SummaryAnti‐Realism claims that the Classical or Realist conception of truth as verification‐transcendent is incoherent. Our grasp of the meanings of statements from any given class is to be assimilated to a grasp of their assertibility or deniability conditions. In this paper I present an apparent counter‐example to the Anti‐Realist's positive claim which derives from the traditional problem of other minds.ResumeL'anti‐réalisme affirme ľincohérence de la conception réaliste classique de la vérité comme transcendante à la vérification. Notre saisie des significations des énoncés (...) ? une classe donnáe quelconque doit être assimilée à la saisie des conditions dans lesquelles ils peuvent être affirmés ou niés. Dans cet article, je présente un apparent contre‐exemple, tiré du problème traditionnel de l'existence ? autres sujets, à la thèse positive des anti‐réalistes.ZusammenfassungDer Antirealist behauptet, dass die klassische realistische Auffassung der Wahrheit als einer der Prüfung unzugänglichen Begriffes unhaltbar sei. Um die Bedeutungen irgendwelcher Aussagen verstehen zu können, mussen wir die Bedingungen ihrer Behauptbarkeit kennen. Ich lege ein offenbares Gegenbeispiel zur These des Antirealisten vor, das sich aus dem traditionellen Problem des Fremdbewusstseins ergibt. (shrink)

In this important book, Drew Khlentzos explains the antirealist argument from a realist perspective. He defends naturalistic realism against the antirealist challenge, and he considers the consequences of his defense for our understanding of realism and truth. Khlentzos argues that the naturalistic realist view that the world exists independently of the mind must take into consideration what he calls the representation problem: if the naturalistic realist view is true, how can mental representation of the world be explained?He (...) examines this major antirealist challenge in detail and shows that many realists have dismissed it because they have not understood its nature. He sees it as a philosophical puzzle: the antirealist challenge, if sound, does not prove that there are no objects that exist independently of the mind, but that there is no rational basis for thinking that there are; we have good reason to believe in the naturalistic view, but we have no way of knowing how it could be true. Khlentzos surveys the antirealist arguments of Michael Dummett, Hilary Putnam, and Crispin Wright and suggests a realist answer. He argues for a radically nonepistemic conception of truth, and against pragmatist, intuitionist, verificationist, and pluralist alternatives. He examines and rejects some current versions of physicalism and functionalism, and offers an original version of the correspondence theory of truth. (shrink)

Collecting the work of linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, archaeologists, artificial intelligence researchers and philosophers this volume presents a richly varied picture of the nature and function of mental states. Starting from questions about the cognitive capacities of the early hominin homo floresiensis, the essays proceed to the role mental representations play in guiding the behaviour of simple organisms and robots, thence to the question of which features of its environment the human brain represents and the extent to which complex cognitive skills (...) such as language acquisition and comprehension are impaired when the brain lacks certain important neural structures. Other papers explore topics ranging from nativism to the presumed constancy of categorization across signed and spoken languages, from the formal representation of metaphor, actions and vague language to philosophical questions about conceptual schemes and colours. Anyone interested in mental states will find much to reward them in this fine volume. (shrink)

According to naturalism, philosophy is part of science. Its aim is thus to acquire synthetic knowledge of the world. Philosophy's methods of discovery – its use of a priori reasoning, conceptual analysis, and thought experiments – are legitimate to the extent that they further this broader scientific aim, naturalists aver. A very different view of philosophy sees it as distinct from science in both aim and methods. Philosophy aims to discover analytic knowledge through a priori reasoning on this competing view. (...) This view of philosophy emphasizes rational intuitions as a source of evidence for the truth of the conclusions attained by a priori reasoning. Naturalism has been criticized as incompatible with realism, the view that the existence and nature of the world are independent of human conceptions of it. What naturalistic sense could be made of the idea that a scientific theory that passed every conceivable observational and theoretical test might yet be false? Isn't such a notion of truth, presupposed by realism, simply at odds with the idea that science is the arbiter of truth? Further, doesn't the attempt to marry naturalism and realism open the door to a radical kind of skepticism, one that makes it impossible to know that all our experiences of the world are not illusory? This chapter explores the nature of philosophy and philosophical theorizing from the perspective of naturalistic realism, arguing that naturalism and realism are compatible in spite of attempts to show they are not. The chapter reviews the leading arguments for incompatibility – Hilary Putnam's model‐theoretic argument (MTA) and the brains‐in‐a‐vat argument – and finds that they do not establish this conclusion. Further, it shows that the view that philosophy is distinct in aim and methods from science – a view that places its faith in the evidential warrant supplied by rational intuition – is at odds with what cognitive science has shown about the nature and reliability of these sorts of intuition. (shrink)

While impressed by much of what Mercier & Sperber (M&S) offer through their argumentative hypothesis, we question whether the specific competencies entailed in each system are adequate. In particular, whether system 2 might not require independent reasoning capabilities. We explore the adequacy of the explanations offered for confirmation bias and the Wason selection task.

This paper argues that the Correspondence Theory of Truth is not well- served by Truthmaker Theory and is better developed in a different direction. For there are reasons to believe that the main axiom of that theory (TA) which states that for every truth there is a truthmaker is either unjustified or false. Some of these reasons are already well-known. Negative existentials and universal generalizations present initial difficulties for TM theory as do necessary truths. There is a more serious problem, (...) though which has not hitherto been noticed. (TA) even when restricted to contingent sentences seems to tolerate clear counterexamples. There seem to be, and I argue that there in fact are, true contingent sentences which lack truthmakers. The examples adduced are all truthmaker analogues of semantically pathological sentences. The positive proposal shares with Truthmaker Theory the view that our judgments and sentences are rendered true by the worldly facts but argues for an alternative conception of Ôrendering trueÕ and a novel conception of 'facts'. (shrink)

We present a series of arguments for logical nativism, focusing mainly on the meaning of disjunction in human languages. We propose that all human languages are logical in the sense that the meaning of linguistic expressions corresponding to disjunction (e.g. English or , Chinese huozhe, Japanese ka ) conform to the meaning of the logical operator in classical logic, inclusive- or . It is highly implausible, we argue, that children acquire the (logical) meaning of disjunction by observing how adults use (...) disjunction. Findings from studies of child language acquisition and from cross-linguistic research invite the conclusion that children do not learn to be logical—it comes naturally to them. (shrink)

Excerpt from Kants Naturphilosophie als Grundlage Seines Systems Die vorliegende Arbeit uber die kantische Naturphilosophie war ursprunglich in Aussicht genommen als erstes Kapitel einer Darstellung der deutschen Naturphilosophie seit Kam. Der Grund, warum sie zu einem selbstandigen Werke angeschwollen ist, liegt darin, weil ich bei genauerem Studium des Philosophen fand, man habe das naturphilosophische Element in den Schriften Kants bisher bei weitem unterschatzt und insbesondere seinen Bemuhungen um eine dynamische Theorie der Materie lange nicht diejenige Bedeutung zugeschrieben, die ihnen sowohl (...) in Hinsicht auf die Richtung, welche die kantische Gedankenentwickelung genommen hat, wie fur die eigentumliche Ausbildung dieser Gedanken im Einzelnen thatsachlich beizumessen ist. Man hat den Philosophen nach seiner theoretischen Seite fast lediglich als den Begrunder der modernen Erkenntnistheorie gewurdigt und dabei ubersehen, wie seine ganze Erkenntnistheorie aus naturphilosophischen Erwagungen hervorgegangen und oft in den wichtigsten Punkten von ihnen bestimmt worden ist. Die vorliegende Arbeit schopft nun bei der Hochflut der philosophischen Litteratur, die sich mit Kant beschaftigt, ihre Daseinsberechtigung vor allem daraus, dafs sie die gesamte theoretische Philosophie Kants unter dem Gesichtspunkte der Naturphilosophie betrachtet. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

Drew Khlentozos’ Naturalistic Realism and the Antirealist Challenge is a meticulous introduction and roadmap to the core arguments of the contemporary realism/antirealism debate. It has several features that I especially admire. The book is carefully argued and for the most part clearly written. Rare among recent writers in Anglo-American philosophy, Khlentzos is a charitable reader of his opponents and earnestly endeavors to present their views as clearly and generously as possible. This generosity and thoroughness are also the book’s (...) main fault, as it is long (weighing in 408 pages) and sometimes plodding. In a few cases Khlentzos’ charity is overly generous. This seems to me to be the case, for example, with some of his contortions on behalf of Dummett, not least of which being a lengthy chapter on how intuitionism drives Dummett’s antirealism that probably should have been an appendix. But these are drawbacks that we can all live with—especially for the purpose of graduate teaching, for which this monograph is well suited. Naturalistic Realism and the Antirealist Challenge begins (Section I) by setting out the realist/anti-realist debate. Khlentzos argues that the kinds of metaphysical realists who have been quickest to shrug off semantic arguments against realism are particularly susceptible to those arguments. Specifically, naturalistic realists—among whom Khlentzos counts himself—cannot dismiss critiques like those from Dummett and Putnam merely by observing that realism is a metaphysical rather than semantic or epistemic doctrine. The trouble is, “If the world is as resolutely mind-independent as the realist makes out, then there is a problem about how we get to know about it in the first place” (4). Khlentzos calls this the representation problem, saying. (shrink)

This paper tries to ‘liberate’ Augustine’s view on time from certain modern prejudices, e.g. that the church father’s theory of time involves the modern dichotomy between subjectivism and objectivism (Ricœur), that his understanding of time can be seen as a precursor of modern phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger), that Conf. XI lacks a coherent theory of time as such or that, at least, it falls short of the insights of Kant’s enlightened transcendentalism (Flasch). By contrast, the church father circumvents typically modern aporiai (...) by both differentiating between time on the level of physics and time on the level of soul as well as by accounting for the link between these two ‘times’: Whereas the time of physics tends to non–existence, it is the soul that, by cognizing a certain process in its (relative) entirety, establishes actual time; on the level of soul, time persists and is preserved (in contrast to physical time). Neither does Augustine propose nor need the notion of any ‘absolute time’. Maybe Augustine’s theory of time is compatible with certain assumptions of modern physics (e.g. Einstein’s theory of relativity) although the church fathers’ view can in no way be reduced to the level of physics. (shrink)

In dem vorliegenden Werk hat sich der Philosoph Arthur Drews einem spannenden Kapitel antiker Philosophie gewidmet. Er richtet sein Augenmerk auf Plotin, Interpret der Lehre Platons und Begr nder des Neuplatonismus. Dabei spannt er den Bogen von der Entwicklung der antiken Philosophie vor Plotin bis zum Untergang der antiken Weltanschauung. Sorgf ltig bearbeiteter Nachdruck der Originalausgabe von 1907.

Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews (1865 - 1935) war ein deutscher Philosoph, Schriftsteller und wichtiger Vertreter des deutschen Monismus. Während seiner Laufbahn schrieb er über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Religionen und Mythologie. Er provoziert oft Streit wegen seiner unorthodoxen Ideen über Religion und teilweise wegen seiner Angriffe auf Nietzsche und seiner leidenschaftlichen Unterstützung von Wagner. Drews gehört zu den bekanntesten deutschen Bestreitern der Existenz eines historischen Jesus. Er faßt das Problem der Religion als ein wesentlich methaphysisches auf und vertritt den Standpunkt (...) des Pantheismus gegenüber dem Theismus der bestehenden Religionen. Das vorliegende Buch, das Drews als eine philosophische Untersuchung über das Wesen der Religion untertitelt, ist sein systematisches Hauptwerk, das sich besonders gegen die herrschende Richtung der protestantischen Theologie wendet. Diese verwirft das christliche Dogma und etabliert eine historisch-hermeneutische Christentumwissenschaft, in der Jesus zum Prototyp der Individualität erhoben wird. Er zeigt, daß eine Weiterentwicklung der Religion und eine Gesundung der religiösen Zustände nicht durch ein Zurückschrauben der bisherigen Entwicklung zu ihrem Ausgangspunkt, sondern durch Fortbildung der in jenen enthaltenen Keime aus dem innersten Wesen der Religion heraus möglich ist. Sorgfältig bearbeiteter Nachdruck der Originalausgabe von 1906. (shrink)

Im Werk von Gilles Deleuze und Michel Foucault sind Körper und Körperlichkeit zentrale Aspekte, die in diesem Band erstmalig vergleichend in den Fokus gerückt werden. Die Beiträger_innen stellen die Entwürfe beider Denker zur Ästhetik und Ethik als Reflexionen der Beziehung zwischen Körper und Bild vor und betonen die Verkettungen von Körper, Macht und Ästhetik. Gleichzeitig werden spezifische Fragen der jüngeren Deleuze- und Foucault-Forschung angesprochen. Der interdisziplinäre Band bietet Wissenschaftler_innen aus Philosophie und Kunstgeschichte sowie den Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften einen thematischen Überblick (...) und weiterführende Lektüre. (shrink)

Die platonische Teilhabe-Ontologie besitzt in Antike und Mittelalter ein konkretes Potential fur einen philosophisch begrundeten interreligiosen Dialog. Das Buch fuhrt Proklos' Henadenlehre im Kontext seines Teilhabe-Theorems einer schlussigen Interpretation zu und zeigt, wie Nikolaus von Kues das Theorem verwendet, um in seinem Werk "Uber den Frieden im Glauben" u.a. die divergenten Perspektiven von Islam und Christentum auf die Trinitatslehre miteinander zu vermitteln.

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)

This bilingual volume—English and German on facing pages—brings together the writings Wittgenstein composed during his stay in Dublin between October 1948 and March 1949, one of his most fruitful periods. He later drew more than half of his remarks for Part II of _Philosophical Investigations_ from this Dublin manuscript. A direct continuation of the writing that makes up the two volumes of _Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology,_ this collection offers scholars a glimpse of Wittgenstein's preliminary thinking on one (...) of his most important works. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman both teach at the University of Helsinki. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Writing and Authority in Early ChinaLothar von FalkenhausenWriting and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 544. Hardcover $92.50. Paper $31.95.Writing and Authority in Early China is a forceful and sparklingly original work in which Mark Edward Lewis explores the role of writing and texts in the transformation of political authority during the Warring States, Qin, (...) and Western Han periods. Following in the footsteps of the author's well-received first book1 and his magisterial contribution to the Cambridge History of Ancient China,2Writing and Authority establishes Lewis as the premier Western historian of the crucial centuries surrounding the unification of China under a centrally administered empire in 221 B.C. The book's complex, comprehensive, and coherent argument is informed by a variety of Western theoretical approaches, but it principally emanates from a close reading of the full record of transmitted texts and recently excavated manuscripts on [End Page 127] bamboo or wooden slips. The inclusion of the latter class of sources, beset with treacherous problems of decipherment, is still unusual in mainstream sinological scholarship and indicates the author's supreme confidence in his philological skills. With a firm hand, undaunted by the multifarious nature of his materials, Lewis guides the reader to some fundamental themes in recent sinology, opening manifold novel perspectives along the way. Even when dealing with well-known texts, he often proposes striking reinterpretations.In his Introduction, Lewis enumerates six main functions of writing in ancient China: enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and "public spheres"; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings. In Lewis' own words, "the culminating role of writing in the period, and the key to its importance in imperial China, was the creation of parallel realities within texts that claimed to depict the entire world" (p. 4). This ultimately led to the formation of the Confucian canon as a "textual double of the polity" that could survive cataclysmic changes of regimes.In chapter 1, "Writing the State," Lewis points out that before the Warring States period Chinese writing occurred exclusively in religious contexts. After circa 500 B.C., written documents gradually came to be used in the administration of government and trade. Both in their details of formulation and in the implication that anything committed to writing was thereby supernaturally validated, these new types of documents exhibit pervasive continuity with the earlier kinds of texts used in ritual communication with the ancestral spirits. Such continuity is also reflected in the rise of religious beliefs in a netherworld governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative processes parallel to those of the world of the living. According to Lewis, "the most important modification in the shift to an administrative polity [in the Warring States] was the extension of writing to new elements of the population. The attributes of the Zhou nobility... were transferred to the common people in the administrative documents of the new state. This widening range of inscription into the state order altered the social meaning of being recorded from a sign of power to one of subjection" (p. 13).Warring States rulers were cast in the role not of the authors of texts but of the authority behind them. Administrative and legal texts were concerned, ultimately, with the proper naming of phenomena, a process that had to adapt itself continually to the changes of the times. The authority of rulers came to encompass both human society and the natural world. "Whereas local and central administration were largely created through reworking and rewriting the ritual bases of the old Zhou order by means of a rationalizing cosmology, the re-invention of rulership drew on the contemporary religious realm and what is sometimes described as shamanism to provide images of cosmic power" (p. 42). Lewis illustrates the mechanics for applying these universal principles of rulership by a comprehensive analysis of the Zhou li (or Zhou guan), emphasizing the cosmological arrangement of the ideal government described therein and the dual administrative and religious dimensions of... (shrink)

This essay wants to provide a preliminary introduction to, and initial contextualization of the sermons of the seventeenth-century Capuchin preacher Geminianus von Mainz. To my knowledge, his literary production has never been a subject of exhaustive scholarship, even though it has been portrayed by some as a typical example of Bavarian baroque preaching from the later seventeenth century.1 More recently, his metaphorical approach to marriage has been commented upon in passing by Ulrike Strasser and Merry Wiesner-Hanks,2 whereas several culinary remarks (...) in his sermons drew the attention of the late German gastrosopher Christoph Wagner, as can be read in the chapter on 'Barocke... (shrink)

While up to the 19th century there were philosophers within Judaism, these sages neither perceived themselves as Jewish philosophers nor did the Jewish community categorized them under this term. This situation changed with the rise of historicism. The first academically trained scholars in Judaism faced a new challenge: almost all leading contemporay German philosophers operated with a concept of a Christian philosophy which left no room for an acknowledgement of Jewish contributions to the history of philosophy. Zunz was the first (...) Jewish scholar who took issue with this Christian challenge when he coined the term Jewish philosophy. Zunz followed Boeckh when he drew a distinction between Philosophy within Judaism and Jewish philosophy. Zunz used the first term for the historical contributions of Jews in the history of philosophy. If the modern scholar does examine the Jewish sources properly with the historical-critical method, the conclusions will lead him to a Jewish philosophy. Since Jewish philosophy for Zunz did not represent the Jewish Volksgeist, he did not elaborate further upon it. After Zunz, Geiger preferred a different approach. Since Geiger understood himself as a theologian who was closer to Schleiermacher, he described an alternative dialectical relationship by confronting the histoical-critical examination of Jewish philosophical sources now with Jewish theology. Munk's Esquisse set the standard for all subsequent histories of Jewish philosophy. He was not interested in a contemporary Jewish philosophy but focussed exclusively on what Zunz had rendered philosophy within Judaism. His aim was to give back Jewish philosophy its rightful place as an integral part of the history of Western philosophy. Munk's groundbreaking studies were triggered by Ritter. Even though Munk's conception still has a certain heuristic value, the deficiency of this approach is obvious as well. (shrink)

In this article we distinguish four kinds of finalities at stake in Nieuwentijt’s “scopologia” (general design, teleology of health, particular final causes and organic uses). We show that the tension between the principle of economy and the assignation of particular final causes in Nieuwentijt’s physico-theology perfectly illustrates what later commentators as Gould and Lewontin called the problem of ‘panglossism’ in biology. It was a problem to which Leibniz himself drew attention in different texts.

This essay concentrates on the reception of Oswald Spengler's book, „Der Untergang des Abendlandes” by German Protestant theologians in the early 1920s, who were more susceptible to the influence of this book than were philosophers. Just after the First World War, for example, Werner Elert, Karl Heim and Ernst Troeltsch – not to mention Emanuel Hirsch, Friedrich Gogarten and others – had to cope with deeply interconnected crises in faith, church, theology and nation. Spengler's idea of cycles in history seemed (...) to help them understand Germany's 1918 defeat not as due to military exhaustion but to a sort of divine destiny. But it also gave hope that this destiny would help to overcome the crisis. The authors drew epon certain aspects of Spengler's thinking to establish their theory of Christianity. However, the influence of Spengler vanished soon enough. As a result, the story of his reception is an example of the struggle to locate Christianity within post-war German society. (shrink)

Montague, Prior, von Wright and others drew attention to resemblances between modal operators and quantifiers. In this paper we show that classical quantifiers can, in fact, be regarded as S5-like operators in a purely propositional modal logic. This logic is axiomatized and some interesting fragments of it are investigated.

One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psychological environments of cognitive (...) subjects and the different sorts of external (physical, geographical, social) environments which they inhabit. The present essay addresses this environmental version of the problem of intentionality. It draws not only on the work of Husserl and Scheler but also on the Gestalt psychological writings of Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin. It considers the influential subjective idealist theory of animal environments put forward by J. von Uexküll and contrasts this with a realist theory of organism-environment interaction based on the work of the ecological psychologists J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker. This realist theory is then exploited as a basis for an ontology of social objects of a range of different sorts. (This is the English original of the French translation.). (shrink)

A neighbor who strikes it rich evokes both admiration and envy, and a similar mix of emotions must be aroused in many neighborhoods of cognitive science when the residents look at the results of research in color perception. It provides what is probably the most widely acknowledged success story of any domain of scientific psychology: the success, against all expectation, of the opponent process theory of color perception. Initially proposed by a Ewald Hering, a nineteenth century physiologist, it drew (...) its inspiration from the existence of opposing muscle groups. Hering thought that analogous opposing processes could explain some aspects of color perception, but the resulting theory was more complicated and less intuitive than that proposed by the great Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz carried his day, but in the long run Hering turned out to be right. (shrink)

This bilingual volume—English and German on facing pages—brings together the writings Wittgenstein composed during his stay in Dublin between October 1948 and March 1949, one of his most fruitful periods. He later drew more than half of his remarks for Part II of Philosophical Investigations from this Dublin manuscript. A direct continuation of the writing that makes up the two volumes of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, this collection offers scholars a glimpse of Wittgenstein's preliminary thinking on one (...) of his most important works. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman both teach at the University of Helsinki. (shrink)

My ultimate purpose here is to examine, discuss, and interpret a difficult excerpt in Stobaeus’ 5th c. AD anthology, alleging to report—uniquely, it appears—a distinction Chrysippus drew between three different applications of the term stoixe›on or element (i.e., physical element).1 Stobaeus lists this passage as giving opinions specifically of Chrysippus “about the elements out of substance” (per‹ t«n §k t∞w oÈs€aw stoixe€vn), though in holding them he says Chrysippus was following Zeno, the leader of his sect. Hermann Diels (1879) (...) identified this selection as an excerpt (his fr. 21) from Arius Didymus’ late first century BC Epitome of Physical Doctrines.2 I print a translation below, with the text in an Appendix, as it is given in von Arnim (1903). The text is not without its problems, and I indicate in footnotes to the text which of the principal editors’ textual interventions I accept and follow in my translation. Whether this text presents a single, continuous excerpt from Arius Didymus, or instead some compilation of Stobaeus (or an earlier anthologist whose work Stobaeus employed) from dispersed passages of.. (shrink)

English summary: While he was a student in Tubingen, the young Schelling wrote his own commentaries on the biblical scriptures and developed a historical hermeneutics which drew on contemporary concepts and took these concepts further. In this volume, the contributors provide the first study of these new sources in the context of the complex hermeneutical and exegetical debates in late Enlightenment theology. In doing so, they use an interdisciplinary approach to show the connections between theological problems at the end (...) of the 18th century and the development of German idealism, connections on which previously little research had been done. German description: Der junge Schelling hat wahrend seiner Tubinger Studienzeit eigene Kommentare zu biblischen Schriften verfasst und eine historische Hermeneutik ausgearbeitet, welche an die zeitgenossischen Konzeptionen anknupft und diese weiterfuhrt. Die Beitrage in diesem Band thematisieren erstmals diese neuen Quellen im Kontext der komplexen hermeneutischen und exegetischen Debattenlagen der spaten Aufklarungstheologie. Dadurch werden die bislang nur wenig erforschten Zusammenhange von theologischen Fragestellungen am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts und der Herausbildung des Deutschen Idealismus auf eine interdisziplinare Weise erschlossen. (shrink)

Le Grand's introduction to philosophy, written for use in Cambridge, was the first to be written along Cartesian lines. A section on moral philosophy, first included in the second edition 1672, drew on the common Aristotelian-style way of dealing with the subject-matter, but with modifications inspired by Descartes. In the third edition 1675 this section was almost doubled in size. The additional chapters are an unacknowledged paraphrase of the bulk of Pufendorf's De officio hominis et civis 1673. Le Grand's (...) revision can be taken as a point of transition from an older moral philosophy to modern moral philosophy. It is argued that the contrast between them is not one of virtues vs rules. Rather, the important difference is that the older is essentially eudaimonistic, both in its Aristotelian and Cartesian varieties, but the modern one is not. It relegates the quest for happiness to other disciplines such as psychology, and imports concepts which had belonged to moral theology, such as conscience, imputation, obligation, etc. into moral philosophy. Le Grands für den Gebrauch in Cambridge geschriebene "Einführung in die Philosophie" ist die erste, die nach kartesianischen Richtlinien verfaßt wird. Der Abschnitt über Moralphilosophie, der in die zweite Auflage von 1672 eingefügt wird, ist zwar immer noch in dem gebräuchlichen aristotelischen Stil geschrieben, enthält aber Modifikationen, die von Descartes inspiriert sind. In der dritten Auflage von 1675 wird der Umfang dieses Abschnitts nahezu verdoppelt. Die neu hinzugekommenen Kapitel sind eine Wiedergabe des Hauptteils von Pufendorfs "De officio hominis et civis" von 1673, die als Wiedergabe jedoch nicht kenntlich gemacht wird. Man kann Le Grands Bearbeitung als einen Schritt auf dem Weg von der alten zur modernen Moralphilosophie ansehen. Der Unterschied zwischen beiden ist nicht der Unterschied zwischen der Lehre von den moralischen Tugenden und der von den moralischen Gesetzen. Der entscheidende Unterschied ist vielmehr, daß die ältere Moralphilosophie, sowohl in ihrer aristotelischen, als auch in ihrer kartesianischen Variante, im wesentlichen eudämonistisch ist, während das auf die moderne Moralphilosophie gerade nicht zutrifft. Dadurch wird die Suche nach dem Glück an andere Disziplinen, beispielsweise die Psychologie, verwiesen, während die Moralphilosophie Konzepte wie "Gewissen", "Zurechnung", "Verbindlichkeit" übernimmt, die von der Moraltheologie entwickelt worden waren. (shrink)

Leibniz’s work on language left a lasting impression on 18th-century philosophical thinking about language. His two major works that discussed natural language were both published in the 18th century and in these works Leibniz focused on the sound symbolism, phonology, and etymology of language, topics that played a major role for 18th-century philosophers of language. These topics belonged to what Leibniz considered the material aspects of language and were tied to the expressive powers of language. Herder acknowledged Leibniz’s influence and (...) developed these ideas in his account of language as a forceful expression of human feeling. However, Herder ignored the formal components of language. The philosopher who developed the synthesis of the material and the formal features of language was Wilhelm von Humboldt, who drew from 18th-century thinkers that saw natural language as a unity of force and form, for example Sulzer and Harris. Humboldt was especially influenced by his tutor, Johann Jakob Engel, whose lectures drew on Leibniz as well as works in the Leibniz-Wolff tradition. (shrink)

This article argues that Cassirer’s thinking about the relationship between the different symbolic forms is best elucidated via the paradigm of “organic harmony.” Although Cassirer did not use the term himself, the harmonious cooperation between the parts found in the organic world provided him with a welcome alternative to traditional accounts of order (i.e., identity or hierarchy). This article gives three examples of “organic harmony” from which Cassirer drew inspiration: Goethe’s idealistic morphology, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s account of language, and (...) Herder’s account of history. Through “organic harmony” we can make better sense of and better articulate the pluralism of Cassirer’s PSF. Finally, this article shows how the motif of organic harmony is the normative moment in Cassirer’s own challenge to twentieth-century fascism and argues that the Cassirerian emphasis on finding a coherence which does justice to the uniqueness of particulars—harmony—is an ethical injunction relevant for our times. (shrink)

English Description: Plato (429/8-349-8 BCE) founded a philosophy which has greatly impacted European intellectual history. 'Platonism' was especially influential during the Roman Empire. However, a comprehensive account of the methodological, genetic, and historical aspects of its Ethics has been lacking up to this point. Stemming from an International Conference at the University of Munster, this volume fills this lacuna. Numerous experts introduced the Ethics of Platonists of the Roman Empire in chronological sequence. The themes range from questions about basic principles (...) to the intellectual classification of ethics within the philosophy (M. Bonazzi); the psychological premises (F. Drews); the action theory (M. Perkams); and the political effect of Platonic ethics (O'Meara). These and other articles represent current research in the field as well as present the sum of the ethical problems to a wider audience in a straightforward manner. German Description: Platon (429/8 - 349/8 v. Chr.) begrundete eine Philosophie, deren Nachwirkung die europaische Geistesgeschichte nachhaltig bestimmte. Der 'Platonismus' erreichte in der romischen Kaiserzeit seinen ersten Hohepunkt. Eine umfassende Darstellung seiner Ethik, in der die systematischen, genetischen und historischen Aspekte zusammengefuhrt werden, steht jedoch bisher noch aus. Dieser Band sieht hier seine Aufgabe. Er ist das Ergebnis einer internationalen Tagung an der Universitat Munster. Zahlreiche Experten stellen die Ethik des kaiserzeitlichen Platonismus in systematischer Abfolge dar. Die Themen reichen von Grundlagenfragen nach der Verortung der Ethik innerhalb der Philosophie (M. Bonazzi) und ihren psychologischen Voraussetzungen (F. Drews) uber die platonische Tugend-, Guter- und Freiheitslehre (A. Linguiti, Ch. Tornau, Ch. Pietsch) sowie die Handlungstheorie (M. Perkams) bis hin zu den politischen Wirkungen platonischer Ethik (O'Meara). Doch wenn auch diese und weitere Beitrage die aktuelle Fachforschung reprasentieren, soll zugleich durch Allgemeinverstandlichkeit auch dem wachsenden Interesse eines weiteren Publikums an ethischen Fragestellungen Rechnung getragen werden. (shrink)