Alongside the 'critical theory' of the Frankfurt School, West Germany was also home to another influential Marxist current known as the Marburg School. In this volume, Marburg disciple Lothar Peter traces the school's history and situates it in the political discourse and developments of its time. The renowned political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth plays a large role, but unlike most histories of the Marburg School Peter also takes the sociologists Werner Hofmann and Heinz Maus into account as well as their (...) many students and successors. They were united by the conviction that teaching and scholarship must necessarily be tied to the practical goal of transforming society - an approach that met with considerable opposition in the harshly anti-Communist atmosphere of the period. (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)

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.

An Epic of Technical Supremacy: Works and Words of Medieval Chinese Textile Technology. By Dieter Kuhn. Riggisberg (Switzerland): Abegg-Stiftung, 2022. Pp. 488. CHF 120.

Kanbandō kara nagameta Kittan Joshin 韓半島から眺 めた契丹・女真 [Khitan and Jurchen as seen from the Korean Peninsula]. By Aisin Gioro Ulhicun 愛新覺羅·烏拉熙春 and Yoshimoto Michimasa 吉本道雅. Kyōto: Kyōto Daigaku Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2011.

Fontanes zweite Reise auf die Kriegsschauplätze wird zu einer Auseinandersetzung mit der „anderen‘ Moderne in Frankreich, vom Geschichtsverlust über die Schrecken der Commune bis zur Literatur, die in Rimbaud und dem späten Flaubert Kontur gewinnt. Dem steht die Fundierung der eigenen (realistischen) Position gegenüber (Begegnung mit F. Th. Vischer, Deutung der deutschen Aktionen, die Kraft der Sprache). Das auf „Substantielles“ (Hegel) zielende Erzählverfahren verlangt nach Mimesis als homogener Fiktion, die der „anderen‘ Moderne Widerpart bietet.

This major work covers almost all that has been learned about the acoustics of stringed instruments from Helmholtz's 19th-century theoretical elaborations to recent electroacoustic and holographic measurements.Many of the results presented here were uncovered by the author himself over a 20-year period of research on the physics of instruments in the violin family. Lothar Cremer is one of the world's most respected authorities on architectural acoustics and, not incidentally, an avid avocational violinist and violist.The book - which was published (...) in German in 1981 - first of all meets the rigorous technical standards of specialists in musical acoustics. But it also serves the needs and interests of two broader groups: makers and players of stringed instruments are expressly addressed, since the implications of the mathematical formulations are fully outlined and explained; and acousticians in general will find that the work represents a textbook illustration of the application of fundamental principles and up-to-date techniques to a specific problem.The first - and longest - of the book's three parts investigates the oscillatory responses of bowed strings. The natural nonlinearities that derive from considerations of string torsion and bending stiffness are deftly handled and concisely modeled.The second part deals with the body of the instrument. Special attention is given to the bridge, which transmits the oscillations of the strings to the wooden body and its air cavity. In this case, linear modeling proves serviceable for the most part - a simplification that would not be possible with lute - like instruments such as the guitar.The radiation of sound from the body into the listener's space, which is treated as an extension of the instrument itself, is the subject of the book's final part.Lothar Cremer is Professor Emeritus at the Technical University of Berlin, where he served as director of the Institute for Acoustical Engineering. (shrink)

I describe characteristic phenomena of quantum physics that suggest that reality appears to us in two domains: the open and well-known domain of empirical, material things—the realm of actuality—and a hidden and invisible domain of nonempirical, non-material forms—the realm of potentiality. The nonempirical forms are part of physical reality because they contain the empirical possibilities of the universe and can manifest themselves in the empirical world. Two classes of nonempirical states are discussed: the superposition states of microphysical entities, which are (...) nonempirical because observation destroys them, and the virtual states of material systems, which are nonempirical because they are empty. The non-empirical part to physical reality represents a predetermined and hidden order that exists before it is empirical, and the visible world is an emanation out of it. I discuss consequences for our understanding of human nature, the origin of life, and human values. Reality is an indivisible wholeness that is aware of its processes, like a Cosmic Spirit, and it reveals its awareness in the mindlike properties of elementary processes as well as in the human consciousness. Thus, one is led to G. W. F. Hegel's thesis that the Cosmic Spirit is thinking in us. (shrink)

Anhand einer Untersuchung der frühen Exzerpte Humes, der sog. Early Memoranda, wird die These erhärtet, dass Humes ursprüngliche Interessen religionsphilosophischer Art waren. Näherhin ist es das Theodizeeproblem gewesen, das seine Aufmerksamkeit auf sich zog. Wesentliche Themen der späteren Religionsphilosophie Humes sind in den Early Memoranda bereits angesprochen. Das gilt sowohl für die naturgeschichtlichen Betrachtungen, wie sie in der Natural History of Religion später angestellt werden, als auch für die rationaltheologischen Überlegungen der Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Diese Parallelen werden anhand von (...) Textvergleichen aufgewiesen. Quantitative Befunde bestätigen das Ergebnis der inhaltlichen Analysen. Aber die frühen Exzerpte Humes erhärtern auch religionsphilosophische Probleme, die in den späteren Werken nicht wieder aufgegriffen werden. Die Bedeutung, die Pierre Bayle für den jungen Hume hatte, wird durch den Aufweis zahlreicher Filiationen konkret bezeugt. (shrink)

1. v. A história da filosofia portuguesa desde o seu coméc̣o até ao final do século xvi (exceptuada a restaurac̣ão da escolástica).