Explores the philosophical contributions and contemporary relevance of early German Romanticism.

This is the first complete English translation of Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, with introduction and annotation. The importance of Frege's ideas within contemporary philosophy would be hard to exaggerate. He was, to all intents and purposes, the inventor of mathematical logic, and the influence exerted on modern philosophy of language and logic, and indeed on general epistemology, by the philosophical framework.

This book represents an effort to understand very old questions about biological form, function, and the relationships between them. The essays collected here reflect the diversity of approaches in evolutionary developmental biology, including not only studies by prominent scientists whose research focuses on topics concerned with evolution and development, but also historically and conceptually oriented studies that place the scientific work within a larger framework and ask how it can be pushed further. Topics under discussion range from the use of (...) theoretical and empirical biomechanics to understand the evolution of plant form, to detailed studies of the evolution of development and the role of developmental constraints on phenotypic variation. The result is a rich and interdisciplinary volume that will begin a wider conversation about the shape of Evo Devo as it matures as a field. (shrink)

Whoever wants to understand the successions of the history of philosophy, will not, as Droysen mocked, only follow in «eunuch-like neutrality». He/she will want to enter into a philosophising relationship to these successions. Now, philosophy is essentially arguing. And arguments have a formal and a material aspect. The logical validity in the truth-value preserving transition from premises to conclusions , is different from the reasons for our conviction of this truth itself . For the second validity claim we are differently (...) accountable than we are when proving the formal consistency of our belief connections. We must justify the assumption for which we argue on its own, independently of whether it stands in analytically correct relations to others of its own kind, or whichever conclusions we wish to draw from it. Only the latter, the second, aspect makes philosophy an untargetted endeavour, a dispute between materially competing intuitions. We argue, yes we quarrel with philosophical theses. It would be naive to believe we could ever be so certain of a position as if it were beyond reasonable doubt. «Whether or not it would be nice to knock disagreeing philosophers down by sheer force of argument, it cannot be done. Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively. […] The theory survives its refutation – at a price» . The question hence is: what price are we prepared to pay for convictions with which we sympathise? In this consideration I am primarily advised by Stephen Toulmin, but also raise critical questions regarding Habermas’s consensualist reception of Toulmin’s indeterminate argumentation theory. (shrink)

The paper gives an overall view of the history of the Stoa and its main achievements.

Previous research described different cognitive processes on how individuals process distributional information. Based on these processes, the current research uncovered a novel phenomenon in distribution perception: the Endpoint Leverage Effect. Subjective endpoints influence distribution estimations not only locally around the endpoint but also influence estimations across the whole value range of the distribution. The influence is largest close to the respective endpoint and decreases in size toward the opposite end of the value range. Three experiments investigate this phenomenon: Experiment 1 (...) provides correlational evidence for the Endpoint Leverage Effect after presenting participants with a numerical distribution. Experiment 2 demonstrates the Endpoint Leverage Effect by manipulating the subjective endpoints of a numerical distribution directly. Experiment 3 generalizes the phenomenon by investigating a general population sample and estimations regarding a real‐world income distribution. In addition, quantitative model analysis examines the cognitive processes underlying the effect. Overall, the novel Endpoint Leverage Effect is found in all three experiments, inspiring further research in a wide area of contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God by Veronica Roberts OgleAaron C. EbertPolitics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God by Veronica Roberts Ogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), x + 201 pp.Politics is not a word in Augustine's lexicon—at least, it's not something he speaks of, in the abstract, in his great work of political theology, the City of God. This curious (...) omission from Augustine's late magnum opus et arduum has given rise to many a divergent reading of his political thought. Lacking an express account of the very term in question, his politics can seem to admit of a wide range of interpretations. On one side of the spectrum, it has been described as anticipating the religious neutrality of modern liberalism. On the other side, it has been interpreted as consolidating politics into religion by transposing political philosophy into the key of ecclesiology and making the Church the new realm of politics.1 In her elegantly written and insightful new book, which builds on the work of her 2014 dissertation at the University of Notre Dame and on a few published articles, Veronica Roberts Ogle charts a new interpretive path for reading Augustine on politics. She does this by means of two principal interventions.The first is by elucidating City of God's rhetorical purpose, what Ogle calls its "psychagogic character" (6). Psychagogy, "the art of leading [agô] souls [psychai] to a state of health," was the rhetorical aim and genre of much ancient philosophy (3). It took its cue from the philosopher's perception that his readers were sick with the disease of unhealthy attachment to the things of the world. Philosophers were physicians of the soul: they applied "the medicinal art of contraries" to their sick patients. This meant that their literary curatives often met patients/readers with the bitter taste of a poison (4). But—and this is the crucial point for Ogle—the poison was given for the purpose of health. What this means for Augustine's City of God, Ogle argues, is that we ought not take the work's biting and at-times-venomous rhetoric as evidence that Augustine is trying to poison his reader's vision of politics. Rather, he is trying to cure them of their attachment to the myths and delusions of politics-according-to-Rome and, instead, "to help us see the world, even the political world, anew: as part of a created order that is good, but that points beyond itself all the same" (4). Augustine's descriptions of Rome—indeed his frequent equations of Rome with the civitas [End Page 1426] terrena—are indeed meant to shock. But, so Ogle argues, they are meant to shock us out of destructive attachments so that we can learn to make the right attachments, first to Christ, and then, through Christ, to our earthly communities as pilgrims. City of God's pessimistic rhetoric is not Augustine simply denouncing the natural project of politics. It is a bitter medicine for a people deathly ill with an addiction to earthly glory.The second intervention of Ogle's book lies in its attention to what she calls City of God's "sacramental ethos" (5). This, I would argue, is the book's most important contribution. It is also the insight on which the heart of the book's argument depends. Sacraments, for Augustine, are signs that point us to God. Understood in this broad sense, the whole created order—that is, everything that is not God—has the quality of a sacrament by virtue of its very existence. This is connected closely to Augustine's understanding of evil as privatio boni: all that exists, to the extent that it exists, is good; and all that exists is, by nature, a sign (signum) pointing beyond itself to the Lord.These are not new insights into Augustine's doctrine of creation, but Ogle's application of them to the question of politics and the earthly city is suggestive. For what emerges is a new account of the relationship between politics and the earthly city. The whole created order... (shrink)