Humanities & Social Sciences

I discuss Descartes’ metaphysics of selfhood, and relevant parts of contemporary philosophy regarding the first person. My two main concerns are the controversy that surrounds Descartes’ conception of conscientia, mistranslated as ‘consciousness’, and his conception of selfhood and its essential connection to conscientia. ‘I’-thoughts give rise to the most challenging philosophical questions. An answer to the questions concerning the peculiarities of the first person, self-identification and self-ascription, is to be found in Descartes’ notion of conscientia. His conception of selfhood insightfully informs his conception of personhood. I offer a unified account of selfhood, conscientia, the first person, and personhood anchored in the self’s authority of reason and autonomy of freedom.

This open access volume explores peer review in the scientific community and academia. While peer review is as old as modern science itself, recent changes in the evaluation culture of higher education systems have increased the use of peer review, and its purposes, forms and functions have become more diversified. This book put together a comprehensive set of conceptual and empirical contributions on various peer review practices with relevance for the scientific community and higher education institutions worldwide. Consisting of three parts, the editors and contributors examine the history, problems and developments of peer review, as well as the specificities of various peer review practices. In doing so, this book gives an overview on and examine peer review , and asks how it can move forward. This is an open access book.

"This fluent and comprehensive field guide responds to increased interest, across the humanities, in the ways in which digital technologies can disrupt and open up new research and pedagogical avenues. It is designed to help scholars and students engage with their subjects using an audio-visual grammar, and to allow readers to efficiently gain the technical and theoretical skills necessary to create and disseminate their own trans-media projects. Documentary Making for Digital Humanists sets out the fundamentals of filmmaking, explores academic discourse on digital documentaries and online distribution, and considers the place of this discourse in the evolving academic landscape. The book walks its readers through the intellectual and practical processes of creating digital media and documentary projects. It is further equipped with video elements, supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process. This will be a valuable resource to humanist scholars and students seeking to embrace new media production and the digital landscape, and to those researchers interested in using means beyond the written word to disseminate their work. It constitutes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of digital humanities, as the first practical guide of its kind designed to facilitate humanist interactions with digital filmmaking, and to empower scholars and students alike to create and distribute new media audio-visual artefacts."

This open access book maps a crucial but neglected chapter in the history of psychiatry: how was melancholia transformed in the nineteenth century from traditional melancholy madness into a modern biomedical mood disorder, paving the way for the emergence of clinical depression as a psychiatric illness in the twentieth century? At a time when the prevalence of mood disorders and antidepressant consumption are at an all-time high, the need for a comprehensive historical understanding of how modern depressive illness came into being has never been more urgent. This book addresses a significant gap in existing scholarly literature on melancholia, depression, and mood disorders by offering a contextualised and critical perspective on the history of melancholia in the first decades of psychiatry, from the 1830s until the turn of the twentieth century.

How can the person and meaning of Jesus Christ be understood in a religiously plural world? Reinhold Bernhardt develops a Christology which does justice to the biblical testimonies and the present context - without relativization and without absolutization. Jesus Christ is presented as God's representative to mankind and as mankind's representative to God. He visualizes God's will of salvation, which at the same time reaches beyond the representative. Bernhardt outlines the challenge that the Christian faith faces in a situation of religious diversity and clarifies what is meant by "representation". He determines the divinity of Jesus not on the basis of his divine nature, but in terms of his relationship to God, his unique familiarity with the nature, will and reality of God. The discussion of five drafts from the German-speaking and American theology of the 19th and 20th centuries (Schleiermacher, Biedermann, Ritschl, Ogden and Haight) additionally sharpens the profile of this "representational Christology".

In der Wissenschaft sind Erkenntnisziele, aber auch ein spezieller Weltaufschluss angelegt. Diesen zu vermitteln, ist Aufgabe der Wissenschaftsdidaktik. Was aber bedeutet es, Wissenschaft institutionell zu einem Gegenstand des Lehrens und Lernens zu machen? Die Beitragenden des Bandes liefern disziplinenübergreifende Antworten auf diese Frage und beleuchten Wissenschaftsdidaktik aus empirischer, theoretischer, konzeptioneller sowie praktisch-reflexiver Perspektive. Hochschullehrende sowie praktisch und forschend tätige Personen finden hier Zugang zur Wissenschaftsdidaktik und ihren innovativen Erkenntnispotentialen.

How do survivors of sexual and domestic violence relate to religion and to a higher power? What are the social and religious contexts that sustain and encourage eating disorders in women? How do these issues intersect? The relationship between Christian religious discourse, incest, and eating disorders reveals an important, and so far unexamined, psychosocial phenomenon. Drawing from interviews with incest survivors whose sexual and religious backgrounds are intimately connected with their problematic relationship with food, Jennifer Manlowe here illuminates the connections between female body, weight, and appetite preoccupations. Manlowe offers social and psychological insights into the most common forms of female suffering—incest and body hatred. The volume is intended as a resource for professionals, advocates, friends of survivors, and most importantly, the survivor of incest herself as she attempts to understand the links of meaning in her mind between her incest experience and her subsequent eating disorder.

Scholarship in medieval studies of the past 20 or so years has offered some provocative experiments in, and elegant exempla of, style. Scholars such as Anne Clark Bartlett, Kathleen Biddick, Catherine Brown, Brantley Bryant, Michael Camille, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, James Earl, L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Roberta Frank, Amy Hollywood, Cary Howie, C. Stephen Jaeger, Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, Peggy McCracken, Paul Strohm, David Wallace, and Paul Zumthor, among others, have blended the conventions of academic writing with those of fiction, drama, memoir, comedy, polemic, and lyricism, and/or have developed what some would describe as elegant, and arresting (and in some cases, deliciously difficult) prose styles. As these registers merge, they can produce what has been called a queer historiographical encounter (or in queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman’s terms, “an erotohistoriography”), a “poetics of intensification,” and even a “new aestheticism.” The work of these scholars has also opened up debates (some rancorous) that often install what the editors of this volume feel are false binaries between form and content, feeling and thinking, affect and rigor, poetry and history, attachment and critical distance, enjoyment and discipline, style and substance. As Anna Klosowska writes in her contribution to this volume, The question of style, as it applies to medieval studies, is precisely the overcoming of that dichotomy between Nature and Man: a third element. And when the critique proceeds through the denunciation of the inimitability of someone’s style, as if it were the third sex, ungenerative, queer, sterile, sodomitic, lesbian, etc., the critic unconsciously puts his finger on exactly what style is; but that critic is mistaken about the style’s supposedly non-generative powers. In fact, style, neither fact nor theory but facilitating the transition between the two, is … the generative principle itself.

Slavic languages

Empirical approaches based on qualitative or quantitative methods of corpus linguistics have become a central paradigm within linguistics. The series takes account of this fact and provides a platform for approaches within synchronous linguistics as well as interdisciplinary works with a linguistic focus which devise new ways of working empirically and develop new data-based methods and theoretical models for empirical linguistic analyses.

Researchers navigate dynamic transitions throughout their careers, moving between roles, institutions, countries, and career stages while assuming leadership positions. These transitions reflect the evolving nature of researcher education and careers across a constantly changing academic landscape. This book explores these movements through a synthesis of literature reviews, theoretical explorations, and empirical studies from institutional policy, local practice, and individual perspectives. Organised into three themes: 'The Evolving Scholarly Community', 'Contextual Transitions', and 'Career-Point Transitions', the book critically examines established concepts while introducing fresh perspectives, such as ethics leadership and the role of artificial intelligence in researcher education. It highlights the growing relationship between researchers, institutions, and societal bodies, while addressing the implications of increased mobility across national, cultural, and disciplinary contexts. Chapters span topics from PhD education to post-PhD careers and mid-to-late career transitions, showcasing a rich methodological scope and diverse theoretical approaches. Offering valuable insights for those studying or navigating transitions from early to late career stages, this is an essential resource for researchers, educators, and policymakers interested in the complexities of researcher education and career transitions.

With so much of the global population living on the move, away from their homelands, and in diasporic communities, death and mourning practices are inevitably impacted. Transnational Death brings together eleven cutting-edge articles from the emerging field of transnational death studies. By highlighting European, Asian, North American, and Middle Eastern perspectives, the collection provides timely and fresh analysis and reflection on people’s changing experiences with death in the context of migration over time. First beginning with a thematic assessment of the field of transnational death studies, readers then have the opportunity to delve into case studies that examine experiences with death and mourning at a distance from the viewpoints of Family, Community, and Commemoration. The chapters highlight complicated issues confronting migrants, their families, and communities, including: negotiations of burial preferences and challenges of corpse repatriation; the financial costs of providing end-of-life care, travel at times of death, and arranging culturally appropriate funerals and religious services; as well as the emotional and sociocultural weight of mourning and commemoration from afar. Overall, Transnational Death provides new insights on identity and belonging, community reciprocity, transnational communication, and spaces of mourning and commemoration.

Seit Marc Bloch und Ernst Kantorowicz ist vieles über die religiöse Legitimierung politischer Gewalt geschrieben worden, doch die Geschichte der Entscheidungsfindung ist von diesem Trend weitgehend unberührt geblieben. Wie aber lassen sich Einflüsse religiöser Vorstellungen auf die Politik untersuchen? Dieses Buch analysiert die Einflussnahme der Katholischen Reform auf das politische Kalkül in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts. Es behandelt den Widerstand gegen die antispanische Kriegspolitik in Frankreich, die bayerische Politik im Dreißigjährigen Krieg und das Scheitern der polnischen Monarchie im 17. Jahrhundert. Damien Tricoire eröffnet mit diesem Buch neue Sichtweisen auf die Verbindung von Politik und Religion in der Vormoderne.

An increasing complexity of models used to predict real-world systems leads to the need for algorithms to replace complex models with far simpler ones, while preserving the accuracy of the predictions. This three-volume handbook covers methods as well as applications. This third volume focuses on applications in engineering, biomedical engineering, computational physics and computer science.

This account of the essays, poems and stories collected in the present volume reflects on the authors’ diverse forms of engagement with Dante via the implications of proximity and distance. In what ways do these students signal affinity with Dante – his historical context, his writerly persona – and in what ways do they subvert or challenge the world view (or the cosmic order) represented in the Commedia? How does their location in South Africa in the twenty-first century, as a particular kind of temporal and spatial dislocation from Italy in the fourteenth century, enable their creative and critical responses to Dante’s work?