This article investigates how voters made sense of the Dutch EU constitutional referendum. Based on a series of focus group interviews, it identifies what information people based their understandings on, and traces the relations they draw between concepts in their own accounts of their vote choices. Applying a cognitive connectionist perspective on the construction of meaning, it models people's considerations as paths across semantic networks. It finds that people shared considerable parts of the knowledge underlying their constructions, but used this (...) information quite differently. They strategically selected frames from their information environment, and reframed contrary arguments to fit their constructions. Yes- and No-voters drew in systematically different additional information, while simultaneously engaging idiosyncratic concerns to personalize their accounts. People's understandings are thus informed and constrained, but by no means determined, by public discourse. Highlighting people's activity and creativity, this paper calls for a stronger audience perspective in political communication research. (shrink)

What is commonly known as neo-Kantianism is in fact a philosophical movement comprising many philosophers and different approaches. This movement established itself in the 1870s and dominated the philosophical developments and debates until the 1930s. The label ‘neo-Kantianism’ or ‘critical philosophy’ is unanimously and unquestionably applied to the Marburg School—whose main representatives are Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer—and the Southwest German School, also called the Baden School or Heidelberg School—whose protagonists are Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, (...) Jonas Cohn and Bruno Bauch. Although these two schools represent what may be called the main theories of neo-Kantian philosophy, there has always been discussion about the main features of neo-Kantianism and the philosophers fitting this label. Even the view that the Marburg and the Southwest German Schools are the essential r .. (shrink)

Nach den Anschlagen in Paris, Brussel und Nizza und den verzweifelten Erklarungsversuchen sind die Baden-Badener Reden von Alfred Grosser, Hans Gert-Pottering und Robert Zollitsch eine grosse Hilfe. Eine Hilfe, die schmerzenden Erfahrungen des Augenblicks in einen grosseren Zusammenhang zu bringen. Wenn etwa Alfred Grosser in seiner Rede den Bogen zu seiner eigenen Biografie hin zu den Banlieues unserer Tage in Paris spannt. "Ich bin seit 1937 Franzose, unsere Erziehungsministerin ist Franzosin seit 1995, unser Premierminister seit 1982, die Burgermeisterin von (...) Paris seit 1973, Nicolas Sarkozy ist Fluchtlingssohn. Niemand wird sagen, sie sind nicht Franzosen. Aber die jungen Leute in den sogenannten "Vororten" sind fast alle franzosische Staatsburger und werden total diskriminiert. Also, sie haben die franzosische Identitat, gewiss, aber sie suchen eine andere Identitat und das ist der Islam. Nicht der Islam war zuerst da, sondern die Diskriminierung.". (shrink)

O Trabalho pretende expor os traços iniciais da fenomenologia hermenêutica de Heidegger a partir da crítica realizada pelo autor ao método crítico-teleológico do neokantismo de Baden na preleção de 1919 A ideia da filosofia e o problema da concepção de mundo.

Was wären die Menschen ohne ihre Werkzeuge? Was erzählen die unterschiedlichen Werkzeuge, technisch gestützten Praktiken und extensions des Menschen ins Unabsehbare über die menschliche Lebensform? Und wie verändert sich das menschliche Selbstverständnis unter dem Eindruck der zunehmenden Durchdringung und Gestaltung des Lebens durch Technik? Dies sind Fragen, die sich – wie öffentliche Diskurse über ‚autonomes Fahren‘, digitales Lernen oder den Fluch und Segen von Smartphones, Apps und Smartwatches zeigen − offenkundig nicht erst im Rahmen wissenschaftlicher Untersuchungen des Mensch-Technik-Verhältnisses stellen. Mithin (...) bieten Kunst und Literatur einen reichen Fundus an menschlichen Selbstentwürfen, Techno-Utopien und Science Fiction, in denen mal realistischere, mal spekulativere Szenarien des Menschseins durchgespielt werden. (shrink)

During the years leading up to the revolutions of 1848, liberal and conservative Germans engaged in a contest over the terms of the Enlightenment legacy and the meaning of Christianity--a contest that grew most intense in the Grand Duchy of Baden, where liberalism first became an influential political movement. Bringing insights drawn from Jewish and women's studies into German history, Dagmar Herzog demonstrates how centrally Christianity's problematic relationships to Judaism and to sexuality shaped liberal, conservative, and radical thought in (...) the pre-revolutionary years. In particular, she reveals how often conflicts over the "politics of the personal," especially over sex and marriage, determined "larger" political matters, among them the relationship between church and state and the terms on which Jews were granted civic rights. Herzog documents the rise of a politically sophisticated conservative Catholicism, and explores liberals' ensuing eagerness to advance a humanist version of Christianity. Yet she also examines the limitations at the heart of the liberal project, especially liberals' unwillingness to grant equality to those deemed "different" from the Christian male norm. Finally, the author analyzes the difficulties encountered by philosemitic and feminist radicals in reconceptualizing both classical liberalism and Christianity in order to make room for the claims of Jews and women. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 353 proportionalism that Finnis's theological argument exploits. In this regard, there is no moral theory, good or bad, which overreaches so far as proportionalism does. Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey ROBERT P. GEORGE Faithful Persuasion: In Aid of a Rhetoric of Christian Theology. By DAVID S. CUNNINGHAM. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Pp. xvii + 312. $29.95 (cloth) ; $16.95 (paper). The relation (...) between words and the Word has always been of in· terest in Christian theology. Earlier in this century a school of writers approached " the Bible as literature " with a view to bringing Scripture into a more persuasive relation with literature at large, but their insistence on the rigorous exclusion of dogmatic elements from literary scrutiny impoverished their work. A later set of procedures and perspectives on rhetoric and language in their relation to reality was bet· ter able to allow the utterances of a text's speakers their own integrity, whether sacred or secular. In any case, a thematic interpretation of the founding texts of Christianity, influenced by Aristotle's Rhetoricwhere form is a means for persuasively communicating an idea-content -had long predominated in ecclesial usage, germane as it was to the didactic concerns of the Church. An alternative tradition, more indebted to Aristotle's Poetics, where form, content, and functions are treated as factors making for the indissoluble whole which is the literary work, has been less conspicuous-though its offer of initiation into the " world " of the sacred writers gives it great exegetical potential. The text's "word " should be encountered at the level of its own patterned imagery and wrought design. In the appreciation of the Gospels this has become in recent decades a commonplace. However, as the T. S. Eliot scholar Helen Gardner warned, one should not so react against the older approach as to treat the biblical text as the product of a disembodied imagination, rather than a human being writing a work that might make his readers "wise unto salvation." David S. Cunningham's Faithful Persuasion extends this discussion of the propriety or impropriety of a rhetorical approach to Scripture to the discourse of Christian theology as a whole. The intent is a laudable one but its execution vitiated, to my mind, by the excessive concessions to scepticism from which the author sets out. Because his theological epistemology, aware of the limitations of the propositions in which we assert the truths of faith, will grant those assertions no more than a 354 BOOK REVIEWS (continuously) revisable character, he falls back on an account of theology as rhetoric so as to make the best of a bad job. For persuasion is what we use when we know demonstration is hopeless. As a result, Professor Cunningham's study, which could most usefully have "placed" a variety of theologies of past, present, and, prospectively, future on the spectrum of (onto-) logic, poetic, and rhetoric, concludes instead that theology must regard itself as rhetorical or perish! This inevitably narrows the several services theologies of different kinds can perform for the Church. Imagine how biblical studies would be reduced were the exegete only to treat his text as paraenesis, and never as history or as a symbolic world. Nonetheless, on the way from its (as I find) unsatisfactory startingpoint and to its depressing conclusion, Faithful Persuasion has worthwhile points to make about a number of authors (of various periods) and topics, though it might have made them more persuasively (its author's key term) had the intended audience (middle-brow or academic?) been more clearly viewed in advance. AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P. Blackfriars Cambridge, England Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860-1914. By THOMAS FRANKLIN O'MEARA, O.P. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Pp. x + 260. $35.95 (cloth). " In 1925, Baden's Kultusminister, a Protestant, began an address to the Gorresgesellschaft in Heidelberg by describing this era: ' Brave men like Hertling, Schell, Julius Bachem, and Carl Muth, shook the German Catholic world in order to lead it out of its fortress, to lead it again into the midst of the life and activity of the entire people, even when this seemed at... (shrink)

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis by training mosquitofish to discriminate two items from three in three different conditions. In one condition, continuous variables were controlled while numerical information was available; in another, the number was (...) kept constant and information relating to continuous variables was available; in the third condition, stimuli differed for both number and continuous quantities. Fish learned to discriminate more quickly when both number and continuous information were available compared to when they could use continuous information only or number only; there was no difference in the learning rate between the two latter conditions. Our results do not support the hypothesis that processing numbers imposes a higher cognitive load than processing continuous variables. Rather, they suggest that availability of multiple information sources may facilitate discrimination learning. (shrink)

Introduction Indéniablement moins facile à intégrer que celles de Saint Simon ou de Proudhon, l’œuvre de Fourier tient une place pour le moins marginale dans la manière dont les sciences sociales pensent leur histoire. On peut même dire que les écrits de « l’inventeur social » ont plus souvent été envisagés comme des « objets » d’investigations (par exemple pour des recherches sur l’imaginaire) qu’ils n’ont été intégrés par ces disciplines en tant que moments de leurs déploiements temporels....

This paper argues that decision theory presupposes free will. Although decision theorists seldom acknowledge this, the way decision theory represents, explains, or rationalizes choice behaviour acquires its intended interpretation only under the assumption that decision-makers are agents capable of making free choices between alternative possibilities. Without that assumption, both normative and descriptive decision theory, including the revealed-preference paradigm, would have to be reinterpreted in implausible ways. The hypothesis that decision-makers have free will is therefore explanatorily indispensable for decision theory. If (...) we regard explanatory indispensability as an indicator of reality in science, decision theorists should embrace the idea of free will. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to ground the notion of cyberethics of co-operation. The evolution of modern society has resulted in a shift from industrial society towards informational capitalism. This transformation is a multidimensional shift that affects all aspects of society. Hence also the ethical system of society is penetrated by the emergence of the knowledge society and ethical guidelines for the information age are needed. Ethical issues and conflicts in the knowledge society are connected to topics of ecological (...) and social sustainability. For information ethics and cyberethics, the sustainable design of society, social, and socio-technological systems is important. In this context the notions of sustainability and co-operation are discussed. Based on these categories, the approach of cyberethics of co-operation can be theoretically grounded. (shrink)

Summary The article deals with the concept of religion in the contemporary theology of religions. Many theologians in the current debate work with a general concept of religion. Such a conception of religion unifies the distinctive religious diversities. This article argues that against the background of the previous debate, a theology of religions must proceed from a concept of religion as communication. This concept emerges out of the Christian religious tradition: it carries a particular meaning and hence should not (...) be treated as universally applicable. Starting with a concrete concept of religion, a theology of religion has the task neither to give a foundation for other “religions”, nor that of Christianity. Only this could be a basis for a real pluralistic conception. From this starting point follows the question on how other religions understand religion. (shrink)

There can be little doubt that, over the last decade or so, the work of Carl Schmitt has emerged as a central point of reference, in both positive and negative terms, for many debates within contemporary political theory. Despite Schmitt's notoriously controversial and complex position within the intellectual field of modern political thought, a growing interest, for instance, in his critique of parliamentary democracy and his conceptualization of partisan warfare can be felt not only among political movements with revolutionary agendas, (...) but it can also easily be observed in main-stream political thought on both sides of the Atlantic.1 With the…. (shrink)

This article introduces the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP), a first systematic method for identifying irony in natural discourse. The first section discusses previous operationalizations of irony and demonstrates that these are not explicit about which criteria were used to separate irony from non-irony. The second section argues why irony can be defined as an “utterance with a literal evaluation that is implicitly contrary to its intended evaluation.” This section also explains why ironic utterances can be placed on an evaluation scale. (...) In the third section, clauses are proposed as a good unit of analysis when looking at irony in natural discourse. The different steps of the VIP are then introduced in the fourth section and subsequently applied in a sample analysis of a natural text in the fifth section. The sixth section discusses a reliability analysis of the VIP protocol. The article ends with an outlook on how future research on verbal irony might benefit from applying the VIP. (shrink)

T. 1. Préface-Einleitung, 1705-1710 -- T. 2. 1711-1718 -- T. 3. 1719-1724 -- T. 4. 1725-1731 -- T. 5. Supplemente Register.

In der als wissenschaftliche Disziplin noch recht jungen WirtschaftsethikWirtschaftsethik geht es um das Verhältnis von Wirtschaft und Moral. Jemand kann – so die Grundannahme – wirtschaftlich handeln, ohne moralisch zu handeln und jemand kann moralisch handeln, ohne wirtschaftlich zu handeln. In den meisten wirtschaftsethischen Ansätzen wird der Moral ein normativer Vorrang vor der Wirtschaft eingeräumt.

The East has seen totality in a far more consistent and systematic way than the West; and India more so than any other civilisation in the East. When the Swami Siddheswarananda came to France to lecture on Vedic philosophy, he entitled his address, Outline of a Philosophy of Totality’. The expression could have been applied to the philosophies of India as a whole. But the world of thought, coextensive with culture, is far broader than philosophy. It is no exaggeration to (...) assert that India is the land of totality par excellence. Is it not even, according to one dictum, bigger than the world …? The notion of totality, implicit or conscious, poetic or theoretical, original or final, is present throughout Indian culture, both in its religion and in its arts, both in its customs as in its language. The Mahabharata, the largest epic poem ever conceived, proclaims: everything in the Mahabharata can be found elsewhere, but what is not in the Mahabharata cannot be found anywhere. Whilst the absolute beginning of a piece of Western music is in keeping with a dramatic time analogous to that of the Creation, Indian music seems to come from the eternity of a universe without transcendence. The body takes on a cosmic meaning through dance. By performing the tandava, the cosmic dance, Shiva Nataraja (‘Lord of the dance’) endlessly creates and destroys worlds. Indian art is an art of proliferation: both the reiteration of motifs sculpted in architecture and the litanies and metaphors spun out in epic poetry are symbolic attempts to capture the totality of the world. Every single element, being, movement or thing within this continuous space and time points towards all the others. The texts describe the sky of Indra with its web of pearls arranged in such a way that when one looks into one, one sees all the others reflecting in it; in the same way, each object of this world is not merely itself but comprises every one of the others and actually is all the others. The culture of India is one of plenitude, presence and continuity. At the opposite extreme, Japan developed a culture based upon the values of emptiness, absence and the interval. When a guru speaks, Valmiki and Vyasa know that it will take them many scores of verses. A Zen master's reply to his disciple takes up a single-line anecdote, or a word, or even a silence. At the other extreme, hundreds of statues line the gopuram of the temple at Madurai: not all of the thirty-three million gods ‘recognized’ in the writings are there, of course, but at least their unbelievable abundance gives us a plausible image of them. (shrink)

We introduce a game for Gödel logic where the players’ interaction stepwise reduces claims about the relative order of truth degrees of complex formulas to atomic truth comparison claims. Using the concept of disjunctive game states this semantic game is lifted to a provability game, where winning strategies correspond to proofs in a sequents-of-relations calculus.

According to recent studies in developmental psychology and neuroscience, symbolic language is essentially intersubjective. Empathetically relating to others renders possible the acquisition of linguistic constructs. Intersubjectivity develops in early ontogenetic life when interactions between mother and infant mutually shape their relatedness. Empirical fndings suggest that the shared attention and intention involved in those interactions is sustained as it becomes internalized and embodied. Symbolic language is derivative and emerges from shared intentionality. In this paper, we present a formalization of shared intentionality (...) based upon a quantum approach. From a phenomenological viewpoint, we investigate the nonseparable, dynamic and sustainable nature of social cognition and evaluate the appropriateness of quantum interaction for modelling intersubjectivity. (shrink)

It is proved that any countable index, universally measurable subgroup of a Polish group is open. By consequence, any universally measurable homomorphism from a Polish group into the infinite symmetric group S ∞ is continuous. It is also shown that a universally measurable homomorphism from a Polish group into a second countable, locally compact group is necessarily continuous.

Der Beitrag versucht, gegen die traditionelle Auffassung der Alphabetschrift als einer Lautschrift, die als Repräsentationsmythos beschrieben wird, Grundlagen für ein logisch angemesseneres Verständnis dieses Schrifttyps zu erarbeiten. Seine Logik wird mit Mitteln des Individuenkalküls als Kombinatorik beschrieben, in der Alphabetschrifttypen als digital organisierte Typen ausgewiesen werden. Mit einer Hierarchie dreier Grundsätze wird dann erstens die Qualität der Alphabetschrift als eines gegenüber der oralen Sprache relativ autonomen Mediums gezeigt, zweitens das Problem der Definition von Sprachen durch Abbildung von Mengen oraler Ausdrücke (...) auf digital organisierte literale Typen gelöst. (shrink)

Although some scholars acknowledge the decisive role of the felt body in the process of perspective taking, the precise role of the felt body remains unclear. In this paper, a theory of affective communication is developed in order to explain and understand the process of perspective taking in human interaction on a corporeal, pre-reflective and thus affective level. The key assumption of the outlined theory is that any process of perspective taking is essentially based on the two dimensions of the (...) felt body, namely attraction and repulsion, dominance and subdominance. The dimension of attraction and repulsion determines whether individuals attractively converge or repulsively diverge in their perspectives. Regarding the dimension of dominance and subdominance, it is assumed that there is always a dominant and a subdominant side in human interaction. In the case of attraction as a necessary condition for finding common ground, the dominant side serves as the perspective giver and the subdominant side serves as the perspective taker. The outlined theory is phenomenologically based on the works of Schmitz and Rappe and marks a contribution to the research program of neophenomenological sociology. (shrink)

In two recent books, I have drawn on hundreds of studies in psychology in order to systematically develop and empirically support a new conception of the character traits which I claim most people possess. Here I will focus on just one underexplored area of the psychological literature – research on harmful as opposed to helpful behavior – and use it in a preliminary way to further support my positive view.

A model of when and where saccades are made necessarily incorporates a model of the “When” and “Where” of target selection. We suggest that the framework proposed by Findlay & Walker does not specify sufficiently how selection processes contribute to the spatial and temporal determinants of saccade generation. Examples from across-trial priming in visual search and from the inhibition of temporally segmented distractors show linkage between the processes involved in computing when and where selection operates, so that there is cooperation (...) rather than competition between so-called Where and When pathways. Aspects of spatial selection may also determine the remote distractor effect on saccades. The detailed relations between the processes involved in selection and saccade generation may be best understood in relation to detailed computational accounts of the processes. (shrink)

Rodger et al have interestingly argued that xenotransplantation should, if possible, entail the use of genetic pain disenhancement to prevent otherwise unavoidable pain in ‘donor’ animals.1 Their argument relies on the empirical assumption that xenotransplantation offers a realistic solution to organ shortage, and that, due to the recent clinical developments and the lack of human donors, it will thus continue for the foreseeable future. We argue below that other options should be prioritised over xenotransplantation, and that so-called ‘non-sentientist’ harms are (...) undervalued in discussions on disenhancement. We do not challenge the empirical claim made by the authors. That is, xenotransplantation research might continue for the foreseeable future since organ demand is increasing. However, we disagree with the priority given to xenotransplantation over other solutions that are more morally desirable. We argue that, if we comply with the 3R principles (Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement of the use of animals in research) and follow a minimal welfarist reasoning (to which the authors seem to adhere), then (1) the principle of replacement demands the use of non-animal alternatives if possible and (2) there are alternative solutions that lead to morally better consequences. Schematically, there are …. (shrink)

The irreducibility of language : the history of rhetoric in the age of typewriters -- The failures of empiricism : language, science, and the philosophical tradition -- What is a trope? : the discourse of metaphor and the language of the body -- The nervous systems of modern consciousness : metaphor, physiology, and mind -- Interpretation and life : outlines of an anthropology of knowledge.