Fischer Klaus

Die Idee der Künstliche IntelligenzKünstliche Intelligenz (KI) (KI) speist sich aus zwei grundverschiedenen Wurzeln. Zum einen aus der schon sehr früh in der Geschichte der Kultur aufkeimenden Vorstellung, auf technischem, alchemistischem oder magischem Weg ein künstliches Wesen schaffen zu können, das dem Erschaffer als Gefährte, Arbeiter, Helfer, Beschützer, Unterhaltungsobjekt usw., dienen kann (Talos, Prometheus-Mythos, Pygmalion-Motiv, Hephaistos‘ Apparate, Daedalus‘ lebende Statuen, Goethes Faust, Automaten von Vaucanson und Jaquet-Droz, Golems, Homunculi, Androiden, Roboter). Zum zweiten aus dem Wunsch, gewisse Funktionen des Denkens zu mechanisieren, zum Beispiel Zähl- und Rechenoperationen an eine Maschine zu delegieren (Raimundus Lullus, Athanasius Kircher, Leibniz, Wilhelm Schickard, Kepler, Pascal, Charles Babbage, Herman Hollerith).

Die Begriffe Körper und Gesundheit sind (nicht erst) seit dem sogenannten body-, corporeal- oder somatic-turn Gegenstand sehr unterschiedlicher Disziplinen und Perspektiven: Die Komplexität der Zusammenhänge, Verschränkungen, Bedingungen des Gegenstandspaares Körper-Gesundheit bis hin zur Identifikation macht es erforderlich, multidisziplinär und multiperspektivisch vorzugehen. In diesem Band sind unterschiedliche Disziplinen und Perspektiven versammelt, die sich aus ihrer Fachgenese und wissenschaftlichen Position heraus mit Körper, Leib und Gesundheit beschäftigen, um v.a. Forschungsfelder zu erschließen und praxeologische Konsequenzen zu benennen.

SummaryAs a logical consequence of recent developments in the philosophy of science the concept of rationality has lost much of its impact. It seems that the rationality of methodological decisions in science can be defined no longer in an absolute sense but only in relation to a given context and in hindsight.This failure of methodology in assessing once and for all the rights and wrongs of scientific decisions is taken as a clue for reanalyzing the strategical intervention-points of methodological norms. It is shown that relativism and irrationalism are to be avoided by not cutting the process of scientific investigation into intrinsically different portions: context of justification and context of discovery. This dichotomy opens a logical and psychological gap between different stages of scientific evolution that the idea of comparing factual contents or degrees of justification is no longer able to bridge. In two case studies, the development of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries and the development of special and general realtivity it is shown that the dichotomy is inherently implausibel. But if it is possible to analyze the context of justification (criticism) and the context of discovery in same terms, the logical (and psychological) chain of reasoning is closed. This problem-shift defies both irrationalism and relativism and leads to a different view of scientific progress as an increase of information-processing capacity that can be measured by a certain set of indicators radically different from the received one.

This book provides insight into the work of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), one of the most prophetic minds of the 20th century, whose dire historical predictions - world wars, ecological disasters, gigantic cities with unrestrained urban sprawl, increasing race conflicts, failure of nerve among the ruling elites, and rapid decline of cultural norms - have more than passed the test of time. Besides focusing on Spengler the prophet and the controversies which surrounded his name in the 1920s, this book also emphasizes Spengler's pioneering role in the development of a comparative study of cultures based on biological principles.

By scientiometrically analyzing the physics-literature produced between 1925 and 1933 it is shown that the purely quantitative contribution of physicists subsequently emigrating from Germany to the literature produced by the physics community in this country was much lower than hitherto estimated. The actual figure is not in the range of 30%, as is generally assumed, but much nearer to 11%. Control analysis of three leading German physics journals and of memberships in the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft confirms this result. Further investigation of university calendars shows that transferring these results to purely academic physics would amount to committing a “universalistic fallacy”. In academic physics emigré-physicists held a total of 15,5% of all teaching postitions.Differentiating the physics literature into various specialties allows further insights into the cognitive and social structure of the German physics community before 1933. Works of emigré-physicists are not randomly distributed over specialities; instead, the distribution reveals a nearly perfect correlation with what could be called “the specialty's paradigmatic age”. The spectrum begins with quantum theory, where future emigrants produced more than 25% of the literature, and fades away with acoustics, where their contribution amounts to less than 4%. The commonly accepted explanation of this phenomenon, which is based on the assumption that time of institutionalization of a specialty, “prestige” of that specialty, and entrance barriers for Jewish scientists are correlated, is falsified by two cases of non- or zero-correlation: by the very old specialties and by the technical disciplines. A new explanans is proposed which is based on the hypothesis of cognitive and social marginality being correlated and on a certain amount of cognitive marginality enhancing the disposition to innovative behavior and creativity