This rich study provides a comprehensive introduction to media philosophy while offering a new perspective on the concept and function of transmission media in all systems of exchange. Kramer uses the figure of the messenger as a key metaphor, examining a diverse range of transmission events, including the circulation of money, translation of languages, angelic visitations, spread of infectious diseases, and processes of transference and counter-transference that occur during psychoanalysis.

This rich study provides a comprehensive introduction to media philosophy while offering a new perspective on the concept and function of transmission media in all systems of exchange. Kramer uses the figure of the messenger as a key metaphor, examining a diverse range of transmission events, including the circulation of money, translation of languages, angelic visitations, spread of infectious diseases, and processes of transference and counter-transference that occur during psychoanalysis.

What is the epistemological value of testimony? What role does language, images, and memory play in its construction? What is the relationship between the person who attests and those who listen? Is bearing witness a concept that is exclusively based in interpersonal relations? Or are there other modes of communicating or mediating to constitute a constellation of testimony? Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry. With examples including the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge and the Armenian genocide the volume discusses the chances and limits of communicating epistemological and ethical, philosophical and cultural-historical, past and present perspectives on the phenomenon and concept of bearing witness.

Diagrammatic reasoning is crucial for human cognition. It is hard to think of any forms of science or knowledge without the "intermediary world" of diagrams and diagrammatic representation in thought experiments and/or processes, manifested in forms as divers as notes, tables, schemata, graphs, drawings and maps. Despite their phenomenological and structural-functional differences, these forms of representation share a number of important attributes and epistemic functions. Combining aspects of linguistic and pictorial symbolism, diagrams go beyond the traditional distinction between language and image. They do not only represent, yet intervene in what is represented. Their spatiality, materiality and operativity establish a dynamic tool to exteriorize thinking, thus contributing to the idea of the extended mind. They foster imagination and problem solving, facilitate orientation in knowledge spaces and the discovery of unsuspected relationships. How can the diagrammatic nature of cognitive and knowledge practices be theorized historically as well as systematically? This is what this volume explores by investigating the semiotic dimension of diagrams as to knowledge, information and reasoning, e.g., the 'thing-ness' of diagrams in the history of art, the range of diagrammatic reasoning in logic, mathematics, philosophy and the sciences in general, including the knowledge function of maps.

Lange Zeit galt Schrift als aufgeschriebene mundliche Sprache. Doch was geschieht, wenn eine mathematische Gleichung gelost und Musik mit Noten komponiert wird, wenn ein Autor an seinem Text feilt, die Konkrete Poesie ein Schriftspiel entfaltet, der genetische Code als Buchstabenfolge sequenziert wird, der Kabbalist Buchstaben permutiert oder der Informatiker ein Computerprogramm schreibt? Schriften sind mehr als Aufschreibsysteme fur Gesprochenes; stets bergen sie lautsprachenneutrale Aspekte. Der Begriff "Schriftbildlichkeit" zielt auf einen Perspektivenwechsel: die Uberwindung eines phonographisch reduzierten und eurozentrisch verengten Schriftkonzeptes. Jenseits der Dichotomie von Sprache und Bild vereinigen sich in Schriften diskursive und ikonische Merkmale und das gilt fur alphabetische wie nichtalphabetische Schriften. Schriften eroffnen Experimentierraume der kognitiven wie der asthetischen Erfahrung. In den Beitragen dieses programmatischen Eroffnungsbandes der neuen Buchreihe "Schriftbildlichkeit" werden explorative und kreative Leistungen von Schriften im Wechselverhaltnis ihrer Sichtbarkeit und Handhabbarkeit in wissenschaftlichen und kunstlerischen, in alltaglichen, spielerischen und religiosen Schriftpraktiken zutage gefordert"

What is the epistemological value of testimony? What role does language, images, and memory play in its construction? What is the relationship between the person who attests and those who listen? Is bearing witness a concept that is exclusively based in interpersonal relations? Or are there other modes of communicating or mediating to constitute a constellation of testimony? Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry. With examples including the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge and the Armenian genocide the volume discusses the chances and limits of communicating epistemological and ethical, philosophical and cultural-historical, past and present perspectives on the phenomenon and concept of bearing witness.