From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as (...) South African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships. Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's _Still Alive_ and Marguerite Duras's _La Douleur_; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's _W_, Art Spiegelman's _Maus_, and Philippe Grimbert's _Secret_; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's _Austerlitz_, Sabine Reichel's _What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?_, and Ursula Duba's _Tales from a Child of the Enemy_. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide. (shrink)

This article argues that the reduction of the morality of killing in war to the morality of killing in self-defense by ‘reductive-individualist’ revisionist just war theories is inconsistent, because when those theories apply the moral notion of self-defense to the morality of killing in war, they do not preserve the two conceptions of the “individual” inherent in this notion. The article demonstrates this inconsistency in two steps: First, it disentangles the two conceptions of the individual inherent to the notion of (...) self-defense, namely (1) that the individual is an “entity” potentially bearing a right to self-defense (unlike, e.g., groups) and (2) that the individual is a “particular,” where “particular” signifies that every human is different from every other human. The conception of the individual as a “particular” is tied to the idea that a justification grounded in a rule of self-defense is necessarily “concrete,” in the sense of referring to individually given and specific perceptions or cases, as opposed to “abstract,” in the sense of being detached from specific perceptions or cases. The article then demonstrates that reductive individualism reflects the first notion of the individual, but not the second. Due to the “loss” of the individual as a “particular”, the reductive-individualist reduction of the morality of killing in war to the morality of killing in self-defense is inconsistent, and hence its justification of killing in war grounded in self-defense is not concrete. Since such a justification must be concrete, reductive individualism cannot offer a justification for belligerent killing. (shrink)

If the Bucolics as a whole ‘ look on us with dark enigmatical eyes,’ for long no more impenetrable darkness and no more compelling enigma could be found than that of the fourth poem in the collection. But Skutsch, the authors of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, and more recently Mr. Royds in his Virgil and Isaiah, have done much to solve its many mysteries. Their efforts, however, were mainly directed towards the problems of fact contained in the Eclogue, and so far (...) little attention seems to have been given to an equally interesting point, that of its metrical arrangement. It is plain that we must consult the Sibyll for help: if it is not plain, that is not Virgil's fault. I hope to be able to show here that Virgil himself has left in this poem certain unmistakeable signs for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, besides his own rather casual reference to the Cumaeum carmen, and incidentally to dispose anew of the theory which reads in that expression an allusion not to the Sibyl but to Hesiod. (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)

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.

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)

Through readings of iconic figures such as the cannibal, the child, the alien, and the posthuman, Gabriele Schwab analyzes literary explorations at the boundaries of the human. Treating literature as a dynamic medium that "writes culture"--one that makes the abstract particular and local, and situates us within the world--Schwab pioneers a compelling approach to reading literary texts as "anthropologies of the future" that challenge habitual productions of meaning and knowledge. Schwab's study draws on anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, (...) and psychoanalysis to trace literature's profound impact on the cultural imaginary. Following a new interpretation of Derrida's and Lévi-Strauss's famous controversy over the indigenous Nambikwara, Schwab explores the vicissitudes of "traveling literature" through novels and films that fashion a cross-cultural imaginary. She also examines the intricate links between colonialism, cannibalism, melancholia, the fate of disenfranchised children under the forces of globalization, and the intertwinement of property and personhood in the neoliberal imaginary. Schwab concludes with an exploration of discourses on the posthuman, using Samuel Beckett's "The Lost Ones" and its depiction of a future lived under the conditions of minimal life. Drawing on a wide range of theories, Schwab engages the productive intersections between literary studies and anthropology, underscoring the power of literature to shape culture, subjectivity, and life. (shrink)

This essay lays the groundwork for a novel conception of autonomy that may be called “effective autonomy”—a conception designed to be genuinely action guiding in bioethics. As empirical psychology research on the heuristics and biases approach shows, decision making commonly fails to correspond to people’s desires because of the biases arising from bounded cognition. People who are classified as autonomous on contemporary philosophical accounts may fail to be effectively autonomous because their decisions are uncoupled from their autonomous desires. Accordingly, continuing (...) attempts to value patient autonomy must go beyond existing philosophical conceptions of autonomy to consider the background conditions of human decision making. (shrink)

_Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis_ explores the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida (_Speech and Phenomena_, _Of Grammatology_, and his later writing on autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights) and Deleuze (_A Thousand Plateaus_, _Anti-Oedipus_, and more). Each essay illuminates a specific aspect of Derrida's and Deleuze's perspectives on psychoanalysis: the human-animal boundary; the child's polymorphism; the face or mouth as constitutive of ethical responsibility toward others; the connections between pain and suffering and political resistance; the role of masochism (...) in psychoanalytic thinking; the use of psychoanalytic secondary revision in theorizing film; and the political dimension of the unconscious. Placing a particular emphasis on liminal figurations of the human and challenges to discourses on free will, the essays explore shared concerns in Derrida and Deleuze with regard to history, politics, the political unconscious, and resistance. By addressing the need to overcome the split between the psychological and the political, _Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis_ illuminates the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics. (shrink)

“Women and the Law in Irigarayan Theory” by Gail Schwab is a reading of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray's writings on law together with texts of American feminist jurisprudence. The first part of the article summarizes many of the conflicts surrounding the concept of equality in American feminist legal thought and attempts to move beyond them with the Irigarayan principle of equivalence or equivalent rights. The second part of the article deals more generally with the symbolic changes that will (...) be necessary in order to change the law, and with the cultural evolution that changes in the law can bring about, and more specifically with two areas of Irigarayan legal theory that are central to cultural change and evolution: the concept of female identity or virginity, and the relationship to the mother. In the conclusion, a new utopian vision of what law might be‐the cultural mediation for an evolved intersubjectivity‐is developed through Irigaray's most recent texts. (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)

Epistemic trust is an unacknowledged feature of medical knowledge. Claims of medical knowledge made by physicians, patients, and others require epistemic trust. And yet, it would be foolish to define all epistemic trust as epistemically responsible. Accordingly, I use a routine example in medical practice to illustrate how epistemically responsible trust in medicine is trust in epistemically responsible individuals. I go on to illustrate how certain areas of current medical practice of medicine fall short of adequately distinguishing reliable and unreliable (...) processes because of a failure to systematically evaluate health outcomes. I conclude by articulating the devastating obstacles to the consilience assumption, which takes intellectual character as the standard for epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

did plato and aristotle have anything to say about belief? The answer to this question might seem blindingly obvious: of course they did. Plato distinguishes belief from knowledge in the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the Posterior Analytics. Plato distinguishes belief from perception in the Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the De anima. They talk about the distinction between true and false beliefs, and the ways in which belief can mislead and the ways in which (...) it can steer us aright. Indeed, they make belief a central component of their epistemologies.The view underlying these claims—one so widespread these days as to remain largely unquestioned—is that when Plato and Aristotle talk... (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)

An examination of verbal hallucinations and thought insertion as examples of "alienated self-consciousness.".

ABSTRACTSeveral eye-tracking studies have revealed that spider phobic patients show a typical hypervigilance-avoidance pattern when confronted with images of spiders. The present experiment investigated if this pattern can be changed via placebo treatment. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 37 women with spider phobia. They looked at picture pairs for 7 s each in a retest design: once with and once without a placebo pill presented along with the verbal suggestion that it can reduce phobic symptoms. The placebo was labelled (...) as Propranolol, a beta-blocker that has been successfully used to treat spider phobia. In the placebo condition, both the fixation count and the dwell time on the spider pictures increased, especially in the second half of the presentation time. This was associated with a slight decrease in self-reported symptom severity. In summary, we were able to show that a placebo was able to positively influence visual avoidance in spider phobia.... (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)