It is being increasingly recognized that the Saussurean dictum of “the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” is in conflict with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon commonly known as “sound symbolism”. After first presenting a historical overview of the debate, however, we conclude that both positions have been exaggerated, and that an adequate explanation of sound symbolism is still lacking. How can there, for example, be (perceived) similarity between expressionsand contents across different sensory modalities? We offer an answer, based on the (...) Peircian notion of iconic ground, and G. Sonesson’s distinction betweenprimary and secondary iconicity. Furthermore, we describe an experimental study, in a paradigm first pioneered by W. Kohler, and recently popularized by V.Ramachandran, in which we varied vowels and consonants in fictive word-forms, and conclude that both types of sounds play a role in perceiving an iconic ground between the word-forms and visual figures. The combination of historical conceptual analysis, semiotic explication and psychological experimentationpresented in this article is characteristic of the emerging paradigm of cognitive semiotics. (shrink)

Every cultural phenomenon is multifaceted and only with great difficulty can it fit into the framework of one general concept. The term ‘sport’ is such a broad concept, because the great wealth of...

As donor trust legitimises research, trust is vital for research in the fields of biomedicine, genetics, translational medicine and personalised medicine. For parts of the donor community, the consent signature is a sign of trust in research. Many consent processes in biomedical research ask donors to provide their data for an unspecified future use, which introduces uncertainty of the unknown. This uncertainty can jeopardise donor trust or demand blind trust. But which donor wants to trust blindly? To reduce this uncertainty, (...) we explore first, which future-proof actors donors could trust when signing a consent form. Second, we discuss the question Can we know if donor trust expires? and what prevents donor trust from expiring. Finally, we present possible measures that can help to nurture trust in the far future. In this article, we draw on our previous research on trust in biomedical research, on trust in the broader healthcare system and Niklas Luhmann’s and Anthony Giddens’ trust theories. Our findings suggest that, in the far future, researchers will need to consider donor autonomy, as well as societal norms and values of the time period in which the data were donated. They will need to find mechanisms where possible to publicly announce the use of old data sets. However, foremost researchers will need to treat the data respectfully. It remains vital that professionals and the society continue to elaborate on the norms and values that shape the common understanding of what is morally right and wrong when researching data. (shrink)

Aesthetic chills occur in artistic, scientific and religious context. We introduce a theoretical framework relating them to humans’ vital need for cognition. We discuss the implications of such a framework and the plausibility of our hypothesis. Numerous references to chills are introduced.

Incompatability in marriage.- The spirital attitude towards old age.- Woman's spiritual influence in marriage.- The revolt against conventional morality.- The ethical attitude towards enemies.- The strain between the older generation and the younger.- The ethical attitude towards the departed.

RESUMENLa filosofía del último Schelling debiera entenderse más bien como una hermenéutica de la libertad, cuyos soportes metódicos serían la dialéctica y la narración. La primera, al contrario de la hegeliana, se escendiría en un desequilibrio que pasa a tensión por contraposición de los extremos y que es al fin superada por un tercer término que se yergue libremente sobre los dos pasos anteriores: una dialéctica, pues, discontinua por superación, no por asunción. A su vez, y en una recuperación suo (...) modo de la filosofía kantiana de la historia, la narración corresponde a una dinámica de la historia, igualmente discontinua (sin posibilidad de ser predeterminada en su curso) y escandida por eventos, en un proceso de retroducción del sentido y de producción de narratividad: ya no «ciencia» (en el alto sentido del hegelianismo) sino un trabajoso quehacer libre de los hombres libres. Si se quiere: la búsqueda de una todavía impensable compenetración de filosofía y religión.PALABRAS CLAVESCRISTIANISMO EXOTÉRICO Y ESOTÉRICO, RELIGIÓN FILOSÓFICA, REVELACIÓN (OFFENBARUNG: ACCIÓN DE DEJAR EN FRANQUÍA LO IMPREPENSABLE), HERMENÉUTICA DE LA LIBERTAD, DIALÉCTICA DE LAHISTORIA, ÉXTASIS DE LA RAZÓN, QUERER (WOLLEN)ABSTRACTThe later philosophy of Schelling should be rather understood as a hermeneutics of freedom, with dialectics and narration as its methodological basis. Unlike Hegelian, Schellingian dialectics splits into an imbalance, that leads to a tension in which the extremes are opposed. This tension is ultimately overcome by a third term, that raises in its freedom over the other two: a case of discontinuous dialectics, in the sense of overcoming, not of sublating. On the other hand, in a recovery /suo modo/ of Kantian philosophy of history, narration would be a dynamics of history, also discontinuous (non-predeterminable in its course) internally scanned by events, in a process of retroduction of meaning and of production of normativity: not a «science» (in the high Hegelian sense) anymore, but a laborious free task performed by free men. In other words: a search of a still unthinkable compenetration of philosophy and religion.KEYWORDSEXOTERIC CHRISTIANITY AND ESOTERIC, PHILOSOPHICAL RELIGION,REVELATION (OFFENBARUNG), FREEDOM HERMENEUTICS, DIALECTICSOF HISTORY, ECSTASY OF REASON, WANT ( WOLLEN ). (shrink)

As a scientific discipline and profession, law has been for centuries at the heart of social and political power of many Western societies. Professors of law, as influential representatives of the profession, are important powerbrokers between academia, politics and the corporate world. Their influence is based on scientific reputation, institutional mandates inside and outside academia or privileged network connections with people in powerful positions. In this study, based on a full sample of all Swiss law professors in the years 1957, (...) 1980 and 2000, we contrast two theories of the distribution of power among law professors: Bourdieu’s thesis on the trade-off between scientific reputation and -academic institutional power vs. the thesis of an opposition between a group of established incumbents and socio-demographically marginal challengers who try to gain access to the profession. We show that among Swiss law professors the endowment with scientific capital is not opposed to the possession of institutional power within academia. Our findings reveal rather an opposition between a challenging group of professors devoid of resources and an incumbent fraction with a high amount of scientific, institutional and social capital alike. In the conclusion we discuss a series of explanations of this specific power structure, including the specific status scientific reputation and social capital can have for law professors. (shrink)

Peter Janichs konstruktiver Aufbau einer Chronometrie, wie er in der neuen Auflage seines Buches "Die Protophysik der Zeit" beschrieben ist, wird einer detaillierten Kritik unterzogen. Dabei kristallisieren sich drei ernste Probleme heraus: Das Problem der Eindeutigkeit der Leitlinie, das Problem der Transitivität der Begleitstellungen, und das Problem der eindeutigen Bestimmtheit der Uhren. Alle drei Probleme bleiben bei Janich unbewältigt, woraus folgt, daß seine Chronometrie in der vorliegenden Form zumindest unvollständig ist.

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of (...) children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. (shrink)

The main item in the present volume was published in 1930 under the title Das Unendliche in der Mathematik und seine Ausschaltung. It was at that time the fullest systematic account from the standpoint of Husserl's phenomenology of what is known as 'finitism' (also as 'intuitionism' and 'constructivism') in mathematics. Since then, important changes have been required in philosophies of mathematics, in part because of Kurt Godel's epoch-making paper of 1931 which established the essential in completeness of arithmetic. In the (...) light of that finding, a number of the claims made in the book (and in the accompanying articles) are demon strably mistaken. Nevertheless, as a whole it retains much of its original interest and value. It presents the issues in the foundations of mathematics that were under debate when it was written (and in some cases still are);, and it offers one alternative to the currently dominant set-theoretical definitions of the cardinal numbers and other arithmetical concepts. While still a student at the University of Vienna, Felix Kaufmann was greatly impressed by the early philosophical writings (especially by the Logische Untersuchungen) of Edmund Husser!' He was never an uncritical disciple of Husserl, and he integrated into his mature philosophy ideas from a wide assortment of intellectual sources. But he thought of himself as a phenomenologist, and made frequent use in all his major publications of many of Husserl's logical and epistemological theses. (shrink)

Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), generally recognized as the founder of the school of modern critical historical scholarship, and Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), the great Swiss proponent of cultural interpretation, are fathers of modern history--giants of their time who continue to exert an immense influence in our own. They are usually seen as contrasts, Ranke as representative of political history and Burckhardt of cultural history. In five essays, each flowing gracefully into the next, the distinguished historian Felix Gilbert shows that such contrasts (...) are oversimplifications. Despite their interest in different aspects of the past, Ranke's and Burckhardt's views arose from common elements in the first half of the nineteenth century, the time in which they grew up and in which their first masterworks attracted such wide attention. This concise volume clarifies the beginnings of history as an autonomous discipline, while forcing us to examine our views on basic questions in historical scholarship. In the case of Ranke, relating his work to his times counteracts the current tendency to disregard the difference between the historical concepts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing on this difference, Gilbert emphasizes the originality and novelty of Ranke's ideas about history. Although Burckhardt is often portrayed as an intellectually lonely figure, this book reveals the importance of relating his thought to the intellectual trends of his time. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Under what conditions are we justified in believing what people tell us? Traditionally, the answer has either been reductionist or anti-reductionist. Either our justification reduces to non-testimonial reasons, or we have a presumptive, though defeasible, right to believe what we are told. However, some philosophers have argued that we need to look beyond this dichotomy. Following this line of thought, this paper examines and criticizes a recent proposal by John Greco. According to Greco, testimony has two functions: (1) passing on (...) information within an epistemic community; (2) receiving information from an outside source. (1) calls for anti-reductionism, while (2) requires reductive reasons. In response to Greco, several cases are presented, showing that his position leads to counterintuitive consequences. In the light of this result, an alternative, risk-dependent, account is put forward. It is argued that the practical risks connected to receiving false information determine which epistemic treatment is appropriate. (shrink)

A passionate indictment of the major political parties in Britain today for their failure to face the biggest issues on the British political agenda. -/- These are issues of survival / not just of ourselves or our families, not just of the immediate environment or of our own country, but of the world itself. Politicians of every tradition have let us down, They offer the superficial appeal of a temporary prosperity. They make no promise for the future. -/- This book (...) brings together prominent people from socialist, liberal and green traditions together with those from whose experience lies in pressure groups. What they have in common is more remarkable than what divides them despite the fact that they have been candidates for opposing political parties. The empty rhetoric of the twentieth century politics has proved of no worth. This book explores the opportunities for a new and green parliamentary politics which will take us beyond the politics of Thatcher and Kinnock and into the 21st century. (shrink)

Not Even a Something. If one exclaims that a pain is not a Nothing, what one means is that one feels it and that, when felt, it is simply there. Why shouldn’t one then also say, contrary to PI 293 & 304, that it is ‘a Something’? One has to admit, however, that, as felt, it is only momentarily there, and when I ask whether the pain that I feel now is the same as the pain I felt earlier, I (...) realize that for me there are no objective criteria of sameness: for me, what counts as the same is what appears to be the same. In the sparse privacy-scenario of PI 258 this talking about ‘sameness’ is totally empty, and so also our talking about ‘pain’, ‘sensation’, and so on, quite generally. In our public language, however, the situation is different, because there our use of a word like “pain” and our talking about the sameness of our own pains is embedded in our intersubjectively assessable speaking about pains. Nevertheless, also in this familiar case Wittgenstein’s statement near the end of PI 258 persists, at least under normal circumstances, and is accepted with regard to my own pain: “whatever is going to seem correct to me is correct”. But now, as part of our normal way of speaking, to claim this correctness is not empty. At the same time, however, it is not justified in a substantial way. With assertions like “I am in pain” or like “This is the same pain as earlier” the language-game does not end, as Wittgenstein says; it begins with them. This view, expressed in PI 290, can appear outrageous and may lead to the reaction, scrutinized in the beetle-paragraph PI 293, that everyone can tell from her own case that she knows what pain is. To talk in this way involves a grammatical model, “the model of ‘object and name’”, that presumably underlies our reference to our own private objects and according to which our language-game with sensation words would ‘begin’ with the objects. However, by this severing of reference from our use of language, the objects referred to prove to be completely indeterminate. – In the two ways just described, regarding sameness and determinateness, our talk of a ‘Something’ in the case of sensations turns out to be problematic. (shrink)

The following text revolves around a contrast in the form of a chiasm: the human skin of the word is the word of human skin, of its orifices and crevices. Halfway between a phenomenology of the life-world and quasi-surrealistic automatic writing, we attempt per impossibile to restore its rights to the living and speaking body, to allow the ear to speak, the eye to smell, and the hands to look – an exercise in synesthesia not devoid of a certain irony. (...) In the process, the rules of writing are rendered as flexible, not to say evanescent, as they were in the beginnings of writing. Thus written language twists and turns against itself and, in accordance with the teachings of the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, becomes a spur for oral, and corporeal communication, rather than simply replacing it. This is why we ask the reader to let himself be carried along by the flow of language, instead of attempting intellectually to recombine the fixed, rigid, clear and distinct units of meaning that serve to transform living speech into an instrument of domination. (shrink)

Resumo: Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir algumas das maneiras como o conceito heideggeriano de “ser para a morte” é decisivo para a tarefa da ontologia fundamental delineada por Heidegger em Ser e tempo. Partindo da assunção de que o tempo é o horizonte da compreensão do ser em geral, o modo originário de doação do ser deverá ser compreendido temporalmente. À medida que a temporalidade do ser-aí é primeiro desentranhada por meio da análise do ser para a morte como (...) sua possibilidade mais própria, não será suficiente o esclarecimento das estruturas da existência na forma de uma estrutura conceitual do tempo; porém, o modo da doação de ser deverá efetivar-se na morte. A tarefa da ontologia fundamental, ou seja, a pergunta por como podemos em geral saber não poderá mais ser resolvida nem na relação do ente finito com o infinito transcendente, nem como manifestação infinita da vontade, mas deverá resolver-se a partir da finitude mais radical.Palavras-chave: Heidegger; temporalidade; ontologia fundamental; ser para a morte. Abstract: This paper aims to discuss some of the ways in which the heideggerian concept of “being towards death” is decisive for the task of the fundamental ontology as proposed by Heidegger in Being and Time. From the assumption that time is the horizon of the understanding of Being in general, the original mode of donation of being must be temporally understood. Insofar as the temporality of Dasein is first revealed through the analysis of being towards death as its ownmost possibility, it should not be enough to clarify the structures of existence in the form of a conceptual structure of time; the mode of donation of Being should be brought about in death. The task of the fundamental ontology, i. e., the question of how we can in general know, cannot be resolved anymore in the relationship between the finite being and the infinite transcendent, nor as infinite manifestation of will, though it should be resolved from the most radical finitude.Keywords: Heidegger; temporality; fundamental ontology; being towards death. (shrink)