Heidegger affirmed traditional technology, but was opposed to science-based modern technology, in which everything (including man) is considered to be a mere “resource”. This opposition was expressed in the form of deep questioning and a suspicion of superficial evaluation, because the true nature of things was often concealed, though disclosed at times. Ways in which engineers should question technology are proposed, highlighting some of the hazards and injustices associated with technology and also its subtle sociological and psychological influences. The demands (...) of engineering ethics and the use of metaphor in design are other ways in which a narrowly rationalistic technological outlook can be confronted. (shrink)

This paper describes how some aspects of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy resonate strongly with an engineering outlook. He argued that practice was more “primordial” than theory, though preserving an important role for theoretical understanding as well, thus speaking to the gap between engineering education (highly theoretical) and engineering practice (mostly empirical). He also underlined the reality of “average” practices into which we are socialized, though affirming the potential for original work and action too, thus providing the grounds for self-actualization whether within (...) the routine or in transcending it. His notion of “thrownness” emphasizes the importance of context, with which engineers are constantly engaged. While all this relates to the idea of our “being”, Heidegger also dealt with the influence of time on our practices. Future death could be seen as spurring innovation, cultural history as a source for critiquing current practice and the present “situation” as the immediate context for corrective action. His major book is appropriately called “Being and Time”.1. (shrink)

Neuroscience of art might give us traction with aesthetic issues. However it can be seen to have trouble modeling the artistically salient semantic properties of artworks. So if meaning really matters, and it does, even in aesthetic contexts, the prospects for this nascent field are dim. The issue boils down to a question of whether or not we can get a grip on the kinds of constraints present and available to guide interpretive behavior in our engagement with works of fine (...) art. I argue that biased competition models of selective attention can be used to solve this problem, generalize to the affective content of our responses to artworks, and so show that research in cognitive neuroscience is germane to the types of problems of interest within the philosophy of art. (shrink)

Die Kritik des späten Wittgenstein am logizistischen Programm zur Begründung der Mathematik, vor allem im Blick auf die Definition der Zahl als Klasse von Klassen, und die darauf gegründete Explikation des Sinnes arithmetischer Sätze wird systematisch rekonstruiert. Entgegen einer verbreiteten Auffassung zeigen die Analysen Wittgensteins, daß Frege und Russell den Zahlbegriff nicht auf den „grundlegenderen" Begriff der eineindeutigen Zuordnung „reduzieren". Entsprechend sind Zahlen nicht mehr als durch Abstraktion erreichbare, echte Eigenschaften von Klassen zu verstehen, sondern als Formen oder Möglicfikeiten, die (...) die Beschreibung der Erfahrungswelt a priori bestimmen. Femer wird die wesentliche Selbständigkeit mathematischer Techniken gegenüber Techniken der Logistik durch einige Betrachtungen deutlich, welche die für den Fall größerer Zahlen unvermeidbare Benutzung vertrauter Bündelungssysteme, etwa der Dezimalnotation, bei Beweisen im Russellschen System zum Thema haben. (shrink)

According to a view widely held in the media and in public discourse more generally, online hating is a social problem on a global scale. However, thus far there has been little scientific literature on the subject, and, to our best knowledge, there is even no established scholarly definition of online hating and online haters in the first place. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a new perspective on online hating by, first, distinguishing online hating from the phenomena (...) it is often confused with, such as trolling, cyberstalking, and online hate speech, and, second, by proposing an operational definition of online hating and online haters based on ethnographic interviews and surveys of the existing scholarly literature. (shrink)

This article considers the Undercover Surrealism exhibition curated at London’s Hayward Gallery (from May to July 2006) and reflects on the practices of documentation, archiving and exhibition when the topic of the exhibition, as in this case, is a journal that in its most radical intention was set up to critique the practices of exhibition and documentation. The short and controversial life of Georges Bataille’s Documents unfolds as an often deliberately confusing juxtaposition of images and articles. The exhibition aims to (...) represent both the sometimes incompatible interests of the journal’s collaborators and the public dispute between Bataille and Breton over the aims of Surrealism. The article explores the intentions, risks, and possible effects of the exhibition in the context of Bataille’s own philosophy and his own peculiar part in the publication of Documents, which in its time was a contemporary review of diverse cultural phenomena interspersed with subversive dictionary entries. The article thus raises the question of what happens to the subversive intentions of a project like Documents in the scholarly historicist environment of public exhibition space. (shrink)

The six platinum group metals (pgms: ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and platinum) posed a number of problems for 19th-century chemists, including Mendeleev, for their Periodic classification. This account discusses the discovery of the pgms, the determination of their atomic weights and their classification.

It is argued that the theories of the modern cognitive psychology of perception and recognition show, under rigorous logical analysis, the same problems which arise in the philosophical theories of knowledge of Descartes and Locke and lead to relativistic and solipsistic consequences. Through examination of the approachs of D. Sanders, E. B. Goldstein and J. Fodor it is shown that the perceptible world in these theories dissolves in internal representations so that despite its realistic starting-point modern cognitive psychology runs into (...) epistemological idealism or solipsism. (shrink)

Die Kritik des späten Wittgenstein am logizistischen Programm zur Begründung der Mathematik, vor allem im Blick auf die Definition der Zahl als Klasse von Klassen, und die darauf gegründete Explikation des Sinnes arithmetischer Sätze wird systematisch rekonstruiert. Entgegen einer verbreiteten Auffassung zeigen die Analysen Wittgensteins, daß Frege und Russell den Zahlbegriff nicht auf den „grundlegenderen" Begriff der eineindeutigen Zuordnung „reduzieren". Entsprechend sind Zahlen nicht mehr als durch Abstraktion erreichbare, echte Eigenschaften von Klassen zu verstehen, sondern als Formen oder Möglicfikeiten, die (...) die Beschreibung der Erfahrungswelt a priori bestimmen. Femer wird die wesentliche Selbständigkeit mathematischer Techniken gegenüber Techniken der Logistik durch einige Betrachtungen deutlich, welche die für den Fall größerer Zahlen unvermeidbare Benutzung vertrauter Bündelungssysteme, etwa der Dezimalnotation, bei Beweisen im Russellschen System zum Thema haben. (shrink)

The article is concerned with the question of how legal institutions are structured with the use of constitutive, institutive, consequential, and terminative rules. To that end, the regulation of international treaties as laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 is analysed. This leads to the discovery of two additional categories of rules: content rules and invalidating rules. Finally, the special status of unique legal institutions is investigated. Unique legal institutions – for example, heads of (...) state, parliaments, and supreme courts – enjoy validity in a legal system to the exclusion of the validity of any other legal institution of the same category in that system. (shrink)