Ursula Coope presents a ground-breaking study of the philosophy of the Neoplatonists. She explores their understanding of freedom and responsibility: an entity is free to the extent that it is wholly in control of itself, self-determining, self-constituting, and self-knowing - which only a non-bodily thing can be.

Nineteen newly-transliterated letters between Ferdinand Christian Baur and his friend Ludwig Friedrich Heyd are presented. Seventeen of them were written by Baur, and two by Heyd in the period between 10th February 1836 and 16th January 1842. A further sixteen earlier letters were already published by Carl Egbert Hester in 1993. The correspondence between the two close friends cover a broad range of subjects, predominantly historical, as well as family, scientific, political themes and particularly university politics. The key personal topic (...) is the death of Baur’s wife in 1839 and the consequences of this for their children. The scientific themes concern firstly Baur’s efforts to assist Heyd in his research into the history of Württemberg, and to promote these works to publishers. Secondly, the letters document the reaction of the two to David Friedrich Strauß’s work “Das Leben Jesu”, and how their views changed during this correspondence. The central political themes of the letters relate primarily to appointments within Tübingen University, and in particular to previously unknown attacks on Baur’s own position there. Further discussions concern two politically arranged festivals; the Buchhändlerfest of 1840, and the 25th coronation anniversary of King Wilhelm I. of Württemberg in 1841, at which Baur gave a courageous speech on the political situation in Württemberg. Of particular interest in the letters previously transliterated by Hester are two topics, firstly the “Polish Petition” regarding the political situation in Poland in the 1830s, and secondly regarding the constitution of Tübingen University. To better understand the significance of these private letters and their openness, a short biography of Heyd is included. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper, I ask why Aristotle thinks that ethical virtue (rather than mere self-control) is required for practical wisdom. I argue that a satisfactory answer will need to explain why being prone to bad appetites implies a failing of the rational part of the soul. I go on to claim that the self-controlled person does suffer from such a rational failing: a failure to take a specifically rational kind of pleasure in fine action. However, this still leaves a (...) problem: could there not be someone who (unlike the self-controlled person) took the right kind of pleasure in fine action, but who failed to be virtuous on account of bad appetites? If so, would such a person be practically wise but not virtuous? I end with some suggestions about how Aristotle might answer this. (shrink)

Aesthetic emotions are elicited by different sensory impressions generated by music, visual arts, literature, theater, film, or nature scenes. Recently, the AESTHEMOS scale has been developed to facilitate the empirical assessment of such emotions. In this article we report a semantic profile analysis of aesthetic emotion terms that had been used for the development of this scale, using the GRID approach. This method consists of obtaining ratings of emotion terms on a set of meaning facets which represent five components of (...) the emotion process. The aims here were to determine the dimensionality of the GRID features when applied to aesthetic emotions and compare it to published results for emotion terms in general, and to examine the internal organization of the domain of aesthetic emotion terms in order to identify salient clusters of these items based on the similarity of their feature profiles on the GRID. Exploratory Principal Component Analyses suggest a four-dimensional structure of the semantic space consisting of valence, power, arousal, and novelty, converging with earlier GRID studies on large sets of standard emotion terms. Using cluster analyses, 15 clusters of aesthetic emotion terms with similar GRID feature profiles were identified, revealing the internal organization of the aesthetic emotion terms domain and meaningful subgroups of aesthetic emotions. While replication for further languages is required, these findings provide a solid basis for further research and methodological development in the realm of aesthetic emotions. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Account of Change in Physics III.1–3 Some Problems for This Account of Change Notes Bibliography.

For many of us, the great scientific discoveries of the modern age--the Big Bang, evolution, quantum physics, relativity--point to an existence that is bleak, devoid of meaning, pointless. But in The Sacred Depths of Nature, eminent biologist Ursula Goodenough shows us that the scientific world view need not be a source of despair. Indeed, it can be a wellspring of solace and hope. This eloquent volume reconciles the modern scientific understanding of reality with our timeless spiritual yearnings for reverence (...) and continuity. Looking at topics such as evolution, emotions, sexuality, and death, Goodenough writes with rich, uncluttered detail about the workings of nature in general and of living creatures in particular. Her luminous clarity makes it possible for even non-scientists to appreciate that the origins of life and the universe are no less meaningful because of our increasingly scientific understanding of them. At the end of each chapter, Goodenough's spiritual reflections respond to the complexity of nature with vibrant emotional intensity and a sense of reverent wonder. A beautifully written celebration of molecular biology with meditations on the spiritual and religious meaning that can be found at the heart of science, this volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing dialog between science and religion. This book will engage anyone who was ever mesmerized--or terrified--by the mysteries of existence. (shrink)

This paper examines Aquinas’ account of a certain kind of rational control: the control one exercises in using one’s reason to make a judgment. Though this control is not itself a kind of voluntary control, it is a precondition for voluntariness. Aquinas claims that one’s voluntary actions must spring from judgments that are subject to one’s rational control and that, because of this, only rational animals can act voluntarily. This rational kind of control depends on a certain distinctive feature of (...) the rational faculty. For Aquinas, reason differs from other faculties in that it can be exercised in a peculiarly self-reflective way: in exercising reason one can be grasping the point of what one is doing in that very exercise of reason. The sense in which one controls one’s rational judgment is that one is, in judging, guided by the norm of judging truly. Aquinas holds that it is only possible to be so guided because the power by which one judges (namely, reason) is self-reflective in this special sense: part of what it is to judge is to grasp the point of what one is doing in that very act of judging. The paper argues that the roots of this view can be found in neoplatonic discussions of self-constitution and self-knowledge. (shrink)

Der vierbändige Titel Die Welt der Philosophin liefert eine anschauliche Darstellung vom Leben einzelnen Philosophinnen, die als Repräsentantinnen ihrer Zeit zu sehen sind. Mit Auszügen aus ihren Texten (zum Teil erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung), ausführlichen Einführungen in die historische Epoche mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Lage der Frauen und einer ausführlichen Biografie bieten die Bände spannenden Einblicke in das Leben von Philosophinnen. The four-volume title The World of the Female Philosopher provides a vivid account of the lives of individual female philosophers (...) who are to be seen as representatives of their times. With excerpts from their texts (some of them in German translation for the first time), detailed introductions to the historical epoch with special attention to the situation of women and a detailed biography, the volumes offer exciting insights into the lives of women philosophers. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 51 Heft: 1 Seiten: 141-192.

Plato's concept of education raises the question of the conditions under which the epistemic quest and a change in the attitude of the soul actually correlate. The Platonic motifs of self-care and a good life, soul therapy and shame lead, as this study shows, to a self-reflective movement of knowledge, which has an orienting effect in view of the good and a mediating and ordering effect regarding the soul-body relationship. This work contours the dynamics of learning processes on specific, and (...) figurative, forms of representation and on transitions of knowledge. Plato's anchoring of his educational concept in a philosophical anthropology and his transformation of rhetoric and poetics become manifest through the figure of Eros in the ‘Phaedrus’. (shrink)

People generally agree that there is something valuable about thinking for oneself rather than simply accepting beliefs on authority, but it is not at all obvious why this is valuable. This paper discusses two ancient responses, both inspired by the example of Socrates. Cicero claims that thinking for yourself gives you freedom. Olympiodorus argues that thinking for yourself makes it possible to achieve understanding, and that understanding is valuable because it gives you a certain kind of independence. The paper asks (...) how insights from these thinkers might bear on a question about the role of experts in a democracy. As citizens, we make judgements about many matters that fall within the domain of some expertise. Should thinking for oneself play an important role in such cases, or must the responsible citizen simply defer to expert authority? -/- . (shrink)

How does one talk about moral thought and moral action as a religious naturalist? We explore this question by considering two human capacities: the capacity for mindfulness, and the capacity for virtue. We suggest that mindfulness is deeply enhanced by an understanding of the scientific worldview and that the four cardinal virtues—courage, fairmindedness, humaneness, and reverence—are rendered coherent by mindful reflection. We focus on the concept of mindful reverence and propose that the mindful reverence elicited by the evolutionary narrative is (...) at the heart of religious naturalism. Religious education, we suggest, entails the cultivation of mindful virtue, in ourselves and in our children. (shrink)

Die Aufklärung ist gerade auf ihrem Höhepunkt, als Johanna Charlotte Unzer in der Männer dominierten Gelehrtenwelt von sich reden macht. Sie interessiert sich für Philosophie, diskutiert mit und will verstehen, was Metaphysik bedeutet. Aber sie darf sich nicht ganz den Wissenschaften verschreiben. Für die Gesellschaft ist Johanna Charlotte in erster Linie Frau. Und das bedeutet, dass sie im Hintergrund bleiben, ihrem Mann eine gute Ehefrau und ihren Kindern eine gute Mutter sein muss. Die Autorin Ursula I. Meyer zeigt im (...) neuen Band der Reihe PhilosophinnenLeben das Spannungsfeld zwischen gelehrtem Anspruch und bürgerlicher Frauenrolle. Johanna Charlotte gibt zwar die Wissenschaften auf, zieht sich aber nicht ins Privatleben zurück. Mit der Veröffentlichung ihrer Gedichte hält sie sich ein Hintertürchen offen. Und sie behandelt auch darin wissenschaftliche Themen, spöttelt über den Metaphysicus oder setzt den Unterschied zwischen einer Uhr und einem Frauenzimmer poetisch um. (shrink)

This article presents a critique of an article previously featured in Nursing Philosophy by Ursula Naue and Thilo Kroll, who suggested that people living with dementia are assigned a negative status upon receipt of a diagnosis, holding the identity of the ‘demented other’. Specifically, in this critique, we suggest that unwitting use of the adjective ‘demented’ to define a person living with the condition is ill‐informed and runs a risk of defining people through negative attributes, which has a deleterious (...) impact upon that person's social and relational personae. Moreover, use of the locution ‘demented’ reinforces a divide between the ‘demented’ and the ‘healthy others’ . Social constructionist theory, malignant positioning and viewing people with dementia as semiotic subjects are the philosophical pillars through which we construct the main arguments of the critique. The article concludes with the voice of one of the authors, a younger person with dementia, asking for language in dementia care to be carefully reconsidered and reframed and for the recognition of the diagnosed person's agency in the conduct of their day‐to‐day lives. (shrink)

Models of dream analysis either assume a continuum of waking and dreaming or the existence of two dissociated realities. Both approaches rely on different methodology. Whereas continuity models are based on content analysis, discontinuity models use a structural approach. In our study, we applied both methods to test specific hypotheses about continuity or discontinuity. We contrasted dream reports of congenitally deaf-mute and congenitally paraplegic individuals with those of non-handicapped controls. Continuity theory would predict that either the deficit itself or compensatory (...) experiences would surface in the dream narrative. We found that dream form and content of sensorially limited persons was indifferent from those of non-handicapped controls. Surprisingly, perceptual representations, even of modalities not experienced during waking, were quite common in the dream reports of our handicapped subjects. Results are discussed with respect to feedforward mechanisms and protoconsciousness theory of dreaming. (shrink)

In this article we present a training program based on the empirical research conducted in the project 'argumentational integrity'. After a brief sketch of the problem dimensions concerning unfair argumentation we give an overview of the training concept and the underlying empirical research. Exemplification of the instructional design is given for the second and the fifth training dimension (standards of argumentational integrity and reactions to unfair contributions). Finally we indicate how the training is to be evaluated and present initial results (...) demonstrating that in comparison with an untrained control group participants in the training significantly improve their skills in identifying and naming argumentative rule violations. (shrink)

The ArgumentMost historians of science share the conviction that the incorporation of the corpuscular theory into seventeenth-century chemistry was the beginning of modern chemistry. My thesis in this paper is that modern chemisty started with the concept of the chemicl compound, which emerged at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, without any signifivant influence of the corpuscular theory. Rather the historical reconstruction of the emergence of this concept shows that it resulted from the reflection (...) on the chemical operations in the sixteenth-century metallurgy and seventeenth-century pharmacy. I argue that the reversibility of these operations and their understanding as crafts (metallurgy) or chemical arts (pharmacy) were decisive factors for the emergence of the first ideas about chemical compounds in the seventeenth-century pharmaceutical works written by pharmaceutically trained authors, influenced by the Paracelsian image of nature. There is a direct line of descent from these authors to E.F.Geoffroy (1675–1742), who integrated the first scattered ideas of chemical compound into a general concept comprising chemical artefacts as well as natural bodies. (shrink)

Elise v. Bernstorff erweitert auf der Grundlage der Theorien des New Materialism den Diskurs über die Erforschung von Bildungspraktiken, indem sie ihre Beobachtungen nicht auf Lehrer*innen und Schüler*innen beschränkt, sondern Stimmen, Klänge und Räume als Akteure einer interaktiven Bildungsperformance beschreibt. Indem sie spezifische Unterrichtssituationen an einer Schule als Zusammenwirken humaner als auch an non-humaner Akteure darstellt, vermittelt v. Bernstorff der Leser*in ein Bild von aktuellem Schulunterricht, das den Charakter des Exemplarischen zugunsten des Experimentellen aufgibt. Ursula Rogg hat nach Jahren (...) freiberuflicher künstlerischer Arbeit als Lehrerin für Kunst und Theater gearbeitet. Seit 2013 ist sie mit dem Schwerpunkt Kulturelle Bildung in der Schulentwicklung tätig. Ihr besonderes Interesse und ihre Forschung gilt den aktivierenden Potenziale auditiven Dokumentierens im schulischen Kontext unter Berücksichtigung der perspektivischen Diversität. In ihrer response sucht sie nach Antworten auf die Fragen, woher die Texte v. Bernstorffss ihre faszinierende Kraft beziehen, welche theoretischen Referenzen ihnen zugrunde liegen und wie das von ihr entwickelte performative writing im Kontext von Bildungsforschung wirksam werden könnte. (shrink)

Three studies were conducted to assess prevalent stereotypes regarding men's and women's emotional expressivity as well as self-perceptions of their emotional behaviour. Emotion profiles were employed to assess both modal emotional reactions and secondary emotional reactions to hypothetical events and personal experiences. In Study 1 we asked how men and women in general would react to a series of hypothetical emotional events. In Study 2 we asked how participants themselves expected to react to these same situations and in Study 3 (...) we asked participants to report a personal emotional event in narrative form. Two gender differences emerged across all three studies. Specifically, women were expected to be more likely to react with sadness to negative emotion-eliciting events in general. They also expected themselves to be more likely to react with sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more when experiencing negative emotional events. Finally, women report more sadness when describing personal events. In contrast, men were expected to react with more happiness/serenity during negative emotional situations. Also, they expect themselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile more and to be more relaxed in negative situations. Finally, men tend to report more happiness when describing negative personal events. In sum, the present study gives a more detailed portrayal of how men and women are expected and expect themselves to react to specific emotional situations and presents some evidence that these expectations may influence the way they reconstruct emotional events from their past. (shrink)

We consider total well-founded orderings on monadic terms satisfying the replacement and full invariance properties. We show that any such ordering on monadic terms in one variable and two unary function symbols must have order typeω,ω2orωω. We show that a familiar construction gives rise to continuum many such orderings of order typeω. We construct a new family of such orderings of order typeω2, and show that there are continuum many of these. We show that there are only four such orderings (...) of order typeωω, the two familiar recursive path orderings and two closely related orderings. We consider also total well-founded orderings onNnwhich are preserved under vector addition. We show that any such ordering must have order typeωkfor some 1 ≤k≤n. We show that ifkshrink)

Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede in den Interpretationen von Ludwig und Popper werden aufgezeigt. Daß überhaupt Unterschiede festzustellen sind, erscheint zunächst verwunderlich, da zum einen von verschiedenen Autoren eine enge Korrelation zwischen Interpretationen der Quantenmechanik und Wahrscheinlichkeitsinterpretationen behauptet wird, zum anderen aber Ludwigs Chancengewichtungen als propensities im Sinne Poppers interpretiert werden können. Es zeigt sich, daß die Unterschiede in den Interpretationen der Quantenmechanik auf Unterschieden in dem jeweils verwendeten wahrscheinlichkeitstheoretischen Formalismus beruhen, die jedoch für die Möglichkeit, Chancengewichtungen als propensities zu interpretieren, ohne (...) Bedeutung sind. (shrink)

What is the relation between time and change? Does time depend on the mind? Is the present always the same or is it always different? Aristotle tackles these questions in the Physics. In the first book in English exclusively devoted to this discussion, Ursula Coope argues that Aristotle sees time as a universal order within which all changes are related to each other. This interpretation enables her to explain two striking Aristotelian claims: that the now is like a moving (...) thing, and that time depends for its existence on the mind. (shrink)

When I raise my arm, what makes it the case that my arm's going up is an instance of my raising my arm? In this paper, I discuss Aristotle's answer to this question. His view, I argue, is that my arm's going up counts as my raising my arm just in case it is an exercise of a certain kind of causal power of mine. I show that this view differs in an interesting way both from the Davidsonian ‘standard causal (...) account’ of action and from accounts put forward by recent critics of Davidson, such as Hornsby, Alvarez and Hyman. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to discuss theoretical arguments concerning the idea that emotional mimicry is an intrinsic part of our social being and thus can be considered a social act. For this, we will first present the theoretical assumptions underlying the Emotional Mimicry as Social Regulator view. We then provide a brief overview of recent developments in emotional mimicry research and specifically discuss new developments regarding the role of emotional mimicry in actual interactions and relationships, and individual differences (...) in emotional mimicry. We conclude with open questions for future research. (shrink)

Based on a study undertaken by the Institute of Medical Ethics and the Royal College of Nursing, this book examines what nurses, midwives and health visitors are taught about ethics in the UK. It defines ethics and related terms and discusses their relevance to the practice of nursing.