Simone Weil's influence has been enormous and in this age of doubt and uncertainty there is something particularly appealing about this French Jewish writer, for Weil lived out her beliefs. From an early age she was attracted to Bolshevism, became an anarchist and helped Trotsky. She joined the International Red Brigade to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War. An agnostic, she experienced a profound religious conversion, yet never converted to the Christian faith to which she was so deeply attracted. (...) This clear lucid exposition of her life and work shows how Weil is truly a prophet for our age and an indispensable source of encouragement to all those at the frontiers of religion, both within and without. (shrink)

In his 1985 book on philosophy and atheism, the Canadian thinker Kai Nielsen, a prolific writer on the subject, wonders why the philosophy of religion is ‘so boring’, and concludes that it must be ‘because the case for atheism is so strong that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the topic.’ Indeed, Nielsen even regards most of the contemporary arguments for atheism as little more than ‘mopping up operations after the Enlightenment’ which, on the whole, add little (...) to the socio-anthropological and socio-psychological accounts of religion provided by thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, as any ‘reasonable person informed by modernity’ will readily acknowledge. On this view, the answer to Kant's question – ‘What may we hope?’ – does not gesture towards a resurrection and personal immortality, but instead to the death of religious discourse itself: I think, and indeed hope, that God-talk, and religious discourse more generally, is, or at least should be, dying out in the West, or more generally in a world that has felt the force of a Weberian disenchantment of the world. This sense that religious convictions are no longer a live option is something which people who think of themselves as either modernists or post-modernists very often tend to have. (shrink)

The papers in this collection present a diversity of views on the epistemology of religious belief. There is a diversity of views about the intelligibility of particular religious beliefs: for example, about the reality of God's existence and of miracles. There is further disagreement concerning the reasonableness of religious belief itself. Some contributors argue that locating grounds for believing in God is still a fruitful undertaking. Both issues raise the problem of the philosopher's position vis-a-vis religious belief. Are philosophers in (...) a privileged position to determine either the reasonableness or the intelligibility of religious belief? Or is philosophy, properly understood, a descriptive task? The papers in this collection present a diversity of views on this issue, too. Drawing on the works of Kierkegaard, a few of the contributors argue that philosophical description cannot be neatly divorced from religious persuasion. Whatever their views on these issues, however, the contributors accept that philosophical discussion cannot proceed very far without attention to what religious believers say about their beliefs and the practices in which they take part. (shrink)

God is said to be Spirit, but the language of spirit is ignored in contemporary philosophy of religion. As well as exploring the notion of spirit in Hegel, Romanticism and Kierkegaard, participants explore the view that God is a spirit without a body, and the relations between "spirit" and "truth.".

In this collection, distinguished theologians and philosophers of religion explore the relation of key Biblical concepts to our world. They examine a range of concepts, including authority, faith and history, the historical Jesus, the resurrection and miracles.

Thomas GRAUMANN (G.) untersucht in seiner im Wintersemester 1999/2000 von der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Ruhr-Universität Bochum als Habilitationsschrift angenommenen Studie die Entstehung einer „patristischen“, sich auf in Zitaten fassbare „Väter“ rückbeziehende und stützende Theologie von ihren Anfängen in der trinitätstheologischen Kontroverse des 4. Jahrhunderts bis zum ihrem (ersten) Höhepunkt im Verlauf der ökumenischen Synode von Ephesos (431).

Eine Analyse der Politischen Philosophie der Neuzeit kann – soll sie nicht lediglich einzelne Autoren oder Werke reihen – zwei methodische Wege einschlagen. Sie kann zum einen mit einer detaillierten Werkinterpretation wichtiger Denker wie Hobbes, Locke oder Kant beginnen und quasiinduktiv den historischen Fortgang der Hauptdiskussionen zu rekonstruieren suchen. Sie kann aber auch wesentliche abstrakte Verlaufskategorien vorschlagen, mit deren Hilfe dann umgekehrt in einem quasideduktiven Konkretionsschritt die Beiträge eminenter Denker möglichst gut verstanden, eingeordnet und gewürdigt werden.Der vorliegende Text wird zum (...) Zweck der Beurteilung dieser beiden großen Alternativen zunächst einige Anforderungen vorschlagen, die derartige abstrakte begriffliche Kategorien erfüllen sollten, um zum Verständnis der Ideengeschichte der neuzeitlichen Politischen Philosophie beitragen zu können . In einem zweiten Schritt werden die beiden soeben genannten Gegensatzpaare an Hand dieser Anforderungen beurteilt . Diese Beurteilung wird zu dem Ergebnis führen, daß beide Gegensatzpaare zwar unabdingbar notwendig sind, um wesentliche Autoren der Politischen Philosophie der Neuzeit würdigen zu können. Für die Erfassung des Verlaufs der grundlegenden Auseinandersetzung in der neuzeitlichen Politischen Philosophie reichen sie aber nicht aus. Deshalb wird drittens das schon im Titel dieses Beitrags genannte Kategorienpaar „Normativer Individualismus versus normativer Kollektivismus" vorgeschlagen . Mit Hilfe dieses Gegensatzpaares und einiger Ergänzungen wird dann viertens die Grundlinie der Auseinandersetzung in der neuzeitlichen Politischen Philosophie skizziert werden . Diese Skizze soll schließlich zu einem besseren Verständnis der gegenwärtigen Diskussionslage führen. (shrink)

This paper considers various senses of the notion of identity and describes the strongest sense of the term—what it labels “absolute identity.” Absolute identity combines monistic identity of all in all as one substance with the absence of internal differentiation. The paper explores the possibility of absolute identity along three lines—linguistic, mental, and ontological. It determines that though there are serious difficulties, linguistic and mental, involved with positing absolute identity the possibility of its coming to be real cannot be ruled (...) out. Finally, on grounds of its lack of coherence-functionality absolute identity is rejected as an adequate conception of the world. The paper closes with a discussion of the ramifications of the denial of absolute identity. (shrink)

Welches Recht ist gerecht? So lautet die Grundfrage der Rechtsethik. Die Rechtsethik fragt also nach der Rechtfertigung und Kritik des Rechts. Dabei geht es ihr nicht nur wie der dogmatischen Rechtsanwendung um die Analyse der Normen und Wertungen des geltenden Rechts, sondern um einen ethischen Maßstab des Rechts.

The first meeting of the Schleiermacher Studies and Translations Group was held August 8–11, 1986, at Drew University. The purposes of this “Schleiermacher Summer Camp” were to plan the translations into English of Schleiermacher’s complete corpus, including sermons and letters, as well as some prominent German secondary sources, and to provide an opportunity for the initial participants in this ambitious project to meet each other and learn each other’s methods. presuppositions, interests, and goals. The sessions were extremely valuable toward these (...) ends, and we all felt the satisfaction of a unified spirit of collaboration. (shrink)

In recent years, the public sector in many countries has had difficulty keeping abreast of social problems due to restricted financial resources and limited organizational capacities. As a consequence, entrepreneurs have started to address social welfare issues that the public sector has been unable to tackle with an innovative approach called social enterprise. The authors present research on the future prospects of social enterprise as a sustainable business model for industrialized countries. As there is a lack of historical and current (...) data, the authors aim to contribute to and structure the debate about the potential of the concept. Therefore, the authors provide initial data from a Delphi survey on the future development of social enterprise in a multistakeholder environment. Experts from academia, business, nongovernmental and governmental organizations, social enterprise investors, and social entrepreneurs evaluated 16 projections for the year 2030. Based on these results, the authors present comprehensive scenarios of four different possible developments of the future of social enterprise in Germany. (shrink)

Are Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes works of art? This article investigates the concept of art in regard to this question in six steps. (1) First, the radical challenge of art in modernity is explained. (2) Second, the concept of art in the history of philosophy is explored. (3) What follows is a discussion of three suggestions on how to understand the concept of art. (4) In the fourth step the question of the concept of art is framed more abstractly and (...) a discussion regarding its relationship between the contingent and necessary elements is offered. (5) As a result of this investigation some elements of the concept of art are suggested. (6) The final step is an answer to the initial question regarding whether or not Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are works of art. (shrink)

Alle Entscheidungen sind in letzter Instanz durch den Bezug auf die betroffenen Individuen zu rechtfertigen – so lautet die zentrale Annahme des normativen Individualismus. Der Beitrag entfaltet, präzisiert und begründet diese These für den Bereich der politischen Ethik. Den Abschluß bildet eine Skizze von Realisationen des normativen Individualismus im deutschen Recht.

Die Frage nach der Gerechtigkeit wurde in der Antike vor allem als Frage nach dem tugendhaften Leben und Handeln verstanden. In der Gegenwart wird dagegen stärker die politische und soziale Gerechtigkeit thematisiert. Diese einzelnen historischen Akzentuierungen dürfen jedoch nicht über den grundsätzlichen Charakter der Gerechtigkeit als Teil der allgemeinen Ethik hinwegtäuschen.