The short version of the Bielefeld Partnership Expectations Questionnaire assesses the partner-related attachment dimensions fear of rejection, readiness for self-disclosure, and conscious need for care. The presented study investigated the factor structure in two samples and evaluated the convergent validity of scales. The sample included N = 175 patients with panic disorder and/or agoraphobia and N = 143 healthy controls. Besides, the BPEQ, the Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire, and the Brief Symptom Inventory were assessed as well, and the Adult (...) Attachment Prototype Rating was conducted. A confirmatory factor analysis of the three factor model revealed an acceptable model fit for the entire sample, patients and controls in terms of low RMSEA and SRMR. We found metric, scalar, and strict measurement invariance for the presence of anxiety disorder. However, only for fear of rejection and readiness for self-disclosure the reliability was acceptable, and convergent validity in terms of large correlations with the ECR scales was found in both samples. The scale conscious need for care had a questionable reliability and correlated only slightly with ECR-R scales. We conclude that fear of rejection and readiness for self-disclosure of the BPEQ-12 are reliable and valid scales for measuring partner-related attachment in healthy and clinical samples. (shrink)

In this classic analysis, Leo Strauss pinpoints what is original and innovative in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

Frames are a concept in knowledge representation that explains how the receiver, using background information, completes the information conveyed by the sender. This concept is used in different disciplines, most notably in cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence. This paper argues that frames can serve as the basis for describing mathematical proofs. The usefulness of the concept is illustrated by giving a partial formalisation of proof frames, specifically focusing on induction proofs, and relevant parts of the mathematical theory within which the (...) proofs are conducted; for the latter, we look at natural numbers and trees specifically. (shrink)

In opposition to traditional forms of dualism and monism, the author holds that our bodily self includes certain aspects of otherness. This is shown concerning the phenomenological issues of intentionality, of self-awareness and of intersubjectivity, by emphasizing the dimension of pathos. We are affected by what happens to us before being able to respond to it by acts or actions. Every sense, myself and others are born out of pathos. The original alienness of our own body, including neurological processes, creates (...) shifting degrees of nearness and remoteness, and allows for pathological deviations such as depersonalisation, paranoia or trauma. Such a phenomenology of body crosses the borderlines of different disciplines. (shrink)

The article which was published for the first and single time in 1939, is the starting point of Leo Strauss’ “esoteric” scholarship. While devoted to the investigation of Xenophon’s treatise called Constitution of the Lacedemonians the article, using it as an example, shows reasons, techniques, and the meaning of writing “between the lines”. Strauss sequentially shows how Xenophon hides his critique of the Spartan constitution behind the facade of an encomium. But what may be even more important, in (...) the piece Strauss clearly tries to overcome the established 19th-century view that Xenophon was a mediocre and charged with laconophilia historian; he tries to reinstate Xenophon’s position as that of a serious thinker: a Socratic philosopher. He shows how meticulously Xenophon studies the Spartan constitution and that this apparently very successful and very stable regime, in fact, deserves serious politico-philosophic critique. Thereby he partially reveals the essence of classical political philosophy to careful readers. (shrink)

This paper seeks to introduce cultural techniques to an Anglophone readership. Specifically geared towards an Anglophone readership, the paper relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. More specifically, it traces how the concept evolved from – and reacted against – so-called German media theory, a decidedly anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the reconceptualization of cultural techniques aims at (...) presenting them as chains of operations that link humans, things, media and even animals. To investigate cultural techniques is to shift the analytic gaze from ontological distinctions to the ontic operations that gave rise to the former in the first place. As Siegert points out, this shift recalls certain concurrent developments within the North American posthumanities; the paper therefore also includes a discussion of the similarities and differences between German and North American posthumanism. (shrink)

We discuss conceptual change and progress within mathematics, in particular how tools, structural concepts and representations are transferred between fields that appear to be unconnected or remote from each other. The theoretical background is provided by the frame concept, which is used in linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence to model how explicitly given information is combined with expectations deriving from background knowledge. In mathematical proofs, we distinguish two kinds of frames, namely structural frames and ontological frames. The interaction between (...) both kinds of frames can drive mathematical interpretation. We first discuss two examples where structural frames (formulaic notation) drive ontological development (the discovery or exploration of mathematical objects). The development of Boole’s Boolean algebra may at first appear as a metaphorical treatment of the (then) new area of logic. In the analysis, we discuss how different (aspects of) certain algebraic frames change in the transfer, how arising difficulties are solved and overall argue that Boole uses the numerical algebra frame as a research template for the discovery of a system for calculations in logic. Following Ifrah, we analyse the discovery of zero as an extension to the number ontology as driven by the development of notation. Both structural and ontological frames are extended and simplified as notation progresses. Finally, we discuss two examples from infinite combinatorics, viz. topological graph theory, and one foundational issue. In both examples, the two simultaneous frames about one object are maintained independently. They motivate different research questions, but may also fruitfully interact: shifting between multiple synchronously maintained perspectives acts as a motor of innovation. The analysis shows how a frame-based approach allows to model how different perspectives drive mathematical innovation because they highlight different aspects, questions and heuristics. (shrink)

Il est évident que l’attention ne fait pas partie des grands thèmes de la philosophie occidentale en tant que celle-ci s’occupe de l’être, du temps, de l’espace, de la liberté ou du sujet. Une telle réserve donne à penser. Il me semble qu’elle s’explique par quelques points faibles, inhérents aux interprétations traditionnelles. Premièrement, l’attention se réduit à une étape préparatoire, à une double fonction : il faut ouvrir les yeux et dresser les oreilles, et le reste viendra. Deuxièmeme...

This paper outlines the basic traits of a responsive phenomenology by focusing on the issue of originary substitution. On the one hand, a phenomenology of alienness or otherness and an ethics of the other in the sense of Levinas will prove to be closely bound up with this sort of substitution. On the other side, this substitution can be concretised by transitional figures such as the advocate, the therapist, the translator, the witness, or the field researcher; they all intervene from (...) the position of a Third without closing the fissure which opens between ourselves and the Other, between the own and the alien. Precisely by focussing on the issue of substitution, we have the opportunity to outline the basis traits of a responsive phenomenology and to discuss some of its institutional consequences. (shrink)

Experience is investigated according to those breaking points where the unexpected surfaces and the surprise of the extraordinary and the alien breaks through. What happens is always in the postponement between pathos and response; this represents the fundamental agreement of a responsive phenomenology: it is never a quiet succession, but always something arriving too early or too late. Threshold experiences such as hesitation, delay, waiting, pausing, stumbling are investigated in this framework.

Living corporeity is the intermediate element between nature and culture, which must be thought of as a reciprocal interconnection, since as corporeal beings we always move on a threshold. In the reflection of the bodily self, a doubling between the living body as a functioning subject and as a material object is revealed; after all, even one's own body sometimes takes on the features of a foreign body, as is the case in the experience of illness. In the technical instrument, (...) the body is prolonged and this highlights the connection between the technique of the thing and the technique of the self; however, despite the gradual autonomisation of the technical element from the living corporeity, there remains what escapes calculation and looms large in the subtraction of the alien. (shrink)

This edited volume offers a new approach to understanding social conventions by way of Martin Heidegger. It connects the philosopher's conceptions of the anyone, everydayness, and authenticity with an analysis and critique of social normativity. Heidegger’s account of the anyone is ambiguous. Some see it as a good description of human sociality, others think of it as an important critique of modern mass society. This volume seeks to understand this ambiguity as reflecting the tension between the constitutive function of conventions (...) for human action and the critical aspects of conformism. It argues that Heidegger’s anyone should neither be reduced to its pejorative nor its constitutive dimension. Rather, the concept could show how power and norms function. This volume would be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy and the social sciences who wish to investigate the social applications of the works of Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

Experience is investigated according to those breaking points where the unexpected surfaces and the surprise of the extraordinary and the alien breaks through. What happens is always in the postponement between pathos and response; this represents the fundamental agreement of a responsive phenomenology: it is never a quiet succession, but always something arriving too early or too late. Threshold experiences such as hesitation, delay, waiting, pausing, stumbling are investigated in this framework.

Through a comparison of the phenomenological motif of the alien and the psychoanalytic motif of the unconscious, a critique is advanced against Cartesian dualism, which recurs today in the natural sciences and in the split of the contemporary individual, divided between spirit and nature, the proper world and the alien world, the inner sphere and the outer sphere. It is a matter of thinking of an original subtraction, an absent presence that begins with ourselves, in a slippage that achieves no (...) synthesis. (shrink)

"Im Rahmen der technikphilosophischen, ethnologischen wie auch medien- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Debatte über die Handlungsmacht der Dinge ist es zu einer Konjunktur von Ontologien gekommen, die jedoch das traditionelle Konzept der Ontologie dekonstruiert bzw. verschiebt. Der Beitrag folgt dieser Verschiebung der Ontologie, die Medien und mediale Artefakte nicht mehr als Substanzen denkt, sondern als Verkettungen von Praktiken und Operationen, die diese Medien-Dinge allererst generieren. Nach ›operativen Ontologien‹ zu fragen bedeutet, nach den konkreten ontischen Operationen zu fragen, die allererst ontologische Unterscheidungen hervorbringen (...) – z. B. zwischen Form und Materie, Bild und Gegenstand, Ding und Prozess, Figur und Grund. Diese ontischen Operationen bilden den Kern dessen, was man Kulturtechniken nennt. Anhand von beispielhaften Hybridobjekten aus dem Bereich der material culture des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit zeigt der Beitrag, wie dies konkret zu verstehen ist. The debate on the agency of objects, lead by philosophy, ethnology as well as cultural and media studies, has triggered a boom of ontologies, deconstructing the traditional concept of ontology. The contribution follows this shift of ontology, which no longer conceives of the media and media artifacts as substances, but as concatenations of practices and operations that are generated by media objects in the first place. To ask for ‘operational ontologies’ means to ask for the concrete ontical operations which first of all produce onto- logical distinctions – e. g. between form and matter, image and object, thing and process, figure and background. These ontical operations form the core of what we call cultural techniques. The contribution illustrates and explains this thesis with reference to hybrid objects from the material culture of the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. ". (shrink)