Genesis: The Evolution of Biology presents a history of the past two centuries of biology, suitable for use in courses, but of interest more broadly to evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and biomedical scientists, as well as general readers interested in the history of science. The book covers the early evolutionary biologists-Lamarck, Cuvier, Darwin and Wallace through Mayr and the neodarwinian synthesis, in much the same way as other histories of evolution have done, bringing in also the social implications, the struggles with (...) our religious understanding, and the interweaving of genetics into evolutionary theory. What is novel about Sapp's account is a real integration of the cytological tradition, from Schwann, Boveri, and the other early cell biologists and embryologists, and the coverage of symbiosis, microbial evolutionary phylogenies, and the new understanding of the diversification of life coming from comparative analyses of complete microbial genomes. The book is a history of theories about evolution, genes and organisms from Lamarck and Darwin to the present day. This is the first book on the general history of evolutionary biology to include the history of research and theories about symbiosis in evolution, and first to include research on microbial evolution which were excluded from the classical neo-Darwinian synthesis. Bacterial evolution, and symbiosis in evolution are also excluded from virtually every book on the history of biology. (shrink)

On the standard interpretation, if a person holds cyclical preferences, the person is prone to acting irrationally. I provide a different interpretation, tying cyclical preferences not to irrationality, but to indecision. According to this alternative understanding – coined the indecision interpretation – top cycles in a person’s preferences can be associated with a difficulty in justifying one’s choice. If an agent’s justificatory impasse persists despite attempts to resolve the cycle, the agent can be deemed undecided. The indecision interpretation is compatible (...) with the standard interpretation of such cycles as instances of irrationality. Yet indecision corresponds to a first-person, non-instrumental perspective on the problem, whereas irrationality usually corresponds to a third-person, instrumental perspective. Due to these differences, interpreting cycles in terms of indecision offers a novel conceptual perspective, pertinent both for explanatory purposes and for the aim of normative theorizing. (shrink)

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)

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...

Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice is a collection of essays of the moral and political philosophy of Jan Narveson. The essays in this collection share a consistent theme running through much of Narveson's moral and political philosophy, namely that politics and morals stem from the interests of individual people, and have no antecedent authority over us. The essays in this collection, in various ways and as applied to various aspects of the scene, argue that the ultimate and true point (...) of politics and morals is to enable us to make our lives better, according to our varied senses of what that might mean. (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)

Software systems play an ever more important role in our lives and software engineers and their companies find themselves in a position where they are held responsible for ethical issues that may arise. In this paper, we try to disentangle ethical considerations that can be performed at the level of the software engineer from those that belong in the wider domain of business ethics. The handling of ethical problems that fall into the responsibility of the engineer has traditionally been addressed (...) by the publication of Codes of Ethics and Conduct. We argue that these Codes are barely able to provide normative orientation in software development. The main contribution of this paper is, thus, to analyze the normative features of Codes of Ethics in software engineering and to explicate how their value-based approach might prevent their usefulness from a normative perspective. Codes of Conduct cannot replace ethical deliberation because they do not and cannot offer guidance because of their underdetermined nature. This lack of orientation, we argue, triggers reactive behavior such as “cherry-picking,” “risk of indifference,” “ex-post orientation,” and the “desire to rely on gut feeling.” In the light of this, we propose to implement ethical deliberation within software development teams as a way out. (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)

This article analyses domestic and foreign reactions to a 2008 report in the British Medical Journal on the complementary and, as argued, synergistic relationship between palliative care and euthanasia in Belgium. The earliest initiators of palliative care in Belgium in the late 1970s held the view that access to proper palliative care was a precondition for euthanasia to be acceptable and that euthanasia and palliative care could, and should, develop together. Advocates of euthanasia including author Jan Bernheim, independent from but (...) together with British expatriates, were among the founders of what was probably the first palliative care service in Europe outside of the United Kingdom. In what has become known as the Belgian model of integral end-of-life care, euthanasia is an available option, also at the end of a palliative care pathway. This approach became the majority view among the wider Belgian public, palliative care workers, other health professionals, and legislators. The legal regulation of euthanasia in 2002 was preceded and followed by a considerable expansion of palliative care services. It is argued that this synergistic development was made possible by public confidence in the health care system and widespread progressive social attitudes that gave rise to a high level of community support for both palliative care and euthanasia. The Belgian model of so-called integral end-of-life care is continuing to evolve, with constant scrutiny of practice and improvements to procedures. It still exhibits several imperfections, for which some solutions are being developed. This article analyses this model by way of answers to a series of questions posed by Journal of Bioethical Inquiry consulting editor Michael Ashby to the Belgian authors. (shrink)

The essays both represent a variety of epistemological approaches, including those of the humanities, social studies, natural science, sociology, psychology, and engineering sciences and reflect a diversity of philosophical traditions such ...

Research on expert‐novice differences has mainly focused on how experts solve familiar problems. We know far less about the skills and knowledge used by experts when they are confronted with novel problems within their area of expertise. This article discusses a study in which verbal protocols were taken from subjects of various expertise designing an experiment in an area with which they were unfamiliar. The results showed that even when domain knowledge is lacking, experts solve a novel problem within their (...) area of expertise by dividing the problem into a number of subproblems that are solved in a specified order. The lack of domain knowledge is compensated for by using abstract knowledge structures and domain‐specific heuristic strategies. However, the quality of their solutions is considerably lower than the quality attained by experts who were familiar with the type of problem to be solved. The results suggest that when experts are confronted with novel problems as compared with familiar problems, their form of reasoning remains intact, but the content of their reasoning suffers due to lack of domain knowledge. (shrink)

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)

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)

Proposition 28 from Proclus'Elements of Theologyis consistently cited as saying that every producing causefirstbrings about effects that are like it andtheneffects that are unlike it. This is a theorem to which Proclus is indeed committed, but I argue that it is not what Proclus is claiming here. At this stage of his general argument, he merely argues that every cause produces things that are like it, without saying anything about other products than the immediate ones. The standard interpretation of proposition (...) 28 is therefore wrong. This becomes clear if one pays close attention to the argumentative structure of theElements of Theologyand to the proof given for proposition 28. (shrink)

For the Critical Theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, rationalisation is a central concept that refers to the socio-cultural closure of capitalist modernity due to the proliferation of technical, ‘instrumental’ rationality at the expense of some form of political reason. This picture of rationalisation, however, hinges on a separation of technology and politics that is both empirically and philosophically problematic. This article aims to re-conceptualise the rationalisation thesis through a survey of research from science and technology studies and the conceptual (...) framework of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. It argues that rationalisation indeed exhibits a logic of closure, namely the ‘operational closure’ of sociotechnical systems of measurement, but that this closure in fact produces the historical logics of technical reason and, paradoxically, also generates spaces of critical-political openness. This opens up the theoretical and practical opportunity of connecting the politically just to the technically efficient. (shrink)

Objectives To determine the frequencies and types of limitation of medical treatment performed by physician members of the German Society for Palliative Medicine and to analyse the findings with respect to clinical and ethical aspects of end-of-life practices. Design Cross-sectional postal survey. Setting Data collection via the secretary of the German Society for Palliative Medicine using the German language version of the EURELD survey instrument. Subjects All 1645 physician members of the German Society for Palliative Medicine. Main outcome measures Types (...) and frequencies of limitation of treatment and possible determinants. Results 901 physicians participated in the study (response rate 55.8%). Participants reported limitation of treatment in 69.1% of cases. These decisions most often affected artificial nutrition (19%), chemotherapy (14%), antibiotics (11%) and medication other than antibiotics (11%). In the majority of eligible cases, physicians estimated the life-shortening effect of limitation of treatment to be <7 days. However, estimations differ depending on the medical measures in question. Bivariate statistical analysis indicated that withholding of treatment was performed significantly more frequently for patients aged ≥65 years (p=0.019). In addition, there were significant associations between the incidence of limitation of treatment and the different diseases reported by respondents as the underlying cause of death. Conclusion The findings of this study provide information on the current state of an ethically and clinically challenging aspect of clinical practice and can serve as a starting point for further interdisciplinary research on normative and empirical aspects of treatment decision-making at the end of life. (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.

Hans Jonas’ anti-visionary conservation-oriented environmental philosophy—prominently articulated in his seminal book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age —had a tremendous impact on public and philosophical debates throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Jonas argues that the “environmental crisis” reveals an underlying fundamental “crisis” in the human-nature relation. The crisis challenges the metaphysical foundations of our Western culture—including the dominant way humans view and deal with nature. Environmental ethics, therefore, requires critical reflection on and (...) revision of the underlying philosophy of nature: ethics and philosophy of nature, Jonas argues, are twin sisters. This approach provokes severe criticism: the diagnosis objection, the origin analysis objection, the justification objection, and the problem-solution objection. Most objections are not as sound as they claim to be—although Jonas’ argumentative justification is in fact a bit weak. However, a systematic critique of the objections of the critics from an analytic perspective shows that he developed a political and practical “philosophy of nature” in which anthropology, ethics, and politics are conceptualized as a converging domain as one of the core constituents of environmentals ethics for this century. (shrink)

In seiner Studie zeigt Jan Hoff, dass im Zuge der theoretischen Entdogmatisierung des Marxismus seit Mitte der 60er Jahre ebenso vielfältige wie fruchtbare Marx-Interpretationen und eine an der Marxschen Ökonomiekritik orientierte kritische Gesellschaftstheorie in zahlreichen Ländern der Welt ungeahnten Auftrieb erhielten. Insbesondere die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit den verschiedenen Entwürfen zum "Kapital" hat sich in den letzten fünf Jahrzehnten beständig weiterentwickelt. In der Arbeit wird diese Globalisierung der Marx-Debatte, das komplexe Geflecht internationaler Theoriebezüge im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Politik, des Theorietransfers (...) und der Herausbildung von Denkschulen über nationale und sprachliche Grenzen hinweg untersucht. Sie bricht mit dem theoretischen Provinzialismus insbesondere der deutschen Marx-Diskussion, der sich bislang hartnäckig halten konnte. Der Autor gibt einen Überblick über die Marx-Rezeption in verschiedenen Weltregionen, wobei die außereuropäische Theoriebildung - etwa die facettenreiche Marx-Debatte in Japan - besondere Aufmerksamkeit erfährt. Der Marxismus im Sinne einer umfassenden Weltanschauung ist inzwischen historisch überwunden. Doch der Marxsche Theorienansatz, den inneren Zusammenhang der ökonomischen Kategorien und Verhältnisse zu explizieren und dabei mit einer kritischen Fetischismus- und Mystifikationstheorie eine "Entzauberung" der "verkehrten Welt" der Ökonomie zu leisten, ist nach wie vor von Aktualität und theoretischer Bedeutung. (shrink)

This posthumous publication attempts to answer the question of what moral code is the most reasonable. Philosophers often turn to consequentialism or deontological ethics to address this issue. As the author points out, each has valid arguments but each is unable to get the other side to agree. To rectify this, he proposes a third way. Inside, readers will discover a theory that tries to do justice to both sides. The author first details consequentialism and deontological ethics. He also explains (...) their fundamental conflict. One holds the view that you should do what has the best consequences. The other believes that there are actions which are wrong to do even if they have the best consequences. Next, the volume considers various ways to solve this conflict. Would rejecting one theory work? Or, is it possible to somehow reconcile them. The author shows why these solutions fail. He then goes on to present his own. The resulting contractual theory brings together the two opposing ethical convictions. It proposes that what is right and wrong depends on what norms people would agree to. Throughout, coverage explores the psychological, sociological, and historical background of the moral theories discussed. The reason is that moral theories are embedded in social and psychological contexts. They are better understood when the contexts are explicit. This key feature distinguishes the volume from other works in moral philosophy. At the time of his death in July 2011, Jan Österberg was close to completing this manuscript. It was taken up and fully completed by Erik Carlson and Ryszard Sliwinski, both of Uppsala University. (shrink)

In recent years, it has become clear that Proclus has an elaborate metaphysics, not only of the higher realm, but also of the natural world. This chapter first delimits its topic by explaining what physics or philosophy of nature is in Proclus’ view: the hypothetical study of all causes, but especially the transcendent causes of the natural world. After briefly addressing the question whether the world is eternal, the author moves on to presenting these causes in due order: first the (...) many demiurges and other productive causes, the different products of the different demiurgies, the plurality of paradigmatic causes, nature as the proximate cause of bodies, and finally the ontology of bodies, as hylomorphic entities, analysable into immanent forms and different levels of substrate or matter. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungMedizinethische Forschung wird häufig unter Verwendung sozialempirischer Methoden durchgeführt. Insbesondere die Anwendung von Methoden der qualitativen Sozialforschung hat eine breite Akzeptanz gefunden. Nach Kenntnis der Autoren fehlen allerdings bislang Untersuchungen, die den spezifischen Beitrag qualitativer Sozialforschung für medizinethische Untersuchungen unter Bezugnahme auf die Merkmale qualitativer Methoden darlegen. Ausgehend von einem handlungsorientierenden medizinethischen Forschungsvorhaben zur Unterstützung der Entscheidungsfindung in der Onkologie wird der Beitrag der verwendeten qualitativen Methoden für das Forschungsvorhaben unter Bezugnahme auf zwei Kennzeichen qualitativer Sozialforschung – Rekonstruktion der sozialen (...) Praxis und Explikation von informellem Wissen – ausgeführt. Den Abschluss bilden eine Analyse von Limitationen der Verwendung qualitativer Forschungsmethoden in medizinethischen Forschungsvorhaben sowie die Identifizierung offener Forschungsfragen. (shrink)

Willen de lidstaten kunnen beantwoorden aan de politieke, rechtsstatelijke en sociale ambities van de Europese Unie, dan moet er iets gaan veranderen bij de overheidsstructuur in Brussel, Straatsburg en Luxemburg. Dan moet er weer aandacht komen voor de ‘ziel van Europa’. Vormen de Europese Gemeenschappen, begonnen om oorlog te voorkomen, alleen maar een vrije markt? Is de Europese Unie slechts een geografisch afgebakende ruimte voortgedreven door het grootkapitaal, of is het ook iets meer? Wat delen de burgers van Europa eigenlijk (...) met elkaar? In de EU is het besef doorgedrongen dat het in een club van vijfentwintig lidstaten, die nog onvoldoende is doordrongen van de ‘idee Europa’, belangrijk is om te praten over gemeenschappelijke waarden. (shrink)