Over the past years, a number of probabilistic measures of coherence have been proposed. As shown in the paper, however, many of them do not conform to the intuitition that equivalent testimonies are highly coherent, regardless of their prior probability.

In 2017, Partridge et al. published remarkable experimental results concerning the use of a new artificial womb technology (AWT) with lambs, developed at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called...

Ontology has been proposed as a solution to the 'Tower of Babel' problem that threatens the semantic interoperability of information systems constructed independently for the same domain. In information systems research and applications, ontologies are often implemented by formalizing the meanings of words from natural languages. However, words in different natural languages sometimes subdivide the same domain of reality in terms of different conceptual categories. If the words and their associated concepts in two natural languages, or even in two terminological (...) traditions within the same language, do not have common referents in the real world, an ontology based on word meanings will inherit the 'Tower of Babel' problem from the languages involved, rather than solve it. In this paper we present evidence from a preliminary comparison of landscape terms in English with those in the Yindjibarndi language of northwestern Australia demonstrating that this problem is not just hypothetical. Some possible solutions are suggested. (shrink)

Mental and behavioral disorders represent a significant portion of the public health burden in all countries. The human cost of these disorders is immense, yet treatment options for sufferers are currently limited, with many patients failing to respond sufficiently to available interventions and drugs. High quality ontologies facilitate data aggregation and comparison across different disciplines, and may therefore speed up the translation of primary research into novel therapeutics. Realism-based ontologies describe entities in reality and the relationships between them in such (...) a way that – once formulated in a suitable formal language – the ontologies can be used for sophisticated automated reasoning applications. Reference ontologies can be applied across different contexts in which different, and often mutually incompatible, domain-specific vocabularies have traditionally been used. In this contribution we describe the Mental Functioning Ontology (MF) and Mental Disease Ontology (MD), two realism-based ontologies currently under development for the description of humanmental functioning and disease. We describe the structure and upper levels of the ontologies and preliminary application scenarios, and identify some open questions. (shrink)

Semantic interoperability requires the use of standards, not only for Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to be transferred and structurally mapped into a receiving repository, but also for the clinical content of the EHR to be interpreted in conformity with the original meanings intended by its authors. Accurate and complete clinical documentation, faithful to the patient’s situation, and interoperability between systems, require widespread and dependable access to published and maintained collections of coherent and quality-assured semantic resources, including models such as (...) archetypes and templates that would (1) provide clinical context, (2) be mapped to interoperability standards for EHR data, (3) be linked to well specified, multi-lingual terminology value sets, and (4) be derived from high quality ontologies. Wide-scale engagement with professional bodies, globally, is needed to develop these clinical information standards. (shrink)

The final chapter concludes that there is currently insufficient systematic attention to distributive justice in Dutch climate policy. Various distributive principles are often overlooked in policymaking. The key message therefore is that all climate policy should take the fair distribution of climate costs into account. In addition to effectiveness and legality, climate measures should also be assessed from the perspective of justice. Failure to do so could erode public support for climate policy, and so delay or even prevent the implementation (...) of the policy measures. (shrink)

This chapter uses the example of the yellow vests in France. The example shows that a just climate policy is about more than the fair distribution of costs and benefits. The way policies are made is also a matter of justice. We therefore examine the theme of procedural justice, and in particular the justice of the policymaking process. We pay special attention to how citizens are involved.

This chapter takes a closer look at the distributive effects of three energy transition subsidies in the Netherlands. We chose these three schemes because they each target different groups: businesses, homeowners and minimum wage earners. We first discuss how the various subsidies work and how they are funded. We then consider which distributive principles we can identify in these three schemes. We explain how other distributive justice considerations and principles could also have been deployed.

In this book, the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) considers climate policies in the light of distributive justice. We ask how a society can distribute the costs of climate policy in a way that is fair, and we offer recommendations on how to embed distributive justice in climate policies. This first chapter introduces the problem, defines major concepts and presents the outline of the book.

Allocating the carbon budget is a fundamental issue of distributive justice in global climate policy. At the national level, the carbon budget is often translated into sectoral reduction targets. In this chapter, we ask how the reduction targets should be distributed amongst the industrial, electricity, agriculture and land use, mobility, and built environment sectors. From a perspective of distributive justice, we ask which sectors need to reduce the most carbon emissions if we are to achieve the national targets?

In this chapter, we examine what citizens themselves consider to be just distributions of climate costs. We do this in two ways. We first discuss the existing research on this topic, and then present the results of our own research into public perspectives of distributive justice. A key finding is that more than three-quarters of respondents consider fair burden sharing to be important; often more important than reducing carbon emissions. However, this is not yet adequately reflected in current climate policy.

Flood protection policy is an existential cause in the Netherlands. It involves the distribution of flood protection measures as well as the distribution of the costs involved. In this chapter, we articulate who benefits from investments in flood protection, and who pays for them. We then consider which distributive principles we can identify in this type of adaptation policy. We explain how other distributive justice considerations and principles could also have been deployed.

Extreme weather already causes much damage today, and it will become only more common as climate change progresses, not only in the Netherlands itself but also in the Caribbean territories. In this chapter, we specifically examine the damage caused by extreme rainfall, who is compensated for it, and who actually pays for it. We then consider which distributive principles we can identify in policies. We explain how other distributive justice considerations and principles could also have been deployed.

This open access book is looking into ways to achieve just climate policy within a country. The authors of this monograph share a unique, timely and original vision: continuous support for climate policy is more likely to emerge when citizens find that the distribution of the bill for climate costs is fair. But what is a fair distribution of climate costs? This is an important question because financial costs of mitigation (reducing greenhouse gases), adaptation (adapting to climate change) and damage (...) (compensating or compensating after weather extremes) increase significantly in the coming decades. Drawing on philosophy and ethics, the authors propose ten principles for achieving just distributions of domestic climate costs. Examples of such principles are individual responsibility, the polluter pays, greatest utility and capacity to pay. Yet what a fair distribution is, depends on, for example, political preferences and the policy issue at hand. Empirical research on designing climate policies, however, shows that distributive principles are not part of the political, policy, and public discussions. The authors therefore argue that explicit attention to principles of just distribution at the start of a policy process contributes to support for climate policy. This book provides tools to professionals and students to achieve justice in climate policy. (shrink)

While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adorno's negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx's critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno's work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the (...) intersection between Adorno's critical theory and Marx's critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory. Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice. (shrink)

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end. The violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works--the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of History--focusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements. (...) Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thing--the point where it peaks--because it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point: one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegel's system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end. Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegel's philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamacher's argument is directed toward what in Hegel's philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea everything that resists appropriation. Emphasizing Hegel's claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body; it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitude--the pleroma--of philosophy and history. What remains--the indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursive--demands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture: toward a pleroma other than Hegel's. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 219-244, June 2022.

We explore the different meanings of “quantum uncertainty” contained in Heisenberg’s seminal paper from 1927, and also some of the precise definitions that were developed later. We recount the controversy about “Anschaulichkeit”, visualizability of the theory, which Heisenberg claims to resolve. Moreover, we consider Heisenberg’s programme of operational analysis of concepts, in which he sees himself as following Einstein. Heisenberg’s work is marked by the tensions between semiclassical arguments and the emerging modern quantum theory, between intuition and rigour, and between (...) shaky arguments and overarching claims. Nevertheless, the main message can be taken into the new quantum theory, and can be brought into the form of general theorems. They come in two kinds, not distinguished by Heisenberg. These are, on one hand, constraints on preparations, like the usual textbook uncertainty relation, and, on the other, constraints on joint measurability, including trade-offs between accuracy and disturbance. (shrink)

Police interview transcripts serve as key evidential documents, yet their linguistic form is rarely examined using scalable and reproducible computational methods, despite its direct impact on how statements are interpreted and assessed for credibility in judicial contexts. This study provides the first computational genre analysis of Italian police interview transcripts, operationalizing genre distinctions through large-scale linguistic profiling. We analyze 50 authentic transcripts produced in two transcription formats: narrative monologues and question–answer (Q–A) interactions, using automated extraction of 147 linguistic features spanning (...) morphology, syntax, readability and legal-language markers. We apply automated feature extraction and feature selection, combined with statistical testing, to compare the transcripts against a large multi-genre Italian reference corpus to assess both shared and format-specific characteristics. Results show that both transcription formats exhibit strong narrative orientation, marked by high verbal density, first-person reference and deeply embedded subordination, distinguishing transcripts from legal and journalistic prose. Narrative monologues align more closely with institutional writing through higher syntactic embedding and domain-specific terminology, whereas Q–A transcripts display elevated pronoun use, preverbal objects, and clause chaining, revealing interactional and procedural dynamics of elicitation. By demonstrating how transcription format encodes distinct communicative functions at the level of measurable linguistic features, this study shows that computational profiling provides a robust forensic method for evaluating transcription practices and their interpretive consequences in judicial settings. (shrink)

From the Anglo-Saxons to the end of the Tudor era, many English glossaries and dictionaries were arranged topically rather than alphabetically and thus reflected the prevailing concerns of theology, philosophy, and natural history. These works are a fascinating part of the topical or onomasiological lexicographical tradition in England. In this book Werner Hüllen presents a learned and readable account of the topical tradition's principles and origins. He considers early glossaries, treatises for the learning of foreign languages, and didactic dialogues, (...) and provides in-depth examinations of later, more comprehensive works. He shows that the English tradition is embedded in a rich European tradition whose important representatives, such as Junius and Comenius, had a marked influence on the English methods. The book makes an important contribution to the history of the English lexicon and English semantics, and to the study of English lexicography. It also reveals a great deal about the history of English ideas over nine centuries. "This is a work of enormously broad scholarship, which brings together a range of quite diverse elements into a coherent narrative which makes for absorbing and often surprisingly entertaining reading..... This is a rich and multifaceted book, and one which will appeal to a variety of audiences." International Journal of Lexicography"Hüllen brings to life relatively dry and difficult material by applying modern techniques to remote frameworks (such as conversation analysis to Caxton's Dialogues, feminist linguistics to Withals's Dictionarie, and semiotic theory to Wilkins's Philosophical Language and Comenius's Visiable World), setting new standards for research in dictionary history." Anglistik. Mitteilungen des deutschen Anglistenverbandes. (shrink)

Physics, History, and the German Atomic Bomb. This paper examines the German concept of a nuclear weapon during National Socialism and the Second World War. Zusammenfassung: Physik, Geschichte und die deutsche Atombombe. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die deutsche Vorstellung einer nuklearen Waffe während des Nationalsozialismus und des Zweiten Weltkrieges.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Utopian Enterprises: Growing Up with Star TrekMark Jendrysik (bio)It might be hard to imagine today, when new Star Trek entertainment product seems to be everywhere, that there was once a time when Star Trek meant the seventy-nine episodes of the original series and nothing else. And it might be hard to imagine a time when episodes of a television series had to be watched at one particular time, with (...) no guarantee those episodes would ever be seen again—before the VCR, before streaming, when you had to race home and not miss a moment of the program. When Star Trek came on at 4 p.m., I sat glued to the TV, hoping my mother wouldn’t call me to dinner until 5. You might also remember telling friends who missed the program about the plot and experiencing the Rashomon effect as debates raged about what happened or did not happen on the show the afternoon before.In this article, I try to reconstruct the experience of watching Star Trek (“the Original Series,” or TOS, not that we called it that) for the first time as a child in the mid-1970s. This will be a reconstruction in Margaret Atwood’s sense of the term. I cannot at this distance of time be certain that my recollections have not been modified with the knowledge of years, or by a desire to make the experience of Star Trek perhaps more central to my life than it [End Page 359] was at the time. I will also reflect on Star Trek as a utopian and anti-utopian artifact. I do this because it seems to me that the Original Series has become the object of various caricatures that don’t do justice to the complexity and ambiguity of the program.Sci-fi in a Simpler Time?I ask you, if you are old enough, to cast your mind back to a time when Star Trek was not a multiplatform cultural juggernaut. I was born in 1964 and, perhaps predictably, I was enthralled by the space program as a child. After all, I grew up in the waxing years of the space race, just after Alan Shepard made his orbit around Earth. I was five years old when Neil Armstrong made his famed walk on the moon. The moon landings and Skylab missions provided hours of respite for my mother, too, as I sat glued to the television listening to Walter Cronkite’s calm voice. I read issues of National Geographic about the space race until they fell apart. I read all the books in my school’s library about space. A picture book with an introduction by Werner Von Braun showing future space habitants seemed to present an obvious future path for humanity.1 My friends and I were firmly convinced that one day, and soon, we would go live and work in space!By the early 1970s I had become a big fan of science fiction. In that simpler time sci-fi meant my Uncle Tom’s collection of anthologies that he had left at my grandmother’s house. On many afternoons in her sunroom, I tried to work through stories that were more than a little above my reading level. Poul Anderson’s story “The Queen of Air and Darkness” (1971) made a particularly strong impression on me in its treatment of colonialism and resistance (not that I would have used those terms at the time). Isaac Asimov’s Y/A2 book series Lucky Starr: Space Ranger (1952–58) was another favorite. I was enthralled with the stories set on Mars, Venus, and across the solar system. When I met the author in 1974, he seemed embarrassed by my love of these fairly slight works that he had published under the pseudonym “Paul French.” When I asked him to sign one of my “Lucky Starr” books, he laughed and said something like “those were a long time ago.”Sci-fi also meant movies that showed up on our local independent television stations, often as part of programs with titles like “Sunday Adventure Theater.” My friends and I became quite the connoisseurs of various voyages to the... (shrink)

Economics has developed into one of the most specialised social sciences. Yet at the same time, it shares its subject matter with other social sciences and humanities and its method of analysis has developed in close correspondence with the natural and life sciences. This book offers an up to date assessment of economics in relation to other disciplines. This edited collection explores fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, sociology, architecture, and literature, drawing from selected contributions to the 2005 (...) Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET). There is currently much discussion at the leading edges of modern economics about openness to other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology. But what we see here is that economics has drawn on (as well as contributed to) other disciplines throughout its history. In this sense, in spite of the increasing specialisation within all disciplines, economics has always been an open discipline and the chapters in this volume provide a vivid illustration for this. Open Economics is a testament to the intellectual vibrancy of historical research in economics. It presents the reader with a historical introduction to the disciplinary context of economics that is the first of its kind, and will appeal to practising economists and students of the discipline alike, as well as to anybody interested in economics and its position in the scientific and social scientific landscape. Table of Contents Introduction: Economics in relation to other disciplines Richard Arena, Sheila Dow and Matthias Klaes Part I. Economics in relation to the humanities and social sciences 1. The social science of economics Brian J. Loasby 2. Economics and literature Bruna Ingrao 3. Happiness: what Kahneman could have learnt from Pietro Verri Pier Luigi Porta Part II. Economics in relation to the life and natural sciences 4. Newtonian physics, experimental moral philosophy and the shaping of political economy Sergio Cremaschi 5. Evolutionary biology and economic behaviour: re-visiting Veblen's instinct of workmanship Mark Harrison 6. Medicine and economics in pre-classical economics Alain Clément and Ludovic Desmedt Part III. Economics and mathematics 7. Mathematics as the role model for neoclassical economics Nicola Giocoli 8. The role of econometric method in economic analysis: A reassessment of the Keynes-Tinbergen debate, 1938-43 Giovanna Garrone and Roberto Marchionatti IV. Economics and architecture 9. Economics and architecture Maurice Lagueux 10. Economic policies and urban development in Latin America Michele Alacevich and Andrea Costa V. Economics and geography 11. ‘Space’ in economic thought Giovanna Vertova 12. Economics, geography and colonialism in the writings of William Petty Hugh Goodacre Part VI. Economics and sociology 13. Economics and sociology: Gustav Schmoller and Werner Sombart on social differentiation Joachim Zweynert 14. Is Homo Oeconomicus a 'bad guy'? Isabelle This Saint-Jean. (shrink)

Werner Bonefeld is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia). He has published on topics as varied as the development of the British state during the 1980s and 1990s, Europe’s monetary union, ordoliberalism, and Marx’s critique of political economy. A ground-breaking critical theorist, Bonefeld’s contribution to an ‘open’ Marxism developed a rigorous critique of capitalist social relations without omitting the significant themes of (...) lived experience and class antagonism. The following interview marks the publication of a recent monograph titled A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation. Bonefeld discusses his reading of Frankfurt School critical theory and its relation to heterodox and open Marxist social theory with Alex Alvarez Taylor, whose research focuses on early critical theory. (shrink)

The author, a physicist as well as a philosopher, uses the thought of Werner Heisenberg as a focus for examining the epistemological foundations of quantum theory. Though Heisenberg's earliest original insights were stimulated by Plato's Timaeus he soon swung over to Bohr's empiricism in developing and supporting the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. His later philosophical reflections are markedly Kantian with irreducible physical invariants playing the role of Kant's necessary and universal laws. As Heelan sees it, an examination of (...) the intentionality-structure of the scientist supplies the critical basis for judging the reality of the objects known through science. Though Heisenberg rejected the naive "empirical objectivity" of pre-quantum interpretations of science, his reflective evaluation of his own achievements is inadequate in explaining the formal objectivity of the objects known. By distinguishing the criterion of reality, rational affirmation, from the meaning of "reality," whatever is defined by the object in its formal sense, Heelan is able to develop a critical realism that assigns an ontological status to fundamental particles. "Main-line" philosophers of science may feel ill at ease with Heelan's phenomenological terminology of "intentionality-structure," "noema," and "horizon" and may object to his treatment of "meaning" and "language." But if they "bracket" these reservations they will find this book an unusually well-informed and penetrating study of the philosophical implications of modern physics.—E. M. M. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Big Women:Mark Adamo's Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess Between Monteverdi and Musical ComedyRalph HexterWe live in an age when opera companies across America are regularly presenting new operas, and some of them are even making hesitant first steps into repertory status, though it is too soon to tell how long- or short-lived their performance history will be. Opera itself began—Peri's Dafne (1597) is commonly regarded as the starting (...) point—as an attempt to recreate Greek tragedy on the stage, and for at least its first two hundred years, plots drawing on classical material, if not always classical literary texts, were staples. Nineteenth-century opera composers were relatively less inclined to turn to the classics for plots and characters, but the twentieth century witnessed renewed activity in classically based operas, from Strauss' Elektra (1909) and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1927) to Hans Werner Henze's Venus und Adonis (1997) and Randolph Peters' The Golden Ass (1999), to name but a few significant examples. Mark Adamo's Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess, which premiered in Houston in 2005, is among the first operas in our new century to continue the tradition.Accompanied by a trio of distinguished distaff classicists, I attended the 2006 revival of Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess at the New York City Opera. Some months later, as word of the outing—any resemblance to this or any other Aristophanic comedy is purely accidental—trickled out, AJP's editor asked me to write this "Brief Mention." The reader will infer, then, that I neither watched nor listened with the idea of writing such a notice. What follows are reflections based partially on recollection of my immediate impressions (especially of the music) but also on subsequent study of the published libretto,1 Adamo's earlier and quite popular Little Women (1998), and stray remarks of the composer in published or online [End Page 119] interviews. In no sense is it a review of the particular April 2nd matinee performance that I saw. Of that let me say that my impression was almost uniformly positive. The principals, who have very demanding parts (and not only vocally), were strong; several were reprising roles they had taken in the Houston world premiere.Adamo states on the title page of the libretto that the opera is "[f]reely adapted from the play by Aristophanes," and this is both true and to the good. Before I turn to the adaptation itself, it might be worth observing that within the reception history of ancient stageworks in opera, the tradition of classical comedies turned into operas is relatively slight. I put it that way because, of course, one might well argue that New Comedy in its Roman form is the ultimate source of all opera buffa. I say nothing new when I place Figaro directly in the line of servi callidi.2Greek Old Comedy (i.e., given the state of preservation, Aristophanes) has only infrequently provided fodder for opera. One of the most interesting cases is Walter Braunfels' setting of Aristophanes Birds—Die Vögel—premiered in 1920. Braunfels (1882–1954) was fired from his teaching post by the Nazis in 1933—he was half Jewish—and his works were banished from the repertory. Die Vögel, his most successful stagework, has been recently revived, and a recording is available in Decca's "Entartete ["degenerate"] Musik" series. One must also recall the famous Frogs performed in the pool of Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium in 1941, since, a generation later, in 1975, the piece was revived, provided with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and, like so many other shows, transferred from New Haven (if not the Shubert) to Broadway.3Aristophanes is more at home, I would argue, in American musical comedy than in opera, at least opera as it has come to be received by modern audiences treated almost without exception to post-Gluckian opera, with major houses, until recently, shunning the more interesting hybrids. (Think even of Carmen and how long it took for it to lose the recitatives by Guiraud that replaced the original opéra comique spoken dialogue.) To modern spectators or readers, Aristophanes, with... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana ReadingDonald G. LuckThe Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading. By John P. Keenan. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995.This is the latest effort of society member John Keenan to “pass over” (as John Dunne puts it) from one tradition to another in order to return to one’s point of departure with fresh perspective and heightened awareness. This book reflects impressive scholarship and (...) builds on the theological indebtedness to Madhyamika [End Page 210] and Yogacara thought that shaped Keenan’s earlier work, The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology, also published by Orbis. The noses of academic purists may be put out of joint by what some might construe as a blurring of boundaries between Buddhism and Christianity, but Keenan places himself right in the thick of current hermeneutical discussions to establish the fruitfulness of Mahayana perspective in interpreting the “charter document of the Christian Gospel” (p. 4). He finds methodological legitimization both in the arguments of narrative criticism and in the lines of connection he discerns between deconstruction and the Mahayana recognition of emptiness. And in so arguing, he finds himself able to account for forms of New Testament criticism such as those advanced by John Dominic Crossan and Werner Kelber that not only undermine forms of essentialism but also resort to conventional modes of thinking and discourse without justifying the latter.What is unwittingly going on, argues Keenan, is parallel to the Mahayana identification of emptiness (shunyata) with dependent co-arising (pratitya samutpada). Like deconstructionist hermenuetics, emptiness destablizes all fixed views by recognizing that ultimate truth is ineffable and silent. However, unlike deconstruction, emptiness avoids the vertigo of a text lost in the interplay of interpretations doubling back on themselves. “That is emptiness ineptly apprehended as itself an essentialist viewpoint that there are no viewpoints” (p. 7). Instead, Mahayana analysis connects recognition of the total otherness of ultimate meaning with the affirmation of worldly convention in its limitation. The result is a hermeneutic of nonabsolutizing suggestiveness shaped by upaya, which leads the reader to the possibility of enlightenment —or, in the case of Mark, disclosure.According to Keenan, this Mahayana recognition of the identity of emptiness and dependent co-arising not only has hermeneutical legitimation but also is the key for unlocking a fresh appreciation of Mark’s contents. Accounting for this is the fact that “the Marcan rhetoric of indirection and irony is the narrative analogue to the Madhyamika dialectical rhetoric employed in Nagarjuna’s Stanzas on the Middle” and the fact that “Mahayana eschews precisely those clarifying elements that Matthew and Luke have added to domesticate Mark’s story and discourse, preferring the opacity of ultimate meaning to the full explication of stated truths, opting for the emptying of all themes and ideas in order to reclaim them with an awakened mind” (p. 4).Keenan’s approach is coherent with Crossan’s observation that while mythos creates a universe of meaning, parable undermines established cosmoi. In this respect, Jesus not only speaks parable, he is parable. Utilizing the Mahayana identification of emptiness with dependent co-arising as a heuristic device and paying close attention to the Greek text, Keenan traces the simultaneously destablizing and restorative effect that Jesus has on his hearers—and that the evangelist potentially can have on his readers. Jesus’ “desert spirituality,” that is, his radically unconventional vision, undermines the expectations and securities of both hearer and reader. But it also reconnects those effected by the liberation he works “not to the ultimate glory of a false kingdom imagined by the disciples and the readers, but to the conventional realm of human living in which alone the kingdom may be established” (p. 73; italics added). Indeed, Jesus’ crucifixion makes clear that the transformation wrought [End Page 211] by the Gospel is an existential reappropriation of ordinary life in the face of ultimate mystery, not some supernatural deliverance within or from it. Appropriately, Mark ends with the women being confronted by both the jarring and ineffable mystery of Jesus’ empty tomb and the promise that he will see the disciples again in the familiar—and open-ended—context of life in Galilee.Keenan has done more... (shrink)

Schlusslogische Letztbegründung is a collection of essays in honor of Kurt Walter Zeidler. Mr. Zeidler is a distinguished Kant- and Neo-Kantian-scholar who has reconstructed Kant's concept of transcendental logic in connection with the logic of the concept of Hegel and the logic of symbolization of Peirce. (cf. Zeidler: Grundriss der transzendentalen Logik, 3rd ed., Wien 2017) He has most notably inquired intensively into the relation of transcendental logic to philosophy of science (cf. Zeidler: Prolegomena zur Wissenschaftstheorie, Wien 2000) and to (...) phenomenology (cf. Zeidler: Vermittlungen. Zum antiken und neueren Idealismus, Wien 2016). He has also published several studies on Neo-Kantianism (cf. Zeidler: Provokationen. Zu Problemen des Neukantianismus, Wien 2018). This is refelected in the collection of essays by distinguished scholars who discuss and critically examine Zeidler's work. It includes contributions by Steinar Mathisen (Oslo), Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Vienna), Werner Flach (Lichtenau), Thomas Knoppe (Straberg), Geert Edel (Wyk/Föhr), Martin Bunte (Münster), Reinhard Hiltscher (Dresden), Walter Tydecks (Bensheim), Christian Krijnen (Amsterdam), Hartwig Wiedebach (Zürich), Max Gottschlich (Linz), Thomas Sören Hoffmann (Hagen), Rudolf Meer (Kaliningrad), Hans-Jürgen Müller (Frankfurt am Main), Robert König (Vienna), Ulrich Blau (Marburg), Karen Gloy (Luzern/Munich), Reinhold Breil (Aachen), Erhard Oeser (Vienna), Hans-Dieter Klein (Vienna), Hans Martin Dober (Tübingen), Kurt Walter Zeidler (Vienna) and Lois Marie Rendl (Vienna). (shrink)

Werner Heisenberg's 1925 paper ‘Quantum-theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations’ marks the beginning of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg famously claims that the paper is based on the idea that the new quantum mechanics should be ‘founded exclusively upon relationships between quantities which in principle are observable’. My paper is an attempt to understand this observability principle, and to see whether its employment is philosophically defensible. Against interpretations of ‘observability’ along empiricist or positivist lines I argue that such readings are (...) philosophically unsatisfying. Moreover, a careful comparison of Heisenberg's reinterpretation of classical kinematics with Einstein's argument against absolute simultaneity reveals that the positivist reading does not fit with Heisenberg's strategy in the paper. Instead the appeal to observability should be understood as a specific criticism of the causal inefficacy of orbital electron motion in Bohr's atomic model. I conclude that the tacit philosophical principle behind Heisenberg's argument is not a positivistic connection between observability and meaning, but the idea that a theory should not contain causally idle wheels. (shrink)

Werner Jaeger's seventieth birthday is marked by this well-deserved Festschrift containing some thirty articles by colleagues and students as well as a list of Jaeger's publications. Of special interest are Leonard Woodbury's "Parmenides on Names," Friedrich Solmsen's "Aristotle and preSocratic Cosmogony," and Joshua Whatmough's reading of νόησις νοήσεως as a superlative.--R. P.

Structural history, Conceptual history, Theory of historical time, Semantics of History: the work of Reinhart Koselleck is associated with a wide spectrum of methodological orientations that emerged during the post-war period and originated from the in-depth reflection on the significance of historical sciences. Koselleck shared with numerous West-German historians the observation that historical science was experiencing a profound crisis exacerbated by the increasing influence of social sciences. However, unlike his contemporary historians, who advocated the criticism of historicism as a prerequisite (...) for reforming their discipline, Koselleck championed a radically different path to remedy to this crisis. In this paper, we shall outline the major stages of the critical dialogue between Koselleck and the West-German historiography of his time. Two distinct historical intervals emerge from this analysis: the first is marked by the influence of the structural historical model, developed by Werner Conze during the 1950s, on Koselleck’s theoretical vision; the second, which started in the 1970s, is characterized by the refusal to consider the critical social history as the basis for a holistic explanation of national history. (shrink)

According to the thesis of the extended mind (EM) , at least some token cognitive processes extend into the cognizing subject's environment in the sense that they are (partly) composed of manipulative, exploitative, and transformative operations performed by that subject on suitable environmental structures. EM has attracted four ostensibly distinct types of objection. This paper has two goals. First, it argues that these objections all reduce to one basic sort: all the objections can be resolved by the provision of an (...) adequate and properly motivated criterion—or mark—of the cognitive. Second, it provides such a criterion—one made up of four conditions that are sufficient for a process to count as cognitive. (shrink)

In August 1869 Mark Twain acquired part ownership of the _Buffalo Express_. During the following eighteen months, he wrote some of his best short pieces, humorous sketches, rants, and commentaries. _Mark Twain at the "Buffalo Express"_ collects these complete and unabridged writings for the first time. Twain's writings for the _Buffalo Express_ crackle with his trademark energy, wit, and insight, illuminating his literary and intellectual journey during a seldom-studied period in his life. From these articles Twain cultivated themes and (...) characters that later appeared in his best-known works. Everyone who loves Mark Twain will love _Mark Twain at the "Buffalo Express."_. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of (...) 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

Provides an overview of Mark Sharlow's philosophical work with summaries of his positions. Includes references and links to his writings.