Until now, the literature on Kant s Opus Postumum has lacked a commentary on the key draft, Transition 1 14. The study offers a systematic interpretation with reference to Kant s other works especially the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant s presentation of natural science as a true science of nature is thereby placed in the context of his transcendental philosophy.".

Auf die Frage: "Was ist Schönheit" oder "Was ist das Schöne" antwortet Hegel mit seiner oft zitierten Formel, das Schöne sei das "Sinnliche Scheinen der Idee". Idee ist hier letztlich das Absolute oder auch das Göttliche, das in den Werken schöner Kunst zuerst und auf dieser Stufe als das sinnlich erfahrbare Göttliche in Erscheinung tritt. Diese Hegelsche Positionierung der Kunst innerhalb seiner Philosophie des absoluten Geistes bedingt nicht nur ihren einmaligen Höhepunkt in der klassischen Kunst des griechischen Altertums, sondern zugleich (...) mit diesem auch die Sicht der Kunst als einer solchen, deren Zenit ein Vergangenes ist. Muß hieraus aber mit Notwendigkeit die Sinnlosigkeit weiterer Kunstausübung folgen? Im Zuge einer Darstellung der wichtigsten Begriffe und Theorien innerhalb der Hegelschen Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik geht vorliegende Studie auf derartige Fragestellungen ein. Ein zweiter Hauptteil befaßt sich ausführlicher mit der Musikästhetik Hegels. Der Autor widmet sich hier den Antworten Hegels auf Fragen nach Material und Anschauungsform musikalischer Kunst und deren qualitativen wie auch quantitativen Bestimmungen. Zudem wird die Hegelsche Bestimmung des Wesens musikalischer Kunst als kadenzierte Interjektion erörtert. Zur Einleitung in den Themenbereich der Arbeit werden in knapper Form die musikästhetischen Aussagen Kants in dessen Kritik der Urteilskraft referiert. (shrink)

In Kant's theoretical philosophy substance is not only constitutive for objects as one of the categories of pure reason, but also functions as a substrate for the unity of time. Result of these different functions is an ambiguity in the meaning of Kant's notion of substance. Is there only one or are there many individual substances? This paper traces the ways in which Kant uses substance not only in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also in the draft „Transition 1–14“ (...) of the Opus postumum to find a solution for this problem. (shrink)

Purpose of this paper is to show, that within the Hobbesian Philosophy of law and state the establishment of legal force can be considered to be a conditio sine qua non for a persistent state of peace. In this regard legal force is to be understood not only as a power able to legislate but also to guarantee the abidance of the law by means of coercive power. As a result of this point of view on legal force as a (...) necessary condition for peace and security, arises furthermore the conceptof legal force as condition of culture. This paper traces the central claims of Thomas Hobbes’ highly influential theory of the origination of state and law pointed out in the first chapters of De Cive, a writing that is part of Hobbes Elements of Philosophy. To this aforementioned theory belongs the Hobbesian conception of the so called state of nature as a legal vacuum and a status of absolute freedom of every individual. Furthermore the war of everyone against everyone as a consequence of this absence of legal force and finally the subjects comprehension in the uselessness of absolute freedom which leads to war and instead of this the decision to abandon specific rights and to subrogate those rights to an elected sovereign. The decision to leave the state of nature and hence war and search peace instead which is granted by the legislative and executive power of the sovereign is according to Hobbes the ultimate dictate of reason. Additionally to the first chapters of De Cive I refer to some passages of Hobbes chief work Leviathan. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 1 Seiten: 166-170.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 1 Seiten: 171-172.

In Kant's theoretical philosophy substance is not only constitutive for objects as one of the categories of pure reason, but also functions as a substrate for the unity of time. Result of these different functions is an ambiguity in the meaning of Kant's notion of substance. Is there only one or are there many individual substances? This paper traces the ways in which Kant uses substance not only in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also in the draft „Transition 1–14“ (...) of the Opus postumum to find a solution for this problem. (shrink)

Since Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542–573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the apparent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by Matthewson (...) and Griffiths [J Med Philos 42(4):447–466, 2017], however, may bear the seeds for the revival of purely naturalist approach to health and disease. In this paper, I defend their idea of Biological Normativity against recent criticism by Schwartz [J Med Philos Forum Bioethics Philos Med 42(4):485–502, 2017] and hope to help it flower into a revival of naturalist approaches in the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

In his 2009 monograph, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith accuses biologists of demonstrating ‘Darwinian Paranoia’ when they engage in what he dubs ‘agential thinking’. But as Daniel Dennett points out, he offers neither an illuminating set of examples nor an extended argument for this assertion, deeming it to be a brilliant propaganda stroke against what is actually a useful way of thinking. Compared to the dangers of teleological thinking in biology, the dangers of agential thinking have unfortunately rarely (...) been discussed. Drawing on recent work by Samir Okasha, I attempt to remedy this omission, through analyzing the nature of agential thinking, and providing a philosophical treatment of the unexamined dangers in this peculiar, yet tempting way of thinking. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 46-48.

In their thoughtful article, Malm and Navin (2020) raise concerns about a potentially unjust generational welfare tradeoff between children and adults when it comes to chicken pox. We share their c...

Hearing has traditionally been regarded as the second sense--as somehow less rational and less modern than the first sense, sight. Reason and Resonance explodes this myth by reconstructing the process through which the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality. For the past four hundred years, hearing has been understood as involving the sympathetic resonance between the vibrating air and various parts of the inner ear. But the emergence of resonance as the centerpiece of modern (...) aurality also coincides with the triumph of a new type of epistemology in which the absence of resonance is the very condition of thought. Our mind's relationship to the world is said to rest on distance or, as the very synonym for reason suggests, reflection. Reason and Resonance traces the genealogy of this "intimate animosity" between reason and resonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a varied cast of otologists, philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists. Among them are the seventeenth-century architect-zoologist Claude Perrault, who refuted Cartesianism in a book on sound and hearing; the Sturm und Drang poet Wilhelm Heinse and his friend the anatomist Samuel Sömmerring, who believed the ventricular fluid to be the interface between the soul and the auditory nerve; the renowned physiologist Johannes Müller, who invented the concept of "sense energies"; and Müller's most important student, Hermann von Helmholtz, author of the magisterial Sensations of Tone. Erlman also discusses key twentieth-century thinkers of aurality, including Ernst Mach; the communications engineer and proponent of the first nonresonant wave theory of hearing, Georg von Békésy; political activist and philosopher Günther Anders; and Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

Distinguishing between reasonable partiality and reasonable impartiality makes a difference in resolving the serious clashes between 'priority for compatriots' versus cosmopolitan global duties. Defenders of a priority for compatriots have to acknowledge two strong moral constraints: states have to fulfil all their special, domestic and trans-domestic duties, and associative duties are limited by distributive constraints resulting from the moral duty to fight poverty and gross global inequalities. In the recent global context, I see four main problems for liberal-nationalist defenders of (...) priority for compatriots: Reasonable particularists often forget that associative duties for compatriots compete with many sub-national and trans-domestic associative duties. They tend to forget that associative national duties compete with other, strong special obligations regarding not only citizens and residents inside nation-states but also trans-domestic obligations across state borders. They do not properly discuss the problem of unallocated duties in addressing global poverty and insecurity. The design of supra-national and global 'mediating' institutions, and the crafting of policies to remedy the misallocation of duties and to coordinate the required state activities is an urgent task neglected by liberal nationalists. In the recent context, reasonable partiality's bias towards partiality is most unwelcome and morally dubious. Reasonable impartiality's bias towards cosmopolitanism helps to stimulate a drastic shift in obligations and stimulates productive trans-national institutional design. (shrink)

Climate change mitigation has become a paradigm case both for externalities in general and for the game-theoretic model of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in particular. This situation is worrying, as we have reasons to suspect that some models in the social sciences are apt to be performative to the extent that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Framing climate change mitigation as a hardly solvable coordination problem may force us into a worse situation, by changing real-world behaviour to fit (...) our model, rather than the other way around. But while this problem of the performativity of the ToC has been noted in a recent paper in this journal by Matthew Kopec, his proposed strategies for dealing with their self-fulfilling nature fall short of providing an adequate solution. Instead of relying on the idea that modelling assumptions are always strictly speaking false, this paper shows that the problem may be better framed as a problem of underdetermination between competing explanations. Our goal here is to provide a framework for choosing between this set of competing models that allows us to avoid a ‘Russian Roulette’-like situation in which we gamble with existential risk. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap is increasingly regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. He was one of the leading figures of the logical empiricist movement associated with the Vienna Circle and a central figure in the analytic tradition more generally. He made major contributions to philosophy of science and philosophy of logic, and, perhaps most importantly, to our understanding of the nature of philosophy as a discipline. In this volume a team of contributors explores the major themes (...) of his philosophy and discusses his relationship with the Vienna Circle and with philosophers such as Frege, Husserl, Russell, and Quine. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Carnap currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Carnap. (shrink)

Political philosophy has difficulties to cope with the complexity and variety of state-religions relations. ‘Strict separationism’ is still the preferred option amongst liberals, deliberative and republican democrats, socialist and feminists. In this article, I develop a complex typology based on comparative history and sociology of religions. I summarize my reasons why institutional pluralist models like plural establishment or non-constitutional pluralism are attractive not only for religious minorities but for religiously deeply diverse societies in general. Most attention is paid defending associative (...) democracy, the most flexible and open variety of institutional pluralism, against realist objections that group representation is incompatible with liberal democracy, that it leads to stigmatization and bureaucratization, that it strengthens undemocratic leaders, that it leads to an ossification of the status quo, and, most importantly, that it is inherently divisive undermining social cohesion and political unity. In my refutation of these objections I try to show that it helps to integrate minority religions into liberal democratic policies compatible with reasonable pluralism and to prevent religious and political fundamentalism. (shrink)

The significance of Kant's philosophy is to be found primarily in his theory of knowledge, a theory that is set forth in his voluminous work, The Critique ...

The most efficient known method for solving certain computational problems is to construct an iterated map whose fixed points are by design the problem's solution. Although the origins of this idea go back at least to Newton, the clearest expression of its logical basis is an example due to Mermin. A contemporary application in image recovery demonstrates the power of the method.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Seckendorff's »Teutsche Reden« of 1691 and the outline of his ideas on natural law published with them are a uniquely eloquent testimony of German Baroque culture. Seckendorff was the only 17th century aristocratic practitioner of courtly and political life to publish a number of his speeches in book form during his own lifetime and to supplement them with a theoretical superstructure substantiating his practical convictions. The text is centrally concerned with the connection between civilization and language culture and the dependence (...) of public speaking on the nature of the state. Seckendorff's unfinished outline of natural law betokens the critical engagement with the rise of secular natural law by a genuinely significant theoretician on the essential issues posed by government and administration. (shrink)

Therefore, the difference between the natural and the non or supernatural would not be an ontological one. The identification of kinds of complexes or ...