Since the dawn of Romanticism, artists and intellectuals in Germany have maintained an abiding interest in the gods and myths of antiquity while calling for a new mythology suitable to the modern age. In this study, George S. Williamson examines the factors that gave rise to this distinct and profound longing for myth. In doing so, he demonstrates the entanglement of aesthetic and philosophical ambitions in Germany with some of the major religious conflicts of the nineteenth century. Through (...) readings of key intellectuals ranging from Herder and Schelling to Wagner and Nietzsche, Williamson highlights three crucial factors in the emergence of the German engagement with myth: the tradition of Philhellenist neohumanism, a critique of contemporary aesthetic and public life as dominated by private interests, and a rejection of the Bible by many Protestant scholars as the product of a foreign, "Oriental" culture. According to Williamson, the discourse on myth in Germany remained bound up with problems of Protestant theology and confessional conflict through the nineteenth century and beyond. A compelling adventure in intellectual history, this study uncovers the foundations of Germany's fascination with myth and its enduring cultural legacy. (shrink)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR George Hunt Williamson served with the Army Air Corps during World War II as Radio Director for the Army Air Forces Technical Training..

Zusammenfassung Das Thema des Gottesdienstes hat in der neueren theologiegeschichtlichen Forschung bislang keine hinreichende Beachtung gefunden. Die Diskussionen über die Notwendigkeit des Gottesdienstes, seinen Charakter und seinen Symbolgehalt führten am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts zu einer grundsätzlichen Erörterung des positiven Charakters des Christentums und seiner institutionellen Rolle in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Die Schriften Immanuel Kants, Carl Friedrich Stäudlins und Friedrich von Hardenbergs belegen den damaligen Wandel der Gottesdienstauffassung, indem sie die Ideen der Französischen Revolution und deren Implikationen für das religiöse (...) Leben thematisieren. Kants Unterscheidung von politischer und moralischer Religion nutzte Stäudlin, um die theophilanthropische Form eines aufklärerischen Gottesdienstes zu kritisieren. Novalis beurteilte die Theophilanthropie, die er als Negation jeglicher genuinen Religion ansah, ebenfalls kritisch. In Kants, Stäudlins und Novalis' Stellungnahmen zu Fragen des Gottesdienstes deutet sich zugleich der Übergang von aufklärerischen Religionskategorien zu frühromantischen Religionsmotiven an. (shrink)

Like a typical volume of the Library of Living Philosophers series, this volume has three parts, beginning with a short philosophical autobiography by the philosopher in question, Hans-Georg Gadamer. “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey” is partly a recounting of significant moments of Gadamer’s academic career and his postretirement career as a traveling lecturer, and partly a reassessment of the strengths and shortcomings of his major work, Truth and Method. He seems to wish to defend the political significance of hermeneutics against (...) what he terms, without naming names, “method-fanatics and ideology-critics”. An exploration of the factors that motivated his thinking, he suggests, will prove hermeneutics to possess both methodical rationality and a critical, emancipatory capacity. To this end, he sketches the relation of his central concepts to those of other thinkers, mainly Heidegger, Hegel, Kant, Plato, and Aristotle, emphasizing his recouping of ancient Greek “practical philosophy” against “scholasticism”. Practical philosophy, Gadamer insists, supplies a model of rationality that steers a middle course between absolute conceptual fixity and empty relativism, and can achieve the right balance of openness in unconstrained dialogue, yet remain tied to real human praxis. As such, hermeneutics offers the possibility of relevantly addressing and entering into dialogue with the Other, a capacity perhaps essential to the viability of modern politics. (shrink)

Entre-Nous is a valuable collection of essays, arranged chronologically from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, by the Lithuanian cum French Jewish thinker who died in 1995.

Identifying Selfhood organizes many of the features of Ricoeur’s philosophical views around the major theme of selfhood, Ricoeur’s hermeneutical quest for a “non-idealistic interpretation of the self.” In a quasi-developmental account, the author, Henry Isaac Venema, provides the reader with numerous details of Ricoeur’s relation to phenomenology and hermeneutics, as well as the complexities of Ricoeur’s views of self-constitution and self-understanding, involving the use of symbolism, metaphor, and narrative.

The paper argues against Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument. It also offers an argument against luminosity from the possibility of defeat of introspective justification.

This article advances towards the reconceptualization of financial innovation. It examines the calamitous role of financial innovation in the global financial crisis, developing a non-rational theorization of finance within the social economy that factors in the role of affect. Outlining the foundations for such an approach, the analysis draws on Thorstein Veblen and Georges Bataille, whose work encompasses psycho-social conceptions of political-economic agency. From the more anthropological lens of Veblen and Bataille's theorizations, it is possible to move beyond instrumentalist accounts (...) of financial innovation premised on pecuniary expedients and aspirations of market completion. As we argue, in a broader affective economy, contemporary financial innovation serves invidious ends, providing a means of attaining social distinction, constituting a medium for violent expenditure and bestowing access to sovereign expression on its purveyors. Highlighting the non-rational dimension of financial markets prompts a reconsideration of the nature of crisis and the means of its redress. (shrink)

This volume succeeds the same authors' well-known An Introduction to Modal Logic and A Companion to Modal Logic. We designate the three books and their authors NIML, IML, CML and H&C respectively. Sadly, George Hughes died partway through the writing of NIML.

Indeterminacy in its various forms has been the focus of a great deal of philosophical attention in recent years. Much of this discussion has focused on the status of vague predicates such as ‘tall’, ‘bald’, and ‘heap’. It is determinately the case that a seven-foot person is tall and that a five-foot person is not tall. However, it seems difficult to pick out any determinate height at which someone becomes tall. How best to account for this phenomenon is, of course, (...) a controversial matter. For example, some (such as Sorensen (2001) and Williamson (2002)) maintain that there is a precise height at which someone becomes tall and such apparent cases of indeterminacy merely reflects our ignorance of this fact. Others maintain that there is some genuine – and not merely epistemic – indeterminacy present is such cases and offer various accounts of how best to account for it. Supervaluationists (such as Keefe (2008)), for example, claim that the indeterminacy with respect to vague terms lies in their not having a single definite extension. Rather, each term is associated with a range of possible precise extensions or precisifications such that it is semantically unsettled which is the correct extension. One precisification of ‘tall’ might allow that anyone over five feet ten inches is tall, whereas another would only allow those over six foot to qualify; but no precisification will take someone who is five foot to be tall, and someone who is seven foot will count as tall on all precisifications. Thus – while someone who is seven foot will be determinately tall and someone who is five foot determinately not so – it will be indeterminate whether someone who stands at five foot eleven inches is tall. -/- Yet, it is important to stress that putative cases of indeterminacy are not limited to vague predicates of this kind. Philosophers have invoked indeterminacy in discussions of topics as diverse as moral responsibility (Bernstein (forthcoming)), identity over time (Williams (2014)), and the status of the future (Barnes and Cameron (2009)). In this paper, we focus on two areas where discussion of various kinds of indeterminacy has been commonplace: physics and fiction. We propose a new model for understanding indeterminacy across these domains and argue that it has some notable advantages when compared to earlier accounts. Treating physics and fiction cases univocally also indicates an interesting connection between indeterminacy in these two areas. (shrink)

Book review of Jon Williamson's `In Defence of objective Bayesianism'.

On American Freedom critiques the value of freedom as it is now manifest in America's political, economic, and cultural life in light of a more robust value of freedom coordinated around human dignity and civic participation. Drawing from historic sources as diverse as James Madison, Adam Smith, and Catherine Beecher - as well as from contemporary sources like George W. Bush and Bob Dylan - the book paints a bleak picture of this most cherished American value. At the same (...) time, On American Freedom outlines a reform initiative that will secure a more preferred value of freedom by simply by reconfiguring the federal system to include reorganized and empowered city-states capable of serving as sites for a fuller form of freedom than Americans now enjoy. (shrink)