Though they worked in very different disciplines, Max Weber and Thomas Mann were engaged from early in their careers in a remarkably similar enterprise converging on questions of personal identity and national self-understanding, and built upon conceptions drawn from a common intellectual and national heritage. Harvey Goldman's ambitious new book is about a part of that enterprise, the foundation of their understanding of the relation of self and work as set out in Weber's essays on religion and Mann's pre-World (...) War I writings. Weber and Mann sought to revitalize a set of ideas of character and action—calling and personality—to guide their own lives and intellectual creation, as well as politics and the life of the nation. In their hands these ideas also became explanatory tools for understanding the crisis of their class and of Germany. By organizing the interpretation of Weber and Mann around the conceptual nexus of calling and personality, the author reveals a number of issues and problems that have been overlooked, providing an altogether new approach to Weber's famous explanation of the capitalist spirit and recovering a vital modern debate around the idea and meaning of the person. In the convergence of so many themes in their writings, Weber and Mann exemplify the self-understanding of their age and cast a special light on problems of self, identity, and social life. This work contains fascinating material for students of intellectual history and modern political theory. Anyone concerned generally with twentieth-century European history, politics, philosophy, and literature will welcome this rich, vigorously written book. (shrink)

_Edward Bibring Photographs the Psychoanalysts of His Time_ provides us with a unique pictorial window into a fascinating period of psychoanalytic history. It is the gift of Edward Bibring, a passionate photographer who, Rolleiflex in hand, chronicled international psychoanalytic congresses from 1932 to 1938. The period in question spans the ascendancy of Hitler, the great exodus of analysts to England and the U.S., and the Anschluss of 1938. A year after the Paris Congress, the last meeting photographed by Bibring, Europe (...) would be in flames. At Wiesbaden in 1932, we find an ever dignified Ernest Jones relaxing aboard a sight-seeing ship, and Helene Deutsch and Heinz Hartmann delightfully at ease at a coffee shop. At the Lucerne Congress of 1934, Anna Freud, Ludwig Jekels, Wilhelm Reich, Grete Bibring, Max Eitingon, and Franz Alexander happily converse outside a hotel. At Marienbad in 1936, there are smiling new faces: Annie Reich, Ernst Kris, Otto Fenichel, Edward Glover, and others. At Budapest in1937 the women – Anna Freud, Vilma Kovacs, Dorothy Burlingham, and Elisabeth Geleerd – speak animatedly among themselves. A demure Margaret Mahler and a chic Marianne Kris make their appearance. In 1938, we see a series of table shots, where analysts, now with suit jackets removed and even a few collars loosened, relax with their food, wine, and cigars. Bracketed by Sanford Gifford’s brief introduction and biographical sketches of all the captured parties, Bibring’s photographs, digitized and enlarged, retain just enough graininess to evoke a different era in the history of psychoanalysis. It is heartening to see the paragons of “classical psychoanalysis” as warmly human, their analytic reserve supplanted by relaxed affability. But it is sobering to remember that the high spirit engendered by Congresses – in Bibring’s time no less than our own – may overlay the gravest political developments and the deepest personal anxieties. (shrink)

Max Stirner’s The Unique and Its Property (1844) is the first ruthless critique of modern society. In All Things are Nothing to Me, Jacob Blumenfeld reconstructs the unique philosophy of Max Stirner (1806–1856), a figure that strongly influenced—for better or worse—Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emma Goldman as well as numerous anarchists, feminists, surrealists, illegalists, existentialists, fascists, libertarians, dadaists, situationists, insurrectionists and nihilists of the last two centuries. -/- Misunderstood, dismissed, and defamed, Stirner’s work is considered by some to be (...) the worst book ever written. It combines the worst elements of philosophy, politics, history, psychology, and morality, and ties it all together with simple tautologies, fancy rhetoric, and militant declarations. That is the glory of Max Stirner’s unique footprint in the history of philosophy. -/- Jacob Blumenfeld wanted to exhume this dead tome along with its dead philosopher, but discovered instead that, rather than deceased, their spirits are alive and quite well, floating in our presence. All Things are Nothing to Me is a forensic investigation into how Stirner has stayed alive throughout time. (shrink)

What, in essence, characterizes the mind? According to Searle, the potential to be conscious provides the only definitive criterion. Thus, conscious states are unquestionably "mental"; "shallow unconscious" states are also "mental" by virtue of their capacity to be conscious (at least in principle); but there are no "deep unconscious mental states" - i.e. those rules and procedures without access to consciousness, inferred by cognitive science to characterize the operations of the unconscious mind are not mental at all. Indeed, according to (...) Searle, they have no ontological status - they are simply ways of describing some interesting facets of purely physiological phenomena. (shrink)

Reflexive monism is, in essence, an ancient view of how consciousness relates to the material world that has, in recent decades, been resurrected in modern form. In this paper I discuss how some of its basic features differ from both dualism and variants of physicalist and functionalist reductionism, focusing on those aspects of the theory that challenge deeply rooted presuppositions in current Western thought. I pay particular attention to the ontological status and seeming “out-thereness” of the phenomenal world and to (...) how the “phenomenal world” relates to the “physical world”, the “world itself”, and processing in the brain. In order to place the theory within the context of current thought and debate, I address questions that have been raised about reflexive monism in recent commentaries and also evaluate competing accounts of the same issues offered by “transparency theory” and by “biological naturalism”. I argue that, of the competing views on offer, reflexive monism most closely follows the contours of ordinary experience, the findings of science, and common sense. (shrink)

Viewed from a first-person perspective consciousness appears to be necessary for complex, novel human activity - but viewed from a third-person perspective consciousness appears to play no role in the activity of brains, producing a "causal paradox". To resolve this paradox one needs to distinguish consciousness of processing from consciousness accompanying processing or causing processing. Accounts of consciousness/brain causal interactions switch between first- and third-person perspectives. However, epistemically, the differences between first- and third-person access are fundamental. First- and third-person accounts (...) are complementary and mutually irreducible. (shrink)

I propose an argument for the thesis that laws of nature are necessary in the sense of holding in all worlds sharing the properties of the actual world, on the basis of a principle I propose to call the Causal Criterion of Reality . The CCR says: for an entity to be real it is necessary and sufficient that it is capable to make a difference to causal interactions. The crucial idea here is that the capacity to interact causally - (...) or to contribute to determining causal interactions - is not only the ultimate metaphysical ground for the existence of an entity, but it also provides a criterion for determining the nature of that entity, i.e. its properties. The alternative is to conceive of laws of nature as contingent: they could be different from what they are like in the actual world, where that possibility is understood to be metaphysical, not only epistemic. For the sake of this paper, I shall accept Armstrong's thesis that laws of nature are relations between universals. I also follow Armstrong in the view that both the existence and the properties of particulars are metaphysically independent of the existence and identity of other particular. However, what is controversial and what I shall challenge is his thesis that universals are like particulars in the following respect: according to Armstrong, each universal is a logically distinct entity whose existence and identity is independent of the existence and identity of other universals. My aim in this paper is to show that the identity of a universal is entirely determined by its lawful relations to other universals. The crucial premise I use is the thesis that the CCR is a universal criterion, which applies both to particulars and universals. From the thesis that the identity of a universal is exclusively determined by laws, it follows that laws are necessary in the sense that they cannot differ without the universals they link also being different. This creates a difficulty for those authors who, as Armstrong, accept the CCR but nevertheless defend the view that laws are contingent. (shrink)

The paper defends the view that events are the basic relata of causation, against arguments based on linguistic analysis to the effect that only facts can play that role. According to those arguments, causal contexts let the meaning of the expressions embedded in them shift: even expressions possessing the linguistic form that usually designates an event take a factual meaning.However, defending events as fundamental relata of causation turns out to be possible only by attributing a – different – causal role (...) to facts as well. The role of facts in causation is characterized as «causal responsibility». This relation, and its connection to causation between events, is clarified by way of the analysis of different inference patterns between causal statements of the two sorts: statements linking events and statements linking facts. (shrink)

Explanation is a perennially hot topic in philosophy of science. Yet philosophers have exhibited a curious blind spot to the questions of how explanatory projects develop over time, as well as what processes are involved in generating their developmental trajectories. This paper examines these questions using research into the end-Permian mass extinction as a case study. It takes as its jumping-off point the observation that explanations of historical events tend to grow more complex over time, but it goes beyond this (...) observation by scrutinizing the processes responsible for generating this pattern. Surveying several decades of research into the end-Permian extinction, I suggest that the principal “driver” of explanation in geohistory is non-explanatory work: work that is undertaken to increase our descriptive understanding of a phenomenon, not to test a particular explanatory claim. Non-explanatory work drives explanation by imposing or eliminating demands on explanation, and by furnishing new resources for constructing explanatory models. Explanations grow more complex because the demands on explanation tend to increase with ongoing characterization of the target phenomenon, and characterization tends grows the roster of explanatory resources. However, the fact that non-explanatory work sometimes eliminates demands on explanation means that this trend is not irreversible. I suggest that to achieve a more rounded view of the dynamics of explanation, philosophers should ask how research into complex phenomena is organized, as well as how explanatory progress depends upon the coordination of different kinds of material and epistemic resources. (shrink)

This article is about a start-up problem in scientific practice. Specifically, it is about the problem of justifying paleontological correlation—the practice of using fossils to establish time relations among fossiliferous rocks. Paleontological correlation was the key to assembling a geological timescale during the nineteenth century and remains an important practice in stratigraphic geology to this day. Yet contrary to philosophical expectations, this practice lacked a robust theoretical justification during the first half of the nineteenth century. This article examines what this (...) lack of justification amounted to, as well as how the method of paleontological correlation was justified in practice. (shrink)

This paper examines the emergence of a new approach to stratigraphic complexity, first in geology and then, following its creative appropriation, in paleobiology. The approach was associated with a set of models that together transformed stratigraphic geology in the decades following 1970. These included the influential models of depositional sequences developed by Peter Vail and others at Exxon. Transposed into paleobiology, they gave researchers new resources for studying the incompleteness of the fossil record and for removing biases imposed by the (...) processes of sedimentary accumulation. In addition, they helped reconfigure the cultural landscape of paleobiology, consolidating a growing emphasis on fieldwork and eroding the barrier that had been erected in the 1970s between “paleontology” and “paleobiology.” This paper traces these developments, paying special attention to the simulation models of stratigraphic paleobiologist Steven Holland. It also considers how the integration of sequence and event stratigraphy and paleobiology has begun to influence long-running discussions of incompleteness and bias in the fossil record. (shrink)

Vorlesungen Kants über Metaphysik aus drei Semestern ist ein unveränderter, hochwertiger Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1894. Hansebooks ist Herausgeber von Literatur zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten wie Forschung und Wissenschaft, Reisen und Expeditionen, Kochen und Ernährung, Medizin und weiteren Genres. Der Schwerpunkt des Verlages liegt auf dem Erhalt historischer Literatur. Viele Werke historischer Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler sind heute nur noch als Antiquitäten erhältlich. Hansebooks verlegt diese Bücher neu und trägt damit zum Erhalt selten gewordener Literatur und historischem Wissen auch für (...) die Zukunft bei. (shrink)

Brod und Weltsch charakterisieren ihr Werk als eine Art „Monographie über verschwommene Vorstellungen". Sie zeigen, dass die von der philosophischen Phänomenologie Franz Brentanos und Husserls aufgestellten Postulate der Evidenz und genauen Beschreibung nur im Bereich der Wissenschaft statthaft sind, ansonsten aber unsere Wahrnehmungswelt von einer Vielzahl von vagen, unbestimmten, verschwommenen Sinnes- und Gedächtniseindrücken bestimmt wird, die eine empirisch arbeitende Psychologie ebenso wie die philosophische Erkenntnistheorie mit einzufangen und ihren Funktionen zu explizieren habe. Diese Schrift ist daher ein idealer Ausgangspunkt, um (...) ein differenzierteres Bild der epistemischen Konfiguration der Prager Moderne zu zeichnen und grundsätzlich die Möglichkeiten einer psychologischen Ästhetik auszuloten. Die Neu-Edition dieser Schrift öffnet aber auch wieder einen lange verschütteten Zugang zur Literatur der Prager Moderne, insbesondere für das Erzählwerk Kafkas. Die Edition des lange vergriffenen Werkes enthält eine Einleitung sowie ausgewählte Literatur zur Rezeption des Werks. (shrink)

Gesture and elaborate forms of nonverbal behaviour have been posited as necessary antecedents to language and shared conceptual understanding. Here we argue that subtle and largely unintentional nonverbal behaviours play a key role in building consensual beliefs within culture. We propose a model that focuses on the subtle and automatic nonverbal transmission of attitudes, beliefs and cultural ideals. Specifically, people extract attitudes and beliefs from nonverbal behaviour-- such extraction is both ubiquitous and efficient. The extracted attitudes and beliefs become individual (...) beliefs if encountered frequently enough. Consequently, people may come to adopt the same attitudes, beliefs and behaviours in the absence of verbal communication. Finally, one's own nonverbal behaviour reflects the extracted attitudes, beliefs and ideals of those of one's group, serving as a means for transmitting culture. The implication is that subtle nonverbal behaviour is important for the creation and maintenance of culture. (shrink)

English title: Are combinatorialism and nomological realism compatible?

The commentary is presented in three sections. Section 1 presents a brief summary of the main theses in Cummins' paper. In section 2, I argue that this analysis is not peculiar to cognition, and that in fact, a similar, more general analysis has been given [3] in fundamental areas of inquiry, hitherto independent of cognitive science. Finally, in section 3, it is argued that, if this general form of Cummins' analysis is correct, it calls for a profound re‐evaluation of our (...) conception of science. (shrink)

Embodied theories of grounded semantics postulate that, when word meaning is first acquired, a link is established between symbol and corresponding semantic information present in modality-specific—including primary—sensorimotor cortices of the brain. Direct experimental evidence documenting the emergence of such a link, however, is still missing. Here, we present new neuroimaging results that provide such evidence. We taught participants aspects of the referential meaning of previously unknown, senseless novel spoken words by associating them with either a familiar action or a familiar (...) object. After training, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to analyze the participants’ brain responses to the new speech items. We found that hearing the newly learnt object-related word sounds selectively triggered activity in the primary visual cortex, as well as secondary and higher visual areas.These results for the first time directly document the formation of a link between the novel, previously meaningless spoken items and corresponding semantic information in primary sensory areas in a category-specific manner, providing experimental support for perceptual accounts of word-meaning acquisition in the brain. (shrink)

This material originally appeared as part of a larger publication developed by ERIC, unden a contract with the National Institute of Edu cation, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as a practical resource for teaching about science-related social issues. It was pub lished jointly by ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies/social Science Education and the Sociat Science Education Consortium.

In 1945 J.C.C. McKinsey produced a ‘semantics’ for modal logic based on necessity defined in terms of validity. The present papers looks at how to update F.R. Drake’s completeness proof for McKinsey’s semantics by comparing McKinsey ‘models’ with the now standard Kripke models. It also looks at the motivation behind the system McKinsey called S4.1, but which we now call S4M; and use this motivation to produce a McKinsey semantics for that system. One lesson which emerges from this work is (...) an appreciation of the superiority of the current possible worlds semantics based on frames and models, both in terms of an intuitive understanding of modality, and also in terms of the ease of working with particular systems. (shrink)