In _Abductive Analysis_, Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans provide a new navigational map for constructing empirically based generalizations in qualitative research. They outline an accessible way to think about observations, methods, and theories that nurtures theory-formation without locking it into predefined conceptual boxes. The authors view research as continually moving back and forth between a set of observations and theoretical generalizations. To craft theory is to then pitch one’s observations in relation to other potential cases, both within and without (...) one’s field. The book provides novel ways to approach the challenges that plague qualitative researchers across the social sciences—how to think about the relation between methods and theories, how to conceptualize causality, how to construct axes of variation, and how to leverage the researcher’s community of inquiry. _Abductive Analysis_ is a landmark work that shows how a pragmatist approach provides a more productive and fruitful way to conduct qualitative research. (shrink)

This article considers the prospects of inference to the best explanation as a method of confirming causal claims vis-à-vis the medical evidence of mechanisms. I show that IBE is actually descriptive of how scientists reason when choosing among hypotheses, that it is amenable to the balance/weight distinction, a pivotal pair of concepts in the philosophy of evidence, and that it can do justice to interesting features of the interplay between mechanistic and population level assessments.

I argue that difference-making should be a crucial element for evaluating the quality of evidence for mechanisms, especially with respect to the robustness of mechanisms, and that it should take central stage when it comes to the general role played by mechanisms in establishing causal claims in medicine. The difference- making of mechanisms should provide additional compelling reasons to accept the gist of Russo-Williamson thesis and include mechanisms in the protocols for Evidence- Based Medicine (EBM), as the EBM+ research group (...) has been advocating. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Die Einführung von Impfprogrammen bei einer immun-naiven Bevölkerung in Europa spielte eine wesentliche Rolle für den Verlauf der COVID-19 Pandemie. Vor allem zu Beginn waren Impfprogramme jedoch durch einen Mangel an Impfdosen gekennzeichnet. Bei einer Zuteilung geringer Dosen an Krankenhäuser in der Initialphase, waren Krankenhausleitungen durch eine möglichst faire Verteilung dieser Impfdosen unter dem Krankenhauspersonal gefordert. Der Beitrag dokumentiert das Vorgehen im ersten Quartal 2021 an fünf deutschen Krankenhäusern in einem Klinikverbund. Wir berichten über einen regel-konsequentialistischen Ansatz auf der (...) strategischen Ebene, der durch einen egalitären Ansatz auf der taktischen Ebene ergänzt wurde. Es erfolgte die ethisch begleitete Entwicklung eines hybriden Schemas unter Verzicht auf klassische Verteilungsmuster, wie dem First-Come-First-Served Schema. Die Kombination des strategischen regel-konsequentialistischen Schemas mit egalitärer Verteilung auf der taktischen Ebene war vollständig funktional und unter den Mitarbeitenden des Klinikverbundes gut akzeptiert. In Zeiten von Pandemien und knappen Ressourcen spielt die Verteilung von medizinischen Gütern für die Funktionalität medizinischer Einrichtungen eine wichtige Rolle. Die Verteilung von Gütern, die durch den Staat bereitgestellt werden, bedarf jedoch einer Anpassung an die jeweiligen Gegebenheiten der Institutionen. Dieser Bericht zeigt eine mögliche Option für die Verteilung knapper Impfdosen auf, die nicht nur unter Personen der Zielgruppe verteilt wurden, sondern die auch die Funktionalität der medizinischen Versorgung in einer Region sicherte. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an anti-Humean critique to Williamson and Russo’s approach to medical mechanisms. I focus on one of the specific claims made by Williamson and Russo, namely the claim that micro-structural ‘mechanisms’ provide evidence for the stability across populations of causal relationships ascertained at the (macro-) level of (test) populations. This claim is grounded in the epistemic account of causality developed by Williamson, an account which—while not relying exclusively on mechanistic evidence for justifying causal judgements—appeals nevertheless to (...) mechanisms, and rejects their anti-Humean interpretation in terms of capacities, powers, potencies, etc. By using (and expanding on) Cartwright’s basic critique against Humean mechanisms, I suggest that, in order to move beyond the level of plausibility, Williamson and Russo’s position is in need of a clarification as to the occurent reading of the components, functioning and interferences of mechanisms. Relatedly, as concerns Williamson’s epistemic account of causation, I argue that this account is in need of a more straightforward answer as to what truth-makers its causal claims should have. (shrink)

An intro. to Didaktic (the heart of thinking about teaching/teacher educ in Germany) for English-speaking readers, drawing on a range of writings assoc. w/ this tradition. Throws light on assumptions, characteristics, & weaknesses of curriculum thought.

The globalization movement in recent decades has meant rapid growth in trade, financial transactions, and cross-country ownership of economic assets. In this article, we examine how the globalization of national business systems has influenced the framing of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This is done using text analysis of CEO letters appearing in the annual reports of 15 major corporations in Sweden during a period of transformational change. The results show that the discourse about CSR in the annual reports has changed (...) from a national and communitarian view of social responsibility (cf. a negotiated view of CSR) toward an international and individualistic view of social responsibility (cf. a self-regulating view of CSR). The article contributes theoretically (1) by adding a national–global dimension to previous conceptualizations of CSR and (2) by showing that the rise of CSR discourse and activities in the last 10 years does not have to imply an increased commitment and interest in corporate responsibility per se, only that there are increased societal expectations that corporations should develop the capability to act more independently as moral agents. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on life-threatening medical conditions and argue that from the point of view of natural properties, induction(s), and participation in laws, at least some of the ill organisms dealt with in somatic medicine form natural kinds in the same sense in which the kinds in the exact sciences are thought of as natural. By way of comparing two ‘divisions of nature’, viz., a ‘classical’ exact science kind (gold) and a kind of disease (Graves disease), I show (...) that there is no justifiable ‘ontological gap’ between disease kinds and exact sciences kinds. We have instead a difference of degree. (shrink)

This collection features eleven original essays, divided into three thematic sections, which explore the work of Wilfrid Sellars in relation to other twentieth-century thinkers. Section I analyzes Sellars’s thought in light of some of his influential predecessors, specifically Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, John Cook Wilson, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The second group of essays explores from different perspectives Sellars’s place within the analytic tradition, including his relation with analytic Kantianism and analytic pragmatism. The book’s final section extracts some of the most (...) significant lessons Sellars’s work has to offer for contemporary philosophy. These chapters address his views on inference, his views on truth and its connection to recent discussions about truth-relativism and truth-pluralism, his conception of self-knowledge, and his theory of perceptual experience. (shrink)

Der Autor schildert Lebenslauf und Karriere von Jürgen Habermas sowie die Menschen und Ereignisse, die ihn geprägt haben, und erläutert sachkundig seine Veröffentlichungen.

This paper reports on comparative research on how textual representations of issues related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in corporate annual reports from Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands have changed over time. The results show a substantial increase on a number of topics that can be linked to the general CSR-discourse in the 2001 sample in comparison to the 1991 and 1981 samples. The rise in the CSR-discourse appears to be related to a drop in other discourses related to issues (...) of social responsibility regarding the social, economic and political development of a company’s native country. (shrink)

The number of people with dementia is increasing worldwide. At the same time, family and professional caregivers’ resources are limited. A promising approach to relieve these carers’ burden and assist people with dementia is assistive technology. In order to be useful and accepted, such technologies need to respect the values and needs of their intended users. We applied the value sensitive design approach to identify values and needs of patients with dementia and family and professional caregivers in respect to assistive (...) technologies to assist people with dementia in institutionalized care. Based on semi-structured interviews of residents/patients with cognitive impairment, relatives, and healthcare professionals (10 each), we identified 44 values summarized by 18 core values. From these values, we created a values’ network to demonstrate the interplay between the values. The core of this network was caring and empathy as most strongly interacting value. Furthermore, we found 36 needs for assistance belonging to the four action fields of activity, care, management/administration, and nursing. Based on these values and needs for assistance, we created possible use cases for assistive technologies in each of the identified four action fields. All these use cases already are technologically feasible today but are not currently being used in healthcare facilities. This underlines the need for development of value-based technologies to ensure not only technological feasibility but also acceptance and implementation of assistive technologies. Our results help balance conflicting values and provide concrete suggestions for how engineers and designers can incorporate values into assistive technologies. (shrink)

Throughout his philosophical work, Schelling came to increasingly emphasize his conviction that the ultimate principles of philosophy are essentially practical: the ego formally conceived as act in early philosophy, creation as the unfolding of structurally rich action in late philosophy. It remained unclear, however, exactly what constituted the practicality of these principles, namely which concept of action Schelling used and how it is being integrated into the totality of his system. The task this study sets itself is to investigate into (...) these issues in respect to his middle and late philosophy. With the doctrine of potencies serving as point of departure, spirit is first reconstructed as practical consciousness. Creation as an ontotheological original act with the historical world as the space of human action is then systematically developed. Freedom, foresight, purposefulness, intentionality and futurity prove to be the central practical attributes of both human and divine action. Their connection is manifested in the religious consciousness of man and instantiated metaphysically in the relationship of time and eternity. Schelling's positive philosophy shows that these practical aspects are the irreducable prerequisites to render the historical world process intelligible. (shrink)

Inference to the Best Explanation is usually employed in the Scientific Realism debates. As far as particular scientific theories are concerned, its most ready usage seems to be that of a theory of confirmation. There are however more uses of IBE, namely as an epistemological theory of testimony and as a means of categorising and justifying the sources of evidence. In this paper, I will present, develop and exemplify IBE as a theory of the quality of evidence - taking examples (...) from medicine and showing that IBE can thereby provide the epistemological underpinning and justify the criteria of grading quality of mechanistic evidence that have been recently provided in the Clarke et al. paper on how evidence of medical mechanisms is to be construed alongside population studies. (shrink)

The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of the apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one's own time. "Apparatus" is at once a most ubiquitous and nebulous concept in Foucault's later thought. In a text bearing the same name Deleuze managed to contribute its mystification, but Agamben's leading essay (...) illuminates the notion: "I will call an apparatus," he writes, "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." Seen from this perspective, Agamben's work, like Foucault's, may be described as the identification and investigation of apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new ways to dismantle them. Though philosophy contains the notion of _philos_, or friend, in its very name, philosophers tend to be very skeptical about friendship. In his second essay, Agamben tries to dispel this skepticism by showing that at the heart of friendship and philosophy, but also at the core of politics, lies the same experience: the shared sensation of being. Guided by the question, "What does it mean to be contemporary?" Agamben begins the third essay with a reading of Nietzsche's philosophy and Mandelstam's poetry, proceeding from these to an exploration of such diverse fields as fashion, neurophysiology, messianism and astrophysics. (shrink)

This book assembles leading legal, political, and moral philosophers to examine the legacy of the work of Ronald Dworkin. They provide the most comprehensive critical treatment of Dworkin's accomplishments focusing on his work in all branches of philosophy, including his theory of value, political philosophy, philosophy of international law, and legal philosophy. The book's organizing principle and theme reflect Dworkin's self-conception as a builder of a unified theory of value, and the broad outlines of his system can be found throughout (...) the book. The first section addresses the most abstract and general aspect of Dworkin's work--the unity of value thesis. The second section explores Dworkin's contributions to political philosophy, and discusses a number of political concepts including authority, civil disobedience, the legitimacy of states and the international legal system, distributive justice, collective responsibility, and Dworkin's master value of dignity and the associated values of equal concern and respect. The third section addresses various aspects of Dworkin's general theory of law. The fourth and final section comprises accounts of the structure and defining values of discrete areas of law. (shrink)

_H. C. for Life, That Is to Say..._ is Derrida's literary critical recollection of his lifelong friendship with Hélène Cixous. The main figure that informs Derrida's reading here is that of "taking sides." While Hélène Cixous in her life and work takes the side of life, "for life," Derrida admits always feeling drawn to the side of death. Rather than being an obvious choice, taking the side of life is an act of faith, by wagering one's life on life. _H. (...) C. for Life_ sets up and explores this interminable "argument" between Derrida and Cixous as to what death has in store deep within life itself, before the end. In addition to being a memoir, it is also a theoretical confrontation—for example about the meaning of "might" and "omnipotence," and a philosophical and philological analysis of the crypts within the vast oeuvre of Hélène Cixous. Finally, the book is Derrida's tribute to the thought of the woman whom he regards as one of the great French poets, writers, and thinkers of our time. (shrink)

Each of the three essays constituting the dissertation's body explores a theoretical approach to conceptual content, as well as to particular kinds of concepts. A concluding chapter defends a distinction between two varieties of intentionality. ;Chapter 1 identifies a distinctive model of intentionality in Locke's discussion of our "ideas of the sorts of substances." Properly understood, his doctrine of the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas reveals that the sort represented by such an idea isn't settled by the idea's descriptive content. The key (...) to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is an injunction to "rectify" each substance-idea, one that reflects a norm governing natural-historical inquiry. Interestingly, Locke regards the resulting picture of the natural kinds represented by substance-ideas as compatible with his descriptivist account of how the extensions of substance-names are fixed. ;Chapter 2 examines Gupta and Belnap's theory of "circular concepts," which likewise appeals to a semantic "revision rule." Besides promising to explain semantic paradox when applied to the concept of truth, their theory significantly liberalizes the framework of truth conditional semantics. I criticize the rationale behind that liberalization by investigating the significance attributed to the revision rule, and propose invoking pragmatic ideas to do justice to some of the theory's motivating intuitions. ;Chapter 3 first argues that Brandom's appeal to normatively characterized linguistic practice subserves two approaches to content: one expressivist and the other reductionist. The criterion of adequacy motivating his "inferentialist" reduction of contentfulness, I then argue, is one he should dismiss in view of his deflationism about truth. Moreover, Brandom fails to vindicate the priority of attributions of inferential norms over attributions of propositional content. This criticism doesn't affect the expressivist elucidation of intentional concepts resulting from Brandom's normative-pragmatic description of assertional practice. ;My conclusion draws on this elucidation to defend a distinction prefigured in my construal of Locke as divorcing the aboutness of substance-ideas from assessments of truth. I argue that we should distinguish between a "representational" kind of intentionality whose attribution subserves explanations of successful inductive and explanatory practices, and a "semantic" kind whose attribution makes explicit normative features of the essentially communicative practice of assertion. (shrink)

The report reasons over the role of the religion in the course of the historic development of the so called “homo sapiens” and in the context of his aspirations to a world community which parallely went along both in secular and in religious aspect. It analyses the common features and differences between the world religions and world empires underlining that the world religions were the closest ones to materializing the dream about community of mankind due to the fact that they (...) contain the thorough models of human behaviour.This report underlines that at the contemporary degradation of values and institutions and with the increasing state of world chaos, the religion restores its positions. As a symbol of common cognition of the world, philosophy is able to give meaning not only to the alternatives of the chaos, but to the contemporary role of the religion for establishing new thorough orientation of the contemporary mankind. (shrink)

Part I. Furthering debate between leading theories of Law -- The Explantory Role of the Weak Natural Law Thesis -- In Defense of Hart -- Law's Authority is not a Claim to Preemption -- The Normative Fallacy Regarding Law's Authority -- The Problem about the Nature of Law vis-à-vis Legal Rationality Revisited : Towards an Integrative Jurisprudence -- Part II. The Power of Legal Systems -- Law as Power : Two Rule of Law Requirements -- A Comprehensive Hartian Theory of (...) Legal Obligation : Social Pressure, Coercive Enforcement, and the Legal Obligations of Citizens -- Law and the Entitlement to Coerce -- Part III. Conceptual Analysis -- Farewell to Conceptual Analysis (in Jurisprudence) -- What Do We Want Law to Be? Philosophical Analysis and the Concept of Law -- Part IV. New Directions -- Legal as a Thick Concept -- Making Old Questions New : Legality, Legal System, and State -- Legal Disagreements and the Dual Nature of Law -- Is There One Right Answer to the Question of the Nature of Law? (shrink)

The paper examines attempts to define philosophy as a discipline in early modern Spanish Aristotelianism. Such definitions served primarily didactical goals: a definition of philosophy conveyed first impressions of what philosophy was in order to facilitate the subsequent detailed apprehension of philosophical doctrines. But even though such definitions should not be misunderstood as >metaphilosophical< in the contemporary sense, they gave rise to quite detailed debates on the nature of philosophy, its relation to wisdom, or the domain of objects philosophy is (...) concerned with. Whereas the canon of problems discussed in the texts is quite homogeneous, the answers given differ considerably. These differences concern e. g. the status of philosophical knowledge, the relation between theoretical and practical philosophy or the role of mathematics in the canon of philosophical disciplines. (shrink)

Reality has become an increasingly prominent topic in contemporary philosophy. The book’s contributors are responding to the challenge to use the philosophically underexplored potential of film to disclose what the editors propose to call “the real of reality.”.

Otto Neurath (1882-1945) was a highly unorthodox thinker both in philosophy and economics. The contributions to this sparkling new book conclude that Neurath touched on many of the most critical problems of economic theory during its formative years as a modern discipline. His economics provide insights into the foundational problems of modern economics and should encourage contemporary economic theorists to critically reflect their own hidden presumptions.

The now classical idea that programmed cell death contributes to a plethora of developmental processes still has lost nothing of its impact. It is, therefore, important to establish effective three-dimensional reconstruction as well as simulation techniques to decipher the exact patterns and functions of such apoptotic events. The present study focuses on the question whether and how apoptosis promotes neurulation-associated processes in the spinal cord of Tupaia belangeri. Our 3D reconstructions demonstrate that at least two craniocaudal waves of apoptosis consecutively (...) pass through the dorsal spinal cord. The first wave appears to be involved in neural fold fusion and/or in selection processes among premigratory neural crest cells. The second one seems to assist in establishing the dorsal signaling center known as the roof plate. In the hindbrain, in contrast, apoptosis among premigratory neural crest cells progresses craniocaudally but discontinuously, in a segment-specific manner. Unlike apoptosis in the spinal cord, these segment-specific apoptotic events, however, precede later ones that seemingly support neural fold fusion and/or postfusion remodeling. Arguing with Whitehead that biological patterns and rhythms differ in that biological rhythms depend “upon the differences involved in each exhibition of the pattern” we show that 3D reconstruction and simulation techniques can contribute to distinguish between patterns and rhythms of apoptosis. By deciphering novel patterns and rhythms of developmental apoptosis, our reconstructions help to reconcile seemingly inconsistent earlier findings in chick and mouse embryos, and to create rules for computer simulations. (shrink)

This article reports the case of prenatally diagnosed twins who were conjoined at the umbilical cord and treated before birth. Fetoscopic cord abla­tion of the twin with a severe anomaly was chosen by the parents to reduce the risk of death for the co-twin, although the procedure meant the certain death of the disabled twin. The author discusses different ethical perspectives on the case and on preventive fetal therapy in general. He concludes that care should be taken to help parents (...) find and articulate their ethical position in complicated clinical settings in which life-or-death decisions must be made. Catholic physicians in particular have a duty to participate in such cases and to develop alternatives to a utilitarian medicine. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.2 (Summer 2011): 329–344. (shrink)

More than 50 years ago, Bongard introduced 100 visual concept learning problems as a challenge for artificial vision systems. These problems are now known as Bongard problems. Although they are well known in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, only very little progress has been made toward building systems that can solve a substantial subset of them. In the system presented here, visual features are extracted through image processing and then translated into a symbolic visual vocabulary. We introduce a formal language (...) that allows representing compositional visual concepts based on this vocabulary. Using this language and Bayesian inference, concepts can be induced from the examples that are provided in each problem. We find a reasonable agreement between the concepts with high posterior probability and the solutions formulated by Bongard himself for a subset of 35 problems. While this approach is far from solving Bongard problems like humans, it does considerably better than previous approaches. We discuss the issues we encountered while developing this system and their continuing relevance for understanding visual cognition. For instance, contrary to other concept learning problems, the examples are not random in Bongard problems; instead they are carefully chosen to ensure that the concept can be induced, and we found it helpful to take the resulting pragmatic constraints into account. (shrink)

Die stoische Philosophie bildet für nahezu alle Disziplinen der Theologie einen Verständnishintergrund, der in der Forschung für ein vornehmlich theologisches Publikum bisher allerdings kaum prinzipiell untersucht ist. Ausgehend von der stoischen Theologie wird daher eine Interpretation der Philosophie der Stoa im Ganzen geboten. Die einzelnen Teilgebiete der stoischen Philosophie werden von dem theologischen Prinzip der Stoa her in je einem eigenen Kapitel erschlossen und gedeutet. Dadurch wird es möglich, die divergenten stoischen Texte einem einheitlichen Verständnis zuzuführen und trotzdem ihre Eigenständigkeit (...) zu beachten. Die Studie gipfelt in der Erörterung, wie sich stoisch die Fragen nach Freiheit, Sinn und Gott beantworten lassen. Als Grundlagenwerk richtet sich der Band an WissenschaftlerInnen aller theologischen und religionsphilosophischen Disziplinen, die von einer einheitlichen Interpretation der stoischen Philosophie her ihren eigenen Forschungsschwerpunkt konzentriert angehen wollen, ohne dabei die stoischen Fragmente erst systematisieren zu müssen. (shrink)

This article discusses the influence that Schopenhauer’s thought had on Mihai Eminescu’s work with reference to the idea of “pessimism.” It also considers Schopenhauer’s influence on Romanian philosophy and literature at the end of the nineteenth century. We shall examine Eminescu’s alleged “Schopenhauerian pessimism,” considering firstly “pessimism” as a part of Eminescu’s “myth.” Secondly, we shall cover the critical reception of Eminescu’s “Schopenhauerian pessimism,” discussing the existing literary and philosophical scholarship. Finding that there are issues for debate regarding Schopenhauer’s alleged (...) influence upon Eminescu, we argue that Eminescu’s “Schopenhauerian pessimism” may be a “legend.” The article examines the connection between Eminescu and one of Schopenhauer’s most influential followers, Eduard von Hartmann. (shrink)

This article reviews Theorie und Praxis in der Philosophie der Antike. Demokrit, die Sokratiker, Platon und Aristoteles 978-3-7705-6393-7.