Suchergebnisse

This volume challenges the widespread belief that scientific knowledge as such is international. Employing case studies from Austria, Poland, the Czech lands, and Hungary, the authors show how scientists in the late Habsburg Monarchy simultaneously nationalized and internationalized their knowledge

AbstractThe paper attempts to place the emergence of cognitive science (CS) as an interdisciplinary research program in historical context. A broad overview of the institutional and intellectual situations during the early postwar period is presented, focusing primarily on psychology and artificial intelligence (AI). From an institutional perspective, the paper shows that although computers and computer science were closely linked with weapons research during World War II, the postwar creation of cognitive science had no military connection, but was largely enabled by small grants from private foundations, though the RAND Corporation was involved to a limited extent. From an epistemic perspective, the paper shows: (1) that neobehaviourist learning theory was not replaced by, but flourished parallel to cognition-oriented psychology in the 1950s, because they were located in different sub-disciplines; (2) that the key theoretical inputs into CS were developed separately at first, and each group remained affiliated with the discipline or complex of disciplines from which it came. A certain tension remained at the core of the project between the machine dreams of the emerging AI community and the idea of autonomous mental processes central to cognitive psychology.

Der Beitrag behandelt in drei Schritten die Rolle der Verfassung in der gegenwärtigen politischen Krise der USA. Zunächst geht es um die Frage, inwiefern der US-Verfassung das Attribut »demokratisch« zugeschrieben werden kann, und warum der offenbar nicht-demokratische Modus der Präsidentenwahl (Electoral College) noch immer besteht. In einem zweiten Schritt wird die reale Verfassung am Beispiel des Wahlrechts besprochen und im aktuellen restriktiven Umgang damit seitens der republikanischen Partei eine der Wurzeln der derzeitigen politischen Krise der USA geortet. Im dritten Schritt wird die zentrale Rolle der Verfassung als Symbol der Rechtstaatlichkeit in der politischen Kultur der USA behandelt und die These vertreten, dass das patriotische Bekenntnis zur Verfassung in einer Zeit der politischen Polarisierung seine einigende Kraft zu verlieren droht.

The general theme that unites the works to be discussed here is the history of psychoanalysis in America over the past hundred years, particularly during the heyday of its public impact from the 1950s through the 1970s. The broad outlines of this story have been well known for some time. Interesting about the volumes discussed here is the step that each book takes in its own way beyond a narrow focus on Freud and his followers or the institutional history of the psychoanalytic profession to examinations of so-called neo-Freudianism and of the entry of psychoanalytic discourse into American middle- and highbrow popular culture. The question whether, how, or to what extent psychoanalysis became "Americanized" in the course of all this is addressed explicitly in the volume by Elizabeth Lunbeck, and implicitly in the other books under review. In the following I will discuss each volume in turn, pointing to linkages among them along the way.