In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Die Philosophische Logik Gottlob Freges. Ein Kommentar, mit den Texten des Vorworts zu Grundgesetze der Arithmetik und der Logischen Untersuchungen I–IVLeila HaaparantaWolfgang Künne. Die Philosophische Logik Gottlob Freges. Ein Kommentar, mit den Texten des Vorworts zu Grundgesetze der Arithmetik und der Logischen Untersuchungen I–IV. RoteReihe 30. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 2010. Pp. 840. Paper, €29.80.Frege’s thought has been a permanent point of interest among philosophers for several decades. In (...) the late sixties a few philosophers, such as Christian Thiel and Ignacio Angelelli, published studies on Frege’s logic, semantics, and metaphysics. In 1973 Michael Dummett’s work on Frege’s philosophy of language appeared, which held the stage for a long time. It presented Frege as a predecessor, even as a representative, of the analytic tradition. New approaches came up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Hans Sluga’s work in 1980 and other studies, which paid special attention to Frege’s German background, where Kant played a significant role. Several scholars, including Michael Dummett, started to dig into Frege’s background. Positions varied; some studied Frege’s background in order to show that there is nothing that could help us understand his philosophical insights; others found the origins of his philosophical and logical ideas precisely in his background and philosophical environment, in such philosophers as Leibniz, Kant, Trendelenburg, and Lotze.After a few somewhat more quiet years, Frege scholarship expanded after 2000. A number of books have appeared that discuss Frege in the analytic context and also seek [End Page 507] to find more details about his philosophical sources. Wolfgang Künne’s work is a most welcome contribution to contemporary scholarship in the field. Lothar Kreiser’s Gottlob Frege: Leben—Werk—Zeit (2001) has already been available, and interpretations of Frege’s philosophy as well as editions and translations of his books contain short biographies. Still, because of its special composition, Künne’s work serves to fill a gap in the scholarship and significantly contributes to what is known about Frege’s logic and philosophy.The volume consists of three parts. First, there is an extensive biography (about 50 pages) of Frege that places Frege’s thought in its historical context and also contextualizes those of his articles that are included in the work. The main projects Frege pursued, most notably the project of logicism, receive proper attention in the first part of the volume. The four texts that are included in the volume are the Preface of the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I (1893) and the three logical investigations that were published during Frege’s lifetime, namely “Der Gedanke” (1918), “Die Verneinung” (1919), and “Gedankengefüge” (1923), which were originally published in Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus. Künne has also included a posthumously published text, “Logische Allgemeinheit,” in the volume, as that fragment, which was not written before 1923, was intended to be a fourth logical investigation. The five texts written by Frege that are included in the edition discuss topics that we would now call philosophical logic, such as meaning, reference, and truth, although they also study themes that we would include in ontology and the philosophy of mind. The title of the volume is thus sufficiently motivated.Frege’s texts take up about 100 pages of the volume, while the commentary is about 600 pages. The book also contains an appendix on Bolzano and Frege, where Künne pays attention to similarities between the two logicians and philosophers but also shows his skepticism about the thesis that Frege had read Bolzano. Apart from this position, Künne prefers to read Frege’s texts closely and inform his reader of historical and philological matters rather than take part in any heated debates concerning interpretations; his own positions become visible only indirectly, through the extensive footnotes. The work also contains a very useful bibliography and indexes of names and subjects.The book is extremely rich. If one, for example, wishes to know more about the views of Frege’s German contemporaries, about the standpoints that Russell or Wittgenstein had on Fregean topics, or about the arguments of Frege scholars, one can find... (shrink)

Gottlob Frege ist der Begründer der modernen Logik und einer der Väter der analytischen Philosophie. Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap und Ludwig Wittgenstein haben seine Ideen aufgegriffen und weiterentwickelt. Dieses Buch liefert eine Bestandsaufnahme zu Werk und Wirkung Freges. Gewürdigt werden seine Leistungen als Logiker, Mathematiker, Sprachphilosoph und Methodologe. Im Ausgang von historischen Untersuchungen zum ursprünglichen 'kontinentalen' Ort des Frege schen Denkens wird die internationale Rezeption und das systematische Gewicht der Philosophie Frege s entfaltet. Mit Beiträgen von: Michael Astroh, Detlef Gronau, (...) Wolfgang Kienzler, Lothar Kreiser, Volker Peckhaus, Eva Picardi, Erich H. Reck, Marco Ruffino, Christiane Schildknecht, Joachim Schulte, Rainer Stuhlmann-Laeisz, Christian Thiel, Kai F. Wehmeier. (shrink)

The major theoretical framework relative to the perception of illusory figures is reviewed and discussed in the attempt to provide a unifying explanatory account for these phenomena.

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this way (...) provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

This article is about the post-history of Hobbes’s name for the state and thus about the history of the name ‘Leviathan’ insofar as this name has remained the catchword for the (modern) state to this day (from the late 17th century to the beginning of the 21st century), but above all for that of absolutist-despotic proportions. This story, told here for the first time, is particularly interesting because it ultimately reveals a continuity in the understanding of Hob-bes that suggests that (...) this post-history not only has something to do with Hobbes’s Leviathan itself, but at least as much with its pre-history - with the name ‘Leviathan’, which Hobbes gave the state in reference to the biblical monster of the same name. (shrink)

There are few articles in science that remain relevant over a span of 100 years; Max Wertheimer's pioneering experimental studies on apparent motion and figural organization are notable exceptions. Wertheimer's 1912 account of motion perception started a revolution and established the Gestalt school of psychology. It also paved the way for further investigations of apparent motion perception, including subsequent research by Oliver Braddick, Stuart Anstis, Vilaynur Ramachandran, and others. Wertheimer's 1923 article on figural organization helped define grouping as a principle (...) of figure-ground perception. This book provides contemporary readers and researchers with Wertheimer's two pivotal articles, newly translated into English and each accompanied by a synopsis, and two essays on apparent motion and figural organization that describe the long-term impact of Wertheimer's work. The translation of the original German into readable English prose allows English-language readers for the first time to appreciate Wertheimer's visionary ideas. The accompanying essays tie Wertheimer's phenomenological descriptions to the underlying neuronal mechanisms, bridging the years between the articles' first publication and modern research. (shrink)

This major work covers almost all that has been learned about the acoustics of stringed instruments from Helmholtz's 19th-century theoretical elaborations to recent electroacoustic and holographic measurements.Many of the results presented here were uncovered by the author himself over a 20-year period of research on the physics of instruments in the violin family. Lothar Cremer is one of the world's most respected authorities on architectural acoustics and, not incidentally, an avid avocational violinist and violist.The book - which was published (...) in German in 1981 - first of all meets the rigorous technical standards of specialists in musical acoustics. But it also serves the needs and interests of two broader groups: makers and players of stringed instruments are expressly addressed, since the implications of the mathematical formulations are fully outlined and explained; and acousticians in general will find that the work represents a textbook illustration of the application of fundamental principles and up-to-date techniques to a specific problem.The first - and longest - of the book's three parts investigates the oscillatory responses of bowed strings. The natural nonlinearities that derive from considerations of string torsion and bending stiffness are deftly handled and concisely modeled.The second part deals with the body of the instrument. Special attention is given to the bridge, which transmits the oscillations of the strings to the wooden body and its air cavity. In this case, linear modeling proves serviceable for the most part - a simplification that would not be possible with lute - like instruments such as the guitar.The radiation of sound from the body into the listener's space, which is treated as an extension of the instrument itself, is the subject of the book's final part.Lothar Cremer is Professor Emeritus at the Technical University of Berlin, where he served as director of the Institute for Acoustical Engineering. (shrink)

Die digitale Transformation erfasst die Medien der Literatur und Literaturkritik in unterschiedlicher Geschwindigkeit. Die Substituierung der gedruckten Zeitung, der Stammheimat der Literaturkritik, durch digitale Formate ist weit vorangeschritten. Auf dem Buchmarkt ist das gedruckte Hardcover nach wie vor ein relativ stabiles Element. Der Beitrag kommentiert diese Differenz in medienhistorischer Perspektive.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Writing and Authority in Early ChinaLothar von FalkenhausenWriting and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 544. Hardcover $92.50. Paper $31.95.Writing and Authority in Early China is a forceful and sparklingly original work in which Mark Edward Lewis explores the role of writing and texts in the transformation of political authority during the Warring States, Qin, (...) and Western Han periods. Following in the footsteps of the author's well-received first book1 and his magisterial contribution to the Cambridge History of Ancient China,2Writing and Authority establishes Lewis as the premier Western historian of the crucial centuries surrounding the unification of China under a centrally administered empire in 221 B.C. The book's complex, comprehensive, and coherent argument is informed by a variety of Western theoretical approaches, but it principally emanates from a close reading of the full record of transmitted texts and recently excavated manuscripts on [End Page 127] bamboo or wooden slips. The inclusion of the latter class of sources, beset with treacherous problems of decipherment, is still unusual in mainstream sinological scholarship and indicates the author's supreme confidence in his philological skills. With a firm hand, undaunted by the multifarious nature of his materials, Lewis guides the reader to some fundamental themes in recent sinology, opening manifold novel perspectives along the way. Even when dealing with well-known texts, he often proposes striking reinterpretations.In his Introduction, Lewis enumerates six main functions of writing in ancient China: enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and "public spheres"; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings. In Lewis' own words, "the culminating role of writing in the period, and the key to its importance in imperial China, was the creation of parallel realities within texts that claimed to depict the entire world" (p. 4). This ultimately led to the formation of the Confucian canon as a "textual double of the polity" that could survive cataclysmic changes of regimes.In chapter 1, "Writing the State," Lewis points out that before the Warring States period Chinese writing occurred exclusively in religious contexts. After circa 500 B.C., written documents gradually came to be used in the administration of government and trade. Both in their details of formulation and in the implication that anything committed to writing was thereby supernaturally validated, these new types of documents exhibit pervasive continuity with the earlier kinds of texts used in ritual communication with the ancestral spirits. Such continuity is also reflected in the rise of religious beliefs in a netherworld governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative processes parallel to those of the world of the living. According to Lewis, "the most important modification in the shift to an administrative polity [in the Warring States] was the extension of writing to new elements of the population. The attributes of the Zhou nobility... were transferred to the common people in the administrative documents of the new state. This widening range of inscription into the state order altered the social meaning of being recorded from a sign of power to one of subjection" (p. 13).Warring States rulers were cast in the role not of the authors of texts but of the authority behind them. Administrative and legal texts were concerned, ultimately, with the proper naming of phenomena, a process that had to adapt itself continually to the changes of the times. The authority of rulers came to encompass both human society and the natural world. "Whereas local and central administration were largely created through reworking and rewriting the ritual bases of the old Zhou order by means of a rationalizing cosmology, the re-invention of rulership drew on the contemporary religious realm and what is sometimes described as shamanism to provide images of cosmic power" (p. 42). Lewis illustrates the mechanics for applying these universal principles of rulership by a comprehensive analysis of the Zhou li (or Zhou guan), emphasizing the cosmological arrangement of the ideal government described therein and the dual administrative and religious dimensions of... (shrink)