A revision of the author's thesis, Ruhr-Universitèat Bochum, 1976.

Postmodernity's Musical Pasts considers music after 1945 as a representation of concepts such as "historicity" and "temporality". The volume understands postmodernity as a period in which both modernism and postmodernism co-exist. It is attracted to a wider interpretation of "historicity" that focuses on the complex nexus of past-present-future. "Historicity" is understood as leaning closely on "temporality", generally thought of as the linear progression of past, present and future. The volume broadens the absolutist understanding of temporality to include processes which can (...) occur in circular, spiral, transcending and other formations. The book covers an extensive spectrum of topics from classical to popular and neo-traditional musics to concerns of the disciplines of musicology. Such a wide range of topics from both the centre and the periphery of the musicological canon mirrors the eclectic and diverse nature of the postwar era itself. The first section investigates how to understand manifestations of the past in musical composition with regard to time, on the one hand, and with regard to genre, style and idiom, on the other. A second section shows how time and history manifest themselves in art music. A third section takes the contrasts and transitional moments of post-1945 practices further by looking at the temporality of reception from different angles. A final part investigates questions of nostalgia and temporalities of belonging. TINA FR HAUF is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University, New York and serves on the faculty of The Graduate Center, CUNY. CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Arnold, Susana Asensio Llamas, Georg Burgstaller, Caitlin Carlos, Daniela Fugellie, Tina Fr hauf, John Koslovsky, Lawrence Kramer, Beate Kutschke, Laurenz L tteken, Max Noubel, Joshua S. Walden. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 43-57, December 2011.

Exploratory inquiry has difficulty attracting research funding because funding agencies have little sense of how to detect good science in exploratory contexts. After documenting and explaining the focus on hypothesis testing among a variety of institutions responsible for distinguishing between good and bad science, I analyze the NIH grant review process. I argue that a good explanation for the focus on hypothesis testing—at least at the level of science funding agencies—is the fact that hypothesis-driven research is relatively easy to appraise. (...) I then explore one method by which we might gauge the epistemic merits of different styles of inquiry. (shrink)

Filozófiai és művészeti gyűjtemények számára egyaránt érdekes lehet Széplaky Gerda filozófus, esztéta, kritikus legújabb kötete, melynek írásai izgalmasan társítják az esztétikát a fenomenológiával. A szerző esszéi a testiség, a nézőben végbemenő fiziológiai folyamatok felől értelmezik a befogadás aktusát. Az első írás általánosságban szól a radikális kritikáról, majd a figyelemfelkeltő kötetcímmel megegyező című esszé (Kant hátán a szőr) a megrázkódtatásról, mint esztétikai fenoménról szól. Olyan további általánosabb témákról ejt még szót a szerző, mint az esztétikai hatásban megnyilvánuló erőszak vagy az (...) építészeti reprezentáció problémái. A kötet második felében konkrét alkotók művészetével kapcsolatos írások kaptak helyet, olyan témákban, mint Bukta Imre művészetének változásai, Szirtes János videoperformanszai, a játék esztétikai szerepe Bondor Csilla műveiben, vagy az Élet menete című holokauszt-emlékmű és kontextusai. "www.kello.hu © minden jog fenntartva". (shrink)

Given the predominance of multilingualism in many countries there is great need for a new, interdisciplinary approach to the problem. Sociolinguistics—or the sociology of language—provides such an approach and can help to shed new light on a phenomenon which is often discussed in terms that tend to create more problems than they solve. In order to demonstrate how sociolinguistic theory and practice can contribute to the study of multilingualism this paper will attempt to outline briefly some of the basic premises (...) of sociolinguistic theory which appear relevant to the understanding of the phenomenon of multilingualism and also to define multilingualism as a social behaviour in response to a contact situation. (shrink)

A major figure in women's studies and a long-term activist for women's issues, Gerda Lerner is a pioneer in the field of Women's History and one of its leading practitioners. "Why History Matters" is a summation of her work which includes pieces on the author's early life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and on her slow assimilation into American life.

Much of Stephen Jay Gould’s legacy is dominated by his views on the contingency of evolutionary history expressed in his classic Wonderful Life. However, Gould also campaigned relentlessly for a “nomothetic” paleontology. How do these commitments hang together? I argue that Gould’s conception of science and natural law combined with his commitment to contingency to produce an evolutionary science centered around the formulation of higher-level evolutionary laws.

An argument that science is indeed 'socially constructed' but in a way that exposes it to a Darwinian version of variability and selection which ensures its success.

Evolutionary psychologists, among others, have used a method called “reverse engineering” to uncover ( a ) whether a trait was selected for, and ( b ) if so, why that trait was selected for. In this paper I argue that reverse engineering cannot deliver on either ( a ) or ( b ), and tends to pervert, rather than enhance, our knowledge of natural history. In particular, I expose as false a fundamental assumption of reverse engineering—namely, that all traits selected (...) for a particular function will share some nontrivial properties. *Received March 2006; revised June 2008. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 229 Major Williams Hall (0126), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061; e‐mail: haufe@vt.edu. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a new way of thinking about natural necessity and a new way of thinking about biological laws. I suggest that much of the lack of progress in making a positive case for distinctively biological laws is that we’ve been looking for necessity in the wrong place. The trend has been to look for exceptionlessness at the level of the outcomes of biological processes and to build one’s claims about necessity off of that. However, as Beatty (...) (1995) observed, even when we are lucky enough to find a biological ‘rule’ of some sort, that rule is apt to be a victim of ‘the rule-breaking capabilities of evolutionary change’. If indeed no distinctively biological generalization—even an exceptionless one—is safe, we need to locate necessity elsewhere. A good place to start is, I think, precisely the point at which Beatty sees the possibility of lawhood as breaking down—namely, at the level of chances. 1 The ‘Necessity’ Objection to Biological Laws2 Necessary Chances2.1 Necessary chances: random drift2.2 Necessary chances: fitness3 But is it Biological?4 Conclusion. (shrink)

Within the genres of news and current affairs television, it is the generic logic of the ‘feelgood’ genre of the talk show that legitimizes personalized discourse between famous hosts and politicians. The article presents a case study of such an interview, focusing on the ways in which the interaction between the verbal, the visual and the rhythmic modalities of the interview is employed by the multiple authors of the text to construct a variety of interpersonal footings for interviewer and interviewee (...) on the one hand and a series of preferred interpretations for the audience on the other. The method is deviant case analysis, using tools from semantics and pragmatics, discourse and conversation analysis, and visual analysis of news images. To explore the manner of interaction between the verbal and visual channel, the concept of rhythm is developed for dialogic audiovisual texts. Dialogic audiovisual rhythm is defined as arising from the interaction of speaker or addressee change with onset of new shot, and with frequency of shots per turn/ generic unit of the interview. Rhythmic sequences can then be segmented which make up the textual structure of the interview, delineating its semantic units and areas of strategic positioning between the private, the personal and the political. Three types of the personalization of politics can be discerned in the text: that of the private domain, that of political relations as private ones, and that of politics as history being made by great men. A forth type of personalization is that of the relations between the media and politics. Different combinations of verbal, visual and rhythmic means are used to realize these types discursively. (shrink)

Some ideas seem to possess a disproportionate ability to lead to new insights, new discoveries, new ideas, and even entirely new ways of thinking. Such ideas are said to be fruitful. Looking across the history of science and mathematics, we see creative minds preoccupied with the search for ideas of this kind. More precious than truth, fruitful ideas provide those in pursuit of knowledge with a seemingly bottomless well of innovation from which to draw as they attempt to solve new (...) problems and to refine solutions to old ones. Professional researchers have a nose for these ideas. They often can see in an instant that some way of approaching a problem will eventually result in a solution to it and to a whole host of other problems, all of which suddenly seem related. In this book, Chris Haufe explains how these ideas are detected and developed into large-scale frameworks for research. He argues for a philosophical perspective on scientific knowledge that places the search for fruitfulness at the heart of the scientific enterprise. (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

These nineteen original studies deal with Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489), the Modern Devotion and its influence, subjects and personalities of early humanism and ...

The importance of mate choice and sexual selection has been emphasized by the majority of evolutionary psychologists. This paper assesses three cases of work on mate choice and sexual selection in evolutionary psychology: David Buss on cross-cultural human mate preferences, Randy Thornhill and Steve Gangestad on the link between mate preferences and fluctuating asymmetry, and Geoffrey Miller on the role of Fisher’s runaway process in human evolution. A mixture of conceptual and empirical problems in each case highlights the general weakness (...) of work in evolutionary psychology on these issues. (shrink)

Developmental psychologists assume that infants understand other persons’ actions after and because they understand their own. However, there is another possibility as well, namely that infants come to understand their own actions after and because they understand other persons’ actions. We reviewed infant research on the influence of perceived actions on self-performed actions as well as the reverse. Furthermore, we investigated the interplay between both aspects of action understanding by means of a sequence variation. The results show the impact of (...) agentive experience for action understanding, but not the reverse. The question whether infants’ perceived and to-be-produced actions share common representations of the perceptual and the motor system is discussed in relation to its implications for the social making of minds. (shrink)