What is the crisis of Western sciences?

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. This article is an attempt to formulate a clear definition of the concept of crisis of Western sciences introduced by Husserl in his last work. The attempt will be based on a reading of the Krisis, which will stress its underlying continuity with Husserl’s life-long concerns about the theoretical insufficiency of positive sciences, and downplay the novelty of the idea of crisis itself within Husserl’s work. After insisting on the fact that, according to Husserl, only an account of the shortcomings of the scientificity of Western sciences can justify the claim that they are undergoing a crisis, it will be argued that the common definition of the crisis of the sciences as the loss of their significance for life rests on a misunderstanding. The crisis of Western sciences will be characterized, instead, as the repercussion of the crisis of the scientificity of philosophy (and, specifically, of metaphysics) on the scientificity of positive sciences. The loss of significance of scientific knowledge for our existence will in turn appear as a further, inevitable consequence of the uprooting of the sciences from the soil of a universal philosophy culminating in metaphysics, and thus, as a phenomenon deeply intertwined with the crisis of Western sciences, but not identical to it

Simulationsrechnungen zur Bevölkerungsentwicklung in den alten und neuen Bundesländern im 21. Jahrhundert

Birg H, Flöthmann E-J, Frein T, Ströker K. Simulationsrechnungen zur Bevölkerungsentwicklung in den alten und neuen Bundesländern im 21. Jahrhundert. IBS-Materialien ; 45. Bielefeld: Inst. für Bevölkerungsforschung u. Sozialpolitik; 1998

Severe symptomatic hypomagnesaemia induced by the chronic use of proton pump inhibitors: a case report of a patient with Zollinger-Ellison syndrome.

The association between proton pump inhibitor (PPI) therapy and hypomagnesaemia has been recognized since 2006. We report the case of a 51-year-old woman who developed severe symptomatic hypomagnesaemia after a long-term PPI therapy given for recurrent peptic ulcer disease. Hypomagnesaemia could only partially be resolved during substitution therapy, but was corrected after withdrawal of the PPI. Recurrence of hypomagnesaemia occurred after retreatment with PPIs, supporting the causal relationship. An underlying gastric acid hypersecretion (Zollinger-Ellison syndrome) was highly suspected and eventually controlled by a combination of a histamine 2-receptor antagonist and octreotide, without the need for further PPI therapy after 2 years of follow-up