The present essay deals with the fabrication of the imperial genealogy of the Southern Tang state. A means of linking the Southern Tang founder Li Bian to the Tang, it helped establish Southern Tang claims to the Tang heritage. Though no original fabricated genealogy survives, variant forms have been handed down through a number of texts starting in the early Northern Song period. These are discussed in terms of their plausibility, marking the Jiang- nan lu by Xu Xuan as the (...) officially accepted description and the Zizhi tongjian version as the most “believable” of all fake Southern Tang genealogies. (shrink)

Kurz bevor Goethe in den Jahren 1808/9 die Wahlverwandtschaften schrieb, hatte sich sein ehemaliger naturwissenschaftlicher Kooperationspartner Johann Ritter in Untersuchungen zu Wünschelruten und Pendeln (1807/8) verloren, aus denen angeblich eine weitere tiefgreifende Analogie zwischen den Polaritäten in der Natur und denen beim Menschen hervorgehen sollte. Ritter arbeitete damals schon seit Jahren erfolgreich mit Goethes Polaritätsbegriff, und war dadurch sogar auf seinen größten Erfolg geleitet worden (die Entdeckung des UV-Lichts). So ist es nicht überraschend, dass sich Goethe für die Pendelexperimente (...) interessierte – und ihnen im Roman ein literarisches Denkmal setzte (während er sich wissenschaftlich dazu sicherheitshalber nicht äußerte). Die von beiden geteilte Polaritätsidee lief auf mehr hinaus als den vagen Gegensatz zwischen irgendwelchen antagonistischen Wirkfaktoren; vielmehr hatte sie handfeste strukturelle Implikationen im Sinne einer mathematischen Symmetrie: Bei Vertauschung der entgegengesetzten Pole in irgendeiner gegebenen Konfiguration kehren sich die ursprünglich beobachtbaren Wirkungen genau in ihr Gegenteil um. Diese Idee ist ein Kerngedanke der Farbenlehre (1810) und liegt z. B. Goethes Farbenkreis zugrunde; überraschenderweise lässt sie sich an einigen entscheidenden Wendepunkten der Wahlverwandtschaften präzise dingfest machen, und dadurch gewinnt ein beliebtes Spiel unter Goethelesern einen neuen Dreh: Die Farben des Farbenkreises haben eindeutig identifizierbare Gegenstücke im Personentableau des Romans. (shrink)

The book examines the discourse on attention emerging in the European Enlightenment (1650-1780) with a focus on German philosophy and literature. It argues that this discourse influenced the formation of aesthetic philosophy in the eighteenth century. Notable figures discussed include René Descartes, G.W.F. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Baumgarten.

Pars 1. Contemplativa -- Pars 2. Activa.

In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of idealism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800–c. 877), the Irish Neoplatonic Christian philosopher. Both Bernard Williams and Myles Burnyeat have argued that idealism never emerged (and for Burnyeat, could not have emerged) as a genuine philosophical position in antiquity, a claim that has had wide currency in recent years, and now constitutes something of an (...) orthodoxy.1. Myles Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” Philosophical Review 91 (1982): 3–40, repr. in Godfrey Vesey, ed., Idealism—Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1982), pp. 19–50. Hereafter this essay will be cited in the version printed in Vesey, ed. Richard Sorabji (instancing Gregory of Nyssa) and Werner Beierwaltes (citing Proclus and Eriugena), and Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson (discussing Plotinus), on the other hand, have all argued that idealism is to be found in the Neoplatonic tradition, a tradition neglected by Burnyeat.Richard Sorabji, “Gregory of Nyssa: The Origins of Idealism,” in Time, Creation and Continuum. Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 287–96; Werner Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen. Studien zur neuplatonischen Philosophie and ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985). See also Beierwaltes, “Die Wiederentdeckung des Eriugena im Deutschen Idealismus,” in Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972), pp. 188–201, and his “Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Eriugenas im Deutschen Idealismus und danach. Eine kurze, unsystematische Nachlese,” in Eriugena. Grundzüge seines Denkens (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), pp. 313–330. Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, “Cognition and its Object,” in Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1996), pp. 217–49, esp. pp. 245–49. But see, Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 227, n.3, who maintains that Plotinus is not an idealist. Similarly, in a 1989 study, I argued not only that idealism was a genuine possibility in late classical and in medieval philosophy, but that that the ninth-century Carolingian philosopher Johannes Eriugena presents a striking example of an extremely radical, almost fantastical, idealism.Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989). Of course, the whole discussion depends entirely on what is meant by ‘idealism’. Burnyeat uses Berkeley’s immaterialism as his standard for idealism, and it is this decision, coupled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism, which prevents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of idealism more broadly understood. (shrink)

Abstrakt Der vorliegende Artikel befasst sich mit der Theorie des Schönen und der Schönheit im Denken des Johannes Scottus Eriugena, basierend auf seinem Hauptwerk Periphyseon, den ‚Aulae sidereae‘, einem Gedicht Eriugenas, und dem Kommentar zur Schrift ‚Über die himmlische Rangfolge‘ des Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. Dazu werden zunächst die metaphysischen Grundlagen für eine Theorie des Schönen im System des Eriugena, wie er sie im s.o. erarbeitet, kurz und prägnant vorgestellt: Für Eriugena ist das Seiende eine Erscheinung und Manifestation Gottes, des (...) unsagbaren Prinzips, des Einen. Danach wird aufgezeigt, wie Eriugena das Schöne als Konkretwerdung des Einen denkt, wobei zuerst die Schönheit der Natur besprochen wird, um dann einen Blick auf den Sonderfall der menschengemachten Kunst zu werfen. Das Ergebnis der Untersuchung ist, dass Eriugena die Kunst als eine reflexive Haltung des Menschen zur Welt und ihrem Ursprung versteht. (shrink)

Bescheidene Antwort auf Herrn Christian Wolffens Anmerckungen über das Buddeische Bedencken ; D. Io. Francisci Buddei Bedencken über die Wolffianische Philosophie -- Bescheidener Beweis, dass das Buddeische Bedencken noch fest stehe, wieder Hrn. Christian Wolffens Nöthige Zugabe aufgesetzet.

It is well known that the Penrose–Banzhaf index of a weighted game can differ starkly from corresponding weights. Limit results are quite the opposite, i.e., under certain conditions the power distribution approaches the weight distribution. Here we provide parametric examples that give necessary conditions for the existence of limit results for the Penrose–Banzhaf index.

Auf dem Berliner IPV-Kongress lud Freud 1922 die psychoanalytische Gemeinschaft in Form eines Preisausschreibens ein, sich mit Problemen der psychoanalytischen Technik auseinanderzusetzen. Fokussiert auf die Frage der Deutung von inner- und außeranalytischen Übertragungen wird das Schicksal dieser Aufforderung nachgezeichnet, der 1924 als erste Otto Rank und Sándor Ferenczi nachkamen, 1927 gefolgt von Wilhelm Reich und – auf dem Gebiet der Kinderanalyse – Anna Freud und Melanie Klein. Der Streifzug durch die Geschichte der Technik zeigt, wie sich die 1927 auf dem (...) Gebiet der Kinderanalyse aufgebrochene Polarisierung hinsichtlich der Übertragungsdeutung mit der Arbeit Stracheys und spätestens seit den »controversial discussions« innerhalb der britischen Gesellschaft auf das Gebiet der Erwachsenenanalyse übertrug. Unter Berücksichtigung der Weiterentwicklung des Diskurses wird die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die starke Betonung der Übertragungsdeutung eine unterschiedliche Praxis widerspiegelt oder ob sie zur Marke einer bestimmten Schule geworden ist, die den Blick auf das Gemeinsame des psychoanalytischen Deutens, die Herstellung von Verbindungen, verstellt. (shrink)

What kind of education is needed for democracy? How can education respond to the challenges that current democracies face? This unprecedented Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the most important ideas, issues, and thinkers within democratic education. Its thirty chapters are written by leading experts in the field in an accessible format. Its breadth of purpose and depth of analysis will appeal to both researchers and practitioners in education and politics. The Handbook addresses not only the historical roots and philosophical (...) foundations of democratic education, but also engages with contemporary political issues and key challenges to the project of democratic education. (shrink)

This paper sketches a theory of the reason‐giving force of well‐being that allows us to reconcile our intuitions about two of the most recalcitrant problem cases in population ethics: Jan Narveson's Procreation Asymmetry and Derek Parfit's Non‐Identity Problem. I show that what has prevented philosophers from developing a theory that gives a satisfactory account of both these problems is their tacit commitment to a teleological conception of well‐being, as something to be ‘promoted’. Replacing this picture with one according to which (...) our reasons to confer well‐being on people are conditional on their existence allows me to do better. It also enables us to understand some of the deep structural parallels between seemingly disparate normative phenomena such as procreating and promising. The resulting theory charts a middle way between the familiar dichotomy of narrow person‐affecting theories and totalist or wide‐person affecting theories in population ethics. (shrink)

Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential,autonoeticcharacter. Here, we offer a comprehensive characterization of episodic memory in representational terms and propose a novel functional account on this basis. We argue that episodic memory should be understood as a distinctive epistemic attitude taken toward an event simulation. In this view, episodic memory has a metarepresentational format and should not be equated with beliefs about the (...) past. Instead, empirical findings suggest that the contents of human episodic memory are often constructed in the service of the explicit justification of such beliefs. Existing accounts of episodic memory function that have focused on explaining its constructive character through its role in future-oriented mental time travel do justice neither to its capacity to ground veridical beliefs about the past nor to its representational format. We provide an account of the metarepresentational structure of episodic memory in terms of its role in communicative interaction. The generative nature of recollection allows us to represent and communicate the reasons why we hold certain beliefs about the past. In this process, autonoesis corresponds to the capacity to determine when and how to assert epistemic authority in making claims about the past. A domain where such claims are indispensable are human social engagements. Such engagements commonly require the justification of entitlements and obligations, which is often possible only by explicit reference to specific past events. (shrink)

The time and opportunity have finally arrived for the next phase of Septuagint research. Even though not all the books of the LXX have been completed by the Septuaginta-Unternehmen in Göttingen, by far the largest number of books have been assigned and are being prepared. Thus, text-critical work has largely been completed, or is in the process of being prepared. The next phase, hermeneutical research, is at hand. This phase naturally requires correct methodology. This applies to an acceptable textual theory (...) as well as to the reconstruction of the textual history of the LXX. This article takes the Septuagint of Proverbs as its point of comparison and discusses the following issues: novel research (monographs) and new research projects in conjunction with existing projects (exegetical commentaries, a theology of the Septuagint). (shrink)

The proposed list of 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals sets out to reframe development according to a more holistic perspective. Yet, drawing on the example of the need for sustainable, resilient and biodiverse agriculture, it is argued here that the SDGs remain essentially grounded within one cultural understanding of how to address poverty. At least with regard to agriculture, the SDGs thus remain mono-cultural, one-dimensional, overly technocratic, and are far from universal as they fail to acknowledge the stipulated alternative pluriverse, (...) frequently understood in the Global South. The problem outlined is neither a technical nor political one: being essentially related to knowledge production it calls for the pluralization of approaches to both global ethics and sustainability. (shrink)

Simulation modeling, the core thesis of Calculated Surprises, is transforming the established conception of mathematical modeling in fundamental ways. These transformations feed back into philosophy of science, opening up new perspectives on longstanding oppositions. The book integrates historical features with both practical case studies and broad reflections on science and technology.

Psychology and philosophy have long reflected on the role of perspective in vision. Since the dawn of modern vision science—roughly, since Helmholtz in the late 1800s—scientific explanations in vision have focused on understanding the computations that transform the sensed retinal image into percepts of the three-dimensional environment. The standard view in the science is that distal properties—viewpoint-independent properties of the environment (object shape) and viewpoint-dependent relational properties (3D orientation relative to the viewer)–are perceptually represented and that properties of the proximal (...) stimulus (in vision, the retinal image) are not. This view is woven into the nature of scientific explanation in perceptual psychology, and has guided impressive advances over the past 150 years. A recently published article suggests that in shape-perception, the standard view must be revised. It argues, on the basis of new empirical data, that a new entity—perspectival shape—should be introduced into scientific explanations of shape perception. Specifically, the article’s centrally advertised claim is that, in addition to distal shape, perspectival shape is perceived. We argue that this claim rests on a series of mistakes. Problems in experimental design entail that the article provides no empirical support for any claims regarding either perspective or the perception of shape. There are further problems in scientific reasoning and conceptual development. Detailing these criticisms and explaining how science treats these issues is meant to clarify method and theory, and to improve exchanges between the science and philosophy of perception. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus – officially named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, causing a disease which has flu-like symptoms – seems to be responsible for the current global lockdown or maybe one can even refer to it as a global event. Neither the virus nor the disease that it causes is truly novel, as the virus is part of the SARS virus family and therefore known, and likewise the symptoms of the disease are also well known, even flu-like, and therefore (...) also not novel. Yet, what is truly novel about the virus or the disease it causes is its effect, not specifically referring to the health effect, but its global socio-economic and political effect. It is for the first time in the history of humanity that such drastic global lockdown measures have been taken and that governments have taken the conscious decisions to ‘lay lame’ their economies. Such a radical decision is truly novel. Besides the economic ‘lockdown’, there are numerous socio-economic repercussions; for example, in a single day, millions of citizens in the United States file for unemployment, and similarly in many other countries. Covid-19 is a challenge to the economies of the world, to society at large, to the poor and vulnerable in particular, and to individuals who are ‘locked safely’ in their homes. Religious institutions, which traditionally provide collective meaning, can no longer gather in public places, and offer communal solace. Covid-19 maybe challenges what being human means, or at least, what one has come to believe concerning the meaning of being human. In this article, this question of being human in the time of Covid-19 will be explored. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the extent to which issues of simulation model validation take on novel characteristics when the models in question become particularly complex. Our central claim is that complex simulation models in general, and global models of climate in particular, face a form of confirmation holism. This holism, moreover, makes analytic understanding of complex models of climate either extremely difficult or even impossible. We argue that this supports a position we call convergence skepticism: the belief that the (...) existence of a plurality of different models making a plurality of different forecasts of future climate is likely to be a persistent feature of global climate science. (shrink)

O objetivo principal deste artigo é esclarecer como Brentano define a relação entre (a) o conhecimento de nossos próprios fenômenos de consciência e (b) o conhecimento de fenômenos de consciência de outros sujeitos. Por um lado, Brentano argumenta, seguindo a tradição moderna, que o conhecimento dos próprios atos mentais é absolutamente fundamental. Ao mesmo tempo, porém, ele quer mostrar com sua Psicologia do ponto de vista empírico uma clara alternativa ao introspeccionismo. Mostraremos como Brentano busca unir estes dois objetivos e (...) como ele também aderiu a esta linha em sua Psicologia Descritiva. Sua psicologia como um todo pode, portanto, ser entendida como um apelo ao pluralismo epistemológico. (shrink)

Sterben und Tod werden aus unterschiedlichster Sicht (medizinisch, psychologisch, mystisch) beleuchtet und reflektiert. Die Sicht von Betroffenen, die Nahtod-Erlebnisse hatten, und die daraus resultierenden Konsequenzen für die betreuenden Personen werden ebenso wie der Umgang mit Sterben und Tod in unserer Gesellschaft kritisch dargestellt.

Die thomanische Erkenntnismetaphysik und -psychologie wird auch heute noch weithin in rein intellektualistischem Sinn gedeutet. Eine eindringliche Untersuchung der Texte zeigt jedoch, dass Thomas neben der streng rationalen Erkenntnis um eine -Erkenntnis durch Naturverwandtschaft- weiss, die vom liebenden Affekt getragen ist. Die vorliegende, lateinisch geschriebene Arbeit untersucht die Rolle des Willens in der Konstitution dieser Erkenntnisweise.".

Papers from a conference held March 2010, Zug, Switzerland.

Von der Prämoderne zur Integralen Moderne -- Philosophische Begriffe : philosophische Exkurse -- Integrale Demokratie -- Ökolonomie -- Kultur als Werte- und Intelligenzübertragungssystem -- Kulturell-innovative Visionen, Entwürfe, Klang-Projekte -- Ansätze für eine integral-moderne Ethik.