English summary: How can something which is absolutely unrepresentable be represented for the senses? In her studies of historical semantics of the concept of representation between 1750 and 1800, Petra Bahr shows that in the fields of aesthetics and religious theory this was a central question in the 18th century. From the perspective of the philosophy of religion, the significance of Baumgarten's Aesthetica and Kant's Critique of Judgment, two works which as a rule are perceived as competing philosophies (...) of art, has been reconstructed here in such a manner that Kant's lasting reference to Baumgarten's insights remains visible even in his overcoming of them. The discussion concerning the role of the productive power of imagination and the redefinition of the understanding of symbols functions as a link between the two philosophers. German description: Wie wird das schlechthin Undarstellbare sinnlich darstellbar? Petra Bahr zeigt in ihren Studien zur historischen Semantik des Darstellungsbegriffs zwischen 1750 und 1800, dass diese Frage das 18. Jahrhundert nicht nur in asthetischer, sondern auch in religionstheoretischer Perspektive beschaftigt. Die religionsphilosophische Dignitat von Baumgartens Aesthetica und Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft, zweier in der Regel nur als konkurrierende Philosophien der Kunst wahrgenommenen Werke, wird dabei so rekonstruiert, dass der bleibende Bezug Kants auf die Einsichten Baumgartens auch noch in deren Uberwindung sichtbar bleibt: die Rolle der produktiven Einbildungskraft, die Neubestimmung des Symbolverstandnisses und die Umbesetzung des Begriffs der sinnlichen Reprasentation. Mit einem sinngeschichtlichen Zugang wird die reiche und wechselvolle Vorgeschichte rekonstruiert, die die Kritik der Urteilskraft zu allererst als die Antwort Kants auf ausstehende Probleme der sinnlichen Darstellung des Undarstellbaren verstehbar macht. (shrink)

German description: Wie wird das schlechthin Undarstellbare sinnlich darstellbar? Petra Bahr zeigt in ihren Studien zur historischen Semantik des Darstellungsbegriffs zwischen 1750 und 1800, dass diese Frage das 18.

Der erste der auf vier Bände angelegten Sichtungen der Bestimmung,Leben' stellt in chronologischer Folge wichtige Grundkonstellationen des Begriffsfeldes Leben von Aristoteles bis Schelling vor. Exemplarisch wird herausgearbeitet, wie in der europäischen Kulturgeschichte vom Leben geredet wurde, wann und weshalb der Lebensbegriff an Bedeutung gewann und warum die Rede vom Leben mit einer eigenen Konfliktgeschichte verbunden ist. Von besonderem Interesse sind dabei jene Diskussionen, die für christliche Traditionen direkt oder latent relevant wurden. Damit soll den Lebensdiskursen innerhalb der bioethischen Debatten ein (...) diese anregendes Gegengewicht gegeben werden. Denn um entscheiden zu können, was zum Wohl von Lebewesen mit Lebendem getan und gelassen werden sollte, dürfte hilfreich sein, zu klären, was genau gesteigert, geschützt, renaturalisiert, kultiviert oder in Frieden gelassen werden soll. Mit Beiträgen von:Petra Bahr, Christoph Ellsiepen, Matthias Freudenberg, Gerald Hartung, Christina Hoegen-Rohls, Tom Kleffmann, Dietrich Korsch, Christof Landmesser, Christoph Markschies, Peter McLaughlin, Jörn Müller, Hanns Nissing, Enno Rudolph, Stephan Schaede, Konrad Schmid, Christian Senkel, Joachim von Soosten, Philipp Stoellger. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 188-206.

The Special Issue is started with the observation that the tension of mind and society, i.e. cognitive and sociological/cultural dimensions in knowledge production and innovation, is a well-known topic of academic discourse in Science and Technology Studies. The introduction mentions some historical hallmarks of the involved perspectives and discussions to outline the background of the Special Issue. The purpose of its contributions, which are briefly presented at the end of the introduction, is to review this long-existing tension of cognitive and (...) cultural dimensions in knowledge production and innovation in the light of the cognitive and societal changes that have just begun and will have a huge impact in the future. (shrink)

Currently, there is not yet a full-fledged philosophical sub-discipline devoted to artifacts. In order to establish such a general philosophical discourse on artifacts, two topics are of special importance: artifact functionality and artifact categorization. Both are central to the question of what artifacts are in general and in particular. This introduction first presents the current state of the art in the debates on functions, both in general and in the domain of artifacts in particular. It then unfolds the three debates (...) relevant for artifact kinds, namely the ontological, epistemological and semantic debates on artifact categorization, and presents the most important theory options currently under scrutiny in these fields. It proceeds by introducing the contributions in this special issue on the functions and kinds of art works and other artifacts, and discusses possible perspectives for a general philosophy of artifacts. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis, Heidelberg, 1977.

The article briefly introduces an academic debate between two different responses to the predicament of the human in the ecological crisis, namely the object-oriented ontology and the vitalist response to that approach. Based on that introduction, it argues for the need of a complementing analytical tool and sketches the contours of such a tool by suggesting an epistemological tactic for a decolonizing human distinctiveness. The article suggests an analytical maneuver to be used by scholars who aim at decolonizing nature from (...) human oppression, a tool that enables illumination and critical scrutiny of the epistemological role of the human as one stage toward destabilizing the notion of human distinctiveness. The article, thus, introduces an approach where human distinctiveness is not understood as a factual distinctiveness—not an essential difference between the human and the nonhuman world—but where human distinctiveness is critically viewed as a discursive role in theoretical work, a role that can be temporarily put to use by the scholar as a decolonizing epistemological tactic. In other words, human distinctiveness is here tactically used as a tool to critically scrutinize the idea of human distinctiveness rather than to safeguard it. (shrink)

GY, an extensively studied human hemianope, is aware of salient visual events in his cortically blind field but does not call this ''vision.'' To learn whether he has low-level conscious visual sensations or whether instead he has gained conscious knowledge about, or access to, visual information that does not produce a conscious phenomenal sensation, we attempted to image process a stimulus s presented to the impaired field so that when the transformed stimulus T(s) was presented to the normal hemifield it (...) would cause a sensation similar to that caused by s in the impaired field. While degradation of contrast, spatio-temporal filtering, contrast reversal, and addition of smear and random blobs all failed to match the response to a flashed bar sf, moving textures of low contrast were accepted to match the response to a moving contrast-defined bar, sm. Orientation and motion direction discrimination of the perceptually matched stimuli [sm and T(sm)] was closely similar. We suggest that the existence of a satisfactory match indicates that GY has phenomenal vision. (shrink)

'... diese 'Einführung in die Metaphysik' [ist] echte Einführung in Heidegger... keines der Werke Heideggers [ist] so lebendig zu lesen und so unmittelbar aufzufassen...' Universitas 4 (1954) 'Unter dem Titel dieser Vorlesung aus dem Jahre 1935 verbirgt sich in Wirklichkeit eine große Auseinandersetzung mit den Grundlagen unserer planetarischen Situation.' Süddeutsche Zeitung vom 7./8.11.1953.

While action selection strategies in well‐defined domains have received considerable attention, little is yet known about how people choose what to do next in ill‐defined tasks. In this contribution, we shed light on this issue by considering everyday tasks, which in many cases have a multitude of possible solutions (e.g., it does not matter in which order the items are brought to the table when setting a table) and are thus categorized as ill‐defined problems. Even if there are no hard (...) constraints on the ordering of subtasks in everyday activities, our research shows that people exhibit specific preferences. We propose that these preferences arise from bounded rationality, that is, people only have limited knowledge and processing power available, which results in a preference to minimize the overall physical and cognitive effort. In the context of everyday activities, this can be achieved by (a) taking properties of the spatial environment into account to use them to one's advantage, and (b) employing a stepwise‐optimal action selection strategy. We present the Opportunistic Planning Model as an explanatory cognitive model, which instantiates these assumptions, and show that the model is able to generalize to new everyday tasks, outperforming machine learning models such as neural networks during generalization. (shrink)

Conflicts in Interpretation applies novel methods of constraint interaction, derived from connectionist theories and implemented in linguistics within the framework of Optimality Theory, to core semantic and pragmatic issues such as polysemy, negation, (in) definiteness, focus, anaphora, and rhetorical structure. It explores the hypothesis that a natural language grammar is a set of potentially conflicting constraints on forms and meanings. Moreover, it hypothesizes that competent language users not only optimize from an input form to the optimal output meaning for this (...) form, or vice versa, but also consider the opposite direction of optimization, thus taking into account the speaker as a hearer and taking into account the hearer as a speaker. The book aims to show that such a bidirectional constraint-based grammar sheds new light on the relation between form and meaning, within a sentence as well as across sentence boundaries, within a single language as well as across languages, and within competent adult language users as well as during language development. An important dimension of the book is the structured investigation of issues at the interface of semantics with syntax and pragmatics, such as the effects of distinguishing between speaker's perspective and hearer's perspective in comprehension and production, stable and instable patterns of form and meaning across languages, and the development of a coherent pattern of form and meaning in children. Conflicts in Interpretation will be of interest to any researcher or advanced student in linguistics, cognitive science, language typology, or psycholinguistics who is interested in the capacity of our human mind to map meaning onto form, and form onto meaning. (shrink)

The topic of this thesis is how we should treat tiny probabilities of vast value. This thesis consists of six independent papers. Chapter 1 discusses the idea that utilities are bounded. It shows that bounded decision theories prescribe prospects that are better for no one and worse for some if combined with an additive axiology. Chapter 2, in turn, points out that standard axiomatizations of Expected Utility Theory violate dominance in cases that involve possible states of zero probability. Chapters 3–6 (...) discuss the idea that we should ignore tiny probabilities in practical decision-making. Chapter 3 argues that discounting small probabilities solves the ‘Intrapersonal Addition Paradox’ and thus helps avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. Chapter 4 explores what the most plausible version of this view might look like and what problems the different versions have. Chapter 5 focuses on one type of problem, namely, money pumps. The Independence Money Pump, in particular, presents a difficult challenge for those who wish to discount small probabilities. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the implications of discounting small probabilities for the value of the far future. (shrink)

In response to cases that involve tiny probabilities of huge payoffs, some argue that we ought to discount small probabilities down to zero. However, this paper shows that doing so violates Independence and Continuity, and as a result of these violations, those who discount small probabilities can be exploited by money pumps. Various possible ways of avoiding exploitation will be discussed. This paper concludes that the money pump for Independence undermines the plausibility of discounting small probabilities. Much of the discussion (...) on Independence generalizes to other views that also violate Independence. (shrink)

Nebel argues for the Repugnant Conclusion via the “Intrapersonal Repugnant Conclusion,” on which certainty of a mediocre life is better for individuals than a sufficiently small chance of an excellent life. In this article, I deny that acceptance of the Intrapersonal Repugnant Conclusion leads us to the Repugnant Conclusion. I point out that on many views which avoid the Repugnant Conclusion we should discount very small probabilities down to zero. If we do, then Nebel’s crucial premise of Ex Ante Pareto (...) fails, because discounting at the individual level can fail to match up with discounting at the population level. (shrink)

Our article explores the repair practices pilots use to correct various troubles during flights. The intersubjective understanding of action is a salient part of the time-critical activities of aviation. Repairs solve troubles before any accident risk emerges, thus contributing to flight safety. In repair practices, the social and technical environment is interwoven. If remedies concern faulty lines of action, they target the techno-material condition of the aircraft. Such repair practices are not repairs of talk, but remedies of action in a (...) socio-material interaction. We discuss remedies of action as a particular type of repair practice, and outline their role in socio-material interactions. The aim is to continue building a holistic analysis of social action, not just to add a multimodal layer over an analysis of talk. The rethinking of social action contributes to the exploration of social actions anchored to their socio-material environment. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the development of model theory of fuzzy logic in narrow sense. We consider a formal system EvŁ of fuzzy logic that has evaluated syntax, i. e. axioms need not be fully convincing and so, they form a fuzzy set only. Consequently, formulas are provable in some general degree. A generalization of Gödel's completeness theorem does hold in EvŁ. The truth values form an MV-algebra that is either finite or Łukasiewicz algebra on [0, 1].The classical (...) omitting types theorem states that given a formal theory T and a set Σ of formulas with the same free variables, we can construct a model of T which omits Σ, i. e. there is always a formula from Σ not true in it. In this paper, we generalize this theorem for EvŁ, that is, we prove that if T is a fuzzy theory and Σ forms a fuzzy set , then a model omitting Σ also exists. We will prove this theorem for two essential cases of EvŁ: either EvŁ has logical constants for all truth values, or it has these constants for truth values from [0, 1] ∩ ℚ only. (shrink)

The present event‐related potential (ERP) study used picture–sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the online processing of compositional‐semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification likeJana war jeden Morgen schwimmen an den Arbeitstagen (“Jana went for a swim every morning during the working week”). We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present study replicated previous (...) results relating to quantification over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting how a sentence continues. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible. (shrink)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Knud Ejler Løgstrup were WWII contemporaries: Lutheran theologians and religious figures in their respective German and Danish communities; both active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Being involved in the resistance, Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup were required to rethink what it meant to be ethical, in particular in relation to disclosure and the telling of truth, in a situation of war. In this paper, we consider the grounds on which both Løgstrup and Bonhoeffer acted, their belief in a duty or (...) requirement to resist, in light of the more general problem presented by resistance as action undertaken in a state of exception. We investigate the distinction between the normativity of ordinary or stable time, and action required in a state of exception, using the specific example of truth-telling as a normative demand and its conflict with the exceptional imperative to lie. The example of truth-telling raises important questions about the role of agency and phronetic judgment in a state of exception. In order to determine a foundation for such judgment, we turn to the framework adapted by both Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup to ground their requirement to lie: Luther’s concept of three estates. We consider how their respective concepts of mandates and laws of life/sovereign expressions of life both illuminate and highlight the more general problem of the relation between norm and exceptional action. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to describe the experiences of undergoing a presymptomatic genetic test for the hereditary and fatal Huntington’s disease, using a case study approach. The study was based on 18 interviews with a young woman and her husband from the decision to undergo the test, to receiving the results and trying to adapt to them, which were analysed using a life history approach. The findings show that the process of undergoing a presymptomatic test involves several closely (...) connected ethical and medical questions, such as the reason for the test, the consequences of the test results and how health-care services can be developed to support people in this situation. (shrink)

Wenn in philosophischen Kontexten von Erziehung die Rede ist, werden gegenwärtig zumeist Fragen philosophischer Teildisziplinen diskutiert. Die angewandte Ethik etwa widmet sich dem besonderen Abhängigkeitsverhältnis zwischen Lehrerinnen und Lehrern auf der einen sowie Schülerinnen und Schülern auf der anderen Seite, während die politische Philosophie sich beispielsweise damit befasst, welchen Stellenwert der verpflichtende Religionsunterricht in einem säkularen Staat haben kann und darf. Obwohl solche Fragen zweifellos wichtig sind, gerät dabei doch leicht aus dem Blick, dass Philosophie und Erziehung bereits auf eine (...) sehr viel grundlegendere Weise miteinander verwoben sind, die der Aufteilung der Philosophie in verschiedene Disziplinen vorausgeht. (shrink)

Der Band geht den zahlreichen Verbindungslinien von Erziehung und Philosophie in Geschichte und Gegenwart nach. Neben exemplarischen Auseinandersetzungen mit einzelnen Denker: innen von Seneca über Locke und Rousseau bis hin zu Jaspers und Foucault stehen grundlegende Aspekte möglicher Überschneidungen und Kontinuitäten zwischen Erziehungsphilosophie, philosophischer Pädagogik, Anthropologie und anderen Teil- oder Fachdisziplinen im Mittelpunkt der Beiträge. Ergänzt wird der Band durch tentative Ausblicke auf die Zukunft der Erziehungsphilosophie unter den sich verändernden Vorzeichen globaler Herausforderungen.

Research suggests that sedentary behavior is negatively associated with cognitive outcomes. Interrupting prolonged sitting has been shown to improve cognitive functions, including executive functioning, which is important for academic performance. No research has been conducted on the effect of standing on EF in VET students, who make up a large proportion of the adolescent population and who are known to sit more than other students of this age. In this study, we investigated the acute effects of reducing SB by short (...) time standing on EF in vocational education and training students. In a randomized crossover study, 165 VET students were first taught for 15 min in seated position. After this, they performed while seated the Letter Memory Test for updating, and the Color Shape Test for shifting and inhibition. Students were randomly assigned to a sitting or standing condition. All students were taught again for 15 min and then took the same tests in the condition they were allocated to, respectively, standing or seated. After 1 week, the test procedure was repeated, in which students switched conditions. Mixed model analyses showed no significant effect of sitting or standing on updating, shifting, or inhibition. Also, no significant differences were found for the order of condition on updating, shifting, or inhibition. Our results suggest that 40 min of standing does not significantly influence EF among VET students. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 92 Heft: 2 Seiten: 321-331.

There is substantial support for the general idea that a formalization of comprehenders' expectations about the likely next word in a sentence helps explaining data related to online sentence processing. While much research has focused on syntactic, semantic, and discourse expectations, the present event‐related potentials (ERPs) study investigates neurolinguistic correlates of pragmatic expectations, which arise when comprehenders expect a sentence to conform to Gricean Maxims of Conversation. For predicting brain responses associated with pragmatic processing, we introduce a formal model of (...) such Gricean pragmatic expectations, using an idealized incremental interpreter. We examine whether pragmatic expectancies derived from this model modulate the amplitude of the N400, a component that has been associated with predictive processing. As part of its parameterization, the model distinguishes genuine pragmatic interpreters, who expect maximally informative true utterances, from literal interpreters, who only expect truthfulness. We explore the model's non‐trivial predictions for an experimental setup which uses picture‐sentence verification with ERPs recorded at several critical positions in sentences containing the scalar implicature trigger some. We find that Gricean expectations indeed affect the N400, largely in line with the predictions of our model, but also discuss discrepancies between model predictions and observations critically. (shrink)

To address an ethics of refusal in higher education is to wager in the name of future possibles not already governed by the extractive politics of colonial progress and oppressive regimes of knowing and doing. In this essay, Petra Mikulan shows American pragmatism to have always been, in a certain sense, post-Anthropocene in its condition of emergence, bound up with settler colonialism and its extractive geopolitics. However, pragmatism in its speculative trust can also help engage education in thinking of (...) a future that does not belong to a presupposed humanity and its “nature” by dramatizing a certain insistence of educational institutions on maintaining comfort and trust in the “common good.” What is at stake in education facing planetary ecological devastation and intensified racial and social injustices, Mikulan contends, is an ethics of refusal of institutionalized learning, knowing, and doing tout court, particularly if these educational regimes continue to insist on governing what are deemed the only possible (and thus impossible) enactments of education. (shrink)

The interplay of content and context is observable in a moment to moment manner as propositional content unfolds. The current contribution illustrates this through data from real-time language comprehension indicating that propositional content is not computed in isolation but relies in important ways on context during every step of the computation of meaning. The relevant notion of context that we have to adopt includes all aspects of possible worlds and draws on a variety of knowledge representations, which in a first (...) processing phase serve to generate expectations for upcoming words. In a second phase, the discourse representation is assessed and if necessary updated by means of inferential reasoning and enrichment to reflect the speaker’s intended meaning. (shrink)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Knud Ejler Løgstrup were WWII contemporaries: Lutheran theologians and religious figures in their respective German and Danish communities; both active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Being involved in the resistance, Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup were required to rethink what it meant to be ethical, in particular in relation to disclosure and the telling of truth, in a situation of war. In this paper, we consider the grounds on which both Løgstrup and Bonhoeffer acted, their belief in a duty or (...) requirement to resist, in light of the more general problem presented by resistance as action undertaken in a state of exception. We investigate the distinction between the normativity of ordinary or stable time, and action required in a state of exception, using the specific example of truth-telling as a normative demand and its conflict with the exceptional imperative to lie. The example of truth-telling raises important questions about the role of agency and phronetic judgment in a state of exception. In order to determine a foundation for such judgment, we turn to the framework adapted by both Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup to ground their requirement to lie: Luther’s concept of three estates. We consider how their respective concepts of mandates and laws of life/sovereign expressions of life both illuminate and highlight the more general problem of the relation between norm and exceptional action. (shrink)