Digital media and technology are nearly ubiquitious in contemporary higher education, As such, researchers and educators are keen to identify best practices and understand impacts. Digital media and technology present opportunities to cultivate interactive, creative teaching-learning communities. However, inclusion of digital media and technology in a course does not necessarily cultivate creative engagement or deep reflection among students. This manuscript studies how a contemplative approach to teaching with digital media, specifically TV series, can lead to more effective and engaging in (...) the process of teaching professional ethics. This research explores how the Contemplative Technopedagogy Framework can enrich the use of TV series for teaching professional ethics and positively influence the effective integration of ethical behavior into university students’ future professional lives. (shrink)

German translation Der Strom der bergauf fließt: Ein Reise durch die Evolution (Carl Hanser Verlag, 1994), DM58-. [click here to see German cover].

The meanings of temporal adverbials seem easy to describe, but the compositional interaction with tense and aspect is notoriously difficult to analyse because we (more accurately: I) do not understand yet the principles governing the tense/aspect architecture of natural languages well enough. One of the most difficult areas of temporal structure is the perfect, and the literature quoted in this article shows that there is little agreement on its meaning(s). I believe that we will make progress only by a careful (...) investigation of the meanings of temporal adverbials and by stating their formal semantics in a way which is precise enough to test empirical predictions. This is what the present article wants to do. It studies the interaction of the German durative temporal PP seit a ‘since a’ with tense, in particular with the perfect. (shrink)

Neurath’s scientific utopianism is the proposal that the social sciences should engage in the elaboration, development, and comparison of counterfactual scenarios, the ‘utopias’. Such scenarios can be understood as centerpieces of scientific thought experiments, that is, in exercises of imagination that not only promote conceptual revision, but also stimulate creativity to deal with experienced problems, as utopias are efforts to imagine what the future could look like. Moreover, utopian thought experiments can offer scientific knowledge to inform political debates and decisions, (...) contributing to the shaping of society. This essay reconstructs a historical event as an example of Neurath’s utopianist methodology. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a scientific and political commission appointed by the Western German Parliament devised and compared four scenarios for future energetic-economic policies. Conclusions of the commission informed political decisions that put Western (later reunified) Germany in a route towards becoming a green industrial power. A fundamental part of the commission’s work involved an appeal to imagination, allowing for the characterization under Neurath’s methodology. (shrink)

The semantic claim defended in this article is that the Participle II morphology is not linked to a uniform meaning. The meaning rather co-varies with the syntactic function of the participle. As..

The dental preterite of weak verbs remains one of the most troublesome chapters of Germanic historical-comparative grammar. The morphological provenience of its dental formative -d- has been debated for nearly two centuries, and there is still no consensus on whether it is a reflex of one or more of the Indo-European dental suffixes, a grammaticalized form of the light verb d¯o ‘do’, or some mix of these. The category’s phonological development within early Germanic presents a whole series of other mysteries. (...) Why does the effect of syllable weight on umlaut in preterite stems differ in North and West Germanic, and for that matter why should umlaut be sensitive to syllable weight at all? Why does the dental preterite seem to undergo two distinct “phases” of umlaut in North Germanic, and why does this category alone undergo a special early phase of syncope in West Germanic? (shrink)

(2) Peter wollte Potsdam nicht verlassen bevor das Projekt in ruhigem Fahrwasser war. There are other well-known examples of non-interpreted negation, viz. cases of so-called negative concord in Slavic and Romance languages, but also in dialects of German and English. But arguably, in those cases the “superfluous” negation has to be present for grammatical reasons, which is not the case here. I will show that the negation is in fact interpreted, and that, due to a complex interplay of semantic (...) and pragmatic factors, we do get truth conditions for the two sentences that are not quite identical, but very similar. (shrink)

In 2003 my book After the Terror in its German translation was condemned as anti semitic by a professor of education at Frankfurt University, Micha Brumlik, also the director of an institute for the study of the Holocaust. The next day the famous German philosopher Jurgen Habermas wrote in the same liberal newspaper, The Frankfurter Rundschau , that the book was not anti semitic. However, he wrote so condescendingly as to distance himself from something charged with anti semitism (...) -- and also as to make it incomprehensible why he himself had secured its translation by the distinguished publishing house, Suhrkamp. (shrink)

Consideration of the German philosophy and political history of the past century might well give the impression, and often does give foreign observers the impression, that liberalism, including in particular commitment to the ideal of free thought and expression, is only skin-deep in Germany. Were not Heidegger's disgust at Gerede (which of course really meant the free speech of the Weimar Republic) and Gadamer's defense of "prejudice" and "tradition" more reflective of the true instincts of German philosophy than, (...) say, the Frankfurt School's heavily Anglophone-influenced championing of free thought and expression? Were not the Kaiser and Nazism more telling of Germany's real political nature than the liberalism of the Weimar Republic (a desperate, ephemeral experiment undertaken in reaction to Germany's disastrous defeat in World War I) or the liberalism of (West) Germany since 1945 (in effect forced on the country by the victorious Allies after World War II)? (shrink)

An interesting asymmetry in syntactic change is that OV base order is commonly replaced by VO, whereas the reverse development is quite rare in languages.1 A shift to VO has taken place in several branches of the Indo-European family, as well as in Finno-Ugric. The Germanic languages conform to this trend in that the original OV order seen in its older representatives, and (in more rigid form) in modern German, Dutch, and Frisian, has given way to a consistently head-initial (...) syntax in English, Scandinavian, and Yiddish. (shrink)

Modern Standard German does not have distinct forms for nominatives and accusatives in the feminine gender. This is not only unique within Germanic languages, but also quite remarkable from a typological and functional viewpoint, under the plausible assumption that feminine NPs do not differ in animacy from masculine NPs. I will discuss the loss of the N/A distinction for feminines in detail and speculate about possible reasons – among others, that the referents of feminines are not typically animate, that (...) the syncretism was modelled after a similar syncretism in the plural, and that a sexist bias of the speech community in which the syncretism originated influenced a core part of the grammar of their language. (shrink)

Kant’s postulate of possibility states that possible is whatever agrees with the formal conditions of experience. As has often been noted, this is a definition of real possibility. However, little attention has been paid to the relation of Kantian real possibility to the German philosophical tradition before him. I discuss three kinds of possibility present in this tradition – internal, external, and (Crusian) real possibility – and argue that Kant endorses internal and external possibility. Furthermore, I show, specifically with (...) respect to the concept of state (Zustand), that the three traditional conceptions are reminiscent of three conceptions of real possibility that Kant implicitly distinguishes. Lastly, I argue that, according to Kant, we need experience to prove real possibility (at least as regards the three conceptions of the real possibility of states) because otherwise we could not know whether the formal conditions of experience obtain. (shrink)

An account of the distribution of the dorsal fricative in German has generally been assumed to require cyclic derivation and/or multiple phonological levels (Hall 1989, Moltmann 1990, Noske 1990, MacFarland and Pierrehumbert 1991, Iverson and Salmons 1992, Borowsky 1993). In this squib, I argue that the facts of fricative assimilation can be accounted for without cyclicity or separate phonological levels within Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993) by employing a version of the theory of alignment proposed by McCarthy (...) and Prince (1993b), which permits direct interaction between morphological and phonological structures. I propose that the fricative in these cases is ambisyllabic, permitting an account under which fricative assimilation occurs only tautosyllabically. My analysis assumes that alignment constraints proper are not violated in cases of multiple linking, supporting the premise that the satisfaction of alignment constraints is to be distinguished from satisfaction of constraints requiring prosodic units to have crisp edges (as argued for in Itô and Mester (in press)). (shrink)

English manuscript version of Afterword to German translation of Victor Turner's The Ritual Process. The Ritual Process is a pivotal book in the body of Victor Turner's works. The first three chapters, drawn from Turner's Henry Morgan lectures at the University of Rochester, reveal the richness and subtlety of his analysis of tribal ritual and social life. In the third chapter, he concentrates on the aspects of liminality and communitas found in Ndembu ritual and expands these in the remainder (...) of the book to universal categories of human experience. His masterful ethnography opens up to reveal the fundamental reality of the subjunctive mood in human affairs: the ritual process. In Turner's analyses of the Isoma and Wubwang'a rituals of the Ndembu of Northwestern Zambia, one sees the fantastic interplay between human affliction and symbolic renewal, between human communities and a natural environment teeming with signification. The Ndembu are revealed to be a people with a deep appreciation of the complexity of existence, and endowed with a sophisticated technics of meaning, a vast architectonic of felt, expressive forms through which to journey to those borderlands beyond human comprehensibility: death, the dead, the call of the mother-line, fecundity, transformation, the interstices of social structure. Turner reveals himself to be an initiate, not only to the rites revealed to him by the Ndembu, but to the centrality of ritual itself in tribal society and human affairs. Trained in the British structural-functionalist approach to social anthropology, Turner notes how the incessant call of the drums made him feel that he "was always on the outside looking in." Soon, however, Turner and his wife and collaborator Edith discarded their theoretical ear-plugs and answered the invitation of the drums. As observers and co-participants in Ndembu ritual the Turners' began to blaze a trail toward a new anthropology. (shrink)

This is my full original translation of Elsenhans' “Phaenomenologie, Psychologie, Erkenntnistheorie,” an early long review article on Husserl's Ideen I, published in German in Kant Studien XX (1915). A revised version of this translation (with Andrea Staiti and Evan Clarke) appears in The Sources of Husserl’s Ideas I, ed. Staiti and Clarke, De Gruyter (2018), 339-82. Please cite only from the published version of the translation.

In this chapter, I consider the largely overlooked influence of E. W. von Tschirnhaus' treatise on method, the Medicina mentis, on Wolff's early philosophical project (in both its conception and execution). As I argue, part of Tschirnhaus' importance for Wolff lies in the use he makes of principles gained from experience as a foundation for the scientific enterprise in the context of his broader philosophical rationalism. I will show that this lesson from Tschirnhaus runs through Wolff's earliest philosophical discussions, and (...) indeed continues to inform his major texts in logic and mathematics just before the publication of the German Metaphysics. In the end, my discussion has the effect of revealing Tschirnhaus to be an exceptionally important influence on Wolff's development, perhaps even as important (or so I suggest) as Leibniz. (shrink)

They are expressives, too. There is a phonology. There is a syntax. There is a compositional semantics. There are interesting interactions to investigate. German, Greek, and Papago are known examples of discourse particle languages. Intonation has been said to have similar uses in other languages.

The adjectival passive construction that is traditionally called ‘Zustandspassiv’ (‘state passive’) in German seems to have the same syntactic and semantic properties as its English cousin, except that it is easier to identify. German state or adjectival passives select the auxiliary sein (‘be’), and are therefore clearly distinguished from verbal or ‘Vorgangs’- passives (‘process passives’), which use the auxiliary werden (‘get’, ‘become’). In spite of their appearance, German state passives do not form a homogenious class, however. There (...) are two important subclasses that behave differently with respect to the adverbial immer noch (‘still’), for example2. (shrink)

Hegel reads the poet Novalis as an expression of terminal irony, a pathological case of Gemüt, where the conscious mind is alienated from reality and turns its negativity inwards on the contents of its own natural soul. The condition of self-feeling, presented in Hegel’s “Anthropology”, is a self-consumption that manifests itself somatically in the physical disease (consumption) from which Novalis dies. The poet’s literary production represents a pathological fixation that impedes the dynamic organicity of Hegelian Science. As such, Novalis’s mental (...) illness and death constitute an expression of romantic irony and an ongoing threat to Hegel’s philosophy. (shrink)

Aspectual particles (the term is due to (König 1991)) appear to come in groups, related by negation, and therefore have attracted the attention of formal semanticists. The following examples list the particles of English, German and Hebrew; they show that the system is semantically transparent in various degrees.

The renewed interest in the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics in recent years has led us to study John von Neumann’s 1929 article on the quantum ergodic theorem. We have found this almost forgotten article, which until now has been available only in German, to be a treasure chest, and to be much misunderstood. In it, von Neumann studied the long-time behavior of macroscopic quantum systems. While one of the two theorems announced in his title, the one he calls (...) the “quantum H-theorem,” is actually a much weaker statement than Boltzmann’s classical H-theorem, the other theorem, which he calls the “quantum ergodic theorem,” is a beautiful and very non-trivial result. It expresses a fact we call “normal typicality” and can be summarized as follows: For a “typical” finite family of commuting macroscopic observables, every initial wave function ψ0 from a micro-canonical energy shell so evolves that for most times t in the long run, the joint probability distribution of these observables obtained from ψt is close to their micro-canonical distribution. (shrink)

There is an emerging view according to which countability is not an integral part of the lexical meaning of singular count nouns, but is ‘added on’ or ‘made available’, whether syntactically, semantically or both. This view has been pursued by Borer and Rothstein among others in order to deal with classifier languages such as Chinese as well as challenges to standard views of the mass-count distinction such as object mass nouns such as furniture. I will discuss a range of data, (...) partly from German, that such a grammar-based view of countability receives support when applied to verbs with respect to the event argument position. Verbs themselves fail to specify events as countable in English and related languages; instead countability is made available only by the use of the event classifier time or else particular lexical items, such as frequency expressions, German beides ‘both’, or the nominalizing light noun -thing. The paper will not adopt or elaborate a particular version of the grammar-based view of countability, but rather critically discuss existing versions and present two semantic options of elaborating the view. (shrink)

What are we to make of the "Parecon" phenomenon? Michael Albert 's book made it to number thirteen on Amazon.com a few days after some on-line promotion.1 Eight of the twelve Amazon.com reviewers had given the book five stars. It has been, or is being, translated into Arabic, Bengali, Telagu, Croatian, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.2 The book has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, who says it "merits close attention, debate and action," (...) by Arundhati Roy, who calls it "a brave argument for a much needed alternative economic vision," by Ben Bagdikian, who finds it "a compelling book for our times," and by Howard Zinn, who sees it as "a thoughtful, profound meditation on what a good society can be like."3 Yet it is a terrible book. (shrink)

Kant's obscure essay entitled An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Quantities into Philosophy has received virtually no attention in the Kant literature. The essay has been in English translation for over twenty years, though not widely available. In his original 1983 translation, Gordon Treash argues that the Negative Quantities essay should be understood as part of an ongoing response to the philosophy of Christian Wolff. Like Hoffmann and Crusius before him, the Kant of 1763 is at odds with (...) the Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition of deductive metaphysics. He joins his predecessors in rejecting the assumption that the law of contradiction alone can provide proof of the principle of sufficient reason: -/- In his rejection of the possibility of deducing all philosophic truth from the law of contradiction, however, and in the clear recognition that this impossibility has immediate consequences for defense of the law of sufficient reason, Kant's work most definitely and positively constitutes a line of succession from Hoffmann and Crusius (Treash, 1983, p. 25). -/- The recognition that Kant's Negative Quantities essay is part of a response to the tradition of deductive metaphysics is, without a doubt, an important contribution to the Kant literature. However, there is still more to be said about this neglected essay. The full significance of the paper becomes known through its ties to a second, empiricist line of succession. Clues to this second line of succession can be found in Kant's prefatory remarks concerning Euler's 1748 Reflections on Space and Time and Crusius' 1749 Guidance in the Orderly and Careful Consideration of Natural Events. As I will show, these prefatory remarks suggest a reading of Kant's Negative Quantities paper that reaches beyond German deductive metaphysics to engage a debate regarding the application of mathematics in philosophy initiated by George Berkeley. (shrink)

In 1958, G¨ odel published in the journal Dialectica an interpretation of intuitionistic number theory in a quantifier-free theory of functionals of finite type; this subsequently came to be known as G¨ odel’s functional or Dialectica interpretation. The article itself was written in German for an issue of that journal in honor of Paul Bernays’ 70th birthday. In 1965, Bernays told G¨.

This is a draft translation of the fourth letter of G.E. Schulze's Aenesidemus. Comments and corrections welcome.

This is a draft translation of the first letter of G.E. Schulze's Aenesidemus. Comments and corrections welcome.

Psychology's fascination with memory and its imperfections dates back further than we can remember. The first careful experimental studies of memory were published in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, and tens of thousands of memory studies have been conducted since. What has been learned, and what might the future of memory be?

Kant was not a very knowledgeable historian of philosophy. He came to the study of philosophy from natural science, and later the fields of ethics, aesthetics, politics and religion came to occupy his central concerns, but his approach to philosophical issues never came by way of reflection on their history. He was well acquainted, of course, with the recent tradition of German philosophy: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Crusius, and he seems also to have had knowledge of eighteenth century French (...) philosophy, and of as much of Anglophone philosophy as had been translated into either French or German. But like many modern philosophers, he had an inadequate appreciation of the scholastic tradition, and his knowledge of classical Greek philosophy was mostly at second hand. (shrink)

HISTORY HAS IT that the four bright satellites of Jupiter were discovered independently by Galileo and the German astronomer Simon Mayer in the early seventeenth century. These initial glimpses of what we now call the Galilean moons of Jupiter are among the first great revelations to have accrued from pointing the newly invented telescope toward the heavens. Yet, were these men the first to observe Jupiter’s satellites? There have been persistent reports, particularly in the nineteenth century, that these moons (...) can be seen with the naked eye. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a significant moral difference between force applied against (imminent) attackers on the one hand and force applied against “threatening” people who are not (imminent) attackers on the other. Given that there is such a difference, one should not blur the lines by using the term “self-defense” (understood as including other-defense) for both uses of force. Rather, only the former is appropriately called self-defense, while for the latter, following German legal terminology, the term “justifying (...) defensive emergency” will be used here. The two justifications are not governed by the same criteria and thus lead to different results. The paper will proceed by providing first, in section (1), a brief sketch of the contours of the self-defense justification, putting particular emphasis on the necessity criterion. On the account presented here, the necessity criterion of the self-defense justification is particularly harsh on the aggressor (and thus not to be interpreted as literally requiring the employment of “the mildest means”) and its applicability is only triggered by an (imminent) attack, not by other kinds of threats. Section (2) will then further explain the differences between self-defense and justifying defensive emergency. A particularly important difference is that people who are subjected to justified self-defense cannot permissibly defend themselves, while people who are subjected to (extremely harmful or even lethal) justified defensive emergency measures can. Thus, in this latter case we have a “moral equality” (of sorts) of the involved parties: they can permissibly use force against each other. Section (3) will list and defend some conditions that a successful argument against the imminence requirement of the self-defense justification has to satisfy. In the light of these conditions, sections (4) to (7) will discuss a number of objections that have been adduced against the imminence requirement as well as proposals that have been made in support of alternative accounts. It will be argued that all these objections and proposals fail. Section (8) will provide a number of thought experiments in support of the claim that the harsh necessity criterion of the self-defense justification is only triggered by imminence while force against non-imminent threats can be justified with the help of the justifying emergency exemption, as well as for the claim that the justifying emergency exemption puts the person using preventive force against non-imminent threats on a shorter leash and makes him liable to counter-measures. Section (9) will explain the rationale for tying the applicability of the harsh necessity criterion of the self-defense justification to imminent attacks. Section (10) will discuss some special cases and show why they do not undermine the normative validity of this tie. (shrink)

When political philosopher Hannah Arendt introduced the concept of ‘banality of evil’ she did so in reference to the actions of Germans who appropriated the doctrines of National Socialism “thoughtlessly” and without obvious intentions to do evil. But, Arendt’s description of this phenomenon entails that such banality can be found even in a democracy such as the USA. The relation of law and morality must therefore be unambiguous to defend the rule of law against the rule of men. However, a (...) legal philosophy other than positivism is essential to safeguard the Republic against the overreach of executive power. And, where the psychopathology of Donald Trump is at the core of America’s electoral discontent in 2020, as mental health professionals have argued, there is all the more reason to take Arendt’s counsel especially seriously today. It is in this context that it is argued here that the American public must beware Trump’s inducement of America’s banality of evil. (shrink)

In the year 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert gave a dramatic address in Paris, at the meeting of the 2nd International Congress of Mathematicians—an address which was to have lasting fame and importance. Hilbert was at that point a rapidly rising star, if not superstar, in mathematics, and before long he was to be ranked with Henri Poincar´.

“You Have Seen Their Faces”: Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin and Margaret Bourke-White as Headhunters of the Thirties -/- Abstract This paper concentrates on one work by each of three authors: Walter Benjamin’s Deutsche Menschen (Germans), an anthology of twenty-five 18th and 19th century German personal letters; Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces; and Gisèle Freund’s collection of photographic portraits of writers and artists, compiled between 1936 and 1939. The purpose of this paper is to compare (...) the politics of representation of these three figures and to examine the challenge they addressed to the dominant iconography of the 1930s. At the heart of each one’s work was a desire to bring about a shift in contemporary cultural politics by reimagining the body politic. Benjamin’s and Freund’s aim was to displace the monumentalizing, distancing, ‘heroic’ forms of fascist art and writing. They construct and project an intimate, or ‘domestic’ image of humanism as a form of social practice, past and present. Bourke-White’s aim was to bring to visibility an America concealed beneath the glossy homogenized images of white American advertising. All three authors aligned themselves with a documentary tradition that believed that representation should function as a constructed record of the traces of lived experience. Driven by a need to expose the other side’s deliberate falsifications of experience, they saw their own constructed fictions as ways of ‘documenting,’ and then perhaps transforming, an experiential world of ‘facts,’ bodies, and ‘truths.’ -/- Working Paper 3:15 European Society and Culture Research Group. Center for German and European Studies, University of California at Berkeley. April 1994 37pp. -/- M. Kay Flavell Critical Theory, University of California at Davis . (shrink)

In his short life, Alan Turing (1912-1954) made foundational contributions to philosophy, mathematics, biology, artificial intelligence, and computer science. He, as much as anyone, invented the digital electronic computer. From September, 1939 much of his work on computation was war-driven and brutally practical. He developed high speed computing devices needed to decipher German Enigma Machine messages to and from U-boats, countering the most serious threat by far to Britain's survival during World War Two. Yet few people have an image (...) of him. (shrink)

This book project reshapes the way we think about Enlightenment: rather than viewing it primarily as the era of the emancipation of human reason, it emphasizes the gendered nature of the Enlightenment ideal of human progress and investigates how this ideal oppressed women. I take a critical look at this ideal from within intellectual debates of the time, examining how the restrictive view of women’s socio-political and educational opportunities was challenged by progressive female German and Polish thinkers of the (...) late Enlightenment. The under-studied views of these thinkers exhibit insightful early-feminist arguments against women’s inability to take an active role in the Enlightenment project and the confinement of women to the “private” sphere of the household, in which they take care of men – “public”, free-thinking citizens. (shrink)

Thomas Henry Huxley designated three men as the finest intellects of 19th century natural history: his dear friend Charles Darwin; his most worthy opponent Georges Cuvier; and Karl Ernst von Baer, who discovered the mammalian egg cell in 1827 and wrote the founding treatise of modern embryology in 1828. Of these three, posterity has largely forgotten von Baer, who suffered a severe mental breakdown in the 1830's, but then recovered and moved to Russia (not uncommon for a German-speaking Estonian (...) national), where he enjoyed a distinguished second university career, largely in anthropology and lasting well into the 1870's. (shrink)

Professor Robert Alexy wrote a book whose avowed purpose is to refute the basic tenets of a type of legal theory which 'has long since been obsolete in legal science and practice'. The quotation is from the German Federal Constitutional Court in 1968. The fact that Prof Alexy himself mentions no writings in the legal positivist tradition [in English] later than Hart's The Concept of Law (1961) may suggest that he shares the court's view. The book itself may be (...) evidence to the contrary. After all why flog a dead horse? Why write a book to refute a totally discredited theory? Perhaps Alexy was simply unlucky. The burst of reflective, suggestive and interesting writings in the legal positivist tradition reached serious dimensions only in the years after the original publication of his book, when Waldron, Marmor, Gardner, Leiter, Shapiro, Murphy, Himma, Kramer, Endicott, Lamont, Dickson, Bix and others joined those who had made important contributions to legal theory in the positivistic tradition in the years preceding the original publication of Alexy's book: Lyons, Coleman, Campbell, Harris, Green, Waluchow and others, who are still among the main contributors to legal theory in the positivist tradition. It is a great shame that nothing in these writings influenced the arguments of the book. Perhaps this regret is misplaced. After all ‘positivism' in legal theory means, and always did mean, different things to different people. What Radbruch, one of Alexy's heroes, meant when he first saw himself as a legal positivist and then recanted was not the same as what 'legal positivism' means in Britain (and nowadays in the United States as well) among those who engage in philosophical reflection about the nature of law. Perhaps Alexy is simply addressing himself to a German audience, and refuting, or attempting to refute, legal theories of a kind identified in Germany as 'legal positivism'. Perhaps, though his references to Hart show that he does not intend it that way. My aims in this chapter are, however, reasonably clear. My main purpose is to explore whether any of Alexy's arguments challenge any of the views which I have advocated. Subsidiary aims are, first, to clarify why what Alexy says is legal positivism is not what is understood as such in the English speaking world, so that some of Alexy's sound points find no target; secondly, to try and clarify some of his arguments which I found, at least initially, rather obscure. Given the prominence of Alexy's book I will refer only to it, and will not consider his other publications. (shrink)

We use large collections of online product reviews, in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese, to study the use conditions of expressives (swears, antihonorifics, intensives). The distributional evidence provides quantitative support for a pragmatic theory of these items that is based in speaker and hearer expectations.

The aim of this paper is to discuss monastic paideia in the context of providing shelter for ASD individuals in the High Middle Ages. Firstly, we will canvas the historical and conceptual shift from Ancient Greek paideitic ideas to their Christian counterparts. Then, by drawing on the recent literature in the history of medicine that traces the signs and symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess in the 12th century, we will turn to (...) her invented language Lingua Ignota as a source of both her diagnosis and a manner of dealing with her disability. This, in turn, could be further advanced by identifying monasteries as therapeutic loci for neuroatypical individuals who had trouble finding their place within the arid and somewhat monochromatic medieval society. (shrink)

Legal theorists in this century have often perceived a need for a theory capable of occupying a stable middle ground between natural law theory and nineteenth-century legal positivism. The prolific German-American legal philosopher, Hans Kelsen, was perhaps not the first to feel the need for such a theory, but he was certainly among the first to attempt to construct one. n1 Although Kelsen's own efforts failed, in many ways they defined the ambitions of twentieth-century legal theory and inspired others (...) to take up the challenge. In order to understand the nature of the challenge, which confronts us still today, it is helpful to examine central difficulties with Kelsen's own Pure Theory of Law. (shrink)

Building on the work of Peter Hinst and Geo Siegwart, we develop a pragmatised natural deduction calculus, i.e. a natural deduction calculus that incorporates illocutionary operators at the formal level, and prove its adequacy. In contrast to other linear calculi of natural deduction, derivations in this calculus are sequences of object-language sentences which do not require graphical or other means of commentary in order to keep track of assumptions or to indicate subproofs. (Translation of our German paper "Ein Redehandlungskalkül. (...) Ein pragmatisierter Kalkül des natürlichen Schließens nebst Metatheorie"; online available at http://philpapers.org/rec/CORERE.). (shrink)

We report the results of a vignette experiment with a quota sample of the German population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distributive decisions. We asked subjects to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The experiment systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that (...) subjects distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is always compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is punished in terms of receiving a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of subjects being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need. (shrink)

In (Jäger and Blutner 1999), Gerhard Jäger and Reinhard Blutner (henceforth J&B) have launched a forceful attack against the account of the adverb wieder “again” I presented in (Stechow 1995) and (Stechow 1996) There I defended a classical account of the repetitive/restitutive ambiguity exhibited by the adverb wieder, which is very close to early proposals found in the Generative Semantics literature, notably (Morgan 1969) and (McCawley 1971). I argued that German surface syntax shows that something in the style of (...) this old decomposition analysis must be correct. (shrink)

Languages differ systematically in how they map path and manner of motion onto lexical and grammatical structures (Talmy, 1985). Manner languages (e.g., English, German and Russian) typically code manner in the verb (cf. English skip, run, hop, jog), and path in a variety of other devices such as particles (out), adpositions (into the room), verb affixes, etc. Path languages (e.g., Modern Greek, Romance, Turkish, Japanese and Hebrew) typically code path in the verb (cf. Greek vjeno ‘exit’, beno ‘enter’, ftano (...) ‘reach’, aneveno ‘ascend’, diashizo ‘cross’), and manner in adverbials (trexontas ‘running’, me ta podia ‘on foot’, jrigora ‘quickly’). The distinction is not meant to imply that the relevant languages lack certain kids of verb altogether. For instance, English has path verbs, such as enter, exit, ascend and descend, and Greek has manner verbs, such as treho ‘run’, kilao.. (shrink)

In some languages, such as French and Austrian German, the perfect construction is the standard tense/aspect form used to report past-time events. In many other languages, including English, the perfect construction alternates with other past tense forms, such as the preterit past (English) or the imperfect (French and many other languages), and there is considerable crosslinguistic variation on the precise usage conditions and semantics associated with each type of past tense form. Many of these languages exhibit the have/be alternation (...) in the formation of the perfect, using have with transitive and unergative verbs, and be with unaccusative verbs. Many other languages, including English, use have uniformly. In this article I will seek to identify the syntactic source of the past tense meaning associated with the perfect construction. Because of the problem posed by the cross-linguistic variation in perfect semantics mentioned above, it is perhaps foolhardy to seek a single answer to this question for all languages, and a comprehensive treatment would require a dissertationlength study. For this reason I will focus on the English perfect construction, though I will occasionally rely on comparative evidence, especially with regard to the have/be alternation, and I will suggest the possibility of parametric variation. Even by focusing on the English perfect, we cannot fully avoid the problem of semantic variation, since the perfect construction does not have a uniform semantics in all its uses; according to many accounts, there are at least two, and perhaps as many as five, different uses of the perfect, each with a different tense semantics. For example, Brugger and D’Angelo (1994) have argued that the so-called universal perfect does not convey past tense; this claim is based on a particular set of syntactic/semantic diagnostics for past that they use, and is supported by the fact that many other languages convey the semantics of the universal perfect by means of the present tense.. (shrink)

Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are. But the rough, commonsense divisions between languages will suffice for our purposes.

This paper concentrates on the syntax and semantics of bare nominals in Germanic and Romance languages. These languages do not normally allow nominals to occur without an article. However, some syntactic configurations, including predicative constructions, supplementives and some prepositional phrases, allow bareness of certain nominals. We argue that bare nominals in these constructions refer to capacities: professions, religions, nationalities or other roles in society. Capacities are analyzed as entities of type e, sortally distinct from regular individuals as well as kinds. (...) We further argue that the capacity interpretation is associated with NP – a layer within the DP that lacks number features. This accounts for the number-neutral status of bare nominals. We also show some patterns in languages other than Romance and Germanic that provide further cross-linguistic support for the postulation of capacities as a separate ontological category, specific to a low position within the DP. (shrink)

Psychology's fascination with memory and its imperfections dates back further than we can remember. The first careful experimental studies of memory were published in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, and tens of thousands of memory studies have been conducted since. What has been learned, and what might the future of memory be?

"Ich liebe dich 3" the swains in mountain valleys of Austria inscribe on their presents to those to whom they plight their troth. The pun is a rare one in German. Only in remote valleys does the word for `three' rhyme with joy; and the word for `true' is usually..