Der Band vereinigt die Vorträge der internationalen Vorlesungsreihe “Tierrechte” an der Universität Heidelberg im Sommersemester 2006. Herausgegeben von der Interdisziplinären Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik (IAT) mit ihren gegenwärtigen und früheren Mitgliedern Katharina Blesch, Alexandra Breunig, Stefan Buss, Guillaume Dondainas, Rainer Ebert, Florian Fruth, Nils Kessler, Matthias Müller, Uta Panten, Anette Reimelt, Bernd Schälling, Jürgen Schneele, Adriana Sixt-Sailer, Manja Unger und Alexander Zehmisch, setzt er die mit der Vorlesungsreihe begonnenen Bemühungen um eine unvoreingenommene Vermittlung der tierethischen Forschung fort. Der Band will (...) es Lesern und Leserinnen ermöglichen, von verschiedenen Seiten Einblick in den modernen Tierrechtsdiskurs zu erhalten. Beiträge lieferten: Silke Bitz, Gieri Bolliger, Carl Cohen, Raymond Corbey, Eugen Drewermann, Mylan Engel Jr., Antoine F. Goetschel, Helmut F. Kaplan, Eisenhart von Loeper, Jörg Luy, Renate Rastätter, Tom Regan, Kurt Remele, Hanna Rheinz, Peter S. Wenz, Markus Wild, Hanno Würbel. (shrink)

ObjectivePhysical and mental well-being are threatened by climate change. Since hospitals in high-income countries contribute significantly to climate change through their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the medical ethics imperative of ‘do no harm’ imposes a responsibility on hospitals to decarbonise. We investigated hospital stakeholders’ perceptions of hospitals’ GHG emissions sources and the sense of responsibility for reducing GHG emissions in a hospital.MethodsWe conducted 29 semistructured qualitative expert interviews at one of Germany’s largest hospitals, Heidelberg University Hospital. Five patients, 12 clinical (...) and 12 administrative employees on different levels were selected using purposive maximum variation sampling. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using the framework approach.ResultsConcerning GHG emissions, hospital stakeholders perceived energy and waste as most relevant emission sources followed by mobility. Climate change mitigation in general was considered as important. However, in their role as patients or employees, hospital stakeholders felt less responsible for climate change mitigation. They saw providing best possible medical care to be the top priority in hospitals and were often concerned that patients’ health could be jeopardised by climate change mitigation measures.ConclusionPerceptions of most important emission sources did not coincide with those in literature, highlighting the need to inform stakeholders, for instance, about pharmaceuticals as important emission source. A frequently perceived conflict between reducing emissions and providing high-quality medical care could be eased, if reducing emissions would not only be justified as a contribution to mitigation, but also as a contribution to preventing ill health—a basic principle of medical ethics. (shrink)

Aristotle's Categories can easily seem to be a statement of a naïve, pre-philosophical ontology, centered around ordinary items. Wolfgang-Rainer Mann argues that the treatise, in fact, presents a revolutionary metaphysical picture, one Aristotle arrives at by (implicitly) criticizing Plato and Plato's strange counterparts, the "Late-Learners" of the Sophist. As Mann shows, the Categories reflects Aristotle's discovery that ordinary items are things (objects with properties). Put most starkly, Mann contends that there were no things before Aristotle. The author's argument consists (...) of two main elements. First, a careful investigation of Plato which aims to make sense of the odd-sounding suggestion that things do not show up as things in his ontology. Secondly, an exposition of the theoretical apparatus Aristotle introduces in the Categories--an exposition which shows how Plato's and the Late-Learners' metaphysical pictures cannot help but seem inadequate in light of that apparatus. In doing so, Mann reveals that Aristotle's conception of things--now so engrained in Western thought as to seem a natural expression of common sense--was really a hard-won philosophical achievement. Clear, subtle, and rigorously argued, The Discovery of Things will reshape our understanding of some of Aristotle's--and Plato's--most basic ideas. (shrink)

The bounded confidence model has become a popular tool for studying communities of epistemically interacting agents. The model makes the idealizing assumption that all agents always have access to all other agents’ belief states. We draw on resources from network epistemology to do away with this assumption. In the model to be proposed, we impose an explicit communication network on a community, due to which each agent has access to the beliefs of only a selection of other agents. A much-discussed (...) result from network epistemology shows that densely connected communication networks are not always preferable to sparser networks. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether there are any noteworthy network effects in a version of the bounded confidence model augmented with communication networks, and in particular whether the aforementioned result from network epistemology can be replicated in that version. (shrink)

'Ich sah mich nach einer Verstandeshandlung um, die alle anderen enthalt und sich nur durch die verschiedenen Modifikationen und Momente unterscheidet, das Mannigfaltige der Vorstellungen unter die Einheit des Denkens zu bringen. Und da fand ich, diese Verstandeshandlung bestehe im Urteilen'. Kant formuliert damit ein Arbeitsprogramm, das den methodischen Grundzug seiner drei Kritiken pragt. Das vorliegende Buch skizziert zunachst Knotenpunkte der Haupt- und der Nebenwege, auf denen die offentliche Auseinandersetzung mit Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft dahin gelangt ist, dieses Arbeitsprogramm (...) ernst zu nehmen. Und es mundet in die Charakterisierung der Haupt- und der Nebenwege, auf denen Kant selbst zu den ursprunglichen Einsichten gelangt ist, durch die er die Moglichkeit und die Fruchtbarkeit, aber auch die Grenzen moglicher Erfahrung mit urteils-analytischen Mitteln durchsichtig gemacht hat. (shrink)

The idea behind someone’s being “liable” to self-defense is that the person has forfeited her rights. This chapter explores how we ought to understand how and why individuals forfeit such rights. Specifically, it claims that forfeiture is a negative normative power, whereby the actor’s voluntary choice to violate another’s rights grounds the loss of his own rights against physical injury. It argues that individuals do not lose “the right to life” but simply claim rights against injury that the defender knows (...) will prevent a culpable rights infringement. It further explores how the self-defense limitations of necessity and proportionality are internal to question of forfeiture itself, rather than being additional limits on the use of force. The chapter further explains why, given the grounding of the forfeiture, the aggressor forfeits only to those who know they must use defensive force. So understood, forfeiture is defeasibly sufficient for all-things-considered permissibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on Kant’s doctrine of figurative synthesis. Figurative synthesis is the result of the activity of productive transcendental imagination. This is the chief problem of the so-called “second proof step” in Kant’s deduction of the categories according to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The pure original synthetic apperception forms in the inner and outer sense - i. e. in time and space - by self-affection structures of order that make it possible to (...) cognize empirical objects. The order of space and time through figurative syntheses must be distinguished on the one hand from space and time as forms of intuition and on the other hand from the order of the manifold given in space and time. This clarifies the differences and relations between the constitutive noetic faculties of our knowledge apparatus. (shrink)

Dreams of chase or pursuit, falling, sex, flying, nudity, failing an examination, one's own and other's death, fire, teeth falling out and some other themes experienced, even if only rarely, by many people all over the world have been labelled 'typical dreams'. This essay argues that typical dreaming, rather a syndrome of themes than monothematic, reflects an extraordinary state of mind and brain. Odd and particularly memorable perceptions, as well as emerging awareness of sleep and dreaming -- i.e. parallels to (...) lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, complex partial seizure, epileptic and migraine auras, and aspects of dreaming after trauma -- can be traced with some plausibility in all prominent variants of typical dreaming. When viewed from this perspective, for example, dream pursuers are much more a shadow of the bodily self than a metaphor for the psycho- biographical situation or evolutionarily implemented sparring partners who make dreamers fit for the struggle for survival during waking hours. (shrink)

Many criminal law scholars have criticized the responsible corporate officer doctrine as a form of strict and vicarious liability. It is neither. It is merely a doctrine that supplies a duty in instances of omissions. Siding with Todd Aagaard in this debate, I argue that a proper reading of the cases yields that the responsible corporate officer doctrine is just duty supplying, and does not allow for strict liability when the underlying statute requires mens rea. After analyzing Dotterweich, Park, and (...) their progeny, I probe the depths of this duty-supplying doctrine, including to whom the duty is owed, whether the duty is grounded in statute, cause of peril, or contract, and what the content of the duty is. Although the responsible corporate officer doctrine unveils questions we may have about duty generally, it is no more problematic than other duty-supplying doctrines in the criminal law. (shrink)

In dieser Untersuchung wird Descartes' Hervorhebung der Rolle der Subjektivität in der Begründung von Wahrheit und Erkenntnis verteidigt. Die Subjektivität generiert einerseits durch eine von ihr hergestellte Erkenntnisordnung und Wissensökonomie Einsicht in neue Wahrheiten und andererseits folgt aus dem wissenden und unbezweifelbaren Selbstverhältnis des endlichen Subjekts die Evidenz als Wahrheitskriterium. Dadurch gelingt es Descartes den notwendigen Zusammenhang von Wahrheitsgeltung und Verifikation in den kognitiven Leistungen des Subjekts zu plausibilisieren. Neuartig ist die hier vertretene These, dass sich das Wahrheitskonzept der Evidenz (...) gegen den Vorwurf des Psychologismus verteidigen lässt. (shrink)

The issue of duplicates and duplication in ethnographic collection is frequently regarded as a process that begins and ends in the museum as a fundamental act of the process of curating. In contrast, this article maintains, this practice occurred all along the chain of collecting, where indigenous artefacts operated as items of exchange in the context of the colonial encounter. Using the example of German New Guinea, the article maintains that epistemological concerns, as symbolic currency both in terms of inter-museum (...) exchange and in terms of contributing to individual and institutional prestige, guiding ethnographic intuitions had little influence on colonial resident collectors. Colonial residents, who resented the heavy hand of colonial and museum officials in Berlin, infused duplication with their own desires, which included commercial gain or the conferment of the many German state decorations. The colonized indigenous population benefited from the increasing demand for their material culture, which provided valuable items and bargaining chips in the emerging colonial exchange. Duplicates are identified as doppelgängers to explore the political tensions that emerged in connection with duplication among museum officials and European and indigenous colonial residents. (shrink)

The book series Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) publishes high-quality work in linguistics that addresses current issues in synchrony and diachrony, theoretically or empirically oriented.

Objective: Deficits in affective processing are associated with impairments in both mental and physical health. The role of affective processing in patients with functional somatic complaints such as irritable bowel syndrome remains unclear. Most studies have focused on the capacity for emotional awareness and expression, but neglect other dimensions of affective processing. Therefore, this study aimed to systematically analyze differences in six different dimensions of affective processing between patients with IBS and healthy controls. Additionally, we exploratively investigated the impact of (...) IBS symptom severity, psychological distress, and attachment styles on affective processing in IBS. Methods: A controlled cross-sectional multi-center study was conducted. Overall, 127 patients with IBS were compared with 127 matched HCs using multivariate analysis of variances. Affective processing was operationalized in line with the affect cascade model on six specific dimensions: emotional experience, emotional awareness, affect tolerance, affect differentiation, affect regulation, and emotional communication. They were measured using two subscales of the Mentalizing Questionnaire and four subscales of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis–Structure Questionnaire. Linear regression analysis was used to investigate the influence of IBS symptom severity, depression, anxiety, and anxious and avoidant attachment styles on the different dimensions of affective processing in IBS. Results: Patients with IBS compared to HCs showed deficits in all six dimensions of affective processing. Deficits were largest for affect tolerance and lowest for emotional experience and emotional awareness. Moderate effect sizes were found for affect differentiation, emotional communication, and affect regulation. Moreover, explorative analyses indicated that affective processing in patients with IBS was significantly influenced by levels of anxiety and insecure attachment. Conclusion: The results indicate a specific pattern of affective processing abilities in patients with IBS. The deficits in affective processing are more prominent in the area of understanding and tolerating difficult affective states than experiencing affective states. This opens interesting perspectives for the development of specific psychotherapeutic interventions. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive overview of what the criminal law would look like if organised around the principle that those who deserve punishment should receive punishment commensurate with, but no greater than, that which they deserve. Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan argue that desert is a function of the actor's culpability, and that culpability is a function of the risks of harm to protected interests that the actor believes he is imposing and his reasons for acting in (...) the face of those risks. The authors deny that resultant harms, as well as unperceived risks, affect the actor's desert. They thus reject punishment for inadvertent negligence as well as for intentions or preparatory acts that are not risky. Alexander and Ferzan discuss the reasons for imposing risks that negate or mitigate culpability, the individuation of crimes, and omissions. (shrink)

In Helen Frowe’s book, Defensive Killing, she argues that some cases of seemingly futile self-defense are actually instances of justifiable defense of the victim’s honor. This paper explores Frowe’s claim, first by isolating the central cases and then by examining her rejection of punitive reasons. From there, the paper examines Frowe’s understanding of “defense of honor,” ultimately suggesting that Frowe’s conception is best construed as action that has expressive, but not defensive, value. From there, I turn to two more general (...) puzzles. First, what if the defender mistakenly believes that she can successfully defend and acts for that reason, but the reason that actually supports her action is not one she is acting in light of? And, second, how ought we to understand the interests of an aggressor who has forfeited his rights? (shrink)

In diesem Artikel geht es um die Beziehungen zwischen der von Jürgen Habermas entwickelten Diskursethik und den Studierendenseminaren, die der Ulmer Arbeitskreis „Ethik in der Medizin“ veranstaltet. Zunächst erfolgt eine Darstellung der Kernaussagen der philosophischen Diskursethik. Sie liefert eine formale Argumentationsprozedur, mit der es möglich ist, die Legitimität strittig gewordener Normen im Diskurs zu prüfen. Anschließend wird das in Ulm von Baitsch und Sponholz entwickelte Modell der Seminare „Ethische Entscheidungskonflikte im ärztlichen Alltag“ vorgestellt. Da sich die Ulmer Seminare unter anderem (...) auf die Diskursethik als theoretischen Hintergrund berufen, werden die Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede beider Konzepte untersucht. Der Hauptunterschied ist der zwischen einem Begründungs- und einem Anwendungsdiskurs. Gemeinsam sind den Ansätzen die grundsätzlich kognitivistische Einstellung und die „Spielregeln“ des Diskurses. (shrink)