Popper gives the concept of social situation the role of key term in the method ology of situational analysis. The important characteristics of the social situation are aims and knowledge, which are attributed to the actor and are part of the situation. Furthermore, the elements of the situation create or are, as social institutions, obstacles to the actor. But more complex situations exist which here are called actor specific situations and are much more structured by the actor. The aims and (...) knowledge of the actors vary widely, so they cannot be attributed to the actors without a serious loss of information. The elements have social meanings and meanings which are ascribed to them by the actors. The concept of dual methodology tries to grasp these complex situations for the purpose of empirical research by combining causal explanation of analytical methodology with intentional explanation of a methodology of understanding. The interface between these methodologies is formed by the concept of generative mecha nisms. These are part of the causal theory as well as data gathered for the intentional explanation. The ideal result of research is achieved if the hypothesis cannot be rejected and the two kinds of generative mechanisms coincide. In this case, the hypothesis is a proven causal statement. Finally, the aptitude of the interpretative methodology for gathering the generative mechanisms is dis cussed. (shrink)

In the first person singular of the athematic middle optative in the R̥ gveda, there is strong metrical evidence that the poets knew and used forms in *-iy-a along- side the morphologically regular forms in -īy-a. I argue that the forms in *-iy-a are older and developed from PIE *-ih1-h2e by regular sound change, whereas the younger ones in -īy-a result from morphological regularization. The phonological development of *-ih1-h2e > *-iy-a provides further evidence for the historical phonology of “laryngeals” and (...) geminate consonants in the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. (shrink)

In the Introduction of the Tugendlehre, Kant identifies love of human beings as one of the four moral predispositions that make us receptive to the moral law. We claim that this love is neither benevolence nor the aptitude of the inclination to beneficence in general (both are also called love of human beings); rather it is amor complacentiae, which Kant understands as the delight in moral striving for perfection. We also provide a detailed analysis of Kant's almost completely neglected theory (...) of moral predispositions. They are necessary conditions to be aware of the moral law and to be motivated by it. (shrink)

Wie kann man einen historischen Blick auf das eigene Fach werfen? Diese Frage ist nicht einfach zu beantworten – will man einerseits nicht in einer Nabelschau und Hagiographie enden, andererseits aber auch keinen umfassenden Entwurf einer zukünftigen Historiographie vorlegen. Die hier in loser Folge publizierten Interviews mit bekannten Protagonist:innen der Berliner Wissenschaftsgeschichte von ca. 1970–1990 in West und Ost rücken die Geschichte des Faches deshalb in einem bestimmten Milieu in den Fokus und versuchen, die Historiographie jenseits einer Institutionen- oder Theoriegeschichte (...) voranzutreiben. Welche Motivationen oder Probleme bewegten einzelne Wissenschaftler:innen, sich der Geschichte ihres Faches zu widmen oder sich etwa aus der Soziologie oder Philosophie in die Wissenschaftsgeschichte zu bewegen? Welche Ausbildungspraktiken existierten in diesem heterogenen, zwischen den Disziplinen angesiedelten Feld, welche Anregungen bezog man aus welchen Kontexten? Wie war Lehre strukturiert und welche Netzwerke bildeten sich mit der Zeit? Kurz: Mit welchem Interesse kam man zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und was wurde daraus? Die Auswahl der Interviewees erfolgt ohne Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit oder Proporz; der Fragenkatalog der Interviews richtet sich individuell nach den Biographien und dem Werk und entfaltet sich oft spontan im Gespräch. Die Interviews wurden digital aufgezeichnet, transkribiert, der Schriftsprache angepasst, gegebenenfalls gekürzt, annotiert und von den Interviewees authentifiziert. Wir beabsichtigen mit dieser Serie von Interviews zunächst die Dokumentation rezenter Geschichte durch eine Oral History, die subjektive Wahrnehmungen und persönliche Erlebnisse einschließt. Auf diese Weise werden Segmente einer größtenteils ungeschriebenen Geschichte anhand von Biographien erfahrbar und damit auch einer weiteren kritischen Bearbeitung und Integration in ein Gesamtbild zugänglich. Da uns im Zuge der jeweiligen Vorbereitung und Durchführung, Transkription und Abstimmung der Interviews daran gelegen war, aus Sicht der Akteur:innen wichtige Sammelbände und Aufsätze, Monographien oder auch „graue Literatur“ zu erfassen, wird nebenbei eine kommentierte Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Wissenschaftsgeschichte entstehen. Unsere Hoffnung besteht darin, mittels dieser Sammlung mit Berlin einen fruchtbaren Raum und mit den siebziger und achtziger Jahren eine produktive Zeit des Faches jenseits von Reminiszenz oder Nostalgie zu erkunden – nicht zuletzt auch, um den Blick für gegenwärtige Herausforderungen des Faches zu schärfen. (shrink)

In these essays, appearing for the first time in English, Gadamer addresses practical questions about recent politics in Europe, about education and university reform, and about the role of poetry in the modern world. This book also includes a series of interviews that the editors conducted in 1986. Gadamer elaborates on his experiences in education and politics, touching on the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the early Frankfurt School, Heidegger and the Nazis, university life in East Germany, and the prospects (...) for Europe in the coming years. Hans-Georg Gadamer was probably Heidegger’s leading interpreter in Germany, and in the 1950s and 1960s he became the world’s leading exponent of hermeneutics. His hermeneutical theory explains how it is that ancient art and philosophy still speak to us today. His influential idea of the “fusion of horizons” also shows how it is that we understand what is remote form our own culture. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga s Warranted Christian Belief has very quickly become one of the most influential books in philosophy of religion. In this collection of essays, German philosophers, theologians and a mathematician deal critically with several aspects of Plantinga s seminal work. In a long essay, Plantinga answers these critics.".

Social Capital belongs to the core repertoire of social theory. Its potential can be spelled out in the economic dimension of ownership and in the social dimension of belonging. Renowned scholars from philosophy, sociology, economics, and religious.

The different behaviour of total and partial numberings with respect to the reducibility preorder is investigated. Partial numberings appear quite naturally in computability studies for topological spaces. The degrees of partial numberings form a distributive lattice which in the case of an infinite numbered set is neither complete nor contains a least element. Friedberg numberings are no longer minimal in this situation. Indeed, there is an infinite descending chain of non-equivalent Friedberg numberings below every given numbering, as well as an (...) uncountable antichain. (shrink)

Summary This paper tries to show how the irreducible indeterminacy of textual meanings can be reconciled with epistemological realism which normally presupposes independently existing but determinate objects of knowledge. E.D. Hirsch's project of objective interpretation, including his most recent attempts to show that meanings, in spite of their openness to future modifications, are historically determined objects of knowledge, is being criticized. The paper argues that his use of the semantics and the reference theories of Kripke, Putnam, and others forces him (...) to give up, against his own intention, his methodologically important distinction between meaning and significance. Within such theories a strict separation of linguistic knowledge of meaning and world knowledge can no longer be upheld. Since the application of individually and historically variable world knowledge is unavoidable in the process of understanding texts, the textual meanings reconstructed by readers will always remain indeterminate. (shrink)

La teoría de la Crítica del Juicio de Kant ha sido generalmente considerada como punto decisivo en la historia de la Estética y la Filosofía del arte. Ella reúne y reconstruye los resultados de los análisis de los predicados estéticos y la actitud estética surgida en las escuelas de Leibniz y Locke, tal como han sido formuladas por filósofos como Baumgarten y Sulzer de un lado y Hume y Burke de otro. Pero también elevó la teoría estética a un nuevo (...) nivel, -integrándola en el sistema de una nueva epistemología que Kant había trabajado con éxito en la Crítica de la Razón Pura, basándose en la consideración según la cual, lo que llamamos razón consiste en una compleja interacción de varias operaciones epistémicas. Con miras a comprender lo que logra la "razón" hay que atender a las operaciones de las cuales procede tal logro. Además hay que atender a las fuentes en las que estas operaciones se originan y a los principios o reglas que las guían. La Crítica del Juicio descubre tal fuente con respecto a la apreciación de lo bello (y lo sublime). De este modo ha probado ser capaz de separar juicios estéticos de otras clases de juicios, al mismo tiempo que les conserva su pretensión de originarse en la razón en cuanto tal y en actividades que están entrelazadas con aquellas de las que depende todo el conocimiento de nuestro mundo. Estos juicios, sin duda, no expresan conocimiento. Pero su pretensión está igualmente justificada porque se funda exactamente sobre las mismas actividades que originan el conocimiento, aunque en un empleo interactivo peculiar. Por medio de este punto de vista, Kant provee por primera vez herramientas para el establecimiento de la actitud estética como independiente y autónoma, y de esta forma como el fundamento para una concepción del arte como un modo primordial de estar relacionado y situado dentro de nuestro mundo, que no puede ser reemplazado ni sobrepasado por otras realizaciones de las capacidades racionales del hombre. (shrink)

The concept of narrative has come to play an important role in a bewildering variety of disciplines such as literary theory, linguistics, historiography, psychology, psychotherapy, ethnology and philosophy due to a number of recent trends in the social sciences including: the rejection of strong apriori unities of experience, the focus on intersubjectivity as the grounding level of experience, the turn to language as the focus of philosophical reflection, and the success of semiotics in articulating the rules for the generation and (...) understanding of texts. The first section of the paper presents the framework of Ricoeur's investigation into narrative identity, which he embeds within an encompassing reflection on time and an examination of current theories of personal identity. The second section, then, both specifies salient aspects of Ricoeur's narrative model and shows how, using that model, Ricoeur claims that the concept of narrative identity solves the paradoxes of personal identity. The third section presents Dennett's concept of a narrative self and compares Dennett's and Ricoeur's models. As we shall see, these two philosophers, who work within antagonistic traditions, have surprisingly similar ways of using narrative as a model for understanding the self. (shrink)

A Criticism misjudging itself too. On the Deficiency of Reflection in Formal Explications. The criticism formulated by L. B. Puntel concerning the theory of dialectic proposed by the author is rejected. Puntel's attempt at explicating predication by means of predicate logic fails: It misjudges predication being already presupposed for the possibility of predicate logic, thus belonging to the transcendental conditions of formal predicate logic, so that predication itself cannot be further explicated by means of such logic. What is in fact (...) criticized by Puntel is something like an artefact of formalization. The unreflected application of formal logic here generates problems instead of solving them. (shrink)

Responsibility for future generations is easily postulated in the abstract but it is much more difficult to set it to work in the concrete. It requires some changes in individual and institutional attitudes that are in opposition to what has been called the "systems variables" of industrial society: individual freedom, consumerism, and equality. The Politics of Sustainability from Philosophical Perspectives seeks to examine the motivational and institutional obstacles standing in the way of a consistent politics of sustainability and to look (...) for strategies to overcome them. It argues that though there have been significant changes in individual and especially collective attitudes to growth, intergenerational solidarity and nature preservation, it is far from certain whether these will be sufficient to encourage politicians into giving sustainable policies priority over other legitimate concerns. Having a philosophical approach as its main focus, the volume is at the same time interdisciplinary in combining political, psychological, ecological and economic analyses. This book will be a contribution to the joint effort to meet the theoretical and practical challenges posed by climate change and other impending global perils and will be of interest to students of environmental studies, applied ethics and environmental psychology. (shrink)