Nineteen newly-transliterated letters between Ferdinand Christian Baur and his friend Ludwig Friedrich Heyd are presented. Seventeen of them were written by Baur, and two by Heyd in the period between 10th February 1836 and 16th January 1842. A further sixteen earlier letters were already published by Carl Egbert Hester in 1993. The correspondence between the two close friends cover a broad range of subjects, predominantly historical, as well as family, scientific, political themes and particularly university politics. The key personal topic (...) is the death of Baur’s wife in 1839 and the consequences of this for their children. The scientific themes concern firstly Baur’s efforts to assist Heyd in his research into the history of Württemberg, and to promote these works to publishers. Secondly, the letters document the reaction of the two to David Friedrich Strauß’s work “Das Leben Jesu”, and how their views changed during this correspondence. The central political themes of the letters relate primarily to appointments within Tübingen University, and in particular to previously unknown attacks on Baur’s own position there. Further discussions concern two politically arranged festivals; the Buchhändlerfest of 1840, and the 25th coronation anniversary of King Wilhelm I. of Württemberg in 1841, at which Baur gave a courageous speech on the political situation in Württemberg. Of particular interest in the letters previously transliterated by Hester are two topics, firstly the “Polish Petition” regarding the political situation in Poland in the 1830s, and secondly regarding the constitution of Tübingen University. To better understand the significance of these private letters and their openness, a short biography of Heyd is included. (shrink)

For many of us, the great scientific discoveries of the modern age--the Big Bang, evolution, quantum physics, relativity--point to an existence that is bleak, devoid of meaning, pointless. But in The Sacred Depths of Nature, eminent biologist Ursula Goodenough shows us that the scientific world view need not be a source of despair. Indeed, it can be a wellspring of solace and hope. This eloquent volume reconciles the modern scientific understanding of reality with our timeless spiritual yearnings for reverence (...) and continuity. Looking at topics such as evolution, emotions, sexuality, and death, Goodenough writes with rich, uncluttered detail about the workings of nature in general and of living creatures in particular. Her luminous clarity makes it possible for even non-scientists to appreciate that the origins of life and the universe are no less meaningful because of our increasingly scientific understanding of them. At the end of each chapter, Goodenough's spiritual reflections respond to the complexity of nature with vibrant emotional intensity and a sense of reverent wonder. A beautifully written celebration of molecular biology with meditations on the spiritual and religious meaning that can be found at the heart of science, this volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing dialog between science and religion. This book will engage anyone who was ever mesmerized--or terrified--by the mysteries of existence. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to discuss theoretical arguments concerning the idea that emotional mimicry is an intrinsic part of our social being and thus can be considered a social act. For this, we will first present the theoretical assumptions underlying the Emotional Mimicry as Social Regulator view. We then provide a brief overview of recent developments in emotional mimicry research and specifically discuss new developments regarding the role of emotional mimicry in actual interactions and relationships, and individual differences (...) in emotional mimicry. We conclude with open questions for future research. (shrink)

When I raise my arm, what makes it the case that my arm's going up is an instance of my raising my arm? In this paper, I discuss Aristotle's answer to this question. His view, I argue, is that my arm's going up counts as my raising my arm just in case it is an exercise of a certain kind of causal power of mine. I show that this view differs in an interesting way both from the Davidsonian ‘standard causal (...) account’ of action and from accounts put forward by recent critics of Davidson, such as Hornsby, Alvarez and Hyman. (shrink)

The ArgumentMost historians of science share the conviction that the incorporation of the corpuscular theory into seventeenth-century chemistry was the beginning of modern chemistry. My thesis in this paper is that modern chemisty started with the concept of the chemicl compound, which emerged at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, without any signifivant influence of the corpuscular theory. Rather the historical reconstruction of the emergence of this concept shows that it resulted from the reflection (...) on the chemical operations in the sixteenth-century metallurgy and seventeenth-century pharmacy. I argue that the reversibility of these operations and their understanding as crafts (metallurgy) or chemical arts (pharmacy) were decisive factors for the emergence of the first ideas about chemical compounds in the seventeenth-century pharmaceutical works written by pharmaceutically trained authors, influenced by the Paracelsian image of nature. There is a direct line of descent from these authors to E.F.Geoffroy (1675–1742), who integrated the first scattered ideas of chemical compound into a general concept comprising chemical artefacts as well as natural bodies. (shrink)

The collective volume brings together the linguistic and didactic findings on the structure and acquisition of the German writing system. Based on current research on the German written language it is shown that its structures can be systematically described in the core area. The book discusses whether these insights can be used for didactic conceptions on written language acquisition. Concrete examples from German instruction illustrate the acquisition problems and discuss effective learning measures based on learning by discovery.

We consider total well-founded orderings on monadic terms satisfying the replacement and full invariance properties. We show that any such ordering on monadic terms in one variable and two unary function symbols must have order typeω,ω2orωω. We show that a familiar construction gives rise to continuum many such orderings of order typeω. We construct a new family of such orderings of order typeω2, and show that there are continuum many of these. We show that there are only four such orderings (...) of order typeωω, the two familiar recursive path orderings and two closely related orderings. We consider also total well-founded orderings onNnwhich are preserved under vector addition. We show that any such ordering must have order typeωkfor some 1 ≤k≤n. We show that ifkshrink)

What is the relation between time and change? Does time depend on the mind? Is the present always the same or is it always different? Aristotle tackles these questions in the Physics. In the first book in English exclusively devoted to this discussion, Ursula Coope argues that Aristotle sees time as a universal order within which all changes are related to each other. This interpretation enables her to explain two striking Aristotelian claims: that the now is like a moving (...) thing, and that time depends for its existence on the mind. (shrink)

Aesthetic emotions are elicited by different sensory impressions generated by music, visual arts, literature, theater, film, or nature scenes. Recently, the AESTHEMOS scale has been developed to facilitate the empirical assessment of such emotions. In this article we report a semantic profile analysis of aesthetic emotion terms that had been used for the development of this scale, using the GRID approach. This method consists of obtaining ratings of emotion terms on a set of meaning facets which represent five components of (...) the emotion process. The aims here were to determine the dimensionality of the GRID features when applied to aesthetic emotions and compare it to published results for emotion terms in general, and to examine the internal organization of the domain of aesthetic emotion terms in order to identify salient clusters of these items based on the similarity of their feature profiles on the GRID. Exploratory Principal Component Analyses suggest a four-dimensional structure of the semantic space consisting of valence, power, arousal, and novelty, converging with earlier GRID studies on large sets of standard emotion terms. Using cluster analyses, 15 clusters of aesthetic emotion terms with similar GRID feature profiles were identified, revealing the internal organization of the aesthetic emotion terms domain and meaningful subgroups of aesthetic emotions. While replication for further languages is required, these findings provide a solid basis for further research and methodological development in the realm of aesthetic emotions. (shrink)

This paper studies the semiotic,epistemological and historical aspects of Berzelianformulas in early nineteenth-century organicchemistry. I argue that Berzelian formulas wereenormously productive `paper tools' for representingchemical reactions of organic substances, and forcreating different pathways of reactions. Moreover, myanalysis of Jean Dumas's application of Berzelianformulas to model the creation of chloral from alcoholand chlorine exemplifies the role played by chemicalformulas in conceptual development (the concept ofsubstitution). Studying the dialectic of chemists'collectively shared goals and tools, I argue thatpaper tools, like laboratory instruments, areresources (...) whose possibilities are not exhausted byscientists' attempts to achieve existing goals, butrather whose applications generate new goals. The term`paper tools' is introduced to emphasize that thepragmatic and syntactic aspects of symbol systems arefully comparable to physical laboratory tools. (shrink)

Ursula Coope presents a ground-breaking study of the philosophy of the Neoplatonists. She explores their understanding of freedom and responsibility: an entity is free to the extent that it is wholly in control of itself, self-determining, self-constituting, and self-knowing - which only a non-bodily thing can be.

In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its neural correlates during sleep. However, the precise differences between lucid and non-lucid dreams remain poorly understood. The construction of the Lucidity and Consciousness in (...) Dreams scale was based on theoretical considerations and empirical observations. Exploratory factor analysis of the data from the first survey identified eight factors that were validated in a second survey using confirmatory factor analysis: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors are involved in dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differentiate between lucid and non-lucid dreams, suggesting that lucid insight is separable from both bizarreness in dreams and a change in the subjectively experienced realism of the dream. (shrink)

Versucht man die philosophische Entwicklung von Hermann Cohen zu überblicken, so sticht ins Auge, dass er genuin rationalistischen Überzeugungen immer näher rückt. Welche Bedeutung dabei der Philosophie von Leibniz für die Entwicklung einer rein idealistischen Urteilslogik zukommt, ist bekannt. Ich denke aber darüber hinausgehend, dass Cohens Ansatz im Verlauf der Jahre ganz zentralen erkenntnistheoretischen Grundintuitionen des klassischen Rationalismus immer näher kommt.

This chapter suggests a new interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of mind claiming that the goal of the equation of the human mind with the idea of the body is not to solve the mind-body problem, but rather to show how we can, within the framework of Spinoza’s rationalism, conceive of finite minds as irreducibly distinguishable individuals. To support this view, the chapter discusses the passage from E2p11 to E2p13 against the background of three preliminaries, i.e. the notion of a union (...) between mind and body as it appears in Thomas Aquinas’ refutation of Averroism, Spinoza’s views on knowledge of actually existing things in E2p8c, and the phenomenological character of E2a2-4. It argues that while this view on the human mind does not undermine radical rationalism, it does require its amendment by some irreducibly empirical concessions. (shrink)

If you kidnap or drug someone to prevent her from casting her vote, then you are responsible for her failure to cast her vote. There is nothing she can do about it. If you hypnotize a person to get her to assassinate your enemy, then you are responsible for the assassination. She cannot be blamed. Kidnapping, drugging and hypnosis are all methods of subjecting someone else to your will. But does persuading a person to do something count as a further (...) method of controlling her, or subjecting her to your will? Intuitively, we want to say it does not. If you persuade me not to vote, then you get me to do what you want, but you do so in a way that leaves me in control. Having been persuaded does not exempt me from blame, as having been kidnapped, drugged or hypnotized would do. However, this intuitive view proves surprisingly difficult to justify. What makes being persuaded different? Why isn't persuading someone to do something simply a further way of controlling what she does? (shrink)

Science and technology are frequently confused. This essay points out thebases for this confusion and then focuses on a basic distinction, namely, that whereas science brings us information that we have little choice but to absorb and reflect upon, technology is something that humans elect to do and, hence, can also elect not to do. It is proposed that technological ethics are most cogently undertaken with scientific understanding as the linchpin and religious/artistic sensibilities as the muse.

The following is a review of three recent critical approaches in medieval literary history: 1) of “New Philology”/“Body-Philology” and its discussion of the mediality particular to older texts 2) of concepts of the relationship between literature and society derived from New French Historiography and New Historicism 3) of the specific orientation of feminist and gender research in medieval studies.

This book offers the first comprehensive account and re-appraisal of the formative phase of what is often termed the 'Grotian tradition' in international relations theory: the view that sovereign states are not free to act at will, but are akin to members of a society, bound by its norms. It examines the period from the later fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, focusing on four thinkers: Erasmus, Vitoria, Gentili and Grotius himself, and is structured by the author's concept of international society. (...) Erasmus' views on international relations have been entirely neglected, but underlying his work is a consistent image of international society. The theologian Francisco de Vitoria concerns himself with its normative principles, the lawyer Alberico Gentili - unexpectedly, the central figure in the narrative - with its extensive practical applications. Grotius, however, does not re-affirm the concept, but wavers at crucial points. This book suggests that the Grotian tradition is a misnomer. (shrink)

How does one talk about moral thought and moral action as a religious naturalist? We explore this question by considering two human capacities: the capacity for mindfulness, and the capacity for virtue. We suggest that mindfulness is deeply enhanced by an understanding of the scientific worldview and that the four cardinal virtues—courage, fairmindedness, humaneness, and reverence—are rendered coherent by mindful reflection. We focus on the concept of mindful reverence and propose that the mindful reverence elicited by the evolutionary narrative is (...) at the heart of religious naturalism. Religious education, we suggest, entails the cultivation of mindful virtue, in ourselves and in our children. (shrink)

In this article we present a training program based on the empirical research conducted in the project 'argumentational integrity'. After a brief sketch of the problem dimensions concerning unfair argumentation we give an overview of the training concept and the underlying empirical research. Exemplification of the instructional design is given for the second and the fifth training dimension (standards of argumentational integrity and reactions to unfair contributions). Finally we indicate how the training is to be evaluated and present initial results (...) demonstrating that in comparison with an untrained control group participants in the training significantly improve their skills in identifying and naming argumentative rule violations. (shrink)

Social animals are provisioned with pro-social orientations that transcend self-interest. Morality, as used here, describes human versions of such orientations. We explore the evolutionary antecedents of morality in the context of emergentism, giving considerable attention to the biological traits that undergird emergent human forms of mind. We suggest that our moral frames of mind emerge from our primate pro-social capacities, transfigured and valenced by our symbolic languages, cultures, and religions.

High profile (and controversial) events and installations, like the Helter-Skelter in Norwich and the Crazy Golf Bridges in Rochester, have drawn attention to innovation and public engagement within Anglican cathedrals. The present study contextualised these innovations both empirically and conceptually. The empirical framework draws on cathedral websites to chronicle the wide and diverse range of events and installations hosted by Anglican cathedrals in England and the Isle of Man between 2018 and 2022. The conceptual framework draws on Edward Bailey’s theory (...) of implicit religion to classify and to explore these events and installations. Two insights from the theory of implicit religion emerged as of particular significance. First, the notion of implicit religion softens the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. This was exemplified by eight categories of events: scientific exhibitions, festivals, musical events, art exhibitions, theatre, markets, community events and installations. Second, the notion of implicit religion draws attention to the themes and activities that generate meaning and purpose. This was exemplified by seven themes: social justice and social conscience, violence and reconciliation, remembrance, migration and sanctuary, COVID-19 and lockdowns, personal well-being and nature and environment.Contribution: Situated within the science of cathedral studies, this article identifies the range of innovative events and installations hosted by Anglican Cathedrals in England and the Isle of Man and assesses the significance of these events and installations through Edward Bailey’s lens of implicit religion, discussing first the softening of boundaries between the sacred and the secular and then the generation of meaning and purpose through the core themes raised by these events and installations. (shrink)

Die Aufklärung ist gerade auf ihrem Höhepunkt, als Johanna Charlotte Unzer in der Männer dominierten Gelehrtenwelt von sich reden macht. Sie interessiert sich für Philosophie, diskutiert mit und will verstehen, was Metaphysik bedeutet. Aber sie darf sich nicht ganz den Wissenschaften verschreiben. Für die Gesellschaft ist Johanna Charlotte in erster Linie Frau. Und das bedeutet, dass sie im Hintergrund bleiben, ihrem Mann eine gute Ehefrau und ihren Kindern eine gute Mutter sein muss. Die Autorin Ursula I. Meyer zeigt im (...) neuen Band der Reihe PhilosophinnenLeben das Spannungsfeld zwischen gelehrtem Anspruch und bürgerlicher Frauenrolle. Johanna Charlotte gibt zwar die Wissenschaften auf, zieht sich aber nicht ins Privatleben zurück. Mit der Veröffentlichung ihrer Gedichte hält sie sich ein Hintertürchen offen. Und sie behandelt auch darin wissenschaftliche Themen, spöttelt über den Metaphysicus oder setzt den Unterschied zwischen einer Uhr und einem Frauenzimmer poetisch um. (shrink)

Elise v. Bernstorff erweitert auf der Grundlage der Theorien des New Materialism den Diskurs über die Erforschung von Bildungspraktiken, indem sie ihre Beobachtungen nicht auf Lehrer*innen und Schüler*innen beschränkt, sondern Stimmen, Klänge und Räume als Akteure einer interaktiven Bildungsperformance beschreibt. Indem sie spezifische Unterrichtssituationen an einer Schule als Zusammenwirken humaner als auch an non-humaner Akteure darstellt, vermittelt v. Bernstorff der Leser*in ein Bild von aktuellem Schulunterricht, das den Charakter des Exemplarischen zugunsten des Experimentellen aufgibt. Ursula Rogg hat nach Jahren (...) freiberuflicher künstlerischer Arbeit als Lehrerin für Kunst und Theater gearbeitet. Seit 2013 ist sie mit dem Schwerpunkt Kulturelle Bildung in der Schulentwicklung tätig. Ihr besonderes Interesse und ihre Forschung gilt den aktivierenden Potenziale auditiven Dokumentierens im schulischen Kontext unter Berücksichtigung der perspektivischen Diversität. In ihrer response sucht sie nach Antworten auf die Fragen, woher die Texte v. Bernstorffss ihre faszinierende Kraft beziehen, welche theoretischen Referenzen ihnen zugrunde liegen und wie das von ihr entwickelte performative writing im Kontext von Bildungsforschung wirksam werden könnte. (shrink)