Familiar Verbs Are Not Always Easier Than Novel Verbs: How German Pre‐School Children Comprehend Active and Passive Sentences

Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non‐prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis investigating German children using a forced‐choice pointing paradigm with reversed agent‐patient roles. We tested active transitive verbs in study 1. The 2‐year olds were better with familiar than novel verbs, while the 2½‐year olds pointed correctly for both. In study 2, we tested passives: 2½‐year olds were significantly below chance for familiar verbs and at chance for novel verbs, supporting the hypothesis that the entrenchment of the familiar verbs in the active transitive voice was interfering with interpreting them in the passive voice construction. The 3½‐year olds were also at chance for novel verbs but above chance with familiar verbs. We interpret this as reflecting a lessening of the verb‐in‐construction entrenchment as the child develops knowledge that particular verbs can occur in a range of constructions. The 4½‐year olds were above chance for both familiar and novel verbs. We discuss our findings in terms of the relative entrenchment of lexical and syntactic information and to interference between them.     

Dialectics and the Transcendence of Dialectics: Adorno's Relation to Schelling

The influence of the thought of the great German Idealist philosopher G.W.F Hegel on the thought of Theodor Adorno, the leading thinker of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, is unmistakeable, and has been the subject of much commentary. Much less discussed, however, is the influence of Hegel's prominent contemporary, F.W.J. Schelling. This article investigates the influence of Schelling on Adorno, and the sometimes striking parallels between fundamental motifs in the work of both thinkers. It argues that Adorno's critique of Hegelian (and indeed of his own, negative) dialectics, his conception of the relation between nature and spirit, and his philosophy of history (amongst other aspects of this thought) owe a considerable debt to Schelling. Furthermore, when adequately explicated, Schelling's position on a range of problems which confronted German Idealist philosophy often prove intrinsically preferable to those of Hegel.     

Clinical implications of The Red Book: Liber Novus

In this presentation I consider whether the importance of Spirit in Liber Novus may render the task of its clinical application peculiarly problematic. Freud's experimentation on himself is briefly compared with Jung's self-experimentation of which Liber Novus is the record. Taking up the theme of the vas from Gaillard's paper, I refer to Jung's two major contributions to the elaboration of the Freudian frame: the necessity for the analyst to have been analysed, and the positive value of countertransference. In an epilogue, I briefly discuss a dream related to the preparation of this report for publication, emphasizing the theme of the disturbing effects of Spirit as a key theme both in Liber Novus itself and in any attempt to assimilate it on the part of the contemporary analyst.     

Prominence vs. aboutness in sequencing: A functional distinction within the left inferior frontal gyrus

Prior research on the neural bases of syntactic comprehension suggests that activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) correlates with the processing of word order variations. However, there are inconsistencies with respect to the specific subregion within the IFG that is implicated by these findings: the pars opercularis or the pars triangularis. Here, we examined the hypothesis that the dissociation between pars opercularis and pars triangularis activation may reflect functional differences between clause-medial and clause-initial word order permutations, respectively. To this end, we directly compared clause-medial and clause-initial object-before-subject orders in German in a within-participants, event-related fMRI design. Our results showed increased activation for object-initial sentences in a bilateral network of frontal, temporal and subcortical regions. Within the lIFG, posterior and inferior subregions showed only a main effect of word order, whereas more anterior and superior subregions showed effects of word order and sentence type, with higher activation for sentences with an argument in the clause-initial position. These findings are interpreted as evidence for a functional gradation of sequence processing within the left IFG: posterior subportions correlate with argument prominence-based (local) aspects of sequencing, while anterior subportions correlate with aboutness-based aspects of sequencing, which are crucial in linking the current sentence to the wider discourse. This proposal appears compatible with more general hypotheses about information processing gradients in prefrontal cortex (Koechlin & Summerfield, 2007).     

麦金太尔何以断言启蒙道德筹划是失败的?——兼论道德哲学中的"一"与"多"

麦金太尔关于"启蒙道德筹划失败"的断言可能导致两种相反理解。麦氏认为,情感主义者放任道德分歧(多),须对无休止的道德争论负责。启蒙筹划虽然寻求普遍性方案,然其背后却深藏不可公度的前提,同样导致不可公度的各家之言。只不过,后者仍试图用理性来解决,而前者则"坦率地"放弃这种努力。为缓解道德分歧,麦金太尔引入传统合理性。但亦存在问题。生活境遇的改变,使我们须悬置先入之见,通过对话重新圈定道德普世性(一)与道德分殊性(多)的话语范围。     

Cassirer’s enlightenment: on philosophy and the ‘Denkform’ of reason

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the way in which Cassirer implicitly commented on current issues in his historical studies, proposing a case study on his monograph The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, published in November 1932. It begins with a general overview of a few famous and a few neglected instances of Cassirer’s position-takings through historical studies, before discussing briefly the context in which this monograph was written and examining how the Enlightenment is presented in the monograph from 1932. The paper claims that at the centre of Cassirer’s engagement with the Enlightenment was his concern with the autonomy of reason. The way in which Cassirer elaborated on this further shows that his defense of the Enlightenment was not just directed against the threats of totalitarian politics, but also had the aim of clarifying the nature of philosophy and its place in culture. This, however, the paper concludes, does not refute the notion that Cassirer was concerned with current politics when writing The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. The point is rather that he comprehended philosophy as political just in virtue of its exercising the autonomy that characterizes reason.     

Personality has minor effects on panel attrition

In light of the recent interest in using longitudinal panel data to study personality development, it is important to know if personality traits are related to panel attrition. We analyse the effects of personality on panel drop-out separately for an ‘older’ subsample (started in 1984), a relatively ‘young’ subsample (started in 2000), and a ‘new’ subsample (started in 2009) of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study. We found that openness slightly decreases the probability of panel drop-out in all three samples. For the ‘older’ subsample only, we found a small negative effect of agreeableness on panel drop-out. We control for age, sex, education, migration background, and the number of inhabitants in the region of the respondents.     

Orientalism andAntivoluntarism in the History of Ethics: On Christian Wolff's Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica

Christian Wolff's 1721 Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese is generally read as championing the autonomy of ethics from religion. This is too simple: Wolff's ethics was an antivoluntarist religious ethics. The example of the Chinese confirmed for Wolff that revelation is not necessary for knowledge or practice of genuine virtue, though he held that the Chinese achieve only the first of three "degrees of virtue." (Most Christians, including the Pietists who drove Wolff from Halle shortly after he delivered the Discourse , did not, in his judgment, achieve even that.) China's being perceived as outside of Western (and sacred) history made it a congenial example for the ethics and moral anthropology that, in Wolff's time, were struggling against the voluntarism of a Christian ethics premised on original sin.     

Pacifying Muslims in Germany’s ‘City of Peace’: interreligious dialogue as a tool of governance in Osnabrück

ABSTRACT

Addressing Muslims as a target group in municipal politics is a relatively new development in German cities. Interreligious dialogue, often initiated by established Christian actors, provides a format for doing so. In our local West German case study, the politics of dialogue link up with a historical narrative of Osnabrück as ‘City of Peace’, creating a semantic framework which is hard to resist, yet not undisputed. As a governance tool, interreligious dialogue has the potential to pacify and to structure social relations. It tends to prefer and support certain subject positions, while neglecting others. In this contribution we focus both on actors who are involved in local interreligious dialogue as well as those who – for diverse reasons – do not participate, and who question or oppose it. Thus, we analyse the effects of interreligious dialogue on local subjectivation processes, including alternative reactions that might challenge the dominant paradigm.     

Hegel and the history of idealism

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to expose an unwarranted narrowness in the study of idealism in nineteenth century philosophy, and to show that the field of idealism is much wider than usually assumed. This narrowness stems from the influence of Hegel’s history of philosophy, which saw the idealist tradition as beginning in Kant, passing through Fichte and Schelling, and then culminating in his own system. This conception of history has been disseminated by Hegel’s followers and still prevails today. I argue that this conception is too narrow for several reasons. First, it ignores the romantic idealists (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel); second, it excludes the opposing tradition of idealism of Herbart, Fries and Beneke, which affirmed (against Schelling and Hegel) transcendental idealism, an empiricist epistemology, the existence of the thing-in-itself and the value of the Kantian dualisms; and, third, it neglects the history of idealism after Hegel later in the nineteenth century, more specifically, the idealism of Trendelenburg, Lotze and Hartmann.