After the parliamentary elections in Germany in September 2017, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), The Greens (Bündnis90/Die Grünen) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) started to negotiate about forming a coalition government. But, surprising to many, the FDP decided to let these coalition talks collapse, and many commentators in Germany found it highly problematic for a political party to refuse to take responsibility in government. Interestingly, the question whether (or: when) democratic parties may legitimately refuse (...) to govern has so far been neglected in political theory and political philosophy. The article develops a general answer by discussing several possible reasons for thinking that it is sometimes wrong to refuse to govern and thereby engages both democratic theory and the recent literature on compromise. The resulting view is that parties have an ‘integrity prerogative’ that allows them to refuse to govern, except when there is no reasonable and stable alternative government coalition available. (shrink)

A paradigm instructs in how to do research successfully. Analytic philosophy of science, currently dominant, models paradigmatic rational science as a system of logical inferences. It is, however, an abundantly inadequate paradigm. This paper presents an alternative paradigm: science as an organized collection of problem solving processes. This position is backed, on the one side, by a cognitive model of problem solving process applicable to all problem solving circumstances and, on the other, by a non-formal conception of rationality that provides (...) a wider enriched notion of rational research process than is available to the analytic paradigm. The result is a very different way of looking at science and of doing history and philosophy of science. The position is developed sufficiently to display its nature and merits. (shrink)