Includes articles by: Ulrich Arnswald, Jens Kertscher, Matthias Kross, Thomas Macho, Walter Mesch, Dieter Mersch, Regine Munz, Hans Julius Schneider, Hans-Peter Schutt, Ilse Somavilla, Samuel C. Wheeler III, Anja Weiberg, Rüdiger Zill.

ZusammenfassungErinnerung ist für Wittgenstein ein komplexer Vorgang, der mit einer Vielzahl von Schwierigkeiten verbunden ist. Dies gilt besonders für seine Überlegungen zur Erinnerung einer Absicht – ein in der Wittgenstein-Literatur bis dato vernachlässigter Aspekt, obwohl er in diversen Manuskripten des Nachlasses hervorsticht. Nach Wittgenstein erlaubt uns der Erinnerungsvorgang nicht, uns eine vermeintliche Absicht „vor Augen zu führen“, dennoch verwenden wir den sprachlichen Ausdruck, um mittels einer Erinnerungsbeschreibung eine vergangene Absicht zu äußern. Nur was bringen wir damit aber zum Ausdruck? – (...) Da die Worte sich weder auf Tatsachen beziehen noch mit diesen korrespondieren, kommt es zur paradoxen Situation, dass jemand sich des Inhalts einer Absicht zu erinnern meint, nicht aber der einstigen Worte. Dies wirft im Umkehrschluss die Frage auf, was unter diesen Umständen die Artikulation der Erinnerung einer Absicht überhaupt aussagen soll und kann, und weiterhin, was der Unterschied zu einer gegenwärtigen Absichtserklärung ist. (shrink)

The criticism of neoliberalism is omnipresent. The term is seemingly self-explanatory, but its original use in public has been forgotten. Its form originated in the international movement of ordoliberalism in the 1930s, which used neoliberalism to describe its distinction from laissez-faire capitalism. This conceptual confusion has created considerable consequential problems that overlay today’s debate on the future of the market economy. The fact that the neoliberalism of the ordoliberals is today equated by its critics with the capitalism of the libertarians (...) raises questions. Since the economic dogma of Milton Friedman, who was the inspiration for the so-called Chicago Boys in Chile, whose economic policy was first captured by today’s negatively connoted term neoliberalism, this approach needs to be looked at more closely. Should the ideas of the Chicago school of thought substantially distinguish themselves from the other currents of economic liberalism, a solution to the confusion of terms could be possible, giving a new twist to the debate on the market economy. Such a clarifiation would be of fundamental importance for the ethical question of the social orientation of the economic order, since ordoliberalism was in turn the godfather of the social market economy. Furthermore, this would have consequences for applied political ethics in the context of political theories of justice, whose theoretical constructs reflect the existing economic order as a fact of experience. (shrink)

Coming from anarchist circles and revolutionary-syndicalist trade unions, Simone Weil initially saw herself as a Marxist and an anarchist, before increasingly becoming their early and extremely pointed critic. From 1933 on, she distanced herself more and more from the syndicalist movement in terms of content, and at the same time she was increasingly skeptical of its politics. She saw in the syndicalists, socialists, and communists no more accurate knowledge of society than in the conservatives or fascists. Moreover, she came to (...) realize that they did not have the necessary means of action to carry out a revolution. In the assertion of the "historical mission of the working class," she saw a phrase that served the functionaries but only further humiliated and betrayed the working class. In this respect, even Marxism was for Weil still the intellectual expression of the bourgeoisie, because even a change in property relations would not have eliminated the oppression of the working class. Until the end of her life, she held that instead a radical change in labor relations was necessary to end the oppression of the working class and its social misery. The article attempts to situate Simone Weil's early disillusionment with syndicalism, socialism, Marxism and Stalinism, as well as her recognition of what was widely labelled totalitarianism in Western societies at the latest after the Second World War, in her writings. (shrink)

Der interdisziplinäre "Wiener Kreis" (der "Wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung", des "Logischen Empirismus") entstand um Moritz Schlick im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit. Er ist bis heute nicht nur in den exakten Wissenschaften und der analytischen Philosophie allgegenwärtig. Er hat darüber hinaus Forschungsfelder wie Ökonomie, Architektur (Werkbund und Bauhaus), Psychologie (Gestalttheorie) oder moderner Literatur mitbestimmt. Seine Wirkung reicht von sozialen Reformbewegungen (Siedlerbewegung) bis in die Kunst der Neuen Sachlichkeit.

The essays collected in this volume explore some of the themes that have been at the centre of recent debates within Wittgensteinian scholarship. In opposition to what we are tentatively inclined to think, the articles of this volume invite us to understand that our need to grasp the essence of ethical and religious thought and language will not be achieved by metaphysical theories expounded from such a point of view, but by focusing on our everyday forms of expression.

Auf Thomas Hobbes geht die Feststellung zurück, Absurdität sei ein Privileg des Menschen: Nur ein rationales Wesen ist offensichtlich der Irrationalität fähig.

Hermeneutics can be understood on the one hand as the art of interpretation, and on the other hand as a medium for dealing with the past, for conveying events, contexts or even writings in new ways of speaking for new recipients. The interpretation of writings, however, places special demands on hermeneutics: it does not take place in a sterile vacuum, but is rather embedded in a social and cultural context that shapes the interpretation or mediation and is an expression of (...) a time, a fashion or a specific requirement of modernity. The question therefore arises as to what role reason and experience, science and/or social ideas, tradition(s) and/or community play in interpretation. Using Thomas More's masterpiece Utopia as an example, various resulting interpretative approaches to a concrete writing will be presented. Through the hermeneutic design of a historical horizon in relation to Thomas More's time as well as through the development of a historical awareness of the work, the possibility of an understanding of this world-famous, still controversial writing as well as the efficiency of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics will become recognisable. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungErinnerung ist für Wittgenstein ein komplexer Vorgang, der mit einer Vielzahl von Schwierigkeiten verbunden ist. Dies gilt besonders für seine Überlegungen zur Erinnerung einer Absicht – ein in der Wittgenstein-Literatur bis dato vernachlässigter Aspekt, obwohl er in diversen Manuskripten des Nachlasses hervorsticht. Nach Wittgenstein erlaubt uns der Erinnerungsvorgang nicht, uns eine vermeintliche Absicht „vor Augen zu führen“, dennoch verwenden wir den sprachlichen Ausdruck, um mittels einer Erinnerungsbeschreibung eine vergangene Absicht zu äußern. Nur was bringen wir damit aber zum Ausdruck? – (...) Da die Worte sich weder auf Tatsachen beziehen noch mit diesen korrespondieren, kommt es zur paradoxen Situation, dass jemand sich des Inhalts einer Absicht zu erinnern meint, nicht aber der einstigen Worte. Dies wirft im Umkehrschluss die Frage auf, was unter diesen Umständen die Artikulation der Erinnerung einer Absicht überhaupt aussagen soll und kann, und weiterhin, was der Unterschied zu einer gegenwärtigen Absichtserklärung ist. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungErinnerung ist für Wittgenstein ein komplexer Vorgang, der mit einer Vielzahl von Schwierigkeiten verbunden ist. Dies gilt besonders für seine Überlegungen zur Erinnerung einer Absicht – ein in der Wittgenstein-Literatur bis dato vernachlässigter Aspekt, obwohl er in diversen Manuskripten des Nachlasses hervorsticht. Nach Wittgenstein erlaubt uns der Erinnerungsvorgang nicht, uns eine vermeintliche Absicht „vor Augen zu führen“, dennoch verwenden wir den sprachlichen Ausdruck, um mittels einer Erinnerungsbeschreibung eine vergangene Absicht zu äußern. Nur was bringen wir damit aber zum Ausdruck? – (...) Da die Worte sich weder auf Tatsachen beziehen noch mit diesen korrespondieren, kommt es zur paradoxen Situation, dass jemand sich des Inhalts einer Absicht zu erinnern meint, nicht aber der einstigen Worte. Dies wirft im Umkehrschluss die Frage auf, was unter diesen Umständen die Artikulation der Erinnerung einer Absicht überhaupt aussagen soll und kann, und weiterhin, was der Unterschied zu einer gegenwärtigen Absichtserklärung ist. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungErinnerung ist für Wittgenstein ein komplexer Vorgang, der mit einer Vielzahl von Schwierigkeiten verbunden ist. Dies gilt besonders für seine Überlegungen zur Erinnerung einer Absicht – ein in der Wittgenstein-Literatur bis dato vernachlässigter Aspekt, obwohl er in diversen Manuskripten des Nachlasses hervorsticht. Nach Wittgenstein erlaubt uns der Erinnerungsvorgang nicht, uns eine vermeintliche Absicht „vor Augen zu führen“, dennoch verwenden wir den sprachlichen Ausdruck, um mittels einer Erinnerungsbeschreibung eine vergangene Absicht zu äußern. Nur was bringen wir damit aber zum Ausdruck? – (...) Da die Worte sich weder auf Tatsachen beziehen noch mit diesen korrespondieren, kommt es zur paradoxen Situation, dass jemand sich des Inhalts einer Absicht zu erinnern meint, nicht aber der einstigen Worte. Dies wirft im Umkehrschluss die Frage auf, was unter diesen Umständen die Artikulation der Erinnerung einer Absicht überhaupt aussagen soll und kann, und weiterhin, was der Unterschied zu einer gegenwärtigen Absichtserklärung ist. (shrink)

A wide-ranging collection of philosophical essays in honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Morality and economic rationality: integrative economic ethics as the rational ethics of economic activity; Part II. Reflections on the Foundations of Economic ...

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely (...) throughout social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological ...

By assembling authors with a wide range of different disciplinary backgrounds, from philosophy, literature, political science, sociology to medical anthropology ...

At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagination' so far has basically been a nation state imagination. The main problem is how to redefine the sociological frame of reference in the horizon of a cosmopolitan imagination. For the purpose of empirical research I distinguish between three concepts: interconnectedness, liquid modernity and cosmopolitization from within. The latter is a kind (...) of class analysis after class analysis, which takes on board globalization internalized. For the purposes of social analysis, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish systematically between the national manifestation on the one hand and cosmopolitan reality of `global flows', currents of information, symbols, money, risks, people, social inequalities, on the other. This internal involuntary and often unseen cosmopolitanization from below of the national sphere of experience is occurring, however, with the power of economic globalization. So what does inner `cosmopolitanization' mean? The key concepts and questions of a way of life, such as nourishment, production, identity, fear, memory, pleasure, fate, power and politics, can no longer be located and understood nationally, but only globally whether in the shape of globally shared collective futures, capital flows, impending ecological or economic catastrophes, global foodstuff chains, transnational power games, or the `Esperanto' of pop music. In this article I look at transformation in the understanding of space-time, of identity, of the production paradigms, as well as at the resulting consequences for key sociological concepts like class and power and, within this frame, point to certain dilemmas of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

How can one distinguish the concept of second modernity from the concept of postmodernity? Postmodernists are interested in deconstruction without reconstruction, second modernity is about deconstruction and reconstruction. Social sciences need to construct new concepts to understand the world dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century. Modernity has not vanished, we are not post it. Radical social change has always been part of modernity. What is new is that modernity has begun to modernize its own foundations. This is what (...) it means to say modernity has become reflexive. It has become directed at itself. This causes huge new problems both in reality and in theory. There has been a pluralization of the boundaries within and between societies, between society and nature, between Us and Other, between life and death. This pluralization also changes the inherent nature of boundaries. They become not so much boundaries as a variety of attempts to draw of boundaries. Border conflicts become transformed into conflicts over the drawing of boundaries. Where postmodernism simply celebrates this multiplication of boundaries, the theory of second modernity starts with the problem this new reality poses for individual and collective decisions, and with the problem that the continued existence of such decisions poses for theory. Institutions that are capable of such conscious boundary drawing are enabled in a way that those of the first modernity were not. But this process also generates qualitatively new kinds of trouble and crises. To investigate those troubles is to unveil the emergence of the second modernity. (shrink)

An original analysis of the parallels between the arrested moment in photography and in the traumatized psyche.

Berger, U., Total sets and objects in domain theory, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 60 91-117. Total sets and objects generalizing total functions are introduced into the theory of effective domains of Scott and Ersov. Using these notions Kreisel's Density Theorem and the Theorem of Kreisel-Lacombe-Shoenfield are generalized. As an immediate consequence we obtain the well-known continuity of computable functions on the constructive reals as well as a domain-theoretic characterization of the Heriditarily Effective Operations.

This article opens with general and historical remarks on philosophy of science's problems with the concept of discovery. Then, drawing upon simple examples of Watson's and Crick's non-philosophical usage, I characterize phrases of the type "x discovers y" semantically. It will subsequently be shown how widespread philosophical discussion on discovery violates the semantic constraints of phrases of the type "x discovers y." Then I provide a philosophical reconstruction of "x discovers y" that is in keeping with the "folk" notion of (...) discovery. The philosophical ingredients of this approach are taken from a certain aspect of action theory and from epistemological reliabilism. The approach draws upon the concept of superior action and connects this concept to progressive research. In contrast to normal actions, superior actions are primarily explained by competencies. This perspective includes reminders of what some nineteenth-century philosopher-scientists had advocated as a competence-oriented view on scientific research. Finally, this approach is applied to the case of Watson's and Crick's discovery. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagination' so far has basically been a nation state imagination. The main problem is how to redefine the sociological frame of reference in the horizon of a cosmopolitan imagination. For the purpose of empirical research I distinguish between three concepts: interconnectedness , liquid modernity and cosmopolitization from within. The latter is a (...) kind of class analysis after class analysis, which takes on board globalization internalized. For the purposes of social analysis, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish systematically between the national manifestation on the one hand and cosmopolitan reality of `global flows', currents of information, symbols, money, risks, people, social inequalities, on the other. This internal involuntary and often unseen cosmopolitanization from below of the national sphere of experience is occurring, however, with the power of economic globalization. So what does inner `cosmopolitanization' mean? The key concepts and questions of a way of life, such as nourishment, production, identity, fear, memory, pleasure, fate, power and politics, can no longer be located and understood nationally, but only globally whether in the shape of globally shared collective futures, capital flows, impending ecological or economic catastrophes, global foodstuff chains, transnational power games, or the `Esperanto' of pop music. In this article I look at transformation in the understanding of space-time, of identity, of the production paradigms, as well as at the resulting consequences for key sociological concepts like class and power and, within this frame, point to certain dilemmas of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

The discourse on climate politics so far is an expert and elitist discourse in which peoples, societies, citizens, workers, voters and their interests, views and voices are very much neglected. So, in order to turn climate change politics from its head onto its feet you have to take sociology into account. There is an important background assumption which shares in the general ignorance concerning environmental issues and, paradoxically, this is in corporated in the specialism of environmental sociology itself — this (...) is the category of ‘the environment’. If ‘the environment’ only includes everything which is not human, not social, then the concept is sociologically empty. If the concept includes human action and society, then it is scientifically mistaken and politically suicidal. (shrink)

Das Buch weist die Fruchtbarkeit einer strukturgenetisch fundierten Rekonstruktionsperspektive für die Analyse der historisch und kulturell differenten Weltbilder nach. Anhand der für die Geschichte der Denksysteme zentralen Vorstellungen über die Natur-Kultur-Differenz und die physikalische Kausalität werden Reichweite und Grenzen der These einer universalen Entwicklungslogik kritische geprüft. Die historischen Studien bieten dabei einen neuartigen Blick auf die Aristotelische Physik und ihre mittelalterlichen Fortentwicklungen. Schließlich werden die materialen Ergebnisse in Richtung einer differenztheoretisch orientierten Theorie der Entstehung des Neuen in der Entwicklung ausgedeutet.

Ulrich Meyer defends a novel theory about the nature of time, and argues against the consensus view that time and space are fundamentally alike. He presents the first comprehensive defense of a 'modal' account, which emphasizes the similarities between times and possible worlds in modal logic, and is easily reconciled with the theory of relativity.