Considering a range of present-day phenomena, from the immediacy effects of literature to the impact of hypercommunication, globalization, and sports, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes an important shift in our relationship to history and the passage of time. Although we continue to use concepts inherited from a "historicist" viewpoint, a notion of time articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the actual construction of time in which we live in today, which shapes our perceptions, experiences, and actions, is no (...) longer historicist. Without fully realizing it, we now inhabit a new, unnamed space in which the "closed future" and "ever-available past" (a past we have not managed to leave behind) converge to produce an "ever-broadening present of simultaneities." This profound change to a key dimension of our existence has complex consequences for the way in which we think about ourselves and our relation to the material world. At the same time, the ubiquity of digital media has eliminated our tactile sense of physical space, altering our perception of our world. Gumbrecht draws on his mastery of the philosophy of language to enrich his everyday observations, traveling to Disneyland, a small town in Louisiana, and the center of Vienna to produce striking sketches of our broad presence in the world. (shrink)

Everyfan -- Definitions : praise, beauty, athletics -- Discontinuities : demigods, gladiators, knights, ruffians, sportsmen, Olympians, customers -- Fascinations : bodies, suffering, grace, tools, forms, plays, timing -- Gratitude : watching, waste.

Verstehen ist nicht nur ein Grundbegriff menschlicher Lebensfuhrung und Lebenswelt, sondern besitzt auch in der Philosophie und den verschiedenen Wissenschaften eine zentrale Bedeutung. Die Frage nach der Moglichkeit von Verstehen ist dabei immer auch die Frage nach dem Subjekt und Objekt des Verstandnisses. Wer versteht wen oder was? Ist "Verstehen" also nur rationales Erfassen, Erkennen tieferer Einsichten und komplexerer Zusammenhange oder impliziert es mehr? Versteht man den Anderen, den Fremden, aber auch den Text wirklich so einfach? Und wenn ja, wie (...) strukturiert sich dieses Verstehen? Es soll in dem interdisziplinaren Band versucht werden, mit den genannten Fragen Anschlussfahigkeit zu evozieren, so dass die Vieldimensionalitat des Verstehens thematisiert und nach Funktion, Leistung und Grenzen des Verstehens vor allem in Philosophie, Geistes- und Naturwissenschaft gefragt werden kann. Mit Beitragen von Christina Brandt, Selin Gerlek, Julia Gruevska, Felix Huttemann, Bernhard Irrgang, Gudrun Kuhne-Bertram, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Kevin Liggieri, Kate Meyer-Drawe, Sabine Ohlenbusch, Tobias Schlicht, Gunter Scholtz und Volker Steenblock. (shrink)

As with a previous colloquium at Moscow in 2004, when my topic was literature in the Federal Republic of Germany during the post-World War II decades, I want to speak about tensions between war and postwar generations in Russia and in Germany, and my perspective will again be largely autobiographical. Of course this convergence (bordering on repetition) is not random. For I believe that remarkably complex affinities exist between Germany after the twelve-year-short nightmare of National Socialism and Russia after the (...) long stagnation of the Soviet Union. In both cases, a national collapse made cultural circles and newly elected governments…. (shrink)

Juli Zeh, who enjoys an international reputation, is one of the most gifted and productive writers of Germany today. Her dystopian tale Corpus Delicti: Ein Prozess represents a lively, intelligent, and innovative addition to the genre. It presents a picture of a benevolent dictatorship that demands good health as the highest duty of its citizens, in a sequence of dramatic scenes combining the virtues of a thriller with a dystopia focusing on the present-day preoccupation with health and the body. Most (...) segments are presented as scenes of a trial against a biologist who is accused of rebellion against “The Method,” the ruling order of the future state, whose dominant ideology is “Health as the Principle of State Legitimacy.” Thus metaphysical morality and Enlightenment values such as freedom, democracy, and justice have been replaced by a scientific, secular notion of life as the ultimate criterion and value. (shrink)

Kant setzt sich im Vorwort seiner Schrift "Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft" mit dem Vorwurf auseinander, die Deduktion der Verstandeskategorien in der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" würde dem Gedanken einer prästabilierten Harmonie Vorschub leisten. Gleichsam ins kritische Mark getroffen weist er diesen Gedanken der dogmatischen Metaphysik zurück. Nicht zuletzt durch diesen Vorwurf angeregt überarbeitet er für die zweite Auflage seiner Kritik insbesondere die Deduktion, die sich nun in zwei Schritten vollzieht. Die Überlegungen sollen verdeutlichen, daß sich diese zwei Schritte zum einen (...) als ein analytisches und zum anderen als ein synthetisches Argument verstehen lassen. 1790 deutet Kant in seiner sogenannten "Streitschrift gegen Eberhard" allerdings in der Tat den Gedanken einer prästabilisierten Harmonie an. Wenngleich er damit eine Argumentationslücke in seinem transzendentalphilosophischen System offenbart, läßt sich doch zeigen, daß er auch hier nicht in dogmatische Metaphysik zurückfällt, sondern vielmehr aus empirischer Sicht die "Zusammenstimmung" der Erkenntnisvermögen Sinnlichkeit und Verstand erörtert. (shrink)

Husserl’s transcendental reduction admits of two motivations: the general methodological ban on begging the question, and the principle that a typology of objects ought to be based on a typology of my ways of cognizing them. As Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ agrees with the ‘linguistic phenomenology’ of many analytic philosophers in being at bottom an effort to understand what precisely we mean to say by asserting that there ‘exists’ a ‘consciousness-independent’ or ‘transcendent’ world, the ‘residue’ of transcendental reduction is my subjective (...) consciousness. My cognitive approaches to the latter and to that of somebody else are not only entirely different but ‘complementary’ in the sense of Bohr’s. In the course of searching for an identity criterion for temporal entities lacking a spatial localisation in the world, we can show that the allegedly noetic phenomenon of, say, my now seeing a cat is a noema, to wit, the cat-as-now-beingseen-by-me-in-such-and-such-a-manner. There is no sound base for postulating, over and above the noematic nature of my consciousness, a second, noetic, aspect thereof. (shrink)

The author discusses Niklas Luhmann's concept of ethics and morals. Therefore he sketches the main traits of Luhmann's theory of systems (e.g. the terms autopoiesis, system and environment, code and programme). From the system-theoretical point of view, ethics are characterized as the reflexive theory of morals. Morals are described as the communication of regard or disregard. The author shows which consequences follow from this concept by discussing problems concerning several subsystems at the same time. The problems of Luhmann's theory of (...) morals and ethics are demonstrated by analyzing the concepts of risk and responsibility. Finally, the author demands that ethics should be understood even more as social ethics which reflect upon their social foundation in a more consequent way. (shrink)

The goal of the paper is to offer a model of self-awareness that fits the testimony of both good and bad responders to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), of which fluoxetine (Prozac; Lilly, Indianapolis, IN) is probably the most well known. After a review of troubling current uncertainties concerning how and for whom SSRIs are therapeutic, it is argued that SSRIs, as a rule, lessen the emotionality of SSRI subjects in favor of an increased cognitive and volitional orientation. Traditional empiricist (...) and rationalist accounts self-awareness fail to provide models that adequately explain how such a shift from an active emotional response to an increased cognitive/volitional orientation is possible. Instead, notions of self-awareness, as understood by founding phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, fit the testimony of SSRI subjects. (shrink)

Despite the great dramatists of the preceding century—Corneille, Racine and Molière—the 18th century is often considered the great age of French theatre. Obviously “the great age” should not be understood in the usual literary history sense as the “classical age”, for the structures and the content of French dramas originating in the 18th century did not have normative effects on the dramatic production of the centuries that followed. Nevertheless, we are doubly right in using the term “the great age” for (...) French theatre of this period. On the one hand, from the viewpoint of the history of theatre, because certain dramatic techniques originating toward the middle of the 18th century have, down to our own times, influenced theatre so decisively and have become so natural that they form true hermeneutical barriers to the interpretation of plays from earlier epochs. And secondly from the viewpoint of social history, for theatre attendance at that time was indissolubly linked to the everyday life—or at least to holidays and festive occasions—of various social levels in France. As a result we can no doubt consider the theatre as the decisive center of critical knowledge, the gradual transmission of which is at the very heart of the process of the Enlightenment. (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 ...

In light of the detailed biographical studies of the past two decades, Martin Heidegger's active pursuit of ideological proximity to the National Socialist state should no longer elicit astonishment or intellectual revulsion. The language of facts speaks too clearly to allow room for euphemism, but too clearly as well on the other side to support demonizing speculations about Heidegger's absolute ideological orthodoxy or even a hypothetical powerful political influence, as recently attempted again by the French philosopher Emannuel Faye. From the (...) early 1930s and probably until the end of the war, Heidegger wanted to prove himself a good National Socialist…. (shrink)

From 1990 on, the London psychologist Max Velmans developed a novel approach to consciousness according to which an experience of an object is phenomenologically identical to an object as experienced. On the face of it I agree; but unlike Velmans I argue that the latter should be understood as comparable, not to a Kantian, but rather to a noematic.

These conference proceedings consider visual and literary images of ancient Rome created by artists and scholars from Late Antiquity until the present day. The occasion for the conference was the colossal panorama Rome 312 by Yadegar Asisi that was displayed in Leipzig. The papers explore the ways and means by which the idea of Rome was developed by the individual artists and authors and transferred to the cultural context of the epoch and of the personalities involved.

Name der Zeitschrift: Internationales Jahrbuch für philosophische Anthropologie Jahrgang: 7 Heft: 1 Seiten: 285-292.

Conversation about expected translation into Ukrainian of Gumbrecht's book Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford UP: Stanford, 2004).

Summary Ordinary language philosophers frequently draw on the fact that an appropriately selected sentential combination of the form p but not q can, or cannot, be uttered without absurdity; however, they do so without sufficient reflection on the methodology of such combination tests, which results in considerable shortcomings even in practical application. To improve things, I shall discuss two criteria for distinguishing ‘pragmatic’ from ‘non-pragmatic’ implications and for separating the latter into ‘linguistic’ (‘semantic’ and ‘syntactical’) and ‘non-linguistic’ ones (2–3); consider (...) the bearing of the principle of ‘sense-constancy‘ on the applicability of combination tests (4); and call attention to the important, though merely heuristic, function of investigating pragmatic, as opposed to semantic, implications (5.1–5.2). Finally, I shall hint at a striking analogy between the linguistic (yet non-empirical) method of combination tests, the phenomenological method of ‘fictional variation’, and the empirical method of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (5.3). (shrink)