Wurde bereits beim ersten Band der Reihe 'Philosophie & Repräsentation' / 'Philosophy & Representation' das Verhältnis von Dargestelltem und Darstellung am Beispiel des Diagramms bzw. der Diagrammatik erörtert und problematisiert, so geht es nun im zweiten Band um die Frage der grundsätzlichen Notwendigkeit von Modellen für das Denken. Die mechanischen oder symbolischen Modelle sind in allen ihren Formen die Vergegenständlichung menschlicher Vorstellung, und das sowohl in rationalistischer, also theorie-immanenter, wie auch in irrationalistischer Hinsicht. Sie sind dies nicht nur im Sinne (...) ihrer explikativer Modellhaftigkeit, also als adäquate Repräsentation von Realität aufgrund quantifizierbarer oder meßbarer Größen, sondern als Garant wahren Wissens, das sich in einer phänomenologischen Sichtung des eigenen Erfahrungs- und Verstehenshorizontes vergewissert. (shrink)

This book offers an updated and comprehensive phenomenology of norms and normativity. It is the first volume that systematically tackles both the normativity of experiencing and various experiences of norms. Part I begins with a discussion of the methodological resources that phenomenology offers for the critique of epistemological, social and cultural norms. It argues that these resources are powerful and have largely been neglected in contemporary philosophy as well as social and human sciences. The second part deepens the discussion by (...) studying the existential and moral-philosophical foundations of practical normativity. It takes on the task of illuminating the origins of normativity and offers phenomenological alternatives to the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian approaches that dominate contemporary debates on the sources of normativity. The final part proceeds from practical normativity to the analysis of the guiding powers of values, perceptual norms, instincts and drives. These are different forms of intentionality that in various manners contribute to the constitution of human practices. By clarifying their divergences and their interrelations, the volume demonstrates that normativity is not one phenomenon but a complex set of various phenomena, with multiple origins and sources. Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on issues of normativity in phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. (shrink)

Any account of “what is special about the human brain” (Passingham 2008) must specify the neural basis of our unique ability to produce speech and delineate how these remarkable motor capabilities could have emerged in our hominin ancestors. Clinical data suggest that the basal ganglia provide a platform for the integration of primate-general mechanisms of acoustic communication with the faculty of articulate speech in humans. Furthermore, neurobiological and paleoanthropological data point at a two-stage model of the phylogenetic evolution of this (...) crucial prerequisite of spoken language: (i) monosynaptic refinement of the projections of motor cortex to the brainstem nuclei that steer laryngeal muscles, presumably, as part of a “phylogenetic trend” associated with increasing brain size during hominin evolution; (ii) subsequent vocal-laryngeal elaboration of cortico-basal ganglia circuitries, driven by human-specificFOXP2mutations.;>This concept implies vocal continuity of spoken language evolution at the motor level, elucidating the deep entrenchment of articulate speech into a “nonverbal matrix” (Ingold 1994), which is not accounted for by gestural-origin theories. Moreover, it provides a solution to the question for the adaptive value of the “first word” (Bickerton 2009) since even the earliest and most simple verbal utterances must have increased the versatility of vocal displays afforded by the preceding elaboration of monosynaptic corticobulbar tracts, giving rise to enhanced social cooperation and prestige. At the ontogenetic level, the proposed model assumes age-dependent interactions between the basal ganglia and their cortical targets, similar to vocal learning in some songbirds. In this view, the emergence of articulate speech builds on the “renaissance” of an ancient organizational principle and, hence, may represent an example of “evolutionary tinkering” (Jacob 1977). (shrink)

This collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. It argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics.

English summary: With his research on early Greek philosophy, Hermann Diels created the definitive works of his era, and his Fragments of the Presocratics remains the standard work on the topic. However, the scholar never published a panorama of his unmatched knowledge. For the first time, a transcript of the lecture in which Diels represented his vision of Hellenic thought is now available. The script from the 1897/98 winter semester documents the oratory and pedagogy of the great Hellenist and (...) was provided by one of his exceptional students, the Munich-based Egyptologist Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing. Diels proved himself as a clear-headed thinker discussing the historical course of early proverbial wisdom, the natural and political theory of Plato, and the conceptual precision of Aristotle. Central figures such as Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Democritus are concisely drawn and colored. Thus the text offers an absorbing picture of the origins of theoretical consciousness in Europe. German text. German description: Mit seinen Forschungen zur fruehgriechischen Philosophie hat Hermann Diels Epoche gemacht; seine aFragmente der Vorsokratiker sind weiterhin das Standardwerk zum Thema. Nie jedoch hat der Gelehrte ein Panorama seines unerreichten Wissens veroffentlicht. Erstmals wird nun eine Mitschrift jener Vorlesung zuganglich, in der Diels seine Sicht des hellenischen Denkens darstellte. Das Skript aus dem Wintersemester 1897/98 dokumentiert vorzueglich Sprachkraft und Padagogik des grossen Grazisten; es stammt von einem Ausnahme-Studenten, dem spateren Muenchner Agyptologen Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing.Im historischen Gang von frueher Spruchweisheit bis zur Natur- und Staatslehre Platons und der begrifflichen Prazisionsarbeit des Aristoteles hebt Diels besonders das Fortwirken grosser Denkmuster hervor. Zentrale Gestalten wie Anaximander, Heraklit, Parmenides oder Demokrit sind pragnant und farbig gezeichnet. So bietet der Text ueber seinen fachhistorischen Wert hinaus ein fesselndes Bild der Urspruenge theoretischen Bewusstseins in Europa. (shrink)

New technologies are the source of uncertainties about the applicability of moral and morally connotated concepts. These uncertainties sometimes call for conceptual engineering, but it is not often recognized when this is the case. We take this to be a missed opportunity, as a recognition that different researchers are working on the same kind of project can help solve methodological questions that one is likely to encounter. In this paper, we present three case studies where philosophers of technology implicitly engage (...) in conceptual engineering (without naming it as such). We subsequently reflect on the case studies to find out how these illustrate conceptual engineering as an appropriate method to deal with pressing concerns in the philosophy of technology. We have two main goals. We first want to contribute to the literature on conceptual engineering by presenting concrete examples of conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology. This is especially relevant, because the technologies that are designed based on the conceptual work done by philosophers of technology potentially have crucial moral and social implications. Secondly, we want to make explicit what choices are made when doing this conceptual work. Making explicit that some of the implicit assumptions are, in fact, debated in the literature allows for reflection on these questions. Ultimately, our hope is that conscious reflection leads to an improvement of the conceptual work done. (shrink)

Conscious existence is the product of a neural brain mechanism, which is largely identical with Immanuel Kant's Oneness Function, a service performed by 200 million neurons in the prefrontal lobe, & makes possible our interior cosmos, the record of our interconnected, or general, experience. Essential for us humans is the well-being of our interior cosmos, or Saint Teresa of Avila's interior castle, in all interactions with each other \& the greater environment. Any disorders of our cosmos are liable to make (...) us fall ill, setting our existence on a path of psychosomatic etiology of a large class of mysterious undiagnosed diseases. (shrink)

Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super- Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So far, philosophy (...) has been rehearsing our thoughts, our human-internal world, a grand painting of the outer world, how we comprehend subjectively our experience, worked up by the logos machine, but now we seek a wider horizon, how humans understand the world thanks to Darwinian evolution to adapt in response to the metaphysical gap, the chasm between the human animal and its environment, shaping the organism so it can deal with its variable world. This new horizon embraces global context coded in neural structures that support the noumenal cosmos, our inner mental world, for us as denizens of the outer environment. Kant’s inner and outer senses are fundamental ingredients of scientific philosophy. Several sections devoted to Heidegger, his lizard debunked, but his version of the metaphysical gap & his doctrine of the logos praised. Rorty and others of the behaviorist school discussed also. (shrink)

Impressions, energy radiated by phenomena in the momentary environmental scene, enter sensory neurons, creating in afferent nerves a data stream. Following Kant, by our inner sense the mind perceives its own thoughts as it ties together sense data into an internalized scene. The mind, residing in the brain, logically a Language Machine, processes and stores items as coded grammatical entities. Kantian synthetic unity in the linguistic brain is able to deliver our experience of the scene as we appear to see (...) it. Uniquely, the brain records its own history, synthesizing a Movie-in-the-Brain, called the Noumenal Cosmos. Attempting thereby to represent the actual Universe, this makes for a sovereign brain that governs itself. The brain is domicile of an Ego, with its selfhood at stake at all times. Yet, it can know itself only by its actions, in which it appears as an actor in its own movie. Phenomena enter garbled, as confused apparitions, and must be put in good form using top–down feedback control by Ego, so that each movie frame makes rational sense within the overall context of the Noumenal Cosmos. A stack of frames is processed typically in 40 Hz rhythm with 300 ms process time each, for about 12 in the stack at any time. Successive neural centers are processing the stack in the brain assembly line, based on data from increasingly global receptive fields. Ego stitches together the movie frames, but only the top frame is in consciousness for 25 ms. The top frame contains the whole scene where the Ego makes an appearance as the actor that imposes Kantian synthetic unity on the scene, merely an assembly of grammatical texts, in a system-internal coded process language, fitting the scene into the Noumenal Cosmos. But Ego observes Ego only to the extent permitted by the objectivity rule, only what it does and thinks, not its true face. From the Noumenal Cosmos, the Ego receives grammatical messages in the internal sense code. They are integrated into a whole in the reaction of the Ego to the momentary scene. The voluntary nature of Ego’s decisions is explained, based on its ability to code in advance its own actions sequentially in time, as it sees fit with a view to an orderly Noumenal Cosmos, records of code being arranged spatially in neural structures. (shrink)

Coping with recent heritage is troublesome for history of science museums, since modern scientific artefacts often suffer from a lack of esthetic and artistic qualities and expressiveness. The traditional object-oriented approach, in which museums collect and present objects as individual showpieces is inadequate to bring recent heritage to life. This paper argues that recent artefacts should be regarded as “key pieces.” In this approach the object derives its meaning not from its intrinsic qualities but from its place in an important (...) historical event or development. The “key pieces” approach involves a more organic way of collecting and displaying, focussing less on the individual object and more on the context in which it functioned and its place in the storyline. Finally, I argue that the “key pieces” approach should not be limited to recent heritage. Using this method as a general guiding principle could be a way for history of science museums to appeal to today’s audiences. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Corroborating upper echelons theory, this study picks up the notion that narcissistic chief executive officers take advantage of accounting choices to enhance their firms’—and inherently their own—personal track records. Using a set of 15 indicators, reflecting the narcissistic trait of 1126 CEOs for the period 1992 to 2012, we find evidence of highly narcissistic CEOs engaging in accrual-based earnings management. In contrast to prior research, the results show evidence not only for income-increasing but also for income-decreasing ABEM. This indicates that (...) highly narcissistic CEOs not only strive to influence stakeholders’ perception of current performance. We conclude that they also assess their potential to influence perception of current and future earnings. The results imply that highly narcissistic CEOs’ accounting choices are driven by self-serving behavior rather than by the intention to provide additional information to the market. When earnings management techniques are used to derive personal advantage from the presentation of a firm’s earnings, the literature refers to this as a case of low earnings quality reflecting unethical behavior. Accordingly, this study contributes to the field of business ethics by showing that CEO narcissism is related to low earnings quality in that it is associated to discretionarily decreasing accruals. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the psychological relevance of a logical model for deductive reasoning. We propose a new way to analyze logical reasoning in a deductive version of the Mastermind game implemented within a popular Dutch online educational learning system (Math Garden). Our main goal is to derive predictions about the difficulty of Deductive Mastermind tasks. By means of a logical analysis we derive the number of steps needed for solving these tasks (a proxy for working memory load). Our (...) model is based on the analytic tableaux method, known from proof theory. We associate the difficulty of Deductive Mastermind game-items with the size of the corresponding logical trees obtained by the tableaux method. We derive empirical hypotheses from this model. A large group of students (over 37 thousand children, 5–12 years of age) played the Deductive Mastermind game, which gave empirical difficulty ratings of all 321 game-items. The results show that our logical approach predicts these item ratings well, which supports the psychological relevance of our model. (shrink)

Outlines of Metaphysic - dictated portions of the lectures of Hermann Lotze is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1884. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to (...) the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future. (shrink)

In this essay, our goal is to discover science in Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, lecture notes for his 1935 summer semester course, because, after all, his subject is metaphysica generalis, or ontology, and this could be construed as a theory of the human brain. Here, by means of verbatim quotes from his text, we attempt to show that indeed these lectures can be viewed as suggestion for an objective scientific theory of human perception, the human capacity for deciphering phenomena, (...) ie. hermeneutics in its broadest sense. His added notes from the 1953 edition, all of which are comments, not corrections, imply that he never abandoned these thoughts on metaphysics, despite all of his utterances about a need to overcome it, and their popular interpretations to that effect. In his presentation, he further develops the colorful and intuitive style, an hermeneutic language, that he had created in his earlier work Being and Time. Of human existence he speaks in such expressions as being-there -- ``Dasein" -- and being-in-the-world, the latter term no longer explicit in the 1935 lectures. The lectures can be read as a pre-scientific analysis of how man, being-there, perceives his environment, artfully managing to deal with the manifold challenges posed by the phenomenal structures of the universe. Man attentively recognizes and deciphers their pre-linguistic contents and, while trying to make sense of it all, puts into words his awareness. There are numerous passages in Heidegger's work where he in fairly concrete terms provides us with hints for a perceptive science that, as it turns out and is demonstrated below in this essay, can be explained in terms of recent advances in neuroscience. It would be implausible, even unthinkable, unimaginable, for there not to be found essential agreement between on one hand his philosophical insights gained by hermeneutics of Dasein, into how our brain functions to let us know what's happening & on the other hand, scientific discoveries obtained through anatomy, EEG, fMRI, TMS, electrode implants, etc, of brain structures & functions employed in perception of the momentary scene. A nexus between science and philosophy is provided in Heidegger's definitive treatment of the Logos, here interpreted as a structural version of Platonic forms (Burchard, 2014). This allows for neurolinguistic brain functions to serve as meta-context for Heidegger's being-in-the-world. The logical functions of Dasein's anatomical brain are performed by the logos machine, formerly the human soul, using top-down processing based on a global context, the noumenal cosmos which humans maintain internally. Heidegger's 1942/43 winter semester lectures Parmenides extend in unbroken fashion his 1935 work, proving that he never abandoned, as is widely claimed, his metaphysical avenue of thought. (shrink)