Seit über zehn Jahren moderieren die Autor*innen mit hohem Zuspruch das Ethik-Café in Einrichtungen des Sozial- und Gesundheitswesens. Menschen aus unterschiedlichen Berufen, Patient*innen, An- und Zugehörige sowie ethisch Interessierte haben im Ethik-Café die Möglichkeit, aus ihrer persönlichen und beruflichen Perspektive ethische Fragestellungen zu diskutieren, die für ihren Alltag relevant sind. Ethik-Cafés sind niederschwellig, multiprofessionell, interdisziplinär. Die Teilnehmer*innen profitieren von dieser Perspektivenvielfalt. Das Buch stellt die Konzeption sowie deren Evaluation, die theoretischen und methodischen Voraussetzungen und in vielen Beispielen die praktische Umsetzung (...) von Ethik-Cafés dar. Das entwickelte Vier-Phasen-Modell des ethischen Prozesses wird exemplarisch in 25 Ethik-Cafés zu Themen aus dem Sozial- und Gesundheitswesen angewendet und umgesetzt. Das Buch richtet sich an Mitarbeiter*innen und Führungskräfte im Sozial- und Gesundheitswesen, Lehrer*innen, Lernbegleiter*innen und Auszubildende in der generalistischen Pflegeausbildung, an Fort- und Weiterbildungsreferent*innen, Studierende, Ehrenamtliche sowie alle ethisch Interessierten. (shrink)

Peter Baumann develops and defends a distinctive version of epistemic contextualism, the view that the truth conditions or the meaning of knowledge attributions of the form "S knows that p" can vary with the context of the attributor. The first part of the book examines arguments for contextualism and develops Baumann's version. It begins by dealing with the argument from cases and ordinary usage, and then addresses "theoretical" arguments, from reliability and from luck. The second part of the (...) book discusses the problems contextualism faces, to which it must respond, and provides an extension of contextualism beyond epistemology. The third part of the book is focused on some major objections to contextualism and alternative views, namely subject-sensitive invariantism, contrastivism and relativism. (shrink)

Christoph Jäger (2004) argues that Dretske's information theory of knowledge raises a serious problem for his denial of closure of knowledge under known entailment: Information is closed under known entailment (even under entailment simpliciter); given that Dretske explains the concept of knowledge in terms of "information", it is hard to stick with his denial of closure for knowledge. Thus, one of the two basic claims of Dretske would have to go. Since giving up the denial of closure would commit Dretske (...) to skepticism, it would most probably be better to rather give up the information-theoretic account of knowledge. But that means that one of the best externalist views of knowledge has to be given up. I argue here that Jäger is mistaken and that there is no problem for Dretske. There is a rather easy way out of Jäger’s problem. (shrink)

One of the most interesting accounts of knowledge which have been recently proposed is the safety account of knowledge. According to it, one only knows that p if one's true belief that p could not have easily been false: S believes that p ==> p (where "==>" stands for the subjunctive conditional). This paper presents a counter-example and discusses attempts to fix the problem. It turns out that there is a deeper underlying problem which does not allow for a solution (...) that would help the safety theorist. It is not the case that knowledge is safe. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Fehlinterpretierte Dokumente und ignorierte physikalische Fakten: Die Geschichte von,Hitlers Atombombe‘ muss korrigiert werden. Warum haben die deutschen Physiker während des Zweiten Weltkriegs keine Atombombe entwickelt? Seit mehr als 25 Jahren sind sich die Historiker einig, dass die deutschen Physiker wussten, wie eine Atombombe gebaut werden muss, dass aber ein Programm wie das amerikanische Manhattan‐Projekt zu ihrer Realisierung in Deutschland, erst recht während des Krieges, unmöglich war. Eine genaue Analyse aller erhaltenen Original‐Dokumente über die Arbeit an der Atombombe während des,Dritten (...) Reichs‘ zeigt jedoch erhebliche Fehler der Autoren durch unvollständige Analyse der Dokumente, falsches Verständnis naturwissenschaftlicher Erläuterungen und Ignorieren physikalischer Fakten. Es wird nachgewiesen, dass die deutschen Physiker bis zum Ende des Krieges nicht bemerkt hatten, dass eine Atombombe nur mit schnellen Neutronen realisiert werden kann. Nur Heisenberg hatte das richtige Prinzip spät erkannt, es aber nicht eindeutig kommuniziert und auch in keiner Weise physikalisch vertieft. Die physikalisch korrekte Interpretation der Dokumente zeigt, dass die deutschen Physiker während des Krieges erfolglos versuchten, einen Reaktor zu entwickeln, der auch eine Voraussetzung für den Bau einer Plutonium‐Bombe gewesen wäre. Aber sie wussten nicht, wie eine Bombe realisiert werden kann, weil sie nie an einer realistischen Theorie der Atombombe gearbeitet hatten. Summary: Misinterpreted Documents and Ignored Physical Facts: The History of ‘Hitler's Atomic Bomb’ needs to be corrected. Why have the German physicists not developed an atomic bomb during World War II? For more than 25 years, the historians agree that they knew how to build the bomb, but that a bomb‐development programme of the size of the US‐Manhattan‐Project would not have been possible in wartime Germany. A detailed analysis of all preserved documents on the German atomic bomb research during the ‘Third Reich’, however, reveals considerable mistakes by the authors due to incomplete analysis of documents, misinterpretations of scientific explanations and ignoring of physical facts. It is shown that until the end of the war the German physicists did not know that an atomic bomb can only be made with fast neutrons, except Heisenberg, who, however, discovered it rather late, did not communicate it clearly and did not study any bomb physics. The physically correct interpretation of the documents reveals that the German physicists worked unsuccessfully on a reactor, which would have been a prerequisite for a plutonium bomb. But they did not know how to build a bomb because they never worked on a realistic bomb theory. (shrink)

Papers presented at the 6th BRICS Academic Forum held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2014.

Multinational corporations are operating in complex business environments. They are confronted with contradictory institutional demands that often represent mutually incompatible expectations of various audiences. Managing these demands poses new organizational challenges for the corporation. Conducting an empirical case study at the sportswear manufacturer Puma, we explore how multinational corporations respond to institutional complexity and what legitimacy strategies they employ to maintain their license to operate. We draw on the literature on institutional theory, contingency theory, and organizational paradoxes. The results of (...) our qualitative longitudinal study show that managing corporate legitimacy is a dynamic process in which corporations adapt organizational capacities, structures, and procedures. (shrink)

This paper develops a way to model performative speech acts within a framework of dynamic semantics. It introduces a distinction between performative and informative updates, where informative updates filter out indices of context sets (cf. Stalnaker, Cole (ed), Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1978), whereas performative updates change their indices (cf. Szabolcsi, Kiefer (ed), Hungarian linguistics, John Benjamins, 1982). The notion of index change is investigated in detail, identifying implementations by a function or by a relation. Declarations like _the meeting is (hereby) (...) adjourned_ are purely performative updates that just enforce an index change on a context set. Assertions like _the meeting is (already) adjourned_ are analyzed as combinations of a performative update that introduces a guarantee of the speaker for the truth of the proposition, and an informative update that restricts the context set so that this proposition is true. The first update is the illocutionary act characteristic for assertions; the second is the primary perlocutionary act, and is up for negotiations with the addressee. Several other speech acts will be discussed, in particular commissives, directives, exclamatives, optatives, and definitions, which are all performative, and differ from related assertions. The paper concludes a discussion of locutionary acts, which are modelled as index changers as well, and proposes a novel analysis for the performative marker _hereby._. (shrink)

One of the most recent trends in epistemology is contrastivism. It can be characterized as the thesis that knowledge is a ternary relation between a subject, a proposition known and a contrast proposition. According to contrastivism, knowledge attributions have the form “S knows that p, rather than q”. In this paper I raise several problems for contrastivism: it lacks plausibility for many cases of knowledge, is too relaxed concerning the third relatum, and overlooks a further relativity of the knowledge relation.

Als »Subjektphilosophie« hat man das neuzeitliche Denken insgesamt charakterisiert. Diese Auszeichnung verdankt das Subjekt der verwegenen Hoffnung, es eigne sich zum ultimativen Prinzip der Wissensbegründung. Das Interesse an einer Aufklärung seiner Struktur wurde dadurch jedoch in den Hintergrund gedrängt. Diese Struktur steht im Zentrum von Manfred Franks jüngstem Buch, das einen Blick auf die moderne Geschichte der Subjekttheorien mit Analysen der inneren Beschaffenheit und der Zeitlichkeit des Subjekts sowie seines Verhältnisses zur Intersubjektivität und einer Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen und neuesten (...) analytischen Theoriebildungen verbindet. Dem Begriff der Präreflexivität kommt dabei die Schlüsselrolle zu. (shrink)

To fulfill their crucial duty of relieving suffering in their patients, physicians may have to administer palliative sedation when they implement treatment-limitation decisions such as the withdrawal of life-supporting interventions in patients with poor prognosis chronic severe brain injury. The issue of palliative sedation deserves particular attention in adults with serious brain injuries and in neonates with severe and irreversible brain lesions, who are unable to express pain or to state their wishes. In France, treatment limitation decisions for these patients (...) are left to the physicians. Treatment-limitation decisions are made collegially, based on the presence of irreversible brain lesions responsible for chronic severe disorders of consciousness. Before these decisions are implemented, they are communicated to the relatives. Because the presence and severity of pain cannot be assessed in these patients, palliative analgesia and/or sedation should be administered. However, palliative sedation is a complex strategy that requires safeguards to prevent a drift toward hastening death or performing covert euthanasia. In addition to the law on patients' rights at the end of life passed in France on April 22, 2005, a recent revision of Article 37 of the French code of medical ethics both acknowledges that treatment-limitation decisions and palliative sedation may be required in patients with severe brain injuries and provides legal and ethical safeguards against a shift towards euthanasia. This legislation may hold value as a model for other countries where euthanasia is illegal and for countries such as Belgium and Netherlands where euthanasia is legal but not allowed in patients incapable of asking for euthanasia but in whom a treatment limitation decision has been made. (shrink)

There are many ordinary propositions we think we know. Almost every ordinary proposition entails some "lottery proposition" which we think we do not know but to which we assign a high probability of being true (for instance: “I will never be a multi-millionaire” entails “I will not win this lottery”). How is this possible - given that some closure principle is true? This problem, also known as “the Lottery puzzle”, has recently provoked a lot of discussion. In this paper I (...) discuss one of the most promising answers to the problem: Stewart Cohen’s contextualist solution which is based on ideas about the salience of chances of error. After presenting some objections to it I sketch an alternative solution which is still contextualist in spirit. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Hájek presents the following alleged paradox. You are certain that a cable guy will visit you tomorrow between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. but you have no further information about when. And you agree to a bet on whether he will come in the morning interval. At first you have no reason to prefer one possibility rather than the other. But you then realise that if you bet on the morning interval, there will certainly be a (...) future time at which you will assign higher probability to an afternoon arrival than a morning one. You are also sure that nothing similar will happen if you bet on an afternoon arrival, so it appears that you ought to do so. (shrink)

Something in the way of a parody of iconography...

Einzelne Aspekte der Bildung werden in aller Einseitigkeit als Heilslehren angeboten, und in ihrer Borniertheit und Verzerrtheit werden sie zur Bildungsideologien.

Examining the nature of Václav Havel's 'postmodernism,' we suggest that his use of this ambiguous label can be best understood if interpreted outside the conventional binary framework of modern/postmodern philosophy, which does not sufficiently answer to the lingering crisis of foundational certainty in political theory. In our view, the Czech playwright-turned-politician offers not merely a less confining sense of what it means to be 'postmodern,' but his commitment to moral political action also lends itself to overcoming some of the limitations (...) of contemporary postmodern theorizing by reentering the depreciated terrain of ontology. Specifically, we argue that an assessment of Havel's brand of postmodernism yields a rich interpretive harvest when read through ontological lenses. Indeed, Havel's theoretical posture serves as an instructive example of what political theorist Stephen K. White has called a 'felicitous weak ontology.'. (shrink)

The ways in which languages express primary sense qualities have been investigated quite unevenly, which is due to the fact that there are great differences in how the senses are linguistically represented, which in turn reflects differences in these sense qualities themselves and their role in cognition.

The critique of capitalism is the bedrock on which rests the reputation of Frankfurt School critical theory. Though critical theory has often been heralded – or criticized and rejected – as a reformulation of Marxian theory for our times, its relation with the critique of political economy, and in particular the economic treatises, has barely been studied. Friedrich Pollock, who was Max Horkheimer’s lifelong friend and close associate at the Institute for Social Research, was responsible for all administrative and financial (...) questions, but he wrote few theoretical essays and Wiggershaus calls him ‘the last unknown member of the Frankfurt School’. Nevertheless this article asks whether not only has his influence on early critical theory been sorely underestimated, but also his impact on the late philosophies of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. (shrink)

Most contextualists agree that contexts differ with respect to relevant epistemic standards. In this paper, I discuss the idea that the difference between more modest and stricter standards should be explained in terms of the closeness or remoteness of relevant possible worlds. I argue that there are serious problems with this version of contextualism. In the second part of the paper, I argue for another form of contextualism that has little to do with standards and a lot with the well-known (...) problem of the reference class. This paper also illustrates the fact that contextualism comes in many varieties. (shrink)

An introduction to epistemology with a focus on different accounts of knowledge, scepticism, belief, truth, rationality and justification, the sources of knowledge.

Suppose someone hears a loud noise and at the same time sees a yellow flash. It seems hard to deny that the person can experience loudness and yellowness together. However, since loudness is experienced by the auditory sense whereas yellowness is experienced by the visual sense it also seems hard to explain how.

The development of new theory is often spurred by novel techniques that provide better answers to existing questions, or that allow asking new ones. In the field of strategy and organization science, models of complex adaptive systems have renewed theoretical work on a fundamental question: how organizations can adapt effectively to their environments. This article has three objectives: to highlight some areas where models of organizations as complex adaptive systems have made substantial contributions: the search for solutions to sets of (...) interdependent choices, the challenge of balancing processes of exploration and exploitation, and the organization of imperfect decision makers; to point to several challenges and tradeoffs which can limit the explanatory power and eventual impact of the modeling enterprise; and to sketch out possible future directions of research that would do further justice to the notion of organizations as complex adaptive systems. (shrink)

Toward evidence‐based policy decisions: a case study of nursing health human resources in Ontario, CanadaThis paper reflects how health services research ‘evidence’ was used to influence decisions in the province of Ontario, Canada. The process involved interaction among a variety of stakeholders and decision‐makers with researchers to reduce uncertainty and to substantiate emerging service provision issues in the province. The issues presented here focus specifically on an analysis of the nursing situation completed in 1998 for the Minister of Health’s Nursing (...) Task Force, which examined key issues in service delivery. The issues were: restructured work environments; nurse supply and declining enrollments; labour trends and utilization of the nursing workforce; patient acuity and complexity of work environments and the influence on workload; and the paucity of reliable and valid data bases for analysis of nursing’s contribution to the health system. Ontarians can be confident that the Task Force recommendations were born from solid research‐based evidence and now the challenge becomes to monitor the implementation of these resolutions over time. (shrink)

Co jest większe, bycie czy nic? Anzelm dowodzi istnienia Boga przy pomocy nihil. Bóg jako to, od czego nic większego nie może zostać pomyślane przez skończony umysł. Właściwe dla Anzelma logiczne – i być może mistyczne – użycie słowa „nic” domaga się porównania z negatywną ontologią Heideggera i jej recepcją w ramach tzw. Szkoły z Kioto założonej przez Nishidę. Czyż jednak pustka buddyzmu zen nie odsyła nas do – niewypowiedzianej – boskiej obecności?

Se aborda la idea de razón pública, atendiendo en particular a su concomitante ideal de razonabilidad. Se expone la continuidad de esta noción desde John Locke a John Rawls, destacando su vínculo con la religiosidad doctrinalmente minimalista de la tradición erasmista. Se cuestiona que, dado tal vínculo, esta ida pueda servir de criterio para evaluar la presencia de otras voces religiosas en la vida pública. The article addresses the idea of public reason, treating in particular its concomitant ideal of reasonableness. (...) It exposes the continuity of this notion from John Locke to John Rawls, highlighting its connection to the minimalist doctrinal religiosity of the Erasmist tradition. It questions if this idea can serve as criteria to evaluate the presence of other religious voices in public life, given this connection. (shrink)

Based on the findings of a qualitative empirical study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Swiss MNCs and SMEs, we suggest that smaller firms are not necessarily less advanced in organizing CSR than large firms. Results according to theoretically derived assessment frameworks illustrate the actual implementation status of CSR in organizational practices. We propose that small firms possess several organizational characteristics that are favorable for promoting the internal implementation of CSR-related practices in core business functions, but constrain external communication and (...) reporting about CSR. In contrast, large firms possess several characteristics that are favorable for promoting external communication and reporting about CSR, but at the same time constrain internal implementation. We sketch a theoretical explanation of these differences in organizing CSR in MNCs and SMEs based on the relationship between firm size and relative organizational costs. (shrink)

The concept of human dignity has remained surprisingly absent from philosophical discussions about the ethics of childhood so far. Likewise, children as a group are mostly neglected in the ongoing discourse on human dignity. In this paper, we attempt to close this double gap by showing that there is, first, a meaningful way to speak of children’s dignity, and that, second, considering children as a group can be illuminating for dignity theorists in general. After an analysis of the reasons why (...) the debates on human dignity and the ethics of childhood have been conducted almost entirely separately, we develop a concept of respecting children as respecting their dignity. Drawing upon personhood accounts of human dignity, we suggest that respecting a child’s dignity means respecting her activity, which means essentially developing and maintaining a perspective of one’s own. Construed in that way, respecting children’s dignity is in some important respects different from concerns about their well-being and their autonomy. In the last section, we will take a step back from the debate about the ethics of childhood and point to some possible conclusions for the debate about human dignity in general. (shrink)

1. Here is a very simple game. You come up with a number and I come up with a number. If I come up with the higher number, I win; otherwise you win. You go first. Call this ‘The Very Simple Game’. Few would play it if they had to go first and many if they are guaranteed to go second.2. Here is another one. You come up with a number n and I come up with a number m. If (...) m times 1/ n > 1, then I win; if not, then you win. You go first. Call this ‘Still The Very Simple Game’. Since I win just in case m is greater than n, this game collapses into The Very Simple Game. Few people will play it if they have to go first.3. Here is a third one. Let us call it ‘Looks Like A Tricky Game’. Suppose you have a choice between exactly two actions: keep holding on to some thing t ; hand t over to me and accept my offer to give you, with some probability p , some thing with utility m .Suppose, you are a maximizer of expected utility with …. (shrink)