There is a consensus that satire cannot be defined, but is best characterized by a cluster account. However, I argue that a cluster account does not acknowledge the artistically and politically significant distinction between real satire and some forms of frivolous topical comedy which are casually labeled ‘satire’ in international media contexts. To uphold this distinction, I introduce a weak proposal that satire is a genre which necessarily sets out to critique and entertain (with the qualification that these purposes necessarily (...) interact, although neither is wholly instrumental to the other). I further argue that this proposal also provides necessary and sufficient conditions for a definition of satire. (shrink)

My argument is that Chalmers’ Zombie fiction and his rigid-designator-argument going back on Kripke seems to come down to a petitio principii. Rather, at the core it appears to be more related to the essential ‘privacy’ of the phenomenal internal perspective. In return for Chalmers I argue that the ‘principle of self-preservation’ of living organisms necessarily implies subjectivity and the emergence of meaning. The comparison with a robot proves instructive. The mode of ‘mere physical’ being is transcended if, in the (...) form of phenomenal perception, meaning appears on the stage of higher animals – a transition explained here as an emergence phenomenon based on the systemic co-operation of perception, evaluation and action (‘percept-eval-act-system’). Some fundamental considerations are added: Those consequences implied by the principle of self-preservation reveal the natural-biological origin of the organism – primarily seeming a more insignificant circumstance – as a momentous fundamental difference (end-in-itself-character, subjectivity, constitution of meaning) compared to technical artefacts (robot). And the emergentist approach indicates the – maybe paradoxical – possibility of a dualism of physical and psychical phenomena in an overall physical system, that is not dualistic at the same time. (shrink)

The study ties in with former considerations concerning the problem of phenomenal perception of higher animals. Accordingly the phenomenal character, qualia included, results from the adjustment of perceptions to (typal) behavioral dispositions under the principle of self-preservation: an emergence phenomenon provided by the constitutive system unity of perception and behavior, here characterized as percept-act-system. Thereby the subject of behavior can be explained as an emergent instance of the – system-theoretically highest rank – percept-act-level. In terms of the principle of self-preservation (...) it subjects all sensations to an valuation. Perception thus gaining existential sense for the subject, a psychic sense-dimension is spanned which as such does not own physical but ideal character. Accessing Hegel this is further interpreted: Accordingly the ontological basis of this view is the lawfulness of nature, understood as the ideal essence underlying it. In virtue of this – basically Hegelian-type idealistic – conception the material being of nature always encloses the possibility of the psychic, according to that ideal substratum of nature. (shrink)

The center of this investigation is the ‘real hard problem’ of phenomenal perception (Chalmers), i.e. of the qualitative kind of perception presenting the subject with forms, colors, smell, pleasurable or negative feelings etc.; the problem of Human consciousness, however, will explicitly not be treated. The ‘explanatory gap’ (Levine) complained by the philosophy of mind, that is to say the failure of all attempts to supply a neuronal explanation of experiences, is emergence-theoretically treated: Systems own properties and laws different from their (...) components; so the emergence concept shows promise also for the explanatory potential with respect to neuronal systems. Here the phenomenal character of perception is explained from the systemic co-action of perception and behavior, whereby also an interpretation is opened to Davidson’s anomal monism. Qualitative feelings, as is further shown, are not to be understood as needless ‘epiphenomena’, but as a necessary completion of per-ception when, as in the case of higher animals, the behavior is primarily controlled by phenomenal perception. (shrink)

Kants Ethik zeigt das typische Profil einer klassischen Theorie: Sie präsentiert im Kontext jeder Zeit neue und überraschende Perspektiven. 200 Jahre nach dem Tod Kants ist die AuseinanderSetzung mit seiner Ethik keineswegs auf das philologische oder philosophiehistorische Interesse beschränkt. Vielmehr ist sie eine der wenigen Beispiele für den Sachverhalt, dass mit dem zeitlichen Abstand der Entstehung eines Werks die systematische Bedeutung immer noch zunehmen kann. Heute werden die großen ethischen Themen der Gegenwart, von den Menschenrechten bis zur Bioethik, nicht ohne (...) ausdrücklichen Bezug auf Kants Ethik behandelt. In diesem Band werden Beiträge vorgelegt, die durchgehend ein systematisches Interesse verfolgen. Sie rekonstruieren ausgehend von einem exegetisch gesicherten Ort im Werk Kants die Erträge für die gegenwärtige Philosophie. Mit Kant wird gleichsam über den ursprünglichen Horizont seines Denkens hinausgegangen. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die kantische Ethik nicht nur auf den ihr vertrauten Gebieten von Gerechtigkeit, Autonomie, Verbindlichkeit und Recht Bedeutendes leistet, sondern auch zum Problem der Motivation Lösungsvorschläge bereithält - einem Bereich, der lange Zeit als ihr Schwachpunkt angesehen worden ist. (shrink)

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird über die verschiedenen Aspekte der sogenannten FitzGerald-Lorentz-Kontraktion berichtet. Nach einem kurzen Abriß der Entwicklung der Ätherkonzeption wird eine Beschreibung des Michelson-Morley Versuchs gegeben und seine Rolle in der Entstehungsgeschichte der speziellen Relativitätstheorie diskutiert. Anschließend wird die Kontraktionshypothese vorgestellt und die Frage erörtert, ob die Kontraktion „wirklich“ oder nur „scheinbar“ ist. Einige Gedankenexperimente werden vorgestellt, die zeigen, daß die Kontraktion bewegter Körper kein bloßer Schein ist. Ferner wird die noch bei Einstein unklare Beantwortung nach der Frage (...) der Sichtbarkeit der Längenkontraktion durch die Analyse der Begriffe „Beobachten“ und „Sehen“ aufgehellt. Abschließend wird auf die Frage nach der Falsifizierbarkeit der Kontraktionshypothese eingegangen, die von Popper aufgeworfen wurde. (shrink)

In examples like the total recursive functions or the computable real numbers the canonical indexings are only partial maps. It is even impossible in these cases to find an equivalent total numbering. We consider effectively given topological T 0 -spaces and study the problem in which cases the canonical numberings of such spaces can be totalized, i.e., have an equivalent total indexing. Moreover, we show under very natural assumptions that such spaces can effectively and effectively homeomorphically be embedded into a (...) totally indexed algebraic partial order that is closed under the operation of taking least upper bounds of enumerable directed subsets. (shrink)

Economic geographers increasingly consider the significance of history in shaping the contemporary socio-economic landscape and believe that experiences and competencies, acquired over time by individuals and entities in particular localities, to a large degree determine present configurations as well as future regional trajectories. Attempts to trace, understand, and investigate the pathways from past to present have given rise to the thriving and exciting sub-field of Evolutionary Economic Geography. EEG highlights the important factors that initiate, inhibit, or consolidate the contextual settings (...) and relationships in which regions and their respective agents, which comprise and shape economic activity and social reproduction, change over time. It has at its core the production and destruction of novelty in space, and the links between innovation and regional economic fortunes. The creation of knowledge, its movement and recombination within different regional ensembles of economic agents and institutions plays a critical role in the evolution of the space-economy. EEG provides a framework to disentangle the complexity of technological change and regional economic development based on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. In only a short time, EEG has established itself as a promising and rapidly evolving research framework with its focus on the driving forces of regional development across various scales and its attempt to translate findings into public policy. This book advances the theoretical foundations of EEG, and demonstrates how EEG utilises and operationalises conceptual frameworks, both established and new. Contributions also point to future research avenues and extensions of EEG, attempting to build stronger ties between theory, empirical evidence, and relevance to policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Regional Studies. _. (shrink)

The paper takes as its point of departure a more modern, pragmatics-based concept of “genre” at the base of which is the a notion of a social activity in a specific configuration or actional purpose, with use of language embedded in and determined by these pragmatic, language-external vectors. Such a concept lends itself more easily to a conceptualization of a complex social action like mobbing as a unitary, coordinated activity, with all component actions steered by a joined overarching goal. Testing (...) the notion of “genre” on such a complex borderline case will at the same time bring out both defining structural properties of mobbing actions and the theoretical issues incumbent on the notion of “genre”, especially how far the concept can be stretched to cover complex, multimedial social actions. (shrink)

The expression nature has seen revisions since its beginning in the Ionian philosophy, with changes both in the differentiation of its content and the hierarchisations of abstractions. This complexity is anything but semantically unfortunate. The conceptual changes reflect the place of the human life form in nature and its epistemic, ethical and aesthetic attitudes towards nature. The contributions discuss the various aspects of the human relationship to nature.

Analysen zur kausalen Wirksamkeit von Gründen und ihrer Nicht-Überführbarkeit in deterministische Ursachen stehen im systematischen Zentrum der praktischen Philosophie Julian Nida-Rümelins. Menschliche Freiheit erschließt sich für ihn über die Bedeutung von Gründen für unsere soziale Praxis. Der Band enthält Texte Nida-Rümelins zum Verhältnis von Freiheit und Vernunft, kritische Beiträge renommierter Autoren sowie Erwiderungen auf die Einwände.

The concept of narrative has come to play an important role in a bewildering variety of disciplines such as literary theory, linguistics, historiography, psychology, psychotherapy, ethnology and philosophy due to a number of recent trends in the social sciences including: the rejection of strong apriori unities of experience, the focus on intersubjectivity as the grounding level of experience, the turn to language as the focus of philosophical reflection, and the success of semiotics in articulating the rules for the generation and (...) understanding of texts. The first section of the paper presents the framework of Ricoeur's investigation into narrative identity, which he embeds within an encompassing reflection on time and an examination of current theories of personal identity. The second section, then, both specifies salient aspects of Ricoeur's narrative model and shows how, using that model, Ricoeur claims that the concept of narrative identity solves the paradoxes of personal identity. The third section presents Dennett's concept of a narrative self and compares Dennett's and Ricoeur's models. As we shall see, these two philosophers, who work within antagonistic traditions, have surprisingly similar ways of using narrative as a model for understanding the self. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 66 Heft: 1 Seiten: 98-111.

Der Status des Liberalismus in der Französischen Revolution und ihrer Folgezeit lässt sich nicht näher bestimmen, ohne zunächst von dem Wort zu reden, das seinen Kern ausmacht: Freiheit. Zu diskutieren sind die Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Freiheitsbegriffen, die die französischen Liberalen der ersten Stunde vorschlagen, und die These, dass die politische Freiheit als Instrument für die private oder bürgerliche Freiheit anzusehen sei. Am Ende soll das Verhältnis zwischen Französischer Revolution und Liberalismus anhand eines markanten Votums TocquevillesTocqueville, Alexis de illustriert werden.

We conjecture that the text of § 9 in Kant's "Doctrine of Virtue" might have been assembled in a wrong order, because of issues in the preparation of the manuscript for publication. We show that textual clues suggest to consider the possibility of reordering two passages in the section, which might yield a more coherent argumentative structure.

Schopenhauers »Preisschrift über die Freiheit des Willens« ist eine der wenigen Einsendungen zu einem Wettbewerb, die nachhaltige Berühmtheit erlangt haben. Die Norwegische Sozietät der Wissenschaften in Trondheim hatte 1839 die Preisfrage gestellt »Lässt sich die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens aus dem Selbstbewusstsein beweisen?«, und Schopenhauers anonym eingesandte Abhandlung – die einzige – bekam den Preis zugesprochen.