Introduction : Rorschach tests -- A question of style -- Live or tell -- Kierkegaard's seductions -- Hegel's seductions -- Talking cures -- A penchant for disguise : the death (and rebirth) of the author in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche -- Passing over : the death of the author in Hegel -- Conclusion : the melancholy of having finished -- Aftersong : from low down.

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

In Flip Thinking, Berthold Gunster, the founder of the Dutch omdenken--or flip thinking--philosophy, presents fifteen strategies to transform your thinking away from limitations and negativities and towards possibilities and opportunities. From disrupting (turn all the rules upside down) to flaunting (play up what you want to hide) and from importing (get the enemy on board) to amplifying (do more of what works), Gunster's strategies and stories will have you approaching even the most challenging problems--from an annoying neighbor to an (...) angry colleague to an unhappy partner--in a whole new way. (shrink)

The German term “Antiziganismus” could be translated as “antigypsyism”, but the semantic roots are, in fact, different. Coined in the 1980s, “Antiziganismus” might be misconceived as a sheer abstraction: a “close reading” of the term's context could indeed partially justify the assumption that it in many ways reproduces certain impacts and implications of its better known equivalent – an actively employed anti-Semitism. However, the article's main thesis is that “Antiziganismus” denotes a term in its own right. This status cannot be (...) challenged even by the most recent development, which is an interest group's attempt to internationalize the scope of the term by coining the derivative “antiziganism”. (shrink)

Faber, W. Martin Buber über Erziehung.--Bohnsack, F. Das Problem der pädagogischen Absicht bei Martin Buber.--Simon, S. Martin Buber, der Erzeiher.--Klafki, W. Dialog und Dialektik in der gegenwärtigen Erziehungswissenschaft.--Faber, W. Reale Bildung.--Caselmann, C. Martin Buber als Erzieher.

Thema dieses Buchs ist die Religion von fünf Philosophen aus unterschiedlichen Kulturen und Epochen: Konfuzius, Sokrates, Epiktet, Montaigne und Pascal. Anhand der sehr unterschiedlichen Textgrundlagen werden nicht nur ihre Gedanken über ihre Religion dargestellt, sondern auch ihre philosophischen Lehren. Im Blickpunkt steht auch, wie sich das, was diese fünf über Religion sagen, von ihrer religiösen Praxis unterscheidet. Ein Ergebnis des Vergleichs ist die Erkenntnis, dass alle echte Religion, die Gott als Höchstes hat, in fünf voneinander untrennbaren Haltungen besteht, die ausdrücken, (...) was dieses Höchste für sie ist: in der Überzeugung, einen göttlichen Auftrag zu haben und diesen Auftrag erfüllen, d.h. dadurch Gott dienen zu sollen, in der Dankbarkeit gegenüber Gott, in der Güte oder tätigen Liebe gegenüber seinen Mitmenschen, im Vertrauen in den Schutz oder in die Hilfe Gottes und in der Ehrlichkeit und Wahrhaftigkeit sich selbst und seinen Mitmenschen gegenüber. (shrink)

When Humpty-Dumpty had his great fall nobody could put him together again. A vastly more moderate challenge is to reunite the two partial beams of a Stern-Gerlach apparatus with such precision that the original spin state is recovered. Nevertheless, as we demonstrate, a substantial loss of spin coherence always occurs, unless the experimenter is able to control the magnetic field's inhomogeneity with an accuracy of at least one part in 105.

Ethisch gutes Handeln ist tätige Liebe, die vom Gewissen geleitet wird - das ist die Einsicht dieses Ethikentwurfs. Worin ein solches Handeln besteht, wird in allen ethisch relevanten Beziehungen untersucht. Ausgangspunkt ist, im Geiste von Husserls Phänomenologie, das erfahrende, wertende und handelnde Subjekt: Die Frage nach dem ethisch guten Handeln wird zur Frage nach dem Selbstverständnis des Ichs und der Bedeutung, welche die Mitmenschen und die Umwelt für es haben. So zeigt der Autor, wie ein ethisch gutes und somit glückliches (...) Leben für den Einzelnen heute möglich ist. Er baut auch auf osteuropäische, chinesische und jüdische Philosophie-Traditionen und wird damit einer Gegenwart gerecht, in der die Menschheit durch neue Wege der Kommunikation zu einem Gefüge geworden ist. (shrink)

In examining Hegel's and Kierkegaard's theories of language, I argue that both entail conceptions of the therapeutic power of language to heal us from madness and despair. I show that whereas Hegel quite straightforwardly celebrates the emancipatory power of language, Kierkegaard is more ambivalent; on the one hand, he devotes his life to a maieutic authorship in service of aiding the reader, but on the other, he believes that ultimately it is only faith in God that can cure us, and (...) that faith requires silence. I use Lacan's psychoanalytic account of the role of language to explore Hegel's view that language constitutes the self and Kierkegaard's experimentation with an indirect form of communication that he hopes will enable him to fulfill each of his apparently conflicting goals, to write and yet to remain silent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Talking Cures, the Clinic, and the Value of the IneffableDaniel Berthold (bio)KeywordsMadness, disease, the normal, the abnormal, the ineffable, Hegel, Kierkegaard, LacanI am most grateful to my readers, James Phillips and Louis Sass, who have led me to several new insights by suggesting ways of complicating my reading of a Lacanian approach to Hegel's and Kierkegaard's conceptions of madness. I am a Kierkegaard and Hegel scholar, with very (...) little pretense to expertise about Lacan and regrettably even less about the theory and practice of psychiatry. In submitting my essay to Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Philosophy, I was hoping to entice a community of practitioners and theoreticians I have great respect for to consider the musings of a philosopher on topics which engage them as thinkers and actors in their professions. I could not possibly have hoped for more intelligent and provocative replies than I have been given by my two respondents.Phillips' framing of his response in terms of the distinction between the "madness of the philosophers" and the "madness of the clinic" is very helpful. It is a distinction that is indeed central to the question of the possibility of dialogue between philosophers and clinicians—so central, in fact, that it is generous of Phillips not to reproach me for failing to mention it. On the one hand, the challenge for philosophers is to show that their descriptions are not merely metaphoric and that their preoccupation with the dark side of human experience connects in some way with the reality of disease, so that there is some way for clinicians to translate their language into the language of psychiatry. Otherwise, philosophers will have only poetic or literary interest for the psychiatrist or psychologist.On the other hand, the challenge for clinicians is the extent to which they are open to moving beyond a reduction of "mental illness" to a purely biological conception of disease. One needn't go so far—nor should we—as Thomas Szasz or Michel Foucault in seeing "mental disease" as itself merely a metaphor. But granting the evidence of underlying organic disorder, symptoms nevertheless display themselves as mental and behavioral states (what Hegel calls "shapes of consciousness") that, as Hegel argued, are paralleled in "normal" experience, so that the distinction between disease and normality (and hence illness and metaphor) is often elusive. Madness "has the healthy consciousness for its presupposition," Hegel writes, because the healthy mind is still grappling with the same sorts of contradictions and feelings of alienation, the same "infinite pain" which characterizes insanity. Madness is not the absolute "other" of rationality, but an echo of it (1978, 3:382, 408).Hegel himself accepted the medicalization of madness that began to occur in the late eighteenth [End Page 325] century, and rejected the metaphysical and theological categories of what was called "romantic medicine." But he also cautioned against the narrowness of the "somatic" school which he felt lacked sufficient explanatory value if not connected to a "speculative" (i.e., philosophic) framework (see Berthold-Bond 1995, ch. 2).It might even be argued that every person seeking therapy is first of all suffering from "philosophic" madness, at least in the sense that initially she does not understand her own suffering as "disease," but experiences her torment in the vocabulary of the philosopher. Thus the philosopher's descriptions are the closest to the subject's own self-understanding, and while the therapist must seek to rephrase these descriptions into the vocabulary of the clinic (just as Hegel, for example, translated his own philosophic description of the madness of his friend Hölderlin in the Phenomenology as the "lost soul" whose "light dies away within it" into the medical category of Wahnsinn—mania or frenzy, which today we would call schizophrenia—in the classificatory scheme of mental disorder he gives in the Encyclopaedia; 1977, 400; 1978, 408)—there is a real question about which vocabulary is a metaphor for the other.The second main point Phillips addresses, which is taken up in different ways by Sass as well, has to do with the relation between speech and silence in madness. Phillips finds that Kierkegaard offers a more complex and subtle view than... (shrink)

A unitary transformation replaces the given description of a quantum system by an equivalent one. It is observed, however, that not all members of a set of unitarily equivalent Hamilton operators are equally well suited for identifying the corresponding classical systems. A criterion is proposed for recognizing the privileged representatives of the set. A few explicit examples are reported that show the criterion at work.

Perspective, Symbol, and Symbolic Form: Concerning the Relationship between Cassirer and Panofsky During the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was a sudden surge of interest in Ernst Cassirer’s major work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), and Erwin Panofsky’s essay, ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’ (1927), an interest that has continued uninterrupted to the present day. Particularly amongst art historians, however, a serious misunderstanding remains evident here – the confusing of ‘symbolic form’ with ‘symbol’. Cultural and perceptual mediations, (...) in which objects (and subjects) are only just in the process of forming, are carelessly turned into arbitrary, isolated objects of art history or pictorial history. Every work, in this view, is regarded as a ‘symbolic form’ to the extent that a representation of the world is ‘expressed’ in it. This article initially reviews Panofsky’s essay in order to establish the context in which the art historian uses the term ‘symbolic form’. His use of it is then compared with Cassirer’s original understanding of the term. A careful distinction is made between ‘symbol’, ‘symbolic pregnance’, and ‘symbolic form’, and this is followed by an analysis of scattered remarks in Cassirer’s writings, and particularly in his posthumous manuscripts and notes, on ‘art’ as symbolic form and on the spatial form that is prior to all perception and art production, as well as his call for a kind of art history that conceives of itself as a scholarly discipline. The article concludes with the recognition that Panofsky not only deliberately, but justifiably – that is, in the spirit of Cassirer, at least – transferred the expression ‘symbolic form’ to ‘perspective’. (shrink)