Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) steht nicht nur für ein neues Selbstverständnis einer "aufgeklärten" jüdischen Elite, sondern auch - wie hier erstmals dokumentiert wird - für einen neuen Umgang mit »ästhetischer Bildung« und Musik: Er selbst nahm Klavierunterricht beim Bach-Schüler Kirnberger, während Sara Levy, geb. Itzig, ihren Salon zu einem Zentrum der Bach-Pflege machte und zahlreiche Berliner Juden ausgerechnet bei öffentlichen Aufführungen von Händels »Messias« und Grauns »Tod Jesu« mitwirkten. Die manifeste Bevorzugung "alter" und selbstreferentieller Musik in diesen Kreisen erlaubt die These, (...) daß die jüdische Minderheit in Berlin der Idee einer »absoluten Musik« wesentlich den Boden bereitet hat. (shrink)

Written over the course of two months in early 2008, Art as "Night" is a series of essays in part inspired by a January 2007 visit to the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, London, with subsequent forays into related themes and art-historical judgments for and against theories of meta-painting. Art as "Night" proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, (...) this "night" is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency. Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as "Night" restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as "Night" argues for a nondiscursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting. A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as "Night" suggests by way of this critique of an elective "night" crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma , a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as "Night" is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge. (shrink)

"A type of book we always long to read for peace and joy in any nation, Father Dr. JoeBarth Abba touched many areas amidst orgies of circles of terrorisms, Islamic insurgents with key solutions for psycho-dialogical ways on cultural ethnic tensions for conflicts resolution." --Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Mueller, Vatican, Rome ***The book presents an inquiry into the thoughts and scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, his classical philosophical synthesis, his insights, and the quest for Justice and Human Rights as a panacea (...) or desired urgent solution to racial justice, abuse of human life, and human rights. Dissertation. (Series: Philosophy / Philosophie, Vol. 108) [Subject: African Studies, Human Rights Studies, Philosophy, Christian Studies, Thomas Aquinas]. (shrink)

Do members of democratic societies have a moral right that others not actively prevent them from engaging in wrongdoing? Many political theorists think that they do. “It is a feature of democratic government,” Michael Walzer writes, “that the people have a right to act wrongly—in much the same way that they have a right to act stupidly”. Of course, advocates of a democratic right to do wrong may believe that the scope of this right is limited. A majority in a (...) democratic society, for example, may not have a moral right against being prevented from enslaving or arbitrarily disenfranchising a minority, or if it were to launch a wrongful aggressive war against another society. But many join Walzer in asserting that it would be wrong in principle to intervene to prevent some wrongs that democratic societies would inflict. This thesis, which we call the democratic right to do wrong thesis (DRTDWT), can be formulated as follows: DRTDWT – For democratic societies A and agents B, there is a class of wrongful policies and institutions X, such that if A chooses to implement members of this class pursuant to democratic procedures, B has a duty not to actively intervene to prevent the implementation of X. Our goal in this essay is to show that the DRTDWT should be rejected. (shrink)

I am very happy indeed to contribute to this series of lectures, especially because I owe most of my training in philosophy to Elizabeth Anscombe, whose work has given the series its name. I am deeply indebted to the marvellous generosity of her teaching, to the example she set me of an unrelentingly thorough and serious thinker, to the unobtrusive way she introduced me to Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Through Elizabeth Anscombe I also made the acquaintance of my friend Philippa Foot, (...) whose work in moral philosophy has, over decades and more than anyone else's, influenced my own. I hope it will be possible to recognize in what I am going to say here not indeed the excellence but at least traces of the beneficial influence of both these philosophers. (shrink)

Im Zentrum der gegenwärtigen Diskussion um das Verhältnis der mittelalterlichen zur neuzeitlichen Philosophie stehen das Denken des Johannes Duns Scotus, Wilhelms von Ockham und Dietrichs von Freiberg. Wird den beiden erstgenannten Autoren in diesem Zusammenhang eher eine vorbereitende Rolle zuerkannt, verbindet sich mit Dietrich von Freiberg durchaus die Einschätzung einer Vorwegnahme maßgeblicher Einsichten neuzeitlichen Denkens. Im Einzelnen stellt sich die Sachlage folgendermaßen dar: Das Urteil in bezug auf die vorbereitende Bedeutung des Denkens des Johannes Duns Scotus hat dessen „ontologisch-transzendentale“ Deutung (...) der Metaphysik im Blick. Gemäß diesem Verständnis repräsentiert die Metaphysik nicht mehr das Wissen von einem ersten ausgezeichneten Seienden, sondern vom Begriff des Seienden als solchen . Auf diese Weise macht Scotus die „Frage nach dem wahrhaft Ersterkannten“ zur Grundlage der Metaphysik und leitet so eine Entwicklung ein, die bei Kant zu „einer Radikalisierung des Gedankens einer transzendentalen Grundlegung“ führt. In bezug auf Wilhelm von Ockham stützt sich die hervorgehobene Einschätzung auf „die innovatorische Einzigartigkeit Analysen“ im Feld der Erkenntnistheorie. Infolgedessen gelangte Ockham zu „einer neuen Einschätzung des Erkenntnissubjektes“, wodurch er „die Grenzen durchbrochen hat, jenseits deren sich die neuzeitliche Philosophie entfalten konnte“. Die Beurteilung der Bedeutung des Dietrich von Freiberg hat wiederum zur Grundlage, daß dieser „in aller Ausdrücklichkeit […] den Ursprung des realen, kategorial bestimmten Seins im menschlichen Denken lehrt“. Insofern Dietrich auf diese Weise als „mittelalterlicher Denker die Kantische Einsicht hatte, daß Metaphysik […] unmöglich wäre, wenn das Seiende, von dem sie handelte, strikt als extramental gedacht würde“, haben dessen Einsichten historisch betrachtet nicht nur vorbereitende Bedeutung in bezug auf die neuzeitliche Philosophie, sondern „setzen […] zahlreiche geschichtsphilosophische Konstruktionen bezüglich der Epochentrennung von Mittelalter und Neuzeit außer Kraft“. (shrink)

The paper gives a reconstruction of Donald Davidson’s theory of primary reasons in the context of the unified theory of meaning and action and its ontology of individual events. This is a necessary task to understand this philosophy of language and action because since his article “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” he has developed and modified his proposal on describing and explaining actions. He has expanded the “unified theory” to a composite theory of beliefs and desires as a total theory of (...) behavior. At first, the anomalous monism was a byproduct. Yet, the step to this philosophy of the mental is not contingent. It will be shown that the anomalous monism as the primary feature of the mental does not lead us to a materialic monism in our ontology. If the evidence of radical interpretation has no echo in natural science, we have to give up materialism.Following this, I will argue for a pure anomalism. Or, in other words, for the ascription of propositional attitudes given by the semantical analysis of sentences of such attitudes does not commit us to a materialistc framework in our ontological thinking. Yet, to understand Davidson’s unified theory, we have to grasp the role of individual events in this framework since the ontological reduction of individual events explains par example the relation between the mind and the body, and the possibility of autonomous action in the world of causality. I do not argue for a dualism of properties between the physical of the mental in the manner of other philosophers, since from the radical interpreters point the empirical restrictions of the speaker’s attitudes and behavior cannot be fixed for all cases. (shrink)

In light of the phenomenon of the “coexistence of the non-contemporaneous” [Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen] every periodic division is problematic, for usually the old exists simultaneously with the new, that which looks to the past exists beside that which points to the future. This is also true for the beginning of “modern times”: Beside the first modern attempts to define the fundamentals of moral conduct without recourse to metaphysical assumptions, the “old dictates” remained in effect for whose truth divine revelation was (...) claimed. Some theoreticians of modernity held a conciliatory position in which they clung to God’s existence, but they no longer looked to infer His attributes from the Book of Books but, rather, out of creation — from the book of nature. Nevertheless the project of the Enlightenment, to find a secular foundation for morality, was worked on more and more self-consciously, and the greatest radicals even went a step further: They held the traditional form of religion, under which in the following is always meant: the Christian-theistic form of religion, to be morally threatening. David Hume was one of them. His provocative reflections on this subject are the object of the following comments. (shrink)