Research that is initiated, designed or funded by sponsor agencies based in countries with relatively high social and economic development, and conducted in countries that are relatively less developed, gives rise to many important ethical challenges. Although clinical trials of HIV vaccines began ten years ago in the US and Europe, an increasing number of trials are now being conducted or planned in other countries, including several that are considered “developing” countries. Safeguarding the rights and welfare of individuals participating as (...) research subjects in developing countries is a priority. In September, 1997, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS embarked on a process of international consultation; its purpose was further to define the important ethical issues and to formulate guidance that might facilitate the ethical design and conduct of HIV vaccine trials in international contexts. This paper summarises the major outcomes of the UNAIDS consultative process. (shrink)

This article compares Kant and Fichte from the double stand- point of identity and difference with regard to two thinkers who were at first united by a master-student relation but who later on drifted apart from each other due to mutual defamation. At the center of the present discussion stands the relationship between spirit of freedom and system’s form which binds Kant and Fichte beyond methodological divergences and doctrinal differ- ences. The critical comparison between Kant and Fichte will be developed (...) in four steps: it will start with the general positioning of Kant within German Idealism, and then move on to Kant’s double critical enterprise of grounding an aprioristic doctrine of principles of nature and freedom; it will later on address the conception championed by Fichte of having pre- sented the “first system of freedom”, and from there it will focus on the manifestations of freedom within Fichte’s philosophical system, with Kant’s position as contrast. (shrink)

As Husserl already noticed, artworks themselves have a phenomenological character. This means, however, that to experience artworks as phenomena no “epoché” and no “phenomenological reduction” is necessary. The leading question of my essay is whether, and possibly how, this observation can be methodologically generalized for understanding phenomena. I discuss if, and possibly how, a phenomenological reflection on art allows and even demands a general conception of phenomenology that nevertheless does not confuse artworks with phenomena in general. My intention is to (...) show that and how phenomenality can be clarified with reference to its spatial character. Accordingly, works of architecture that are artworks will play a decisive role in my argument. (shrink)

Scientific exploration and thus our knowledge about the outside world is subject to the conditions of our experience.These conditions are condensed here into an interface model which,besides being physical,has an additional interface structure not reducible to physics. We suggest that this structure can dynamically be characterized by separate modes.Their selection and operation presupposes free will and a rudimentary concept of time and space. Based on some analogies with quantum networks it is argued that the 'observed' gets 'dressed'as a consequence of (...) the observing. Interface dynamics and system dynamics supplement each other without over- determination. (shrink)

The paper is a critical discussion of scholarship on the "Critique of Pure Reason" published during the past ten years. The emphasis is on Anglo-American authors. I identify and discuss three main trends in the field: a shift from the general discussion of transcendental arguments to the analysis and evaluation of particular proofs in Kant; a renewed interest in the doctrine of transcendental idealism and the distinction between things in themselves and appearances; and the emergence of an entire body of (...) literature on Kant's philosophy of mind, centered around the idea of a "transcendental psychology." The main body of the text is supplemented by extensive bibliographical information provided in the notes. (shrink)

A constant theme in human self-reflection has been our ability to escape the control of nature. As Sophocles remarks in his Antigone, “Many are the wonders, none is more wonderful than what is man. He has a way against everything.”[1] A list follows of the ways in which man overcomes the limits imposed by the seas, the land, and the seasons. We do this by creating new environments for ourselves. These environments condition us. Thus, we do not just escape nature (...) by building cities. We, in turn, become city dwellers. The fact that we determine ourselves by determining our world has led thinkers like Hannah Arendt to describe us as conditioned beings. In her words, “Men are conditioned beings because everything they come into contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” This includes “the things that owe their existence exclusively to men.” They too “constantly condition their human makers.” [2] Since Hegel’s time, such self-conditioning has been understood to include our very nature. Our ability to determine our environments, i.e., escape being determined by nature, has been taken to mean that our nature is our own creation. There are, in other words, no external limits to the freedom we have to determine who and what we are. This freedom, to put it paradoxically, is ground-less. There is nothing prior to it that determines it. “Freedom,” here, does not signify some nature or essence, but rather the lack of such. As Heidegger writes, “Freedom is the abyss (Ab-grund) of human existence (Dasein).” It is our character as ground-less beings. (shrink)

There is a famous passage in the Gospels, where a lawyer questions Jesus with regard to the command to love God with one's whole heart and to love ones neighbour `as oneself.' The lawyer asks, 'And who is my neighbour?' (Luke 10:2 [1]). Is he someone who lives close by or a co-religionist or is he a stranger, a follower of a different faith as Jesus suggests by answering with the parable of the good Samaritan? The 'religions of the book (...) [2],' Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have difficulties answering this question. As their respective histories show, they all manifest a double potential. They show themselves capable of promoting acts of love and extreme self-sacrifice in their followers. But they also have histories marked by religiously motivated struggles, intolerance and acts of brutality. What is the root of this double potential? How can they promote both love and violence? (shrink)

To say we are present to ourselves through our bodies is to express something so obvious that most people hardly give it a thought. Philosophers, however, came late to this recognition. The idea that our embodiment shapes our apprehensions seemed to Descartes to designate a problem rather than a topic of study. His effort was to overcome embodiment, that is, to reach a realm where the unencumbered mind could confront the world. The same prejudice informed the modern tradition he founded. (...) It took for granted that the mind, or self, was unextended. Since the nonextended could not interact with the extended, Leibniz assumed that the self was a “windowless monad.” God provided its impressions of the external world. The same position was embraced by Berkeley. Realizing that matter had entirely lost its function of supplying the disembodied self with impressions, he denied its existence altogether. Even Hume, the dedicated empiricist, refused to speculate on the origin of such impressions. They could as well come from God, the external world, or the mind itself. The latter, as disembodied, was a mere theater--a ghostly stage on which our impressions and ideas succeeded each other. Kant pushed this tradition to its logical extreme. The disembodied self, he declared, was entirely noumenal. It could not even appear. It was only with Nietzsche’s biologism that a break with this tradition appears. Nietzsche’s will to power, however, was something more than an organic will to life. Its appeal was ultimately to something beyond our bodily being. (shrink)

Since the original UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights[i] laid out the general principles of human rights, there has been a split between what have been regarded as civil and political rights as opposed to economic, cultural and social rights. It was, in fact, the denial that both could be considered “rights” that prevented them from being included in the same covenant.[ii] Essentially, the argument for distinguishing the two concerns the nature of freedom. The civil rights to the freedoms of (...) speech, religion, assembly, association, and so on do not specify the content of the speech, the theology of the religion or the purpose of the assembly or association. [iii] Freedom in such cases is necessarily value-neutral. In leaving the choice up to the individual, these rights purposefully abstract from the content of this choice. The case is quite different for economic, cultural and social rights. All of these necessarily express values with regard to the forms of our social organization. This is because they move beyond individual choices to consider the purposes or goals of our existence together. Thus, the rights to the cultivation of a cultural identity necessarily impact more than the individuals exercising them. As collective, they affect the society as a whole. The same holds for the UN sponsored rights of a person “to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”[iv] For a society to honor these rights involves specific choices with regard to its social content and collective organization. Such choices embody a particular value—in the UN’s words, that of the “social security” of the individual.[v] Freedom, here, is freedom for specific social goals. Since these goals are collective, they have an impact on our individual choices. Thus, while my right to expressing my opinion need not impact yours, this is not the case for the economic rights the UN covenant endorses. The question I want to explore is the nature of the relationship between these two types of rights.. (shrink)

We can make very sensitive machines and may arrange for them to distinguish themselves from other objects. The programs that are designed toward specific goals, such as the identification of external objects, can also be imagined as action programs relating to the manipulation of these objects. These programs can be designed to retain data in order of receipt, picking patterns and anticipated appearance of perspective based on the success of their past performances. In this way, could be designed to allow (...) the machine to identify their own “here” and “now”, but would It has a self a machine capable of doing this? If so, where would it be? The purpose of this article is to address philosophical questions, revising extensively the question of the self in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

According to the standard, accepted view of Husserl, the notion of a Husserlian account of the instincts appears paradoxical. Is not Husserl the proponent of a philosophy conducted by a “pure” observer? Instincts relate to the body, but the reduction seems to leave us with a disembodied Cartesian ego. Quotations are not lacking to support this view.

Is violence senseless or is it at the origin of sense? Does its destruction of meaning disclose ourselves as the origin of meaning? Or is it the case that it leaves in its wake only a barren field? Does it result in renewal or only in a sense of dead loss? To answer these questions, I shall look at James Dodd’s, Hegel’s, and Carl Schmitt’s accounts of the creative power of violence—particularly with regard to its ability to give individuals and (...) groups their sense of self-identity. I shall also follow up on Peg Birmingham’s suggestion that Socrates’ defense at his trial points to an alternate source of our self-identity—one that is ultimately less barren. (shrink)

This study proposes a double thesis. The first concerns the Logische Untersuchungen itself. We will attempt to show that its statements about the nature of being are inconsistent and that this inconsis tency is responsible for the failure of this work. The second con cerns the Logische Untersuchungen's relation to the Ideen. The latter, we propose, is a response to the failure of the Logische Untersuchungen's ontology. It can thus be understood in terms of a shift in the ontology of (...) the Logische Untersuchungen, a shift motivated by the attempt to overcome the contradictory assertions of the Logische Untersuchungen. In this sense our thesis is that, in the technical meaning that Husserl gives the term, the Logische Untersuchungen and the Ideen can be linked via a "motivated path. " We can, by way of an introduction, clarify our theses by regard ing three elements. The first is the relation of epistemology to ontology. The second is the notion of motivation as Husserl conceives the term. The third is the fundamental distinctions that are to be explained via the notion of motivation. 1. We should begin by remarking that the goal of the Logische Untersuchungen is explicitly epistemological; it is that of answer ing "the cardinal question of epistemology, the question concerning the objectivity of knowledge" (LU, Tub. ed. , I, 8; F. , p. 56V For Husserl, his other questions - i. e. (shrink)

The question of who we are is a perennial one in philosophy. It is particularly acute in transcendental philosophy with its focus on the subject. In its attempt to see in the subject the structures and activities that determine experience, such philosophy confronts what Husserl called “the paradox of human subjectivity.” This is the paradox of its two-fold being. It has “both the being of a subject for the world and the being of an object in the world.” As the (...) first, it appears as the subject whose constitutive syntheses result in the presence of the world. Possessing an “absolute being,” it is uniquely singular. As the second, it is itself but one object among many in the world. It appears as a particular human subject with all the vulnerabilities and limitations that we all too readily recognize in ourselves. Reflecting on this duality, Husserl asks: “Howcan human subjectivity,which is a part of theworld, constitute thewhole world, i.e., constitute it as its intentional product . . .? The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world including itself. What an absurdity!”4 The absurdity arises when we identify the two subjectivities, that is, when we say that the absolutely constituting subjectivity is, in fact, our own limited empirical subjectivity. It is at this point that we say that a part of the world constitutes the whole of the world and hence itself as a part of this whole. (shrink)

It may seem strange to associate the name of Jan Patočka with artificial intelligence. Neither a mathematician nor a logician, the phenomenology he espoused, with its emphasis on lived experience, seems worlds apart from the formalism associated with the discipline. Yet, as I hope to show, the radicality and depth of Patočka’s thought is such that it casts a wide net. The reform of metaphysics that Patočka proposed in his asubjective phenomenology also affects artificial intelligence. It shows that what philosophers (...) take as its most difficult, yet primary problem may well be the result of a category mistake. (shrink)

This book offers a fresh look at Edmund Husserl’s philosophy as a nonfoundational approach to understanding the self as an embodied presence. Contrary to the conventional view of Husserl as carrying on the Cartesian tradition of seeking a trustworthy foundation for knowledge in the "pure" observations of a disembodied ego, James Mensch introduces us to the Husserl who, anticipating the later investigations of Merleau-Ponty, explored how the body functions to determine our self-presence, our freedom, and our sense of time. The (...) result is a concept of selfhood that allows us to see how consciousness’s arising from sensuous experiences follows from the temporal features of embodiment. From this understanding of what is crucial to Husserl’s phenomenology, the book draws the implications for language and ethics, comparing Husserl’s ideas with those of Derrida on language and with those of Heidegger and Levinas on responsibility. Paradoxically, it is these postmodernists who are shown to be extending the logic of foundationalism to its ultimate extreme, whereas Husserl can be seen as leading the way beyond modernity to a nonfoundational account of the self and its world. (shrink)

This is an interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of subjective and objective freedom as presented in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The interpretation takes the form of a detailed commentary on the sections on practical subjective spirit and objective spirit from Part 3 of the Encyclopaedia.

Patt's study attempts to explain Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism through a detailed examination of Kant's theory of sensible intuition. The center of the book is a minute textual exegesis of Kant's direct proof for the doctrine of transcendental idealism in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" of the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on the arguments concerning the nature of space and time and the conclusions that Kant draws from them. This middle part is preceded by three smaller chapters that examine the (...) Kantian distinction between appearances and things in themselves, the relation between intuition and sensation, and the function of intuition in synthetic judgments. The study concludes with an analysis of Kant's indirect proof of the doctrine of transcendental idealism in the "Transcendental Dialectic," with an emphasis on the treatment of the first two antinomies. No detailed consideration is given to the role of intuitions in Kant's theory of categories and principles in the "Transcendental Analytic.". (shrink)

This essay offers an interrogation of Leadership-as-Practice in the context of MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. LAP is a constructionist leadership approach that rationalizes leadership as the co-creation of embodied leadership practices in organizations, and we argue that its theoretical and philosophical foundations are best aligned with a genealogist version of moral enquiry. We contend that LAP’s theoretical assumptions and implications place it in opposition to traditionalist and encyclopaedist moral philosophies and that application of LAP without an appreciation (...) for our argument poses challenges for practitioners as it diminishes their ability to learn from opposing perspectives. We argue for an appreciation of diverse moral viewpoints and discouragement of coercive moral practices from any competing perspective. While the philosophy undergirding LAP may encourage moral relativism and possible conflicts in principled beliefs, we offer LAP may strengthen organizational members cognitively and emotionally, bringing greater long-term benefit for the organization. (shrink)

Anglophone attention to issues of race and racism, with particular attention to Kant and other members of the German Enlightenment, has long been hampered by a lack of critical editions in English. While this is no longer significantly true for Kant studies, it continues to be the case for many of the most relevant works by Georg Forster and Christoph Meiners. This is a problem for philosophers working exclusively in English, and it is one that is only exacerbated by the (...) field’s general lack of interest in not just the intellectual history of philosophy and its figures, but in analyses published in languages other than English today. Ahistorical, monolinguistic approaches become especially problematic, however, when it comes to the philosophical analysis of race and racism, given the need to approach such topics from multiple angles at once—historical, political, cultural, economic, and legal—a fact that is no less true for scholarship on the figures of the eighteenth century than it is for the study of the present one. My aim in what follows therefore is to fill in a bit of the bigger picture, the specific context within which a writer like Georg Forster and his cohort were working, in order to better frame the kinds of specialised discussions of Kant’s philosophy of race that we find today. (shrink)

In our increasingly interdependent world, human solidarity has become a topic of general (and heated) discussion. It has been urged as an antidote to the competitive pressures of globalisation and to the threats of climate change. Others argue that the sense of belonging together, of sharing a common fate that it brings is essential for civil society. Without this, we will seek to avoid the burdens our governments impose on us, for example, taxes and the draft. This sense of belonging (...) facilitates our talking to each other and forming a democratically based consensus on such matters. A common history, language, religion, or ethnic identity can ground this sense of belonging. So can a feeling of shared danger. (shrink)

Weil aber das volle Wesen der Wahrheit das Unwesen einschließt und allem zuvor als Verbergung waltet, ist die Philosophie als das Erfragen dieser Wahrheit in sich zwiespaltig. Ihr Denken ist die Gelassenheit der Milde, die der Verborgenheit des Seienden im Ganzen sich nicht versagt. Ihr Denken ist zumal die Ent-schlossenheit der Strange, die nicht die Verbergung sprengt, aber ihr unversehrtes Wesen ins Offene des Bergreifens und so in ihre eigene Wahrheit nötigt.