Unsere Zeit scheint wenig geeignet, Grundlagen der Geschlechterbeziehung zu klären. Es ist unsicher, ob es diese Grundlagen überhaupt gibt. Über Liebe vollends scheint sich wissenschaftlich nahezu nichts sagen zu lassen. Es gibt jedoch einen Befund, der zu denken geben muss: Durch die Geschichte hin hat sich eine spezifisch humane Geschlechterbeziehung gebildet; in allen Gesellschaften haben Menschen gesucht, ihre Leben in der Körperzone eines anderen zu führen, zumeist eines anderen des anderen Geschlechts. Es gibt eindrückliche Berichte dieser Beziehung, von der schieren (...) Existenz des anderen überwältigen worden zu sein, und keineswegs war dafür nur Sexualität der Grund. Warum gibt es diese Form der Verbindung zwischen den Geschlechtern? Dux zögert nicht, die vielfältigen Formen, in denen sie sich ausgebildet hat, Liebe zu nennen. Von der romantischen Form ihrer Ausprägung sagt er ohnehin, dass es sie nicht länger gebe, nachdem die Welt eine andere geworden sei. Es geht ihm nicht um das, was Liebe meint, so eindrückliche literarische Bestimmungen in den Text eingegangen sind, es geht ihm um das Warum. Warum gibt es das: Liebe? Das ist die Frage, die eine Antwort finden soll. (shrink)

Das Ziel, das Dux mit der Untersuchung zur Moral verfolgt, ist, einsichtig zu machen, dass und wie sich die Moral als eine Form sozialer Vernunft aus einer Bedingungskonstellation der evolutiv erworbenen Verfassung heraus zu bilden vermochte und immer wieder zu bilden vermag. Man muss, das ist die Kernthese Günter Dux‘, die Moral unter den erkenntniskritischen Vorgaben der Moderne neu verstehen – anders als sie in aller Vergangenheit verstanden wurde. Dux macht deutlich, dass es zum Verständnis der Moral einer anderen Logik (...) bedarf, nämlich einer prozessualen. Durch sie muss geklärt werden, dass und wie Moral sich mit der Vernunft in der Gesellschaft historisch-genetisch ausgebildet hat. Das erkenntniskritische Interesse an der Moral ist politisch motiviert. Wir sind mit den gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen in eine Krise geraten. Das Problem ist der Markt. Er macht es unmöglich, der Gesellschaft eine von der Idee der Versöhnung bestimmte Welt als normatives Ideal zugrunde zu legen. Das Normative ist in die Strukturen der Gesellschaft eingelassen. Mit den Strukturen der Gesellschaft bedarf es deshalb der Kritik der Moral und einer trennscharfen Bestimmung der Gerechtigkeit. Auch sie stellt sich in der prozessualen Logik anders dar, als im philosophischen Denken von der Antike bis zu unserer Gegenwart. (shrink)

This book, inspired by the sociologist Günter Dux, co-edited by the historian Hans Ulrich Vogel, and introduced by Mark Elvin, is a collective intellectual ...

The book focuses on the modern understanding of human life-forms as constructs that followed an evolutionary history. The author thus finds science confronted with two questions: firstly, how the transgression of the virtual threshold between natural and cultural history was possible, secondly, how the socio-cultural constructs were able to develop in the course of history the way they did. The discussion concentrates on the problem of determining a processual logic in the development of societal structures as well as in the (...) development of cognition. The focus of attention is the historico-genetic reconstruction of cognition. The book was originally published in German as Historisch-genetische Theorie der Kultur (Weilerswist 2000: Velbrück). (shrink)

Do the previous termviewpoint costsnext term incurred when naming rotated familiar objects arise during initial identification or during previous termconsolidation?next term To answer this question we employed an attentional blink (AB) task where two target objects appeared amongst a rapid stream of distractor objects. Our assumption was that while both targets and distractors undergo initial identification only targets are consolidated in a form that allows overt report. We presented line drawings of objects with a usual upright canonical orientation, and separately (...) manipulated the orientation of targets and distractors. In two experiments, targets were defined by colour, whereas in a third experiment they were defined by semantic category. Target 1 orientation influenced the AB, with objects rotated by 90° causing a larger second target deficit than upright and upside-down objects. However, distractor orientation did not affect the magnitude of the second target deficit, regardless of whether targets were defined by colour or semantic category. Taken together, these findings suggest that the visual representations involved in the preliminary recognition of familiar objects are previous termviewpointnext term-invariant and that previous termviewpoint costsnext term are incurred when these objects are consolidated for report. (shrink)

In diesem Band der Reihe wird das Verständnis von Moral und Recht von international anerkannten Experten der jeweiligen Fächer dargestellt. Dabei steht die historische Perspektive im Vordergrund. Durch die Beiträge des Buches soll ein neuer Diskurs zwischen den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften eröffnet werden.

This commentary provides experimental data in support of the critical role of capsaicin-sensitive primary afferent fibers in the initiation and maintenance of pathological pain. The demonstration of capsaicin-induced, centrally-evoked cutaneous hyperalgesia, and of neuroplastic changes elicited by the degeneration of C-fiber primary afferent terminals following peripheral nerve damage, indicates a significant contribution of capsaicin-sensitive sensory ganglion neurons in the development of pathological pain conditions. [coderre & katz].

The question of whether object recognition is orientation-invariant or orientation-dependent was investigated using a repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. In RB, the second occurrence of a repeated stimulus is less likely to be reported, compared to the occurrence of a different stimulus, if it occurs within a short time of the first presentation. This failure is usually interpreted as a difficulty in assigning two separate episodic tokens to the same visual type. Thus, RB can provide useful information about which representations are (...) treated as the same by the visual system. Two experiments tested whether RB occurs for repeated objects that were either in identical orientations, or differed by 30, 60, 90, or 180°. Significant RB was found for all orientation differences, consistent with the existence of orientation-invariant object representations. However, under some circumstances, RB was reduced or even eliminated when the repeated object was rotated by 180°, suggesting easier individuation of the repeated objects in this case. A third experiment confirmed that the upside-down orientation is processed more easily than other rotated orientations. The results indicate that, although object identity can be determined independently of orientation, orientation plays an important role in establishing distinct episodic representations of a repeated object, thus enabling one to report them as separate events. (shrink)

Spatial asymmetries are an intriguing feature of directed attention. Recent observations indicate an influence of temperament upon the direction of these asymmetries. It is unknown whether this influence generalises to visual orienting behaviour. The aim of the current study was therefore to explore the relationship between temperament and measures of spatial orienting as a function of target hemifield. An exogenous cueing task was administered to 92 healthy participants. Temperament was assessed using Carver and White's (1994) Behavioural Inhibition System and Behavioural (...) Activation System (BIS/BAS) scales. Individuals with high sensitivity to punishment and low sensitivity to reward showed a leftward asymmetry of directed attention when there was no informative spatial cue provided. This asymmetry was not present when targets were preceded by spatial cues that were either valid or invalid. The findings support the notion that individual variations in temperament influence spatial asymmetries in visual orienting, but only when lateral targets are preceded by a non-directional (neutral) cue. The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric asymmetries and dopamine activity. (shrink)

Eye movements during false-belief tasks can reveal an individual's capacity to implicitly monitor others' mental states (theory of mind - ToM). It has been suggested, based on the results of a single-trial-experiment, that this ability is impaired in those with a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD), despite neurotypical-like performance on explicit ToM measures. However, given there are known attention differences and visual hypersensitivities in ASD it is important to establish whether such impairments are evident over time. In addition, investigating implicit (...) ToM using a repeated trial approach allows an assessment of whether learning processes can reduce the ASD impairment in this ability, as is the case with explicit ToM. Here we investigated the temporal profile of implicit ToM in individuals with ASD and a control group. Despite similar performance on explicit ToM measures, ASD-diagnosed individuals showed no evidence of implicit false-belief tracking even over a one-hour period and many trials, whereas control participants did. These findings demonstrate that the systems involved in implicit and explicit ToM are distinct and hint that impaired implicit false-belief tracking may play an important role in ASD. Further, they indicate that learning processes do not alleviate this impairment across the presentation of multiple trials. (shrink)

The essay is divided into five sections: the first section gives a short overview of the history of “experience” – Greek empeiria, Latin experientia – which takes Aristotle’s theory of knowledge as its starting point. Within its theoretical framework, experience served as a crucial mediator between sensory perception and intellectual knowledge. In the philosophy of Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages the category of experience then was reduced to marginal importance under neo-Platonic and Arabic influences. At the dusk of (...) the Middle Ages, however, it was rehabilitated and turned into a rallying cry by those who attempted to overcome late medieval philosophy. The following section describes the revaluation of experience as the fountain of real knowledge under the auspices of Petrarchism, which ran contrary to the formalistic teachings of the Scholastics. The remaining sections first deal with the role of the humanist concept of experience in the field of moral philosophy (specifically regarding the teaching of history). Secondly, it shows how experience worked as an incentive for field research in natural history and medicine and how it precipitated a revival of ancient Aristotelian empiricism within natural philosophy, thereby paving the way for the modern empirical science of nature. (shrink)