The Owl is pleased and proud to honor Fritz Marti, America’s pre-eminent Schelling scholar, on his ninetieth birthday, January 1, 1984, by publishing the following essay as testimony to the uncommon depth, breadth, and originality of his thought.

In English, little has been available of Fichte’s works. In 1873, Trübner in London brought out a volume of Popular Works containing a biographic memoir by the translator, William Smith, and three essays of Fichte’s: The Nature of the Scholar, The Vocation of Man and the Doctrine of Religion. In 1889, in a fourth edition of two volumes, there were three additions: The Vocation of the Scholar, The Characteristics of the Present Age and the score of pages of Outlines of (...) the Doctrine of Knowledge of 1810. Recently, the Addresses to the German Nation, of 1808, came out as a Harper Torchbook. (shrink)

The last few decades there is quite a revival of Schelling studies. Adding to the thousand titles in Guido Schneeberger’s Bibliographie on Schelling Hans Jörg Sandkühler’s book on Schelling lists over three hundred bibliographic items for 1954–1970 alone.

In the second part of these aphorisms, starting at about Aphorism 121, Schelling sketches the traits of his Naturphilosophie. The total of the two hundred and twenty-four aphorisms can rightly bear the title of an Introduction to Naturphilosophie. But when I here present a translation of only the first eighty, I ought to warn the reader that she or he will not find Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, but rather an emphatic introduction to the method of philosophizing and more especially a short “negative (...) theology,” that is, an instruction in what not to do when theologizing. I hope that theologians unfamiliar with the German original will find my translation useful, and that it will challenge philosophers to revise a still current notion that Fichte provides one half of philosophy and Schelling the other. (shrink)

This is an announcement, not a review. A review would require a study in depth, an item by item checking of all passages in a widespread literature to which the 1550 footnotes refer and, above all, a thorough familiarity with the work of Schelling and a lot of his contemporaries. I believe it would mean the work of a year. Then only could the reviewer offer a reasoned though perhaps concise evaluation of this book, whose printing was finished September 18, (...) 1973. (shrink)

These are handsome tomes, 7 x 10”, bound in spring green cloth, printed on good heavy paper, with restful clear type pleasingly arranged on the page with broad margins, so that to see the page is a joy. Rosters on the inner margins make it easy to look up a line indicated by its number.

Fritz Marti is a “true believer” in the transcendental method of philosophy pioneered by Fichte and modified by Schelling. With it he links the Augustinian religious theme that at the very center of our own self-conscious life we can encounter God who is our ground. Marti ranges freely between these Augustinian and idealist anchors, reading intervening figures such as Descartes and Kant in their terms. The result is his own vital personal testimony, a philosophico-religious “profession of faith” (...) that illumines the powerful attraction this strand of German idealism had, and still has, for many. Marti began his philosophical education with Fichte, and still employs Fichte’s insights to carry out transcendentally the analysis of the free, self-conscious “I” that Augustine initiated. But Marti also turns to Schelling for what Fichte’s analysis largely neglects, namely, a developed idealistic account of God as ground of the self’s freedom, and serious attention to human encounters with God in the history of religion. (shrink)

With regard to the acta Dei, Fritz Marti rightly tells us that God named himself “I am,” the One who is present, adsum, the One who Acts. Could we not add that God is the One who forces us to act, whose very presence is the necessitating ground of our being? How deeply Augustine grasped this reality of being before God, how intensely he felt the desire to believe in the reality of his unbelief. “For I kept saying (...) within myself, ‘Lo, let it be now, let it be now’ ecce modo fiat, modo fiat, and as I uttered the phrase I was on the brink of resolution. I was on the point of action and I acted not and yet I did not fall back to my former state but stood hard by and drew breath. And I tried again and came a little nearer, yet a little nearer, and now I was all but touching and grasping it; and I did not reach or touch or grasp it, as I shrank from dying unto death, and from living unto life and the worse which was ingrained grew stronger in me than the better which was untrained, plusque in me valebat deterius inolitum, quam melius insolitum, and that very instant which was to make me another man struck greater terror into me, the nearer it approached; but neither repelled nor daunted me but kept me in suspense”. Before God the opposites that control our existence are felt with pain and fear, the longing to turn toward God is challenged by the forces that turn us from God, the movement toward bears within it the movement away, the escape, the need to flee and reject. How weak we discover our faith to be, how powerful we find our fear and distrust. How easily we realize the vanities of vanities, vanitates vanitatum, the childishness of our being compared to God. Deep within the experience of the “I” we see the conflicts that drive us from doubt to doubt and force us to that despair of sin that has so deeply separated us from God. The “religiosity of reason,” can it be any other than this struggle of opposites that we bear in the self and know in revelation? (shrink)

Phenomenology was in large part the discovery of Edmund Husserl, whose Logical Investigations of 1900/01 are normally regarded as the work that launched the phenomenological movement. Yet Husserl's phenomenology, in particular in the form in which it is set out in this his most important contribution to philosophy, is itself part of an Austrian philosophical tradi tion inspired by Brentano and continued, in very different ways, by Meinong, Stumpf, Twardowski, Ehrenfels, Husserl - and Marty. Like Brentano and all his heirs (...) Marty's philosophical interests were in the philosophy of mind, where this is taken to include or at least ground the philosophy of language, and analytic metaphysics. It is Marty's discussions of topics in these two areas that provide the contributions to this volume with their subject-matter. The papers by Roderick Chisholm, S. -Y. Kuroda, Barry Smith, Peter Simons, Rosaria Egidi, Karl Schuhmann, Elmar Holenstein, Edgar Morscher, Wolf gang Wenning and myself were presented at the 1984 conference on Anton Marty in Fribourg, Switzerland. Our host in Fribourg was Guido Kung, the conference was made possible by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. I should like to thank both for their help. Geneva, April 1988 KEVIN MULLIGAN Xl Abbreviations Employed in the Text Anton Marty's two major works, the Untersuchungen and the posthumously published Raum und Zeit are referred to in what follows in the following style. U Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, Vol. I (only volume published). Halle a. S. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has argued that in the debate on modal ontology, the familiar distinction between actualism and possibilism should be replaced by a distinction between positions he calls contingentism and necessitism. He has also argued in favor of necessitism, using results on quantified modal logic with plurally interpreted second-order quantifiers showing that necessitists can draw distinctions contingentists cannot draw. Some of these results are similar to well-known results on the relative expressivity of quantified modal logics with so-called inner and outer (...) quantifiers. The present paper deals with these issues in the context of quantified modal logics with generalized quantifiers. Its main aim is to establish two results for such a logic: Firstly, contingentists can draw the distinctions necessitists can draw if and only if the logic with inner quantifiers is at least as expressive as the logic with outer quantifiers, and necessitists can draw the distinctions contingentists can draw if and only if the logic with outer quantifiers is at least as expressive as the logic with inner quantifiers. Secondly, the former two items are the case if and only if all of the generalized quantifiers are first-order definable, and the latter two items are the case if and only if first-order logic with these generalized quantifiers relativizes. (shrink)

El objetivo fundamental de la arqueología ha sido el de perseguir la vida que ha habido detrás de todos los objetos encontrados del pasado humano 'huesos, cerámica y trozos de piedra' y tratar de descifrar sus contextos histórico y cultural. Este libro ofrece un resumen del discurso escrito de los arqueólogos sobre la instrumentación técnica y los métodos que se han ido proponiendo como la mejor forma de acercarse objetivamente a este pasado.

Tae Wan Kim, John Hooker, and Thomas Donaldson make an attempt, in recent articles, to solve the alignment problem. As they define the alignment problem, it is the issue of how to give AI systems moral intelligence. They contend that one might program machines with a version of Kantian ethics cast in deontic modal logic. On their view, machines can be aligned with human values if such machines obey principles of universalization and autonomy, as well as a deontic utilitarian principle. (...) Programming machines to do so might be useful, in their view, for applications such as future autonomous vehicles. Their proposal draws both on traditional logic-based and contemporary connectionist approaches, to fuse factual information with normative principles. I will argue that this approach makes demands of machines that go beyond what is currently feasible, and may extend past the limits of the possible for AI. I also argue that a deontological ethics for machines should place greater stress on the formula of humanity of the Kantian categorical imperative. On this principle, one ought never treat a person as a mere means. Recognition of what makes a person a person requires ethical insight. Similar insight is needed to tell treatment as a means from treatment as a mere means. The resources in Kim, Hooker, and Donaldson’s approach is insufficient for this reason. Hesitation regarding deployment of autonomous machines is warranted in light of these alignment concerns. (shrink)

The world provides us with an ocean of opportunities for fitting emotion. But we are beings with limited emotional resources, so missed opportunities are common. This chapter argues that these failures to take up fitting emotions are very frequently unfitting in their own right—so frequently, in fact, that most of us lead lives replete with unfitting absences of emotion. It begins by showing that, whenever an emotion can be unfitting in virtue of being too weak, the absence of that emotion (...) can also be unfitting, and for just the same reason. But emotional responses to a host of everyday objects—a funny joke, a nasty insult, and so on—can be unfittingly weak. This means that failures to respond emotionally to an enormous host of everyday objects are similarly unfitting. (shrink)

This is evident, for example, in the contribution it has made to the emancipation of repressed social classes.

Propositional quantifiers are quantifiers binding proposition letters, understood as variables. This Element introduces propositional quantifiers and explains why they are especially interesting in the context of propositional modal logics. It surveys the main results on propositionally quantified modal logics which have been obtained in the literature, presents a number of open questions, and provides examples of applications of such logics to philosophical problems.

Reprint of the Knopf edition of 1972 with a new introduction by Fritz Stern. Now printed on acid-free paper. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This research details a pilot study of Finnish college students and their views on the academic ethics. Finland is an unexamined population on this issue. In the current project, we surveyed students in the spring of 2014. We found unethical behavior is common on projects but less common on exams. We also found students are unwilling to report wrongdoing by other students. We examined differences between students’ attitudes on cheating based on several demographic factors, including gender, age and major. We (...) conclude by discussing the implications for further research in this area. (shrink)

Antropología y filosofía Los textos aquí reunidos son sólo pensamientos en voz alta, a la vez que propuestas para pensar, que más que aportar soluciones presentan problemas. Todos son textos programáticos, sin pretensión dogmática, dirigidos a mostrar que la reflexión científica sobre el ser humano pide, si ha de ser auténtica, su continuidad en la filosofía.

In Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective, Marti Kheel explores the underlying worldview of "nature ethics," offering an alternative ecofeminist approach. Seeking to heal the divisions between the seemingly disparate movements and philosophies of feminism, animal advocacy, environmental ethics, and holistic health, Kheel proposes an ecofeminist philosophy that underscores the importance of empathy and care for individual beings as well as larger wholes.

I show the relevance of feminist thought to some of the major debates within the field of environmental ethics. The feminist vision of a holistic universe is contrasted with the dualistic notions inherent in both the “individual rights” and traditionally defined “holist” camps. I criticize the attempt in environmental ethics to establish universal, hierarchical rules of conduct for our dealing with nature (an up-down dualism) as weIl as the attempt to derive an ethic from reason alone (the dualism of reason (...) and emotion). I maintain that the division between the “holist” and “individual rights” camps is yet another form of dualist thinking, and propose in its stead a holistic vision that concerns itself both with the individual and with the whole of which the individual is apart. (shrink)

Business in Ethical Focus is a compilation of classical and contemporary essays on business ethics. Approximately 50 essays are organized into five units: Corporate Social Responsibility; Rights and Obligations of Employees and Employers; Justice and Fair Practice; Distributive Justice; and Advertising, Marketing, and the Consumer. Readers will become acquainted with seminal ideas from important thinkers such as Milton Friedman on corporate social responsibility and Amartya Sen on whether business ethics makes economic sense. They will also find classic readings on distributive (...) justice by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Karl Marx, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick. Other topics include drug testing, sexual harassment, environmental responsibility, bribery, and ethical issues in advertising and marketing. The editors provide thoughtful commentary, case studies, and study questions for each unit, enabling readers to clearly understand the growing discipline of business ethics. (shrink)