Critical phenomenology and the study of politics -- Beyond possessive individualism -- Political philosophy today -- Habermas and rationality -- Rethinking the political: some Heideggerian contributions -- Cross-cultural theory -- Beyond monologue: for a comparative political theory -- Conversation across boundaries: e pluribus unum? -- Modes of cross-cultural encounter: reflections on 1492 -- Political self-rule: Gandhi and the future of democracy -- Global governance and cultural diversity: toward a cosmopolitan democracy -- Cosmopolitanism: in search of cosmos -- Mindfulness and cosmopolis: (...) why cross-cultural studies now? -- An interview with Fred Dallmayr (questions from Farah Godrej). (shrink)

What follows shall provide an introduction to a predominantly philosophical and polemical, but historically revealing, paper on the foundations of the theory of probability. The leading Russian probabilist Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin wrote the paper in the late 1930s, commenting on a slightly older, but still competing approach to probability theory by Richard von Mises. Together with the even more influential Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov, who was nine years his junior, Khinchin had revolutionized probability theory around 1930 by introducing the modern measure-theoretic (...) approach, which is still standard today and which allowed for a sufficiently general treatment of important new notions such as “stochastic processes.” This development had its first culmination in Kolmogorov's booklet, Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, written in German in 1933, which has exerted an enormous influence world wide. (shrink)

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. Aimed at linguists, computer scientists, and logicians with an interest in the computation of meaning, this book focuses on two main topics in recent research in computational semantics. The first topic is the definition and use of underspecified semantic representations, i.e. formal structures that represent part of the meaning of a linguistic object while leaving other parts unspecified. The (...) second topic discussed is semantic annotation. Annotated corpora have become an indispensable resource both for linguists and for developers of language and speech technology, especially when used in combination with machine learning methods. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy. This book discusses the development and application of such methodologies. (shrink)

The semantics of anaphoric pronouns or _relativa grammaticalia_ played an important role in the treatises of both grammarians and logicians in the middle ages. However only very recently has the theme again received comparable attention in transformational grammar and the analytic school of linguistic philosophy under the influence of Geach. Here philosophers of language take particular interest in the question of how far these expressions can be seen as colloquial counterparts of the bound variables known from predicate logic. This work (...) shows that scholastic theories of _suppositio relativorum_ underwent a development in the 14th century and that the theories which gradually emerged anticipated in important ways the insights of recent linguistic philosophy. This thesis is illustrated by editions of selected texts of the logicians of the new continental universities of Vienna and Prague of the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries and make it clear that the often asserted decline of scholasticism had not yet set in in the period after Ockham and Buridan. (shrink)

Measurement instruments assessing multiple emotions during epistemic activities are largely lacking. We describe the construction and validation of the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales, which measure surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration, and boredom occurring during epistemic cognitive activities. The instrument was tested in a multinational study of emotions during learning from conflicting texts. The findings document the reliability, internal validity, and external validity of the instrument. A seven-factor model best fit the data, suggesting that epistemically-related emotions should be conceptualised in terms (...) of discrete emotion categories, and the scales showed metric invariance across the North American and German samples. Furthermore, emotion scores changed over time as a function of conflicting task information and related significantly to perceived task value and use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. (shrink)

_Heidegger's Hidden Sources_ documents for the first time Heidegger's remarkable debt to East Asian philosophy. In this groundbreaking study, Reinhard May shows conclusively that Martin Heidegger borrowed some of the major ideas of his philosophy - on occasion almost word for word - from German translations of Chinese Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics. The discovery of this astonishing appropriation of non-Western sources will have important consequences for future interpretations of Heidegger's work. Moreover, it shows Heidegger as a pioneer of (...) comparative philosophy and transcultural thinking. (shrink)

Democracy purged of all its Disadvantages. « Encoded at the level of its lexicology and logical constructedness, the republican discourse of the enlightenment and revolution is marked by two conceptualizations which contradict and mutually exclude each other. Contemporary observers of the revolution or those close to its events speak about an opposition between an order of egotism and an order of equality, between a principle of utility and a principle of ascetism, between an ethics based on personal interest and an (...) ethics based on the national interest, between a kind of individualism and a kind of socialism, etc. Because it has excluded physiocratic thinking from its domain, the traditional historio-graphy of political ideas has obstructed an unbiased view to the context which engenders conceptualizations of an alternative Republicanism vis-a-vis that of Rousseau, while at the same time utilizing Rousseaus formulas ». (shrink)

This lucid essay takes the reader on a fascinating journey of discovery through the cultures of the present and past, revealing the origins of loneliness, its changing meaning and the challenge it poses. The essay’s discourse, which is critical of the present in places, makes it clear that our society has largely brought about its own prevailing problems with loneliness. There is no escaping loneliness: We must learn to master it again and make it useful to us. This is only (...) possible if we accept it as a central part of our existence and practise using it. A look at the loneliness skills of past generations can help us to do this. (shrink)

Sustainable development (SD) – that is, “Development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs and aspirations” – can be pursued in many different ways. Stakeholder relations management (SRM) is one such way, through which corporations are confronted with economic, social, and environmental stakeholder claims. This paper lays the groundwork for an empirical analysis of the question of how far SD can be achieved through SRM. It describes the so-called SD–SRM (...) perspective as a distinctive research approach and shows how it relates to the wider body of stakeholder theory. Next, the concept of SD is operationalized for the microeconomic level with reference to important documents. Based on the ensuing SD framework, it is shown how SD and SRM relate to each other, and how the two concepts relate to other popular concepts such as Corporate Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. The paper concludes that the significance of societal guiding models such as SD and of management approaches like CSR is strongly dependent on their footing in society. (shrink)

Force, Fate, and Freedom serves as an introduction to historical sociology, as well as a critical analysis of the belief in economic and political progress through social knowledge. Reinhard Bendix offers a development of the historicist approach to social change first championed by Max Weber, and presents an overview of the foundations of political authority in Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and England.

The Studiengruppe für Systemforschung was dissolved in 1974. Several members of the group moved to the Research Centre Karlsruhe. There, despite their new institutional surroundings, they remained faithful to the Studiengruppe’s conceptual foundations, and developed a new Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis. This has since become the leading technology assessment group in Germany.

Uniformities describing the distinguishability of states and of observables are discussed in the context of general statistical theories and are shown to be related to distinguished subspaces of continuous observables and states, respectively. The usual formalism of quantum mechanics contains no such physical uniformity for states. Using recently developed tools of quantum harmonic analysis, a natural one-to-one correspondence between continuous subspaces of nonrelativistic quantum and classical mechanics is established, thus exhibiting a close interrelation between physical uniformities for quantum states and (...) compactifications of phase space. General properties of the completions of the quantum state space with respect to these uniformities are discussed. (shrink)

Grafting embryonic brain tissue into the brain of patients with visual field loss due to cerebral lesions may become a method to restore visual function. This method is not without risk, however, and will only be considered in cases of complete blindness after bilateral occipital lesions, when other, risk-free neuropsychological methods fail.