In diesem Band werden verschiedene Horizonte des Nachdenkens über Nietzsche eröffnet, so wie es sich nach 1933 in den unterschiedlichsten Exil-Ländern um Deutschland herum darstellte. In den Beiträgen wird mit dem zentralen Bild vom EXIL bei Nietzsche sowohl auf die prinzipielle Distanz seines Denkes gegenüber jeder Form des Totalitarismus als auch auf dessen lebendigen Impetus von Philosophie als Unterwegs-Sein hingewiesen. Autoren sind u. a. der Nestor deutscher Nietzsche-Forschung Eugen Biser, aus Finnland Tarmo Kunnas, aus Israel Dominique Bourel, Milos Havelka aus (...) Prag und der Senior der Kritischen Theorie Hermann Schweppenhäuser. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzscheforschung Jahrgang: 24 Heft: 1 Seiten: 401-406.

This brief text assists students in understanding Hume's philosophy and thinking so that they can more fully engage in useful, intelligent class dialogue and improve their understanding of course content. Part of the "Wadsworth Philosophers Series,", ON HUME is written by a philosopher deeply versed in the philosophy of this key thinker. Like other books in the series, this concise book offers sufficient insight into the thinking of a notable philosopher better enabling students to engage in the reading and to (...) discuss the material in class and on paper. (shrink)

Many historians of philosophy, with all their intended praise, let the philosophers speak mere nonsense. They do not guess the purpose of the philosophers.… They cannot see beyond what the philosophers actually said, to what they really meant to say.Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) is one of the key figures of contemporary New Confucianism (當代新儒家) who to this day remains largely unknown and grossly understudied in the West.1 This neglect by the Western academy contrasts sharply with the ever-growing output of literature by (...) Chinese and Taiwanese scholars in which Mou Zongsan emerges as one of the most discussed and most controversial Chinese philosophers of the twentieth century. Given this unfortunate East-West divide—as .. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the expanding discourse on inter- and transdisciplinarity. Referring to well-established distinctions in philosophy of science, the paper argues in favor of a plurality of four different dimensions: Interdisciplinarity with regard to objects, knowledge/theories, methods/practices, and further, problem perception/problem solving. Different philosophical thought traditions can be related to these distinguishable meanings. The philosophical framework of the four different dimensions will be illustrated by some of the most popular examples of research programs that are labeled interdisciplinary (...) : nanoresearch/nanoscience/nanotechnology, complex systems theory/chaos theory, biomimicry/bionics, and technology assessment/sustainability research. Thus, a minimal philosophy of science is required to understand and foster inter- and transdisciplinarity. (shrink)

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one (...) hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Several of these papers can in fact be regarded as attempts to close the 'semiotic circle' by bringing together the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of certain constructions in an explanatory framework thereby making it more than obvious that these three components of an integrated linguistic theory cannot be as neatly separated as one would have liked to believe. In other words, not only can we not elaborate a syntactic description of (a fragment of) a language and then proceed to the semantics (as Montague pointed out already forcefully in 1968), we cannot hope to achieve an adequate integrated syntax and semantics without paying heed to the pragmatic aspects of the constructions involved. The behavior of polarity items, 'quantifiers' like any, conditionals or even logical particles like and and or in non-indicative sentences is clear-cut evidence for the need to let each component of the grammar inform the other. (shrink)

This article contributes to the analysis of refusal to license cases as abuse of a dominant position pursuant Article 82 EC from an economic perspective. In the Microsoft case, the European Commission introduced an "Incentives Balance Test" to assess whether the refusal to give access to interface information can be justified by arguing that this information is protected by Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs): The Commission argued that if the overall innovative effects evoked by a compulsory license are significantly higher than (...) without this access, the IPR owner is obliged to license. This should be assessed through balancing the different incentives to innovate between the dominant firm and its competitors. In the paper we pursue two objectives: Firstly, we analyze to what extent the decision of the Court of First Instance, which confirmed the decision of the Commission, helps to clarify the criteria in refusal to license cases; in fact, it is disappointing in this regard. Secondly, we demonstrate that the basic idea of the Incentives Balance Test can be interpreted as a test whether the specific IPRs of the dominant firm can be defended from the perspective of the economics of IPRs. This implies that Article 82 allows competition law to correct economically not optimal IPRs through a specific economic analysis. This is followed by a broad overview on theoretical and empirical insights from economics of IPRs, innovation economics and competition and network economics that can help to develop a more general and sophisticated Innovation Effects Test that can be applied in Article 82 refusal to license cases. (shrink)

When animal ethicists deal with welfare they seem to face a dilemma: On the one hand, they recognize the necessity of welfare concepts for their ethical approaches. On the other hand, many animal ethicists do not want to be considered reformist welfarists. Moreover, animal welfare scientists may feel pressed by moral demands for a fundamental change in our attitude towards animals. The analysis of this conflict from the perspective of animal ethics shows that animal welfare science and animal ethics highly (...) depend on each other. Welfare concepts are indispensable in the whole field of animal ethics. Evidence for this can be found by analyzing the structure of theories of animal ethics and the different ways in which these theories employ welfare concepts. Furthermore, the background of values underneath every welfare theory is essential to pursue animal welfare science. Animal ethics can make important contributions to the clarification of underlying normative assumptions with regard to the value of the animal, with regard to ideas about what is valuable for the animal, and with regard to the actions that should follow from the results of animal welfare science. (shrink)

How do speakers design what they say in order to communicate effectively with groups of addressees who vary in their background knowledge of the topic at hand? Prior findings indicate that when a speaker addresses a pair of listeners with discrepant knowledge, that speakers Aim Low, designing their utterances for the least knowledgeable of the two addressees. Here, we test the hypothesis that speakers will depart from an Aim Low approach in order to efficiently communicate with larger groups of interacting (...) partners. Further, we ask whether the cognitive demands of tracking multiple conversational partners' perspectives places limitations on successful audience design. We find that speakers can successfully track information about what up to four of their partners do and do not know in conversation. When addressing groups of 3–4 addressees at once, speakers design language based on the combined knowledge of the group. These findings point to an audience design process that simultaneously represents the perspectives of multiple other individuals and combines these representations in order to design utterances that strike a balance between the different needs of the individuals within the group. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation between Cartwright's concept of 'capacities' and Mill's concept of 'tendencies' and argues that they are not equivalent. Cartwright's concept of 'capacities' and her motivation to adopt it as a central notion in her philosophy of science are described. It is argued that the Millian concept of 'tendencies' is distinct because Mill restricts its use to a set of special cases. These are the cases in which causes combine 'mechanically'. Hence for Mill 'tendencies' do not merely (...) describe the operation of causes, but also and perhaps even primarily how they combine. This does not hold of Cartwrightian capacities which are meant to have unlimited applicability. Mill also explicitly denies the realism of 'capacities' in a sense which overlaps with Cartwright's. Her attempt to derive empirist credentials for her notion of capacity from Mill is therefore unsuccessful. (shrink)

Kant's critical philosophy is often regarded as standing in a problematic relation to his works in “anthropology”, or the study of human nature. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes his critical project as a “Copernican” turn toward the cognitive subject, which might seem to signal a reorientation of philosophy around anthropology.1 However, both in the first Critique and in his subsequent works he relegates “empirical anthropology” and “practical” or “moral anthropology” to (...) the sidelines of his critical projects in cognitive and practical philosophy. Yet Kant's formulation of his critical philosophy coincided almost exactly with the development of his interest in anthropology. During the 1770s, the “silent decade” in which he formulated his critical philosophy, Kant initiated a course on anthropology at the University of Königsberg. This course was among the most popular in his regular schedule, and he offered it annually for twenty-five years until his retirement. He then published a revised version of his lectures as the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, a text that is one of his most accessible publications, and might even seem uncharacteristically loose and anecdotal to readers of his other works. Kant also published a number of shorter works on anthropological topics during this period, and even suggested, in several scattered remarks, that anthropology in some way encompasses all of the philosophical disciplines. (shrink)

Communicating with multiple addressees poses a problem for speakers: Each addressee necessarily comes to the conversation with a different perspective—different knowledge, different beliefs, and a distinct physical context. Despite the ubiquity of multiparty conversation in everyday life, little is known about the processes by which speakers design language in multiparty conversation. While prior evidence demonstrates that speakers design utterances to accommodate addressee knowledge in multiparty conversation, it is unknown if and how speakers encode and combine different types of perspective information. (...) Here we test whether speakers encode the perspective of multiple addressees, and then simultaneously consider their knowledge and physical context during referential design in a three‐party conversation. Analyses of referential form—expression length, disfluency, and elaboration rate—in an interactive multiparty conversation demonstrate that speakers do take into consideration both addressee knowledge and physical context when designing utterances, consistent with a knowledge‐scene integration view. These findings point to an audience design process that takes as input multiple types of representations about the perspectives of multiple addressees, and that bases the informational content of the to‐be‐designed utterance on a combination of the perspectives of the intended addressees. (shrink)

Problem: Mitterer's critique of the central argumentations of radical constructivists has been mostly neglected until today. The paper presents and evaluates his criticism and, in the second part, outlines a format of constructivism that tries to draw appropriate consequences. Solution: In his critique Mitterer explains why the radical constructivism represented above all by Maturana, Varela, von Glasersfeld or Roth still remains in a dualistic format. In his view Neurobiology is used in their writings as the indisputable basis for deriving far-reaching (...) epistemological consequences. Therefore constructivism evades self-application. To overcome this serious critique a different approach to constructivist thinking is sketched that operates without using any biological or psychological theories, tries to avoid dualism, and elaborates Mitterer's basic argument that the description of an object and the object under description are the same. Benefits: The paper shows what constructivism can learn from a serious critique and how it can be rewritten in a non-dualistic way. (shrink)

In reading all the theoretical contributions to this book, an essentially common idea of the social can be observed which is of fundamental importance for a new definition of artistic production: a process-related order of institutionalized actions, including the linguistic actions to which individuals are exposed. For here, in the repetition of such institutionalized acts, is where subjects first emerge at all. Objects, whether they be objects of everyday use or whole architectures, are like moulds which provide for the institutionalization (...) of actions. The artist emerges as a social figure, as the product of a society and the agent of political interests. From this point of view, the status of objects, the status of the “work” is not the expression of a circumscribed meaning, but the instrument of forming a subject. The opposition of theory and practice becomes obsolete. Subject and object are meaning written into actions. (shrink)

This book traces the development of the notion of self throughout the Western intellectual and religious tradition. While using the historical thread as its guiding norm, it presents a dynamic model of selfhood.

The program of intervening, manipulating, constructing and creating is central to natural and engineering sciences. A renewed wave of interest in this program has emerged within the recent practices and discourse of nano-technoscience. However, it is striking that, framed from the perspective of well-established epistemologies, the constructed technoscientific objects and engineered things remain invisible. Their ontological and epistemological status is unclear. The purpose of the present paper is to support present-day approaches to techno-objects ( ontology ) insofar as they make (...) these hidden objects epistemologically perceivable. To accomplish this goal, it is inspiring to look back to the origin of the project of modernity and to its founding father: Francis Bacon. The thesis is that everything we need today for an adequate (dialectic-materialist), ontologically well-informed epistemology of technoscience can be found in the works of Bacon—this position will be called epistemological real-constructivism. Rather than describing it as realist or constructivist, empiricist or rationalist, Bacon’s position can best be understood as real-constructivist since it challenges modern dichotomies, including the dichotomy between epistemology and ontology. Such real-constructive turn might serve to promote the acknowledgement that natural and engineering sciences, in particular recent technosciences, are creating and producing the world we live in. Reflection upon the contemporary relevance of Bacon is intended as a contribution to the expanding and critical discussion on nano-technoscience. (shrink)

This edited collection is the first volume solely dedicated to research on Johann Gottfried Herder's understanding of history, time, and temporalities. Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder is ideal for scholars, graduates, and postgraduates interested in Herder's metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of history, as well as any scholar concerned with 18th-century concepts of time and the emergence of the modern world at the beginning of the 19th century.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century ThoughtJeremy SchmidtThe concept of melancholy comprehended a wide range of characteristics and conditions in seventeenth-century European culture, from the brooding introspection of the genius and the scholar to a condition of delirious and delusory madness.1 Its central and most immediately identifiable characteristic, however, was the excessive and unreasonable nature of its symptomologically defining emotions of fear and sorrow. As (...) Robert Burton noted out in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the melancholic condition was commonly taken to be "a kind of dotage without fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion."2 The presence of a pervasive and unreasonable sense of fear and sorrow invariably solicited the melancholic label. Indeed, melancholic emotions were the primary substance of melancholic dotage; the ravings of the melancholically mad and their frequent obsession with a single idea were often driven by an overwhelming feeling of fear and sorrow.3The concept of melancholy as a mental disorder involving these specific emotions had coalesced under the gaze of medical observation in ancient Greece, and the melancholic condition was thought by many medical theorists of classical [End Page 583] antiquity to be caused by a physiological surfeit of black bile, the Greek word for which was melancholia.4 Western medicine, profoundly influenced by the Greek medical tradition, continued to diagnose and treat melancholic disturbance as a physical distemper well into the nineteenth century. Yet the kind of mental anguish which early medical observers labeled melancholic bore a striking resemblance to forms of emotional disorder whose point of origin was thought to be the mind itself. Various traditions of classical moral philosophy sought to treat disorders of the mind that unchecked emotion could create primarily by directing, ordering, and correcting the thought of the sufferer. Where the melancholic condition displayed qualities of the emotions as these were represented and analyzed by moral philosophers it was viewed as susceptible to philosophical treatment and insight.5Early modern English writers, no less than classical writers, thought it appropriate to apply to cases of melancholy therapies derived from the philosophic endeavor to define and achieve peace of mind. Burton argued explicitly in The Anatomy of Melancholy for the rightful authority of the philosophical "physician of the soul" in the treatment of melancholy; and the conceptual similarity of melancholy to moral diseases of the soul which provided the basis for this authority is evidenced in the works of several seventeenth-century moralists, as well as in the writings of the influential seventeenth-century physician and natural philosopher Thomas Willis on melancholy and the passions. Willis noted that melancholic emotions were structured and caused by the judgments of the mind rather than by the force of physiological dysfunction alone. His recognition of the importance of the mental aspects of melancholy provided the basis for his prescription of moral therapies for the government of the mind in addition to therapies for the body. Moreover, his writing on the passion of grief displays the ability of moral philosophical language to represent melancholic-like states as problems of the moral life, to be engaged through rational meditation and control.The importance of moral philosophy in understanding and treating melancholy has been largely ignored in current scholarship in the history of psychiatry and madness, which has concentrated on early modern medical concepts of mental disorder that traced its origins to the body. The historian of psychiatry and "madness" Roy Porter has, for instance, referred to Willis's medical writings as evidence for the "thoroughgoing somatic grounding of disorders of thought, feeling and behavior" that he alleged to have dominated the era's medical [End Page 584] conceptualization and treatment of madness.6 While Michel Foucault insightfully noted that Willis's ostensibly chemical account of the nature of melancholy was in fact "a phenomenology of the melancholic experience," he dismissed out of hand the relevance of classical moral philosophical language to the early modern treatment of madness, asserting the complete absence of moral treatments of madness until the end of the eighteenth century.7 In analyzing Willis's writing he thus failed to note the broader moral philosophical... (shrink)

The concept of “site” is at the center of current debates in theories of social practices as well as in cultural anthropology. It is unclear, however, how to assess the associated methodological assumption that overriding social structures or cultural formations can manifest themselves in sites. The article draws on the conception of social practices and introduces the notion of “publicness” in order to explicate how and why sociality and social structures can be accessed through “siting”. Sites as well as social (...) practices, it is claimed, have to be conceptualized as essentially public and thus principally observable phenomena. This assumption of publicness implicit to both site ontology and theories of social practices is unfolded on the basis of a praxeological reformulation of the paradigm of joint attention elaborated in developmental psychology. To avoid presentist misinterpretations, we then conceptualize sociality as chains of practices across time and space, drawing on the works of Theodore Schatzki, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anthony Giddens and Bruno Latour. The public carriers of practices (artifacts, symbols, media, bodies) and the translocal structures they establish acquire particular significance in these approaches. In a further step, we present some methodological consequences of the “publicness assumption” and support our arguments by referring to Pierre Bourdieu's study on Distinction. (shrink)

El trabajo como toda actividad del hombre debe insertarse en un mundo de sentido, que hoy pareciera ser el productivo, olvidando otras dimensiones del mismo, que enriquecen el vivir del hombre en su avance hacia un mundo más humano y humanizante.