Scholarship, community formation and book reviews: The Literarisches Centralblatt as arena and meeting place

Book reviews serve multiple functions. They are not only used to assess the merit of individual books but also contribute to the creation and maintenance of scholarly communities. This paper draws on nineteenth-century book reviews to outline three of their features that contributed to the selfdefinition of such communities: the assessment of books, the assessment of authors, and the use of positive and negative politeness strategies to address individual authors as well as a broader audience. The analysis will be based on the book reviews of the German Semitist Theodor Nöldeke and the experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in the Literarisches Centralblatt in the eighteenseventies. In their book reviews they both criticized and praised their peers, which turned review journals like the Centralblatt in arenas for polemic debate as well as meeting places for likeminded scholars. To be more precise, book reviews were used to communicate standards of scholarly excellence, expectations of the character and skills of scholars, and the acknowledgement of the value of the continued existence of aims and interests shared among a large group of academically educated and employed scholars. By contributing to the establishment and maintenance of scholarly peer groups with shared values, book reviews also reinforced the dividing line between academic researchers and lay contributors to their fields.

David Katz’s “Phenomenological Psychology”

David Katz (1884-1953)was an experimental psychologist who worked in the early years of psychology as an independent science. He performed many experiments on color vision and touch by means of what he called the “phenomenological method.” He claimed to have learned the method by attending Husserl’s lectures on phenomenological philosophy while the latter was teaching at Göttingen. However the method that Katz actually used was “description with an attitude of disciplined naiveté”. Consequently, while such a method was known as “phenomenological” at the time Katz was working, the nomenclature reflects a historically dated meaning of phenomenology and not the sense of phenomenological method that Husserl developed later in his career. Katz’s method was actually qualitative and empirical. It was not phenomenological according to Husserl’s complete, mature philosophy.

From Freud to Android: Constructing a scale of uncanny feelings

The uncanny valley is a topic for engineers, animators, and experimental psychologist, yet uncanniness is without a clear definition. Across 3 studies, we developed a 16-item scale measuring uncanny feelings, finding that uncanniness is discriminable from other emotions. In Study 1, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis of uncanny feelings. In Study 2, we measured the convergent and discriminant validity of our 16-item scale, establishing that participants who watched an uncanny video responded with more uncanny feelings than those who watched a disgusting, fearful, or neutral video. In Study 3, we conducted a high-powered confirmatory factor analysis to assess the reliability of the 2-factor model on a new sample. These studies contribute to the psychological and interdisciplinary understanding of this strange, eerie phenomenon of being confronted with what looms just beyond our understanding.

Representational and Attitudinal Sexual Objectification

“James Tiptree Jr.” is a pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon, US Air Force intelligence officer, CIA analyst, experimental psychologist, and one of the most important and highly acclaimed science fiction writers of the twentieth century. Sheldon’s work as Tiptree (both fiction and nonfiction) deals with a variety of important feminist concerns—among them, sexism, misogyny, objectification, sexual assault, the “otherness” of women, and silencing. This paper explores in a philosophical mode some of the important insights about objectification conveyed in one of Tiptree’s most well-known stories, “’And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.” These insights lead naturally to a characterization of sexual objectification that both avoids problems with standard philosophical characterizations and also sheds important light on the relationship between objectification and silencing.

Beyond the Lab: Influencing Practice and Policy

In this article, the authors describe over 20 years of work with Ellen Winner at Project Zero, a research and development group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This included a cross-arts curriculum and assessment project aimed at practitioners (ArtsPROPEL, 1989–1995), 10 meta-analytic syntheses of the effects of arts learning on nonarts achievement (REAP, 1997–2001), and an observational theory-building study of the dispositions intended to be learned in high school art classes and the structures through which they are taught, meant for audiences of both practice and theory (Studio Thinking, 2001–2013). Ellen’s perspective as an experimental psychologist interacted with ours in fertile ways to make richly rewarding collaborations in our efforts to make sense of art education practices. From how she chooses what she studies, to her eclectic approaches to research, to addressing her work to broad audiences, psychologists have much to gain from Ellen’s methods.

Introduction

In his biography of the eminent Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky, Andrew Blane recounts a conversation in which Florovsky reminisced about one of his mentors at the University of Odessa, the experimental psychologist N. N. Lange (1858–1921). A convinced positivist, Lange offered the budding religious thinker the following advice:...