The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions. Much has been discovered since1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also (...) be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons. (shrink)

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...) action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons-responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine-grained measures of degrees of reasons-responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty to extend the reasons-responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Yet, the central conviction that informs this volume is that phenomenology provides extraordinary insights into many of the issues that are directly addressed ...

Responsibility, blameworthiness in particular, has been characterized in a number of ways in a literature in which participants appear to be talking about the same thing much of the time. More specifically, blameworthiness has been characterized in terms of what sorts of responses are fair, appropriate, and deserved in a basic way, where the responses in question range over blame, sanctions, alterations to interpersonal relationships, and the reactive attitudes, such as resentment and indignation. In this paper, I explore the relationships (...) between three particular theses: (i) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is fair to impose sanctions, (ii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that one deserves sanctions, and (iii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is appropriate to respond with reactive attitudes. Appealing to the way in which luck in the outcome of an action can justifiably affect the degree of sanctions received, I argue that (i) is false and that fairness and desert come apart. I then argue that the relationship between the reactive attitudes and sanction is not as straightforward as has sometimes been assumed, but that (ii) and (iii) might both be true and closely linked. I conclude by exploring various claims about desert, including ones that link it to the intrinsic goodness of receiving what is deserved and to the permissibility or rightness of inflicting suffering. (shrink)

Nelkin presents a simple and natural account of freedom and moral responsibility which responds to the great variety of challenges to the idea that we are free and responsible, before ultimately reaffirming our conception of ourselves as agents. Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility begins with a defense of the rational abilities view, according to which one is responsible for an action if and only if one acts with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. The view is (...) compatibilist -- that is, on the view defended, responsibility is compatible with determinism -- and one of its striking features is a certain asymmetry: it requires the ability to do otherwise for responsibility when actions are praiseworthy, but not when they are blameworthy. In defending and elaborating the view, Nelkin questions long-held assumptions such as those concerning the relation between fairness and blame and the nature of so-called reactive attitudes such as resentment and forgiveness. Her argument not only fits with a metaphysical picture of causation -- agent-causation -- often assumed to be available only to incompatibilist accounts, but receives positive support from the intuitively appealing Ought Implies Can Principle, and establishes a new interpretation of freedom and moral responsibility that dovetails with a compelling account of our inescapable commitments as rational agents. (shrink)

Article CLiPs (Cognitive Linguistics in Publications) Survey of collective volumes, monographs, MA, doctoral and post-doctoral theses, articles, papers and book reviews A selected and annotated bibliography of recent publications with a cognitive perspective was published on January 1, 1993 in the journal Cognitive Linguistics (volume 4, issue 1).

The Lambdoma, considered the most important harmonical pattern of order is to be understood as a further development of a figure attributed to the Pythagoreans "in the shape of the capital letter Lambda" -therefore named Lambda . Diagrams similar to the Lambdoma without explicit harmonical significance can be found in the writings of several medieval and modern authors, including Ramon Llull , whose influence on Leibniz is already evident in the Dissertatio de arte combinatoria , Leipzig 1666. Leibniz and Llull (...) are linked particularly by the idea of Kombinatorik as ars inveniandi in the sense of a universal language, whose extension of knowledge is self-creating . In the larger context of LlulPs historical influence, Kombinatorik as structural logic and harmonical Lambdoma we also have to see Leibniz's genealogical scheme in his academic dissertation . The harmonical analysis of this model contains convincing parallels to the structural build-up of the Lambdoma . However, the analogies go further, as is shown by the reference to Leibniz's Dyadik, to the 64 hexagrams of the /Ging and the comparison of the /Ging with the genetical code. Harmonically structured systematized thought reveals itself as that possibility of an interpretation of the universe, which Leibniz did not really have in mind. However, we can find that thought at the decisive points of his theory of philosophical principles so to speak as the pythagorean-platonic inheritance. (shrink)

Much of the mathematics with which Felix Klein and Sophus Lie are now associated (Klein’s Erlangen Program and Lie’s theory of transformation groups) is rooted in ideas they developed in their early work: the consideration of geometric objects or properties preserved by systems of transformations. As early as 1870, Lie studied particular examples of what he later called contact transformations, which preserve tangency and which came to play a crucial role in his systematic study of transformation groups and differential equations. (...) This note examines Klein’s efforts in the 1870s to interpret contact transformations in terms of connexes and traces that interpretation (which included a false assumption) over the decades that follow. The analysis passes from Klein’s letters to Lie through Lindemann’s edition of Clebsch’s lectures on geometry in 1876, Lie’s criticism of it in his treatise on transformation groups in 1893, and the careful development of that interpretation by Dohmen, a student of Engel, in his 1905 dissertation. The now-obscure notion of connexes and its relation to Lie’s line elements and surface elements are discussed here in some detail. (shrink)

I outline some of my work and results on my matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis, according to which the entropy of a closed quantum gravitational system is equal to the system’s matter-gravity entanglement entropy. The main arguments presented are: that this hypothesis is capable of resolving what I call the second-law puzzle, i.e. the puzzle as to how the entropy increase of a closed system can be reconciled with the asssumption of unitary time-evolution; that the black hole information loss puzzle may be (...) regarded as a special case of this second law puzzle and that therefore the same resolution applies to it; that the black hole thermal atmosphere puzzle can be resolved by adopting a radically different-from-usual description of quantum black hole equilibrium states, according to which they are total pure states, entangled between matter and gravity in such a way that the partial states of matter and gravity are each approximately thermal equilibrium states ; that the Susskind–Horowitz–Polchinski string-theoretic understanding of black hole entropy as the logarithm of the degeneracy of a long string cannot be quite correct but should be replaced by a modified understanding according to which it is the entanglement entropy between a long string and its stringy atmosphere, when in a total pure equilibrium state in a suitable box, which ) goes over, at strong-coupling, to a black hole in equilibrium with its thermal atmosphere. The modified understanding in is based on a general result, which I also describe, which concerns the likely state of a quantum system when it is weakly coupled to an energy-bath and the total state is a random pure state with a given energy. This result generalizes Goldstein et al.’s ‘canonical typicality’ result to systems which are not necessarily small. (shrink)

Europe’s affluent democracies adopted different policy strategies to buffer their labor markets from the effects of the worldwide recession that followed the financial crisis in 2007. This article offers a sociologically anchored historical institutionalist explanation to account for this divergence. Reviewing the politics of employment policymaking before, during, and after the crisis in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark, the article traces partisan actors’ tactics of maneuvering within the constraints of institutionally embedded mass preferences to legitimate their policies and improve (...) their electoral performance. The analysis moves beyond contemporary treatments of path-dependent institutional evolution in two important ways. Rather than focusing on how arrangements at the work-welfare nexus provide actors with particular functional benefits and differential power resources, it examines institutions’ ideational effects on the construction of electorates’ interests. Moreover, it illuminates partisan politicians’ room for strategic agency, breaking with interpretations that view government responses as the product of particular producer group coalitions. (shrink)

Der Begriff »Race«, aus den universitären Kulturwissenschaften stammend, will unbewusste Rassifizierungsprozesse beschreiben, die wir unweigerlich vornähmen und denen wir zugleich ausgesetzt seien. Der vorliegende Beitrag will diesen Begriff für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie fruchtbar machen. Zwei Fallvignetten illustrieren, welche Fallstricke für Psychoanalytiker und Patienten bereit lägen, wenn »Race« in Übertragung und Gegenübertragung verleugnet werden müsse. Tauchen negativ konnotierte »racial« Phantasien auf, könne die Angst, rassistisch zu denken oder zu agieren, zum Stillstand und sogar Scheitern einer Behandlung führen. Da rassifizierte Projektionen nach (...) Ansicht der Autorin unvermeidbar seien, sieht sie die Entstehung des Gefühls einer »racial Melancholia« als Möglichkeit, dem drohenden Stillstand entgegenzuwirken. (shrink)

The book series Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) publishes high-quality work in linguistics that addresses current issues in synchrony and diachrony, theoretically or empirically oriented.

In this paper I briefly summarize Pellegrino’s phenomenological analysis of the ethics of the physician–patient relationship. In delineating the essential elements of the healing relationship, Pellegrino demonstrates the necessity for health care professionals to understand the patient’s lived experience of illness. In considering the phenomenon of illness, I identify certain essential characteristics of illness-as-lived that provide a basis for developing a rigorous understanding of the patient’s experience. I note recent developments in the systematic delivery of health care that make it (...) difficult for health care professionals to realize Pellegrino’s ethical model of the role of healer. Such developments limit both the physician’s freedom to act on behalf of the patient without the constraint of third parties and the physician’s freedom to act in light of his or her own ethical or religious convictions. Given these difficulties, I note MacIntyre’s call for the development of moral communities, as an alternative to the prevailing culture, and share a first-hand example illustrating how intentional Christian community provides an alternative nurturing context that permits the full development of the healing relationship. (shrink)

The rapidly increasing wealth of genomic data has driven the development of tools to assist in the task of representing and processing information about genes, their products and their functions. One of the most important of these tools is the Gene Ontology (GO), which is being developed in tandem with work on a variety of bioinformatics databases. An examination of the structure of GO, however, reveals a number of problems, which we believe can be resolved by taking account of certain (...) organizing principles drawn from philosophical ontology. We shall explore the results of applying such principles to GO with a view to improving GO’s consistency and coherence and thus its future applicability in the automated processing of biological data. (shrink)

Excerpt from Encyklopadie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften zum Gebrauche fur Seine Vorlesungen About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our (...) edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Political action requires a concept of humanity grounded in an explicit notion of human nature. Feminists apprehensive about poststructuralism's implications for a feminist politics need methods and discourses that allow feminist politics to proceed toward a vision of human well-being. Recent work by Chris Weedon and Erica Sherover-Marcuse highlights the need for hypotheses that can guide efforts to dismantle oppressed habits of being and help women evaluate and develop political strategies for universal solidarity.

This introduction outlines the threefold contribution that this Focus section on research film offers. First, it introduces the vast collection of films from the former Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]), arguably the most ambitious endeavor ever undertaken to manage the distribution, production, and archiving of research films. At the same time, the institute’s questionable roots in the National Socialist education system and in war research are addressed. Second, the introduction points out that the Focus section (...) enters largely uncharted terrain in the history of research films. Third, it argues that a focus on the multiple reuses of research films, as this section attempts, not only suits the medium specificity of film but helps us to map the aesthetic, intermedial, and cultural-political practices of disseminating knowledge. In this vein, the organizers asked established scholars working on film and science to share with us a short story of a reused research film. Scott Curtis, Vinzenz Hediger, Anja Laukötter, and Hanna Rose Shell responded. Their contributions can be found in the supplementary materials to the online edition. (shrink)

This edition presents the hitherto largely unpublished correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich, and is supplemented by further important documents, taken from the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the Library of Congress in Washington and the New York Public Library. This is the first time these documents have been published in full.

Der Affekt der Verachtung wurde im Gegenübertragungserleben des Analytikers bislang kaum beschrieben. Wenn der Analytiker diesen nicht ausschließlich als Resultat der projektiven Identifizierung des Patienten versteht, kann er oder sie in Konflikte mit dem Über-Ich geraten, was zu einer Verleugnung dieses schwierigen Gegenübertragungsgefühls führen kann. Die Autorin beschreibt in zwei Fallvignetten, wie verächtliche Gefühle in der Gegenübertragung auftauchten und welche Über-Ich-Konflikte in ihr aktiviert wurden. Verachtung als schwieriger Affekt wird auf dem Hintergrund der Unterscheidung des normalen Über-Ichs von einem pathologischen (...) Über-Ich untersucht. Ein pathologisches Über-Ich wird insbesondere dann im Analytiker aktiviert, wenn das Ich-Ideal durch die Wahrnehmung von Verachtung angegriffen scheint. Entscheidend ist dann, ob das pathologische Über-Ich im Analytiker mithilfe einer differenzierenden Selbstanalyse bearbeitet und modifiziert werden kann, um Verachtung als mögliche Abwehrbewegung im Kontext von schwer erträglichem traumatischem Material verstehen zu können. (shrink)