Many scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, religion, history or social science have ventured to offer a comprehensive explanation of music, one of the most intangible and elusive phenomena in the world. A palaeoanthropological approach, which places music into an evolutionary paradigm, can add important perspectives to our understanding of this phenomenon. To begin with, the question whether music is an adaptation that has survival value in the classical Darwinian sense is contemplated. Views on the origin of music in conjunction with the (...) emergence of language and as a domain for the expression of emotion, linked to music’s benefits for social coherence, are discussed. More recent views on the emergence of consciousness, on semiosis and on music as a manifestation of biocultural co-evolution, especially in conjunction with ritual, are then presented. Finally, the merit of exploiting the concept of play to help account for the systematicity of music’s semiosis is examined.Contribution: In line with the intent of this special collection of articles, the above considerations are placed into the context of materialist versus nonmaterialist perspectives on the emergence of the human mind. The overarching argument is that music contributes crucially to what it means to be human. (shrink)

We prove the existence of p-ideals that are nonmeagre subsets of P(ω) under various set-theoretic assumptions.

Band 13 der psycho-logik widmet sich aus fächerübergreifendem Blickwinkel dem Thema Identität, das in den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften zu einem Schlagwort des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts geworden ist. Gerade die moderne und liberale Gesellschaftsordnung, die uns ungeahnt viel Freiheit ermöglicht hat, charakterisiert ein Patchwork aus Identifikationsangeboten, das zugleich die kollektive und personale Identitätsfindung problematisch macht. Aktuell hat die narrative Theorie die erinnerte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte zum Gründungsort des Selbst erhoben. Sie spielt auch in den Beiträgen dieses Bandes eine prominente Rolle. (...) Es zeigt sich, dass die Identitätskonstruktion ein Prozess ist, in dem sich Identität als etwas Fragiles und Plurales offenbart. Identität ist ein tragisches Spiel zwischen Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit: Identität(en). Forscher*innen aus Deutschland, Irland und den USA mit ihren Beiträgen aus Literaturwissenschaft, Theologie, Philosophie und Psychologie diskutieren u. a. das Band zwischen Identität und Erinnerung bei Marcel Proust, transsexuelle Identitätskonstruktionen in US-amerikanischen Biopics, den Film als Identitätsbildungsmedium des Publikums, Identitätspolitik(en) am Beispiel des Zugangs zu US-amerikanischen Hochschulen, die Identitätsfindung in Lebensgeschichten und den psychotherapeutischen Umgang mit gebrochenen Identitäten. Fotoarbeiten des Künstlers Hermann Recknagel runden den Band ab. Mit Beiträgen von Michaela I. Abdelhamid, Carsten Albers, Paul Clogher, Katherine Duval, Winfried Eckel, Fiona Ennis, Annette Hilt, Christopher A. Nixon, Paul Nnodim, Hermann Recknagel, Patricia Rehm-Grätzel, Martin Reker, Annika Schlitte und Hartwig Wiedebach. (shrink)

Disgust (Ekel, dégoût) is a state of high alert. It acutely says "no" to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives. In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and (...) theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the role of disgust as both a cognitive and moral organon in Kant and Nietzsche; the history of the imagination of the rotting corpse; the counter-cathexis of the disgusting in Romantic poetics and its modernist appeal ever since; the affinities of disgust and laughter and the analogies of vomiting and writing; the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis in a theory of disgusting pleasures and practices; the association of disgusting "otherness" with truth and the trans-symbolic "real" in Bataille, Sartre, and Kristeva; Kafka's self-representation as an "Angel" of disgusting smells and acts, concealed in a writerly stance of uncompromising "purity"; and recent debates on "Abject Art.". (shrink)

From cosmology to the fact that the existence of God and nature, to address these issues, the development of two kinds of controversial contemporary line of argument, I compared and assessed in this paper: the physical cosmology as a starting argument and the natural design as a starting point of the argument. I made ​​some preliminary assessment of the court. The results showed that the Big Bang argument are quite reasonable, however, found the natural design of the demonstration clearly insufficient. (...) I compare and evaluate two contemporary and controversial lines of argument from cosmological facts to the existence and nature of God: the argument from physical cosmology and the argument from design in nature. As a preliminary step, some criteria for such an evaluation are proposed. It turns out that the Big Bang argument keeps considerable plausibility , whereas the Design argument can be shown to be deficient. (shrink)

We give a simplified proof of the main lemma in “Ramsey filters and the reaping number—Con” by Goldstern and Shelah.

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, (...) and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positiveandnegative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories. (shrink)

The nature of representation has been a central but controversial issue of cognitive philosophy. After 2,500 years of reflection (cf. Rolf 2006), opinions are still divided. On the one hand, there are those who are convinced that we have reached a crisis of representation in the arts, the media, and cultural theory; on the other hand, representation has remained right at the top of the agenda of cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence research (cf. Nöth & Ljungberg, eds. 2003; Nöth 1997). (...) The words in which Daniel Dennett, in 1978, postulates the necessity for a new theory of representation as a foundation of cognitive science are symptomatic of a certain unease about the state of the art: "What is needed is.. (shrink)

In several of his papers, Charles S. Peirce illustrates processes of interpreting and understanding signs by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed by means of these little pedagogical scenarios are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning, but they aim at elucidating fundamental semiotic implications of knowledge acquisition in general. Peirce's semiotic premise that a well-understood sign is one that represents an object and creates an interpretant is essential to the understanding (...) of how new words and signs in general can be taught and learned. The article argues that Peirce's theory of the object of the sign, especially of the necessity of collateral experience of the object of a sign, can help to understand the riddle posed by of the Meno paradox of the impossibility of learning what we do not yet know. It examines the semiotic implications of the didactic methods of teaching and learning through translation, ostension, mental and real images, as well as metacognition, and it shows how icons, indices, and symbols are essential to learning new words. (shrink)

This article examines rival strategies employed by public, private and civil society actors to promote fair trade organic commodity chains. The article analyses the case of fair trade organic cotton as a produce that is on the brink of reaching a mass market, and compares this with patterns of the more widely documented fair trade organic fruit case. It is shown how variations in commodity chain configurations and interfaces reflect different stakeholder positions and interests, as well as development philosophies. The (...) case of fair trade organic cotton chains illustrates how stakeholder involvement may speed up learning and thus facilitate mass-market entry. Finally, it is argued that rival commodity chain configurations make it difficult to agree upon common fair trade organic cotton certification strategies. (shrink)

Contrary to the early media semioticians' claim that semiotics is a metalanguage of the media and the media are a metalanguage of reality, the present paper gives evidence of how the media represent a world that is itself highly mediated. It is argued that media representations involve self-referential loops in which communication turns out to be communication about communication, reports are reports about reports, and mediations are mediations of mediations. Self-reference in the media is interpreted as a symptom of postmodernity (...) with its tendency towards historical self-reflection in scenarios in which even catastrophic current events are being interpreted as mere media events or even déjà-vu scenarios in a culture in which everything seems to have been said and shown before. (shrink)

The paper is a study of how graphic narratives (graphic novels and the comics) represent time in external visual space as well as in inner (mental) representations. Peirce’s semiotics is the main tool of research. After a survey of various approaches to the study of time in narratives in general and in graphic narratives in particular, an outline of the various aspects of the embodiment of time in space in general is given before the forms of the embodiment of time (...) in the space of graphic narratives is examined in detail. Signs of time are signs that represent time as their object and create mental representations of time as their interpretant. On this semiotic premise, the paper proposes a reinterpretation of Genette’s theory of time in narratives. A comparison with narratives in prose reveals that narrative time in graphic narratives evinces marked discontinuities in their spatial representation. The paper distinguishes between time as continuity, time as age, and points in time. It concludes that time as continuity is typically embodied in the form of spatial diagrams whereas time as age and points in time are mainly of the nature of indexical signs. The insights into the forms of embodiment of time in space derived from these premises are applied to examples from recent graphic novels and some traditional comics. (shrink)

Ecosemiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in relation to the natural environment in which they occur. The paper examines the cultural, biological, and evolutionary dimensions of ecosemioses on the basis of C. S. Peirce's theory of continuity between matter and mind and investigates the ecosemiotic dimensions of natural signs. Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature are distinguished from pansemiotism, and the coevolution of sign processes with their natural enviromnent is discussed as a determining factor of ecosemiosis.

It is a much neglected fact that the young Leibniz expressed particular interest for the philosophy of Johannes Clauberg, a follower of Descartes with Aristotelian outlook who taught at the University of Duisburg. Indeed he found here, against the background of Cartesianism, important impulses and preconceptions for important basic positions of his, which in many respects can be understood as extensions and unfoldings of Claubergian approaches. In this way nothing less than a story of creation and development of Leibnizian thought (...) is uncovered, e. g. from the gnoseological (symbolism of ideas; differentiation of nominal and real definitions, truths of reason and fact; the importance of real existence for the coherence of concepts) to the ontological area (the preparation of Leibnizian monadology through the question about the character of being in the innate ideas of Descartes; development of the concept of potency by means of that of facultas to that of virtus, of the petites perceptions of Leibniz and accordingly, for the first time in intellectual history, to his basic understanding of the unconscious): Further development of the anthropological question formulation through the idea of pre-established harmony. (shrink)

The "semiotic threshold" is U. Eco's metaphor of the borderline between the world of semiosis and the nonsemiotic world and hence also between semiotics and its neighboring disciplines. The paper examines Eco's threshold in comparison to the views of semiosis and semiotics of C. S. Peirce. While Eco follows the structuralist tradition, postulating the conventionality of signs as the main criterion of semiosis, Peirce has a much broader concept of semiosis, which is not restricted to phenomena of culture but includes (...) many processes in nature. Whereas Eco arrives at the conclusion that biological processes, such as the ones within the immune system, cannot be included in the program of semiotic research, Peirce's broader defmition of semiosis has meanwhile become thefoundation of semiotic studies in biology and medicine and hence in biosemiotics and medical semiotics. (shrink)

Le présent volume réunit les contributions d'un colloque sur la pensée sémiotique et linguistique des Idéologues qui s'est tenu à Berlin du 3 au 5 octobre 1983. Ce recueil d'articles fait suite à un fascicule de la revue Histoire Epistémologie Langage qui était consacré au même sujet et dont il complète et amplifie les perspectives en ce qui concerne la portée européenne de la discussion. Le volume manifeste l'intérêt que beaucoup d'entre nous portent, surtout dans les sciences du langage, à (...) ces philosophes longtemps négligés par l'histoire de la pensée. (shrink)

This essay offers a new perspective on Darwin’s evolutionary theorizing on the human arts of music, poetry and rhetoric. It argues that Darwin’s theory of the human arts is primarily a theory of their effects on our emotions. Contrary to the topical understanding Darwin nowhere claimed that the music of homo sapiens sapiens used to be performed, let alone still is performed in the service of sexual success. He exclusively stipulated that some such evolutionary attractor might have shaped the vocal (...) arts of our «half-human ancestors». In the human music proper, by contrast, he sees this archaic function only persist as a cognitively vague, yet intensely felt «mental reversion to the emotions and thoughts of a long-past age», as widely unconscious and barely decodable memory traces. Read in Gouldian terms the evolved proto-human «musical arts» have thus been «exapted», i.e. lost their presumable biologically adaptive function of evolutionary origin, yet have survived this exaptation and ever since serve new communicative functions while retaining some of their archaic affective power. Moreover, the arts of rhetoric and poetry, by using the hypothetically older neural and vocal architecture of singing (with regards to linguistic prosody, meter, and cadences), coopt this «exapted» emotional power of music into the novel field of symbolic language. Darwin’s understanding of rhetoric and poetry is shown to entail not only explicit references, but also many implicit similarities both with Greek and Latin rhetoric and poetics and, more specifically, with Romanticist assumptions regarding the origin and function of poetry. (shrink)

Strongly positive uses of terms that designate an absence, a cognitive or ontological impossibility or a sensory privation are among the persistent conceptual figures of Benjamin’s thought. This article analyses the moves by which Benjamin gave his concept of ‘the expressionless’ its intriguing semantic meaning and moral value. Drawing on the poetics and philosophy of the sublime from Greek antiquity through modern times, the article reveals key historical reference points of Benjamin’s concept and, furthermore, his strategy of advocating a novel (...) theory of the sublime as an antithesis to, or an interruption of, the beautiful by selectively integrating older traditions with theorems previously unrelated to these traditions. (shrink)

I propose that a logical formalization of a natural language text may be regarded as adequate if the following three groups of beliefs can be integrated into a wide reflective equilibrium: our initial, spontaneous beliefs about the structure and logical quality of the text; our beliefs about its structure and logical quality as reflected in the proposed formalization, and our background beliefs about the original text’s author, his thought and other contextually relevant factors. Unlike a good part of the literature, (...) I stress the indispensable role of initial beliefs in achieving such a wide reflective equilibrium. In the final sections I show that my approach does not succumb to undue subjectivism or the mere perpetuation of prejudice. The examples I use to illustrate my claims are chiefly taken from Anselm’s Proslogion 2–3 and the various attempts to formalize these texts. (shrink)

It is controversial whether ”Christian Philosophy’ is a useful or even consistent notion. After providing some historical background to the problem, I will distinguish and explicate two possible understandings of ”Christian Philosophy’ which should be kept apart: a ”Thomistic’ and an ”Augustinian’ one, of which the latter has garnered more attention in the recent literature. A sketch of the most prominent current ”Augustinian’ position leads to some considerations for why a ”Thomistic’ understanding of ”Christian Philosophy’ has more to recommend it, (...) if the term is regarded as useful at all. (shrink)

The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are presented: phenomenological consciousness and the qualia, consciousness as self-controlled agency of humans, self-control and self-reflection, consciousness and language, self-consciousness and introspection, consciousness and the other, consciousness of nonhuman animals, and the question of a (...) quasi-consciousness of the physical universe. A detailed account of Peirce’s three modes of consciousness is presented: primisense, qualisense or feeling-consciousness, altersense, and medisense, the consciousness of cognition, thought, and reasoning. In contrast to consciousness studies that establish a rather sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious states of mind, Peirce adopts the principle of synechism, the theory of continuity. For him, consciousness is a matter of degree. An important difference between Peirce’s concept of qualia and current theories of qualia in human consciousness is discussed. The paper shows how consciousness, according to Peirce, emerges from unconscious qualia and vanishes into equally unconscious habits. It concludes with a study of the roles of qualia, habit, and self-control in Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular in qualisigns and symbols, and the question of signs as quasi-conscious agents in semiosis. (shrink)

In early modern medicine, both green sickness and hysteria were understood to be gendered diseases, diseases of women. Green sickness, a disease of young women, was considered so serious that John Graunt, the father of English statistics, thought that in his time dozens of women died of it in London every year. One of the symptoms of hysteria was that women fell unconscious. The force of etymology and medical tradition was so strong that in one instance the gender of the (...) patient seems to have been changed by the recorder to make the case fit medical theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a moderately cognitive account of religious beliefs. Religious beliefs are interpreted as “worldview beliefs”, which I explicate as being indispensable to our everyday and scientific practice; my reading is nonetheless distinct from non-cognitivist readings of “worldview belief” which occasionally appear in the literature. I start with a brief analysis of a recent German contribution to the debate which on the one hand insists on the priority of epistemic reasons for or against religious beliefs, but on (...) the other hand contends that religious beliefs are worldview beliefs. This leads me to explicate a special sense of worldview beliefs, as well as their cognitive role. After that, I shed some light on a special epistemological characteristic of worldview beliefs, namely the strong involvement of “free certitude” in their acceptance. I explore the implications for the possible role of arguments for worldview beliefs, especially for worldview beliefs concerning theism. (shrink)

Angesichts der Globalisierung und der von ihr aufgeworfenen Probleme für das nationale und das internationale Recht gewinnt die Rechtsphilosophie immer stärker an Bedeutung. Zugleich verbinden sich rechtstheoretische Fragen wieder zunehmend mit philosophischen Überlegungen. Der vorliegende Band versammelt 20 Beiträge namhafter Rechtstheoretiker und Philosophen, die die eigenständige Begriffsbildung und die Entwicklung neuer Theorieansätze auf dem Gebiet der Rechtsphilosophie zum Ziel haben. Das Spektrum reicht dabei von grundbegrifflichen Klärungen bis hin zu konkreten Problemstellungen des globalisierten Rechts und bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über (...) die aktuelle deutsche und internationale Debatte. Mit Beiträgen u. a. von Robert Alexy, Klaus Günther, Gunther Teubner, Otfried Höffe und Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

English summary: Deism, the "Religionsphilosophie der Aufklarung" (religious philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Troeltsch) played a significant role in the modernization of philosophy in the early modern age and of European culture in a broader sense. Although this has been known for a long time, there is still the need for a differentiated overall picture of the subject. Therefore, on the occasion of Gunter Gawlick's 80th birthday in June 2010, a seminar on the manifestations of Deism in Europe was held (...) at the "Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel" (library of Duke August of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel). The resulting anthology, edited by Winfried Schroder, assembles the partial results of current research on Deism, thereby providing a definition of Deism's role in the cultural, ideological and intellectual history of early modern times. German description: Zu den philosophie- und theologiegeschichtlichen Formationen, denen in der Zeitspanne zwischen dem spaten 16. und dem 18. Jahrhundert die Uberwindung der vormodernen Welt die wichtigsten Impulse verdankt, gehort ohne Zweifel der Deismus. Seine Leitideen sind der Gedanke der Suffizienz einer um moralische Vorschriften zentrierten 'naturlichen' Religion, die aus blosser Vernunft zuganglich ist, die Uberflussigkeit einer ubernaturlichen Offenbarung und die daraus abgeleitete Forderung nach Toleranz und Denkfreiheit. Diese Ideen weisen den Deismus geradezu als "die Religionsphilosophie der Aufklarung" (Ernst Troeltsch) aus. Diese massgebliche Rolle, die der Deismus im Modernisierungsprozess der fruhneuzeitlichen Philosophie und der europaischen Kultur im weiteren Sinne gespielt hat, ist seit langem bekannt - und doch fehlt es an einem differenzierten Gesamtbild. In den letzten Jahrzehnten sind zum einen wichtige Forschungsertrage erzielt worden, zum anderen hat die Deismus-Forschung etliche Desiderate festgestellt, denen sie teilweise bereits nachgegangen ist. Aus Anlass des 80. Geburtstags von Gunter Gawlick fand deshalb im Juni 2010 ein Arbeitsgesprach zu den Gestalten des Deismus in Europa in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel statt. Der zugehorige von Winfried Schroder herausgegebene Sammelband bundelt die Teilergebnisse der bisherigen Desismus-Forschung zu einer Positionsbestimmung des Deismus in der Kultur-, Ideen- und Geistesgeschichte der Fruhen Neuzeit. (shrink)

Collected here in one volume are fifteen cutting-edge essays by leading academics which together clarify and defend the claim that freedom from poverty is a human right with corresponding binding obligations on the more affluent to practice effective poverty avoidance. This volume is co-published with UNESCO publishing.

The paper has two main tasks: to trace the systematic connections between two recent pieces of epistemological work by David Henderson and Terry Horgan, and to criticize as unintelligible the concept of epistemically relevant possible worlds, which is central to one of them. Iceberg Epistemology sketches a general account of the structure of our cognitive organisation, which can, by and large, be classified as an externalist, reliabilist account. I argue that Henderson & Horgan's new objective epistemic value (labelled robustness of (...) reliability and loosely defined as reliability across a wide range of epistemically relevant possible worlds) is introduced to clarify the connection between reliability and the ideal of truth (and by that to remedy a standard shortcoming of externalist accounts). However, the concept of an epistemically relevant possible world seems to be unintelligible (at least on the basis of the introductory examples offered so far). Some concluding remarks address the status and the achievability of robustness of reliability as an epistemic ideal. (shrink)

In his 1868 paper “Questions concerning Reality” (QR), an early version of his better-known paper “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” (QCF) of the same year (Fisch 1984: xxxviii), Charles S. Peirce quotes the unidentified Latin fragment Hoc loquor inde est (W 2:167). In QCF, the better-known essay first published in the second volume of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy and included in Peirce’s Collected Papers (CP) as well as in the first volume of the Essential Peirce, Peirce quotes (...) the same fragment again. Here, the quote appears in a variant adapted to the given argumentative context as Hinc loquor inde est (W 2:207; CP 5.253; EP 1:24). None of the editors of Peirce’s writings nor, it.. (shrink)

Competitive courtship and aesthetic judgment/choice : Darwin's model of the arts -- The arts as promoters of social cooperation and cohesion -- Engagement in the arts as ontogenetic self-(trans-)formation -- A cooptation model of the evolution of the human arts : the special role of play behavior -- Technology, and symbolic cognition.

Global Ethics, along with its companion volume Global Justice, will aid in the study of global justice and global ethical issues with significant global dimensions. Some of those issues directly concern what individuals, countries, and other associations ought to do in response to various global problems, such as poverty, population growth, and climate change. Others concern the concepts that are commonly used to discuss such issues, such as "development" and "human rights." And still others concern the legitimacy of various phenomena (...) that structure the global scene, such as national borders, the institutions of national sovereignty and self-determination, and attitudes such as nationalism and patriotism. In recent decades, literature on such issues has started to build up in the Western philosophical tradition. Until now, though, no up-to-date sample of this literature has been available to students and other interested parties. These two books, companion volumes sold separately, fill this gap by providing a sample of the best recent work on these themes. (shrink)

According to the logical positivists, signs (words and pictures) of imaginary beings have no referent (Goodman). The semiotic theory behind this assumption is dualistic and Cartesian: signs vs. nonsigns as well as the mental vs. the material world are in fundamental opposition. Peirce’s semiotics is based on the premise of the sign as a mediator between such opposites: signs do not refer to referents, they represent objects to a mind, but the object of a sign can be existent or nonexistent, (...) a feeling or an idea, something merely imaginary or even something false. The paper examines the nature of imaginary, nonexistent, and nonfigurative objects, such as unicorns, phoenixes, or nonrepresentative paintings, and shows why verbal or visual representations of imaginary beings and even nonfigurative paintings, which seem to represent nothing, are fully developed signs with a variety of objects determining their representation. (shrink)