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This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language High German', a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of German' speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
Madness and Sense
(2015)
In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker's knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker's knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality - often context bound - by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages.
Though Peter Gordon mentioned philosophical anthropology in his book Continental Divide, he has not yet realized how it works independently from Cassirer's and Heidegger's prejudices. The whole argument between them before, in and after Davos (1929) raged around the status of philosophical anthropology: How do the spiritualisation of life and the enlivening of the spirit come about? This was not just the central question for philosophical anthropology founded by Max Scheler, but also in Wilhelm Dilthey's life philosophy, which was systematized by Georg Misch. Cassirer and Heidegger shared three shortcomings with respect to the Life-philosophical Anthropology. Neither had a philosophy of nature or a philosophy of sociaty or a philosophy of history. The insight into the unfathomability of humans (Misch) is given a political edge in Helmuth Plessner's book Power and Human Nature (1931). Elevating it to the principle of democratic equality with respect to the worth of all cultures one opens up the potential for a form of civil competition that might supersede ethnocentric wars.
The current practice in allocating post-mortem organ donations is in many respects ethically problematic. After criticizing this practice, this article explores what a more morally acceptable practice could look like.
The article concludes with an appeal for the random allocation of available donor organs.
Gespenstergeschichten
(2015)
Welchen Stellenwert nimmt die Rote Armee Fraktion innerhalb der deutschen Geschichte ein? Eignet sie sich als Prisma für ein Nachdenken über Kunst, Trauma und Erinnerung nach 1945? Und was gibt sie uns über die deutsche Gesellschaft, ihre bewussten und unbewussten Mechanismen der Selbstverständigung zu verstehen?
Svea Bräunert nähert sich diesen und weiteren Fragen über die Kunst: Literatur, Film und bildende Kunst haben sich von Anfang an von der RAF angesprochen und herausgefordert gefühlt. Mit dem Linksterrorismus greifen sie ein Thema auf, das eine breite Palette an historischen, politischen, medialen und mnemonischen Fragestellungen eröffnet. Neben kanonischen Positionen von Richter, Kluge und Enzensberger werden zur Betrachtung derselben auch neuere Arbeiten von Demand, DeLillo und Dumas herangezogen.
Die Beschäftigung mit den künstlerischen Ansätzen steht im Kontext eines thematisch-theoretischen Nachdenkens über die RAF, das den Linksterrorismus als eine besondere Form des Traumas begreift und das Gespenst als Ausdruck dieser Besonderheit stark macht. Das Gespenst ist die Gestalt, die ein Trauma dennoch annehmen kann, obwohl es sich eigentlich jeder Form von Darstellung entziehen müsste. Möglich wird dies durch seinen metonymischen und nachträglichen Impuls. Er erlaubt es dem Gespenst, etwas auf verschobene Weise zur Anschauung zu bringen, was sonst ungesehen oder unausgesprochen bleiben müsste. Indem das Buch diese Verschiebungen nachvollzieht, leistet es ebenso einen Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik wie zur erinnerungstheoretischen Diskussion.