Search results for ""Author Thomas M Schmidt""

Preventing contributions to serious human rights violations in the course of business activity is a matter of prime importance to the international community. With a view to business actors providing infrastructure, funding or other means for the commission of crimes, this study presents concepts for assessing their individual responsibility under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. To this end, the author expands upon foundational German scholarship and scrutinizes the Court’s jurisprudence on commission and civilian superior responsibility, in particular its recourse to the control over the crime theory. The book examines the necessity to exempt socially valuable business activity from such responsibility from a human rights perspective. An interdisciplinary approach to the proposal to extend the Court’s jurisdiction to corporate actors identifies as a major obstacle to statutory reform the unresolved conflict between diverging views on the reality of organizations.

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The science-and-religion dialogue has now become an established part of the wider cultural debate about the respective roles of science and religion within democratic societies. Typically, science has usually been identified with the sphere of reason, fact and explanation, whereas religion has been located within the realm of experience, value and interpretation. But religions also prescribe beliefs and support these with metaphysical accounts of the self, world and God. Such belief systems are both identity-forming and comprehensive. But the pluralism of world-views within modern liberal democracies and methodological naturalism in the sciences would seem to require believers to suspend these deeply-held beliefs when engaged in public discourse or scientific inquiry. This raises a number of interesting philosophical and practical issues which this volume seeks to address. As a reflection on the matrix of science, religion and politics, this volume constitutes a major contribution to an important, but neglected topic. This book will open up new lines of research and communication not only among philosophers, scientists and theologians, but for all those interested in the larger cultural conversation about the relationship between science and religion.

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Science deeply challenges classical descriptions of the human person as 'free' and as 'spirit'. This survey of contemporary neuroscience and evolutionary biology explores why these challenges have arisen. At the same time it finds in the religious dimension of human existence powerful resources for speaking of the 'Emergenz des Geistes' and of a deeper sense of human freedom.

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