The edition illustrates the correspondence between Martin Buber and Ludwig Feuchtwanger and is based on four unpublished letters from the Leo Baeck Institute and the National Library Jerusalem. Among the documents included, Feuchtwanger's review of Buber's book on the origins and historical dynamic of messianism clarifies different aspects of the historical context as does the previously unknown letter from Franz Rosenzweig addressed to Ludwig Feuchtwanger.

The present work studies for the first time the important discussions of the period from the debate between Leo Strauss and Julius Guttmann, Alexander Altmann s contribution to Jewish theology, to the reception of the work of Franz ...

In light of the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, this paper examines various works of literature to reveal that people who have prisoners in their power tend to torment their victims. Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville’s seafaring novels reveal how the captain and his mates assume brutal, godlike powers over the common sailors; T. E. Lawrence describes how the victim’s pain can become a masochistic pleasure; Franz Kafka imagines a state of universal guilt, where the victim, an average (...) man, suffers in the grip of an elaborate torture machine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jacobo Timerman, both political prisoners who survived to describe their terror, and George Orwell, meditating on contemporary totalitarian regimes as he suffered the agonies of medical treatment, transform their pain into art. Such literary works provide insights into the morally ambiguous depths of punishment. Every scene of torture, based on the authors’ experience, observation and imagination, has the same context as those vividly captured in the Abu Ghraib snapshots. (shrink)

The important and influential mathematician Felix Hausdorff was also the author of several remarkable philosophical books and essays. About his unusual biography between philosophy and topology we have only little knowledge. We know only few personal documents and letters. Among Hausdorff’s letters that have been preserved (about 130), the letters and postcards to the librarian, translator and artist Franz Meyer in Jena (10) give an important insight into Hausdorff’s biography and his philosophical development. They also inform about his (...) way from a philosopher, who liked to play with Nietzsche’s thoughts, to a pure mathematician. (shrink)

Growing out of concerns for environment-development interlinkages expressed at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, 1972, this volume is a compilation of edited versions of statements made at that conference and at the ...

The Description Logic Handbook covers all aspects of the research in the field of knowledge representation. Written by some of the most prominent researchers in the field, and covering the basic technical material and implementational aspects, it is both a unique reference and a self-study guide.

Die Sprache weiß, wovon sie spricht. Das zeigt sich im Kompositum "ef?μe ", von dem das deutsche "ephemer" abgeleitet wurde. Während das Präfix "epi" u.a. die Bedeutungen "darauf, während, bis zu" umfasst, bedeutet "hemära" nicht nur "Tag", sondern auch "Zeit" und "Leben". Das Ephemere spricht existenziell die Daseinsweise des Menschen an. Ephemeroi, Menschen, sind "Eintagswesen", "eines Schattens Traum". Ohne das Ephemere als Kennzeichen der Moderne und Postmoderne zu vernachlässigen, unter Berücksichtigung der Wechselwirkungen mit Medienumbrüchen und Künsten stehen Fragen nach der (...) Zeitlichkeit als Bedingung der Möglichkeit allen Existierens, aber auch nach den Weisen der Zeitigung von Zeit, die die konkrete Lebenszeit prägen, im Zentrum. Mit Beiträgen von: Gabriele Brandstetter, Danica Darkic, Martina Dobbe, Martin Dornberg, Hinderk M. Emmrich, Daniel Fetzner, Angela Melitopoulos, Petra Maria Meyer, Jürgen Partenheimer, Claus-Arthur Scheier, Michael Schirner, Annette Stahmer, Georg Christoph Tholen, Michael Wetzel, Martin Zenck. (shrink)

A perennial question in the philosophy of time concerns the relation between the objective “physical time” that features in empirical theories of motion and the subjective “human time” in which our own experiences unfold. This article is about one facet of this broader question: whether the phenomenon of consciousness allows us to make a principled distinction between the present and other times. A number of authors have argued that, without conscious observers, there would be no distinctions of past, present, and (...) future. This paper defends the opposing thesis that there is no interesting connection between consciousness and presentness. (shrink)

Discusses the beliefs of Judaism and their application to life in today's world.

Dieser Band präsentiert den Text der Originalausgabe von 1907, drei weitere Arbeiten über ein optisches Paradoxon sowie sieben bisher unveröffentlichte Basisuntersuchungen zum Problem Sinneswahrnehmungen, die Brentano in eine zweite ...

Dem durch Kant verschütteten Verständnis der aristotelischen Kategorienlehre brach schon Brentanos erste Schrift 'Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles' Bahn. Zu ihrem Thema kehrt er in den hier vereinten Diktaten aus seinem letzten Jahrzehnt zurück.

Theodor Geiger (1891-1952) zählt zu den vernachlässigten Klassikern der deutschen Soziologie. Realismus und Ideologiekritik bilden die Klammer für ein Opus, das von der Schichtungs-, Rechts- und Erziehungssoziologie über Fragen zur Eugenik bis hin zur Erkenntnis-, Modernitäts- und Demokratietheorie reicht. Die vorliegende Studie ist der Versuch, trotz der zahlreichen Wechselfälle in Geigers Leben eine Gesamtwürdigung seines umfangreichen und heterogenen Werkes vorzulegen. Berücksichtigt werden die zum Teil schwer zugänglichen Schriften aus dem skandinavischen Exil sowie einige bislang unveröffentlichte Arbeiten aus dem Nachlass. Dies (...) erlaubt es, wissenschaftsbiographisch aufschlussreiche Aspekte aus der Zeit der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung zu erhellen. Der Vergleich mit alten und neuen Klassikern macht deutlich, dass dem "Querdenker" Geiger innerhalb der frühen deutschen Soziologie eine Ausnahmerolle zukommt. So ist er zum einen Pionier einer kritischen Problem- und Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, der danach strebt, die Soziologie mit den Mitteln der empirischen Sozialforschung und der Sozialstatistik auf eine methodisch kontrollierte Grundlage zu stellen. Zugleich ist Geiger aber auch Machtkritiker, Wertnihilist und Modernist. Als Ausdruck dieser Grundposition lässt sich nicht nur die entschiedene Gegnerschaft zu Kulturkritik, Gemeinschaftsschwärmerei und der NS-Ideologie verstehen, sondern auch sein Beitrag zur Entwicklung einer "realistischen" Demokratiekonzeption. (shrink)

Der vierbändige Titel Die Welt der Philosophin liefert eine anschauliche Darstellung vom Leben einzelnen Philosophinnen, die als Repräsentantinnen ihrer Zeit zu sehen sind. Mit Auszügen aus ihren Texten (zum Teil erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung), ausführlichen Einführungen in die historische Epoche mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Lage der Frauen und einer ausführlichen Biografie bieten die Bände spannenden Einblicke in das Leben von Philosophinnen. The four-volume title The World of the Female Philosopher provides a vivid account of the lives of individual female philosophers (...) who are to be seen as representatives of their times. With excerpts from their texts (some of them in German translation for the first time), detailed introductions to the historical epoch with special attention to the situation of women and a detailed biography, the volumes offer exciting insights into the lives of women philosophers. (shrink)

This Introduction tells the story of intergerational justice and how it has influenced philosophers and political thinkers throughout history. The Introduction goes on to discuss the aims of the book, which is to offer a sustained discussion of intergenerational justice as seen by practical philosophers. The first part of the book focuses on the way in which various schools of thought in moral and political philosophy approach the domain of intergenerational justice, while the second part focuses on more specific aspects, (...) such as how these theories address the question of motivation, how they deal with demographic fluctuations, or how they can be applied to real-world issues such as climate change. (shrink)

Description logics are a family of knowledge representation formalisms that are descended from semantic networks and frames via the system Kl-one. During the last decade, it has been shown that the important reasoning problems (like subsumption and satisfiability) in a great variety of description logics can be decided using tableau-like algorithms. This is not very surprising since description logics have turned out to be closely related to propositional modal logics and logics of programs (such as propositional dynamic logic), for which (...) tableau procedures have been quite successful.Nevertheless, due to different underlying institutions and applications, most description logics differ significantly from run-of-the-mill modal and program logics. Consequently, the research on tableau algorithms in description logics led to new techniques and results, which are, however, also of interest for modal logicians. In this article, we will focus on three features that play an important rôle in description logics (number restrictions, terminological axioms, and role constructors), and show how they can be taken into account by tableau algorithms. (shrink)

Fifteen leading philosophers explore a set of themes from the pioneering work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, in ancient philosophy but also in later periods and in systematic philosophy. The contributors discuss knowledge, rhetoric, freedom and practical reason, virtue and the good life, ethics and politics in Plato and Aristotle and beyond. The editors offer an introduction charting the scholarly contributions of Fine and Irwin and assessing their individual and joint impact, together with a complete bibliography of their writings.

Abstract:Charles Darwin died in 1882—more than a hundred years ago. His doctrine, however, is still alive. Recently there has been particular interest in his ideas among philosophers. These ideas are indeed a challenge to (traditional) philosophy: To take Darwin seriously means to revise—or even to destroy—some positions in (traditional) philosophy. Among the philosophical disciplines which have been affected by Darwin's ideas are epistemology and moral philosophy (ethics). In the present paper I shall discuss the epistemological and ethical consequences of Darwin's (...) doctrine from the point of view of contemporary philosophy of biology; I shall give a brief outline of evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary ethics which both have caused many controversies. (shrink)

Since the 19th century the theory of evolution has been the guide not only of biological research, but of the explanation of man's psychic and mental abilities, too. In particular Herbert Spencer's and Charles Darwin's works gave rise to an evolutionary view of human mind (evolutionary psychology). This view was generalized to the explanation of epistemic structures like science and was adopted by many philosophers and scientists, e. g. Boltzmann, Mach, and others. Under the influence of Darwin's theory of natural (...) selection a selective elimination model was established in order to explain epistemic activities. Thus, in the 19th century we find expressed the basic ideas of today's evolutionary epistemology. The modern evolutionary theory of (human) knowledge therefore turns out to be the more precise and elaborated formulation of the fundamental postulates of an evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

SummaryThe present paper is devoted to the problem of teleology in modern biology. Teleology is restricted to the phenomenon of goal‐directedness, whereas goal‐intended actions are denied. Thus, only the aspect of seemingly material teleology or teleonomy is required which paraphrases functions of certain value for the self maintenance of a system and is explainable without reference to vitalistic premises.Some aspects of evolution and selection are discussed and subsumed under a systems‐theoretically oriented view. Furthermore it is stressed that teleological explanations are (...) compatible with causal ones. The result of these assertions is the possibility of the reconciliation of seemingly irreconcilable positions. This, last not least, means a plea for the re‐assessment of an old and venerable problem.RésuméCet article est consacré au problèm de la finalité dans la biologie moderne, » finalite «étant pris ici dans un sens restreint de »comportement dirigé vers un but«, écartant toute notion d'intention consciente.La finalité matérielle apparente ou téléonomie, qui dénote simplement des fonctions ayant pour effet la conservation de systèmes, suffit donc, sans qu'un recours à des prémisses vitalistes soit nécessaire.Quelques aspects de l'evolution et de la sélection sont discutés dans le cadre de la théorie des systèmes. L'auteur montre aussi que les explications téléologiques n'entrent pas en contradiction avec des explications causales , d'où une synthèse possible de positions apparemment incompatibles. Enfin il plaide pour une réévaluation de ce problème ancien et vénérable.ZusammenfassungVorliegende Arbeit ist dem Problem der Teleologie in der modernen Biologie gewidmet. Die Teleologie wird dabei auf zielgerichtetes Verhalten eingeschränkt, während zielintendiertes Ver‐halten geleugnet wird. Daher genügt der Aspekt der scheinbaren materialen Teleologie oder Teleonomie, die lediglich Funktionen von systemerhaltendem Wert umschreibt und ohne Rückgriff auf vitalistische Pramissen erklart werden kann.Es werden einige Aspekte der Evolution und Selektion diskutiert und unter eine systemtheo‐retisch orientierte Betrachtungsweise subsumiert. Ferner wird hervorgehoben, dass teleologische Erklärungen nicht im Widerspruch zu kausalen Erklärungen stehen, was in einer moglichen Synthese von scheinbar inkompatiblen Positionen resultiert. Dies bedeuted nicht zuletzt ein Plädoyer für die Wieder‐bewertung eines altehrwürdigen Problems. (shrink)