"Der Band untersucht in 12 interdisziplinären Beiträgen die Rolle der Imagination bei der Genese des Neuen in Prozessen der Antiketransformation. Den Ausgangspunkt bilden zwei wesentliche Zusammenhänge zwischen Imagination und Transformation: Einerseits lässt sich das moderne Verständnis von Imagination als Ergebnis einer Antiketransformation lesen, andererseits stellt die Imagination eine zentrale Produktivkraft in Transformationsprozessen dar."--Cover.

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)

The ArgumentThe overall portrayal of early modern experimentation as a new method of securing assent within a philosophical discourse sketched in many of the recent studies on the historical origin of experimentation is questioned by the analysis of the experimental practice of chemistry at the Paris Academy. Chemical experimentation at the Paris Academy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century originated in a different tradition than the philosophical. It continued and developed the material culture of the chemical work shops (...) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and explored epistemic objects which had rather loose connections to philosophy. On the other hand, I argue against the classical dichotomy between the work of the mind that of the hand, and for an epistemology of experimentation that acknowledges that experimental manipulation goes hand in hand with reflexion. In particuler, I argue against the view that chemists at the Paris Academy were “pragmatists” who merely gathered experimental facts and classified substances and operations without perplexing themselves over general conceptions. I claim that the chemists at the Paris Academy constructed a general conception framework which shaped the significance of their experiments. This conception that I call conception of the chemical combination, compound and reaction was rather quickly reified into an experimental fact. Despite its generality it was a genuine chemical conception rather independent of philosophy. (shrink)

Three studies were conducted to assess prevalent stereotypes regarding men's and women's emotional expressivity as well as self-perceptions of their emotional behaviour. Emotion profiles were employed to assess both modal emotional reactions and secondary emotional reactions to hypothetical events and personal experiences. In Study 1 we asked how men and women in general would react to a series of hypothetical emotional events. In Study 2 we asked how participants themselves expected to react to these same situations and in Study 3 (...) we asked participants to report a personal emotional event in narrative form. Two gender differences emerged across all three studies. Specifically, women were expected to be more likely to react with sadness to negative emotion-eliciting events in general. They also expected themselves to be more likely to react with sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more when experiencing negative emotional events. Finally, women report more sadness when describing personal events. In contrast, men were expected to react with more happiness/serenity during negative emotional situations. Also, they expect themselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile more and to be more relaxed in negative situations. Finally, men tend to report more happiness when describing negative personal events. In sum, the present study gives a more detailed portrayal of how men and women are expected and expect themselves to react to specific emotional situations and presents some evidence that these expectations may influence the way they reconstruct emotional events from their past. (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)

I argue and demonstrate in this essay that interconnected systems of science and technology, or technoscience, existed long before the late nineteenth century, and that eighteenth-century chemistry was such an early form of technoscience. Based on recent historical research on the early development of carbon chemistry from the late 1820s until the 1840s—which revealed that early carbon chemistry was an experimental expert culture that was largely detached from the mundane industrial world—I further examine the question of the internal preconditions within (...) the expert culture of carbon chemistry that contributed to its convergence with the synthetic-dye industry in the late 1850s. I argue that the introduction of new types and techniques of organic-chemical reactions and organic substances in this experimental expert culture, along with the application of chemical formulae as paper tools for modeling reactions as well as the chemical constitution and structure of substances, enabled academic chemists to make specific, novel contributions to chemical technology and industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. (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)

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 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)

ABSTRACTThis study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Corpora and discourse studies: Integrating discourse and corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan.) and provides a critical discussion of key topics and stances in the marriage equality debate in Germany. The ways in which the German print media covered the debate are explored through two corpora which include relevant texts from three German newspapers and two magazines from two key periods ; in 2001, Germany introduced ‘civil unions’ but it was only in 2017 that (...) marriage was opened to same-sex couples. Qualitative and quantitative analyses using AntConc and ProtAnt suggest that while there are parallels to marriage equality debates in other countries, there are also language-/culture-specific features. For example, there is a stronger focus on children’s welfare in the contemporary data, since marriage equality meant joint adoption rights for same-sex couples. Through an exploration of keywords/collocations and close reading of prototypical texts, it is shown how linguistic choices contribute to framing the arguments for/against marriage equality and how these stances are connected to culture-specific and cross-cultural norms. (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.

Spricht man über die Aufklärung, taucht man, wie meist in der Philosophie in eine Männerwelt, Frauen sind darin Randfiguren. In einer Zeit, als die Männer die Grundlagen der modernen Zivilisation legten, hat man Frauen eine Nebenrolle zugewiesen. Trotzdem haben Aufklärerinnen durch ihr Denken, ihr Werk und ihr Beispiel viele weitere Generationen beeinflusst. Der Titel Aufklärerinnen beschreibt Philosophinnen, Literatinnen und Wissenschaftlerinnen, die in dieser Umbruchphase etwas bewegen wollten. Mangelnder Frauenbildung, wirtschaftlicher Abhängigkeit und ehelicher Unterwerfung hatten sie den Kampf angesagt. Und das (...) in einer Zeit, die den Frauen mehr denn je ein bürgerliches Korsett aufgezwungen hat. When one speaks about the Enlightenment, one is immersed, as is usually the case in philosophy, in a man's world; women are marginal figures in it. At a time when men were laying the foundations of modern civilisation, women were assigned a supporting role. Nevertheless, women Enlightenment thinkers have influenced many more generations through their thinking, their work and their example. The title Women Enlighteners describes female philosophers, writers and scientists who wanted to make a difference during this period of upheaval. They declared war on the lack of female education, economic dependence and marital subjugation. And they did so in a time that imposed a bourgeois corset on women more than ever before. (shrink)

Der Argumentationszusammenhang der im Titel genannten Schrift von König, welche Erziehungswissenschaft als praktische Disziplin von Grund auf revidieren und neu aufbauen soll, wird dargestellt, das Gesamtwerk dann aber einer eingehenden Kritik unterzogen. Dabei wird nachgewiesen, daß die Begründung oberster Normen bei König zirkelhaft ist. Außerdem wird auf eine Reihe von Unklarheiten und Verwechslungen begrifflicher Art, sowie auf Unkorrektheiten formaler Art hingewiesen. Vor allem aber wird deutlich gemacht, daß König sich viele Schwierigkeiten und Unklarheiten durch die kritiklose Übernahme der Lehren der (...) Erlanger Schule eingehandelt hat. (shrink)

In the past few years, the philosophical debate about self-knowledge has presented itself in a strikingly ‘pre-Kantian’ fashion. Some claimed that all sorts of self-knowledge can be analyzed in the manner of the empiricists, or in terms of cognitive psychology, whereas defenders of rationalism have not grown tired of voicing the claim that there must be some sort of self-knowledge present and underlying, as it were, all sorts of epistemic self-concern. It is against this background that this paper advocates what (...) I would call a ‘Kantian’ strategy to approach the problem of self-knowledge. Taking Kant as a model, it argues, we may come to see how the current divide between empiricism and rationalism may be overcome in philosophical theorizing about self-knowledge. (shrink)

1. Probleme und Positionen der Wissenschaftstheorie.

Huston Smith's book, Why Religion Matters, offers an eloquent evocation of mystical sensibility. Unfortunately, along the way, he offers a strongly negative and often inaccurate account of the scientific worldview, the claim being that the science is laying siege to the spiritual.

. Reason’s genuine historicity: the establishment of a history of philosophy as a philosophical sub-discipline in Marburg Neo-Kantianism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Special Issue: Historical Thought in German Neo-Kantianism, Guest Editors: Katherina Kinzel and Lydia Patton, pp. 694-717.

Transcendence is explored from two perspectives: the traditional concept wherein the origination of the sacred is “out there,” and the alternate concept wherein the sacred originates “here.” Each is evaluated from the perspectives of aesthetics and hierarchy. Both forms of transcendence are viewed as essential to the full religious life.

Models of dream analysis either assume a continuum of waking and dreaming or the existence of two dissociated realities. Both approaches rely on different methodology. Whereas continuity models are based on content analysis, discontinuity models use a structural approach. In our study, we applied both methods to test specific hypotheses about continuity or discontinuity. We contrasted dream reports of congenitally deaf-mute and congenitally paraplegic individuals with those of non-handicapped controls. Continuity theory would predict that either the deficit itself or compensatory (...) experiences would surface in the dream narrative. We found that dream form and content of sensorially limited persons was indifferent from those of non-handicapped controls. Surprisingly, perceptual representations, even of modalities not experienced during waking, were quite common in the dream reports of our handicapped subjects. Results are discussed with respect to feedforward mechanisms and protoconsciousness theory of dreaming. (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)

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)

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)