Adolf Meyer

No abstract available for this article.     

Luise Meyer im Zeitfenster

The psychoanalyst Luise Meyer documents the inextricable entanglement of the inner and outer world in post-war Germany. With the assistance of psychoanalysis she hoped to find inner peace and a social niche which allowed a professional development.     

Max Wertheimer's university career in Germany

Summary This paper presents archival and related material bearing on the German university career of Max Wertheimer. It is shown that many factors interacted to shape that career. What drew Wertheimer to psychological science was its potential philosophical relevance, as expounded by his mentors Christian von Ehrenfels and Carl Stumpf. Once his career had begun, however, he faced the challenge of maintaining intellectual independence in a system where patronage counted, and also the problem of producing systematic philosophical work as well as empirical research in psychology at appropriate points in his career. These difficulties, compounded by Wertheimer's highly personal style of thinking and writing, appear to have been at least as inhibiting to Wertheimer's career as was Anti-Semitism. Thanks to unusual circumstances created in part by Kurt Riezler at the University of Frankfurt, Wertheimer became full professor there in 1929 — only to be forced into exile in 1933, on obviously anti-Semitic grounds.Portions of this paper were originally presented in an invited commentary at the symposium documented in this issue. Grateful acknowledgements are due to Professor Viktor Sarris and the other symposium participants for their assistance. Research for the paper was funded in part by NSF grnat No. SES-8511230.     

City and Democracy in Max Weber

Topoi - Although it is mainly focused on medieval communes, Weber’s thought about the city is relevant because it questions every city and cohabitation: both because Weber tries to grasp its...     

Max Wertheimer's challenging legacy

Summary Max Wertheimer's past contributions to psychology were recognized, 45 years after his death, by the posthumous award to him in 1988 of the Wilhelm Wundt medal of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie. The award acknowledged the elegant model of experimental work represented by his original studies of the perception of apparent motion, the development and promulgation of the influential Gestalt theory, and the application of Gestalt thought to significant issues of epistemology, ethics, and social and political science. But Max Wertheimer's contribution is not only of historical interest; it still constitutes a contemporary challenge. First, his seminal book, Productive Thinking, has recently been reissued with a new preface that documents the challenge of its characterization of insight or understanding for the current field of cognitive science. Second, his works, originally in English, on truth, ethics, freedom and democracy are now being published in German as clearly still highly relevant to the current scence. Third, several previously unpublished fragments, dictated by Max Wertheimer, address the nature of genuine explanation; they argue that simply reducing the unfamiliar to the familiar is not enough, but that genuine explanation occurs only if a situation previously not understood becomes clarified, changing from a murky to a transparent state. Some concrete examples described in these fragments provide a challenge to traditional conceptions of the nature of explanation which is still far from satisfactorily answered today.     

Max Ernst,Sedona

Walking through the guarded gate of CERN. a center for peaceful atomic research near Geneva, Switzerland, one finds oneself in what seems to be a typical industrial park Upon coming to thefirst corner, one has a sense of the surreal tofind pleasant signs marking it as the intersection of Einstein and W. Pauli streets. Ambling along a bit further, one comes to a quiet, treeshaded building housing the office of theoretical physicist, John Stewart Bell, whose work on “nonlocality” is regarded by some as fermenting yet another conceptual revolution in our world view. With an almost shy Irish brogue from his native Dublin, however, Bell modestly disavows any such significance to what is called “Bell's Inequality” in the literature of quantum physics.

In this interview, our editor queried Bell on the relevance of his work for Jung's view of synchronicity as a non- causal factor in human affairs. Bell cautions that everything he says here is only his “opinion of the mystery and muddle of it all.”     

Max Deutscher and perception

In this paper I examine a strategy which aims to bypass the technicalities of the indispensability debate and to offer a direct route to nominalism. The starting-point for this alternative nominalist strategy is the claim that--according to the platonist picture--the existence of mathematical objects makes no difference to the concrete, physical world. My principal goal is to show that the 'Makes No Difference' (MND) Argument does not succeed in undermining platonism. The basic reason why not is that the makes-no-difference claim which the argument is based on is problematic. Arguments both for and against this claim can be found in the literature; I examine three such arguments, uncovering flaws in each one. In the second half of the paper, I take a more direct approach and present an analysis of the counterfactual which underpins the makes-no-difference claim. What this analysis reveals is that indispensability considerations are in fact crucial to the proper evaluation of the MND Argument, contrary to the claims of its supporters.     

马克思和施蒂纳

作者以《德意志意识形态》中的"圣麦克斯"部分和《唯一者及其所有物》为文本支撑,通过对马克思、施蒂纳、费尔巴哈三人思想关系的细致考察,指出:其一、正是施蒂纳对费尔巴哈的人本学唯物主义的批判,使马克思意识到费尔巴哈人本主义的危险所在,即马克思既要反驳费尔巴哈的人本主义,又要防止自己陷入施蒂纳的极端个人主义;其二、正是施蒂纳对费尔巴哈的批判迫使马克思改变自己的哲学立场,最后使马克思转而批判了费尔巴哈也批判了施蒂纳本人。