cover "Physik in unserer Zeit"

Dealing with auditory oddities and ambiguities is not only entertaining, it is also an important driver for basic auditory research. The same acoustic stimulus can actually be perceived in different ways. We not only hear “with our ears”, but various other physical, physiological and cultural factors also play an important role. This directly gives rise to broader philosophical questions, for example on perception – and the enduring appeal of pieces of music is also based in many places on such ambiguities [13].


Physik in unserer Zeit 53(1): 28-34.

DOI: 10.1002/piuz.202101621

Back to overview
ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht