Diversität ist eines der zentralen Themen unserer Zeit. Sie durchdringt alle Lebensbereiche unserer Gesellschaften. Das Nachdenken über Diversität reicht von den Naturwissenschaften über die Geschichtswissenschaften, die Gesellschaftswissenschaften, die Philosophie bis zu den Künsten. Diversität ist zudem politisch und emotional beladen. Man denke an gesellschaftliche Minderheiten und ihre Rechte oder an das massive Artensterben unserer Tage. In diesem Buch wird nicht nur über Einzelaspekte von Diversität berichtet, es wird auch eine Synthese versucht. Drei einleitende Kapitel der HerausgeberInnen führen verständlich in komplexe (...) interdisziplinäre Problemzusammenhänge ein. Der Band versammelt 17 Beiträge namhafter Autorinnen und Autoren aus den Bereichen Kunst-, Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Medizin und Gesellschaftstheorie.00. (shrink)

Forschungen zur verkörperten Intelligenz und zu den symbolischen Vermittlungen des menschlichen Geistes werden bislang zumeist in getrennten Disziplinen betrieben. Die aus der Kulturphilosophie, Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft, Theologie, Medizin, Psychiatrie, Psychologie und Kognitionswissenschaft stammenden Beiträge des Bandes vereint jedoch das gemeinsame Ziel, einen umfassenden Begriff von Verkörperung zu entwickeln, der die Grenzziehung zwischen kulturalistischen und naturalistischen Ansätzen überwindet.

This book demonstrates that ancient Christian Gnosticism was an ancient form of cultural criticism in a mythological garb. It establishes that, much like modern forms of critical theory, ancient Gnosticism was set on deconstructing mainstream discourses and cultural premises. Strains of critical theory dealt with include the Frankfurt School, queer theory, and poststructural philosophy. The book documents how in both ancient Gnosticism and modern critical theories issues that used to serve as premises for discussion or as concepts relegated to the (...) realms of the “natural” and the “given” in their respective historical contexts, are transformed into objects of contention. The main aim of this book is to salvage the historical category of Gnosticism from its present scholarly disavowal, if only because Gnosticism, when read as a cultural, and not only a religious phenomenon, presents us an ancient form of culture criticism which would be hard to parallel until (post) modernity. While Hans Jonas remarked many years ago that “something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular,” by the 21st century global world this something has already entered and lives with us. We can thus still benefit from another perspective, even if it comes from Mediterranean people who lived almost 2,000 years ago. (shrink)

Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked (...) by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence. (shrink)

For many years G. E. Moore asked himself what was wrong with sentences like ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don't believe that I did’, or ‘I believe that he has gone out, but he has not’. He discussed the problem in 1912 in his Ethics , and was still discussing it in 1944 in a paper to the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge—an event we know about from a letter of Wittgenstein that I shall quote in (...) a moment. Throughout these years of pondering, Moore retained a remarkably stable vocabulary for setting out his solution. Briefly, he held this: saying ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don't believe that I did’ is absurd, but not self-contradictory. Not self-contradictory, because ‘it may quite well be true’; yet absurd, because the speaker expressly repudiates, in the second part of the sentence, a belief which he implies by uttering the first part. The panoply of distinctions which subtends this doctrine—sentence v. utterance of sentence, saying v. implying, contradiction v. absurdity—was subjected to keen scrutiny a generation or so ago, and much of it has now passed into philosophical lore as a discussion of ‘Moore's Paradox’. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive and detailed exploration of the relationship between the thought of G.W.F. Hegel and that of John McDowell, the latter of whom is widely considered to be one of the most influential living analytic philosophers. It serves as a point of entry in McDowell’s and Hegel’s philosophy, and a substantial contribution to ongoing debates on perceptual experience and perceptual justification, naturalism, human freedom and action. The chapters gathered in this volume, as well as McDowell’s responses, make (...) it clear that McDowell’s work paves the way for an original reading of Hegel’s texts. His conceptual framework allows for new interpretive possibilities in Hegel’s philosophy which, until now, have remained largely unexplored. Moreover, these interpretations shed light on various aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the philosophies of these two authors, thus defining more clearly their positions on specific issues. In addition, they allow us to see Hegel’s thought as containing a number of conceptual tools that might be useful for advancing McDowell’s own philosophy and contemporary philosophy in general. (shrink)

The survival of some masterpieces of literature across the ages is still an unexplained mystery. Deeply rooted in their time, they reflect the preoccupations of a given historical period and have an impact, by means of their testimony, on future generations. They bring into play images, drives and phantoms which have remained unchanged from prehistoric time to our day. The perfection of their form has remained unequaled; their examples incite us to meditation and creativity.

Burge famously argued that one can have thoughts involving a concept C even if one’s understanding of C is incomplete. Even though this view has been extremely influential, it has also been taken by critics as less than clear. The aim of this paper is to show that the cases imagined by Burge as being ones in which incomplete understanding of concepts is involved can be made clearer given an account of direct concept ascriptions—such as “Peter has the concept of (...) arthritis”—according to which these ascriptions are to be analysed in terms of ascriptions of the knowledge of what something is. The upshot is that the cases imagined by Burge can be explained is terms of the idea of subjects knowing in part what something is. (shrink)

Burns proposes an intriguing hypothesis by suggesting that the “schizophrenia genes” might not be regulatory genes themselves, but rather closely associated with regulatory genes directly involved in the proper growth of the social brain. We point out that this account would benefit from incorporating the effects of localized lesions and aberrant hemispheric asymmetry on cortical connectivity underlying the social brain. In addition, we argue that the evolutionary framework is superfluous.

We argue that the pivotal role assigned by Northoff to the principle of top-down modulation in catatonia might successfully be applied to other symptoms of schizophrenia, for example, hallucinations. Second, we propose that Northoff's account would benefit from a more comprehensive analysis of the cognitive level of explanation. Finally, contrary to Northoff, we hypothesize that “top-down modulation” might play as important a role as “horizontal modulation” in affective-behavioral alterations.

A proposta do presente artigo é contextualizar, no pensamento de Schopenhauer, traços fundamentais de sua reflexão estética sobre a alegoria. Para tanto, o artigo foi desenvolvido segundo três linhas de argumentação: interpretação da alegoria no âmbito de uma reflexão simbólica da teoria da representação; a relação entre poesia e alegoria no pensamento de Schopenhauer, com destaque para uma confrontação de sua posição tanto com o primeiro romantismo quanto com o idealismo alemão; compreensão da alegoria como elemento estético de uma retórica (...) poética do engano. (shrink)

O objetivo do presente artigo, pensado preliminarmente como parte integrante de um estudo mais amplo e sistemático sobre o processo de formação do pensamento do jovem Nietzsche, é discutir o estatuto da linguagem em suas considerações sobre estética, notadamente naquela apresentada nos fragmentos, apontamentos e escritos póstumos preparatórios d’ O Nascimento da Tragédia . Como se poderá notar, o viés de investigação proposto, respaldado em importantes estudos de literatura secundária, primou por uma esmerada, porém não exaustiva, reconstituição do trinômio: linguagem (...) sonora ( Tonsprache ), linguagem-de-gesto ( Geberdensprache ) e linguagem-de-palavra ( Wortsprache ), que margeia a investigação nietzscheana sobre a origem, desenvolvimento e perecimento da tragédia grega. (shrink)

In The Sovereignty of Good Iris Murdoch suggests that the central task of the moral agent involves a true and loving perception of an- other individual, who is seen as a particular reality external to the agent. Writing in the 1960s she claimed that this dimension of morality had been "theorized away" in contemporary ethics. I will argue today that 20 years later, this charge still holds true of much contemporary ethical theory.

Je présente d’abord quelques notions de base de la sémantique philosophique, en particulier celles de signification linguistique, compré-hension linguistique, conditions de vérité, et “ce qui est dit”. La signi-fication linguistique ne doit pas être confondue avec “ce qui est dit” par l’énonciation littérale d’une phrase en contexte, cette dernière notion, centrale dans le contextualisme actuel, pouvant être reconstruite comme sémantique ou pragmatique selon le rôle que l’on fait jouer à la notion de signification du locuteur. J’examine ensuite de quelle façon (...) ces notions se combinent dans diverses approches ou “figures historiques”, en insistant sur la relation langage-pensée. La première est la théorie idéationnelle du langage, défendue par Arnauld et Locke. La seconde est la sémantique philosophique classique, qui se développe dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. La troisième est le contextualisme actuel, développé en parti-culier par Travis et Récanati. La comparaison révèle ceci: quant à la façon dont est reconstruite la notion de “ce qui est dit”: l’idéisme et le contex-tualisme s’accordent pour en faire une notion pragmatique, en opposition à la sémantique philosophique classique assortie de l’appareil gricéen.I first present a few basic notions of philosophical semantics, namely that of linguistic meaning, linguistic understanding, truth-con-ditions, and What Is Said. I try to show, like contextualists today urge us to, that the distinction between linguistic meaning and What Is Said by a literal utterance of a sentence in a context should not be blurred. The notion of What Is Said, of central importance for contextualism, can be construed as a semantic or a pragmatic notion according to the role played by the notion of speaker meaning in one’s favorite theory. Then I present an overview of three historical approaches in the history of the sciences of language, focusing on the language-thought relation and showing how these notions combine differently. The first is the ideational theory of language, defended by Arnauld and Locke. The sec-ond is the classical philosophical semantics developed in the first half of XXth century. The third is today’s contextualism, developed mainly by Travis and Recanati. Here is what the comparison reveals: the “way of ideas” and contextualism agree that the notion of What Is Said should be construed as a pragmatic notion, in opposition to classical philosophical semantics cum the Gricean apparatus. (shrink)

A relative tensor calculus is formulated for expressing equations of mathematical physics. A tensor time derivative operator ▽ b a is defined which operates on tensors λia...ib. Equations are written in a rigid, flat, inertial or other coordinate system a, altered to relative tensor notation, and are thereby expressed in general flowing coordinate systems or materials b, c, d, .... Mirror tensor expressions for ▽ b a λic...id and ▽ b a λic...id exist in a relative geometry G if and (...) only if a rigid coordinate system a exists in G, where ▽ b a λic = λ ,0c ic + λkev ckc aic + λ kc ic v b ckc , ▽jcλic = λ ,jc ic + λkcΓ jc kc ie , and v b aic is the velocity of b relative to a with components in c. These operators are convenient in theoretical analyses and can be incorporated into machine programs for the numerical solution of physical problems. (shrink)

Le possible s'y revele a l'etat pur et c'est pourquoi le titre en devient un verbe actif; Le Sera.