Loss aversion can occur in riskless and risky choices. We present novel evidence on both in a non-student sample (660 randomly selected customers of a car manufacturer). We measure loss aversion in riskless choice in endowment effect experiments within and between subjects and find similar levels of average loss aversion in both. The subjects of the within study also participate in a simple lottery choice task which arguably measures loss aversion in risky choices. We find substantial heterogeneity in both measures (...) of loss aversion. Loss aversion in riskless choice and loss aversion in risky choice are strongly positively correlated, but on average riskless loss aversion is higher than risky loss aversion. We find that in both choice tasks, loss aversion increases in age, income, and wealth, and decreases in education. Our results provide novel supportive input to the debate about the reality of loss aversion. (shrink)

We argue that analyzing everyday memory failures in terms of the “unity of consciousness” can elucidate the bases of such failures. A perfect unity amongst one’s mental states is rare. In extreme cases the unity of consciousness can breakdown in dramatic fashion , but such breakdowns also occur in less dramatic ways that affect us in everyday life. For example, disruptions in the unity of consciousness can result in everyday memory failures, such as forgetting to put on a tie for (...) an important formal meeting. After providing some philosophical background into the notions of “unity of consciousness” and “functionalism,” we offer preliminary analyses of three examples of everyday memory failure. We then introduce and develop what we call the “unity model” of memory failure and show how it explains the examples. We also describe different ways that unity can break down which, in turn, can lead to memory failure and inappropriate behavior. We then show how slips of action and other kinds of cognitive failures differ from everyday memory failures. Finally, we examine alternative models arguing that the unity model is preferable, and then show how our model is consistent with some experimental results. (shrink)

BackgroundTo probe the functional role of brain oscillations, transcranial alternating current stimulation has proven to be a useful neuroscientific tool. Because of the excessive tACS-caused artifact at the stimulation frequency in electroencephalography signals, tACS + EEG studies have been mostly limited to compare brain activity between recordings before and after concurrent tACS. Critically, attempts to suppress the artifact in the data cannot assure that the entire artifact is removed while brain activity is preserved. The current study aims to evaluate the (...) feasibility of specific artifact correction techniques to clean tACS-contaminated EEG data.New MethodIn the first experiment, we used a phantom head to have full control over the signal to be analyzed. Driving pre-recorded human brain-oscillation signals through a dipolar current source within the phantom, we simultaneously applied tACS and compared the performance of different artifact-correction techniques: sine subtraction, template subtraction, and signal-space projection. In the second experiment, we combined tACS and EEG on one human subject to demonstrate the best-performing data-correction approach in a proof of principle.ResultsThe tACS artifact was highly attenuated by SSP in the phantom and the human EEG; thus, we were able to recover the amplitude and phase of the oscillatory activity. In the human experiment, event-related desynchronization could be restored after correcting the artifact.Comparison With Existing MethodsThe best results were achieved with SSP, which outperformed sine subtraction and template subtraction.ConclusionOur results demonstrate the feasibility of SSP by applying it to a phantom measurement with pre-recorded signal and one human tACS + EEG dataset. For a full validation of SSP, more data are needed. (shrink)

In the past two decades, feminist scholars have produced an abundance of theoretical writing in humanities and social science disciplines. The result is a body of work that is extraordinarily rich, hard to keep up with, and extremely difficult to teach.With the appearance of Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the first genuinely interdisciplinary anthology of significant contributions to feminist theory, teachers will finally have a volume that does justice to their topic. Creatively edited, with insightful (...) introductory material, this timely reader illuminates the historical development of feminist theory as well as the current state of the field.Emphasizing common themes and interests in the humanities and social sciences, the editors have chosen those topics that have been central to feminist theory in many disciplines, that remain relevant to current debates, and that reflect the interests of a diverse community of thinkers.The contributors include leading figures from psychology, literary criticism, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, art history, law, and economics. This is the ideal text for any advanced course on interdisciplinary feminist theory, one that fills a long-standing gap in feminist pedagogy. (shrink)

This paper examines patterns of metaphor in usage. Four samples of text excerpts of on average 47,000 words each were taken from the British National Corpus and annotated for metaphor. The linguistic metaphor data were collected by five analysts on the basis of a highly explicit identification procedure that is a variant of the approach developed by the Pragglejaz Group (Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1–39, 2007). Part of this paper is a report of the protocol and the reliability of the (...) procedure. Data analysis shows that, on average, one in every seven and a half lexical units in the corpus is related to metaphor defined as a potential cross-domain mapping in conceptual structure. It also appears that the bulk of the expression of metaphor in discourse consists of non-signalled metaphorically used words, not similes. The distribution of metaphor-related words, finally, turns out to be quite variable between the four registers examined in this study: academic texts have 18.5%, news 16.4%, fiction 11.7%, and conversation 7.7%. The systematic comparative investigation of these registers raises new questions about the relation between cognitive linguistic and other approaches to metaphor. (shrink)

The Many-Interacting-Worlds (MIW) approach to a quantum theory without wave functions proposed in [8] leads naturally to numerical integrators of the Schrödinger equation on comoving grids. As yet, little is known about concrete MIW models for more than one spatial dimension and/or more than one particle. In honour of Detlef Dürr, we report on a further development of the MIW approach to treat arbitrary degrees of freedom and provide a numerical proof of concept for ground states in 2d. The latter (...) is part of a systematic numerical study [22] that includes also 1d ground and excited states. With this step towards the treatment of higher degrees of freedom we hope to stimulate their further study. (shrink)

Previous studies using the dot-perspective task postulated that people automatically take into account others' perspective even when it prevents them from achieving their own goals. This human ability may be of key importance for the ascription of mental states and social interactions. The cognitive and emotional determinants of automatic perspective taking is still matter of debate. To address this issue, we examined the performance in the Samson et al. APT task in 91 healthy adults who underwent a detailed neuropsychological testing (...) including assessment of their general intelligence, attention and impulsivity, alexithymia, and measures of affective empathy and explicit theory of mind. Univariate and multiple linear regression models were used to explore the association between mean reaction times in the APT task, and the CPT-II parameters, WAIS global score, TAS, and GeSoCS and mini-SEA scores. Only the CPT-II parameters were significantly associated with the mean reaction times. Increased omissions, commissions, and detectability as well as hit reaction time standard error in CPT-II were all related to worse performances both in Self and Other conditions. The mean number of errors was negatively associated with the GeSoCS score. Among the variables studied, only CPT-II parameters had a significant impact on egocentric and altercentric interference. Neither global intelligence nor alexithymia have an effect on dot-perspective task performance. The present findings suggest that people with lower attentional resources and increased impulsivity display worse performances in the APT task and are less responsive to both egocentric and altercentric interference. (shrink)

Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843) zählt sicherlich zu den bedeutendsten Denkern der auf Kant folgenden Phase der deutschen Philosophie. Das wird in eindrucksvoller Weise durch die Beiträge dieses Bandes belegt, die aus Vorträgen auf dem Fries-Symposion hervorgingen, das im Oktober 1997 an der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena stattfand. Die Autoren beleuchten die Lebensumstände von Fries, ordnen sein Werk philosophiegeschichtlich ein und setzen sich systematisch mit erkenntnistheoretischen, naturphilosophischen, wissenschaftstheoretischen und politischen Aspekten seiner Philosophie auseinander. Auch die Rezeption des Fries’schen Werkes bei Naturwissenschaftlern wie M. (...) J. Schleiden und Philosophen wie E. F. Fries und L. Nelson kommt zur Sprache. (shrink)

Jakob Friedrich Fries is one of the most important representatives of the Critical Philosophy, someone who built immediately on the original Kantian philosophy. -/- Fries was born in 1773 in Barby (on the Elbe). In 1805 he was extraordinary professor for philosophy in Jena and in the same year was ordinary professor for philosophy in Heidelberg. Returning to Jena in 1816, one year later he was compulsorily retired because of his participation at the nationalistic and republican Wartburg Festival. In 1924 (...) he obtained a professorship for physics and mathematics, and in 1838 he was given back a professorship for philosophy. He died in 1843 in Jena. -/- The book summarizes the research results of the DFG-Project "Jakob Friedrich Fries' Influence on the Sciences of the 19th Century". The research project was carried out by Dr. Kay Herrmann (Institute of Philosophy, Jena University) and Prof. Dr. Wolfram Hogrebe (Institute of Philosophy, Bonn University). Such a study has special importance. There is available a large amount of literature about the "speculative contemporaries" of Fries, like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In contrast to the "speculative philosophy", there has been published only a few studies about the Friesian natural philosophy. Fries was, in his natural-philosophical studies, looking for a link between philosophy and modern sciences, wheras his "speculative philosophical" contemporaries felt obligated to stick primarily to a descriptive, phenomenal view of nature. So far the question "How was mathematical natural philosophy regarded by scientists and mathematicians of the 19th century?" has hardly been investigated. Archival studies showed that this gap in Fries-research can be filled. The Friesian correspondence turned out to be a rich gold mine. -/- The present publication is more than a research report. The monographic first part is intended to introduce the foundations of the Friesian theory of cognition, the Friesian methodology, and the Friesian natural philosophy. This should facilitate entry into Friesian philosophy. -/- The Friesian theory is analyzed from two points of view: •How did Fries suceed in continuing and improving the Kantian approach? Is Fries able to remove the weak points of Kantian philosophy? -/- •What is the current significance of the Friesian approach? There are some interesting similarities between the Friesian approach and modern philosophical theories (such like Chomsky's theory of "universal grammer"). The lasting core of the Friesian theory of cognition is: To use empirical studies for working on philosophical problems. -/- Chapters 3 and 4 are scientific-historically oriented. These chapters analyze the Friesian position in scientific and mathematical debates (debates about the a priori foundations of physics, the problem of the identification of physics as an independent discipline, the problem of the boundary between chemistry and physics, the problem of mathematization of the sciences, the theory of the imponderabilia, the systematics and structure of sciences and mathematics, problems of infinity, the differential calculus, the theory of parallel lines) and the relation between Fries and the scientists of the 19th century. The book contains the latest findings gained by evaluation of the Friesian unpublished work (for example the correspondence with W. Weber, C. F. Gauß, E. F. Apelt, O. Schlömilch, Ch. Reichel, B. A. v. Lindenau, L. Gmelin, E. G. Fischer, A. N. Scherer, J. S. C. Schweigger) -/- One result of the research project is that some important scientists took a favourable view of the Friesian theory, but the influence of the Friesian philosophy on the sciences of the 19th century was very limited. The causes are very complex: An anti-natural-philosophical spirit of age, the limits of the Kantian inspired philosophy and some unfavourable aspects in the biography of Fries. -/- For the first time the voluminous Fries-Reichel-correspondence was evaluated. The Fries-Reichel-correspondence contains the Friesian approach to prove the 11th Euclidean axiom, and the whole transcript of the Friesian attempt at proof is given. // Der erste Teil des Buches will in die Grundprobleme Fries’scher Erkenntnis­theorie, Methodenlehre und Naturphilosophie einführen, wobei das Hauptaugenmerk auf die Fortführung der kantischen Ansätze durch Fries sowie auf die aktuelle Interpretation der Fries’schen Lehre gerichtet ist. Der wissenschaftshistorisch ausgerichtete zweite Teil analysiert Fries’ Stellung zu naturwissenschaftlichen und mathematischen Diskussionsrichtungen (Probleme der Identifizierung der Physik als eigenständige Disziplin, der Grenzziehung zwischen Physik und Chemie, der Mathematisierung der Naturwissenschaften, der Imponderabilientheorie, der Systematik von Naturwissenschaft und Mathematik, des Unendlichen, der Parallelentheorie usw.) sowie sein Verhältnis zu Naturwissenschaftlern und Mathematikern seiner Zeit. Das Buch enthält neue Erkenntnisse, die aus der Auswertung zahlreicher Nachlassmaterialien gewonnen wurden. Erstmalig wird unter dem Blickwinkel „Fries als Naturwissenschaftler und Mathematiker“ auch der sehr umfangreiche Reichel-Briefwechsel ausgewertet. Dem Reichel-Briefwechsel entstammt auch Fries’ Versuch eines Beweises des Parallelenaxioms, der in diesem Buch erstmalig in transkribierter Form vollständig vorliegt. -/- . (shrink)

Introduction: Kantian concepts, liberal theology, and post-Kantian idealism -- Subjectivity in question: Immanuel Kant, Johann G. Fichte, and critical idealism -- Making sense of religion: Friedrich Schleiermacher, John Locke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and liberal theology -- Dialectics of spirit: F.W.J. Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, and absolute idealism -- Hegelian spirit in question: David Friedrich Strauss, Søren Kierkegaard, and mediating theology -- Neo-Kantian historicism: Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, and the Ritschlian school -- Idealistic ordering: Lux Mundi, (...) Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hastings Rashdall, Alfred E. Garvie, Alfred North Whitehead, William Temple, and British idealism -- The Barthian revolt: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and the legacy of liberal theology -- Idealistic ironies: from Kant and Hegel to Tillich and Barth. (shrink)

Since 1968 there has been a renewal of interest in Dilthey which has revealed new facets of his work and shown the need for a fundamental revision of the prevailing general conception of Dilthey. In 1968 Peter Krausser, in Kritik der endlichen Vernunft. Diltheys Revolution der allgemeinen Wissenschafts- und Handlungstheorie, brought out the connection between his epistemological and social-hermeneutic concerns by isolating a theory of functional structure running through his work which was seen as an anticipation of a cybernetic approach. (...) Krausser concluded by contrasting this "structure-theory" favorably with contending positions in current debate, Adorno and Habermas, Gadamer, and Popper. In the same year Habermas devoted two chapters of Erkenntnis und Interesse to Dilthey. Although he related him rather exclusively to a theoretical grounding of "the Geisteswissenschaften", the effect of Habermas’ parallel treatment of Dilthey, Peirce, and Freud was to free Dilthey from the confines of his received image. This worked to undermine the tripartite division of natural, humanistic, and social science which Habermas adapted from Scheler. Just as Peirce’s ideas on the fixation of belief concern not only experimental method but the psychology of experience, so Dilthey’s grasp of the relation of lived experience, objectivation, and understanding bears directly on experience in the full practical sense. In 1969 Frithjof Rodi, in Morphologie und Hermeneutik. Dilthey’s Ästhetik, connected his more "humanistic" work with his interests in biology and physiology, complementing the formal continuity of "structure-theory" established by Krausser and reintegrating this with a more familiar Dilthey. More recently others, above all Manfred Riedel and Ulrich Herrmann, have made important critical and editorial contributions, relying like Krausser on their familiarity with unpublished manuscripts, including that of the second volume of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, which Rodi is currently editing, in collaboration with Johach, for publication as volumes 18 and 19 of the Gesammelte Schriften. The availability of these texts should consolidate the revolution of the conventional image of Dilthey, under way since 1968, and Johach’s book must be welcomed as an anticipation of that edition. (shrink)