William James and Wisconsin, by G.C. Sellery.--The distinctive philosophy of William James, by M.C. Otto.--William James, man and philosopher, by D.S. Miller.--William James and psychoanalysis, by Norman Cameron.--The William James centenary dinner: Introductory remarks, by C.A. Dykstra. William James and the world today, by John Dewey, read by Carl Boegholt. William James in the American tradition, by B.H. Bode.--The Sunday service: William James as religious thinker, by J.S. Bixler.

As is rather generally admitted today, the terms of our language in scientific as well as in everyday use, are not completely precise, but exhibit a more or less high degree of vagueness. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the consequences of this circumstance for a series of questions which belong to the field of logic. First of all, the meaning and the logical status of the concept of vagueness will be analyzed; then we will try to (...) find out whether logical terms are free from vagueness, and whether vagueness has an influence upon the validity of the customary principles of logic; finally, the possibilities of diminishing the vagueness of scientific concepts by suitable logical devices will be briefly dealt with. As starting point for the subsequent considerations we choose the clear and stimulating analysis of the concept of vagueness which has recently been carried out by Max Black ([1]) and which has suggested the considerations of this paper. (shrink)

The thread running through this collection of essays is the inviolate marriage between philosophy and psychology. This book explores the connections made between the two disciplines by famous thinkers such as Aristotle, Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Robert Coles, and Viktor Frankl.

1. IntroductionIn his dissertation written under Wilhelm Hennis in 1991, Franz-Josef Ehrle was the first to write about the lecture “Probleme der Staatssoziolo-gie” (“Problems of State Sociology”) that Max Weber gave to the Vienna Sociological Society on October 25, 1917.1 Ehrle used as his source the report on the lecture published in the Neue Freie Presse on October 26, 1917.2 Ehrle also mentions a diary entry made by Josef Redlich, who was among the audience: “Thursday evening, a brilliant lecture by (...) Max Weber(Heidelberg) at the Sociological Society.”3 There exists a short biography of Redlich, taken from an excursus on “The Representatives of the (Bourgeois) Austrian Peace Movement” (“Die Vertreter der (bürgerlichen) österreichischen Friedensbewegung”): “Josef Redlich (1869–1936), jurist and politician, 1907–1918 MöAH (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei/German Progressive Party), Oct.–Nov. 1918, last Imperial and Royal Finance Minister.”4 Ehrle also indicates that Redlich met Max Weber in Vienna in 1909 at the General Congress of the Society for Social Politics (Verein für Sozialpolitik), but that Redlich’s acquaintance with Alfred Weber went back further (as shown in Redlich’s diary entry of September 2, 1909: “Saw Alfred Weber again”).5 Furthermore, a longer meeting with Max Weber is mentioned in Redlich’s diary in 1916 (on June 6).6 When Weber was staying in Vienna in 1917 and 1918, he also met privately with Redlich, and Arthur von Rosthorn attended one of these meetings with his wife (entry of May 9, 1918). Finally, Redlich wrote about his acquaintance with Max Weber in a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal on December 3, 1926. Ehrle summarizes Weber’s meetings in Vienna as being “limited primarily to his contacts from academia, economics (Hammerschlag), and politics (and, here, above all the economic field (Mataja, Riedl, Schüler)),” often encouraged by the fact that “academics held ministerial posts and ministers held academic posts.”7. (shrink)

The State of the Political challenges traditional interpretations of the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. Focusing on their adaptation of a German tradition of state-legal theory, the book offers a scholarly, contextualized account of the interrelationship between their political thought and practical political criticism. Dr Kelly criticizes the typical separation of these writers, and offers a substantial reinterpretation of modern German political thought in a period of profound transition, in particular the relationship between political (...) theory and conceptual change. Alongside its focus on German political and juridical thought, the book contributes significantly to the history of European ideas, discussing parliamentarism and democracy, academic freedom and cultural criticism, political economy, patriotism, sovereignty and rationality, and the inter-relationships between law, the constitution and political representation. (shrink)

Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular foundings has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. The aim of Andreas Kalyvas' study is to show why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of its beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? Can (...) a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders. (shrink)

Max Scheler defends that the ultimate subject of human acts is different from the “I” often worked upon in Psychology. To show it he distinguishes “acts”, which correspond to the “person”, from “functions”, which correspond to the “I”. In that exposition, developed in his Ethics, he makes reference to an essay by Carl Stumpf about the “psychic functions”. In this paper that same essay is analised and the significance that Scheler gives to it is evaluated.

Carl Schmitt described the political in existential terms. The political consists in the distinction between friend and enemy, a distinction between collectivities that are existentially different. This led Richard Wolin to label Schmitt a “political existentialist” whose work relies on a specific cultural and philosophical climate of “vitalism.” Consequently, Schmitt’s thought is treated as ideology by Wolin. Instead of focusing on Schmitt’s underlying ideological affinity with a particular cultural climate, this paper attempts to conceptualize the notion of “political existentiality” (...) as a crucial element in Schmitt’s understanding of the political and defend it as a notion that reveals something about the political condition itself. In order to understand the meaning of existentiality, we will conceptualize it against the background of Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis and conclude that through the notion of political existentiality Schmitt conceptualizes the political sphere as a locus of meaning and values and thus reenchants the political. (shrink)

The intellectual relationship between Carl Schmitt and Max Weber has been a point of controversy for at least half a century. At the 1964 convention of the German Sociological Association, in honor of Weber's centenary, Schmitt was famously referred to as Weber's ?legitimate student.? This article uses the chapter Schmitt specifically wrote for an edited volume in Weber's memory, published in 1923, as the starting point for juxtaposing the two scholars, and then expands the analysis to encompass a range (...) of sources and commentaries. The comparison focuses on the approach of each of the two scholars to methodology and didactics, theory and conceptual use, as well as to the society/social science nexus. The article concludes by arguing that Schmitt performed a double rhetorical move: while styling himself as Weber's student, he then drew on that authority to assault Weber's liberalism and concept of scientific integrity. (shrink)

This article offers an in-depth analysis of Carl Schmitt's social ontology to explain how and why he came to reject exceptionalist decisionism. To this end, the authors unearth the considerable shifts in terms of social ontology that paved the way for this conceptual turn. The gist of their argument is that Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) espoused a Hobbesian conception of the political as the possibility condition for stable patters of social interaction. Though the first three chapters of Political Theology (...) were originally designed for and published in a posthumous Festschrift for Max Weber, his understanding of the social was indebted to a Hobbesian legacy. Nonetheless, shortly thereafter, he began to revise his conception of the social and to put stress on the organisational dynamics of social institutions as independent of there being a political authority. From 1927 through to 1950, Schmitt never got back to his 1922 exceptionalist view of politics and rather sought to make sense of how the state could and should draw the contents of the legal order from the normative life of social institutions. (shrink)

Max Weber famously diagnosed both an excess and a subordination of meaning in modernity when he coined the term disenchantment next to the fragmentation and irreconcilability of value spheres. Unlike Weber, however, who sought to keep the ideological and the rationalist sides of the modern divide together, his immediate followers capitalized either on his decisionism (i.e. Carl Schmitt) or on his universalism (i.e. Jürgen Habermas). In an attempt to develop a constructive perspective on the question of how we can (...) conceive of irreconcilable values within a larger normative horizon, this article introduces Karl Jaspers’s interpretation and refinement of Weber’s work. Most fundamentally, Jaspers’s existentialist philosophy of communication sought to turn Weber’s warring gods into a source of solidarity rather than divisiveness. I argue that Jaspers did so in rooting human freedom not in the decision or the law but in an experiential uncertainty and the knowledge not to know. The article closes with a discussion of some practical and theoretical implications of Jaspers’s thought for our understanding of diversity in unity in post-truth times. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar comparativamente as semelhanças contidas nas críticas à democracia liberal presentes em alguns trabalhos selecionados de Carl Schmitt e Robert Kurz. A despeito da estreita associação do primeiro autor com o regime nazista após 1933 e do segundo ser normalmente caracterizado como um pensador marxista, são verificáveis inúmeras similitudes entre ambos quando se propõem a analisar as características do liberalismo parlamentar das democracias do século XX. Uma hipótese que pode explicar tais semelhanças seria a (...) influência exercida por Schmitt sobre diversos teóricos da escola de Frankfurt, com os quais Kurz frequentemente dialoga em seus escritos e que foram inspiradores de algumas de suas reflexões – em especial, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno e Max Horkheimer, embora Schmitt também tenha influenciado Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Karl Korsch e Herbert Marcuse. Outra via de interpretação abordada aqui se refere à possibilidade de Schmitt ter encontrado, em suas teorias sobre o Estado e sobre o direito, os limites epistemológicos do liberalismo moderno, o que constitui o principal objeto de pesquisa de Kurz e foi tema recorrente nos escritos dos teóricos de Frankfurt. (shrink)

I intend to examine the relationship of the conceptions of constituent power and of plebiscitary leader in Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy with the political sociology of Max Weber. I sustain that starting from this relationship one can better understand the nationalist background of the schmi..