Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) was unquestionably one of the most important philosophers of all time. He trained as a mathematician, and his work in philosophy started as an attempt to provide an explanation of the truths of arithmetic, but in the course of this attempt he not only founded modern logic but also had to address fundamental questions in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Frege is generally seen (along with Russell and Wittgenstein) as one of the fathers of the (...) analytic method, which dominated philosophy in English-speaking countries for most of the twentieth century. His work is studied today not just for its historical importance but also because many of his ideas are still seen as relevant to current debates in the philosophies of logic, language, mathematics and the mind. The Cambridge Companion to Frege provides a route into this lively area of research. (shrink)

Regular musical activity as a complex multimodal lifestyle activity is proposed to be protective against age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. This cross-sectional study investigated the association and interplay between musical instrument playing during life, multi-domain cognitive abilities and brain morphology in older adults from the DZNE-Longitudinal Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Study study. Participants reporting having played a musical instrument across three life periods were compared to controls without a history of musical instrument playing, well-matched for reserve proxies of education, (...) intelligence, socioeconomic status and physical activity. Participants with musical activity outperformed controls in global cognition, working memory, executive functions, language, and visuospatial abilities, with no effects seen for learning and memory. The musically active group had greater gray matter volume in the somatosensory area, but did not differ from controls in higher-order frontal, temporal, or hippocampal volumes. However, the association between gray matter volume in distributed frontal-to-temporal regions and cognitive abilities was enhanced in participants with musical activity compared to controls. We show that playing a musical instrument during life relates to better late-life cognitive abilities and greater brain capacities in OA. Musical activity may serve as a multimodal enrichment strategy that could help preserve cognitive and brain health in late life. Longitudinal and interventional studies are needed to support this notion. (shrink)

Based on an analysis of the category of “infinite judgments” in Kant, we will introduce the logical hexagon of predicate negation. This hexagon allows us to visualize in a single diagram the general structure of both Kant’s solution of the antinomies of pure reason and his argument in favor of Transcendental Idealism.

Many scientists routinely generalize from study samples to larger populations. It is commonly assumed that this cognitive process of scientific induction is a voluntary inference in which researchers assess the generalizability of their data and then draw conclusions accordingly. We challenge this view and argue for a novel account. The account describes scientific induction as involving by default a generalization bias that operates automatically and frequently leads researchers to unintentionally generalize their findings without sufficient evidence. The result is unwarranted, overgeneralized (...) conclusions. We support this account of scientific induction by integrating a range of disparate findings from across the cognitive sciences that have until now not been connected to research on the nature of scientific induction. The view that scientific induction involves by default a generalization bias calls for a revision of the current thinking about scientific induction and highlights an overlooked cause of the replication crisis in the sciences. Commonly proposed interventions to tackle scientific overgeneralizations that may feed into this crisis need to be supplemented with cognitive debiasing strategies against generalization bias to most effectively improve science. (shrink)

There are strong indications that many consumers are switching towards more socially and environmentally responsible products and services, reflecting a shift in consumer values indicated in several countries. However, little is known about the motives that drive some toward, or deter others from, higher levels of ethical concern and action in their purchasing decisions. Following a qualitative investigation using ZMET and focus group discussions, a questionnaire was developed and administered to a representative sample of consumers; nearly 1,000 usable questionnaires were (...) collected. The degree of awareness, concern and action regarding 16 ethical issues was quantified, using a measure developed from the Stages of Change concept within the Transtheoretical model. Motivations for ethical behaviour, in relation to each individual’s most salient ethical issue, were investigated using initially 22 motive statements within the framework of the Decisional Balance Scale (DBS). The findings suggest that the DBS and Stages model have an explanatory value within the ethical decision-making context, and that the motives identified do reflect the Decisional Balance Constructs. Indeed the study suggests that respondents’ motivational attitudes are a function of their stage of ethical awareness, concern and action. Therefore, the Decisional Balance Scale may well prove useful for designing appropriate interventions and communications to facilitate movement towards more ethical decision-making. These findings yield strategic insight for communicating messages to ethical consumers and for better understanding their purchasing decisions. (shrink)

P. KOnig: Einleitung - P. ZIche: Idiographik und allgemeine Wissenschaftlichkeit - Windelband und die Wissenschaftsreflexion um 1900 - G. HArtung: Ein Philosoph korrigiert sich selbst - Wilhelm Windelbands Abkehr vom Relativismus - O. SChlaudt: Philosophie am Leitfaden der Empirie. WIndelbands relativistisches Programm - S. KUft: Windelbands Konzeption von Transzendentalphilosophie und ihr Bezug zur Kulturphilosophie - R. BOnito Oliva: Windelband. KUlturphilosophie und Kulturkrise - P. KOnig: Teleologie und Geschichte bei Wilhelm Windelband - J. BOhr: Im Fortschreiben der Probleme: Windelbands 19. JAhrhundert (...) - T.-H. CHang: Der Wertbegriff beiWilhelm Windelband und sein Konzept der Problemgeschichte - T. KUbalica: Die Geschichte der Philosophie als Problemgeschichte - J. MEhlich: Windelbands Praludien und das Silberne Zeitalter in Russland - G. SChluter: Windelbands italienische Kontakte und Bezugnahmen - D. STefanelli: Notizen uber Karl Vossler und die "Sudwestdeutsche Schule" - C. ZAnfi: Geschichte, Natur und Leben: Windelband und Bergson in der Historismus-Debatte - J.-I. LIndén: Der beseelte Geist: Dilthey als Kritiker der badischen Schule - H. GUndlach: Windelbands Ringen mit der Psychologie - Anhang: Wilhelm Windelband: Blaue Hefte zur Psychologie. (shrink)

The Constitution of Independence is a contribution to the newly rejuvenated subject of comparative Commonwealth constitutional law, politics, and history. In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, a series of fascinating developments have been under way for more than a decade, characterized by independent thinking, experimentation, and cross-Commonwealth borrowing of constitutional ideas. These include the final termination of constitutional ties with the United Kingdom Parliament and the emergence of controversial issues including variably entrenched or implied rights and freedoms; wide-ranging claims by (...) indigenous peoples; republicanism; and assertions of national, popular, and sectional sovereignty.This book explores the development of constitutional thinking in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand from early domination by Imperial ideas, through the adoption of the Statute of Westminster and the contemplation of severing Imperial connections, to irreversible acquisition of constitutional independence in the 1980s. This book focusses primarily on sovereignty and the legal system, concepts which are also central to contemporary constitutional theory in Europe and the United States. The book closes with an evaluation of recent varied and often contradictory accounts of the constitutional foundations of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which depict a wide range of scenarios: from constitutional continuity and respect for the rule of law, to popular sovereignty and disguised revolution. Oliver argues that explanations of constitutional independence are characterized by their reliance on independent, country-specific constitutional thinking that evolved over the last century. on. (shrink)

This collection of essays explore the long-standing,intricate relationship between law and faith. Faith in this context is to be read in the broadest sense, as extending beyond religion to embrace the knowledge, beliefs, understandings and practices which are at work alongside the familiar and seemingly more reliable, trusted and relatively certain content and conventionally accepted methods of law and legal reasoning. The essays deal with three broad themes. The first concerns the extent to which faith should be involved in legal (...) decision making. Ought decisions to aspire simply to right reason or ought faith-based models of decision-making to be incorporated into the legal system? If the latter, how is this best done? Ought faith to operate simply as a reason itself or ought it to help to structure the method by which legal decisions are reached? The second, and perhaps most familiar theme, stemming in part from rights discourse, is the extent to which law does, and ought to, respect the rights of those whose religious beliefs conflict with the dominant social norms and practices. Liberal democratic constitutions typically provide protection for religion and religious beliefs. Are these justified, and if so how? Can such protection as exists suffice from the perspective of the faithful, or does law's otherwise pervasive agnosticism make this impossible or illusory? Thirdly, questions of identity and difference arise. Assuming that most societies remain a mix of many faiths (religious and secular) and no faith, how should law and legal theory understand the varying and, it must be said, conflicting claims for recognition. Should we encourage conformity in the hope of reducing friction, or should we preserve and promote difference, seeking to understand others, whether groups or individuals, without removing that which makes them distinct? More radically and controversially, should we be more sceptical of individual and group claims to authenticity and see them rather as strategies in an ongoing power game? Faith after all, like reason and law, has never been far from politics and intrigue, especially in its institutional representation. Contributors: Zenon Bankowski, Anthony Bradney, Claire Davis, John Gardner, Adam Gearey, Tim Macklem, Maleiha Malik, Victor Tadros. (shrink)

Transparencies (1) We used to stick them on window-panes Starting with butterflies. Later We found more momentous scenes Mandalas — ziggurats — Jesus. ...

Pioneering work in the 1940s and 1950s suggested that the concept of chunking might be important in many processes of perception, learning and cognition in humans and animals. We summarize here the major sources of evidence for chunking mechanisms, and consider how such mechanisms have been implemented in computational models of the learning process. We distinguish two forms of chunking: the first deliberate, under strategic control, and goal-oriented; the second automatic, continuous, and linked to perceptual processes. Recent work with discrimination-network (...) computational models of long- and short-term memory (EPAM/CHREST) has produced a diverse range of applications of perceptual chunking. We focus on recent successes in verbal learning, expert memory, language acquisition and learning multiple representations, to illustrate the implementation and use of chunking mechanisms within contemporary models of human learning. (shrink)

Modern theories of authoritarianism have stressed the importance of threat to the expression of authoritarian attitudes and intolerance. Arguably, authoritarian tendencies may have increased during COVID-19 pandemic, a major threat to life and security. One issue arising when comparing mean scores is that of measurement invariance. Meaningful comparisons are only possible, if latent constructs are similar between groups and/or across time. This prerequisite is rarely ever tested in research on authoritarianism. In this study, we aim to analyze the short scale (...) for authoritarianism KSA-3 by investigating its measurement invariance on two levels and latent mean changes using two German representative samples. Specifically, we look at differences before and during the pandemic. While measurement invariance holds across both levels in all conditions, we find a decrease in latent means in 2020, contrary to expectations and established theories. Moreover, latent means differ with regard to gender, education, and east–west Germany. We conclude that analyses of latent means and measurement invariance instead of mean comparisons with composites should become the standard. Future studies should focus on threat as a moderator between authoritarianism and intolerance, and on possible interactions with context variables. (shrink)

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political (...) philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation Section II. Philosophy Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind Section V. Sociology and Social Theory Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology Section VIII. Mathematics Section IX. Education Section X. Varia Section XI. Bibliography. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

_Skepticism and Cognitivism_ addresses the fundamental question of epistemology: Is knowledge possible? It approaches this query with an evaluation of the skeptical tradition in Western philosophy, analyzing thinkers who have claimed that we can know nothing. After an introductory chapter lays out the central issues, chapter 2 focuses on the classical skeptics of the Academic and Pyrrhonistic schools and then on the skepticism of David Hume. Chapters 3 through 5 are devoted to contemporary defenders of skepticism—Keith Lehrer, Arne Næss, and (...) Peter Unger. In chapter 6, author Oliver A. Johnson dons the mantle of skeptic himself and develops and adds theories to the skeptical arsenal. He closes with an examination of the relationship between skepticism and cognitivism, reaching and defending conclusions on the nature and extent of possible human knowledge. (shrink)

ObjectiveIn this study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate whether motor imagery of handwriting and circle drawing activates a similar handwriting network as writing and drawing itself.MethodsEighteen healthy right-handed participants wrote the German word “Wellen” and drew continuously circles in a sitting and lying position to capture kinematic handwriting parameters such as velocity, pressure and regularity of hand movements. Afterward, they performed the same tasks during fMRI in a MI and an executed condition.ResultsThe kinematic analysis revealed a general (...) correlation of handwriting parameters during sitting and lying except of pen pressure during drawing. Writing compared to imagined writing was accompanied by an increased activity of the ipsilateral cerebellum and the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. Executed compared to imagined drawing revealed elevated activity of a fronto–parieto-temporal network. By contrasting writing and drawing directly, executed writing induced an enhanced activation of the left somatosensory and premotor area. The comparison of the MI of these tasks revealed a higher involvement of occipital activation during imagined writing.ConclusionThe kinematic results pointed to a high comparability of writing in a vertical and horizontal position. Overall, we observed highly overlapping cortical activity except of a higher involvement of motor control areas during motor execution. The sparse difference between writing and drawing can be explained by highly automatized writing in healthy individuals. (shrink)

The concept of mediation plays a central part in several positions of contemporary philosophy of technology. Especially Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek have served to establish mediation as one of the core concepts in the postphenomenologically rooted philosophical analysis of human-technology-world relations. While meditation theory provides many important conceptual and empirical contributions to our knowledge of how material artefacts shape our embodied being in the world, too little attention has arguably been given to the development of concepts that enable (...) a philosophical analysis of the symbolic aspect of technological artefacts. This paper aims to develop the notion of ‘symbolic mediation’ by drawing on inspiration from the tradition of philosophical anthropology, more specifically, the work of Ernst Cassirer and his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (PSF). Drawing on empirical examples of human-robot interactions (HRI), I coin two types of symbolic mediation: 1) mythic mediation and 2) aesthetic mediation. (shrink)

In the second edition of this groundbreaking text in non-Western philosophy, sixteen experts introduce some of the great philosophical traditions in the world. The essays unveil exciting, sophisticated philosophical traditions that are too often neglected in the western world. The contributors include the leading scholars in their fields, but they write for students coming to these concepts for the first time. Building on revisions and updates to the original, this new edition also considers three philosophical traditions for the first time—Jewish, (...) Buddhist, and South Pacific philosophy. (shrink)

Guilt and shame are self-conscious emotions with implications for mental health, social and occupational functioning, and the effectiveness of sports practice. To date, the assessment and role of athlete-specific guilt and shame has been under-researched. Reporting data from 174 junior elite cricketers, the present study utilized exploratory factor analysis in validating the Athletic Perceptions of Performance Scale, assessing three distinct and statistically reliable factors: athletic shame-proneness, guilt-proneness, and no-concern. Conditional process analysis indicated that APPS shame-proneness mediated the relationship between general (...) and athlete-specific distress. While APPS domains of guilt-proneness and no-concern were not significant mediators, they exhibited correlations in the expected direction with indices of psychological distress and well-being. The APPS may assist coaches and support staff identify players who may benefit from targeted interventions to reduce the likelihood of experiencing shame-prone states. (shrink)

The capacity of next-generation closed-loop or adaptive deep brain stimulation devices to read and write shows great potential to effectively manage movement, seizure, and psychiatric disorders, and also raises the possibility of using aDBS to electively modulate mood, cognition, and prosociality. What separates aDBS from most neurotechnologies currently used for enhancement is that aDBS remains an invasive, surgically-implanted technology with a risk-benefit ratio significantly different when applied to diseased versus non-diseased individuals. Despite a large discourse about the ethics of enhancement, (...) no empirical studies yet examine perspectives on enhancement from within the aDBS research community. We interviewed 23 aDBS researchers about their attitudes toward expanding aDBS use for enhancement. A thematic content analysis revealed that researchers share ethical concerns related to safety and security; enhancement as unnecessary, unnatural or aberrant; and fairness, equality, and distributive justice. Most researchers felt that enhancement applications for DBS will eventually be technically feasible and that attempts to develop such applications for DBS are already happening. However, researchers unanimously felt that DBS ideally should not be considered for enhancement until researchers better understand brain target localization and functioning. While many researchers acknowledged controversies highlighted by scholars and ethicists, such as potential impacts on personhood, authenticity, autonomy and privacy, their ethical concerns reflect considerations of both gravity and perceived near-term likelihood. (shrink)

Sanitizing Justice Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11158-011-9174-y Authors Oliver Dowlen, 62 Brockswood Lane, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire AL8 7BQ, UK Journal Res Publica Online ISSN 1572-8692 Print ISSN 1356-4765.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature, Knowledge, and ValueOliver Conolly and Bashshar HaydarMany of the terms we use to assess works of literature are cognitive in nature. We say that a work is profound, insightful, shrewd, well-observed, or perceptive, and conversely that it is shallow, or sentimental, or impercipient. A common thread running throughout this terminology is that works of literature are ascribed cognitive features affecting the value of those works qua literature. Use (...) of this terminology therefore implies adherence to a substantial philosophical theory, cognitivism, the thesis that (1) works of literature have cognitive content, and (2) this content enhances their value as works of literature. Note that cognitivism is not the thesis that literature's value resides in its causing us to acquire knowledge, but rather in its displaying such knowledge. A given work's displaying knowledge does not of course entail that it causes us to acquire it.While cognitivism appears consistent with literary critical practice, it is open to a number of objections. In this paper we aim to defend cognitivism and in the process refine it. Broadly, objections to cognitivism deny either (1) the thesis that works of literature contain any cognitive content, or (2) the thesis that such content can be aesthetically relevant in the sense of being relevant to the evaluation of works of literature qua literature. The principal objection is to (2), for it is difficult to deny that no knowledge whatsoever can be obtained from works of art. For example, the Iliad sheds light on values, habits and customs of ancient Greeks, and nineteenth-century Russian novels may inform us about contemporary debates concerning the emancipation of the serfs. It is the relevance of such knowledge to the artistic value of the literature that is in issue. [End Page 111]IThe main challenge faced by the cognitivist is well put by the anti-cognitivist, Peter Lamarque, thus: the "question artistic cognitivists dread most is what (nontrivial) truths they have learnt from works of art." It is thought a difficult question because in "propositional terms the best they can come up with are usually generalities of numbingly banal kind."1 The objection, in short, is that while it is correct that truths can be gleaned from literature, they are trivial. We call this the triviality objection. Stolnitz for example states that the truth to be learned from Pride and Prejudice is, "Stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart," which he describes as "pitifully meager."2However, the notion of an insight implies nontriviality: a "trivial insight" is an oxymoron. So if the triviality objection succeeds, it follows that we should either stop calling works of literature insightful and perceptive, or that those terms have a different meaning in the context of literary criticism than they do in everyday parlance.There is nothing which in principle debars a philosophical theory from correcting mistaken practices but the practice in this case is widespread and, on the face of it, unobjectionable. The alternative available open to anti-cognitivism is that literary critical terminology has an altogether different meaning from that in ordinary parlance, so that in a literary context a term such as "insightful" has a formal meaning only. Peter Lamarque for instance asserts that we (rightly) evaluate works of literature in part in terms of their content, but not in terms of the truth of the content: "it is usually a work's treatment of a theme which is judged profound or sentimental."3 Lamarque gives the following examples: "Milton's treatment of the Fall is profound just as is Descartes's appeal to God to refute scepticism, but neither need be interpreted as true." However, it is not as easy to divorce profundity from truth as Lamarque implies. With regard to Milton's treatment of the Fall, it is possible to find it profound without believing in the literal truth of the Fall. One might point to, for example, Milton's treatment of the sexuality of Adam and Eve, and the way in which it is bound up with their awareness of their mortality. When, in Paradise Lost, Adam learns of Eve's disobedience, he declares his wish to fall with her... (shrink)

In this discussion I argue that Peter Sullivan is wrong to suggest that Wittgenstein's position in the Philosophical Investigations involves a commitment to transcendental idealism. I show that Sullivan's interpretation involves holding that transcendental idealism was employed by Wittgenstein in the attempt to combat a Platonist mythology. I show, through a detailed appraisal of Wittgenstein's discussion of samples, that Wittgenstein's approach to Platonism does not involve any such employment of transcendental idealism. I conclude that there is no such motivation (...) as Sullivan finds in Wittgenstein for endorsing transcendental idealism, and that we ought not, therefore, ascribe to him such a view. (shrink)

Askese und Devotion: Das rituelle System der Terāpanth Śvetāmbara Jaina. 2 vols. By Peter Flügel. Alt- und Neu-Indische Studien, vol. 56. Dettelbach: J.H. Röll, 2018. Pp. 1227. €229.

This volume explores whether the concept of the common good might be retrieved and become central in contemporary religious social thought. Contributors include: Charles C. West, John J. Collins, Ralph McInerny; J. Philip Wogaman, Charles E. Curran, Richard John Neuhaus, Dennis P. McCann, Ernest Bartell, Michael Novak, Charles K. Wilber, John W. Cooper, Gar Alperovitz, Richard T. DeGeorge, Gerald Cavanagh, William J. Cunningham, Peter Mann, Bette Jean Bullert and David Vogel. Co-published with the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and (...) Religious Values in Business. (shrink)

Im Zentrum des Werkes von Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) steht die Frage nach der Vernunft der Praxis und der Praxis der Vernunft. Dieses klassische Thema der praktischen Philosophie, das heute im Hintergrund verschiedener Debatten in Philosophie und Politikwissenschaft steht, leitete Oakeshott in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit der modernen Politik. Die in dem Sammelband vereinigten Beitrage bieten einen Uberblick uber die internationale Forschungslage; ihr gemeinsamer Angelpunkt ist Oakeshotts Praxisbegriff: Diskutiert wird seine praktische Bedeutung im Durchgang durch die grundlegenden politischen und gesellschaftlichen Problemfragen der (...) Gegenwart, seine theoretische Leistungsfahigkeit ist Gegenstand vergleichender Perspektiven, die vor allem die deutschen Zeitgenossen wie H. Arendt, H.-G. Gadamer, G. Simmel oder L. Strauss einbeziehen. Der vorliegende Band unternimmt es, die seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten intensiv gefuhrte, vor allem angelsachsische Debatte um Oakeshotts Denken in die einschlagigen deutschen Diskussionen zu tragen und die Anknupfungspunkte sichtbar zu machen, die sein facettenreiches Werk fur die Verstandigung uber eine humane Praxis in den Konflikten des 21. Jahrhunderts bietet. Mit Beitragen von: Josiah Lee Auspitz, Michael Becker, Wendell John Coats Jr., Peter Finn, Jurgen Gebhardt, Steven A. Gerencser, Michael Grossheim, Michael Henkel, Hans Jorg Hennecke, Bart van Klink, Silviya Lechner, Oliver W. Lembcke, Kenneth B. McIntyre, Efraim Podoksik, Rainer Schmidt, Suvi Soininen, Judith A. Swanson, Martyn P. Thompson. (shrink)

I begin by acknowledging the profusion of Peter Sloterdijk’s published work, the suggestion by Bruno Latour that it may be on the side of design, and Sloterdijk’s pugnacious aversion to professorial critique. I focus on what I consider to be the crucial and vexed relationship between the general immunology of the Spheres trilogy [1998–2004] and the general ascetology of You Must Change Your Life [2009]. I present an analytical reconstruction of Sloterdijk’s account of originary spheric being-with in the trilogy, (...) focused on its culmination in the foam-world; I suggest this account is too ambiguous on key matters of basic ontological structure and I question whether the foam metaphor is adequate as a description of intersubjectivity today. Against the backdrop of this discussion I consider whether the general ascetology of Sloterdijk’s second anthropotechnics involves practising in, or practising on, the shells of symbolic immunity and conclude the latter. Setting this alongside the trilogy’s insistence that cells in the foam are “co-fragile,” I argue that anthropotechnical practising in the foam-world is suffused with a violence which Sloterdijk is reluctant to theorize. Registering one significant undeclared context of his discussion of self-enhancement, in postmodern management theory, I suggest that successful anthropotechnical practising in the foam-world requires the capacity to ignore other people and their interests. I note that Sloterdijk’s one-eyed embrace of competitive self-enhancement in You Must Change Your Life has since been qualified in brief remarks in What Happened in the 20th Century? [2016] but not substantively reconsidered. In conclusion, I pay tribute to the anthropotechnical lesson of Sloterdijk’s theoretical project, notwithstanding its design flaws and continuity errors. (shrink)

The essay is an exposition and critical analysis of Peter Unger's book Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism (Oxford, 1975). In the introductory chapter my main object, in addition to defining terms, is to distinguish the two forms of scepticism Unger defends in Ignorance, which he calls, respectively, scepticism about knowledge and scepticism about rationality. Chapter II is devoted to an exposition, analysis, and evaluation of the latter and Chapter III of the former. In Chapter IV I consider a second-order (...) argument that informs Unger's case throughout the book, his "ancestor language" hypothesis. In the final chapter I assess his scepticism as a whole and attempt to develop some of its implications concerning both the possibility and actuality of knowledge. (shrink)

Where is philosophy going? Are we entering a post-philosophy millennium? The Future of Philosophy presents the notion of what the future of philosophy is as a crucial concept, since it allows us to speculate not only on the future, but also on the past. The insightful essays consider a variety of issues, from ethics to mind, language to feminist thought, postmodernism to religion. Contributors: Peter Edwards, Lenn Goodman, Sean Hand, Heta Hayry, Matti Hayry, Gill Howie, Oliver Leaman, Harry (...) Lesser, Gerard Livingstone, William Lyons and Catherine Wilson. (shrink)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that great works of literature have an impact on people's lives. Well known literary characters—Oedipus, Hamlet, Faustus, Don Quixote—acquire iconic or mythic status and their stories, in more or less detail, are revered and recalled often in contexts far beyond the strictly literary. At the level of national literatures, familiar characters and plots are assimilated into a wider cultural consciousness and help define national stereotypes and norms of behaviour. In the English speaking world, Shakespeare's (...) plays or the novels of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, and Trollope, provide imaginative material that reverberates in people's lives every bit as much as do the great historical figures, like Julius Caesar, Elizabeth I, Horatio Nelson, or Winston Churchill. What is striking is how often fictional characters from the literary tradition—like the well-loved Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Pip, Tess of the d'Ubervilles—enter readers' lives at a highly personal level. They become, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, our ‘friends’, and for many readers the lives of these characters become closely entwined with their own. Happy and unhappy incidents in the fictional worlds are held up against similar incidents in the real lives of readers and such readers take inspiration from the courage, ingenuity, or good fortune of their fictional heroines and heroes. Nowhere is it more true that life imitates art. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

This is exciting medical researchers because it means that, at least in theory, the cells from an early embryo could eliminate the need for organ transplants entirely, cure leukaemia, enable people with diabetes to manufacture insulin, treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, and repair the nerve systems of quadriplegics. Though these prospects are still far from realisation, results achieved by Oliver Brustle at the University of Bonn Medical Centre have brought them a step closer. In an article published in Science (...) on July 30, Brustle reported that he was able to repair the damaged nervous systems of rats using cells taken from embryos. (shrink)

_Courting the Abyss_ updates the philosophy of free expression for a world that is very different from the one in which it originated. The notion that a free society should allow Klansmen, neo-Nazis, sundry extremists, and pornographers to spread their doctrines as freely as everyone else has come increasingly under fire. At the same time, in the wake of 9/11, the Right and the Left continue to wage war over the utility of an absolute vision of free speech in a (...) time of increased national security. _Courting the Abyss_ revisits the tangled history of free speech, finding resolutions to these debates hidden at the very roots of the liberal tradition. A mesmerizing account of the role of public communication in the Anglo-American world, _Courting the Abyss_ shows that liberty's earliest advocates recognized its fraternal relationship with wickedness and evil. While we understand freedom of expression to mean "anything goes," John Durham Peters asks why its advocates so often celebrate a sojourn in hell and the overcoming of suffering. He directs us to such well-known sources as the prose and poetry of John Milton and the political and philosophical theory of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., as well as lesser-known sources such as the theology of Paul of Tarsus. In various ways they all, he shows, envisioned an attitude of self-mastery or self-transcendence as a response to the inevitable dangers of free speech, a troubled legacy that continues to inform ruling norms about knowledge, ethical responsibility, and democracy today. A world of gigabytes, undiminished religious passion, and relentless scientific discovery calls for a fresh account of liberty that recognizes its risk and its splendor. Instead of celebrating noxious doctrine as proof of society's robustness, _Courting the Abyss_ invites us to rethink public communication today by looking more deeply into the unfathomable mystery of liberty and evil. (shrink)

The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century—climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two—are not problems that can be solved from within individual disciplines, nation-states, or cultural perspectives. They are predicaments that can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. The scale of the problems and necessity for coordinated global solutions signal a world historical transit as momentous as the Industrial Revolution: a transition from the predominance (...) of technical knowledge to that of ethical deliberation. This volume brings together leading thinkers from around the world to deliberate on how best to correlate worth (value) with what is worthwhile (values), pairing human prosperity with personal, environmental, and spiritual flourishing in a world of differing visions of what constitutes a moral life. Especially in the aftermath of what is now being called the Great Recession, awareness has mounted of the imperative to question the modern divorce of economics from ethics. While the domains of economics and ethics were from antiquity through at least the eighteenth century understood in many cultures to be coterminous and mutually entailing, the modern assumption has been that the goal of maximizing human prosperity and the aim of justly enhancing our lives as persons and as communities were functionally and practically distinct. Working from a wide array of perspectives, the contributors to this volume offer a set of challenges to the assumed independence of the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of human and planetary well-being. Reflecting on the complex interrelationship among economics, justice, and equity, the book resists "one size fits all" approaches and struggles to revitalize the marriage of economics and ethics by activating cultural differences as the basis of mutual contribution to shared human flourishing. The publication of this important collection will stimulate or extend critical debates among scholars and students working in a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including philosophy, history, environmental studies, economics, and law. Contributors: Roger T. Ames, James Behuniak Jr., Steve Bein, Nalini Bhushan, Purushottama Bilimoria, Steven Burik, Amita Chatterjee, Baoyan Cheng, Gordon Davis, Jay L. Garfield, Steven F. Geisz, Peter D. Hershock, Larry A. Hickman, Kathleen M. Higgins, Heidi M. Hurd, Thomas P. Kasulis, Workineh Kelbessa, Lori Keleher, Oliver Leaman, James McRae, Jin Y. Park, James Peterman, Naoko Saito, May Sim, Robert Smid, Paul Standish, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Karsten J. Struhl, Meera Sushila Viswanathan, Wu Shiu- Ching, Xu Di, T. Yamauchi, Yang Liuxin. (shrink)

As the transaction cost theory of the firm was taking shape in the 1970s, another important movement in economics was emerging: a revival of the ‘Austrian’ tradition in economic theory associated with such economists as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek . As Oliver Williamson has pointed out, Austrian economics is among the diverse sources for transaction cost economics. In particular, Williamson frequently cites Hayek , particularly Hayek’s emphasis on adaptation as a key problem of economic organisation . (...) Following Williamson’s lead, a reference to Hayek’s ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ has become almost mandatory in discussions of economic organisation . However, there are many other potential links between Austrian and transaction cost economics that have not been explored closely and exploited.This article argues that characteristically Austrian ideas about property, entrepreneurship, economic calculation, tacit knowledge, and the temporal structure of capital have important implications for theories of economic organisation, transaction cost economics in particular. Austrian economists have not, however, devoted substantial attention to the theory of the firm, preferring to focus on business-cycle theory, welfare economics, political economy, comparative economic systems, and other areas. Until recently the theory of the firm was an almost completely neglected area in Austrian economics, but over the last decade, a small Austrian literature on the firm has emerged. While these works cover a wide variety of theoretical and applied topics, their authors share the view that Austrian insights have something to offer students of firm organisation. (shrink)

_Parallax_ is an international, peer-reviewed journal that aims towards a critical engagement with the production of culture and knowledge. The journal explores a wide range of cultural practices, reconfiguring the production and understanding of culture as well as the relation between theory and practice itself. This text brings together scholars from a number of different theoretical backgrounds to consider the ethical and political processes involved in witnessing, and the possible limits of theory in some situations. Contributors include J.M. Bernstein, Kelly (...) Oliver, Griselda Pollock, Laurence Rickels, Avital Ronell and Hayden White. (shrink)