Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The (...) book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

Was Anselm zu einem leuchtenden Vorbild für die Theologie heute werden lässt, ist nicht seine Gelehrsamkeit, sondern das Wagnis, auf die Anfragen seiner Zeit durch mutige und eigenständige Synthesen des christlichen Denkens zu antworten. Die hier vorliegende Interpretation gestaltet sich als Versuch, die zuletzt etwas eingefahren wirkende Zugangsweise zum Werk Anselms auf einen neuen Boden zu stellen. Die Komplementarität von Teleologie und Eschatologie, bzw. die Begründung der ersteren in der letzteren bietet dafür den begrifflichen Rahmen, von welchem her sich neue (...) Einblicke in das Denken des Doctor magnificus ergeben. (shrink)

In this work, attention is drawn to the abundant use of metaphor and analogy in works of logic. I argue that pervasiveness of figurative language is to be counted among the features that characterize logic and distinguish it from other sciences. This characteristic feature reflects the creativity that is inherent in logic and indeed has been demonstrated to be a necessary part of logic. The goal of this paper, in short, is to provide specific examples of figurative language used in (...) logic that yield insights into the nature of the subject. I encourage the reader to take metaphors seriously, and to accept that they are not mere embellishments but key elements in our understanding of logic. (shrink)

Measurement instruments assessing multiple emotions during epistemic activities are largely lacking. We describe the construction and validation of the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales, which measure surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration, and boredom occurring during epistemic cognitive activities. The instrument was tested in a multinational study of emotions during learning from conflicting texts. The findings document the reliability, internal validity, and external validity of the instrument. A seven-factor model best fit the data, suggesting that epistemically-related emotions should be conceptualised in terms (...) of discrete emotion categories, and the scales showed metric invariance across the North American and German samples. Furthermore, emotion scores changed over time as a function of conflicting task information and related significantly to perceived task value and use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. (shrink)

Sustainable development (SD) – that is, “Development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs and aspirations” – can be pursued in many different ways. Stakeholder relations management (SRM) is one such way, through which corporations are confronted with economic, social, and environmental stakeholder claims. This paper lays the groundwork for an empirical analysis of the question of how far SD can be achieved through SRM. It describes the so-called SD–SRM (...) perspective as a distinctive research approach and shows how it relates to the wider body of stakeholder theory. Next, the concept of SD is operationalized for the microeconomic level with reference to important documents. Based on the ensuing SD framework, it is shown how SD and SRM relate to each other, and how the two concepts relate to other popular concepts such as Corporate Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. The paper concludes that the significance of societal guiding models such as SD and of management approaches like CSR is strongly dependent on their footing in society. (shrink)

This paper embeds the core part of Discourse Representation Theory in the classical theory of types plus a few simple axioms that allow the theory to express key facts about variables and assignments on the object level of the logic. It is shown how the embedding can be used to combine core analyses of natural language phenomena in Discourse Representation Theory with analyses that can be obtained in Montague Semantics.

This book radically simplifies Montague Semantics and generalizes the theory by basing it on a partial higher order logic. The resulting theory is a synthesis of Montague Semantics and Situation Semantics. In the late sixties Richard Montague developed the revolutionary idea that we can understand the concept of meaning in ordinary languages much in the same way as we understand the semantics of logical languages. Unfortunately, however, he formalized his idea in an unnecessarily complex way - two outstanding researchers in (...) the field even compared his work to a `Rube Goldberg machine.' Muskens' work does away with such unnecessary complexities, obtains a streamlined version of the theory, shows how partialising the theory automatically provides us with the most central concepts of Situation Semantics, and offers a simple logical treatment of propositional attitude verbs, perception verbs and proper names. (shrink)

Based on the tenets of the so-called ‘radical pragmatics’ school (see, for instance, Cole, 1981), this book takes a particular view with regard to the relationship between content and linguistically encoded meaning. The traditional view embodied in the work of Montague and Kaplan (e.g., Kaplan, 1979; Montague, 1970) sees content being fully determined by linguistic meaning relative to a contextual index. In contrast, the radical view takes it that, although linguistic meaning is clearly important to content, it does not determine (...) it, as pragmatic principles also play a role. The central issue of this book is how to give a principled account of the determination of content. Seeing linguistic meanings as underdetermining the content (proposition) expressed, there must be a pragmatic mechanism of completion which can be best represented as an optimization procedure. It is demonstrated that the general framework of Optimality Theory (OT) makes it possible to formulate the desired explanatory principles. The first section of this general introduction outlines the basic framework of OT as applied to phonology, syntax and morphology. The second section takes a historical perspective and shows that the idea of optimization was present in the pragmatic enterprise right from the beginning. Further, it explains the main advantages of the general framework of OT when applied to the field of pragmatics, and it puts the whole idea into concrete terms by demonstrating how Horn’s (1984) theory of conversational implicature can be implemented within a bidirectional optimality theory. In section 3, we rise several basic questions underlying the whole volume and discuss them from a theoretical and empirical perspective. This part 1 gives a overview of the different topics treated in the book, and it explains in which respects the single contributions aim to satisfy our cooperative goal: to give a new impulse to the tradition of radical pragmatics. Section 4, finally, outlines basic open question of future research.. (shrink)

The Studiengruppe für Systemforschung was dissolved in 1974. Several members of the group moved to the Research Centre Karlsruhe. There, despite their new institutional surroundings, they remained faithful to the Studiengruppe’s conceptual foundations, and developed a new Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis. This has since become the leading technology assessment group in Germany.

has to do with the acquisition of encyclopedic knowledge.

The paper shows how ideas that explain the sense of an expression as a method or algorithm for finding its reference, preshadowed in Frege’s dictum that sense is the way in which a referent is given, can be formalized on the basis of the ideas in Thomason (1980). To this end, the function that sends propositions to truth values or sets of possible worlds in Thomason (1980) must be replaced by a relation and the meaning postulates governing the behaviour of (...) this relation must be given in the form of a logic program. The resulting system does not only throw light on the properties of sense and their relation to computation, but also shows circular behaviour if some ingredients of the Liar Paradox are added. The connection is natural, as algorithms can be inherently circular and the Liar is explained as expressing one of those. Many ideas in the present paper are closely related to those in Moschovakis (1994), but receive a considerably lighter formalization. (shrink)

Force, Fate, and Freedom serves as an introduction to historical sociology, as well as a critical analysis of the belief in economic and political progress through social knowledge. Reinhard Bendix offers a development of the historicist approach to social change first championed by Max Weber, and presents an overview of the foundations of political authority in Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and England.

In this paper it is shown how the DRT (Discourse Representation Theory) treatment of temporal anaphora can be formalized within a version of Montague Semantics that is based on classical type logic.

This unique anthology from a seminal period of Germany history contains major writings by nine authors, many never before translated into English. Included in this collection of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century works are Erasmus, Martin Luther, Thomas Muntzer, Johann von Tepl, Sebastian Brant, and Rubianus.

In this note, we review paradoxes like Russell’s, the Liar, and Curry’s in the context of intuitionistic logic. One may observe that one cannot blame the underlying logic for the paradoxes, but has to take into account the particular concept formations. For proof-theoretic semantics, however, this comes with the challenge to block some forms of direct axiomatizations of the Liar. A proper answer to this challenge might be given by Schroeder-Heister’s definitional freedom.

A logic is called higher order if it allows for quantification over higher order objects, such as functions of individuals, relations between individuals, functions of functions, relations between functions, etc. Higher order logic began with Frege, was formalized in Russell [46] and Whitehead and Russell [52] early in the previous century, and received its canonical formulation in Church [14].1 While classical type theory has since long been overshadowed by set theory as a foundation of mathematics, recent decades have shown remarkable (...) comebacks in the fields of mechanized reasoning (see, e.g., Benzm¨. (shrink)