Altruismus zu philosophieren, könnten wir auch möglichst effektiv Hungerleidenden helfen. Ist es daher etwa moralisch verwerflich – weil egoistisch – zu philosophieren? In diesem Beitrag beleuchte ich die Gründe, die wir haben, Philosophie in den Mittelpunkt unseres Lebens zu stellen. Ich argumentiere, dass Philosophieren – genauso wie die Beschäftigung mit (...) Kunst und Wissenschaft – nur dann gerechtfertigt sein kann, wenn es praktische Gründe jenseits von Gründen des persönlichen Nutzens und der Moral gibt. Dabei schliesse ich an Susan Wolfs Idee an, dass diese Tätigkeiten ein Leben mit Sinn erfüllen können. Es bleibt jedoch offen, ob in einer Welt voller Ungerechtigkeit die moralischen Gründe gegen das Philosophieren (und für andere Handlungsoptionen) nicht dennoch überwiegen. (shrink)

Hume is an avowed critic of contractarianism. He opposes the idea that a legitimate government is based on an ‘original contract’ or on the consent of those who are governed. Most scholars assume, though, that his criticisms apply only to a limited range of contractarian theories, namely to theories according to which actual contractors reach an actual agreement. Theories on which the agreement in question is understood in hypothetical or counterfactual terms, however, are oftentimes seen as being compatible with Hume’s (...) views. Against such interpretations, this paper shows that Hume rejects all contractarian theories, including hypothetical ones. It argues, first, that Hume employs a so far unacknowledged empiricist debunking strategy against contractarianism; if successful, this strategy undermines all variants of contractarianism. Second, it shows that the Humean conception of the state of nature (a topic that has received virtually no scholarly attention) is incompatible with hypothetical contractarianism. Finally, it argues that Hume rejects contractarianism in part because he anticipates a line of criticism which nowadays is often leveled against so-called ideal theory. On Hume’s view, the agreements reached by highly idealized contractors are of little relevance to the non-ideal individuals in the actual world. (shrink)

It is a commonplace to sum up Plato's dialectical method under the formula logon didonai, which means to account for one's belief. The expression along with its genuine meaning seems to have originated at Greek courts of law, and Plato's Socrates, having adopted this formula to describe his philosophical method, seems to be the best advocate of the idea that to know means to be able to render an account. This paper aims to give a critical discussion of these traditional (...) views. First, there is no hint of any offspring of the expression logon didonai at Greek courts of law. Second, in pre-Socratic contexts the expression had not one but several meanings. And third, Plato, through the voice of Socrates, criticizes the unclear meaning of this expression in epistemological contexts. (shrink)

LANDEMORE, Hélène. Open Democracy. Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Summary Until recently it was believed that Christian Huygens’ earliest publication of his pendulum invention was Horologium of 1658. He published the more famous general treatise, Horologium Oscillatorium, fifteen years later in 1673. Two years ago, an article1 suggesting an unknown collaboration in developing the clock pendulum between Huygens and the Paris clockmaker Isaac Thuret, presented the evidence of Benjamin Martin, an 18th century educationalist and retailer of scientific material. Martin described a Huygens publication of 1657 and reproduced the illustration (...) it contained. This illustration shows a different clock from the one drawn in Horologium and different also from those previously considered as Huygens’ earliest surviving examples. However, the illustration is similar to part of a plate in Horologium Oscillatorium and this similarity caused one historian to cast doubt on the existence of the 1657 publication.2 This article, with information presented for the first time, seeks to prove the existence of that work and thereby establish it in the canon of Huygens’ writings while re-examining the invention in the light that it casts. 1Whitestone, Sebastian, ‘The Identification and Attribution of Christiaan Huygens’ First Pendulum Clock', Antiquarian Horology, December (2008), 201–222. 2Plomp, R., ‘Letter', Antiquarian Horology, December (2009), 714–17. See also author's reply, ibid, 717–19. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to the history of the Geiger-Müller counter, based on the replication method. Along with a historical analysis of the Geiger-Müller counter I present and discuss my experience with replicas of early counters from 1928. The explicit and tacit knowledge that was gained during my construction und the experimentation process allows a different view of the development process in 1928. Against this background, I discuss Walter Müller’s role in the development and the significance of experimental work (...) in Geiger’s laboratory by illustrating the status of data gained from indirect electrical measurements in the field of early radioactivity research. All things considered it was not the instrument itself, but Geiger’s influence and status that affected its establishment in the scientific community in an authoritative way. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Aktuelle Debatten zu gesellschaftspolitischen Folgen der Corona-Pandemie zeigen, dass Intellektuelle wie Giorgio Agamben und Roberto Esposito den Begriff „Biopolitik“ ins Treffen führen, um Regierungsmaßnahmen zur Eindämmung des Virus zu analysieren. Seit Michel Foucaults Überlegungen zur Funktionsweise und Genealogie der Biopolitik birgt der Begriff jedoch eine gewisse Problematik: Aufgrund strukturell bedingter Mechanismen der Inklusion und Exklusion menschlichen Lebens gelingt es den biopolitischen Modellen nach Agamben und Esposito nicht – so die These –, ein zentrales Element des Politischen zu beschreiben. Unberücksichtigt (...) bleibt die Möglichkeit des Widerstands und der Kritik an Regierungsmaßnahmen; eine Möglichkeit, die gerade die Heterogenität politischer Ordnungsstrukturen anzeigt. Im Zuge der Analytik moderner Machttechniken verschiebt Foucault anders als Agamben und Esposito den Fokus von der Biopolitik hin zu einem umfassenderen Paradigma des „Regierens“, der Gouvernementalität. Infolgedessen lässt sich die Biopolitik als Regierungsweise thematisieren, mit der immer schon Formen widerständigen Handelns einhergehen. Um dieser Perspektive Rechnung zu tragen, argumentiert mein Beitrag mit Foucault gegen die primär strukturale Auffassung politischer Ordnungen nach Agamben und Esposito. (shrink)