"Spolien – intentional wiederverwendete Bauglieder – referenzieren auf etwas nicht mehr Vorhandenes und machen dieses zugleich materiell präsent. Als einstiger Teil des Ab- wesenden verweisen sie im neuen Kontext zurück auf ihre Herkunftsobjekte. Sie verkörpern abstrakte Konzepte, Autorisierung und Authentisierung. In den präsentierten Bei- spielen werden verschiedene Ähnlichkeitsbezüge zum Herkunftsmonument diskutiert, die von formalen Referenzen über die exzessive Verkörperung zur formlosen Verarbeitung des Materials in einer neuer Oberfläche reichen. Spoils – intentionally reused architectural fragments – refer to something that no (...) longer exists and re-present it materially. As a former part of the absent, they refer back to their original objects in their new context. They embody abstract concepts, authorization and authentication. In the examples presented, different ways of referring to the original monuments are discussed, ranging from formal references to excessive embodiment and complete loss of shape. ". (shrink)

Felix Kaufmanns Wissenschaftstheorie Hans-Georg Zilian. X KAUFMANN, DIE ÖKONOMEN UND DAS A PRIORI Bei den österreichischen Grenznutzentheoretikern, mit deren Arbeiten sich Kaufmann vor allem auseinandersetzte, ist von ...

For centuries, the ancient Chinese philosophical text the _Daodejing (Tao Te Ching)_ has fascinated and frustrated its readers. While it offers a wealth of rich philosophical insights concerning the cultivation of one's body and attaining one's proper place within nature and the cosmos, its teachings and structure can be enigmatic and obscure. Hans-Georg Moeller presents a clear and coherent description and analysis of this vaguely understood Chinese classic. He explores the recurring images and ideas that shape the work and (...) offers a variety of useful approaches to understanding and appreciating this canonical text. Moeller expounds on the core philosophical issues addressed in the _Daodejing_, clarifying such crucial concepts as Yin and Yang and Dao and De. He explains its teachings on a variety of subjects, including sexuality, ethics, desire, cosmology, human nature, the emotions, time, death, and the death penalty. The _Daodejing_ also offers a distinctive ideal of social order and political leadership and presents a philosophy of war and peace. An illuminating exploration, The _Daodejing_ is an interesting foil to the philosophical outlook of Western humanism and contains surprising parallels between its teachings and nontraditional contemporary philosophies. (shrink)

Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was a German sociologist and system theorist who wrote on law, economics, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. Luhmann advocated a radical constructivism and antihumanism, or "grand theory," to explain society within a universal theoretical framework. Nevertheless, despite being an iconoclast, Luhmann is viewed as a political conservative. Hans-Georg Moeller challenges this legacy, repositioning Luhmann as an explosive thinker critical of Western humanism. Moeller focuses on Luhmann's shift from philosophy to theory, which introduced new (...) perspectives on the contemporary world. For centuries, the task of philosophy meant transforming contingency into necessity, in the sense that philosophy enabled an understanding of the necessity of everything that appeared contingent. Luhmann pursued the opposite--the transformation of necessity into contingency. Boldly breaking with the heritage of Western thought, Luhmann denied the central role of humans in social theory, particularly the possibility of autonomous agency. In this way, after Copernicus's cosmological, Darwin's biological, and Freud's psychological deconstructions of anthropocentrism, he added a sociological "fourth insult" to human vanity. A theoretical shift toward complex system-environment relations helped Luhmann "accidentally" solve one of Western philosophy's primary problems: mind-body dualism. By pulling communication into the mix, Luhmann rendered the Platonic dualist heritage obsolete. Moeller's clarity opens such formulations to general understanding and directly relates Luhmannian theory to contemporary social issues. He also captures for the first time a Luhmannian attitude toward society and life, defined through the cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity. (shrink)

Following the cart meeting of June 13, in which it was agreed that McCarthy would buy the cart project a TV transmitter if I could demonstrate my ability to do work on vision by writing a program which extracted three dimensional information from a motion stereo sequence of pictures, I began work on this task. So that there would be no doubt as to who had done the work, and because I operate most comfortably and effectively in a programming environment (...) made to my own tastes, the first order of business was the writing of a set of graphics and picture utility routines. The resulting package provides more flexibility than Quam's III buffer based routines, and is more cohesive than Baumgart's set, which is spread out among several programs. Currently the package accesses Data Disc displays only, in future it will be extended to provide output to the XGP and maybe the III's. As an example of increased capabilities, it allows display of filled in polygons, and permits displays to be shrunk or expanded arbitrarily merely by changing the declared dimensions of the screen or the requested sizes of the individual parts. Also, selected areas of the display may be erased or complemented, as well as added to. The programs described below use no previously existing software other than the FAIL and SAIL compilers and the operating system. (shrink)

The idea of distinct brain systems for the processing of episodic and other forms of memory is welcome. The two brain systems actually proposed however, appear to be stripped of further existing connections and could be integrated with one another. If integrating them, it seems more logical to propose one enlarged system of limbic structures whose individual components make partly different contributions to the forms of memory under discussion.

Excerpt from The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas Several methods may be used in attempting a comprehensive state ment of the philosophy of a great thinker, but frequently no one method alone Will enable us to grasp the essence of his system. Sev eral methods must be used to Obtain a comprehensive knowledge of an extensive and important philosophical system. Because Of the receptive character Of Scholasticism, especially in the thirteenth cen tury, and because of its high regard for tradition (...) and authority, we shall consider the thinkers and philosophical movements to which St. Thomas was indebted. But this method is by no means the only one or the most important. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

. Standard considerations of philosophy of science are reformulated in psychological terms and arguments, suggesting a fundamental change in life perspective: subjective experiences or introspective data are subject to motivational biases and therefore not admitted as objective empirical facts in science, However, we never experience objects or events of the external world, i.e., so called objective facts, but exclusively subjective percepts or mental events. They are merely assumed to, but may or may not be accurate or distorted mental representations of (...) objects or events of an external world. Accordingly, the latter are theoretical constructs, i.e., constructs of the fictitious but most successful predictive (implicit) theory, called external world, which seems to be constructed from regularities observed in mental events and serves as a reference fiction for, erroneously called empirical, tests of predictions of scientific theories. (shrink)

Donald Davidson has shocked his readers by arguing that assertion is not a conventional activity, thus attacking what was taken to be a truism by most philosophers of language. The paper claims that Davidson's argument is seriously flawed by his failure to distinguish a number of questions which should be kept separate. Assertion is a matter of seriousness, not of sincerity; departures from seriousness are marked by techniques which are undeniably conventional. There are no parallel indicators of seriousness, i. e. (...) there is no assertion-sign. But this necessary absence of a conventional marker of seriousness from our communicative repertoire does not imply that the activity of asserting is not conventional. Assertion differs in important ways from eating or walking; it is these differences which have led Searle, Lewis, EHimmett and countless others to conceive of language as essentially conventional'. The paper argues that Davidson'snaturalistic challenge illuminates the (non-existing) role of the assertion-sign, while failing to undermine the credentials of the 'truism'. (shrink)