In 1958, one of the first projects to carry out a systematic archaeological campaign underwater began off the coast of Asia Minor. At Cape Gelidonya, the wreck of a Bronze Age ship was investigated. To understand the concrete problems and working methods of underwater archaeology, it is important to account not only for the tangible objects of research and the technical aids used, but also the natural features and the political framework in which actors operated. Situated in the years between (...) the end of the colonial era and the Cold War, this article traces the biographical paths that brought together central actors at the site of the discovery. This perspective is necessary for understanding why divers who were not established archaeologists initiated and carried out the campaign. The article also analyzes the research of the campaign carried out 1960 and explores some of the difficulties and solutions encountered in working underwater. The article is a contribution to the still unwritten history of underwater archaeology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Is Masao Abe an Original Thinker?Steven HeineDuring the course of a remarkable career spanning six decades in various institutions in Japan and the West, beginning with his training under Hisamatsu Shin’ichi at Kyoto University, Masao Abe became known for several important accomplishments in disseminating Buddhist thought in comparative perspectives and global contexts. In addition to his considerable contributions to the teaching and mentoring of several dozen Western scholars of (...) Buddhist studies, a first major achievement was the translation and interpretation of eminent Zen Buddhist thinkers. Abe is especially known for his work on Dōgen, the thirteenth-century founder of the Sōtō Zen sect, and Nishida Kitarō, the leading figure in modern Japanese philosophy and originator of the Kyoto school, of which Abe is considered a prominent member. Abe’s renderings (as a cotranslator) and hermeneutic discussions of Dōgen and Nishida remain among the best and most frequently cited in those respective fields.Second, Abe gained prominence more generally as a presenter of traditional Zen Buddhist thought to the modern West. It was often said that with the passing of D. T. Suzuki in 1966, the mantle was passed to Abe, who became the leading figure playing the role of transmitter. A third accomplishment was Abe’s ever vigorous participation and lifelong commitment to interfaith dialogue, primarily involving Buddhist-Christian studies, as well as exchanges with Jewish thinkers and discussions of thematic issues, such as the encounter of religion and science or the impact of the Holocaust on comparative ethics. The hallmark of the Kyoto school is a comparison of Japanese Buddhism and Western thought. However, Abe went much further than predecessors and colleagues in seeking out and exchanging ideas with dialogue partners from among the leading theologians and philosophers of religion in the West representing a wide ranger of Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish traditions.The question that arises is whether and to what extent there may be a fourth area of accomplishment by examining whether Abe can be considered an original thinker, and, if so, what his special contribution to the Kyoto school and cross-cultural religious philosophy in a broader sense might be. Reflecting on this issue, I have often thought about an episode that took place a few years ago, when I requested permission from a journal to reprint an article in a collection of Abe’s work that I was editing for the University of Hawai‘i Press. The editor’s response in consenting to the request [End Page 131] also included the comment that he considered Abe’s contribution to Buddhist studies to be “not a secondary, but a primary source.”What did this remark mean? I believe there are two possibilities. One possibility, on the more critical side, is that Abe does not present Buddhism in an objective, historical fashion and is not worthy of being referred to as a secondary source, which in a way has more validity than what he represents. The positive side of the journal editor’s comment is that Abe’s work offers a distinctively original interpretation that is part of the ongoing construction of Buddhist thought for the modern world. Following this line of understanding, my tentative answer to the question of whether Abe is an original thinker is “yes.” A major reason for my saying this is based on the fact, of which the editor was not aware, that Abe rather late in his life was producing books in Japanese for an audience in Japan rather than the West.1In these three volumes published from 1996 to 2000, Abe began to develop what he innovatively called “sunyata-ology,” or a systematic discussion of the root meaning and far-ranging philosophical implications of the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of śūnyatā or emptiness. This term is often used interchangeably with the notion of nothingness ( Japanese: mu ), in relation to or in contrast with nihilism, nihilation, and negation. Like his Kyoto school predecessors Nishida and Keiji Nishitani, who were in turn greatly influenced by Western philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the mission of overcoming nihilism at its root must be the central goal of modern thought, according to Abe, who believes... (shrink)

Biology in the Critical Philosophy and the Opus postumum Hein van den Berg. Parts of Chap. 2 have been previously published in Hein van den Berg (2011), “ Kant's Conception of Proper Science.” Synthese 183 (1): 7–26. Parts of Chap.

Ernst Mayr argued that the emergence of biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century was possible due to the demise of the mathematical model of science and its insistence on demonstrative knowledge. More recently, John Zammito has claimed that the rise of biology as a special science was due to a distinctive experimental, anti-metaphysical, anti-mathematical, and anti-rationalist strand of thought coming from outside of Germany. In this paper we argue that this narrative neglects the important role played (...) by the mathematical and axiomatic model of science in the emergence of biology as a special science. We show that several major actors involved in the emergence of biology as a science in Germany were working with an axiomatic conception of science that goes back at least to Aristotle and was popular in mid-eighteenth-century German academic circles due to its endorsement by Christian Wolff. More specifically, we show that at least two major contributors to the emergence of biology in Germany—Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus—sought to provide a conception of the new science of life that satisfies the criteria of a traditional axiomatic ideal of science. Both C.F. Wolff and Treviranus took over strong commitments to the axiomatic model of science from major philosophers of their time, Christian Wolff and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, respectively. The ideal of biology as an axiomatic science with specific biological fundamental concepts and principles thus played a role in the emergence of biology as a special science. (shrink)

Kant’s teleology as presented in the Critique of Judgment is commonly interpreted in relation to the late eighteenth-century biological research of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In the present paper, I show that this interpretative perspective is incomplete. Understanding Kant’s views on teleology and biology requires a consideration of the teleological and biological views of Christian Wolff and his rationalist successors. By reconstructing the Wolffian roots of Kant’s teleology, I identify several little known sources of Kant’s views on biology. I argue (...) that one of Kant’s main contributions to eighteenth-century debates on biology consisted in demarcating biology from metaphysics. Kant rejected Wolffian views on the hierarchy of sciences, according to which propositions specifying the functions of organisms are derived from theological truths. In addition, Kant argued that organic self-organization necessitates a teleological description in order to show that self-organization does not support materialism. By demarcating biology and metaphysics, Kant made a small yet important contribution to establishing biology as a science. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss in what sense physics, chemistry, and the life sciences constitute a systematic unity according to Kant. I start by discussing Christian Wolff’s views on the hierarchy of sciences. I then argue that in one specific sense physics, chemistry and several life sciences constitute a unity: physics and chemistry provide statements that can be used to provide proofs in the life sciences. However, the unity of physics, chemistry, and the life sciences is limited in scope, (...) since Kant claims that the purposeful unity of organisms is mechanically inexplicable. I finally discuss whether there are laws within the life sciences according to Kant. I argue that the fact that Kant acknowledged that physics and chemistry ground the life sciences does not imply that there are laws of life. The reason is that life sciences of Kant’s time were concerned with explaining the purposeful unity of organisms, which is mechanically inexplicable according to Kant, and the regularities discussed by life scientists in Kant’s time lack a priori grounding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western DiscoursesSteven HeineDouble Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses. By Bernard Faure. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 174. Hardcover $49.50. Paper $21.95.In some ways, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses by Bernard Faure seems quite different from other publications by this author, including several books that were also translated from the French (...) such as Visions of Power and Will to Orthodoxy, which have a specific focus on the practice of Chan or on gender issues in Buddhism. Double Exposure deals with broad, wide-ranging philosophical themes concerning Buddhist thought set in comparative contexts with Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, especially continental European philosophy. Faure is well known from previous works for his extensive explorations of poststructural theory in examining historical and doctrinal buddhological issues. Clearly, however, this book was intended primarily not for Buddhist studies scholars but for an audience of French intellectuals and cultural critics, encompassing but more diverse than the academic community, who wish to understand how the discourse of Buddhism pertains to, yet remains distinct from, their own recent history of thought. Rather than citing a particular set of poststructural thinkers to illuminate Buddhism, Faure does the converse and uses Buddhism to make key points about the development of Western thought.At the same time, Double Exposure is consistent with and an extension of Faure's earlier books in that it tracks the role of the twofold or double in its various manifestations both in Buddhist thought and in methodological approaches to interpreting Buddhism. Faure is endlessly fascinated by and delights in exposing the fact that the Buddhist tradition, nwhich claims to espouse a standpoint of nondualism, invariably and inevitably divvies reality up into an endless series of polarities and paradoxes regarding the apparent oppositions or contradictions between the realms of nirvāṇa and samsāṃra, karmic causality and transcendence of karma, ultimate and mundane reality (or two levels of truth), and sudden and gradual enlightenment. He asserts: "The history of Buddhism... seems to be governed by what Bergson, in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, suggested calling the 'law of dichotomy,' a law which apparently brings about a realization, by a mere splitting, of tendencies which began by being two views, so to speak, of one and the same tendency" (p. 124). [End Page 178]In addition to Bergson, Faure cites classical notions like the Platonic division between the ideal form and the world of concrete forms, the two-faced Roman god Janus who rules over past and future, and the Manichaean split between good and evil. Faure also emphasizes more recent French thinkers and scholars, including Emile Beneviste, Nayla Farouki, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Henri Micheaux, among others, who in probing the "diabolical" sense of truth versus error, which are considered eternal contraries in Western thought, especially in Christianity, are useful for discussing parallels and differences with Buddhism.Double Exposure also discusses interpretive debates about whether Buddhism should be seen as epitomizing agnosticism versus mysticism, pragmatism versus supernaturalism, or rationalism versus mythology, as well as conflicts in using the method of psychology as opposed to anthropology and the impact of hidden, or not-so-hidden Orientalist and reverse Orientalist tendencies. Perhaps the best organized chapter in the book is "The Major Schools" (chapter 5), which offers a quick but insightful overview of early Buddhist realism, Yogācāra idealism, the Mādhyamika middle way, and Chan's compromise between immanence and transcendence. The most imaginative section is "External Thought" (chapter 8), which delves into a vast array of topics. These range from Tantric sexuality as a form of spiritual energy and Diderot's view of the perpetual shifting of ordinary thought to Zongmi's image of the bright pearl as a metaphor for sudden realization compared with Paul Claudel's own pearl metaphor in Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher, which evokes a gradual path of self-understanding.I think Faure's main aim in all his many publications is to explore and expose the wedges, gaps, and inconsistencies, without making a judgment other than to underscore that what... (shrink)

Are psychiatric disorders natural kinds? This question has received a lot of attention within present-day philosophy of psychiatry, where many authors debate the ontology and nature of mental disorders. Similarly, historians of psychiatry, dating back to Foucault, have debated whether psychiatric researchers conceived of mental disorders as natural kinds or not. However, historians of psychiatry have paid little to no attention to the influence of (a) theories within logic, and (b) theories within metaphysics on psychiatric accounts of proper method, and (...) on accounts of the nature and classification of mental disorders. Historically, however, logic and metaphysics have extensively shaped methods and interpretations of classifications in the natural sciences. This paper corrects this lacuna in the history of psychiatry, and demonstrates that theories within logic and metaphysics, articulated by Christian Wolff (1679-1754), have significantly shaped the conception of medical method and (psychiatric) nosology of the influential nosologist Boissier De Sauvages (1706-1767). After treating Sauvages, I discuss the method of the influential nosologist William Cullen (1710-1790), and demonstrate the continuity between the classificatory methods of Sauvages and Cullen. I show that both Sauvages and Cullen were essentialists concerning medical diseases in general and psychiatric disorders in particular, contributing to the history of conceptions of the ontology and nature of mental disorders. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Immanuel Kant’s views on mechanical explanation on the basis of Christian Wolff’s idea of scientific demonstration. Kant takes mechanical explanations to explain properties of wholes in terms of their parts. I reconstruct the nature of such explanations by showing how part-whole conceptualizations in Wolff’s logic and metaphysics shape the ideal of a proper and explanatory scientific demonstration. This logico-philosophical background elucidates why Kant construes mechanical explanations as ideal explanations of nature.

This paper analyzes debates on animal language in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science. Adopting a history of ideas approach, I explain how the study of animal language became tied to the investigation into the origin and development of language towards the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that for large parts of the eighteenth century, the question of the existence of animal languages was studied within the context of the philosophical question of whether animals possess reason. In Germany, the (...) debate concerning animal reason was influenced by Christian Wolff and was taken up by diverse thinkers such as Winkler, Meier, and Reimarus. I argue that in the second half of the eighteenth century the study of animal language became more loosely related to the question of whether animals possess reason: animal language was studied not only in light of the debate on animal reason but also because it sheds light on the nature of animals, on the differences and similarities between animals and humans, and on the origin and development of language. This systematic study of animal language coincided with the rise of linguistics, anthropology, and biology as independent sciences. (shrink)

Resumo A partir da concepção de que filosofia, para Nietzsche, é a arte da transfiguração, o texto analisa como Nietzsche incorpora e transfigura Os deuses no exílio, de Heinrich Heine. Nietzsche teria invertido a perspectiva do problema posto por Heine, bem como o seu procedimento expositivo: se o poeta traz o que seria uma humanização e aburguesamento dos antigos deuses como ato de degradação cósmica pelo qual a ascensão do cristianismo seria culpada, Nietzsche analisa a equivocada autodivinização do (...) homem por meio da moral como megalomania trágica, cuja consequência seria a invocação do sofrimento da existência terrena e a esperança numa vida melhor, supraterrena.Taking Nietzsche´s comprehension of philosophy as the art of transfiguration, the text analyses how the philosopher incorporates and transfigures The Gods in Exile, from Heinrich Heine. The philosopher would have inverted the perspective of the problem settled by Heine and his expositive procedure: if the poet bring us what would be an humanization and a “gentifrication” of the ancient gods as a cosmic degradation act by which the ascension of Christianity would be blamed, Nietzsche analyses the mistaken autodivinization of man through morals as a tragic megalomania, whose consequence would be the invocation of a suffering at the core of earthly existence and a hope in a better, ethereal life. (shrink)

Heine is one of Germany's most renowned poets. His Jewish heritage and his Christian baptism have informed both his life's work as well as its reception. He was an expert and a passionate reader of the Bible. Despite his criticism of the official system of churches and religious communities, he greatly appreciated religion and its symbolic language, which speaks especially to the poet – even in its silences.

As regards Aby Warburg’s oeuvre, it is fascinating that three unfinished or unpublished projects have come to represent the very theorems now appearing of most interest for cultural historians and theorists: The Mnemosyne Atlas representing pictorial memory; the Serpent Ritual as theorem for a cultural-anthropological reading of pagan cultures; and the Nymph Fragment as a foundational figure of modern iconology. This essay undertakes an analysis of the fragmentary character of Warburg’s way of working, arguing that his search for an analytic (...) model to account for the interplay between Christian and pagan/polytheistic traditions displays striking asynchronies and displacements. Rather than explicating these irregularities biographically, the conceptual problems tied to his methods and cognitive interests are investigated. The article thus examines a set of conceptual questions whose relevance extends well past Warburg’s methodology, considering the dimensions of religious and cultural-historical theory within a broader history of European arts and media. Concentrating on probably the most cited figure from Warburg’s repertoire of images, the “nymph” figure on Ghirlandaio’s fresco The Birth of St John the Baptist, the essay focuses on Warburg’s borrowings from Heinrich Heine and reveals Heine to be a blind spot in research on Warburg up until now. (shrink)

This collection of essays is a sequel to the editors' 1976 volume Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition. Philosophers, theologians, and literary historians discuss important aspects of Nietzsche's attack on Judaism and Christianity. The book contains studies of his view of biblical figures, Luther and Pascal as well as comparisons of his thought with that of Spinoza, Lessing, Heine, and Kierkegaard. Nietzsche's critique of the Old Testament, the Jewish religion of the diaspora, and historical Christianity are also investigated. (...) Of the eighteen articles included here, thirteen were prepared expressly for this volume--five were translated from German, one from French, and one from Hebrew. Contributors to this volume are: Eugen Biser, Harry Neumann, Israel Eldad, Charles Lewis, Jorg Salaquarda, Joan Stambaugh, Max L. Baeumer, Brendan Donellan, Diana Behler, Sander L. Gilman, Gerd-Gunther Grau, Josef Simon, James C. O'Flaherty, Bernd Magnus, Georges Goedert, Hans Lung, and Karl Barth. (shrink)

Heinrich Heine had not only many places of residence during his years in Germany, but he also made numerous journeys throughout Europe. Thus, during his time in France, he got to know the country substantially better and furthermore he would have liked to undertake a detour to Spain. Since his student days, Spain was for him as a German Jew the epitome of a Jewish- Christian-Islamic symbiosis despite many differences and difficulties. He slipped into the role of the (...) Moors to express his own outsider role within the German Christian majority society. Heine admired the great Jewish achievements and remained critical of Christian claims, although he had become a Protestant after being baptized at the end of his law studies. His tragedy Almansor, poems from the Buch der Lieder, texts in prose and epic poems from the Parisian years as well as in his literary bequest and above all the last collection of poems called Romanzero with their moving “Spanish” texts, namely the stories about Jews, Christians and Muslims, are the most important poetic evidences of religious coexistence and its problems. (shrink)

Historismus, verstanden als umfassende Historisierung kultureller Gegebenheiten, prägt seit annähernd 200 Jahren die europäische Kultur der Moderne. Gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts mehrten sich Stimmen, die einem Zuviel an Geschichte eine schädigende Wirkung zusprachen. Namentlich die zweite 'Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung' Friedrich Nietzsches (1874) wird immer wieder als Initialzündung für die Krise des Historismus angesehen, die sich alsbald zur kritischen Reflexion der Erkenntnisgrundlagen überhaupt, zur gut fünfzig Jahre andauernden Krise der Wirklichkeit ausweitete.Johannes Heinßen interpretiert die Krise des Historismus als Folge der Erosion (...) geschichtsphilosophischer, sinnstiftender Ordnungsverfahren in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Über eine Vielzahl von Einzeldisziplinen (Theologie, Philosophie, Kunstgeschichte, Geschichtswissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft, Soziologie, Naturwissenschaft) hinweg zeichnet er ein Bild zahlreicher, letztlich vergeblicher Rettungsversuche dieser Gedankenwelt. Auf der Grundlage der zeitgenössischen Kulturpublizistik entfaltet sich daneben ein Panorama heute vergessener Autoren wie Eduard von Hartmann, Moriz Carrière, Karl Christian Planck, David Friedrich Strauß und Karl Hillebrand, die als Epigonen des Idealismus oder des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus das Weltbild des Bildungsbürgertums dieser Jahre prägten.Zugleich wird hier eine Problemgeschichte der Klassischen Moderne geschrieben. Die Sicht auf das historische Denken um 1890 in seiner Breite erklärt wesentliche Strukturen der Geschichtskultur um die Jahrhundertwende: den Weg in die völkische Kulturkritik (Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn) ebenso wie die Genese der Historischen Kulturwissenschaft. (shrink)

English summary: It seems that reason is less a universal principle than something inherently bound to the contexts in which it appears. These contributions to a conference held on the occasion of Christoph Schwobel's 60th birthday explore the character of reason's manifold contexts: the grounding of reason in the inner word of God 's Trinitarian life as well as the disclosure of reason and and its limits in human conversation. German description: Vernunft scheint in der Gegenwart weniger ein allgemeines Prinzip (...) als eine in Kontexte eingebundene Grosse zu sein. Die Beitrage einer Tagung anlasslich von Christoph Schwobels 60. Geburtstag, gehen der Frage nach dem Charakter dieser Kontextbindung nach: der Begrundung der Vernunft im trinitarischen Gesprach wie der Erschliessung und Problematisierung der Vernunft im menschlichen Gesprach. Mit Beitragen von V. Brummer, G. van den Brink, C. Drobe, H. J. Eckstein, D.-M. Grube, J. Halfwassen, S. Heine, F. Hermanni, E. Herms, W. Harle, W. Homolka, W. Jeanrond, R. W. Jenson, D. Kelsey, A. F. Koch, A. Kupsch, V. Leppin, P.-C. Lai, P. Lo, A. Min, J. Moltmann, M. Muhling, P. Peterson, M. Sarot, F. Schweitzer, A. Torrance, J. Webster, M. Welker, M. Wendte, M. Wisse, H. Wisskirchen und L. Zak. (shrink)

Few studies have considered in detail the ethical issues surrounding research in which investigators ask community members to engage in research subject recruitment within their own communities. Peer-driven recruitment and its variants are useful for accessing and including certain populations in research, but also have the potential to undermine the ethical and scientific integrity of community-based research. This paper examines the ethical implications of utilizing community members as recruiters of human subjects in the context of PDR, as well as the (...) authors' experience with a variant of PDR in a research project in South Africa. The importance of situating PDR in a comprehensive community engagement process that is responsive to the constraints of science and local needs and interests is emphasized. The paper will have relevance to bioethicists, health researchers, and research regulators concerned about the appropriate use of peer-driven recruitment strategies in health research. (shrink)

Gregory of Nyssa made important contributions to both theological thought and the understanding of the spiritual life. He was especially significant in adapting the thought of Origen to fourth century orthodoxy. The early treatise on the inscriptions of the Psalms shows the early stages of the development of Gregory's thought. This book presents the first translation of the treatise in a modern language. The annotations show Gregory's indebtedness to the thought of classical antiquity as well as to the Bible. The (...) Introduction sets forth the structure of Gregory's treatise, and places it in the context of earlier Christian commentaries on the Psalms. It shows how his hermeneutical approach was influenced by both Iamblichus the Neo-Platonist and Origen. Finally, Dr Heine compares Gregory's understanding of the stages of the spiritual life in the treatise with that in his later and more widely known writings on the life of Moses and the Song of Songs. (shrink)

This article assesses John Rawls's case against the welfare state as a means for implementing socio-economic justice, and for a ‘property-owning democracy’, from both a normative and a methodological point of view. It points out several flaws of Rawls's critique of the welfare state, through a focus on an existing variety of it — a Swedish-style universal welfare state — which can be said to be relatively successful, both in terms of normative merits and in terms of institutional stability and (...) capacity for self-perpetuation. On this basis, the article argues that a universal welfare state should constitute the institutional bedrock of Rawlsian social justice, even though it cannot completely fulfil all its requirements. It also develops some reasons to think that, in order to adequately and stably implement those requirements of Rawlsian justice that cannot be fulfilled even by a universal welfare state, the latter should be supplemented by democratic socialism, not by a ‘property-owning democracy’. (shrink)

Consider the hypothesis H that a defendant is guilty, and the evidence E that a majority of h out of n independent jurors have voted for H and a minority of k:=n-h against H. How likely is the majority verdict to be correct? By a formula of Condorcet, the probability that H is true given E depends only on each juror's competence and on the absolute margin between the majority and the minority h-k, but neither on the number n, nor (...) on the proportion h/n. This paper reassesses that result and explores its implications. First, using the classical Condorcet jury model, I derive a more general version of Condorcet's formula, confirming the significance of the absolute margin, but showing that the probability that H is true given E depends also on an additional parameter: the prior probability that H is true. Second, I show that a related result holds when we consider not the degree of belief we attach to H given E, but the degree of support E gives to H. Third, I address the implications for the definition of special majority voting, a procedure used to capture the asymmetry between false positive and false negative decisions. I argue that the standard definition of special majority voting in terms of a required proportion of the jury is epistemically questionable, and that the classical Condorcet jury model leads to an alternative definition in terms of a required absolute margin between the majority and the minority. Finally, I show that the results on the significance of the absolute margin can be resisted if the so-called assumption of symmetrical juror competence is relaxed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial CultureSpencer Hawkins (bio)Mufti, Aamir. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton UP, NJ: Princeton, 2007. xv + 325 pp.Mufti’s comparison of the Jewish question and the Indian Partition invites readers to join building projects that delineate and then endanger minorities within nations. Literature about minorities speaks a language deliberately (...) distant from the national one. Minority status has little to do with population numbers for Aamir Mufti; instead it signifies [End Page 61] tential victimization through disproportional rights, since “minority is always potentially exile” (Mufti 13). This definition of minority suits his two examples—Jews in Germany and Muslims in India—since in the twentieth century both fledgling nations adopted forms of nationalism that regarded the lives of these minorities as contaminants to the purity of the emergent national body. The prologue catalogues the brutality in India that prompted Mufti to write this book. Among the horrors listed were the destruction of Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 and the videotaped gang rapes of Muslim women that became a widespread form of entertainment in India. While Mufti reads violence toward minorities as correlative with the rise of nationstates, he considers similarities and differences between nation building in the West and in the subcontinent. In both cases, the new establishment of political equality for citizens came along with the desire to pare down the number of officially recognized citizens. Muslim and Jewish minorities migrated to “minority” nations in the collapsing British Empire, in present-day Pakistan and Israel, respectively, during the respective formations of India and Germany. By founding nations on formerly British-occupied territory, minorities potentially would enjoy the role of nationalist majorities. This solution strikes Mufti as spreading the nationalist contagion onto the minority.The whole book lets literature mark broad cultural attitudes and phenomena. The first chapter observes incipient Jewish nationalism in a work by a British author, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, who spent time in Germany and grew fascinated with the Jewish question while abroad. Her Britishness reinforces a pattern in Mufti’s schema: British powers facilitate the rise of nationalism among minorities in India and in Germany. Daniel Deronda comes at the tail end of a long discourse on Jews’ relation to Europe. The first of Mufti’s cases within canonical literature is the hope for tolerance and a dialogue of cultures, which G. E. Lessing allegorizes through a drama about Saladin, the Muslim sultan of Egypt and Syria, who learns to trust the eponymous Jewish merchant in Nathan the Wise. “Muslim” stands in for “Christian” since Nathan’s alienation is allegorical for the alienation of Jews in Lutheran Germany. Heinrich Heine weighs in on the advantages to assimilation in this period with his fragmentary novel The Rabbi from Bacherach, where religiously raised Jewish children feel comforted when they hear the Tale of the Nibelungen from Father Rhein, the personification of a river that figures generally for German national myth and, in Heine’s story, as a possible source of comfort for partially assimilated minorities. If we read literature as a barometer of cultural pressures, then the appeal of assimilation for European Jews declines in the late colonial nineteenth century when George Eliot inscribed religion into the “secular” discourse of national citizenship.Since the Israeli state is outside of the range of his argument, we leave the Jewish Question with George Eliot’s philo-Semitism in Daniel Deronda, where the only hope for European Jews is to become a nation and to occupy the Palestinian territory. Mufti compares the concerns of early Zionism and Pakistani nationalism side by side in chapter 2. Pakistani issues dominate chapters 3 to 5. In chapter 2, he launches the comparison with the parallel between Hebrew’s development as a national language to identify [End Page 62] Jews secularly and culturally, not just religiously, and Urdu’s transition from a vernacular language to a national language with the secular goal of creating a Pakistani culture freed from Hindi’s erstwhile predominance. When he depicts language choice as mimetic of specific cultural trends, Mufti indicates the shape of... (shrink)

Monitoring the environment for visual events while performing a concurrent task requires adjustment of visual processing priorities. By use of Bundesen's (1990) Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), we investigated how monitoring for an object-based brief event affected distinct components of visual attention in a concurrent task. The perceptual salience of the event was varied. Monitoring reduced the processing speed in the concurrent task, and the reduction was stronger when the event was less salient. The monitoring task neither affected the temporal (...) threshold of conscious perception nor the storage capacity of visual short-term memory nor the efficiency of top-down controlled attentional selection. (shrink)

Jennifer Nado has recently argued that conceptual engineers should focus on (re-)designing representations and may safely ignore issues of implementation. I make a general case for the methodological importance of implementation to conceptual engineering. Using the Social Norms Account as a foil, I argue for three claims. (1) Inquiring into methods of implementation is a theoretically challenging and philosophically worthwhile project in and of itself. (2) A sound theoretical understanding of implementation is imperative for theorists of conceptual engineering. It proves (...) vital for their assessment of the prospects for engineering interventions and the political risks inherent in them. (3) A sound theoretical understanding of implementation is imperative for practitioners of conceptual engineering. The usefulness of their representational (re-)designs depends on respecting broadly cognitive and social constraints on the part of the target population. I conclude that conceptual engineers have very good reasons to seriously engage with issues of implementation. (shrink)

This introduction summarizes the main contributions of this special issue titled “Quiet Politics and the Power of Business: New Perspectives in an Era of Noisy Politics.” The four articles in the issue use and extend Culpepper’s influential concept of “quiet politics” according to which business is able to shape policies and regulations when issues are of low salience to the public and politicians. The issue takes Culpepper’s analysis further in ways that respond to the rise of noisy politics over the (...) last few years, often associated with new strident forms of left- and right-wing populism. Three contributions are made. First, the articles show that salience is not an inherent property of a policy area but is socially constructed. Second, a variety of strategies are described that business uses when trying to keep politics quiet. Third, strategies are affected by the structure of business, which varies across types of capitalism. Future research can use these insights to extend our understanding of the limits, strategies, and dynamics of quiet politics across political economies. (shrink)