Ben Morgan

Ion mobilities and microscopic dynamics in liquid (Li,K)Cl

The dynamical properties of ionic melts formed from mixtures of LiCl and KCl have been studied across the full composition range in computer simulations of sufficient length to enable reliable values for such collective transport coefficients as the viscosity, conductivity, and internal mobilities to be determined reliably. Interest centers on the nontrivial concentration dependence exhibited by these transport coefficients, which agrees well with that observed experimentally, and in relating this to the strength of the association between an ion and its first coordination shell. The relationships between the various transport coefficients, such as those between the diffusion coefficient and the viscosity (Stokes-Einstein) and the conductivity (Nernst-Einstein) also exhibit composition dependences that reflect this association. The connection between the internal mobility and two measures of the coordination shell dynamics (the cage relaxation time and the self-exchange velocity) is explored; it is shown that the self-exchange velocity follows the composition and temperature dependence of the internal mobility very well. Finally, it is shown that allowing for anion polarization in the interaction model increases the mobility of all species without changing the structure of the melt discernibly, with the largest effect being found for the Li(+) ion.

Relating to Ourselves without a Self: Eckhart and Neuroscience

Abstract This paper questions models of identity that take individual consciousness as a focus, comparing the understanding of subjectivity in Eckharts work to that found in recent empirical studies of the forms and mechanisms of social cognition. The argument begins by questioning the instrumental purpose of recent research into meditative states. Researchers in this field pursue a goal-orientated agenda, which is in stark contrast to Eckharts non-agenda and relinquishment of control. A close reading of Sermon Q69 then shows how Eckhart challenges our intellectual habits and first-person perspective, suggesting that what he calls our ‘intellect’ can be without instrumental assumptions: pure surprise. In the last part, the paper compares Eckharts exhortation that we intelligently accept insecurity with recent research into automated responses and mirror neurons. The findings of this research present a model of human identity comparable to Eckharts: one which questions the focus on consciousness and control associated with Cartesian and Kantian models of human identity.

GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT: POETRY AND EXPERIENCE IN THE CULTURAL DEBATES OF THE BRENNER CIRCLE

Abstract This article reads Trakl’s poetry in the context of his involvement with the journal ‘Der Brenner’. In particular the admiration for Karl Kraus which Trakl shared with the Brenner Circle is used as a way of showing how Trakl’s poetic method compares to the approaches of his cultural peers. The reading of Trakl that emerges lies between that of a critique of Kraus (Stieg) and a staging of literary fragmentation (Baßler). We see instead a meaningful meaningnessless that critics from the 1910s onwards, including Heidegger, have explained by grounding it in the authenticity of the poet. This strategy is read as a version of Aristotelian ēthos.

Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture: An Introduction

The article surveys three major positions in early debates about situated cognition in the 1990s as they are represented in particular in the work of Edwin Hutchins, Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger, Tim van Gelder, Andy Clark, Jerome Bruner and John Haugeland. Rather than arbitrate among the three positions and declare a winner, the article suggests that the very tensions between sub-personal, supra-personal and personal levels of analysis evident in the debates are a necessary feature of the study of situated cognition, which can be resolved only by the sort of case by case negotiation of which we find records in the cultural archive. The eight case studies collected in this special issue can be read as explorations of the historical variety of these lived negotiations.

Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 479. Love in Context: Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 60 in an Oxford and a Munich Manuscript

The article contrasts the versions of Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 60 to be found in two manuscripts. The sermon replaces the more usual Dominican emphasis on intellect with a privileging of love as the highest power. The differing responses to this unusual line of argument in the two manuscripts give a concrete sense of the puzzlement provoked by Eckhart’s preaching, and of the different strategies by which Eckhart’s texts shaped or were themselves shaped by the spiritual milieu in which they were encountered. Der Beitrag kontrastiert die Fassung der 60. Predigt Meister Eckharts in der Oxforder Handschrift MS. Laud Misc. 479 mit der der Münchner Handschrift Staatsbibliothek cgm 133. Die Textänderungen werden darauf zurückgeführt, dass in dieser Predigt statt der erwartbaren dominikanischen Bevorzugung des Intellekts der Schwerpunkt auf Liebe als höchster Macht liegt. Wie unterschiedlich die beiden Handschriften darauf reagieren, vermittelt einen Einblick in die starken Reaktionen, die Eckharts Predigen hervorriefen, und mit welchen Textverfahren Eckharts Texte vorbildhaft wirkten und selbst durch das geistliche Umfeld geformt wurde, in denen sie auftraten.

The Pleasure of the Text

Abstract This article presents two previously unrecognized Augsburg sources for the transmission of the radical Eckhartian ‘Sister Catherine‘ treatise. A comparison with the earliest known version of the treatise in Munich BSB cgm 133 is used to demonstrate how individual statements in a codex should not be assessed for their interest or radicality independent of context. Rather, the manuscript as a whole should be linked to the spiritual endeavours from which it emerged. One of the two Augsburg codices in particular is situated in the context of the copyist‘s, Agnes Bühlerin’s, attempt to preserve a particular model of spiritual life in the face of external interference by the new Protestant authorities in the diocese of Augsburg post-1539.

The Unfolding of Our Lives with Others: Heidegger and Medieval Mysticism

The chapter argues that the aspects of Heidegger’s thought which are most useful to feminist philosophy of religion are not the obviously spiritual terms, like Gelassenheit or “releasement” borrowed from Meister Eckhart, but instead the focus on co-existence and shared mood (Mitsein and Mitbefindlichkeit) to be found in Being and Time (1927). At the same time, these concepts represent a missed opportunity, as can be seen when Heidegger’s arguments are juxtaposed with texts of fourteenth-century German mysticism and the milieu and practices from which these texts arose. The medieval texts supply a model for explaining why Heidegger’s arguments about co-existence in the course of Being and Time unexpectedly come to privilege isolation and anxiety over being with other people. In particular, they make visible a culturally determined attachment to a model of masculine behaviour, that as well as being implicit in the arguments of Being and Time is explicit in the letters Heidegger wrote to Hannah Arendt in the mid-1920s.

Music in Nazi film: How different is Triumph of the Will?

Abstract The article analyses the use of music in Triumph of the Will/Triumph des Willens (Riefenstahl, 1934/35). A discussion of the theory and practice of film music in the Third Reich shows how Riefenstahls film conformed to and indeed embodied the model of monumental film art promulgated by the Nazi state. At the same time, the music in the film also draws on idioms and devices used in commercial film making in Germany and beyond in the 1930s. This suggests that the film and its particular effects cannot be understood only in terms of Nazi propaganda but that the films relation to a wider cinematic context must be taken into account.

At one Remove: The Paradoxes of Jelinek’s narrative Voice

Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust is pornographic not because it graphically describes a woman’s sexual maltreatment, but because it violently abuses language, cutting it up and degrading it before the eyes of the reader. Such at least is the conclusion reached by Wolfram Schutte in the review which he writes of the novel when it first appears in 1989.2 His epigrammatic inversion is an extreme, if problematic formulation of issues central to any discussion of Jelinek’s writing. Not only does it shift our attention away from the content of the texts to their form. It implicitly raises questions as to the gender both of the subject who wrote the texts, and of the very language in which they are composed (in Schutte’s scenario, language features as the abused woman, with Jelinek taking the role of the abusing man).