Fiction and truth : ancient stories about Pythagoras -- In search of the historical Pythagoras -- The Pythagorean secret society -- Thinkers influenced by Pythagoras and his pupils.

The „left Hegelian” interpretation of Hegel′s theory of Sittlichkeit has shown that the claim of the concept of autonomy to establish an internal connection between normativity and freedom can only be carried out, if the subject of autonomy is defined by its participation in social practices. While the left Hegelian interpretation thereby solves the paradoxes of the Kantian tradition of understanding autonomy, it is destined to repeat the paradoxical structure of autonomy in a new and fundamental form. This follows from (...) the insight – articulated by Hegel′s anti-Aristotelian concept of “second nature” – that participation in social practices is at the same time the medium and the other of autonomy. Autonomy thus remains dependent on an act of liberation that cannot be an autonomous action itself. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 43 Heft: 1 Seiten: 306-319.

History of medicine is taught in West Germany as part of the standard course offerings for medical students and is well represented at many universities. But history of science and technology unfortunately still lacks any adequate supporting system and accordingly barely continues to survive at a few institutions of the Federal Republic. Although history of medicine serves a different function than history of science and technology, closer cooperation between these groups is possible and greatly desired for the future.

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 2 Seiten: 15-24.

Promotion of pro-social attitudes and moral behaviour is a crucial and challenging task for social orders. As traditional ways such as moral education have some, but apparently and unfortunately only limited effect, some authors have suggested employing biomedical means such as pharmaceuticals or electrical stimulation of the brain to alter individual psychologies in a more direct way — moral bioenhancement. One of the salient questions in the nascent ethical debate concerns the impact of such interventions on human freedom. Advocates argue (...) that moral bioenhancements do not pose a serious threat to freedom. This contention, however, is based on an overly narrow, if not impoverished, sense of freedom, which comprises only freedom of action and freedom of will. Mind-altering interventions primarily affect another sense of freedom: freedom of mind, a concept that has not received much attention although it should rank among the most important legal and political freedoms. The article introduces three senses of mental freedom potentially infringed upon by moral bioenhancement and places it in a broader perspective. Ignorance of mental freedom has far-ranging consequences for the shape of the political and legal order at large. As many advocates are apparently not aware of the freedoms they seek to undermine, their calls for moral enhancement programmes are dangerously premature. (shrink)

_Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation_ offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his successors: How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions? Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism (...) and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought. (shrink)

_Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation_ offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his successors: How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions? Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism (...) and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought. (shrink)

This book presents an answer to the question of why modern legal institutions and the idea of citizenship are important for leading a free life. The majority of views in political and legal philosophy regard the law merely as a useful instrument, employed to render our lives more secure and to enable us to engage in cooperate activities more efficiently. The view developed here defends a non-instrumentalist alternative of why the law matters. It identifies the law as a constitutive feature (...) of our identities as citizens of modern states. The constitutivist argument rests on the (Kantian) assumption that a person's practical identity (its normative self-conception as an agent) is the result of its actions. The law co-constitutes these identities because it maintains the external conditions that are necessary for the actions performed under its authority. Modern legal institutions provide these external prerequisites for achieving a high degree of individual self-constitution and freedom. Only public principles can establish our status as individuals who pursue their life plans and actions as a matter of right and not because others contingently happen to let us do so. The book thereby provides resources for a reply to anarchist challenges to the necessity of legal ordering. (shrink)

Cognitive technology is an increasingly important form of technology that can deal with meaning by either replicating or simulating human cognition. Cognitive technology can make use of information technology, but it strives to go beyond mere information processing by recognizing, changing, and creating meaning. This presents us with a two-sided challenge: On the one hand, cognitive technology is challenged to ‘understand’ meaning in ordinary language. And on the other, it challenges us to rethink fundamental questions of human cognition and sense-making. (...) Both challenges demand a better understanding of the difference between the technical transformation of symbols and the understanding of meaning in the ordinary sense. After explaining the topic in relation to both the insights and the limitations of the reflections by Turing, Searle, and Heidegger, this paper primarily builds on Wittgenstein’s contributions to a better understanding of the difference between two conceptions of meaning and their implications for technical replication and simulation. The paper shows that Wittgenstein developed his early calculus account of meaning into that of language games and that language games not only come in many different varieties, but are also much more flexible than calculi. Of particular interest will be the difference between rigid and creative rule-following. Creative rule-following involves an intricate interplay of very different bodily, mental, and cultural constituents, so that its simulation is not merely a technical problem but also requires clarification of a number of profound philosophical questions. It will become clear that the challenge of cognitive technology shows up at unexpected places and that is much bigger than usually assumed. (shrink)

Comment on Armin Falk & Nora Szech "Morals and Markets", Science 340(6133), 707-711, 2013.

When confronted with unfair contributions in an argumentative discourse, participants evaluate these contributions negatively and show emotional and verbal reactions. These reactions may be crucial for further discourse and may depend on cognitive evaluation. In order to investigate the relationship between cognitive, emotional and verbal responses to unfair contributions, such contributions were embedded in argumentational episodes and presented to participants in written, auditory or role play modality. The application of a path model relating indicators of cognitive, emotional and verbal reactions, (...) demonstrated that the intensity of emotional reactions depends on evaluative cognitions, whereas verbal confrontativeness merely depends on the offender’s perceived awareness. The results are discussed with respect to methodological and theoretical issues. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 64 Heft: 2 Seiten: 307-312.

In this article, two phenomenologists are considered who both view the relation between religion and subjectivity as an affective one: M. Scheler and M. Henry. According to Scheler, the specific religious field deals with the personal appropriation of an objective modality of value. Even though he reproaches F. Schleiermacher for perpetrating a ‘Bedürfnistheologie’, there is doubt whether his own alternative is not susceptible to a similar tendency of immediacy. In the case of Henry, this tendency is striking. His plea for (...) a completely immanent self-experience seems to remove divine incarnation from transcendence. Therefore it is suggested that the possibility of God’s self-revelation requires a different kind of subjective comprehension, namely by rethinking a cogital reserve in subjectivity. In his attempt, the author briefly formulates an existential-phenomenological framework in which religious pathos can claim its proper, but ambiguous place. To that end, he deconstructs two perspectives: that of any ‘gnostic’ immediacy in which the natural capacities of man, on the one hand, and transcendence, on the other, spontaneously intertwine, and any radical hermeneutics in which the necessity of a linguistic mediation tends to fall back on contextual self-satisfaction. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 2 Seiten: 183-191.

There is unanimous agreement that Nāgārjuna (ca 150–250 AD) is the most important Buddhist philosopher after the historical Buddha himself and one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of Indian philosophy. His philosophy of the “middle way” (madhyamaka) based around the central notion of “emptiness” (śūnyatā) influenced the Indian philosophical debate for a thousand years after his death; with the spread of Buddhism to Tibet, China, Japan and other Asian countries the writings of Nāgārjuna became an (...) indispensable point of reference for their own philosophical inquiries. A specific reading of Nāgārjuna's thought, called Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka, became the official philosophical position of Tibetan Buddhism which regards it as the pinnacle of philosophical sophistication up to the present day. (shrink)

Buildings are frequently described as ambiguous and, indeed, they often involve the ambivalence associated with ambiguous symbols. In this paper, I develop a theory of architectural ambiguity within the framework of a Goodmanian symbol theory. Based upon Israel Scheffler’s study of verbal and pictorial ambiguity, I present a theory of denotational ambiguity of buildings which distinguishes four types of ambiguity: elementary ambiguity, interpretation-ambiguity, multiple meaning and metaphor, which proves to be a special case of multiple meaning. Denotationally ambiguous buildings are (...) exceptions, because buildings usually exemplify rather than denote. I therefore add a theory of exemplificational ambiguity. The crucial distinction between mere multiple exemplification and genuine exemplificational ambiguity leads to two versions of each of the first three types of ambiguity. The resulting extension of Goodman’s symbol theory is of interest beyond architecture. (shrink)

Art is not only autonomous, following its own law, different from nonaesthetic reason, but sovereign: it subverts the rule of reason.In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling ...