Die in diesem Bande vereinigten Aufsatze dokumentieren die siebte einer Reihe thematisch aufeinander bezogener Arbeitstagungen von Indologen, Buddhologen und Theologen, zu der das Institut fur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften eingeladen hatte, und die im September 2000 unter dem Titel "Mythisierung der Transzendenz als Entwurf ihrer Erfahrung" stattfand. Zur Diskussion stand die Tragweite und Anwendbarkeit des Begriffes "Mythisierung", ein zentraler Terminus der Religionshermeneutik Gerhard Oberhammers. Dieser Begriff ermoglichte es den Beitragenden nicht nur, den Gegensatz von (...) Erfahrung, Sprache und Transzendenz in den unterschiedlichen Religionen zu problematisieren, sondern mit ihm konnte auch auf die Bedingungen jeder historisch-konkreten Religion reflektiert werden. Zu den theologischen und philosophischen Beitragen gehoren: Gerhard Oberhammer, Mit-sein, Mythisierung und Transzendenz. Einleitende Gedanken; Siegfried Wiedenhofer, "Mythisierung der Transzendenz". Zwischen Offenbarungsereignis und Traditionsvermittlung; H. J. Adriaanse, Wort, Offenbarung und Theologie als Momente der Mythisierung. Karl Barths Theologie des Wortes Gottes als Prufstein eines religionshermeneutischen Grundbegriffs; Desiree J. Berendsen, Mythisierung der Transzendenz als Ordnung des Lebens. Uber Kierkegaard und Oberhammer; Marcus Schmucker, Von der individuellen Erfahrung zum Text; Norbert Hintersteiner, Von der Gebung des Unendlichen. Phanomen und Transzendenz bei Jean-Luc Marion. Shizuteru Ueda, Mythisierung und Ent-Mythisierung der Transzendenz als Entwurf ihrer Erfahrung im Zen-Buddhismus; Hans-Peter Muller, Mythisierung geschichtlicher Ereignisse im Alten Testament und im Alten Vorderen Orient; Lourens Minnema, Bildlose Bildhaftigkeit. "Mythisierung" im Werk Mark Rothkos; Johann Reikerstorfer, Kritische Toleranz. Verstandigungsmoglichkeiten im interreligiosen Dialog? Indologische Beitrage: Halina Marlewicz, Advaita Vedanta Hermeneutics of Revelation Key-Statements as "Mythicising" of Transcendence; Jan C. Heesterman, Opfer, Transzendenz und Dharma in der Sicht der Mima'sa; Andre Padoux, Mythisierung am Beispiel des Sivaismus; Marion Rastelli, Der Tempel als Mythisierung der Transzendenz; Axel Michaels, Tirtha - Orte der Transzendenz in hinduistischen Texten, Ritualen und Karten; Tilmann Vetter, Zur Anthropologie der Khandha-Passagen in den alteren Sammlungen des Pali-Kanons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Benjamin ReduxGerhard RichterProfane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen; 271 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00 cloth, $14.00 paper.Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, by John McCole; xiii & 329 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.Walter Benjamin’s Passages, by Pierre Missac, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson; xvii & 221 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, $25.00.Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: (...) Destruction and Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne; xiv & 298 pp. London: Routledge, 1994, $65.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success,” writes Emerson in his 1860 essay “Culture.” 1 Perhaps at no point since the publication of Emerson’s essay has the diagnosis it advances been more relevant than today, some 136 years later, when “Culture,” at least in the methodological and political struggles within the academy, has again become the word of ambition. As in Emerson’s nineteenth-century America, those who today pursue that word most ardently also tend—in their struggle to explicate history and culture—to shy away from the persistent instability of meaning with which the texts that they take as their objects of study are vexed. In other words, they are afraid of earthquakes. For Emerson continues: [End Page 200] “There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your word, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.” 2It has become one of the methodological orthodoxies of the new contextualism, the increasingly prominent engine driving a continuing metamorphosis of what is perhaps no longer usefully called “Humanities,” to posit a relatively transparent, unproblematic relationship between a textual artifact and its larger cultural or historical context. It is precisely this complex relationship between text and culture—and the theoretical possibility of doing justice to it—that this review of four new publications on Walter Benjamin will revisit.The urgent promise to think through the complicated relationship between text and culture, between the idiomatic artifact and its historical formation, has yet to be fulfilled. How does one account for the singularity of a specific instance of signification, be it a literary text, a film, or a neon sign, articulating the relationship between it and the cultural paradigm that gave rise to it and to which it gave rise? How might one talk about a text’s historicity without forcing a hasty assimilation of it into a crudely mimetic model? One way out of the difficulty, of course, is to suppress the vicissitudes of language altogether, with an eye to hastening the assimilation of a text, seen primarily as illustrative or evidential material, into pre-established assumptions. An example of such a dissatisfactory answer can be found in the introduction to a recent programmatic publication, in which the editors triumphantly proclaim: “Thus, for example, although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required.” 3 A marked dislike of earthquakes is at work here. What is more, the logic of such a statement goes as follows: because close reading is no longer necessary, it is dispensable, and therefore eventually no longer performed at all. One is tempted to invoke the famous language of Kafka’s chaplain in The Trial who reprimands Joseph K. for his failure to read closely: “You have not enough respect for writing and you are altering the story.” 4Such methodological difficulties only get worse when one considers the particular problem posed to scholarship by the case of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish critic, writer, and philosopher now widely regarded as one of the most significant theorists of our century. On the [End Page 201] one... (shrink)

The mystical and spiritual authors of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries provided rich inspiration for Kierkegaard's religious thought. Kierkegaard owned numerous works by these authors, who are associated with the spiritual traditions of Rheno‐Flemish mysticism, Devotio Moderna, post‐Tridentine and Baroque Catholicism, and Reformed Pietism. The accurate spiritual diagnostics and the apt methods of spiritual formation found in (Pseudo‐)Tauler, Theologia Deutsch, Abraham a Sancta Clara, and François Fénelon deeply impressed Kierkegaard. He adopted and further developed motifs from the mystical and spiritual (...) authors in a variety of his writings, and his journals contain abundant reflections on themes from Thomas à Kempis, Ludovicus Blosius, and Gerhard Tersteegen, such as the imitation of Christ, spiritual guidance, or divine pedagogy. The best testimony to the importance of spiritual literature for Kierkegaard is the fact that he sought counsel in it in a personal crisis when he was deciding on the future of his religious authorship. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, (...) and contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 2 runs from September 1827 to 1832. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854), in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular (...) internationally, and contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford (1812–77) was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular (...) internationally, and contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford (1812–77) was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 1 covers the years 1822 to 1827. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular (...) internationally, and contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford (1812–77) was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 2 runs from September 1827 to 1832. (shrink)

The divisions emanating from the Eurozone crisis have led political realists to argue that European identity should be conceived of via “basic legitimation demand” that prioritizes the creation of order in backward-looking, non-utopian terms. In contrast, I suggest that Europe would do better by building an ethically-constitutive “story of peoplehood” that looks both backward and forward. I argue that the EU should build on the ideals drawn from the continent’s shared past as well as its desire to retake control from (...) the global economic forces that threaten democratic political sovereignty in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Despite its importance to Chemistry, the Pauli Exclusion Principle appears as a rather ad hoc addition to quantum mechanics. In this paper a description of its origin is given together with a critical discussion of its use and significance in Chemistry and Quantum Physics.

In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor–patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two distinct medical interactions. We found that patients employed both low pitch and creak as linguistic resources when describing (...) chronic pain, narrating symptoms and requesting opioids. The situational use of both features informs us about the linguistic ways in which patients frame fraught issues like chronic pain in light of the current opioid crisis. This study expands the breadth of phonetic analysis within the domain of discourse analysis, serving to illuminate discussions surrounding the illocutionary role of the lower vocal tract in expressing emotions. (shrink)

DIVA new look at Kenneth Arrow’s classic study of the economics of health care: is his formulation still relevant 40 years later?/div.

Summary The complex of ‚lysenkoism‘ cannot satisfyingly be explained as a pure and internal marxist tradition and reception. A necessary external addition has to consider the social history of the Soviet Union, her political economy, and the development of her scientific history. Hence, a more adequate connection to the ‚stalinist‘ epoch can be drawn.

The founders of the Marburger Schule of Neo-Kantianism, Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, laid an emphasis upon a Platonic understanding of mathematics and logic as the paradigmatic epistemological basis of philosophy. Their successors, namely Ernst Cassirer and Nicolai Hartmann, made obvious, however, that new biological thinking can have a strong influence on ontology as well as on the theory of knowledge. They could show that biology was no longer to be treated as a metaphysical system in that pejorative meaning of (...) metaphysics which Kant had so severely been opposing. Against the anti-realistic approach of the older neo-Kantians who wanted to eliminate Kant's thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), both Cassirer and Hartmann returned to a form of realism by way of Hegel's philosophical results and reflections on his method. This makes clear that their realism is still to be taken as a more of less monistic idealism. However, considering that modern biology as an antimetaphysical force became influential in their system for the first time and that it did so in two different but - on second thoughts - complementary ways, it becomes clear that it was necessary to change the paradigms of any neo-Kantian philosophy. Cassirer proved this by his development as a philosopher with a strong historical impetus while Hartmann as a more systematical philosopher only pointed in that direction. (shrink)

The new area of logic and computation is now undergoing rapid development. This has affected the social pattern of research in the area. A new topic may rise very quickly with a significant body of research around it. The community, however, cannot wait the traditional two years for a book to appear. This has given greater importance to thematic collections of papers, centred around a topic and addressing it from several points of view, usually as a result of a workshop, (...) summer school, or just a scientific initiative. Such a collection may not be as coherent as a book by one or two authors yet it is more focused than a collection of key papers on a certain topic. It is best thought of as a thematic collection, a study in the area of logic and computation. The new series Studies in Logic and Computation is intended to provide a home for such thematic collections. Substructural logics are nonclassical logics, which arose in response to problems in foundations of mathematics and logic, theoretical computer science, mathematical linguistics, and category theory. They include intuitionistic logic, relevant logic, BCK logic, linear logic, and Lambek's calculus of syntactic categories. Substructural logics differ from classical logics, and from each other, in their presuppositions about Gentzen's structural rules, although their presuppositions about the deductive role of logical constants are invariant. Substructural logics have been a subject of study for logicians during the last sixty years. Specialists have often worked in isolation, however, largely unaware of the contributions of others. This book brings together new papers by some of the most eminent authorities in these varioustraditions to produce a unified view of substructural logics. (shrink)

This essay examines how Michel Henry's and Jean‐Luc Marion's continuation of phenomenology's turn to the invisible relates to painting, aesthetics, and theology. First, it discusses Henry and Marion's redefinition of phenomenality. Second, it explores Henry's “Kandinskian” description of abstract painting as expressing “Life.” Third, it explicates Marion's “Rothkoian” rehabilitation of the idol and renewed zeal for the icon—both phenomena exemplify “givenness.” Fourth, it unpacks my thesis: Henry's phenomenology, theologically applied, exercises an inadequate Kantian apophasis, characterized by a sublime sacrifice of (...) the imagination; although Marion's work sometimes evidences a similar tendency, its prevailing momentum offers theology a fully catholic scope. (shrink)

J. Matthew Ashley’s Renewing Theology compellingly argues that academic theology needs renewal by way of a “living circulation” with spirituality. The latter may be an animating force for the former, assuring that theology, even in its academic form, arises from concrete experiential encounter with God. Ashley rec­ommends Ignatian spirituality as a tradition distinctively suited to renewing theology in late modernity, and offers detailed accounts of Karl Rahner’s, Ignacio Ellacuría’s, and Pope Francis’s diverse theological appropriations of Ignatian spirituality to substantiate his (...) case. Among the book’s numerous successes is Ashley’s creative presentation of Rahner as retrieving Ignatian spirituality so as to present a message and mission of consolation to the modern world; thus Rahner can be a productive model for academic theology today. (shrink)

Nicholas Jacobs’s introduction to and translation of Johann Peter Hebel’s story, The Glass Jew, a humorous example of inclusiveness and communicative conflict-resolution.

Rahner's Mariology and theology of the saints exemplify his respect for the universality of the Catholic ethos. The article’s three parts substantiate this claim. First, it analyzes Rahner's placement of Mary outside his theology's center, while he resists marginalizing her. This analysis involves contrasting Rahner with Hans Urs von Balthasar. Second, it reads Rahner's theology of Mary's Assumption as an exercise in fundamental-eschatological theology. He takes a similar approach in his theology of the saints. Third, it considers Rahner's thoughts on (...) devotion to Mary and the saints, relating these practices to his fundamental-eschatological theology. Rahner’s contextualization of Mary and the saints within the wideness of all history, to which eschatology attests, reflects his holding open of the universal Catholic ethos. This sets him apart from other Catholics, who fix Mary and the saints firmly at Catholicism’s center, thus potentially restricting the Catholic ethos. Today’s Catholics must learn from Rahner’s holism. (shrink)

Rahner's Mariology and theology of the saints exemplify his respect for the universality of the Catholic ethos. The article’s three parts substantiate this claim. First, it analyzes Rahner's placement of Mary outside his theology's center, while he resists marginalizing her. This analysis involves contrasting Rahner with Hans Urs von Balthasar. Second, it reads Rahner's theology of Mary's Assumption as an exercise in fundamental-eschatological theology. He takes a similar approach in his theology of the saints. Third, it considers Rahner's thoughts on (...) devotion to Mary and the saints, relating these practices to his fundamental-eschatological theology. Rahner’s contextualization of Mary and the saints within the wideness of all history, to which eschatology attests, reflects his holding open of the universal Catholic ethos. This sets him apart from other Catholics, who fix Mary and the saints firmly at Catholicism’s center, thus potentially restricting the Catholic ethos. Today’s Catholics must learn from Rahner’s holism. (shrink)

This article argues that Karl Rahner’s theme of “eschatological ignorance” should be retrieved to facilitate and to fortify the enactment of Catholic theology’s prophetic commitments in a U.S. context. First, the article presents and defends Rahner’s famous distinction between eschatology and apocalyptic. Second, it characterizes Rahner’s distinction as representative of his conviction of a need for docta ignorantia futuri, which stems from his theology of God as Absolute Mystery, and which, though Rahner recommends it to twentieth-century Europeans, seems particularly well (...) suited for theological application in the twenty-first-century United States. Third, it suggests how Rahner’s eschatological ignorance might make a prophetic impact on the American socio-religio-political climate. (shrink)

This article argues that Karl Rahner’s theme of “eschatological ignorance” should be retrieved to facilitate and to fortify the enactment of Catholic theology’s prophetic commitments in a U.S. context. First, the article presents and defends Rahner’s famous distinction between eschatology and apocalyptic. Second, it characterizes Rahner’s distinction as representative of his conviction of a need for docta ignorantia futuri, which stems from his theology of God as Absolute Mystery, and which, though Rahner recommends it to twentieth-century Europeans, seems particularly well (...) suited for theological application in the twenty-first-century United States. Third, it suggests how Rahner’s eschatological ignorance might make a prophetic impact on the American socio-religio-political climate. (shrink)

This article explores how Jean-Luc Nancy attempts to gain critical traction on Christianity by proscribing thinking of completion. First, it describes Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity as stemming from his aesthetic redirection of Heidegger's thinking of finitude. Second, it further details Nancy's noetic declension of Heidegger via Kant and Lyotard, where the imagination and aesthetic communication are deemed impossible. Third, it examines Nancy's treatment of paintings of the Virgin Mary who, for Nancy, exemplifies his brand of incompletion. Nancy's work on Mary (...) reveals both the oversights and the insights of his deconstruction of Christianity, which Catholic theology should seriously engage. (shrink)

dialectical frameworks constitute a recent and powerful generalisation of Dung's argumentation frameworks, where the relationship between the arguments can be specified via Boolean formulas. Recent results have shown that this enhancement comes with the price of higher complexity compared to AFs. In fact, acceptance problems in the world of ADFs can be hard even for the third level of the polynomial hierarchy. In order to implement reasoning problems on ADFs, systems for quantified Boolean formulas thus are suitable engines to be (...) employed. In this paper we give complexity sensitive QBF encodings of ADF problems generalising recent work on QBFs for AF labellings. Our encodings provide a uniform and modular way of translating reasoning in ADFs to QBFs, that can be used as the basis for novel systems for ADF reasoning. (shrink)

The main topic of this article is Otto Frank's forgotten notion of the pressure-volume diagram of the cardiac ventricle as a means to assess the external mechanical work of the heart. Developed by Frank at the end of the 19th century, this idea was reenvisioned as pressure-volume area about 70 to 80 years later by Hiroyuki Suga. This notion now serves as a perspective for defining cardiac contractility and thus enabling the controlled clinical application of cardiac assist devices. We begin (...) our discussion, however, with the work of Ernest H. Starling, whose dominant influence on the thinking of cardio-physiologists led to a neglect of some of the fundamental insights of Frank's... (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories (...) and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Humanism and the Death of God is a critical exploration of secular humanism and its discontents. Through close readings of three exemplary nineteenth-century philosophical naturalists or materialists, who perhaps more than anyone set the stage for our contemporary quandaries when it comes to questions of human nature and moral obligation, Ronald E. Osborn argues that "the death of God" ultimately tends toward the death of liberal understandings of the human as well. Any fully persuasive defense of humanistic values - including (...) the core humanistic concepts of inviolable dignity, rights, and equality attaching to each individual - requires an essentially religious vision of personhood. Osborn shows such a vision is found in an especially dramatic and historically consequential way in the scandalous particularity of the Christian narrative of God becoming a human. He does not attempt to provide logical proofs for the central claims of Christian humanism along the lines some philosophers might demand. Instead, this study demonstrates how philosophical naturalism or materialism, and secular humanisms and anti-humanisms, might be persuasively read from the perspective of a classically orthodox Christian faith. (shrink)

In the context of the emerging Semantic Web and the quest for a common logical framework underpinning its architecture, the relation of rule-based languages such as Answer Set Programming (ASP) and ontology languages such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) has attracted a lot of attention in the literature over the past years. With its roots in Deductive Databases and Datalog though, ASP shares much more commonality with another Semantic Web standard, namely the Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL). (...) In this paper, we take the recent approval of the SPARQL1.1 standard by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) as an opportunity to introduce this standard to the Logic Programming community by providing a translation of SPARQL1.1 into ASP. In this translation, we explain and highlight peculiarities of the new W3C standard. Along the way, we survey existing literature on foundations of SPARQL and SPARQL1.1, and also combinations of SPARQL with ontology and rules languages. Thereby, apart from providing the means to implement and support SPARQL natively within Logic Programming engines and particularly ASP engines, we hope to pave the way for further research on a common logical framework for Semantic Web languages, including query languages, from an ASP point of view. (shrink)