We discuss some implications of the Holocaust for moral philosophy. Our thesis is that morality became distorted in the Third Reich at the level of its social articulation. We explore this thesis in application to several front-line perpetrators who maintained false moral self-conceptions. We conclude that more than a priori moral reasoning is required to correct such distortions.

The Special Issue is started with the observation that the tension of mind and society, i.e. cognitive and sociological/cultural dimensions in knowledge production and innovation, is a well-known topic of academic discourse in Science and Technology Studies. The introduction mentions some historical hallmarks of the involved perspectives and discussions to outline the background of the Special Issue. The purpose of its contributions, which are briefly presented at the end of the introduction, is to review this long-existing tension of cognitive and (...) cultural dimensions in knowledge production and innovation in the light of the cognitive and societal changes that have just begun and will have a huge impact in the future. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 188-206.

In his seminal work The Concept of Law, H. L. A. Hart observed that the ‘law of every modern state shows at a thousand points the influence of both the accepted social morality and wider moral idea...

Hitlers Ernennung zum Reichskanzler am 30. Januar 1933 brachte eine radikale Veränderung der politischen und staatlichen Strukturen mit sich. Erklärtes Ziel der Nationalsozialisten war, die Übertragung der Kanzlerschaft als Instrument zur umfassenden Machtausübung zu benützen. Die Strategie richtete sich von Beginn an auf die Ausschaltung des Reichstages und das Verbot der anderen politischen Parteien. Die Einschränkung der in der Weimarer Verfassung garantierten Grundrechte und Grundfreiheiten sollte die völlige Kontrolle politischer Gegner ermöglichen und absichern.

In response to cases that involve tiny probabilities of huge payoffs, some argue that we ought to discount small probabilities down to zero. However, this paper shows that doing so violates Independence and Continuity, and as a result of these violations, those who discount small probabilities can be exploited by money pumps. Various possible ways of avoiding exploitation will be discussed. This paper concludes that the money pump for Independence undermines the plausibility of discounting small probabilities. Much of the discussion (...) on Independence generalizes to other views that also violate Independence. (shrink)

Internalization is a key property of justification logics. It states that justification logics internalize their own notion of proof which is essential for the proof of the realization theorem. The aim of this note is to show how to make use of internalization to track where an agent’s knowledge comes from and how to apply this to the problem of data privacy.

Theologian. Conspirator. Martyr. Saint. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed in the waning days of World War II, having been implicated in the July 20th assassination attempt on Hitler. Since his death, Bonhoeffer’s life and writings have inspired contradictory responses. He is often seen as a model for Christian pacifist resistance, and more recently for violent direct political action. Bonhoeffer’s name has been invoked by violent anti-abortion protestors as well as political leaders calling for support on a ‘war on terror’ in the (...) aftermath of 9/11. Petra Brown critically analyses Bonhoeffer’s writing preceding and during his conspiracy involvement, particularly his recurring concept of the ‘extraordinary.’ Brown examines this idea in light of ‘the state of exception,’ a concept coined by the one-time Nazi jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. She also draws on the existentialist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard to consider what happens when discipleship is understood as obedience to a divine command. This book aims to complicate an unreflective admiration of Bonhoeffer’s decision for conspiracy, and draws attention to the potentially dangerous implications of his emerging political theology. (shrink)

This paper advances a framework for modeling the component interactions between cognitive and social aspects of scientific creativity and technological innovation. Specifically, it aims to characterize Innovation Networks; those networks that involve the interplay of people, ideas and organizations to create new, technologically feasible, commercially-realizable products, processes and organizational structures. The tri-partite framework captures networks of ideas (Concept Level), people (Individual Level) and social structures (Social-Organizational Level) and the interactions between these levels. At the concept level, new ideas are the (...) nodes that are created and linked, kept open for further investigation or closed if solved by actors at the individual or organizational levels. At the individual level, the nodes are actors linked by shared worldviews (based on shared professional, educational, experiential backgrounds) who are the builders of the concept level. At the social-organizational level, the nodes are organizations linked by common efforts on a given project (e.g., a company–university collaboration) that by virtue of their intellectual property or rules of governance constrain the actions of individuals (at the Individual Level) or ideas (at the Concept Level). After describing this framework and its implications we paint a number of scenarios to flesh out how it can be applied. (shrink)

Despite the importance of knowing the cognitive capabilities of children with neurodevelopmental conditions, less than one-third of children with cerebral palsy participate in standardized assessments. Globally, approximately 50% of people with cerebral palsy have an intellectual disability and there is significant risk for domain-specific cognitive impairments for the majority of people with cerebral palsy. However, standardized cognitive assessment tools are not accessible to many children with cerebral palsy, as they require manual manipulation of objects, verbal response and/or speeded response. As (...) such, standardised assessment may result in an underestimation of abilities for children with significant motor and/or speech impairment. The overall aim of the project is to examine and compare the psychometric properties of standardised cognitive assessment tools that have been accommodated for use with either a switch device or eye-gaze control technologies, with the specific aims to: Examine the psychometric properties of accommodated assessment tools by comparing the performance of typically developing children on six cognitive assessment tools administered via standardised versus accommodated administration; Describe and compare the performance and user experience of children with cerebral palsy on six accommodated cognitive assessments administered via switch or eye-gaze control technologies. Secondary aims are to: Describe the completion rates and time to complete assessments of participants in each group; Within the group with cerebral palsy, examine the effects of condition-specific characteristics and demographics on participation. This protocol paper describes a two-phase validation and acceptability study that utilizes a mixed-model design. This study will collect concurrent data from 80 typically developing children and 40 children with cerebral palsy, who use switch or eye-gaze control technology as alternate access communication methods. The set of instruments will measure receptive vocabulary, fluid reasoning, sustained attention, vision perception, visuospatial working memory and executive functions. Data analyses will be conducted using SPSS v. 25 and R v 4.1.0. SPSS Sample Power 3 was used for power computation and allows for a 10% drop out rate. Quantitative descriptive statistics, measurement agreement data plotting, bivariate and multiple regressions analysis will be conducted using appropriate methods. (shrink)

A draft of a will takes us back to the fifteenth century Cyprus introducing a strange case : a nun as an owner of a slave woman of foreign origin. While attempting to reconstruct the identities and circumstances of the two women, the primary sources offer a glimpse of the late medieval eastern Mediterranean with its quickly changing boundaries, multicultural context and complex interpersonal relationships.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to show that there is a way to consider corporations and organizations as agents without attributing to them mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Looking at the constitutional setup and structure of corporations and organizations, as well as the professional status and role of its principal operative members, provides us with sufficient information to classify them as agents. Corporations and organizations are agents, I argue, because their operative members, (...) acting in accordance with their professional role, turn them into decision-making and acting entities. Second, the paper argues that such a non-mentalistic account still allows us to hold corporations and organizations morally responsible for their impact on the social world and the environment. Taking into account the professional identity and role of senior managers also allows us to show why they might be accountable for a corporation’s unethical, let alone illegal practices. (shrink)

Introduction Petra Storjohann This collective volume focuses on what have traditionally been termed the "para- digmatics" or "sense relations" of a lexical ...

Justification logics are modal logics that include justifications for the agent's knowledge. So far, there are no decidability results available for justification logics with negative introspection. In this paper, we develop a novel model construction for such logics and show that justification logics with negative introspection are decidable for finite constant specifications.

In his ground‐breaking study Complicity, Christopher Kutz introduces the notion of ‘participatory intentions’ (individual intentions whose content is collective) to explain an agent's complicity with groups or organisations. According to Kutz, participatory intentions allow us to hold individuals morally accountable for collective wrongs independent of their causal contribution to the wrong and its ensuing harm. This article offers an alternative account of complicity. Its central claim is that an agent's complicity might be due to the dependence of his professional role (...) on the normative principles that make up the organisation or institution in whose practices he partakes. In other words, there might arise a constitutive failure in an agent's attempt to ascribe to himself a non‐complicit professional identity. I use the case of SS‐Judge Konrad Morgen in order to illustrate this understanding of complicity. (shrink)

What picture do we get when wie apply gender analysis to mainstream moral philosophy? Starting with an analysis of Kant, Hume and Rawls, Pauer–Studer develops the categorical framework of a moral theory that is free from any "male bias".

Der erste der auf vier Bände angelegten Sichtungen der Bestimmung,Leben' stellt in chronologischer Folge wichtige Grundkonstellationen des Begriffsfeldes Leben von Aristoteles bis Schelling vor. Exemplarisch wird herausgearbeitet, wie in der europäischen Kulturgeschichte vom Leben geredet wurde, wann und weshalb der Lebensbegriff an Bedeutung gewann und warum die Rede vom Leben mit einer eigenen Konfliktgeschichte verbunden ist. Von besonderem Interesse sind dabei jene Diskussionen, die für christliche Traditionen direkt oder latent relevant wurden. Damit soll den Lebensdiskursen innerhalb der bioethischen Debatten ein (...) diese anregendes Gegengewicht gegeben werden. Denn um entscheiden zu können, was zum Wohl von Lebewesen mit Lebendem getan und gelassen werden sollte, dürfte hilfreich sein, zu klären, was genau gesteigert, geschützt, renaturalisiert, kultiviert oder in Frieden gelassen werden soll. Mit Beiträgen von:Petra Bahr, Christoph Ellsiepen, Matthias Freudenberg, Gerald Hartung, Christina Hoegen-Rohls, Tom Kleffmann, Dietrich Korsch, Christof Landmesser, Christoph Markschies, Peter McLaughlin, Jörn Müller, Hanns Nissing, Enno Rudolph, Stephan Schaede, Konrad Schmid, Christian Senkel, Joachim von Soosten, Philipp Stoellger. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many daughters, sisters, aunts, wives, and mothers found themselves with additional caretaking duties, and many were also vulnerable and unsafe in different constellations of relationships. Lockdown exacerbated this vulnerability. It also heightened stress, as vulnerable women were required to be constantly alert and risk aware in their reconfigured worlds. This not only included women in unsafe intimate relationships but also digital vulnerability for women as life moved online, economic risk for casually employed women unable to work (...) from home, and even increased exposure to misogyny for female political leaders navigating polarizing and volatile political communities. Whilst... (shrink)

Analyses of household urban agriculture have demonstrated a wealth of personal, economic, social, moral or political uses for self-provisioned food, yet have often understood the practice itself as merely a production process. This ‘means-to-an-end’ perspective is especially pronounced in studies of locations undergoing economic hardship. Urban gardening in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been framed as an element of an informal economy, enabling household savings, access to informal networks and avoidance of industrial goods deemed (...) ethically dubious. In this article, I present evidence from participant observation and interviews with urban gardeners conducted in 2014–2015 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where urban agriculture proliferated during the European debt crisis that began in 2009. I interpret the material through an ecological perspective that focuses on labour in nature and highlights the interconnected, situated role of the gardener. My analysis of gardening styles, behaviours, attitudes and life-narratives of long-term urban growers challenges the utilitarian interpretation by arguing that urban agriculture in Ljubljana is in fact a means in itself—not an informal economy, but a narrative practice. While undertaken to ameliorate the effects of economic hardship, household urban agriculture first and foremost promotes individual wellbeing and restores a stable sense of self. I outline a series of self-making benefits of working with cultivated, edible nature that helped gardeners reconstruct their biographies after their previously established self-making processes collapsed in the economic downturn. (shrink)

Das dritte Buch von Humes Traktat, das Buch Über Moral, ist eines der bedeutendsten Werke der Moralphilosophie. Humes Versuch, aus einer Analyse der Prinzipien der menschlichen Natur Einsichten über die Grundlagen der Moral zu gewinnen, kann von keiner Moralphilosophie übergangen werden, die sich ernsthaft mit der Verknüpfung von moralischen Begrifflichkeiten und Handlungskontexten auseinandersetzt. Diesem Kommentar zu Humes Buch Über Moral liegt die These zugrunde, dass Hume sehr wohl eine normative Konzeption der Moral vertritt. Hume entwickelt eine Theorie der Individualmoral, welche (...) die wichtige Ebene moralischer Empfindungen nicht ausklammert. Er vermittelt uns aber auch eine normative Bestimmung des Wertes moralischer Institutionen und analysiert die Gründe, warum wir diese konstruieren und warum wir ihre Regeln akzeptieren und befolgen sollten. Humes erkenntnistheoretischer Empirismus bestimmt auch seine Moralphilosophie. Das ambitionierte Vorhaben der theoretischen Philosophie Humes, Erkenntnis auf den unmittelbaren Inhalten der Erfahrung aufzubauen, findet seine Fortsetzung in Humes Ethik. Moralisches Erkennen und Urteilen wird auf einfachste Einheiten, die Eindrücke, zurückgeführt. Und aus dem spezifischen Charakter dieser Impressionen baut sich eine unverwechselbare Theorie der Moral auf. Die Bedeutsamkeit des Traktats verdankt sich nicht zuletzt dem Stellenwert dieses Werks in der Entwicklung der Moralphilosphie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Humes Ethik knüpft an wichtige Traditionen der britischen Moralphilosophie an und entwickelt diese weiter. Hume ist mit konträren und kontroversiellen Positionen seiner Vorgänger konfrontiert. So verankert Hobbes Moral und Recht im Selbstinteresse und betrachtet den Eigennutz als die vorrangige Motivation menschlichen Handelns. Die rationalistischen Naturrechtstheoretiker hingegen bestreiten, dass Gerechtigkeit und Recht nur aus dem Selbstinteresse folgen. Die Voluntaristen sehen die Moral in der Allmacht eines göttlichen Willens begründet. Die moral sense-Philosophen nehmen einen moralischen Sinn an, der uns ermöglicht, objektive moralische Urteile zu fällen und sehen wohlwollende Empfindungen als maßgeblich für die Moral. (shrink)

Der Band stellt die maßgeblichen Theorien der Ethik vor: die Kantische Ethik, den Utilitarismus, die Tugendethik und den Kontraktualismus. Diskutiert werden auch die wesentlichen Probleme der Moraltheorie, wie z.B. die Ursprünge und die Reichweite moralischer Verpflichtung, die Rolle moralischer Gefühle und die universelle Begründbarkeit moralischer Grundsätze. Studierenden der Philosophie, aber auch der Medizin, Rechtswissenschaft, Ökonomie und Medientheorie, die mit konkreten Fragen der Ethik konfrontiert sind, bietet diese Einführung grundlegendes Wissen über die Prinzipien der Ethik.

This autobiographically based article aims to consider the practical application of Anderson’s conception of analytic autoethnography under particular circumstances and requirements for its use. It reflects on the friendships that developed between me and my key informants during ethnographic research. In this context I refer to autoethnography as a method that allows researchers to identify aspects of their lives that have relevance beyond the personal and deal analytically with friendships in the field. Moreover, I consider how the researcher can analytically (...) handle friendships in the field using analytic autoethnography, even when he is not a complete member of the community under investigation. (shrink)

Although Olympic athletes are celebrated for their sports achievements, they often face serious difficulties in their post-sport career employment. Factors of development that are affecting the quality of post-sport career transition of Olympic athletes are important to acknowledge in the dual career (DC) development perspective. Due to the side lining of academic activities, athletes are often not well prepared for the labor market. If they do not gain sufficient financial background in their careers, it can lead to a lack of (...) proper economic inclusion of athletes in their post-sport career employment and further impact their lives. Career transitions of athletes have been the subject of research in different aspects of DC support (e.g., athletic, psychological, psychosocial, academic/vocational, financial), but most research is linked to the student-athlete DC perspective. Therefore, the aim of our research was to examine the impact of factors directly contributing to the quality of the post-sport career transition in Slovenian elite and Olympic athletes and the social class position and employment of these athletes after the termination of their sports career. From DC support practice, we learned that although athletes often have a proper level of education, their post-sport career transitions were not successful. To fill this gap, 168 elite athletes (Mage= 33.34, SD = 13.1) from Slovenia were asked to complete online questionnaires. The results showed a significant contribution of education and DC support-related finances (e.g., employment of athletes in public administration) to the quality of post-sport career transition. Regarding developing a national DC model and based on empirical research, this study identifies the social class position and employment status of former elite athletes from Slovenia. It also identifies opportunities for further research on the quality of the post-sport career transitions and perspectives on DC support. Understanding how different factors contribute to the integrated development of individual athletes to reach their potential in sports, education, and their post-sport career employment is important for theorists, DC practitioners, and stakeholders working with DC athletes. To develop a sufficient mechanism, DC support providers should consider supporting education along with the financial support of athletes during their sports careers and recognizing study-training ecosystems, based on good practices to successfully transition to their post-sport careers. These findings can also be useful for athletes and their athletic triangle support network (e.g., coaches and parents) as a support in the decision-making. (shrink)

In the Gogarene region, the period of peak production of the area’s stone crosses - the mid-sixth century through the seventh - was particularly favorable for local governors. This paper investigates the practice of incorporating real persons into devotional images, focusing on many depictions of local personages included in Gogarene crosses’ pictorial compositions amid biblical scenes, with local saints, and in symbolic imagery. The desired effect of this practice was to guarantee the commemoration of these persons in prayers said before (...) the crosses. In the case of the cross at Mtskheta, comparison between the Georgian Lectionary’s content and information surrounding the stational liturgy of Jerusalem confirms that, besides prayers, biblical texts were also read before such crosses. (shrink)

To address an ethics of refusal in higher education is to wager in the name of future possibles not already governed by the extractive politics of colonial progress and oppressive regimes of knowing and doing. In this essay, Petra Mikulan shows American pragmatism to have always been, in a certain sense, post-Anthropocene in its condition of emergence, bound up with settler colonialism and its extractive geopolitics. However, pragmatism in its speculative trust can also help engage education in thinking of (...) a future that does not belong to a presupposed humanity and its “nature” by dramatizing a certain insistence of educational institutions on maintaining comfort and trust in the “common good.” What is at stake in education facing planetary ecological devastation and intensified racial and social injustices, Mikulan contends, is an ethics of refusal of institutionalized learning, knowing, and doing tout court, particularly if these educational regimes continue to insist on governing what are deemed the only possible (and thus impossible) enactments of education. (shrink)

The interplay of content and context is observable in a moment to moment manner as propositional content unfolds. The current contribution illustrates this through data from real-time language comprehension indicating that propositional content is not computed in isolation but relies in important ways on context during every step of the computation of meaning. The relevant notion of context that we have to adopt includes all aspects of possible worlds and draws on a variety of knowledge representations, which in a first (...) processing phase serve to generate expectations for upcoming words. In a second phase, the discourse representation is assessed and if necessary updated by means of inferential reasoning and enrichment to reflect the speaker’s intended meaning. (shrink)

"Das Leben zu erkennen" (II,5,112) bestimmt Fichte als Gegenstand der "Wissenschaftslehre" (1794 ff.). Die Aufgabe der Philosophie besteht fur ihn nicht darin, "durch die Kraft (der) Syllogismen neue Objekte des naturlichen Denkens" (II,5,112) zu erschaffen. Er gewichtet seine Philosophie dergestalt, dass sie "das Leben, das System der Gefuhle und das Begehren zum Hochsten (macht) und. der Erkenntnis uberall nur das Zusehen (lasst)" (II,5,137). Die herausragende Stellung des Gefuhls besteht darin, dass es einerseits als begrifflich explizierbarer Teilaspekt der Reflexionen uber die (...) Grundbedingungen der unterschiedlichen Bewusstseins- bwz. Lebensformen des Menschen selbst Bestandteil der "Wissenschaftslehre" ist und dass es andererseits zugleich als die ausgezeichnete Weise der Selbstmanifestation dieser Lebensformen zu bestimmen ist, deren Genese in der "Wissenschaftslehre" rekonstruiert wird. Fichte entwickelt im System der "Wissenschaftslehre" eine weitreichende und complex strukturierte Theorie des Gefuhls, die die Bereiche des theoretischen und praktischen, sinnlichen, intellektuellen und intelligiblen Lebens umfasst. In einem systematisch angelegten Untersuchungsstrang werden Genese, Stellenwert und Funktion des Gefuhls in der "Wissenschaftslehre" und ihren Teildisziplinen entwickelt. In historischer Hinsicht wird Fichtes Lehre vom Gefuhl im Kontext der zeitgenossischen Diskussion (Kant, Jacobi u.a.) erortert. Systematische und historische Zielsetzungen werden parallel aus einer entwicklungsgeschichtlichen Perspektive entfaltet. Im Ausgang von den Jugendschriften bis zur "Wissenschaftslehre 1801" wird der Begriff des Gefuhls in seinen padagogischen, erkenntnistheoretischen, moralischen und religiosen Bedeutungen unter. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain well-known problems associated with compositionality. This will become particularly clear in the context of incomplete expressions. Our approach takes as a point of departure total freedom of interpretation in combination with the (...) parallel application of soft constraints on possible interpretations. These constraints can be contextual, intonational or syntactic in nature. The integration of pragmatic and syntactic/semantic information in a system of ranked constraints is proposed to correctly derive the optimal interpretations in cases of nominal anaphorization, determiner quantification and elliptical comparatives. (shrink)