For centuries, natural law was the main philosophical legal paradigm. Now, it is a wonder when a court of law invokes it. Arthur Kaufmann already underlined a modern general "horror iuris naturalis". We also know, with Winfried Hassemer, that the succession of legal paradigms is a matter of fashion. But why did natural law become outdated? Are there any remnants of it still alive today? This book analyses a number of prejudices and myths that have created a general (...) misconception of natural law. As Jean-Marc Trigeaud put it: there is a natural law that positivists invented. Not the real one(s). It seeks to understand not only the usual adversaries of natural law (like legalists, positivists and historicists) but also its further enemies, the inner enemies of natural law, such as internal aporias, political and ideological manipulations, etc. The book puts forward a reasoned and balanced examination of this treasure of western political and juridical though. And, if we look at it another way, natural law is by no means a loser in our times: because it lives in modern human rights. (shrink)

Disgust (Ekel, dégoût) is a state of high alert. It acutely says "no" to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives. In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and (...) theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the role of disgust as both a cognitive and moral organon in Kant and Nietzsche; the history of the imagination of the rotting corpse; the counter-cathexis of the disgusting in Romantic poetics and its modernist appeal ever since; the affinities of disgust and laughter and the analogies of vomiting and writing; the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis in a theory of disgusting pleasures and practices; the association of disgusting "otherness" with truth and the trans-symbolic "real" in Bataille, Sartre, and Kristeva; Kafka's self-representation as an "Angel" of disgusting smells and acts, concealed in a writerly stance of uncompromising "purity"; and recent debates on "Abject Art.". (shrink)

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, (...) and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positiveandnegative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories. (shrink)

Speakers frequently perform representational gestures to depict concepts in an iconic fashion. For example, a speaker may hold her index finger and thumb apart to indicate the size of a matchstick. However, the process by which a physical handshape is mentally transformed into abstract spatial information is not well understood. We present a series of experiments that investigate how people decode the physical form of an articulator to derive imaginary geometrical constructs, which we call “gesture form.” We provide quantitative evidence (...) for several key properties that play a role in this process. First, “profiling,” the ability to focus on a structural subunit within the complex form of the physical hand. Second, “perspective,” for which we show that one and the same handshape seen from different perspectives can lead to different spatial interpretations. Third, “selectivity,” the fact that gestures focus on specific spatial features at the expense of others. Our results provide a first step toward mapping out the process of how representational gestures make the communication of spatial information possible. (shrink)

Die Aufklärung erfuhr ihre wohl radikalste Infragestellung in Max Horkheimers und Theodor W. Adornos Dialektik der Aufklärung. Ihre These, dass die Aufklärung, statt Emanzipation und Humanität zu befördern, verhängnisvolle Folgen zeitigte, stützt sich einerseits auf eine grundsätzliche Rationalitätskritik, andererseits auf eine Analyse der Philosophien von Autoren, die sie als Protagonisten der Aufklärung einstufen: Bacon, Spinoza, Kant und de Sade. Zwar ist ‚Aufklärung‘ im Sinne Horkheimers und Adornos ein von Anbeginn mit der okzidentalen Kultur verbundenes Phänomen. Doch trat aus ihrer Sicht (...) erst in den Philosophien des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts ihre ambivalente, ja fatale Natur vollends zutage. Während sich die Diskussionen über die Dialektik der Aufklärung zumeist auf die grundsätzliche Rationalitätskritik Horkheimers und Adornos konzentrierten, haben Philosophiehistoriker nur selten die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die dort herangezogenen Philosophen tatsächlich geeignete Kronzeugen ihrer Aufklärungskritik sind. Ziel des vorliegenden Bandes ist es daher, das von Horkheimer und Adorno gezeichnete Gesamtbild der Aufklärung und ihre Interpretationen Bacons, Spinozas, Kants und de Sades auf den Prüfstand zu stellen. (shrink)

Die metaphysikferne oder metaphysikentfremdete Philosophie der Gegenwart ist gleichermaßen der Wahrheitsfrage fern oder entfremdet, da die neuzeitliche Philosophie – und darin vor allem die Erkenntniskritik – eine Infragestellung der objektiven Wahrheit eingeleitet habe. Descartes und Kant zweifelten an objektiver Wahrheit. Aber stimmt es, dass es keine objektive Wahrheit gibt? Birgt diese Behauptung nicht in sich selbst das Problem, dass sie sich als objektive Wahrheit annehmen muss, um nicht gegenstandslos zu werden? Dies führt jedoch zurück zur in der Moderne problematisch gewordenen (...) Metaphysik. In der Auseinandersetzung mit der neuzeitlichen Philosophie geht Winfried Weier dieser Frage nach, denn die Aufhebung der Metaphysik führt offensichtlich zu erheblichen Problemen der Möglichkeit wahrer Erkenntnis. (shrink)

Ecosemiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in relation to the natural environment in which they occur. The paper examines the cultural, biological, and evolutionary dimensions of ecosemioses on the basis of C. S. Peirce's theory of continuity between matter and mind and investigates the ecosemiotic dimensions of natural signs. Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature are distinguished from pansemiotism, and the coevolution of sign processes with their natural enviromnent is discussed as a determining factor of ecosemiosis.

In several of his papers, Charles S. Peirce illustrates processes of interpreting and understanding signs by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed by means of these little pedagogical scenarios are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning, but they aim at elucidating fundamental semiotic implications of knowledge acquisition in general. Peirce's semiotic premise that a well-understood sign is one that represents an object and creates an interpretant is essential to the understanding (...) of how new words and signs in general can be taught and learned. The article argues that Peirce's theory of the object of the sign, especially of the necessity of collateral experience of the object of a sign, can help to understand the riddle posed by of the Meno paradox of the impossibility of learning what we do not yet know. It examines the semiotic implications of the didactic methods of teaching and learning through translation, ostension, mental and real images, as well as metacognition, and it shows how icons, indices, and symbols are essential to learning new words. (shrink)

The nature of representation has been a central but controversial issue of cognitive philosophy. After 2,500 years of reflection (cf. Rolf 2006), opinions are still divided. On the one hand, there are those who are convinced that we have reached a crisis of representation in the arts, the media, and cultural theory; on the other hand, representation has remained right at the top of the agenda of cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence research (cf. Nöth & Ljungberg, eds. 2003; Nöth 1997). (...) The words in which Daniel Dennett, in 1978, postulates the necessity for a new theory of representation as a foundation of cognitive science are symptomatic of a certain unease about the state of the art: "What is needed is.. (shrink)

Many scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, religion, history or social science have ventured to offer a comprehensive explanation of music, one of the most intangible and elusive phenomena in the world. A palaeoanthropological approach, which places music into an evolutionary paradigm, can add important perspectives to our understanding of this phenomenon. To begin with, the question whether music is an adaptation that has survival value in the classical Darwinian sense is contemplated. Views on the origin of music in conjunction with the (...) emergence of language and as a domain for the expression of emotion, linked to music’s benefits for social coherence, are discussed. More recent views on the emergence of consciousness, on semiosis and on music as a manifestation of biocultural co-evolution, especially in conjunction with ritual, are then presented. Finally, the merit of exploiting the concept of play to help account for the systematicity of music’s semiosis is examined.Contribution: In line with the intent of this special collection of articles, the above considerations are placed into the context of materialist versus nonmaterialist perspectives on the emergence of the human mind. The overarching argument is that music contributes crucially to what it means to be human. (shrink)

The "semiotic threshold" is U. Eco's metaphor of the borderline between the world of semiosis and the nonsemiotic world and hence also between semiotics and its neighboring disciplines. The paper examines Eco's threshold in comparison to the views of semiosis and semiotics of C. S. Peirce. While Eco follows the structuralist tradition, postulating the conventionality of signs as the main criterion of semiosis, Peirce has a much broader concept of semiosis, which is not restricted to phenomena of culture but includes (...) many processes in nature. Whereas Eco arrives at the conclusion that biological processes, such as the ones within the immune system, cannot be included in the program of semiotic research, Peirce's broader defmition of semiosis has meanwhile become thefoundation of semiotic studies in biology and medicine and hence in biosemiotics and medical semiotics. (shrink)

Competitive courtship and aesthetic judgment/choice : Darwin's model of the arts -- The arts as promoters of social cooperation and cohesion -- Engagement in the arts as ontogenetic self-(trans-)formation -- A cooptation model of the evolution of the human arts : the special role of play behavior -- Technology, and symbolic cognition.

Protosemiotics is the study of the rudiments of semiosis, primarily in nature. The extension of the semiotic field from culture to nature is both necessary and possible in the framework of Peirce's semiotic theory. Against this extension, the critique of pansemiotism has been raised. However, Peirce's semiotics is not pansemiotic since it is based on the criterion of thirdness, which is not ubiquitous in nature. The paper examines the criteria of protosemiosis in the domain of physical and mechanical processes.

The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are presented: phenomenological consciousness and the qualia, consciousness as self-controlled agency of humans, self-control and self-reflection, consciousness and language, self-consciousness and introspection, consciousness and the other, consciousness of nonhuman animals, and the question of a (...) quasi-consciousness of the physical universe. A detailed account of Peirce’s three modes of consciousness is presented: primisense, qualisense or feeling-consciousness, altersense, and medisense, the consciousness of cognition, thought, and reasoning. In contrast to consciousness studies that establish a rather sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious states of mind, Peirce adopts the principle of synechism, the theory of continuity. For him, consciousness is a matter of degree. An important difference between Peirce’s concept of qualia and current theories of qualia in human consciousness is discussed. The paper shows how consciousness, according to Peirce, emerges from unconscious qualia and vanishes into equally unconscious habits. It concludes with a study of the roles of qualia, habit, and self-control in Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular in qualisigns and symbols, and the question of signs as quasi-conscious agents in semiosis. (shrink)