A fresh look at the importance of natural and international law in the religious politics at the heartlands of the Reformation, from the Low Countries, the German principalities up to Transylvania; from Niels Hemmingsen to Gian Battista Vico; from religious reasons for the universalist claims of natural law to political arguments for the sacred polity, their tension and creative potential.

`Hans Cohn has given us a personal and valuable statement about the theoretical underpinnings of his work as a psychotherapist. These can be little doubt about his contribution to our thinking practice is invaluable. Students will find Cohn's easygoing exposition of complex ideas enormously helpful' - Professor Emmy van Deurzen, Existential Analysis `One of the most important books published this year. This long-awaited book by the foremost expert on the relationship between Heidegger and psychotherapy, manages to encapsulate the essence (...) of Heidegger's thinking and make of understandable and relevant to therapists without losing any of the original meaning' - Counsellingbooks.com Anyone interested in modern philosophy is familiar with the name of Martin Heidegger but there is a serious gap in even the most complete accounts of his life and thought. This is Heidegger's association with, and influence on, psychotherapy. Hans C Cohn explores the role of Heidegger's thought in providing an alternative basis for psychotherapeutic practice to the dominant psychodynamic, humanistic and cognitive approaches, also focusing strongly on the practical therapeutic relevance of Heidegger's ideas. This book will be essential reading for students and teachers of modern philosophy, as well as existential psychotherapists, and all practitioners interested in existential approaches to therapy. (shrink)

SummaryGrotius has a rudimentary theory of sociability. Only with hindsight has a remark about appetitus societatis been promoted to the starting point of a theory that flourished in the writings of later natural jurists. In this article, I address the issue of the appearance in Grotius's natural law of sociability [as the 1715/38 English translation of John Morrice renders appetitus societatis, following Barbeyrac's sociabilité]. Writing in the just war tradition, Grotius is first of all interested in finding out the conditions (...) for peace, and although injustice is a condition of war, it is not per se true that injustice is a perversion of society. Apparently, not all societies are perfect and the violence of war and the legal actions of peace are both instruments for achieving a greater modicum of justice in this world. Yet appetitus et custodia societatis is called the foundation of justice. Grotius achieved this context for sociability in phases, through a series of writings from c. 1600 until De iure belli ac pacis of 1625, and its revision of 1631. In this development the notion of fides plays an intriguing role, through which we can obtain a better understanding of the meaning of appetitus societatis in the later work. The present article is a sequel to a previous publication, on fides in De iure praedae. Analysing the genesis of appetitus societatis in De iure belli ac pacis, I argue that Grotius was changing his strategy over the years, without however arriving at a definitive solution to the question of what commits men to the pursuit of justice. (shrink)

Die Beiträge des vorliegenden Bandes erkunden das Phänomen der Musse in seiner Räumlichkeit und in seinem Verhältnis zur Zeit. Im mussetypischen Verweilen tritt das Nacheinander der Zeit zurück, während der Raum mit seinen Ordnungen des Nebeneinander bestimmend wird. Diese spezifische Raumzeitlichkeit wird in vier Abschnitten ausgelotet: Der erste ist Konzepten und Theorien der Musse gewidmet, der zweite der ästhetischen Erfahrung von Räumen der Natur und Kunst, der dritte gebauten Räumen der Musse, der vierte der Musseerfahrung, wie sie sich in Kommunikations- (...) und Schreibprozessen darstellt. Die Bandbreite der Untersuchungen reicht von der philosophischen, begriffsanalytischen Reflexion über die phänomenologische Analyse sowie von der literaturwissenschaftlichen Falluntersuchung hin zur kunsthistorischen Betrachtung. (shrink)

Vagueness is an ultimate challenge. An enormous diversity of literature on the topic has accumulated over the years, with no hint of a consensus emerging. In this light, Section 1 presents the main aspects of the challenge vagueness poses, focusing on the category of adjectives, and then gives some brief illustrations of the pervasive manifestations of vagueness in grammar.Section 2 deals with theSorites paradox, which for many philosophers is the hallmark of vagueness: By assigning avague predicate step by apparently inescapable (...) step to more and more objects one is eventually led to assign it to entities of which it plainly isn’t true.It is hard to resist the force of the paradox once one has been exposed to it. The result of this has been that many see the philosophical problem presented by vagueness as nothing other than the problem of solving the Sorites.The efforts to solve the Sorites paradox have uncovered a range of important connections between vagueness and other aspects of language and thought. But most of these seem to lead further and further away from what some consider the core issues that vagueness raises.Given the challenge posed by the Sorites, it is rather remarkable to discover that there is a lot more to vagueness beyond the paradox. In fact, linguists traditionally leave it to the philosophers to deal with the Sorites and put their own efforts into dealing with other manifestations of vagueness in natural language and their consequences for grammar. Page 2 2Section 3 reviews some of these additional phenomena, centering around three issues: (i) the controversial connections between vagueness and morphological gradability, (ii) the similarity and differences between the phenomena of vagueness and imprecision, and (iii) the ways in which vagueness infiltrates various grammatical constructions we find in language, with consequences for the architecture of grammar.The aim of this section is to highlight the main questions which any theory of vagueness will ultimately have to address. (shrink)

Almost all the existing modern systems of Ethics deal with formal definitions, and at bottom repeat more or less the same thing about them in slightly different words. In this work these are a side issue, and therefore are treated briefly. Their treatment in Section I is based upon the author's theoretical works the Theory of Order and the Theory of Reality, but will be intelligible to those who are not acquainted with those works. The chief concern is moral teaching (...) - that is, the practical element. (shrink)

This paper presents a comprehensive mathematical framework in which a unified treatment of additive and expected utility can be given. For achieving this, elaborate structural assumptions, characterizing a simply ordered, topological semigroup, have to be established in order to construct an isomorphism with the additive group of real numbers.This construction establishes a link between additive and expected utility theory to the extent that the same mathematical considerations leading to the derivation of an additive representation are also valid for proving the (...) expected utility theorem. (shrink)

Although American scholars sometimes consider European legal scholarship as old-fashioned and inward-looking and Europeans often perceive American legal scholarship as amateur social science, both traditions share a joint challenge. If legal scholarship becomes too much separated from practice, legal scholars will ultimately make themselves superfluous. If legal scholars, on the other hand, cannot explain to other disciplines what is academic about their research, which methodologies are typical, and what separates proper research from mediocre or poor research, they will probably end (...) up in a similar situation. Therefore we need a debate on what unites legal academics on both sides of the Atlantic. Should legal scholarship aspire to the status of a science and gradually adopt more and more of the methods, (quality) standards, and practices of other (social) sciences? What sort of methods do we need to study law in its social context and how should legal scholarship deal with the challenges posed by globalization?" -- Page i. (shrink)

Für Ernst Schütte zum 65. Geburtstag, von G.-A. Zinn.--Zur Konzeption der Festschrift für Ernst Schütte, von H. Hamm-Brücher.--Autonomie und Autorität des Menschen, ein Gesprach.--Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung, von M. Horkheimer.--Resignation, von T. W. Adorno.--Die Grenzen psychologischer Forschung, von A. Mitscherlich.--Empfehlungen zur techokratischen Hochschulreform, von J. Habermas.--Quantitative überlegungen zum tertiären Bildungsbereich, H. Leussink.--Bemerkungen zur Didaktik ais einer offenen Strukturtheorie des Lehrens und Lernens, von G. Hausmann.--Erziehungswissenschaft, von W. Klafki.--Der pädagogische Fortschritt und die pädagogische Forschung, von W. Schultze.--Ideologisches und Unidelogisches in der Bildungsreformsdiskussion, (...) von C.-H. Evers.--Leistung und Glück, von H. W. Nicklas.--Schulversuche und Bildungsplanung, von G. Preissler.--Das pädagogische Elternrecht im sozialen Rechsstaat, von E. Stein.--Kreatives. (shrink)

In this analysis we discuss the change in criteria for triage of patients during three different phases of a pandemic like COVID-19, seen from the critical care point of view. Availability of critical care beds has become a hot topic, and in many countries, we have seen a huge increase in the provision of temporary intensive care bed capacity. However, there is a limit where the hospitals may run out of resources to provide critical care, which is heavily dependent on (...) trained staff, just-in-time supply chains for clinical consumables and drugs and advanced equipment. In the first phase, we can still do clinical prioritisation and decision-making as usual, based on the need for intensive care and prognostication: what are the odds for a good result with regard to survival and quality of life. In the next, the resources are mostly available, but the system is stressed by many patients arriving over a short time period and auxiliary beds in different places in the hospital being used. We may have to abandon admittance of patients with doubtful prognosis. In the last phase, usual medical triage and priority setting may not be sufficient to decrease inflow and there may not be enough intensive care unit beds available. In this phase different criteria must be applied using a utilitarian approach for triage. We argue that this is an important transition where society, and not physicians, must provide guidance to support triage that is no longer based on medical priorities alone. (shrink)

This volume presents six lively conversations with Hans-Georg Gadamer (born 1900), one of the twentieth century's master philosophers. Looking back over his life and thought, Gadamer takes up key issues in his philosophy, addresses points of controversy, and replies to his critics, including those who accuse him of having been in complicity with the Nazis. A genial and direct conversationalist, Gadamer is here captured at his best and most accessible. The interviews took place between 1989 and 1996, and all (...) but one appear in English for the first time in this volume. The first three conversations, conducted by Heidelberg philosopher Carsten Dutt, deal with hermeneutics, aesthetics, and practical philosophy and the question of ethics. In a fourth conversation, with University of Heidelberg classics professor Glenn W. Most, Gadamer argues for the vital importance of the Greeks for our contemporary thinking. In the next, the philosopher reaffirms his connection with phenomenology and clarifies his relation to Husserl and Heidegger in a conversation with London philosopher Alfons Grieder. In the final interview, with German Nazi expert Dörte von Westernhagen, Gadamer describes his life as a struggling young professor in Germany in the 1930s and refutes accusations of his complicity with the Nazis. These conversations are a lucid introduction for readers new to the philosopher's thought, and for experts they present an invaluable commentary on Gadamer's most important themes. (shrink)

Controversies, i.e., multiple theory confrontations, may have a strong impact on the development of science. By an analysis of the so-called resonance controversy in chemistry the view that controversies and their resolution differ considerably from the process of theory succession is defended. It is argued that controversies are symptomatic of foundational problems, produce theory-scattering or domain-splitting, and induce ontological shifts. An explication is given of the role of existence claims and the applicability of Ockham's Razor in the resolution of controversies. (...) The requirement of a realistic interpretation of theories at all times, as defended by some philosophers, is criticised. (shrink)