Alongside the 'critical theory' of the Frankfurt School, West Germany was also home to another influential Marxist current known as the Marburg School. In this volume, Marburg disciple Lothar Peter traces the school's history and situates it in the political discourse and developments of its time. The renowned political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth plays a large role, but unlike most histories of the Marburg School Peter also takes the sociologists Werner Hofmann and Heinz Maus into account as well as their (...) many students and successors. They were united by the conviction that teaching and scholarship must necessarily be tied to the practical goal of transforming society - an approach that met with considerable opposition in the harshly anti-Communist atmosphere of the period. (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)

"Die Kritik ist nicht die Wissenschaft." Zu diesem Ergebnis führt eine Besinnung auf den Begriff der Objektivität in der kunstwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Die aktuelle Situation, die durch wissenschaftstheoretische und methodologische Überlegungen bestimmt ist, verlangt neue Zielsetzungen und Aufgaben. Das zentrale Problem - die Begründung der Ästhetik als selbständige, moderne Wissenschaft - steht und fällt mit der Frage, ob die Kunst Gegenstand einer generellen, empirisch prüfbaren Theorie sein kann. Der zeitgenössische Strukturalismus glaubt diese Frage positiv beantworten zu können. Er versucht, die ästhetischen (...) Gebilde nicht nur als registrierbare Einzelfälle zu erklären und zu bewerten, sondern auf allgemeinere Gesetzmäßigkeiten zurückzuführen. (shrink)

I describe characteristic phenomena of quantum physics that suggest that reality appears to us in two domains: the open and well-known domain of empirical, material things—the realm of actuality—and a hidden and invisible domain of nonempirical, non-material forms—the realm of potentiality. The nonempirical forms are part of physical reality because they contain the empirical possibilities of the universe and can manifest themselves in the empirical world. Two classes of nonempirical states are discussed: the superposition states of microphysical entities, which are (...) nonempirical because observation destroys them, and the virtual states of material systems, which are nonempirical because they are empty. The non-empirical part to physical reality represents a predetermined and hidden order that exists before it is empirical, and the visible world is an emanation out of it. I discuss consequences for our understanding of human nature, the origin of life, and human values. Reality is an indivisible wholeness that is aware of its processes, like a Cosmic Spirit, and it reveals its awareness in the mindlike properties of elementary processes as well as in the human consciousness. Thus, one is led to G. W. F. Hegel's thesis that the Cosmic Spirit is thinking in us. (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.

On the basis of the primitive dyadic time relation “earlier than” we develop subsequently temporal relations and orders of things in mereological terms. The basic mereological relation is the relation of part to whole, which permits the whole as part of itself. Starting point of the mereo-chronological systematization is Alfred Tarski’s development of the characteristics of the relations of part and time and their correlations in the appendix E of Henry Woodger’s application of mathematical and logical methods in biology in (...) “The Axiomatic Method in Biology” (1937). Tarski’s reasoning is modified and expanded in different ways. Modifications are made with respect to the following three items: the choice of the postulated axioms and cited theorems, the transscription of the axioms and theorems formalized by Tarski in Principia Mathematica-notation in symbolism of modern First-Order Predicate Logic and the detailed proofs of the theorems. The intended meaning of the axioms and theorems is given in common everyday language and − if possible − illustrating diagrams are added. -/- Things in time and momentary things are introduced (§ 2) and their relations to things in general are contemplated (§ 3.1). By means of the relation of temporal coincidence certain relations between momentary things are dealt with (§ 3.2). For momentary things another time relation “wholly earlier” is defined (§ 3.3), which leads together with the definition of momentary worlds to a corresponding relation between them (§ 3.4). This relation eventually gives us a temporal order of momentary worlds, which is isomorphic to the continuum of real numbers (§ 3.4). Momentary phases as “slices” of single things (§ 3.5), the fundamental concept of an organized (biological) unity and the relation “wholly earlier” between momentary phases of an organized unity have the result that the duration of life of an organized unity can be modelled as a closed interval in the sequence of momentary worlds (§ 4). Finally by means of a dyadic time relation “wholly earlier” between things introduced by Tarski in the appendix E the time relations of copresence, of temporal part, of simultaneousness and of genuine temporal part are defined (§ 5). (shrink)

Is the reference to the Book of Job sufficient to explain why Hobbes gave the name ‘Leviathan’ to the state he advocated? Had he not been aware of how maligned this name had been for centuries: that it not only referred to a monster, but soon became synonymous with the devil himself? - The “long shadow” that, according to Carl Schmitt, the name ‘Leviathan’ alone had cast on Hobbes’s work from the very beginning was first cleared somewhat in 2007 by (...) Noel Malcolm’s reference to Jacques Boulduc’s Job- commentary of 1619/37. As far as the “extraneous influence” in question is concerned, however, reference could also be made to the Job-commentary of a certain Joseph Caryl of 1643, which in turn took away some of the scandalous connotation of the biblical Leviathan. The real key to Hobbes’s naming, however, may lie with Jean Bodin, with whom Hobbes shares everything that the name ‘Leviathan’ stands for in his political philosophy. (shrink)

The following conjecture is due to Shelah–Hasson: Any infinite strongly NIP field is either real closed, algebraically closed, or admits a non‐trivial definable henselian valuation, in the language of rings. We specialise this conjecture to ordered fields in the language of ordered rings, which leads towards a systematic study of the class of strongly NIP almost real closed fields. As a result, we obtain a complete characterisation of this class.

Modern science is based empirically on data, which are gained, mainly, by means of technical machinery and plants of high complexity. This type of laboratory research is at a distance to the old forms of investigating nature such that it is under suspicion to investigate artefacts rather than nature. - Against this it is argued in the following, that laboratory research has to be acknowledged as true heir of the form of science which Galileo had started. Knowledge of the powers (...) and mechanisms of nature can be gained only by means of pointed interventions into natural processes. The term ,,laboratory", however, designates less the place of experimentation, but, rather, the ,,thoughtstyle" practised by a research group, in which forms of handling experimental setups and (social) structures of cooperation in a team of specialists are integrated. - Scientific facts cannot be separated from the social and cultural conditions comprised in a thoughtstyle, they are dependent on thoughtstyles. Yet, this does not make them mere artefacts of instrumentation. Scientific practices in the laboratories define, rather, the conditions under which nature can present herself. German Die moderne Naturwissenschaft stützt sich auf empirische Daten, die weitgehend in hochkomplizierten technischen Apparaturen und Anlagen gewonnen werden. Von den Formen der alten Naturforschung ist diese Laborforschung so weit entfernt, daß sie den Vorwurf auf sich zog, sie untersuche Artefakte, aber nicht Natur. - Dagegen wird hier argumentiert, daß die Laborforschung als genuine Erbin der mit Galilei begonnenen Form der Naturwissenschaft anzuerkennen sei. Erkenntnis von den Wirkungsweisen der Natur ist nur durch gezieltes Eingreifen in Vorgänge der Natur zu gewinnen. Unter dem ,,Laboratorium haben wir allerdings weniger den Ort des Experimentierens zu verstehen, als vielmehr den in einer Arbeitsgruppe praktizierten ,,Denkstil, in dem die Formen des Forschungshandelns mit den (sozialen) Strukturen der arbeitsteiligen Kooperation verbunden sind. - Wissenschaftliche Tatsachen lassen sich zwar nicht von den Bindungen an einen Denkstil ablösen, sie erweisen sich als denkstilabhängig; das macht sie aber nicht zu Kunstprodukten. Die in einem Labor praktizierten Arbeitsweisen definieren vielmehr die Bedingungen, unter denen Natur sich zeigen kann. (shrink)