[t. 1.] Filosofii︠a︡ -- [t. 2.] Mifologii︠a︡--religii︠a︡-- [t. 3]. Literatura. I︠A︡zyk i pisʹmennostʹ -- [t. 4]. Istoricheskai︠a︡ myslʹ. Politicheskai︠a︡ i pravovai︠a︡ kulʹtura -- [t. 5]. Nauka, tekhnicheskai︠a︡ i voennai︠a︡ myslʹ, zdravookhranenie i obrazovanie -- [t. 6]. Iskusstvo.

BackgroundThis study aimed to translate the negative and positive items of the Psychological Consequences Questionnaire into German, to adapt this version to the context of screening for cirrhosis and fibrosis of the liver, and to test its psychometric properties.Materials and methodsThe three subscales were translated into German using a forward-backward translation method. Furthermore, we adapted the wording to the context of liver diseases. In sum, the PCQ comprises twelve negative items and ten positive items. We tested the acceptability, (...) distribution properties, internal consistency, scale structure, and the convergent validity using an analysis sample of 443 patients who were screened for cirrhosis or fibrosis of the liver.ResultsWe found low non-response and non-unique answer rates on the PCQ items in general. However, positive items had higher non-response rates. All items showed strong floor effects. McDonald’s Omega was high for both the negative and the positive PCQ scale, as well as for the total PCQ scale. Confirmatory factor analysis could reproduce the three dimensions that the PCQ intends to measure. However, it suggests not summing up a total PCQ score and instead treat the subscales separately considering a higher order overall construct. Convergent validity with the short form of the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was acceptable.ConclusionOverall, our study results report a successful adaptation of the German PCQ with good performance in terms of acceptability, internal consistency, scale structure, and convergent validity. Floor-effects limit the content validity of the PCQ, which needs to be addressed in future research. However, the German version of the PCQ is a useful measurement for both negative and positive screening consequences - even in a non-cancer setting. (shrink)

Although it is central to the social sciences, the notion of the collective has been elaborated primarily in fields of study which are concerned with deviant behavior, and then only in the sense of »collective behavior.« In order to consider the emergence of collectivity, the present paper suggests a re-reading of this sociology (especially of Herbert Blumer). By means of a reading of Walt Whitman, who was important as a lyrical and journalistic source of inspiration to early American sociology, a (...) concept of material and medial infrastructures (particularly transport media such as the ferry) is obtained, which is also significant for the current theoretical interweaving of collectivity and infrastructure. German Der Begriff des Kollektivs ist, obgleich im Zentrum der Sozialwissenschaften, meist nur im Rahmen einer für abweichendes Verhalten zuständigen Spezialsoziologie als »kollektives Verhalten« konzipiert worden. Der Aufsatz schlägt eine Re-Lektüre dieser Soziologie (insbesondere von Herbert Blumer) vor, um das Zustandekommen von Kollektivität zu denken. Mit Hilfe einer Lektüre von Walt Whitman, der als lyrische und journalistische Inspirationsquelle für die frühe amerikanische Soziologie wichtig war, wird ein Konzept der materialen und medialen Infrastrukturen (insbesondere von Transportmedien wie der Fähre) gewonnen, das gerade auch für die heutige Verschränkung von Kollektivität und Infrastruktur aussagekräftig ist. (shrink)

So geschaftig die internationale Nietzsche-Forschung auch ist, bleibt doch weithin unklar, was eigentlich gemeint ist, wenn wir von Nietzsches Philosophie sprechen. Handelt es sich um ein Gefuge von Lehrsatzen Wille zur Macht, Ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen, Ubermensch? Wie sollen philosophisch interessierte Leserinnen und Leser damit umgehen, dass Nietzsche sich offensichtlich unentwegt selbst ins Wort fallt und jede doktrinale Festlegung verweigert? Ist das nur eine billige literarische Strategie, um das eigene Gefuge von Lehrsatzen interessanter zu machen? Oder handelt es sich vielmehr (...) um den Versuch, den Glauben an Philosophie als Gefuge von Lehrsatzen grundsatzlich zu problematisieren? Vielleicht ist Nietzsches Philosophie etwas vollig Anderes: eine andere Praxis. Der bekannte Nietzsche-Forscher Andreas Urs Sommer stellt und beantwortet in diesem Band grundlegende Fragen zum Umgang mit Nietzsches Texten, die so ganz anders zu funktionieren scheinen als landlaufige philosophische Texte. Die dafur erforderliche philosophische Hermeneutik muss auf einem sicheren philologisch-historischen Fundament stehen. (shrink)

Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem's Betrachtungen über die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der Religion was a bestseller of the German Enlightenment, although it is a theological book. In this article, his Betrachtungen is treated as a text that tries to synthesize the newly established philosophy of history with more or less traditional theological patterns. Jerusalem uses the argument of universal development and progress in history to demonstrate the evidence of divine providence. His book thus resembles Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, which (...) it may have influenced. The main purpose of Jerusalem is to calm and pacify the individual's soul. He wants to prove that the individual's life fits into the general order of history, which is also the purpose of ‘profane’ philosophy of history in German Enlightenment. Jerusalem's neological philosophy of history provides new answers to the problem of evil after the decline of a metaphysical theodicy in the tradition of Leibniz. (shrink)

This study employs the Porter hypothesis framework to test the moderating role of production cost in the relationship between resource-efficiency actions and financial performance for German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For this purpose, we employ the 2012, 2018, and 2021 Flash Eurobarometer surveys to analyze how consistently SMEs adopt resource-efficiency actions, and the impact of these actions on their performance and costs. We also conduct a generalized method of moments regression analysis (GMM). Among the seven resource-efficiency actions proposed, (...) saving water had a significant positive (negative) influence on financial performance in 2012, 2021, and (2018). Saving energy and using renewable energy had a positive and significant (insignificant) effect on financial performance in 2018, 2021, and (2012). Finally, selling scrap material to other companies had a positive and significant impact in all years. Furthermore, increased production costs negatively moderate the relationship between eco-efficiency action scores and financial performance. The results indicate that the “strong” version of the Porter hypothesis is not supported: It only holds when the implementation of eco-efficiency actions reduces production costs and increases financial performance. (shrink)

The term ur-emotion is proposed to replace basic emotion as a name for the aspects of emotion that underlie perceived similarities of emotion types across cultures and species. The ur- prefix is borrowed from the German on analogy to similar borrowings in textual criticism and musicology. The proposed term ur-emotion is less likely to be interpreted as referring to the entirety of an emotional state than is the term basic emotion. Ur-emotion avoids reductionism by indicating an abstract underlying structure (...) that accounts for similarities between emotions without implying that the differences are unimportant. This article is dedicated to the memory of Bob Solomon, and is framed in terms of his decades-long analysis and critique of the concept of basic emotions. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis article analyzes Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of the rise of modernism in his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele . Balthasar's narration of the history of eschatology and the rise of the modern age is critical preparation for his rejection of modernism. It is also a forerunner for his definition of German culture through anti-Semitic adversary-markers. According to Balthasar, in the 18th century there was a fall from a romantic age when German culture was Christian. In the 19th (...) and 20th century Balthasar sees a dramatic deterioration of religious and intellectual sensibilities and an alienation from these earlier foundations. Balthasar presents “the Jewish” as an adversary of these foundations. Balthasar's claims are here presented and critiqued.ZUSAMMENFASSUNGDer vorliegende Aufsatz betrachtet die Entstehungsgeschichte der Moderne, wie sie Hans Urs von Balthasar in seiner Apokalypse der deutschen Seele darstellt. Balthasars Verständnis der Geschichte der Eschatologie und der Entstehung des modernen Zeitalters ist kritische Vorarbeit für seine Ablehnung der Moderne. Balthasars Kulturkritik leitet auch zu einer Definition der deutschen Kultur durch antisemitische Feindmarkierung hin. Nach Balthasars Auffassung »entfremdete« sich die deutsche Kultur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert »immer mehr von ihren Grundlagen« und brach damit mit einem romantischen 18. Jahrhundert, in dem die deutsche Kultur noch christlich war. Balthasar sieht im »Jüdischen« einen Feind der Grundlagen der deutschen Kultur. Balthasars Behauptungen werden im vorliegenden Aufsatz dargestellt und kritisch beurteilt. (shrink)

In order to counter the dominance of subjectivity in modern German philosophy since Kant, the young Hans Urs von Balthasar appealed to the theocentric epistemology of Gregory of Nyssa. By means of a study of Balthasar's Présence et Pensée: Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse, the purpose of this essay will be to elucidate Balthasar's interpretation of the meaning and orientation of thought according to Gregory of Nyssa's epistemology. After an initial presentation of Balthasar's contention that (...) for Gregory of Nyssa God qua Being (to einai) serves as the constitutive source of thought and, therefore, the necessary orientation for any philosophical reckoning of the meaning of thought, the following issues are addressed: 1.) The meaning of thought as erotic and egressive, 2.) the interpretation of imago dei in relation to thought, 3.) the Incarnation and the ultimate horizon of thought. (shrink)

Even in scientific usage there are terms that we believe we understand and when we try to pinpoint what they refer to we notice that these terms do not have a precise meaning. This applies, in linguistics, to the term Indo-European. Mostly, when used as an adjective, it seems to apply to those languages that derive, hypothetically, from a disappeared idiom which some scholars for nearly two hundred years have been trying to reconstruct. Thus, it is said that Sanskrit, Greek (...) and Latin are Indo-European languages. When this epithet is applied to French it causes surprise. From a comparative viewpoint, French is usually seen as a Romance language and only Romance languages taken together or, better said, Latin from which they derive, seem to merit the epithet. When used as a noun, “Indo-European” may designate the disappeared language itself. But serious scholars give it a precision in this case like commun in French, proto in English or Ur- in German. Does this imply that we may designate as Indo-European the sum of the individual languages of this family, whether they still exist or have disappeared? One may indeed take a chance and do it, but not without startling or even shocking one's public. (shrink)

El pensador suizo Andreas Urs Sommer es, sin dudarlo, uno de los actuales especialistas de Nietzsche. En el año 2017 publica un texto titulado Nietzsche und die Folgen, un libro que recobra la figura del pensador alemán a la luz de ideas bastantes novedosas que hasta ahora no habían sido presentadas por la mayoría de los intérpretes de Nietzsche. En ese sentido, la filosofía experimental (Experimentalphilosophie) que presenta Sommer es la que ha llamado la atención de la crítica. Se trataría (...) de esconder bajo el juego experimental la filosofía de Nietzsche, omitiendo de ese modo un cierto tipo de compromiso de sus postulados filosóficos. Esta determinación está cobrando fuerza en la medida en que nos muestra las consecuencias de la filosofía experimental. Este trabajo pretende desarrollar, por un lado, los postulados centrales de la propuesta de Sommer para luego confrontarlos a la luz de la crítica y en qué medida dicha crítica es medular. Lo anterior da luces a una discusión que, más que inclinarse a la polémica, muestra el nutriente de una fructífera investigación. -/- The Swiss thinker Andreas Urs Sommer is, undoubtedly, one of Nietzsche’s current specialists. In the year of 2017 publishes a text entitled Nietzsche und die Folgen, a book that recovers the figure of the German thinker in the light of quite novel ideas that until now had not been presented by most of the interpreters of Nietzsche. In that sense, the experimental philosophy (Experimentalphilosophie) presented by Sommer is the one that has caught the attention of critics. It would be a matter of hiding Nietzsche’s philosophy under the experimental game, thus omitting a certain type of commitment from his philosophical postulates. This determination is gaining strength insofar as it shows us the consequences of experimental philosophy. This work aims to develop, on the one hand, the central postulates of Sommer’s proposal and then confront them in the light of criticism and to what extent such criticism is central. The foregoing gives light of a discussion that more than leaning to the controversy shows the nutrient of a fruitful investigation. (shrink)

The essay compares Ricœur’s and Levinas’s conceptions of the constitution of conscience in the sense of German Gewissen. Beginning with Ricœur’s basic distinction between “identity-idem” and “identity-ipse” it shows the proper place of conscience in his conception. For Ricœur conscience is a finite category of otherness as related to the self, i.e. its most interior, intrinsic otherness. For Levinas, on the other hand, conscience – the other in the same – is an initiatory category, which is described in terms (...) of absolute passivity, persecution and substitution. In conclusion Ricœur´s critique of Levinas’ category of “the Other” is examined on the background of Levinas’ conception of subjectivity as a vocation for Good. (shrink)

The life and career of the Soviet scholar of myth and religion Izrail′ Grigor′evič Frank-Kamenetskij is discussed, tracing his development from a scholar working exclusively on semitology to a theorist of myth and literature. The scholar’s relationship to German philosophy and Biblical scholarship is outlined, along with his relationship to Soviet scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. The development of the scholar’s work is related to his encounter with N. Ja. Marr in the early 1920s, and the way in (...) which Marr’s doctrine underwent considerable revisions when subjected to German philosophy and applied to narrative material is detailed. Finally the way in which attention increasingly turned to the genesis of literary plots and poetic metaphor is discussed, along with both the influence such work exerted and the enduring value of such work today. (shrink)

Based on a symposium by the International Gesellschaft f'ur dialektische Philosophie, Societas Hegeliana with the theme "Abstrakt/Konkret," Sept. 21-12, 1998 in Braga, Portugal.

Nicht erst seit dem Erscheinen der Schwarzen Hefte wird Martin Heideggers personliche wie denkerische Verstrickung in den Nationalsozialismus diskutiert. Die Debatte, ob er sich aus dieser Verstrickung jemals entschieden gelost hat, begleitet die Auseinandersetzung mit Heideggers Denken seit Jahrzehnten. Die Tagung Heideggers Schwarze Hefte. Ideologieanfalligkeit der Intellektuellen, die im Dezember 2015 an der Universitat Freiburg i.Br. stattfand, wendete sich im Blick auf Heidegger und daruber hinaus der Frage zu, wie es dazu kommen konnte, dass sich Intellektuelle in der Weimarer Republik (...) wenigstens zeitweise fur die NS-Bewegung begeisterten. Immanent-kritisches Weiterdenken mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger (NZZ) zeichnet die aus Anlass der Tagung gehaltenen Vortrage in ihrer Gesamtheit aus. Der Band enthalt die Beitrage von Wolfgang Essbach, Andreas Urs Sommer, Claus Arnold, Lore Huhn, Christian Bermes, Jeff Malpas, Emil Angehrn, Peter Trawny, Christoph Demmerling, Oliver Muller, Georg Essen, Rainer Marten und Dieter Thoma. (shrink)

Excerpt from Wirklichkeiten: Beitrge zum Weltverstndnis Cdie erften hrei 9 uffhe geben eine allgemeine hiftorifche @in eitnng unb gegen -c$nhe he? britten einen turg, en berbiicf her 23e tanfchauung, hie ha' Q3uch naher begrunhen (R)iefe entmi e ich im 8ufammenhange bi' 3um g'man5igften Q bfchnitt. (R)ie Iet3ten ?qftg'e enthalten in freierer ?infniipfung weitere 'j u'fiihrungen einiger chemata, hie, toie ich hoffe, g'ur @rluterung her beruhrten $ragen nicht unmillfommn fein wethen; man mirh ihnen hoher biefleicht nachfehen, haf3 ihre (c)chreibart mehr feuiiietoniftifch (...) gehalten ift; e'5 erfchien mir fein C5ehier, menu hiefeiben (c)runhgehanfen unter berfchiehener Qieleuchtung geaeigt werben. (R)en 2 rtifei ber aufere ?rume habe ich aufgenommen, weil mir hie harin enthaltenen (c)e bfb beobachtungen nicht ohne pfhchoiogifchecs' $ntereffe fchienen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Architectural experience and creation is studied through a selection of projects, each driven by an obsessive creator towards particular levels of architectural experience, both physical and virtual. The article investigates the processes of turning dreams into physical space, exemplified by four extraordinary creators and collectors of space, each one a pursuer of obsessive architectural activities, all haunted by transitive dreams: Baron Des Esseintes, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ fictional character in the novel À Rebours (Against Nature) from 1884; Kurt Schwitters, the dadaist painter (...) and constructor of the Merzbau created in Hannover between 1919 and 1937; Sir John Soane, the architect and collector, who arranged his home as a museum from 1790 until 1837; and the German artist Gregor Schneider, whose home in Rheydt since 1985 is slowly folding in on itself under the name Haus Ur. Whereas Des Esseintes is a fictional builder of dreams in physical form; Schwitters, Soane and Schneider are real builders of dreams in physical form - the author Huysmans is a real builder of dreams in fictional form. Three of the four selected projects introduce layers of hybrid existence into ordinary building shells, and one represents the virtual architecture of narrative space. Their creators are driving architectural space into different ontological states, providing a field of perceptional and representational problems. The architects of parallel realities are subsequently challenging our basic understanding of architectural organization, aesthetics and methods. This erratic field of subjective and obsessive architecture serves my purposes of investigating architectural imagination as the main asset of virtual space. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Michael N. ForsterGünter ZöllerMichael N. Forster. Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 661. Paper, $30.00.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) has remained an enigmatic and controversial work. Typically it has been studied and appropriated selectively, by focusing on a few topics or sections of this immense opus. There are also several (...) commentaries on all or part of the work that immerse the reader in plenty of detail, but often with insufficient attention paid to the work’s overall design. Forster’s book is thematically focused but has sufficient scope to provide the reader with an overall orientation about the Phenomenology. Moreover, it is written in a clear, accessible language, with plenty of genuinely philosophical material to balance the more narrowly exegetical aspects of the study. Forster’s work stands in the tradition of a number of German and French studies that seek to unravel the “genesis and structure” (Hyppolite) of the Phenomenology as a key to understanding and assessing the import of Hegel’s singular work. Forster discusses those earlier readings, subjects them to a thorough critique, and develops original positions on a number of key issues in scholarship on the Phenomenology.The entire first half of the book (Parts One and Two) is concerned with the “official project of the Phenomenology,” which Forster reconstructs as three sets of philosophical tasks. First are the pedagogical tasks designed to introduce the reader to the superior viewpoint of Hegel’s system and its ability to overcome the ills specific to modern culture. In particular, Hegel is shown to further advance Herder’s and Schiller’s philosophical project of replacing the multiple, unreconciled dualisms of the modern intellectual and moral outlook with a unified, monistic account of natural and social reality. In a strong interpretive move, Forster attributes a naturalism of sorts to Hegel’s integrationist account of mind and body or self and world.Second are the epistemological tasks designed to justify the cognitive claims of Hegel’s [End Page 541] system (“science”) against those of all other philosophical and popular viewpoints. In particular, Forster shows Hegel’s indebtedness to the ancient (Pyrronic) skeptical strategy of equipollence, i.e., the method of setting into opposition equally strong arguments on both sides of any issue and thereby producing an equal balance of justification on all sides of the issue. Of all possible viewpoints only Hegel’s own, which is not subject to any external opposition, eludes the scope of the method of equipollence.The third, specifically metaphysical set of tasks of the Phenomenology centers around the work’s social and (on Forster’s reading) naturalist conceptions of God, meaning and truth, in which transcendent warrants are replaced by communal consensus. Forster concludes the first half of his study with a detailed consideration of the relation between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s system proper. He stresses that the work is only the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the philosophical science itself and that it remains systematically independent of the latter.Part Three examines the role of history and historicism in the Phenomenology. Forster distinguishes between teleological or normative historicism and intellectual or descriptive historicism, and limits his investigation to the latter as the philosophically defensible of the two enterprises. He argues extensively for a one-to-one correlation between the various “shapes of consciousness” to be found in the core of the Phenomenology (from the chapter on Consciousness through the chapter on Reason) and specific periods in human history. This chronological history of consciousness is shown to be supplemented by two further accounts of the history of consciousness (in the chapter on Spirit and in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in which the first history’s focus on individual consciousness is enlarged to include supra-individual mind (“spirit”).In Part Four Forster explains the tripling of the history of consciousness with a shift in the plan of the Phenomenology, away from the more limited project of the original or “Ur-Phenomenology”—to lead individual consciousness to the viewpoint of (Hegelian) science—to the more ambitious goal... (shrink)

La tesis de este artículo es que tenemosrazones suficientes para considerar losdeícticos un problema para la propuestasemántica de Gottlob Frege. Dividiremosel texto en dos partes: en la primera,expondremos el programa semánt i codel l ógi co al emán por medi o de t rest e s i s e s t r uc t ur ant e s. En l a s e gunda,introduciremos la cuestión de los deícticos,explorando en qué medida representan unproblema para dicho programa. The thesis of this (...) article is that we haveenough reasons to consider indexicals asa problem for Gottlob Frege’s semantic.We will divide the text into two parts: inthe first one, we will expose the semanticprogram of the german logician by meansof three structuring theses. In the secondone, we will introduce the question of theindexicals, exploring how they representa problem for the above mentioned program. (shrink)

Professor Wilhelm Blasius, physiologist at Giessen in West Germany, has written a book "Probleme der Lebensforschung" (Verlag Rombach, Freiburg 1973) which - I understand - is to be published in an English version. To me it has been of interest as an orientation in a world of traditional German thinking, best known from Goethe's natural philosophy of perceptible "Ur­ bilder", which perhaps in English could be rendered descriptively by calling it an inner vision of further irre­ ducible totalities. It (...) is in contemporary language a kind of intuitive 'holistic' insight which represents understanding different from that of natural science. The latter is devoted to the study of causal chains, is largely experimental and in its aim ultimately 'reduc­ tionist' -to use another modern term. Goethe's approach is reincarnated in the "Wesenslehre" of the late Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) and in the thinking of Carl Gustav Caruso To Klages the perceived image alone is the meaning of everything in this world and in this sense he is the advocate of a psychological phenom­ enology that is an end in itself. Originally trained as a chemist Klages soon turned to philosophy and de­ veloped a system of concepts supposed to give a deeper insight into the essence of life than did the endless causal chains of natural science. Blasius makes much use of the concepts of this philosopher, in particular his ideas on 'polarities'. (shrink)

The life and career of the Soviet scholar of myth and religion Izrail' Grigor'evic Frank -Kamenetskij is discussed, tracing his development from a scholar working exclusively on semitology to a theorist of myth and literature. The scholar's relationship to German philosophy and Biblical scholarship is outlined, along with his relationship to Soviet scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. The development of the scholar's work is related to his encounter with N. Ja. Marr in the early 1920s, and the way (...) in which Marr's doctrine underwent considerable revisions when subjected to German philosophy and applied to narrative material is detailed. Finally the way in which attention increasingly turned to the genesis of literary plots and poetic metaphor is discussed, along with both the influence such work exerted and the enduring value of such work today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Scheeben's Place in Nineteenth-Century Catholic Theology and the Question of His Theological MethodEvan S. KoopMatthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888) is enjoying a moment in English-speaking Catholic theological circles. In recent years his thought has attracted increasing interest from scholars who view him as an important forerunner to some of the central currents of Catholic theology in the twentieth century,1 a trend that promises only to accelerate with the recent (...) publication of the initial volumes of the first complete translation of his monumental Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik into English.2 The much-debated question of Scheeben's proper place in the history of Catholic theology in the nineteenth century therefore, has gained a new relevance. While the present study of course, cannot and does not claim to bring this dispute to a definitive resolution, nevertheless it is hoped that it may at least help to clarify some common misunderstandings that can arise from hasty generalizations, and offer a few insights—which are not in fact new, but which are too often ignored by English-speaking scholars today—into the way in which the thought of the Jesuit theologians of the so-called "Roman School" may have served to influence Scheeben's unique theological method.In the past, numerous attempts have been made to situate Scheeben's thought within a particular theological school, and members of rival schools, in turn, have sought to claim him (or indeed repudiate him) as one of their [End Page 471] own.3 Amid the flood of divergent assessments of Scheeben's theological affinities, there at least exists some scholarly consensus about his greatness as a theologian. In 1935, during the centenary celebrations of Scheeben's birth, Pope Pius XI lauded him as a "man of genius" and proposed his thought to the students of the Germanicum as a model of the proper unity of theology's ascetical and dogmatic elements.4 In a Festschrift dedicated to Scheeben's theology published in the same year, Martin Grabmann judged that Scheeben was "the greatest dogmatic theologian of the nineteenth century,"5 and Carl Feckes, Scheeben's successor at the Cologne seminary, named him "the greatest Mariologist of our time."6 On the eve of the Second Vatican Council, no less an authority than Hans Urs von Balthasar could proclaim that Scheeben was "the greatest German theologian to-date [1961] since the time of Romanticism."7Nearly all, likewise, acknowledge the great difficulty of comprehending Scheeben's theology: even a German theologian of the stature of Joseph Ratzinger laments that Scheeben "has not made it easy, either as a professor for his hearers or as a writer for his readers. His language is rigorous, marked by the laborious travail of thought." The fact that he draws abundantly from such sources as Aquinas and the Greek Fathers "lends to his work [End Page 472] breadth and depth, but does not necessarily facilitate easy access."8 Similarly, the ultramontane Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, in his preface to an English abridgment of Scheeben's Dogmatik, warned that Scheeben's greatest work "requires not only reading but study; and study with patient care and conscientious desire to understand."9 Perhaps it is for this reason that it has become almost proverbial to observe that Scheeben's works are much praised, but seldom read.10Far less agreement, however, exists when it comes to the question of what kind of theologian Scheeben was, or to what theological school he belonged. Was he, asks the great Scheeben scholar Eugen Paul, "the prototype of those theologians who represent (if not establish) the infamous 'two-storey theory [Stockwerkstheorie] with respect to nature and grace—or does he rather belong to those who insist precisely on the transcendental unity of nature and grace?"11 Is Scheeben, in other words, a Neo-Scholastic, even "the most precious flower ever granted to the spring of Neo-Scholasticism,"12 as he was called in the first major study of his theology produced in the twentieth century? Or is he, instead, to be classed with the theologians of the Tübingen School who, under the influence of Romantic Idealism, sought to renew Catholic theology through... (shrink)

In an unpublished text from the early postwar period, Georges Canguilhem deals with Nietzsche’s maxim “Become who you are!” Is this “apparently contradictory formula of a philosopher full of contradictions” really only seemingly inconsistent? Canguilhem regards it as a norm whose supposed metaphysical or objective content dissolves upon further analysis. So he here discerns a new instance of the same potential confusion he had already addressed in his classical essay on The Normal and the Pathological (1943). According to him, the (...) formula “become who you are!” must not be misunderstood in a naturalistic sense, a tendency from which not even Nietzsche himself, Canguilhem thinks, was entirely free. Besides the French philosophy of his time, his philosophical inquiry into “Become who you are!” critically engages two classic German Nietzsche scholars, Ernst Bertram and Karl Jaspers, as well as the French interpreters of the latter’s philosophy of Existenz, Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricœur. Finally, the paper highlights Nietzsche’s specific importance for Canguilhem and the ambivalence in his privileged relationship to the German thinker. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. 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Článek připomíná 110. výročí narození švýcarského katolického teologa a filosofa (metafyzika) Hanse Urse von Balthasara (1905 Luzern–1988 Basilej). Po studiích germanistiky ve Vídni, Berlíně a Curychu pokračoval ve studiu filosofie a teologie u jezuitů (E. Przywara, H. de Lubac). Před nadějnou akademickou dráhou dal přednost pastorační službě u studentů. V Basileji navázal úzké kontakty s K. Rahnerem a K. Barthem. S lékařkou a mystičkou Adriennou von Speyr založil sekulární institut Johannesgemeinschaft (1944) a nakladatelství, ve kterém vydával její díla. Roku 1950 (...) jezuitský řád opouští. Před druhým vatikánským koncilem vystupoval jako katolický progresivista, po něm jako kritik katolického modernismu, v němž viděl ohrožení biblických tradic. S Henri de Lubacem a Josephem Ratzingerem roku 1972 spoluzakládal mezinárodní katolickou revui Communio. Svou rozsáhlou a rozmanitou publikační činnost završil trilogií Herrlichkeit–Theodramatik–Theologik (1961–1987), v níž uvažuje o Bohu v estetických souvislostech, v kategoriích transcendentálií pravdy, dobra a jejich ztělesnění – krásy.The article recalls the 110th anniversary of the birth of the Swiss Catholic theologian and philosopher (metaphysician) Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905 Luzern–1988 Basel). He studied German in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich and after that he continued his studies in philosophy and theology at the Jesuits (E. Przywara, H. de Lubac). He preferred pastoral ministry among students to a promising academic career. In Basel he established close contacts with K. Rahner and K. Barth. Together with the doctor and mystic Adrienne von Speyr he founded the secular institute Johannesgemeinschaft (1944) and a publishing house, in which he published her work. In 1950 he left the Jesuit order. Before the Second Vatican Council he acted as a progressive Catholic, afterwards as a critic of Catholic modernism, in which he saw the threat of biblical traditions. With Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger in 1972 he co-founded the International Catholic review Communio. His extensive and diverse publications he completed with trilogy The Glory of the Lord–Theo-Drama–Theo-Logic (1961–1987), in which he contemplates God within aesthetic contexts, within categories of transcendentals truth, goodness and their embodiment – beauty. (shrink)

" Cet ouvrage a pour but de laisser parler le cœur de la pensée hégélienne, sa Logique afin de la voir parvenir au bout de ce qu'elle peut. Patiemment mis au contact de ce que cette pensée comporte de plus puissant, le lecteur est paradoxalement conduit à la regarder se renverser de l'intérieur. La philosophie hégélienne n'est pas une opinion offerte à une réfutation protéiforme, elle n'est ni une simple représentation ni une supplémentaire conception du monde, mais une nef colossale (...) dont il ne suffit pas de contredire avec plus ou moins d'inspiration l'une ou l'autre base pour espérer la faire chavirer. Cette œuvre relève le vertigineux défi de déployer un mouvement qui précède son lecteur. On ne "sort" de ce cercle que pour l'étendre, l'enrichir et y contribuer. C'est un fait : la pensée de Hegel est, sur son terrain, indépassable, ou, en dehors de son terrain, jamais atteinte puisque ce n'est pas d'elle que l'on parle quand on croit la mettre en cause. Nous voyons ainsi, plus que pour toute autre pensée, deux camps ennemis s'affronter autour du système hégélien : d'une part, ceux qui, croyant préserver la "liberté" de leur "esprit critique", ne veulent ni lire véritablement, ni comprendre en profondeur, ni entendre parler de Hegel, d'autre part, ceux qui n'en sortent plus et répètent Hegel comme on répète encore une pièce quand on la joue pour la millième fois. Conscient de ces deux écueils, nous avons voulu suivre la voie d'une herméneutique phénoménologique : laisser apparaître l'œuvre comme elle se donne. Attentif aux métamorphoses de cette notion d'identité qui est l'expressive figure dans laquelle se lisent les diverses motions de l'Idée absolue, nous laissons cette dernière s'ouvrir, révéler ses différents aspects et nous conduire d'elle-même à ce qu'elle veut nous dire. La méditation de la notion d'identité fait précisément apparaître les différents moments de la rythmique hégélienne et en fait pénétrer le sens ontologique. Chemin faisant, si l'affaire s'expose, elle s'expose intégralement, et elle se met donc également à nu. Un cohérent principe de connivence avec une grande pensée ne s'interdit nullement les voies de la clairvoyance ; il produit au contraire les conditions de sa juste et saine apparition. Cet ouvrage est donc une exposition ou une manifestation du penser hégélien au terne de laquelle doit logiquement apparaître l'essence de ce dernier, car l'objet d'une méditation approfondie laisse non seulement apparaître le tout, mais il laisse aussi tout apparaître, c'est-à-dire des limites et des inconséquences qui sont désormais les siennes et non celles que l'arbitraire critique importe pour la commodité de ses préjugés. Cette méditation se donne donc à la fois comme un cours sur la pensée hégélienne et comme une irrémédiable prise de distance. ". (shrink)

Troisième et dernière recherche de La dialectique réflexive, achevant la constitution de l'ontologie du soi ou « séisme ». L'intérêt du livre n’est pas seulement spéculatif ou de philosophie théorique, mais, conformément à la méthode mise en œuvre dans les deux premiers volumes, également historique, puisque ce sont les traditions de « l’analogie de l’être », de « l’attribution » et de la « participation » en régime métaphysique, notamment chez les auteurs dits scolastiques, de même que les rapports entre (...) religion et philosophie, en particulier chez Saint Thomas et Hegel, qui sont au cœur de l’ouvrage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Traité des premières véritésby Claude G. BuffierJeffrey D. BursonClaude G. Buffier. Traité des premières vérités. Édition, présentation et notes par Louis Rouquayrol. Textes cartésiens en langue française. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2020. Pp. 379. Paperback, €32.00.Born in Poland to French parents, Claude G. Buffier, SJ (1661–1737) emerged as one of the most influential of the Parisian scriptores librorumin the first decades of the eighteenth century. Buffier is (...) perhaps best known as one of the founding editors of, and contributors to, the influential French Jesuit periodical Mémoires de Trévoux, but his works on general grammar, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and logic earned him widespread renown. His Grammaire françaiseachieved translation into Spanish, German, Italian, and English, and his Cours de sciences sur des principes nouveaux et simples pour former le langage, l'esprit, et le cœur dans l'usage ordinaire de la vie(1715) was widely adopted in France and Spain throughout the eighteenth century. Buffier's eclectic approach to philosophy, science, moral philosophy, and practical theology developed across several significant works: Principes du raisonnement(1714), Traité des premières vérités(1724), Éléments de métaphysique(1725), and Exposition des preuves les plus sensibles de la véritable religion(1732). In these works, Buffier was prescient in selectively adopting perspectives from Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, evincing thereby his avid interest and participation in early Enlightenment discussions. Many of Buffier's texts proved to be influential on contributors to the Encyclopédie, on Voltaire, and perhaps later, as harbingers of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Given the growing recognition of Buffier's importance thanks to the work of Kathleen Wilkins, Catherine Northeast, Jeffrey Burson, Katharine Hammerton, and others, Louis Rouquayrol's new critical edition of Buffier's most influential work, Traité des premières vérités( Treatise of First Truths) is most welcome. Rouquayrol's critical edition of the Traitéis replete with helpful [End Page 156]intertextual explanatory notes to the texts and debates that Buffier addressed, and it includes an insightful synthetic introduction, which summarizes the Traitéand addresses aspects of its philosophical and historical significance. The editor also helpfully includes a detailed chronology of Buffier's life and works, a note about the textual bases for the edition, several instructive appendices to later editions and related works by Buffier, and a profoundly helpful bibliography that includes existing editions, copies, and translations of the Traité, in addition to scholarly studies of Buffier's life and work. Rouquayrol's critical edition is, in short, the best one currently available, and it is likely to remain the standard published edition for some time.In the editor's view, Buffier's primary significance is as the inaugural eighteenth-century figure who attempted to redress the weaknesses at the heart of Cartesian "innate ideas" in ways that might have avoided Berkeley's or Malebranche's immaterialism or Hume's skepticism: "pour lutter contre les 'conséquences idéalistes du cartésianisme,'" Buffier "avait eu plutôt recours au sens commun comme à un 'complément nécessaire du sense intime, qui garantit l'existence du monde extérieur'" (13n2, quoting Étienne Gilson). This "solution mitigée" allowed for a certain reconciliation between Descartes and the "empirisme tempéré" of Locke, and more broadly, a way of moderating "les principes des Modernes" with "les poncifs des Anciens" (13). This conciliation of Lockean empiricism and certain strands of Cartesianism found in Buffier was in fact a central point made by my earlier work on Buffier's contribution to eighteenth-century Enlightenment Catholicism (see Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment[South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010]; also "Claude G. Buffier and the Maturation of the Jesuit Synthesis in the Age of Enlightenment," Intellectual History Review21 [2011]: 449–72). Rouquayrol's effort to revisit the complexities of this conciliation in his introduction is a welcome development. He explicitly reminds us that while Jesuits such as Buffier were prohibited from teaching particular theses associated with Descartes after 1706, they were nevertheless increasingly influenced by aspects of Cartesianism (15–17). In many... (shrink)

This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about persons and acquired Christian beliefs about God were consistent or inconsistent. Participants were less accurate and slower to respond to inconsistent versus consistent (...) statements, suggesting that the core intuitions both coexisted alongside and interfered with the acquired beliefs. In Experiment 2 when responding under time pressure participants were disproportionately more likely to make errors on inconsistent versus consistent statements than when responding with no time pressure, suggesting that the resolution of interference requires cognitive resources the functioning of which decreases under cognitive load. In Experiment 3 a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings was ruled out by demonstrating that the response accuracy and time differences on consistent versus inconsistent statements occur for God—a supernatural religious entity—but not for a natural religious entity. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have been debating how the folk concept of intentional action works. We suggest a simple account: people consider that an agent did X intentionally to the extent that X was causally dependent on how much the agent wanted X to happen (or not to happen). Combined with recent models of human causal cognition, this definition provides a good account of the way people use the concept of intentional action, and offers natural explanations for puzzling phenomena such as the (...) side-effect effect. We provide empirical support for our theory, in studies where we show that people’s causation and intentionality judgments track each other closely, in everyday situations as well as in scenarios with unusual causal structures. Study 5 additionally shows that the effect of norm violations on intentionality judgments depends on the causal structure of the situation, in a way uniquely predicted by our theory. Taken together, these results suggest that the folk concept of intentional action has been difficult to define because it is made of cognitive building blocks, such as our intuitive concept of causation, whose logic cognitive scientists are just starting to understand. (shrink)

This study is aimed to identify the relative effect of online review ratings and perceived crowding on purchase intentions of a consumer. Our study also investigated the contingent effect of gender and perceived crowding between the relationship of exogenous and endogenous variables. This study was conducted in the Malaysian restaurant industry. We applied the purposive sampling technique to identify respondents, the mall intercept survey method was used for data collection. Smart PLS software was applied for data analysis. This study demonstrates (...) through its results that online review ratings and perceived crowding have a positive effect on purchase intentions of a consumer. Moreover, if a consumer perceives crowding at a restaurant, this has a positive contingent effect on the relationship between review ratings and purchase intentions. This demonstrates that the consumer is more inclined to choose a restaurant with a high online review rating and has high perceived crowding at some unfamiliar place. Lastly, no evidence is found for the gender difference between review rating and purchase intentions; however, gender shows contingent effect and results confirmed that males preferred more crowded restaurants as compared to females. There are theoretical and practical implications for managers in the findings of this study. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that autobiographical memory can be conceptualized as a mental state resulting from the interplay of a set of psychological capacities?self-reflection, self-agency, self-ownership and personal temporality?that transform a memorial representation into an autobiographical personal experience. We first review evidence from a variety of clinical domains?for example, amnesia, autism, frontal lobe pathology, schizophrenia?showing that breakdowns in any of the proposed components can produce impairments in autobiographical recollection, and conclude that the self-reflection, agency, ownership, and personal temporality are (...) individually necessary and jointly sufficient for autobiographical memorial experience. We then suggest a taxonomy of amnesic disorders derived from consideration of the consequences of breakdown in each of the individual component processes that contribute to the experience of autobiographical recollection. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has imperatively shaken the behavior of the global financial markets. This study estimated the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of the financial markets of Europe and the US. The results revealed that the returns of the S&P 500 index have been greatly affected by a lockdown in the US owing to COVID-19. However, the health crisis generated due to the novel coronavirus significantly decreased the stock returns of the Nasdaq Composite index. The results also showed (...) that the economic crisis generated from the pandemic in Spain has had more impact on the IBEX 35 as compared to the health crisis itself. On the other hand, in the long-run, Italy’s stock markets are more affected by the health crisis as contrasted with the economic crisis, while, in the short-run, both lockdown conditions and economic instability lower the stock returns of FTSE MIB. The UK stock markets witnessed that in the short-run, deficiency of health management systems imperatively damaged the stock returns of the London Stock Exchange. The investigation revealed that deficiency of health systems and lockdown conditions have imperatively damaged the structure of financial markets, inferring that sustainable development of these nations is at risk due to COVID-19. The study suggested that governments should allocate more of their budget to the health sector to overcome a health crisis in the future. (shrink)

Nowadays, online product reviews have been at the heart of the product assessment process for a company and its customers. They give feedback to a company on improving product quality, planning, and monitoring its business schemes in order to increase sale and gain more profit. They are also helpful for customers to select the right products in less effort and time. Most companies make spam reviews of products in order to increase the products sales and gain more profit. Detecting spam (...) product reviews is a challenging issue in NLP. Numerous machine learning approaches have attempted to detect and classify the product reviews as spam or nonspam. However, in order to improve the classification accuracy, this study has introduced an ensemble machine learning model that combines predictions from multilayer perceptron, K-Nearest Neighbour, and Random Forest and predicts the outcome of the review as spam or real, based on the majority vote of the contributing models. In order to accomplish the task of spam review classification, the proposed ensemble and other benchmark boosting approaches are tested with 25 statistical features extracted from mobile application reviews of Yelp Dataset. Then, three different selection techniques are exploited to diminish the feature space and filter out the top 10 optimal features. The effectiveness of the proposed ensemble, the individual models, and other benchmark boosting approaches is again evaluated with 10 optimal features in terms of classification accuracy. Experimental outcomes illustrate that the proposed ensemble model outperformed the individual classifiers and state-of-the-art boosting approaches like Generalized Boost Regression Model, Extreme Gradient Boost, and AdaBoost Regression Model in terms of classification accuracy. (shrink)

Ernest Gellner was a unique scholar whose work covered areas as diverse as social anthropology, analytical philosophy, the sociology of the Islamic world, nationalism, psychoanalysis, East European transformations and kinship structures. Despite this diversity, there is an exceptional degree of unity and coherence in Gellner's work with his distinctly modernist, rationalist and liberal world-view evident in everything he wrote. His central problematic remains constant: understanding how the modern world came into being and to what extent it is unique relative to (...) all other social forms. Ten years after his death, this book brings together leading social theorists to evaluate the significance of Gellner's legacy and to re-examine his central concerns. It corrects many misunderstandings and critically engages with Gellner's legacy to provide a cutting edge contribution to understanding our contemporary post-9/11, global, late modern, social condition. (shrink)

It is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred (...) to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters. Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals. Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely lifelogging and self-monitoring, remote monitoring of vital signs, emotional state recognition, food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, activity and personal assistance, gesture recognition, fall detection and prevention, mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed. (shrink)