In 1889, Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published "Aristocratic Radicalism: An Essay on Friedrich Nietzsche," which transformed the as-yet-unknown German-Swiss philosopher into a European, and ultimately global, phenomenon. The article sparked a furious public debate between Brandes and a fellow Dane, philosopher Harald Høffding, who swiftly issued a rebuttal, "Democratic Radicalism: An Objection." What began as a scholarly disagreement over Nietzsche's philosophy rapidly spiraled into a sprawling contest of competing visions of society's future, one radically aristocratic and the other (...) radically democratic. Marking the moment at which the uniquely Nordic concept of social democratic welfare was first contested in the public sphere, this debate provides insights into not only Nietzschean philosophy and its immediate reception but also the foundational concept of modern Scandinavian social, cultural, and political organization. This volume presents, for the first time in any language other than Danish, the debate in its entirety: three essays by Brandes and three by Høffding. A critical introduction by editor and translator William Banks explores the exchange in its context and convincingly argues that the principles contested by the two Danish luminaries still very much resonate in Western society today. (shrink)

Antike Noëtik und moderne Subjektivität / Helmut Kuhn -- Die platonische Idee des Guten und das sokratische Paradox bei Kierkegaard / Wilhelm Anz -- Der Herakliteer in Platons Theätet / Uvo Hölscher -- Antike und moderne Ethik / Ernst Tugendhat.

No entendimento de Habermas, "direito", na expressão "direitos humanos", é um conceito jurídico, donde direitos humanos, para ele, serem direitos jurídicos, normas legais declaradas em atos defundações do Estado ou anunciadas em convenções do direito internacional e/ou constituições estatais. Ao conceber assim os direitos e tematizar os direitos humanos numa abordagem tríplice (focando-os entre moral, direito e política), ele fornece diferentes definições teóricas dos direitos humanos. O texto apresenta uma exposição sistemática dessas definições e focaliza os diferentes problemas que motivaram (...) Habermas a alterar e ampliar suas concepções de direitos humanos. (shrink)

An important short study of Nietzsche by the famed European critic. Included are selections from the Brandes-Nietzsche correspondence.

Le but de la vie chez Schopenhauer et chez Nietzsche.--Sur la sociologie des sens.--La notion de valeur.--Le christianisme et l'art.--Du réalisme dans l'art.--La philosophie de l'aventure.--La religion et les contrastes de la vie.--Métaphysique de la mort.--Sur le matérialisme historique.--De l'essence de la philosophie, etc.

My goal in this paper is to defend the plausibility of a particular version of collectivism – understood as the evolutionary claim that individual-level cognition is systematically biased in favor of aggregate-level regularities – in the domain of language. Chomsky's (1986) methodological promotion of I-language (speaker-internal knowledge) and the corresponding demotion of E-language (aggregate output of a population of speakers) has led mainstream cognitive science to view language essentially as a property of individual minds/brains whose evolution is best explained as (...) a result of the natural selection of an innate language faculty (Pinker 1994). Such a framework is largely oblivious to the linguistic dynamics arising from iterated learning, i.e. the fact that linguistic information must be periodically mapped from its I-linguistic into its E-linguistic medium and back in order to persist over time. Recent expression/induction models of language evolution, which are heavily inspired by the simulation-based methodology of Artificial Life, suggest that linguistic universals, such as compositional and recursive structure, can emerge from cultural selection alone (Brighton et al. 2005). I will conclude that there is both a biological and a cultural route towards collectivism. (shrink)

Georg Simmel developed a "form" method for the newly revived field of sociology, drawing on the subjectivity/objectivity dialectic. While his book's organization differs from that of contemporary texts, his method remains implicit in the field to this day.

There is a long-standing debate whether propositions, sentences, statements or utterances provide an answer to the question of what objects logical formulas stand for. Based on the traditional understanding of logic as a science of valid arguments, this question is firstly framed more exactly, making explicit that it calls not only for identifying some class of objects, but also for explaining their relationship to ordinary language utterances. It is then argued that there are strong arguments against the proposals commonly put (...) forward in the debate. The core of the problem is that an informative account of the objects formulas stand for presupposes a theory of formalization; that is, a theory that explains what formulas may adequately substitute for an inference in proofs of validity. Although such theories are still subject to research, some consequences can be drawn from an analysis of the reasons why the common accounts featuring sentences, propositions or utterances fail. Theories of formalization cannot refer to utterances qua expressions of propositions; instead they may refer to sentences and rely on additional information about linguistic structure and pragmatic context. (shrink)

Om den teknologiske tids verdensbillede.