68 research outputs found
The Sonnenfels´ weekly moral women´s magazine Theresie und Eleonore
No full textAs the title itself suggests, the bachelor´s work called The Sonnenfels´ weekly moral women´s magazine Theresie und Eleonore pursues a weekly moral magazine Theresie und Eleonore issued in 1767, 1773 and 1784. Its author Joseph von Sonnenfels was a jurist of the Enlightenment, a reformer and an intellectual. Theresie und Eleonore is one of his lesser-known magazines which was considered a women´s magazine and describing the women´s world. The main characters are named after Sonnenfels´ wife and her sister Eleonore. Initially the magazine had been regarded as a work of two women - the main characters. Later, Sonnenfels owned up to his work. The constituent parts of my work are the author of the magazine, the form of particular copies and the Sonnenfels´ fictitious authorship. His life and work is set into the cultural context of his time and Theresie und Eleonore is shown as a typical example of the Enlightenment era. The following chapter concentrates on particular editions of the magazine which was published three times in three slightly different editions in the 18th century. The chapter examines the forms of individual issues and their differences. The last part of my work pursues the Sonnenfels´ fictitious authorship which is especially interesting in the fact that the authors were supposedly women. The particular elements of the fictitious authorship are analysed in the order as they were set by Sonnenfels. It concerns the fictitious characters, letters and narration
Les fables de la Fontaine
No full textLast night I catalogued a large French book of La Fontaine's fables and opined that it may have had an Italian source. This morning I happened to be looking over a big box of uncatalogued books and noticed a large La Fontaine book. Bingo! It is a year earlier, interiorly exactly the same, and done in Italy! The differences I notice are these: the 1992 year of publication instead of 1993; thinner and shinier paper; a canvas binding; a cover illustration featuring various animals in and near a pond; and a different publisher, Editrice La Lucciola instead of L'Etoile. The back cover again lists the fables, but now they are more appropriately labeled Fables Choisies. The cover illustration is again signed Eleonore or Eleonora in 1992. The verso of the first page and the back cover both refer this time to County Studio. Let me repeat some comments from there. Here is a very large-format book (almost 9½ x 12) with connections to several European countries. There is an AI at the back covering the book's 150 pages. The same design of snail and flowers recurs frequently at the bottom of text pages. The animals are regularly dressed. WC exhibits a typical illustration on 35. TMCM on 103 shows a big black boot ready to come through the door and interrupt the two rats, both of whom are holding hunks of cheese. For large portions of the book there seems to be a rhythm at work: a fable text on a left-hand page is balanced by a full-page illustration on the right-hand page. Then there are two pages with only texts and the repeated bottom decoration. Then the rhythm starts over.This is a hardbound book (hard cover)Language note: FrenchJean de La Fontain
Engineering social concepts: Feasibility and causal models
No full textHow feasible are conceptual engineering projects of social concepts that aim for the engineered concept to be deployed in people's ordinary conceptual practices? Predominant frameworks on the psychology of concepts that shape work on stereotyping, bias, and machine learning have grim implications for the prospects of conceptual engineers: conceptual engineering efforts are ineffective in promoting certain social‐conceptual changes. Since conceptual components that give rise to problematic social stereotypes are sensitive to statistical structures of the environment, purely conceptual change won't be possible without corresponding world change. This tradition, however, tends to ignore that concepts don't only encode statistical, but also causal information. Paying attention to this feature of concepts, I argue, shows that conceptual engineering is not only possible. There is an imperative to conceptually‐engineer
An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs
Full text linkIn this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true of P iff P bears the “essence” of G—whatever this essence is—which is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features associated with G and predicted of P. Since there is no essence that is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features of a social group, slurs have null-extension, and consequently, many sentences containing them are either meaningless or false. After giving a detailed outline of my theory, I show that it receives strong linguistic support. In particular, it can account for a wide range of linguistic cases that are regarded as challenging, central data for any theory of slurs. Finally, I show that my theory also receives convergent support from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics
Against Teleological Essentialism
Full text linkIn two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences in terms of a telos, such as honey-making, and not in terms of scientific essences, such as bee DNA. In this paper, I challenge their interpretation of the evidence, and show that it is directly predicted by the main theory they seek to undermine. I argue that their results can be explained as instances of diagnostic reasoning about scientific essences
Engineering Social Concepts: Labels and the Science of Categorization
Full text linkOne of the core insights from Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization is that human categorization isn’t arbitrary. Instead, two psychological principles constrain possible systems of classification for all human cultures. According to these principles, the task of a category system is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, and the perceived world provides us with structured rather than arbitrary features. In this paper, I show that Rosch's insights contain important lessons for which kind of ameliorative proposals are \textit{feasible}. I do this by highlighting one overlooked upshot of Rosch's work, namely, that that naming practices play an extremely important role in the construction of perceived similarities within and dissimilarities between categories, and, correspondingly, the dissemination of social stereotypes that serve as markers between different categories that are otherwise similar. Thus, the existence of labeling practices make any ameliorative objective to `engineer away' stereotypes from our conceptual practices unobtainable. And while several intervention techniques might be proposed to overcome this limitation, all of them come with feasibility problems on their own. It might not be possible for us to engineer the undesirable stereotypes that shape our conceptual practices away
Engineering social concepts: Feasibility and causal models
Full text linkHow feasible are conceptual engineering projects of social concepts that aim for the engineered concept to be deployed in people's ordinary conceptual practices? Predominant frameworks on the psychology of concepts that shape work on stereotyping, bias, and machine learning have grim implications for the prospects of conceptual engineers: conceptual engineering efforts are ineffective in promoting certain social‐conceptual changes. Since conceptual components that give rise to problematic social stereotypes are sensitive to statistical structures of the environment, purely conceptual change won't be possible without corresponding world change. This tradition, however, tends to ignore that concepts don't only encode statistical, but also causal information. Paying attention to this feature of concepts, I argue, shows that conceptual engineering is not only possible. There is an imperative to conceptually‐engineer
Psychological Essentialism and the Structure of Concepts
No full textPsychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors. Throughout the past several decades, psychological essentialism has emerged as an extremely active area of research in cognitive science. More recently, it has also attracted attention from philosophers, who put the empirical results to use in many different philosophical areas, ranging from philosophy of mind and cognitive science to social philosophy. This article aims to give philosophers who are new to the topic an overview of the key empirical findings surrounding psychological essentialism, and some of the ways the hypothesis and its related findings have been discussed, extended, and applied in philosophical research
- …
