I. THE TASK OF DOGMATICS As a theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self- examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of ...

The paper attempts to give an account of two different ways of relating to mathematics: Lacan’s and Badiou’s. Its starting point is Badiou’s and Lacan’s interpretations of Russell’s infamous definition of mathematics, according to which mathematics is a discourse in which no one knows what one is talking about, nor whether what one is saying is true. While for Badiou, the ignorance that is supposed to characterise mathematics according to Russell only concerns the role philosophy assigns to it, namely, it (...) being identified with the science of being qua being, for Lacan the ignorance constitutive of mathematics should rather be seen as a symptom resulting from the reduction of truth to a mere truth value. In discussing the detected divergences in these two readings, the paper shows how the access to psychoanalysis as well as the access to philosophy coincides with a certain access to mathematics, although we are not dealing with the same type of access. (shrink)

What is the peculiar evocative force of the notion of the real? Rather than succumbing to the temptation of forcing appearance in order to accede to the real supposed to be lurking behind it, for Lacanian psychoanalysis the access to the real is that of the semblance. While one of our aims in this paper is to briefly outline the development of Lacan’s rather peculiar “realism”, we would also wish to emphasize the relation between the real and the semblance as (...) being the crux of Lacan’s later teaching. Indeed, for psychoanalysis, the question of the real is inseparable from the interrogation of the semblance, a term forged by Lacan in the last period of his teaching in order to rework the relation between the truth and the real. This is why although the semblance is relevant to numerous contemporary discourses, it is only in psychoanalysis that this problem is raised to the level of one of the central theoretical and practical issues. Omnipresent, unsettling, yet unresolved, this problem comes to the fore at the critical moments in the history of psychoanalysis, thereby marking turning points at which the orientation of psychoanalysis is at stake. (shrink)

In this article I offer an opinionated overview of the central elements of Kant’s philosophical methodology during the critical period. I begin with a brief characterization of how Kant conceives of the aims of human inquiry – focusing on the idea that inquiry ideally aims at not just cognition (Erkenntnis), but also the more demanding cognitive achievements that Kant labels insight (Einsehen) and comprehension (Begreifen). Then I explore the implications of this picture for philosophy — emphasizing Kant’s distinction between critical (...) and doctrinal phases of philosophical inquiry, with the first of these playing both a negative and a positive role with respect to the second. Then, I will argue that this positive role is possible, according to Kant, only insofar as philosophy follows what I call a “capacities-first” methodology – that is, one that treats basic cognitive capacities (such as reason) and their self-conscious activities as fundamental (in both a cognitive sense and in an explanatory sense) for the sort of philosophy human beings are capable of. It is this methodology, I will argue, that allows Kant to introduce the first principles that philosophy in its doctrinal phase requires in a manner that is neither arbitrary nor (at least obviously) incompatible with Kant’s own critical restrictions on cognition. I conclude by discussing some of the implications of this methodological picture – including the methodological significance of self-consciousness and regressive or “transcendental” arguments, Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic methods in philosophy, and Kant’s conception of reason as autonomous. (shrink)

Muss Philosophie immer eine bierernste Angelegenheit sein? Einer, der das vehement bestritten hat, war der griechische Denker Diogenes, jener berühmte Tonnen-Philosoph, der bis heute als eine der schillerndsten und originellsten Gestalten des Altertums gilt. Seine Gesellschaftskritik lebte er mit einer nachgerade schockierenden Konsequenz vor. Seine Forderung: nicht mehr und nicht weniger als der konsequente Ausstieg aus der Zivilisation. Karl-Wilhelm Weeber stellt in diesem locker geschriebenen Band den scharfzüngigen, schlagfertigen und respektlosen Philosophen und seine Ideenwelt vor.

Zeigt, wie der äTonnenphilosophä in einer unsicheren Zeit eine auch heute noch gültige Überlebensphilosophie für das Individuum entwickelte und praktizierte.

Prolog -- Eros : auf dem Weg zur Erkenntnis -- Liebe als einheitsstiftende Macht -- Das tragische Chorspiel der Hellenen und ihre Imaginationen von Liebe -- Narkissos : die unstillbare Selbstliebe und das Spiegelmotiv -- Gnosis als erlösende Erkenntnis der Liebe -- Liebe in der kontemplativen Metaphysik Plotins -- Das Eine und das Viele -- Kontemplation und Liebe : das Mysterium Sacrum -- Sensorisches und Imaginatives : Weisen der Vergeistigung der Liebe -- Mystische Liebe : Gott-Leiden und Gott-Lieben in der (...) "Rheinischen Mystik" (Eckhart, Tauler, Seuse, Ruusbroec) -- Figurationen der Liebe auf den Brettern, die "die Welt bedeuten" (Wissen, Macht, Liebe, Tod) -- Amor fati : die Liebe zum Schicksal -- Die Liebe auf der Bühne des Theatrum Mundi -- Reflexionen und Mythopoetik der Liebe : philosophisch, theologisch, poetisch -- Liebe in der Theologie des Alten Bundes -- Liebe in der Theologie des Neuen Bundes. (shrink)

Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom. -/- This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism, providing a complete course for students of The Communist (...) Manifesto, and demonstrating not only the historical importance of the text, but also its place in the world today. (shrink)

Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical...

Why was Hufeland’s work on Macrobiotics so successful? It can neither keep its promise to prolong people’s lives nor does it contain any new information (the proposals are indeed most traditional). The article suggests a double answer: Looking back to antiquity was fashionable at the time, and Hufeland managed to combine classical elements with the late 18th century discourse. Second, Hufeland’s point was the holeness of human existence. In his eyes, health is not only a question of the body, but (...) also of character and soul. This concept seems to cope with some deplorable defects of modern medicine. (shrink)

Seen from the perspective of the inconsistency of the Other, the post-truth era can be considered to be an era emerging from a crisis in belief in the existence of the Other, which is to be taken in a twofold sense: as a belief in the Other of the Other, that is, the Other of Law, and a belief in the Other considered as the subject supposed to know. Insofar as the contemporary subject does not want to know anything about (...) this “condition of belief” without which no knowledge, and therefore no truth, are possible, the crisis of belief affect both, the Other and the subject. This can be seen in the fact that the failing belief in the Other and knowledge, considered as a distinctive feature of our profoundly unbelieving times, is accompanied by an unprecedented rise in anxiety at the social level, as contemporary subjects who do not believe in the (existence of the) Other are singularly defenceless before the irruption of the real. With truth losing its power to name the real, the subject itself as a singular response to the real is becoming ever more precarious. Which is why, when faced with the erratic irruption of the real, contemporary subjects are condemned to a desperate search for certainties. (shrink)

In medieval medical anthropology, emotions are closely tied up with humoral pathology, e.g. joy with blood, anger with yellow bile, and sorrow with black bile. The face and body are external signs of a person's constitutional emotionality. Health is based on mental stability: Rage should be channelled into something constructive; love-sickness can even cause death. The use of drugs must respect emotional side effects: While some herbs and gems can brighten the mind, others cause sadness und discomfort. Inadequate emotions not (...) only cause mental illnesses, but can also be mental illnesses in themselves, e.g. raving madness or deep depression. Thus, calming and cheering psychotherapy complements dietary, physical, medicinal, and surgical treatment. (shrink)

Analysing the role of Kant’s third and final Critique, the _Critique of Judgement_, in the system of Kant’s three Critiques (_Critique of Pure Reason_, _Critique of Practical Reason_, _Critique of Judgement_), the paper posits that with the conclusion of the system of critiques in the third _Critique_, Kant succeeds in presenting it as a point of a transfinitisation of knowledge within the critiques’ system.

_Conjectures and Refutations_ is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

_Conjectures and Refutations_ is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

The way in which knowledge progresses, and especially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism: that is, by attempted refutations, which include severely critical tests. They may survive these tests; but they can never be positively justified: they can neither be established as certainly true nor even as 'probable'. Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us (...) understand the difficulties of the problems which we try to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problem, and able to propose more mature solutions: the very refutation of a theory - that is, of a tentative solution to our problem - is always a step forward that takes us nearer the truth. And this is how we can learn from our mistakes. As we learn from our mistakes our knowledge grows, even though we may never know - that is, know for certain. Since our knowledge can grow, there can be no reason here for despair of reason. And since we can never know for certain, the can be no authority here for any claim to authority, for conceit over our knowledge, or for smugness. The essays and lectures of which this book is composed apply this thesis to many topics, ranging from problems of the philosophy and history of the physical and social sciences to historical and political problems. (shrink)

Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto has become one of the world’s most influential political tracts since its original 1848 publication. Part of the Rethinking the Western Tradition series, this edition of the Manifesto features an extensive introduction by Jeffrey C. Isaac, and essays by Vladimir Tismaneanu, Steven Lukes, Saskia Sassen, and Stephen Eric Bronner, each well known for their writing on questions central to the Manifesto and the history of Marxism. These essays address the Manifesto's historical background, its impact on (...) the development of twentieth-century Communism, its strengths and weaknesses as a form of ethical critique, and its relevance in the post-1989, post-Cold War world. This edition also includes much ancillary material, including the many Prefaces published in the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, and Engels's "Principles of Communism.". (shrink)

Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.

If one formulates Helmholtz's ideas about perception in terms of modern-day theories one arrives at a model of perceptual inference and learning that can explain a remarkable range of neurobiological facts. Using constructs from statistical physics it can be shown that the problems of inferring what cause our sensory inputs and learning causal regularities in the sensorium can be resolved using exactly the same principles. Furthermore, inference and learning can proceed in a biologically plausible fashion. The ensuing scheme rests on (...) Empirical Bayes and hierarchical models of how sensory information is generated. The use of hierarchical models enables the brain to construct prior expectations in a dynamic and context-sensitive fashion. This scheme provides a principled way to understand many aspects of the brain's organisation and responses. In this paper, we suggest that these perceptual processes are just one emergent property of systems that conform to a free-energy principle. The free-energy considered here represents a bound on the surprise inherent in any exchange with the environment, under expectations encoded by its state or configuration. A system can minimise free-energy by changing its configuration to change the way it samples the environment, or to change its expectations. These changes correspond to action and perception, respectively, and lead to an adaptive exchange with the environment that is characteristic of biological systems. This treatment implies that the system's state and structure encode an implicit and probabilistic model of the environment. We will look at models entailed by the brain and how minimisation of free-energy can explain its dynamics and structure. (shrink)

If one formulates Helmholtz’s ideas about perception in terms of modern-day theories one arrives at a model of perceptual inference and learning that can explain a remarkable range of neurobiological facts. Using constructs from statistical physics it can be shown that the problems of inferring what cause our sensory inputs and learning causal regularities in the sensorium can be resolved using exactly the same principles. Furthermore, inference and learning can proceed in a biologically plausible fashion. The ensuing scheme rests on (...) Empirical Bayes and hierarchical models of how sensory information is generated. The use of hierarchical models enables the brain to construct prior expectations in a dynamic and context-sensitive fashion. This scheme provides a principled way to understand many aspects of the brain’s organisation and responses. In this paper, we suggest that these perceptual processes are just one emergent property of systems that conform to a free-energy principle. The free-energy considered here represents a bound on the surprise inherent in any exchange with the environment, under expectations encoded by its state or configuration. A system can minimise free-energy by changing its configuration to change the way it samples the environment, or to change its expectations. These changes correspond to action and perception, respectively, and lead to an adaptive exchange with the environment that is characteristic of biological systems. This treatment implies that the system’s state and structure encode an implicit and probabilistic model of the environment. We will look at models entailed by the brain and how minimisation of free-energy can explain its dynamics and structure. (shrink)