Das Verhältnis zwischen Kirche und säkularer Kultur steht einmal mehr in Frage. Gehören die Kunstwerke der christlichen Tradition als lebendige Quelle noch in unsere Gegenwart, oder nicht vielmehr einer Vergangenheit an, die höchstens noch von musealem Interesse ist? Ist eine intellektuelle Durchdringung des Glaubens, eine christliche, katholische/protestantische Intellektualität sinnvoll, notwendig, überhaupt möglich?

In “What is the state-of-the-art on lucid dreaming? Recent advances and ques- tions for future research”, Ursula Voss and Allan Hobson provide a detailed view of the features characterizing lucid dreaming and put forward four innovative hy- potheses to explain why and how lucid dreaming occurs, as well as how lucid dream states are related to other states of consciousness. Their aim is to show that not only is there benefit to studying lucid dreaming in itself, as this would give (...) us a deeper understanding of dream consciousness, but also that it is an im- portant endeavor because of the kind of conscious state lucid dreaming is. To be sure, Voss and Hobson make important in-roads into the empirical study of lucid dreaming that ought to sprout new and exciting research in the area. As I will show, however, there remains much conceptual work to be done. In this comment- ary I tease out three aspects of Voss and Hobson’s view that would greatly bene- fit from philosophical consideration. First, I highlight the lingering confusion with what exactly insight is, and I point to how one might go about clarifying this no- tion. Second, I argue that our understanding of insight and meta-awareness in lu- cid dreaming could be greatly increased by looking at how these concepts are used and understood in relation to meditative states. Last, I explore the role of the body in lucid dreaming and argue that one’s bodily awareness in lucid dreams is far more multi-faceted than at it might at first seem. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein/ Karl R. Popper/ Claude Levi-Strauss/ Martin Heidegger/ Karl Jaspers/ Hannah Arendt/ Ernst Bloch/ Max Horkheimer/ Theodor W. Adorno.

L'inscription d'Aberkios, évêque de Hiérapolis en Phrygie dans la seconde moitié du 2e siècle, nous est parvenue par la tradition manuscrite et épigraphique : l'article décrit d'abord l'histoire de la transmission de cette épitaphe extraordinaire, epigramma dignitate et pretio inter Christianan facile princeps d'après G.B. de Rossi. Puis, il donne des explications de détail en confrontant deux traductions allemandes assez différentes, celle de W. Wischmeyer (1980) et celle de R. Merkelbach (1997). Enfin, l'article tente de donner des pistes pour contextualiser (...) ce document dans le monde du Haut-Empire, où les autorités romaines ont accepté la visibilité du culte chrétien et des monuments funéraires des évêques, malgré la situation juridique peu favorable aux Chrétiens. (shrink)

Our emotional states affect how we perceive the world. If I am stressed, annoyed, or irritated, I might experience the sound of children laughing and screaming as they play around the house in a negative manner — it is unpleasant, loud, piercing, and so on. Yet, if I’m in a relaxed, happy, loving mood, the very same sounds might be experienced as pleasant, playful, warm, and so on. The sounds being made by the children are the same in both cases, (...) but how they are experienced differs. The auditory experience is affected by the emotional state that I am in. I perceive the sounds differently depending on how I’m feeling. Although this might at first seem to be a trivial observation, it certainly is not. We take for granted that our perceptual experiences give rise to justified beliefs and knowledge. Thus, if my perceptual experience of an object can differ based on my emotional state, and I take my perceptual experience to justify my beliefs and even lead to knowledge, then we might have a problem. If emotions — which are not fixed and in large part uncontrolled — affect our ability to accurately perceive the world, then they may undermine the justified beliefs and knowledge gained on the basis of our perceptual experience of the world. My goal here is to explore this potential problem. -/- I consider how we might understand the effect that emotions have on the justification of our perceptual beliefs about the world, beliefs that we acquire from a variety of sensory modalities — audition, gustation olfaction, and so on. I take the problem to be associated with one of two forms of perceptual influence: penetration or multisensory integration. In any given perceptual moment there are multiple sensory modalities and mental states at play, each affecting the overall experience. Whether we understand the influence of emotion on perception as a form of non-perceptual penetration or a form of non-visual sensory perception of the inner body — interoception — the potential epistemological difficulties remain: how can we be said to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge on the basis of such influenced perceptual experience. As has been the norm, only the five exteroceptive senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taste and touch are typically discussed in the context of sensory perception. However, as I argue, there is strong reason to accept the claim that emotional experience is a form of interoception, and that interoception ought to be considered when discussing sensory perception. In this way, then, I propose that clarifying the role played by interoception in sense perception across modalities is necessary if we are to make progress on the epistemological problems at hand. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers of mind have been guided by a brainbound approach: the mind, whatever it turns out to be, will be related to or identical with the brain. The body, under this approach, plays a merely instrumental role — it is what keeps the brain alive and healthy. Over the past few decades there has been increasing resistance to the brainbound approach, and a strongly supported push for taking a non-brainbound approach: the body is not merely instrumental, but in many (...) ways constitutive of the mind — the mind, whatever it turns out to be, is bodily in many fundamental respects. Thus, in explaining the mind, we must consider not only brain states, but also wider bodily processes. What those wider bodily processes are, and how they constitute certain mental states, are the key questions that we now face as non-brainbound philosophers of mind. -/- One avenue of investigation that many have taken in view to answering these two questions has been to look at bodily awareness and its relation to our sense of self. How does our body, and our awareness of our body more specifically, constitute our sense of self and our subjective experience of the world. A clear way of investigating this last question is to turn to pathological cases of body awareness, e.g. body dysmorphic disorder and anorexia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is an interesting case. The DSM-5 distinguishes anorexia nervosa from body dysmorphic disorder — the former is classified as an eating disorder, while the latter is classified as a mental disorder. As I will explore in this chapter, this very manner of distinguishing among such pathologies admits of a traditional brainbound approach to separating the mind/brain from the body. Here I shall consider how a non-brainbound approach might give us different, and perhaps even better insight into cases such as anorexia nervosa, and I shall, conversely, consider how such body awareness disorders might serve to further strengthen the view that the right approach to understanding the mind is the non-brainbound approach. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness lies in explaining what constitutes the subjectivity of consciousness. I argue that significant headway can be made on the problem from an embodied mind view, and particularly if we turn to William James’ theory of emotions. The challenge is one of explaining how bodily subjectivity arises from biological processes. I argue that the solution to this problem lies in our sense of interoception, and James’ theory which suggests emotional feelings are the cascade of changing bodily (...) states. Through James’ account, I show how the biological body can give rise to a bodily subjectivity in experiential consciousness, and thus move towards a solution of the hard problem. (shrink)

Our emotional states affect how we perceive the world. If I am stressed, annoyed, or irritated, I might experience the sound of children laughing and screaming as they play around the house in a negative manner — it is unpleasant, loud, piercing, and so on. Yet, if I’m in a relaxed, happy, loving mood, the very same sounds might be experienced as pleasant, playful, warm, and so on. The sounds being made by the children are the same in both cases, (...) but how they are experienced differs. The auditory experience is affected by the emotional state that I am in. I perceive the sounds differently depending on how I’m feeling. Although this might at first seem to be a trivial observation, it certainly is not. We take for granted that our perceptual experiences give rise to justified beliefs and knowledge. Thus, if my perceptual experience of an object can differ based on my emotional state, and I take my perceptual experience to justify my beliefs and even lead to knowledge, then we might have a problem. If emotions — which are not fixed and in large part uncontrolled — affect our ability to accurately perceive the world, then they may undermine the justified beliefs and knowledge gained on the basis of our perceptual experience of the world. My goal here is to explore this potential problem. -/- I consider how we might understand the effect that emotions have on the justification of our perceptual beliefs about the world, beliefs that we acquire from a variety of sensory modalities — audition, gustation olfaction, and so on. I take the problem to be associated with one of two forms of perceptual influence: penetration or multisensory integration. In any given perceptual moment there are multiple sensory modalities and mental states at play, each affecting the overall experience. Whether we understand the influence of emotion on perception as a form of non-perceptual penetration or a form of non-visual sensory perception of the inner body — interoception — the potential epistemological difficulties remain: how can we be said to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge on the basis of such influenced perceptual experience. As has been the norm, only the five exteroceptive senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taste and touch are typically discussed in the context of sensory perception. However, as I argue, there is strong reason to accept the claim that emotional experience is a form of interoception, and that interoception ought to be considered when discussing sensory perception. In this way, then, I propose that clarifying the role played by interoception in sense perception across modalities is necessary if we are to make progress on the epistemological problems at hand. (shrink)

To the extent that contemporary literature can irritate common understandings of literature and the present, it can also function as a stimulus and corrective for literary studies that do not always already presuppose to know what literature is. This has recently become visible in confrontations with social media, in which literary and time-diagnostic modes of writing come together in different ways in experiments with digital tools, as in the context of more conventional forms of literature and corresponding theoretical discourses, to (...) produce what can be called »representing the present«. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine how films recreate memories of resistance and define, both visually and in film narration, the difference between imperial aggressors and local protagonists of resistance. The examples are taken from the Brazilian film Quilombo that describes the resistance of the 17th and 18th century Maroon communities against the onslaught of the Portuguese colonial powers (political and military). Med Hondo’s (Mauretania) Sarraounia deals with the resistance in West Africa against the Jihad of the Sokoto Fulani and (...) the (in)famous French “exploratory” expedition under the command of Voulet. Both films are based on “real” histories as they were generally communicated from the colonialist perspective. And both films present themselves as counter-discursive revisions of history. The analysis in this paper focuses on the visual representation of the resistance heroes, first isolating them from the continuity of film narration in a type of still image, thus emphasizing the contrastive imagology between aggression and resistance. In the second step, aggressors and resistors are examined in terms of how they relate socially to their fellow combatants and to their communities. The obvious difference is that the aggressors have no immediate community to relate to socially or emotionally. Particular emphasis is put on the associative and symbolic meanings of the scenic setting, in which the antagonistic characters are placed. (shrink)

Menschen, die ihren Zeitgenossen anders erscheinen, müssen deshalb nicht auch anders sein. Ebenso wenig wie Menschen, die in der frühen Neuzeit für besessen, Narren, Hexen oder Wechselbälger gehalten wurden, das tatsächlich waren, kann davon ausgegangen werden, dass Menschen, die uns heute als Behinderte oder psychisch Kranke erscheinen, dies in ontologischem Sinne sind. Der Hexenmythos ist weitgehend entzaubert, die thomistische Dämonologie als Leitparadigma durch den kartesianischen Mechanismus abgelöst worden. Doch auch unser heutiges Verständnis von Behinderung und psychischer Krankheit ist sozial konstruiert.

Francesco Petrarca ist heute fast ausschließlich als Verfasser des Canzoniere bekannt, mit dem er für Jahrhunderte die europäische Liebeslyrik geprägt hat. Seinen Zeitgenossen und anscheinend auch ihm selbst galten jedoch seine lateinischen Werke - das Epos Africa, die Viten, die moralphilosophischen Schriften, Invektiven und Briefsammlungen, in denen er die wechselnden Fragen des privaten und öffentlichen Lebens reflektierte - höher; in ihnen fand nicht nur die italienische Umwelt, sondern auch noch ein Jahrhundert später die europäische Nachwelt den Philosophen, der angesichts der (...) Ausweglosigkeit spätmittelalterlicher Scholastik neue Wege zu einem dem Menschen gemäßen Selbst- und Weltverständnis wies. Eckhard Keßlers Untersuchung, die mit dem Premio Montecchio ausgezeichnet wurde, stellt Petrarca in den Kontext der Spätscholastik und zeigt, dass er, gerade weil er die Probleme der spätscholastischen Philosophie ernst nahm, zum exemplarischen Wegbereiter neuzeitlichen Denkens geworden ist. "Eckhard Keßler hat in Petrarca und die Geschichte wie keiner zuvor herausgearbeitet, daß die Prozesse der Säkularisierung als Kern jeder Geschichte der Neuzeit zum ersten Mal von Petrarca nach eigener Erfahrung beschrieben und in ihrer Konsequenz durchdacht worden sind. [.] Petrarcas Auffassungen von einer notwendigen Säkularisierung sind seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts völlig aus dem Bewußtsein der politischen Philosophen und künstlerischen Verweltlicher ausgeblendet gewesen; auch Schlegel und seine Zeitgenossen besaßen von Petrarcas Leistungen nicht einmal eine Ahnung. Daß die politische Theologie, die politische Philosophie, die politische Poesie gegenwärtig nicht nur in fernen Theokratien Konjunktur haben, sondern auch bei uns herbeigesehnt werden, sollte uns für Petrarcas Alternativen interessieren. Keßler gebührt die Ehre; ihm sollten wir zuhören, wenn er über Petrarca spricht." Bazon Brock. (shrink)

Research on bodily awareness has focused on body illusions with an aim to explore the possible dissociation of our bodily awareness from our own body. It has provided insights into how our sensory modalities shape our sense of embodiment, and it has raised important questions regarding the malleability of our sense of ownership over our own body. The issue, however, is that this research fails to consider an important distinction in how we experience our body. There are indeed two ways (...) in which we can be aware of our body: via observational awareness, which involves attending to the body as an object, and via non-observational awareness, where the body is given as the subject of experience and does not involve attention. The research to date has focused on the former—observational bodily awareness—and has left the latter—non-observational bodily awareness—in the dark. This is detrimental to ever formulating a complete account of how we are aware of our body. It is understandable, however, because of the inherent problem in studying non-observational bodily awareness: how would you instruct subjects to report on their unattended bodily awareness? In view to resolving this problem, I propose here a working hypothesis on the basis of research on interoception and the rubber hand illusion, and on the effect of meditation on awareness and attention. This working hypothesis can show us a way to begin studying non-observational bodily awareness, and finally build a complete theory of bodily awareness. (shrink)

Closed systems are mental artefacts whose structure can neither be explained in terms of innate dispositions nor in terms of the mechanism of natural selection and which stands in contradiction to the conditions of the possibility of information transfer. Kant takes the formal structure of pure mathematics as a guarantor for his reconstruction of a closed system of the subject's structures of knowledge a priori, thereby giving rise to the problem of a normative interface between interior system and exterior information (...) – a problem which is, in this form, not to be solved. By tracing the structure of generative grammar and formal logics back to innate modules, respectively, Chomsky and Fodor are creating the same interface problem, whose basic structure has not yet received the necessary attention. (shrink)

This piece of work intends to shed light on Alexander of Aphrodisias from the second-century Aristotle commentator through the history of Aristotelian psychology up to the sixteenth century's clandestine prompter of the new philosophy of nature. In the millennium after his death the head of the Peripatetic school in Athens served as the authority on Aristotle in the Neo-Platonic school, survived the Arabic centuries of philosophy as Averroes' exemplary exponent of the mortality of the soul and as such was not (...) considered worthy of translation by the Latin Scholastics. This attitude changed only in the Late Middle Ages, when the resistance against Averroes grew fierce and Alexander emerged as the only Aristotelian alternative to him. In 1495 his account of Aristotle's psychology was translated and published and the underlying principles of a natural philosophy, based on sense perception and exempt from metaphysics, became accessible. The prompt reception and widespread endorsement of Alexander's teaching testify to his impact throughout the sixteenth century. (shrink)

RESUMO: Desde os primórdios dos espetáculos teatrais inteiramente musicados, estabelece-se a convenção tácita do final feliz. Desse modo, até mesmo episódios oriundos de escritores antigos, com conhecidos finais funestos, acabaram sendo transformados, acomodando a trama aos usos dos locais onde óperas eram apresentadas. Apesar de parecer uma solução fácil ou episódica, há algumas questões poéticas envolvidas, o que transparece sobretudo em alguns escritos sobre ópera, no século XVIII. A proposta deste artigo é discutir, em primeiro lugar, através de exemplos, como (...) o final feliz acontece em algumas óperas e qual a função que nelas desempenha; num segundo momento, a intenção é mostrar como a crítica italiana do final do século XVIII se mobiliza para dar conta da questão. ABSTRACT: Ever since the appearance of the first dramas entirely set to music, happy endings have emerged as a tacit convention. Even ancient myths with their sad endings were transformed, adapting plots to local customs where operas were performed. Although it may seem a facile or occasional solution, there are some important poetical questions involved which appear in certain writings on opera from the eighteenth century. The purpose of this article is to discuss, by means of examples, how the happy ending appears in some operas, and what function it has. The article also pretends to show how Italian critics of the late eighteenth century approached the question. (shrink)

The Wnt signalling cascade is a highly conserved signalling pathway throughout the animal kingdom. In Xenopus, Wnt signalling functions in mesodermal dorsoventral patterning. Earlier work on deciphering the components of the wnt signalling cascade left a gap between cytosolic β‐catenin, the final member of the cascade, and the nuclear target genes. Several recent papers now reveal how the Wnt signal is transmitted into the nucleus. Surprisingly, β‐catenin directly interacts with the transcription factor LEF‐1/XTCF‐3, and thereby is not only translocated into (...) the nucleus but also modulates the properties of LEF‐1/XTCF‐3 as a transcription factor(1–5). (shrink)

This piece of work intends to shed light on Alexander of Aphrodisias from the second-century Aristotle commentator through the history of Aristotelian psychology up to the sixteenth century's clandestine prompter of the new philosophy of nature. In the millennium after his death the head of the Peripatetic school in Athens served as the authority on Aristotle in the Neo-Platonic school, survived the Arabic centuries of philosophy as Averroes' exemplary exponent of the mortality of the soul and as such was not (...) considered worthy of translation by the Latin Scholastics. This attitude changed only in the Late Middle Ages, when the resistance against Averroes grew fierce and Alexander emerged as the only Aristotelian alternative to him. In 1495 his account of Aristotle's psychology was translated and published and the underlying principles of a natural philosophy, based on sense perception and exempt from metaphysics, became accessible. The prompt reception and widespread endorsement of Alexander's teaching testify to his impact throughout the sixteenth century. (shrink)

Theories of epistemology make reference—via the perspective of an observer—to the structure of information transfer, which generates reality, of which the observer himself forms a part. It can be shown that any epistemological approach which implies the participation of tautological structural elements in the information transfer necessarily leads to an antinomy. Nevertheless, since the time of Aristotle the paradigm of mathematics—and thus tautological structure—has always been a hidden ingredient in the various concepts of knowledge acquisition or general theories of information (...) transfer. We hold that Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory is the first scientific theory which consistently presupposes a non-tautological structure for the information transfer and, at the same time, keeps it strictly distinct from the tautological metric of scientific observation. The consequences of this technique—namely the dissociation of information from intentionality—have not yet been fully drawn. (shrink)

Papers from a conference held Oct. 8-12, 1989, in the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbèuttel.