This collection presents the English-language reader for the first time with essays that are representative of Bernstein's much-neglected revisionist period, 1901-1921. Bernstein himself suggested that this later work included significant new elements, indicating further progress in his liberal-socialist theory. Bernstein's later work acquires additional significance in light of the events of 1989, which have discredited not only Marxism-Leninism, but revolutionary Marxist theory in general, thus making the reevaluation of Bernstein's revisionism a worthwhile experience.

"Like Hanslick, Professor Payzant is both musician and philosopher; and he has brought the knowledge and insights of both disciplines to this large undertaking." --Gordon Epperson, _Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_.

The book makes a direct contribution to the connection between phenomenology and cognitive science.

Two major developments of the last two decades have radically undermined traditional justifications of leftist politics: the failure of 20th-century `socialist' experiments, and what might be termed the deessentializing movement in contemporary philosophy. However, the social injustices that animated revolutionary thinkers in many respects remain, and some have arguably worsened in the era of globalized capitalism. This article investigates whether it is possible to articulate a new theoretical underpinning for progressive politics that nevertheless avoids the essentialist moves of Marxism. Ethico-political (...) readings of Derrida — one of the most influential anti-essentialist thinkers — are compared to Ernesto Laclau's attempts at formulating a post-Marxist progressive politics built around the notions of `hegemony' and `radical democracy'. Laclau's intervention in the Marxist tradition is to deconstruct its traditional categories so as to take account of contingency; his intervention in deconstruction is to introduce what in this article is described as `contestation', so as to provide a more coherent account of the political. The article concludes that neither deconstruction nor radical democracy provides an adequate basis for poltical action, but that the latter's account of the political is a meaningful development of the theoretical schema articulated by the former and does point to the possibility of a non-essentialist progressive politics. Key Words: aporia • contestation • contingency • deconstruction • Jacques Derrida • hegemony • justice • Ernesto Laclau • Emmanuel Levinas • responsibility. (shrink)

(2005). On Bringing Consciousness into the House of Science – with the Help of Husserlian Phenomenology. Angelaki: Vol. 10, continental philosophy and the sciences the german traditionissue editor: damian veal, pp. 145-162.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the context of «reassessing the relationship between explanation and phenomenology», the paper discusses the question in what ways Husserlian phenomenology as a descriptive science of consciousness has an explanatory potential in consciousness studies. It takes a very limited approach to the wide-ranging themes that may come to mind on this topic. At the center is an exploration of consciousness as an explanandum in its own right, building on Husserl's reflective-eidetic analyses of conscious experiences. It will concentrate on explicating acts (...) of intuitive representification ( anschauliche Vergegenwärtigungen) as intentional modifications of perception, making up higher, radical novel levels of intentionality. Acts of remembering, imagining, depicting something, as well as iterations and combinations of such acts, will serve as examples. A formal notation will be used with the intention to make the reflection-based theoretical language of phenomenology more precise and easier to survey. (shrink)

Philosophy after Hiroshima offers a philosophical analysis of the issues surrounding war and peace, and their challenges to ethics. It reminds us that the threat posed to civilization by nuclear weapons persists, as does the need for continuing philosophical reflection on the nature of war, the problem of violence, and the need for a workable ethics in the nuclear age. The book recalls the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the beginning of the nuclear age, the Cold War, and (...) subsequently of the hegemonic unilateralism of the sole superpower. Reviewing early critical responses to the first atomic bombings by such figures as Camus, Sartre, Russell, Heidegger, Jaspers and others, the authors themselves respond to contemporary threats to peace, including the US "global war on terrorism," the recrudescence of militarism, and the continuation of imperial power politics by other means. In the nuclear age, the use of military force as a political instrument threatens the future of humanity. This poses formidable challenges to philosophy and calls for its transformation. In using memories of the atomic bombings to help us to grasp the moral implications of the current escalation of global violence, the authors hope to show the urgent relevance of nonviolence in the contemporary context. Drawing on a range of philosophical traditions Taoist and Western the contributors take up a welter of philosophical and political concerns of topical interest, including human rights, toleration, the politics of memory, intercultural dialogue, the ethics of co-responsibility, and the possibility of a cosmopolitan order of law and peace. Going beyond postmodernism and deconstruction, several of the authors develop a post-critical, constructive paradigm of thinking a philosophy of the possible and a new methodology for the realization of the creative potential of the humanities. Philosophy is viewed as a peace-promoting global dialogue. (shrink)

Marx, like many of his contemporaries, uncritically assumed that humanity develops from primitive beginnings to ever more perfect stages. In his theory of human development he measured progress by two main standards: the decrease of all forms of dependence, and the increase of universality in man's relations to nature and to his fellow man. In our century, not only have new structures of power and dependence emerged, but successive movements have also been generated to restore the more ordered and limited (...) relationships of the past. If belief in progress is nowadays no longer self-evident, such a state of affairs can help us reflect on the conditions necessary to realize the values which determined Marx's categorical imperative, or his insistence that we overthrow all relations by which man is made a debased and enslaved being. One of these conditions is the voluntary limitation of our needs: the need to use material goods without regard for others, the need to build up or maintain security even at the cost of violence, and the need to restrict the circle of those with whom we identify to our own particular culture, race, class or ways of thinking and acting. (shrink)

This paper argues for the combination of political and socio-economic analysis in the study of early medieval gift-giving, specifically in the context of the late Merovingian Church. Gift-giving in this period is often viewed through a historiographical tradition strongly influenced by anthropological scholarship, which rarely considers any socio-economic reasoning behind the act – particularly in the case of ecclesiastical institutions and actors. This paper associates itself with the recent and growing answer to this position, and particularly to Ian Wood’s re-working (...) of Appadurai and Appadurai Breckenridge’s “Temple Societies” theory. It studies the political, social, and economic context and repercussions of gift-giving in the Life of Saint Eligius, a seventh-century craftsman, member of the Merovingian court, and subsequently bishop of the see of Noyon, in North-Eastern Francia. The paper analyses the vita in a threefold way: Firstly, it looks at the connection between political patronage and gift-giving through the saint’s relationship to the Merovingian court. Secondly, it considers the potential socio-economic effects of gift-giving on the ecclesiastical institutions described throughout the text, and on the societies around them. Thirdly, it interprets these aspects in the light of the political expansion of the Merovingian Church, and of its institutions, in eastern Gaul. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement among philosophers that we refer to, think or talk about non-existent objects in much the same way as we refer to, think or talk about other objects. This paper explores the case of objects of fiction in the perspective of Husserlian philosophical phenomenology. In this perspective, everything objective is dealt with as object of some consciousness and as presenting itself in subjective modes. Within the scope of this paper, the focus of the descriptive analysis will be (...) on showing in some detail how conscious experiences of intentionally referring to something fictive in pre-linguistic intuitive acts of imagining something are to be articulated with regard to the object of consciousness, i.e. noematically, and with regard to the intentional act, i.e. noetically. Special attention will be given to the reflective finding of some consciousness being intentionally implied and thereby modified in the very performance of an intentional act of representifying (vergegenwärtigen) something in fiction and to the question of identity and individuation of objects in fiction. It will be argued that modifications occurring in representificational consciousness, which Husserl called ‘as-if’ or ‘quasi’ modifications, provide the key for understanding the phenomenology of fictional intentionality and reference. (shrink)

In this article, we develop the concept of Transparency by Design that serves as practical guidance in helping promote the beneficial functions of transparency while mitigating its challenges in automated-decision making environments. With the rise of artificial intelligence and the ability of AI systems to make automated and self-learned decisions, a call for transparency of how such systems reach decisions has echoed within academic and policy circles. The term transparency, however, relates to multiple concepts, fulfills many functions, and holds different (...) promises that struggle to be realized in concrete applications. Indeed, the complexity of transparency for ADM shows tension between transparency as a normative ideal and its translation to practical application. To address this tension, we first conduct a review of transparency, analyzing its challenges and limitations concerning automated decision-making practices. We then look at the lessons learned from the development of Privacy by Design, as a basis for developing the Transparency by Design principles. Finally, we propose a set of nine principles to cover relevant contextual, technical, informational, and stakeholder-sensitive considerations. Transparency by Design is a model that helps organizations design transparent AI systems, by integrating these principles in a step-by-step manner and as an ex-ante value, not as an afterthought. (shrink)

In this paper I explore possibilities of bringing post-positivist philosophies of empirical science to bear on the dynamics of mathematical development. This is done by way of a convergent accommodation of a mathematical version of Lakatos's methodology of research programmes, and a version of Kuhn's account of scientific change that is made applicable to mathematics by cleansing it of all references to the psychology of perception. The resulting view is argued in the light of two case histories of radical conceptual (...) innovations. (shrink)

The older schools were not indeed wholly extinct; but all belief in the systems taught had been practically undermined, and a general disposition to doubt ...

"Allerdings, das ist eine grosse Frage, der ich zu sehr ausgewichen bin, die Evidenz des Ich als ein Identisches, das also doch nicht in dem Bündel bestehen kann." (Husserl, 1907) Bekanntlich verwirft Husserl in den Logischen Untersuchungen die Auffassung, "dass die Beziehung auf das Ich etwas zum we sentlichen Bestande des intentionalen Erlebnisses selbst Gehöriges sei'',! und bildet um 1907, nach Einführung der phänomenolo gischen Reduktion, "die Beziehung auf das Ich zu unterlassen, oder von ihr zu abstrahieren" geradezu die Bedingung, (...) ein "reines Phänomen im Sinne der Phänomenologie" 2 zu gewinnen. Und bekanntlich heisst es demgegenüber in den Ideen von 1913: "Unter den allgemeinen Wesenseigentümlichkeiten des tran szendental gereinigten Erlebnisgebietes gebührt eigentlich die erste Stelle der Beziehung auf das,reine' Ich",3 und revidiert Husserl in der zweiten Auflage der Logischen Untersuchungen von 4 1913 seine Stellungnahme zur Frage des reinen Ich. Weniger bekannt ist bisher, wie Husserl auf seinem Denkweg von der einen zur anderen Stellungnahme zum Problem des Ich gekommen ist. Was bewegte ihn, das "Ich" in die phänomeno logische Problematik einzubeziehen? Zu vermuten war, dem Wandel in der Stellung zum Problem des Ich liege ein Wandel im Verständnis der Phänomenologie selbst zugrunde. Welche Phänomene motivierten, auf dem phänomenologischen Boden selbst, die Einbeziehung des Ich? Vor allem dieser Frage gehen wir, unter Berücksichtigung des Nachlassmaterials des Husserl Archivs (Leuven), in unserer Studie nach. (shrink)

On the whole our study has made a plea for the combined research into the history, methodology and philosophy of science. There is an intricate communication between these aspects of science, philosophy being both a fruit of scientific developments and a higher-level frame of reference for discussion on the inevicable metaphysical issues in science.As such philosophy can be very useful to science, but should never impose its ideas on the conduct of scientists . ... Zie: Summary.

A reproducibility principle is formulated and adopted as the guiding criterion for the acceptance of an experimental procedure as a simultaneous measurement of several observables. It is pointed out that this criterion can be applied to classical as well as quantum physics, and that it incorporates compatible as well as incompatible observables. The concept of fuzzy probability measure is presented as a possible mathematical tool for the description of statistical processes involving measurements of incompatible observables.

A notion of quantum space-time is introduced, physically defined as the totality of all flows of quantum test particles in free fall. In quantum space-time the classical notion of deterministic inertial frames is replaced by that of stochastic frames marked by extended particles. The same particles are used both as markers of quantum space-time points as well as natural clocks, each species of quantum test particle thus providing a standard for space-time measurements. In the considered flat-space case, the fluctuations in (...) coordinate values with respect to stochastic frames are described by coordinate probability amplitudes related to irreducible stochastic phase space representations of the Poincaré group. Lagrangian field theory on quantum space-time is formulated. The ensuing equations of motion for interacting fields contain no singularities in their nonlinear terms, and therefore can be handled by methods borrowed from classical nonlinear analysis. (shrink)

The paper presents, first, some general remarks about Husserl’s philosophical Phenomenology in view of relating it to the scientific study of consciousness, and recalls some of the basic methodological tenets of a Husserlian phenomenology of consciousness (I). It then introduces some recent work on so-called “mental imagery” in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (II). Next, a detailed exposition of a reflective analysis of conscious experiences that involve “imagery” or “images” is given (III), arguing thereby that reflective conceptual clarifications of various forms (...) of such experiences could contribute to research into their finer details. In order to show more distinctly that the conscious experiences involved in the contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific imagery research are indeed differently structured, a simple notation for designating the various structural components of the experiences under study will be used. In concluding (IV), some methodological assets concerning the present proposal of integrating the method of Husserlian phenomenology into the present-day, and hopefully even more so into the future study of consciousness are highlighted! (shrink)