Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 237-240.

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 293-302.

Modern medicine provides unprecedented opportunities in diagnostics and treatment. However, in some situations at the end of a patient’s life, many physicians refrain from using all possible measures to prolong life. We studied the incidence of different types of treatment withheld or withdrawn in 6 European countries and analyzed the main background characteristics.

Europeanization is part of globalization and in this context the European Union is propelled by wider forces of technological, economic, financial and political change. Cultural identity is discussed against this backdrop. If presently there is a surfeit of national and ethnic identity talk, evoked from parochial perspectives, there is a deficit of European identity and reflexivity in terms of politics, political economy and the social capitalism which Rhineland Europe used to represent. An open, casual definition of European identity may (...) be appropriate on historical grounds, in view of the multicultural antecedents of European cultures; on theoretical grounds, considering that culture is open‐ended; on political grounds, in view of postnationalist definitions of citizenship. It may be welcome medicine for Eurochauvinism. It may also be pragmatic in relation to ongoing technological and economic changes. With a view to narrowing the split between disciplines and sensibilities it would be important to integrate cultural, political and economic analyses and to arrive at a forward‐looking combination of agendas. (shrink)

This article addresses issues of regulatory convergence and Europeanization as they have developed within the agrochemicals sector. Taking the United Kingdom as a case study, the article considers the continuing importance of local and national factors within systems that are ostensibly international and standardized. In particular, the article shows how the embedded social relations of regulatory science in the United Kingdom, including institutional practices, judgments of expertise, and established relationships of trust, result in a “nation centeredness” and divergence of (...) regulatory cultures despite the putative development of a harmonized European framework. It is argued that, as a consequence, the claimed universalism of scientific culture in this area is in tension with the local conditions of its practice and enactment. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the discussion on the Europeanization of public spheres. It is the starting point for an investigation into the role of the media in transnational debate in Germany. The study aims to determine whether the media function as either a motor of or an obstacle to Europeanization of national public debate, compared to other actors. Drawing on empirical data from the project ‘The transformation of political mobilisation and communication in European public spheres’ (Europub.com), (...) we analyze the communications through which political actors, civil society actors, and the media in Germany make public demands on European issues. Sources on which this investigation was built were the news and editorial section of two national quality newspapers (center-left, center-right), one tabloid and one regional newspaper in the period between 2000 and 2002. The findings show that the demands made by the media are generally more European in scope than those made by other political actors. Regarding the evaluation of EU integration and the frames that are advocated, the German press and the political elite are rather convergent. (shrink)

This essay discusses the changes promoted in European universities by the ‘Bologna Process’ and the ‘European Higher Education Area’. Through an analysis of the main policy documents and mechanisms, the paper demonstrates that the European Higher Education Area is designed to dismantle academic autonomy across the continent. Before setting out to examine this transnational policy process, the paper specifies in its first part the meaning of academic autonomy – a particular European creation, as it argues – through an overview of (...) the historical material. (shrink)

European integration has increased to encompass security-related policies. One such policy is defense industry policy, which traditionally has been a national concern rooted in defense and security policy. Efforts have been made since the 1990s to create a European defense industry market. However, there have been different ideas of how this goal should be achieved or which model for state—industry relations the market should rest on. Using Sweden to illustrate the development, this article argues that for the Europeanization of (...) defense industry policy, marketization has played a vital role. Building on official documents and interviews, the article analyzes the efforts to create a European defense industry market, marketization of Swedish defense industry policy, and the increased interaction between Swedish and European defense industry policy processes. The analysis also shows domestic challenges that the processes of Europeanization and marketization have brought about. (shrink)

The new business opportunities and prospects emerging in Europe within the Common Market and other Western and European countries also raise important ethical challenges. This work comprises a collection of ethical insights to enhance the conduct of business in an evolving Europe.

The European Council called for a period of reflection in each of the member states of the European Union (EU) after the people of France and the Netherlands rejected the Constitutional Treaty in referendums in 2005. The present article offers a contribution to this process by reflecting on the prospects for institutional design and redesign in the EU, a topic that became even more relevant after the Irish ?no? to the Lisbon Treaty in June 2008. The discussions are based on (...) a historical perspective, and the article discusses what lessons can be drawn from Jean Monnet, viewed as an institutional designer on the European stage. The article argues that the successful establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was a product of a robust deontological design in a constitutional moment for Europe, and that prospective designers in the EU can learn important lessons from how Monnet identified and exploited available spaces for institutional design. (shrink)

This article focuses on Slovenia’s efforts to institute national coordination of EU affairs and the related institutional shifts that followed in the 20 ensuing years of EU membership. By introducing gradual, pragmatic, and flexible adaptations, the Slovenian experience with Europeanization and its effects on the domestic political system confirmed the assumption that domestic institutions undergo incremental changes rather than radical transformations. If they wish to produce stronger national positions and advocate for them more effectively in the Brussels decision-making arena, (...) institutions should (1) strive to balance effectiveness and inclusion of other stakeholders in EU policymaking, while also (2) investing more effort into improving expert knowledge on EU-related topics, growing skills, and increasing the number of EU specialists. (shrink)

This article investigates media representations of the European financial crisis in Greece and Italy. We study the Euro crisis as an ‘emergency situation’ with domino effects, where media played a central role in shaping communication practices at the national level as well as between the two countries. Drawing upon vertical and horizontal dynamics of Europeanization, we map the convergences and divergences in media discourses that surround the period 2011–2015. In doing so, we elaborate a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles (...) focusing, in particular, on the themes of austerity and the fragmentation of Europe. Our argument suggests that national public spheres in times of transnational crisis become increasingly nationalized; yet under certain circumstances such as when the supranational infrastructure is the target of blame, they converge, opening the path toward a transnational discursive dialogue. (shrink)

This book analyzes the limitations in the Europeanization of Spanish security and defense policy. For various reasons, Spain has maintained an amalgamated security system based on agreements with NATO, the EU and the US. This combination has produced a dysfunctional system, as it is not truly able to address some of the country’s vital security interests, above all in North Africa and the Mediterranean. At the same time, due mainly to domestic reasons, various Spanish governments have been reluctant to (...) pursue autonomy in the country’s security policy and defense capabilities. Written by a team of scholars and practitioners, this book offers policymakers and professionals both a general overview of and deeper insights into the issue. Due to the lack of comprehensive studies on Spanish security and defense policy and its ties to Europe, this book will be of particular interest. (shrink)

Television regulation is increasingly Europeanized. While the transposition of community law into national legislation in EU member states has been widely discussed, scholarly attention is less frequently devoted to the Europeanization of non-member states. This paper investigates how television regulation in non-EU members has been influenced by European audiovisual policy since the liberalization of broadcasting. Focusing on the case of Switzerland and putting it into a wider context, changes in television regulation and their connection to the European level were (...) analyzed by performing a qualitative document analysis. Results indicate that the degree of Europeanization in Switzerland differs remarkably from other non-member states like Norway. While advertising regulation was brought in line with less-strict EU directives, a public value test or compliance with state aid rules were not even discussed. Yet similar to other non-members, rules were adopted without having a say in their development. (shrink)

I clarify Hegel’s role in the Europeanization of philosophy over the course of the 19th century. I begin with an investigation of the way non-Western philosophy was conceptualized in Europe before, and after, I move on to a consideration of the debates about philosophy that emerged in late 19th century China because of European attempts, such as that of Hegel, to circumscribe the geographical and civilizational scope of this discipline. How may we see the emergence of a distinctly modern, (...) generally nationalist, discourse about “Chinese philosophy” within China as a reflection of larger global processes then taking place? (shrink)

Eduard von Hartmann was one of the most influential public philosophers of his era, known primarily through his Philosophy of the Unconscious. A conservative nationalist in politics, he positioned himself as a cultural and religious reformer and modernist ad­vocate of a “religion of the future” of self-redemption (autosoterism), one that reconciled pessimism and a panpneumatic impersonal unconscious with rationality and individu­al responsibility. This paper traces how Buddhism served as a primary albeit imperfect exemplar in his thought, how his ethical and (...) symbolic interpretative strategy, based on the unconscious, drew him into proximity and conflict with esoteric spiritist discourses, and how this context informed his Daodejing interpretation. German Idealism disclosed the unity of reason, will, and nature, while Buddhist teachings demonstrated the world’s fundamentally contradictory and illusory character through nothingness (emptiness), nir­vāṇa, and objective illusionism and phenomenalism. Hartmann’s secularized moral and symbolic adaptation of Buddhism entailed a resigned yet heroic embrace of suffering life rather than what he deemed ascetic and quietist acquiescence. His hermeneutics reveal his modernizing vision of Buddhism as an exemplary model (if suitably reformed to ac­centuate a heroic response to suffering and karma) for the future. (shrink)

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Computer Science Logic, CSL '97, held as the 1997 Annual Conference of the European Association on Computer Science Logic, EACSL, in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 1997. The volume presents 26 revised full papers selected after two rounds of refereeing from initially 92 submissions; also included are four invited papers. The book addresses all current aspects of computer science logics and its applications and thus presents the state (...) of the art in the area. (shrink)

Initially trained as a classical historian and philologist, Georg S. Knabe (1920–2011) was among the first Russian-speaking scholars to engage intensively with the study of everyday life. Beyond Roman history, his research also encompassed countercultural movements, rock and punk music, and fashion trends. These diverse subjects were unified, however, by Knabe’s original theory of cultural memory, which brought together Aristotelian teleology, Romantic natural philosophy, Goethe’s morphology, the philosophy of life, Ernst Cassirer’s notion of the inner form of culture, and Roland (...) Barthes’s semiology. Despite his openness to novelty and his strong pro-Western orientation, at the beginning of the twenty-first century Knabe grew increasingly critical of the shifting intellectual climate in the West and of new EU policies. He argued that under the ideology of multiculturalism and political correctness, Europe was severing its ties with the past—particularly with its Roman heritage. Although this rhetoric echoes that of many Russian and Western conservative thinkers and is not entirely original, what proves most illuminating are not Knabe’s sometimes biased conclusions, but the causes that led him to them. This article examines those causes by analyzing Knabe’s post-Soviet writings and contextualizing his arguments within contemporary conservative and communitarian thought. It argues that Knabe’s rightward shift was driven by three main factors: (1) the crisis within the Western community of classical scholars, (2) the recognition that his vision of the Russian intelligentsia’s mission—to promote the nation’s “return to Europe” through grassroots cultural renewal rather than through political decree—had become impossible, and (3) the incompatibility of new EU identity politics with his view of cultural memory and of communities as its primary bearers and subjects. (shrink)

European absolute monarchy was the model for all subsequent versions of statism. The rise of the centralized state apparatus that claimed a monopoly of the (legitimate) use of force within a given territory went hand in hand with the intellectual pursuit of describing it. America, both during colonial times and even more so at the founding of the republic, was relatively free from absolutism. The US, born without a sovereign, could not know the peculiar development of a fundamental state category (...) such as sovereignty, first defined by Jean Bodin in the 16th century. Sovereignty, in American political discourse, was…. (shrink)

This article defends state sovereignty as necessary for a form of popular sovereignty capable of realising the republican value of non-domination and argues it remains achievable and normatively warranted in an interconnected world. Many scholars, including certain republicans, contend that the external sovereignty of states can no longer be maintained or justified in such circumstances. Consequently, we must abandon the sovereignty of states and reconceive popular sovereignty on a different basis. Some argue sovereignty must be displaced upwards to a more (...) global state, while others advocate it be vertically and horizontally dispersed to units below, across and above the state. Each group offers a related vision of the European Union to illustrate their proposals. Both these arguments are criticised as more likely to produce than reduce domination because neither can sustain a form of popular sovereignty capable of instantiating relations of non-domination. This article proposes the alternative of a republican association of sovereign states that allows sovereign states and their peoples to mutually regulate their external sovereignty in non-dominating ways. This alternative proposal provides a more plausible and defensible means for sustaining the requisite kind of popular sovereignty in contemporary conditions and a more appropriate vision of the European Union. (shrink)

The paper has two goals. The first is presenting the main results of the recent report Ethics of Connected and Automated Vehicles: recommendations on road safety, privacy, fairness, explainability and responsibility written by the Horizon 2020 European Commission Expert Group to advise on specific ethical issues raised by driverless mobility, of which the author of this paper has been member and rapporteur. The second is presenting some broader ethical and philosophical implications of these recommendations, and using these to contribute to (...) the establishment of Ethics of Transportation as an independent branch of applied ethics. The recent debate on the ethics of Connected and Automated Vehicles presents a paradox and an opportunity. The paradox is the presence of a flourishing debate on the ethics of one very specific transportation technology without ethics of transportation being in itself a well-established academic discipline. The opportunity is that now that a spotlight has been switched on the ethical dimensions of CAVs it may be easier to establish a broader debate on ethics of transportation. While the 20 recommendations of the EU report are grouped in three macro-areas: road safety, data ethics, and responsibility, in this paper they will be grouped according to eight philosophical themes: Responsible Innovation, road justice, road safety, freedom, human control, privacy, data fairness, responsibility. These are proposed as the first topics for a new ethics of transportation. (shrink)

The European Corporate Sustainability Framework (ECSF) is a new generation management framework, aimed to meet increased corporate complexity and support corporate transformation towards more sustainable ways of doing business. It is a multi-layer, integral business framework with an analytical, contextual, situational and dynamic dimension.Analytically, the framework is structured according to four focus points – the constitutional, conceptual, behavioural and evaluative perspective – providing integrative designs of complex and dynamic phenomena. The framework includes coherent sets of business philosophies, approaches, concepts and (...) tools that structures corporate realities and generates sequences of steps in order to obtain adequate institutional structures, a road to corporate transformation and higher performance levels. (shrink)

The article addresses Europeanization of social movements in the context of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Europeanization occurs when movements collaborate, or make horizontal communicative linkages with movements in other countries, contest authorities beyond the state, frame issues as European and claim a European identity. The article presents a theoretical framework and research design for measuring the degree of social movement Europeanization followed by results of a pilot study on mobilization in Spain and Greece during 2011. While (...) many contentious action events studied only encompassed the domestic arena, the pilot study showed a relatively high degree of Europeanization in the Greek case, suggesting the viability of future research.El presente artículo aborda la europeización de los movimientos sociales en el contexto de la crisis de la deuda soberana europea. La europeización se produce cuando los movimientos colaboran, o establecen vínculos horizontales, con movimientos de otros países, contestan a las autoridades más allá de los límites del Estado-nación, identifican cuestiones como europeos y reclaman una identidad europea. El artículo presenta un marco teórico y un diseño investigación para medir el grado de europeización de los movimientos sociales seguido por los resultados de un estudio piloto de la movilización en España y Grecia durante el año 2011. Mientras que muchas de las acciones de protesta estudiadas solamente apelaban al ámbito doméstico, el estudio piloto muestra un relativamente alto grado de europeización en el caso griego, lo que sugiere la viabilidad de futuras investigaciones. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In times of crisis, interpersonal and group solidarity often emerge as people face critical challenges that threaten their survival. However, it remains unclear whether spontaneous solidarity practices are enough to effectively face such crisis situations. In this paper, we argue that to be fully effective, solidarity must be deployed through all its political tiers, from interpersonal and group relationships to institutional and legal normativity. We contend that solidarity relations can only reach an enduring goal if they solidify into stable (...) principles that can be acknowledged and enacted at the institutional level. Through an examination of recent literature and concrete case studies, the paper investigates the linkages and mutual dependencies between the various levels of solidarity developed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis may allow us to answer the question of whether a “Multilevel European Solidarity” is a realistic goal, and what is required to achieve it. (shrink)

European Computing and Philosophy conference, 2–4 July Barcelona The Seventh ECAP (European Computing and Philosophy) conference was organized by Jordi Vallverdu at Autonomous University of Barcelona. The conference started with the IACAP (The International Association for CAP) presidential address by Luciano Floridi, focusing on mechanisms of knowledge production in informational networks. The first keynote delivered by Klaus Mainzer made a frame for the rest of the conference, by elucidating the fundamental role of complexity of informational structures that can be analyzed (...) on different levels of organization giving place for variety of possible approaches which converge in this cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary research field. Keynotes by Kevin Warwick about re-embodiment of rats’ neurons into robots, Raymond Turner on syntax and semantics in programming languages, Roderic Guigo on Biocomputing Sciences and Francesco Subirada on the past and future of supercomputing presented different topics of philosophical as well as practical aspects of computing. Vonference tracks included: Philosophy of Information (Patrick Allo), Philosophy of Computer Science (Raymond Turner), Computer and Information Ethics (Johnny Søraker and Alison Adam), Computational Approaches to the Mind (Ruth Hagengruber), IT and Cultural Diversity (Jutta Weber and Charles Ess), Crossroads (David Casacuberta), Robotics, AI & Ambient Intelligence (Thomas Roth-Berghofer), Biocomputing, Evolutionary and Complex Systems (Gordana Dodig Crnkovic and Søren Brier), E-learning, E-science and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Annamaria Carusi) and Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies (Amnon Eden). (shrink)

Should the EU be a federal union or an intergovernmental forum? Recently, demoicrats have been arguing that there exists a third alternative. The EU should be conceived as a demoicracy, namely a ‘Union of peoples who govern together, but not as one’. The demoi of Europe recognise that they affect one another’s democratic health, and hence establish a union to guarantee their freedom qua demoi – which most demoicrats cash out as non-domination. This is more than intergovernmentalism, because the demoi (...) govern together on these matters. However, if the union aims at protecting the freedom of the different European demoi, it cannot do so by replacing them with a ‘superdemos’, as federalists want. This paper argues that demoicracy does possess distinctive normative features; it claims, however, that an institutional choice between intergovernmentalism and federalism is necessary. Depending on how we interpret what the non-domination of demoi requires, demoicracy will either ground a specific way of practicing intergovernmentalism or a specific form of federalism. It cannot, however, ground an institutional model which is genuinely alternative to both. (shrink)

This paper explores, in some detail at the European Union scale, processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextualization of ‘competitiveness rhetoric’ and ‘globalization rhetoric’ in HE policy documents. We trace the implementation of the Bologna Process in two EU member states, Austria and Romania, illustrating the effects of these very different socio-political and historical contexts on EU standardization processes through a detailed discourse analytic study of recontextualization processes of policy (...) documents. This paper integrates two approaches in critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's dialectic-relational approach and Wodak's discourse-historical approach, by introducing recontextualization as a salient critical discourse analysis category and explaining its relationship to other categories within a discourse-analytical approach to trans-disciplinary research on social change. (shrink)

Several European countries are approving legislative reforms moving to a presumed consent system in order to increase organ donation rates. Nevertheless, irrespective of the consent system in force, family's decisional capacity probably causes a greater impact on such rates. In this contribution we have developed a systematic methodology in order to analyse and compare European organ procurement laws, and we clarify the weight given by each European law to relatives' decisional capacity over individual's preferences (expressed or not while alive) regarding (...) the destination of his or her organs after death. In this sense, the results constitute the first comprehensive and comparative legislative mapping on European transplantation laws. (shrink)

On 21 April 2021, the European Commission published the proposal of the new EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) — one of the most influential steps taken so far to regulate AI internationally. This article highlights some foundational aspects of the Act and analyses the philosophy behind its proposal.

I outline the current debate over the European Union democratic deficit in terms of differing methodological approaches towards the realization of freedom and basic rights to political participation. Federalists opt for a model of freedom as noninterference and autonomous self-determination by proposing to tie basic rights in the EU to a univocal form of European-wide popular sovereignty. Although skeptics argue that the EU lacks the fundamental basis for such European-wide democratic self-determination, they ultimately defend a similar view of freedom as (...) noninterference with their appeal to the collective will of the member states. Democratic revisionists instead point to the novel democratic potential of institutions in the EU such as the Open Method of Coordination for mediating overlapping sovereignties. I conclude using the example of basic rights to effective participation for immigrants and minorities to illustrate the strengths of the revisionist view over views that appeal to the principle of subsidiarity. (shrink)

The article proposes the consideration of Skovoroda’s philosophical heritage in the complex contexts of the European philosophical thought in its historical dimension. This complexity was caused through the secular tendency of the Enlightenment ideology with its explanation patterns for human being and social life. The mediological method developed of R. Debray and A. Koschorke is used for analyzing of Skovoroda’s attitudes towards the Enlightenment innovations in cultural and political life. The contemporary narratives of the First, the Second and the Third (...) Enlightenment are applied as pattern for explanation of Skovoroda’s attitude towards the secular trends in the culture and education caused of the Enlightenment ideology. Skovoroda is balancing on the edge of the First and Second Enlightenment: as a philosopher of freedom he makes human responsible for his way of life, but as philosopher of morality he defended the idea of God using the neo-platonic approach. The resurrection of Epicureanism in the Age of Enlightenment was a theoretical challenge for Skovoroda with resonance reactions because his ethical views were based on Epicurus concept of necessity as regulative principle for successful life which can be got without any effort. The religious anthropology developed of Skovoroda is considering in its anthropological-technical aspect. The central ideas of the First Enlightenment — omnipotence of education, disenchanting of religion and project of a new human are rethinking by Skovoroda from the perspective of his religious anthropology with imperatives of self-knowing and making distinction between visual and invisible thereby the way to the eternal truth is possible only possible by the new hermeneutic of the Bible. The semantics and heuristic metaphors in Skovoroda’s works are analyzed, which have a resonance effect with Protestantism and Freema sons ideas, some of which are actualized today. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst to build a stronger European Health Union to protect the health of Europeans and to develop a new Global Health Strategy to contribute to global health security. In positioning itself as a key player in global health governance, the EU seeks to assert its responsibility as a global health actor and deepen its leadership in global health law.

A code of ethics for the practice of nursing seeks to capture, in a written document, the normative values, ethical principles and standards of good care to guide nurses – qua moral agents. A codification of the accepted collective values of nursing can play a constitutional and directional role for the profession. It can further stimulate discussions about nursing that reflect the dynamic essence of the profession. Consequently, there is merit to continually reflecting on a code’s function and role especially (...) when a new or revised code is introduced to the nursing profession and the wider public such as the European Nursing Council’s Code of Ethics and Conduct for European Nursing. This paper examines codes of ethics in general and the European Nursing Council Code in particular using the framework of Gaumnitz and Lere. Although the European Nursing Council Code has all the ingredients of a contemporary professional ethics code, our position is that future iterations or addenda to this Code should be aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and take a more radical step in becoming an exemplar of a nursing code that can be a catalyst for the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals. (shrink)

This is a review of the books on the European Union by two well-known Italian economists, Luigi Zingales and Giacomo Vaciago. It turns out there is a broad area of agreement and complementarity between them. Their treatments are summarized under the following ten headings: 1) The political genesis of the European Union; 2) the surprisingly narrow range of activities included in the present economic and monetary union; 3) the dubious validity of the “theory of forward reactions”, that should guarantee the (...) forward direction of the unification process; 4) The unsure presuppositions of the Maastricht Treaty, and the reasons why it arose the skepticism of most American economists; 5) the Italian crisis and the European paralysis; 6) Italy stands to Europe as Southern Italy to Italy; 7) Italexit? 8) What brakes the progress of the unification process? 9) What corrections to existing institutions? 10) Is there still a role for a European Federation? (shrink)