Literatur, die von Pandemien handelt, ist kenntlich oft durch ihren parabolischen Charakter. Sie schildert Pandemien als eine Katastrophe, die die Fragilität gesellschaftlicher Institutionen entlarvt, soziale Normen außer Kraft zu setzen und Menschen auf das Animalische zu reduzieren vermag. Der gewohnte Rhythmus des Lebens, Denkens, Handelns ist während der Pandemie unterbrochen: Die Literatur spiegelt diesen Kontrollverlust und widersteht ihm zugleich in der poetologischen Ordnung ihrer Werke, durch deren freie und autonome Wahl. Sie vermag in Sinnbildern vom begrifflich kaum Fassbaren, von Sterben (...) und Tod und zugleich tröstlich gegen den Tod zu erzählen. Von dieser Macht poetischen Denkens handeln die folgenden Analysen von Giovanni Boccaccios Decamerone, Heinrich von Kleists Der Findling und Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, Albert Camus’ La Peste und Mircea Cārtārescus aktuellem Corona-Tagebuch Nach-Leben. (shrink)

„Literature is Freedom“, so endet Susan Sontags Dankrede zur Verleihung des Friedenspreises des Deutschen Buchhandels 2003. Worin gründet die Wirkmacht der Poesie, Freiräume des Denkens zu eröffnen, Lesern Grenzüberschreitungen der eigenen Zeit, der eigenen Identität, der eigenen Kultur zu ermöglichen und damit das Bewusstsein für gänzlich andere Vermessungen der Welt? Wie können Literaturwissenschaftler die Freiheit der Kunst und damit die Komplexität ästhetischer Erfahrungen verteidigen, angesichts der Reduzierung von Freiheitsgraden in den aktuellen Kulturkämpfen? Wie gelingt es zeitgenössischer politischer Dichtung, denen Gehör (...) zu verschaffen, deren Unfreiheit nur die Konsequenz des rücksichtslosen Freiheitsanspruchs privilegierter Individuen und Nationen ist? Antworten darauf versucht der folgende Artikel in offener, aphoristischer Form – mit Hilfe poetologischer Überlegungen und exemplarischen Hinweisen zur Gegenwartslyrik, u.a. zu Gedichten von Don Mee Choi, Kateryna Kalytko, Mihret Kebede, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Aleš Šteger, Carlos Soto-Román, Anja Utler, Uljana Wolf und Serhji Zhadan. (shrink)

Ten years after the appearance of Günter Blamberger’s award-winning Heinrich von Kleist. Biographie in the original German, the English translation by Sebastian Goth and Kelly Kawar appeared in 202...

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable - in (...) case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

Empirical evidence clearly shows that child poverty is a growing concern in the industrialized world and that the well-being of children is deeply affected by growing up in poverty in at least two ways. On the one hand, a low socioeconomic status jeopardizes the access to goods and services that are necessary for the current well-being of children. On the other hand, growing up in poverty also, in various ways, negatively affects the well-being in later life. On the basis of (...) the capability approach, we will show that the systematic protection and advancement of the wellbeing of children, and hence the reduction of child poverty, is a key task of social justice, which should therefore guide policy design and implementation. However, we will also discuss the special composition of the well-being of children and point out how it poses difficulties for state action in this regard. In particular, we will argue that the importance of love and affection for a child’s well-being limits considerably the possible political measures to provide fair life chances to all children. This again reflects the insight that poverty should not be reduced to economic inequality. (shrink)

"Dionysos" ist in Nietzsches Spätwerk das "Gegenwort" zum "Willen zur Macht". Anders als der philosophische Begriff des Dionysischen in der Geburt der Tragödie bündelt der Name "Dionysos" die Erfahrungen des Ewigen im menschlichen Leben. Dieses entdeckt Nietzsche in den Möglichkeiten, sich zum Gedanken der "ewigen Wiederkehr" zu verhalten. Diesem Gedanken vernag weder Gleichgültigkeit noch das Festhalten an einer moralischen Instanz, sondern allein die religiöse, aber nicht mehr christliche Erfahrung des "ungeheuren Augenblicks" grecht zu werden. Eine solche Erfahrung des Göttlichen lässt (...) aus dem "grössten Schwergewicht" die "leichte" Freheit von der letztlich noch moralisch gebundenen Selbstüberwindung werden. Während der philosophische "Lehrer der weigen Wiederkunft" Zarathustra - als "alter Atheist", der er für Nietzsche ist - nur den "Begriff des Dionysos" kennt, zielt Nietzsche selbst mit dem Namen des griechischen Gottes des "grossen Zweideutigen und Versuchers", auf ein Erfahrung des Göttlichen, das als "Genie des Herzens" jenseits des "moralischen Gottes" ist.In Nietzsche's later work, "Dionysos" is the counterconcept to the "will to power". Unlike the philosophical concept of Dionysos in The Birth of Tragedy, the name "Dionysos" in this later work signifies that which is eternal in human life. Nietzsche discovers this in the possibility of taking an attitude towards the thought of "eternal recurrence." Neither indifference nor retreat to a moral authority is appropriate when facing this thought. The correct attitude is rather an embrace of a religious yet no longer Christian experience of the "terrible moment." Such an experience of godliness allows "the most heavy weight" to become the "light" freedom of a self-overcoming still bound to mortality. While Zarathustra, the "teacher of eternal recurrance," only know the "concept of Dionysos," Nietzsche himself is in touch with the experience of the divine. This experience, with the name of the Greek God who is "the most ambiguous and seductive" and a "genius of the heart," is beyond the "mortal God.". (shrink)

In den letzten Jahren hat sich der internationale Sport so grundlegend gewandelt, dass er in Gefahr ist, seine historisch gewachsene Identität aufzugeben. Nicht seine bildliche Qualität, seine Intensität und Spannung haben sich verändert; sie haben im Gegenteil noch zugenommen. Auf einem anderen Feld haben sich Dinge ereignet, die dem Sport einen neuen Charakter geben. Doch diese Veränderungen gehören zu einem Ausschnitt der Wirklichkeit, der auf den Fernsehbildern und in den Kommentaren nicht erkennbar ist; für die meisten Zuschauer bleibt er unsichtbar.

In seiner Lehre vom Begriff, Urteil und Schluss behandelt Hegel die Gegenstände der traditionellen formalen Logik. In der Hegel-Forschung hat dieser Abschnitt der Wissenschaft der Logik vergleichsweise wenig Aufmerksamkeit gefunden. Der hier angezeigte Band erschließt jenen Abschnitt vor dem Hintergrund der gesamten Wissenschaft der Logik und problematisiert Hegels Ausführungen sowohl hinsichtlich der immanenten Nachvollziehbarkeit des Gedankens als auch unter aktuellen systematischen Gesichtspunkten. Der Band vereinigt, der Gliederung des Hegelschen Textes folgend, dreizehn thematisch abgestimmte Beiträge zu einem kooperativen Kommentar, der durch (...) eine Auswahlbibliographie ergänzt wird. (shrink)

Mimesis, the notion that art imitates reality, has long been recognized as one of the central ideas of Western aesthetics and has been most frequently associated with Aristotle. Less well documented is the great importance of mimetic theories of literature, theater, and the visual arts during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In this book, the most comprehensive overview of the theory of mimesis since Auerbach's monumental study, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf provide a thorough introduction to the complex and shifting (...) meanings of the term. Beginning with the Platonic doctrine of imitation, they chart the concept's appropriation and significance in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, Molière, Shakespeare, Racine, Diderot, Lessing, and Rousseau. They examine the status of mimesis in the nineteenth-century novel and its reworking by such modern thinkers as Benjamin, Adorno, and Derrida. Widening the traditional understanding of mimesis to encompass the body and cultural practices of everyday life, their work suggests the continuing value of mimetic theory and will prove essential reading for scholars and students of literature, theater, and the visual arts. (shrink)

This new translation of the first Critique forms part of a fifteen-volume English-language edition of the works of Immanuel Kant under the general editorship of this volume’s editor-translators, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. The edition, which is almost complete by now, comprises all of Kant’s published works along with extensive selections from his literary remains, his correspondence, and student transcripts of his lecture courses in metaphysics, ethics, logic, and anthropology. The Cambridge edition aims at a consistent English rendition of Kant’s (...) works, both within a given volume and across volumes. In terms of scope and detail, the Cambridge edition is unrivaled in any language, except for the authoritative Academy edition begun under the directorship of Wilhelm Dilthey in 1900, which, however, is still not completed and several volumes of which are in serious need of re-editing. In one case, that of the Opus postumum, the best edition currently available seems to be the one in the Cambridge edition. (shrink)

" Because characters and the conception of characters are central to all studies of evolution, and because evolution is the central organizing principle of biology, this book will appeal to a wide cross-section of biologists.

Mimesis, the notion that art imitates reality, has long been recognized as one of the central ideas of Western aesthetics and has been most frequently associated with Aristotle. Less well documented is the great importance of mimetic theories of literature, theater, and the visual arts during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In this book, the most comprehensive overview of the theory of mimesis since Auerbach's monumental study, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf provide a thorough introduction to the complex and shifting (...) meanings of the term. Beginning with the Platonic doctrine of imitation, they chart the concept's appropriation and significance in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, Molière, Shakespeare, Racine, Diderot, Lessing, and Rousseau. They examine the status of mimesis in the nineteenth-century novel and its reworking by such modern thinkers as Benjamin, Adorno, and Derrida. Widening the traditional understanding of mimesis to encompass the body and cultural practices of everyday life, their work suggests the continuing value of mimetic theory and will prove essential reading for scholars and students of literature, theater, and the visual arts. (shrink)

This study concerns the ideas of one particular philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose views of time, intuition, and creativity have had a significant impact on art, literature, and the humanities, both in his time and in our own. Although it is generally recognized that Bergson's ideas have significantly impacted the arts and the humanities, it has not been recognized how they have also had a creative influence on the sciences as well. Nor has it been realized that this was one of (...) his most basic contentions. Bergson's conception of intuition--his fundamental insight into reality--was not limited to fugitive insights into human existence. By realizing previously unsuspected possibilities for research and discovery, his endeavors were also meant to make possible new advances in the sciences. If it enabled his cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust, to explore human memory in depth, it also inspired psychologists like Daniel Schachter to use Bergson's ideas to make real contributions to contemporary memory science. If his notion of creative evolution brought many thinkers to a belief in human creative freedom, it brought others (notably Alexis Carrel and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy) to a scientific study of biological time. Among his successful speculations was the theory of the Big Bang cosmology. 'Getting Bergson Straight' shows many points at which Bergson's ideas anticipated future developments in the sciences. This was seen clearly by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis de Broglie who viewed Bergson's physics as presaging quantum physics. Thus, the text is well situated for arts, humanities, social science, and natural science classrooms studying creative thinking and/or intellectual history. (shrink)

The relationship between education and democratic development has been a growing theme in debates focussed upon public education, but there has been little work that has directly related educational leadership to wider issues of freedom, politics and practice. Engaging with ELMA through the work of Hannah Arendt enables these issues of power to be directly confronted. Arendt produced texts that challenged notions of freedom and politics, and notably examined the lives of people, ideas and historical events in ways that are (...) pertinent to the purposes and practices of education. This significant volume examines the main texts in the Arendt library and explains each of the key ideas and how they can enable critical thinking about knowledge production and practice in educational leadership. The analysis draws upon a range of exemplars and empirical projects from the field of educational leadership, investigating utility issues regarding Arendt's ideas, and engaging with the debates concerning her insights and contribution. Included in the book: -using Arendt to think about ELMA -the relationship between policy and practice, and organisation and leadership -critiques of the Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa -thinking with and against Arendt. Gunter uses the work of Arendt to challenge the purposes and practices of intellectual work, with a view to developing perspectives on the responsibility for research and ideas. The book will be of value to all those working and researching in the field of Educational Leadership, Management and Administration. (shrink)

The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry’s business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user’s autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control. While this push back is important, current societal debates on the ethics of persuasive technologies are informed by a particular understanding of (...) attention, rarely posited explicitly yet assumed as the default. They share the same concept of attention, namely an individualistic and descriptive concept of attention that is a cognitive process, an expendable resource, something that one should control individually. We step away from a negative analysis in terms of external distractions and aim for positive answers, turning to Buddhist ethics to formulate a critique of persuasive technology from a genuinely ethical perspective. Buddhist ethics points at our attention’s inescapable ethical and ontological embeddedness. Attention as practice requires “the right effort” to distinguish desirable and undesirable states, the “right concentration” to stop the flow we are caught in, and the “right mindfulness” to fortify the ability to attend to the present situation and keep in mind a general sense of life’s direction. We offer input for further philosophical inquiry on attention as practice and attention ecology. We put forward comfort/effort and individualism/collectivism as two remaining central tensions in need of further research. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The book (...) series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

Understanding the evolutionary role of environmentally induced phenotypic variation (i.e., plasticity) is an important issue in developmental evolution. A major physiological response to environmental change is cellular stress, which is counteracted by generic stress reactions detoxifying the cell. A model, stress‐induced evolutionary innovation (SIEI), whereby ancestral stress reactions and their corresponding pathways can be transformed into novel structural components of body plans, such as new cell types, is described. Previous findings suggest that the cell differentiation cascade of a cell type (...) critical to pregnancy in humans, the decidual stromal cell, evolved from a cellular stress reaction. It is hypothesized that the stress reaction in these cells was elicited ancestrally via inflammation caused by embryo attachment. The present study proposes that SIEI is a distinct form of plasticity‐based evolutionary change leading to the origin of novel structures rather than adaptive transformation of pre‐existing characters. (shrink)

Two welcome extensions of evolutionary thinking have come to prominence over the last thirty years: the so-called ’extended evolutionary synthesis’ (EES) and debate about biological kinds and individuals. These two agendas have, however, remained orthogonal to one another. The EES has mostly restricted itself to widening the explanations of adaptation offered by the preceding ’modern evolutionary synthesis’ by including additional mechanisms of inheritance and variation; while discussion of biological kinds has turned toward philosophical questions of essential vs. contingent properties of (...) life forms and realist vs. epistemological approaches to categorization and classification. Here we attempt to broaden the explanatory scope of evolutionary theory by linking these two agendas. We expand on the mechanistic orientation of the EES, using new understandings of networked systems of components in order to engage the distinct intellectual challenge of the origination of “historical kinds”. With this phrase we designate a subset of natural kinds that acquires, through evolutionary processes, a quasi-independent lineage-history. Such kinds emerge in both biology and culture, and we enlarge the limited number of historical kinds that have thus far been recognized in evolutionary biology in a series of paradigmatic exemplars, from genes and cell types to rituals and music. For each exemplar we discern specific mechanisms by which it arose and persists; comparing these, we suggest a general unity in the ways in which diverse historical kinds originate. (shrink)

Our society is in the middle of the AI revolution. We discuss several applications of AI, in particular medical causality, where deep-learning neural networks screen through big data bases, extracting associations between a patient’s condition and possible causes. While beneficial in medicine, several questionable AI trading strategies have emerged in finance. Though advantages in many aspects of our lives, serious threats of AI exist. We suggest several regulatory measures to reduce these threats. We further discuss whether ‘full AI robots’ should (...) be programmed with a virtual consciousness and conscience. While this would reduce AI threats via motivational control, other threats such as the desire for AI—human socioeconomic equality could prove detrimental. (shrink)

Figal has long been recognized as one of the most insightful interpreters working in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics and its leading themes concerned with ancient Greek thought, art, language, and history. With this book, Figal presses this tradition of philosophical hermeneutics in new directions. In his effort to forge philosophical hermeneutics into a hermeneutical philosophy, Figal develops an original critique of the objectification of the world that emerges in modernity as the first stage in his systematic treatment of the (...) elements of experience hermeneutically understood. Breaking through the prejudices of modernity, but not sacrificing the importance and challenge of the objective world that confronts us and is in need of interpretation, Figal reorients how it is that philosophy should take up some of its most longstanding and stubborn questions. World, object, space, language, freedom, time, and life are refreshed as philosophical notions here since they are each regarded as elements of human life engaged in the task assigned to each of us—the task of understanding ourselves and our world. (shrink)

Vorwort - O. Bayer: Johann Georg Hamann - Radikaler Aufklarer als Metakritiker - D. Berman: Hume and Collins: Two Ways of Lying Theologically - U. Dierse: Nachtrage zu G. F. Meiers Religionsphilosophie - K. Dusing: Schema und Einbildungskraft in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft - J. Ecole: Des rapports de l'essence et de l'existence selon Wolff - E. J. Engel: Mendelssohn und Spinoza: Dankesschuld und Rettung - N. Hinske: Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft und der Freiraum des Glaubens. Zur Kantrezeption (...) des Jenaer Fruhkantianismus - H.-U. Hoche: Anthropologische Komplementaritat und die Einheit der Sache. Versuch einer skeptischen Losung eines skeptischen Zweifels - M. Hossenfelder: Der Liberalismus als Naturrecht im Anschluss an Kant - L. Kreimendahl: Hume uber das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee um 1748 - R. H. Popkin: Scepticism and Optimism in the Late 18th Century - H. Graf Reventlow: Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit. Bibel und Philosophie von Thomas von Aquin bis H. S. Reimarus - W. Schneiders: Vernunft und Verstand - Krisen eines Begriffspaares - W. Schroder: Aporien des theologischen Liberalismus. Johann Lorenz Schmidts Pladoyer fur 'eine allgemeine Religions- und Gewissensfreyheit' - R. Specht: Sind einfache Ideen einfach und gegeben? - I. Strohschneider-Kohrs: Anmerkungen zu Lessings Selbstdeutungs-Bildern - W. Strube: Der Begriff des Erhabenen in der deutschsprachigen Asthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts - Bibliographie Gunter Gawlick 1956-1993. Zusammengestellt von U. Golembek. (shrink)

The encounter of amateur science with synthetic biology has led to the formation of several amateur/do‐it‐yourself biology (DIYBio) groups worldwide. Although media outlets covered DIYBio events, most seemed only to highlight the hope, hype, and horror of what DIYBio would do in the future. Here, we analyze the European amateur biology movement to find out who they are, what they aim for and how they differ from US groups. We found that all groups are driven by a core leadership of (...) (semi‐)professional people who struggle with finding lab space and equipment. Regulations on genetic modification limit what groups can do. Differences between Europe and the US are found in the distinct regulatory environments and the European emphasis on bio‐art. We conclude that DIYBio Europe has so far been a responsible and transparent citizen science movement with a solid user base that will continue to grow irrespective of media attention. (shrink)

Research on the effectiveness of case studies in teaching engineering ethics in higher education is underdeveloped. To add to our knowledge, we have systematically compared the outcomes of two case approaches to an undergraduate course on the ethics of technology: a detached approach using real-life cases and a challenge-based learning approach with students and stakeholders acting as co-creators. We first developed a practical typology of case-study approaches and subsequently tested an evaluation method to assess the students’ learning experiences and outcomes (...) and staff interpretations and operationalizations, seeking to answer three questions: Do students in the CBL approach report higher basic needs, motivation and competence development compared to their peers in the detached approach? What is the relationship between student-perceived co-creation and their basic needs, motivation and competence development? And what are the implications of CBL/CC for engineering-ethics teaching and learning? Our mixed methods analysis favored CBL as it best supported teaching and research goals while satisfying the students’ basic needs and promoting intrinsic motivation and communication competences. Competence progress in other areas did not differ between approaches, and motivation in terms of identified regulation was lower for CBL, with staff perceiving a higher workload. We propose that our case typology model is useful and that as a method to engage students as co-creators, CBL certainly merits further development and evaluation, as does our effectiveness analysis for engineering ethics instruction in general and for case-study approaches in particular. (shrink)

We introduce three families of diagonal reflection principles for matrices of stationary sets of ordinals. We analyze both their relationships among themselves and their relationships with other known principles of simultaneous stationary reflection, the strong reflection principle, and the existence of square sequences.

It is shown that the Magidor forcing to collapse the cofinality of a measurable cardinal that carries a length \ sequence of normal ultrafilters, increasing in the Mitchell order, to \, is subcomplete.