Although one would not wish to classify Copernicus’ own intentions as belonging to the late-medieval and Renaissance tradition of nominalist philosophy, if we are to turn our consideration to what was responsible for the eventual success of the Copernican Revolution, we must also attend to other features of the dialectical context in relation to which the views of Copernicus and his followers were articulated, interpreted, and evaluated. Accordingly, this paper discusses the significance of the erosion of the Aristotelian prohibition against (...) metabasis to the eventual success of the Copernican Revolution. (shrink)

Historians of fourteenth-century science have long recognized the extraordinary work at both Oxford and Paris in which natural philosophy was becoming highly mathematical. The movement to subject natural philosophy to a mathematical analysis and to quantify such qualities as heat, color, and of course speed surely stands as one of the most significant aspects of late medieval science. Yet as Edith Sylla has observed, because qualities and quantities pertain to different categories in Aristotelian theory, one might expect Aristotelian theorists to (...) avoid quantifying qualities. Even more serious still, the very task of quantifying physical qualities exposes a tension in the nature of science that was discussed first by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics. (shrink)

In his booklet "Contributions to a better founded presentation of mathematics" of 1810 Bernard Bolzano made his first serious attempt to explain the notion of a rigorous proof. Although the system of logic he employed at that stage is in various respects far below the level of the achievements in his later Wissenschaftslehre, there is a striking continuity between his earlier and later work as regards the methodological constraints on rigorous proofs. This paper tries to give a perspicuous and critical (...) account of the fragmentary logic of Beyträge, and it shows that there is a tension between that logic and Bolzano's methodological ban on ?kind crossing? (shrink)

I discuss the issue whether Aristotle's philosophy of science allows the use of mathematical premises or mathematical tools in general for explanaing phenomena in the natural sciences. I thereby discuss the concept of "metabasis eis allo genos" as it appears in Posterior Analytics I.7.

ZusammenfassungVom Konzept ›Menschenwürde‹ machte die ethisch geprägte Philosophie Robert Spaemanns weniger und vorsichtiger Gebrauch, als man – angesichts der Positionen, die sie verteidigen möchte – vermuten würde. Dies liegt vor allem an einem in den Begriff einmontierten und von Spaemann in einer Abhandlung von 1987 hervorgehobenen »Trugschluss«, den auszuräumen der von ihm anschließend in mehreren Büchern entwickelte Personenbegriff dienen soll. Der Trugschluss verbindet und begründet auf der einen Seite die Würde mit der Kompetenz personaler Selbstbestimmung, auf der anderen Seite möchte (...) er allen und nur den Mitgliedern der menschlichen Spezies die Menschenwürde zubilligen. Doch handelt es sich hier – ohne starke metaphysische Hintergrundannahmen – um eine metabasis eis allo genos, da ein natürlicher Sortalbegriff mit dem Vernunftkonzept ›Person‹ mir nichts dir nichts identifiziert werden müsste – was aber insbesondere die zeitgenössisch führende analytische Philosophie mit recht kritisierte. Im Aufsatz wird gezeigt, wie Spaemanns Philosophie diesen Trugschluss durch sein neues Verständnis dessen, was Personen eigentlich sind, tatsächlich zur Auflösung zu bringen vermag. Zugleich wird deutlich gemacht, dass Spaemann auch in diesem Verständnis noch an gewissen, unter dem Verdacht religiöser Parteilichkeit stehende Auffassungen festhält – von denen aber auch vollkommen abgesehen werden kann, ohne den Kern von Spaemanns Verständnis der Person aufgeben zu müssen. (shrink)

La investigación propuesta tratará de contextualizar las insuficiencias teóricas de la fenomenología “clásica” antes de su despliegue genético. Ideen I aparecerá como la culminación de un periodo programático. La estructura de correlación, la naturaleza de la reducción trascendental, la necesidad de aunar la reducción fenomenológica y la reducción eidéti-ca, y la proliferación indiscriminada de metábasis de todo tipo, serán indicadores de la exigencia de una fenomenología “no-clásica”. La disociación entre Intencionalidad y Eidética nos mostrará la necesidad de una “ampliación” de (...) la fenomenología en forma de una arquitectónica de niveles, ya anunciada en los textos, pero más allá del lema programático: A los textos mismos.Our investigation will seek to contextualize the theoretical inadequacies of "classical" phenomenology before its genetic deployment took place. Edmund Husserl’s Ideen I will signify the culmination of a programmatic period. The correlation structure, the nature of transcendental reduction, the need to make phenomenological and eidetic reductions coalesce and the indiscriminate proliferation of all kinds of metabasis all are indicators of the need for a "non-classical" phenomenology. The dis-sociation between Intentionality and Eidetics will show the need for an "extension" of phenomenology into architectural levels−already announced in the texts−but beyond the pro-grammatic slogan: To the texts themselves. (shrink)

This paper aims to deal with the disputes on transferring demonstration between the various sciences in the context of the medicine-geometry relationship. According to Aristotle’s metabasis-prohibition, these two sciences should be located in separate compartments due to the characteristics of their subject-matter. However, a thorough analysis of the critical passage in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics on circular wounds forces a revision of the boundaries of the interactions between sciences, since subsequently Avicenna, on the grounds of this passage, would widen the (...) area of the transference of demonstration. Furthermore, the fact that Avicenna and Ibn al-Nafīs continued to use geometrical demonstrations in their anatomical investigations shows the need to understand kind-crossing prohibition as a reminder to take into account the present scientific infrastructure and logical rules before proceeding onto a scientific investigation instead of accepting it as a mere nominal doctrine. Therefore, whether kind-crossing was possible or not depended on the extent to which the conclusion derived at the end of the scientific investigation, using a different method after taking into account all these reminders, had contributed to the solution of a particular proposition or the achievement of an approximate truth. (shrink)

The article intends to analyse the problem of the coexistence of opposite and alternative “comprehensive doc- trines” in today's Western society, on the basis of a comparison between the thought of Schmitt, Böckenförde, Habermas, Rawls and Charles Taylor. In this regard the article proposes a possible solution to avoid, on the one hand, the intolerant goal of a total homogeneity, and on the other a naive and aproblematic acceptance of a relativistic multiculturalism.