This chapter first argues against the widely accepted “mentalist” interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of the perception of external objects. On that view, the perception of objects results from an act of synthesis of the diverse perceptual input provided by the different sense modalities. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of perception does not require such mental “construction” of external objects. For him, we unfailingly perceive external objects by way of modally specific perception: perception without qualification is primarily of external 3-D objects, (...) while modally specific perception is of perceptual qualities. As the special senses cannot operate in isolation from the perceptual system as a whole, it follows that we see colors, hear sounds, etc., and thereby perceive the objects whose colors and sounds they are. The second part offers a causal interpretation of Aristotle’s definition of perception as “reception of the form without the matter,” according to which the causal history of sensory affection fixes the content of the resulting act of perception: perception is cognitive in virtue of being the matterless presence of external things’ qualities in the perceiver. (shrink)

In this book, linguists and philosophers combine to offer a unique insight not only into Grice's contribution to philosophy of language, but on his theories of natural and non-natural meaning, implicatures and the semantic-pragmatic distinction.

Social health disparities are increasing in most countries around the world. During the past two decades, a large amount of evidence has emerged about the health consequences of social inequalities. Despite such evidence, the concept of medical fairness, as traditionally defined by the World Medical Association, has remained unchallenged and even reinforced by some scholars who emphasize that doctors should remain neutral to the socioeconomic status of their patients when providing clinical care. The inconsistency between public health and clinical care (...) perspectives raises tension between a narrow interpretation of the ethics of justice, which stresses the importance of equality and impartiality, and the ethics of care, which highlights the importance of particularity and individuality in clinical practice. This article analyzes the concept of medical fairness using the emerging evidence that demonstrates the impact of social health disparities on clinical care. It proposes a new approach of medical fairness based on equity rather than on equality and provides a consistent ethical framework based on Paul Ricoeur’s three levels of medical judgments. This integrative framework provides a better balance between public health and clinical care in medical practice. (shrink)

Attention is automatically allocated to stimuli that are opposite in valence to the current motivational focus (Rothermund, 2003; Rothermund, Voss, & Wentura, 2008). We tested whether this incongruency effect is due to affective–motivational counter-regulation or to an increased salience of stimuli that mismatch with cognitively activated information. Affective processing biases were assessed with a search task in which participants had to detect the spatial position at which a positive or negative stimulus was presented. In the motivational condition, positive or negative (...) affective–motivational states were induced by performance feedback after each trial. In the cognitive activation condition, participants memorised the word “good” or “bad” during the search task. The affective incongruency effect was replicated in the motivational condition, whereas an affective congruency effect obtained in the cognitive activation condition. These findings support an explanation of affective incongruency effects in terms of automatic counter-regulation that is motivational in nature. (shrink)

After a short description of the Aristotelian examples for practical syllogisms, the essay gives an overview of the interpretations of the practical syllogism since the 1950s. These interpretations can be divided into two main groups: while the first group connects the practical syllogism with practical thinking, the second, smaller group considers it as an illustration of the causal explananation of actions. The essay closes with some remarks on the reasons for these different interpretations.

Tras un esbozo de críticas recientes, el artículo analiza el concepto de subjetividad en la filosofía alemana clásica. Se señala que la apercepción pura en Kant es el principio de la lógica formal sin rastros de psicologismo, y que Kant ofrece las determinaciones básicas de la apercepción pura y de su «Yo pienso». Fichte continúa el problema de la relación entre lógica y subjetividad, y apuesta por la prioridad de la subjetividad. Su estructura se explica en detalle en una historia (...) sistemática de la autoconciencia. Se muestra que éste es un nuevo programa idealista, que es desarrollado mucho más en la filosofía del joven Schelling. La subjetividad de acuerdo con este último programa se explica como un sistema dinámico de facultades y de estados del sujeto; por ello, la subjetividad no se fija en la relación sujeto-objeto y no se expone a la objeción de circularidad. Esto también es válido para Hegel en su «Fenomenología del Espíritu», que es esencialmente tal historia sistemática de la autoconciencia. El propósito final en Fichte es la voluntad moral; en Schelling, el genio estético; en Hegel, el conocimiento absoluto, el cual se expone en un orden sistemático de categorías, que Hegel echa de menos en Kant. En estas categorías, de acuerdo con Hegel, la subjetividad se piensa a sí misma. (shrink)

We highlight the need to focus on the underlying determinants and production mechanisms to fully understand the nature of facial expression of emotion and to settle the theoretical debate about the meaning of motor expression. Although emotion theorists have generally remained rather vague about the details of the process, this has been a central concern of componential appraisal theories. We describe the fundamental assumptions and predictions of this approach regarding the patterning of facial expressions for different emotions. We also review (...) recent evidence for the assumption that specific facial muscle movements may be reliable symptoms of certain appraisal outcomes and that facial expressions unfold over time on the basis of a sequence of appraisal check results. (shrink)

One of many writers inspired by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the German novelist Jean Paul Richter coined the term 'Shandean humour' in his work of aesthetic theory. The essays in this volume investigate how Sterne's humour functions, the reasons for its enduring appeal, and what role it played in identity-construction and in the representation of melancholy. In tracing its hitherto under-recognised impact both on literary writers, such as Jean Paul and Herman Melville, and on philosophers, including Hegel and Marx, the (...) collection reveals that Shandean humour is a Grenzgänger - a point of commerce not only between Anglophone and German discourses, but also between literature and philosophy.Klaus Vieweg is Professor of Philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena; James Vigus is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of English and American Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Kathleen M. Wheeler is Reader in English Literature at the University of Cambridge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience or Interpretation:"What You See Is Not What You Read"Klaus OttmannMuseums of modern and contemporary art are growing at an unprecedented rate. New museums are being founded and existing ones are expanding exhibition spaces and acquiring more and more works of art. Concurrently, cultural institutions compete with a growing number of art fairs, biennials, galleries, and public collection spaces.Since the 1980s the focus of museums increasingly has been (...) on education and interpretation, which among other things has created a boom for audio guides and scholarly exhibition catalogs at the expense of the unmediated experience of works of art. Perhaps what is needed are exhibitions that present art again primarily as "experience," with minimal curatorial and didactic intervention. [End Page 13]I have borrowed the title of my essay from a lecture that was given by Nicolas Serota, the director of the Tate galleries in London, in 1996. His lecture was subtitled "The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art."But the question of the presentation of art, and specifically, that of experience vs. interpretation, by no means originated in the last decades. It is at least as old a question as modern art itself, going as far back as the nineteenth-century French intellectual dispute on the museum between the poet Paul Valéry and the novelist Marcel Proust, as recounted with a sympathetic voice by the German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno in a short essay with the minimalist title "Valéry Proust Museum."There is much to be learned from reading this small text. Paul Valéry criticized the museum of his time (the Louvre) for creating confusion in the mind of the spectator by reducing the experience to the level of information only. No one would want to listen to ten orchestras at once, he argued, yet we are forced to apprehend, at the same moment, a seascape, a portrait, and a still-life, or worse, painting styles completely incompatible with each other. He warned that excess of information would lead to impoverishment of the senses, as art was becoming a matter of education. Valéry's view could be regarded as the conservative position.Marcel Proust's view was more modernist: he regarded the museum as the best place to view art. Devoid of décor and other commonplace distractions, its galleries symbolized for him the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create works of art.Both Valéry and Proust emphasized that art should be enjoyed. But while for Valéry art lost its vitality in the museum and effectively "died," Proust saw an afterlife of art in the museum and in the subjective stream of consciousness of the viewer.For Adorno, both views were too one-sided and extreme. Valéry's absolute unwavering contemplation of pure art takes the risk of neutralization, unless the work can point beyond itself toward a social context. Thus, a work of art is neither an embodiment of a Platonic idea, as Valéry believed, nor is it exclusively a reflection of the soul, as Proust understood it. Rather, in Adorno's view, art is a "force field" between the art and the viewer, both passive and active.In his 1931 lectures on "Art as Experience," the American philosopher John Dewey said:The trouble with existing theories [of art] is that they start from ready-made compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that "spiritualizes" it out of connection with the objects of concrete experience. The alternative, however, to such spiritualization is not a degrading... materialization of works of fine art, but a conception that discloses the way in which these works idealize qualities found in common experience.1 [End Page 14]In my book The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition, I describe the creative act as an active-passive leap that the artist is impelled to make and the viewer is challenged to repeat.Wittgenstein often spoke about the inexpressible, that which is beyond the limits of language. He called it "running against the boundaries of language." It is something any poet, musician, or painter is familiar with; they all run against boundaries of language, sound, or color... (shrink)

Band 1. Die anthropologische Grundlage der Kunst -- Band 2. Die gesellschaftliche Autonomie der Kunst.

There is a growing consensus that the elicitation and differentiation of emotions can best be understood as the result of the subjective appraisal of the significance of events for individuals. The present paper addresses the process of appraisal, hitherto neglected; particularly the postulate that appraisal consists of a fixed sequence of stimulus evaluation checks, as proposed by the component process model of emotion (Scherer, 1984, 1993b). It is suggested that indirect evidence pertinent to the order assumption, which is an essential (...) aspect of the sequence hypothesis, can be obtained via the study of recognition-of-emotion-situation scenarios that have been segmented according to individual appraisal criteria or dimensions. The hypothesis that the presentation of these segments in the predicted sequence (as compared to a random sequence) will result in a faster and more accurate identification of the respective emotions is supported by data from three experiments. Potential alternative explanations are discussed. (shrink)

We introduce a new Turing machine based concept of time complexity for functions on computable metric spaces. It generalizes the ordinary complexity of word functions and the complexity of real functions studied by Ko [19] et al. Although this definition of TIME as the maximum of a generally infinite family of numbers looks straightforward, at first glance, examples for which this maximum exists seem to be very rare. It is the main purpose of this paper to prove that, nevertheless, the (...) definition has a large number of important applications. Using the framework of TTE [40], we introduce computable metric spaces and computability on the compact subsets. We prove that every computable metric space has a c-proper c-admissible representation. We prove that Turing machine time complexity of a function computable relative to c-admissible c-proper representations has a computable bound on every computable compact subset. We prove that computably compact computable metric spaces have concise c-proper c-admissible representations and show by examples that many canonical representations are of this kind. Finally, we compare our definition with a similar one by Labhalla et al. [22]. Several examples illustrate the concepts. By these results natural and realistic definitions of computational complexity are now available for a variety of numerical problems such as image processing, integration, continuous Fourier transform or wave propagation. (shrink)

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Im Ausgang vom historischen Scholastikbild Brentanos wird nach den Quellen und Interpretationshinsichten gefragt, die für Brentanos frühe und späte Fassung des Intentionalen leitend waren. Dabei zeigt sich, daß die Voraussetzung der Intentionalität in der aristotelischen Sachproblematik der Wahrnehmung liegt (De an. 424 al7), die Brentano mit dem scholastischen Begriff obiective interpretiert, einem Terminus, den Brentano von der Neuscholastik, aber auch von Descartes und dem spätmittelalterlichen Konzeptualismus her kannte. Es ist nun entscheidend, daß in dieser Terminologie nur ein sehr eingeschränkter Aspekt (...) der scholastischen Intentionalität thematisch ist, der in seiner internen Problematik den Ansatzpunkt für alle späteren Reinterpretationen abgibt. (shrink)

Die kirchen- und dogmengeschichtliche Forschung hat die Beschäftigung mit der Geschichte der Christen im mittelalterlichen Nahen Osten lange vernachlässigt. Für die Zeit nach 700 reduzierte sich Kirchengeschichte in den meisten einschlägigen Handbüchern weitgehend auf die Darstellung der Entwicklung der abendländischen Kirche. Abgesehen von griechischen, russischen und arabischen Arbeiten, die schon aus sprachlichen Gründen meist wenig Beachtung fanden, beschäftigten sich nur wenige Abhandlungen von Spezialisten, die Kenntnisse der orientalischen Sprachen besaßen, mit der Geschichte der einheimischen Christen des Nahen Ostens nach dem (...) 7. Jahrhundert. Erst seit neuester Zeit sind mehrbändige Darstellungen der Kirchengeschichte greifbar, die auch die Geschichte der östlichen Kirchen in befriedigender Weise miteinbeziehen. Wie der von Pahlitzsch in der Einleitung (S. 13–18) gegebene Überblick über den Forschungsstand zeigt, ist jedoch in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten auch eine Zunahme der wissenschaftlichen Beschäftigung mit der Kirchengeschichte und der gesellschaftlichen Situation der griechisch-orthodoxen Melkiten in den Kreuzfahrerstaaten zu beobachten. (shrink)