A major challenge with the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence applications is to manage the long-term societal impacts of this technology. Two central concerns that have emerged in this respect are that the optimized goals behind the data processing of AI applications usually remain opaque and the energy footprint of their data processing is growing quickly. This study thus explores how much people value the transparency and environmental sustainability of AI using the example of personal AI assistants. The results from (...) a choice-based conjoint analysis with a sample of more than 1.000 respondents from Germany indicate that people hardly care about the energy efficiency of AI; and while they do value transparency through explainable AI, this added value of an application is offset by minor costs. The findings shed light on what kinds of AI people are likely to demand and have important implications for policy and regulation. (shrink)

Stefan Collini challenges the common claim that universities need to show that they help to make money in order to justify getting more money.

The fact that the standard probabilistic calculus does not define probabilities for sentences with embedded conditionals is a fundamental problem for the probabilistic theory of conditionals. Several authors have explored ways to assign probabilities to such sentences, but those proposals have come under criticism for making counterintuitive predictions. This paper examines the source of the problematic predictions and proposes an amendment which corrects them in a principled way. The account brings intuitions about counterfactual conditionals to bear on the interpretation of (...) indicatives and relies on the notion of causal (in)dependence. (shrink)

Taking credit for digitalization and platformization, China has initiated its open science infrastructure implementation and made an effort to focus on open access (OA) journals and data sharing over the past two decades. With the continuous development need, issues and concerns have caught in attention, including data accessibility, research transparency, general population awareness and communication of science, public trust in science, and scientific research and innovation efficiency. This paper has unfolded the maze of open science stance in China and elaborated (...) on its current economy, openness and freedom extents, and future innovation potential towards a global open science community, within depth and scope of both the Chinese and Western scholars’ interpretations. (shrink)

By using the notions of exact truth and exact falsity, one can give 16 distinct definitions of classical consequence. This paper studies the class of relations that results from these definitions in settings that are paracomplete, paraconsistent or both and that are governed by the Strong Kleene schema. Besides familiar logics such as Strong Kleene logic, the Logic of Paradox and First Degree Entailment, the resulting class of all Strong Kleene generalizations of classical logic also contains a host of unfamiliar (...) logics. We first study the members of our class semantically, after which we present a uniform sequent calculus that is sound and complete with respect to all of them. Two further sequent calculi and \ calculus) will be considered, which serve the same purpose and which are obtained by applying general methods to construct sequent calculi for many-valued logics. Rules and proofs in the SK calculus are much simpler and shorter than those of the \ and the \ calculus, which is one of the reasons to prefer the SK calculus over the latter two. Besides favourably comparing the SK calculus to both the \ and the \ calculus, we also hint at its philosophical significance. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction General Scenario for the Transmission of Information and Its Application to Genetics Semiotic Dimensions of Biological Information Syntactic Dimension I: Measuring the Statistical Entropy of Signals and Messages Syntactic Dimension II: Estimating the Algorithmic Complexity of Signals and Messages Semantic Dimension: Classifying the Mutual Complexity of Transmitters and Receivers Acknowledgment References Further Reading.

The number of legal and nonlegal ethical regulations in the biomedical field has increased tremendously, leaving present-day practitioners and researchers in a virtual crossfire of legislations and guidelines. Judging by the production and by the way these regulations are motivated and presented, they are held to be of great importance to ethical practice. This view is shared by many commentators. For instance, Commons and Baldwin write that, within the nursing profession, patient care can be performed unethically or ethically depending on (...) the professional standards the nurses have set for themselves. They also hold that such standards are set when nurses become aware of the ethical codes available. As nurses are often not familiar with the codes, they do not all conform to them. Commons and Baldwin argue that nurses' ability to deal with ethical dilemmas is effectively secured with education on guidelines, creating a “barrier” between personal and professional values. (shrink)

Dieses Buch befasst sich mit der Wirkung Richard Wagners und Friedrich Nietzsches auf die Ideologien der radikalen Rechten, die in der einen oder anderen Form Eingang in die Sammlungsbewegung des Nationalsozialismus gefunden haben. Es konzentriert sich also auf die Rezeption durch die intellektuelle Rechte des Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik, die zur Analyse des Nationalsozialismus wie der neuen Rechten durch die Erhellung der Vorgeschichte der Ideologien beiträgt. Zwei Kapitel widmen sich dem theoretischen Werk Wagners und dem Werk Nietzsches und den (...) Beziehungen der beiden Leitfiguren des späten 19. Jahrhunderts untereinander"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Die Arbeit des Bundesverfassungsgerichts hat Ausstrahlungswirkung auf alle drei Staatsgewalten. Während sich das Interesse der Öffentlichkeit wie der Medien im Wesentlichen auf spektakuläre Einzelurteile fokussiert, bemüht sich die Rechtswissenschaft, die Rechtsprechung des BVerfG in ihrer gesamten Breite zu erfassen, zu analysieren und zu strukturieren. Die wissenschaftlichen MitarbeiterInnen nehmen als Erste Tendenzen und Rechtsprechungslinien wahr und begleiten sie mit ihrer Arbeit. Aus dieser Nahsicht herauswird in dem vorliegenden Bandder Versuch unternommen, zentrale, charakteristische und bedeutsame Themen und Fragestellungen aufzugreifen und auf wissenschaftlichem (...) Niveau zu erörtern. Die Beiträge gehen dabei über bloße Entscheidungsbesprechungen ebenso hinaus wie über Rechtsprechungsübersichten. Im Aufzeigen sowohl von Hintergründen als auch von Tendenzen der Verfassungsrechtsprechung und ihrer aktuellen und praktischen Bezüge zur Tätigkeit der anderen Staatsgewalten gerade durch Mitarbeiter des Gerichts liegt der besondere Wert dieses Sammelbandes. (shrink)

This paper challenges the thesis that Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of stages is a project undertaken in the first authorship, and is abandoned in the second one, where the task of becoming a Christian becomes central. For this, I have reopened the hermeneutical discussion with regards to the whole Kierkegaardian oeuvre, and proposed a new thesis that pin-points the shift from the first to the second authorship in 1847’s Upbuilding Discourses. In this sense, the discourse on the “Lilies and the Birds”, (...) which is suggestively repeated in 1849, becomes paradigmatic. The proposed restructuring of Kierkegaard’s authorship eventually puts forward the ground for a new way of understanding the drastic differences between categories of “the Christian” and “the religious”, and the aesthetic writings/stage. (shrink)

Can private companies legitimately regulate sharing markets, and if yes, how? Whereas scholars have either criticized sharing platforms for expanding into private and public arenas or welcomed them to counterbalance encroaching government regulations, studies document their unbridled popularity. On the basis of a special version of social contracts theory pioneered by James Buchanan, we develop a heuristics that helps guide reasoning about the legitimacy of the sharing economy’s regulatory function. First, we discuss the conditions under which free and responsible individuals (...) deliberately subject themselves to rules without their prior direct participation, that is, exit, voice, and constitutional limits. Second, we suggest sharing platforms can use novel ordo-responsibilities to establish a sharing constitution that takes these conditions into account. Third, we argue that sharing platforms can legitimately do so within an enabling institutional environment in society, the provision of which relies on the joint efforts of sharing platforms, political actors, and civil society. (shrink)

The principal task of Marxist ethics is not to formulate particular moral principles or to implement them but to describe and explain moral reality. Ethics is not a philosophical discipline although as a science of morals in its own rights it is based on philosophical premises of historical materialism. Trying to define the principal tasks of Marxist ethics in the socialist society the author contends that Marxist ethics should determine the contents, the forms and the ways in which the communist (...) morality develops and functions: in the analysis and scientific examination of the social reality it should reveal the causes of contradictions and moral conflicts in the socialist society, it should also identify favourable conditions for an extensive acceptance of the communist morality. (shrink)

We discuss four distinct semantic consequence relations which are based on Strong Kleene theories of truth and which generalize the notion of classical consequence to 3-valued logics. Then we set up a uniform signed tableau calculus, which we show to be sound and complete with respect to each of the four semantic consequence relations. The signs employed by our calculus are,, and, which indicate a strict assertion, strict denial, tolerant assertion and tolerant denial respectively. Recently, Ripley applied the strict–tolerant account (...) of assertion and denial to develop a new approach to truth and alethic paradox, which we call the Strict–Tolerant Conceptionof Truth. The paper aims to contribute to our understanding of STCT in at least three ways. First, by developing the strict–tolerant calculus.Second, by developing a semantic version of the strict–tolerant calculus, which informs us about the assertoric possibilities relative to a fixed ground model. Third, by showing that the strict–tolerant calculus and assertoric semantics jointly suggest that STCT's claim that the strict and tolerant can be understood in terms of one another has to be reconsidered. (shrink)

Sartre’s description of violence from his often-neglected Notebooks for an Ethics can be analyzed from a psychological point of view in relationship with other negative passions like hatred, fury, pain and sufferance. Literary characters such as Seneca’s Medea or Anouilh’s Antigone seem to embody this fundamental characteristic of violence: the alliance with an ontological striving for destruction. In this paper we provide an interpretation of the Sartrean portrait of the violent man, analyzing its connections with his existential doctrine from Being (...) and Nothingness, and its affinity with modern nihilism (Nietzsche and Cioran) and Gnostic dualism (Catharism and Manicheanism). (shrink)

Critical posthumanism is a theory paradigm that has become hugely influential across the humanities and social sciences in the last twenty years. This volume collects essays written over the last decade by one of the founders and leading figures of this movement.

This chapter describes the main themes of Dewey's approach. It examines some central philosophical topics from the impressive richness of Dewey's works and the comprehensive body of his writings, which fill thirty-seven volumes in the critical edition of the Collected Works. The chapter provides comments to a brief discussion of each topic, highlighting its importance as an element within Dewey's overall philosophical approach. The topics include “experience” as a philosophical core concept, theory of art, logic and theory of knowledge, anthropology (...) and social psychology, ethics and moral philosophy, social philosophy and political theory, theory of education and school, and theory of religion. (shrink)

We replace Shelah's notion of true cofinality by the notion of the bounding number for an arbitrary partial order and begin to develop a theory similar to Shelah's pcf theory, which gives many analog results, including the existence of the so-called generators, for the more general case of products of partial orders. The development can be strictly divided into an ideal theoretical and a combinatorial part. We also show that pcf theory is a special case of this more general theory (...) and conclude with some remarks about Shelah's function pp, which also show that there are some differences between pcf theory and the presented theory of bounding numbers. (shrink)

SummaryErnest Gellner was, by all accounts, one of the most unconventional thinkers of the twentieth century. Not only was the content of his theories often strikingly original, but he also arrived at them by use of a singularly personal thought-style. The article describes the most salient features of this thought-style: his quest for overviews, on the one hand, and for penetrating and unexpected insights, on the other, his opposition to what he perceived as humanistic complacency, his academic elitism, and much (...) else. In the final section, an assessment of the most conspicuous feature of Gellner's thought-style—his tendency to downplay the importance of detail and to focus on high-level theory—is given. It is argued that this characteristic served Gellner better in philosophy and the history of ideas than in the social sciences. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Robert Nozick and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the author argues that human self-consciousness cannot be explained in naturalistic terms. Instead, it is a spontaneous phenomenon.

In contemporary theories of language it is common to appeal to propositions as expressed by utterances of sentences. The aim of this paper is to question this idea, for as I argue, the relationship between sentences and propositions cannot be worked out in any rewarding way.