First published in 1948, Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was an important milestone in anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history’s relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or, as he phrased it, art historians of ‘the older persuasion’ ignorant of ‘the fruitful achievements of modern historical research’. Despite (...) its considerable scholarship and erudition, Antal’s book was not warmly received, largely because he had used historical materialism to understand the production of art and the development of styles. Antal’s class-based account of the social position of the artist and the role of the patron in determining the emergence of early Renaissance styles was especially controversial. However, although Marxist analysis was used to challenge the assumptions of Anglo art history, it was not Antal’s intention to weaken art history’s disciplinary autonomy. With historical materialism, he sought to place art history on a firmer historical footing. Most importantly, this approach was compatible with the discipline’s Central European tradition, where art-historical scholarship was framed by questions of method and based on broad historical research. Without defending its more deterministic features, this article supports a re-evaluation of Antal’s book, as an important forerunner of interdisciplinary art scholarship. It considers why Antal’s legacy has not endured, despite the ‘social history of art’ enjoying widespread acceptance in English-speaking art history in later decades. (shrink)

The concept of corporate social responsibility is a relatively recent addition to the agenda in Germany, although the country has a long history of companies practicing social responsibilities. The expectations of society had remained stable for many years, encapsulated in laws, societal norms, and industrial relations agreements. But the past decade has seen significant changes in Germany, challenging established ways of treating the role of business in society. This contribution reviews and illustrates the development of diverse forms of social responsibility (...) in German corporations and analyzes how actors in business and society can build on traditional strengths to find new institutional arrangements for sharing tasks and responsibilities in the interests of achieving a better balance between societal, economic, and environmental needs. (shrink)

A critique of the hypothesis of extended cognition.

Metaphor and metonymy, on the mental level temporally rather than syntactically or semantically defined, show a close association to healthy and neurotic defense, respectively. When the mind functions optimally, reverberating issues of past and present domains inform each other bidirectionally like source and target of a metaphor. Neurotic defense, metonymically conflating past and present, is mental access barring (negative metonymy). Metaphor and positive metonymy, fundamental to how the mind works, are autopoietic devices organizing creative change. Trauma (lost metaphoricity) results in (...) negative metonymy. During psychoanalysis metonymic defenses and transferences get remetaphorized. Nested mentational configurations emerge sequentially as markers of increased awareness (clinical vignette): negative metonymy (target enigmatic); positive metonymy (accessing target); metaphor (domains seen in terms of each other). (shrink)

This article explores the dynamics of the discourse and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in France to illustrate the interplay between endogenous and exogenous factors in the development of CSR in a country. It shows how the cultural, socioeconomic, and legal traditions influence the way ideas are raised, the kinds of questions considered relevant, and the sorts of solutions conceived as desirable and possible. Furthermore, the article traces how expectations and practices evolve as a result of various social and (...) economic factors within a country, and increasingly, as a result of global influences such as the international academic discourse, the international practices of multinational companies, nongovernmental organizations and trade unions, and initiatives of supranational organizations. The article closes with reflections about what can be learned from the French experience with CSR and how to stimulate such cross-border learning. (shrink)

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a relatively recent addition to the agenda in Germany, although the country has a long history of companies practicing social responsibilities. The expectations of society had remained stable for many years, encapsulated in laws, societal norms, and industrial relations agreements. But the past decade has seen significant changes in Germany, challenging established ways of treating the role of business in society. This contribution reviews and illustrates the development of diverse forms of social (...) responsibility in German corporations and analyzes how actors in business and society can build on traditional strengths to find new institutional arrangements for sharing tasks and responsibilities in the interests of achieving a better balance between societal, economic, and environmental needs. (shrink)

That about sums up what is wrong with Clark's view.

Following Wiggins’ seminal article, On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time, this article presents the first comprehensive account of the relation of material constitution, an asymmetrical, transitive relation which totally orders distinct ‘entities’ (individuals, pluralities or masses of stuff) which ‘spatially coincide.’ Their coincidence in space is explained by a recursive definition of ‘complete-composition’, weaker than strict mereological indiscernibility, which also explains the variety of logically independent similarities in such cases. This account is ‘analytical’, dealing with ‘putative’ (...) cases in general. The main strategy is to rationally reconstruct Aristotle’s notion of material cause. It is developed more fully with a theory of how to justify admitting generable and perishable things into the natural world, in The Kinds of Things: A Theory of Personal Identity Based on Transcendental Argument (Open Court, 1996). (shrink)

In Knowledge and Belief, Frederick Schmitt explores the nature and value of knowledge and justified belief through an examination of the dispute between epistemological internalism and externalism. Knowledge and justified belief are naturally viewed as belief of a sort likely to be true--an externalist view. It is also intuitive, however, to view them as an internal matter; justification must be accessible to the subject or constituted by the subject's epistemic perspective. The author argues against the view that internalism is (...) the historically dominant epistemology by examining closely the epistemological principles that underlie the treatment of skepticism in Plato, the Academic and Pyrrhonian skeptics, Descartes and Hume. Schmitt develops a sustained, detailed argument against many forms of internalism in favor of a reliabilist/externalist epistemology. His version of reliabilism, though strictly externalist, accommodates and explains the most durable intuitions alleged to support internalism. Knowledge and Belief assumes no knowledge of epistemology or its history. Readers of philosophy will find this an excellent introduction to ancient and modern epistemology; this systematic study of the internalist and externalist debate is the first of its kind. (shrink)

One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong objective, or realist, strain running from Kant to Hegel and identifies the crucial role of the early romantics—Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis—as the founders of absolute idealism.

In a series of articles specifically commossioned for this volume, some of today's most distinguished business ethicists survey the main areas of interest and ...

A firm's ability to shape its policies to meet societal demands depends on how it perceives the opportunities and risks in its environment. The authors hypothesized that corporate culture plays a significant role in shaping organizational percep-tions. This article summarizes the findings of a study on how the organizational culture of a chemical firm headquartered in West Germany affected the evolution of its social and personnel policy from 1950 to 1989 given the changes in its sociopolitical environment during this period. (...) The study shows that the culture of a company, by shaping its perceptions, plays a central role in determining the areas in which the organization is likely to be able to learn easily and those in which it is likely to resist changing its policies. (shrink)

First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea of a (...) "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides. (shrink)

The Fate of Reason is the first general history devoted to the period between Kant and Fichte, one of the most revolutionary and fertile in modern philosophy.

There is a good chance that “each critic becomes a Pygmalion” (as Leo Curran put it) when they bring the work of art to life in their narcissistic (and almost amorous) attention, unfolding its meaning so that they should be able to write their own interpretation. The starting point of the present text is the perfection of sculptural forms, and the author discusses “traditional” aesthetic concepts: the beautiful and the sublime along with the difference and interplay of the two qualities, (...) bearing in mind their variations and relations. The framework is provided by the occurrence of these two in the discourses on the self and taste in the eighteenth-century while the focus is on subjective criticism concerning the beautiful versus the sublime in the artistic and sensual experience of statues. Within the given framework, the author is planning to force Edmund Burke, stiffened by the experience of the sublime, and Winckelmann, softened by the sight of the Greek statues, into a dialogue on individual taste. (shrink)

Frederick F. Schmitt offers a new account of Hume's epistemology in A Treatise of Human Nature, which alternately manifests scepticism, empiricism, and naturalism. Critics have emphasised one of these positions over the others, but Schmitt argues that they can be reconciled by tracing them to an underlying epistemology of knowledge and probability.

Given the significant transformations underway in academia, it is pertinent to ask whether the traditional notion of entering the profession in response to a calling is still relevant. This article draws together hitherto unconnected strands of German and Anglo-Saxon literature on callings, then analyzes biographical narratives of 40 social scientists in Germany and the United States. The comparative analysis of the timing, sources, and nature of the respondents’ decision to become academics finds that almost all exhibit a calling orientation. However, (...) their responses no longer correspond to the classical, passive notion; instead, callings in academia have become agentic. In the context of a wider societal trend to self-realization, academia has been transformed to an activity that people pursue because they want to rather than because destiny or an external force pushes them to make such a commitment. The recognition of the social nature of callings is underscored by the significance of professional mentors and family. The unexpected predominance of similarities in the cross-national comparison of calling orientation suggests that the internationalization of academic standards and procedures and the high level of competition for few positions in both contexts may outweigh the effects of culture and tradition. (shrink)

Derrida’s highly personal mourning texts are collected and published in a unique book under the title The Work of Mourning edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, two outstanding translators of Derrida’s works. The English collection is published in 2001, while the French edition came out later in 2003 titled Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. In his deconstructed eulogies, Derrida, being in accordance with ‘the mission impossible’ of deconstruction, namely, ‘to allow the coming of the entirely other’ in (...) its otherness, seems to find his own voice. In my paper, I will focus on this special segment of Derrida’s death-work ; namely, on his mourning texts written for his dead friends, paying special attention to the rhetoric ‘circling around’ fidelity, friendship, and the other in his textual mourning. (shrink)

Mary Shelley in her writings relies on the romanticised notions of nature: in addition to its beauties, the sublime quality is highlighted in its overwhelming greatness. In her ecological fiction, The Last Man (1826), the dystopian view of man results in the presentation of the declining civilization and the catastrophic destruction of infested mankind. In the novel, all of the characters are associated with forces of culture and history. On the one hand, Mary Shelley, focussing on different human bonds, warns (...) against the sickening discord and dissonance, the lack of harmony in the world, while, on the other hand, she calls for the respect of nature and natural order. The prophetic caring female characters ‘foresee’ the events but cannot help the beloved men to control their building and destroying powers. Mary Shelley expresses her unmanly view of nature and the author’s utopian hope seems to lie in ‘unhuman’ nature. While the epidemic, having been unleashed by the pests of patriarchal society and being accelerated by global warming, sweeps away humanity, Mother Nature flourishes and gains back her original ‘dwelling place’. (shrink)

This book is the first complete intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen and the only work to cover all his major philosophical and Jewish writings. Frederick C. Beiser pays special attention to all phases of Cohen's intellectual development, its breaks and its continuities, throughout seven decades. The guiding goal behind Cohen's intellectual career, he argues, was the development of a radical rationalism, one committed to defending the rights of unending enquiry and unlimited criticism. Cohen's philosophy was therefore an attempt to (...) defend and revive the Enlightenment belief in the authority of reason; his critical idealism an attempt to justify this belief and to establish a purely rational worldview. According to this interpretation, Cohen's thought is resolutely opposed to any form of irrationalism or mysticism because these would impose arbitrary and artificial limits on criticism and enquiry. It is therefore critical of those interpretations which see Cohen's philosophy as a species of proto-existentialism or Jewish mysticism. Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography attempts to unify the two sides of Cohen's thought, his philosophy and his Judaism. Maintaining that Cohen's Judaism was not a limit to his radical rationalism but a consistent development of it, Beiser contends that his religion was one of reason. He concludes that most critical interpretations have failed to appreciate the philosophical depth and sophistication of his Judaism, a religion which committed the believer to the unending search for truth and the striving to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of reason. (shrink)

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half--when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the (...) very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period's five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century. (shrink)

Diotima's Children is a re-examination of the rationalist tradition of aesthetics which prevailed in Germany in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century.