Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

Religionen unterbreiten Sinnstiftungsangebote und beeinflussen nicht unwesentlich den Umgang der Menschen miteinander. SIe konnen zu Fortschritt und Freiheit der Menschen beitragen, aber auch zu Fanatismus und Intoleranz fuhren. DEshalb ist ihr Stellenwert in einer sakularen Gesellschaft umstritten. WElcher Umgang mit Religionen empfiehlt sich? Ist es fur eine soziomoralische Fundierung der Gesellschaft nicht besser, allein auf eine vernunftbasierte Ethik zu setzen? Und lassen sich Glauben und Wissen uberhaupt miteinander versohnen? Mit Beitragen von Konrad Paul Liessmann, Volker Gerhardt, Nadia Baghdadi und (...) Jan Assmann. (shrink)

Welche Werte und Normen als moralisch verbindlich erklärt werden und ob diese universelle Gültigkeit beanspruchen können, ist umstritten. So ist z.B. keineswegs geklärt, wozu wir gegenüber unserer Familie verpflichtet sind oder welche Verantwortung für uns aus dem Umgang mit der Vergangenheit erwächst. Können wir also je nach Belieben handeln? Sind durch den Wertepluralismus und die Vielfalt der Handlungsoptionen in modernen Gesellschaften allgemeingültige Werte und Normen überholt? Woran können wir uns dann noch orientieren? Die Beiträge von Konrad Paul Liessmann, Barbara (...) Bleisch, Herfried Münkler und Susan Neiman geben einen tiefen Einblick in das Spannungsfeld zwischen Wertepluralismus und moralischer Verantwortung. (shrink)

Religionen unterbreiten Sinnstiftungsangebote und beeinflussen nicht unwesentlich den Umgang der Menschen miteinander. Sie können zu Fortschritt und Freiheit der Menschen beitragen, aber auch zu Fanatismus und Intoleranz führen. Deshalb ist ihr Stellenwert in einer säkularen Gesellschaft umstritten. Welcher Umgang mit Religionen empfiehlt sich? Ist es für eine soziomoralische Fundierung der Gesellschaft nicht besser, allein auf eine vernunftbasierte Ethik zu setzen? Und lassen sich Glauben und Wissen überhaupt miteinander versöhnen? Mit Beiträgen von Konrad Paul Liessmann, Volker Gerhardt, Nadia Baghdadi und (...) Jan Assmann. (shrink)

Dans La naissance du politique (Paris, 1995), Christian Meier propose, à partir de l’étude des Euménides d’Eschyle, une réinterprétation et une correction en un sens démocratique du « concept du politique » élaboré par Carl Schmitt.

My title is “Arguing for Freedom of Religion,” not for “Toleration,” because I follow the eighteenth-century writer Christoph Martin Wieland in taking “toleration" to connote a gift or indulgence from a majority to a minority, whereas true freedom of religion would put everybody on the same plane to believe and practice religion as they see fit, or not at all. I consider three historically distinct ways of arguing for freedom of religion: from a premise held by one religion that requires (...) freedom from others (the strategy of Locke, Madison, and Mendelssohn); from a premise about the uncertainty of all religious beliefs which calls for equal freedom (Bayle and Wieland); or from a fundamental requirement of equal freedom for all, with no premise about religion although it entails freedom in religious matters as in other things (Hutcheson, Meier, Kant). The latter approach may be most appealing from a purely philosophical point of view, but the former styles of argument have obviously had much to recommend them in historical contexts, and may still be useful. (shrink)

Lukas J. Meier et al. offer the promise of a pathway for resolving clinical bioethical problems using an artificial intelligence interface. The ultimate goal, we assume, is...

This work makes the revisionist claim that "the theory of mind in the Critique [of Pure Reason] is much more traditional and rationalistic than it at first appears, but that it is also more defensible than is generally recognized". Specifically, Ameriks aims to show that "Kant can be seen as wanting, above all else, to put... into a respectable form" the "core of the rationalist commitment" "to the idea that we have a special kind of identity that can withstand all (...) the kinds of change that ordinarily spell the end of ordinary objects". But, first, Ameriks's account of the "core of the rationalist commitment" is maddeningly vague and unstable--indeed, Ameriks's conception of rationalism is so ill-defined that at one point skepticism about the external world is treated as a part of rationalism rather than as the very much undesired consequence of certain Cartesian premises which Kant thought it to be!--and the discussion is damagingly ahistorical. Ameriks does emphasize the developmental dimension within Kant's own work, ranging over the whole of Kant's published corpus and mining the various lecture courses on metaphysics which have now been gathered together as volume 28 of the Berlin edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften. But his picture of rationalism itself and its characteristic arguments is undifferentiated and undocumented, and this leads to the misconception that Kant thought that some theoretical defense of rationalist theses could still be maintained while what are merely some possible arguments in their behalf were criticized; but some review of Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Meier would surely have shown that Kant was criticizing all of the chief arguments for the rationalist conception of the soul known to him, and attention to Kant's own claim for the completeness of his presentation of these natural and inevitable illusions of human reason could have suggested only that Kant himself thought that these were all the theoretical arguments for a rationalist philosophy of mind there could be. Second, it is questionable whether Ameriks's view really revises our standard reading of Kant's conclusions at all. The gist of Ameriks's argument is that in spite of Kant's specific criticism of the paralogistic arguments of pure psychology, Kant retained a favorable attitude toward the theoretical and not just practical postulation of such properties as immateriality and transcendental freedom at the noumenal level--but this turns out to mean little more than that Kant accepted his own transcendental idealism. This is hardly revolutionary, and the interest of the point is far from strengthened by Ameriks's own conclusion that transcendental idealism cannot be fully proved. (shrink)

Luca M. Possati, Jean Grondin, Paul Ricoeur ; Aurore Dumont, François Dosse et Catherine Goldenstein, Paul Ricoeur: penser la mémoire ; Paul-Gabriel Sandu, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, The Truth of Language. Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement ; Paul Marinescu, Marc-Antoine Vallée, Gadamer et Ricoeur. La conception herméneutiquedu langage ; Witold Płotka, Saulius Geniusas, Th e Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology ; Delia Popa, Annabelle Dufourcq, La dimension imaginaire du réel dans la (...) philosophie de Husserl ; Maria GyemantDenis Seron, Ce que voir veut dire. Essai sur la perception ; Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Hans Friesen, Christian Lotz, Jakob Meier, Markus Wolf, Ding und Verdinglichung. Technik- und Sozialphilosophie nach Heidegger und der Kritischen Th eorie ; Bogdan MincăLarisa Cercel, John Stanley, Unterwegs zu einer hermeneutischen Übersetzungswissenschaft. Radegundis Stolze zu ihrem 60. Geburtstag ; Denisa Butnaru Johann Michel, Sociologie du soi. Essai d’herméneutique appliquée ; Ovidiu Stanciu, Jan Patočka, Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs. Trad. fr. Erika Abrams ; Mădălina Diaconu, Emmanuel Alloa, Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen, Phänomenologie. (shrink)

This book, by one of the most prominent interpreters of Leo Strauss's thought, was the first to address the problem that Leo Strauss himself said was the theme of his studies: the theologico-political problem or the confrontation with the theological and the political alternative to philosophy as a way of life. In his theologico-political treatise, which comprises four parts and an appendix, Heinrich Meier clarifies the distinction between political theology and political philosophy and reappraises the unifying center of Strauss's philosophical (...) enterprise. The book is the culmination of Meier's work on the theologico-political problem. It will interest anyone who seeks to understand both the problem caused by revelation for philosophy and the challenge posed by political-religious radicalism. The appendix makes available for the first time two lectures by Strauss that are immediately relevant to the subject of this book and that will open the way for future research and debate on the legacy of Strauss. (shrink)

Machine intelligence already helps medical staff with a number of tasks. Ethical decision-making, however, has not been handed over to computers. In this proof-of-concept study, we show how an algorithm based on Beauchamp and Childress’ prima-facie principles could be employed to advise on a range of moral dilemma situations that occur in medical institutions. We explain why we chose fuzzy cognitive maps to set up the advisory system and how we utilized machine learning to train it. We report on the (...) difficult task of operationalizing the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence and patient autonomy, and describe how we selected suitable input parameters that we extracted from a training dataset of clinical cases. The first performance results are promising, but an algorithmic approach to ethics also comes with several weaknesses and limitations. Should one really entrust the sensitive domain of clinical ethics to machine intelligence? (shrink)

The options in a decision problem generally have outcomes with common features. Putting aside the common features simplifies deliberations, but the simplification requires a philosophical justification that this book provides.

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 47 Heft: 1 Seiten: 185-208.

Schelling und Hegel benutzen in ihren philosophischen Texten mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle wie Unendlichkeit oder Gleichgewicht. Die Strukturen dieser Begriffe liefern einen Massstab fur den Vergleich der Positionen Schellings und Hegels, der fur Schellings Identitatsphilosophie und Hegels erste Jenaer Schriften durchgefuhrt wird. Als wichtigstes Resultat kann eine grundlegende Differenz zwischen beiden Positionen bereits um 1801 nachgewiesen und gezeigt werden, dass diese auf einer unterschiedlichen Auffassung der Rolle des Absoluten beruht.

We investigated the competition between automatic and controlled processes in a word stem completion task. Prime-display duration and the prime-target interval were manipulated. On each trial a masked prime was displayed briefly, followed either immediately or after a delay by a word stem. The subjects were required to complete each stem with the first word that came to mind, to report any prime they could identify, and not to give as completion any identified prime. By the assumption that automatic processes (...) require less stimulus input and can be completed faster than consciously controlled processes we expected a stronger performance contribution from automatic processes with the shorter prime-display durations and in the immediate stems condition. The results confirmed this expectation. The findings highlight that consciously controlled processes require more time to run their course than unconscious automatic processes. (shrink)

The first book-length study of a leading tenth-century Ismaili theoretician Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani.

Zusammenfassungen der Referate in französischer Sprache.

An agent often does not have precise probabilities or utilities to guide resolution of a decision problem. I advance a principle of rationality for making decisions in such cases. To begin, I represent the doxastic and conative state of an agent with a set of pairs of a probability assignment and a utility assignment. Then I support a decision principle that allows any act that maximizes expected utility according to some pair of assignments in the set. Assuming that computation of (...) an option's expected utility uses comprehensive possible outcomes that include the option's risk, no consideration supports a stricter requirement. (shrink)

Morality, or one's own question as a figure -- Politics, or what is truth? -- Revelation, or he that is not with me is against me -- History, or the Christian Epimetheus.

The centrality of death rituals has in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism been little documented. The current volume brings together a range of perspectives on Buddhist death rituals including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, and presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. It arises out of the University of Bristol's Centre for Buddhist Studies research project Buddhist Death Rituals in Southeast Asia and China, funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities (...) Research Council. This project involved extensive new research in Thailand, Laos and China. Other items from that project included several public exhibitions, extensive stills photographs, and several video films. The project-team produced two 30 minutes films on the ghost festival in Laos and China, one on urban funerals in Chiang Mai (Thailand) and several shorter clips dealing with funeral cultures in Laos, Thailand and China. Most of this material (and an extensive bibliography on the topic) is available free of charge from the project website located at the webpage of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies (Centre for Buddhist Studies) at the University of Bristol. (shrink)

This article contends that the evolution toward interdisciplinary collaboration that we are witnessing in the sciences must also occur in the humanities to ensure their very survival. That is, humanists must be open to working with scientists and social scientists interested in similar research questions and vice versa. Digital humanities is a positive first step. Complexity science should be the next step. Even though much of the ground-breaking work in complexity science has been done in the natural sciences and mathematics, (...) it can, if critically adapted, provide the needed metaphor for a broad integration of disciplines, humanistic and otherwise. Given its almost a-disciplinary nature, a complexity approach to the research problems in the humanities necessarily breaks down silos. Moreover, it can restore and reframe the seamless intellectual fabric sought by researchers before the atomization of the various disciplines in the nineteenthcentury academy. (shrink)

We can hardly know for certain how strongly a scholarly discipline like history is able to affect politics and society, popular views and morals. Whatever its impact, it's influence also varies from epoch to epoch. During a few decades of the nineteenth century, historians were overwhelmed by so many questions and by such high expectations that there existed a large public space for them that they merely had to occupy. At other times, they have had to conquer this space first (...) if they wanted to gain continued attention.To be sure, a differentiation has to be introduced: any society has particular interests, e.g., in parts of its more recent past or in events that society sees as having something like a “mythical quality” about then, events that represent a major divide, that are deeply imprinted on that society's memory, that have attained a special role through tradition. There is, of course, always a space commanding wider public attention for these aspects. However, they are no more than small specks on the large canvas of history. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und (...) Literaturwissenschaften sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)