: Although Eckart Förster’s work contains many advanced scholarly accounts, it also has weaknesses. As Förster’s central attempt to make Goethe a Spinozan unfortunately ended in failure, we must recur to previous research. The same holds for several of the interpretations of Kant.

Review of Eckart Menzler-Trott’s book, Logic’s Lost Genius: The Life of Gerhard Gentzen.

Die Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen gehort derzeit zu den dynamischsten und innovativsten Feldern der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft. Eine historische Teildisziplin, die lange Zeit als eher traditionell und konservativ galt, erweitert und erneuert sich. Diesen Prozess dokumentieren die Beitrage des vorliegenden Bandes. Sie leisten eine Bestandsaufnahme, entwickeln Perspektiven und reflektieren so die ganze Bandbreite einer modernen Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen. Gepragt ist der Band durch den Dialog von Historikern, die sich mit unterschiedlicher Ausrichtung - politik-, wirtschafts-, sozial- oder kulturgeschichtlich - fur internationale (...) Geschichte interessieren. Das Spektrum der Beitrage reicht von der Erforschung von Globalisierungsprozessen uber Fragen des Kulturtransfers bis hin zu einer internationalen Politikgeschichte. (shrink)

The Wigner--Eckart theorem is central to the application of symmetry principles throughout atomic, molecular, and nuclear physics. Nevertheless, the theorem has a puzzling feature: it is dispensable for solving problems within these domains, since elementary methods suffice. To account for the significance of the theorem, I first contrast it with an elementary approach to calculating matrix elements. Next, I consider three broad strategies for interpreting the theorem: conventionalism, fundamentalism, and conceptualism. I argue that the conventionalist framework is unnecessarily pragmatic, (...) while the fundamentalist framework requires more ontological commitments than necessary. Conceptualism avoids both defects, accounting for the theorem's significance in terms of how it epistemically restructures the calculation of matrix elements. Specifically, the Wigner--Eckart theorem modularizes and unifies matrix element problems, thereby changing what we need to know to solve them. (shrink)

The way in which a nation’s economy is structured is of great importance for the material welfare of its people as well as the people’s relationship with the state and the operation of the state itself. It is also important for the proper functioning of a nation as a people and its psychological welfare. If the gap between rich and poor increases, the structure of an economy, and therefore the welfare of the state and the nation, is at risk. Two (...) important documents of antiquity, Plato’s Nomoi and the Book of Deuteronomy, which even today influence life, dealt intensively with the fissures between rich and poor within society as a danger to political welfare and harmony. This article will examine these documents to make use of these two books for improving a societal situation. This will be done by a comparative perspective on both of these books. (shrink)

The article provides a brief overview on Hans Mayer’s life and work and his several stays in Jerusalem and with Stéphane Mosès.

Politeia bezeichnet in Aristoteles’ Politik einmal Verfassung als die je verschieden ausgeprägte politische Ordnung einer polis. Besonders in Politik IV und V stellt Aristoteles häufig politeia monarchischen Staatsformen gegenüber – die poleis unter diesen Verfassungen wären damit etwa ›Gemeindestaaten‹. Normativ kann die Geltung von politeia eingeengt sein, wenn gesetzlosen bzw. autokratischen Regierungsformen die Kennzeichnung politeia bestritten wird.

A family reconstitution study of the Krummhörn population (Ostfriesland, Germany, 1720–1874) reveals that infant mortality and children’s probabilities of marrying or emigrating unmarried are affected by the number of living same-sexed sibs in farmers’ families but not in the families of landless laborers. We interpret these results in terms of a “local resource competition” model in which resource-holding families are obliged to manipulate the reproductive future of their offspring. In contrast, families that lack resources have no need to manipulate their (...) offspring and are more likely to benefit from allowing their offspring to capitalize on whatever opportunities to reproduce present themselves. (shrink)

We construct a model for the level by level equivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness in which below the least supercompact cardinal κ, there is a stationary set of cardinals on which SCH fails. In this model, the structure of the class of supercompact cardinals can be arbitrary.

This paper is on dangerous human experimentations with drugs against trypanosimiasis carried out in the former German colonies of German East Africa and Togo. Victory over trypanosomiasis could not be achieved in Berlin because animals were thought to be unsuitable for therapeutic laboratory research in the field of trypanosomiasis. The colonies themselves were necessarily chosen as laboratories and the patients with sleeping sickness became the objects of therapeutical and pharmacological research. The paper first outlines Robert Koch's trypanosomiasis research in the (...) large sleeping sickness laboratory of German East Africa and then focuses on the escalating human experiments on trypanosomiasis in the German Musterkolonie Togo, which must be interpreted as a reaction to the starting signal given by Robert Koch in East Africa. (shrink)

This is the first book in English devoted entirely to Kant's Opus postumum and its place in the Kantian oeuvre.