The articles collected in this volume have their origin in an international workshop dedicated to “Experience and Knowledge Structures in Arabic and Latin Sciences.” Specialists from Great Britain, France, Denmark, Spain, Morocco, the United States, and Germany gathered in Berlin in 1996 in the context of an interdisciplinary research project on the history of mechanical thinking at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. The workshop initiated a process of discussion focused on problems of the intercultural transmission and (...) transformation of knowledge. The present double issue is an outcome of this ongoing discussion. (shrink)

Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries By HanaokaMimi, xiii + 301 pp. Price PB £29.99. EAN 978–1107565838.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 2 Seiten: 495-531.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 2 Seiten: 570-573.

In this astonishingly rich volume, experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship on what is arguably Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. A lengthy introduction, annotated (...) bibliography, and index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research. (shrink)

Anxiety patients over-generalize fear, possibly because of an incapacity to discriminate threat and safety signals. Discrimination trainings are promising approaches for reducing such fear over-generalization. Here we investigated the efficacy of a fear-relevant vs. a fear-irrelevant discrimination training on fear generalization and whether the effects are increased with feedback during training. Eighty participants underwent two fear acquisition blocks, during which one face, but not another face, was associated with a female scream. During two generalization blocks, both CSs plus four morphs (...) were presented. Between these generalization blocks, half of the participants underwent a fear-relevant discrimination training with or without feedback and the other half a fear-irrelevant discrimination training with or without feedback. US expectancy, arousal, valence ratings, and skin conductance responses indicated successful fear acquisition. Importantly, fear-relevant vs. fear-irrelevant discrimination trainings and feedback vs. no feedback reduced generalization as reflected in US expectancy ratings independently from one another. No effects of training condition were found for arousal and valence ratings or SCR. In summary, this is a first indication that fear-relevant discrimination training and feedback can improve the discrimination between threat and safety signals in healthy individuals, at least for learning-related evaluations, but not evaluations of valence or arousal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading History: On Jacob Burckhardt as Source-ReaderJürgen GroßeThere is a gap between the reputation Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) has enjoyed among the educated public and among professional historians—a discrepancy that has become commonplace in the century-long reception of the Swiss cultural historian’s work. 1 Nevertheless, in the light of recent appraisals of Burckhardt as an ancestor of a different—perhaps a new—cultural history, and with the rediscovery of his contributions to (...) the history of art, aesthetics, and historical anthropology, the gap seems to be ever-narrowing. 2 However, let us keep it open in the following few pages.The chasm between assessments of Burckhardt as an historian-writer and as an historian-researcher appears roughly analogous to his above-mentioned respective reputations among laymen and professional scholars. As a historian Burckhardt did not want to be a scientific researcher. From the time he began writing history he admitted that he felt little commitment to the predominating concept of scientific progress as a continuous accumulation of facts and theories. Thus, as an outsider to the profession he had only one option, which was to [End Page 525] attain a place of honor as an esteemed writer of historical books for the educated public—a “master historian.” Yet it is precisely this characterization of Burckhardt that makes a curious fact appear all the more baffling: the act of writing books made Burckhardt feel thoroughly tormented. Throughout his career, he lamented historical authorship as a thankless occupation—a form of “slavery.” Just four years after finishing Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) Burckhardt wrote to his friend Paul Heyse:I now consider my modest literary career as finally closed, and feel much better and content reading sources, as I only study and make notes for teaching and not for possible book-making. The historical market is tremendously overcrowded as things are, and it will be worse if peace lasts. 3Books like Die Zeit Constantins des Großen, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, and Der Cicerone—works that gained the Basler historian fame that has endured to the present day—were either not prepared by the author for further editions or abandoned for colleagues to revise. Thus, Burckhardt seemed to regard himself neither as a researcher nor as a writer but rather as a reader of history. His dislike of research and authorship deserves our attention not only because it stands in sharp contrast to the mores of the scientific community, both in his and our times; for it might also elucidate yet another interesting paradox: Burckhardt, who celebrated the “reading of sources” and “the insights accessible from sources” as no other nineteenth-century historian, was soon to be charged with failing to meet the accepted standards of source-criticism. This essay examines these problems in terms of a series of questions concerning Burckhardt’s reading of history.Why Burckhardt Prefers ReadingBurckhardt clearly abhorred what he called the “history of the events.” Already as a student, he felt himself confronted with a barrage of events, not so much as matters of real history as rather as products of historical science—the ever-increasing facts that historians produced in relation to actual events. Unlike the humanistic and enlightenment paradigms of history, mainstream nineteenth-century scholarship no longer relied on the eyewitness to guarantee authenticity. The focus had shifted from remembrance to reconstruction; events were now narrated in terms of newly conceived abstractions like “development,” “process,” “spirit of an age,” and “spirit of a nation.” This increasing detachment from eyewitnessed experience paved the way for an endless production of information, [End Page 526] which had become an occupation in its own right. Every newcomer to the study of history now encountered a huge mass of mere historical facts, largely devoid of content—“a desperate prospect at the beginning of the study of history,” according to Burckhardt. Furthermore, the dynamism of modern history itself continued to produce more and more “events,” which were then to be reproduced as “facts.” This mire of facts burdened the reader of historiography even more than the student of history. “Even the most well-meaning of contemporary historians,” Burckhardt... (shrink)

The contributions to volume 8 of the Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism pursue from various perspectives the multifarious relations of German Idealism to the natural sciences and mathematics. The concepts of nature and of the basis for mathematics develop complexly in German philosophy after Kant. At issue are: the foundation of mathematics; the relation of freedom to nature; the significance of philosophy to emerging research in biology, chemistry, and physics, and reconsideration of the thought of Leibniz (...) and Spinoza. Contributors: Gideon Freudenthal, Michael Friedman, Hans-Peter Neumann, Wolfgang Neuser, Konstantin Pollok, Sebastian Rand, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Thomas Sturm, Lars-Thade Ulrichs, Eric Watkins, John Zammito, Paul Ziche, Rachel Zuckert. (shrink)

With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. From Text to Action is an essential companion to the now classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own (...) theorization of ideology to their version of ideology critique. (shrink)

With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. From Text to Action is an essential companion to the now classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own (...) theorization of ideology to their version of ideology critique. (shrink)

In 1877 Louis Paul Cailletet in France and Raoul Pictet in Switzerland liquefied oxygen in the form of a mist. The liquefaction of the first of the so-called permanent gases heralded the birth of low-temperature research and is often described in the literature as having started a ‘race’ for attaining progressively lower temperatures. In fact, between 1877 and 1908, when helium, the last of the permanent gases, was liquefied, there were many priority disputes—something quite characteristic of the emergence of (...) a new research field. This paper examines Cailletet’s path to the liquefaction of oxygen, as well as a debate between him and the Polish physicist Zygmunt Wróblewski over the latter’s contribution to the liquefaction of gases. (shrink)

With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. _From Text to Action_ is an essential companion to the now classic_ The Conflict of Interpretation_s. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own (...) theorization of ideology to their version of ideology critique. (shrink)

Par son parcours et par sa biographie, l’historien de l’économie Jürgen Kuczynski (1904-1997) illustre les problématiques et les paradoxes d’une partie des marxistes est-allemands. Issu d’une famille « juive assimilée » de la grande bourgeoisie libérale allemande, il a pourtant été l’un des intellectuels les plus renommés en RDA. Son parcours personnel et académique montre qu’il avait à la fois la formation et les références d’un intellectuel classique allemand et l’engagement politique de l’ intelligentsia communiste. Jürgen Kuczynski était un intellectuel (...) cosmopolite polyglotte qui pouvait bénéficier de ses réseaux mais aussi de ses habitus bourgeois pour se présenter comme le « passeur » et l’ Avant-garde du socialisme à travers les frontières politiques et intellectuelles du « rideau de fer ». L’ambivalence de cette figure d’intellectuel marxiste au « parcours exemplaire », est éloquente pour illustrer le rôle paradoxal des intellectuels marxistes-bourgeois dans la société est-allemande. (shrink)

Der erklärte Anti-Philosoph Paul Valéry teilt so manche Eigenschaft mit seinen Zeitgenossen, den Kulturphilosophen Ernst Cassirer und Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wie Cassirer war Valéry von den kulturphilosophisch interessanten Positionen der Ideengeschichte lebenslang fasziniert, und wie Wittgenstein verstand er Philosophie wesentlich als Sprachkritik. Mit diesen und anderen Affinitäten – vor allem mit seiner »poïétique« – greift Valéry genuin kulturphilosophische Themen auf.