Penicillin is a serendipitous discovery par excellence. But, what does this say about Alexander Fleming’s praiseworthiness? Clearly, Fleming would not have received the Nobel Prize, had not a mould accidently entered his laboratory. This seems paradoxical, since it was beyond his control. The present article will first discuss Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin as an example of moral luck in science and technology and critically assess some common responses to this problem. Second, the Control Principle that says that people are not (...) responsible for things beyond their control will be defended. An implication of this principle is that Alexander Fleming’s desert, which is based on his epistemic skills, remains untouched by luck. Third, by distinguishing different notions of praiseworthiness, a way to resolve the paradox of moral luck will be elaborated. Desert provides only a pro tanto reason to determine whether someone is an appropriate addressee of reward. Here, luck can make a difference. Forth, it will be argued that stimulating the quest for socially beneficial science provides a compelling reason to treat scientists with equal desert differently. Penicillin provides striking evidence for the importance of this quest and showcasing it incentivizes the making of socially beneficial science. Ultimately, it will be justified why Fleming deserved the Nobel Prize in at least one sense of the concept. (shrink)

Globalisation is widely understood as a set of processes driven by technological, economic and cultural change. Few have successfully defined the changing character and role of politics in global change. Political institutions such as the nation-state have been seen as undermined by globalisation, or needing to respond to it. This book clarifies the tensions which global change has provoked in our understanding of politics. Politics and Globalisation suggests that globalisation is a process which is politically contested and even politically constituted. (...) The volume presents five key intellectual and political contests in globalisation: · the extent and political significance of globalising changes in economy and society · how and how far the relations and forms of nation-state organisation are transformed · whether the given concepts and methods of political science as a discipline can be applied to global and regional politics, and whether they require radical reformulation; · the role and significance of ethical questions in global change · whether global change is constituted by, or denies, radical political agency. (shrink)

Although science and law employ different methods to gather and weigh evidence, their conclusions are remarkably convergent with regard to the effect that workplace stress has on the health of employees. Science, using the language of probability, affirms that certain stressors predict adverse health outcomes such as disabling anxiety and depression, cardiovascular disease, certain types of injury, and a variety of immune system disorders. Law, using the language of reasonable foreseeability, affirms that these adverse outcomes are predictable under certain conditions, (...) typically defined in relation to what a reasonable person should know. Society is arguably in a position to establish standards for the abatement of certain types of workplace stress. As part of this process, we need to conceptualize an ideal form of conduct that exemplifies the standards to which both law and science urge us to aspire. For this purpose, the concept of the neighbor at work is proposed. (shrink)

Das Verstehen der Intention menschlicher Handlungen - und damit eine im Kern psychologische Dimension - bildet die Erkenntnisgrundlage der Geschichtswissenschaft. Die nicht-intendierten Folgen menschlichen Handelns hingegen sind das Kardinalproblem der Geschichtsphilosophie, die nach dem Sinn, mitunter auch nach dem Ziel der Geschichte fragt. Die Anthropologie schliesslich sucht anzugeben, was den Menschen jenseits seiner Geschichte ausmacht. Der unhistorische Charakter der Anthropologie einerseits sowie das unvollstandige Menschenbild traditioneller Geschichtsphilosophien andererseits schienen eine gegenseitige Verstandigung bislang auszuschliessen.Die Psychoanalyse, an der Schnittstelle von Natur- und (...) Kulturwissenschaft befindlich, vermag das Verhaltnis von Natur und Geschichte jedoch neu zu bestimmen: Sie betrachtet nicht nur die Natur des Menschen als fundamental geschichtlich und sozial, sie erganzt zugleich das Verstehen der Intention menschlicher Handlungen um innerpsychische und unbewusste Aspekte.Prof. Dr. Jurgen Straub schreibt im Geleitwort uber Martin Kluners: Freud als einen Geschichtsphilosophen vorzustellen, auf diese ein wenig verwegene Idee waren bislang doch eher wenige gekommen. [...] Kluners meldet sich mit seiner aussergewohnlichen Dissertationsschrift als origineller, individueller Autor zu Wort, der nicht mit dem Strom schwimmt und dennoch zu hochst aktuellen Fragen etwas Interessantes zu sagen hat. Er liefert zweifellos neue Impulse. Kluners gibt fast nirgends einfach bloss wieder, was andere vor ihm auch schon wussten und sagten - er tut dies zwar auch, gewiss, erganzt und erweitert den Blick aber stets. Er nimmt in vielfach hochst anregender Weise jene geschichtliche, geschichtstheoretische und geschichtsphilosophische Dimension in den Blick, welche die Psychoanalyse als Subjekt-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaft auszeichnet. (shrink)

This article focuses on the next generation of entrepreneurs likely to emerge in Silicon Valley. It profiles two tech-savvy college students and describes the Valley’s demographics and subculture to show how previous models of the entrepreneur (the pre-Internet and geek subculture varieties) are blending to form a new sort of entrepreneur for a computer industry in transition.

Se escribe que el tiempo y el espacio han perdido su significado tradicional. Por eso Manuel Castells habla de nueva Era y Alain Touraine de ruptura. El Norte está cada vez más disperso y fragmentado y el Sur también. Podría decirse que ahora hay muchos Nortesy muchos Sures. Por eso hay visiones tan distin­tas del intenso e imprevisible proceso iniciado hace apenas tres décadas. Nadie sabe hacia dónde nos va a conducir el proceso de cambio en esta nueva Era de (...) la información y la comunicaci.. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Mind, Brain, Behavior".

Carrier M. Newton's ideas on the structure of matter and their impact on eighteenth-century chemistry: some historical and methodological remarks. _International Studies in the Philosophy of science_. 1986;1:85-105.

A classicist, philosopher, and poet, Poul Martin Møller was an important figure in the Danish Golden Age. The traumatic event of the death of his wife led him to think more profoundly about the question of the immortality of the soul. In 1837 he published his most important philosophical treatise, "Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality," presented here in English for the first time. It was read and commented upon by the leading figures of the Golden (...) Age, such as Søren Kierkegaard. It proved to be the last important work that Møller wrote before his death in March of 1838 at the age of 43. (shrink)

En este pequeño texto, resumo brevemente tres experimentos psicológicos que Peter Carruthers (2010) cita como evidencia para la tesis según la cual no tenemos un acceso introspectivo y exclusivo de la primera persona a nuestras actitudes proposicionales, sino sólo uno interpretativo. Si Carruthers tiene razón, sólo conocemos nuestras creencias, intenciones y otras actitudes a través de un proceso inconsciente de interpretación de nuestro propio comportamiento y, por ende, de la misma manera en que conocemos las mentes de otras personas. Esta (...) exposición tiene el propósito de mostrar la utilidad y necesidad de acercarse al problema del autoconocimiento desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria. (shrink)

El capítulo introduce al debate sobre la naturaleza del espacio entre Leibniz y Clarke/Newton y a la posición que adopta Kant más tarde. En particular, se exponen los dos principales argumentos de Leibniz, basados en los Principios de Razón Suficiente e Identidad de Indiscernibles, en favor del relacionismo así como algunas respuestas de Clarke/Newton. También se presenta el argumento basado en la orientación del espacio que propuso Kant en 1768 para refutar el relacionismo de Leibniz. Se concluye con una breve (...) exposición del idealismo trascendental de Kant en su Primera Crítica. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with a recent proposal due to Shogenji (Synthese 184:29–48, 2012). In his paper, Shogenji introduces J, a normatively motivated formal measure of justification (and of confirmation), and then proceeds to recruit it descriptively in an explanation of the conjunction fallacy. We argue that this explanation is undermined by the fact that it cannot be extended in any natural way to the inverse conjunction fallacy, a more recently discovered, closely related fallacy. We point out that since the (...) inverse conjunction fallacy occurs in the absence of any form of explicit evidence, formal measures of confirmation such as J, are hard pressed to apply to it at all. We then proceed to argue that this problem with Shogenji’s measure is actually quite difficult to come to terms with; even if the situations where people commit the inverse conjunction fallacy are understood in such a way that the measure is applicable, it doesn’t seem possible to reasonably interpret these situations in such a way that the measure can explain the found response pattern. (shrink)

We usually mean what we say, but sometimes we do not. When I ironically utter ‘What lovely weather’ on a rainy day, or mistakenly utter ‘Jim is a barn door’ instead of ‘Jim is a darn bore’, I say one thing and mean another. However, although utterances like these are not uncommon, they are greatly overshadowed by the volume of humdrum utterances of ‘There is wine in the fridge’ or ‘I really like nachos’ where we mean what we say. And (...) since we usually mean what we say, the following simple thesis will usually be correct. (N) S meant that _p_ by uttering _e_ iff S said that _p_ by uttering _e_. The simplicity of (N) raises the question of whether it can be refined in order to also cover situations where we do not mean what we say. In this paper we defend a modal version of (N): an analysis where speaker meaning in most situations is identified with what is actually said, and in other situations with what the speaker _would have said_ in certain counterfactual situations. The analysis constitutes a radical, but welcome, break with Gricean orthodoxy, where linguistic meaning, rather than speaker meaning, is ultimately used to explain other semantic notions. (shrink)