Religion ist der Kritik ausgesetzt und steht unter Rechtfertigungsdruck. Beides verbindet sie mit der Vernunft. Doch um das Thema «Vernunft und Religion», ein klassisches Thema philosophischer Theologie, ist es gegenwärtig still geworden. Neuzeitliche Metaphysikkritik und Plausibilitätsschwund des Christentums verlangen eine Neuausrichtung philosophischer Theologie. Sie muss die modernen Lebenswelten und Sozialverhältnisse, unter denen die christliche Religion heute gelebt wird, aufgreifen. Zugleich muss sie den Anspruch des Christentums, dass seine Gehalte von allgemeiner Bedeutung für den Menschen sind, gedanklich entfalten. Philosophische Theologie steht (...) dafür, Religion im Diskurs mit der Vernunft zu halten - ein Diskurs, der Strittiges nicht ausschließt und sich nicht in lebensferner Begriffsscholastik erschöpft. (shrink)

This paper presents the case of a 17-year-old right-handed Belgian boy with developmental FAS and comorbid developmental apraxia of speech (DAS). Extensive neuropsychological and neurolinguistic investigations demonstrated a normal IQ but impaired planning (visuo-constructional dyspraxia). A Tc-99m-ECD SPECT revealed a significant hypoperfusion in the prefrontal and medial frontal regions, as well as in the lateral temporal regions. Hypoperfusion in the right cerebellum almost reached significance. It is hypothesized that these clinical findings support the view that FAS and DAS are related (...) phenomena following impairment of the cerebro-cerebellar network. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 67 Leila J. Rupp Queer Dilemmas of Desire The dilemmas of desire confronting young women in contemporary US society are all too familiar. In the face of the persistent double standard that separates sluts from good girls, young women mobilize a variety of strategies: they lack desire, deny desire, restrain desire, police desire, and sometimes embrace desire. They (...) confront expectations to be sexy but not too sexual even as they insist on the right to be just as sexually active as men. Even in the hookup scene on college campuses, potentially liberating in its facilitation of noncommittal sexual encounters, young women worry about hooking up too much. It is a familiar story, but one that most often leaves behind young women with queer desires. Where they do appear, there are hints that they are not as likely to suppress their desires as straight women, no doubt because it is hard to ignore one’s desires when they fly in the face of heteronormative expectations. But it is also hard to come to grips with queer desires, and that is why the dilemmas I explore here are different. Unlike young straight women working to control their desires, the queer students whose stories I tell report awareness and acceptance of their attractions, sometimes from a very young age. Yet they encounter other kinds of dilemmas, especially uncertainty about the boundary between erotic love and intense friendship, a dilemma harking back to an earlier world of romantic friendship. And in the end, despite a contemporary social context in which nonnormative sexualities are more visible than ever before, 68 Leila J. Rupp experiencing queer desires continues to elicit confusion. Much has changed, but much has not. We know a great deal about straight dilemmas of desire. On the one hand, the double standard that separates sluts from good girls has persisted, despite the loosening of restrictions we associate with the sexual revolution of the long 1960s. In the face of slut shaming, young women continue to mobilize a variety of strategies, which Deborah Tolman has documented so eloquently in Dilemmas of Desire. Young women of color face additional obstacles to enjoying their desire, as the Latina girls we encounter in Lorena Garcia’s Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself make clear through their policing of their own and other girls’ sexuality in the face of racist stereotypes of unrestrained sexuality and teenage motherhood.1 On the other hand, a whole raft of commentators depict young women increasingly insisting on the right to be just as sexual as men. From Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs to Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex to Nancy Jo Sales’ American Girls, critics lament young women embracing sex as a form of empowerment.2 The tension arising from the contradictory responses of young women to the demands placed on their sexuality is nowhere clearer than in the ongoing debate about the impact of hookup culture on women. Is hooking up good for women because it allows them to be sexual while pursuing their studies and career goals unencumbered by intimate relationships, as Hannah Rosin has suggested? Or is it, as Kathleen Bogle first argued in Hooking Up, exploitative in fashioning sexual encounters around men’s preference for sex without commitment? Or is it somewhere in between, with some 1. See Leora Tanenbaum, Slut! Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation (New York: HarperCollins, 2000); Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (New York: Berkeley Books, 2002); Sarah A. Miller, “’How You Bully a Girl:’ Sexual Drama and the Negotiation of Gendered Sexuality in High School,” Gender & Society 30, no. 5 (2016): 721–44; Deborah L. Tolman, Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Lorena Garcia, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 2. Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005). See also Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape (New York: HarperCollins, 2016); Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of... (shrink)

Psychiatric diagnoses such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are primarily attributed on the basis of behavioral criteria. The aim of most of the biomedical research on ASD is to uncover the underlying mechanisms that lead to or even cause pathological behavior. However, in the philosophical and sociological literature, it has been suggested that autism is also to some extent a ‘social construct’ that cannot merely be reduced to its biological explanation. We show that a one-sided adherence to either a biological (...) or a social explanation leads to a moral dilemma, a Catch-22, for autistics and for those living with them. Such explanations close the space for self-identifying as autistic and at the same time being considered to be in good mental health. They foreclose the possibility of making sense of the lived experience of (and with) autistics. In this paper we argue that such lack of space for moral imagination inherently leads to scientific stalemate. We propose that one can only go beyond this stalemate by taking an ethical stance in theorizing, one that enables better intersubjective understanding. Only on such a view can behavior and biology be linked without either disconnecting them or reducing the one to the other. (shrink)

Purpose: There is a widespread recognition that biomedical explanations offer benefits to those diagnosed with a mental disorder. Recent research points out that such explanations may nevertheless have stigmatizing effects. In this study, this ‘mixed blessing’ account of biomedical explanations is investigated in a case of philosophical interest: Tourette Syndrome. Method: We conducted a vignette survey with 221 participants in which we first assessed quantitative attributions of blame as well as the desire for social distance for behavior associated with Tourette (...) Syndrome. Results: In our study, it is confirmed that in the case of biomedical explanations, less blame is attributed than in the case of psychosocial explanations. When presented with a mixed explanation stressing an entanglement of biological and psychosocial factors this did not increase blame attribution. The desire for social distance is unaffected by the type of explanation but the participants’ free text feedback indicates this might obfuscate an underlying dilemma between stigma and blame revealed in recent research. Conclusion: There seems to be potential for blame reduction in explanations where biological and psychosocial factors are entangled. However, dynamic, ‘epigenetic’, explanations require further qualitative research to be performed as well as a philosophical framework to account for the ‘mixed blessings’ account. (shrink)

Research papers, chiefly on ancient Indic philosophy, and a few on Indian civilization.

Although emissions trading is embraced as a means to curb carbon emissions and to incentivize the use of renewable energy, it is also heavily contested on ethical grounds. We will assess the main fundamental objections and possible counterarguments. Although we sympathize with some of these arguments, we argue that they are unpersuasive when an emissions trading system is well designed: emissions should be accounted ‘upstream,’ on the production rather than the consumer level. Moreover, allowances should be auctioned, and regulatory measures (...) could instigate the right kind of behavior towards the environment. (shrink)

Purpose Underlying much recent development in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) is a dependence on the labour of precarious crowdworkers via platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. These platforms have been widely critiqued for their exploitative labour relations, and over recent years, there have been various efforts by academic researchers to develop interventions aimed at improving labour conditions. The aim of this paper is to explore US-based crowdworkers’ views on two proposed interventions: a browser plugin that detects automated quality (...) control “Gold Question” (GQ) checks and a proposal for a crowdworker co-operative. Design/methodology/approach The authors interviewed 20 US-based crowdworkers and undertook a thematic analysis of collected data. Findings The findings indicate that US-based crowdworkers tend to have negative and mixed feelings about the GQ detector, but were more enthusiastic about the crowdworker co-operative. Originality/value Drawing on theories of precarious labour, this study suggests an explanation for the findings based on US-based workers’ objective and subjective experiences of precarity. The authors argue that for US-based crowdworkers “constructive” interventions such as a crowdworker co-operative have more potential to improve labour conditions. (shrink)

This book chapter shows how the early Heidegger’s philosophy around the period of Being and Time can address some central questions of contemporary social ontology. After sketching “non-summative constructionism”, which is arguably the generic framework that underlies all forms of contemporary analytic social ontology, I lay out early Heidegger’s conception of human social reality in terms of an extended argument. The Heidegger that shows up in light of this treatment is an acute phenomenologist of human social existence who emphasizes our (...) engagement in norm-governed practices as the basis of social reality. I then defuse a common and understandable set of objections against invoking the early Heidegger as someone who can make any positive contribution to our understanding of social reality. Lastly, I explore the extent to which the early Heidegger’s philosophy provides insights regarding phenomena of collective intentionality by showing how the intelligibility of such phenomena traces back to individual agents’ common understanding of possible ways of understanding things and acting with one another. With the early Heidegger, I argue that this common understanding is the fundamental source and basis of collective intentionality, not the non-summativist constructionism on which contemporary analytic social ontology has sought to focus with much effort. The lesson about social ontology that we should learn from the early Heidegger is that there is a tight connection between the social constitution of the human individual and his or her capacity to perform actions or activities that instantiate collective intentionality. (shrink)

Visual perspective during autobiographical memory (AM) retrieval influences how people remember the emotional aspects of memories. Prior research in emotion regulation has also shown that shifting from an own eyes to an observer-like perspective is an efficient way of regulating the affect elicited by emotional AMs. However, the impact of shifting visual perspective is also dependent on the nature of the emotion associated with the event. The current review synthesizes behavioral and functional neuroimaging findings from the event memory and emotion (...) regulation literature that examine how adopting particular visual perspectives and actively shifting across them during retrieval alters emotional experience, by primarily focusing on emotional intensity. We review current theories explaining why shifts in perspectives may or may not change the emotional characteristics of memories, then propose a new theory, suggesting that the own eyes and observer-like perspectives are two different retrieval orientations supported by differential neural activations that lead episodic details to be reconstructed in specific ways. (shrink)

Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ (...) in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking. The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have configured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘trafficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world trafficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘trafficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation. (shrink)

This article critically examines the legal arguments presented on behalf of Charlie Gard’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, based on a threshold test of significant harm for intervention into the decisions made jointly by holders of parental responsibility. It argues that the legal basis of the argument, from the case of Ashya King, was tenuous. It sought to introduce different categories of cases concerning children’s medical treatment when, despite the inevitable factual distinctions between individual cases, the duty of the (...) judge in all cases to determine the best interests of the child is firmly established by the case law. It argues that the focus should not have been on a threshold for intervention but on whether his parents had established that the therapy they wanted was a viable alternative therapeutic option. In the April hearing, Charlie’s parents relied on the offer of treatment from a US doctor; by July they had an independent panel of international experts supporting their case although by this time the medical evidence was that it was too late for Charlie. One of Charlie’s legacies for future disputes may be that his case highlighted the need for evidence as to whether the treatment parents want for their child is a viable alternative therapeutic option before a court can determine which therapeutic option is in the best interests of the child. (shrink)

Using the search engine Google to locate information linked to individuals and organizations has become part of everyday functioning. This article addresses whether the “gaming” of Internet applications in attempts to modify reputations raises substantial ethical concerns. It analyzes emerging approaches for manipulation of how personally-identifiable information is accessed online as well as critically-important international differences in information handling. Itinvestigates privacy issues involving the data mining of personally-identifiable information with search engines and social media platforms. Notions of “gaming” and “manipulation” (...) have negative connotations as well as instrumental functions, which are distinguished in this article. The article also explores ethical matters engendered by the expanding industry of reputation management services that assist in these detailed technical matters. Ethical dimensions of online reputation are changing in the advent of reputation management, raising issues such as fairness and legitimacy of various information-related practices; the article provides scenarios and questions for classroom deliberation. (shrink)

This chapter provides an interpretation of the early Heidegger’s underdeveloped conception of the undistinguishedness of everyday human existence in Being and Time. After explaining why certain translation choices of some key terms in this text are interpretively and philosophically important, I first provide a concise argument for why the social constitution interpretation of the relation between ownedness and unownedness makes better overall sense of Heidegger’s ambivalent attitude toward the social constitution of the human being than the standard existentialist interpretation of (...) this relation. I then proceed to the heart of this chapter, which develops his inchoate conception of the undistinguishedness of everydayness by arguing that it specifies the third distinctive mode of concrete human existence in addition to ownedness and unownedness. Accordingly, I show how unownedness is actually a generic phenomenon with two distinct species, namely, undistinguishedness and disownedness, which are at once closely related to, but also differ in significant respects from, each other. Consequently, instead of taking for granted a one-dimensional and mutually exclusive opposition between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, I argue that we should adopt a two-dimensional and more nuanced understanding of the relations among undistinguishedness, disownedness, and ownedness that intersects with Heidegger’s underappreciated distinction between genuineness and ungenuineness. After raising and replying to some objections to this interpretation of undistinguishedness, I conclude this chapter by briefly sketching three of its philosophical consequences and pointing out its potential as an important resource for contemporary social theories. (shrink)

Is a conception of human nature still possible or even desirable in light of the “postmetaphysical sensibilities” of our time? Furthermore, can philosophy make any contribution towards the articulation of a tenable conception of human nature given this current intellectual climate? I will argue in this paper that affirmative answers can be given to both of these questions. Section I rehearses briefly some of the difficulties and even dangers involved in working out any conception of human nature at all, let (...) alone one that is philosophically informed. Section II sketches what I argue to be three necessary aspects of a tenable philosophical anthropology. Finally, section III argues that such a philosophical anthropology is only justifiable, given our postmetaphysical sensibilities, by its use of “transcendental arguments” in justifying its claims, ones that nonetheless must repudiate a common but damaging assumption that arguing for the conclusions of such arguments commits one necessarily to a hyper-strong conception of subjectivity. In general, my primary aim in this paper is only to make plausible, not so much to justify, let alone defend, adequately the aspects of a conception of a tenable philosophical anthropology as sketched below. (shrink)

In recent years a growing number of philosophers in the analytic tradition have focused their attention on the significance of human sociality. An older point of departure of analysis, which actually precedes this current tide of accounts of sociality, has revolved around the debate between “holism” and “individualism” in the philosophy of the human or social sciences and social theory. The more recent point of departure for various accounts of sociality has centered on the nature of conventions, social groups, shared (...) intentions, or collective intentionality. Putting aside the disagreements among these accounts, they all take for granted an antecedently intelligible notion of individual agency as explanatorily primitive and seek to explain the possibility of plural or collective agency in terms of the former. By contrast, other philosophers who have worked at the intersection of analytic and "continental" philosophy have emphasized the primacy of practice as the proper starting point for philosophical reflections on the nature of human sociality. In the analytic tradition this emphasis is typically framed in terms of the possibility of rule-following, a topic put on the philosophical agenda by the later Wittgenstein. Peter Winch’s and Saul Kripke’s influential but controversial readings of Wittgenstein explicitly thematize the issue of rule-following, readings which have in turn generated critical reflection in various disciplines for which this issue is relevant. -/- I begin by briefly explicating the positions of Pettit and Brandom on the issue of rule-following (putting aside any specific differences between them for the moment). Next I connect Pettit’s and Brandom’s views on rule-following, and more generally on normativity and its necessarily social basis, with the views of Theodore Schatzki and Joseph Rouse, whose conceptions of the significance of practice and its inherent sociality are indebted as much to the early Heidegger as well as the later Wittgenstein. I suggest that Pettit’s and Brandom’s views of the necessarily social nature of rule-following (i.e., practice) ought to acknowledge and integrate the shared insight of Schatzki and Rouse that practices are not only modes of activity, but constitute more basically the concrete setting or world within which practices qua modes of activity are intelligible (verständlich) at all. I conclude the paper by suggesting how an integrated account of the significance of the necessarily social nature of practice undermines the assumptions of those philosophers who seek to analyze human sociality solely on the basis of modes of interactions among individual agents. (shrink)

The properties of the phosphate uptake system of the cyanobacterium Anacystis nidulans have been studied during the transition from a phosphate-deficient non-growing state to a non-deficient growing state. In the phosphate-deficient state the high affinity phosphate transport system in the cell membrane is extremely adaptive. As a result of these adaptive features the phosphate transport system cannot be described by determinate, fixed parameters, because the transport system is influenced by the measurement of the uptake process itself. When the growing state (...) has been initiated by a persisting phosphate pulse, the transport system rapidly loses its adaptive features and can then be characterized by determinate parameters that remain unchanged for a long period of time, even if no uptake occurs in that time. Depending on the amount of phosphate stored during a pulse the cell makes a choice between slow or fast growth. In the latter case the light harvesting and energy converting machinery is completely reorganized before growth commences. Thereby the components of this machinery conform to each other and to the stable properties of the phosphate transport system. It is suggested that the mutual adjustment of these adaptive energy converting subunits is guided by attractors that function as the final cause for the development of the whole system.An application of this model to an analysis of the selforganization of aquatic ecosystems is discussed. (shrink)