Foreword by Oliver Sacks Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was already an established neuropsychologist when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s. This book, his magnum opus and widely regarded as a modern classic in psychology and biology, grew out of his dissatisfaction with traditional natural science techniques for analyzing living beings. It offers a broad introduction to the sources and ranges of application of the "holistic" or "organismic" research program that has since become a standard part (...) of biological thought. Goldstein was especially concerned with the breakdown of organization and the failure of central controls that take place in catastrophic responses to situations such as physical or mental illness. But he was equally attuned to the amazing powers of the organism to readjust to such catastrophic losses, if only by withdrawal to a more limited range that it could manage by a redistribution of its reduced energies, thus reclaiming as much wholeness as new circumstances allowed. Goldstein's theses in The Organism have had an important impact on philosophical and psychological thought throughout the twentieth century, as evidenced in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Ernst Cassirer, and Ludwig Binswanger. (shrink)

According to Xenophon, Socrates tried to persuade his associate Aristippus to moderate his excessive indulgence in wine, women, and food, arguing that only hard work can bring happiness. Aristippus wasn’t convinced. Instead, he and his followers espoused the most radical form of hedonism in ancient Western philosophy. Before the rise of the better known but comparatively ascetic Epicureans, the Cyrenaics pursued a way of life in which moments of pleasure, particularly bodily pleasure, held the highest value. In The Birth of (...) Hedonism, Kurt Lampe provides the most comprehensive account in any language of Cyrenaic ideas and behavior, revolutionizing the understanding of this neglected but important school of philosophy. -/- The Birth of Hedonism thoroughly and sympathetically reconstructs the doctrines and practices of the Cyrenaics, who were active between the fourth and third centuries BCE. The book examines not only Aristippus and the mainstream Cyrenaics, but also Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus. Contrary to recent scholarship, the book shows that the Cyrenaics, despite giving primary value to discrete pleasurable experiences, accepted the dominant Greek philosophical belief that life-long happiness and the virtues that sustain it are the principal concerns of ethics. The book also offers the first in-depth effort to understand Theodorus’s atheism and Hegesias’s pessimism, both of which are extremely unusual in ancient Greek philosophy and which raise the interesting question of hedonism’s relationship to pessimism and atheism. Finally, the book explores the “new Cyrenaicism” of the nineteenth-century writer and classicist Walter Pater, who drew out the enduring philosophical interest of Cyrenaic hedonism more than any other modern thinker. (shrink)

BREYSIG: SEIN U. ERK. GESCHICHTL. DINGE BD. 3.

1. Bd. Persönlichkeit und Entwicklung.--2. Bd. Die Macht des Gedankens in der Geschichte in Auseinandersetzung mit Marx und mit Hegel.--3. Bd. Der Weg der Menschheit.

Dieser Sammelband vereinigt zeitdiagnostische Studien, in denen wichtige Tendenzen der Denkkultur der Gegenwart kritisch analysiert werden. So bekannte deutschsprachige Philosophen und Sozialwissenschaftler wie Hans Albert, Werner Becker, Malte Hossenfelder, Hans Lenk, Michael Schmid, Gerard Radnitzky, Ernst Topitsch usw. behandeln Themen wie: Ist Aufklärung heute noch aktuell? Wie gefährlich sind philosophische Heilslehrer und fundamentalistische Weltanschauungen? Ist das Theorem der Risikogesellschaft bloß ein Mythologem? Werden Utopien durch Demokratie domestiziert? Gibt es ein gemeinsames Verständnis von Glück? Ist die moderne Wohlfahrtsdemokratie mit individueller Freiheit (...) vereinbar? Was leistet die Rational-Choice-Theorie, die in sozialwissenschaftlichen Erklärungsmodellen eine immer größere Bedeutung gewinnt? (shrink)

Recent writers claim that responsibilist virtue epistemology courts skepticism, owing to the fact that most of us lack the virtues it deems necessary for justified belief and knowledge. A powerful version of this objection is the challenge from situationist social psychology pressed by Alfano (2012, 2013) and Olin and Doris (2014). This paper develops a new version of responsibilism that is immune from this objection, and shows that this view has many advantages over other forms of virtue epistemology. My responsibilism (...) dispenses with the ubiquitous but (I argue) mistaken idea that responsibilist virtue properties must be understood in terms of character traits. My view parallels an often overlooked form of virtue ethics suggested by Thomson (1997) that some situationists (e.g., Harman (2001)) have praised. That form shares with other forms the thought that virtue properties are normatively fundamental, but it adds that act-attaching ones are prior to person-attaching ones, and require no backing by character traits. Far from being an ad hoc retreat position, I argue that this view is independently attractive. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Platon" verfügbar.

Die Arbeit setzt sich mit der neuzeitlichen Theodizeefrage auseinander. In einem ersten Schritt wird versucht, den genuinen Gehalt der Philosophie von Leibniz darzustellen, dessen Werk für die weitere Diskussion dieser Thematik maßgeblich wurde. Dabei wird aufgewiesen, dass die Argumente von Leibniz empiristischen und fideistischen Bestreitungen einer Theodizee standzuhalten und den Glauben an den allmächtigen und gütigen Gott mit dem Phänomen menschlicher Freiheit in Verbindung zu bringen vermögen. In einem zweiten Schritt werden die Positionen von Kant und Leibniz konfrontiert. Dabei zeigt (...) sich, dass Kant den von Leibniz bezeichneten Weg nicht verwirft, sondern weiterführt und die Theodizeefrage konsequent in der Praxis menschlichen Weltumgangs zu verorten vermag. (shrink)