On Schiller’s Aesthetic and Social Elevation of Moral Perception

Many contemporary philosophical theories of morality operate according to crude logical examples. For instance: ‘setting a cat on fire is wrong’. Schille’s robbed man scenarios from his Kallias letters tell a subtler tale. In this paper, I claim that with the notion of moral beauty, Schiller substantially transcends contemporary philosophical approaches to moral perception by (i) leading the eye to the ‘how’, rather than only to the ‘what’ of an action, (ii) loosening the fixation on the immoral, yet becoming aware of the graceful among the ostensibly dutiful and (iii) realizing that the possibility of moral perception is ultimately interlocked with graceful expressions in social interactions

FORMALITY AND REPRESENTATIONAL RELATIVISM: A CRITICAL PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION INTO KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION AS ONE TRANSFORMATION OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

This paper provides a philosophical discussion of Knowledge Representation [KR], which has become an influential interdisciplinary and technology friendly research field through Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. While KR appears an increasingly fashionable and subsequently blurred term, it originally emerged out of genuine meta-theoretical considerations. Subsequently, the reconstruction of KR's formal, structural and functional foundations should call for further philosophical evaluation of KR's interdisciplinary and practical potential. The focus is put on KR's logical and semiotical roots, both methodologically and historically, whose exposure prove necessary for a proper understanding and possible criticism of KR's [technological] applicability. The stipulation of analytical symbol theory is new in this context, but nevertheless necessary, as only a more principal semiotic focus may allow an appropriate evaluation of symbolic intelligence, which has to be considered KR's essence

Abstract animation, emergent audiovisual motion and micro-expression: A case study of analogue music tracking with Robert Schumann’s Forest Scenes in AudioVisualizer

Abstract animation in the form of “visual music” facilitates both discovery and priming of musical motion that synthesises diverse acoustic parameters. In this article, two scenes of AudioVisualizer, an open-source Chrome extension, are applied to the nine musical poems of Robert Schumann’s Forest Scenes, with the goal to establish a basic framework of expressive cross-modal qualities that in audiovisual synchrony become apparent through visual abstraction and the emergence of defined dynamic Gestalts. The animations that build this article’s core exemplify hands-on how particular ways of real-time analogue music tracking convert score structure and acoustic information into continuous dynamic images. The interplay between basic principles of information capture and concrete simulation in the processing of music provides one crucial entry point to fundamental questions as to how music generates meaning and non-acoustic signification. Additionally, the considerations in this article may motivate the creation of new stimuli in empirical music research as well as stimulate new approaches to the teaching of music

Moral Seeing and the Spectacles of Reason

Initiating a differentiation between an expansive and a narrow conception of moral perception (MP), this paper shows interest in the questions whether (i) it is actually rational ethics’ blind spot that ultimately measures the potential of ethical immediacy, particularly with regard to MP, and (ii) a narrow notion of MP could be meaningfully separated from ethical immediacy in general. These questions are motivated by the notion of “heterochthonous perception” and generate from doubts whether MP could, as Wisnewski claims in a recent paper, be detached from personal interests, intrinsically prescriptive and, at the same time, divergent. I conclude that MP can neither be ontologically univocal, e.g. in the spirit of direct moral realism, nor is there “belief-free” moral immediacy. Finally, I posit that a narrow and stringent notion of MP has to build on the recognition and appraisal of physical symptoms in the expression of human activity

Physics and technology of the Next Linear Collider: a report submitted to Snowmass '96

We present the current expectations for the design and physics program of an e+e- linear collider of center of mass energy 500 GeV -- 1 TeV. We review the experiments that would be carried out at this facility and demonstrate its key role in exploring physics beyond the Standard Model over the full range of theoretical possibilities. We then show the feasibility of constructing this machine, by reviewing the current status of linear collider technology and by presenting a precis of our `zeroth-order' design