The philosophy of the art of living asks the age-old question of orienting one’s own life: ‘How can I live well?’ An art of living is always called for when people do not know what to do and how to go on, when the ways of life are no longer self-evident, when traditions, conventions, rules, and norms lose their plausibility and individuals begin to worry about themselves. The art of living and of its philosophy has a practical aim: It is (...) not concerned with ethical principles, but with the concrete practice of people’s everyday life, with their individual and successful lives. Friedrich Nietzsche, as he often did, pushed the problem of the art of living to the extreme, making it palpable both in its dignity and in its force. For him, the modern uncertainty of human orientation caused by nihilism pointed to art and aesthetics, which, he supposed, makes life if not justifiable, at least bearable. The arts open up a multi-perspectival seeing and hearing, they experiment with alternative forms and techniques, and create the finest sensibilities for both – Nietzsche himself, with his rich forms of philosophical writing, is an outstanding example of this. -/- The volume we present here, entails contributions of German-speaking scholars on Nietzsche and the ways of living he proposes, especially, but not alone in Dawn. The papers are selected from a book series on the common issue “Critical Art of Living,” edited by Günter Gödde, Jörg Zirfas, and others, and translated on behalf of the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation. (shrink)

This introduction presents the articles contained in this special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism on the topic of populism. It does so by placing them in the field of discussions that the standard conception of populism as ‘illliberal democracy’ has stimulated in many areas of the populism-research that was produced in response to the recent increase in populist governments in established constitutional democracies world-wide. Following the methodological canon of studies in the field, it presents the individual contributions roughly in (...) three segments according to leading questions they focus on. In each segment, the introduction attempts to indicate the degree to which the articles depart and provide reasons for departing from the initial standard conception and thereby point to new relevant directions for further work. The first segment (articles 1. -4.) consists of essays that take on the definitional and empirical question of what and where populism is, and which varieties of it there are. The second segment (articles 5. -8.) presents new work focusing on the diagnostic question of what conditions and institutional conditions enable contemporary populism in established liberal constitutional representative democracies. They thus also aim at explaining or at least providing insight into the structures on the supply side (party politics) that make populism popular as an `outsider option'. The third and largest segment (essays 9. -15.) comprises essays that present various approaches to answering the therapeutic question what democratic political systems and societies can do to confront, absorb or internalize the lessons from populist challenges. (shrink)

Die in diesem Band versammelten Arbeiten des französischen Phänomenologen Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) führen nicht nur auf vorzügliche Weise in dessen Philosophie ein, sie dokumentieren darüber hinaus auch die Entwicklung neu einsetzender Reflexionen in den Jahren nach der Publikation der Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (1945). Kunsttheoretische, sprachphilosophische und auch soziologische Untersuchungen erschließen dem Leser eine Philosophie, die im Rahmen einer kulturphilosophischen Selbstverständigung das 20. Jahrhundert hinsichtlich seiner großen Themen und seiner radikalen Fragestellungen umgreift. Inhalt: Der Zweifel Cézannes (1945), Das Kino und die (...) neue Psychologie (1947), Das Metaphysische im Menschen (1947), Der Mensch und die Widersetzlichkeit der Dinge (1952), Schrift für die Kandidatur am Collège de France (1951/52), Das mittelbare Sprechen und die Stimmen des Schweigens (1952); Lob der Philosophie (1953), Von Mauss zu Claude Lévi-Strauss (1959), Der Philosoph und sein Schatten (1959), Das Auge und der Geist (1961). (shrink)

Reality is hierarchically structured, or so proponents of the metaphysical posit of grounding argue. The less fundamental facts obtain in virtue of, or are grounded in, the more fundamental facts. But what exactly is it for one fact to be more fundamental than another? The aim of this paper is to provide a measure of relative fundamentality. I develop and defend an account of the metaphysical hierarchy that assigns to each fact a set of ordinals representing the levels on which (...) it occurs. The account allows one to compare any two facts with respect to their fundamentality and it uses immediate grounding as its sole primitive. In the first section, I will set the stage and point to some shortcomings of a rival account proposed by Karen Bennett. The second section will present my own proposal and the third section will discuss how it can be extended to non-foundationalist settings. The fourth section discusses potential objections. (shrink)

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end. The violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works--the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of History--focusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements. (...) Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thing--the point where it peaks--because it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point: one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegel's system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end. Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegel's philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamacher's argument is directed toward what in Hegel's philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea everything that resists appropriation. Emphasizing Hegel's claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body; it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitude--the pleroma--of philosophy and history. What remains--the indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursive--demands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture: toward a pleroma other than Hegel's. (shrink)

The book is the first formulation of a meta-philosophical scheme rooted in the embodied cognition paradigm. The latter views subjects capable of cognition and experience as living, embodied creatures coupled with their environments. On the other hand, the emergence of experimental philosophy has given rise to a new context in which philosophers have begun to search for a more thorough definition of philosophical competence. The time is ripe for these two trends to join their efforts. Therefore, the book discusses what (...) it means for a human being thought of as a living subject to pursue philosophy. In this context, in contrast to the existing literature, philosophical competence must not be conflated with competence in philosophy. The former is a skill or attitude. The book refers to this peculiar attitude as the recognition of one’s epistemic position. (shrink)

In der Technikethik spielt das Konzept der Verantwortung eine zentrale Rolle. ›Verantwortung‹ ist ein Basiskonzept, das, ähnlich wie die Konzepte ›Pflicht‹ oder ›Schuld‹, in vielfältigen Kontexten gebraucht wird. Dennoch lassen sich einige allgemeine Aussagen über seine Bedeutung treffen. Gerade Autoren, die im Bereich der Technik- und Wissenschaftsethik aktiv sind, haben sich nachdrücklich um eine Klärung des allgemeinen Verantwortungsbegriffs und seiner verschiedenen Aspekte und Gebrauchsweisen bemüht.

Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully fleshed out (...) moral epistemology will simultaneously rebut metasemantic objections to non-naturalism. Thus, both the metasemantic and the more widely discussed epistemological challenges in effect amount to one. Before setting out the positive view, the chapter considers why all of the traditional metasemantic theories cause trouble for the non-naturalist. This includes discussions of teleosemantics, conceptual role semantics, as well as Schroeter and Schroeter’s “connectedness” model. (shrink)

We are printing, by kind permission of the Law Commission, two sections of the report of the Law Commission on injuries to unborn children. This report was the result of a request to the Law Commission by the Lord Chancellor at the time (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone) to advise on `what the nature and extent of civil liability for antenatal injury should be'. The Law Commission followed its usual practice in such circumstances of consulting various bodies and obtaining expert (...) advice on the subject and then embodying the results in a working paper (Working Paper No. 47 - injuries to unborn children) published on 19 January 1973, which preceded their report (Cmnd 5709). Meanwhile a Royal Commission is considering much wider issues of civil liability for injury (including antenatal injury) but the terms of reference for the Law Commission were much narrower and confined to the position of children injured before birth. In the section relating to the present law the report makes it clear that it is probable that liability under the common law already exists. The Scottish Law Commission has also issued a report (Cmnd 5371). They were given different terms of reference and came to somewhat different conclusions. We are printing from this long report the paragraphs discussing the medical background and the summary of recommendations. As will be evident on reading the paragraphs on the medical background to injuries to the unborn child, events are moving very rapidly, particularly in the study of congenital defects and the effects of drugs but the problems of proof present great difficulty. Other causes of injury to the unborn child are better known to the general public: for example, those following the illness, infection and disease of the mother during pregnancy, injury caused in attempted termination of pregnancy and the risks resulting from the mother's condition. The summary of the recommendations sets out very clearly the legal position of the unborn child, as the Law Commission sees it, arising from injury before birth, the final conclusion being that `legislation is desirable'. These extracts from the report, apart from their intrinsic interest, lead on to the paper by Mr Kennedy and Dr Edwards in which they set out their criticisms of it, and provide quick references to the original document. (shrink)

Dedicating one’s life to the task of exploring particular relations within nature automatically leads one to ask again and again how those particular relations arrange themselves harmonically into the whole, the way life, or the world present itself to us.

"Das Ringen ums Seyn" entwickelt eine Destruktion der Schriften Martin Heideggers von "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens" bis zu "Sein und Zeit". Dabei wird zunächst untersucht, ob die Annahme einer Kehre in diesem Denkprozess berechtigt ist. Im zweiten Teil wird vor diesem Hintergrund das "Denken des Selben" als zentrales Besinnungsmoment herausgestellt, um Rückschlüsse auf den Umgang Heideggers mit den Topoi Existenz, Eigentlichkeit und Apperzeption ziehen zu können.