In Melanconia e società (1969), W. Lepenies si propone di individuare le cause storico-sociali e le conseguenze sociologicamente rilevanti degli atteggiamenti individuali e collettivi melanconici per la genesi, la conservazione e innovazione delle strutture sociali. Egli afferma che non intende definire a priori che cosa sia la melanconia, ma piuttosto ricostruirne il significato tramite le rappresentazioni dei vissuti interiori di coloro che si sono autodefiniti tali attingendo alla letteratura di corte, salottiera nobiliare e borghese, francese e tedesca. In realtà, (...) egli esamina le differenti rappresentazioni della malinconia, alla luce del quadro clinico elaborato dalla psicoanalisi di S. Freud e dalla psichiatria di E. Kraepelin, H. Tellenbach, ecc., e dello schema sociologico dei tipi di adattamento di R.K. Merton. Queste categorie concettuali consentono a Lepenies di ricostruire gli atteggiamenti malinconici che si diffusero presso due diversi ceti sociali in tempi e in luoghi differenti: 1) i ceti nobiliari francesi dopo la sconfitta della Fronda e 2) la borghesia tedesca del ‘700. (shrink)

Langeweile wird in dieser Anthologie als Signatur der Moderne lesbar: Sie durchdringt die gegenwärtige Kultur, wird aber nach wie vor weggeschoben, ja tabuisiert. Der Band bietet eine Textauswahl von klassischen Denkern sowie von Autorinnen und Autoren des modernen Diskurses bis heute und stellt den Zusammenhang mit verwandten Phänomenen der Sinnleere und Erschöpfung her. Als zunehmendes Massenphänomen in saturierten Gesellschaften entwickelt die Langeweile eine pathologische Dynamik, wenn ihr nicht ein eigener Raum gelassen wird. Ein Plädoyer für die Anerkennung dieses unvermeidlichen Gefühls. (...) Mit Texten von Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Bertrand Russell, Iwan Gontscharow, Siegfried Kracauer, Emil Cioran, Giacomo Leopardi, Wolf Lepenies, Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Peter Toohey, Martin Doehlemann, Françoise Wemelsfelder und anderen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and ModernityFelipe GutterriezExperience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Elizabeth Goodstein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. 461. $50.00, cloth.Winner of the Modern Language Association's 2005 award for Best First Book, Elizabeth Goodstein's Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity is a work impressive for its erudition and rigorous analysis. Experience Without Qualities is a genealogical study of the modern "modern discourse on boredom," a phrase (...) referring both to a family of experiences and to the uses of language associated with them. (Although somewhat murkily introduced, a further distinction operates in Goodstein's account of the modern discourse on boredom, a distinction between language of boredom, language that is part of the expression of boredom, and language on boredom, language that is part of the reflection on boredom. It's the difference between saying, "I'm bored, there's nothing to do," and saying, "Powerlessness is the cause of boredom.") Goodstein believes the modern discourse on boredom exemplifies the modern rhetoric of reflection, the way of understanding and interpreting human experience that is historically and culturally specific to modernity. Through her genealogy of the modern discourse on boredom she hopes "to further the historical task of coming to terms with the fragmentation of subjective experience in the face of the dissolution of metanarratives that is the legacy of the Enlightenment." Experience without Qualities is a dense and complex text over 450 pages in length, and the account that follows necessarily fails to capture the richness that is a principal strength of the text.As an introduction to her genealogy proper, Goodstein examines two contrasting contemporary accounts of boredom. These accounts serve as paradigmatic examples of idealist and materialist accounts of boredom and, by implication, subjectivity generally. Reinhard Kuhn's idealist account treats all social and historical forms of boredom as either incidental to or a manifestation of "ennui," an ahistorical feature of the human condition, an "encounter with nothingness" that is productive of human creativity. Wolf Lepenies's materialist account treats boredom as epiphenomenal, a symptom of "action-inhibition" and a way of legitimating a feeling of powerlessness. On one level, the two accounts provide competing types of explanations, but on another level both are [End Page 257] examples of the characteristic fallacy of the modern rhetoric of reflection, the abstraction of categories of language and their reification into things. Although Goodstein does not use the term, this fallacy could be called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." (This is a phrase that Alfred North Whitehead coined in connection with his critique of scientific materialism. Its use suggests the affinities between his critique and Goodstein's account of the modern rhetoric of reflection.)In the case of Kuhn, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness takes the form of an abstraction drawn from the historically and culturally specific language of boredom that Kuhn and his audience share and its reification as an ahistorical principle that grounds Kuhn's idealist language on boredom. In the case of Lepenies, this fallacy takes the form of an abstraction drawn from the language of boredom and reified as the social practices that ground Lepenies's language on boredom. Neither Kuhn's idealist history nor Lepenies's materialist sociology recognize the historicity of the modern discourse on boredom.Goodstein faults Kuhn and Lepenies for their failure to think through the relationship between the language of boredom and the language on boredom. The conditions that make this failure possible are addressed in Chapter 3, "Boredom and the Modernization of Subjectivity." This chapter describes the spread of Enlightenment skepticism in an environment of rapid political and economic change. Beginning toward the end of the eighteenth century and continuing to the middle of the nineteenth, a discursive paradigm shift occurs. The result is a rhetoric of reflection organized around a radically isolated subjectivity and a "clocktime" view of temporality, time as a series of empty, meaningless moments stretching forward in linear progression. This rhetoric of reflection maintains a tension between idealist and materialist accounts of experience within a materialist framework that medicalizes subjectivity.Goodstein's genealogy of the modern discourse on boredom is strongly reminiscent of Foucault's genealogy of modernity... (shrink)

Jianjun Mei: Cultural Interaction between China and Central Asia during the Bronze Age Charles Higham: The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor Ralph Hanna: Yorkshire Writers Christopher Ricks: Shakespeare and the Anagram Tony Wrigley: The Quest for the Industrial Revolution Linda Colley: 'This Small Island': Britain, Size and Empire Murray Pittock: Robert Burns and British Poetry Peter Pulzer: Special Paths or Main Roads? Making Sense of German History Wolf Lepenies: Overestimating Culture: A German Problem. Exile and Emigration, The (...) Survival of German Culture Angela Leighton: Elegies of Form in Bishop, Plath, Stevenson Nicholas Stern: Development as a Process of Change: Toward a Dynamic Public Economics Lord Woolf: Human Rights: Have the Public Benefitted? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 523-541 [Access article in PDF] Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, and the History of Art before Winckelmann Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann [Figures] To the Memory of Franklin LeVan Baumer. In light of postmodernist and poststructuralist trends in the humanities which have contested notions of originality and of authorship, it might seem surprising that one outstanding myth of the eighteenth century has not (...) yet been thoroughly challenged. This is the claim made by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the foreword to the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, originally published in 1764, that he had created a new history of art which was distinct from a history of artists and also different from what had previously been written about antiquities (Altertümer): The history of the art of antiquity, which I have undertaken to write, is no mere account of the chronological order and change of art, but I take the word history in the wider sense, that it has in the Greek language, and my intention is to offer an attempt at a system.... But the essence of art is in every part the most eminent aim, in which the history of artists has little influence, and this [sort of history of artists], which has been compiled by others, is therefore not to be sought here... those who have treated antiquities, examine either only such where erudition was to be applied, or, if they speak of art, this happens in part with common eulogies, or their judgment is built on peculiar, false grounds. 1 [End Page 523]Wolf Lepenies once described this claim as one of the many foundational myths of the Enlightenment and presented instead some parallels between the writing of art history and natural history in the eighteenth century. 2 As interest in the historiography of art has revived, publications have continued to pour forth on Winckelmann. 3 Yet the critique suggested by Lepenies has largely not been followed. Winckelmann's claim to originality remains a starting or major turning point for most accounts of the history of the discipline of art history. 4 [End Page 524]It may be that Winckelmann's claim has remained largely unchallenged because his differentiation of his accomplishment from that of Gelehrsamkeit in particular coincides with and helps to support another distinction made at his time, that between "philosophy," or criticism, and erudition, the latter being at best necessary but inferior. 5 This distinction, which was fostered by the philosophes and their counterparts in other countries, has been frequently heard in scholarly debates, and it is echoed in current discussions where empirical scholarship is disparaged in favor of what is often now called Theory. 6 Thus while in the twentieth century the Enlightenment came in for heavy going starting with at least the critique of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, 7 this is one Enlightenment opinion which, despite the rise of critical theory among other trends in recent scholarship, has gained in fashion, especially in the English-speaking world.But the contrast between philosophy, or critique, and erudition makes a distinction that is ultimately untenable, even if it is also one that has continued to dominate many views of the history of eighteenth-century scholarship. The case at hand suggests that supposed innovations of the eighteenth century in the historiography of art, as in many other fields of study, are much more bound up with late humanism and encyclopedism than their promulgators might have wished to admit. Scholars of a number of disciplines have begun to revise interpretations of the role of the so-called antiquarians of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries--those who dealt with Altertümer. 8 Some recent studies of the historiography of art have pointed to some connections between the antiquarian tradition and that of the historiography of art. 9 These approaches, however, have primarily dealt with Italian and French writers and, moreover, have left Winckelmann's position largely untouched. 10 Winckelmann's situation in the [End Page 525] broader European historical and geographical context also remains... (shrink)

Langeweile wird in dieser Anthologie als Signatur der Moderne lesbar: Sie durchdringt die gegenwärtige Kultur, wird aber nach wie vor weggeschoben, ja tabuisiert. Der Band bietet eine Textauswahl von klassischen Denkern sowie von Autorinnen und Autoren des modernen Diskurses bis heute und stellt den Zusammenhang mit verwandten Phänomenen der Sinnleere und Erschöpfung her. Als zunehmendes Massenphänomen in saturierten Gesellschaften entwickelt die Langeweile eine pathologische Dynamik, wenn ihr nicht ein eigener Raum gelassen wird. Ein Plädoyer für die Anerkennung dieses unvermeidlichen Gefühls. (...) Mit Texten von Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Bertrand Russell, Iwan Gontscharow, Siegfried Kracauer, Emil Cioran, Giacomo Leopardi, Wolf Lepenies, Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Peter Toohey, Martin Doehlemann, Françoise Wemelsfelder und anderen. (shrink)

Previously issued as author's dissertation, 1999/2000, Universiteat Berlin.

The topic of self-interest raises large and intractable philosophical questions–most obviously, the question “In what does self-interest consist?” The concept, as opposed to the content of self-interest, however, seems clear enough. Self-interest is interest in one's own good. To act self-interestedly is to act on the motive of advancing one's own good. Whether what one does actually is in one's self-interest depends on whether it actually does advance, or at least, minimize the decline of, one's own good. Though it may (...) be difficult to tell whether a person is motivated by self-interest in a particular instance, and difficult also to determine whether a given act or decision really is in one's self-interest, the meaning of the claims in question seems unproblematic. My main concern in this essay is to make a point about the content of self-interest. Specifically I shall put forward the view that meaningfulness, in a sense I shall elaborate, is an important element of a good life. It follows, then, that it is part of an enlightened self-interest that one wants to secure meaning in one's life, or, at any rate, to allow and promote meaningful activity within it. Accepting this substantial conception of self-interest, however, carries with it a curious consequence: the concept of self-interest which formerly seemed so clear begins to grow fuzzy. Fortunately, it comes to seem less important as well. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit distinguishes three sorts of theories about self-interest–hedonistic theories, preference theories, and what he calls “objective-list theories." Hedonistic theories hold that one's good is a matter of the felt quality of one's experiences. (shrink)

Theories of binding have recently come into the focus of the consciousness debate. In this review, we discuss the potential relevance of temporal binding mechanisms for sensory awareness. Specifically, we suggest that neural synchrony with a precision in the millisecond range may be crucial for conscious processing, and may be involved in arousal, perceptual integration, attentional selection and working memory. Recent evidence from both animal and human studies demonstrates that specific changes in neuronal synchrony occur during all of these processes (...) and that they are distinguished by the emergence of fast oscillations with frequencies in the gamma-range. (shrink)

We offer a precautionary account of why business managers should proactively rethink about what kinds of automation firms ought to implement, by exploring two challenges that automation will potentially pose. We engage the current debate concerning whether life without work opportunities will incur a meaning crisis, offering an argument in favor of the position that if technological unemployment occurs, the machine age may be a structurally limited condition for many without work opportunities to have or add meaning to their lives. (...) We term this the axiological challenge. This challenge, if it turns out to be persuasive, leads to a second challenge, to which managers should pay special attention: the teleological challenge, a topic especially relevant to the broad literature about corporate purpose and governance. We argue that both the shareholder profit-maximization model and its major alternative, stakeholder theory, are insufficient to address the meaning crisis. Unless rebutted, the two challenges compel business leaders to proactively rethink the purpose of business for future society. Otherwise, businesses will be contributors to a major ethical crisis and societal externality in the coming society. (shrink)

It is worthwhile to search for forms of coding, processing, and learning common to various cortical regions and cognitive functions. Local cortical processors may coordinate their activity by maximizing the transmission of information coherently related to the context in which it occurs, thus forming synchronized population codes. This coordination involves contextual field (CF) connections that link processors within and between cortical regions. The effects of CF connections are distinguished from those mediating receptive field (RF) input; it is shown how CFs (...) can guide both learning and processing without becoming confused with the transmission of RF information. Simulations explore the capabilities of networks built from local processors with both RF and CF connections. Physiological evidence for synchronization, CFs, and plasticity of the RF and CF connections is described. Coordination via CFs is related to perceptual grouping, the effects of context on contrast sensitivity, amblyopia, implicit influences of color in achromotopsia, object and word perception, and the discovery of distal environmental variables and their interactions through self-organization. Cortical computation could thus involve the flexible evaluation of relations between input signals by locally specialized but adaptive processors whose activity is dynamically associated and coordinated within and between regions through specialized contextual connections. Key Words: cell assemblies; cerebral cortex; context; coordination; dynamic binding; epistemology; functional specialization; learning; neural coding; neural computation; neuropsychology; object recognition; perception; reading; self-organization; synaptic plasticity; synchronization. (shrink)

Health care reform proposals threaten to exacerbate tensions physicians already face in trying to balance traditional duties to individual patients against increasing pressure to serve broader societal and institutional goals. To cope with reform, medical ethics must clarify physicians' moral obligations, change existing ethical codes, and develop an ethics of institutions.