For more than twenty years, Macedonio Melloni (1798–1854) experimented with radiant heat rays. Until 1841 he thought of them as ontologically different from light, but in 1842 he converted to the opposite view according to which they are similar in kind, but only differ in wavelength. In this article I analyze the arguments which induced him to change his interpretation of radiant heat and I describe the instruments with which he arrived at these insights.

Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre läßt sich sicherlich nicht unter den klassischen Begriff der Affektenlehre bringen, schon weil sie eine systematische Grundlegung des gesamten Wissens enthält und nicht nur eine Lehre von der Ordnung und der Regelung der Affekte, die ja nur den Bereich der Ethik betrifft. Es soll auch hier gar nicht versucht werden, sie so zu interpretieren. Vielmehr geht es um einen neuen Sinn von Affektenlehre, wenn im Titel davon die Rede ist, die Wissenschaftslehre könnte sich in ihr vollenden.

Prvi in drugi del predavanja na splošno obravnavata možnosti in meje medkulturnega sporazumevanja. Pri tem se z vidika temeljnih navad in »globokih razpoloženj« razložijo razlike med kulturnimi svetovi ljudi. Iz tega se poraja razlikovanje med razsežnostjo vsakdanje prakse, ki jo lahko dandanes srečamo kjer koli v svetu in v kateri se ne pojavljajo nikakršne načelne težave medkulturnega sporazumevanja, in razsežnostjo, v kateri je treba premagovati takšne težave in v kateri zaradi tega grozi tako imenovani »clash« kultur. Tretji del predavanja poizkuša (...) na posameznih primerih konkretizirati te splošne predhodne razlage, tako da najprej osvetli pomen družine in demokracije v razvoju zahodnjaškega sveta vse tja do novoveškega gospostva principa subjektivitete in mu nasproti postavi pomen družine v vzhodni Aziji. V nadaljevanju se paradigmatično konfrontira vlogo subiectuma, torej »subjekta« v indoevropski gramatiki in zahodnjaški ontologiji z brezsubjektno strukturo japonskih stavkov in njihovim habitualnim ozadjem. Pri tem se pokaže, da je treba pri premagovanju načelnih težav medkulturnega sporazumevanja izbrati drugačno pot, kot jo ubira naturalistično vračanje k nečemu, kar je biološko skupnega vsem ljudem, ali načelno-teoretsko izpeljevanje domnevno univerzalnih norm človekovih pravic.My presentation consists of three sections. In the title of the lecture, the term “understanding” occurs – in German “Verstehen” – which is embedded in the expression “coming to an understanding,” in German “Verständigung,” i.e., an understanding which includes the effort we need in order to achieve it. Accordingly, in the first section of my reflections, I would like to explain by means of a phenomenologically oriented philosophy why such an effort is required at all, i.e., why the agreement between people does not come to be by itself. In the second section, I will concentrate upon the problem of intercultural coming to an understanding. I intend to show why there are still today fundamental obstacles standing in the way of such an understanding. In the third and final section of my reflections, I would like to explicate these principle difficulties, using the intercultural coming to an understanding between the Eastern and Western hemispheres as an example. I will then close my paper with the question how these difficulties might be overcome. (shrink)

In der 1970 gegründeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien veröffentlicht. Gründungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe (Herausgeber bis 1991), Günther Patzig (bis 1999) und Wolfgang Wieland (bis 2003). Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von Jürgen Mittelstraß mitherausgegeben.

Although depression is characterized as a mood disorder it turns out that, like moods in general, it cannot be explained independently of a theory of emotion. In this paper I outline one promising theory of emotion and show how it deals with the phenomenon of depressive mood. An important aspect of MAT is the role it assigns to peripheral information processing systems in setting up emotional responses. The operations of these systems are automatic and opaque to consciousness, but they represent (...) information about the significance of the environment for the subject, bias cognition and behaviour, and have a characteristic phenomenology. I show how understanding the nature of peripheral appraisal provides a principled way to link neurochemistry and mood via an information processing theory of the circuitry targeted by antidepressant treatment. The discussion is organized around Matthew Ratcliffe's distinction between pre-intentional and intentional feelings and suggests that the MAT might provide a way to link phenomenological and mechanistic accounts of feeling states characteristic of depression. (shrink)

ArgumentKuhnian phases of paradigmatic development correspond to characteristic variations of citation measures. These correlations can in turn be predicted from a simple model of human information processing when applied to the common environments of scientists. By combining a scientometric and a human information processing approach to the history of scientific thought, structures of disciplinary development, and in particular paradigmatic cycles, can be more reliably assessed than before. Consequently, the quantitative historian of science is liberated to some extent from the vagaries (...) of qualitative judgment, as exemplified by traditional narrative type approaches to the history of science. (shrink)

Hybrid identities are sentences in a special second order language with identity. The model classes of sets of hybrid identities are called hybrid solid varieties. We give a Birkhoff-type-characterization of hybrid solid varieties and develop a hybrid equational logic.

This paper outlines the experience of four universities that collaborated on a pre-arrival shared reading project, the Big Read, in 2018/2019. They did so primarily to promote student engagement and retention and also to ease the transition into higher education, particularly for first-generation students, to promote staff connectedness, and to provide a USP for their institution. The paper covers all the associated processes, from isolating the respective aims of the collaborators to the choosing and sharing of a single agreed title. (...) In analysing the outcomes, recommendations are made for future cross-institutional projects of this kind. (shrink)

The literature on human ethos evinces terminological arbitrariness, which can in my opinion be overcome in only one way: through historical reflection of the meaning which the moral-philosophical concepts have expressed at the very beginning of European philosophy. The first part of the paper is therefore dedicated to the reflection on Greek notions and then its Latin translations. In this respect there appears a fundamentally historical and substantial difference between classical Greek “ethos” and modern “morality”. The second part begins with (...) the nowadays prevailing impression that “ethos” is foredoomed to disappearance for the sake of “morality”. Attempts at rehabilitating the ethos of virtues in contrast to modern morality, undertaken by communitarily inclined philosophers after the publication of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, have for the most part been justly criticized. By means of the phenomenological method of stepping back to originary experience, I would like to approach this matter from a different and new angle. My thesis is that “ethos” represents the normality of the world of experience. “Morality” of the modern world is based upon the borderline case of such “normality”, which is elevated to the level of a normal case. In conclusion, I will try to provide a phenomenological explanation of this historical development by interpreting it as the process of “idealization”. (shrink)

This book brings key authors in anthropology together to debate and transgress anthropological expectations.

Health is higher on the international agenda than ever before, and improving the health of poor people is a central issue in development. Poor people suffer from far higher levels of ill health, mortality, and malnutrition than do those better off, and their inadequate health is one of the factors keeping them poor or for their being poor in the first place. Health is a crucially important economic asset, particularly for poor people. Their livelihoods depend on it. When poor people (...) become ill or injured, their entire household can become trapped in a downward spiral of lost income and high healthcare costs—a vicious circle of poverty and ill health. (shrink)