Andreas Dorschel

In the process of making bedsteads, Plato claimed, makers look towards the ‘idea’ of the bed. But what is that idea? Two candidates come to mind: shape and purpose. The fact that we identify objects of very different shape, not even involving a bedstead, as beds seems to render purpose conceptually superior. But, then, what is a bed’s purpose? An obvious response appears tobe: lying down and sleeping. Yet, first, beds are not needed for that. Secondly, precisely when a bed is slept on, it is not perceived as a design object. Thirdly, beds constitute a kind of existential furniture, associated with giving birth, making love, suffering illness and dying. All such issues humans really care about, however, are strikingly indifferent towards the design of beds. As elsewhere, the maxim that form follows function fails. Design thinking might rather make headway when beds are conceived of as peculiar spaces within spaces.

Reference to past possibilities is not an additional luxury in writing history, after all facts have been established. For even facts become such only within a field of alternative options. What it means that one path was taken depends in part on answers to the question which other paths once open were not taken. Historical potential unrealized can be conceived of in a number of ways: as unfulfilled intentions, as unresolved problems, as suppressed endeavours, as waived alternatives within a context of decision, or as losses incurred by gains in some other respect. Some of these conceptions are non-exclusive. None of them provides the single model to grasp past possibilities; rather, they will turn out to be more or less elucidative according to historical case.

In book 3 of ‘De anima’, Aristotle distinguishes between sensations and feelings. On the level of sensation, we merely register that something is so and so; feeling, by way of contrast, takes that so and so to be agreeable or disagreeable. Emotion has to be distinguished from both sensation and feeling. One cannot have a sensation or feeling without noticing it. But others may be the first to realize that somebody is jealous or envious. Hence emotions like jealousy or envy are not, and are not like, sensations or feelings. Feelings and emotions share an evaluative stance towards the world. But they differ in the way they relate to reason.

The expulsion of prejudice is the centrepiece of intellectual progress, as it has been understood since the Enlightenment. that this fight has not been successful since is obvious, but this does not invalidate it. There is no reason to believe that people in the 20th century had fewer (rather than merely different) prejudices than people had in the 18th century; yet we might simply conclude that the fight has not been conducted resolutely enough. The question whether or not this might be the right conclusion, however, depends on an answer to a more fundamental question; whether prejudices, as such, are a proper object to fight against in the first place. The argument of this book, is an attempt to show that they are not. The author begins by reconstructing the Enlightenment's main objection to prejudice, challenging the conclusion that all prejudices must be destroyed and focusing on the context of decision and action. The book goes on to consider the relationship between prejudice and experience, and explores a particular defence of prejudice developed in hermeneutics. A final chapter drives home the general conclusion of the book. To make the case for a reinterpretation of the concept of prejudice, it addresses particularly contentious issues, exploring dogmatism, fundamentalism and racist prejudices.

In this paper I want to examine the concept of 'conditions of fulfilment' or 'compliance' or 'satisfaction' which have been introduced by some authors in order to provide analyses of meaning which are just as adequate to directive speech acts as truth-conditional semantics are (claimed to be) adequate to assertive speech acts. It will be argued that this aim is missed. Most analyses (except those of some primitive cases) will remain throughout imcomplete as long as they are not supplemented by a specification of conditions of normative validity. In the case of several illocutionary verbs they can be substituted by conditions under which the speaker could make use of sanctions against the hearer.

The relationship between art and knowledge is subject to historical change. In the early 19th century, the view was still prevalent that art was about eternal values, especially beauty, whereas science was entirely involved in historical time: The former was seen as contemplative, the latter as searching. But ever since, most artists have given up that stance and hence the once imagined detachment from historical time. They search, and sometimes research, too. Does that mean that art and science have come closer?

Is fear a ‘deficient mode’ of anxiety? This claim made by Martin Heidegger in ‘Being and Time’ (1927) depends on an analysis of intentionality. Emotions take objects: to love, to hate, to fear is to love, to hate, to fear someone or something. Yet anxiety, Heidegger maintains (‘Being and Time’ § 40), is about “nothing” (“nichts”) rather than “something” (“etwas”). Heidegger then turns lack of knowledge or understanding of what one’s anxiety is about into a revelation of “Nothing” (“Die Angst offenbart das Nichts”; ‘Being and Time’ § 40) – a state meant to manifest freedom. Yet freedom is not increased but diminished if and when someone cannot judge the direction, extent and power of a threat. Concrete, determinate thought liberates; someone is less free in anxiety than in fear.

Simplicity can be a complicated matter. This has been notorious in the philosophy of science for some time; but it seems the aesthetics of music yet have to come up to that insight. Song, apparently the plainest of musical genres, turns out to be a rather intricate sort of thing once we try to unravel its puzzle of expression as confluence of words and music. Specifically, Franz Schubert’s Ihr Bild, after Heinrich Heine, achieves simplicity through condensation. The idea of gestural development, linked with expressive modes, can disclose such a process.

Expression in orchestral music is a matter of conductors rather than orchestras. Why should that be so? The straightforward answer seems to be that expression is bound to the individual self. But, then, does it have to be? Collective expression of, e.g., anger, rage or protest is not at all unusual in the public domain of politics. Our intuition of conductors’ expressive primacy could be salvaged if we were to conceive of orchestras as their instruments. But that will not do. For conducting is to make oneself understood by an orchestra rather than to impact on it causally. A better way of making sense of the relationship between conductor and orchestra is offered by the theory of the social contract. That idea should be supplemented by an account of the relationship between the conductor who gesturally embodies the music’s expression on the one hand and the audience on the other hand.

Die 4. Auflage bringt zunächst die Kommentierung der Präambel und der Art. 1 bis 19 auf den aktuellen Stand von Judikatur und Literatur. Die grundlegende Struktur des Kommentares wurde beibehalten und um neuere Entwicklungen wie die Implikationen der Europäisierung und Digitalisierung sowie der Corona-Pandemie ergänzt.Die Herausgeberschaft des Kommentares hat ab der 4. Auflage Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf übernommen. Auch im Autorenkreis sind personelle Veränderungen zu verzeichnen: Mit Ausnahme von Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, Alexander Thiele und Ferdinand Wollenschläger, die bereits an der 3. Auflage mitgewirkt haben, liegen die Kommentierungen in den Händen neuer Autorinnen und Autoren.Der Kommentar erscheint in drei Bänden und wird nur geschlossen abgegeben.Der Grundgesetz-Kommentar ist Bestandteil des Moduls Verfassungsrecht PREMIUM, das bei beck-online.de erhältlich ist.

Delius’ Messe des Lebens (1907) transforms Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-5) into a Mass, religious services for worshippers of ‚Life‘. An individual reader’s train of thought is thus replaced by a collective experience at grand scale. To achieve that, Delius abandons cognitive, in particular philosophical, as well as satirical and parodistic features of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Yet unlike the Christian Mass, Eine Messe des Lebens gathers its congregation less by reference to belief, but rather by virtue of a sequence of musically evocative moods (‚Stimmungen‘). Mood is not to be confused with a mere subjective state (‚feeling‘). Bound up with Delius’ idea of Nature, it is meant to dispel the suspicion of arbitrariness attached to the particular artistic invention of a Mass of Life, compared to its rival, the anonymous Holy Mass.

Acting morally comes at a price. The fewer people act morally, the dearer moral acts will be to those who perform them. Even if it could be proven that a certain moral norm were valid, the question might still be open whether, under certain circumstances, the demand to follow it meant asking too much. The validity of a moral norm is independent from actual compliance. In that regard, moral norms differ from legal rules. A law that nobody obeys has eroded and thus lost validity; a moral norm that nobody keeps, however, may still be valid. Yet the latter point does not render the question obsolete whether demanding obedience to a specific moral norm, under certain circumstances, could mean asking too much. The costs incurred might be, on the one hand, individual costs. But there may, on the other hand, also be moral costs of obeying a certain moral norm. For an individual might also have responsibilities towards others near her, e.g., her family or peers; acting in accordance with the strict moral standard, then, could do harm not just to her but also to those who rely, and must rely upon her. Yet to define moral limits to following moral rules appears to be self-defeating.

‘Metaphysical painting’ (‘pittura metafisica’) is a paradoxical term: extrasensory sensuousness, as it were. Painting is the representation of visible surfaces; metaphysics rejects surfaces, as deceptive, in favour of the deeper essence. But Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) who coined the term ‘pittura metafisica’ in 1919 was a follower of the anti-essentialist Nietzsche. ‘Metaphysics’, then, is not about discovering the essence of things but about shaping their appearances, their ‘physique’. This is an intriguing concept and the corollary to a subtle artistic oeuvre.

In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance qualities via recoupling not equally retaining bodily expressivity. When, where, and what is the body expressed in electronic music then? The authors of this book reveal composers', performers', improvisers' and listeners' bodies, as well as the works' and technologies' figurative bodies as a rich source of expressive articulation. Bringing together humanities' scholarship and musical arts contingent upon new media, the contributors offer inspiring thought and critical reflection for all those seriously engaged with the aesthetics of electronic music, interactive performance, and the body's role in aesthetic experience and expression. Performativity is not only seen as being reclaimed in live electronic music, interactive arts, and installations; it is also exposed as embodied in the music and the listeners themselves.

Remembrance is constitutive of music. For music emerges not as an isolated physical stimulus. Rather, it is experienced, i.e., a present musical moment is tied to its temporal antecedents. It is tempting to conceive of remembrance as repetition and as thus opposed to oblivion. Yet to memory selectivity is crucial. What is not selected, falls into oblivion. Hence as we remember we have forgotten already. The present moment evokes remembrance, and exhibits what was then in the light of what is now. Remembrance changes the past it recovers. Listening to music, we may experience anamnesis to be metamorphosis.