I am aware of the red and orange autumn leaves. Am I aware of my awareness of the leaves? Not so according to many philosophers. By contrast, many meditative traditions report an experience of awareness itself. I argue that such a pure awareness experience must have a non-sensory phenomenal character. I use Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments for assisting in recognising pure awareness. In particular, I investigate the gap where one cannot see one’s head. This is not a mere gap because (...) I seem to be looking from here. Critically, I claim, the experience of looking from here has a non-sensory phenomenal character. I argue that this sense of being aware cannot be reduced to egocentric visual-spatial relations nor the viewpoint because it continues when I close my eyes. Neither is a multisensory origin sufficient to explain why I seem to be at this central point rather than elsewhere. Traditionally, claims of a pure awareness experience have been restricted to highly trained individuals in very restricted circumstances. The innovation of Harding’s approach is that it reliably isolates a candidate for pure awareness using methods which can be replicated at any time. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a version of panpsychist idealism on first-person experiential grounds. As things always appear in my field of consciousness, there is prima facie empirical support for idealism. Furthermore, by assuming that all things correspond to a conscious perspective or perspectives (i.e., panpsychism), realism about the world is arguably safeguarded without the need to appeal to God (as per Berkeley’s idealism). Panpsychist idealism also has a phenomenological advantage over traditional panpsychist views as it does not commit (...) perceptual experience to massive error by denying that perceived colours are properties of things. Finally, I argue that the subject combination problem for panpsychism has been motivated by the problematic assumption that consciousness is in things. Thinking about subject combination from the first-person perspective is fruitful for reframing the subject combination problem and for seeing how subjects could potentially combine for the idealist. (shrink)

I am aware of the tree and its leaves, but am I aware of my awareness of these things? When I try to introspect my awareness, I just find myself attending to objects and their properties. This observation is known as the ‘transparency of experience’. On the other hand, I seem to directly know that I am aware. Given the first observation, it is not clear how I know that I am aware. Fred Dretske thought that the problem was so (...) acute that he issued the challenge of answering ‘How do you know that you are not a zombie?’ I propose that a view found in the Advaita Vedanta, that awareness is self luminous, reconciles these two observations. I understand self-luminosity as the thesis that: (1) I am implicitly aware of my awareness and (2) I am phenomenally aware of a distinct phenomenal character of my awareness. In support of the first claim, that I apparently only attend to objects in the world when introspecting perceptual experience, suggests that I do not know my awareness explicitly, but rather that I must know it implicitly. In support of the second claim, I argue that the mere fact that I am perceptually conscious is not sufficient to allow me to know that I am perceptually conscious. In particular, the qualities I am perceptually aware of do not tell me that I aware of them, rather they just seem to be properties of objects. I also assess whether strategies for responding to Cartesian sceptical scenarios can be employed against Dretske’s consciousness scepticism. I argue that these strategies either fail to distinguish me from a zombie or they do not adequately describe my epistemic situation. By contrast to other accounts, if awareness has its own distinct phenomenal character, then it cannot be considered to be a prima facie property of the world, hence the self-luminosity of awareness provides a plausible account of how I know that I’m not a zombie. (shrink)

Objectives Practitioners in contemplative traditions commonly report experiencing an awareness that is distinct from sensory objects, thoughts, and emotions (“awareness itself”). They also report experiences of a void or underlying silence that is closely associated with this awareness. Subjects who carry out the Headless Way exercises frequently report an experience of emptiness or void at the same time as other contents (void-like experiences). The goals of this study were to (1) assess the reliability of these methods in eliciting the recognition (...) of awareness and void-like experiences in participants who had no prior exposure to these techniques, (2) investigate the prevalence of these experiences in these tasks, and (3) to differentiate these experiences from closely related and potential precursor experiences. -/- Method Twenty adults participated in in-depth individual interviews in which they were guided through the Headless Way exercises. A thematic analysis was conducted on the interview transcripts. -/- Results Twelve of the participants reported a void-like experience, and five participants reported an experience of awareness itself. These experiences were respectively categorized as subsets of the more general categories of perceptual absences and the sense of not being person-like. Another novel finding was the real-time reports of awareness and void-like experiences during the exercises. -/- Conclusions Our findings provide preliminary evidence that the Headless Way exercises can effectively induce experiences of emptiness and awareness in participants without prior experience. The findings suggest that such experiences can be elicited outside of a traditional meditation context, including in non-meditators. Furthermore, the experience of not being person-like and of perceptual absences may be precursors and more general forms of recognizing awareness itself and the void-like nature of the mind. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag analysiert auf der Basis theoretischer Überlegungen sowie empirischer Ergebnisse Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer „interkulturellen Öffnung“ von Sportvereinen, worunter Strukturanpassungen verstanden werden, die auf die Inklusion und Integration von Personen mit Migrationshintergrund zielen. Es wird gezeigt, inwiefern eine nachhaltige interkulturelle Öffnung der Vereine von der programmatischen Anbindung an den Vereinszweck, von der kontinuierlichen Behandlung in den Kommunikationswegen, von spezifischen Personalentscheidungen und der Kompatibilität mit der Organisationskultur abhängig ist.

Der Fokus auf die Sprache bestimmte die Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, die sowohl die Dekonstruktion der Metaphysik als auch den Tod des Subjekts verkündete. Der Psychoanalytiker Jacques Lacan führte das Subjekt des Begehrens wieder in den philosophischen Diskurs ein und entwickelte aus der Struktur der Sprache eine neue, symbolische Logik des Unbewussten. Die Logik des Signifikanten, deren Geschichte diese Arbeit nachzeichnet, um sie zu transzendieren, stellt die Frage nach der Dialektik von Signifikant und Begriff, Sprache und Logik, Bewusstem und Unbewusstem, (...) Ich und Subjekt, Gesetz und Begehren, Denken und Sein. Durch die Funktionen der Metonymie, der Metapher und des Stepppunktes sowie über das Schema der vier Diskurse werden die Tropen der traditionellen philosophischen Logik - Begriff, Urteil und Schluss - neu interpretiert. Das Peirce'sche Konzept der Abduktion ermöglicht es, sowohl den Borromäischen Knoten Lacans - Imaginäres, Symbolisches und Reales - wie auch die transzendentale Dialektik und Ontologie der Moderne, die auf Kants und Hegels Revolutionen der Denkungsart zurückgehen, schlusslogisch zu begründen. (shrink)

Diese komparatistische Monographie stellt zentrale Kategorien und Theorien der Literaturwissenschaft dar. Sie synthetisiert und bewertet den Stand der Forschung und unterwirft viele Dogmen der neueren Forschung einer kritischen Analyse. Resultat ist eine Reformulierung des theoretischen Kernbestandes der Literaturwissenschaft für die zentralen Kategorien Interpretation, Fiktion, Performativität, Intertextualität, Gattung, Epoche. Der Band richtet sich an alle Wissenschaften, die mit Texten als Erkenntnisobjekten umgehen; neben der Literaturwissenschaft sind also auch die Theaterwissenschaft, die Sprachwissenschaft, die Sprachphilosophie, die Kunstwissenschaft, die Geschichtswissenschaft sowie Theologie und Jurisprudenz (...) angesprochen. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag verfolgt das Ziel, Mechanismen der Inklusion und Exklusion in Sportvereinen zu identifizieren, die die Partizipation von Personen mit Migrationshintergrund am organisierten Sport erklären können. Im Lichte von theoretischen Überlegungen zur „symbolischen Grenzziehung“ und „Zugehörigkeit“ werden Ergebnisse aus Fallstudien in Nordrhein-Westfalen und Baden-Württemberg präsentiert.

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag untersucht den Gebrauch von Moral in der Kommunikation zwischen Trainer und Ath­leten im Spitzensport. Dabei wird moralische Kommunikation aus systemtheoretischer Perspektive als soziale Tatsache konstruiert, um im Lichte dieser Konstruktion konkrete Beispiele aus den Sport­arten Handball und Hockey analysieren und im Hinblick auf ihre Funktionen und Folgen reflektie­ren zu können. Die Ergebnisse dieser Analysen münden in Empfehlungen an Trainer, die zu einem sensiblen Umgang mit Moral raten, da insbesondere dem polemogenen Charakter moralischer und moralisierender Kommunikation Rechnung zu (...) tragen ist. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenology of awakening in Chinese Zen Buddhism. In this tradition, to awaken is to ‘see your true nature’. In particular, the two aspects of awakening are: (1) seeing that the nature of one’s self or mind is empty or void and (2) an erasing of the usual (though merely apparent) boundary between subject and object. In the early Zen tradition, there are many references to awakening as chopping off your head, not having eyes, nose (...) and tongue, and seeing your ‘Original Face’. These references bear a remarkable resemblance to an approach to awakening developed by Douglas Harding. I will guide the reader through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments which investigate the gap where you cannot see your own head. I will endeavour to show that these methods, although radically different from traditional meditation techniques, result in an experience with striking similarities to Zen accounts of awakening, in particular, as experiencing oneself as empty or void and yet totally united with the given world. The repeatability and apparent reliability of these first-person methods opens up a class of awakening experience to empirical investigation and has the potential to provide new insights into nondual traditions. (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)

Zusammenfassung Die Vereinbarkeit von Spitzensport- und Schulkarriere gestaltet sich für schulpflichtige Nachwuchsathleten sehr schwierig. Der vorliegende Beitrag konstruiert diese Unvereinbarkeit zunächst als Inklusionsproblem und beschreibt dann prinzipielle Lösungsmöglichkeiten im Rahmen einer Funktionalisierung von Schulen. Dabei wird insbesondere die sachliche Funktionalisierung in Form der strukturellen Kopplung von Spitzensport und Schule in den Blick genommen. Am Beispiel der „NRW-Sportschulen" und der „Spezialschulen Sport" in Brandenburg werden schließlich Möglichkeiten und Grenzen dieser strukturellen Kopplung diskutiert und Barrieren der sachlichen Funktionalisierung von Schulen identifiziert.

Zusammenfassung Spitzensport zu betreiben und gleichzeitig ein Hochschulstudium zu absolvieren, scheint unter den derzeitigen Umständen nahezu unmöglich. Der Artikel konstruiert dieses Phänomen der Unvereinbarkeit zweier Karrieren zunächst gesellschaftstheoretisch als Inklusionsproblem. Da eine merkliche Verbesserung der Situation der Athleten letztlich nur auf Seiten der Hochschule erwartet werden darf, werden anschließend aus organisationstheoretischer Perspektive die dortigen Möglichkeiten und Grenzen interner Strukturveränderungen reflektiert. Schließlich wird diskutiert, wie Hochschulen mit den Erwartungen des Spitzensports umgehen können und in welcher Weise sich im Rahmen von Netzwerken (...) womöglich doch Kooperationsbeziehungen zwischen den beteiligten Organisationen zugunsten studierender Spitzensportler aufbauen lassen. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag analysiert auf der Basis theoretischer Überlegungen sowie empirischer Ergebnisse Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Steuerung interkultureller Öffnung von Sportvereinen durch Sportverbände. Es wird gezeigt, dass die interkulturelle Öffnung der Vereine funktional ausgerichteter Strategien seitens der Sportverbände bedarf, die an die Ziele und Zwecke der Vereine anschließen, und dass Netzwerke den zentralen Mechanismus bei der Koordination der Interorganisationsbeziehungen zwischen Sportverbänden und Sportvereinen darstellen.

Zusammenfassung Dem deutschen Fußball scheint es geradezu mühelos zu gelingen, Spielerinnen und Spieler mit Migrationshintergrund zu integrieren, was sich deutlich in der Zahl betreffender Spielerinnen und Spieler in den Auswahlmannschaften des Deutschen Fußball Bundes zeigt. Die Mannschaften des Deutschen Handball Bundes dagegen rekrutieren sich bislang ausschließlich aus rein deutschstämmigen Spielerinnen und Spielern. Beim Handballsport scheint es sich hierzulande bislang um etwas ausgesprochen „Deutsches“ zu handeln, mithin um eine Sportart, die fast 20 % der Bevölkerung kaum erreicht und dabei offenkundig sogar (...) die größte Migrantengruppe, nämlich diejenige mit muslimischem Hintergrund, so gut wie vollständig ausschließt. Der Aufsatz steckt sich das Ziel, all jene Mechanismen der Exklusion von Migranten im Handball zu identifizieren und in einem theoretischen Modell zusammenzufassen, die in Deutschland zur Unter- bzw. Nichtrepräsentanz von Spielerinnen und Spielern mit unterschiedlichem Migrationshintergrund im Handballsport beitragen. Aufbauend darauf werden Leitfragen für eine empirische Untersuchung der Exklusionsmechanismen abgeleitet. (shrink)

While first-person methods are essential for a science of consciousness, it is controversial what form these methods should take and whether any such methods are reliable. I propose that first-person experiments are a reliable method for investigating conscious experience. I outline the history of these methods and describe their characteristics. In particular, a first-person experiment is an intervention on a subject's experience in which independent variables are manipulated, extraneous variables are held fixed, and in which the subject makes a phenomenal (...) judgement about the target experience of the investigation. I examine historical and contemporary examples of first-person experiments: Mariotte’s demonstration of the visual blind spot, Kanizsa’s subjective contours, the Tse Illusion, and investigations of the non-uniform resolution of the visual field. I discuss the role that phenomenal contrast plays in these methods, and how they overcome typical introspective errors. I argue that their intersubjective repeatability is an important factor in their scientific status, however, it is not the only factor. That they control for extraneous factors and confounds is another factor which sets them apart from pseudoscience (e.g., the perception of auras), and hence another reason for classifying them as genuine experiments. Furthermore, by systematically mapping out the structure of visual experience, these methods make scientific progress. Praises of such first-person experimental approaches may not always be sung by philosophers and psychologists, but they continue to flourish as respectable scientific methods nevertheless. (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.

This chapter describes the phenomenology of the political world. Phenomenology must get underway with an analysis of the political world. The chapter evaluates more precisely the relation between the concept of world or worldliness and the openness of the political. Using the term ‘political world’ is preferred to utilising the traditional terms because it is less burdened by prejudice. The guiding impulse towards the clarification of the Sache of political philosophy as political world stems from Hannah Arendt, who does not (...) make use of the phenomenological conception of ‘horizon’. Science's confidence that it can attain a knowledge free of all horizonal plurality is among the most fundamental prejudices that phenomenology endeavours to overcome. Phenomenology is the decided present renewal of the most ancient idea of epistêmê. (shrink)

The achievement of unity and perfection in human action begins with a struggle for these ideals in human thought. Dr. Klaus Vondung in his collection of essays that span four decades explores examples of this in different fields of human inquiry: striving for harmonious existential unity of talents and morals, intellect and emotion; seeking to make natural sciences consonant with the humanities and thereby moving toward a more universal, "perfect" science; and establishing unity in political structures and cultivating in (...) this unity a homogenous society. Vondung has given special devotion to National Socialism as a context wherein he revisits its perverted motivation and the consequences of this despite noble ideals. Particular focus in following the thread of unity and perfection in human intellectual and practical ambitions ultimately hones in on the combination of religion and politics. Vondung in these essays unpacks the ways in which this continues to fascinate and disturb us, and in his expertise he uses National Socialism to connect this pursuit of unity and perfection to what he calls one of the signature marks of modernity--namely, secular apocalypticism. This claim stands in opposition to Eric Voegelin's remark that Gnosticism, rather, is "the nature of modernity." Vondung, who studied and wrote his dissertation under Voegelin, grapples with the contrast of these positions. Vondung is willing to challenge Voegelin, but ultimately his treatment of the latter bears the quality of tribute to this great scholar. Vondung also explores the points of contact between apocalypticism and Hermetic speculation. Despite the independence of the religious and philosophical doctrines of Hermeticism, there are parallels to be found. Apocalypticism and Hermeticism originated in antiquity and yet each represents a tradition that still holds footing today. Vondung furthermore leads the reader to see the project of salvation found in both even as each operates with a different scope. This collection of essays centers itself on a perspective of the human pursuit of unity and perfection, directly or indirectly, as objectives of intellectual endeavors, existential ideals, as social or political outcomes, and in the case of National Socialism even as perverse aberrations. Vondung's particular treatment of Voegelin's work likewise establishes what the former identifies as a stand-out question of this study: Does the search of order in history show us the unity of the history of humankind? (shrink)

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual space, this (...) article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified. (shrink)

In the age of digitization, the world seems to be reducible to a digital computer. However, mathematically, modern quantum field theories do not only depend on discrete, but also continuous concepts. Ancient debates in natural philosophy on atomism versus the continuum are deeply involved in modern research on digital and computational physics. This example underlines that modern physics, in the tradition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, is a further development of natural philosophy with the rigorous methods of mathematics, measuring, (...) and computing. We consider fundamental concepts of natural philosophy with mathematical and computational methods and ask for their ontological and epistemic status. The following article refers to the author’s book, “The Digital and the Real World. Computational Foundations of Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Philosophy.”. (shrink)

Hume famously denied that he could experience the self. Most subsequent philosophers have concurred with this finding. I argue that if the subject is to function as a bearer of experience it must (1) lack sensory qualities in itself to be compatible with bearing sensory qualities and (2) be single so that it can unify experience. I use Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments to investigate the visual gap where one cannot see one’s own head. I argue that this open space conforms (...) to the above criteria and hence is consistent with being the subject. I respond to the objection that this location is merely a lack of visual experience. I argue that this space also encompasses sound and touch properties and hence functions as a bearer for other sensory modalities. These first-person findings provide prima facie support for the view that the subject is a thin bearer of experience. (shrink)

Historical Justice and Memory highlights the global movement for historical justice—acknowledging and redressing historic wrongs—as one of the most significant moral and social developments of our times. Such historic wrongs include acts of genocide, slavery, systems of apartheid, the systematic persecution of presumed enemies of the state, colonialism, and the oppression of or discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities. The historical justice movement has inspired the spread of truth and reconciliation processes around the world and has pushed governments to make (...) reparations and apologies for past wrongs. It has changed the public understanding of justice and the role of memory. In this book, leading scholars in philosophy, history, political science, and semiotics offer new essays that discuss and assess these momentous global developments. They evaluate the strength and weaknesses of the movement, its accomplishments and failings, its philosophical assumptions and social preconditions, and its prospects for the future. (shrink)

Measures and theories of information abound, but there are few formalised methods for treating the contextuality that can manifest in different information systems. Quantum theory provides one possible formalism for treating information in context. This paper introduces a quantum inspired model of the human mental lexicon. This model is currently being experimentally investigated and we present a preliminary set of pilot data suggesting that concept combinations can indeed behave non-separably.

Die Wissenschaft hat - von der Wissenschaftstheorie des 20. Jahrhunderts gründlich untersucht - bestimmte Strukturen ihres Wissens, ihrer Methodik der Wissensgewinnung und Wissensabsicherung entwickelt, die sie von anderen Arten des Umgangs mit Wissen - z.B. der Alltagserfahrung - signifikant unterscheidet. Für die Technikwissenschaften haben solche wissenschaftstheoretischen Untersuchungen jedoch bisher kaum stattgefunden. Was etwa die analytische Wissenschaftstheorie für die Naturwissenschaften geleistet hat, steht daher für die Technikwissenschaften noch aus. Denn das technische Wissen unterscheidet sich vom wissenschaftlichen Wissen in seiner inneren Struktur. (...) Diese Struktur aufzuklären ist eine lohnende Aufgabe, weil deren Kenntnis hilft, besser mit Technik umzugehen. Die in diesem Band vorgelegten analytischen Studien zur Wissenschaftstheorie der Technikwissenschaften behandeln - ausgehend vom Problem der Formalisierung und der Wahrheitsfrage in der Philosophie - die Grundeinheit des technischen Wissens, die technologische Regel, und den Aufbau und Zusammenhang technologischer Theorien. Daraus ergeben sich Hinweise auf die innere, d.h. auch logische Struktur des technischen Wissens. (shrink)

Technischer Wandel in hoher Geschwindigkeit kennzeichnet unsere Zeit. Dieser Wandel wirft grundsätzliche Fragen auf: Können wir begreifen, was wir tun? Können wir abschätzen, was wir tun? Können wir wollen, was wir tun? Können wir sagen, was wir tun? Können wir leben, was wir tun? Mit Fragen wie diesen hat sich der Philosoph Klaus Kornwachs immer wieder auseinandergesetzt. Ihm zu Ehren widmen sich die Autorinnen und Autoren in ihren Essays der Philosophie der Technik, der Technikfolgenabschätzung sowie der Ethik, Sprache und (...) Kultur der Technik. Neben Philosophen kommen auch Vertreter der Soziologie, Medizin, Technik- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Psychologie, Physik, Theologie, Ingenieurswissenschaft, Ökonomie, Politologie und Rhetorik zu Wort. So entsteht - ganz im Sinne Klaus Kornwachsˈ - ein breites Spektrum von Ein- und Ansichten. (shrink)

Eric Schwitzgebel (2011) argues that phenomenal judgments are in general less reliable than perceptual judgments. This paper distinguishes two versions of this unreliability thesis. The process unreliability thesis says that unreliability in phenomenal judgments is due to faulty domain-specific mechanisms involved in producing these judgments, whereas the statistical unreliability thesis says that it is simply a matter of higher numbers of errors. Against the process unreliability thesis, I argue that the main errors and limitations in making phenomenal judgments can be (...) accounted for by domain-general factors: attention, working memory limits and conceptualization. As these factors are shared with the production of perceptual judgments, errors in phenomenal judgments are not due to faulty domain-specific processes. Furthermore, this account defends phenomenal judgments against general scepticism by providing criteria for distinguishing between reliable and unreliable phenomenal judgments. (shrink)

Im vorliegenden Buch stellt Klaus Oehler die Lehre vom noetischen und dianoetischen Denken bei Platon und Aristoteles dar und begründet damit erstmals die These, dass das für die neuzeitliche Philosophie zentrale Problem der Reflexion und des Selbstbewusstseins schon, wenn auch nicht in gleicher Weise, in der antiken Philosophie eine Rolle gespielt hat.

Der Mathematiker Erhard Weigel (1625-1699) gilt bisher als einer der bedeutendsten deutschen Vertreter der sog. "Fruehaufklärung". Dieser Band hinterfragt nun diesen traditionellen und deshalb allzu bequemen philosophiegeschichtlichen Begriff nach seiner Erklärungsfunktion innerhalb der modernen Wissenschaftsgeschichte. In komparatistischer Sicht auf die deutsche Universitätslandschaft nehmen die Beiträger den institutionellen Rahmen und seine konkreten Auswirkungen auf den Lehrbetrieb in den Blick, um die Bedingungen des damaligen Wissenschaftsverständnisses und seiner Entwicklungsrichtungen zu untersuchen. Im Fokus stehen die Verwandlungen der aristotelischen Basis des Wissenschaftsverständnisses und was (...) sich damalige Universitätslehrer als Autoren explizit (z.B. in Form wissenschaftstheoretischer Schriften und Lehrbuecher) oder implizit (z.B. in Form der von ihnen praktizierten Wissenschaft) unter Wissenschaft vorgestellt und ihrem gelehrten Publikum vermittelt haben. (shrink)

It is shown by means of four examples that the demarcation between law and morals has become problematical. The study of more recent developments in ethics and in law indicates that in both fields the relevance of discourse and consent has grown. Though both law and morals aim at agreement their degree of dependance on it differs. The definition of law and morals suggested in this article is based on this view. Legitimate law consists of norms, which besides fulfilling other (...) conditions have attained a certain degree of consent. On the other hand one can only talk of social morals when a very high degree of consent has been reached. The consequences of this definition are explained by means of the examples presented at the beginning. (shrink)

Phenomenal objectivism explains perceptual phenomenal character by reducing it to an awareness of mind-independent objects, properties, and relations. A challenge for this view is that there is a sense in which a distant tree looks smaller than a closer tree even when they are the same objective size (perceptual size variation). The dual content view is a popular objectivist account in which such experiences are explained by my objective spatial relation to the tree, in particular visual angle (perspectival size). I (...) describe a series of first-person experiments for investigating size experience. I use a ruler as a first-person method for operationalising perspectival size (Experiment 1). I use the corridor illusion (Experiment 2), outlining one’s head in the mirror (Experiment 3), and outlining the size of objects on glass (Experiment 4) to show a phenomenal difference in size for items in different depth contexts, despite being identical in visual angle. These finding demonstrate that visual angle cannot account for these spatial experiences. Psychological evidence provides further support for the thesis that subjects do not experience visual angle when depth information is present. Together this evidence supports the hypothesis that perceptual size variation cannot be accounted for by visual angle, hence undermining a plausible version of the dual content theory. This outcome, combined with problems raised by alternative objectivist accounts of size variation, provides support for a subjectivist account of size experience. (shrink)