In the twenty-four years since the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, a body of high-quality scholarship on socialism has slowly accumulated. Here I discuss two superb additions to this incipient post–Cold War canon, Mark Bevir’s The Making of British Socialism and Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life. Both authors take it as axiomatic that the socialist utopia, with its quasi-eschatological promise of complete human emancipation, is an idea whose time has passed. But Bevir and, to a (...) lesser degree, Sperber discern a utopian afterglow that warrants our interest—and is still quite capable of providing inspiration. “This book has been a long time in the making,” Mark Bevir admits in the .. (shrink)

In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance of dissenters in the history of ideas--among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen, and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times--and still challenge conventional wisdom. In a new foreword to this corrected edition, which also includes a new appendix of letters in which Berlin (...) discusses and further illuminates some of its topics, noted essayist Mark Lilla argues that Berlin's decision to give up a philosophy fellowship and become a historian of ideas represented not an abandonment of philosophy but a decision to do philosophy by other, perhaps better, means. "His instinct told him," Lilla writes, "that you learn more about an idea as an idea when you know something about its genesis and understand why certain people found it compelling and were spurred to action by it." This collection of fascinating intellectual portraits is a rich demonstration of that belief. (shrink)

Although Isaiah Berlin's critique of positive liberty has achieved canonical status, its place within his wider political philosophy remains obscure. However, the re-publication of one of his most important philosophical essays, From Hope and Fear Set Free, as part of a new edition of Four Essays on Liberty, simply entitled Liberty, has opened the door to a re-evaluation of Berlin's political project. At the heart of Berlin's argument, which gains its fullest expression in From Hope and Fear (...) Set Free, stands his contention that positive liberty, in its incarnation as self-realisation, conflates liberty with knowledge, which leads to the distortion of our phenomenologically inescapable structure of experience. This transgression against the conceptual framework in terms of which we think, Berlin argues, played its desolate part in linking the ?totalitarian temptation? latent in liberty as self-realisation with the totalitarian politics of the mid-twentieth century. (shrink)

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of (...) things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay, and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new interpretation of Archilochus's epigram. (shrink)

Introduction: Beyond neoliberalism -- Friedrich A. Hayek : markets, planning, and the rule of law -- The politics of utopia and the liberal theory of totalitarianism : Karl Popper and Michael Foucault -- Pluralism and positive freedom : toward a critique of Isaiah Berlin -- From the Crick report to the Parekh report : multiculturalism, cultural difference and democracy -- Foucault, liberal education and the issue of autonomy -- Saving Martha Nussbaum from herself : help from friends she didn't (...) know she had -- Social democracy in the 21st century : Hobson, Keynes and complexity. (shrink)

With Fermat’s Last Theorem finally disposed of by Andrew Wiles in 1994, it’s only natural that popular attention should turn to arguably the most outstanding unsolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Hypothesis. Unlike Fermat’s Last Theorem, however, the Riemann Hypothesis requires quite a bit of mathematical background to even understand what it says. And of course both require a great deal of background in order to understand their significance. The Riemann Hypothesis was first articulated by Bernhard Riemann in an address (...) to the Berlin Academy in 1859. The address was called “On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quantity” and among the many interesting results and methods contained in that paper was Riemann’s famous hypothesis: all non-trivial zeros of the zeta function, ζ(s) = ∞ n=1 n−s, have real part 1/2. Although the zeta function as stated and considered as a real-valued function is defined only for s > 1, it can be suitably extended. It can, as a matter of fact, be extended to have as its domain all the complex numbers (numbers of the form x + yi, where x and y √ −1) with the exception of 1 + 0i (at which point are real numbers and i =. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 31 features lectures given during the academic year 2010–2011 at Yale University, The University of Utah, The University of Michigan, Stanford University, Princeton University, and Harvard University. _Contributors: __Rebecca Goldstein, (...) “The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature” _ Rebecca Goldstein is a research associate in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University, and an award-winning novelist. _Spike Lee, “America Through My Lens: The Evolving Nature of Race and Class in the Films of Spike Lee” _ Spike Lee, a writer-director, actor, producer, author, and educator who has revolutionized the role of black talent in cinema, is widely regarded as today’s premiere African-American filmmaker. _Susan Neiman, “Victims and Heroes”_ Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum, an international interdisciplinary think tank in Berlin, and is the author of three books. _Elinor Ostrom, “Frameworks” and “Analyzing 100-Year-Old Irrigation Puzzles”_ Elinor Ostrom is Distinguished Professor, Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, and senior research director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington. _Robert Putnam, “American Grace: Religious Americans Are Nicer and Happier. Why?”_ and “American Grace: Americans Are Religiously Devout and Religiously Divided, yet Religiously Tolerant. Why?” Robert Putnam is Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and has written more than a dozen books. _James Scott, “The Late Neolithic Multispecies Resettlement Camp” and “The Long Golden Age of Barbarians, a.k.a. Non-State Peoples”_ James Scott is the Sterling professor of Political Science and professor of Anthropology and director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. _Martin Seligman, “Flourish: Positive Psychology and Positive Interventions”_ Martin Seligman is Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Positive Psychology Center. He is the author of twenty-one books and more than 250 articles. _Susan Smith, “Moral Maze: Dealings in Debt” and “Ethical Investment?: Attending to Assets”_ Susan Smith, Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, researches the interdisciplinary world of housing studies. She has published more than 100 scholarly articles. (shrink)

Na een ongeluk met hersenletsel wist hij precies hoe de mens zich, eenmaal van God los, zou moeten bevrijden van allerlei mythen en angsten om eindelijk een onafhankelijk individu te worden. Maar de gedachten van deze eigenzinnige Napolitaanse filosoof druisten lijnrecht in tegen de gevestigde orde en stuitten op onbegrip en hoongelach. Want Vico vertrouwde eerder op poëzie, leugens en verbeelding dan op het 'meten is weten' van Descartes.0En niemand kon vermoeden dat juist hij veel later de inspiratie zou worden (...) van denkers als Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Berlin, Said, Eco en Sloterdijk. Zijn adagium 'Ik fabuleer, dus ik ben' zou bovendien naadloos in onze tijd hebben gepast.0Mark Blaisse schreef een uiterst onderhoudend, geromantiseerd portret van deze briljante anarchist, een pechvogel op vrijwel elk gebied. In 'Het orakel van Napels' gidst de eigenzinnige Vico de lezer door barok Napels, langs schilderijen, theaters, castraten, vioolbouwers, verboden boekenkasten, bordelen en literaire salons. Een wereld vol populisme, corruptie en alternatieve feiten: Vico's leven en ideeën blijken verbazingwekkend actueel. (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the (...) frequency of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

7 What Ss Counter- Enlightenment? Mark Cilia i. The critique of the modern age is as old as the age itself. Ever since men began seeking distinction by ...

Isaiah Berlin's (1909-97) standing in twentieth-century intellectual history rests primarily upon his post-Second World War writings in political theory and the history of ideas. Berlin's investigations into the antagonistic traditions of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thought, and his advocacy of liberal responses to the conflicts between values, which, he believed, were an unavoidable feature of the human condition, have been the subject of extensive discussion. Less has been written, however, about Berlin's formative experiences of analytic philosophy during the (...) 1930s and late 1940s. It is often assumed that Berlin 'abandoned' philosophy after the war in favour of the history of ideas. As such, there is a tendency in much of the existing literature to underestimate the influence of Berlin's early analytical work on his later historical and political writings. Indeed, Berlin's work is regularly thought to be marked by a fracture at which point the study of philosophy is relinquished for that of history and political theory. The present article will aim to challenge this reading of Berlin's work. The article will advance two main claims. Firstly, it will be argued that not only is Berlin's early work in analytic philosophy of interest to those concerned with the development of his thought as a whole but also that it is highly edifying for any understanding of the nature of the outlook contained in his later writings. Secondly, the article will maintain that there exists a degree of continuity in Berlin's thought that connects his earlier and later work in a manner reflecting a greater level of coherence than is generally assumed. The main theme of continuity emphasized in the article is represented by Berlin's critique of what he terms the 'fallacy of reduction'. (shrink)

For Hegel’s German-Jewish disciples, the French Revolution marked the starting point of a history of freedom, which was to include legal and political emancipation. In many cases, however, the experiences of German-Jewish migrants in Paris were disappointing. The philosophical idea of “France” was not to be confused with its political reality. Nevertheless, the image of France served as a critical antithesis to the political situation in Germany throughout the 1820 and 1830s. The article discusses the impact of France on the (...) political concepts of Jewish Hegelians with a focus on the jurist and political philosopher Eduard Gans. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin, English Liberalism and a Third Concept of Liberty. Isaiah Berlin is celebrated for having defended the claim that there are two distinct concepts of liberty. According to the more familiar view, liberty is a « negative » concept. The presence of liberty is said to be marked, that is, by the absence of something, and specifically by the absence of inteference with an agent’s capacity to pursue some chosen end. According to Berlin, however, this concept (...) stands in contrast with a « positive » view, according to which liberty is the name of that state in which we shall have realised ourselves most completely. Liberty on this account is the name not of an opportunity but of a moral achievement. Berlin considered the second view dangerously confused, but one aim of the present essay is to defend its coherence. Its principal aim, however, is to show that Berlin’s understanding of negative liberty is a misleadingly narrow one. As is evident from classical and early-modern debates, we have in fact inherited two rival conceptions of negative liberty. One of these focuses, as Berlin rightly observed, on the idea of absence of interference. But the other, which he overlooked, sees lack of liberty as arising from relations of domination and dependence. The principal aim of the present essay is to distinguish these two traditions and to give new prominence to the idea of negative liberty as absence not of interference but of dependence. (shrink)

This paper takes a close look at Berlin’s claim that the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment pluralism marks a momentous historical watershed. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its significance. He has good reason, in particular, to treat Herder as ‘the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their German disciples’, but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of monism on (...) which they relied. For Berlin’s monistic interpretation of the French Enlightenment, I shall show, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its impact on the world. The great significance of Herder’s pluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity, a critique that directly attacks the core mission of the philosophes: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge. (shrink)

This collection of pen-portraits of the renowned public intellectual Isaiah Berlin, published to mark the centenary of his birth, brings him vividly to life from many vantage-points: essential reading for all who seek to understand the full range of his impact.

In jurisprudential circles the year 1981 might well be dubbed the year of Hans Kelsen, with no fewer than three symposia celebrating the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The Association for Legal and Social Philosophy in the United Kingdom held a conference on Kelsen in Edinburgh in April, giving special attention to “legal epistemology” in the Pure Theory of Law. A symposium of the Austrian Association for Legal and Social Philosophy, held in the Schloss Retzhof near Graz in May, was (...) devoted to Kelsen's political theory and critique of ideology. And the Hans Kelsen Institute in Vienna sponsored a symposium in September on Kelsen's posthumously published work, the Allgemeine Theorie der Normen. All three events were marked by significant international participation, and they point to continuing widespread interest in Kelsen and the Pure Theory of Law. (shrink)

The editing of the correspondence of major figures in intellectual history is an essential scholarly activity. Yet in this country in recent years it has neither been the priority it should be, nor has it received the support that it deserves. Of course there have been exceptions to this, perhaps notably – for the early modern period – the epic one-man effort of Esmond de Beer in his later years in producing The Correspondence of John Locke (though this regrettably, and (...) frustratingly, lacks a composite index). A further exception, the edition of The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg by A. R. and M. B. Hall, was unfortunately flawed by the need to change publishers midway in the series, which has led to a marked disparity in the availability of the latter part of the set compared with its early volumes. In any case, like the Locke edition, this was conceived in the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, and few have ventured such enterprises since. Virtually the only exception is Noel Malcolm's edition of the manageable-sized Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (two volumes, 1994). Moreover, it is revealing of the acute need to justify the publication of such material felt by editors and publishers alike that the promotional leaflet for this edition went so far as to claim that it was ‘one of the most important scholarly publications of the twentieth century’ – a claim that is the more ironic in view of the quite significant shortcomings in its method of presenting the material that it contains. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin viewed value conflict as tragic, as it requires the sacrifice of some values for others. It is a mark of maturity, he thought, to accept this tragic truth. This view raises certain conceptual problems that can be attributed to Berlin’s subtle departures from the German authors (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) who originated the doctrine of tragic maturity—figures who had, in turn, transformed the earlier idea that enlightenment is a natural and morally neutral process of maturation. (...) Kant moralized the notion of enlightened maturation by portraying it as contingent on our courage to bring it about, such that we are responsible if we remain immature. This theory of maturity rested on the idea, which would have been uncongenial to Berlin, that we are intelligible creatures inhabiting the noumenal realm, duty bound to exercise moral freedom, even though this duty surpasses our ability to carry it out, as we also inhabit the phenomenal realm, where our natural inclinations tend to make us resist laboring to fulfill our duties. However, according to Kant, the metaphysical limitations we face as individuals can be transcended to an extent, allowing us to make moral progress as a species—so long as we do not lazily persist in our immaturity. Schelling built upon Kant’s notion of freedom to bring out the tragic and heroic dimension of individual moral life, where the tragedy is our doomed but noble struggle to exert moral freedom in a world of natural necessity. Hegel turned these metaphysical notions in a more recognizably Berlinian direction by extending Schelling’s account of tragic conflict to conflicts of values. But he identified the ultimate tragic hero as an ethical totality that enacts eternal justice by reconciling such conflicts, while Berlin attempted to repudiate both the notion of a historical totality and the possibility of reconciliation on empirical grounds, even though these are metaphysical claims. Thus, Berlin asserted the absolute, trans-historical necessity of tragic value conflict, while the evidence for this assertion was merely his personal conviction that in his particular time and place, specific values were, as a matter of empirical fact, tragically irreconcilable. In this manner he illicitly portrayed Cold War value pluralists (such as himself) as courageously accepting the tragic inevitability of value conflict, while Marxists, the legatees of Hegel and thus German Idealism, immaturely shrank from this reality by embracing the fantasy of total reconciliation. (shrink)

The author presents his views on the factors that led the Church to dialogue with Jews, after a history marked by Catholic rule and persecution of the Jewish people. Also exposes some biblical Jewish contribution to the topic such as technic of discussion / study called pilpul and the content of extensive discussions found in the Talmud, that demonstrate the central role that dialogue and philosophical inquiry have in Judaism. It also adds the contemporary Jewish contributions to the universal thought (...) made by the philosophy developed by the Jewish thinker Martin Buber, corroborating the central and uninterrupted place of dialogue in Judaism since its birth. Throughout the presentation connections are made with the Nostra Aetate Declaration, showing the Church key position in the theme of dialogue with the Jews and the 10 points of Seelisberg and the “12 points of Berlin”, result of the interaction between Christians and Jews after the Holocaust. (shrink)

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture (...) of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought. (shrink)

Mark Eli Kalderon presents an original study of perception, taking as its starting point a puzzle in Empedocles' theory of vision: if perception is a mode of material assimilation, how can we perceive colors at a distance? Kalderon argues that the theory of perception offered by Aristotle in answer to the puzzle is both attractive and defensible.

November 9, 2009 will mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the monumental event that signaled the beginning of the end of Communism in the former Soviet Union. Yet, why was this collapse of Communism considered final, but the many failures of capitalism are considered temporary and episodic? In _The Idea of Communism_, Tariq Ali addresses this very question. The idea of Communism, argues Ali, was simple and noble. _The Communist Manifesto_, which advocated the creation (...) of a society based on the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” rather than a system based on greed and profit, appealed to millions all over the globe. However, Ali argues that the vision of society adumbrated by the founders of Communism was a far cry from what became known as actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union and China. The Communist system that developed ignored Engels’s belief that a workers’ movement and its victory were inconceivable without freedom of the press and assembly. This freedom, Engels insisted, “is the air it needs to breathe. Here, in a thought-provoking re-evaluation, Ali argues that a new form of socialism and global planning is vital to save the planet from capitalist and environmental degradation. (shrink)

Auf dem Berliner IPV-Kongress lud Freud 1922 die psychoanalytische Gemeinschaft in Form eines Preisausschreibens ein, sich mit Problemen der psychoanalytischen Technik auseinanderzusetzen. Fokussiert auf die Frage der Deutung von inner- und außeranalytischen Übertragungen wird das Schicksal dieser Aufforderung nachgezeichnet, der 1924 als erste Otto Rank und Sándor Ferenczi nachkamen, 1927 gefolgt von Wilhelm Reich und – auf dem Gebiet der Kinderanalyse – Anna Freud und Melanie Klein. Der Streifzug durch die Geschichte der Technik zeigt, wie sich die 1927 auf dem (...) Gebiet der Kinderanalyse aufgebrochene Polarisierung hinsichtlich der Übertragungsdeutung mit der Arbeit Stracheys und spätestens seit den »controversial discussions« innerhalb der britischen Gesellschaft auf das Gebiet der Erwachsenenanalyse übertrug. Unter Berücksichtigung der Weiterentwicklung des Diskurses wird die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die starke Betonung der Übertragungsdeutung eine unterschiedliche Praxis widerspiegelt oder ob sie zur Marke einer bestimmten Schule geworden ist, die den Blick auf das Gemeinsame des psychoanalytischen Deutens, die Herstellung von Verbindungen, verstellt. (shrink)