Background Scientific and technological advancements in mapping and understanding the interrelated pathways through which biological and environmental exposures affect disease development create new possibilities for detecting disease risk factors. Early detection of such risk factors may help prevent disease onset or moderate the disease course, thereby decreasing associated disease burden, morbidity, and mortality. However, the ethical implications of screening for disease risk factors are unclear and the current literature provides a fragmented and case-by-case picture. Methods To identify key ethical considerations (...) arising from the early detection of disease risk factors, we performed a systematic scoping review. The Scopus, Embase, and Philosopher’s Index databases were searched for peer-reviewed, academic records, which were included if they were written in English or Dutch and concerned the ethics of (1) early detection of (2) disease risk factors for (3) disease caused by environmental factors or gene-environment interactions. All records were reviewed independently by at least two researchers. Results After screening 2034 titles and abstracts, and 112 full papers, 55 articles were included in the thematic synthesis of the results. We identified eight common ethical themes: (1) Reliability and uncertainty in early detection, (2) autonomy, (3) privacy, (4) beneficence and non-maleficence, (5) downstream burdens on others, (6) responsibility, (7) justice, and (8) medicalization and conceptual disruption. We identified several gaps in the literature, including a relative scarcity of research on ethical considerations associated with environmental preventive health interventions, a dearth of practical suggestions on how to address expressed concerns about overestimating health capacities, and a lack of insights into preventing undue attribution of health responsibility to individuals. Conclusions The ethical concerns arising with the early detection of risk factors are often interrelated and complex. Comprehensive ethical analyses are needed that are better embedded in normative frameworks and also assess and weigh the expected benefits of early risk factor detection. Such research is necessary for developing and implementing responsible and fair preventive health policies. (shrink)

A model is presented that addresses both the distribution and comprehension of different forms of referring expressions in language. This model is expressed in a formalism (Kamp & Reyle, 1993) that uses interpretive rules to map syntactic representations onto representations of discourse. Basic interpretive rules are developed for names, pronouns, definite descriptions, and quantified descriptions. These rules are triggered by syntactic input and interact dynamically with representations of discourse to establish reference and coreference. This interaction determines the ease with (...) which coreference can be established for different linguistic forms given the existing discourse context. The performance of the model approximates that observed in studies of intuitive judgments of grammaticality and studies using online measures of language comprehension. The model uses the same basic interpretive mechanisms for coreference within and between sentences, thereby linking the domain traditionally studied by generative linguists to domains that have been of concern primarily to psychologists and computational linguists. (shrink)

Hauser, H. La response de Jean Bodin à M. de Malestroit.--Levron, J. Jean Bodin et sa famille.--Kamp, M. E. Die Staatswirtschaftslehre Jean Bodins.--Mesnard, P. La pensée religieuse de Bodin.--Bezold, F. von, Jean Bodin als Occultist und seine Démonomanie.--Bezold, F. von. Jean Bodins Colloquium Heptaplomeres und der Altheismus des 16.--Feist, E. Weltbild und Staatsidee bei Jean Bodin.--Mayer, J. P. Jefferson as reader of Bodin.

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series—and the seminars on which they are based—brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fourth volume in the series, _Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic_, focuses on questions revolving around the concepts of the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and the political. (...) The book is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. The central question of this book is whether artists and academicians are free of this choice in practice, in pedagogy, and in theory. The contributors are Stéphanie Benzaquen, J. M. Bern­stein, Karen Busk-Jepsen, Luis Camnitzer, Diarmuid Costello, Joana Cunha Leal, Angela Dimitrakaki, Alexander Dumbadze, T. Brandon Evans, Geng Youzhuang, Boris Groys, Beáta Hock, Gordon Hughes, Michael Kelly, Grant Kester, Meredith Kooi, Cary Levine, Sunil Manghani, William Mazzarella, Justin McKeown, Andrew McNamara, Eve Meltzer, Nadja Millner-Larsen, Maria Filomena Molder, Carrie Noland, Gary Peters, Aaron Richmond, Lauren Ross, Toni Ross, Eva Schürmann, Gregory Sholette, Noah Simblist, Jon Simons, Robert Storr, Martin Sundberg, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Rebecca Zorach. (shrink)

K.E. Løgstrups monografi om Immanuel Kants erkendelsesteoretiske hovedværk 'Kritik af den rene fornuft'. Med efterskrift af Peter Aaboe Sørensen. "De metafysiske spørgsmål bliver stående; de er givet med vor fornufts naturanlæg. Måske mere end nogen anden videnskab er metafysikken lagt i os, og dens spørgsmål er alt andet end tilfældige. Man kan lige så lidt vente, at menneskets ånd helt ville opgive metafysiske undersøgelser, som man kan vente, at vi ville indstille at trække vejret for at undgå at indånde (...) uren luft. Om bogens efterskrift m.m.: "... han [Peter Aaboe Sørensen] gør det glimrende. Vi får for eksempel at vide, at bogens hovedafsnit udkom første gang så tidligt som i 1952, i en periode, hvor de teologiske professorer i Århus bestræbte sig på at skrive små filosofi-historiske monografier til deres studerende. Aaboe gør også meget relevant rede for den biografiske baggrund for Løgstrups engagement i Kant: Som studerende havde han selv haft enorme vanskeligheder med at forstå den tyske gigant. Først i det tredje studieår lykkedes det ham ved ren stædighed og vilje at få fat. Nu ville han forstå det. Dette resultat af veloverstået kamp kom senere tiders studerende og nutidens læsere til gode i den klare og myndige præsentation af Kants tanker, som er temmelig vanskelige at gå til uden mellemled." Nils Gunder Hansen, Kristeligt Dagblad. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that awareness comes in degrees, and we propose a novel multi-factor account that spans both subjective experiences and perceptual representations. At the subjective level, we argue that conscious experiences can be degraded by being fragmented, less salient, too generic, or flash-like. At the representational level, we identify corresponding features of perceptual representations—their availability for working memory, intensity, precision, and stability—and argue that the mechanisms that affect these features are what ultimately modulate the degree of awareness. (...) We conclude the paper by demonstrating why the original interpretations of certain empirical findings that apparently pose problems for our account are, in fact, flawed. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

In this comparative analysis of twelve focus groups conducted in Austria, France, and the Netherlands, we investigate how lay people come to terms with two biomedical technologies. Using the term ‘‘technopolitical culture,’’ we aim to show that the ways in which technosciences are interwoven with a specific society frame how citizens build their individual and collective positions toward them. We investigate how the focus group participants conceptualized organ transplantation and genetic testing, their perceptions of individual agency in relation to the (...) two technologies and to more collective forms of acting and governing, and also their understanding of the two technologies’ relationship to broader societal value systems. Against the background of the sustained political effort to build common European values, we suggest that more fine-grained attention toward the culturally embedded differences in coming to terms with biomedical technologies is needed. (shrink)

Dynamical Grammar explores the consequences for language acquisition, language evolution, and linguistic theory of taking the underlying architecture of the language faculty to be that of a complex adaptive dynamical system. It contains the first results of a new and complex model of language acquisition which the authors have developed to measure how far language input is reflected in language output and thereby get a better idea of just how far the human language faculty is hard-wired.

Peter Frankental, Head of Business Networks, Amnesty International, explores the role of The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a corporate code of conduct. Frankental observes a changing business context, which overall increases the risk to business of dealing with other parties, including countries, subcontractors, joint venture partners and their stockholders. The paper proceeds to examine the barriers to integration of human rights, and identifies dilemmas that firms need to resolve. While in the author’s view ethical behaviour does (...) not confer competitive advantages in the short run, companies that base their codes of conduct on the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights are likely to find themselves in the stronger position to protect their reputation, brands and assets in the longer term. (shrink)

An intellectual biography of Max Weber which uses his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as its starting point, with wider reference to the social, political, and religious thought of the time.

In this important new book in the IPPP series, a group of leading thinkers in psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy offer alternative perspectives that address both the scientific and clinical aspects of psychiatric validation, emphasizing throughout their philosophical and historical considerations.

This book argues that Nietzsche bases his affirmative morality on the model of individual responsiveness to otherness which he takes from the mythology of Dionysus. The subject is not free to choose to avoid such responding to the demands of the other. Nietzsche finds that the basic mode of responding is pleasure. This feeling, as a basis for morality, underlies the morality which is true to the earth and the major concepts of "will to power", "eternal return", and "amor fati". (...) The priority of otherness makes all thought ethical and not only aesthetic. The basis of all meanings combines the fundamental impulse of responding outwards with an immediate complement in the individual interpretation-world. This is specifically ethical because the recognition of our own historical specificity arises as a result of the refusal of others to become mere differences within our notion of the Same, and through their demand that we "become who we are" in the recognition of their separate existence. (shrink)

The principle of semantic compositionality, as Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have emphasized, imposes constraints on theories of meaning that it is hard to meet with psychological or epistemic accounts. Here, I argue that this general tendency is exemplified in Michael Dummett's account of meaning. On that account, the so-called manifestability requirement has the effect that the speaker who understands a sentence s must be able to tell whether or not s satisfies central semantic conditions. This requirement is not met (...) by truth-conditional accounts of meaning. On Dummett's view, it is met by a proof conditional account: understanding amounts to knowledge of what counts as a proof of a sentence. A speaker is supposed always to be capable of deciding whether or not a given object is a proof of a given sentence she understands. This requirement comes into conflict with compositionality. If meaning is compositionally determined, then all you need for understanding a sentence is what you get from combining your understanding of the parts according to the mode of composition. But that knowledge is not always sufficient for recognizing any proof at all of a given sentence. Dummett's proof-theoretic argument to the contrary is mistaken. (shrink)

From its beginning, Critical Theory aimed to explore the laws governing social life as a formational totality and the forces shaping and driving its historical evolution. So the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of ‘society’ encompassing both its structural as well as its cultural components can be considered one of the defining hallmarks of Critical Theory through all its theoretical and generational variations. But what, then, is Critical Theory’s conception of society? To answer this question, the authors make use (...) of a three-tiered heuristic model distinguishing synthesis (what is society?), dynamis (what are the driving forces of social change?) and praxis ((how) can social change be motivated or influenced by social actors?). In this way, they are able to reconstruct not only the divergences and controversies between the different versions and approaches in Critical Theory across the four generations of authors writing in this tradition, but also four core points of convergence which can serve to differentiate between Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and other critical theories. These four points, we suggest, should be seen to form the backbone of any valid conception of society in contemporary Critical Theory. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Notes.

Vor dem Hintergrund der Tatsache, dass innovatives Handeln in der Gegenwart eine große Wertschätzung erfährt, unternimmt das Buch eine Untersuchung des Begriffs, des Ursprungs, des Werts und der Spielarten der Kreativität. Kreativität ist immer ein bewusstes Menschenwerk, das überraschende Neuigkeiten hervorbringt; dabei können solche Neuigkeiten durchaus unterschiedlich bewertet werden und auch ihre Schattenseiten haben. Zur Anwendung kommt die Lust auf Neues in allen Bereichen des Lebens - in den Künsten und in den Wissenschaften, im Privatleben und in der Politik, bei (...) Beziehungen zu anderen Personen und bei der Beziehung zu uns selbst. Das Buch geht detailliert auf die multiplen Facetten des Phänomens ein. Ob auch künstliche Intelligenzen zu kreativen Leistungen in der Lage sind, ist heute eine wichtige und stark umstrittene Frage, deren Antwort nicht zuletzt vom Begriff der Kreativität abhängen wird. Als besonders förderlich für die Ausbildung und Ausübung einer Lust auf Neues haben sich das Nichtstun, die Langeweile und Tagträumereien erwiesen. Der Autor ​Peter Rinderle ist Philosoph mit den Schwerpunkten Ethik, Ästhetik und politische Theorie. Er arbeitet freiberuflich als Autor, Dozent und Lektor. (shrink)

Peter Boettke's Why Perestroika Failed offers an overly mechanistic explanation for the collapse of the Soviet economy, derived from Mises's theory of the economic impossibility of socialism. Arguing that the economic system was doomed to fail does not explain why it fell precisely when it did. Thus, Boettke underestimates the extent to which elements of the Communist nomenklatura themselves came to realize that their interests could be served by ditching the command economy. Such an emphasis on the role of (...) human agents is surely compatible with a Hayekian approach. (shrink)

Peter Sloterdijk turns his keen eye to the history of western thought, conducting colorful readings of the lives and ideas of the world's most influential intellectuals. Featuring nineteen vignettes rich in personal characterizations and theoretical analysis, Sloterdijk's companionable volume casts the development of philosophical thinking not as a buildup of compelling books and arguments but as a lifelong, intimate struggle with intellectual and spiritual movements, filled with as many pitfalls and derailments as transcendent breakthroughs. Sloterdijk delves into the work (...) and times of Aristotle, Augustine, Bruno, Descartes, Foucault, Fichte, Hegel, Husserl, Kant, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Marx, Nietzsche, Pascal, Plato, Sartre, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. He provocatively juxtaposes Plato against shamanism and Marx against Gnosticism, revealing both the vital external influences shaping these intellectuals' thought and the excitement and wonder generated by the application of their thinking in the real world. The philosophical "temperament" as conceived by Sloterdijk represents the uniquely creative encounter between the mind and a diverse array of cultures. It marks these philosophers' singular achievements and the special dynamic at play in philosophy as a whole. Creston Davis's introduction details Sloterdijk's own temperament, surveying the celebrated thinker's intellectual context, rhetorical style, and philosophical persona. (shrink)

ONE INTRODUCTION: NEO-CONFUCIANISM AND TOKUGAWA DISCOURSE BY PETER NOSCO Modern scholarship on the intellectual history of the Tokugawa period ...

This chapter is offered as a contribution to the logic of down below. We attempt to demonstrate that the nature of human agency necessitates that there actually be such a logic. The ensuing sections develop the suggestion that cognition down below has a structure strikingly similar to the physical structure of quantum states. In its general form, this is not an idea that originates with the present authors. It is known that there exist mathematical models from the cognitive science of (...) cognition down below that have certain formal similarities to quantum mechanics. We want to take this idea seriously. We will propose that the subspaces of von Neumann-Birkhoff lattices are too crisp for modelling requisite cognitive aspects in relation to subsymbolic logic. Instead, we adopt an approach which relies on projections into nonorthogonal density states. The projection operator is motivated from cues which probe human memory. (shrink)