2 results
2 - Bats – Using Sound to Reveal Cognition
- Edited by Nereida Bueno-Guerra, Federica Amici, Universität Leipzig
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- Book:
- Field and Laboratory Methods in Animal Cognition
- Published online:
- 30 July 2018
- Print publication:
- 09 August 2018, pp 31-59
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Summary
With almost 1300 species all around the globe, bats are probably the most diverse group within the mammalian order, exhibiting an immense range of foraging strategies, social behaviours and navigation skills. The reliance of many bats on echolocation to perceive the world makes them especially useful for cognitive studies. By recording bats' sound emissions, researchers can gain access to the sensory world of the bat, documenting how it allocates sensory attention in space and detects the presence of new stimuli. Moreover, bats rely on a range of sensory modalities including vision, passive audition, olfaction and even magnetic and thermal sensing. Beyond sensing, bats' movement in three dimensions over very large environmental scales, their often complex social life style and their unique longevity (relative to body size) make them intriguing models for studying cognition. However, studies of bat cognition are still sparse, mostly focusing on the psychophysics of echolocation. In this chapter, we highlight many of the advantages and difficulties of studying bat cognition. We point to some of the interesting open questions in the field, offering practical advice for the researcher who has never worked with bats before.
6 - Herder's Aesthetics and Poetics
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- By Stefan Greif
- Edited by Hans Adler, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wulf Koepke, Texas A & M University
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- Book:
- A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 28 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2009, pp 141-164
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Summary
H ERDER'S IMPORTANCE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT of thinking in the field of aesthetics and poetics has always been recognized, but it has been difficult to define the nature and extent of his contributions. They came during a crucial time of evolution leading into what is generally termed as European Romanticism. It seems to be necessary to define more precisely where exactly to locate Herder in this momentous shift of worldviews. In the second half of the eighteenth century, aesthetics established itself as a discipline of philosophy. In contrast to earlier rule-based poetics, the question of the nature of art now came into the foreground of scientific interest. In general terms, philosophers now granted a wider-reaching meaning to the senses and their influence on the rational perception of truth. Although the early humanists had understood the human being as purely rational, the senses were now no longer suspected of undermining the logical or discursive perception of the world through a diversity of perspectives. This epistemological revaluation was, however, not without contradictions. To be sure, philosophers now recognized sensory perception, on the one hand, for its contributions to the discovery of eternal truths; but, on the other hand, this contribution amounted to no more than furnishing the higher cognitive powers with rationally pre-selected information. In Enlightenment discourse the senses were equated in this respect with a rational interface between a causal explanation of nature and empirical reality. The fact that the human being experiences his surrounding reality in more than a merely reflective manner was not taken into consideration in the aesthetic and anthropological discourse of the Enlightenment. This also includes the “trivial” fact that everyday life abounds in unforeseen and irrational occurrences. It is significant that in order to exclude these potential irregularities of existence, the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century based itself only on the “hellsichtige” (clairvoyant) eye. In contrast to the “dumpferen” (duller) powers of sensation, the eye was given the task of providing reason with preobjective images of reality. The human being, who is constantly threatened by other sensations, is accordingly obligated to mistrust his lower organs of perception.
At the end of the eighteenth century, anyone who expressed serious doubts about this aesthetics — based as it was on epistemology and a theory of perception — found himself outside the boundaries of Enlightenment philosophy.