"Do not make yourself a worm.":Reconsidering dignity as a duty towards oneself

Discussions about the dignity of human beings often focus on violations of a person’s dignity thatare performed by other persons. However, human beings can also violate their own dignity or atleast they can expose it to a violation by others thoughtlessly or intentionally. In his Metaphysicsof Morals Kant states that ‘[o]ne who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards ifpeople step on him’. He presupposes that persons can infringe or even forfeit their own dignity– for instance through servile behaviour – and that violating one’s own dignity is a violation of aduty towards oneself. Starting from the tension between dignity in terms of honour and worth incurrent debates and in Kant’s own thinking, as well as between understanding dignity as absoluteor relational, I develop a comprehensive account of dignity as a duty to oneself. I argue for atwofold obligation towards oneself to respect one’s own dignity: A) a duty (as the necessity of anaction done out of respect for the moral law) to respect one’s authority as an autonomous personin the Kantian sense, and B) – beyond the Kantian framework – an obligation arising from thepractical necessity that follows from one’s self-understanding as a self-determined, selfexpressive individual personality in a socio-cultural context. Finally, I outline the consequencesof the idea of ‘making oneself a worm’ for the concept of dignity in the realm of rights bydiscussing why, even though persons can behave like worms, others ought not to step on them.<br/

The power of hope? Powerlessness and strong democratic hope

In this paper I discuss how and to what extent core elements of Beatrice Han-Pile’s account of a constitutive experience of powerlessness at the centre of hope can be fruitfully transferred to a collective political level. Despite its constitutive relation to uncertainty, we often talk about the power of hope as a motivating and activating force that helps us to cope with challenges, overcome obstacles and pursue plans. Hoping with an awareness of the limitations of one’s individual power can at the same time be a strong motivation for acting in concert and thereby establishing power as a collective practice. I will explore how democratic hope that is empowering participation can be distinguished from disempowering political hopes. Finally, I will argue that integrating experiences of relative powerlessness and reflecting them explicitly is constitutive for ‘strong democratic hope’, while the experience of powerlessness can remain pre-reflective on the individual psychological level. At the same time strong democratic hope is directed towards preventing experiences of radical powerlessness.</p

From Paradise to a Graveyard: Aleksey N. Tolstoy’s Representations of Places Between Literary and Ideological Discourses

Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Darstellung und Rolle von europäischen Städten in ausgewähltenTexten des neo-realistischen russischen Autors Aleksej Nikolaevič Tolstoj, einem prominentenAkteur der russischen bzw. sowjetischen Literatur zwischen 1910 und 1945. Je mehrsich der Autor in seinen Texten mit Fragen nationaler Identität auseinandersetzt, umso wichtigerwerden seine Begegnungen mit anderen Kulturen, da sie ihm ermöglichen – oder ihnauch dazu zwingen, Russland aus der Perspektive eines Außenstehenden zu betrachten. DerFokus des Beitrags liegt deshalb auf Reisen Tolstojs nach Deutschland und Frankreich zwischen1908 und 1935. Die Darstellung der von Tolstoj besuchten europäischen Städte reicht dabeivon ausdrücklich subjektiven Beschreibungen, über die Bezugnahme auf literarische Topoi, bishin zur Instrumentalisierung für geo-kulturelle Ziele im sowjetischen Kontext. Im Laufe der Jahrewird ein deutlicher Wandel sichtbar: Der zunächst als produktiv wahrgenommene Kontaktmit europäischen Kulturen schlägt in eine tiefgreifende Entfremdung um. Allerdings erhält sichTolstoj in einigen privaten Texten einen gewissen „Bewegungsspielraum“, um eine andere Sichtauf Europa zum Ausdruck zu bringen als in seinen offiziellen Texten. Als theoretischer Rahmender Analyse dient Detlev Ipsens Definition von „Orten“ als Schnittpunkte individueller Wahrnehmungund kultureller Deutung. Die Synthese der Erfahrungsebene mit dem symbolischenPotenzial von Orten ist nicht zuletzt für die Anwendbarkeit auf sowohl literarische wie auchdokumentarische Texte wichtig. Der Begriff „Geokulturologie“ im Anschluss an Susanne Frankermöglicht dabei eine Annäherung an den Wandel von Tolstojs Sicht auf die besuchten Orte.The contribution explores the significance of European locations in the writings of Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1883–1945), a neo-realist writer and prominent figure between 1910 and 1945 of Russian respectively Soviet literature. The more the author deals with questions of national identity in his writings, the more important become his encounters with other cultures, as they give him the chance – or force him – to glance at Russia from an outside point of view. Presenting some of the author’s journeys to Germany and France between 1908 and 1935, this contribution demonstrates how his topographies of the visited European cities oscillate between explicitly subjective descriptions, references to literary topoi and an instrumentalisation for geo-cultural purposes in the Soviet context: Over the years, the first, allegedly productive encounter with European cultures changes into an experience of deep estrangement combined with the claim of the Soviet Union’s cultural superiority. Yet, there are other texts that give Aleksey Tolstoy “room for manoeuvre” to express a much more personal view on Europe than in his official writings. The theoretical framework of the analysis is based on Detlef Ipsen’s definition of places, underlining both the concrete experiential character as well as the meaning-making potential of places. For tracing Tolstoy’s changing interpretation of the visited places, Susanne Frank’s works on geo-kulturologija and its relation to geopoetics gave important impulses

To be or Not to be Authentic: In Defence of Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal

It has recently been pointed out that the cloudiness of the concept of authenticity as well as inflated ideologies of the 'true self' provide good reasons to criticize theories and ideals of authenticity. Nevertheless, there are also good reasons to defend an ethical ideal of authenticity, not least because of its critical and oppositional force, which is directed against experiences of self-abandonment and self-alienation. I will argue for an elaborated ethical ideal of authenticity: the ambitious ideal of a continuous self-reflective process of 'self-authentication'. For this purpose, the ideal of being authentic in expressing and unfolding one's individual personality and characteristics will be combined with the ideal of being 'an authentic person' - whereby 'a person' is to be understood in a Kantian sense as an autonomous person who is (at least potentially) reasonable and morally responsible

Learning from Business Failure – Does Restarting Affect the Business Model Design?

Business failure is an existent and severe threat for entrepreneurs, but also offers an opportunity for learning. According to literature, failed entrepreneurs are facing a tremendous learning experience. However, only very few studies focus on the long-term entrepreneur-related consequences of failure and even less work is available on entrepreneurs who decide to restart (Ucbasaran et al. (2013)). The goal of the thesis is to enhance business failure literature by focusing on behavioral outcomes of failure-based learning in the context of entrepreneurs who decide to restart after experiencing business failure. Hence, it will be possible to analyze whether cognitive learning processes result in changes of the entrepreneur’s behaviors and actions with respect to the subsequent business. Thus, the aim is to answer the following research questions: (1) How do business models of an entrepreneur’s failed business and the subsequent business differ? (2) What explains possible business model differences? The business model concept is employed as a unit of analysis to identify learning outcomes of entrepreneurs by comparing the business models of the initial, failed business and the subsequent business by conducting an in-depth multiple-case study. Particularly, five semistructured interviews with entrepreneurs who failed and restarted were conducted to allow for the theory building approach according to Eisenhardt (1989). In addition, to triangulate data and enrich the findigns objectively two interviews were held with bankruptcy trustees, experts in the field of business failure. Especially the information provided by the experts enhanced the cross-case analysis. By employing the business model concept as a unit of analysis in the context of restart entrepreneurship, I am able to provide in-depth, empirically-based insights into behavioral outcomes of failure-based entrepreneurial learning. The multiple-case study provides evidence that an entrepreneur rather improves the business model of the failed business than creating a completely novel business model design for a subsequent, new business. Findings also show that learning from failure is affected by situation-specific, entrepreneur-related conditions, which becomes obvious in the business model design of the subsequent businesses. Particularly, the time span between failure and restart, external support and outside options have an impact. Thus, learning from business failure does not automatically take place but is affected by the entrepreneur’s willingness and ability to reflect on past experiences and further conditions that are beyond the entrepreneur’s scope of influence. Therefore, the thesis enhances existing literature on failure-based learning as it highlights that failure-based learning does not happen automatically, but requires certain cognitive capabilities that depict a precondition for successful transfer of learning outcomes to an operational level. Overall, the thesis emphasizes a difference between business closure and serial entrepreneurship on the one hand and business failure and restart entrepreneurship on the other hand. This distinction is of particular importance for entrepreneurship research, as the behavior of serial entrepreneurs seems to follow a different logic compared to restart entrepreneurs. This important finding calls for future research that may rely on the thesis as groundwork and contributes to a deeper understanding of restart entrepreneurship. Managers or entrepreneur on the other hand shall use the findings as a guide. The thesis highlights the importance of the business model and its benefits for the real-world as a tool to objectively consider value creation and capture. In particular, the entrepreneur or manager shall check and critically analyze his or her business in terms of the internal and external fit the business model design. Furthermore, in the case of an approaching or already existent business failure, entrepreneurs should take time for reflection and learning; consider external advice and accept responsibilities and deal with costs of failure openly.Keywords: Business Failure, Learning, Restart Entrepreneurship, Business Mode

Technomoral Resilience as a Goal of Moral Education

In today’s highly dynamic societies, moral norms and values are subject to change. Moral change is partly driven by technological developments. For instance, the introduction of robots in elderly care practices requires caregivers to share moral responsibility with a robot (see van Wynsberghe 2013). Since we do not know what elements of morality will change and how they will change (see van der Burg 2003), moral education should aim at fostering what has been called “moral resilience” (Swierstra 2013). We seek to fill two gaps in the existing literature: (i) research on moral education has not paid enough attention to the development of moral resilience; (ii) the very limited literature on moral resilience does not conceptualise moral resilience in relation to new technological developments. We argue that philosophical accounts of moral education need to do justice to the importance of moral resilience, and that a specific form of moral resilience should be conceptualised as “technomoral resilience” to underline the added value of cultivating moral resilience in relation to technomoral change. We illustrate the role of technomoral resilience in practice by looking at the context of elderly care. To make the first step towards an account of how technomoral resilience can be fostered in moral education, we propose that moral education shall focus on a triangle of capacities: (1) moral imagination, (2) a capacity for critical reflection, and (3) a capacity for maintaining one’s moral agency in the face of disturbances

Aerothermal Analysis of Film Cooling Flows

Flow field and thermal film cooling parameters are analysed and compared for different blowing ratios for a 10°-10°-10° laidback fan-shaped film cooling hole geometry with an inclination angle of 35° and a wide spacing of P/D = 8 to ensure the absence of jet interaction. The influence of the coolant ejection on the aerodynamics of the hot gas is investigated and stationary as well as non-stationary vortex structures are identified. The present study uses an existing test rig at the Institute of Thermal Turbomachinery (ITS) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) designed for generic film cooling studies with high spatial resolution applying stereoscopic particle image velocimetry (SPIV) as well as infrared thermography (IRT). Operating conditions of hot gas and cooling air inlet and exit are uniquely compliant with scaled engine-realistic conditions, including temperature ratio, turbulence intensity and coolant flow configuration

Medicine, Dissent and the “Chloroquinization” of Truth:Brazil and Pandemic

This article explores the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil radicalizing Foucault’s notion of governmentality. While dominant scholarship has been interpreting the human tragedy of the outbreak in Brazil in terms of necropolitics and Bolsonaro’s populist rhetoric, the present work highlights other dimensions. It shows that the management of the pandemic was deployed to govern the conduct of the Brazilian population. This article detects novel economies of medical truth, obedience, and salvation. It also examines the struggles and (bio)political resistance of Brazil’s vulnerable communities. While academic debates interpreted those movements in terms of care and compassion, this article highlights their radical political aspects. Extending Foucault’s notion of “counter-conducts,” this article reveals how those collectives shaped new forms of medical dissent. More concretely, they brought forward political practices of hope, solidarity, and resilience.</p