Angesichts der gegenwärtigen ökonomischen, ökologischen und sozialen Krisen zeichnet sich ab, dass die Wachstumsdynamik moderner Gesellschaften nicht mehr stabilisierend wirkt, sondern selbst zum Krisentreiber geworden ist. In diesem Band diskutieren die Philosophin Nancy Fraser und die Soziologen Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich und Hartmut Rosa, was dies für die Gegenwart und die Zukunft der Demokratie bedeutet und welche Konzeptionen und Wege hin zu einer demokratischen Transformation vorstellbar sind. Aus ihrer demokratietheoretischen Perspektive intervenieren Viviana Asara, Banu Bargu, Ingolfur Blühdorn, Robin Celikates, (...) Lisa Herzog, Brian Milstein, Michelle Williams und Christos Zografos. (shrink)

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and (...) were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches. (shrink)

"... Fraser and Bartky have brought the encounter between U.S. and French feminism to a new level of seriousness." —Ethics In the last decade, elements of French feminist discourse have permeated and transformed the larger feminist culture in the United States. This volume is the first sustained attempt to revalue French feminism and answer the question: What has been gained and what has been lost as a result of this intercultural encounter? Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir open the book; (...) essays by French feminists Sarah Kofman and Luce Irigaray follow; the North American contributors are Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Diana J. Fuss, Nancy J. Holland, Eleanor H. Kuykendall, Dorothy Leland, Diana T. Meyers, Andrea Nye, and Margaret A. Simons. (shrink)

The expression "artificial animal" denotes a range of different objects from teddy bears to the results of genetic engineering. As a basis for further investigation, this article first of all presents the main interpretations and traces their systematic interconnections. The subsequent sections concentrate on artificial animals in the context of play. The development of material toys is fueled by robotics. It gives toys artificial sense organs, limbs, and cognitive abilities, thus enabling them to act in the real world. The second (...) line of development, closely related to research into Artificial Life, creates virtual beings "living" on computer screens. Themost essential difference between these variants are the sense modalities involved in interaction. Virtual beings can only be seen and heard, whereas material toys can be touched as well. Therefore, the simulation of haptic qualities plays an important role. In order to complete the proposed typology, two further areas are outlined, namely artificial animals outside play and "artificial animals in the medium of flesh" which are alive but designed and created by man. Research on artificial animals belongs to an extended notion of ecosemiotics, as they are part of ecosystems which may themselves be virtual such as the Internet. (shrink)

Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality provides readers with a critical overview of what psychology tells us about religion and spirituality. It is concise without being simplistic, and the first such broad overview to be published for some years. Fraser Watts recognizes that 'religion' is complex and multi-faceted, taking different forms in different people and contexts. The book presents a broad view of psychology; whatever kind of psychology you are interested in, you will find it covered here, from biological to social, (...) and from experimental to psychoanalytic. It focuses particularly on the varied concepts that psychologists have employed to make sense of religion and subjects them to critical examination. The book is also concerned with practical applications, helping those engaged in religious ministry. It will be of interest to undergraduates and general readers, as well as specialists in religious studies, psychology, and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The volume explores the relationship between well-studied aspects of language (constructional alternations, lexical contrasts and extensions and multi-word expressions) in a variety of languages (Dutch, English, Russian and Spanish) and their representation in cognition as mediated by frequency counts in both text and experiment. The state-of-the-art data collection (ranging from questionnaires to eye-tracking) and analysis (from simple chi-squared to random effects regression) techniques allow to draw theoretical conclusions from (mis)matches between different types of empirical data. The sister volume focuses on (...) language learning and processing. (shrink)

The paper investigates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of body and space and Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Francis Bacon’s work, in order to derive a renegotiated interrelation between habitual body, phenomenal space, preferential plane and constructive line. The resulting system is ap- plied as a filter to understand the sartorial fashion of Rei Kawakubo and Hussein Chalayan and their potential as a spatial prosthesis: the operative third skin. If the evolutionary nature of culture demands a constant change, how does the surface of (...) a third skin, which embodies the generative of stable/ unstable, respond to changes of context? The fleeting, shifting conditions of contemporary culture/ lifestyle rely upon, result in, and reflect one constant, change: change of working conditions, family structures, modes of inhabitation, relation networks, of userprofile and identity, of social and territorial boundaries. We occupy the shift- ing spatial parameters of a transitional supermodern environment. Culture, as enacted or embodied through each of these fields, is regulated by a number of abstract and factual variables that interplay constantly: time, space, movement, surface, individual, and data. Elizabeth Grosz argues that culture is an evolutionary effect: it regenerates itself in order to ensure the survival of the species. Each “prosthetic” expression of culture – language, fashion, architecture, etc. – changes repeatedly. Here change is not an end in itself, but a means. And the most successful prosthesis may not be the one that is able to answer the largest number of challenges, but one which itself undergoes a process of learning, self-modification, and differentiation – in short, a process of evolution. Any prosthesis is by nature an extension of the body. In the case of architecture and fashion the prosthesis addressing change is most often external to the body – a “cultural fur” or a surface phenomenon, that is, a highly profiled supplementary skin. As with all prostheses, their respective life-span depends on their ability to reflect a change in context and value systems. They are adapted or updated, if not, they vanish. Any situation of change is processed as a differentiation between the actual and the virtual of a given context. Grosz identifies distinctions between the actual and virtual, the real and the possible: the possible is a preformed real that has not yet received its final materiality, and thus delineates a range of options of becoming. The real is the blueprint of the possible, negotiated by factual limitations, and it is conjoint with the actual through a process of differentiation and divergence. The virtual comprises alternate variations of the actual, it defines a realm of deviation from the blueprint. In order to be responsive to change, the balance between the actual and virtual thus must be rendered unstable: “The virtual requires the actual to diverge, to differentiate itself, to proceed by way of division and disruption, forging modes of actualisation that will transform this virtual into others unforeseen or uncontained within it.” 4 The integration of the virtual allows a re-ordering of the blueprint, a return to the crossroad of possibilities, unlimiting and processing an alternative real, and establishing a state of continual change. A repeated change – not as a choice between a number of options but as a gradual process – marks the moment of evolution, and requires a dynamic system. Such a dynamic can be rendered as an adaptable, flexible, modular, mobile, or morphing system of change. The key lies with the fluency and ability of adaptation for the proposed differentiation between actual and virtual – thus it is an elastic change that is required. The nature of this elasticity is encoded in a repeated repositioning of the variables: a constant fine-tuning of a maximum number of parameters that engineer, alter and define the blueprint. When looking for a dynamic system that incorporates a transformation of skin or space, we are in search of dynamics through an operative surface, controlled by means of the constructive line. Both operative surface and constructive line are generative methods for the formation and form finding of the second and third skin of sartorial fashion and architecture respectively, as they both produce inhabitable or wearable envelopes with a specific responsiveness. Both professions share communication, coding and signage, form information programs, pattern charts, volume outlines, texture fields, surface operations, and implement electronic or digital extensions. In both, the constructive line shapes the surface twice: before production and in operation. The surface demarcates space, spatial envelope, enclosing garment, field of action. In which way can an operative system of the surface with stable/ unstable conditioning generate a phenomenological or evolutionary change in the reconstruction of body and context? How do time, space, movement, surface, individual and data interact in this framework? What is the impact of surface strategies and constructive line on that system? (shrink)

Prenatal care and the practice of prenatal genetic testing are about to be changed fundamentally. Due to several ground-breaking technological developments prenatal screening and diagnosis (PND) will soon be offered earlier in gestation, with less procedure-related risks and for a profoundly enlarged variety of targets. In this paper it is argued that the existing normative framework for prenatal screening and diagnosis cannot answer adequately to these new developments. In concentrating on issues of informed consent and the reproductive autonomy of the (...) pregnant women the ethical debate misses problems related to the clinical pathway as a whole and to implicit normative attributions to clinical actions or the function of health care professionals. If, however, ethical debate would focus on the clinical context and on the ends of PND to a larger extent, it would be able to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the ethical challenges especially of the new technologies in order to be more adequately prepared for their implementation. (shrink)

This book offers a critical assessment of Axel Honneth’s complex and growing opus in social and political philosophy. It examines this in the context of the history and future of the Frankfurt School and in its relation to contemporary analytic approaches to social and political philosophy as well as postmodernist critics.

Reseña de FRASER, Nancy: Dilemas de la justicia en el siglo XXI. Género y globalización , Mª Antonia Carbonero Gamundí y Joaquín Valdivielso (eds.), Edicions UIB, 2011.

This study is an important contribution to the intellectual history of Victorian England which examines the religio-aesthetic theories of some central writers of the time. Dr Fraser begins with a discussion of the aesthetic dimensions of Tractarian theology and then proceeds to the orthodox certainties of Hopkins' theory of inscape, Ruskin's and Arnold's moralistic criticism of literature and the visual arts, and Pater's and Wilde's faith in a religion of art. The author identifies significant cultural and historical conditions which (...) determined the interdependence of aesthetic and religious sensibility in the period. She argues that certain tensions in the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge - tensions between poetry and religion, rebellion and reaction, individualism and authority - continued to manifest themselves throughout the Victorian age, and as society became increasingly democratic, religion in turn became increasingly personal and secular. (shrink)

Dissident circles during the Czechoslovak communist regime were organized in semi-private islands of resistance. They saw themselves as a parallel polis in line with Arendt’s notion of political action by pursuing “life in truth,” authentic experience, and ultimately freedom. The heroes of these circles were that society’s pariahs. In their quest for authenticity, they turned to the past to find meaning, to understand the nature of their communities and the needs for political action towards the future. As such, they sought (...) what Heidegger would label authentic public interpretations. After 1989, these heroes shaped and adapted to the constitutional design of the new polis and often experienced a transformation from pariah to inauthentic hero to at least the potential to become strong man, maintaining varying degrees of authenticity. (shrink)

Until recently, sex determination in mammals has often been described as a male determination process, with male differentiation being the active and dominant pathway, and only in its absence is the passive female pathway followed. This picture has been challenged recently with the discovery that the gene encoding R-spondin1 is mutated in human patients with female-to-male sex reversal.((1)) These findings might place R-spondin1 in the exceptional position of being the female-determining gene in mammals. In this review, possible roles of R-spondin1 (...) during sex determination as well as questions arising from this study will be discussed. (shrink)

This essay examines the status of events of 1989 in Czechoslovakia from an Arendtian perspective, focusing on whether they qualify as a revolution or even, precisely speaking, a modern event. For Arendt, revolutions are decidedly modern in that they expand freedom to all equally, an expansion conceivable because history can be thought of as rectilinear and because new ideas can be introduced into the secular world. Leaving aside the importance of violence as a criterion, we find that 1989 in Czechoslovakia (...) does not live up to her other criteria, nor does it make sense to call it either modern or postmodern. We thus claim that it is an ‘immodern’, non-revolutionary event. In concluding, we nd that its immodernity is why it failed to be a revolution. (shrink)

In a clinic-wide approach to establish liberal policies, a closed psychiatric ward was planned to be opened. The leaders of the multi-professional team of this ward requested continuous ethics support during the first few months after the transition from their previously closed ward into an open one. During the process of accompanying the team through this ethically sensitive period of institutional change, several variations of ethics consultation were developed: the ‘context-adjusted’ clinical ethics support. Some ethics consultations focused on a retrospective (...) evaluation of a patient case, in other ethics consultations consolidation of a previous case discussion was worked out, and/or reflections on fundamental ethical issues were included. Based on our experiences and the feedback of the team, we consider this context-adjusted clinical ethics support as feasible and effective. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é um estudo da virtude em Aristóteles. O termo areté é frequentemente traduzido como “virtude”, mas sua real significação remete-nos à ideia de “excelência”. Cada atividade humana, prática, possui uma areté particular. No domínio político, além da deliberação, Aristóteles expõe a noção de phronesis. Esta última é a excelência do líder político.

In this paper I provide a state of the art survey and assessment of the contemporary debate about relations. After (1) distinguishing different varieties of relations, symmetric from non-symmetric, internal from external relations etc. and relations from their set-theoretic models or sequences, I proceed (2) to consider Bradley’s regress and whether relations can be eliminated altogether. Next I turn (3) to the question whether relations can be reduced, bringing to bear considerations from the philosophy of physics as well as metaphysics. (...) Finally, (3) I consider in what sense relations have order, and whether to make sense of this we are required to conceive of relations as having direction or argument positions. (shrink)

The debate about sustainability and gender at the international level is characterized by a strong presence of international women's networks from the South. However, in Agenda 21 — the UNCED programme for sustainability in the 21st century — the situation of women in the North is barely visible. Nevertheless, Agenda 21 recommends that all states pursue strategies of sustainability at national and local levels. Therefore, it is necessary to contribute to the sustainability debate from a Northern feminist perspective. This article (...) discusses relevant contributions from feminist scholars in Germany and looks at the arguments that have been brought forward in the context of developing a strategy of sustainable development in Germany from a gender perspective. Second, results of gender studies in relevant fields of sustainability are discussed, using the distinction between explicit and implicit gender aspects. Finally, research perspectives for developing concepts of linking socioecological transformation with empowerment are presented as a specific feminist claim to sustainability. (shrink)

This study contextualizes Konrad of Megenberg’s “Book of Natural Things” within the natural philosophy practiced by the Faculty of Arts in the 14th century. Albert the Great and texts of ps.-Albert emerge as significant in this interpretation.

Was ist zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts von einer Auseinandersetzung mit der Philosophie Johann Gottlieb Fichtes zu erwarten, die sich darum bemuht, die Konstitution von Subjektivitat herauszuarbeiten? Kann es nach dem 'Tod des Subjektes' und der neurobiologischen Erforschung des Bewusstseins ein Interesse an Fichte geben, das mehr als ein historisches ist? Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, anhand Fichtes Kritik an dem psychologischen Konzept der Seele seine Konstitution von Subjektivitat als mogliche Grundlage fur systemisches Denken und Arbeiten zu erweisen. (...) Zwingende Vorraussetzung, um Fichtes Philosophie zur heutigen Subjektivitats-Debatte hin zu offnen, ist es dabei allerdings, immer noch weit verbreitete Missverstandnisse uber die Wissenschaftslehre zu beheben: Einschatzungen wie 'Grossenwahn' oder 'Narzissmus' gilt es zu widerlegen, um eine neue Lesart der Wissenschaftslehre zu fordern, um damit wiederum ihr volles Potential frei zu legen. (shrink)

This article analyzes Nancy Fraser's account of the contrasting social movements for recognition versus those for redistribution. In her most recent analysis, only those forms of recognition struggles that she equates with identity politics are subject to critique. I argue that identity politics does not have an inevitable logic to it that destines it to fracture, border patrol, internal conservatism, etc., and further that the very redistribution claims she proposes require identity politics.

This paper provides a critique of Nancy Fraser's theory of recognition and account of identity and redistribution.

This article for the Stanford Encyclopedia for Philosophy provides a state of the art survey and assessment of the contemporary debate about truth-makers, covering both the case for and against truth-makers. It explores 4 interrelated questions about truth-makers, (1) What is it to be a truth-maker? (2) Which range, or ranges, of truths are eligible to be made true (if any are)? (3) What kinds of entities are truth-makers? (4) What is the motivation for adopting a theory of truth-makers? And (...) adds that there's another question to often put aside by metaphysicians but has critical consequences for truth-makers: (5) What are the truth-bearers? (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 1 Seiten: 1-33.

Článek ukazuje pohled na utváření novověké koncepce pokroku v dílech Bernarda Le Boviera de Fontenelle. Idea pokroku byla poprvé přesně zformulována právě ve Fontenellových pracích. Podnětem pro Fontenellovy úvahy byla intelektuální debata querelle des anciens et des modernes. Tato diskuze měla rozhodnout o nadřazenosti novověku nad antikou nebo naopak. Fontenelle se debaty účastnil a závěry, k nimž došel, dovršily jeho teorii pokroku, jíž se věnoval nejen téměř ve všech pracích, ale též ve chvalořečích.

The concepts of particular and universal have grown so familiar that their significance has become difficult to discern, like coins that have been passed back and forth too many times, worn smooth so their values can no longer be read. On the Genealogy of Universals seeks to overcome our sense of over-familiarity with these concepts by providing a case study of their evolution during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, a study that shows how the history of these (...) concepts is bound up with the origins and development of analytic philosophy itself. Understanding how these concepts were taken up, transfigured, and given up by the early analytic philosophers, enables us to recover and reanimate the debate amongst them that otherwise remains Delphic. This book begins from the early, originating texts of analytic philosophy that have hitherto baffled commentators, including Moore's early papers, and engages afresh with the neglected contributions of philosophical figures that historians of analytic philosophy have mostly since forgotten, including Stout and Whitehead. This sheds new light upon the relationships of Moore to Russell, Russell to Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein to Ramsey. (shrink)

Recenze: Robert Goulding. Defending Hypatia: Ramus, Savile and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History, New York: Springer, 2010, 201 s.