The Bremen research group (the psychologists Birgit Volmerg and Thomas Leithäuser and the social scientist Eva Senghaas-Knobloch) was concerned with investigation into criteria for social compatibility in the area of information and communication technology, as well as with the perspectives for action in different occupational situations experienced by engineers. One central problem that remained unresolved during discussions with nine groups of engineers was the relationship between economy and culture. Only within the context of a cooperative cost-benefit or means-and-ends (...) discussion (in which all groups in society participate) are problem-conscious engineers able to utilise their professional responsibility in the sense of achieving socially responsible technological development. (shrink)

Working with Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings, this essay shows how creaturely beings, or transfigurations, dramatize the afterlife of racial slavery, coloniality, the temporality of HIV/AIDS, and how their im/possibility disturbs and breaks with the “order of things.” While transitive and transversal in their potentiality for insurgency, Imaginary Beings and Fantastic Zoology also always carry a colonial logic, a conquest paradigm, while also un-resting the enjoyment of, what Borges calls, “terrible grounds.” Taking up fantastical and imaginary figures, (...) this essay aims to add to Borges’s compendium of beings; this is a tracing of fugitive forces, of pessimistic and potent provocations that break from “the Human,” “the Man,” and their enumerable agents – from the Fanonian invocation of the bestiary, to the +* value form and its racialized and erotico-, bio-, and necropolitical calculus of HIV/AIDS risk, the authors explore transfigurations at the edge of existence. (shrink)

Telepsychiatry has long been discussed as a supplement to or substitute for face-to-face therapeutic consultations. The current pandemic crisis has fueled the development in an unprecedented way. More and more psychiatric consultations are now carried out online as video-based consultations. Treatment results appear to be comparable with those of face-to-face care in terms of clinical outcome, acceptance, adherence and patient satisfaction. However, evidence on videoconferencing in a variety of different fields indicates that there are extensive changes in the communication behaviour (...) in online conversations. We hypothesise that this might impact ethically relevant aspects of the therapeutic relationship, which plays a prominent role in psychiatry. In this paper, we review effects of video-based consultations on communication between therapists and patients in psychiatry. Based on a common understanding of video-based consultations as changing the lived experience of communication, we categorise these effects according to sensory, spatial and technical aspects. Departing from a power-based model of therapeutic relationships, we then discuss the ethical significance of this changed communication situation, based on dimensions of respect for autonomy, lucidity, fidelity, justice and humanity. We conclude that there is evidence for ethically relevant changes of the therapeutic relationship in video-based telepsychiatric consultations. These changes need to be more carefully considered in psychiatric practice and future studies. (shrink)

In the modern age, the political secret has acquired a bad reputation. With modern democracy’s ideal of transparency, political secrecy is identified with political crime or corruption. The article argues that this repression of secrecy in modern democracies falls short of a substantial understanding of the structure and workings of political secrecy. By outlining a genealogy of political secrecy, it elucidates the logic as well as the blind spots of a current culture of secrecy. It focuses on two fundamental logics (...) of secrecy, deduced from the Latin terms ‘ arcanum’ and ‘ secretum’. Whereas the logic of arcanum regards secrecy as a legitimate dimension of government, a modern logic of secretum is marked by an inextricable dialectics between the withdrawal and communication of knowledge, between secrecy and publicity. Here, the secret is not so much a piece of withheld knowledge as a ‘secrecy effect’ that binds the realm of secrecy to the public sphere by a dialectics of permanent suspicion and scandal. Instead of falling into the trap of this ‘secrecy effect’ it is worth taking a closer look at the tradition of thought on the arcana imperii, from Tacitus to early modern doctrines of raison d’état to Carl Schmitt. What this tradition deals with is the functionality of secrecy and its complicated relation to the law. The arcana tradition elaborates the crucial point of secrecy: its potential, but also its profound ambivalence. Secrecy opens up a discretionary space of action exempt from the rule of law, and, according to Carl Schmitt, ignores the law so as to allow it to become effective. Secrecy serves to protect and stabilize the state, but at the same time it opens a space of exception from the rule of law that breeds violence, corruption and oppression. Instead of seeing secrecy as the opposite of a political culture of transparency, it is more productive to regard secrecy as transparency's complement – a counterpart, however, that is marked by the profound paradox of being both a consolidation of and a threat to democracy. (shrink)

What makes a word easy to learn? Early‐learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word's surprisal in child‐directed speech, computed using n‐gram and long‐short‐term‐memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a better (...) predictor than predictability derived from n‐gram models. Across five languages, average surprisal was positively correlated with the AoA of predicates and function words but not nouns. Controlling for concreteness and word frequency, more predictable predicates and function words were learned earlier. Differences in predictability between languages were associated with cross‐linguistic differences in AoA: the same word (when it was a predicate) was produced earlier in languages where the word was more predictable. (shrink)

In 1948 Ludwik Fleck published a paper in Polish discussing the use of humans in medical experiments, thereby addressing his peers. Though the paper has so far not been translated or studied, it has been taken to indicate Fleck’s deep commitment to ethical questions, notably the question of informed consent. In being written by a former victim of the Nazi policy and a survivor of the Holocaust also acting as an expert witness in the trial of the IG Farben in (...) Nuremberg, the paper is of interest. A scrutiny of Fleck’s text and related sources discloses, however, not only the complexity of the issue at the centre of the Nuremberg trial, but also Fleck’s unexpected stance in seemingly adducing his arguments from both the German defendants and the prosecution, heavily informed by US scientists. Further, the contentious discussion of the past in Fleck’s paper reveals its links to modern bioethical discussion. Though sometimes oblivious of that past, it still faces the same questions. (shrink)

The paper deals with the position of a scholar in the society, as articulated in the philosophy of J. G. Fichte. It also offers a brief outline of the philosophies of education of the 18th and 19th centuries and their differences. It shows different interpretations of the concept of Bildung in German philosophy, which in that time became almost a “fashion”. The spirit of that time is reflected also in the idealist views of J. G. Fichte, especially those concerning education, (...) upbringing and personality development. (shrink)

The paper tries to explain the nature and meaning of education, as well as its role in human life. Education appears to be taken for granted. Nevertheless, we need to understand its nature and ontological background. Thus the paper aims at giving at least a partial answer to the question: What is education?

The word 'bisexuality', unknown to the ancients, is used here in two senses to indicate an individual with male and female sex organs or who copulates with people of both sexes. The phenomenon of bisexuality is then analysed with reference to the Greek myth of Hermaphrodite, a 'bisexual' being, born of a nymph's love for a young man of divine descent: in the guise of a fable, the myth recounts the birth of a 'monster', who raises a question-mark over the (...) fundamental rule of the division between the sexes. As regards behaviour, the paper then shows that in both Greece and Rome bisexual behaviour was the rule for men. The concept of 'homosexuality', in contrast to heterosexuality, was not introduced till the Christian era, and then not without difficulty. Condemnation of the practice as 'against nature' began with the emperor Justinian in the 6th century. (shrink)

In parallel to their monumental installations, which were built in the Western and South- western deserts of the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of representatives of American Land Art have also produced works on film. Researchers have held divergent views about the importance of these films for the understanding of the installations and about their character as either independent works or mere documentations. This article takes a different approach and analyses an element common to both (...) installations and films: the critique of conventional constructions of illusionistic space. The repudiation of conventional spatial structures and of the representation of perspective is discussed on the basis of works by Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson. A formal analysis demonstrates that the films go beyond merely showing the conception of space in Land Art installations. Instead, they perform a similar critique of conventional ideas of space with decidedly cinematic techniques. (shrink)

This title is playful, of course. It is designed merely to attract curiosity and attention … It dates back to a childhood game of which I have forgotten both rules and stakes. An imaginary sovereign was roused from his indifference and responded with an approximate repetition of Marie-Antoinette's suggestion that if the people were hungry, food should be thrown to them. I took such caricatures of kings as anti-models, replacing bread with symbols. Now we are all too disturbed, individually and (...) collectively, by the economic discomfort which is a generalized hunger and, in too many parts of the world and - not only in the third world - by actual famines, not to be aware, on a daily basis, of the responsibility it is to cultivate and transmit to others substance which is purely symbolic. Certain statistics, which now form part of our daily life, are capable of discrediting definitively the ivory tower which our universities are accused of representing, or of having represented in the past. In my own country, Canada, one child in five lives in poverty. The economic worth of the poorest forty-eight countries in the world is equal to the combined wealth of the ten richest individuals. There were twenty million refugees in 1997. One billion two hundred million human beings are short of fresh water this year, etc. This type of figure is, sadly, all too familiar. And it is a case of preaching to the converted to assert the extent to which culture, education and all their constituent disciplines are nourishment of a different order to physical food, because intellectual work is genuine work, providing a living for those who work at it professionally, and above all also those who benefit from its immediate and continuing fruits - i.e. ideally, the whole of society, and in all countries. In this respect - and this is implicit, but through depending habitually on what is implicit nothing is ever sufficiently explicit - it is generally acknowledged (thanks to UNESCO in particular) to what extent the development of economic resources is linked with the advancement and communication of knowledge, on a scale which is regional as well as national, within cities, rural communities, families. (shrink)

Rorty's assessment of the origins of the analytic/continental divide is discussed and criticized on several grounds. Rorty's plea in favour of the philosophical quietism implicit in the pragmatists' dismissal of metaphysics rests on an uncritical faith in scientific progress. To emphasize the tensions implicit in the ideal of progress a novel interpretation of the significance of Faust's encounter with Sorge (Care) is offered and compared with Heidegger's construal of Sorge in Sein und Zeit . A better understanding of the analytic/continental (...) divide is gained if we concentrate on the impact of Nazism and Fascism on the philosophical tradition with which philosophers living on the Continent had to come to terms after the Second World War. In this respect Adorno's attitude to progress in general and to philosophy in particular is very instructive and can be usefully contrasted with Rorty's dismissal of metaphysics. (shrink)

Cursory review of the reception of Adorno's unfinished Aesthetic Theory up to the present suggests that an introduction to the book's major concerns, its structure (or lack thereof), and its concepts is missing to this date. Going back to Fredric Jameson's watershed contribution Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), the article attempts to provide the introduction missing to date. It is organized around key concepts of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, beginning with the guiding juxtaposition of Kant's formalist (...) aesthetics vs. Hegel's content aesthetics and the various notions of the End of Art, followed by two sections on art and its respective others (from the culture industry and art appreciation to nature and natural beauty), and concluding with the axiom of suffering and its impact on the key notions of semblance, expression, and mimesis. (shrink)

Interpreting a seemingly simple function word like “or,” “behind,” or “more” can require logical, numerical, and relational reasoning. How are such words learned by children? Prior acquisition theories have often relied on positing a foundation of innate knowledge. Yet recent neural‐network‐based visual question answering models apparently can learn to use function words as part of answering questions about complex visual scenes. In this paper, we study what these models learn about function words, in the hope of better understanding how the (...) meanings of these words can be learned by both models and children. We show that recurrent models trained on visually grounded language learn gradient semantics for function words requiring spatial and numerical reasoning. Furthermore, we find that these models can learn the meanings of logical connectives and and or without any prior knowledge of logical reasoning as well as early evidence that they are sensitive to alternative expressions when interpreting language. Finally, we show that word learning difficulty is dependent on the frequency of models' input. Our findings offer proof‐of‐concept evidence that it is possible to learn the nuanced interpretations of function words in a visually grounded context by using non‐symbolic general statistical learning algorithms, without any prior knowledge of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

Since Hegel, the idea of an end of art has become a staple of aesthetic theory. This book analyzes its role and its rhetoric in Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger in order to account for the topic's enduring persistence. In addition to providing a general overview of the main thinkers of post-Idealist German aesthetics, the book explores the relationship between tradition and modernity. For despite the differences that distinguish one philosopher's end of art from another's, all authors treated here (...) turn the end of art into an occasion to thematize and to reflect on the very thing that modernism cannot or should not be: tradition. As a discourse, the end of art is one of our modern traditions. (shrink)

What precisely do we mean by respect? How should we adjudicate between conflicting demands of respect? What obstacles stand in the way of respect? The papers contained in this international anthology were presented at the North American Association of the Community of Inquiry conference in Vancouver, Canada, in June 2012, and were the outcome of in-depth and interdisciplinary discussions around the various aspects of respect. The book is an exacting and exciting analysis of the notion of respect - an analysis (...) that has the potential to have lasting and extensive practical consequences. (shrink)

To examine the psychological origins of sex-typed news preferences, an online newsmagazine was presented to 246 German participants in a quasi-experimental design. The presented articles featured equal portions of social/interpersonal and achievement/performance topics. Newsreaders' selective news exposure was unobtrusively logged. Results show that, even when various intervening factors are eliminated, women read more about social/interpersonal topics than men did, and men spent more time on achievement/performance-related news than women. Newsreaders' self-esteem and gender role orientation influenced the preference of news content. (...) This contribution will also discuss the effects of sex-typed news exposure. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between `mass media' representations of love and a model of love which we commonly view as more `realistic', that is more compatible with sharing everyday life with another. The article offers three arguments: (1) the postmodern claim that everyday life in general and romantic love in particular have been colonized by the empty `simulacrum' of mass media resonates with a long-standing Western discussion of the problematic relation between fiction and reality; (2) the relation between mass (...) media representations of love and realistic models of love is reconceptualized as deriving from two conflicting bodily experiences of love; (3) postmodern love is defined as being characterized by a particular crisis of representation in which signifiers and signifieds of love do not match. (shrink)

This essay explores the philosophical sources of the modern prohibition of torture by tracing different systematic steps in the difficult moral struggle against torture. It will be shown that the reluctance to embrace an outright ban on torture does not originate only from ancient convictions but also from the internal tensions between sovereignty and freedom in the context of the legitimation of the modern state. Starting with the universally empathic approach of 16th century’s humanists the moral condemnation of torture shifted (...) its focus successively from matters such as pity or the protection of bodily integrity to the recognition of human self-determination. During the Age of Enlightenment, the ambiguity of the modern concept of the state is even more clearly revealed. Political arguments against torture are put forward by utilitarians only stressing, again, the futility of bodily pain. Kant and Hegel, however, though developing human dignity as a matter of principle stick to retribution and the strict enforcement of the rule of law. Their approach overemphasizes certain notions of sovereignty and leads to perplexing consequences. This can be shown also with regard to the actual debate concerning exceptions from the general prohibition of torture. (shrink)

Die Arbeit verfolgt Entwicklungslinien eines auf praktische Vernunft gestützten Republikmodells an Hand der exemplarischen Bedeutung der aristotelischen Politik und ihrer Rezeption durch Thomas von Aquin. Diesen werden auch entscheidende Weichenstellungen für die Ausbildung des modernen Staatsbegriffs und seines begrifflichen Instrumentariums politischer Vernünftigkeit zugerechnet. Teil 1 stellt das aristotelische Modell der auf den Begriff des Menschen als Menschen gegründeten "bürgerlichen Gesellschaft" vor, in der sich ein gegenüber der Beliebigkeit tatsächlicher Herrschaftsan-massungen kritischer ursprünglicher Zusammenhang zwischen dem Verständnis "politischer Herr-schaft" und der wechselseitigen (...) "Anerkennung" konkret freier und gleicher Bürger präsent hält. Dieser ruht jedoch auf einschränkenden Voraussetzungen politischer Subjektivität und deren unmittelbarer Bindung an institutionelle Rahmenbedingungen auf, wie sie aus einem spezifisch antiken Verständnishorizont, näherhin aus dem aristotelischen Konzept entelechialer Teleologie, erläutert werden. Der Versuch einer Einordnung in Grundlinien des umfassenden systematischen Kontexts in Metaphysik, Physik und praktischer Philosophie soll gerade durch den gegenüber der unbestrittenen aktuellen Relevanz neuzeitlichen Freiheitsethos differenzierenden und nicht ungeschichtlich-planen Zugang zu diesem Politikmodell auch aktualisierende Perspektiven eröffnen. So soll etwa durch die Erläuterung der aristotelischen Teleologiekonzeption, die anhand des Paradigmas der Naturbewegung eingeführt wird, sowie des dazu korrespondierenden Ethos "vernünftigen Strebens" das etwaige Verständnis einer vorgängigen materialen Zweckbindung der Politik, im Sinne etwa einer herkömmlichen "Werteethik", distanziert werden. Das Verhältnis Naturteleologie - Praxis wird nicht deduktiv, sondern als ein solches der Strukturanalogie bei gleichzeitiger methodischer Abgrenzung verstanden. Teil 2 widmet sich der Herausarbeitung systematischer Akzentverschiebungen und Umformungen im Spannungsfeld der Konfrontation von aristotelischer Teleologie bzw. praktischer Vernunft mit einer von der Perspektive der Geschichtlichkeit geprägten Offenbarungsreligion bei Thomas von Aquin. Im Zeichen eines vorläufig theologisch gewonnenen universalen Freiheitsverständnisses vollzieht sich auch ein Strukturwandel politischer Öffentlichkeit, der zunächst eine institutionelle Verdünnung des republikanischen Ideals herbeiführt. Durch die Rücknahme des Ziels der Politik vom konkreten Bürger-ethos in die Universalität und den nunmehr transzendentalen Anspruch des Begriffs des "bonum commune" wird gleichzeitig aber auch ein Prozess der Pluralisierung und Dynamisierung gesellschaft-licher und individueller Zielsetzungen und Praxisformen freigesetzt. Entscheidende Bedeutung kommt dabei dem Stellenwert des thomasischen "Gesetzes" zu, in dem - jenseits einer material-deduktiven oder imperialistischen Konzeption - ein dezidiert praktisch-handlungsleitendes Gesetzesverständnis zum Vorschein kommt. Dieses führt die sittlich-politische Anerkennung stiftende Funktion der "koinonia politike" weiter und leitet in seinem Anspruch gesteigerter "Allgemeinheit"--Dies sowohl im Rückgang auf ein transzendentales Prinzip seiner Begründung wie auch in der Ausweitung seines Adressaten-kreises - zur Neuzeit über. (shrink)

This essay is meant to draw the principle outlines of the development of a specific modern issue of penalty. Deriving from an erosion of Augustine's dominating paradigm of retribution as a balance of two equivalent “evils” the legitimation of modern punishment was not sought in ef ficient deterrence only – as utilitarian philosophers suggested. More deeply, a modern justification of punishment was developed within the political philosophy of Kant, Fichte and Hegel by successively unfolding its close relation to the concept (...) of freedom. This does not only stress the criminal's own responsibility but also relies on the condition of a developed rule of law. As a result punishment was not only meant to restore sovereignty, often based on a social contract, but also the fundamental relation of mutual recognition between individuals. Adhering to a substantial understanding of the modern state under the rule of law this concept of penal law draws a marked distinction between “punishment” and “war” and also sets a clear limit to tendencies of expanding criminality beyond the rule of law. Regarding its philosophical impact it predominantly must be put forward against all measures which negate or extinguish the criminal's personality as a whole, such as torture, death penalty or life imprisonment. (shrink)

One of the common targets that contemporary feminists are critical of concerning the problem of the body is Rene Descartes' mind and body relation. Feminist scholars can identify at least three lines of investigation of the body in contemporary thought that may be regarded as legacies of the Cartesian view, which treat the body as primarily an object for: 1) the natural sciences, particularly for the life sciences, biology, and medicine; 2) as an instrument or a machine at the disposal (...) of consciousness or allocating an animating, willful subjectivity; and 3) as a vehicle of expression of private thoughts and feelings; that is, as fundamentally passive and transparent. Recently, feminist scholars are seriously thinking of a new conceptual model that can displace Cartesian dualism and that can emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian dominant mechanistic models and metaphors. In this light, this paper turns to a Confucian theory of the body for revelation and the case of Mencius is introduced, in which the mind is regarded as the major component of the body and a coherent model is adopted. Can we then conclude to ask in what ways the reclaiming of the body in the Contemporary Western discussion may learn from the Confucian ideas of the body...? (shrink)

One of the common targets that contemporary feminists are critical of concerning the problem of the body is Rene Descartes' mind and body relation. Feminist scholars can identify at least three lines of investigation of the body in contemporary thought that may be regarded as legacies of the Cartesian view, which treat the body as primarily an object for: 1) the natural sciences, particularly for the life sciences, biology, and medicine; 2) as an instrument or a machine at the disposal (...) of consciousness or allocating an animating, willful subjectivity; and 3) as a vehicle of expression of private thoughts and feelings; that is, as fundamentally passive and transparent. Recently, feminist scholars are seriously thinking of a new conceptual model that can displace Cartesian dualism and that can emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian dominant mechanistic models and metaphors. In this light, this paper turns to a Confucian theory of the body for revelation and the case of Mencius is introduced, in which the mind is regarded as the major component of the body and a coherent model is adopted. Can we then conclude to ask in what ways the reclaiming of the body in the Contemporary Western discussion may learn from the Confucian ideas of the body...? (shrink)

El término transmedia acuñado por Jenkins (2003) hace referencia a aquellos relatos que expanden sus historias a través de diferentes canales de distribución. Esta manera de construir relatos narrativos se vuelve sumamente interesante y natural para la generación Alfa y Zeta. Ante este escenario, la asignatura universitaria Creation of transmedia stories se presenta como una oportunidad para que los estudiantes exploren las posibilidades del transmedia y lo apliquen de manera específica a un producto cultural. En este artículo se analizará un (...) caso de estudio aplicado en el aula. (shrink)

Leading international scholars present analysis and case studies from different cultural settings, East and West, exploring aesthetic interest and experience in our daily lives at home, in workplaces, using everyday things, in our built and natural environments, and in our relationships and communities. A wide range of views and examples of everyday aesthetics are presented from western philosophical paradigms, from Confucian and Daoist aesthetics, and from the Japanese tradition. All indicate universal features of human aesthetic lives together with their cultural (...) variations. Comparative Everyday Aesthetics is a significant contribution to a key trend in international aesthetics for thinking beyond narrow art-centered conceptions of the aesthetic. It generates global discussions about good, aesthetic, everyday living in all its various aspects. It also promotes aesthetic education for personal, social, and environmental development and presents opportunities for global collaborative projects in philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)