Das Universalienproblem - die Frage nach der Erkenntnis der Natur des Allgemeinen -, das seit der griechischen Antike zu den zentralen Problemen philosophischen Denkens zählt, besitzt für die Gegenwart nicht nur philosophischen Wert, sondern liegt zugleich vielfach wichtigen Streitpunkten in verschiedenen Wissenschaften zugrunde. Wöhler legt eine Auswahl der wichtigsten Primärquellen, ausgehend von der berühmten "Isagoge" des Porphyrios und deren Kommentierung durch Boethius bis zu Anselm von Canterbury und Johannes von Salisbury vor, wobei er die arabische Tradition (Avicenna, Averroes) mit einbezieht. (...) Erstmals werden in dieser Breite dem deutschen Leser Texte mit dem Ziel zur Verfügung gestellt, die wesentlichen Entwicklungslinien des Streits um die Universalien mitvollziehen zu können. In seinem umfangreichen Nachwort gibt Wöhler über die Texterläuterungen hinaus einen Überblick über die Geschichte des Universalienstreits und seinen Verlauf bis zur Frühscholastik. Ergänzt wird der Band durch ein deutsch-lateinisches Glossar. (shrink)

In diesem Buch liefert Hans-Ulrich Wöhler einen repräsentativen geschichtlichen Überblick zum dialektischen Denken in der mittelalterlichen Philosophie. Untersucht werden ausgewählte Texte von Autoren unterschiedlicher sprachlicher, religiöser und philosophischer Provenienz aus dem Zeitraum zwischen dem 6. und dem 17. Jahrhundert. Die den Autor dabei leitende Frage lautet: Inwiefern dachten diese Denker in ihrer Philosophie dialektisch? Im Zentrum des Bandes steht somit die Beschreibung und Rekonstruktion von konkreten Äußerungs- und Anwendungsformen und vor allem von Inhalten eines dialektischen Denkens, unabhängig von (...) ihrer Selbstkennzeichnung durch deren Urheber. Entscheidend für die Beantwortung der Leitfrage ist es, ob und in welcher Weise in den untersuchten Texten ein Verständnis für die Kompatibilität, die Relativität, die Vermittelbarkeit oder auch die Einheit von Gegensätzen artikuliert wird. Der gewählte zeitliche Rahmen integriert in die Darstellung nicht nur einige klassische Vertreter der Philosophie im lateinischen, islamischen und jüdischen Mittelalter, sondern er bezieht zugleich die Perioden der Rezeption und Aneignung des antiken Erbes am Anfang und des kritischen Rekurses darauf am Ende der Epoche ein. (shrink)

In 1514 at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leipzig, a quodlibetical disputation took place. About 60 persons participated in the disputation. A handwritten record of this event has been preserved. A thorough analysis of these texts gives us a wealth of information with regard to the themes, positions, and tendencies of thinking during that period of time. The scholars at Leipzig University made an attempt at reconciling their philosophical interests with the claim to spiritual hegemony on the (...) part of theology and the church. This aspect is remarkable if one thinks of the famous papal bull Apostolici Regiminis, promulgated in the year 1513. The attached appendix lists the topics and the names of the participants of the disputation according to the record. (shrink)

In his works on natural philosophy, Walter Burley designed a theory about one particular kind of opposition, namely contrariety. In this respect, one of his most peculiar tractates is the Tractatus primus. However, also in his Physics-commentary, in his Tractatus secundus and in the quaestio Utrum contraria adequata in virtute agant et patiantur ad invicem? one finds arguments revealing a dialectical approach to the problem of the specific identity and/or incompatibility of contrariously opposed qualities. Burley’s rea­­sonings compose an original attempt (...) to use philosophical dialectic not only as a meth­od of disputation, but moreover primarily as a theory of the mediation of opposites. These arguments refer to the scope of natural philosophy, logic, ethics and medicine. An analysis of these arguments and of the criticisms of Thomas Wylton and Konrad of Megenberg reveals Burley’s dialectical approach to be an eminent historical contribution to the solution of fundamental questions within the realm of Aristotelian metaphysics. (shrink)

The University of Leipzig was founded in the year 1409. In the faculty of arts - the heart and the basis of the old university as a whole - there were numerous controversies during the first century of its existence. From the very beginning it competed with the older University of Prague, its historic mother, for an independent manner of philosophical thinking. The so-called » Wegestreit « between the via moderna and the via antiqua , and the » Poetenstreit « (...) between traditional and new humanistic patterns of science and philosophy were constituents of late medieval philosophy in Germany. Especially the various forms of academic disputation, that is ordinary, extraordinary and quodlibetal disputations, played an important part within the first hundred years of existence of this university, specifically its faculty of arts. The famous disputation between Johann Eck and Martin Luther at Leipzig in the year 1519 was one of the culminating points of this practice. Considerable work remains to be done on the exploration of late medieval philosophy. The analysis of the collection of medieval philosophical manuscripts originating from the old University of Leipzig could provide some new material for our historical knowledge of this period. (shrink)

The first philosophical faculty in Saxony up to the beginning of the Reformation in its local, regional, and supraregional context. The University of Leipzig was founded in the year 1409. In the faculty of arts – the heart and the basis of the old university as a whole – there were numerous controversies during the first century of its existence. From the very beginning it competed with the older University of Prague, its historic mother, for an independent manner of philosophical (...) thinking. The so-called »Wegestreit« between the via moderna and the via antiqua, and the »Poetenstreit« between traditional and new humanistic patterns of science and philosophy were constituents of late medieval philosophy in Germany. Especially the various forms of academic disputation, that is ordinary, extraordinary and quodlibetal disputations, played an important part within the first hundred years of existence of this university, specifically its faculty of arts. The famous disputation between Johann Eck and Martin Luther at Leipzig in the year 1519 was one of the culminating points of this practice. Considerable work remains to be done on the exploration of late medieval philosophy. The analysis of the collection of medieval philosophical manuscripts originating from the old University of Leipzig could provide some new material for our historical knowledge of this period. (shrink)

Considering a range of present-day phenomena, from the immediacy effects of literature to the impact of hypercommunication, globalization, and sports, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes an important shift in our relationship to history and the passage of time. Although we continue to use concepts inherited from a "historicist" viewpoint, a notion of time articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the actual construction of time in which we live in today, which shapes our perceptions, experiences, and actions, is no (...) longer historicist. Without fully realizing it, we now inhabit a new, unnamed space in which the "closed future" and "ever-available past" (a past we have not managed to leave behind) converge to produce an "ever-broadening present of simultaneities." This profound change to a key dimension of our existence has complex consequences for the way in which we think about ourselves and our relation to the material world. At the same time, the ubiquity of digital media has eliminated our tactile sense of physical space, altering our perception of our world. Gumbrecht draws on his mastery of the philosophy of language to enrich his everyday observations, traveling to Disneyland, a small town in Louisiana, and the center of Vienna to produce striking sketches of our broad presence in the world. (shrink)

Conversation about expected translation into Ukrainian of Gumbrecht's book Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford UP: Stanford, 2004).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 83-101 [Access article in PDF] Martin Heidegger and his Japanese InterlocutorsAbout A Limit of Western Metaphysics Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht 1 Quite obviously, the central position that Western philosophical discourses have assigned, over the past two centuries, to the concept of "sense" hinges upon the epistemological dominance of the Subject/Object paradigm. In whichever specific ways this concept has been defined (and we all know how (...) confusing the range of those proposals has become), 1 it always ends up referring to the modalities in which an "Observer-Subject" can refer to what (s)he is observing as the "World of Objects." "Making sense," then, may be described as the selection, performed by an observer, of a specific object of reference among all the objects of which the world is believed to consist; or as the drawing of a line by which (s)he makes a distinction, at every given moment, between those parts of the world that (s)he is observing and those that (s)he is not observing; or as the positioning of a chosen topic within a preexisting context of possible associations. All these different descriptions can be turned into definitions of "sense making" as long as they point to the awareness that whatever has been chosen, divided, or contextualized could have been chosen, divided, or contextualized differently. Another way of evoking the same type of relation between what remains "potential" and what becomes "actual" would be to say that the concept of "sense" always refers to cases of entropy transformed into structure—under the condition that alternative patterns of transforming entropy into structure remain available. What we call the Subject's consciousness (Bewusstsein) is the place where these selections take place and where their alternatives are held available.If we consider the Subject/Object paradigm as the core element of that style of philosophizing which has been called (sometimes from a purely descriptive and sometimes from a critical angle) "Western metaphysics," then it is a both true and trivial conclusion to say that, within Western metaphysics, sense making is inevitable (that is, that Subjects cannot help producing sense and, also, that there can be no effects of sense without pointing to a Subject). An interesting case that proves the point of this implicational relationship is Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. Despite Luhmann's sustained effort to be epistemologically eccentric, despite all his great conceptual ambition to bypass the instance of the Subject, 2 his books (and, above all, their reception) make it [End Page 83] very clear how a philosophical discourse that gives as central a position to the concept of "sense" as Luhmann's cannot help producing Subject-effects. The frequently used everyday expression, on the other hand, that "something makes no sense" is not in conflict with our point about the inevitability of sense making within the metaphysical—and also within our Western everyday—framework of discursive presuppositions.For if we say that "something makes no sense," we are not using the word "sense" in accordance with the conventional philosophical meaning of "sense making," and we are thus not referring to individual phenomena that would "resist" individual acts of sense attribution. 3 Rather, when we say that "something makes no sense," we react to situations where a (shorter or longer) sequence of those elementary and inevitable acts of sense attribution does not produce an impression of "coherence" or "consistency"; we refer to situations where we lack a larger perspective from which we could subsume the results of different individual acts of sense making [see Hahn]. Astonishingly enough (or not astonishingly at all), all those loud intellectual slogans from a decade or two ago about the "death of the Subject" never reached this—altogether unsurprising—point: that any attempt at (or the mere historical process of) overcoming a Subject-centered epistemological tradition (or, with the more Heideggerian concept, of overcoming "metaphysics") would have to ask how one could—begin to—avoid sense making. On the contrary, that "weak subject" and that so-called "weak thinking" as which the Subject/Object paradigm seems to... (shrink)

From 1990 on, the London psychologist Max Velmans developed a novel approach to consciousness according to which an experience of an object is phenomenologically identical to an object as experienced. On the face of it I agree; but unlike Velmans I argue that the latter should be understood as comparable, not to a Kantian, but rather to a noematic.