In the article, the author presents attempts by Polish Marxist philosophers to enrich Marxism with ethical issues. The initial absence of ethics in Marxism is associated with the ignorance of tradition related to their own formation. In the author’s opinion, only polemics with the competitive Lviv-Warsaw school forced Polish Marxists to take the issue seriously. That is why Polish Marxist ethics in its mature form was only established in the 1960s, and did not enrich Marxism itself, but rather indirectly contributed (...) to the initiation of socio-political transformations in our country. (shrink)

Environmental problems do have a universal dimension: they concern entire humanity as well as each human being individually, therefore, a new ecology needs to be developed in which man will play a principal role being a focal point of the study, its creator and executor of its assumptions, the discipline thus understood is one of the aspects of general ecology for it studies relationships between man as a species and its environment, the author believes that, regardless of the standpoint that (...) representatives of various sciences may take, the future of our species depends on the interdisciplinary approach toward the questions that are subject to human ecology studies. (shrink)

Author: Konstańczak Stefan Title: EXISTENTIAL MEANING OF SUFFERING IN AXIOLOGY OF WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ (Egzystencjalne znaczenie cierpienia w aksjologii Władysława Tatarkiewicza) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 629-642 Keywords: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, ETHICS, SUFFERING, HAPPINESS, INJUSTICE, MORAL COMPENSATION, MINIMIZING OF SUFFERING, HAPPINESS Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The problem of human suffering was not the subject of a separate publication by Władysław Tatarkiewicz. However, such theme matter appeared in (...) a few of his important publications, including his post-doctoral thesis “On inexorability of the good”, after-war publication “On happiness” and a small treatise “Ethical bases of revindication and compensation” justifying Polish claims for reparations after the warfare. Tatarkiewicz made a distinction between physical and spiritual suffering, but each one was always considered as a bad thing. War experience changed his attitude in this matter and therefore he admitted that it is impossible to eliminate suffering from human life and hence he claimed that one can experience happiness even in spite of some negative sensations. Age is not an obstacle to feel it either. However, he pointed out that undeserved suffering justifiably demands a compensation and the lack of it or evasion from redressing the wrong are immoral. One cannot evade a duty of minimizing of suffering because even personal suffering cannot be the reason of drawing back from moral duties fulfillment. (shrink)

Justifying the existence of professional ethics in medicine is usually connected with the traditions of a profession and with a humanistic dimension of these ethics, pointing at the same time to their culture-forming character. With such an attitude, professional ethics is treated as a part of all mankind’s output, and its teaching turns out to be an important element of preparation for taking part in culture. Taking into account the cultural meaning of professional ethics, one should notice that all discussions (...) about the character of relations of medicine and ethics exceed the very health care system. The dilemma outlined in the article deals with the problem whether the existence of medical ethics requires external regulations or is this also a creation of the very representatives of medicine and only they can formulate it. If the latter is to be assumed, ethics in medicine would have to be independent of other detailed ethics and it would not need to be included in any other more general theory. In the first solution, medical ethics is becoming a part of general ethics and, therefore, it would be justified to include it in a more general theory – bioethics. The authors indicate that professional ethics does not limit freedom of the staff but gives a special opportunity to use it. Records constituting its contents are mostly standardized by a professional group which sets criteria of recruitment on its own and general duties resting on their members. (shrink)

Michael Novak’s concept of democratic capitalism in Poland aroused great interest for several reasons. The most important of them consisted in its close relation to the teaching of the Polish Pope John Paul II. The second was its temporal coincidence with the start of a political transformation in Poland, when a model of development consistent with Polish tradition and social expectations was sought. The third was related to its Slavic roots and origin, which gained in importance given a perceived civilizational (...) backwardness of the countries belonging to the former socialist bloc. For Polish Catholic thinkers, the concept of democratic capitalism initially seemed to promise a smooth transition to a market economy, protecting society from the shock of a possible collision with predatory capitalism. But the discussions of Michael Novak’s conception which took place in Poland at that time were unfortunately burdened with fears of cultural pluralism and with leaving individuals too much freedom in implementing their own ways of achieving happiness. Polish conservatives, who were in power at that time, did not seem to understand the important need for a dynamic moral and cultural system in a society that was just starting its modernization processes. It is paradoxical, but in these discussions what was most feared was the weakening of religious traditions in Polish society. According to the author, this fear caused distrust of the democratic conception, and especially its moral foundations, which continues to this day. This paper, therefore, also contributes to reflection on to what extent the teachings of John Paul II have been absorbed in Polish conservative circles. (shrink)

In this article the author presents the history of the development of independent ethics in Poland, which was developed by followers of the Lvov-Warsaw School, the most famous Polish school of philosophy in the world. The general specificity of all branches, defined as independent ethics is presented first. Next, the author presents the historical and political conditions for the creation of this type of ethical concept. In Poland, such ethics was established in two forms, the first of which exhibited its (...) separation from the whole ethical tradition while the second, in contrast, tried to generalise this tradition in a form, named by Tadeusz Czeżowski, as metaethics. This article discusses in depth only the most well-known concept of independent ethics developed by Tadeusz Kotarbiński. (shrink)

„Ruch Filozoficzny” and the freedom of scientific research in Poland (in 1947-1957 years). Presented article refers to the situation in the Polish philosophy, which took place between 40-50 of the twentieth century. Author’s reflections are carried on the example of attempts to reactivate in the realities of war, the polish philosophical journal “Ruch Filozoficzny” founded in 1911 by Kazimierz Twardowski. Political conditions have made the magazine was renewed twice, at each time was the greatest merit of Tadeusz Czeżowski. He was (...) assisted by the other representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School, who worked in various academic centers in Poland. The reconstruction of the history of the magazine in the postwar years, will be based on previously unpublished archival material. In its conclusions, the author tries to point out of great importance of independent from the political authorities publishers on development of Polish philosophy. (shrink)

In his paper, the author makes an attempt at reconstructing one of the first propositions in Poland to start a philosophical discourse on ecological problems. The author of this proposition is priest Tadeusz Ślipko. According to this author the problems of the moral aspects of natural environmental protection are also bioethical problems. Therefore, we can see that he does not consider ethics of the environment as an individual philosophical discipline. The article concentrates on presenting the sources and the range of (...) moral duties of humankind towards the natural environment. Tadeusz Ślipko does not approve of the anthropocentric or biocentric standpoints in the issues of natural environmental protection. He offers his own idea of anthropopriorism, which takes the middle ground between these two extreme concepts. In conclusion, the author underlines that there is still a strong need for ethical reflection over the state of the natural environment along the lines of Ślipko’s stance. (shrink)

The starting point of the article is the thesis that Hippocrates’ rule: “the health of an ill person is the highest right” is not only the main rule of the conduct of medical staff but also includes a defined method of evaluation. According to the author, the consequence of such evaluation is a detailed rule “Firstly, not to harm”. This rule has got a universal character and cannot only be restricted to medical staff. Healthcare is not the domain of doctors (...) alone. It is everybody’s obligation, as it is to ensure that people don’t risk their own health or others’. In support of this approach, Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s considerations have been mentioned in the article, especially those that combine an individual sense of happiness with a state of health. In the end, the author refers to empirical research, which shows dependence on the state of health on and acquired lifestyle and points to the greater rationale of health prevention rather than institutional medical care. (shrink)

Artykuł przedstawia historię sporów i polemik naukowych na temat teorii ewolucji oraz publikacji Karola Darwina, jakie miały miejsce w w Polsce w drugiej połowie XIX wieku.

The article is mainly based on Tadeusz Czeżowski’s publication – “Metaethical considerations”, prepared to be printed but never published. This publication, however, is not a handbook of classical metaethics but a kind of generalization of ethical theories ordering in a way, all known until now ethical systems within philosophy. Thus, Czeżowski does not offer his metaethics as a section of traditional ethics but also as a kind of generalization of all ethics until now, and therefore, all systems worked out within (...) itself. In its essence “Metaethical considerations” is the concept of scientific ethics, regardless of anything that does not pass verification, subject of which are e.g. empirical science research results. (shrink)

Autor prezentuje mało znane fakty z historii polskiej nauki świadczące o tym, że przedstawiciele polskiej emigracji powojennej mieli bardzo dobre rozeznanie o sytuacji w nauce krajowej. W filozofii przykładem tego były kontakty Zbigniewa Jordana (1911–1977) z przedstawicielami filozofii pracującymi w kraju. Jordan przez wiele lat utrzymywał systematyczne kontakty z około czterdziestoma osobami, stanowiącymi elitę polskiej powojennej filozofii i socjologii. Do grona jego znajomych i korespondentów należeli m.in. Jan Łukasiewicz, ks. Józef Pastuszka, Tadeusz Czeżowski, Maria i Stanisław Ossowscy, Tadeusz i Janina (...) Kotarbińscy, Adam Schaff, Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Szczepański, Andrzej Grzegorczyk, a także przedstawiciele polskiej emigracji pracujący na uczelniach zachodnich. Dzięki tym kontaktom potrafił zrealizować naraz dwa cele. Po pierwsze, popularyzował godne upamiętnienia osiągnięcia nauki polskiej, dzięki czemu jego starania zapewniały ścisły związek między nauką krajową a światową. Po drugie, zapewniał historyczna ciągłość nauki polskiej, której nie przerwało nawet wprowadzenie komunistycznych porządków w kraju, które sprowadzały się do próby odrzucenia całej dotychczasowej tradycji. Autor stoi na stanowisku, że nauka stanowi najważniejszą część kultury i z tej racji dokonania Jordana powinny zostać spopularyzowane w całym środowisku nauki w Polsce jako przykład, którym winni kierować się jej młodzi adepci, koncentrujący się wyłącznie na karierze w zagranicznych instytucjach naukowych. (shrink)

The program of Evolutionary Ethics (EE) is based on the assumption that our moral features constitute adaptations and as such are to be explained in terms of the evolutionary process of natural selection. However, the fundamental assumption of EE was seriously put into question: the level of analysis relevant for moral features is essentially ontogeny and culture, while the explanation using natural selection applies to the level of phylogeny and genes (Sober, 1995; Ayala, 1995; Okasha, 2009). To the discussion on (...) the validity of the program of EE we propose to bring the recent program of Extended Synthesis (ES, Pigliucci & Muller, 2010), because it attempts to account for the role of the ontogeny in evolution. We conclude, nevertheless, that ES fails to properly account for the importance of ontogeny in evolutionary processes because by extending the notion of inheritance it (con-)fuses the notions of unit of inheritance and of unit of selection (against the well-known distinction made by Hull, 1980). (shrink)

Artykuł w całości nawiązuje do dotąd niepublikowanej korespondencji Tadeusza Czeżowskiego z emigracyjnym filozofem Zbigniewem Jordanem zachowanej w rękopisach w zasobach archiwalnych Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu. Ich korespondencja trwała blisko 40 lat i jest dowodem, że nawet przymusowa powojenna emigracja nie zrywała więzów łączących filozofów związanych ze szkołą lwowsko-warszawską. Choć Czeżowski i Jordan należeli do dwóch różnych pokoleń tej szkoły, to wspólne zainteresowania naukowe i podobne zapatrywania polityczne spowodowały, że ich więź, choć tylko korespondencyjna, była w pewnym sensie wyjątkowa, bo (...) nawet ingerencje komunistycznej cenzury nie były w stanie wpłynąć na jej kształt. Dzięki niej Jordan wykazywał się doskonałą orientacją w dorobku samego Czeżowskiego jak i pozostałych przedstawicieli szkoły lwowsko-warszawskiej. To właśnie głównie dzięki tej korespondencji mógł pełnić rolę „ambasadora” polskiej filozofii w świecie i zarazem pierwszego historyka szkoły lwowsko-warszawskiej. Przypomnieniu roli obu filozofów w dziejach polskiej filozofii sprzyja zwłaszcza przypadająca w tym roku 40-ta rocznica śmierci Czeżowskiego oraz 110 rocznica urodzin Jordana. (shrink)

Karol Frenkel was one of Kazimierz Twardowski’s first disciples to undertake an attempt to develop their own concept of ethics. In his case, the process of developing his own ethical concept involved questioning the tradition in which he had been educated. Accordingly, he was able to formulate an original concept of independent ethics. In his doctoral dissertation, Frenkel analyzed two ethical systems, formulated by David Hume and Arthur Schopenhauer respectively which sought ethical determinants in the affective sphere. For Frenkel, these (...) proposals turned out to be unsatisfactory, and thus he proposed his own solution derived from the accepted concept of morality. From today’s perspective, it was the first reflection in Poland referring to scientific ethics, which – chronologically speaking – in many respects preceded the analogous solutions proposed later by British analytical philosophers. (shrink)

In this article, the author attempts to identify the sources of good and evil as undertaken by the Lvov-Warsaw School of Philosophy (LWSP) founded by Kazimierz Twardowski. Such attempts were undertaken by both Twardowski himself and his closest students and associates; Władysław Witwicki, Tadeusz Kotarbiński. Tadeusz Czeżowski, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The best-known approach is Kotarbiński’s independent ethics in which the author refers to Aristotle perceiving such potential in the characteristics of each individual as to distinguish elementary qualities in the form (...) of opposites including opposition to good and evil. According to this approach, man acts in an evil manner because he stops following the natural voice of his own heart and instead implements set proposals provided by external factors. In the opinion of the author, the proposals formulated within the LWSP can form the basis for a rational explanation of the atrocities committed during World War II which modern ethics, being focused on neutral metaethical issues, fails to do. (shrink)

In the article, the author analyses the impact of the tragic experiences during the Holocaust on contemporary ethics and literature. Such considerations coincide with yet another anniversary – the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, celebrated globally as Holocaust Memorial Day. The article also considers the reasons why testimonies from Holocaust survivors have not had an adequate impact on society. The author argues that trivialisation of the Holocaust tragedy occurred in modern science and it is related to the fact that (...) traditional ethics has not been able to convincingly explain why the Holocaust occurred in the most civilised nations. Thus, Holocaust testimonies should be constantly popularised in society for the good of all mankind. Literature seems to be the best form of mass media for this task and it is also a recorder of human emotions. According to the author, it is essential that humanity is protected this way against the possibility of a similar tragedy occurring in the future. (shrink)

Streszczenie Salomon Igel (1889-1942) był jednym z kilku wypromowanych przez Kazimierza Twardowskiego doktorów psychologii, Zajmował się teoretycznymi podstawami psychologii wywodząc je wprost z filozofii. Stał na stanowisku psychologicznego funkcjonalizmu twierdząc, że zjawiska psychiczne są postrzegane zmysłowo. Za jedyny przedmiot psychologii uważał świadomość. Konsekwentne rozwijanie tego założenia doprowadziło go do próby sformułowania oryginalnej koncepcji filozofii elementów witalnych, która łączyła w sobie odkrycia epistemologii, psychologii oraz fizjologii. W jego dorobku znajdują się również prace z dydaktyki filozofii i psychologii. Zginął śmiercią samobójczą podczas (...) wojny na terenie lwowskiego getta a wraz z nim przepadł cały jego dorobek naukowy i przygotowywane do publikacji wyniki jego najnowszych badań. Słowa kluczowe: Salomon Igel, Kazimierz Twardowski, psychologia, filozofia, Uniwersytet Jana Kazimierza we Lwowie, Polskie Towarzystwo Filozoficzne. (shrink)

This book, through its essays, captures this interdisciplinary nature of research into morality, treated both as a social fact, as well as man’s individual disposition. The Slovak philosopher and ethicist Vasil Gluchman, as the book’s scientific editor, divided the book into two parts, the first, entitled Different Concepts of Morality presents, in accordance with its title, various and sometimes even controversial stances related to the understanding of key issues of morality. The second part of the book titled New Trends in (...) Understanding Morality consists primarily of the author’s attempts to explain the sources of morality formulated not only by ethics, but also by the biological sciences. In this short presentation it is clear that both the scientific editor as well as the individual authors, did not set themselves the objective of writing another book on moral philosophy, but instead focused themselves on the key issues which determine the status and direction of contemporary rese .. (shrink)

This article shows how activists in the open data movement re-articulate notions of democracy, participation, and journalism by applying practices and values from open source culture to the creation and use of data. Focusing on the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and drawing from a combination of interviews and content analysis, it argues that this process leads activists to develop new rationalities around datafication that can support the agency of datafied publics. Three modulations of open source are identified: First, by regarding (...) data as a prerequisite for generating knowledge, activists transform the sharing of source code to include the sharing of raw data. Sharing raw data should break the interpretative monopoly of governments and would allow people to make their own interpretation of data about public issues. Second, activists connect this idea to an open and flexible form of representative democracy by applying the open source model of participation to political participation. Third, activists acknowledge that intermediaries are necessary to make raw data accessible to the public. This leads them to an interest in transforming journalism to become an intermediary in this sense. At the same time, they try to act as intermediaries themselves and develop civic technologies to put their ideas into practice. The article concludes with suggesting that the practices and ideas of open data activists are relevant because they illustrate the connection between datafication and open source culture and help to understand how datafication might support the agency of publics and actors outside big government and big business. (shrink)

Explanatory realism is the view that explanations work by providing information about relations of productive determination such as causation or grounding. The view has gained considerable popularity in the last decades, especially in the context of metaphysical debates about non-causal explanation. What makes the view particularly attractive is that it fits nicely with the idea that not all explanations are causal whilst avoiding an implausible pluralism about explanation. Another attractive feature of the view is that it allows explanation to be (...) a partially epistemic, context-dependent phenomenon. In spite of its attractiveness, explanatory realism has recently been subject to criticism. In particular, Taylor :197–219, 2018). has presented four types of explanation that the view allegedly cannot account for. This paper defends explanatory realism against Taylor’s challenges. We will show that Taylor’s counterexamples are either explanations that turn out to provide information about entities standing in productive determination relations or that they are not genuine explanations in the first place. (shrink)

Recent examples of rapid evolution under natural selection seem to require that the disciplines of ecology and evolution become better integrated. This inference makes sense only if one’s understanding of these disciplines is based on Hutchinson’s two-speed model of the ecological theater and the evolutionary play. Instead, these disciplines are more accurately viewed as occupying distinct “epistemic niches.” When so understood, we see that rapid evolution under selection, even if it is generally true, does not imply that evolutionary explanations are (...) improved by the inclusion of ecological details. Nor are ecological explanations necessarily improved by the inclusion of information about trait variation, heritability, effective population size, or other standard evolutionary factors. To illustrate, I develop a version of Kitcher’s “gory details” argument to show that, even for some trait that is under strong directional selection, a dynamically sufficient explanation of its ecological relationships should ignore most of the information explaining why that trait is evolving. The wholesale integration of ecology and evolution looks even less appealing when empirical sufficiency, a purely practical requirement, is taken into account. As a way forward, I propose an eco-evo partitioning framework. This strategy enables researchers to estimate the empirical sufficiency of a purely ecological, a purely evolutionary, or a combined eco-evo approach. (shrink)

The recent explosion of interest in epigenetics is often portrayed as the dawning of a scientific revolution that promises to transform biomedical science along with developmental and evolutionary biology. Much of this enthusiasm surrounds what we call the epigenetic switch hypothesis, which regards certain examples of epigenetic inheritance as an adaptive organismal response to environmental change. This interpretation overlooks an alternative explanation in terms of coevolutionary dynamics between parasitic transposons and the host genome. This raises a question about whether epigenetics (...) researchers tend to overlook transposon dynamics more generally. To address this question, we surveyed a large sample of scientific publications on the topics of epigenetics and transposons over the past fifty years. We found that enthusiasm for epigenetics is often inversely related to interest in transposon dynamics across the four disciplines we examined. Most surprising was a declining interest in transposons within biomedical science and cellular and molecular biology over the past two decades. Also notable was a delayed and relatively muted enthusiasm for epigenetics within evolutionary biology. An analysis of scientific abstracts from the past twenty-five years further reveals systematic differences among disciplines in their uses of the term epigenetic, especially with respect to heritability commitments and functional interpretations. Taken together, these results paint a nuanced picture of the rise of epigenetics and the possible neglect of transposon dynamics, especially among biomedical scientists. (shrink)

This collection features eleven original essays, divided into three thematic sections, which explore the work of Wilfrid Sellars in relation to other twentieth-century thinkers. Section I analyzes Sellars’s thought in light of some of his influential predecessors, specifically Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, John Cook Wilson, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The second group of essays explores from different perspectives Sellars’s place within the analytic tradition, including his relation with analytic Kantianism and analytic pragmatism. The book’s final section extracts some of the most (...) significant lessons Sellars’s work has to offer for contemporary philosophy. These chapters address his views on inference, his views on truth and its connection to recent discussions about truth-relativism and truth-pluralism, his conception of self-knowledge, and his theory of perceptual experience. (shrink)

Abstract“A Misleading Parallel”. Wittgenstein on Conceptual Confusion in Psychology and the Semantics of Psychological Concepts. After the Philosophical Investigations, except for details, were largely finished in 1945, Wittgenstein, in his final years, undertook an intensive study of the grammar of our psychological concepts and the philosophical misinterpretations we often assign to them. Anyone looking through these extensive collections of philosophical remarks will probably quite often find it difficult to understand which questions Wittgenstein was addressing with individual remarks or groups of (...) remarks and where the philosophical problems lay for which he was trying to find a solution, whether therapeutic or otherwise appropriate.In the article at hand I do not claim to fathom the full range of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the philosophy of psychology even in the most general way. Rather it is my intention to shed some light on a diagnosis which he made for the psychology of his time. In part 1 of this paper I would like to provide a brief sketch of what Wittgenstein considered to be the conceptual confusion prevalent in psychology and to suggest why he did not expect the methods of an experimental (natural) science to be successful in solving the problems that concern us in psychology. In part 2 I’ll attempt to analyze how psychological concepts, according to Wittgenstein, might be construed in order to avoid any type of conceptual confusion. (shrink)

Construction grammar organizes its basic elements of description, its constructions, into networks that range from concrete, lexically-filled constructions to fully schematic ones, with several levels of partially schematic constructions in between. However, only few corpus studies with a constructionist background take this multi-level nature fully into account. In this paper, we argue that understanding language variation can be advanced considerably by systematically formulating and testing hypotheses at various levels in the constructional network. To illustrate the approach, we present a corpus (...) study of the Dutch naar-alternation. It is found that this alternation primarily functions at an intermediate level in the constructional network. (shrink)

Research on patients with damage to ventromedial frontal cortices suggests a key role for emotions in practical decision making. This field of investigation is often associated with Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis—a putative account of the mechanism through which autonomic tags guide decision making in typical individuals. Here we discuss two questionable assumptions—or ‘myths’—surrounding the direction and interpretation of this research. First, it is often assumed that there is a single somatic marker hypothesis. As others have noted, however, Damasio’s ‘hypothesis’ (...) admits of multiple interpretations (Dunn et al. [2006]; Colombetti [2008]). Our analysis builds upon this point by characterizing decision making as a multi-stage process and identifying the various potential roles for somatic markers. The second myth is that the available evidence suggests a role for somatic markers in the core stages of decision making, that is, during the generation, deliberation, or evaluation of candidate options. On the contrary, we suggest that somatic markers most likely have a peripheral role, in the recognition of decision points, or in the motivation of action. This conclusion is based on an examination of the past twenty-five years of research conducted by Damasio and colleagues, focusing in particular on some early experiments that have been largely neglected by the critical literature. 1 Introduction2 What is the Somatic Marker Model?3 Multiple Somatic Marker Hypotheses3.1 Are somatic markers necessary for practical decision making?3.2 Speed, accuracy, or both?3.3 At which of the five stages of decision making are somatic markers engaged?4 Anecdotal Evidence Suggests a Peripheral Role for Somatic Markers4.1 Chronic indecisiveness4.2 Extreme impulsiveness4.3 Enhanced decision making in the lab4.4 Lack of motivation. 5 Early Experiments Suggest that VMF Damage Leaves Core Processes Intact5.1 The evocative images study5.2 Five problem solving tasks6 Recent Experiments Fail to Discriminate among Alternate Versions of SMH7 Conclusion. (shrink)

In der Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsches Kritik der Menschenwürde nimmt dieses Buch zugleich Stellung zur aktuellen Diskussion. Wie ist die gegenwärtige Norm der Menschenwürde, wie sie auch im Grundgesetz enthalten ist, vor dem Hintergrund der Theorien des vehementen Moralkritikers Nietzsche einzuschätzen? Welchen Stellenwert hat die Würde des Menschen im Zeitalter des Posthumanismus überhaupt? Im ersten Teil skizziert der Autor zunächst die wichtigsten philosophischen Konzeptionen der Menschenwürde von Cicero bis Kant. Dabei macht er deutlich, welche Probleme die gegenwärtige Rezeption historischer Konzeptionen aufwirft. (...) Der zweite Teil ist der ausführlichen Darstellung von Nietzsches Kritik der Menschenwürde gewidmet. Daraus ergeben sich wichtige Impulse für die gegenwärtige Diskussion und konkrete Hinweise, wie ein tragbarer Begriff der Menschenwürde für die Zukunft aussehen könnte. (shrink)

This article considers the prospects of inference to the best explanation as a method of confirming causal claims vis-à-vis the medical evidence of mechanisms. I show that IBE is actually descriptive of how scientists reason when choosing among hypotheses, that it is amenable to the balance/weight distinction, a pivotal pair of concepts in the philosophy of evidence, and that it can do justice to interesting features of the interplay between mechanistic and population level assessments.