« Eine Vielzahl von bisher unpublizierten Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten eröffnet eine neue und unerwartete Perspektive auf das Leben und Werk Theodor W. Adornos. Von den frühen Zeugnissen aus der Kindheit, wie etwa einem bisher unbekannten Jugendtagebuch, das transkribiert und z.T. faksimiliert vorgelegt wird, über Dokumente aus seinen Studien- und Exiljahren bis hin zur Rückkehr nach Frankfurt und seiner Arbeit am Institut für Sozialforschung und an der Frankfurter Universität verfolgt der Band das Leben Adornos am Leitfaden von überaus anschaulichen, prägnanten, (...) im besten Sinne »sprechenden« Zeugnissen. Neben einem weiteren Tagebuch aus dem Jahr 1949 finden sich zahlreiche, hier erstmals veröffentlichte Briefe, Notizen, Kompositionen, Photographien und Skizzen aus seinem Nachlass. »--. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition is the only CD-ROM to give you instant facsimile and text access to the 20,000 pages of the philosopher's Nachlass as catalogued by Professor von Wright in his 1982 publication The Wittgenstein Papers. -/- The result of 10 years of academic research and editorial work by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen this electronic edition is the first scholarly resource to apply a uniform, well-documented, consistent set of editorial principles to the (...) writings. The CD-ROM is a joint publication between Oxford University Press and the Wittgenstein Archives and is published in Text & Facsimile and Text Only formats. (shrink)

In this essay, I will examine Henri Maldiney’s phenomenological aesthetics, focusing on his claim that “art is the truth of the sensible.” This claim is presented by Maldiney in the context of a two-fold critique of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective attempts to phenomenologically elucidate the experience of artworks. According to Maldiney, both Husserl and Heidegger fail to recognize what he, following Erwin Straus, terms the “pathic” moment of sense experience, which is also the key moment of the aesthetic reception of (...) art. Drawing on this concept of the pathic and its way of engaging what Maldiney calls the “transpassibility” of receptivity, I argue that his phenomenology of art can be viewed as an attempt to bring together the two senses of the aesthetic in the Kantian sense, namely as an aesthetics of sense experience and as an aesthetics of art, from within the domain of sensibility itself. I develop this idea by turning to Maldiney’s notion of rhythm and examining how he thinks that it can be applied to the visual arts. Ultimately, I suggest that Maldiney’s aesthetics imbues art with ontological significance, since he takes the rhythmic presence of artworks to be a sensuous manifestation of the rhythmic ground of the world’s constitution. The truth of art, in this sense, is a revelation of the ontological functioning of rhythm. (shrink)

The basic principle of all realist theories of truth developed in the 13th and 14th centuries was that a proposition is true if and only if it tells us how things are in reality. Walter Burley (1275-1344) interpreted this principle in a more radical way than 13th-century realists did. Burley, in fact, proposed a strong correspondence theory, in which there is a strict biunique correspondence between linguistic and extra-linguistic elements. Now, if the principle of correspondence can be applied to Burley (...) unconditionally to all affirmative statements (both for accidental and essential predications), it cannot be applied in the case of negative propositions, since in reality there can be no negative state of affairs. In order to solve this problem, Burley uses the strategy of introducing a complex mental object or objective entity as the significatum adequatum of negative sentences. It is an object which, although it exists only in the mind, is completely independent of our mental operations and which ultimately refers to the extra-mental world, composed exclusively of positive objects and states of affairs. In fact, the truth of a negative sentence does not depend on it corresponding to some negative fact, but rather on the opposite affirmative sentence failing to correspond to some positive extramental fact. Thus, extramental reality, which is only composed of positive objects, recovers its role as a yardstick for verifying the truth or falsity of all particular sentences, both affirmative and negative. (shrink)

La transcription, la traduction et l’étude du libelle d’un petit procès daté de 1435 extrait d’un registre judiciaire (liber maleficiorum) de Bologne permet de comparer les abus sexuels perpétrés par des hommes à l’encontre des filles et des garçons. Pour exprimer une agression sexuelle sur une petite fille, on emploie les mêmes mots que ceux qui servent à désigner le viol d’une femme. Pour décrire la violence commise sur un garçon, on use du vocabulaire de la sodomie. Ce constat permet (...) de montrer qu’à la fin du Moyen Âge, c’est bien la pénétration qui crée l’acte sexuel et que ce que les textes désignent par “vice sodomite” peut souvent avoir le sens moderne de “pédophilie” vis-à-vis des garçons. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Wittgenstein-Studien Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 273-282.

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, (...) we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related. (shrink)

Martha A. Hall’s artists’ books documenting her experience of living with breast cancer offer future health professionals a unique opportunity to sit in the patient’s position of vulnerability and fear. Hall’s books have become a cornerstone of our medical humanities pedagogy at the Maine Women Writers Collection because of their emotional directness and their impact on readers. This essay examines the ways that Hall’s call for conversation with healthcare providers is enacted at the University of New England and provides a (...) model for how such works might be used at other educational institutions to encourage empathy between practitioners and patients by engaging in conversations about anger, fear, and other common reactions to life-threatening illness. We explore the unruly nature of Martha A. Hall’s narratives of illness and care, as well as how the form of the books themselves engages the reader in a deep relationship with Hall’s personal pain and her humanity itself. We explore, too, the cumulative effect of these powerful books on readers who handle them regularly, as we do in our roles as professor and archivist. (shrink)

La présente étude de cas soulève une série de questions historiographiques et archivistiques induites par une enquête que nous avons consacrée à la patrimonialisation des papiers personnels de Jean Leray (1906-1998). Nous entendons tout d’abord reconstituer la persona scientifique de Jean Leray telle qu’elle ressort des notices biographiques produites en particulier après son décès. Le récit que nous a livré Leray sur sa captivité durant la seconde guerre mondiale y est alors reproduit et amplifié. Nous établissons ensuite que le tri (...) des papiers de Leray est contemporain de ces éloges et qu’il a été mené sous l’étroit contrôle du mathématicien et académicien Paul Malliavin. Nous formulons ce faisant quelques hypothèses sur les principes ayant conduit ce dernier à n’en déposer que quelques fragments dans trois bibliothèques de mathématiques distinctes. Pour finir, nous replaçons le récit de captivité de Leray dans le contexte des relations étroites que certains membres de l’Académie des sciences, dont Gaston Julia et Henri Villat, entretenaient avec l’université en captivité de l’Oflag XVII-A durant l’Occupation. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that the destruction or hiding of archives can cause long-lasting epistemic harms and constitute complex ethical challenges. The case of Kenya’s ‘migrated archives’ is argued to be an example of how actions in the past can have long-lasting epistemic consequences and can cause contemporary epistemic injustices and harms related to one’s knowledge of the past. The perpetrators of such harms and injustices are argued to have a backward-looking epistemic responsibility and to be liable (...) to make epistemic amends. The practice of acknowledgement is suggested as one possible way to make effective epistemic amends. I argue that making effective epistemic amends would constitute a step towards addressing epistemic harms and injustices related to our knowledge of the past. However, it is important to remember that this would only constitute one out of many necessary steps in addressing epistemic injustice and that further individual, institutional and ideological changes are necessary. (shrink)

In contrast to their western medievalist counterparts, scholars of Byzantine studies are at a disadvantage with regard to surviving primary source materials. I cannot but regard with envy the documents available to my colleagues in the Academy who research the lands of western Europe: to mention a few random examples, the three thousand coroner's inquests analyzed by Barbara Hanawalt and used to inform her remarkably detailed picture of peasant life in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, the local customs accounts for the (...) port of Exeter that enabled Maryanne Kowaleski to reconstruct the trading operations of this coastal town, the extraordinary cartularies and other documents from the county of Champagne so ably edited and explicated by Theodore Evergates. (shrink)

Considering the value of archives for dealing with the past processes, especially for the establishment of collective memory and identity, this paper discusses the role of archives in situations of conflicting memories such as in the case of the official Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. A crucial problem of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation are the divergent perceptions of what to consider as proper ‘evidence’, i.e. as objective, reliable, impartial or trustworthy sources of knowledge in order to prove the Armenian (...) genocide. The aim of this paper is to show how in a general atmosphere of distrust or prejudiced credibility judgments, even technically reliable archival records will be perceived as unreliable and biased, lacking any evidentiary status to factually prove a genocide which is categorically denied. Therefore, this working paper discusses how claims to reliability, objectivity and other similar scientifically and epistemically relevant attributes are understood in archival science as well as memory studies, and emphasizes the problems related to their instrumentalization by political actors within the context of genocide denialism. The Turkish-Armenian context promises many important empirical as well as theoretical insights on the uses and misuses of these attributes, suggesting that measures ought to be taken beforehand to decrease intergroup prejudice and distrust toward the ‘other’, so that archives can be effective in the truth-finding process. (shrink)