Bd. 1. Texte zur Diskussion in den USA -- [Bd.] 2. Die Diskussion in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

In their article “Out of nowhere: thought insertion, ownership and context-integration”, Jean-Remy Martin & Elisabeth Pacherie criticize the standard approach to thought insertion. However, their criticism is based on a misunderstanding of what the standard approach actually claims. By clarifying the notions ‘sense of ownership’ and ‘sense of agency’, I show that Martin & Pacherie’s own approach can be construed as a refined version of the standard approach.

Moulages are contact media – images made by contagion in the most literal sense: their production relies on a process in which the object to be reproduced is touched by the reproducing material. In the case of dermatological moulages, the plaster touches the infected skin of the sick and, once dried, serves as the negative form for the waxen image of a disease. Focussing on the collection of the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, the article situates the production of dermatological moulages (...) within the visual culture of 19th-century medicine and raises the question how an ancient technique of image production could become such a prevalent tool for the documentation of skin diseases during a period usually associated with the rise of scientific medicine and a reconsideration of theories of contagion in medical aetiology. (shrink)

This article argues that sociologists have much to gain from a fuller engagement with dystopian literature. This is because (i) the speculation in dystopian literature tends to be more grounded in empirical social reality than in the case of utopian literature, and (ii) the literary conventions of the dystopia more readily illustrate the relationship between the inner life of the individual and the greater whole of social-historical reality. These conventional features mean dystopian literature is especially attuned to how historically-conditioned social (...) forces shape the inner life and personal experience of the individual, and how acts of individuals can, in turn, shape the social structures in which they are situated. In other words, dystopian literature is a potent exercise of what C. Wright Mills famously termed ‘the sociological imagination’. (shrink)

According to the incentives argument, inequalities in material goods are justifiable if they are to the benefit of the worst off members of society. In this paper, I point out what is easily overlooked, namely that inequalities are justifiable only if they are to the overall benefit of the worst off, that is, in terms of both material and social goods. I then address the question how gains in material goods can be weighed against probable losses in social goods. The (...) ultimate criterion, so my idea, is how these gains and losses affect a person's ability to reach her goals in life. Based on the idea that goals in life cannot be taken as given, I conclude that the absolute material gains are negligible compared to the losses of social goods and the disadvantage in the relative position caused by material inequalities. (shrink)

In thought insertion, subjects experience thoughts which they claim not to be their own. What they claim, it is typically said, is that the thought is not theirs in the sense that they are not the agent or author of the thought. But what does it mean to be the agent or author of a thought? The most intuitive idea is that for a thought to be one's own means for the thought to causally originate within the subject. I defend (...) this analysis against rivaling accounts and discuss several challenges that have not been recognized so far. (shrink)

This paper takes a step back from considering expertise as a social phenomenon. One should investigate how people become knowers before assigning expertise to a person’s actions. Using a temporal-sensitive systemic ethnography, a case study shows how undergraduate students form a social system out of necessity as they fabricate knowledge around an empty wording like ‘conscious living’. Tracing the engagement with students and tutor to recursive moments of coaction, I argue that, through the subtleties of bodily movements, people incorporate the (...) actions of others as they become knowers. Knowing for a person solidifies as they imbue concepts, terms, facts, etc. with their own understanding. While coaction refers to the interlocking of actions in a specific moment, the fabrication of knowledge resides in temporally distributed moments of coaction where students deliberately incorporate and build on past occurrences in a present moment. In so doing, people cannot be separated from their systemic embedding. Linking coaction with systemic cognition, people fabricate knowledge within wider systemic structures. Within these boundaries, knowers come to fabricate knowledge for themselves and a wider system. Thus, knowing must be seen as an active, embodied, dialogical and multiscalar activity. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Taking Yanis Varoufakis’s novel Another Now as a case study, this article introduces and makes an argument for a new concept in utopian studies: the postcritical utopia. It begins by making four claims: (1) that Varoufakis has written a utopian socialist novel; (2) that this represents a retrieval of a historical form of literature; (3) that the utopia at its center takes the form of a utopian blueprint; and (4) that two objections to this utopia, posed by one of its (...) main characters, complicate our understanding of Another Now, with implications for how we ought to classify it. It is then argued that Another Now’s combination of a systematic utopian blueprint with insights drawn from the tradition of the critical utopia qualifies it as a postcritical utopia. The latter concept is then considered in the context of utopian studies scholarship. (shrink)

Prisons & Punishment focuses on cross-national perspectives about penal theories and empirical studies. It brings together African, European and North American social philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, legal practitioners, prisoners and abolitionist activists. The contributors reflect on carceral society, most notably in the United States, and on the re-conceptualisation of punishment.

Using Habermas’s latest major work Between Facts and Norms (1996), this paper contrasts his explicit views on jurisprudence in the Occident with implied statements about the native Other. I wish to show that there’s an embedded agonistic (combative) — if not imperial — theme, not only in his theory of communicative competence, but also in his larger project of critical theory.

Three pathologies of alienation have been claimed to refute the philosophical thesis that introspection-based self-ascriptions of mental states are immune to error through misidentification. In this paper, I show that this critique of the Immunity Thesis is misguided; the cases of alienation either are not self-ascriptions or do not involve misidentification. Rather, these cases undermine a widely assumed explanation of immunity, which is based on the idea that self-ascriptions of mental states are identification-free. I argue that, given a certain understanding (...) of the Immunity Thesis, identification-freedom does not explain immunity anyhow, and I offer an alternative explanation, one which posits a tight link between first-personal awareness and ownership of a mental state. (shrink)

Human presencing explores how people’s past encounters with others shape their present actions. In this paper, I present an alternative perspective on human embodiment in which the re-evoking of the absent can be traced to the intricate interplay of bodily dynamics. By situating the phenomenon within distributed, embodied, and dialogic approaches to language and cognition, I am overcoming the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in perceiving and acting upon what is not perceptually present. In a case study, I present strong (...) and weak dimensions of human presencing. In the former, a person uses their body in distinct ways and shapes their immediate ecology to make others present to them. In contrast, in the latter, a person’s past encounter with others powerfully shapes the projections they make onto written digital inscriptions. These findings have implications for how people act in online learning environments and how human activity shapes the machines we use every day. In this way, the paper highlights the complexity of a person as a social being and allows for different approaches to human embodiment in technology. (shrink)

In this essay I describe how my involvement in the political struggles of an immigrant domestic workers' collective inspired me to hang out not only with the workers, but also with the writings of María Lugones and Hannah Arendt. The essay invites the reader to engage in a playful rereading of Arendt's notion of the worldlessness of laboring in the private realm by putting her into dialogue with Lugones's notion of the hangout that defies the public–private split Arendt adamantly insists (...) on in all her writings. By following the complex physical, mental, and emotional itineraries of immigrant domestic workers to, from, and in-between a number of places and spaces, I demonstrate how their stories blur the line between public and private, and therefore also between the unfreedom of the body and the presumed escape into the political public. I describe the women's experiences as the living promise of a world that allows for an embodied fluid movement between labor, work, and the freedom “inherent in action” (Arendt 193, 153). (shrink)

Isidor von Sevilla sammelte in seinen Etymologien um 600 vorhandenes Wissen aus historischen und zeitgenössischen Quellen. Rund 300 Wörter aus dem Arbeitsbereich Textil werden mit Kurzkommentaren erläutert. Ca. 1050 findet sich dieses Wissen überarbeitet im Summarium Heinrici 1. Am Beispiel des Komplexes "Kleidung" liefert der Band neben den Quellen und hervorragenden Übersetzungen zum ersten Mal auch ausführlicheKommentare und Überblicksdarstellungen, die eine Fülle von Informationen bringen. Dazu gehören u. a. neue Erkenntnisse über Herstellung der griechischen, bombycina genannten, Seide oder die Beschreibung (...) der Vielzahl der Purpurfarben von Gelb und Himmelblau bis zum exklusiven Schwarz. (shrink)

Development of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been described completely on a cell‐by‐cell basis. In an invariant pattern five somatic founder cells and the primordial germ cell are generated within the first hour after the onset of cleavage. Using a laser microbeam for manipulation of individual blastomers several aspects of early embryogenesis have been investigated, including the expression of cellular polarity, the localization of lineage‐specific cleavage potential, the necessity for early cell–cell interaction, and the control of differential cell‐cycle timing. The (...) experiments demonstrate the central importance of a correct partitioning of cytoplasmic components during early embryogenesis and suggest a stepwise, binary segregation mechanism associated with the unequal cleavages in the germline. (shrink)

Comparative analysis of nematode development has revealed considerable variations in how the fates of embryonic cells are specified. Such early variations seem enigmatic as they do not influence the resultant structure or performance of the emerging animal. Three different nematode species are used to consider why alternative ways to reach the same goal may have been established during evolution and why early steps of embryogenesis are particularly variable. A scenario is sketched with a shift from late to early cell specification, (...) along with an increase in maternal contribution and developmental tempo and a decrease in regulative potential expressing different developmental strategies. Future studies of larger numbers of species are needed to assess the extent of such variations and to understand more fully the under lying mechanisms, rules and driving forces. BioEssays 23:841–847, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

At the 1969 annual meeting of the American Association for the Ad vancement ofScience, held in Boston on December 27-29, a sequence of symposia on the philosophical foundations of science was organized jointly by Section L of the Association and the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science. Section L is devoted to the history, philos ophy, logic and sociology of science, with broad connotations extended both to 'science' and to 'philosophy'. With collaboration generously extended by other and more specialized (...) Sections of the AAAS, the Section L program took an unusually rich range of topics, and indeed the audiences were large, and the discussions lively. This book, regrettably delayed in publication, contains the major papers from those symposia of 1969. In addition, it contains the distin guished George Sarton Memorial Lecture of that meeting, 'Boltzmann, Monocycles and Mechanical Explanation' by Martin J. Klein. Some additions and omissions should be noted: In Part 1, dedicated to the 450th anniversary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, we have been una bie to include a contrihution by Elmer Belt who was prevented by storms from participating. In Part II, on physics and the explanation of life, we were unable to persuade Isaac Asimov to overcome his modesty about the historical remarks he made under the title 'Arrhenius Revisited'. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate a number of public intellectual debates in current Thai Theravada Buddhism that are related to several fundamental questions regarding the meaning and function of the Pali canon. The focal point of this investigation will be debates in which the Thai scholar monk Phra Payutto (b. 1939) has been playing a significant role. In these debates, the Pali canon is regarded as a central text endowed with special normative and formative authority. I will look at contestations (...) that concern Theravada-ness and, at the same time, and inextricably linked with this, at concepts of demarcation to systems of religious beliefs and practices that are believed to be ‘outside’ Theravada. This, of course, engages the question of inclusivism, exclusivism and pluralism within Theravada. In so doing, I explore and posit concepts on the meanings and functions of the Pali canon that position it either as the or an authoritative reference. (shrink)

James Pryor distinguishes two varieties of error through misidentification, de re misidentification and which-object misidentification, and two corresponding varieties of immunity to error through misidentification. This paper examines the relation between de re and which-object misidentification. I argue that the most natural reading of which-object misidentification, according to which the two kinds of error are mutually exclusive, is in tension with Pryor’s claim that immunity to which-object misidentification implies immunity to de re misidentification. To resolve the tension, Pryor should construe (...) which-object misidentification more broadly, as encompassing de re misidentification. (shrink)

This paper examines a paradigm case of allegedly successful reductive explanation, viz. the explanation of the fact that water boils at 100°C based on facts about H2O. The case figures prominently in Joseph Levine’s explanatory gap argument against physicalism. The paper studies the way the argument evolved in the writings of Levine, focusing especially on the question how the reductive explanation of boiling water figures in the argument. It will turn out that there are two versions of the explanatory gap (...) argument to be found in Levine’s writings. The earlier version relies heavily on conceptual analysis and construes reductive explanation as a process of deduction. The later version makes do without conceptual analysis and understands reductive explanations as based on theoretic reductions that are justified by explanatory power. Along the way will be shown that the bridge principles — which are being neglected in the explanatory gap literature — play a crucial role in the explanatory gap argument. (shrink)

This volume provides new sources of knowledge based on Michael Otte’s fundamental insight that understanding the problems of mathematics education – how to teach, how to learn, how to communicate, how to do, and how to represent ...