The last play of the Varronian canon, Vidularia, is transmitted to us through two different channels. Some pages of it survive in the Codex Ambrosianus, containing the prologue and a couple of scenes from the beginning of the play. On the other hand grammarians quote fragments of a few lines out of context, as examples of idiosyncratic Latin syntax and morphology. From the combination of these two disparate sources classical scholars have reconstructed a Vidularia that is parallel to Rudens on (...) all major points. The plot is not very different, and on the whole the consensus philologorum is correctly summed up by the Terentian sentence of Leo: qui utramve recte novit, ambas noverit. (shrink)

Die Beiträge dieses Sammelbandes stellen zum einen Wittgensteins Philosophie in wirkungsgeschichtlichen Zusammenhängen dar, zum anderen fragen sie danach, wie sich Wittgensteins Problemstellungen zu traditionellen Fragen der Ideengeschichte verhalten, ohne dabei unbedingt an unmittelbare geistesgeschichtliche Einflüsse zu denken. So werden im Buch Themen behandelt wie Wittgenstein und der Cartesianismus, Wittgensteins Religiosität vor dem Hintergrund des Werkes von Pascal, Tolstoi und Kierkegaard, Wittgensteins Grammatikbegriff im Kontext analytischer und synthetischer Sätze, sein Bild von Weininger, Aspekte malerischer Gestaltung seiner Arbeitsweise, oder die Frage, inwieweit (...) er zu der sogenannten Österreichischen Philosophie zu zählen ist. Eine wittgensteinianische Kritik von Brandoms Inferentialismus rundet den Band ab. (shrink)

Aus dem Inhalt: Das wissende und wollende Subjekt im Tractatus. - Die gemeinsame menschliche Handlungsweise: das Verstehen des anderen in Wittgenstein's Spatphilosophie. - Das Rot, der Schmerz, der Leopard und die Sprache: aussersprachliche Gegenstande und die Grenzen des Relativismus im Spatwerk. - Schmerzen und Schmerzausserungen als vorsprachliche Phanomene: Nachtrag zum Kapitel Das Rot, der Schmerz, der Leopard und die Sprache. - Bedeutungserlebnisse: Privatsprachenkritik und Gebrauchstheorie der Bedeutung im Licht der psychologischen Aufzeichnungen.".

Kann man einen anderen Menschen oder eine andere Kultur und Lebensform verstehen? Welches sind die Bedingungen des Fremdverstehens? Was soll man unter dem Begriff des Anderen bzw. des Fremden verstehen? Die Autoren des Bandes setzen sich mit ähnlichen Fragen auseinander und hier insbesondere anhand der Philosophie Wittgensteins. Dabei kommen sie sowohl auf den Tractatus als auch auf das Spätwerk zu sprechen. Der Band behandelt die Interpretationsmöglichkeiten der Begriffe Lebensform, Naturgeschichte des Menschen und Bedeutungserlebnis. Ferner werden Themen wie das Erlernen einer (...) Sprache, die Verstehensmodi eines Ethnologen, Ästhetik, Musik sowie das Verhältnis von Wittgenstein und Whitehead diskutiert. (shrink)

Auf die Frage "Wie kann man ein anderes Weltbild, eine andere Kultur verstehen?" lassen sich in Wittgensteins Spätwerk zwei Tendenzen entdecken: Dem wechselseitigen Unverständnis stellt er die „gemeinsame menschliche Handlungsweise und die „Naturgeschichte des Menschen“ gegenüber. Die Bedeutung dieser beiden Begriffe ist umstritten und weist auf ein konzeptionelles Problem in Wittgensteins Argumentation hin. Anhand der Diskussion prominenter Interptetationen von Baker, Hacker, Haller, Savigny u.a. der einschlägigen Stelle § 206 in den Philosophischen Untersuchungen wird herausgearbeitet, daß Wittgenstein nur die unscharfen Grenzen (...) des menschlichen Lebens gegen die unbelebte Natur oder Tiere feststellt, aber nicht genügend differenziert, um mit dem Konzept der gemeinsamen menschlichen Handlungsweise das Verständnis des anderen zu sichern. (shrink)

Volume 74 in the series Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung -/- Die vor-autonome und noch nicht auf das Feld der Künste beschränkte Ästhetik des ›langen 18. Jahrhunderts‹ strebte eine interdisziplinäre und internationale Kommunikationspraxis an, die eine universelle Verständigung unter den Menschen ermöglichen sollte. -/- Der Band versammelt Beiträge zu der europäischen Geschichte dieser anthropologisch ausgerichteten ästhetischen Kommunikation. Die Aufsätze der ersten Sektion beschäftigen sich mit der zeitgenössichen Theorie der ästhetischen Wissensvermittlung: Es wird die fachübergreifende (Proto-) Ästhetik Shaftesburys und Addisons, die (...) Sprachtheorie von Coleridge bzw. die schwierige Einbürgerüng der Disziplin ›Ästhetik‹ in Frankreich thematisiert. Im zweiten Teil beschäftigen sich zwei Aufsätze mit der Kommunikation durch Bilder, anhand der Analyse von Gemälden Jean-Siméon Chardins und Caspar David Friedrichs. Die Bedeutung des Bild- und Erzählstoffes ›Herkules am Scheideweg‹ für Wielands ästhetische Kommunikation wird hier ebenfalls behandelt. Die dritte Sektion enthält Untersuchungen zu zwei wichtigen Gattungen der ästhetischen Kommunikation. Es werden zunächst unterschiedliche Varianten des Genres Traumerzählung bei Johann Gottlob Krüger und Mihály Vörösmarty beleuchtet. Der Band schließt mit der Analyse von József Eötvös’ Künstlerroman Der Karthäuser. -/- Die Fallstudien tragen zu dem besseren Verständnis einer Ästhetik bei, die die Bildung der Menschen durch intersubjektive Kommunikation vorantreiben wollte. (shrink)

This essay begins with the recent visit of the Secretary of Defense William Cohen to the National Training Center for an Advanced Warfighting Experiment, and ends with an ethnographic ramble in Disneyworld's backyard at Orlando, Florida, where the CEOs of the defense industries and the flag and general officers of US armed forces convened for four days at the annual Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference, to analyze, exhibit, and hawk ‘Information Technologies: The World Tomorrow’. In between lies an effort (...) to understand the persistence of what William S. Burroughs called the ‘war universe’. (shrink)

On the dust jacket of The Subject's Point of View there is a detail from Vilhelm Hammershoi's Interior with Sitting Woman. It is hard to think of a painter who better captures the inner in his work. From the monochrome colour, to the back that faces us, to the door swung open to reveal yet another doorway, we are led to interiority – to the inner. This is a perfect image for a book whose author wants to persuade us to (...) return to the interior – a Cartesian interior.The Cartesian interior has come in for quite a drubbing in philosophy for some considerable time. In the mid-to-late 1970s, a style of argument emerged, designed to challenge this conception of mind and establish in its place an externalist conception of language and of mind. One version of the argument was due to Hilary Putnam and emerged in the context of considerations concerning linguistic meaning; another was due to Tyler Burge and emerged first in the context of considerations concerning the individual in relation to his/her social environment. In his earliest paper, on this topic, Burge wrote of ‘the elderly Cartesian tradition’ where ‘the spotlight is on what exists or transpires “in” the individual – his secret cognition, his innate cognitive structures, his private perceptions and introspections, his grasping of ideas, concepts or forms’. Farkas wants to defend this ‘elderly tradition’, but she does add to it some interesting twists. First and foremost, she places to one side ideas of privacy, of incorrigibility and infallibility. She also wishes to place the issue of dualism to one side. What Farkas concentrates on is privileged access and argues that this is …. (shrink)

This study is focused on unsustainable agri-food systems, especially intensive livestock farming and its resulting environmental harms. Specifically we focus on the development of technologies that seek to mitigate these environmental harms. These technologies are generally developed as incremental innovations in response to government regulation. Critics of these technological solutions allege that these developments legitimate unsustainable food production systems and are incapable of supporting agri-food systems transformation. At the same time, technology developers and other actors seek to present these technologies (...) as the legitimate solution to agri-environmental harms. Our study seeks to explore the perceptions and constructions of legitimacy for technologies that are developed to reduce ammonia emissions in intensive livestock farming in Flanders (Belgium). We use a qualitative case study, employing semi-structured interviews and workshops, with technology developers of ammonia-emission reducing technologies and stakeholders in the intensive livestock farming industry in Flanders. What our study shows is that technologies developed to reduce emissions are dependent on regulative legitimacy. The normative and cognitive legitimacy of these technologies is lacking, both due to ties to the intensive livestock industry and due to uncertainty over the performance of these technologies. With the delegitimation of intensive livestock farming, the legitimacy of these technologies is also under threat. In response, technology developers are looking to (re-)construct this legitimacy through knowledge claims over the performance of their technologies. We show several ways for other actors to deal with this, centred on either re-legitimising technologies to maintain the status quo, or to contest these knowledge claims and use them to disrupt path dependencies. (shrink)

In studying the history of the ethics of war, the just war tradition may be interpreted as a historically evolving body of tenets about just war principles. Instead of a single just war theory, there have been many just war theories—for example, those of Augustine, Aquinas, Vitoria, and Grotius—theories that have various commonalities and differences. A comprehensive history of the evolving just war tradition should feature a thorough study of how these just war theories were rethought. For example, in his (...) landmark work Just and Unjust Wars, written during the Cold War, Michael Walzer exclaimed: “Nuclear weapons explode the theory of just war.” 1 In his rethinking of the just war tradition in light of the superpower practice of nuclear deterrence, he contributed his influential conception of supreme emergency exceptions. Now that the Cold War is over, the authors of the articles in this book are primarily concerned with the question of how the just war tradition—which is understood somewhat differently by the different authors—should be rethought today. Echoing Walzer’s exclamation, among the particular post–Cold War questions that can be raised are these: Is just war theory exploded by terrorism? Is it annihilated by genocide? In their various rethinkings of the just war tradition, our authors state their own particular post–Cold War questions, and answer them from their diverse viewpoints... (shrink)

Aristotelian ideas on analogy that may be found in Brentano's early thesis help to elucidate his theory of truth, especially what Brentano wrote on truth at the end of his life. It seems as though Brentano did not distinguish between the notion of truth and the notion of evidence ; but, in fact, he has two notions of truth. The original sense of truth in a true judgment means evidence ; in a derived or analogical sense, a blind judgment, which (...) corresponds to an evident judgment in all other aspects, is also called true. Such a judgment is true in so far as it may be judged with evidence. (shrink)

Masters Thesis -- Stellenbosch University, 2019.

Provides a materialist analysis of the field of vaginal microbicides highlighting the problems of materialising the concept of empowerment through biomedical process, while utilising the microbicide as an analytical ally in a provocative debate with contemporary feminist theory on materiality.

This (by no means exhaustive) survey of Postman’s work reflects on his penetrating analyses of contemporary technology. He focused attention on the ways technology today, especially the television and the computer, inevitably change us. The essential questions he asks us to ask (and answer) are, How does technology affect us? Is it for good or ill? and Must we accept all technological advances? Postman recognized the current dominance and autonomy of technology as well as the concomitant dangers and consequently made (...) the case and the plea for the reassertion of human over technological values. (shrink)

This review essay discusses three recent books on the Green New Deal, written, respectively, by Naomi Klein, Jeremy Rifkin, and Kate Aronoff and a few other democratic socialists. It argues that the New Deal offers a better model of how to envision the change required for deep carbonization than the vision of war mobilization after Pearl Harbor since it emphasizes not only the need for massive introduction of green technology but also the importance of broad social change constituting a just (...) transition. The essay argues that the GND should be placed in a global context so that the adoption of the GND in the Global North would lead to much greater funding of green developments in the less industrialized countries of the Global South. (shrink)

Difference and Habit: Deleuze anti-Hegelian critique of consciousness Since Antiquity, habit has been understood as a second nature, as something that we develop in a conscious or unconscious way, and which directs and structures both our cognitive and practical lives – our consciousness and our actions. For Hegel, habit effectuates the transition from nature to spirit or consciousness, thus forming the basis of morality. Habit thus constitutes an essential stage in the development of the mind and a crucial aspect of (...) Hegel’s philosophical anthropology. Habit also plays a crucial role in the thinking of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who characterizes his philosophical project as anti-Hegelian or anti-dialectical. Even though many works examine the relationship between Deleuze and Hegel, almost none of these discuss the concept of habit of these authors, and the role that it plays in Deleuze’s so-called anti-Hegelianism. In this article, I address the concept of habit in Difference and Repetition, and the role it plays in Deleuze’s critique of Hegel. I also compare this concept with Hegel’s own conception of habit in his Anthropology. I show that Deleuze certainly does not understand repetition as second nature as Hegel does, because then it is impossible to account for the productive power of the unconscious or the sub-representative, and of real creativity. I distinguish my interpretation of habit in Deleuze from that of a number of other authors, who, in my view, do not draw all the conclusions from Deleuze’s interpretation of Hume. I then expound Deleuze’s original notion of habit and compare it with Hegel’s. (shrink)

Although normative systems, or social laws, have proved to be a highly influential approach to coordination in multi-agent systems, the issue of compliance to such normative systems remains problematic. In all real systems, it is possible that some members of an agent population will not comply with the rules of a normative system, even if it is in their interests to do so. It is therefore important to consider the extent to which a normative system is robust, i.e., the extent (...) to which it remains effective even if some agents do not comply with it. We formalise and investigate three different notions of robustness and related decision problems. We begin by considering sets of agents whose compliance is necessary and/or sufficient to guarantee the effectiveness of a normative system; we then consider quantitative approaches to robustness, where we try to identify the proportion of an agent population that must comply in order to ensure success; and finally, we consider a more general approach, where we characterise the compliance conditions required for success as a logical formula. We furthermore introduce a logic for specifying properties of norm compliance in general and norm robustness in particular. (shrink)