Twentieth-century art historians have primarily regarded the interior of medieval churches aesthetically, in part as a result of the impression these churches left after the turmoil of the French Revolution and their subsequent rebuilding and reconstruction in the spirit of bourgeois enlightenment. The choir screens had disappeared, and reformed cathedral chapters and monastic communities installed themselves as best they could in the remaining space, but the real centerpieces of medieval piety could no longer shape the interior of these churches. On (...) Paris's Place de Grève in 1793 the bones of St. Geneviève were publicly burned and her golden shrine melted down; in similar ways the remaining churches of France—and, in the wake of the Napoleonic occupation, other countries—lost their saints' relics . What remained of the medieval saints' bodies the church, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, no longer dared to display. (shrink)

Legal theory usually distinguishes only two kinds of legal realism: the American and the Scandinavian. Another school of this theoretical perspective is German legal realism, which refers to scholars like Ihering, Weber, and Schelsky. According to German legal realism, the author outlines what legal theory can do to persuade modern jurisprudence to face the social reality of law, conceived as institutionalized normative communication. The latter always occurs with reference to already valid and effectively operative legal norms which are used in (...) an established, normatively binding legal practice in a given regional society. (shrink)

Conceptual research is interdisciplinary in two regards. On the one hand, various disciplines have developed various approaches to conceptual research. These range from conceptual analysis and conceptual history in philosophy, Begriffsgeschichte in historical and literary studies to term-related semantics in linguistics and conceptual research in psychoanalysis. On the other hand, concepts play a key role in any cooperation within interdisciplinary research projects. If they remain undiscussed and unmediated between the participating disciplines, they tend to impede productive cooperation. This contribution provides (...) an overview of different forms of conceptual research and introduces the approach of Experimental Conceptual Research as a technique of conceptual reflection, which unifies approaches of various disciplines by going back to an investigation of those criteria that become effective in the practice of concept formation and usage. As a criterial investigation, it starts at the level of conceptualizing phenomena within the course of research. In this way, premature fixations of conceptually filtered perceptions can be avoided, allowing the discovery of distinguishing features in phenomena to pave the way for forms of interdisciplinary cooperation that are deeply anchored in material content. (shrink)

Karma and Teleology. A problem and its solution in Indian philosophy. Johannes Bronkhorst. The International Institute for Buddhist Studies of the International College for Advanced Studies, Tokyo 2000. iii, 142 pp. ISBN 4-906267-44-0.

Könne und Vertrauen. Das Tovil-Heilritual von Sri Lanka als kultureigene Psychotherapie. Beatrice Vogt Frýba., Verlag Rüeger, Chur/Zürich 1991. Sw.Fr.54. 284 pp., illustrated.

I discuss various reactions to my article “Again, what the philosophy of science is not” [Callebaut (Acta Biotheor 53:92–122 (2005a))], most of which concern the naturalism issue, the place of the philosophy of biology within philosophy of science and philosophy at large, and the proper tasks of the philosophy of biology.

I focus on the relationship between the coalition of ideas including constructivism and enactivism on the one side, and ontology in general on the other. Based on a certain logico-phenomenological attitude that dominated Polish philosophy in the 20th century I argue that ontology as such is not burdened with realistic or representationalist presumptions. Finally, certain more specific issues raised by the commentators are also addressed, including the very usability of the notion of cognitive niche and its role when it comes (...) to the problem of presentation. (shrink)

Günter Grass entschied sich bereits 1956 unter dem Eindruck von Adornos Analyse der Kultur nach dem Zivilisationsbruch Auschwitz für eine asketische, »graue« Sprache als Maßstab der Dichtung – eine Maxime, die für Paul Celan zu grundlegenden Entscheidungen für die Skelettierung seiner lyrischen Sprache führte. Der Austausch zwischen dem Autodidakten Grass und seinem »Lehrer« Celan hatte andererseits fundamentale Bedeutung für die Konzeption von Hundejahre als episches Korrelat zum Sprachkosmos des Lyrikers. Als »kommunizierende Gefäße« sind sie durch einen gemeinsamen Code miteinander verbunden, (...) den dieses Essay zu entschlüsseln versucht. (shrink)

In participatory activities in the workplace, employees are invited to raise problems and suggest improvements to the management. Although it is widely acknowledged that employees rarely control decisions in these settings, little is known about the interactional resources that employees and managers draw upon when negotiating consensus about which initiatives to pursue in the future. We analyse interactions from participatory meetings in an industrial setting in relation to the topic of work shoes, showing how the participants orient to both their (...) relative deontic rights and epistemic rights. The analysis suggests that besides their low deontic status, employees’ fragile epistemic status constitutes an important but overlooked challenge to achieving improved working conditions through the participatory activities. (shrink)

The paper defines dialogic rationality and shows a rational path and understanding from the individual point of view. A separate discipline or discourse should coordinate the urgent need of deeper emotional transformation (metanoia) and explore the appearance of inner spiritual connectedness. This will establish the importance of every unique creature in the universe. Consequently in postmodernism, epistemology can no longer be accomplished by a “clear” cognitive theory, separated from ontological and anthropological elements. Cognition can no longer progress to an unchangeable, (...) non-falsifiable knowledge, because of changes within the object’s inner ontological level. Thus an observer can only interpret the phenomena but can never say “the last word”. Human cognition is based on time-coordinates when an observer tries to make a projection before the future has come. Yet existing now, it also contains the step back to the past as a shore of memory, experience, and knowledge. In this view history is considered to be non-linear—it is a complicated forward process, still continuously going back to the origin of human correlations with nature. A dialogic approach does not reject the importance of self-organizing processes, but tries to compose a sphere of acknowledgeable co-existence with the other to save the whole specter of human physical and mental, existential and creational features. Facing rational or mystical, but still radical, transformation, we get a sense of self-existence and can actively work and challenge ourselves to realize this in every-day life and in communication with the other. (shrink)