Proceedings of a colloquium held in 2008 at Central European University.

Methods Young healthy heterosexual couples underwent sleep-lab-based polysomnography of two sleeping arrangements: individual sleep and co-sleep. Individual and dyadic sleep parameters (i.e., synchronization of sleep stages) were collected. The latter were assessed using cross-recurrence quantification analysis. Additionally, subjective sleep quality, relationship characteristics, and chronotype were monitored. Data were analyzed comparing co-sleep vs. individual sleep. Interaction effects of the sleeping arrangement with gender, chronotype, or relationship characteristics were moreover tested. Results As compared to sleeping individually, co-sleeping was associated with about 10% (...) more REM sleep, less fragmented REM sleep (p = 0.008), longer undisturbed REM fragments (p = 0.0006), and more limb movements (p = 0.007). None of the other sleep stages was significantly altered. Social support interacted with sleeping arrangement in a way that individuals with suboptimal social support showed the biggest impact of the sleeping arrangement on REM sleep. Sleep architectures were more synchronized between partners during co-sleep (p = 0.005) even if wake phases were excluded (p = 0.022). Moreover, sleep architectures are significantly coupled across a lag of ± 5min. Depth of relationship represented an additional significant main effect regarding synchronization, reflecting a positive association between the two. Neither REM sleep nor synchronization was influenced by gender, chronotype, or other relationship characteristics. Conclusion Depending on the sleeping arrangement, couple's sleep architecture and synchronization show alterations that are modified by relationship characteristics. We discuss that these alterations could be part of a self-enhancing feedback loop of REM sleep and sociality and a mechanism through which sociality prevents mental illness. (shrink)

This paper argues that Husserl’s ethics do not fit into any one of three commonly recognized kinds of ethical theory: virtue (Aristotelian), deontological (Kantian), and consequentialist (especially, utilitarianism). Husserl’s mature ethical theory, in particular, combines a modern, Kantian or Fichtean approach based on a strong concept of a free and active ego capable of shaping its life autonomously through its own will with a more Aristotelian theory of the virtues that help us to shape our lives in order to reach (...) happiness or eudaimonia. The paper presents a historical overview of Husserl’s writings on ethics, divided into two main periods with distinct emphases. It concludes that, on the one hand, Husserl’s theory of the ethical person clarifies the origin of the virtues in the free activity of the subject, and on the other, it extends the voluntaristic conception of subjectivity to encompass the passively constituted habits. In this way, Husserl combines an Aristotelian-style virtue ethics with modern theories of subjectivity. It is this combination of modern and Aristotelian elements in Husserl’s ethics that makes it a systematically fruitful and promising contribution to ethical theory. (shrink)

Strategies to involve agribusiness in the development of sustainable agricultural systems have been limited by the lack of a comprehensive conceptual framework for identifying the most critical supportive policies, programs and regulations. In this paper, we propose an efficiency/substitution/redesign framework to categorize strategies for modifying agribusiness practices. This framework is then used to identify a diverse range of short, medium, and long-term strategies to be pursued by governments, community groups, academics and agribusiness to support the transition. Strategies discussed include corporate (...) greening, ethical investment, changing the legal status of the corporaton, new business forms and the development of ecological economics. (shrink)

This paper introduces Husserl's ethics by examining his critique of Kant's ethics. It presents Husserl's lectures on ethics in which he offers his own ethical theory in a historical context. The phenomenological ethics seeks to combine the advantages of both the traditional empiricism and rationalism. Husserl's ethics takes into account that emotions play an essential role in the constitution of values and morals. Contrariwise, Husserl fights against relativism in ethics and praises Kant for the discovery of an absolute moral imperative. (...) He considers Kant's ethics as a rationalistic position that is too formal and that does not take into account that every will must be motivated by some concrete material good that is evaluated in our feelings or emotions. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION HUTCHESONS LIFE AND WORKS The history of philosophy includes the names of many persons, famous in their time, whose contributions to human ...

Twelve years after his famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (1943), the philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1904–1995) published a book-length study on the history of a single biological concept. Within France, his Formation of the Reflex Concept in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1955) contributed significantly to defining the “French style” of writing on the history of science. Outside of France, the book passed largely unnoticed. This paper re-reads Canguilhem’s study of the reflex concept with respect (...) to its historiographical and epistemological implications. Canguilhem defines concepts as complex and dynamic entities combining terms, definitions, and phenomena. As a consequence, the historiography of science becomes a rather complex task. It has to take into account textual and contextual aspects that develop independently of individual authors. In addition, Canguilhem stresses the connection between conceptual activities and other functions of organic individuals in their respective environments. As a result, biological concepts become tied to a biology of conceptual thinking, analogical reasoning, and technological practice. The paper argues that this seemingly circular structure is a major feature in Canguilhem’s philosophical approach to the history of the biological sciences. (shrink)

Can we have objective knowledge of the world? Can we understand what is morally right or wrong? Yes, to some extent. This is the answer given by Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Both rejected David Hume’s skeptical account of what we can hope to understand. But they held his empirical method in high regard, inquiring into the way we perceive and emotionally experience the world, into the nature and function of human empathy and sympathy and the role of the imagination (...) in processes of intersubjective understanding. The challenge is to overcome the natural constraints of perceptual and emotional experience and reach an agreement that is informed by the facts in the world and the nature of morality. This collection of philosophical essays addresses an audience of Smith- and Husserl scholars as well as everybody interested in theories of objective knowledge and proper morality which are informed by the way we perceive and think and communicate. (shrink)

Mirror-touch synaesthesia is a condition where observing touch to another’s body induces a subjective tactile sensation on the synaesthetes body. The present study explores which characteristics of the inducing stimulus modulate the synaesthetic touch experience. Fourteen mirror-touch synaesthetes watched videos depicting a touch event while indicating whether the video induced a tactile sensation, on which side of their body they felt this sensation and the intensity of the experienced sensation. Results indicate that the synaesthetes experience stronger tactile sensations when observing (...) touch to real bodies, whereas observing touch to dummy bodies, pictures of bodies and disconnected dummy body parts elicited weaker sensations. These results suggest that mirror-touch synaesthesia is not entirely bottom-up driven, but top-down information, such as knowledge about real and dummy body parts, also modulate the intensity of the experience. (shrink)

Following a detailed study of the views of reid and wittgenstein on philosophy and language, I conclude that reid's position represents an extremely pivotal stage in the upgrading of the importance of language in philosophy which, Taken up and carried along by moore, Culminates in the later philosophy of wittgenstein and that the latter owes much to views on philosophy and language which have their origin in reid.

This article raises the question of whether there is one consistent theory of volitional acts in Husserl’s writings. The question arises because Husserl approaches volitional consciousness in his static and his genetic phenomenology rather differently. Static phenomenology understands acts of willing as complex, higher-order phenomena that are founded in both intellectual and emotional acts; while genetic phenomenology describes them as passively motivated phenomena that are implicitly predelineated in feelings, instincts, and drives, which always already include a characteristic element of striving. (...) Thus, according to genetic phenomenology, volitional acts are not founded on intellectual and emotional acts but rather influence those acts in their specific directedness. This article critically investigates four possible attempts to unite the two phenomenological approaches consistently and concludes that all these attempts are burdened with unsolved problems. It thus remains questionable whether Husserl has one consistent theory of volitional acts. (shrink)

This article sheds new light on Bruno Latour’s sociology of science and technology by looking at his early study of the French writer, philosopher and editor Charles Péguy (1873–1914). In the early 1970s, Latour engaged in a comparative study of Péguy’s Clio and the four gospels of the New Testament. His 1973 contribution to a Péguy colloquium (published in 1977) offers rich insights into his interest in questions of time, history, tradition and translation. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, (...) Latour reads Clio as spelling out and illustrating the following argument: ‘Repetition is a machine to produce differences with identity’. However, in contrast to Deleuze’s work (together with Félix Guattari) on the materiality of machines, or assemblages [agencements], Latour emphasizes the semiotic aspects of the repetition/difference process. As in Péguy, the main model for this process is the Roman Catholic tradition of religious events. The article argues that it is this reading of Péguy and Latour’s early interest in biblical exegesis that inspired much of Latour’s later work. In Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar, 1979) and The Pasteurization of France (1988) in particular, problems of exegesis and tradition provide important stimuli for the analysis of scientific texts. In this context, Latour gradually transforms the question of tradition into the problem of reference. In a first step, he shifts the event that is transmitted and translated from the temporal dimension (i.e. the past) to the spatial (i.e. from one part of the laboratory to another). It is only in a second step that Latour resituates scientific events in time. As facts they are ‘constructed’ but nevertheless ‘irreducible’. They result, according to Latour, from the tradition of the future. As a consequence, the Latourian approach to science distances itself from the materialism of Deleuze and other innovative theoreticians. (shrink)

Suppose we can save either a larger group of persons or a distinct, smaller group from some harm. Many people think that, all else equal, we ought to save the greater number. This article defends this view (with qualifications). But unlike earlier theories, it does not rely on the idea that several people's interests or claims receive greater aggregate weight. The argument starts from the idea that due to their stakes, the affected people have claims to have a say in (...) the rescue decision. As rescuers, our primary duty is to respect these procedural claims, which we must do by doing what these people would decide, in a process where each is given an equal vote on the matter. So in cases where each votes in their own self-interest, respect for their equal right to decide, or their autonomy, will lead us to save the greater number. The argument is explained in detail, with special attention to the questions of how, exactly, it avoids aggregation, and of why majority rule is superior to lottery procedures. The view has further advantages. Especially, it explains the “partial” relevance of numbers in cases involving unequal harms, and it does so in a way that dissolves the appearance of paradox that besets theories of “partial aggregation.”. (shrink)

This article is composed of three sections that investigate the epistemological foundations of Husserl’s idea of logic from the Logical Investigations . First, it shows the general structure of this logic. Husserl conceives of logic as a comprehensive, multi-layered theory of possible theories that has its most fundamental level in a doctrine of meaning. This doctrine aims to determine the elementary categories that constitute every possible meaning (meaning-categories). The second section presents the main idea of Husserl’s search for an epistemological (...) foundation for knowledge, science and logic. Their epistemological clarification can only be reached through a detailed analysis of the structure of those intentions that give us what is meant in our intentions. To reveal the intuitive giveness of logical forms is the ultimate aim of Husserl’s epistemology of logic. Logical forms and meaning-categories can only be given in a certain higher-order intuition that Husserl calls categorical intuition. The third section of this article distinguishes different kinds of categorical intuition and shows how the most basic logical categories and concepts are given to us in a categorical abstraction. (shrink)

Contemporary commentators on the history of ethics have devoted little attention to the ethical theory of Thomas Reid. The main reason for this neglect concerns the perspective from which they are very likely to view his theory. Roughly, this perspective is as follows. Eighteenth century ethics tends to be viewed as consisting mainly in the prolonged dispute concerning the nature of the moral faculty. In identifying Reid’s part in this dispute it should be noted that his Essays on the Active (...) Powers of the Human Mind, his major work on ethics, was published in 1788. It was therefore preceded by the works of such early rational intuitionists as Cudworth, Clarke, Balguy, and Wollaston and by the criticisms directed against them by such defenders of the moral sense position as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. Moreover, it was preceded by the intuitionistic counterattack directed against the latter by Richard Price, a near contemporary of Reid, who has often been described as the greatest of the intuitionists and whose prominence is such that his ethical theory has tended to eclipse that of Reid. The result is that there are in Reid a large number of pages devoted to restatements of an intuitionistic position which a contemporary reader has already encountered in earlier writers and which he is therefore likely to find rather boring. Even those who have maintained correctly that Reid is the founder of the Scottish school of common sense and that his ethical theory is to be seen in the context of his defense of common sense have added little to this perspective, since, generally speaking, they have found no significant differences between his ethical theory as seen in this context and intuitionism. Viewed from this perspective, Reid’s ethics might well be deserving of neglect and of the comment made by Alasdair MacIntyre that “the successors of Hume and Adam Smith in Scottish philosophy have little to say to us. Thomas Reid was a rationalist in the spirit of Price.”. (shrink)

In What Is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari distinguish the functions of philosophy, art and science. According to this distinction, the primary purpose of philosophy is to invent concepts, the purpose of art to bring forth percepts, or sensorial aggregates, and that of science to delineate functions. This article aims to show that these distinctions are not as clear-cut as they appear. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition that ‘philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ as a (...) reference point, it suggests that the corresponding philosophical practice is intimately connected to art and science. Studying the conceptual drawings in Deleuze’s texts, the article situates his philosophy in the French tradition of epistemology. As a result, the conceptual work of this philosophy can be seen as intensively responding to the creative problems posed by the dynamics of science in contemporary societies. (shrink)

ArgumentIn the winter of 1849–1850 in Königsberg, German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) conducted pioneering measurements concerning the propagation speed of stimulations in the living nerve. While recent historians of science have paid considerable attention to Helmholtz's uses of the graphic method, in particular his construction of an instrument called “myographion,” this paper draws attention to theinscription surfacesthat he used in effective ways for capturing and transmitting his findings. Against the background of recent archival findings, I show that Helmholtz used (...) isinglass copies of his graphical recordings in order to communicate the basic principle of previous measurements to the academic public. As the correspondence with his Berlin-based friend and colleague Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) and the subsequent development of the myographion make clear, these curves were not meant as measurements but functioned as demonstrations. In other words, Helmholtz's curves did provide “images of precision” (Olesko and Holmes 1993) – but they were not precise images. (shrink)

A main objection – perhaps the foremost – to Kant's theory of moral worth is that whereas he claims that only actions performed from the motive of duty have moral worth, most people are convinced that right actions performed out of.

This paper contributes to the current discussion on collective affective intentionality. Very often, affective sharing is regarded as a special feature ofamore general form of we-intentionality being already in place. In contrast to this view, the paper attempts to explicate a more elementary form of affective sharing that does not simply presuppose other forms of we-intentionality, but amounts to a primitive form of we-intentionality of its own. The account presented here draws on two conceptual tools from the broader phenomenological tradition: (...) prereflective we-intentionality on the one hand and atmospheric perception on the other. The central claim is that some instances of affective we-consciousness mainly emerge on the level of unthematic, pre-reflective orientation within one’s environment. The first part of the paper gives an account of this claim, while second part places the account in the broader discussion on collective affective intentionality. (shrink)

Causation has always been a philosophically controversial subject matter. While David Hume’s empiricist account of causation has been the dominant influence in analytic philosophy and science during modern times, a minority view has instead connected causation essentially to agency and manipulation. A related approach has for the first time gained widespread popularity in recent years, due to new powerful theories of causal inference in science that are based in a technical notion of intervention, and James Woodward’s closely connected interventionist theory (...) of causation in philosophy. This monograph assesses five manipulationist or interventionist theories of causation, viewed as theories that purport to tell us what causation is by providing us with the meaning of causal claims. It is shown that they cannot do this, as the conditions on causation that they impose are too weak, mainly due to ineliminable circularities in their definitions of causal terms. It is then argued that a subset of Woodward’s theory can nevertheless contribute crucially to an explanation of the unique role that manipulation has in our acquisition of causal knowledge. This explanation differs from the common regularist explanation of the epistemic utility of manipulation and experiment, and it is taken to confirm several important manipulationist intuitions. However, the success of the explanation depends on (this subset of) interventionism not itself being understood as a theory of causation, but as a theory of intervention. (shrink)

This article argues for the view that statements about normative reasons are context-sensitive. Specifically, they are sensitive to a contextual parameter specifying a relevant person's or group's body of information. The argument for normative reasons contextualism starts from the context-sensitivity of the normative “ought” and the further premise that reasons must be aligned with oughts. It is incoherent, I maintain, to suppose that someone normatively ought to φ but has most reason not to φ. So given that oughts depend on (...) context, a parallel view about normative reasons is needed. It is shown that the resulting view solves notorious puzzles involving apparently conflicting but equally plausible claims about reasons. These puzzles arise especially in cases where agents have limited information or false beliefs. In these cases, we feel torn between reasons claims that take into account the limitations of the agent's perspective and apparently conflicting claims that are made from a more objective point of view. The contextualist account developed here accommodates both objectivist and subjectivist intuitions. It shows that all of the claims in question can be true, provided that they are relativized to different values of the relevant information parameter. Also, contextualism yields a fruitful approach to the debate about having reasons and the alleged failure of the so-called “factoring account”. (shrink)

In 1923, Paul Valéry created an artificial world of antiquity. In it the sea could wash up things which, because of their brilliance, hardness, and unfamiliar form, interrupted and irritated well-established habits of thought. Nature or art? Given or created? Earthly or heavenly? Eupalinos, the architect, does not find himself in the position to decide. He throws back into the sea the shiny, ball-like thing he had picked up from the shore only seconds before.1 In the 1950s, the situation has (...) changed markedly. Parisian consumer society uses the polished floors of exhibition halls and salesrooms to create encounters with similarly enigmatic and wonderful objects. However, one can no longer take these .. (shrink)

This article examines the reading protocols of eleventh grade, primary school (USA) students for the purpose of better understanding their development in the interpretation and organization of text. Peirce’s description of thought as a triadic process is utilized to show how a continuous process of differentiation and integration leads to an increasingly sophisticated perception of context, organization and coherence within a text. More proficient student readers are simultaneously better able to distinguish more finely and to integrate more broadly across the (...) text. For all levels of readers, it is in the interplay between differentiation and integration that meaning emerges. (shrink)

In 1955, Norbert Wiener suggested a sociological model according to which all forms of culture ultimately depended on the temporal coordination of human activities, in particular their synchronization. The basis for Wiener’s model was provided by his insights into the temporal structures of cerebral processes. This article reconstructs the historical context of Wiener’s ‘brain clock’ hypothesis, largely via his dialogues with John W. Stroud and other scholars working at the intersection of neurophysiology, experimental psychology, and electrical engineering. Since the 19th (...) century, physiologists and psychologists have been conducting experimental investigations into the relation between time and the brain. Using innovative instruments and technologies, Stroud rehearsed these experiments, in part without paying any attention at all to the experimental traditions involved. Against this background, this article argues that the novelty of Wiener’s model relies largely on his productive rephrasing of physiological and psychological findings that had been established long before the Second World War. (shrink)

Engaging with the specific ways current media technologies interact with, or directly access the human body, we suggest developing a ‘symmetrical’ theory of touch. Critically referring to Bruno Latour’s invocation of ‘symmetrical anthropology’, we reconsider tactile agency as ‘technological agency’, arguing that the concept of touch – traditionally viewed as an exclusively human ability – should be extended to non-human actors and analysed in view of the cultural logic of capitalism. Its systematic focus, then, is on the productive intersections and (...) contact zones between biology and technology: from phenomena of non-human touch in industrial production to the material touching taking place in the instrumental grasp on the living in the 19th-century physiological laboratories and the invisible operations of tracing, tracking and sensing taking place in the technological milieus of today’s environments. In highlighting the tactile dimension of digital modernity and its economic genealogies, this article aims to advance a combined concept of human and non-human touch which provides a crucial angle for reconsidering bodies and technologies in the age of ubiquitous computing. (shrink)

With studies like Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler contributed significantly to transforming the history of media into a vital field of inquiry. This essay undertakes to more precisely characterize Kittler’s historiographical approach. When we look back on his early contributions to studies of the relationship between literature, madness and truth – among others, his doctoral dissertation on the Swiss poet and writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer – what strikes us is the significance that Jacques Lacan’s structuralist (...) psychoanalysis had in shaping the orientation of Kittler’s later studies. His intensive engagement with Lacan galvanized Kittler’s concern with the question of sex and/or gender in the evolution of the humanities as well as his concern with the media history of the university. At the same time, Kittler’s reliance on Lacan led him to a kind of history that is interested above all in the internal logic of discourse. As we see, for instance, in Kittler’s anecdotic treatment of 19th-century physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, this historiography does not involve any original research in archives and/or museums. Rather, it builds upon existing historical accounts and focuses its analyses on the issue of symbolic structures. Instead of investigating the history of the material culture of science and technology, what is thereby ultimately reinforced is a philosophical idealism in which knowledge and paranoia become superimposed in and by means of an ‘original syntax’. (shrink)

Der Beitrag vertritt die These, dass die Fröhlichen Wissenschaft von einer Metaphorik der Seefahrt strukturiert wird: Sie liefert Nietzsche die Dramaturgie zur Entwicklung der zentralen Themen seines Buches. Zunächst wirft der Aufsatz im Anschluss an Hans Blumenberg und Manfred Frank einen Blick auf die Meerfahrt als Topos der Daseinbeschreibung insbesondere der romantischen Literatur. Dann zeigt er auf, wie Nietzsche den "Tod Gottes" und die Figur des "Schaffenden", die Kritik der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis und des traditionalen Subjektbegriffs mithlife der Seefahrtsmetaphorik entfaltet. Abschließend (...) werden noch zwei Strategien betrachtet, die Nietzsche zur Überwindung des Subjekts verfolgt, und mit Paul de Man und Michel Foucault als 'rhetorische' und 'somatische' charakterisiert.The following essay argues that the Gay Science is structured through the imagery of a sea voyage. This imagery provides the dramaturgy for the development of the book's central themes. In its first part, the essay examines, with reference to Hans Blumenberg and Manfred Frank, the sea voyage as a topos for the description of the human condition, as it can be found particularly in the literature of the Romantic period. The essay then shows how Nietzsche uses the metaphor of the sea voyage to unfold the theme of the "death of God" and the figure of the "creator", to question the objectivity to scientific knowledge and to criticize the traditional concept of the subject. It finally discusses the two main strategies Nietzsche operates to overcome the Cartesian subject and characterizes them, with reference to Paul de Man and Michael Foucault, as 'rhetorical' and 'somatic'. (shrink)

The article examines the scholarly travels of Enno Littmann in Syria and Ethiopia as providing an alternative model for understanding ‘the archive’ as a theoretical topos in connection with the production of historical knowledge in the 19th century. The argument seeks to dismantle the nexus between classification and modern European statehood – here discussed with the help of Derrida’s Mal d’archive – that has come to dominate debates on the epistemological place of the archive. Instead, the article seeks to sketch (...) an understanding of practical work on plural, collected and textual records of the past in terms of epistemic situations displaying a high degree of spontaneity, thus ‘wildness’. For this purpose, reading procedures, archival material and normative orders purportedly regulating archival work are scrutinized in turn for signs of wildness. (shrink)

The article examines the scholarly travels of Enno Littmann (1875–1958) in Syria and Ethiopia as providing an alternative model for understanding ‘the archive’ as a theoretical topos in connection with the production of historical knowledge in the 19th century. The argument seeks to dismantle the nexus between classification and modern European statehood – here discussed with the help of Derrida’s Mal d’archive – that has come to dominate debates on the epistemological place of the archive. Instead, the article seeks to (...) sketch an understanding of practical work on plural, collected and textual records of the past in terms of epistemic situations displaying a high degree of spontaneity, thus ‘wildness’. For this purpose, reading procedures, archival material and normative orders purportedly regulating archival work are scrutinized in turn for signs of wildness. (shrink)

In Humanism in Intercultural Perspective, editors Jörn Rüsen and Henner Laass outline their project of renewing the foundations of the notion of “humanism.” They collect a large variety of contributions they hope will be conducive to this aim. Yet the architecture of the project leaves open a long list of conceptual problems, concerning in particular: the integration of cultural diversity into humanism; the relationship between humanism and the political; the way in which normativity is incorporated into humanism; and the question (...) as to the place of historicity in the human condition. An extended discussion of Elisio Macamo's, Dipesh Chakrabarty's, and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf's contributions to the volume serves to further elucidate these problems and to explore ways in which they might possibly be solved. (shrink)

The article conducts an analysis of everyday notions of witnessing as emerging from the marginal writings of a mid-twentieth century Belgian medievalist, François Louis Ganshof (1895-1980). The aim of the analysis is threefold: to explore a specific set of cultural conditions shaping the understanding of witnessing; to demonstrate the primacy, in witnessing, of an intricate notion of historicity as moulded by scholarly practice; and to indicate that, and in what manner, witnessing and historicity informed a notion of political experience that (...) appears foundational to Ganshof's understanding of, and attitude towards, matters political in general. The article also stipulates the legitimacy and the value, in a historical investigation of political thought, of focusing on minor figures, discursive patterns and events of seeming insignificance. It ultimately proposes that the small-scale cultural labour on the discursive formations centred on historicity may be deployed for rethinking our understanding of epochal concepts such as modernity. (shrink)

The sources, extent and margins of parental obligations in taking decisions regarding their children’s medical care are subjects of ongoing debates. Balancing children’s immediate welfare with keeping their future open is a delicate task. In this paper, we briefly present two examples of situations in which parents may be confronted with the choice of whether to authorise or demand non-therapeutic interventions on their children for the purpose of fertility preservation. The first example is that of children facing cancer treatment, and (...) the second of children with Klinefelter syndrome. We argue that, whereas decisions of whether to preserve fertility may be prima facie within the limits of parental discretion, the right to an open future does not straightforwardly put parents under an obligation to take actions that would detect or relieve future infertility in their children—and indeed in some cases taking such actions is problematic. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt has claimed that some of our desires are ‘internal’, i.e., our own in a special sense. I defend the idea that a desire's being internal matters in a normative, reasons-involving sense, and offer an explanation for this fact. The explanation is Kantian in spirit. We have reason to respect the desires of persons in so far as respecting them is a way to respect the persons who have them (in some cases, ourselves). But if desires matter normatively in (...) so far as they belong to persons, then it matters whether they really do belong to the persons who have them. Thus Kantian considerations explain why identification (or internality) is a normatively relevant category. This account is superior to others, and does not lead to reasons bootstrapping or a self-centred conception of deliberation. (shrink)

Gilbert Simondon's essay Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958 [On the mode of being of technical objects]) operates in the transitional space between Heidegger's philosophy of technology and contemporary cybernetics. Furthermore, Simondon outlines an explicitly political program that culminates in the demand to emphasize the status of technical objects in the culture of contemporary society by way of human representatives. The basis for this program is his conception of the technical »thing« as a medium. German Gilbert Simondons Abhandlung Du (...) mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958) operiert im Übergangsraum zwischen Heideggers Technikphilosophie und zeitgenössischer Kybernetik. Darüber hinaus skizziert Simondon ein explizit politisches Programm, das in der Forderung kulminiert, die technischen Objekte durch menschliche Repräsentanten in der Kultur der heutigen Gesellschaft besser zur Geltung zu bringen. Grundlage für dieses Programm ist seine Auffassung des technischen »Dings« als Medium. (shrink)

This paper presents and discusses the website. Under the title “The Virtual Laboratory: Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life” it gives access to a massive collection of texts and images concerning the experimental life sciences of the 19th and early 20th century. The main focus is on physiology and psychology. Plant breeding is an additional theme. As of now, the Virtual Laboratory gives access to some 12,000 digital items, i.e. historical text books, journal articles, manuscripts, trade catalogs, photos, (...) films, audio files, etc. At the same time, the Virtual Laboratory is a platform for historians of science to publish and discuss their research on the experimentalization of life. Topics range from the history of precision time measurements in the physiological lab to the historical epistemology of hearing and the role of the Axolotl as an experimental animal in zoology. By way of a guided tour through the Virtual Laboratory, the paper describes the kind of epistemic space that was created. It argues that open access to historical sources as well as tight connections between historical research papers and their raw data, e.g. manuscript sources, profoundly change what used to be called the Archive. Today’s historians of science have started to work within a space that is widely distributed and extremely flexible with respect to its internal connections. It is a space that turns the Archive into an authentic laboratory for the science historian. (shrink)

Gilbert Simondons Abhandlung Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958) operiert im Übergangsraum zwischen Heideggers Technikphilosophie und zeitgenössischer Kybernetik. Darüber hinaus skizziert Simondon ein explizit politisches Programm, das in der Forderung kulminiert, die technischen Objekte durch menschliche Repräsentanten in der Kultur der heutigen Gesellschaft besser zur Geltung zu bringen. Grundlage für dieses Programm ist seine Auffassung des technischen »Dings« als Medium. Gilbert Simondon's essay (1958 [On the mode of being of technical objects]) operates in the transitional space between Heidegger's philosophy (...) of technology and contemporary cybernetics. Furthermore, Simondon outlines an explicitly political program that culminates in the demand to emphasize the status of technical objects in the culture of contemporary society by way of human representatives. The basis for this program is his conception of the technical »thing« as a medium. (shrink)