This paper explores the Baden Neo-Kantian attempt to integrate hermeneutic ‘understanding’ into the formal philosophy of the historical sciences. It focuses primarily on Heinrich Ricker...

In his famous essay “Der moderne Denkmalkultus. Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung” from 1903, the Austrian historian and art theorist Alois Riegl pondered why it is that the modern observer is able to appreciate the monuments of the past. It seems an odd question. The nineteenth century was obsessed with history; its artists and architects were often accused of appreciating nothing but the past. Yet, Riegl’s question is prescient. If, as the historicists had long professed, there are no absolute or (...) eternal standards in art – if the value of art and architecture is relative, changing with time and circumstance – then logically, the past should be inaccessible to us. How come it is not? Riegl’s seemingly naïve question sums up historicism’s most pressing dilemmas and reveals the epochal determinism lurking in nineteenth-century Zeitgeist-thinking. This essay investigates Riegl’s attempted answers and their intellectual presuppositions. (shrink)

The paper examines the “prehistory” in the 18th century of the theory of Bildung. Pedagogical historiography commonly traces the theory back to the influence of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, who is held to be the founder of the concept of “innere Bildung; on the grounds that Shaftesbury’s concept of “inward form” was translated into German as Bildung. The study focuses on the reception of Shaftesbury’s writings in the German-speaking realm in the 17th century in order to discover (...) the contexts of discourse in which this reception took place and to find out what significance the various discourses had for the formulation of a German “theory of Bildung.” What is revealed are varied influences of a religious, literary theory, and aesthetics nature that give indications as to why the construct of Bildung has remained diffuse and excessive in the German tradition up to the very present. It is also shown that the concept, in comparison to other discourses, found its way into the pedagogical discourse relatively late, which may be another reason for the difficulties that the German theory of Bildung continues to present to the science of pedagogy. (shrink)

Farrenkopf argues that Western triumphalism, precipitated by the crisis of Communism, is symptomatic of the failure in the U.S. to reflect upon the prospects for ameliorating the tragic nature of international political developments in the twentieth century.

ArgumentDespite the fact that “empathy” is often simply used as a translation ofEinfühlung, the two terms have distinct meanings and distinct disciplinary affiliations. This text considers the manner in which the moving image invites spatial forms of engagement akin to those described both by historical accounts ofEinfühlung, a form of engagement that pertains not only to the activities of humans represented within images, but also to the aesthetic qualities of images in a more abstract sense and to the forms to (...) be found there. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas’s opus magnum, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, synthesises his impressive work of the last half century. His thesis is that the modern project of the normativity of “rational freedom” can be reconstructed as a learning process of the conflictual dialogue between reason and faith, philosophy and religion in the West. Furthermore, under conditions of a world society, cross-cultural communication across lifeworlds, based on such normative principles, is possible. I argue that Habermas’s argument recapitulates a claim first made in (...) The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel, who presented the normativity of modernity through a narrative unfolding between two epistemological standpoints, namely, that of consciousness and “we.” Just like Hegel, in order to defend the idea of a Lernprozess, Habermas too must presuppose a unified subject called “we;” furthermore the development of such subjectivity unfolds in a homogeneous temporal process that is then assumed to be the same for all mankind. I call this a form of “historicism,” and juxtapose recent historical writing that presents the narrative of modernity and the emergence of world-society as a much more diverse and fractured process than Hegel’s and Habermas’s methodology. “Die Einbeziehung der Anderen,” I argue, must involve including the voices of those others who do not experience the normative of modernity as a process like the one unfolding between faith and reason in the West. Nevertheless, I conclude that this plea for a more complex narrative that “provincialises Europe,” is not a rejection of the normative legacy of modern rationality and freedom that are based on the ideals of fallibilism, refutability and revisability through a rational community of inquirers. (shrink)

Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...) it different? What sorts of properties do social groups have? Can they have beliefs or intentions? Can they perform actions? And if so, what does it take for a group to believe, intend, or act? -/- Other entities investigated in social ontology include money, corporations, institutions, property, social classes, races, genders, artifacts, artworks, language, and law. It is difficult to delineate a precise scope for the field (see section 2.1). In general, though, the entities explored in social ontology largely overlap with those that social scientists work on. A good deal of the work in social ontology takes place within the social sciences (see sections 5.1–5.8). -/- Social ontology also addresses more basic questions about the nature of the social world. One set of questions pertains to the constituents, or building blocks, of social things in general. For instance, some theories argue that social entities are built out of the psychological states of individual people, while others argue that they are built out of actions, and yet others that they are built out of practices. Still other theories deny that a distinction can even be made between the social and the non-social. -/- A different set of questions pertains to how social categories are constructed or set up. Are social categories and kinds produced by our attitudes? By our language? Are they produced by causal patterns? And is there just one way social categories are set up, or are there many varieties of social construction? -/- The term ‘social ontology’ has only come into wide currency in recent years, but the nature of the social has been a topic of inquiry since ancient Greece. As a whole, the field can be understood as a branch of metaphysics, the general inquiry into the nature of entities. (shrink)

Hinter–Asien. Hegel’s Interpretation of the spiritual dimensions of the Far East. The topic of this dissertation is Hegel’s interpretation of the Chinese, the Indian and the Buddhist civilizations. The first part handles the origin of some images of these civilizations in the Augustan and Romantic Age, and the interests and approaches of many European philosophers in order to understand them. Then we deal with Hegel’s philosophical attitude towards the “Other”: special attention is given to the speculative reasons of his position (...) in the debates on the ideas of development and progress and on the translation and understanding of other civilizations’ philosophical concepts. In this context Hegel’s position is compared to that of Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt and to the Romantic critic of the concept of progress in the Enlightenment. The second part concerns Hegel’s interpretation of the East in its entirety as well as his analysis of these three civilizations, examined from the point of view of the philosophy of history and the philosophy of religion. A chapter aside handles the most speculative aspects of Indian and Buddhist religions, since they were actually considered philosophical and as such they played an important role in the renewed debates on pantheism in thinkers like Friedrich Schlegel and Hegel himself. (shrink)