Mission-oriented climate change research is often unverifiable. Therefore, many stakeholders look to peer-reviewed climate change research for trustworthy information about deeply uncertain and impactful phenomena. This is because peer-review signals that research has been vetted for scientific standards like reproducibility and replicability. Here we evaluate the transparency of research methodologies in mission-oriented computational climate research. We find that only five percent of our sample meets the minimal standard of fully open data and code required for reproducibility and replicability. The widespread (...) lack of minimal openness standards in peer-reviewed climate change research jeopardizes scientific credibility and risks poor societal outcomes as we manage growing climate risks. The scientific community can and must do better. We, the authors, outline necessary openness standards that we commit to as researchers, reviewers, and readers. We invite you to join us. (shrink)

In recent years, biologists and philosophers of science have argued that evolutionary theory should incorporate more seriously the idea of ‘reciprocal causation.’ This notion refers to feedback loops whereby organisms change their experiences of the environment or alter the physical properties of their surroundings. In these loops, in particular niche constructing activities are central, since they may alter selection pressures acting on organisms, and thus affect their evolutionary trajectories. This paper discusses long-standing problems that emerge when studying such reciprocal causal (...) processes between organisms and environments. By comparing past approaches to reciprocal causation from the early twentieth century with contemporary ones in niche construction theory, we identify two central reoccurring problems: All of these approaches have not been able to provide a conceptual framework that allows maintaining meaningful boundaries between organisms and environments, instead of merging the two, and integrating experiential and physical kinds of reciprocal causation. By building on case studies of niche construction research, we provide a model that is able to solve these two problems. It allows distinguishing between mutually interacting organisms and environments in complex scenarios, as well as integrating various forms of experiential and physical niche construction. (shrink)

Subjective Bayesianism is a major school of uncertain reasoning and statistical inference. It is often criticized for a lack of objectivity: it opens the door to the influence of values and biases, evidence judgments can vary substantially between scientists, it is not suited for informing policy decisions. My paper rebuts these concerns by connecting the debates on scientific objectivity and statistical method. First, I show that the above concerns arise equally for standard frequentist inference with null hypothesis significance tests. Second, (...) the criticisms are based on specific senses of objectivity with unclear epistemic value. Third, I show that Subjective Bayesianism promotes other, epistemically relevant senses of scientific objectivity—most notably by increasing the transparency of scientific reasoning. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the key points of Nāgārjuna’s discussion of problems relating to the philosophy of language. We will focus on two works from Nāgārjuna’s yukti-corpus that address these matters most explicitly, the Vigrahavyāvartanī and the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa. The discussion will concentrate on four topics: Nāgārjuna’s views on semantics, the problem of empty names, the relation between language and momentariness, and the implications of Madhyamaka views on parts and wholes for the existence of language.

Karl Löwith, den Hans-Georg Gadamer als »den zweifellos begabtesten Schüler Heideggers« bezeichnete, zählt zu den bedeutendsten Vertretern der philosophischen Anthropologie. Sein Denken umkreist die Frage nach dem Selbstverständnis des modernen Menschen in der säkularisierten Welt. Max Weber folgend bejaht Löwith die Situation des modernen Menschen, der ohne göttliche Autorität auskommen muss, sich aber den Spannungen einer modernen kapitalistischen Gesellschaft ebenso ausgesetzt sieht wie den ihm eigenen Widersprüchen. Neben einer Einführung überträgt Jan Schenkenberger Löwiths Philosophie - unter Verwendung von teils unveröffentlichten (...) Quellen - in neue Kontexte und denkt ihren ethischen Kern in die Gegenwart weiter. (shrink)

Biologists and philosophers of science have recently called for an extension of evolutionary theory. This so-called ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ seeks to integrate developmental processes, extra-genetic forms of inheritance, and niche construction into evolutionary theory in a central way. While there is often agreement in evolutionary biology over the existence of these phenomena, their explanatory relevance is questioned. Advocates of EES posit that their perspective offers better explanations than those provided by ‘standard evolutionary theory’. Still, why this would be the case (...) is unclear. Usually, such claims assume that EES’s superior explanatory status arises from the pluralist structure of EES, its different problem agenda, and a growing body of evidence for the evolutionary relevance of developmental phenomena. However, what is usually neglected in this debate is a discussion of what the explanatory standards of EES actually are, and how they differ from prevailing standards in SET. In other words, what is considered to be a good explanation in EES versus SET? To answer this question, we present a theoretical framework that evaluates the explanatory power of different evolutionary explanations of the same phenomena. This account is able to identify criteria for why and when evolutionary explanations of EES are better than those of SET. Such evaluations will enable evolutionary biology to find potential grounds for theoretical integration. (shrink)

The theory of technological mediation aims to take technological artifacts seriously, recognizing the constitutive role they play in how we experience the world, act in it, and how we are constituted as (moral) subjects. Its quest for a compatible ethics has led it to Foucault’s “care of the self,” i.e., a transformation of the self by oneself through self-discipline. In this regard, technologies have been interpreted as power structures to which one can relate through Foucaultian “technologies of the self” or (...) ascetic practices. However, this leaves unexplored how concrete technologies can actuallysupportthe process of self-care. This paper explores this possibility by examining one such technology: a gamified To-Do list app. Doing so, it first shows that despite the apparent straightforwardness of gamification, confrontation and shame play an important role in how the app motivates me to do better. Second, inspired by Ihde’s schema of human-technology relations, it presents different ways in which the app may confront me with myself. Subsequently, it accounts for the motivation and shame that this technologically mediated confrontation with myself invokes through a Levinasian account of ethical subjectivity. In so doing, it also shows how Levinas’ phenomenology implies a responsibility for self-care and how nonhuman, technological others may still call me to responsibility. It concludes with a reflection on the role of gamification in technologically mediated subjectivation and some implications for design. (shrink)

The goal of our article is to review the widespread anthropological figure, according to which we can achieve a better understanding of humans by contrasting them with animals. This originally Herderian approach was elaborated by Arnold Gehlen, who characterized humans as “deficient beings” who become complete through culture. According to Gehlen, humans, who are insufficiently equipped by instincts, indirectly stabilize their existence by creating institutions, i.e., complexes of habitual actions. On the other hand, Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows that corporeal relationship to (...) the world is already indirect because it is based on preestablished and readjusted “standards” or “norms” of interaction with the environment. Merleau-Ponty then calls these norms “institutions” and views culture as readjustment of institutions which operate already on the level of corporeal existence. The anthropological figure of confronting humans and animals thus cannot produce, as in Gehlen, a contrast between an allegedly “direct” relationship to the world in animals and a supposedly “indirect” relationship to the world in humans. The Herderian approach can be meaningfully retained only if interpreted as an invitation to confront the norms of indirect interaction with the world in animals and in people, that is, if viewed as a comparison of their respective institutions. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess Žižek ’s article “No Sex, Please, We’re Post-human!” as a provocative injunction to signal the posthuman ecstasy and deterrence. I seek to expose, rather than express, Žižek ’s posthumanist perspective as a paradoxical intertwining of different aspects of perspectivizing a post-human being from the view of the end of sexuality – the background that informs a posthuman future. Žižek ’s eluding the subject’s confrontation with the question of sexual difference to the apex of the genome (...) project touches the delicate coalescing of the notions of ‘objectivity and subjectivity’ and ‘virtuality and reality’ in the fate of the body. Ultimately, he renders this inception of this tarrying as a traumatic encounter that informs us of the existential birthright of a true posthuman. (shrink)

In recent years the idea that perceptual content is tensed in the sense that we can perceive objects as present or as past has come under attack. In this paper the notion of tensed content is to the contrary defended. The paper argues that assuming that something like an intentionalistic theory of perception is correct, it is very reasonable to suppose that perceptual content is tensed, and that a denial of this notion requires a denial of some intuitively very plausible (...) principles. The paper discusses some common objections against the notion of tensed content and concludes that none of them succeeds in showing that perceptual content cannot be tensed. (shrink)

This article identifies a distinct strand of 20th-century liberal thought that was exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron and, to a lesser extent, Karl Popper. I offer a stylized account of their common ideas and shared political sensibility, and argue that their primarily negative liberalism was a variety of what Judith Shklar called the `liberalism of fear' — which put the imperative to avoid cruelty and atrocity first. All three founded their liberalism on a `politics of knowledge' that was directed (...) primarily against Marxist philosophies of history and less against the idea of bureaucratic planning, as, in contrast, was the case with Friedrich von Hayek's thought. Moreover, all three subscribed to more or less explicit versions of value pluralism, and claimed that, in the circumstances of modernity, Weber's `clash of values' was exacerbated and required a particularly prudential approach to politics; this prudential management of value conflicts in turn was best entrusted to cultivated bureaucratic elites. All shared an image of a tolerant and humane society — essentially an idealized version of Britain — but said perhaps too little on the question how societies without the appropriate traditions of moderation and compromise were to be liberalized. (shrink)

This book provides for the first time a complete history of the doctrine of the transcendentals and shows its importance for the understanding of philosophy in the Middle Ages.

This essay proposes to view networks as sociocultural structures. Following authors from Leopold von Wiese and Norbert Elias to Gary Alan Fine and Harrison White, networks are configurations of social relationships interwoven with meaning. Social relationships as the basic building blocks of networks are conceived of as dynamic structures of reciprocal (but not necessarily symmetric) expectations between alter and ego. Through their transactions, alter and ego construct an idiosyncratic "relationship culture" comprising symbols, narratives, and relational identities. The coupling of social (...) relationships to networks, too, is heavily laden with meaning. The symbolic construction of persons is one instance of this coupling. Another instance is the application of social categories (like race or gender), which both map and structure social networks. The conclusion offers an agenda for research on this "meaning structure of social networks.". (shrink)

BackgroundSharing de-identified individual-level health research data is widely promoted and has many potential benefits. However there are also some potential harms, such as misuse of data and breach of participant confidentiality. One way to promote the benefits of sharing while ameliorating its potential harms is through the adoption of a managed access approach where data requests are channeled through a Data Access Committee (DAC), rather than making data openly available without restrictions. A DAC, whether a formal or informal group of (...) individuals, has the responsibility of reviewing and assessing data access requests. Many individual groups, consortiums, institutional and independent DACs have been established but there is currently no widely accepted framework for their organization and function.Main textWe propose that DACs, should have the role of both promotion of data sharing and protection of data subjects, their communities, data producers, their institutions and the scientific enterprise. We suggest that data access should be granted by DACs as long as the data reuse has potential social value and provided there is low risk of foreseeable harms. To promote data sharing and to motivate data producers, DACs should encourage secondary uses that are consistent with the interests of data producers and their own institutions. Given the suggested roles of DACs, there should be transparent, simple and clear application procedures for data access. The approach to review of applications should be proportionate to the potential risks involved. DACs should be established within institutional and legal frameworks with clear lines of accountability, terms of reference and membership. We suggest that DACs should not be modelled after research ethics committees (RECs) because their functions and goals of review are different from those of RECs. DAC reviews should be guided by the principles of public health ethics instead of research ethics.ConclusionsIn this paper we have suggested a framework under which DACs should operate, how they should be organised, and how to constitute them. (shrink)

Ever since the 19th century, political parties and free media were widely deemed indispensable for the proper functioning of representative democracy. They constituted what one might call the criti...

This paper deals with the problem of universality property of logic. At first, this property is analyzed in the context of first-order logic. Three senses of the universality property are distinguished: universal applicability, topical neutrality and validity. All theses senses can be proved to be justified. The fourth understanding, namely the amount of expressive power, is connected with the criticism of the first-order thesis: first-order logic is the logic. The categorical approach to logic is presented as associated with the last (...) understanding of universality. The author concludes that two senses of universality should be sharply discriminated and defends the first-order thesis. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that medical specialists interpret and diagnose through technological mediations like X-ray and fMRI images, and by actualizing embodied skills tacitly they are determining the identity of objects in the perceptual field. The initial phase of human interpretation of visual objects takes place during the moments of visual perception before we are consciously aware of the perceived. What facilitate this innate ability to interpret are experiences, learning and training that become humanly embodied skills. These embodied (...) skills are actualized during the moments of visual perception. My argument is that biology, society and instruments constitute unique individual ontologies influencing specialist readings of the technological output, in other words, putting limits on the ‘‘truth-to-nature’’ relation, which is so much sought for in science. (shrink)

The essay takes the widespread complaint that societies today are deeply divided and polarized as a starting point. Affirming that there is no democracy without division, it asks what it means for conflict and disagreement to be dealt with in a respectful and civil manner. As an illustration of the main argument, the way that liberals (in the broadest sense) have engaged with populist leaders is criticized on both a strategic and normative level. An alternative to existing strategies of dealing (...) with the conflict between liberals and populist is then proposed. Finally, the article also asks under what conditions civil disobedience might be an appropriate response to authoritarian populism. (shrink)

In recent years, postgenomic research, and the fields of epigenetics and microbiome science in particular, have described novel ways in which social processes of racialization can become embodied and result in physiological and health-related racial difference. This new conception of biosocial race has important implications for philosophical debates on the ontology of race. We argue that postgenomic research on race exhibits two key biases in the way that racial schemas are deployed. Firstly, although the ‘new biosocial race’ has been characterized (...) as social race entering into biological processes, it is only particular aspects of social race that are taken to cross the biosocial boundary, resulting in a distorted view of the social component of biosocial race. Secondly, racial categories are assumed to be stable across time and space. This assumption is epistemically limiting, as well as indicating a reliance on a fixed racial ontology. However, the causal pathways for the embodiment of social race, and the different possible modes of embodiment, that postgenomic science is uncovering themselves present a challenge for fixed or static racial ontologies. Given these tensions, we argue that the emerging picture of a shifting landscape of entanglement between the social and the biological requires us to increase the complexity of our ontologies of race, or even embrace a deflationary metaphysics of race. (shrink)

Extensionalist theories of the specious present suggest that every perceptual experience is extended in time for a short while, such that they are co-extensive in time with the time experienced in them. Thus, there can be no experience of time, unless the experience itself is extended in time. Accordingly, there must be something that unites the temporal parts of a perceptual experience into temporally extended wholes. I call this the “glue-problem for extensionalism”. In this paper I suggest three desiderata that (...) an extensionalist theory should meet in order to solve the glue-problem. I also distinguish between different versions of extensionalism, and argue that none of them can solve the glue-problem without violating at least one desideratum. (shrink)

Some of our reasons for action are grounded in the fact that the action in question is a means to something else we have reason to do. This raises the question as to which principles govern the transmission of reasons from ends to means. In this paper, we discuss the merits and demerits of a liberal transmission principle, which plays a prominent role in the current literature. The principle states that an agent has an instrumental reason to whenever -ing is (...) a means for him to do what he has intrinsic reason to do. We start by discussing the objection that this principle implies counterintuitive reason statements. We argue that attempts to solve this “too many reasons problem” by appealing to pragmatic strategies for debunking intuitions about so-called negative reason existentials are questionable. Subsequently, we discuss three important arguments in favor of Liberal Transmission, and argue that they fail to make a convincing case for this principle. In the course of the discussion, we also provide alternative, less liberal transmission principles. We argue that these alternative principles allow us to accommodate those phenomena that seem to support Liberal Transmission while avoiding its problems. (shrink)

The paper critically engages with some of the normative arguments in Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson’s book Unfit for the Future. In particular, it scrutinizes the authors’ argument in denial of a moral right to privacy as well as their political proposal to alter humankind’s moral psychology in order to avert climate change, terrorism and to redress global injustice.

Political theorists tend to dismiss the concept of constitutional patriotism for two main reasons. On the one hand, constitutional patriotism — understood as a post-national, universalist form of democratic political allegiance — is rejected on account of its abstract quality. On the otherhand, it is argued that constitutional patriotism, while apprearing universalist, is in fact particular through and through. According to this genealogical critique, it is held that constitutional patriotism might have been appropriate in the context when it originated — (...) namely West Germany, a half-nation with a deeply compromised sense of nationality on account of the Nazi past — but it is not universally applicable. This article reconstructs the origins of constitutional patriotism arguing that both the ‘protective’ and state-centred patriotism of Dolf Sternberger, and the ‘purifying’ patriotism of Jurgen Habermas — focused mainly on the public sphere — can indeed be understood as relying on ‘supplements of particularily’. However, there are also normative connections between universalist constitutional morality and militant democracy on the one hand, and universalist constitutionalist morality and an imperative to remember on the other. Thus, the genealogical critique by itself is insufficient to invalidate the idea of constitutional patriotism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT On 22 January 2001, the UK became the first country to approve of embryonic stem cell research by passing the Human Fertilisation (Research Purposes) Regulations 2001, which legislated new research purposes for which early embryos can be used, in addition to those approved by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. Legal advisory committees, most notably the Chief Medical Officer's Expert Group and the House of Lords’ Select Committee, have offered various reasons, which can also be found in the (...) ethics literature, to justify this change. Those examined here are the views that: 1. Early embryos lack relevant qualities (or ‘the argument from lack of qualities’) and 2. Early embryos only have a potentiality to become humans with moral status (or ‘the argument from potentiality’). The validity of these arguments is questioned and a case is made for egalitarian speciesism. Embryos have moral status (used here in the restricted sense of the status possessed by all members of the class of beings which deserve the greatest moral significance in equal measure). They have more value than the value that should be assigned to nonhuman beings from the start of fertilisation. Current UK legislation on embryo research is immoral. (shrink)

We say that a first order theoryTislocally finiteif every finite part ofThas a finite model. It is the purpose of this paper to construct in a uniform way for any consistent theoryTa locally finite theory FIN which is syntactically isomorphic toT.Our construction draws upon the main idea of Paris and Harrington [6] and generalizes the syntactic aspect of their result from arithmetic to arbitrary theories. The first mathematically strong locally finite theory, called FIN, was defined in [1]. Now we get (...) much stronger ones, e.g. FIN.From a physicalistic point of view the theorems of ZF and their FIN-counterparts may have the same meaning. Therefore FIN is a solution of Hilbert's second problem. It eliminates ideal objects from the proofs of properties of concrete objects.In [4] we will demonstrate that one can develop a direct finitistic intuition that FIN is locally finite. We will also prove a variant of Gödel's second incompleteness theorem for the theory FIN and for all its primitively recursively axiomatizable consistent extensions.The results of this paper were announced in [3]. (shrink)

The study’s main thesis is that respect for some moral values is a condition for methodologically rational decisions, namely, decisions which do not satisfy the condition are either not methodologically rational at all, or not fully rational. The paper shows supporting arguments for the thesis in terms of the philosophical theories by Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Max Weber, Jean-Paul Sartre and some other thinkers. Their presentation undergoes phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of decision making.

As corporate social responsibility involves a voluntary business endeavour to address social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance, governments cannot fall back on hierarchical command-and-control policies to support it. As such, it is complementary with the increasing popularity of public policies known as New Governance policies, where the government is engaged in a horizontal inter-organizational network of societal actors and where public policy is both formed and executed by the interacting and voluntary efforts from a multitude of stakeholders. However, such (...) policies are known to generate substantive uncertainty about the content of CSR and its related issues, strategic uncertainty regarding the behavior of the actors involved and institutional uncertainty related to the interaction process involved in the institutional change. We explore New Governance policy instruments to address these uncertainties in the context CSR and discuss the experiences with these methods in the European Union. (shrink)

I present what I take to be the approach to property rights, in which property is basically a unitary concept: owners are the ones with the right to do, and prohibit others from doing, whatever there is to do with the thing owned, within the limits imposed by the rights of others to their things. I expound and defend the idea of in more or less Lockean mode. I also point to the many difficulties of application of the general idea, (...) leading to the need to negotiate at many points. For example, the vagueness of land ownership as we consider what goes on in the earth below or the sky above; to consideration of not just possible physical damages to others by virtue of ownership, but also aesthetic ones; and to the increasingly important area of intellectual property. I argue that the original idea continues to hold, though it underdetermines any number of specific issues. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall be concerned to explore the utilitarian account of promising, which for some time has had, in many circles, the status of a dead horse. My aim is not to flog it, however, but to show that perhaps it yet lives. At least, I hope to show that some prominent and apparently powerful objections to this account do not find their mark. In the course of this, several subjects of wider interest will come in for review (...) as well, and it is hoped that some further light on the utilitarian position in general, as well as the concepts of expectation and obligation, may glimmer forth.At the outset, some clarification of the question at issue about promising is essential. Briefly, the question is: why ought we to keep our promises? Less question-beggingly put: why, if at all, should we keep promises, and to what extent?; where by talk of ‘extent’ it is meant that the question of whether we sometimes should not keep them, of its being a matter of attaching a “degree of stringency” to the obligation, is to be kept open. (shrink)

We consider the use of interventions for resolving a problem of unidentified statistical models. The leading examples are from latent variable modelling, an influential statistical tool in the social sciences. We first explain the problem of statistical identifiability and contrast it with the identifiability of causal models. We then draw a parallel between the latent variable models and Bayesian networks with hidden nodes. This allows us to clarify the use of interventions for dealing with unidentified statistical models. We end by (...) discussing the philosophical and methodological import of our result. (shrink)

Using the history classroom as a context for ethics and moral education is a long, but also contested, tradition. Recently, more emphasis has been put on how to incorporate ethics education, with this paper exploring the spaces of ethics and moral education in the history classroom. It is argued here that insights from moral philosophy and theories of historical consciousness, but – importantly – also moral psychology and the study of moral emotions, are needed to realise the potential of history (...) teaching and learning to support ethics education. Following this line, three spaces of ethics education in the history classroom are identified in this paper, including: reasoning about the moral quality of historical actors’ conduct; the use of historical empathy ; and reflection of the past’s moral meaning to the present and the future. As an example of how to implement this, a set of stimulus activities is presented that is designed for the classroom and a qualitative analysis of students’ responses that explicate expressions of students’ moral reasoning, perspective-taking, and historical consciousness. (shrink)

Jeffrey Friedman broaches a number of criticisms of Libertarianism as a conceptual basis for opposing the extensive modern welfare state, examining several variants and concluding that they are fundamentally unsupported. He opts for a “consequentialist” view of foundations. Nevertheless, he thinks that the modem welfare state is subject to effective critique along such lines. But rational contractarian individualism works and does provide foundations for libertarianism, while “consequentialism” is an ill‐defined theory.that is quite unpromising for the proposed critique; nevertheless, Friedman's empirical (...) and economic critique of the welfare state is valid. (shrink)

Due to the intense selection pressure against inbreeding, humans are expected to possess psychological adaptations that regulate mate choice and avoid inbreeding. From a gene’s-eye perspective, there is little difference in the evolutionary costs between situations where an individual him/herself is participating in inbreeding and inbreeding among other close relatives. The difference is merely quantitative, as fitness can be compromised via both routes. The question is whether humans are sensitive to the direct as well as indirect costs of inbreeding. Using (...) responses from a large population-based sample (27,364 responses from 2,353 participants), we found that human motivations to avoid inbreeding closely track the theoretical costs of inbreeding as predicted by inclusive-fitness theory. Participants were asked to select in a forced choice paradigm, which of two acts of inbreeding with actual family members they would want to avoid most. We found that the estimated fitness costs explained 83.6% of participant choices. Importantly, fitness costs explained choices also when the self was not involved. We conclude that humans intuit the indirect fitness costs of mating decisions made by close family members and that psychological inbreeding avoidance mechanisms extend beyond self-regulation. (shrink)

This innovative book proposes a unique and original perspective on the nature of the mind and how phenomenal consciousness may arise in a physical world. From simple sentient organisms to complex self-reflective systems, Faye argues for a naturalistic-evolutionary approach to philosophy of mind and consciousness. Drawing on substantial literature in evolutionary biology and cognitive science, this book offers a promising alternative to the major theories of the mind-body problem: the quality of our experiences should not, as some philosophers have claimed, (...) be associated with subjectivity that is not open for scientific explanation, nor should it be associated with intrinsic properties of the brain. Instead, Faye argues that mental properties are extrinsic properties of the brain caused by the organism’s interaction with its environment. Taking on the explanatory gap, and rejecting the ontological pluralism of present naturalist theories of the mind, Faye thus proposes a unified view of reality in which it is possible to explain qualitative mental presentations as part of the physical world. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es refutar las objeciones de Marc Ramsey a los principios de educación cívica del liberalismo político. Argumento que Ramsey malinterpreta la distinción entre la esfera pública y la esfera privada que emana del liberalismo político, y que su opinión de que, cuando es escrutado, el liberalismo político deriva en un liberalismo comprehensivo o de la «autonomía» carece de fundamento. La relevancia del tema es que la educación de acuerdo con el liberalismo político es más tolerante (...) que la educación conforme al liberalismo comprehensivo. Aquellos padres razonablemente religiosos que no son liberales podrán aceptar un liberalismo político, pero no uno comprehensivo. (shrink)

Conceiving of nuclear energy as a social experiment gives rise to the question of what to do when the experiment is no longer responsible or desirable. To be able to appropriately respond to such a situation, the nuclear energy technology in question should be reversible, i.e. it must be possible to stop its further development and implementation in society, and it must be possible to undo its undesirable consequences. This paper explores these two conditions by applying them to geological disposal (...) of high-level radioactive waste. Despite the fact that considerations of reversibility and retrievability have received increased attention in GD, the analysis in this paper concludes that GD cannot be considered reversible. Firstly, it would be difficult to stop its further development and implementation, since its historical development has led to a point where GD is significantly locked-in. Secondly, the strategy it employs for undoing undesirable consequences is less-than-ideal: it relies on containment of severely radiotoxic waste rather than attempting to eliminate this waste or its radioactivity. And while it may currently be technologically impossible to turn high-level waste into benign substances, GD’s containment strategy makes it difficult to eliminate this waste’s radioactivity when the possibility would arise. In all, GD should be critically reconsidered if the inclusion of reversibility considerations in radioactive waste management has indeed become as important as is sometimes claimed. (shrink)

I join Gerben Meynen’s call for an ethical assessment of mind-reading technology by enlarging on four points he raises. First, I suggest distinguishing between neural and mental data, apprehending...

SUMMARYThis article argues that Henry Savile's widely admired Tacitus of 1591 should not be read as an implied call for a more aggressive English stance against Spanish advances on the Continent, but precisely for a more restrained and prudential approach. Secondly, it calls into question the generally accepted view that Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, played a prominent role in the composition of the book. It argues that in reconstructing the work's original intellectual context and especially that of the supplement (...) The Ende of Nero and the beginning of Galba, the main emphasis should not be on Essex's political and military career, but on that of his stepfather Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The article provides an investigation of the background in Continental politics and political thought in relation to the text of The Ende, which suggests that it should primarily be read from the perspective of the unsuccessful English intervention in the Low Countries in 1585–88. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between the German historian Reinhart Koselleck and the Germanjurist Carl Schmitt. It focuses especially on how Koselleck's doctoral thesis,,Kritik und Krise" approaches Schmitt's 1938 study on Thomas Hobbes. Both scholars are contextualized in the intellectual and academic milieu of Heidelberg in the early 1950s.