A vernacular fifteenth-century sermon tells us, in order to warn of the threats to spiritual welfare posed by dance, that cyclic motion and centering of sensory impressions – amongst them intimate conversation – are essential elements of dance. When blending out the parenesis, implicit poetics of medieval dance can be distilled from that sermon. The way how these essential elements of dance are used for generating disruptions within literary plots will be demonstrated in three literary texts dating from the thirteenth (...) to the fifteenth century: Disruptions in connection with dance occur when contrary concepts of motion clash with each other, for example the linearity of the chivalrous way through the Other World with the cyclicity of round dances. ‚Der Württemberger‘, however, collides two contrary concepts of time which can be paraphrased as spatial metaphors, namely the linearity of earthly life which collides with the cyclicity of eternal damnation, a collision symbolized by the expulsion of life out of the dance of the death. Finally in ‚Ritter Sociabilis‘, dance generates a virtual space which subverts the courtly society. The protagonists of all these texts differently manage to resolve disruptions, namely by redemption, by repentance, or by continuing disruptions which they have caused themselves. (shrink)

Jakob Mauvillon machte sich seit den frühen 1770er Jahren als Literaturkritiker, Religionsphilosoph, Militärhistoriker, politischer Ökonom sowie Gesellschafts- und Geschlechtertheoretiker einen Namen. Dabei verbindet er radikalaufklärerische Positionen – wie der Forderung nach der Abschaffung des Adels oder die Beförderung der Amerikanischen und Französischen Revolution – mit traditionellen Überzeugungen zur christlichen Theologie und gar antikatholischen Ressentiments. Der Band rekonstruiert die unterschiedlichen Reflexions- und Handlungsfelder des Aufklärers und versucht sie – im Hinblick auf den Begriff der Radikalaufklärung sowie das aufklärerische Theorie-Praxis-Verhältnis zu synthetisieren. (...) Mit Beiträgen von Sebastian Abel, Kevin Hilliard, Dieter Hüning, Jutta Heinz, Arne Klawitter, Till Kinzel, Stefan Klingner, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Martin Mulsow, Ere Nokkola, Hans-Peter Nowitzki, Michael Schwingenschlögl, Gideon Stiening und Udo Thiel. (shrink)

Integrating the study of human diversity into the human evolutionary sciences requires substantial revision of traditional conceptions of a shared human nature. This process may be made more difficult by entrenched, 'folkbiological' modes of thought. Earlier work by the authors suggests that biologically naive subjects hold an implicit theory according to which some traits are expressions of an animal's inner nature while others are imposed by its environment. In this paper, we report further studies that extend and refine our account (...) of this aspect of folkbiology. We examine biologically naive subjects' judgments about whether traits of an animal are 'innate', 'in its DNA' or 'part of its nature'. Subjects do not understand these three descriptions to be equivalent. Both innate and in its DNA have the connotation that the trait is species-typical. This poses an obstacle to the assimilation of the biology of polymorphic and plastic traits by biologically naive audiences. Researchers themselves may not be immune to the continuing pull of folkbiological modes of thought. (shrink)

Philosophers investigating the interpretation and use of conditional sentences have long been intrigued by the intuitive correspondence between the probability of a conditional `if A, then C' and the conditional probability of C, given A. Attempts to account for this intuition within a general probabilistic theory of belief, meaning and use have been plagued by a danger of trivialization, which has proven to be remarkably recalcitrant and absorbed much of the creative effort in the area. But there is a strategy (...) for avoiding triviality that has been known for almost as long as the triviality results themselves. What is lacking is a straightforward integration of this approach in a larger framework of belief representation and dynamics. This paper discusses some of the issues involved and proposes an account of belief update by conditionalization. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that Helmholtz made a decisive contribution to the first principle of thermodynamics by his Erhaltung der Kraft of 1847 he did not participate actively in the following debates about the nature of heat. Probably he was cautious in some way as he did not yet belong to the community of university physicists. His research concentrated on physiology at that time. On the other hand he was rather influential by his public speeches and his comprehensive reviews (...) on problems of heat even without further publications. Insofar the discussion of Helmholtz's activities on heat of the time before he became chairholder of physics in 1871 will help to understand his special relation to physics in this early period. (shrink)

What is the relationship between music and time? How does musical rhythm express our social experience of time? In Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Mark Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western music of a new way of organising rhythm - groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components which make it work. Drawing on materialist interpretations of art and culture, Mark Abel engages (...) with aesthetic arguments, challenging in particular Adorno's critique of popular music. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Recent examples of rapid evolution under natural selection seem to require that the disciplines of ecology and evolution become better integrated. This inference makes sense only if one’s understanding of these disciplines is based on Hutchinson’s two-speed model of the ecological theater and the evolutionary play. Instead, these disciplines are more accurately viewed as occupying distinct “epistemic niches.” When so understood, we see that rapid evolution under selection, even if it is generally true, does not imply that evolutionary explanations are (...) improved by the inclusion of ecological details. Nor are ecological explanations necessarily improved by the inclusion of information about trait variation, heritability, effective population size, or other standard evolutionary factors. To illustrate, I develop a version of Kitcher’s “gory details” argument to show that, even for some trait that is under strong directional selection, a dynamically sufficient explanation of its ecological relationships should ignore most of the information explaining why that trait is evolving. The wholesale integration of ecology and evolution looks even less appealing when empirical sufficiency, a purely practical requirement, is taken into account. As a way forward, I propose an eco-evo partitioning framework. This strategy enables researchers to estimate the empirical sufficiency of a purely ecological, a purely evolutionary, or a combined eco-evo approach. (shrink)

Mathematical cognition has become an interesting case study for wider theories of cognition. Menary :1–20, 2015) argues that arithmetical cognition not only shows that internalist theories of cognition are wrong, but that it also shows that the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition is right. I examine this argument in more detail, to see if arithmetical cognition can support such conclusions. Specifically, I look at how the use of numerals extends our arithmetical abilities from quantity-related innate systems to systems that can deal (...) with exact numbers of arbitrary size. I then argue that the system underlying our grasp of small numbers is an unhelpful case study for Menary; it doesn’t support an argument for externalism over internalism. The system for large numbers, on the other hand, clearly displays important interactions between public numeral systems and our cognitive processes. I argue that the large number system supports an argument against internalist theories of arithmetical cognition, but that one cannot conclude that the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition is correct. In other words, the large number case doesn’t decide between the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition and the Hypothesis of EMbedded Cognition. (shrink)

Links between musicality and vocal emotion perception skills have only recently emerged as a focus of study. Here we review current evidence for or against such links. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 33 studies that addressed either (a) vocal emotion perception in musicians and nonmusicians, (b) vocal emotion perception in individuals with congenital amusia, (c) the role of individual differences (e.g., musical interests, psychoacoustic abilities), or (d) effects of musical training interventions on both the normal hearing population (...) and cochlear implant users. Overall, the evidence supports a link between musicality and vocal emotion perception abilities. We discuss potential factors moderating the link between emotions and music, and possible directions for future research. (shrink)

In the context of transgender health, most people are not comfortable with allowing a twelve‐year‐old child with gender dysphoria to elect to undergo gender reassignment surgery. The likelihood is too high that the child would be unable to fully comprehend the scope of a decision that carries significant, permanent consequences, particularly because the decision to surgically change gender is based upon a conception of gender that can fluctuate during adolescent years. Conversely, however, most people would not contend that this fluidity (...) is reason to wholly deny certain medical care such as hormonal treatments to transgender youth, a demographic with extremely high rates of violent behavior, self‐harm, and suicide. This paper will explore ethical considerations to this emerging debate of what therapeutic options should be offered to transgender children and adolescents.Pediatric endocrinologists have been treating gender dysphoric adolescents with puberty‐suppressing drugs and, to a lesser extent, with cross‐sex hormone therapies for more than twenty years. Clinicians and thought leaders have mentioned ethical components of this emerging practice in the few cohort studies and clinical review articles about the subject. However, ethics have generally been a secondary consideration in the medical academic literature. In this paper, I will provide a brief overview of the practice, summarize the current research on hormone treatment for transgender minors, and provide an ethical analysis of the practice. (shrink)

This systematic review identified and evaluated instruments measuring patients' perceptions of patient‐centred nursing care. Of 2629 studies reviewed, 12 were eligible for inclusion. Four instruments were reported: The Individualized Care Scale, the Client‐Centred Care Questionnaire, the Oncology patients' Perceptions of the Quality of Nursing Care Scale and the Smoliner scale. These instruments cover themes addressing patient participation and the clinician–patient relationship. Instruments were shown to have satisfactory psychometric properties, although not all were adequately assessed. More research is needed regarding test–retest (...) reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, validity with known groups and structural validity using confirmatory factor analysis. (shrink)

As conservation biology has developed as a distinct discipline from ecology, conservation guidelines based on ecological theory have been largely cast aside in favor of theory-independent decision procedures for designing conservation reserves. I argue that this transition has failed to advance the field toward its aim of preserving biodiversity. The abandonment of island biogeography theory in favor of complementarity-based algorithms is a case in point. In what follows, I consider the four central objections raised against island biogeographic conservation guidelines, arguing (...) that they fail to undermine the credibility of this framework as a conservation tool. At best, these objections call for a more careful application of this framework to conservation problems, not its wholesale abandonment. At the same time, complementarily-based algorithms are biased in favor of networks of small reserves containing non-overlapping species. These conditions threaten to promote inbreeding depression, genetic drift and other factors that increase a population’s risk of extinction. Therefore, recent developments in the field of conservation biology have arguably not contributed to its ultimate aim of preserving the maximum amount of biodiversity in the long run. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to widen the scope of the current debate on peer disagreement by applying it to a kind of case it has hitherto remained silent about – namely, to cases of disagreement in which one of the disagreeing parties bases her opinion on a private religious experience to which the other party has no access. In order to do this, I will introduce a modified version of the notion of peerhood – a version that, in (...) contrast to the one employed in the current debate, can be fruitfully applied to the troublesome kind of case in question. I will then employ this new notion in order to specify the degree of conciliation rationally required from the disagreeing parties in the kind of case in question. (shrink)

A promising recent development in molecular biology involves viewing the genome as a miniecosystem, where genetic elements are compared to organisms and the surrounding cellular and genomic structures are regarded as the local environment. Here we critically evaluate the prospects of Ecological Neutral Theory, a popular model in ecology, as it applies at the genomic level. This assessment requires an overview of the controversy surrounding neutral models in community ecology. In particular, we discuss the limitations of using ENT both as (...) an explanation of community dynamics and as a null hypothesis. We then analyze a case study in which ENT has been applied to genomic data. Our central finding is that genetic elements do not conform to the requirements of ENT once its assumptions and limitations are made explicit. We further compare this genome-level application of ENT to two other, more familiar approaches in genomics that rely on neutral mechanisms: Kimura’s Molecular Neutral Theory and Lynch’s Mutational Hazard Model. Interestingly, this comparison reveals that there are two distinct concepts of neutrality associated with these models which we dub ‘fitness-neutrality’ and ‘competitive neutrality’. This distinction helps to clarify the various roles for neutral models in genomics, for example, in explaining the evolution of genome size. (shrink)

With the widespread use of artificial intelligence, it becomes crucial to provide information about these systems and how they are used. Governments aim to disclose their use of algorithms to establish legitimacy and the EU AI Act mandates forms of transparency for all high-risk and limited-risk systems. Yet, what should the standards for transparency be? What information is needed to show to a wide public that a certain system can be used legitimately and responsibly? I argue that process-based approaches fail (...) to satisfy, as knowledge about the development process is insufficient to predict the properties of the resulting system. Current outcome-based approaches [Mitchell et al., 2019; Loi et al., 2021] are also criticized for a lack of attention to the broader socio-technical system and failure to account for empirical results that show that people care about more than just the outcomes of a process [as reported by Meyerson et al. (Procedural justice and relational theory: Empirical, philosophical, and legal perspectives, Taylor & Francis, 2021)]. Instead, I propose value-based transparency, on which the information we need to provide is what values have been considered in the design and how successful these have been realized in the final system. This can handle the objections to other frameworks, matches with current best practices on the design of responsible AI and provides the public with information on the crucial aspects of a system’s design. (shrink)

“De jure naturae multa fabulamur” — after 450 years, Luther's statement has lost none of its original validity. After a brief pseudo-renaissance following WWII, one now hears far less in legal theory about natural law, which appears finally to have fallen victim to what Weber early in the century characterized as “a progressive decomposition and relativization of all meta-legal axioms” — a destruction resulting partly “from legal rationalism itself,” and partly “from the skepticism which characterizes modern intellectual life generally.” Law (...) today, wrote Weber, “is all too tangibly (in the great majority of its determinations, and especially in many which are particularly important in terms of principle) revealed to be both the product and the technical medium of a compromise of interests,”. (shrink)

Recently several educational theorists have argued for the incorporation of a scepticism of a postmodern kind into educational theory and into educational research more specifically. Their understanding of postmodernism in terms of scepticism harbours much potential, but to avoid confusion and misunderstanding it is of importance that the ‘scepticism’ associated with postmodernism is distinguished from traditional philosophical scepticism, be it as part of the very process of theoretical scrutiny or as a challenge towards its results. In this paper it will (...) be argued that the interest of postmodernist ‘scepticism’ lies not in a quest for ever more certainty but rather in the way it moves beyond both foundationalism and philosophical scepticism. This will be elaborated from the point of view of a Wittgensteinian understanding of theoretical scrutiny (as found in On Certainty). This opens up the possibility of shedding light on postmodernist ‘scepticism’ in educational theory in terms of an aesthetic distance towards what is reflected upon. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the theory of area developed by Euclid in the Elements and its modern reinterpretation in Hilbert’s influential monograph Foundations of Geometry. Particular attention is bestowed upon the role that two specific principles play in these theories, namely the famous common notion 5 and the geometrical proposition known as De Zolt’s postulate. On the one hand, we argue that an adequate elucidation of how these two principles are conceptually related in the theories of Euclid and Hilbert is highly (...) relevant for a better understanding of the respective geometrical practices. On the other hand, we claim that these conceptual relations unveil interesting issues between the two main contemporary approaches to the study of area of plane rectilinear figures, i.e., the geometrical approach consisting in the geometrical theory of equivalence and the metrical approach based on the notion of measure of area. Finally, in an appendix logical relations among equivalence, comparison and addition of magnitudes are examined schematically in an abstract setting. (shrink)

This essay argues that persons not only have nonconceptual bodily self-awareness and nonconceptual mental anonymous self-awareness but also, at least if they produce the expression ‘I’, nonconceptual mental egological self-awareness. It contains information of ‘I’ being produced by oneself. It is argued that this can be seen if we examine the constitution of referential self-consciousness, i.e. the consciousness of being the referent of ‘I’ oneself. The main argument is: A. It is not possible to explain the constitution of referential self-consciousness (...) if it is not assumed that persons have nonconceptual mental egological self-awareness. B. It is possible to explain the constitution of referential self-consciousness if it is assumed that persons have nonconceptual mental egological self-awareness. C. Thus it is reasonable to assume that persons have nonconceptual mental egological self-awareness. The justification of the thesis that persons have nonconceptual mental egological self-awareness is presented while discussing Tomis Kapitan’s analysis of conceptual egological self-consciousness. Conceptual egological self-consciousness contains infor­mation of being a subject oneself. It is argued that it is not possible to explain the constitution of referential self-consciousness with the help of Kapitan’s interpretation of conceptual self-consciousness. However, it is possible to ex­plain the constitution of referential self-consciousness within the framework of Kapitan’s account if it is assumed that persons have nonconceptual mental egological self-awareness. (shrink)

Before engaging with the already intensive and still increasing personal branding activities in many fields of practice, a scholarly approach would call for a more specific definition of the concept of personal branding processes and the resulting human brands. A multi-step analysis of the growing body of literature on personal branding is employed, integrating a framework that covers six key research streams of personal branding, (1) terminology and definition, (2) underlying theories, (3) classes and categories, (4) benefits, (5) antecedents, and (...) (6) key ingredients and applications, complemented by challenges the domain of personal branding has to cope with. The analysis shows that personal branding is an interdisciplinary concern, which is still in its infancy and in which universally valid personal branding frameworks or even theories cannot be identified yet. Personal branding appears as a source for new academic impulses, as it may sensitize scholars to opportunities for intensifying collaboration with practitioners and with other academic domains to enrich and disseminate knowledge in their fields. (shrink)

Starting from the hypothesis that the predominant church, religion and belief in Romania (i.e. the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Orthodox religion and the Orthodox belief) are paradigms that help understand politics, we will highlight in the present article three major aspects of the political phenomenon in post-communist Romania: de-symbolizing the democratic function, institutionalizing “democratism” and manifesting integralism in the public space. Our analysis is based on a communicational approach which postulates the conceptual oppositions as a fundament of understanding. The interpretation (...) of these oppositions has lead us to discovering a series of coherent actions, behaviors, facts, etc., but also a series of incoherent, at some point irrational situations in the relation between the religious and the political spheres. The importance of this article lies in the fact that, once highlighted, these structures allow us to take into consideration the possibility of analyzing the meaning of the relation between the religious and the political spheres. (shrink)

This article explores the arguments for architecture having an identifiable essence equivalent to Heidegger's concept of 'dwelling' and place identity, versus those who claim it is no more than a 'hybrid' collection of many different technical, social and cultural practices. The opposing positions in architecture are compared by analogy with the opposing theories of language which underly them, the latter position being associated with the universalist theory of language propagated by Chomsky, while the purpose of architecture in identity formation is (...) compared with Wittgenstein's theory of the interdependence between language and human behaviour as a 'form of life'. As an example, the author points to colonial architecture as a clear case where people retain 'that part of their identity which is their architecture'. The author concludes that, in so far as objects also have meanings, then the physical environment must also be taken into account in the evolution of mind. (shrink)

Cette contribution resitue tout d’abord le principe d’indulgence ou de charité dans la philosophie analytique et l’herméneutique contemporaines. La version maximaliste de ce principe, qui invite à présupposer comme vrai ce que l’autre tient pour vrai, est critiquée et rectifiée dans le cadre du caractère interprétatif de la compréhension. La critique du principe d’indulgence est défendue par rapport à la fiction davidsonienne d’un interprète omniscient ou d’un herméneute omnipotent. L’article conclut sur la nécessité de saisir la compréhension comme une interprétation (...) et de clarifier les situations d’interprétation. (shrink)

I examine Michael Oakeshott's theory of modes of experience in light of today's evolution debates and argue that in much of our current debate science and religion irrelevantly attack each other or, less commonly but still irrelevantly, seek out support from the other. An analysis of Oakeshott's idea of religion finds links between his early holistic theory of the state, his individualistic account of religious sensibility, and his theory of political, moral, and religious authority. Such analysis shows that a modern (...) individualistic theory of the state need not be barrenly secular and suggests that a religious sensibility need not be translated into an overmastering desire to use state power to pursue moral or spiritual ends in politics. Finally, Oakeshott's vision of a civil conversation, as both a metaphor for Western civilization and as a quasi-ethical ideal, shows us how we might balance the recognition of diverse modal truths, the pursuit of singular religious or philosophic truth, and a free political order. (shrink)