The central theme of the prologue is the notion of responsibility, as well it might be, given the subject, Accordingly, those first seven pages swamp the reader with the word “responsibility” to the point where they could be described as “variations on the theme.” Inundation, alas, is not elucidation, and all closer references to the notion remain impenetrability elliptic: Derrida possesses the unique art of combining extreme ellipsis with extreme verbosity. In fact these “variation” are more musical than analytic: “responsibility” (...) comes close to being a Wagnerian leitmotiv. Like a characteristic melody, the word winds through the text in a constant sequence of appearances and temporary disappearances, ever expected, always ready to reemerge. Although there is no clear-cut line of argument, there does seem to be a general direction of development. The question of de Man’s responsibility, which we might have thought to be crucial, is touched on only briefly and vaguely; we read much more about responsibility to de Man. Ours and Derrida’s: “responsibility” is associated with “responding,” which is increasingly read as Derrida’s obligation to respond for de Man. From the outset, this emphasis evokes the danger of an apologia rather than the conscientious quest for truth that is demanded in the same breath. There are further suggestions of this nature when Derrida later briefly returns to this subject and this style. “Responding for the other” is here connected with transference, allegory , and prosopopeia—that is, connected with two rhetorical categories and psychoanalytic one. To write about responsibility with so little reference to ethical categories is something of a tour de force. W. Wolfgang Holdheim, professor of comparative literature and romance studies and Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies at Cornell University, has published numerous articles on literature and literary theory as well as a number of books, including The Hermeneutic Mode. (shrink)

(2023). Reality+ – Virtual Worlds and the Problem of Philosophy. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology: Vol. 23, No. 1, e2326227.

In 2009, WW Norton published ‘The Red Book’, a book written by Jung in 1913-1914 but not previously published. Snippets of information about the likely contents of the Red Book had been in circulation for years, and there was much debate and eager anticipation of its publication within the Jungian field and the larger reading public. In 2010, a conference was held at the San Francisco Jungian Institute which brought together an international group of distinguished scholars in analytical psychology to (...) explore and address critical contextual aspects of ‘The Red Book’ and to debate its importance for current and future Jungian theory and practice. __The Red Book: Reflections on C.G. Jung’s _Liber Novus_ is based on that conference, the individual papers have been thoroughly revised and updated for this book and address some of the important questions and issues that were raised at that conference in response to the presentation of these papers. As yet there has been very little published about ‘The Red Book’. __The Red Book: Reflections on C.G. Jung’s _Liber Novus_ will contribute to setting the agenda for further research, both scholarly and clinical, in response to Jung’s account of his experiences between 1913-1914, when arguably, the future course of his entire project was set in motion. This book will be essential reading for any Jungian interested in the importance of The Red Book, analytical psychologists, trainee analysts, those with an interest in the history of ideas and historians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Schopenhauer's Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good MARK MIGOTTI SCHOPENHAUERTOOK PESSIMISMtO be a profound doctrine that had long been accepted by the majority of humanity, albeit usually in the allegorical form given to it by one or another religious creed. Accordingly, he credited himself, not with the discovery of pessimism, but with the provision of a satisfactory philosophical exposition and defense of its claims. It was, he contended, only within (...) the context of his philosophy, animated by the "single thought" that "the world is the self-knowledge of the will,"' that the ultimate significance of pessimism and the arguments demonstrating its inescapability can be brought to light. If, nevertheless, he sometimes appears to protest too much, to defend pessimism as if it were a striking and novel affair, he would have attributed this to the fact that he was, unfortunately, writing in the midst of one of the most naively optimistic cultures known to world history. 2 The philosophical reception of Schopenhauer's pessimism since the publication of The World as Will and Representation in 1818 would, one suspects, have been taken by him as further evidence of modern Western philosophy's optimistic somnambulance. For while other, comparably fundamental aspects of his thought--for example, his theories of action, of the self, and his criticisms of Kant--have received a welcome amount of fruitful, critical attention, his I would like to thank John Atwell, David Schmidtz, Susan Haack, Rudolf Makkreel and, especially,two anonymous referees, for prompting me to make substantial improvements to an earlier draft of this paper. ' Arthur Schopenhauer, Der handschrifllicher Nachlass 1, ed. Arthur Hiibscher (Frankfurt-amMain : Kramer, 1967),462; Manuscript Remains 1, trans. E. F.J. Payne(NewYork: Berg Publishing, 1988), 512. 'See, for example, Arthur Schopenhauer, D/e Welt als Wille und VorsteUung II. In Arthur Schopenhauer. Ziircher Ausgabe, ed. Arthur Hiibscher et. al. (Zurich: DiogenesVerlag, 1977),w 4:721, 732-33; The World as Will and Representation II, trans. E. F. J. Payne(New York: Dover Press, 1969),615, 625-26. Future references to this work willbe made within the text, by the abbreviation WW followed by section number, German edition volume and page number and English translation page number. [643] 644 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER ~995 pessimism has not. Amongst enthusiastic followers it has sometimes been swallowed more or less whole, but from more independent-minded readers it has generally met with disdainful mockery or well-intentioned neglect.3 The aim of this paper is to help rectify' this imbalance. In the first of its four sections, I present an account of Schopenhauerian pessimism that can claim a good measure of textual support, and the essential features of which are found often enough in the secondary literature to warrant calling it the mainstream interpretation.4 In section 2 I show that, as critics have charged, the arguments for pessimism on this interpretation suffer from a pair of fatal ambiguities, and in section 3 I sketch an alternative argument for pessimism, one not so obviously open to the sort of knock-down refutation to which the first argument succumbs. In the paper's final section l explore further the philosophical consequences of this alternative argument for pessimism. 3Gyorg'yLukacs, "Schopenhauer," chapter ~,section 4 of The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin Press, 1979), 19~-243, isthe locusclassicusof an attitude of superior scorn. Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: "the Clarendon Press, 1983), z3-14, D. W. Hamlyn, Schopentmuer (London: Routledge, z98o), *43, Michael Fox, "Schopenhauer on Death, Suicide, and Renunciation." in Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, ed. Michael Fox (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 198o), ]47-7o, and David Cartwrigh*, "Schopenhauer on Suffering, Death, Guilt, and the Consolation of Metaphysics,"in Schopenhauer: New Essays in Hotwr ofHis 2ooth Birthday, ed. Eric yon der Luft (Lewiston,NY: Edwin Mellen Press, t988), 66, all incline to the viewthat it was temperament, not argument, that drove Schopenhauer to pessimism, while Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhatwr (London: Penguin Books, ]963), does not discuss pessimism by name. Not even Nietzsche, the deepest and most astute of Schopenhauer'scritics,can resistbarbs of the following sort: "Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, in ]act played the flute... (shrink)

One response to the existential threat posed by a super-intelligent AI is to design it to be friendly to us. Some have argued that even if this were possible, the resulting AI would treat us as we do our pets. Sparrow (AI & Soc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01698-x, 2023) argues that this would be a bad outcome, for such an AI would dominate us—resulting in our freedom being diminished (Pettit in Just freedom: A moral compass for a complex world. WW Norton & Company, (...) 2014). In this paper, I consider whether this would be such a bad outcome. (shrink)

Recently, Barbara Renzi argued that Kuhn's account of scientific change is undermined by mismatches in the analogy that Kuhn supposedly draws between scientific change and biological evolution. We argue that Renzi's criticism is inadequate to Kuhn's account of scientific change, as Kuhn does not draw any precise analogy between the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution nor aims to argue that the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution are similar in any important respects. Therefore, pointing to mismatches between (...) the central concepts that feature in the descriptions of the two phenomena simply misses the point of Kuhn's analogy. *Received January 2010; revised January 2010. †To contact the authors, please write to: Thomas A. C. Reydon, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Im Moore 21, D‐30167 Hannover, Germany; e‐mail: [email protected]‐hannover.de. (shrink)

According to the traditional view of weakness of will, a weak-willed agent acts in a way inconsistent with what she judges to be best.1 Richard Holton has argued against this view, claiming that ‘the central cases of weakness of will are best characterized not as cases in which people act against their better judgment, but as cases in which they fail to act on their intentions’ (1999: 241). But Holton doesn’t think all failures to act on one’s prior intentions, or (...) all revisings of intentions, are cases of weakness of will (WW). Rather, he thinks an intention-revision is a case of WW only when it occurs ‘in circumstances in which [one] should not have revised [the intention]’. Holton points out that according to the traditional view of WW, to call an agent ‘weak-willed’ is to make descriptive claim about the agent (about whether an action in fact is inconsistent with what (s)he judges to be best). But according to Holton’s account, the question of whether the agent was weak-willed ‘will depend on which intentions [the agent] should have stuck with as a rational intender. That is a normative question’ (my emphasis) (241-3, 247-8. (shrink)

In this paper, we re-examine a series of gedanken welcher Weg (WW) experiments introduced by Scully, Englert and Walther that contain the essential ideas underlying the quantum eraser. For this purpose we use the Bohm model which gives a sharp picture of the behaviour of the atoms involved in these experiments. This model supports the thesis that interference disappears in such WW experiments, even though the centre of mass wave function remains coherent throughout the experiment. It also shows exactly what (...) it means to say ‘that the interference can be restored by manipulating the WW detectors long after the atoms have passed’. It does not support Wheeler’s notion that ‘the past is undefined and undefinable without the observation (in the present)’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Front NICOLAS ALIFERIS (Translated by Avi Sharon) The poems in Nicolas Aliferis’s 1998 collection “From the Front” offer a panorama of postcard views and epistolary voices from across the Greek oikoumene during the years 1897 through 1922. While the title has military tones, they are not all soldier’s letters. In point of fact, this was a period when the territorial limits of Greece, “the Front,” were undergoing (...) near constant alteration—“like the ink drunk in by blotting paper” as Seferis wrote in a poem about Europe at the beginning of the Second World War. The front, therefore, could be almost anywhere during this period, and certainly in the minds of almost every Greek. The Greco-Turkish War of 1897, stemming from irredentist forces in Crete, was the earliest outbreak, and put that island on a path toward union with the mainland. After that came the string of Balkan conflagrations before, during, and after ww i, that would more than double the land mass and population of Greece. The sequence of Treaties that, one by one, concluded each stage in these disputes (from that of Constantinople in 1897, to Sevres in 1920) brought Crete, Epirus, much of Macedonia, and then Thrace and the Dodecanese islands within the limits of Greece proper. The “front” was therefore more an idea than a line on a map, and the experience of it was not limited to actual soldiers in real trenches. The distinct personae that animate each poem range from conscripts in training camps to villagers turned mercenaries to city-bound merchants and other figures, high and low. The poems themselves are drawn from various sources: some were personal letters in the poet’s own family archive, others were drawn from written history arion 28.2 fall 2020 124 from the front and newspaper scraps, while some are more purely hypothetical. They present an imaginary memento of the experiences and voices of that period, and the struggle, personal and national, that helped inform the shape and meaning of what Greece is today. Nicolas Aliferis 125 the death of chakalarov We did away with Chakalarov and Popov, those terrors to the villages. They’d collect our lira then make their way to the north. When word reached Macedonia it was a huge relief. Now we’re in the mountains, all sixteen of us, walking the trails covered in fog, holed up in the rocks, always on lookout. The cold is fierce: ice, snow, gnashing teeth. Our enemies raging and the Bulgarians wild as bears. So much blood, deep red. Beyond to the east, gleaming peacefully, the lakes, Ostrovou and Sorovitz. 126 from the front dombro betser I received your letter. With so much happening here there was little time to write. But we haven’t forgotten you; every day there’s some mention of your name. How are you finding Macedonia— her mountains, her rivers? You were not joking with our neighbors, I see. Where will this story end for us? The teacher from the Monastery, she asks about you: “And Mr. Pelopidas...” she begins, then lowers her eyes. Here the knives are out. Oh Lord, will we ever get over it? Nicolas Aliferis 127 adrianople 1920 I am well and wish you the same. Living is cheap here— a chicken costs just two and a half drachmas. Lately I’ve gotten to know all the upper level subordinates and quite a few merchants, Turks and Jews. In the evening there’s either study or cards. As for what you write: I say we should learn from the Belgians, Pantelis, just a little. Otherwise, I’m afraid, our race is finished! 128 from the front training camp, 1918 I’ve sent three letters and received none. Only yesterday I heard news from the trenches: the deeds of Yanni and Bicha, how they died. It rained today and is raining still. I sit alone (it’s been a while...) and write you. My comrades are outside, their eyes glued to the open spaces. How necessary for the soul— amid this solitude— to feel human. The need to hear the breath of a comrade, to stand above his gaze, to half close your... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Handbook of Research and Policy in Art EducationCharles M. DornHandbook of Research and Policy in Art Education, edited by Elliot Eisner and Michael Day. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004, 879 pp., $90.00 paper.The Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education is an 875-page compendium of articles addressing nearly every conceivable issue in the field and is, if nothing else, a valuable tour de force for any reader (...) who wants to come up to speed on issues in the field. It is not, however, either strictly a handbook or a complete exploration of either art education policy or research. This in no way diminishes its potential value as a source for policy issues and research that are of significant concern to the field.The publication presents 36 individual or joint authored chapters on (1) historical currents in art education, (2) policy perspectives impacting the teaching of art, (3) learning in the visual arts, (4) teaching and teacher education, (5) forms of assessment in art education, and (6) emerging visions of the field. Each of the six sections begins with a short introductory statement by the researcher responsible for reviewing the essays in that session. These section editors include F. Graeme-Chalmers, Ralph Smith, Anna Kindler, Enid Zimmerman, Elisabeth Soep, and Arthur Efland. Forty-one authors contributed to the book's contents, all of which have nationally recognized expertise in handling the topic discussed.Editors Elliot Eisner and Michael Day view the book as an effort to bring together research and theory, policy, and concepts that guide and give shape to what people in art education try to accomplish—which is, of course, a rather ambitious goal. Even the editors admit the Handbook meets some but not all of these competing orientations. They also claim that the Handbook serves as an assertion that art education is a scholarly field, perhaps even to a fault through mostly ignoring qualitative issues regarding goals, expressive art form, and aesthetics. Also, the editors admit that the Handbook will be a disappointment, which is true, especially with respect to its emphasis on rationales rather than policy problems, on assessment appreciation rather than policy and research, on assessment in art education history as a record of events rather than as policy windows, and on emerging visions as older forms of social and political discourse rather than policy issues, implementation, and evaluation.Nevertheless, the Handbook addresses a number of important policy issues, providing well-developed and valuable views of the field by a variety of important authors and, in some cases, with some rarely seen insights into the nature of the field. I will only review the most salient ideas of the chapter authors in each of the six sections and then comment on what I believe are promising, and sometimes somewhat troubling, directions pointed out in the chapters, including what promises have not been fulfilled. [End Page 111]Section I, on historical currents, includes chapters by F. Graeme Chalmers; Mary Ann Stankiewicz, Pat Amburgy, and Paul Bolin; and John Howell White. Chalmers provides a very thorough overview of the literature on the history of art education, including what he calls the broad perspectives on art education, history, and research interests of art education historians. Overall, he references nearly 300 publications. Stankiewicz, Amburgy, and Bolin then address specific movements in nineteenth-century art education and art, including a brief history of the social function of art, drawing instruction in schools, industrial drawing, manual training, the arts and crafts movement picture study, and progressive education with over 120 references. White, who follows, provides a similar review of major forces, focusing mainly on art education influences in the twentieth century, addressing the contributions of various art educators, arts organizational leaders, artists, government initiatives, and the critical and divergent influences of key post–WW II art education writers. He also documents his work with nearly 300 sources.Section II, on policy perspectives, contains seven chapters, including ones by Ralph Smith; Samuel Hope; Constance Bumgarner Gee; Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner; H. Gene Blocker; and E. Louis Langford and Kelly Scheffer. In Section II, Sam Hope outlines the power of policy and its effect... (shrink)

Among Marxists and Communists, Louis Althusser has long had a reputation for theoreticism and scientism, the factors most often cited to explain the eclipse of his work since the 1960’s. According to the standard account, the distinguishing characteristic and major flaw of his work is that it brings everything back to knowledge. In this essay, I interrogate this understanding of Althusser by reconsidering two cornerstones of Althusserian theory that seem most to exemplify his extreme privileging of epistemology: the symptom and (...) the interpellation theory of ideology. I argue not that taking them to work on the epistemological level is wrong but rather incomplete; there exists a not quite acknowledged beyond of knowledge and interpellation in Althusser, which takes the form of a traumaticnarrative of history, enjoyment, and desire. The production of knowledge in Althusser unfolds as a pathos-laden story, which on one level gestures toward the turbulent world history in which he developed his theory: primarily WW II and the post-war Stalinist revelations, along with the conflicts it provoked in the Communist Party, and the French Communist Party in particular. Although not the subject of extended analysis, these events haunt Althusser’s texts in the form of allusions and the surprisingly violent figurative language with which Althusser discusses theoretical labor. I contend that they call to be analyzed as a kind of return of the repressed, best approached through Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytically inflected theory of ideology. (shrink)

Analiza postępowania inżynieryjnego przeprowadzona przez pracowników Politechniki Wrocławskiej potwierdza zasadność użycia metody optymalizacyjnej, będącej szczególnym rodzajem stosowanej w naukach teoretycznych metody idealizacyjnej. Treścią artykułu jest przedstawienie próby zastosowania metody optymalizacyjnej w naukach technicznych zaliczanych do grupy nauk praktycznych. Wcześniej wykazano na przykładzie pedagogiki, iż ww. nauki z powodzeniem mogą stosować metodę optymalizacji. Zadaniem artykułu było zapoznanie kolegów z Wyższej Szkoły Technicznej w Karl-Marx-Stadt - gdzie został wygłoszony w postaci referatu na międzynarodowej konferencji - z metodą optymalizacyjną i jej zastosowaniem w (...) postępowaniu inżynieryjnym. (shrink)

Conrad Hal Waddington integrated genetics with embryology and evolution by formulating and providing experimental evidence for the mechanisms of canalization and genetic assimilation in the context of stabilizing selection, and by fostering an epigenetic rather than the prevailing gene-centered view of embryonic development and of evolutionary change in development and adult form. Waddington saw phenotypes as processes, not static structures and behaviors. Trained in geology at Cambridge, Waddington turned to experimental studies on the chemical nature of the primary organizer and (...) developed the concepts of evocation and individuation as separable components of embryonic induction. A move after WW II to Edinburgh provided Waddington with his professional home for the rest of his career, during which he integrated genetics and development into an evolutionarily relevant discipline. Our conception of embryonic development as a highly integrated series of canalized pathways owes much to Waddington’s development of the concepts of canalization, chreods, epigenetics, and the epigenotype. The integrated, heritable, epigenetic organization of embryonic development is Waddington’s lasting legacy to development. He demonstrated organismal response to environmental change and hidden genetic variation, integrated environmental responsiveness into heritable change in response to selection, and coupled development, environment, and evolution. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie analizy tekstów prasowych zamieszczonych w niemieckim „DER SPIEGEL” oraz „SPIEGEL ONLINE” z okresu 31.05.2010 – 07.07.2010 poświęconych wynikom oraz dwóm kluczowym kandydatom wyborów prezydenckich w Polsce 2010 – Jarosławowi Kaczyńskiemu i Bronisławowi Komorowskiemu. W szczególności analizie poddane zostają sformułowania i wyrażenia użyte w tekstach na określenie wyników wyborów oraz obydwu kluczowych postaci zmagań wyborczych, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem potencjałów ewaluacyjnych zawartych w ww. określeniach.

Ubiquitination is essential in mediating diverse cellular functions including protein degradation and trafficking. Ubiquitin‐protein (E3) ligases determine the substrate specificity of the ubiquitination process. The Nedd4 family of E3 ligases is an evolutionarily conserved family of proteins required for the ubiquitination of a large number of cellular targets. As a result, this family regulates a wide variety of cellular processes including transcription, stability and trafficking of plasma membrane proteins, and the degradation of misfolded proteins. The modular architecture of the proteins, (...) comprising a C2 domain, multiple WW domains and a catalytic domain, enables diverse intermolecular interactions and recruitment to various subcellular locations. The WW domains commonly mediate interaction with substrate proteins; however, an increasing number of Nedd4 targets do not contain obvious WW domain‐interaction motifs suggesting the involvement of accessory proteins. This review discusses recent insights into how accessory and adaptor proteins modulate the activities of Nedd4 family members, including recruitment of novel substrates, alteration of subcellular localisation and effects on ubiquitination. BioEssays 28: 617–628, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Artykuł przywołuje poglądy liderów polskiej myśli oświeceniowej na temat sprawiedliwości i równości. W dobie oświecenia dokonał się niewątpliwy awans tej problematyki, co wyrażało się nie tylko w wydatnym wzroście ilościowym wypowiedzi na temat sprawiedliwości, a zwłaszcza równości, ale także w ujawnianiu bogactwa konstytuujących je zagadnień oraz w merytorycznej dojrzałości ich interpretacji i analiz. Przegląd poglądów na ww. zagadnienia zaczynamy od wypowiedzi Stanisława Leszczyńskiego, w których pojawiły się idee prooświeceniowe, następnie przedstawiamy poglądy przedstawicieli philosophiae recentiorum: Stanisława H. Konarskiego, Antoniego Wiśniewskiego, Józefa (...) K. Skrzetuskiego, z kolei dojrzałą fazę myśli oświeceniowej reprezentują tu jej liderzy: Stanisław Popławski, Franciszek S. Jezierski, Hugo Kołłątaj, Hieronim Stroynowski (Strojnowski), Stanisław W. Staszic. Przedstawiony zestaw poglądów wymienionych wyżej myślicieli na temat sprawiedliwości i równości wymownie zaświadcza o tym, że problematyka ta budziła żywe zainteresowanie ówczesnych elit intelektualnych, które wypowiadały się na ich temat z dużą kompetencją, zaangażowaniem i znawstwem, co w konsekwencji sprawiło, że ich znaczenie znacznie wybiegało poza epokę,która je zrodziła. (shrink)

The recent developments in new media tools promise to improve our personal access to information management and our personalized abilities concerning i-communication. Rather than focusing on the practical implications of this evolution, I take a step back and address two underlying cultural phenomena in order to get a grip on the contemporary significance of ‘new media’. The first phenomenon (technotopia) concerns the place technology occupies in our psychological perception. ‘Technology’ is a concept on the move. In post-war culture, technology stands (...) for industrialization and mechanization. It is often associated withan external power, like capitalism (consumerism), military force (WW II, Cold War warfare) or ideology (the race for space travel, biotechnoscience). In post-wall culture, technology increasingly stands for new media and digital user-oriented innovations. The threat or fascination with respect to an external authority is replaced by a democratization of technology. New media constantly remediates our relation to the world, hence becoming immanent and ubiquitous. The second phenomenon (Cybertribes) concerns the function of new media in our society. From an anthropological point of view, it is worthwhile to conceive new media as acontemporary ‘totem’ that structures communities. Unlike ‘myths’ or ‘gods’, ‘totems’ are ideological organization principles that are conceptually ambiguous, heterogeneous, open and incomplete. Hence, it can fulfill plurality of functions. For instance, it intensively shapes our daily interaction, it allows for aspiration and identification (cf. Cyborg-mania, avatars in Second Life). Moreover, it is a device to express and revolt (cf. Hacktivism, Etoy‐war, Marx 2.0). (shrink)

Aerial photography had a special place in the business of the legendary former Swiss airline, "Swissair." Walter Mittelholzer, aviation pioneer and one of the founders of "Swissair," first trained as a photographer before joining the Swiss army s flying corps during WW I and later turning to civil aviation because of his keen interest in aerial photography. Photography was also the more profitable part of "Ad Astra Aero," one of "Swissair s "preceding companies which continued to exist as a subsidiary (...) of the newly formed "Swissair" under the name "Swissair Photo AG" as of 1931 until 2001, when the famous airline ceased operations. "Swissair Photo + Vermessung AG" was saved from liquidation in a buyout in 2001 and still operates as" BSF Swissphoto." The heritage of Walter Mittelholzer and "Swissair Photo AG" is kept at ETH Zurich s Image Archive, alongside Swissair s corporate "Swissair Photo Archive". The collection comprises around 100,000 pictures taken between 1918 and 2011. In includes mainly vertical and oblique aerial photographs of landscapes, towns and villages, and mountains, but also industrial plants, infrastructures, and individual buildings in Switzerland and abroad, from the 1960s onward in color. About 15,000 of them were taken by Walter Mittelholzer. A remarkable aspect is the vast number of views of the Swiss mountains: pure landscape photography, many of them with a horizontal or slightly oblique perspective. This was caused by personal interest of the photographers, many of them also keen mountaineers, but probably also by a high demand for such pictures for postcards and other commercial use. During the 1970s there was a notable change, when a more aesthetic view of the land became dominant that rather looked vertically at shapes and colors of the cultivated landscape than at the wilderness. Around 200 of the most beautiful, most striking, and most informative photographs were selected for the new book "Swissair Aerial Photography." They show the many changes in the landscape and in settlements over nearly a century. They also are an inventory of lost elements making a landscape, such as untamed rivers, orchards, receding glaciers and moors, shrinking agricultural areas, vanished historical buildings. And they document the growth of industrial plants and other infrastructure and urban sprawl in general. The book shows how an idyllic agricultural country has turned into one of the most densely inhabited places in the world in a matter of decades. The introductory essay looks at the history and content of the collection at the Image Archive at ETH Bibliothek, the history and a range of aspects of aerial photography in general, the changing aesthetics and use of the images and what can be read from them today, technical developments and a brief history of aerial photography in Switzerland." " Series The series "Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the Image Archive, ETH-Bibliothek, "published in cooperation by "ETH-Bibliothek" and Scheidegger & Spiess, aims at building a bridge between analytical treatment of historical image sources and the interest in individual photographs for any possible reason. Whereas the library s online database simplifies research and enables search inquiries going beyond the mere inventory, the books are meant to present the contours of specific collections of images, to embed them in the context of their origin, and to offer an introduction to the multitude of possible historical interpretations. Each volume of the series comprises an introductory essay on the given subject and presented material. Detailed captions offer additional information on individual images. This subject-guided approach and carefully selected examples are meant to give a representative view of the sometimes extensive range of a particular collection within the Image Archive. The entire series is conceived for a general audience interested in cultural history and visual aesthetics, rather than for a specialized and scientifically interested one. ". (shrink)