Subject collection: Philosophy (254 titles, 1969–2015)

The total body of papers presented in this volume captures research across a variety of languages and language groups, to show how particular elements of linguistic description draw on otherwise separate aspects (or fields) of linguistic investigation. As such, this volume captures a diversity of research interest from the field of cognitive linguistics. These areas include: lexical semantics, cognitive grammar, metaphor, prototypes, pragmatics, narrative and discourse, computational and translation models; and are considered within the contexts of: language change, child language acquisition, language and culture, grammatical features and word order and gesture. Despite possible differences in philosophical approach to the role of language in cognitive tasks, these papers are similar in a fundamental way: they all share a commitment to the view that human categorization involves mental concepts that have fuzzy boundaries and are culturally and situation-based.

Aristoteles’ De Anima ist einer der zentralen Texte der Philosophiegeschichte. Seine grundlegende Leistung liegt in der alle Lebewesen umfassenden ontologisch-ontischen Bestimmung der Seele und ihrer Vermögen, einschließlich der Lehre vom Geist (nous), deren nähere Explikation seit der Antike Anlaß zu vielfältigen Diskussionen gab. Die vorliegende Studie ermittelt unter Rückgriff auf die traditionellen Schulen des Alexandrismus, Neuplatonismus, Averroismus und Thomismus diejenigen mannigfaltigen philosophischen und theologischen Konstellationen des 16. und 17. Jh.s, die von innerkatholischen wie interkonfessionellen Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Katholiken, Lutheranern und Calvinisten geprägt waren. Unter diesem Gesichtspunkt werden die entsprechenden Werke der Reformatoren Luther und Melanchthon, der Renaissance-Aristoteliker Portio, Toletus, Zabarella und die Conimbrincenser sowie die hier erstmals berücksichtigten Schriften der lutherischen und calvinistischen Schulphilosophen des 17. Jh.s. interpretiert.





Aristotle’s On the soul is one of the most important books in the history of philosophy. Its fundamental achievement is based on the ontological-ontical definition of the soul and its virtues, which embrace all living beings, including the doctrine of the mind (nous), and whose further explication has been interpreted controversially since antiquity. With respect to the traditional schools of Alexandrism, Neoplatonism, Averroism and Thomism the present study studies the various philosophical and theological constellations of the 16th and 17th century, which were determined by the intracatholical as well as by the interdenominational controversies between the Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. From this point of view the works of Luther and Melanchthon, of the Renaissance-Aristotelians Portio, Toletus, Zabarella, and the Conimbricenses as well as the works of the Lutheran and Calvinistic Philosophers of the 17th century are interpreted, these last ones being taken into consideration here for the first time.

Then follow interpretations of some of the main philosophical concepts of Aristotle’s De Anima in the 16th and 17th century, namely the Protestant Aristotelianism of Luther (1483–1546) and Melanchthon (1497–1560), the ‘Second Scholastic’ of the Jesuits Toletus (1532–1596) and Emmanul de Goes, the Natural Philosophy of Portio (1496–1554) and Zabarella (1533–1589) and at least the New Protestant Aristotelianism of Martini (1570-1649), Evenius (1585/9–1639), Scheibler (1589–1653), Leuschner (1589–1641) and Dannhauer (1603–1666) at the Lutheran Universities in Germany in the early 17th century.

This book is a collection of articles based on a lecture series about Kant's philosophy. The contributions present an excellent overview of Kant's work – the subjects range from metaphysical, ethical, aesthetical, teleological, historical and political aspects to questions of mind, nature and education.

The common topic of all articles is the examination of Kant's current relevance in the context of modern philosophy and society. Each author gives various arguments why a close reading of Kant is still worthwhile and can make important contributions to present philosophical and social discussions.

The lecture series from which the book developed was conceived as an introduction of Kant for students but some of the articles are very profound. Therefore while students and Kant-beginners may find the texts helpful as introductory reading, philosophers and Kant-experts will also appreciate the book for opening up new perspectives on their specific field of interest.

Dieser Sammelband basiert auf einer einführenden Ringvorlesung zur Philosophie Kants. Die Beiträge behandeln sowohl metaphysische, ethische, ästhetische, teleologische und politische Aspekte als auch Fragen zu Natur, Geist und Erziehung und bieten damit einen ausgezeichneten Überblick über Kants Werk.

Der Schwerpunkt liegt in allen Artikeln auf der aktuellen Bedeutung Kants im Kontext der modernen Philosophie und Gesellschaft. Den Autoren gelingt es zu zeigen, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit Kant nicht nur immer noch lohnenswert ist, sondern auch wichtige Beiträge zu den philosophischen und gesellschaftlichen Diskussionen der Gegenwart – von bioethischen und neurophilosophischen Fragen bis hin zu Problemen von Krieg und Frieden – liefern kann.

Die Texte sind nicht nur als Einstieg in die Kantlektüre für Studenten und Kant-Neulinge wertvoll, auch Philosophen und Kant-Experten werden darin zahlreiche neue Gesichtspunkte für eine fruchtbare Auseinandersetzung mit Kant finden.

Since the late 1950s the study of argumentation has developed from a marginal part of logic and rhetoric into a genuine interdisciplinary academic discipline. After having first been primarily concerned with creating an adequate philosophical perspective on argumentation, argumentation theorists have gradually shifted their focus of attention to a more immediate concern with the ins and outs of argumentative praxis. What exactly are the characteristics of situated argumentative discourse in different argumentative ‘action types’? How is the discourse influenced by institutional and contextual constraints? In what way can prominent cases of argumentative discourse be fruitfully analysed? Argumentation in Practice aims to provide insight into some important facets of argumentative praxis and the different ways in which it can be approached. The first part of this volume, ‘Conceptions of problems in argumentative practice’, introduces useful theoretical perspectives. The second part, ‘Empirical studies of argumentative practice’, contains both empirical studies of a general kind and several types of specific case studies.

The book claims that philosophy can be defined by its distinct rhetoric. This rhetoric is shaped by two values: humanism and critique. Humanism is defined as preferring the individual human deliberation to any external authority or method. Self-conviction is the touchstone of truth in philosophy. Critique is defined as suspecting your beliefs and convictions. This is the reason why the book uses Nietzsche’s definition of "the will to truth" – "the will not to deceive, not even myself" – for explaining the nature of philosophical thinking and argumentation. This rhetorical analysis reveals that the danger of self-deception is a constitutive yet irresolvable problem of philosophy.

The subjects of the book are: the relations between philosophy and rhetoric, the speaker and the addressee of philosophical arguments, the subordination of logic to rhetoric in philosophy and the philosophical problem of self-deception.

This work, unburdened with philosophers’ jargon, fits well in the current critical debate about the relevance of pragmatic features of the concepts of subjectivity and truth.

This book treats memory and understanding on two levels, on the phenomenological level of experience, on which a theory of dynamic conceptual semantics is built, and on the neuro-connectionist level, which supports the capacities of concept formation, remembering, and understanding. A neuro-connectionist circuit architecture of a constructive memory is developed in which understanding and remembering are modelled in accordance with the constituent structures of a dynamic conceptual semantics. Consciousness emerges by circuit activation between conceptual indicators and episodic indices with the sensory-motor, emotional, and proprioceptual areas.

This theory of concept formation, remembering, and understanding is applied to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu , with special attention to the author’s excursions into philosophical and aesthetic issues. Under this perspective, Proust’s work can be seen as an artistic exploration into our capacity of understanding, whereby the unconscious, the memory, is exteriorized in consciousness by presenting the experienced episodes in the conceptual order of similarity and contiguity through our capacity of concept formation. (Series A)

Sverker Johansson has written an unusual book on language origins, with its emphasis on empirical evidence rather than theory-building. This is a book for the student or researcher who prefers solid data and well-supported conclusions, over speculative scenarios. Much that has been written on the origins of language is characterized by hypothesizing largely unconstrained by evidence. But empirical data do exist, and the purpose of this book is to integrate and review the available evidence from all relevant disciplines, not only linguistics but also, e.g., neurology, primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology. The evidence is then used to constrain the multitude of scenarios for language origins, demonstrating that many popular hypotheses are untenable. Among the issues covered: (1) Human evolutionary history, (2) Anatomical prerequisites for language, (3) Animal communication and ape "language", (4) Mind and language, (5) The role of gesture, (6) Innateness, (7) Selective advantage of language, (8) Proto-language.

This book examines the various philosophical influences contained in the ancient description of the noun. According to the traditional view, grammar adopted its philosophical categories in the second century B.C. and continued to make use of precisely the same concepts for over six hundred years, that is, until the time of Priscian (ca. 500). The standard view is questioned in this study, which investigates in detail the philosophy contained in Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae. This investigation reveals a distinctly Platonic element in Priscian’s grammar, which has not been recognised in linguistic historiography. Thus, grammar manifestly interacted with philosophy in Late Antiquity. This discovery led to the reconsideration of the origin of all the philosophical categories of the noun. Since the authenticity of the Techne, which was attributed to Dionysius Thrax, is now regarded as uncertain, it is possible to speculate that the semantic categories are derived from Late Antiquity.

This new collection of contributions to the field of Cognitive Technology (CT) provides the (to date) widest spectrum of the state of the art in the discipline — a disciple dedicated to humane factors in tool design. The reader will find here a summary of past research as well as an overview of new areas for future investigations. The collection contains an extensive CT agenda identifying many as yet unsolved, CT-related, design issues. An exciting new development is the concept of ‘natural technology’. Some examples of natural technologies are discussed and the merits of empirical investigations (into what they are and how they develop), of interest to cognitive scientists and designers of new (corrective, digital) technologies, are pointed out. Another distinctive feature of the collection is that it provides examples of scientists’ tools; important, too, is its emphasis on ethics in tool design. The collection ends with a provocative coda (any responses can appear in the new, annual, CT forum of the Pragmatics and Cognition journal). The collection will appeal to all scientists, humanists and professionals interested in the interface between human cognitive processes and the technologies that augment them.

Self-consciousness is a topic of considerable importance to a variety of empirical and theoretical disciplines such as developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This volume presents essays on self-consciousness by prominent psychologists, cognitive neurologists, and philosophers. Some of the topics included are the infants’ sense of self and others, theory of mind, phenomenology of embodiment, neural mechanisms of action attribution, and hermeneutics of the self. A number of these essays argue in turn that empirical findings in developmental psychology, phenomenological analyses of embodiment, or studies of pathological self-experiences point to the existence of a type of self-consciousness that does not require any explicit I —thought or self-observation, but is more adequately described as a pre-reflective, embodied form of self-familiarity. The different contributions in the volume amply demonstrate that self-consciousness is a complex multifaceted phenomenon that calls for an integration of different complementary interdisciplinary perspectives. (Series B)