Translating German philosophy into English: The case of Martin Heidegger

Language endangerment and language loss have become of focal interest for linguists and cultural anthropologists who bemoan the loss of linguistic diversity. The coinage of the term “linguicide” indicates the inherent problem that is related to mondialisation, universalization, and urbanization, which in itself is a highly controversial subject. The recent discoveries of Martin Heidegger’s black notebooks cast a new perspective on his work, revealing his revulsion at universalist ideologies and his antimodernism – and, most fatefully, his antisemitism: Jews who are to him the incarnation of rootlessness, distance from the soil, and thus subversion. Heidegger was born in a rural provincial German – and for many remained so, walking in the countryside, hating TV, airplanes, pop music, and processed food that all conspire to distract us from the basic wondrous nature of Being, overwhelming us with information, killing silence, and never leaving us alone, and thus keep us away from the confrontation with “das Nichts” (the Nothing), which lies on the other side of Being, that is, however, unknown to the chatter (das Gerede), which can be perceived in the newspapers, on TV and in the cities Heidegger hated to spend time in. Although he was a Nazi to the end, this does not mean that nothing can be learned from him or problems connected to his work. This library research deals with the complexity of translating this German philosopher into the English language. It draws not only on typical examples from Heidegger’s path-breaking philosophical work Sein und Zeit and presents attempts at translating it, but also points out their shortcomings and drawbacks. Additionally, it presents solutions to the problems that emerge from Heidegger’s idiosyncratic language. Generally speaking, it reveals the almost unbridgeable language barriers that can only be overcome at the expense of depth and authenticity. Homogenization can be seen as a way of leveling down ideas and concepts that end in language death

The Great War in Poland-Lithuania from A Jewish Perspective: Modernization and Orientalization

The article presents views of Eastern Judaism, especially in Lithuania, in the Jewish press around the Great War. It is based on a close research of journals, newspapers and book-publications written in the German language. It evidences the global implications of the Great War due, among others, to forced and voluntary migrations that involved cultural encounters, confrontations and challenges. The Other, signifying a collective excluded from the social whole, in those days perceived in the Eastern Jew, meant an embarrassment to the Western Jews (Albanis: 30) and served the function of constructing self-identity, involving them in conflicts or making them develop a dual allegiance (Moshe Gresser; Albanis). Should Jews, if they were to become proper Europeans, not decisively shed their Asian being and carriage and thus de-orientalize themselves? The paper also demonstrates that this historical phase of Jewish history, as it deeply involves the problem of secularization, is connected to intricate problems of identity. It can also illustrate a certain openness and fluidity of identitarian possibilities. The issues involved have a clear relevance for contemporary societies, centred around the question if modernity requires minorities to surrender their particularism, or if is there a suble dialectic between universalism and particularism. Implicitly the core issue also raises the question of a common history of Islam and Judaism and the current problem if antisemitism, as targeted at the Eastern Jews, is comparable to contemporary Islamophobia

The Goldberger-Treiman Discrepancy in SU(3)

The Goldberger-Treiman discrepancy in SU(3) is analyzed in the framework of heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory (HBChPT). It is shown that the discrepancy at leading order is entirely given by counterterms from the order p^3 Lagrangian, and that the first subleading corrections are suppressed by two powers in the HBChPT expansion. These subleading corrections include meson-loop contributions as well as counterterms from the order p^5 Lagrangian. Some one-loop contributions are calculated and found to be small. Using the three discrepancies (pi-N-N, K-N-Lambda and K-N-Sigma) which can be extracted from existing experimental data, we find that the HBChPT calculation favors the smaller g(pi-N-N) values obtained in recent partial wave analyses.Comment: 16 pages,2 figures, revte

OntoWiki 1.0: 10 years of development - what's new in OntoWiki

In this demonstration (with supportive poster) we present the semantic data wiki OntoWiki, which was released in version 1.0 just recently. We focus on the changes introduced to the tool in the latest release and showcase the generic data wiki, improvements we made with regard to the documentation as well as three success stories where OntoWiki was adapted and deployed

A stable backbone for the fungi

Fungi are abundant in the biosphere. They have fascinated mankind as far as written history goes and have considerably influenced our culture. In biotechnology, cell biology, genetics, and life sciences in general fungi constitute relevant model organisms. Once the phylogenetic relationships of fungi are stably resolved individual results from fungal research can be combined into a holistic picture of biology. However, and despite recent progress, the backbone of the fungal phylogeny is not yet fully resolved. Especially the early evolutionary history of fungi and the order or below-order relationships within the ascomycetes remain uncertain. Here we present the first phylogenomic study for a eukaryotic kingdom that merges all publicly available fungal genomes and expressed sequence tags (EST) to build a data set comprising 128 genes and 146 taxa. The resulting tree provides a stable phylogenetic backbone for the fungi. Moreover, we present the first formal supertree based on 161 fungal taxa and 128 gene trees. The combined evidences from the trees support the deep-level stability of the fungal groups towards a comprehensive natural system of the fungi. They indicate that the classification of the fungi, especially their alliance with the Microsporidia, requires careful revision. Our analysis is also an inventory of present day sequence information for the fungi. It provides insights into which phylogenenetic conclusions can and which cannot be drawn from the current data and may serve as a guide to direct further sequencing initiatives. Together with a comprehensive animal phylogeny, we provide the second of three pillars to understand the evolution of the multicellular eukaryotic kingdoms, fungi, metazoa, and plants, in the past 1.6 billion years

Forschungsorientierte Gruppenlernprozesse "blended" gestalten

„Wurzeln und Flügel“ sollten Kinder bekanntlich von ihren Eltern bekommen um Bindung und Freiheit zu erfahren. Möchte man engagierte forschungsorientierte Gruppenlernprozesse gestalten spielen diese beiden Aspekte ebenfalls eine zentrale Rolle. Die Teilnehmenden solcher Prozesse erarbeiten sich gemeinsam den Zugang zu einem Themengebiet, finden sich in Gruppen zusammen, um sich gegenseitig zu unterstützen und bekommen durch die Auflösung der Seminarstruktur die Freiheit, sich intensiv mit den selbst gewählten Schwerpunkten auseinanderzusetzen. Sie teilen Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse mit der Gesamtgruppe und profitieren von einem umfassenden Peer-Review im Prozess der Verschriftlichung der Ergebnisse. Einblicke in die Planung, die Durchführung und vor allem die umfassende Evaluation eines solchen „blended“ gestalteten Seminars der Kunstdidaktik (Fachdidaktische Kritik digitaler Arbeitsmittel im Kunstunterricht) bilden in diesem Workshop die Basis für Diskussionen, praktische Überlegungen und kleine Anwendungen

Digitale Klangumgebungen in der Kunstpädagogik: Erprobung und Blickwinkel

Die zeitgenössische Kunst steht dem Kunstunterricht in der Wahl der Ausdruckmittel sowie bei der Be-handlung von Inhalten und Intentionen mit einer kaum überschaubaren und stetig wachsenden Fülle an Neuerungen zur Seite. Damit stellt sich die Frage, wie die Kunstpädagogik mit diesen umgehen, sie er-proben und vermitteln kann. Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, Einblicke in die Arbeit mit digitalen Klangumge-bungen zu geben, erste Erkenntnisse abzuleiten und in einem theoretischen Diskurs Perspektiven für den Einsatz zu eröffnen. Dazu wird, mit Blick auf die Ausdrucksmittel, exemplarisch die Begegnung mit der digitalen Klangumgebung des MotionComposers im Lehrkontext dargestellt sowie an Quellen, für die Kunstpädagogik relevant erscheinenden Begriffen und einem künstlerischen Vorläufer reflektiert