Using hitherto unpublished manuscripts from the Zermelo Nachlass, I describe the development of the notion of definiteness and the discussion about it, giving a conclusive picture of Zermelo's thoughts up to the late thirties. As it turns out, Zermelo's considerations about definiteness are intimately related to his concept of a Cantorian universe of categorically definable sets that may be considered an inner model of set theory in an ideationally given universe of classes.

In a time in which an exuberant, trans-classical, non-trivial machine culture redesigns terminologies, remodels logics, produces new evidence, and reorganizes semantic resources, a new, neocybernetic regime of truth is taking shape. Many of our recent self-descriptions and theory formations are coined by our media-technological condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Niklas Luhmann, especially in his inherent narrative of the history of rationality. This essay attempts to reconstruct Luhmann’s redescription of European rationality, especially the media- and (...) machine-historical conditions that remain apparent in Luhmann’s account. The decisive issue is that Luhmann’s history of rationality reveals the technological unconscious of systems theory and indeed the epochal imaginary it belongs to. With the help of the theories of machines developed by von Foerster, Simondon and Günther, Luhmann’s oeuvre must be read as probably the most striking conceptual edifice to emerge from what could be called the 20th-century’s epochal technological shift of meaning. (shrink)

Auch als originar politischer Denker ist Karl Jaspers reich an Einsichten: Ausgehend vom Ethos der Freiheit jedes Einzelnen richtet er seinen Blick auf die konkrete politische Gestaltung einer Freiheitsordnung. Dabei steht fur ihn im Hinblick auf die noch junge Bundesrepublik die Selbsterziehung in Freiheit im Zentrum seiner oft mahnenden Worte. Ganz im sokratischen Sinne fordert er intellektuelle Redlichkeit und politische Wahrhaftigkeit ein, um den beiden grossen Gegenwartsherausforderungen gewachsen zu sein: einer atomwaffenbestuckten Welt, die sich jederzeit selbst ausloschen kann, und dem (...) modernen Totalitarismus, der in seiner Verherrlichung des Antipolitischen allen politischen Ordnungsbestrebungen die Vernichtung androht. Jeder Frieden, der mehr ist als die Friedhofsruhe eines Waffenstillstands, grundet fur Jaspers in der politischen Freiheit handelnder Burgerinnen und Burger, die gemeinsam Sorge fur die Integritat ihres politischen Gemeinwesens tragen. Mit Beitragen von Karl-Heinz Breier, Alexander Gantschow, Anton Hugli, Annabelle Petschow, Kurt Salamun, Reinhard Schulz, Bernhard Sutor, Bernd Weidmann. (shrink)

The concept of the artes liberales originates in antiquity and was, especially in the Anglo-Saxon area and during the 17th and 18th centuries, remodelled into a socially, educationally, and politically modern educational concept. In this process, the progress within the empirical sciences and the formation of an early civil public are of the utmost importance. In the course of these transformations, the absolute force of church and state is called into question; educational concepts which have to be called modern emerge (...) from it. (shrink)

Psychological traumatisation, as we understand it today, was—in terms of the history of ideas—anticipated by various approaches which have had a lasting impact on modern psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychosomatic medicine. On the one hand, there is the traditional concept of possession and exorcism with its impressive psychodynamics. On the other hand, there is the theory of the imagination, of an illusion in the sense of a pathogenic infection. Especially the pathological teachings of Paracelsus (sixteenth century) and Johann Baptist van Helmont (...) (seventeenth century)—the latter having advanced the former’s alchemist approach—demonstrate the extent to which demonological, parasitological, and psychological ideas were amalgamated in their ontological notion of a disease. Only the introduction of hypnotism in the middle of the nineteenth century made possible a psychological or psychodynamic understanding of psychological trauma in the modern sense. Hypnotism was striving to strictly dissociate from the magical and natural philosophical speculations of mesmerism and its theory was quite compatible with the model representations of scientific medicine. Sigmund Freud was able to tie in his ideas of hysteria and neurosis with this concept and especially to define repression of (infantile) sexuality as the cause of a culturally ineluctable psychological trauma. Finally, a brief survey of medical history is given to explore artificial trauma as a healing factor. (shrink)

CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Vtt A CHRONOLOGY OF EDMUND BURKE INTRODUCTION X FURTHER READING XXxix A NOTE ON THE TEXTS xliv A Vindication of Natural ...

This collection offers a critical assessment of the published works of Piero Sraffa, one of the leading economists of the twentieth century, and their legacy for the economics profession. The topics covered explore Sraffa's interpretation of the classical economists; his theory of value and distribution; his critique of partial and general neoclassical equilibrium theory; his focus on the problem of capital; and his critique of Hayek's monetary overinvestment theory of the business cycle. Specific issues investigated include intertemporal general equilibrium theory (...) and the capital problem; the probability of reswitching; Ricardo, Malthus, and the corn model; and the meaning and implication of the capital controversy. Among the contributors are many of the world's leading students of Sraffian economics, including Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, Christian Bidard, Edwin Burmeister, John Eatwell, Pierangelo Garegnani, Samuel Hollander, Heinz Kurz, Lynn Mainwaring, Neri Salvadori, Bertram Schefold and Ian Steedman. (shrink)

Romano Guardini gilt als einer der massgeblichen christlichen Denker des 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine Schriften, philosophische und theologische Abhandlungen, aber auch zahlreiche meditative und spirituelle Texte, haben eine weltweite Verbreitung gefunden und pragen ungebrochen bis heute Generationen von Leserinnen und Lesern. Der vorliegende Band, der aus Anlass des 50. Todestages Romano Guardinis am 1. Oktober 2018 sowie zur Eroffnung des Seligsprechungsprozesses erscheint, versammelt Beitrage namhafter Autorinnen und Autoren. Aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven widmen sie sich insbesondere Guardinis Buch "Der Herr" uber Person und (...) Botschaft Jesu Christi, aber beispielsweise auch Aspekten der Gottesfrage, der Ethik oder des Gebets. Eine Fundgrube fur alle, die sich der Person und dem Denken Guardinis neu nahern mochten. Mit Beitragen von Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, Jean Greisch, Karl Kardinal Lehmann (+), Peter Reifenberg, Marius Reiser, Peter Schallenberg, P. Kosmas Lars Thielmann OCist, Karl-Heinz Wiesemann. (shrink)

To stress the subjectivity of the analyst is to accept the centrality of countertransference in the analytic relationship. Psychoanalysts have long recognized the importance of transference in the analytic setting—that is, the analysand's way of relating to the analyst in terms of his strong, ambivalent unconscious feelings for earlier figures , a process whose successful resolution constitutes the psychoanalystic "cure." But, since the patient's transference is only experienced by the analyst through his countertransference responses, recent theorists have come to emphasize (...) the importance of countertransference in psychoanalysis. In what Otto Kernberg calls its "totalistic" definition, countertransference refers to "the total emotional reaction of the psychoanalyst to the patient in the treatment situation."1 It is, therefore, a source of both empathic understanding and defensive misunderstanding, of distortion and insight. Hans Loewald remarks: "Since a psychoanalytic investigation can be carried out only by a human mind, we cannot conceive of one in which the analyst's [counter] transference and resistance are not the warp and woof of his activity."2 · 1. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism , p. 49. · 2. Hans Loewald, "Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process," The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 25 : 56. Cf. Heinz Kohut, "Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 : 459-83. For a clear discussion of the background of the countertransference concept in Freud, see Humberto Nagera, et. al., Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on Metapsychology, Conflicts, Anxiety and Other Subjects , pp. 200-206. Two surveys of the literature on the topic are particularly useful: Douglas Orr, "Transference and Countertransference: A Historical Survey," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 2 : 621-70, and Kernberg, pp. 49-66. Arthur F. Marotti, associate professor of English at Wayne State University, has written a number of essays on Ben Jonson, John Donne, Thomas Middleton, and Edmund Spenser. He is completing a book-length social-historical and psychoanalytic study of Donne's poetry and a book on Jonson; some of the theoretical assumptions behind both projects are discussed in this article. See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

Ranging from Plato to Marx, one can only find a few philosophers who have talked about money without detesting it. Naturally, economists are avoiding such an attitude. But they deliver only functional definitions, nothing which could give a hint at the essence of money. The essay tries to clarify it by delineating a currency as an ‘ens ficitivum’ – created by our semiotic activities, which have been analysed by Charles Sanders Peirce. So, the thesis is: Money is basically a sign (...) indicating at a present time one’s ability to handle future events. (shrink)

Discussing some aspects of Carl Schmitt’s, Chantal Mouffe’s, Paul Ricoeur’s, and Jacques Rancière’s political theories the paper tries to determine the proper subject of political and social philosophy. To that end the author constructs two terminological oppositions: ‚the social’ versus ‘the society’, ‘the political’ versus ‘politics’. These four nouns form a terminological square which marks the social and the political difference. The social appears when underprivileged people demand a redistribution of wealth and influence, i. e. a reconstruction of a given (...) society. The political emerges when the hidden normative framework of politics comes into vie. Confronting the social and the political difference in this way makes it possible to determine: politics are the matter of the political sciences, the difference between politics and the political, conversely, is the theme of political philosophy; society is the subject of sociology, the difference between the social and any form of society, however, is the issue of social philosophy. (shrink)