In this paper, I present a conception of individual religiousness in terms of religious experience. Using ideas of the early Friedrich Schleiermacher, I will claim that religious experiences are contemplative experiences of the totality of being. This understanding of religious experiences presents an alternative to how religious experience is often epistemologically thought about in the more contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Furthermore, it has systematic advantages: It can construe religious plurality in terms of different ways to experience the totality of (...) being, it stays neutral to metaphysical and moral debates such as whether there is a God whose laws we should obey, and it allows for an explanation of how religious intuitions and religious emotions relate to one another as well as of why religiousness and art often go hand in hand. Even though understanding religiousness in terms of contemplative experience also bears revisionary potential, I will discuss how more doxastic elements of religious people’s lives can be reintegrated into this picture. (shrink)

United States of America demographic profiles illustrate a nation rich in cultural and racial diversity. Approximately 29% of the population are minorities and demographic projections indicate an increase to 50% by the year 2050. This creates a highly mobile and constantly changing environment, revealing the need for new levels of cultural awareness and sensitivity. These issues are particularly critical in the medical community where medical professionals must understand the impact cultural differences and barriers can have on evaluation, treatment, and rehabilitation. (...) During times of stress, such as when injury strikes, problems associated with lack of cultural sensitivity are intensified. Cultural diversity is of particular concern when standard measures for diagnosis and prognosis are derived from established norms for responding, because culture defines norms. This paper details a ten point checklist designed to facilitate cultural awareness and sensitivity in medical settings to ensure maximum successful recovery and outcomes for all patients. (shrink)

As a youngster of perhaps 8 years, Charles S. Peirce was given a chemistry laboratory in which he probably did experiments in qualitative analysis. These experiments were modeled on the hypothetico-deductive method of inquiry. I argue that this laboratory experience initiated Peirce’s life-long interest in logic and the logic of science, and flowered in his “pragmaticism.”.

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, (...) and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positiveandnegative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce frequently mentioned reading Richard Whately's Elements of Logic when he was 12 years old. Throughout his life, Peirce emphasized the importance of that experience. This valorization of Whately is puzzling at first. Early in his career Peirce rejected Whately's central logical doctrines. What valuable insight concerning logic was robust enough to survive these specific rejections? Peirce recommended a biographical approach to understanding his philosophy. This essay follows that suggestion by considering Peirce's reading of Whately in a larger (...) life context. Surprisingly many factors in Charles Peirce's personal and intellectual development were at play when he read Whately. His father, Benjamin Peirce, oversaw rigorous home schooling intended to train young Charley for a brilliant intellectual career. Laboratory experience with qualitative chemical analysis exposed the boy to the logic of scientific investigation, specifically to the hypothetico-deductive method of inquiry. However, tensions between father and son developed over Charles' wish to devote his life to studying the logic of science. The two also disagreed upon the value of formal science. Against this background we will review relevant logical doctrines of Whately's book, as well as his innovative formalizing practice of logical inquiry. Then we will see that it was Whately's lessons about formal science that were of such importance to Peirce. (shrink)

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGDer Essay setzt in seinem ersten Teil bei der Beobachtung von zwei scheinbar alternativen Projekten des modernen religionsphilosophischen Diskurses ein: Während in dem einen Religion vornehmlich intellektualistisch aufgefasst und eine öffentliche Rechtfertigung religiöser Überzeugungen gefordert wird, bestreitet das andere ihren epistemischen Wert, und zwar mit der Konsequenz, sie ausschließlich unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihres privaten Nutzens zu begreifen. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird im zweiten Teil des Essays eine Überlegung entwickelt, die auf die Überwindung jener Alternative anhand einer Analyse der Entstehungsbedingungen von (...) Überzeugungssystemen zielt. In Anknüpfung an die Tradition des klassischen Pragmatismus, vor allem an William James und John Dewey, werden dabei Grundstrukturender Erfahrungssituation skizziert und schließlich die Konzeption eines »ursprünglich Gegebenen« entwickelt, die dem Vorrang unmittelbaren Erlebens ebenso Rechnung trägt wie auftretenden Vermittlungszumutungen. Auf dieser Gedankenlinie kommt es im dritten Teil schließlich zu einer Bestimmung der Funktion von Religion innerhalb des menschlichen Erfahrungszusammenhanges. Dies führt zu der These, dass eine sorgfältige Analyse der Entstehungsbedingungen religiöser Überzeugungen einen Weg eröffnet, die Wirklichkeit von Religion zu verstehen, ohne in die Fallen des Intellektualismus oder Privatismus zu geraten.SUMMARYThe essay begins with the observation of two seemingly alternative projects within the modern discourse in the philosophy of religion. While one project approaches religion in intellectual terms and calls for a public justification of its beliefs, the other denies the epistemic value of religious beliefs altogether and tries to understand religion solely in terms of its private use. Against this backdrop the essay engages in its second part in an argument, which aims to overcome the mentioned alternative by exploring the experiential conditions of our belief-systems. With reference to the classical tradition of pragmatism, especially to William James and John Dewey, it sketches general features of our human experience and develops a conception of the “given” which accounts for the primacy of immediate experience as well as for the obligation for mediation. Following this line of thought, the third part broadly defines the function of religion within human experience. This leads to the thesis that a careful study of the experiential conditions of religious beliefs presents a third way of approaching the reality of religion without being caught in the traps of intellectualism or privatism. (shrink)

Ecosemiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in relation to the natural environment in which they occur. The paper examines the cultural, biological, and evolutionary dimensions of ecosemioses on the basis of C. S. Peirce's theory of continuity between matter and mind and investigates the ecosemiotic dimensions of natural signs. Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature are distinguished from pansemiotism, and the coevolution of sign processes with their natural enviromnent is discussed as a determining factor of ecosemiosis.

In this paper, I defend a moderately cognitive account of religious beliefs. Religious beliefs are interpreted as “worldview beliefs”, which I explicate as being indispensable to our everyday and scientific practice; my reading is nonetheless distinct from non-cognitivist readings of “worldview belief” which occasionally appear in the literature. I start with a brief analysis of a recent German contribution to the debate which on the one hand insists on the priority of epistemic reasons for or against religious beliefs, but on (...) the other hand contends that religious beliefs are worldview beliefs. This leads me to explicate a special sense of worldview beliefs, as well as their cognitive role. After that, I shed some light on a special epistemological characteristic of worldview beliefs, namely the strong involvement of “free certitude” in their acceptance. I explore the implications for the possible role of arguments for worldview beliefs, especially for worldview beliefs concerning theism. (shrink)

Competitive courtship and aesthetic judgment/choice : Darwin's model of the arts -- The arts as promoters of social cooperation and cohesion -- Engagement in the arts as ontogenetic self-(trans-)formation -- A cooptation model of the evolution of the human arts : the special role of play behavior -- Technology, and symbolic cognition.

The Cuddeback Letter Book contains approximately two-hundred letters sent to Charles Peirce between 1859 and 1861. In the front of the book Peirce compiled a list of sixty-one correspondents. Many of them are key figures in Peirce's life, and the Cuddeback has long been recognized as an important source for biographical research. However, some years ago the owner of the Cuddeback blocked scholarly access because of its fragile condition, among other reasons. Fortunately, the Cuddeback has recently been conserved and a (...) digital image of each sheet has been made. This recent development is described below. Scholarly research on this area of Peirce's biography may now resume. (shrink)

This paper details research which investigated a probable causal connection between taking an introductory logic course and significant improvement in logical skills. The authors first detail the setting (a two-year, open-access unit of the University of Cincinnati), the student body (the authors note that many students enter the college with several notable types of academic disadvantage), and the content of an introductory logic course. Following this, they summarize and defend their research protocol and the results of their study. Findings include (...) a statistically significant increase in students’ logical skills after enrollment in a one-quarter introductory logic course. After a statistical analysis of their findings, the authors discuss several possible applications, extensions, and improvements of their research protocol, concluding that the generalizability of their study is limited due to the myriad variables that attend teaching. (shrink)

Josiah Royce was undoubtedly one of the most interesting thinkers of classical American philosophy in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. His works cover a wide range of subjects from psychology and issues of social philosophy to metaphysics. Surrounded by philosophers such as William James or Charles Sanders Peirce, Royce developed a concept of pragmatism which he himself called "absolute pragmatism" and which was centred around a theory of community. The essays in this edited volume deal with (...) this pragmatistic approach in his work and discuss it from various points of view. Among other things, they explore Royce's relationship to German idealism, the foundation of his ethics as well as his philosophical doctrine of God and his philosophy of religion. This results in rather divergent assessments of his philosophy, each of which is evidence of the enduring relevance of his thinking for the world of today. (shrink)

The "semiotic threshold" is U. Eco's metaphor of the borderline between the world of semiosis and the nonsemiotic world and hence also between semiotics and its neighboring disciplines. The paper examines Eco's threshold in comparison to the views of semiosis and semiotics of C. S. Peirce. While Eco follows the structuralist tradition, postulating the conventionality of signs as the main criterion of semiosis, Peirce has a much broader concept of semiosis, which is not restricted to phenomena of culture but includes (...) many processes in nature. Whereas Eco arrives at the conclusion that biological processes, such as the ones within the immune system, cannot be included in the program of semiotic research, Peirce's broader defmition of semiosis has meanwhile become thefoundation of semiotic studies in biology and medicine and hence in biosemiotics and medical semiotics. (shrink)

Many scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, religion, history or social science have ventured to offer a comprehensive explanation of music, one of the most intangible and elusive phenomena in the world. A palaeoanthropological approach, which places music into an evolutionary paradigm, can add important perspectives to our understanding of this phenomenon. To begin with, the question whether music is an adaptation that has survival value in the classical Darwinian sense is contemplated. Views on the origin of music in conjunction with the (...) emergence of language and as a domain for the expression of emotion, linked to music’s benefits for social coherence, are discussed. More recent views on the emergence of consciousness, on semiosis and on music as a manifestation of biocultural co-evolution, especially in conjunction with ritual, are then presented. Finally, the merit of exploiting the concept of play to help account for the systematicity of music’s semiosis is examined.Contribution: In line with the intent of this special collection of articles, the above considerations are placed into the context of materialist versus nonmaterialist perspectives on the emergence of the human mind. The overarching argument is that music contributes crucially to what it means to be human. (shrink)

The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are presented: phenomenological consciousness and the qualia, consciousness as self-controlled agency of humans, self-control and self-reflection, consciousness and language, self-consciousness and introspection, consciousness and the other, consciousness of nonhuman animals, and the question of a (...) quasi-consciousness of the physical universe. A detailed account of Peirce’s three modes of consciousness is presented: primisense, qualisense or feeling-consciousness, altersense, and medisense, the consciousness of cognition, thought, and reasoning. In contrast to consciousness studies that establish a rather sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious states of mind, Peirce adopts the principle of synechism, the theory of continuity. For him, consciousness is a matter of degree. An important difference between Peirce’s concept of qualia and current theories of qualia in human consciousness is discussed. The paper shows how consciousness, according to Peirce, emerges from unconscious qualia and vanishes into equally unconscious habits. It concludes with a study of the roles of qualia, habit, and self-control in Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular in qualisigns and symbols, and the question of signs as quasi-conscious agents in semiosis. (shrink)

In several of his papers, Charles S. Peirce illustrates processes of interpreting and understanding signs by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed by means of these little pedagogical scenarios are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning, but they aim at elucidating fundamental semiotic implications of knowledge acquisition in general. Peirce's semiotic premise that a well-understood sign is one that represents an object and creates an interpretant is essential to the understanding (...) of how new words and signs in general can be taught and learned. The article argues that Peirce's theory of the object of the sign, especially of the necessity of collateral experience of the object of a sign, can help to understand the riddle posed by of the Meno paradox of the impossibility of learning what we do not yet know. It examines the semiotic implications of the didactic methods of teaching and learning through translation, ostension, mental and real images, as well as metacognition, and it shows how icons, indices, and symbols are essential to learning new words. (shrink)

Protosemiotics is the study of the rudiments of semiosis, primarily in nature. The extension of the semiotic field from culture to nature is both necessary and possible in the framework of Peirce's semiotic theory. Against this extension, the critique of pansemiotism has been raised. However, Peirce's semiotics is not pansemiotic since it is based on the criterion of thirdness, which is not ubiquitous in nature. The paper examines the criteria of protosemiosis in the domain of physical and mechanical processes.

We prove the existence of p-ideals that are nonmeagre subsets of P(ω) under various set-theoretic assumptions.

This review article of Frederik Stjernfelt’s Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism (2022) argues that Peirce’s theory of iconicity with its subdivision into the image-diagram-metaphor triad must not be reduced to diagrammatic iconicity. The foundation of the triadic subdivision of the icon is not in Peirce’s diagrammatic logic but in Peirce’s cenopythagorean categories. A focus is on misinterpretations of Peirce’s concept of thirdness in the firstness of the icon. The paper argues that not only metaphors, but also comparisons, analogies, analogic arguments, and (...) examples belong to the third class of icons. (shrink)

The nature of representation has been a central but controversial issue of cognitive philosophy. After 2,500 years of reflection (cf. Rolf 2006), opinions are still divided. On the one hand, there are those who are convinced that we have reached a crisis of representation in the arts, the media, and cultural theory; on the other hand, representation has remained right at the top of the agenda of cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence research (cf. Nöth & Ljungberg, eds. 2003; Nöth 1997). (...) The words in which Daniel Dennett, in 1978, postulates the necessity for a new theory of representation as a foundation of cognitive science are symptomatic of a certain unease about the state of the art: "What is needed is.. (shrink)

Die Aufklärung erfuhr ihre wohl radikalste Infragestellung in Max Horkheimers und Theodor W. Adornos Dialektik der Aufklärung. Ihre These, dass die Aufklärung, statt Emanzipation und Humanität zu befördern, verhängnisvolle Folgen zeitigte, stützt sich einerseits auf eine grundsätzliche Rationalitätskritik, andererseits auf eine Analyse der Philosophien von Autoren, die sie als Protagonisten der Aufklärung einstufen: Bacon, Spinoza, Kant und de Sade. Zwar ist ‚Aufklärung‘ im Sinne Horkheimers und Adornos ein von Anbeginn mit der okzidentalen Kultur verbundenes Phänomen. Doch trat aus ihrer Sicht (...) erst in den Philosophien des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts ihre ambivalente, ja fatale Natur vollends zutage. Während sich die Diskussionen über die Dialektik der Aufklärung zumeist auf die grundsätzliche Rationalitätskritik Horkheimers und Adornos konzentrierten, haben Philosophiehistoriker nur selten die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die dort herangezogenen Philosophen tatsächlich geeignete Kronzeugen ihrer Aufklärungskritik sind. Ziel des vorliegenden Bandes ist es daher, das von Horkheimer und Adorno gezeichnete Gesamtbild der Aufklärung und ihre Interpretationen Bacons, Spinozas, Kants und de Sades auf den Prüfstand zu stellen. (shrink)

It is one of the most relevant questions of journalism research: Why do journalists select certain events or topics for publication, neglecting the overwhelming majority of news available to them? Communication scholars have been addressing this question from very different theoretical perspectives, applying a wide variety of social research methods to answer it. But although there are various models identifying a multitude of influences on news decisions, a theory capable of exactly predicting the news selection of tomorrow's newspapers and news (...) programs is still missing. Journalistic decision-making is a complex phenomenon that depends on a number of preconditions which are hard to tackle in a single theoretical approach or empirical investigation. Due to this complexity, there are still many unanswered questions that stimulate both empirical studies and theoretical thinking on news-making. Moreover, the media, journalism, and the factors shaping them are constantly changing. Yesterday's answers may not be appropriate to explain today's or tomorrow's news decisions. (shrink)