The German term “Antiziganismus” could be translated as “antigypsyism”, but the semantic roots are, in fact, different. Coined in the 1980s, “Antiziganismus” might be misconceived as a sheer abstraction: a “close reading” of the term's context could indeed partially justify the assumption that it in many ways reproduces certain impacts and implications of its better known equivalent – an actively employed anti-Semitism. However, the article's main thesis is that “Antiziganismus” denotes a term in its own right. This status cannot be (...) challenged even by the most recent development, which is an interest group's attempt to internationalize the scope of the term by coining the derivative “antiziganism”. (shrink)

In examining Hegel's and Kierkegaard's theories of language, I argue that both entail conceptions of the therapeutic power of language to heal us from madness and despair. I show that whereas Hegel quite straightforwardly celebrates the emancipatory power of language, Kierkegaard is more ambivalent; on the one hand, he devotes his life to a maieutic authorship in service of aiding the reader, but on the other, he believes that ultimately it is only faith in God that can cure us, and (...) that faith requires silence. I use Lacan's psychoanalytic account of the role of language to explore Hegel's view that language constitutes the self and Kierkegaard's experimentation with an indirect form of communication that he hopes will enable him to fulfill each of his apparently conflicting goals, to write and yet to remain silent. (shrink)

In Flip Thinking, Berthold Gunster, the founder of the Dutch omdenken--or flip thinking--philosophy, presents fifteen strategies to transform your thinking away from limitations and negativities and towards possibilities and opportunities. From disrupting (turn all the rules upside down) to flaunting (play up what you want to hide) and from importing (get the enemy on board) to amplifying (do more of what works), Gunster's strategies and stories will have you approaching even the most challenging problems--from an annoying neighbor to an (...) angry colleague to an unhappy partner--in a whole new way. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Talking Cures, the Clinic, and the Value of the IneffableDaniel Berthold (bio)KeywordsMadness, disease, the normal, the abnormal, the ineffable, Hegel, Kierkegaard, LacanI am most grateful to my readers, James Phillips and Louis Sass, who have led me to several new insights by suggesting ways of complicating my reading of a Lacanian approach to Hegel's and Kierkegaard's conceptions of madness. I am a Kierkegaard and Hegel scholar, with very (...) little pretense to expertise about Lacan and regrettably even less about the theory and practice of psychiatry. In submitting my essay to Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Philosophy, I was hoping to entice a community of practitioners and theoreticians I have great respect for to consider the musings of a philosopher on topics which engage them as thinkers and actors in their professions. I could not possibly have hoped for more intelligent and provocative replies than I have been given by my two respondents.Phillips' framing of his response in terms of the distinction between the "madness of the philosophers" and the "madness of the clinic" is very helpful. It is a distinction that is indeed central to the question of the possibility of dialogue between philosophers and clinicians—so central, in fact, that it is generous of Phillips not to reproach me for failing to mention it. On the one hand, the challenge for philosophers is to show that their descriptions are not merely metaphoric and that their preoccupation with the dark side of human experience connects in some way with the reality of disease, so that there is some way for clinicians to translate their language into the language of psychiatry. Otherwise, philosophers will have only poetic or literary interest for the psychiatrist or psychologist.On the other hand, the challenge for clinicians is the extent to which they are open to moving beyond a reduction of "mental illness" to a purely biological conception of disease. One needn't go so far—nor should we—as Thomas Szasz or Michel Foucault in seeing "mental disease" as itself merely a metaphor. But granting the evidence of underlying organic disorder, symptoms nevertheless display themselves as mental and behavioral states (what Hegel calls "shapes of consciousness") that, as Hegel argued, are paralleled in "normal" experience, so that the distinction between disease and normality (and hence illness and metaphor) is often elusive. Madness "has the healthy consciousness for its presupposition," Hegel writes, because the healthy mind is still grappling with the same sorts of contradictions and feelings of alienation, the same "infinite pain" which characterizes insanity. Madness is not the absolute "other" of rationality, but an echo of it (1978, 3:382, 408).Hegel himself accepted the medicalization of madness that began to occur in the late eighteenth [End Page 325] century, and rejected the metaphysical and theological categories of what was called "romantic medicine." But he also cautioned against the narrowness of the "somatic" school which he felt lacked sufficient explanatory value if not connected to a "speculative" (i.e., philosophic) framework (see Berthold-Bond 1995, ch. 2).It might even be argued that every person seeking therapy is first of all suffering from "philosophic" madness, at least in the sense that initially she does not understand her own suffering as "disease," but experiences her torment in the vocabulary of the philosopher. Thus the philosopher's descriptions are the closest to the subject's own self-understanding, and while the therapist must seek to rephrase these descriptions into the vocabulary of the clinic (just as Hegel, for example, translated his own philosophic description of the madness of his friend Hölderlin in the Phenomenology as the "lost soul" whose "light dies away within it" into the medical category of Wahnsinn—mania or frenzy, which today we would call schizophrenia—in the classificatory scheme of mental disorder he gives in the Encyclopaedia; 1977, 400; 1978, 408)—there is a real question about which vocabulary is a metaphor for the other.The second main point Phillips addresses, which is taken up in different ways by Sass as well, has to do with the relation between speech and silence in madness. Phillips finds that Kierkegaard offers a more complex and subtle view than... (shrink)

The idea of “place” has become a topic of growing interest in environmental ethics literature. I explore a variety of issues surrounding the conceptualization of “place” in bioregional theory. I show that there is a necessary vagueness in bioregional definitions of region or place because these concepts elude any purely objective, geographically literal categorization. I argue that this elusiveness is in fact a great meritbecause it calls attention to a more essential “subjective” and experiential geography of place. I use a (...) reading of Aldo Leopold’s Sand Country Almanac as an example of the value of a non-literalistic geography for the understanding of place. (shrink)

While ideals of racial purity may be out of fashion, other sorts of purity ideals are increasingly popular in the United States today. The theme of purity is noticeable everywhere, but it is especially prominent in our contemporary fixation on health and hygiene. This may seem totally unrelated to issues of racism and classism, but in fact, the purveyors of purity draw upon the same themes of physical and moral purity that have helped produce white identity and dominance in the (...) US. Historically, this is where the purity rhetoric gets its power. To invoke purity ideals in the US is to mobilize this genealogy of racialized associations. Today's zealous preoccupation with hygiene is part of our living heritage in a racist culture.Just as ideas of race and racial purity were debunked by biologists long before the public would begin to question them, ideals of extreme hygienic purity linger with us, even flourish, despite scientific evidence of their futility and harm. Why are we still so enamored with purity? Because, to some extent, our very self-conceptions are at stake. Other scholars have described how our process of self individuation is based upon exclusion. The unique contribution of a genealogical approach to this issue is that, instead of merely locating the problem in ideologies held by others, it can evoke self-recognition and self-transformation. We will tend to assume the problem lies elsewhere until we learn to recognize ourselves in practices that reproduce cultural ideals. As inheritors of this racist culture, we are all lovers of purity, and we are all responsible for rethinking this value. (shrink)

Die digitale Transformation erfasst die Medien der Literatur und Literaturkritik in unterschiedlicher Geschwindigkeit. Die Substituierung der gedruckten Zeitung, der Stammheimat der Literaturkritik, durch digitale Formate ist weit vorangeschritten. Auf dem Buchmarkt ist das gedruckte Hardcover nach wie vor ein relativ stabiles Element. Der Beitrag kommentiert diese Differenz in medienhistorischer Perspektive.

When Humpty-Dumpty had his great fall nobody could put him together again. A vastly more moderate challenge is to reunite the two partial beams of a Stern-Gerlach apparatus with such precision that the original spin state is recovered. Nevertheless, as we demonstrate, a substantial loss of spin coherence always occurs, unless the experimenter is able to control the magnetic field's inhomogeneity with an accuracy of at least one part in 105.

"Die Kritik ist nicht die Wissenschaft." Zu diesem Ergebnis führt eine Besinnung auf den Begriff der Objektivität in der kunstwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Die aktuelle Situation, die durch wissenschaftstheoretische und methodologische Überlegungen bestimmt ist, verlangt neue Zielsetzungen und Aufgaben. Das zentrale Problem - die Begründung der Ästhetik als selbständige, moderne Wissenschaft - steht und fällt mit der Frage, ob die Kunst Gegenstand einer generellen, empirisch prüfbaren Theorie sein kann. Der zeitgenössische Strukturalismus glaubt diese Frage positiv beantworten zu können. Er versucht, die ästhetischen (...) Gebilde nicht nur als registrierbare Einzelfälle zu erklären und zu bewerten, sondern auf allgemeinere Gesetzmäßigkeiten zurückzuführen. (shrink)

The major theoretical framework relative to the perception of illusory figures is reviewed and discussed in the attempt to provide a unifying explanatory account for these phenomena.

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this way (...) provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)