Heraklits Denken und seine philosophischen Positionen haben einen ungeheuren Einfluss im Altertum, in der Neuzeit und bis in die Moderne hinein ausgeübt. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes machen die kulturellen Bedingungen sichtbar, unter denen dieses Denken entstanden ist, und helfen, sowohl den,Dunklen' selbst, wie er seit der Antike genannt wurde, als auch seine Wirkung systematisch besser zu verstehen. Alle Beiträge gehen auf eine internationale Konferenz zurück, die im Oktober 2013 ausgewiesene Spezialisten zu einem umfassenden Dialog in Ephesos zusammenführte. Im Zusammenwirken verschiedener (...) Disziplinen ließ sich Heraklits Ort in der Philosophie- und Geistesgeschichte genauer bestimmen, als das in den bisher vorwiegend auf philosophiehistorisch-philologische Aspekte fokussierten Darstellungen geschehen ist. Das Alleinstellungsmerkmal der Konferenz in ihrer Orientierung am genius loci und auch die damit einhergehende Einbeziehung historischer und archäologischer Fragestellungen bedeutet etwas Neues für die Heraklit-Forschung: Das Aufzeigen der Verbindungen zwischen der naturräumlichen Situation in Ephesos zur Zeit Heraklits, dem Verhältnis des Denkers zu seiner Stadt sowie der Rolle seiner Reflexion auf die Bedingungen menschlicher Erkenntnis und ihrer Vermittlung. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung In diesem Artikel geht es darum, die Genealogie im Anschluss an Michel Foucault für die Religionswissenschaft fruchtbar zu machen und ihr Programm zu schärfen. Dazu hebe ich zuerst einige wesentliche Aspekte hervor, welche die Genealogie ausmachen. Im Folgenden untersuche ich den Artikel „Umkämpfte Historisierung“ von Michael Bergunder als ein aktuelles Beispiel für die Anwendung der Genealogie in der Religionswissenschaft. Diesem stelle ich im letzten Teil des Artikels meine eigene Genealogie von Religion gegenüber. Ich zeige, wie sich die Konstitution eines (...) spezifisch religiösen Bereichs und die nominalistische Auffassung seiner Zeichen innerhalb des Ritenstreits im Kontext von Mission in Asien seit dem 16. Jh. vollzogen hat. Wie Religion verstanden wurde, hing dabei unmittelbar davon ab, welche kolonialen Interessen durchgesetzt werden sollten. Die Verstrickung von Religion in den Zusammenhang von Macht-Subjekt-Wissen muss deshalb zukünftig konsequenter auch durch die Religionswissenschaft untersucht werden. Religion ist keine unschuldige Kategorie der Beobachtung, sondern über sie wurden und werden Kämpfe um Macht und gesellschaftlichen Einfluss ausgetragen. (shrink)

It is an assumption common to many theories of rationality that all practical reasons are based on a person's given desires. I shall call any approach to practical reasons which accepts this assumption a "Humean approach". In spite of many criticisms, the Humean approach has numerous followers who take it to be the natural and inevitable view of practical reason. I will develop an argument against the Humean view aiming to explain its appeal, as well as to expose its mistake. (...) I focus on just one argument in favour of the Humean approach, which I believe can be constructed as the background idea of many Humean accounts: the argument from motivation. (shrink)

Rooted in Assyriology with a strong interdisciplinary outlook, this book offers the first comprehensive study of ancient Mesopotamian notions of the human person, including semantic analyses of Akkadian terms for body parts and multiple ...

Bei Kant tauchen viele antike Autoren und Theorien auf. In dieser ersten Gesamtbearbeitung zum Thema wird gegen eine langjährige Forschungsmeinung gezeigt, dass nicht so sehr Platon und Aristoteles als vielmehr der hellenistischen Philosophie die entscheidende Rolle für sein Denken zukommt. Anhand der drei Kritiken werden Konstanzen und Umbrüche seines Antikeverständnisses herausgearbeitet und in ihren Konsequenzen für die Kantdeutung beleuchtet.

The debate on the role and identity of Christian social ethics in liberal democracy touches upon the question about the relationship between universality and specificity. Rather than argue for the difference between these approaches, it can be argued that they are to be understood in a differentiated unity with each other. This idea can be substantiated by a figurative appropriation of a Chalcedonian Christology, particularly the communicatio idiomatum . The communicative dimension of this concept has been found to be useful (...) for a reinterpretation of the idea of responsibility. By engaging contemporary positions of communicative ethics, H. Richard Niebuhr's understanding of responsibility as responsiveness, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christological concept of responsibility in a constructive dialogue with each other, the article has attempted to outline main tenets of a responsive concept of responsibility based on a broadly conceived Chalcedonian Christology. This responsive understanding of responsibility serves as the foundation of a third position beyond the futile antagonism of liberalism and communitarianism. Hereby it maintains the reasonableness of a liberal democratic assertion of a common political discourse, and yet it also contends the necessity of authentic particular worldviews and outlooks. In its argument for such a third-way thinking it hopes to contribute with an understanding where these positions are seen in a constructive relationship – rather than in contrast – with each other. (shrink)

This paper investigates the dynamic and performative construction of publics in public engagement exercises. In this investigation, we, on the one hand, analyse how public engagement settings as political machineries frame particular kinds of roles and identities for the participating publics in relation to ‘the public at large’. On the other hand, we study how the participating citizens appropriate, resist and transform these roles and identities, and how they construct themselves and the participating group in relation to wider publics. The (...) empirical basis of our argument is a discussion of four different kinds of participation events in Austria. Building on these observations we develop conclusions about the public up-take of public participation in technoscience and the role of public engagement in current techno-political cultures. (shrink)

Donald Davidson writes that “[r]easons for intending to do something are very much like reasons for action, indeed one might hold that they are exactly the same except for time.” That the reasons for forming an intention and the reasons for acting as intended are in some way related is a widely accepted claim. But it can take different forms: (1) the reasons may mirror each other so that there is a (derivative) reason to intend whenever there is a reason (...) to act; or (2) they may reduce to just one kind: perhaps all reasons for action are really reasons for forming intentions.3 Or the other way around: (3) all reasons for intentions are really reasons to act. The three versions are not equally strong contenders though. The third - that reasons to intend could reduce to reasons to act - seems unlikely. After all, there may be reasons to form future-directed intentions, in particular, independently of the reason to act as intended. The second suggestion falls prey to different considerations: reasons to act can, at least sometimes, be reasons to produce a certain outcome, quite independently of the intention with which the action is done, or whether it is done intentionally at all. In these cases, the reason to act is not (or not obviously) a reason to intend. Therefore, I don’t pursue the possibility of a reduction in this paper. My focus is on the first, non-reductive proposal. I will discuss various versions of it in some detail, but ultimately reject it. (shrink)

Zebrafish is recognized as one of the most important vertebrate model organisms; however, its value in pharmacological studies has not been extensively explored and exploited. In this review, I summarize significant findings about the effects of drugs and medicines on important physiological processes in zebrafish. Our experiments have shown that cardiovascular, anti‐angiogenic and anti‐cancer drugs elicit comparable responses in zebrafish embryos to those in mammalian systems. Similar observations have been reported by other laboratories, exposing zebrafish to a variety of pharmaceutical (...) active compounds affecting a range of different processes. All the data summarized indicate that zebrafish represents a very valuable organism for different kinds of pharmacological studies, such as screenings of chemical libraries, lead validation and optimization, mode‐of‐action studies, analysis of gene function, predictive toxicology and teratogenicity, pharmacogenomics and toxicogenomics. Zebrafish pharmacological assays have specific advantages compared to in vitro cell culture studies and in vivo experiments using mice, complementing these assays to give valuable guides for future tests of new drugs for human therapy. BioEssays 25:904–912, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Among various changing views on sex and gender, transsexualism, theoretically as well as clinically, raises a paradoxical issue: transsexual subjects seem to confirm something that they simultaneously disclaim or, at least, destabilize with their transition. These days psychoanalysis remains rather critical towards transsexualism. Jacques Lacan has developed several theories on sex and gender, reworking them during the course of his lifetime. That is why his work includes possibilities of understanding transsexual phenomena at the level of singular solutions that he himself, (...) especially with respect to some of his earlier cases, has not been able to formulate. (shrink)

Zwischen 1920 und 1925 kam es nach Vorarbeiten von Jones, Abraham, Stärcke, van Ophuijsen und Alexander sowie in Abrahams Hauptwerk, dem Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido, zu einer Veränderung der psychoanalytischen Theorie, die sich vor allem auf die Stellung der Aggression bezog. Die stärkere Gewichtung der präödipalen Aggression wurde in London in erster Linie von Abrahams Analysanden James und Edward Glover durchgeführt. Ihre Arbeiten bereiteten den Boden für die Rezeption von Melanie Klein, einer weiteren Abraham-Analysandin, die ihrerseits von Alix Strachey, (...) auch sie eine Analysandin Abrahams, sowie von Ernest Jones unterstützt wurde. Klein entwickelte in der Analyse mit Kindern eine Technik, die sich bevorzugt auf die Wahrnehmung und Deutung der Aggression in der Stunde bezog. All dies, ohne dass Freud die neue Linie begrüßt hätte, was aber seit dem Erstarken der lokalen Gruppen in Berlin und London nicht mehr so stark ins Gewicht fiel. Gleichwohl blieb die Frage nach der Stellung der Aggression in der Schwebe, während sich Freud bis zuletzt für das Primat des Sexuellen aussprach und sich von den Positionen der hier erwähnten Schüler zwischen 1920 und 1925 mehrere Male ausdrücklich distanzierte. (shrink)

Aus philosophischer Perspektive diskutiert Ulrike Kleemeiers Studie einer Reihe auch aktuelle wieder sehr brisanter Probleme. Analysiert werden der Begriff des Krieges ebenso wie die Ursachen von Kriegen und die Kriegsprävention. Dabei untersucht die Autorin auch den Zusammenhang von Krieg und Gerechtigkeit bzw. Krieg und Recht, das Verhältnis von Krieg und Politik, das Problem des Bürgerkriegs sowie die Bedeutung kriegerisch-militärischer Tugenden und Kompetenzen. Die Auseinandersetzung erfolgt in exemplarischer Form anhand der Theorien von Platon, Hobbes und Clausewitz. Der Arbeit liegt die (...) Annahme zugrunde, dass eine Theorie des Krieges sinnvoll nur in einem interdisziplinären Bezugsrahmen entwickelt werden kann. Deshalb wendet sich dieses Buch an Fachphilosophen genauso wie an alle anderen am Thema Krieg interessierten Forscher, etwas an Historiker, Politologen und Sozialwissenschaftler. (shrink)

The buck-passing account of value (BPA) is very fertile ground that has given rise to a number of interpretations and controversies. It has originally been proposed by T.M. Scanlon as an analysis of value: according to it, being good ‘is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond to a thing in certain ways. Rather, to be good or valuable is to have other properties that constitute such reasons’. Buck-passing stands in a complicated relation to the fitting-attitude analysis (...) of normativity that reaches back to the work of Brentano and Ewing. Proponents of FA-analysis hold that, as a matter of the conceptual analysis of ‘good’, something is good if it is fitting to have pro-attitudes of a certain kind towards it. The ambition of FA-analysis is to explain all practical normativity in terms of the fittingness of attitudes, which – while being itself a normative concept – is the only normative concept which grounds all others. Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen welcomed BPA as a contemporary version of FA-analysis, and others have followed this suggestion. But whether BPA should be regarded as a version of FA-analysis is a moot point. In section I, I show that BPA is not as obviously a successor of the fitting-attitude analysis of value as some have thought. The much discussed wrong-kind-of-reasons (for short: WKR) problem afflicts buck-passing only in so far as it incorporates a version of FA analysis, or at any rate is expressed in terms of reasons for attitudes. There can be a buck-passing account of value which is not affected by the problem: one that limits the account to reasons for actions (rather than attitudes). However, insofar as BPA does inherit elements of FA analysis, it also has a WKR problem. In section II, I discuss this problem and its solution. I show that it has been misidentified in the current literature, and that – once we understand the problem correctly – its solution is likely to be unavailable to the buck-passer. Hence we should reject any account of BPA that incorporates FA analysis. That leaves us with versions which do not: versions that formulate BPA in terms of reasons for actions only, rather than reasons for attitudes. Finally, in section III, I discuss why buck-passing seemed to be appealing to begin with, and whether a version of BPA that does not incorporate FA analysis is a viable contender of the account – beyond the WKR problem. (shrink)

Many of the things we do in the course of a day we don't do intentionally: blushing, sneezing, breathing, blinking, smiling—to name but a few. But we also do act intentionally, and often when we do we act for reasons. Whether we always act for reasons when we act intentionally is controversial. But at least the converse is generally accepted: when we act for reasons we always act intentionally. Necessarily, it seems. In this paper, I argue that acting intentionally is (...) not in all cases acting for a reason. Instead, intentional agency involves a specific kind of control. Having this kind of control makes it possible to modify one's action in the light of reasons. Intentional agency opens the possibility of acting in the light of reasons. I also explain why when we act with an intention we act for reasons. In the second part of the paper, I draw on these results to show that the dominant view of reasons to intend and the rationality of intentions should be rejected. (shrink)

Argumentation is pervasive in everyday life. Understanding what makes a strong argument is therefore of both theoretical and practical interest. One factor that seems intuitively important to the strength of an argument is the reliability of the source providing it. Whilst traditional approaches to argument evaluation are silent on this issue, the Bayesian approach to argumentation (Hahn & Oaksford, 2007) is able to capture important aspects of source reliability. In particular, the Bayesian approach predicts that argument content and source reliability (...) should interact to determine argument strength. In this paper, we outline the approach and then demonstrate the importance of source reliability in two empirical studies. These experiments show the multiplicative relationship between the content and the source of the argument predicted by the Bayesian framework. (shrink)

English summary: Contrary to the prevailing view that the 'Encheiridion' is a second rate summary of the 'Diatribai', this commentary makes clear the unique significance of this so-called handbook on stoic morality, which must rank as one of the first philosophical handbooks ever to be published. The commentary places the most popular work of this Stoic of the Roman Empire in the overall context of Epictetus's thought and discusses its significance in Stoic schools as well as with regard to both (...) precursory and contemporary followers from competing schools of philosophy. Taking into account the most important debates on terminology and the history of philosophy, the author describes the unique synthesis of rhetoric and debate, which reveal the 'Encheiridion' as being a workbook for character based self-education. German description: Entgegen der vorherrschenden Einschatzung, das 'Encheiridion' sei eine zweitrangige Zusammenfassung der 'Diatribai', begrundet der vorliegende Kommentar die eigenstandige Bedeutung des 'Handbuchleins zur stoischen Moral', das als eines der ersten philosophischen Handbucher uberhaupt gelten darf. In 53 Abschnitten bietet das 'Encheiridion' zahlreiche charakterliche und seelische Ubungen, um die stoische 'ars vitae' zu vervollkommnen. Mit ausdrucklichem Verweis auf die sokratische Tradition der epimeleia heautou stellt Epiktet den richtigen Gebrauch der Vorstellungen und fortwahrende Selbstuberprufung in den Mittelpunkt seines psychagogischen Programms. Der Kommentar ordnet das popularste Werk des kaiserzeitlichen Stoikers in den Gesamtzusammenhang des Denkens Epiktets ein und diskutiert dessen Positionen innerhalb des stoischen Schulsystems sowie in Hinsicht auf Vorlaufer und zeitgenossische Anhanger konkurrierender Philosophenschulen. Unter Berucksichtigung der wichtigsten terminologischen und philosophiegeschichtlichen Debatten wird die eigentumliche Synthese von rhetorischer und argumentativer Darstellung erlautert, anhand deren das 'Encheiridion' seine Wirkung als Ubungsbuch zur charakterlichen Selbstbildung entfaltet. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a person can have a reason to do what she cannot do. In a nutshell, the argument is that a person can have derivate reasons relating to an action that she has a non-derivative reason to perform. There are clear examples of derivative reasons that a person has in cases where she cannot do what she (non-derivatively) has reason to do. She couldn’t have those derivative reasons, unless she also had the non-derivative reason to (...) do what she cannot do. I discuss a number of objections to this view, in particular two: (1) The objection that if there were reasons to do what one cannot do, many of those would be ‘crazy reasons’, and (2) the worry that if there were such reasons, then agents would have reasons to engage in futile deliberations and tryings. I develop an explanation of ‘crazy reasons’ that shows that not all reasons to do the impossible are crazy and only those that are need to be filtered out, and, regarding the second objecting, I show that the reasons for trying as well as for taking the means to doing something—instrumental reasons in a broad sense—are different from the reasons for performing the action in the first place. They are affected by impossibility, and we can explain why that is so. The view I argue for is that a person may have a reason to do what she cannot do, but she does not have a reason to try to do so or to take means to realizing the impossible. (shrink)

This paper argues that, contrary to a common line of criticism followed by scholars such as Helga Kuhse, a particularistic version of virtue ethics properly elaborated, can provide sound moral guidance and a satisfactory account for moral justification of our opinions regarding, for instance, health care practice. In the first part of the paper, three criteria for comparing normative theories with respect to action‐guiding power are outlined, and it is argued that the presented particularistic version of virtue ethics actually can (...) provide more guidance than the universalistic theories favoured by Kuhse and others. In the second part of the paper it is claimed that universalist normative theories have serious problems accounting for the role that moral principles are supposed to play in the justification, of moral opinions, whereas the present version of virtue ethics accommodates a plausible alternative idea of justification without invoking moral principles or eschewing objectivity. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to investigate radio frequency identification tagging as a form of sociotechnical experimentation and the kinds of sociotechnical futures at stake in this experimentation. For this purpose, a detailed analysis of a publicly available promotional video by a tag producer for the fashion industry, a sector widely using RFID tags, was analysed in detail. The results of the study indicated that the sociotechnical imaginary of RFID tagging gravitates around the core value of perfect sociotechnical efficiency. (...) This demands a high degree of readiness to engage in standardization efforts, which performs a specific materialized understanding of ethics by other means. Furthermore, the analysis points to the importance of considering the spatiotemporal dimensions in which RFID tags work when reflecting on how this technology matters to society. Finally, the analysis shows a tacit effort to keep RFID technology and thus any questions of responsible innovation confined to the shop floor. However, given the spreading of the use of RFIDs, much wider-ranging considerations are called for. (shrink)

ArgumentRecurring economic crises, like the one of 2007-2008, led to criticism of economic research and a demand to develop new strategies to avoid them. Standard economic theories use conventional approaches to deal with economic challenges, heterodox theories try to develop alternatives with which to face them. It remains unclear whether the 2007-2008 crisis led to a change in economic research as well as to a consideration of alternative approaches. We used co-word analysis to map the structure of economic research in (...) Germany between 2005 and 2014. Core topics within economic research, such as “market” or “production” hardly shift and can be linked to standard economic theories. Peripheral topics such as “inequality” or “unemployment” show greater dynamics. However, only a few of these topics can be linked to heterodox approaches. Certain changes have occurred in reaction to the 2007-2008 crisis. However, the unchanged importance of standard economic topics raises the question whether these changes are sufficient to face coming economic challenges. (shrink)