This biography of Emil du Bois-Reymond, the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century, received an Honorable Mention for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the 2013 PROSE Awards, was shortlisted for the 2014 John Pickstone Prize (Britain's most prestigious award for the best scholarly book in the history of science), and was named by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as one of the Best Books of 2014. -/- In his own time (1818–1896) du Bois-Reymond (...) grew famous for his groundbreaking research in neuroscience and his provocative addresses on politics and culture. His discovery of the electrical transmission of nerve signals, his innovations in laboratory instrumentation, and his reductionist methodology all helped lay the foundations of modern neuroscience. -/- In addition to describing the pioneering experiments that earned du Bois-Reymond a seat in the Prussian Academy of Sciences and a professorship at the University of Berlin, this book also recounts du Bois-Reymond’s family origins, private life, public service, and lasting influence. In talks that touched on science, philosophy, history, and literature, du Bois-Reymond introduced Darwin to German students (triggering two days of debate in the Prussian parliament), asked on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War whether France had forfeited its right to exist, and proclaimed the mystery of consciousness, heralding the age of doubt. The first modern biography in any language, "Emil du Bois-Reymond" recovers an important chapter in the history of science, the history of ideas, and the history of Germany. (shrink)

Während die Bedeutung Freges für die Philosophie der Gegenwart, soweit sich diese der analytischen Philosophie verpflichtet fühlt, allgemeine Anerkennung gefunden hat, ist seine Stellung innerhalb der eigenen Zeit noch weitgehend unaufgeklärt geblieben. So herrscht die Auffassung vor, Frege habe seine Ideen ganz aus sich selbst oder geradezu im Gegensatz zur deutschen philosophischen Tradition seiner Zeit gewonnen. Bei genauerer Textanalyse weisen Freges Schriften dagegen vielfältige Beziehungen zur zeitgenössischen Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Sprachphilosophie und Philosophie der Mathematik auf, so dass bei ihm von einem (...) Bruch mit der kontinentalen Philosophie nicht die Rede sein kann. Weil die historischen Voraussetzungen unberücksichtigt geblieben sind, ist ein unzutreffendes Bild von Freges Einsichten entstanden. Dieses Bild wird durch die Entfaltung des historischen Kontextes korrigiert. Bestimmend ist dabei ein problemorientierter Zugang, der sich systematischer Bewertungen und Weiterführungen nicht enthält. (shrink)

A hugely important book that rediscovers three crucial, but long overlooked themes in German idealism: mythology, madness and laughter.

This paper is based on a study of therapists’ experiences of working with suicidal clients. Using a hermeneutic-phenomenological methodology informed by Heidegger, the study provides an understanding of the meaning of therapists’ experiences from their perspective as mental health professionals in New Zealand. In this regard, the findings of the study identified three themes: Therapists’ reaction of shock upon learning of the suicide of their client; Therapists’ experience of assessing suicidal clients as a burden; and finally, Therapists’ professional and personal (...) crises as a result of their experiences and struggling to come to terms with events.The study sheds light on how the experiences of therapists whose clients have committed suicide can be understood. The findings show how mainstream prevention and intervention strategies result from the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of our traditional way of knowing what it means to be human. When therapists discover that phenomena are not necessarily what they appear to be, they feel unsettled and confused about their responsibilities and what it means to live and die as a human being. The study reveals that therapists experience a profound legacy of guilt, doubt and fear when a client commits suicide. Finally, the study proposes that the time has come for the profession to care for its own in order to allow therapist, in turn to care for (and about) the vulnerable other. (shrink)

This paper is principally devoted to comparing and contrasting poverty of stimulus arguments for innate cognitive apparatus in relation to language and in relation to folk psychology. These days one is no longer allowed to use the term ‘innate’ without saying what one means by it. So I will begin by saying what I mean by ‘innate’. Sections 2 and 3 will discuss language and theory of mind, respectively. Along the way, I will also briefly discuss other arguments for innate (...) cognitive apparatus in these areas. (shrink)

In 1854 the British East India Company, acting in co-operation with the Prussian Crown, commissioned Hermann, Adolph and Robert Schlagintweit to undertake a scientific expedition to India and High Asia. Despite the mission's outstanding achievements, all the brothers ended forgotten and miserable. This article will discuss (1) how three sons of a Munich eye surgeon attracted and lost so much high-level attention, and (2) what the Schlagintweits' successes and failures tell us about British and German science in the middle of (...) the 19th century. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre la biografía de Gabriela Mistral gracias a perspectivas geográfica, histórico-filosófica y ética. Asimismo, la cuestión del cronotopo y subjetividad, como también el espacio biográfico en la construcción de la propia subjetividad serán de gran ayuda para comprender las vicisitudes en la actualización biográfica sobre Gabriela Mistral. La metodología se basa en la reconstrucción de su memoria y archivo contra el olvido de la autora en su diversidad. Como resultados esperados, la memoria nos (...) ayuda a evitar la consolidación del mito mistraliano en el Chile republicano. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl devoted much attention to the analysis of internal time consciousness beginning as early as the turn of the twentieth-century. His various notes and lectures were left unorganized and unpublished until Husserl's capable assistants were given the responsibility of organizing his work for publication. This paper provides a social and philosophical account of the redaction of Husserl's materials on time consciousness as it involved the activity of his famous assistants Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden and Martin Heidegger. Special attention is (...) given to the way that both Stein and Heidegger appropriated Husserl's work and at the same time challenged fundamental elements of the master's phenomenology. (shrink)

Intrigues: From Being to the Other examines the possibility of writing the other, explores whether an ethical writing that preserves the other as such is possible, and discusses what the implications are for an ethically inflected criticism. Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, whose works constitute the most thorough contemporary exploration of the question of the other and of its relation to writing, are the main focus of this study. The book's horizon is ethics in the Levinasian sense: the question of (...) the other, which, on the hither side of language understood as a system of signs and of representation, must be welcomed by language and preserved in its alterity. Martin Heidegger is an unavoidable reference, however. While it is true that for the German philosopher Being is an immanent production, his elucidation of a more essential understanding of Being entails a deconstruction of onto-theology, of the sign and the grammatical and logical determinations of language, all decisive starting points for both Levinas and Blanchot. At stake for both Levinas and Blanchot, then, is how to mark a nondiscursive excess within discourse without erasing or reducing it. How should one read and write the other in the same without reducing the other to the same? Critics in recent years have discussed an ethical moment or turn characterized by the other's irruption into the order of discourse. The other becomes a true crossroads of disciplines, since it affects several aspects of discourse: the constitution of the subject, the status of knowledge, the nature of representation, and what that representation represses (gender, power). Yet there has been a tendency to graft the other onto paradigms whose main purpose is to reassess questions of identity, fundamentally in terms of representation; the other thus loses some of its most crucial features. Through close readings of texts by Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot the book examines how the question of the other engages the very limits of philosophy, rationality, and power. (shrink)

Shafer-Landau, Russ. Ethical Theory: An Anthology. Second Edition. London, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Marxism is alive and well in university English departments, often in other guises such as Feminism, various forms of Historicism and Materialism, and Queer Theory. As well as explaining all the major ideas of Marx in a form digestible by literary students, this book shows how these ideas have shaped Shakespeare criticism for over a century and offers new readings of the plays to illustrate the continued relevance of Marx's approach to literary and dramatic art.

Imagine a world where machines can see and understand the world the way humans do. Rapid progress in artificial intelligence has led to smartphones that recognize faces, cars that detect pedestrians, and algorithms that suggest diagnoses from clinical images, among many other applications. The success of computer vision is founded on a deep understanding of the neural circuits in the brain responsible for visual processing. This book introduces the neuroscientific study of neuronal computations in visual cortex alongside of the psychological (...) understanding of visual cognition and the burgeoning field of biologically-inspired artificial intelligence. Topics include the neurophysiological investigation of visual cortex, visual illusions, visual disorders, deep convolutional neural networks, machine learning, and generative adversarial networks among others. It is an ideal resource for students and researchers looking to build bridges across different approaches to studying and developing visual systems. (shrink)