The paper focuses on processes of normalization through which dis/ability is simultaneously produced in specific collectives, networks, and socio-technological systems that enable the construction of such demarcations. Our point of departure is the cochlear implant, a neuroprosthetic device intended to replace and/or augment the function of the damaged inner ear. Unlike hearing aids, which amplify sounds, the CI does the work of damaged hair cells in the inner ear by providing sound signals to the brain. We examine the processes of (...) the CI’s genesis as well as its specific uses by and interrelations to the different and divergent actors that the CI assembles. We argue that the technological device and the implicated normalization process mobilize complex effects in varying socio-technical arrangements. The CI is conceived as a “boundary object” [89] or a “quasi-object” [49, 83], i.e., a metastabilized medium of translation that coordinates social, cultural, and technological action. Although intended to transform non-hearing or hard of hearing people into competent and “normal” hearing subjects, the CI system reproduces the asymmetrical structures of the disability discourse [14] through its function of “developing and maintaining coherence between intersecting social worlds” [89, 393]. Additionally, it initiates controversial discourses that have resulted in new forms of biosocial collectivities ranging from cochlear implantees with normal human hearing to human configurations who have passed through human enhancement. Our approach is thus situated at the intersection of disability and media studies and tackles the particular conditions technological media configurations impose upon the production of dis/ability. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of an aging world population increasingly affected by a diverse range of abilities and disabilities as well as the rise of ubiquitous computing and digital app cultures, this paper questions how mobile technologies mediate between heterogeneous environments and sensing beings. To approach the current technological manufacturing of the senses, two lines of thought are of importance: First, there is a need to critically reflect upon the concept of assistive technologies as artifacts providing tangible solutions for a specific (...) disability. Second, the conventional distinction between user and environment requires a differentiated consideration. This contribution will first review James Gibson’s concept of “affordances” and modify this approach by introducing theories and methods of Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory. Then, we present two case studies where we explore the relations between recent “assistive” app technologies and human sensory perception. As hearing and seeing are key in this regard, we concentrate on two specific media technologies: ReSound LINX2, a hearing aid which allows for direct connect with iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and Camassia, an IOS app for sonic wayfinding for blind people. We emphasize the significance of dis-/abling practices for manufacturing novel forms of hearing and seeing and drawing on sources like promotional materials by manufacturers, ads, or user testimonials and reviews. Our analysis is interested in the reciprocal relationships between users and their socio-technical and media environments. By and large, this contribution will provide crucial insights into the contemporary entanglement of algorithm-driven technologies, daily practices, and sensing subjects: the production of techno-sensory arrangements. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 18 Heft: 2 Seiten: 113-128.

The detrimental effect of the public recital on the quality of epic production in the first century is a stock theme both in ancient and in modern literary criticism. While previous studies on the epic recital emphasize its negative effects, or aim at its reconstruction as social reality, I focus on its conflicting representations by the ancients themselves and the lessons that we can learn from them. The voices of critics and defenders reveal anxieties about who controls the prestigious (...) high genre of epic and about the construction of gender and social status through epic's public performance. Critics of the recitatio such as Horace, Persius, Petronius and Juvenal represent it as an informal and popular event that panders to public taste and incurs infamy. These critics charge that the epic recital has an effeminizing effect both on the recitator and on his audience, a charge traditionally advanced against orators and actors. Because the epic recital in Rome lacks a performative context similar to the rhapsodic performances in Greece, its public image mirrors that of other public performances . The main point of divergence is the presence of the book, the symbol of permanent fame, which casts upon the recital the shadow of an evanescent entertainment. Defenders see the recital as instrumental to the maintenance of literature's value in society. This means that well into the first century there were those who felt nostalgia for the epic recital as a bulwark of male aristocratic values and who wanted to reclaim its prestige. Both Statius as a poet, who performed regularly at Domitian's court, and Suetonius, who acted as Hadrian's ab epistulis some twenty years after Statius' death, defend the waning reputation of the contemporary epic recital in an effort to reclaim it as a prestigious component of imperial literary culture. While critics unanimously negate the recital's role in the achievement of poetic fame in favor of the book, Suetonius chooses anecdotal evidence about the early performances by grammarians grammarians that show the important role of the recital in forging poetic fame. The emperor and the members of the new aristocracy whom Statius explicitly names as the target audience of his epic recitals have a stake in reclaiming for imperial culture an institution that went back to the second century B.C.E. and carried the prestige of an aristocratic event. (shrink)

The paper develops an account of minimal traces devoid of representational content and exploits an analogy to a predictive processing framework of perception. As perception can be regarded as a prediction of the present on the basis of sparse sensory inputs without any representational content, episodic memory can be conceived of as a “prediction of the past” on the basis of a minimal trace, i.e., an informationally sparse, merely causal link to a previous experience. The resulting notion of episodic memory (...) will be validated as a natural kind distinct from imagination. This trace minimalist view contrasts with two theory camps dominating the philosophical debate on memory. On one side, we face versions of the Causal Theory that hold on to the idea that episodic remembering requires a memory trace that causally links the event of remembering to the event of experience and carries over representational content from the content of experience to the content of remembering. The Causal Theory, however, fails to account for the epistemic generativity of episodic memory and is psychologically and information-theoretically implausible. On the other side, a new camp of simulationists is currently forming up. Motivated by empirical and conceptual deficits of the Causal Theory, they reject not only the necessity of preserving representational content, but also the necessity of a causal link between experience and memory. They argue that remembering is nothing but a peculiar form of imagination, peculiar only in that it has been reliably produced and is directed towards an episode of one’s personal past. Albeit sharing their criticism of the Causal Theory and, in particular, rejecting its demand for an intermediary carrier of representational content, the paper argues that a causal connection to experience is still necessary to fulfill even the minimal requirements of past-directedness and reliability. (shrink)

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents: Rudolf HALLER: Zwei Vorworte in einem. Evelyn DÖLLING: Alexius Meinong: "Der blinde Seher Theiresias". Jaakko HINTIKKA: Meinong in a Long Perspective. Richard SYLVAN: Re-Exploring Item-Theory. Francesca MODENATO: Meinong's Theory of Objects: An Attempt at Overcoming Psychologism. Jan WOLE??N??SKI: Ways of Dealing with Non-existence. Karel LAMBERT: Substitution and the Expansion of the World. Terence PARSONS: Meinongian Semantics Generalized. Reinhardt GROSSMANN: Thoughts, Objectives and States of Affairs. Peter SIMONS: Meinong's Theory of Sense and Reference. Barry SMITH: More Things in (...) Heaven and Earth. Michele LENOCI: Meinongs unvollständige Gegenstände und das Universalienproblem. Maria E. REICHER: Gibt es unvollständige Gegenstände? Dale JACQUETTE: Meinong's Concept of Implexive Being and Nonbeing. Herbert HOCHBERG:s, Functions, Existence and Relations in the Russell-Meinong Dispute, the Bradley Paradox and the Realism-Nominalism Controversy. Jacek PA_NICZEK: Are Contradictions Still Lurking in Meinongian Theories of Objects? Marie-Luise SCHUBERT KALSI: Apriorische Elemente im Denken. Liliana ALBERTAZZI: Forms of Completion. Johann Ch. MAREK: Zwei Gegenstände und ein Inhalt. Zur Intentionalität bei Meinong. Wolfgang KÜNNE: Some Varieties of Thinking. Reflections on Meinong and Fodor. Alberto VOLTOLINI: Is Meaning Without Actually Existing Reference Naturalizable? Markus S. STEPANIANS: Russells Kritik an Meinongs Begriff des Annahmeschlusses. Nenad MIŠ_EVI_: Imagination and Necessity. R.D. ROLLINGER: Meinong on Perception: Two Questions Concerning Propositional Seeing. Wolfgang G. STOCK: Die Genese der Theorie der Vorstellungsproduktion der Grazer Schule. Rudolf HALLER: Über Meinongs Wissenschaftstheorie. Alfred SCHRAMM: Meinongs Wahrscheinlichkeit. Karl SCHUHMANN: Der Wertbegriff beim frühen Meinong. Wilhelm BAUMGARTNER: Wertpräsentation. Ursula ZEGLÉN: Meinong's Analysis of Lying. Seppo SAJAMA: Hitting Reality: France Veber's Concept of Zadevanje. Matja_ POTR_: Sensation According to Meinong and Veber. Róbert SOMOS: Zwei Schüler Brentanos: Ákos von Pauler und Meinong. J.C. NYÍRI: Palágyis Kritik an der Gegenstandstheorie. David M. ARMSTRONG: Reaction to Meinong. (shrink)

This article aims to classify those reducts of expansions of (Q, <) by unary predicates which eliminate quantifiers, and in particular to show that, up to interdefinability, there are only finitely many for a given language. Equivalently, we wish to classify the closed subgroups of Sym(Q) containing the group of all automorphisms of (Q, <) fixing setwise certain subsets. This goal is achieved for expansions by convex predicates, yielding expansions by constants as a special case, and for the expansion by (...) a dense, co-dense predicate. Partial results are obtained in the general setting of several dense predicates. (shrink)

Michel Foucault entwickelt sich gegenwartig zweifellos zu einer der neuen Bezugsgrossen des padagogischen Diskurses: Nach einer langen Phase grosser Widerstande innerhalb der deutschsprachigen Erziehungswissenschaft werden jetzt die ...

Several attempts have been done to distinguish “positive” information in an arbitrary first order theory, i.e., to find a well behaved class of closed sets among the definable sets. In many cases, a definable set is said to be closed if its conjugates are sufficiently distinct from each other. Each such definition yields a class of theories, namely those where all definable sets are constructible, i.e., boolean combinations of closed sets. Here are some examples, ordered by strength:Weak normality describes a (...) rather small class of theories which are well understood by now (see, for example, [P]). On the other hand, normalization is so weak that all theories, in a suitable context, are normalizable (see [HH]). Thus equational theories form an interesting intermediate class of theories. Little work has been done so far. The original work of Srour [S1, S2, S3] adopts a point of view that is closer to universal algebra than to stability theory. The fundamental definitions and model theoretic properties can be found in [PS], though some easy observations are missing there. Hrushovski's example of a stable non-equational theory, the first and only one so far, is described in the unfortunately unpublished manuscript [HS]. In fact, it is an expansion of the free pseudospace constructed independently by Baudisch and Pillay in [BP] as an example of a strictly 2-ample theory. Strong equationality, defined in [Hr], is also investigated in [HS]. (shrink)

We associate with every first order structure [Formula: see text] a family of invariant, locally Noetherian topologies. The structure is almost determined by the topologies, and properties of the structure are reflected by topological properties. We study these topologies in particular for stable structures. In nice cases, we get a behaviour similar to the Zariski topology in algebraically closed fields.

This paper describes the interventions by the International Committee of the Red Cross to support a hospital in Afghanistan during the mid 1990s. We present elements of the interventions introduced in Ghazni, Afghanistan, and consider a number of ethical issues stimulated by this analysis. Ethical challenges arise whenever humanitarian interventions to deal with complex political emergencies are undertaken: among those related to the case study presented are questions concerning: a) whether humanitarian support runs the risk of propping up repressive and (...) irresponsible governments; b) whether humanitarian relief activities can legitimately focus on a narrow range of interventions, or need to broaden to address the range of challenges facing the health system; and c) whether sustainability and quality of care should be routinely considered in such settings. The paper concludes by highlighting the value of case studies, suggesting mechanisms for extending transparency and accountability in humanitarian health interventions, and highlighting the need of contextualising humanitarian work if the interventions are to be successful. (shrink)

The paper concerns the textual form of the sentence Crit. 48e4. A return to the transmitted infinitive πεῖσαι is proposed; at the same time, it is demonstrated that the sentence is thereby ambiguous. Yet, it can be shown that this ambiguousness does not render the passage meaningless. In fact, the transmitted text is interpretively extremely rich, because with the indefinite infinitive a central problem of the dialogue, the demand ‘to convince or obey’, is accentuated in a distinctive way, namely in (...) respect of the personal relation of the two philosophising friends. For the dramatic effect of the dialogue this passage is of great importance. (shrink)

Since the first diagnosis of an HIV infection in 1956, the number of victims infected with the virus has dramatically increased to 40.3 million in 2005. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa carry the largest burden of HIV/AIDS worldwide. Various programs against the spread of the epidemic in this region have been promised. The objective of this article is to analyze to what extent these programs can achieve a sustainable effect. This article examines in detail the sustainability of thirteen programmes initiated (...) by large American and European pharmaceutical companies. It finds that none of the examined programs offers a fully sustainable solution. However, programs that were organized in cooperation with local authorities or organizations appear suitable to reach sustainable effects in high-prevalencecountries. As a result, cooperation seems to be an important prerequisite to implement the infrastructural measures necessary to guarantee sustainable effects in sub-Saharan Africa. (shrink)

This paper addresses various solutions to Meno's Problem: Why is it that knowledge is more valuable than merely true belief? Given both a pragmatist as well as a veritist understanding of epistemic value, it is argued that a reliabilist analysis of knowledge, in general, promises a hopeful strategy to explain the extra value of knowledge. It is, however, shown that two recent attempts to solve Meno's Problem within reliabilism are severely flawed: Olsson's conditional probability solution and Goldman's value autonomization solution. (...) The paper proceeds with a discussion of the purpose of having a higher value of knowledge as opposed to merely true belief, both in evolutionary and social terms. It claims that under a reliabilist analysis of knowledge it can be explained how knowers could evolve rather than just truthful believers. Subsequently, the paper develops an account of how we can manipulate our testimonial environment in an epistemically beneficial way by valuing reliably produced true belief more that just true belief and so gives an indirect justification of the extra value of knowledge. (shrink)

The paper argues that cognitive states of biological systems are inherently temporal. Three adequacy conditions for neuronal models of representation are vindicated: the compositionality of meaning, the compositionality of content, and the co-variation with content. Classicist and connectionist approaches are discussed and rejected. Based on recent neurobiological data, oscillatory networks are introduced as a third alternative. A mathematical description in a Hilbert space framework is developed. The states of this structure can be regarded as conceptual representations satisfying the three conditions.

The present article presents a new manuscript discovery of an Eckhart manuscript hitherto thought to have been lost. The text section of Eckhartian texts consist to a large extent of questions, two of which are being discussed here. As it seems these texts are not, as previously believed, vernacular translations of Eckhart’s Latin exegetical commentaries, but of Latin questions which Eckhart seems to have collected in his Liber quaestionum and translated into the vernacular. ‘Eckhart’ here is taken as a broad (...) label that may encompass Eckhart himself as well as his early readers. (shrink)

RGVV (History of Religion: Essays and Preliminary Studies) brings together the mutually constitutive aspects of the study of religion(s)--contextualized data, theory, and disciplinary positioning--and engages them from a critical historical perspective. The series publishes monographs and thematically focused edited volumes on specific topics and cases as well as comparative work across historical periods from the ancient world to the modern era.

Since the first diagnosis of an HIV infection in 1956, the number of victims infected with the virus has dramatically increased to 40.3 million in 2005. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa carry the largest burden of HIV/AIDS worldwide. Various programs against the spread of the epidemic in this region have been promised. The objective of this article is to analyze to what extent these programs can achieve a sustainable effect. This article examines in detail the sustainability of thirteen programmes initiated (...) by large American and European pharmaceutical companies. It finds that none of the examined programs offers a fully sustainable solution. However, programs that were organized in cooperation with local authorities or organizations appear suitable to reach sustainable effects in high-prevalencecountries. As a result, cooperation seems to be an important prerequisite to implement the infrastructural measures necessary to guarantee sustainable effects in sub-Saharan Africa. (shrink)

Bertolt Brecht is internationally known as one of the most influential dramatists, directors, and theater theorists of the twentieth century and also, within German culture, as one of its most innovative modern poets and prose stylists. Whereas Brecht’s contributions to a Marxist aesthetics of drama, theater, poetry, and prose are widely acknowledged, he is less well known as a major thinker on ethical issues, mostly because of his materialist orientation, which conflicts with ethical traditions rooted in metaphysics. Against these traditions, (...) Brecht envisioned an “ethics for the satisfaction of needs”1 and claimed that “material needs as ethical, ethical ones as material, this is not grasped.”2 This.. (shrink)

This work was awarded the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise 2009.

The revival of realism for francophone literature has been widely addressed. The essay argues that this comeback stems not only from a social crisis, but from an urgent need to justify the social world. If this new realism can be said to emerge at the end of the 1980s, then its driving force is a melting away of universalism – a loss of claims to global legitimacy, or to speak with a validity encompassing all of human experience, that manifests itself (...) as a fundamental problem in representing the world. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 703, August 2012.

The nineteenth century saw the invention of the national hero. His main function was to serve as an ideal for the nation. Latvia, however, is an exception to this general rule: after it regained independence in 1990, the national hero simply disappeared and no heroic image emerged. On the contrary, it was now the victim that became the emblem of Latvia’s regained independence. The country, of course, did not lack “heroes,” for there were in fact many candidates for the creation (...) of a national hero, yet the hero as such no longer seemed to fit the new state. While the path Latvia had chosen of rejecting or refusing national heroes had an impact on its integration into Europe, it also contributed to ongoing frictions among its own ethnic communities. (shrink)

In 2015 over one million people applied for asylum in Europe and pushed it into political turmoil because no common answer could be found to the “European migrant crisis.” Germany was heavily criti...

In memory of Alina Margolis-Edelman ABSTRACT The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is the symbol of the heroism of the Jews during the Holocaust. For decades after the war it has been central for commemorating the Jewish victims. The symbolic meaning of the Uprising has led in the past sixty years to a wide and lively discussion about the meaning of the symbol, for it has often been used to support or justify different political or moral arguments. This article argues against the (...) transformation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into a heroic epic, and offers an alternative approach to its interpretation. (shrink)