The goal of this study was to explore two accounts for why sketching during learning from text is helpful: sketching acts like other constructive strategies such as self-explanation because it helps learners to identify relevant information and generate inferences; or that in addition to these general effects, sketching has more specific benefits due to the pictorial representation that is constructed. Seventy-three seventh-graders were first taught how to either create sketches or self-explain while studying science texts. During a subsequent learning phase, (...) all students were asked to read an expository text about the greenhouse effect. Finally, they were asked to write down everything they remembered and then answer transfer questions. Strategy quality during learning was assessed as the number of key concepts that had either been sketched or mentioned in the self-explanations. The results showed that at an overall performance level there were only marginal group differences. However, a more in-depth analysis revealed that whereas no group differences emerged for students implementing either strategy poorly, the sketching group clearly outperformed the self-explanation group for students who applied the strategies with higher quality. Furthermore, higher sketching quality was strongly related to better learning outcomes. Thus, the study's results are more in line with the second account: Sketching can have a beneficial effect on learning above and beyond generating written explanations; at least, if well deployed. (shrink)

Im 20. Jahrhundert sind Zweifel an normativ hoch aufgeladenen Unterscheidungen aufgekommen, wie zwischen Mensch und Tier oder zwischen Frau und Mann, und dies hat die Dringlichkeit gesteigert, nicht nur uber bestimmte Unterscheidungen zu streiten, sondern sich auf die Arten und Weisen unseres Unterscheidens selbst zu richten. Unsere Praxis des Unterscheidens lasst sich nicht als ganze uberblicken, sondern nur exemplarisch an bestimmten Unterscheidungsvollzugen reflektieren. Dies geschieht in der vorliegenden Studie am Beispiel der Unterscheidung zwischen Wunsch und Wille. Diese Unterscheidung betrifft unser (...) Selbstverstandnis als Handelnde und sie verweist auf die Erfahrung der Diskrepanz zwischen dem, was wir uns vornehmen und gerne tun wurden, und dem, was wir tatsachlich tun. Das Ziel der exemplarischen Unterscheidungsstudie im ersten Teil wie der methodischen Grundlegung im zweiten Teil liegt darin, einen Grundriss spezifischer, inhaltsgesattigter und systematischer Unterscheidungsforschung zu entwerfen. Votiert wird in Auseinandersetzung mit Platon und Hegel fur eine dynamische Weise dialektischen Unterscheidens. (shrink)

Starting from Kant's striking question 'What is orientation in thinking?', this book argues that the main challenge facing global normative theorising lies in its failure to acknowledge its conceptual inadequacies. We do not know how to reason globally; instead, we tend to apply our domestic political experiences to the global context. Katrin Flikschuh argues that we must develop a form of global reasoning that is sensitive to the variability of contexts: rather than trying to identify a uniquely shareable set (...) of substantive principles, we need to appreciate and understand local reasons for action. Her original and incisive study shows how such reasoning can benefit from the open-ended nature of Kant's systematic but non-dogmatic philosophical thinking, and from reorientation from a domestic to a non-domestic frame of thought. It will appeal to all those interested in global moral issues, as well as to Kant scholars. (shrink)

In view of the numerous accounting and corporate scandals associated with various forms of moral misconduct and the recent financial crisis, economics and business programs are often accused of actively contributing to the amoral decision making of their graduates. It is argued that theories and ideas taught at universities engender moral misbehavior among some managers, as these theories mainly focus on the primacy of profit-maximization and typically neglect the ethical and moral dimensions of decision making. To investigate this criticism, two (...) overlapping effects must be disentangled: the self-selection effect and the treatment effect. Drawing on the concept of moral judgment competence, we empirically examine this question with a sample of 1773 bachelor’s and 501 master’s students. Our results reveal that there is neither a self-selection nor a treatment effect for economics and business studies. Moreover, our results indicate that—regardless of the course of studies—university education in general does not seem to foster students’ moral development. (shrink)

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here, we argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. (...) In a subliminal priming paradigm we show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects. (shrink)

While interdisciplinarity is not a new concept, the political and discursive mobilisation of interdisciplinarity is. Since the 1990s, this movement has intensified, and this has affected central funding bodies so that interdisciplinarity is now a de facto requirement in successful grant application. As a result, the literature is ripe with definitions, taxonomies, discussions and other attempts to grasp and define the concept of interdisciplinarity. In this paper, we explore how strategic demands for interdisciplinarity meet, interact with and change local research (...) practices and results of higher education and research. Our aim is to question and trace the consequences of applying the slippery and difficult term interdisciplinarity in research. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish interdisciplinary research programme, where we observed and analysed practices of writing, publishing, collaboration and educational development in five different research projects. We show how the call for interdisciplinarity was mobilised in a way that rendered the incentives and motives behind the programme unclear. Furthermore, we argue that the absence of clear definitions and assessment criteria produced a dominant, all-inclusive, but vague, configuration of interdisciplinarity that affected the research outcome, and ultimately, promoted and reproduced the existing monodisciplinary research and power structures. (shrink)

Die Diatriben und das Encheiridion des Stoikers Epiktet (spätes 1. bis frühes 2.Jh.n.Chr.) erfreuen sich eines bleibenden Interesses in der Forschung. Dies belegen zahlreiche Einzeluntersuchungen sowie neuere Kommentare und Übersetzungen zu ausgewählten Kapiteln seines Werkes. Als Stoiker weist Epiktet insofern eine Besonderheit auf, als er die theologischen Aspekte in seiner Philosophie besonders betont. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit einem wichtigen Teil der Theologie Epiktets: seiner Gebetslehre. Epiktet integriert in sein Werk Gebetstexte, die er seinen Schülern als Vorbild- und Übungstexte (...) an die Hand gibt, und stellt mehrfach die Wichtigkeit der Gebete innerhalb des täglichen Lebens heraus. Sie sind nach Epiktets Lehre ein zentrales Element der angemessenen stoischen Lebenshaltung. Mit seiner Gebetslehre beeinflusst Epiktet nicht nur Philosophen der Antike, sondern auch frühchristliche Theologen. Um Epiktets Gebetslehre vorzustellen, werden die Gebete Epiktets und seine Aussagen über das Beten in der vorliegenden Arbeit in ihrem jeweiligen Kontext bezüglich Form, Inhalt und Funktionen analysiert und interpretiert. Darüber hinaus wird anhand der Gebetslehren ausgewählter Autoren ein Einblick in die Geschichte des philosophischen Gebets gegeben, um Epiktets Gebetslehre anschließend darin verorten zu können. (shrink)

Rousseau and Nietzsche: Toward an Aesthetic Morality offers a vivid depiction of the problems and potential of modernity through the words of two of its most poignant voices. The book focuses upon the modern self's desire to individuate while facing the ethical responsibility to integrate into the world. Katrin Froese elegantly juxtaposes Nietzsche's drive for extraordinary individualism with Rousseau's call for the dependable citizen, demonstrating that where Nietzsche's aestheticism embraces the limitless and irreconcilable longings of a divided being, Rousseau's (...) approach emphasizes the imposition of limits to ensure that harmony and contentment prevail. Going beyond conventional scholarship, the work emphasizes the similarities at the heart of Rousseau's notion of morality and Nietzsche's aestheticism: the moral vision that underlies Nietzsche's notion of art and the aesthetic understanding prevalent in Rousseau's moral system. This stunning new work of political philosophy will be of great use to scholars of political thought and readers seeking to understand what made Rousseau and Nietzsche's thought so decidedly modern. (shrink)

This paper examines whether adults can adapt to novel accents of their native language that contain unfamiliar context-dependent phonological alternations. In two experiments, French participants listen to short stories read in accented speech. Their knowledge of the accents is then tested in a forced-choice identification task. In Experiment 1, two groups of listeners are exposed to newly created French accents in which certain vowels harmonize or disharmonize, respectively, to the rounding of the preceding vowel. Despite the cross-linguistic predominance of vowel (...) harmony over disharmony, the two groups adapt equally well to both accents, suggesting that this typological difference is not reflected in perceptual learning. Experiment 2 further explores the mechanism underlying this type of phonological learning. Participants are exposed to an accent in which some vowels harmonize and others disharmonize, yielding an increased featural complexity. They adapt less well to this regularity, showing that adaptation to novel accents involves feature-based inferences. (shrink)

In this book Katrin Flikschuh examines the relevance of Kant's political thought to major issues and problems in contemporary political philosophy. She advances and defends two principal claims: that Kant's philosophy of Right endorses the role of metaphysics in political thinking, in contrast to its generally hostile reception in the field today, and that his account of political obligation is cosmopolitan in its inception, assigning priority to the global rather than the domestic context. She shows how Kant's metaphysics of (...) freedom as a shared idea of practical reason underlies the cosmopolitan scope of his theory of justice, and she concludes that despite the revival of 'Kantianism' in contemporary thinking, his account of justice is in many respects very different from dominant approaches in contemporary liberal theory. Her study will be of interest to political philosophers, political theorists, and historians of ideas. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag wird die These vertreten, daß die gegenwärtig herrschende liberal-egalitaristische idealistische Doktrin eine verzerrte Darstellung der liberalen politischen Ethik liefert. Diese idealistisch-theoretische Verzerrung kann erhebliche praktische Konsequenzen haben, insbesondere im Kontext des idealistisch-theoretischen Denkens über die Probleme globaler Gerechtigkeit. Aus einer globalen Perspektive betrachtet sind die idealistisch-theoretischen Verzerrungen der historisch entstandenen liberalen politischen Ethik in zweifacher Hinsicht gegeben. Zum einen überschätzt die liberal-egalitaristische idealistische Doktrin die substanzielle Reichweite der Universalisierungsanforderungen des Kontraktua-lismus. Zum anderen unterschätzt die Doktrin die Bindungen, (...) die liberal teleolo-gische Werte für die Verallgemeinbarkeit bedeuten. Der vorliegende Beitrag unterscheidet zwischen einer deontologischen und einer teleologischen Richtung innerhalb der idealistischen Doktrin. Außerdem werden die historisch erzeugten begrifflichen und substanziellen Bindungen innerhalb jeder der beiden Richtungen benannt, und es wird die These vertreten, daß global denkende liberale Egalitaristen diesen Bindungen ausweichen, a) indem sie die kontraktu-alistische Deontologie mit einer Naturrechts-Deontologie vermengen und b), indem sie die historische materialistische Konzeption eines aus liberaler Perspektive guten Lebens durch eine nicht-materialistische idealistisch-theoretische Variante ersetzen. Der Beitrag schließt mit der Frage, ob solche idealistisch-theoretischen Verzerrungen nicht möglicherweise die Propagierung einer politischen Ethik ermutigen könnten, die zumindest in bestimmter Hinsicht besonders ungeeignet ist, um als ein Modell für das Denken über globale Gerechtigkeit zu dienen. Wenn hier diese Bedenken erhoben werden, so bedeutet das nicht, in Abrede zu stellen, daß eine realistischer konzipierte liberale Ethik durchaus die einzige politisch lebensfähige, für diese Aufgabe verfügbare ist. The paper argues that currently dominant liberal-egalitarian ideal theory offers a distorted account of liberal political morality. These ideal-theoretical distortions may have grave practical consequences especially in the context of ideal-theoretical thinking about issues of global justice. Considered from a global perspective, ideal-theoretical distortions of historically evolved liberal political morality are twofold. First, liberal-egalitarian ideal theory overestimates the substantive reach of contractarianism"s universalisability requirements. Second, it underestimates the constraints upon universalisability imposed by liberal teleological values. The paper distinguishes between a deontological and a teleological strand within ideal theory. It specifies some of the historically engendered conceptual and substantive constraints within each strand and argues that global liberal-egalitarians evade these constraints a.) by conflating contractualist deontology with natural law deontology, and b.) by substituting the historically materialistic conception of the liberal good life with a non-materialistic ideal-theoretical variant. The paper concludes by asking whether such ideal theoretical distortions may not encourage the recommendation of a political morality that is at least in certain respect particularly ill-suited to serve as a model for thinking about global justice. Raising these worries is not to deny, however, that a more realistically conceived liberal morality may well be the only politically viable alternative available to this task. (shrink)

While appreciating Oblak’s call for and investment in more ecological research designs in psychology, I point out several aspects in Oblak’s own experimental setup that might themselves derive ….

Philosophische Analysen zum Verhaltnis von Macht und Gewalt Die Philosophin Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) hat die politische Theorie des 20. Jahrhunderts durch eine folgenreiche begriffliche Unterscheidung nachhaltig herausgefordert. Sie entwickelt in ihren Schriften Vita activa, Uber die Revolution und Macht und Gewalt in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren die These, dass Macht und Gewalt zwei politische Phanomene darstellen, die gegenteilige Ursachen und Effekte haben und darum radikal zu unterscheiden sind. Arendt unterzieht die politische Geschichte der Gegenwart im Lichte des Gegensatzes von (...) Macht und Gewalt einer Relekture und entwickelt ein neues Verstandnis von Revolution und Demokratie, von okonomischer Rationalitat und totaler Herrschaft. Den Ausgangspunkt ihrer politischen Philosophie bildet die Uberzeugung, dass sich der freiheitliche Charakter der Politik daran bemisst, wie weit sie Gewalt in ihren verschiedenen Facetten vermeiden und transformieren kann. Das vorliegende Werk analysiert Arendts politische Philosophie, indem sie die deskriptive und normative Unterscheidung von Macht und Gewalt ins Zentrum ruckt. Der Gegensatz der beiden Konzepte bietet einen Schlussel, um wichtige Aspekte von Arendts politischem Denken zu klaren, die bei Arendt selbst wie auch in der Sekundarliteratur nur ansatzweise ausgefuhrt sind. Dies beinhaltet einerseits die genauere Bestimmung des Konzepts der Macht, verstanden als Ermoglichungsmacht und als Durchsetzungsmacht sowie deren Abgrenzung zu Formen der politischen Gewalt. Andererseits geht es darum, Arendts emphatisches Verstandnis von Macht als Praxis des Anfangens, Teilens und der Teilhabe kritisch nach seinen Grenzen und Ausschlussen zu befragen und zu zeigen, wo sich in Arendts eigener Machttheorie Gewalt implizit einschreibt und wie auf politischer Ebene Macht und Gewalt zusammenwirken konnen. Das Buch bietet eine klare und detaillierte Rekonstruktion von Arendts Verstandnis von Macht und Gewalt und diskutiert dessen aktuelle Bedeutung fur eine politische Theorie demokratischer Praxis. (shrink)

Research on sustainability assurance is still in its beginnings. One of the key questions in this field that also is of the highest practical relevance is concerned with the quality of the assurance process. However, a common understanding of assurance quality and how it should be measured is still missing. We try to close this gap by building on the financial audit literature. We introduce a definition of assurance quality that comprises two key aspects: the depth of the assurance process (...) and the breadth of the assurance statement. Based on prior research, we hypothesize that a firm’s sustainability performance is related to the depth of the assurance process, while the type of the assurance provider, more precisely the affiliation to the accounting profession, is related to the breadth of the assurance statement. Results for a sample of 122 European firms reveal a negative relationship between sustainability performance and assurance process depth as well as between the affiliation to the accounting profession and assurance statement breadth. Thus, we find evidence that poor sustainability performers ask for in-depth assurance services, most likely as a means to enhance their internal sustainability-related processes and systems. Assurance providers that do not belong to the accounting profession in turn are associated with broader assurance statements. (shrink)

This study explores the attitude of German psychiatrists in leading positions towards joint crisis plans and psychiatric advance directives. This topic was examined by contacting 473 medical directors of German psychiatric hospitals and departments. They were asked to complete a questionnaire developed by us. That form contained questions about the incidence and acceptance of joint crisis plans and psychiatric advance directives and previous experiences with them. 108 medical directors of psychiatric hospitals and departments responded . Their answers demonstrate that in (...) their hospitals these documents are rarely used. Among the respondents, joint crisis plans are more accepted than psychiatric advance directives. There is a certain uncertainty when dealing with these instruments. Our main conclusion is that German psychiatry needs an intensified discussion on the use of instruments for patients to constitute procedures for future critical psychiatric events. For this purpose it will be helpful to collect more empirical data. Furthermore, the proposal of joint crisis plans in psychiatric hospitals and departments should be discussed as well as the possibility of consulting an expert during the preparation of a psychiatric advance directive. (shrink)

The current neurosciences contribute to the construction of gender/sex to a high degree. Moreover, the subject of gender/sex differences in cognitive abilities attracts an immense public interest. At the same time, the entanglement of gender and science has been shown in many theoretical and empirical analyses. Although the body of literature is very extensive and differentiated with regards to the dimensions of ‘neuroscience of gender’ and ‘gender in neuroscience’, the feeding back of these findings into the field of neuroscience remains (...) a desideratum. Especially, the question of how gender knowledge, i.e. insights from feminist theory on gender/sex and from gender and science studies on knowledge production, may be integrated and applied within the neurosciences has been strongly neglected. Presumably due to their epistemic culture and epistemological presuppositions, these critical engagements are conceived as externalist by critical scholars and neuroscientists alike. In this context, the question arises of how substantiated gender knowledge may be accounted for in neuroscientific research practice? The article outlines methodological considerations for a critical research agenda in the cognitive neurosciences. I present thoughts on how insights and expertise from gender and science studies can be taken into account in the neuroscientific practice of knowledge production. Starting from the assumption that changes in neuroscientific research practices are possible, my aim is to point out possibilities of integrating gender knowledge into the neurosciences. (shrink)

This article focusses on the social and legal implications that blockchain technology brings about, not only due to its ideological framework, but also, and especially, due to the concept of law it inaugurates. Thus, this article claims, that, by interlocking technological and legal structures, blockchain technology initiates a profound displacement of legal symbolics and imaginaries. It shows how blockchain law, by emancipating itself from three essential dimensions of law—language, territory, and the body—implies a profound disruption of how we perceive law (...) and its legitimacy. Starting with an overview of the technological details of blockchain, the paper then addresses its ideological context and traces the underlying ideas, values and functions and their relation with—and impact on—the general perception of law and legal issues. By critically assessing the claim that blockchain will liberate the subject from any heteronymic constraints, this paper analyses to what extent this technology has social and legal implications that reach far beyond its virtual, purely blockchain-related scope of applications—and why this technology should matter to us all. (shrink)

Welches Verhältnis besteht zwischen Wahrnehmung und Wahrnehmungsurteil? Handelt es sich auf der einen Seite um rein sinnliche Gehalte, welche sprachlich gar nicht ausgedrückt werden können? Oder sind es umgekehrt sprachliche Strukturen, die uns überhaupt erst etwas als etwas erkennen lassen? Beide Positionen verursachen ein Unbehagen.Katrin Nolte ist in dieser historisch weit ausgreifenden und zugleich klar systematisch konzipierten Untersuchung einem althergebrachten philosophischen Dogma auf der Spur, welches beiden Extrempositionen zugrunde liegt. Sie eröffnet mit der Aufgabe dieses Dogmas eine Perspektive, in (...) der sinnliche und sprachliche Gehalte als vermittelbare gedacht werden können, ohne dass ihre gegenseitige Souveränität in Frage gestellt werden muss. (shrink)

This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl to formalize a causal notion (...) of consequence. This notion inserted in premise semantics for counterfactuals in the style of Veltman and Kratzer will provide a new interpretation rule for conditionals. I will illustrate how this approach overcomes problems of previous proposals and end with some remarks on remaining questions. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

In this paper, a pragmatic approach to the phenomenon of free choice permission is proposed. Free choice permission is explained as due to taking the speaker (i) to obey certain Gricean maxims of conversation and (ii) to be competent on the deontic options, i.e. to know the valid obligations and permissions. The approach differs from other pragmatic approaches to free choice permission in giving a formally precise description of the class of inferences that can be derived based on these two (...) assumptions. This formalization builds on work of Halpern and Moses (1984) on the concept of ‘only knowing’, generalized by Hoek et al., (1999, 2000), and Zimmermann’s (2000) approach to competence. (shrink)

In spite of their striking differences with real-life perception, films are perceived and understood without effort. Cognitive film theory attributes this to the system of continuity editing, a system of editing guidelines outlining the effect of different cuts and edits on spectators. A major principle in this framework is the 180° rule, a rule recommendation that, to avoid spectators’ attention to the editing, two edited shots of the same event or action should not be filmed from angles differing in a (...) way that expectations of spatial continuity are strongly violated. In the present study, we used high-density EEG to explore the neural underpinnings of this rule. In particular, our analysis shows that cuts and edits in general elicit early ERP component indicating the registration of syntactic violations as known from language, music, and action processing. However, continuity edits and cuts-across the line differ from each other regarding later components likely to be indicating the differences in spatial remapping as well as in the degree of conscious awareness of one's own perception. Interestingly, a time–frequency analysis of the occipital alpha rhythm did not support the hypothesis that such differences in processing routes are mainly linked to visual attention. On the contrary, our study found specific modulations of the central mu rhythm ERD as an indicator of sensorimotor activity, suggesting that sensorimotor networks might play an important role. We think that these findings shed new light on current discussions about the role of attention and embodied perception in film perception and should be considered when explaining spectators’ different experience of different kinds of cuts. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy’s (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof’s (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

ExcerptIn recent years, there has been a renewed interest in political theology that is not restricted to certain strands of political philosophy but concerns the humanities as a whole. Conferences and collections put to the fore the question of if and how our modern culture is to be understood in terms—however modified or displaced—of political theology.1 Some of the authors pursuing this question try to define new directions, along the lines of Jean-Luc Nancy or Claude Lefort, who present very different (...) and more positive notions of political theology than those that had previously been discussed with respect to Carl Schmitt,…. (shrink)