In the book Forgotten Connections. On Culture and Upbringing, originally from 1983, the late German educator Klaus Mollenhauer interprets Johann Friedrich Herbart’s educational concept of Bildsamkeit, i.e., the ability and willingness to be educated. Furthermore, Mollenhauer conceives Bildsamkeit as growing out of a primitive state towards a cultivated life. The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, however, conceives the Christian concept of ‘primitiveness’ as a growing in the opposite direction, i.e., as a growing out of a cultivated state towards (...) a primitive one, in which the self shall let itself be invented by ‘God’. Thus, I investigate whether the concept of primitiveness may enrich the reflection on the educational concept of Bildsamkeit, as it is conceived by Mollenhauer. Towards the end of the paper I turn to Emmanuel Levinas, whose ethical reading of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud may reveal a weakness in Kierkegaard’s concept of primitiveness. But rather than rejecting the concept of primitiveness, I suggest that we re-consider the concept, with the help of Levinas’s transcendental perspective of ‘God’. Essentially, I try to address the following question: Can Bildsamkeit be something more than the ability to be educated? Can not Bildsamkeit also be defined as being susceptible to ‘God’, who transcends our existence, after which we are lead towards a teaching and education otherwise? (shrink)

In this paper, the endeavour to understand how to think of education ‘after progress’, viz. in an age in which progress has become problematic, is undertaken by focusing on the theme of time. Dovetailing Klaus Mollenhauer’s reflections on the rise of the Bildungszeit at the dawn of modernity with Thomas Popkewitz’s analyses of ‘cosmopolitan time’ presiding over pedagogical reform from the 19th century to the present, I shall, first, explore this temporal configuration of modern schooling (which goes hand (...) in hand with a specific understanding of the child). Against this backdrop, I shall, second, advance an interpretive hypothesis, that of substituting what will be called the ‘child-as-migrant’ for the ‘cosmopolitan child’, by appropriating, in an educational key, some insights of Thomas Nail’s ‘migrant cosmopolitanism’. I shall thereby suggest an alternative view of ‘progressivity’, construed not along modern-developmentalist lines but as a form of non-conservativeness, linked with a recognition of the ekstatikon (that is, destabilizing) character of time. This will require a revisiting of some Aristotelian intuitions about time as the rhythm of movement, reinterpreted as the affective experience of that ek-statikon without which there is no potential for the new. Accordingly, ‘progressive’ education (in the different interpretation investigated here) is the concern to allow all of us as ‘migrants’ to live actively in the abode of our ek-static and unpredictable condition and, therefore, to be vulnerable to the new, without merely remaining in a taken-for-granted ethos, cosmopolitan, inclusive, and progress-oriented though it may be. (Editor's note: This paper forms part of the suite entitled ‘Education After Progress’.). (shrink)

In contemporary societies, there is a strong push toward seeing education as an instrument for the delivery of particular societal agendas. On such a view, the only questions that remain are how effective education is at delivering such agendas and how its effectiveness can be increased. While this might be a desirable way forward for those who believe that a consensus about the agenda for education can easily be achieved, it is at odds with the idea that a democratic society (...) is characterized by a fundamental plurality of visions about what schools are supposed to be for. Yet the democratic critique of educational instrumentalism cannot be confined to giving each and every vision its own school, as this would simply multiply educational instrumentalism rather than oppose it. A true democratic response thus needs to take education's own interest seriously as well, which, as Gert Biesta argues in this paper, amounts to a defense of the school as institution. (shrink)

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Welche Rolle spielt die Moral für unser wirtschaftliches Handeln und überhaupt in der Wirtschaft? Steht sie uns vielleicht sogar im Weg? Durch Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrisen ist das Misstrauen zwischen Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft weiter gestiegen. In Anbetracht dessen stellen die Herausgeber dieses Bandes die Frage, ob wir eine neue Wirtschaftsethik brauchen: eine Wirtschaftsethik, die den in der Wirtschaft tätigen Menschen eine wirkliche Orientierung gibt, statt sie dem Dilemma von leerem Moralismus und praktischen Zwängen der ökonomischen Welt zu überlassen; eine Wirtschaftsethik, die (...) dem Anspruch, einen realistischen ethischen Rahmen für das wirtschaftliche Handeln zu bieten, tatsächlich gerecht wird. Die Beiträge dieses Buches behandeln interdisziplinär und aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven die Schwierigkeiten mit der Moral und münden in der provokanten These, dass sich Wirtschaftsethik auch ausgezeichnet als Warnung vor der Moral eignet. (shrink)

Hegels _Wissenschaft der Logik_ stellt eine Revolution im philosophischen Denken dar, sie repräsentiert eine moderne und ungebrochen aktuelle Metaphysik. Hegel's _Science of Logic_ represents a revolution in philosophical thought, advancing a modern and still relevant metaphysics.

This volume is a comprehensive roadmap to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. The Handbook brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of the relationship between the mechanisms of the brain and the psychology of mind. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. Drawing on a wide range of neuroimaging techniques, (...) neuropsychological assessment, and clinical research, scientists are beginning to understand the biological mechanisms for emotions. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as: How do people experience life emotionally? Why do people respond so differently to the same experiences? What can the face tell us about internal states? How does emotion in significant social relationships influence health? Are there basic emotions common to all humans? This volume brings together the most eminent scholars in the field to present, in sixty original chapters, the latest research and theories in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression; Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Adaptation, Culture, and Evolution; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade. (shrink)

Although still young when he wrote this book, Voegelin already demonstrates his singular analytical capacity as well as his ability to put political phenomena into a new perspective.

The concept of the self is embedded in a web of relationships of other concepts and phenomena such as consciousness, self-consciousness, personal identity and the mind–body problem. The article follows the ontological and epistemological roles of the concept of selfconsciousness and the structural co-implication of consciousness and self-consciousness from Descartes and Locke to Kant and Sartre while delineating its subject matter from related inquiries into the relationship between the mind and the body, personal identity, and the question whether consciousness is (...) an irreducible reality sui generis or essentially a neurobiological entity. Over the course of its history, the modern self turns out to become an ever more elusive phenomenon, while its roles as a bearer of individual responsibility and as a subject of reflective endorsement of the truth become ever more pronounced. (shrink)

The meaning of optimality and economy in phylogenetics and evolutionary biology is discussed.It can be shown that the prevailing concepts of optimality and economy are equivocal as they are not based on strict theoretical positions and as they have a variable meaning in different theoretical contexts. The ideas of optimality and economy can be considered to be identical with the expectation of a relatively simple order in a particular field of study. Although there exists no way of inferring one or (...) several methods of solving scientific problems from the presupposed idea of economy and optimality, a lack of motivation for scientific investigations would result if the concepts of economy and optimality in nature were dropped. (shrink)

The contributions to this volume offer a rich, detailed, and in some respects innovative and remarkable account of that uniquely fecund and philosophically revolutionary epoch known as German Idealism. The epoch’s historical context, its driving ideas, its post-Kantian development, and its repercussions in post-Hegelian philosophy are all presented competently and concisely. The editor also included essays on some of the philosophical ideas underlying the parallel phenomenon of German Romanticism, for good reasons, since some of the foremost poets and literary theorists (...) of the age were philosophers in their own right, whose influence on the development of German Idealism was not insignificant. What emerges from this collection is the picture of a multifaceted philosophical movement embedded in and influenced by and in turn influencing a complex intellectual and literary environment. The reader of this volume will be in no danger of reducing German Idealism to a linear development that started with Kant and that was preordained to culminate in Hegel’s system. (shrink)

Philosophers investigating questions of animal ethics tend to draw on animal cognition research while subscribing to strong positions regarding animal minds, and philosophers pursuing the question of animal minds frequently draw conclusions from the arguments of ethical philosophers. Despite this exchange, animal mind and animal ethics research have developed in fundamentally different directions. One reason for this divison lies in the institutional distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy. This anthology brings these fields and their philosophical approaches closer together, mapping their (...) surprising ideological and methodological overlap. (shrink)

In The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus, Eric Voegelin places the rise of the race idea in the context of the development of modern philosophy.