Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, (...) and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positiveandnegative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories. (shrink)

English summary: Deism, the "Religionsphilosophie der Aufklarung" (religious philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Troeltsch) played a significant role in the modernization of philosophy in the early modern age and of European culture in a broader sense. Although this has been known for a long time, there is still the need for a differentiated overall picture of the subject. Therefore, on the occasion of Gunter Gawlick's 80th birthday in June 2010, a seminar on the manifestations of Deism in Europe was held (...) at the "Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel" (library of Duke August of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel). The resulting anthology, edited by Winfried Schroder, assembles the partial results of current research on Deism, thereby providing a definition of Deism's role in the cultural, ideological and intellectual history of early modern times. German description: Zu den philosophie- und theologiegeschichtlichen Formationen, denen in der Zeitspanne zwischen dem spaten 16. und dem 18. Jahrhundert die Uberwindung der vormodernen Welt die wichtigsten Impulse verdankt, gehort ohne Zweifel der Deismus. Seine Leitideen sind der Gedanke der Suffizienz einer um moralische Vorschriften zentrierten 'naturlichen' Religion, die aus blosser Vernunft zuganglich ist, die Uberflussigkeit einer ubernaturlichen Offenbarung und die daraus abgeleitete Forderung nach Toleranz und Denkfreiheit. Diese Ideen weisen den Deismus geradezu als "die Religionsphilosophie der Aufklarung" (Ernst Troeltsch) aus. Diese massgebliche Rolle, die der Deismus im Modernisierungsprozess der fruhneuzeitlichen Philosophie und der europaischen Kultur im weiteren Sinne gespielt hat, ist seit langem bekannt - und doch fehlt es an einem differenzierten Gesamtbild. In den letzten Jahrzehnten sind zum einen wichtige Forschungsertrage erzielt worden, zum anderen hat die Deismus-Forschung etliche Desiderate festgestellt, denen sie teilweise bereits nachgegangen ist. Aus Anlass des 80. Geburtstags von Gunter Gawlick fand deshalb im Juni 2010 ein Arbeitsgesprach zu den Gestalten des Deismus in Europa in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel statt. Der zugehorige von Winfried Schroder herausgegebene Sammelband bundelt die Teilergebnisse der bisherigen Desismus-Forschung zu einer Positionsbestimmung des Deismus in der Kultur-, Ideen- und Geistesgeschichte der Fruhen Neuzeit. (shrink)

Many scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, religion, history or social science have ventured to offer a comprehensive explanation of music, one of the most intangible and elusive phenomena in the world. A palaeoanthropological approach, which places music into an evolutionary paradigm, can add important perspectives to our understanding of this phenomenon. To begin with, the question whether music is an adaptation that has survival value in the classical Darwinian sense is contemplated. Views on the origin of music in conjunction with the (...) emergence of language and as a domain for the expression of emotion, linked to music’s benefits for social coherence, are discussed. More recent views on the emergence of consciousness, on semiosis and on music as a manifestation of biocultural co-evolution, especially in conjunction with ritual, are then presented. Finally, the merit of exploiting the concept of play to help account for the systematicity of music’s semiosis is examined.Contribution: In line with the intent of this special collection of articles, the above considerations are placed into the context of materialist versus nonmaterialist perspectives on the emergence of the human mind. The overarching argument is that music contributes crucially to what it means to be human. (shrink)

The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are presented: phenomenological consciousness and the qualia, consciousness as self-controlled agency of humans, self-control and self-reflection, consciousness and language, self-consciousness and introspection, consciousness and the other, consciousness of nonhuman animals, and the question of a (...) quasi-consciousness of the physical universe. A detailed account of Peirce’s three modes of consciousness is presented: primisense, qualisense or feeling-consciousness, altersense, and medisense, the consciousness of cognition, thought, and reasoning. In contrast to consciousness studies that establish a rather sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious states of mind, Peirce adopts the principle of synechism, the theory of continuity. For him, consciousness is a matter of degree. An important difference between Peirce’s concept of qualia and current theories of qualia in human consciousness is discussed. The paper shows how consciousness, according to Peirce, emerges from unconscious qualia and vanishes into equally unconscious habits. It concludes with a study of the roles of qualia, habit, and self-control in Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular in qualisigns and symbols, and the question of signs as quasi-conscious agents in semiosis. (shrink)

Die metaphysikferne oder metaphysikentfremdete Philosophie der Gegenwart ist gleichermaßen der Wahrheitsfrage fern oder entfremdet, da die neuzeitliche Philosophie – und darin vor allem die Erkenntniskritik – eine Infragestellung der objektiven Wahrheit eingeleitet habe. Descartes und Kant zweifelten an objektiver Wahrheit. Aber stimmt es, dass es keine objektive Wahrheit gibt? Birgt diese Behauptung nicht in sich selbst das Problem, dass sie sich als objektive Wahrheit annehmen muss, um nicht gegenstandslos zu werden? Dies führt jedoch zurück zur in der Moderne problematisch gewordenen (...) Metaphysik. In der Auseinandersetzung mit der neuzeitlichen Philosophie geht Winfried Weier dieser Frage nach, denn die Aufhebung der Metaphysik führt offensichtlich zu erheblichen Problemen der Möglichkeit wahrer Erkenntnis. (shrink)

Winfried Weier ; Volltext // Exemplar mit der Signatur: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- Z 47.281-39/40.

Ecosemiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in relation to the natural environment in which they occur. The paper examines the cultural, biological, and evolutionary dimensions of ecosemioses on the basis of C. S. Peirce's theory of continuity between matter and mind and investigates the ecosemiotic dimensions of natural signs. Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature are distinguished from pansemiotism, and the coevolution of sign processes with their natural enviromnent is discussed as a determining factor of ecosemiosis.

Grundlegung einer dimensionalen Anthropologie Winfried Weier. gründigen für ein noch zu Erfragendes und so fort. Die nie zur Ruhe kommende Dynamik des Fragens kennt kein Stehenbleiben, keinen Stillstand, solange sie nicht durch ...

In several of his papers, Charles S. Peirce illustrates processes of interpreting and understanding signs by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed by means of these little pedagogical scenarios are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning, but they aim at elucidating fundamental semiotic implications of knowledge acquisition in general. Peirce's semiotic premise that a well-understood sign is one that represents an object and creates an interpretant is essential to the understanding (...) of how new words and signs in general can be taught and learned. The article argues that Peirce's theory of the object of the sign, especially of the necessity of collateral experience of the object of a sign, can help to understand the riddle posed by of the Meno paradox of the impossibility of learning what we do not yet know. It examines the semiotic implications of the didactic methods of teaching and learning through translation, ostension, mental and real images, as well as metacognition, and it shows how icons, indices, and symbols are essential to learning new words. (shrink)

The nature of representation has been a central but controversial issue of cognitive philosophy. After 2,500 years of reflection (cf. Rolf 2006), opinions are still divided. On the one hand, there are those who are convinced that we have reached a crisis of representation in the arts, the media, and cultural theory; on the other hand, representation has remained right at the top of the agenda of cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence research (cf. Nöth & Ljungberg, eds. 2003; Nöth 1997). (...) The words in which Daniel Dennett, in 1978, postulates the necessity for a new theory of representation as a foundation of cognitive science are symptomatic of a certain unease about the state of the art: "What is needed is.. (shrink)

Angesichts der Globalisierung und der von ihr aufgeworfenen Probleme für das nationale und das internationale Recht gewinnt die Rechtsphilosophie immer stärker an Bedeutung. Zugleich verbinden sich rechtstheoretische Fragen wieder zunehmend mit philosophischen Überlegungen. Der vorliegende Band versammelt 20 Beiträge namhafter Rechtstheoretiker und Philosophen, die die eigenständige Begriffsbildung und die Entwicklung neuer Theorieansätze auf dem Gebiet der Rechtsphilosophie zum Ziel haben. Das Spektrum reicht dabei von grundbegrifflichen Klärungen bis hin zu konkreten Problemstellungen des globalisierten Rechts und bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über (...) die aktuelle deutsche und internationale Debatte. Mit Beiträgen u. a. von Robert Alexy, Klaus Günther, Gunther Teubner, Otfried Höffe und Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

The "semiotic threshold" is U. Eco's metaphor of the borderline between the world of semiosis and the nonsemiotic world and hence also between semiotics and its neighboring disciplines. The paper examines Eco's threshold in comparison to the views of semiosis and semiotics of C. S. Peirce. While Eco follows the structuralist tradition, postulating the conventionality of signs as the main criterion of semiosis, Peirce has a much broader concept of semiosis, which is not restricted to phenomena of culture but includes (...) many processes in nature. Whereas Eco arrives at the conclusion that biological processes, such as the ones within the immune system, cannot be included in the program of semiotic research, Peirce's broader defmition of semiosis has meanwhile become thefoundation of semiotic studies in biology and medicine and hence in biosemiotics and medical semiotics. (shrink)

Protosemiotics is the study of the rudiments of semiosis, primarily in nature. The extension of the semiotic field from culture to nature is both necessary and possible in the framework of Peirce's semiotic theory. Against this extension, the critique of pansemiotism has been raised. However, Peirce's semiotics is not pansemiotic since it is based on the criterion of thirdness, which is not ubiquitous in nature. The paper examines the criteria of protosemiosis in the domain of physical and mechanical processes.

Culture has become a major instrument for expanding claims to recognition in modern societies. It was Tocqueville who first realized that the political ideal of equality would create new challenges to distinguish oneself from others. Cultural forms have proven especially useful for this purpose, and cultural science – especially the anglosaxon variety of cultural studies – seems to increasingly see its task in reinforcing and replicating these claims to recognition. In this way it runs the risk of merely mimicking modern (...) processes of differentiation and pluralization and elevating them to the level of a tacit norm, instead of analyzing them. This narrative of pluralization may thus be in need of reconsideration. (shrink)

We give a simplified proof of the main lemma in “Ramsey filters and the reaping number—Con” by Goldstern and Shelah.

Otto Muck (*1928) verbindet in seinem Denken analytische Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie mit bleibend gultigen Einsichten der aristotelisch-scholastischen und transzendentalphilosophischen Traditionen. Zentral ist dabei eine integrative Konzeption von Metaphysik: Metaphysik erstellt keine Zusatz- oder Alternativtheorien zu anderen Wissenschaften, sondern expliziert den fundamentalen kategorialen Rahmen, in dem speziellere wissenschaftliche Begrifflichkeiten und Theorieansatze konstituiert werden und ihre Problemlosungsfahigkeit entfalten. Die Essays in diesem Band widmen sich auch Mucks Wahrheitsauffassung, der Rolle von Retorsionsargumenten, seiner Konzeption von wissenschaftlichen und weltanschaulichen Erklarungen sowie theologischen Anwendungen seines (...) Denkens. Beitrage von E. Runggaldier, C. Kanzian, H. Weidemann, G. Siegwart, W. Loffler, H.-D. Mutschler und N. Wandinger.". (shrink)

The paper is a study of how graphic narratives (graphic novels and the comics) represent time in external visual space as well as in inner (mental) representations. Peirce’s semiotics is the main tool of research. After a survey of various approaches to the study of time in narratives in general and in graphic narratives in particular, an outline of the various aspects of the embodiment of time in space in general is given before the forms of the embodiment of time (...) in the space of graphic narratives is examined in detail. Signs of time are signs that represent time as their object and create mental representations of time as their interpretant. On this semiotic premise, the paper proposes a reinterpretation of Genette’s theory of time in narratives. A comparison with narratives in prose reveals that narrative time in graphic narratives evinces marked discontinuities in their spatial representation. The paper distinguishes between time as continuity, time as age, and points in time. It concludes that time as continuity is typically embodied in the form of spatial diagrams whereas time as age and points in time are mainly of the nature of indexical signs. The insights into the forms of embodiment of time in space derived from these premises are applied to examples from recent graphic novels and some traditional comics. (shrink)