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)

v. 1. The Enlightenment, Kant -- v. 2. Kant's immediate critics, Early German romanticism -- v. 3. General characterization, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel -- v. 4. New horizons, The legacy of German idealism.

Hegel's Encyclopaedia Logic constitutes the foundation of the system of philosophy presented in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Together with his Science of Logic, it contains the most explicit formulation of his enduringly influential dialectical method and of the categorical system underlying his thought. It offers a more compact presentation of his dialectical method than is found elsewhere, and also incorporates changes that he would have made to the second edition of the Science of Logic if he had lived (...) to do so. This volume presents it in a new translation with a helpful introduction and notes. It will be a valuable reference work for scholars and students of Hegel and German idealism, as well as for those who are interested in the post-Hegelian character of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The role of history in Hegel’s system is puzzling. On one hand, Hegel argues that truth is necessarily the outcome of development, and to that extent historical. On the other hand, however, this development is said to be a mere “play” of the Idea with itself. Moreover, Hegel’s claim in Enc. §14 that the historical development of spirit follows its systematic development not only implies that the systematic structure of the Idea precedes its historical unfolding but also makes history deterministic. (...) This article argues that if we want to preserve the primacy of the system over its history while at the same time avoiding determinism, we need to amend Hegel’s position in light of the Aristotelian distinction, ignored by Hegel, between hypothetical and absolute necessity. (shrink)

By conventional standards, the papers collected in this first volume of invited contributions to the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy fall roughly into the two broad categories of moral theory and applied ethics. However, a closer look will reveal that there is nothing conventional about them. Not only do some of the applied ethics papers challenge some widely acknowledged positions in bioethics or suggest a new framework for the reconciliation of nature and culture in environmental ethics, the papers in moral (...) theory broadly conceived show a remarkable preparedness to rethink traditional boundaries, positions, and methodological approaches altogether. Thus the traditional boundaries between normative ethics and metaethics come under pressure once it is realized that, for instance, normative disagreements concerning different conceptions of the good life presuppose an agreement to the effect that the good life is indeed something we ought to strive for. Based on observations like these, it is possible to develop a powerful argument for the reintegration of normative ethics with metaethics. Again, the divisions within moral theory become less important, not to say irrelevant, when the established normative positions seem to lose their universalistic standing in a confrontation with culturally based ethical pluralism. One may then even go so far as to speak of the “demise of moral theory” due to its inability to defend an unambiguous notion of morality. (shrink)

This latest volume of BACAP Proceedings contains some innovative research by international scholars on Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles. It covers such themes as Plato on the philosopher ruler, and Aristotle on essence and necessity in science. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

This book contains material from some 15 years of scholarly work on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and its reception by his immediate successors. While large parts of the book rely on previously published articles, Ameriks has worked these earlier publications into a monographic study by integrating them into an overall argument now prefaced by a detailed introduction to the book’s main thesis and rounded out by a conclusion that provides a “final perspective” on the study as a whole. The (...) central thesis of the book may be summarized as follows. The reception of Kant’s philosophy by his contemporaries and immediate successors, and above all by Fichte and Hegel, was decisively influenced by the way in which Reinhold transformed the Kantian enterprise into a foundationalist system in which all propositions were to be derived from a first grounding principle. This is significant because in the process Reinhold “managed to distort the basic meaning of Kant’s original doctrine”. As a result, German idealism after Kant can by no means be said to be the continuation and completion of Kant’s Copernican revolution. Rather, Kant’s position constitutes an “alternative to this ambitious foundational project”. The post-Kantian development thus breaks with Kant’s much more modest view of what a system of philosophy can and should be. A crucial role in this process of misinterpretation of Kant’s intentions falls to Reinhold’s recasting of what Ameriks calls Kant’s “long argument to idealism” into Reinhold’s “short argument”, that is, the exclusive reliance by Reinhold on the argument from representation according to which the thing-in-itself is “unrepresentable” and hence dispensable. The Reinhold of the “Elementary Philosophy” of 1789–91 thus believed to possess a shortcut to idealism which made Kant’s complicated justification of the complementarity thesis redundant. It also established the immanence of representational consciousness as the exclusive ground of all claims to knowledge and thus prepared the way for the closed, “absolutist” systems that became the hallmark of post-Kantian idealism. Ameriks unfolds this argument in four parts dealing first with Kant’s more modest claims concerning system and knowledge as a backdrop for the subsequent discussion, the motivation for and the content of Reinhold’s revision of Kant’s philosophy, Fichte’s practical foundationalism as inspired by Reinhold, and Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy. The book covers other topics as well such as an illuminating discussion of the notion of apperception in Kant and Fichte as compared to contemporary interpretations of the apperception theory. The introduction also argues for a compatibilist alternative to Kant’s theory of freedom which would minimize Kant’s metaphysical commitment to the existence of an absolute spontaneity and thus make Kant’s position an even more modest one. (shrink)

This book attempts to reconstruct the deep current of part of the spiritual history of modernity which in the Western world has led to the fundamental reorientation of our being-in-the-world known under the title of secularization. In addition, the book tries to understand the nature of the intellectual response to this process of secularization as it was mounted by various Catholic movements. The process of secularization finally issued not only in the loss of the religious dimension of transcendence, but also (...) in what the author calls the "disappearance of the future as an historical standard of judgment". In the book's final chapter, the author argues that the Heideggerian concept of temporality is apt to contribute to a new opening up of the dimension of futurity insofar as Heidegger's interpretation of time as "ek-static" leads to a re-evaluation of the past as dependent in its meaning on the advent of the future--a notion that has become all but extinct in the process of secularization. It is as though Heidegger offered a secular alternative to both the religious tradition of transcendence with its eschatological connotations and the loss of a teleological orientation of history in the wake of the scientific interpretation of the world. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

This article outlines three conceptions of culture: The normative, the anthropological, and the pragmatist. I advocate a pragmatist conception of culture as practices using the conceptual resources found in John Dewey's pragmatism. I argue that culture is not to be thought of as a distinct, non-natural ontological realm, but is nature as it directs itself intelligently through historically evolved social practices. In Dewey's pragmatism, culture is another name for human experience as a practical process. I further argue that we can (...) only have cultures if we presuppose the reality of certain moral values like truthfulness, justice, and respect for ritual. Finally, I argue that the deepest understanding of culture is a kind of practical rather than cognitive understanding. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Societies change; and sociology has, since its inception, described and evaluated these changes. This article proposes a revised theory of collective learning processes, a conceptual framework which addresses ways in which people make sense of and cope with change. Drawing on Habermas’ classic proposal, but shifting the focus from argumentation towards storytelling, it explains how certain articulations allow for collective learning processes (imagining more inclusive orders), while others block learning processes (imagining more exclusive orders). More specifically, the article points to (...) narrative genres (romance, tragedy, comedy and irony) which organize feelings and shape the social bond, proposing that ironic and tragic stories have the potential to trigger collective learning processes, while romantic and comic stories tend to block them. (shrink)

In _The Idealism of Freedom_, Klaus Vieweg argues for a Hegelian turn in philosophy: Hegel’s idealism of freedom contains a number of epoch-making ideas that articulate a new understanding of freedom, which still shape contemporary philosophy.

La menzogna è irrinunciabile per vincere in politica? Davi ci spiega quali sono i meccanismi di persuasione a cui ricorrono taluni politici per farsi eleggere e quali le responsabilità di quegli elettori che scelgono comunque di votare chi sostiene anche ciò che non può essere vero. È indubbio che la comunicazione politica si rifaccia al simbolismo e al linguaggio delle favole; non necessariamente per occultare la realtà, ma più direttamente per esprimere con maggiore efficacia il suo messaggio. Alle celebri favole (...) di 'Biancaneve', 'Cenerentola', 'Il brutto anatroccolo' sono ricorsi infatti uomini politici del calibro di Berlusconi, Prodi, Nixon, Carter, Mitterrand e partiti quali la Democrazia Cristiana; l'hanno fatto per conquistare voti ma anche per attivare ampi meccanismi di consenso che attingessero direttamente dall'inconscio collettivo. Le conseguenze - ammonisce l'autore - possono essere molto serie, come nel caso dell'attuale politica americana che ha portato la manipolazione e l'inganno a essere riconosciuti come tratti identitari della presidenza di George W. Bush. (shrink)

In this book, linguists and philosophers combine to offer a unique insight not only into Grice's contribution to philosophy of language, but on his theories of natural and non-natural meaning, implicatures and the semantic-pragmatic distinction.

We highlight the need to focus on the underlying determinants and production mechanisms to fully understand the nature of facial expression of emotion and to settle the theoretical debate about the meaning of motor expression. Although emotion theorists have generally remained rather vague about the details of the process, this has been a central concern of componential appraisal theories. We describe the fundamental assumptions and predictions of this approach regarding the patterning of facial expressions for different emotions. We also review (...) recent evidence for the assumption that specific facial muscle movements may be reliable symptoms of certain appraisal outcomes and that facial expressions unfold over time on the basis of a sequence of appraisal check results. (shrink)

Appraisal theories of emotion have had a strong impact on the development of theory and experimental research in the domain of the affective sciences. While there is generally a high degree of convergence between theorists in this tradition, some central issues are open to debate. In this contribution three issues have been chosen for discussion: (a) varieties of relevance detection, (b) varieties of valence appraisal, and (c) sequential-cumulative effects of appraisal results. In addressing these issues, new theoretical ideas are suggested (...) and an update of recent research on the sequence of appraisal processes is provided. Special emphasis is placed on nonverbal signatures of appraisal processes. (shrink)

I show that in his De motu animalium Aristoteles proposes a teleology of the practical on the most general zoological level, i.e. on the level common to humans and self-moving animals. A teleology of the practical is a teleological account of the highest practical goals of animal and human self-motion. I argue that Aristotle conceives of such highest practical goals as goals that are contingently related to their realizations. Animal and human self-motion is the kind of action in which certain (...) state of affairs that realize values are mechanized. (shrink)

Some authors have argued that legitimacy without authority is possible, though their work has not found much uptake in mainstream political philosophy. I provide an improved model how legitimate political institutions without authority are possible, the Transmission Model, which I couple with a thin substantive position, the Moral Value View. I defend the model against three common objections.

Aus dem Inhalt: Die transzendentallogische Funktion des Ich (Klaus Hammacher). - Du formel au transcendental: remarques sur l'itineraire de Husserl et de Fichte (Therese Pentzopoulou-Valalas). - Fichte und das Problem des intelligiblen Fatalismus (Georg Wallwitz). - Die Philosophie in Freiheit setzen: Freiheitsbegriff und Freiheit des Begriffs bei Schelling (Felix Duque).

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag analysiert auf der Basis theoretischer Überlegungen sowie empirischer Ergebnisse Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer „interkulturellen Öffnung“ von Sportvereinen, worunter Strukturanpassungen verstanden werden, die auf die Inklusion und Integration von Personen mit Migrationshintergrund zielen. Es wird gezeigt, inwiefern eine nachhaltige interkulturelle Öffnung der Vereine von der programmatischen Anbindung an den Vereinszweck, von der kontinuierlichen Behandlung in den Kommunikationswegen, von spezifischen Personalentscheidungen und der Kompatibilität mit der Organisationskultur abhängig ist.