Departing from the fact that László Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material zu Architektur (1929), had been an important source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, this article examines the affinities between László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto’s intellectual positions. The article places emphasis on two particular ideas: how Aalto and Moholy-Nagy conceived the connection of biology with standardization and technology and its relationship to light and perception. Special attention is paid to the notions of “flexible standardisation” and rationalisation (...) in Aalto’s thought, as well as to his belief that nature and standardization should be conceived are closely interconnected. In regard to their shared intellectual development, the article sheds light on the first encounters of the two men including: their meeting at the second Congrès International de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1929; the June 1931 Finish meeting of Aino Marsio-Aalto, Alvar Aalto, Moholy-Nagy and Ellen Frank; the June 1931 exchanges between Aalto and Moholy-Nagy during the inner circle CIAM meeting in Berlin; and the common stay of the Aaltos and Moholy-Nagy in London in 1933 are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on Aalto’s “The Reconstruction of Europe is the Key Problem for the Architecture of Our Time”, in which he argued that standardization in architecture should draw upon biological models. (shrink)

ArgumentI propose that both Moholy-Nagy's suggestions that products of applied, particularly scientific, photography be employed as exemplars for art photography, and his practice of integrating such applied photographs with art photographs in his publications and exhibitions, laid the groundwork for an aestheticization of scientific photography within the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde. This photographic “New Vision,” formulated in the 1920s, also effected a kind of “scientization” of art photography. Rather than Positivist mechanism, however, I argue that the science at play (...) was “biocentrism,” the early twentieth-century worldview that can be described as Naturromantik updated by biologism. His key inspiration in this regard was one of the most important figures of biocentrism, the biologist and popular scientific writer Raoul Heinrich Francé, and his conception of Biotechnik [bionics], in which he proposed that all human technologies are based in natural technologies.The biological, pure and simple, taken as the guide.– Moholy-Nagy. (shrink)

In Focus: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy reproduces almost fifty of the artist's photographs, with commentaries on each by katherine Ware, an Assistant Curator in the Musuem's Department of Photographs. Included as well is an edited transcript of a colloquim on Moholy-Nagy's work, with comments by Thomas Barrow, Jeannine Fiedler, Charles Hagen, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Weston Naef, Leland Rice, and Katherine Ware. A chronology of significant events in the artist's life is also provided.

Three volumes from the Getty Museum's popular In Focus series are packaged together here, offering a handsome set of books on these important photographers: André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray. All born in Europe, each photographer journeyed to the United States and made important contributions to the medium. The volume on Kertész presents the Getty Museum's holdings of his work from his Budapest, Paris, and New York periods, while the images in the book on Bauhaus teacher (...) class='Hi'>Moholy-Nagy include his pioneering photomontages and camera-less "photograms." The Man Ray volume presents his inventive photographs taken in New York, Paris, and Los Angeles, including portraits and nudes, and his experimental work with Rayographs and solarization. Each volume in the In Focus series contains approximately fifty photographs, with commentaries, an introduction, a chronology, and a transcription of a colloquium on the photographer's life and work. (shrink)

Food retailers are powerful actors of the agro-industrial food system. They exert strong lock-in effects that hinder transitions towards more sustainable agri-food systems. Indeed, their marketing practices generally result in excluding the most sustainable food products, such as local, low-input, small-scale farmers’ products. Recently in Belgium, several initiatives have been created to enable the introduction of local products on supermarket shelves. In this article, we study three of those initiatives to analyse if the development of local sourcing in supermarkets opens (...) up an opportunity for a transition towards more sustainable agri-food systems. We conceptualise transitions as a shift in governance and ethical values and adopt a pragmatist approach of ethics combined with the systemic perspective of transition studies, to evaluate the impact of these initiatives. Our analysis shows that they mainly contribute to the reproduction of the incumbent agri-food system. It also highlights that first, to be a driver for sustainability transitions, food ethics need to be systemic i.e. relate to a systemic understanding of problems and perspective of sustainability, including social justice. And second, it highlights that governance arrangements involving not only representative organisations of the various agri-food and non-agricultural actors, but also actors upholding ethical values that are currently missing in conventional supply chains and representing excluded and marginalised interests, favour the uptake of such systemic ethics by incumbent actors. Hence, systemic ethics and inclusive governance are key features for initiatives to contribute to a sustainability transition. (shrink)

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is tasked with facing the hundred-year history of Indian Residential Schools. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is frequently invoked in relation to the Canadian TRC, perhaps because this is one of the few TRCs worldwide that Canadians know. Whilst the South African TRC is mainly applauded as an international success, I argue that loose analogizing is often more emotive than concise. Whilst much indeed can be drawn from the South African experience, it (...) is important to specify the Canada–South Africa analogy. In this article, I do so by focussing on the institutional approach to truth and how this relates to issues of settler/White denial. The South African experience teaches that narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence. Consequently, I argue that Indigenous–settler reconciliation requires a broad truth that locates residential schools on a continuum of violence, linking extraordinary abuses with structural injustices and historic colonization with lived relationships. (shrink)

Sibylle Moser untersucht am Beispiel des Handlungsbegriffs die argumentative Komplexität der Empirischen Theorie der Literatur (ETL) und stellt den Entwurf einer konstruktivistischen Methodologie vor.

Investigators agree that hope is an important coping skill for patients. Hope is stronger than optimism and influences one's physical well being. Suggestions and strategies that can be used in the clinical setting to increase hope begin with an admission of its important role.

The 1924 Church reform, through which the Romanian Orthodox Church decided to adopt the Revised Julian Calendar, led to dissent movements, mostly comprised of peasants, especially in the villages of Moldavia and Bessarabia. Considering the calendar change a heresy, these groups soon developed into religious communities that came to be known as Old Calendarists, or “stylists,” followers of “the old-style calendar.” Led by defrocked priests and monks who rejected the reform, the groups very quickly became the target of the secret (...) police and the Gendarmerie. What also drew the attention of the authorities and the Orthodox Church was that women, especially the younger ones, seemed to play important roles within the communities, not only in terms of membership, but also in preserving and spreading the Old Calendarists’ beliefs and religious ideas. As many members of the communities were being arrested, and their churches were destroyed, these women also suffered imprisonment, monastic incarceration, or were forced to hide from the authorities in caves or huts that they built in the woods. Though subjected to various forms of persecution, which continued through the communist period, the majority of them held strong to their beliefs and contributed to the forging of a religious identity. Using archival documents, in the forms of letters, postcards, photos, and declarations as primary sources, and drawing on interviews conducted with contemporary nuns and members of the Old Calendarist communities, the present article explores the personal stories of young Old Calendarist women. Building upon the work of Anca Șincan, this article challenges the notion that transmission of religion was the exclusive prerogative of older women. (shrink)

With the ever-growing quality of observational data in astronomy, the complexity of astrophysical models has been increasing in turn. This trend raises the question: Are there still reasons to prefer simpler models if the final goal is an actual model-target comparison? I argue for two aspects in which astrophysical research may favor models having reduced complexity: first, to address the problem of determining the values of adjustable parameters and, second, to pave the way for a validation of the model based (...) on the modeler’s understanding of the scope of the model and the critical processes on the target’s side. (shrink)

This paper explores the epistemic status of models and simulations between theory, on the one hand, and observations, on the other. In particular, I will argue that the interpretation of an essentially invariant astrophysical model structure can change substantially over time. I will illustrate this claim using as an example the first 20 years (1985–2004) of development of the Paris-Durham shock code—a numerical model of slow interstellar shock waves (i.e. a disturbance of the medium that travel faster than the local (...) speed of sound). I will show that the model’s interpretation and, in particular, its underlying representational ideal—the modeler’s (often implicit) goal governing the development and the use of the model—changed notably during this period. Whereas the code was originally used in a purely exploratory fashion, it was later taken to represent and encompass the target phenomenon as completely as possible. It is noteworthy that during this transition the model’s change of epistemic status was never explicitly acknowledged or in any way articulated. However, the impetus for the change can, I claim, be found in the role that observational data came to play in the later publications. (shrink)

This paper explores the epistemic status of models and simulations between theory, on the one hand, and observations, on the other. In particular, I will argue that the interpretation of an essentially invariant astrophysical model structure can change substantially over time. I will illustrate this claim using as an example the first 20 years (1985–2004) of development of the Paris-Durham shock code—a numerical model of slow interstellar shock waves (i.e. a disturbance of the medium that travel faster than the local (...) speed of sound). I will show that the model’s interpretation and, in particular, its underlying representational ideal—the modeler’s (often implicit) goal governing the development and the use of the model—changed notably during this period. Whereas the code was originally used in a purely exploratory fashion, it was later taken to represent and encompass the target phenomenon as completely as possible. It is noteworthy that during this transition the model’s change of epistemic status was never explicitly acknowledged or in any way articulated. However, the impetus for the change can, I claim, be found in the role that observational data came to play in the later publications. (shrink)

This article presents an analytic critique of the predominant revisionist theoretical paradigm of just war (henceforth: revisionism). This is accomplished by means of a precise description and explanation of the practicability problem that confronts it, namely that soldiers that revisionism would deem “unjust” are bound to fail to fulfil the duties that revisionism imposes on them, because these duties are overdemanding. The article locates the origin of the practicability problem in revisionism’s overidealized conception of a soldier as an individual rational (...) agent analogous to the aggressor or defender in a case of lethal self-defense, who is capable of reflecting on the morality of his status in war and of the killing he performs and thus of recognizing his revisionist duties. Revisionism, however, ignores the following fact: Killing in war is not a natural human behavior. This is why training soldiers to kill is—and arguably always has been—a necessity for the existence of war and the killing that occurs in it. Moreover, this training involves a certain level of moral desensitization to violence whose goal is to prevent soldiers from thoroughly reflecting on the morality of the killing they engage in. Hence, war and killing can only exist if soldiers are trained in such a way that they do not reflect on whether they could be addressees of revisionist duties in the first place. This means that military training is a “constitutive condition” of soldiers and war, which is why it cannot excuse their noncompliance with revisionist duties, thus making these duties categorically overdemanding. The argument here draws on the paradigmatic example of modern US military killing conditioning (MC), but embeds it into a broader military-historical perspective that describes how soldiers have always needed to be mentally and morally influenced in order to enable war and killing. The article’s explanation of revisionism’s practicability problem has a constructive consequence for future theory-building in the ethics of war: It implies that a potentially revised ethical theory of war must necessarily analyze the institutions that allocate belligerent resources, if it aims to morally assess battlefield behavior in a practicable manner. (shrink)

In the eighteenth century, the sciences and their applications adopted a new attitude based on quantification and, increasingly, on a notion of precision. Within this process, instruments played a significant role. However, while new devices such as the micrometer, telescope, and pendulum clock embodied a formerly unknown potential of precision, this could only be realized by defining a set of practices regulating their application and control. The paper picks up the case of pendulum clocks used in eighteenth-century observatories in order (...) to show the process of learning in the course of which the pendulum clock first became a precision instrument. By examining the results of an especially developed statistical analysis, conducted to compare the performance of eighteenth-century clocks, it highlights the diversity of conditions, attitudes, and manners of handling that are characteristic for the epoch. In this way, it underlines the necessity of standardization of timekeeping practices rather than exclusively focusing on the technological development of clocks. Ultimately, the paper discusses the role of makers and users in order to show the evolution of a “precision instrument.”. (shrink)

The daughter of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tries to make sense of her relationship with her father. “When I was born, my father was already no longer there.” Sibylle Lacan's memoir of her father, the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is told through fragmentary, elliptical episodes, and describes a figure who had defined himself to her as much by his absence as by his presence. Sibylle was the second daughter and unhappy last child of Lacan's first marriage: the fruit of (...) despair (“some will say of desire, but I do not believe them”). Lacan abandoned his old family for a new one: a new partner, Sylvia Bataille (the wife of Georges Bataille), and another daughter, born a few months after Sibylle. For years, this daughter, Judith, was the only publicly recognized child of Lacan—even if, due to French law, she lacked his name. In one sense, then, A Father presents the voice of one who, while bearing his name, had been erased. If Jacques Lacan had described the word as a “presence made of absence,” Sibylle Lacan here turns to the language of the memoir as a means of piecing together the presence of a man who had entered her life in absence, and in his passing, finished in it. In its interplay of absence, naming, and the despair engendered by both, A Father ultimately poses an essential question: what is a father? This first-person account offers both a riposte and a complement to the concept (and the name) of the father as Lacan had defined him in his work, and raises difficult issues about the influence biography can have on theory—and vice versa—and the sometimes yawning divide that can open up between theory and the lives we lead. (shrink)

1. In June 1737, Jean Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678–1771) informed Joseph-Nicolas Delisle (1688–1768) about the dispatch from Paris of six pendulum clocks and one seconds counter designed for the...

In 2017 a clock from the collection of the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in Dresden was dismantled. This clock had been made around 1767 by Johann Gottfried Köhler (1745–1800), who was then in...

"Das Konzept der ›operativen Ontologien‹ ist nicht einfach zu verstehen. Dieser Artikel versucht Potenzial und Schranken dieser Idee auszuloten. Der methodische Ansatz der operativen Ontologie zielt darauf, dass das ›Ontische‹ im Sinne des phänomenal je Gegebenen das ›Ontologische‹ im Sinne der Erklärbarkeit und Verstehbarkeit von Welt bedingt und aus sich hervortreibt: Das Ontische gebiert das Ontologische. Was das bedeutet, wird einerseits anhand von Bernhard Siegerts Begriff ›Kulturtechnik‹ sowie andererseits anhand von Lorenz Engells Begriff der ›Ontographie‹ rekonstruiert sowie kritisch kommentiert. The (...) concept of ‘operative ontologies’ is not easy to understand. The article tries to explore the potential and limitations of this idea. The methodological approach of operative ontology aims at the fact that the ‘ontic’ (in the sense of the phenomenally given) deter- mines and produces the ‘ontological’ (in the sense of the comprehensibility of the world): The ontic gives birth to the ontological. The meaning of this statement is reconstructed with reference to Bernhard Siegert’s concept of ‘cultural technique’ as well as Lorenz Engell’s notion of ‘ontography’ and is further- more critically commented upon. ". (shrink)

The article deals with Kant's understanding of personhood and autonomy. It highlights the connection of autonomy and human dignity within Kant's appreciation of morality, and indicates how his distinction between the empirical and transcendental spheres enables Kant to extend dignity even to humans who are not actually autonomous. Turning to contemporary approaches within ethics that refer to Kant but omit this transcendental framework, it defends the necessity of a trans-empirical frame within the Kantian system and hints at consequences for bioethics. (...) It concludes that Kant works with neither an absolutist notion of freedom in terms of solipsistic autarky, nor an empirical freedom and autonomy that begin and end at certain points of time. (shrink)

In recent years feminists have begun arguing for various political conceptions of ‘care’. I have argued, by contrast, for the intimate connection between the women’s movement of the last half century, and the growing realization of the necessity of civic friendship as a condition for genuine justice. I only repeat the outlines of my argument here, for my goal is to look at various institutions which might help realize not merely ‘public care’ – contemporary theories of which I argue need (...) a far more careful normative account – but a civic friendship between all citizens. Indeed, I argue that the ideal of civic friendship provides that normative account of political care lacking in contemporary theories. (shrink)