This paper presents the results of a study of the effect of a business ethics course in enhancing the ability of students to recognize ethical issues. The findings show that compared to students who do not complete such a course, students enrolled in a business ethics course experience substantial improvement in that ability.

This study examines the philosophical foundations of Hegel's social theory by articulating the normative standards at work in his claim that the central social institutions of the modern era are rational or good.

The Fate of Reason is the first general history devoted to the period between Kant and Fichte, one of the most revolutionary and fertile in modern philosophy. The philosophers of this time broke with the two central tenets of the modem Cartesian tradition: the authority of reason and the primacy of epistemology. They also witnessed the decline of the Aufkldrung, the completion of Kant's philosophy, and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism. Thanks to Beiser we can newly appreciate the influence of (...) Kant's critics on the development of his philosophy. Beiser brings the controversies, and the personalities who engaged in them, to life and tells a story that has uncanny parallels with the debates of the present. (shrink)

This is the first book in English to elucidate the central issues in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a figure crucial to the movement of philosophy from Kant to German idealism. The book explains Fichte's notion of subjectivity and how his particular view developed out of Kant's accounts of theoretical and practical reason. Fichte argued that the subject has a self-positing structure which distinguishes it from a thing or an object. Thus, the subject must be understood as an activity (...) rather than a thing and is self-constituting in a way that an object is not. In the final chapter, Professor Neuhouser considers how this doctrine of the self-positing subject enables us to understand the possibility of the self's autonomy, or self-determination. (shrink)

Written by one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Heidegger, this book is an important statement about the basis of human sociability that is a major contribution to the continuing debates about Heidegger in particular, and ethics in general. Existential philosophy is often thought to promote moral nihilism in which everything is permitted. This book demonstrates that, in the case of Martin Heidegger, any such accusation is unjust. On the contrary, Heidegger thought seriously about the implications of human co-existence, and this (...) book shows that conceptions of trust and responsibility that lie at the very heart of morality are to be found in the sketch of Mitsein - our being together with one another in the world - offered in Being and Time. That Heidegger never developed these conceptions may explain why they have been overlooked, but renders them no less important for that. (shrink)

This book is an account of the philosophical movement named Lebensphilosophie, which flourished at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. There many philosophers who participated in the movement, but this book concentrates on the three most important: Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. The movement was called Lebensphilosophie—literally, philosophy of life—because its main interest was not life as a biological phenomenon but life as it is lived by human beings. They regarded human life (...) and experience as the fundamental reality, the basis of all knowledge and value, and disputed the relevance of any supernatural realm transcending human experience. The purpose of life was therefore life itself. Lebensphilosophie was the first modern philosophical movement in the Western tradition. It was “modern” in the sense that it was entirely humanist and secular, deriving all values from a non-religious perspective. Nietzsche, Dilthey and Simmel were either atheists or agnostics; they denied the relevance of any transcendent reality or being for human life. They abjured the traditional Christian concern with salvation and immortality. They also disputed the existence of natural law, teleology or a providential order; human beings created their own values and they did not conform to any made by nature. In anticipation of later existentialism, the Lebensphilosophen maintained that human beings are the makers of their own fate. Contrary to pessimism, they affirmed the great value of life while still acknowledging its frequent tragedy. The Lebensphilosophen were champions of an individualist ethics, which maintained that the highest good for a human being was self-realization, the development of a persons’s unique individuality. Their ethics was neither utilitarian nor de-ontological: it was not utilitarian because it did not regard the highest good as pleasure; self-realization could be a very unpleasant experience; and it was not de-ontological because it grounded moral norms upon the facts of human development and experience. The Lebensphilosophen were major advocates of historicism. They believed that human experience is formed by history, and that its horizons and limits are historical. Just as it was impossible to transcend human experience, so it was impossible to transcend history. All values and norms were therefore historical. In attempting to describe historical experience, the Lebensphilosophen developed the discipline of hermeneutics. They refused to accept mechanical explanation as a paradigm of explanation. This book attempts to describe and analyze the fundamental aspects of Lebensphilosophie by looking in detail at the views of its three leading figures. It examines their ethics, their religious background, their responses to pessimism and relativism, and their contributions to hermeneutics and historicism. (shrink)

Fred Stoutland was a major figure in the philosophy of action and philosophy of language. This collection brings together essays on truth, language, action and mind and thus provides an important summary of many key themes in Stoutland’s own work, as well as offering valuable perspectives on key issues in contemporary philosophy.

"Revision and enlargement of Medieval philosophy... published in 1952." Bibliography : p. [347]-381.

Introduction The central aim of this book is to focus attention upon and illuminate the character of a certain phase of philosophical reflection: namely, ...

In “A Theory of Content, 11: The Theory,” Jerry Fodor presents two reasons why his asymmetric causal dependency theory does not lead to the conclusion that syntactic items “X” mean proximal sensory stimulations, rather than distal environmental objects. Here we challenge Fodor’s reasoning.

Edited by Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch & Christopher Zurn. This volume collects original, cutting-edge essays on the philosophy of recognition by international scholars eminent in the field. By considering the topic of recognition as addressed by both classical and contemporary authors, the volume explores the connections between historical and contemporary recognition research and makes substantive contributions to the further development of contemporary theories of recognition.

This book shows the vital relationship between human life and the philosophical placement of value, emphasizing the now-occurring transition from the old mechanical world view to the postmodern alternative inspired by ecology.

Few thinkers are more controversial in the history of philosophy than Hegel. He has been dismissed as a charlatan and obscurantist, but also praised as one of the greatest thinkers in modern philosophy. No one interested in philosophy can afford to ignore him. This volume considers all the major aspects of Hegel's work: epistemology, logic, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion. Special attention is devoted to problems in the interpretation of Hegel: the unity of the Phenomenology (...) of Spirit; the value of the dialectical method; the status of his logic; the nature of his politics. A final group of chapters treats Hegel's complex historical legacy: the development of Hegelianism and its growth into a left and right-wing school; the relation of Hegel and Marx; and the subtle connections between Hegel and contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Further Reading.

Can a human society suffer from illness like a living thing? And if so, how does such a malaise manifest itself? In this thought-provoking book, Fred Neuhouser explains and defends the idea of social pathology, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as 'ill', or 'sick', and why we are so often drawn to conceiving of social problems as ailments or maladies. He shows how Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim – four key philosophers who are seldom taken to constitute a (...) 'tradition' – deploy the idea of social pathology in comparable ways, and then explores the connections between societal illnesses and the phenomena those thinkers made famous: alienation, anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction. His book is a rich and compelling illumination of both the idea of social disease and the importance it has had, and continues to have, for philosophical views of society. (shrink)

Jacobi’s importance in the history of German philosophy has long been recognized. Yet his writings have been little studied in the English-speaking world, mainly because very few of them have been translated. George di Giovanni’s translation and edition of some of Jacobi’s main philosophical writings now fills this serious gap. This is the first major scholarly edition in English of Jacobi’s writings. The quality of the translation and the editing set a high standard for future work. Giovanni’s translations capture the (...) freshness and fluency of the German original, and his scholarly notes leave nothing to be desired in thoroughness and erudition. But it is not only students who will appreciate this volume. The long introduction, and the many notes, will be useful even for specialists. It is among the very best scholarship on Jacobi in any language. (shrink)

Norms are widely regarded as kinds of templates of performance, resident in agents. As such they are thought to determine unilaterally what kinds of thought or action accords with them. Under philosophical elaboration this view has led to multiple perplexities: among them the question of how there can be evaluation, justification, and rectification of such unilaterally determining entities. Sometimes one can appeal to other, supervening norms; but the need to terminate the regressive procedure typically leads to appeals to dubious "foundations," (...) to conventions, or to sheer prejudice. In a feat of surpassing acuity Wittgenstein exposed this view of norms to be inadequate in the apparently paradigm contexts to which traditionally it seemed best suited, these being those of mathematical rules and principles. An alternative general view of norms is one with important congruences with the view taken by the Critical-Pragmatic philosophy concerning the constitutive role played by norms in creating the texture of human life and thought. This view is that norms are intrinsically socio-psychological entities that interlock with each other and are rooted deeply in the practices of individuals and their communities. Embedded in these practices, norms are in principle open-textured: open to further definition and revision when serious anomalies in their extant forms are encountered. This article explores certain features of the alternative view, concentrating upon the illumination it sheds and the guidance it provides in the conduct of the fundamental philosophical activities of assessment, criticism, and revision of broad and deep personal and communal norms. Normen werden üblicherweise verstanden als eine Art Handlungsschablonen im Innern des jeweils Agierenden. Als solche wird von ihnen angenommen, daß sie einseitig festlegen, welche Arten von Gedanken oder Handlungen mit ihnen übereinstimmen. Bei philosophischer Überprüfung führt diese Sichtweise zu vielfältigen Schwierigkeiten: unter ihnen die Frage, wie solche einseitig bestimmenden Wesenheiten bewertet, gerechtfertigt und berichtigt werden können. Manchmal kann man sich auf andere, übergeordnete Normen berufen; aber angesichts der Notwendigkeit, überhaupt zu einem Ende zu kommen, führt das regressive Verfahren typischerweise zu einer Berufung auf zweifelhafte "Grundsätze", auf Konventionen oder auf ein bloßes Vorurteil. In einer Meisterleistung von außerordentlicher gedanklicher Schärfe hat Wittgenstein diese Sichtweise von Normen als inadäquat gerade für den scheinbar paradigmatischen Zusammenhang entlarvt, auf den sie nach traditioneller Anschauung am besten passen soll: den von mathematischen Regeln und Prinzipien. Eine demgegenüber alternative, allgemeine Sichtweise von Normen stimmt in wesentlichen Punkten mit der Perspektive überein, die von der kritisch-pragmatischen Philosophie im Hinblick auf die konstitutive Rolle eingenommen wird, die Normen bei der Schaffung der Strukturen menschlichen Lebens und Denkens spielen. Diese Sichtweise besteht darin, daß Normen eigentlich sozialpsychologische Entitäten sind, die ineinandergreifen und tief in der Praxis von Individuen und ihren Gemeinschaften wurzeln. Eingebettet in diese Praxis sind Normen prinzipiell offen strukturiert: offen für weitere Definition und für Revision, falls man auf ernstzunehmende Anomalien ihrer bestehenden Fassung stößt. Dieser Beitrag untersucht bestimmte Aspekte jener alternativen Sichtweise. Er konzentriert sich dabei auf die von ihr bewirkte Klärung und die Leitung, die sie bietet, wenn es um die Handhabung so fundamentaler philosophischer Aufgaben wie Bewertung, Kritik und Revision von weit und tief reichenden persönlichen und gesellschaftlichen Normen geht. (shrink)

Against current non-metaphysical interpretations, I argue that Naturphilosophie is central to Hegel’s philosophy. This is so for three reasons. First, it was crucial to Hegel’s program to create a holistic culture. Second, Naturphilosophie is pivotal to absolute idealism, Hegel’s characteristic philosophical doctrine. Third, the idea of organic development, so central to Naturphilosophie, is pervasive throughout Hegel’s system. This idea is essential to Hegel’s concepts of spirit, dialectic, and identity-in-difference. Finally, I take issue with the neo-Kantian critique of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie on (...) the grounds that it fails to appreciate the underlying motive behind Hegel’s system: the attempt to resolve the aporia of Kant’s epistemology.Author Keywords: Naturphilosophie; Absolute idealism; Organicism; Alienation; Subjective idealism; Dualism. (shrink)

He demonstrates that a broad parallelism exists between developments in ethical theory among Continental philosophers of the phenomenological persuasion and the more analytically inclined philosophers of the English-speaking world.

This article defends the paradoxical thesis that neo-Kantianism is better described as neo-Fichteanism rather than neo-Kantianism. It maintains that neo-Kantianism is closer to Fichte than Kant in four fundamental respects: in its nationalism, socialism, activism, and in its dynamic and quantitative conception of the dualism between understanding and sensibility. By contrast, Kant’s philosophy was cosmopolitan, liberal, non-activist quietist and held a static and qualitative view of the dualism between understanding and sensibility. I attempt to explain why it took the neo-Kantians (...) so long to recognize these profound affinities with Fichte: they were influenced by Fries conception of Fichte as a speculative metaphysician. I argue that the hold of Friesian interpretation of Fichte was first broken by Emil Lask in his Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte. (shrink)