This article refers to Kierkegaard’s complex Christian apologetics. Several of his works, mainly those stemming from the ‘second authorship’, are interpreted under the aspect of Kierkegaard’s paradoxical defense of Christianity, aimed in particular, not against the so-called ‘heathens’, but against those who self-confidently advance its credibility on dubious grounds. To substantiate the importance of this defense it is shown that it has recently received a noteworthy actuality in the light of a ‘newly arisen superior tone in philosophy’; a tone voiced (...) by ‘enthusiasts’ of a religiously inspired social ethics of recognition, friendship, community, Bildung and tradition. Their concern is about the ‘malaise of modernity’, the excessive liberalism and individualism of contemporary culture, for which religion supposedly is the sollution. Their critique is confronted with Kierkegaard’s ethos of suspense and his concept of ‘armed neutrality’. Judged from this existential religious perspective, the enthusiasts are defending a revaluation and resurrection of what is merely a pseudo-Christian spirit. They represent a ‘spiritual materialism’ unconsciously inspired by the hidden and repressed offense they take to the a-social ‘verticality’ of Christianity, in particularly to the Christian dogmas with respect to the subject of sin and love. (shrink)

The chapters in this book offer an in-depth and profound overview of Hegel’s daring, many-faceted philosophical interpretations of the multifarious and dialectically interrelated, historical religions, including the Islam and the ‘revealed’ religion of Christianity.

Dit boek biedt een kritische inleiding in de godsdienstfilosofie, aan de hand van een confrontatie tussen enerzijds G.W.F. Hegels filosofie van de monotheïstische religies en anderzijds godsdienstwetenschappelijke inzichten in en vanuit de godsdiensten zelf. Het doel is te komen tot een wijsgerige verheldering van wat deze religies kenmerkt. Wat kan een filosofische benadering van de verschillende godsdiensten, zoals die van Hegel, bijdragen aan een beter begrip ervan? Hoe zou de godsdienstfilosofie een rol kunnen spelen in het actuele debat over religie, (...) en de verhouding daarvan tot de grondslagen van recht en politiek? De manier waarop we over God denken en dus hoe we geloven, beïnvloedt onze moraal en ons recht, de wetten die we maken en de wijze waarop we die toepassen. Hegel had veel op met het christendom. In zijn ogen vormde het christelijk geloof ten opzichte van andere, eerdere godsdiensten een vervolmaking en een voltooiing van de religie. Filosofisch bezien is het christendom de religie van vrijheid en van verzoening van God en de mens met elkaar. Alle godsdiensten die voorafgingen aan het christendom, beschouwt hij als beperkter en eenzijdiger: de ‘ware geest’ is daarin nog onvoldoende ontwikkeld. Deze hoogst controversiële claim wordt in dit boek aan een nader, kritisch onderzoek onderworpen. (shrink)

The chapters in this book offer an in-depth and profound overview of Hegel’s daring, many-faceted philosophical interpretations of the multifarious and dialectically interrelated, historical religions, including the Islam and the ...

This book explores the spiritual potential of faith, mysticism and transcendence in answer to the dangers of a mythologised state and the sacro-sanctification of (liberal) democracy and its rule of law. It searches for a curative for the pathological transformation of these institutions into--so called--political religions. Along this line, it explores the importance of spirituality and transcendence for political legitimacy, democratic participation and international cooperation, law and politics. There being no general agreed-upon definition of 'spirituality', the authors examine what may (...) be seen as 'spiritual' dimensions of the political. These dimensions have in common a focus on transcendence as a vanishing point of rationality and rational justification. This vanishing point may become manifest, for example, in a primordial requisite of becoming an individual person; in responding--in freedom--to the call of theocracy; in the phenomenon of prophecy or political wisdom; in the remaining shards of formerly all-pervasive religious institutions; in tenacious hope for a democracy-to-come; in the courageous resilience and resistance of citizens of 'non-' or 'un-democratic' states; etc."--Page 4 of back cover. (shrink)

We introduce a framework for a graph-theoretic analysis of the semantic paradoxes. Similar frameworks have been recently developed for infinitary propositional languages by Cook and Rabern, Rabern, and Macauley. Our focus, however, will be on the language of first-order arithmetic augmented with a primitive truth predicate. Using Leitgeb’s notion of semantic dependence, we assign reference graphs (rfgs) to the sentences of this language and define a notion of paradoxicality in terms of acceptable decorations of rfgs with truth values. It is (...) shown that this notion of paradoxicality coincides with that of Kripke. In order to track down the structural components of an rfg that are responsible for paradoxicality, we show that any decoration can be obtained in a three-stage process: first, the rfg is unfolded into a tree, second, the tree is decorated with truth values (yielding a dependence tree in the sense of Yablo), and third, the decorated tree is re-collapsed onto the rfg. We show that paradoxicality enters the picture only at stage three. Due to this we can isolate two basic patterns necessary for paradoxicality. Moreover, we conjecture a solution to the characterization problem for dangerous rfgs that amounts to the claim that basically the Liar- and the Yablo graph are the only paradoxical rfgs. Furthermore, we develop signed rfgs that allow us to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ reference and obtain more fine-grained versions of our results for unsigned rfgs. (shrink)

In Vagaries of Desire, Timo Airaksinen develops a new philosophical account of desire understood as mental state that focuses on a desirable possible world. Literary and philosophical themes, including sexuality, are discussed in terms of their metaphoric and metonymic features.

The same method that creates adversarial examples to fool image-classifiers can be used to generate counterfactual explanations that explain algorithmic decisions. This observation has led researchers to consider CEs as AEs by another name. We argue that the relationship to the true label and the tolerance with respect to proximity are two properties that formally distinguish CEs and AEs. Based on these arguments, we introduce CEs, AEs, and related concepts mathematically in a common framework. Furthermore, we show connections between current (...) methods for generating CEs and AEs, and estimate that the fields will merge more and more as the number of common use-cases grows. (shrink)

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is, with John Locke and David Hume, one of the three major figures in the British empiricist school of philosophy. He has been the centre of much attention recently and his philosophical profile has gradually changed. In the 20th century he was almost exclusively known for his denial of the existence of matter (as this term was defined in those days), but today it is no longer reasonable to confine an account of Berkeley to the challenging philosophical (...) inventions that he published when he was a young fellow at Trinity College in Dublin. This is a welcome trend. It shows Berkeley as a contributor not only to epistemology, metaphysics and moral and social philosophy, but also to a wide range of subjects including mathematics, philosophy of science, empirical psychology, political economy and monetary policy. The present collection aims at meeting this new trend by presenting a broad and comprehensive picture of Berkeley's works in their historical context. The contributors are some of the finest international experts in the field. The editors hope that this collection will show George Berkeley as he was: a wide-ranging, widely influential and courageous philosophical innovator. This volume has been published to celebrate the 300th anniversary of George Berkeley's Principles. (shrink)

George Berkeley's Siris (1744) has been a neglected work, for many reasons. Some of them are good and some bad. The book is difficult to decipher, mainly because of its ancient metaphysics. He talks about the world as an animal or plant. He speculates about man as a microcosm which is analogous to the universe as a macrocosm. He recommends tar-water as a universal medicine. This was understandable in his own time. But Siris is also a Newtonian treatise which both (...) criticizes and develops important physical and chemical theories. Berkeley's own contribution is formulated in terms of light and fire. I study these arguments in detail. It is also clear that Siris is no longer an immaterialist treatise. The doctrine of ideas is not so important to him any more. However, he never changed his doctrine of causality. I analyze several versions of it. This looks like his lasting main contribution to the philosophy of science. And causality is also theologically crucial, as I try to show. We must keep in mind the fact that Berkeley might have been interesting in the contemporary science, but he insisted that science must ultimately be ruled by religion. Science is never an autonomous or sovereign field of human enterprise. (shrink)

Two Dogmas of Rorty's Pragmatism Here I discuss two controversial distinctions that have an essential role in Rorty's pragmatism: the distinction between descriptive and normative discourses, and the distinction between the private and public dimensions of human life. Neither of them is Rorty's novelty, but the way he stresses them is unique. The first is a central presupposition of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), while the other is the argumentative base of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). I (...) will argue that the distinctions provide metaphilosophical tools for Rorty's pragmatism, and that our stance towards the latter depends on the plausibility of them. (shrink)

The role of uncertainty within an organization’s environment features prominently in the business ethics and management literature, but how corporate investment decisions should proceed in the face of uncertainties relating to the natural environment is less discussed. From the perspective of ecological economics, the salience of ecology-induced issues challenges management to address new types of uncertainties. These pertain to constraints within the natural environment as well as to institutional action aimed at conserving the natural environment. We derive six areas of (...) ecology-induced uncertainties and propose ecology-driven real options as a conceptual approach for systematically incorporating these uncertainties into strategic management. We combine our results in an integrative investment framework and illustrate its application with the case of carbon constraints. (shrink)

The chapter tackles the complex, tension-ridden, and often paradoxical relationship between relativism and conservatism. We focus particularly on radical conservatism, an early twentieth-century German movement that arguably constitutes the climax of conservatism’s problematic relationship with relativism. We trace the shared genealogy of conservatism and historicism in nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment thought and interpret radical conservatism’s ambivalent relation to relativism as reflecting this heritage. Emphasizing national particularity, historical uniqueness, and global political plurality, Carl Schmitt and Hans Freyer moved in the tradition of historicism, (...) stopping short of full relativism. Yet they utilized relativistic elements – such as seeing irrational decisions or the demands of “life” as the basis of politics – to discredit notions of universal political morality and law, thereby underpinning their authoritarian agendas. Oswald Spengler, by contrast, took the relativistic impulses to the extreme, interweaving his conservative authoritarianism and nationalism with full-fledged epistemic, moral, and political relativism. Martin Heidegger has recently been perceived as the key philosopher of radical conservatism, and his thought arguably channeled antimodern aspects of historicism into contemporary political thought. We conclude by analyzing how some radical conservative arguments involving cultural relativism and plurality still reverberate in contemporary theorists such as Samuel Huntington, Aleksandr Dugin, and Alain de Benoist. (shrink)

The same method that creates adversarial examples to fool image-classifiers can be used to generate counterfactual explanations that explain algorithmic decisions. This observation has led researchers to consider CEs as AEs by another name. We argue that the relationship to the true label and the tolerance with respect to proximity are two properties that formally distinguish CEs and AEs. Based on these arguments, we introduce CEs, AEs, and related concepts mathematically in a common framework. Furthermore, we show connections between current (...) methods for generating CEs and AEs, and estimate that the fields will merge more and more as the number of common use-cases grows. (shrink)

In dieser rekonstruktiv angelegten qualitativen Analyse wird aus systemtheoretischer Perspektive der Sozialfigur Vater nachgegangen. Ausgehend von einer historisch-genetischen Rekonstruktion der Fremdbeschreibung der gepflegten Vater-Semantik seit der Antike bis ins 21. Jahrhundert werden 14 Väter in problemzentrierten Interviews auf ihre Selbstbeschreibung hin dokumentarisch analysiert. Als Ergebnisse der Forschungsarbeit werden neben gegenwärtigen kommunikativen Spielräumen auch Rekursionen auf die im ersten Teil der Arbeit herausgestellte gepflegte Semantik deutlich, die im Sinne eines Trampelpfads komplexe Verweisungsstrukturen des kommunikativ Sagbaren abstecken. Der AutorTimo Burger war bis (...) 2017 wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft der JGU Mainz. Seit 2019 ist er Studienrat am Berufsbildungszentrum in Grevenbroich mit den Fächern Sozialpädagogik und Politik/Wirtschaftskunde. (shrink)

The monograph tells a different story on the history of modern philosophy: the narrative is no longer centred on the question whether knowledge results from experience or reason, but whether experience and reason are in fact possible without language.

The year 2017 marks fifteen years for me as a fashion educator in Australia and the United States, nine of those in a full-time capacity. My research has focused on various facets of fashion and sustainability for almost as long. In that time many positive developments have occurred, among them, the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate action and the formation of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition in 2010, to name two. Yet an immense amount of urgent work remains. Wallace-Wells presents an (...) apocalyptic near-future caused by anthropogenic global warming;1 within two weeks the online version of the article became New York Magazine's most read in history. It is worth reading in tandem with Rockström et al.,2 as the latter... (shrink)

In diesem Buch werden die wichtigsten musikphilosophischen Grundbegriffe neu definiert. Der Autor entwickelt ein kohärentes Begriffssystem, das die präzise Beschreibung musikalischer Phänomene ermöglicht. Die Untersuchung kulminiert in einer ausdifferenzierten Theorie der musikalischen Improvisation, die deren Erscheinungsformen zum ersten Mal in ihrer Vielgestaltigkeit umfassend charakterisiert und in ihrem systematischen Zusammenhang erläutert.

In Reinhart Koselleck's history of concepts, the general orientation that concepts are to be understood in their proper contexts is intertwined with the assumption that they are manifestations of particular political conflicts. The essay shows that the dense compound of context and conflict in Koselleck's thought springs from Carl Schmitt's political theory and also forms an important point of continuity between Koselleck's early work and his later methodological writings. The formalized assumption of conflict, somewhat problematically, binds Koselleckian conceptual history to (...) a particular conception of politics, one that sees politics ultimately as struggle and conflict. Once the historical-theoretical contingency of this conception is recognized, it becomes both possible and necessary to reassess the role of conflict in the methodology of conceptual history. (shrink)

The article analyzes the work of Hanno Kesting, Reinhart Koselleck, Roman Schnur, and Nicolaus Sombart—four young followers of Carl Schmitt in postwar Germany. Their “intellectual Schmittianism” was less than a full commitment to Schmitt’s political positions, yet had more than an arbitrary similarity with them: it pertained to assumptions, categories, and modes of thought. Drawing on Pocock’s terminology, I identify a particular “language” of intellectual Schmittianism, introduce its key components, and analyze their interaction. I focus on six categories derived from (...) Schmitt’s narrative of European political modernity: discrimination, historical parallels, secularization, global civil war, open/latent civil war, and category blurs. The analysis shows that these categories were interlinked argumentative devices rather than mere rhetoric and that they systematically upheld the postwar scholars’ arguments. While the Schmittian language enabled the young scholars to express their political skepticis... (shrink)

The most serious objection to Beall and Restall’s case-based logical pluralism is the so-called collapse argument. According to the collapse argument, logical pluralism is not genuinely pluralistic and collapses into a single privileged relation of logical consequence. In response, Caret offered an account of logical contextualism that supposedly maintains the merits of Beall and Restall’s case-based logical pluralism while circumventing the collapse argument. In this paper, I first point out a gap in the collapse argument in that it does not (...) affect pluralists who assume that there is no uniquely strongest admissible consequence relation. This gap, then, is closed by an improved version of the collapse argument, which makes use of Eklund’s classification of types of pluralism. Finally, I discuss how Caret’s logical contextualism cannot hold up against this new formulation of the collapse argument unless implausible assumptions about the contents of normative operators are made. Moreover, by reformulating the collapse argument, I determine the extent to which logical monism and pluralism oppose each other, paving the way for fruitful future discussion. (shrink)

According to Husserl’s self-description, his phenomenological project was “completely apolitical.” Husserl’s phenomenology did not provide a political philosophy in the classical sense, a normative description of a functioning social order and its respective institutional structures. Nor did Husserl have much to say about the day-to-day politics of his time. Yet his reflections on community and culture were not completely without political implications. This article deals with an often-neglected strand of Husserl’s philosophy, namely his critique of liberalism. In this article, liberalism (...) is understood in the manner of Leo Strauss, as a tradition of individualist philosophy emerging from Hobbes’s political thought. As the article shows, Husserl followed many of his contemporaries in criticizing Hobbes’s abstract individualism, which could provide only a preventative function for political institutions. More importantly, Husserl’s engagement with Hobbes can be understood as a kind of ethical counterpart to his analysis of Galileo in the Crisis, as a critique of formal apriorism in the political domain. What Galileo did for physical nature with his “garb of ideas,” Hobbes did for human nature, reducing human sociality to interactions between atomistic individuals. In doing so, Hobbes ended up presenting a “mathematics of sociality” in an empirical garb. Going against the liberal view of the human person, Husserl presented his theory of social ethics founded on an original co-existence of subjects and a theory of human renewal. (shrink)

Large-scale, interoperable biobanks are an increasingly important asset in today's life science research and, as a result, multiple types of biobanks are being established around the globe with very different financial, organizational and legal set-ups. With interdisciplinary chapters written by lawyers, sociologists, doctors and biobank practitioners, Global Genes, Local Concerns identifies and discusses the most pressing issues in contemporary biobanking.This timely book addresses pressing questions such as: how do national biobanks best contribute to translational research?; What are the opportunities and (...) challenges that current regulations present for translational use of biobanks?; How does inter-biobank coordination and collaboration occur on various levels?; and how could academic and industrial exploitation, ownership and IPR issues be addressed and facilitated? Identifying that biobanks' foundational and operational set-ups should be legally and ethically sound, while at the same time reflecting the hopes and concerns of all the involved stakeholders, this book contributes to the continued development of international biobanking by highlighting and analysing the complexities in this important area of research.Academics in the fields of law and ethics, health law and biomedical law, as well as biobank managers and policymakers will find this insightful book a stimulating and engaging read. (shrink)

Intonation plays an integral role in comprehending spoken language. Listeners can rapidly integrate intonational information to predictively map a given pitch accent onto the speaker's likely referential intentions. We use mouse tracking to investigate two questions: (a) how listeners draw predictive inferences based on information from intonation? and (b) how listeners adapt their online interpretation of intonational cues when these are reliable or unreliable? We formulate a novel Bayesian model of rational predictive cue integration and explore predictions derived under a (...) concrete linking hypothesis relating a quantitative notion of evidential strength of a cue to the moment in time, relative to the unfolding speech signal, at which mouse trajectories turn towards the eventually selected option. In order to capture rational belief updates after concrete observations of a speaker's behavior, we formulate and explore an extension of this model that includes the listener's hierarchical beliefs about the speaker's likely production behavior. Our results are compatible with the assumption that listeners rapidly and rationally integrate all available intonational information, that they expect reliable intonational information initially, and that they adapt these initial expectations gradually during exposition to unreliable input. All materials, data, and scripts can be retrieved here: https://osf.io/dnbuk/. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungPflegende und Ärzte haben in der beruflichen Alltagspraxis unterschiedliche Perspektiven. Dies zeigt sich insbesondere in ethisch relevanten Entscheidungssituationen, in denen sie oft zu grundlegend unterschiedlichen Urteilen kommen. Aus dieser „Unterschiedlichkeit der Perspektiven“ können in der beruflichen Alltagspraxis mitunter erhebliche Dissonanzen entstehen, die einer konstruktiven Zusammenarbeit im Wege stehen. Die vorliegende Arbeit will zum einen den in der Praxis der klinischen Ethik gewonnenen Eindruck und die daraus formulierte These einer „perspektivischen Differenz“ empirisch nachweisen. Um dies zu leisten, wurde am Universitätsklinikum Frankfurt (...) eine quantitative Erhebung durchgeführt. Zum anderen sollen die empirischen Ergebnisse zur Erklärung in einem weiteren theoretischen Kontext verortet werden. Hierfür wird im Anschluss an Bourdieu das Habituskonzept rekonstruiert, um zu erklären, warum die perspektivische Differenz weder unmittelbar wahrgenommen wird noch ohne weiteres überwunden werden kann. Die These der perspektivischen Differenz wird durch die empirische Studie gestützt. Dieser Sachverhalt ist insbesondere vor dem Hintergrund der habitustheoretischen Rekonstruktion von erheblicher Relevanz für die klinische Ethik, die einerseits Verfahren zur diskursiven Bearbeitung ethischer Konflikte in der klinischen Praxis und andererseits Konzepte für die medizinethische Fortbildung anbietet. (shrink)

The theory of the organism-environment system starts with the proposition that in any functional sense organism and environment are inseparable and form only one unitary system. The organism cannot exist without the environment and the environment has descriptive properties only if it is connected to the organism. Although for practical purposes we do separate organism and environment, this common-sense starting point leads in psychological theory to problems which cannot be solved. Therefore, separation of organism and environment cannot be the basis (...) of any scientific explanation of human behavior. The theory leads to a reinterpretation of basic problems in many fields of inquiry and makes possible the definition of mental phenomena without their reduction either to neural or biological activity or to separate mental functions. According to the theory, mental activity is activity of the whole organism-environment system, and the traditional psychological concepts describe only different aspects of organisation of this system. Therefore, mental activity cannot be separated from the nervous system, but the nervous system is only one part of the organism­environment system. This problem will be dealt with in detail in the second part of the article. (shrink)

A diagnostic judgment of a teacher can be seen as an inference from manifest observable evidence on a student’s behavior to his or her latent traits. This can be described by a Bayesian model of in-ference: The teacher starts from a set of assumptions on the student (hypotheses), with subjective probabilities for each hypothesis (priors). Subsequently, he or she uses observed evidence (stu-dents’ responses to tasks) and knowledge on conditional probabilities of this evidence (likelihoods) to revise these assumptions. Many systematic (...) deviations from this model (biases, e.g. base-rate neglect, inverse fallacy) are reported in literature on Bayesian reasoning. In a teacher’s situation the information (hypotheses, priors, likelihoods) is usually not explicitly represented numerically (as in most research on Bayesian reasoning), but only by qualitative esti-mations in the mind of the teacher. In our study, we ask to which extent individuals (approximately) apply a rational Bayesian strategy or resort on other biased strategies of processing information for their diagnostic judgments. We explicitly pose this question with respect to non-numerical settings. To investigate this question, we developed a scenario that visually displays all relevant information (hypotheses, priors, likelihoods) in a graphically displayed hypothesis space (called “hypothegon”) – without recurring to numerical representations or mathematical procedures. 42 pre-service teach-ers were asked to judge the plausibility of different misconceptions of six students based on their responses to decimal comparison tasks (e.g. 3.39 > 3.4). Applying a Bayesian classification proce-dure, we identified three updating strategies: A Bayesian update strategy (BUS, processing all probabilities), a combined evidence strategy (CES, ignoring the prior probabilities but including all likelihoods), and a single evidence strategy (SES, only using the likelihood of the most probable hypothesis). In study 1, an instruction on the relevance of using all probabilities (priors and likelihoods) only weakly increased the processing of more information. In study 2, we found strong evidence that a visual explication of the prior-likelihood interaction led to an increase of processing the interaction of all relevant information. These results show that the phenomena found in general research on Bayesian reasoning in numerical settings extend to diagnostic judgments in non-numerical settings. (shrink)

Throughout its history, the relationship of phenomenology to historical reflection has appeared ambiguous. On the one hand, phenomenology—with the help of its founding figures—gave a promise to return from the world-historical speculations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the phenomenon of lived historicity, that is, to the question of how historical time is experienced within the life of the individual. On the other hand, phenomenology could not resist the temptation to critically reconsider some of the fundamental historical narratives that (...) define our modern self-understanding—narratives that concerned the revolutionary effect of the natural sciences , the birth of the subject .. (shrink)

The devices with which experimental economists account for and justify their own and their opponents’ views are investigated by examining transcripts of interviews with two participants in experimental economics. The earlier investigations of natural scientists’ discourse provide material for comparisons. The results suggest that in assessing an opponent’s deviating view experimentalists in economics can be more cautious than natural scientists to characterize their opponents as influenced by personal and social factors. Indeed, they seem to admit that to some extent both (...) their own and their opponents’ behavior involves these influences. Regarding the development of disputes, the respondents constructed accounts where general optimism concerning the ability of empirical arguments to resolve disputes was linked with an idea of dialogues between theorists and experimentalists as vehicles of progress. (shrink)

In this paper I criticise Axel Honneth's reactualization of reification as a concept in critical theory in his 2005 Tanner Lectures and argue that he ultimately fails on his own terms. His account is based on two premises: (1) reification is to be taken literally rather than metaphorically, and (2) it is not conceived of as a moral injury but as a social pathology. Honneth concludes that reification is ?forgetfulness of recognition?, more specifically, of antecedent recognition, an emphatic and engaged (...) relationship with oneself, others and the world, which precedes any more concrete relationship both genetically and categorially. I argue against this conception of reification on two grounds. (1) The two premises of Honneth's account cannot be squared with one another. It is not possible to literally take a person as a thing without this being a recognisable moral injury, and, therefore, I suggest that there are no cases of literal reification. (2) Honneth's account is essentially ahistorical, because it is based on an anthropological model of recognition that tacitly equates reification with autism. In conclusion, I suggest that any successful account of reification must (i) take reification metaphorically and (ii) offer a social-historical account of the origin(s) of reification. (shrink)

This article considers the possibility of articulating a renewed understanding of the principle of political idealism on the basis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. By taking its point of departure from one of the most interesting political applications of Husserl’s phenomenological method, the ordoliberal tradition of the so-called Freiburg School of Economics, the article raises the question of the normative implications of Husserl’s eidetic method. Contrary to the “static” idealism of the ordoliberal tradition, the article proposes that the phenomenological concept of (...) political idealism ought to be understood as a fundamentally dynamic principle. As opposed to the classical understanding of political idealism as the implementation of a particular normative model—political utopianism—the phenomenological reformulation of this idea denoted a radically critical principle of self-reflection that can only be realized on the basis of perpetual renewal. In order to illustrate this point, the article considers Husserl’s distinction between two types of ideals of perfection, the absolute and the relative, and argues for their relevance for political philosophy. (shrink)

Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity presents Ricoeur’s work from the beginning to its end in form of a cultural theory and proposes a cultural hermeneutic that clarifies the cultural facilitation in a person’s process of attaining a sense of being a human. This exploration of human being as profoundly formed and influenced by the cultural condition also enables a new understanding of intercultural questions by revealing the common human condition that the various cultures manifest.