The issue of duplicates and duplication in ethnographic collection is frequently regarded as a process that begins and ends in the museum as a fundamental act of the process of curating. In contrast, this article maintains, this practice occurred all along the chain of collecting, where indigenous artefacts operated as items of exchange in the context of the colonial encounter. Using the example of German New Guinea, the article maintains that epistemological concerns, as symbolic currency both in terms of inter-museum (...) exchange and in terms of contributing to individual and institutional prestige, guiding ethnographic intuitions had little influence on colonial resident collectors. Colonial residents, who resented the heavy hand of colonial and museum officials in Berlin, infused duplication with their own desires, which included commercial gain or the conferment of the many German state decorations. The colonized indigenous population benefited from the increasing demand for their material culture, which provided valuable items and bargaining chips in the emerging colonial exchange. Duplicates are identified as doppelgängers to explore the political tensions that emerged in connection with duplication among museum officials and European and indigenous colonial residents. (shrink)

The permanent preservation of objects in global custodianship is a captivating ideal that informs countless museums’ corporate identities and governs collection guidelines as well as politics. Recent research has challenged the alleged perpetuity of collections and collected items, revealing their coherence as fragile and dependent on historically, politically and culturally specific conditions. Duplicates offer an instructive point of entry to explore the idea of collection permanence, museum politics, and the mobility of museum objects. The history of duplicates, moreover, comprises a (...) constellation of practises, concepts and debates that can be found in various forms throughout the intertwined histories of natural-scientific, ethnographic and artistic collections. This history, however, has rarely been questioned or explored. By introducing the issue of duplicates, this paper opens up a discussion that not only connects different forms of collections, but also situates the history of collecting institutions across the disciplinary spectrum within broader political, economic and epistemic frameworks. (shrink)

The Justification of Basic Rights. A Response to Forst This paper responds to Rainer Forst’s article ‘The Justification of Basic Rights’. I argue that Forst's main thesis is difficult to pin down, partly because it is formulated in significantly distinct ways at numerous points. I offer a possible formulation of the argument but note that this encapsulates a fallacy; I further argue that his inference of the basic rights seems to imply an over-moralisation of social life and that his (...) argument does not distinguish rights with discretionary and non-discretionary content. Then I query Forst’s claim that a right to justification is a condition of engaging in justificatory discourse. This leads to the conclusion that what goes into the process of justification, including who figures in the discursive community, are irreducibly political questions, whose answers cannot be convincingly specified antecedently by a form of moral legislation. I argue that actual discursive processes allow for considerably more contingency and contextual variability than Forst’s construction acknowledges. This extends, as I suggest in conclusion, to the idea that content can be specified via the Kantian notion that acceptability requires the ‘containment’ of an actor's ends by another, such as an affected party. (shrink)

What Does it Mean to Justify Basic Rights? Reply to Düwell, Newey, Rummens and Valentini In this paper, I reply to the four comments on my paper ‘The Justification of Basic Rights: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach’ given by Laura Valentini, Marcus Düwell, Stefan Rummens and Glen Newey.

The growing global prominence of Chinese state-owned enterprises brings new dimensions to our understanding of multi-national corporations and human rights issues. This article constructs a three-level framework that enables the mapping of transnational, national, and intra-organizational human rights pressures, and uses this framework to identify and analyze the human rights that Chinese SOEs report concern with. The analysis provided suggests that while China’s most global SOEs are subject to transnational pressures to respect all human rights, such pressures appear outweighed by (...) those encouraging them to concentrate on only some human rights within their national and intra-organizational environment. The article concludes by identifying a number of ways in which our conceptual framework and empirical findings can inform future research. (shrink)

Aristotle's Categories can easily seem to be a statement of a naïve, pre-philosophical ontology, centered around ordinary items. Wolfgang-Rainer Mann argues that the treatise, in fact, presents a revolutionary metaphysical picture, one Aristotle arrives at by (implicitly) criticizing Plato and Plato's strange counterparts, the "Late-Learners" of the Sophist. As Mann shows, the Categories reflects Aristotle's discovery that ordinary items are things (objects with properties). Put most starkly, Mann contends that there were no things before Aristotle. The author's argument consists (...) of two main elements. First, a careful investigation of Plato which aims to make sense of the odd-sounding suggestion that things do not show up as things in his ontology. Secondly, an exposition of the theoretical apparatus Aristotle introduces in the Categories--an exposition which shows how Plato's and the Late-Learners' metaphysical pictures cannot help but seem inadequate in light of that apparatus. In doing so, Mann reveals that Aristotle's conception of things--now so engrained in Western thought as to seem a natural expression of common sense--was really a hard-won philosophical achievement. Clear, subtle, and rigorously argued, The Discovery of Things will reshape our understanding of some of Aristotle's--and Plato's--most basic ideas. (shrink)

Toleration has a rich tradition in Western political philosophy. It is, after all, one of the defining topics of political philosophy—historically pivotal in the development of modern liberalism, prominent in the writings of such canonical figures as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and central to our understanding of the idea of a society in which individuals have the right to live their own lives by their own values, left alone by the state so long as they respect the similar (...) interests of others. -/- Toleration and Its Limits, the latest addition to the NOMOS series, explores the philosophical nuances of the concept of toleration and its scope in contemporary liberal democratic societies. Editors Melissa S. Williams and Jeremy Waldron carefully compiled essays that address the tradition's key historical figures; its role in the development and evolution of Western political theory; its relation to morality, liberalism, and identity; and its limits and dangers. -/- Contributors: Lawrence A. Alexander, Kathryn Abrams, Wendy Brown, Ingrid Creppell, Noah Feldman, Rainer Forst, David Heyd, Glyn Morgan, Glen Newey, Michael A. Rosenthal, Andrew Sabl, Steven D. Smith, and Alex Tuckness. (shrink)

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Unter Rückgriff auf die im Affektsystem von Beginn an verfügbare Semiotik des Ausdrucks verfolgt der Autor die Idee, dass der Affektausdruck des Anderen Organisationskern der kindlichen Persönlichkeit ist und dass die frühen Repräsentationsformen Gesichts- und Lautperzepte sind. Das Kleinkind wird mit einer Fülle von Leitaffekten der elterlichen Projektionen konfrontiert. Diese »emotional scripts« werden bis ins Erwachsenenalter weitergeführt, wie an fünf Fallvignetten von Patienten illustriert wird. Der Autor versucht zu zeigen, dass diese »affektiven Drehbücher« geändert werden können, wenn es gelingt, den (...) sie tragenden Affekt durch einen anderen zu ersetzen. Diese Überlegungen führen zu einer Neufassung des Vorgangs der Spaltung. Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit werden, ausgehend von der Tatsache, dass eine Reihe von Personen eine extreme Reduktion der affektiv-expressiven Motorik in dyadischen Interaktionen aufweisen und dass ihr Verhalten von ihren Interaktionspartnern unbemerkt kopiert wird, Überlegungen angestellt – u.a. unter Rückgriff auf die Konzepte der Desaffektualisierung von Moser, der Beta-Elemente von Bion und der Desobjektalisierung von Green –, wie man dieses Phänomen verstehen kann. Abschließend werden Behandlungsansätze diskutiert. (shrink)

In den sozialwissenschaftlichen und sozialtheoretischen Diskussionen ruckt nach einer langeren Interimszeit wieder zunehmend die Frage nach den Konstitutionsbedingungen des Sozialen, von Sozialitat bzw. sozialen Gebilden in den Vordergrund.

Das kosmologische Denken Eugen Finks verabschiedet sich vom europaischen Verstandnis eines Herrschaftsverhaltnisses des Geistes uber die Natur. Demgegenuber bestimmt Fink im Ruckbezug auf die antike Physis das welthafte Sein des Menschen, sein Wohnen, als eine Existenzweise, die Naturbezug und Dimensionen der Freiheit in sich schliesst. Demzufolge existiert der Mensch als ein Verhaltnis, das sowohl im Einverstandnis mit Elementarvorgangen lebt als auch offen fur seine Selbstgestaltung ist. Die Beitrage klaren diese Neubestimmung des Menschen in der Spannung von Natur und Freiheit und (...) schlagen einen Bogen von Finks fruhem Werk bis hin zu seinen spateren Schriften. (shrink)

When perceiving a face, we can easily decide whether it belongs to a human or non-human primate. It is thought that face information is represented by neurons in the macaque temporal cortex. However, the precise encoding mechanisms used by these neurons remain unclear. Here we use face stimuli of humans, monkeys and monkey-human hybrids (morphs) to gain a better understanding of these mechanisms, in particular of the categorization of faces into different species, and how learning affects representation of these stimuli.

Der bedeutende amerikanische Logiker und Philosoph W.V.O. Quine hat die folgende Frage ins Zentrum seines Schaffens gestellt: "Wie kommen wir von unseren Sinnesdaten zu Theorien über die Welt?“ Bei der Beantwortung dieser Frage tritt ein grundlegendes Problem auf, das damit zusammenhängt, dass uns immer nur ein endlicher Satz an Informationen über die Welt zugänglich ist. Jedes Experiment liefert z. B. nur eine endliche Anzahl von Messpunkten.

Daniel Bell and Wang Pei’s recent monograph, Just Hierarchy, seeks to defend hierarchical relationships against more egalitarian alternatives. This paper addresses their argument, offered in one chapter of the book, in favour of a hierarchical relationship between human and nonhuman animals. This relationship, Bell and Pei argue, should conform to what they call “subordination without cruelty:” it is permissible to subordinate and exploit animals for human ends, provided that we do not treat them cruelly. We focus on three aspects of (...) their view: their argument for a hierarchical view; their understanding of cruelty; and their account of the heightened duties they claim we owe to nonhuman animals who are intelligent, domesticated, and/or “cute.” We argue that the reasons that Bell and Pei offer fail to support their conclusions, and that, even if one accepts a hierarchical view, the conclusions that Bell and Pei draw about the permissibility of practices such as killing animals for food do not follow. We conclude by emphasizing philosophers’ responsibility to thoroughly test their arguments and to engage with existing debates, especially when the practices they seek to justify involve harms of great magnitude. (shrink)

Do individuals accept a moral point of view - if they are completely oriented towards their natural preferences and interests? The present article outlines the context of discussion concerning this question within moral philosophy and the social science. In addition it suggests a game-theoretical model with the help of which the question can be answered positively.

Die Erfahrung eines Konflikts zwischen Forderungen der Moral und kluger Verfolgung des Eigeninteresses ist elementar. In Gefangenen-Dilemma-Situationen hat es für die Beteiligten katastrophale Konsequenzen, wenn alle klug ihr Eigeninteresse verfolgen. Hingegen kann in solchen Situationen jeder unter dem Gesichtspunkt seines Eigeninteresses besser gestellt werden, wenn sich jeder von Forderungen der Moral leiten läßt. Eine Funktion der Moral kann daher sein, die Individuen gerade vor den Fallen der Klugheit zu schützen.

The present volume contains the lectures and papers given at the 1994 international conference on hermeneutics in Halle (Germany). The conference aimed at a state of the art in the light of recent developments in science and humanities. The place in which the conference was held is renowned for its centuries-old tradition in hermeneutics and among the lectures there are indeed some devoted to this history. For the most part, however, the papers concentrate on present-day problems in fields as different (...) as comparative literature, religious studies, bible exegesis, esthetics, social sciences, intercultural dialogue. The theme of the conference, "strangeness and familiarity", reflects the tension in which any interpretation process is situated and that any theory of interpretation has to account for. The contributions to the volume are in German and French. (shrink)

The dissertation has two parts. In Part I, I argue that the method of question and answer, that is, dialectic, had its origins not, as Plato and Aristotle might lead us to expect, with Zeno or Socrates, but with the Sophists of the fifth century. They were at the vanguard of a new rationalism that made matters which tradition had regarded as settled, subjects for debate and inquiry. They were committed to a self-consciously rationalistic conception of the arts that held (...) that expertise is a matter of rationally grounded knowledge and hence teachable. ;Of particular importance, especially in democracies, and central to their educational program was the art of rhetoric, that is, the art of rational deliberation and argumentation. It is as part of the instruction in this art that dialectic first emerges. Dialectic is a method subject to specific rules , it provides for at least two roles , and provides criteria for judging who has won a question-and-answer exchange. ;In Part II, I examine Plato's Protagoras. I focus on two sorts of passages: those where the participants seem to be engaged in such a question-and-answer exchange, and those where they comment on what they are doing. Examination of the text leads to the conclusion that both Socrates and Protagoras proceed as if this method of argumentation were antecedently familiar, and Socrates and Protagoras both ask and answer questions in accord with its rules. Thus the difference between Socrates and the Sophists cannot consist in their relying on essentially different methods of argumentation . ;I end by suggesting that if there is a difference between Socrates and the Sophists, it consists in Socrates making explicit what the Sophists had been relying on, though only imperfectly: a commitment to the avoidance of contradictions. (shrink)

This paper states an analogy between Kant's categories of Pure Reason and the theoretical terms in sciences. The analogy consists in two points, namely the questions: Do the categories have empirical meaning and reference at all? If so, what then is their empirical meaning and reference? With respect to the categories, Kant answers in the Transcendental Deduction, within the Critique of Pure Reason, and he answers in his book Metaphysical grounds of Natural Science. Thesetwo answers are mapped onto a case (...) from the science of social and economic history. An attempt is made to solve the problems of a particular theoretical term of this discipline in the Kantian manner, i.e.: aprioristic and metaphysical. (shrink)

Throughout the Middle Ages, documents commemorating the names of dignitaries and benefactors in monasteries and churches were characterized as liber vitae, just as the heavenly book mentioned in the Bible. Those whose names were inscribed in such a list were promised eternal life through commemoration. The paper discusses material and medial aspects of the mediation of salvation within such documents as well as the shifts between different sorts of bookkeeping arising between the 9th and the 15th century by focusing on (...) writing strategies, document organization, and layout in Carolingian confraternity books, monastic necrologies, and late medieval obituaries or anniversary books from collegiate and parish churches. Their differing structures show how concepts and places of liturgical commemoration changed over the centuries. (shrink)

Die Erfahrung eines Konflikts zwischen Forderungen der Moral und kluger Verfolgung des Eigeninteresses ist elementar. In Gefangenen-Dilemma-Situationen hat es für die Beteiligten katastrophale Konsequenzen, wenn alle klug ihr Eigeninteresse verfolgen. Hingegen kann in solchen Situationen jeder unter dem Gesichtspunkt seines Eigeninteresses besser gestellt werden, wenn sich jeder von Forderungen der Moral leiten läßt. Eine Funktion der Moral kann daher sein, die Individuen gerade vor den Fallen der Klugheit zu schützen.