The theme of the philosopher as therapist dominates Nietzsche's entire opus, from his earliest writings to the Zarathustra period and beyond. Nietzsche wishes to hasten the coming and future sanctification of a new type of synthetic human being, and his entire teaching is shaped by his own struggles against illness.Yet few Nietzsche scholars have paid this crucial therapeutic element of his thought sufficient attention. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field is composed around the Nietzschean insight, which (...) has its roots in the Hippocratic tradition of ancient medicine, that beliefs, behaviours, ideals and patterns of striving are not things for which individuals or even cultures are responsible. Rather, they are symptoms of what an individual or culture is, which symptoms require diagnostic interpretation and evaluation. The book identifies three principal approaches in Nietzsche's philosophy: diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic. Each essay takes up this essential insight into Nietzsche's therapeutic philosophy from a different perspective and collectively they reveal an array of insightful approaches to self-induced enhancement, for both individuals and cultures. (shrink)

Shaftesburys Dialog «The Moralists», ein Schlüsseltext der englischen Literatur und Ästhetik des frühen achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, ist bisher nur ideengeschichtlich interpretiert worden. Die vorliegende Studie zeichnet anhand weitgehend unbekannter Quellen aus dem Shaftesbury-Nachlass zum erstenmal die ebenso langwierige wie komplizierte Genese und Druckgeschichte des Textes nach. Shaftesburys hier erstmals veröffentlichte Briefe und Anweisungen an den Drucker und Verleger John Darby werfen neues Licht auf den Wandel der Typographie und der Buchgestaltung in der Epoche des englischen Neoklassizismus.

There is a broad public interest in the current discussion about evolution and creation, a discussion led mainly by scientists on the one hand and theologians on the other. The scientists argue for the evolution of the cosmos and nature without a creator, while the theologians defend the idea of creation. However, the perspective of natural philosophy is largely missing from the debate. Since this is no longer represented in contemporary philosophical trends, this study revives it from the aristotelian-thomist tradition (...) with its valuable insights into the finality of nature, which the author uses in his attempt to mediate between scientific and theological viewpoints. (shrink)

Rock art - paintings, and pecked or engraved images on rocks, whether in caves, shelters, or in the open-air - exists in all but a couple of countries of the world [Bahn, 1998], It spans a period from at least 35,000 years ago to historic times, comprises many millions of images from hundreds of thousands of sites, and thus constitutes the vast majority of the world's art, and art history. It is a phenomenon that has seen a huge upsurge (...) of interest in the last few decades, with not only numerous publications and conferences, but also a proliferation of calendars, T-shirts, mugs, jewellery, and garments bearing rock art images. Many people who are famous for other things have worked on or published rock art - for example, scholars such as Mary Leakey or authors like Joy Adamson or Erle Stanley Gardner. Rock art studies have always been the domain of the “amateur” as well as the “professional”, and amateurs remain of huge importance in this field. Indeed, most of the principal rock art organisations, along with their journals, were created by, are run by, and consist largely of amateur enthusiasts who include some of the world's foremost specialists. The growing popularity of the art brings an ever-increasing risk of pollution, damage, and vandalism, as well as outright thefts of wall or cave images. The rock art associations are dedicated to the discovery, recording, and conservation of rock art, and play a major role in striving to teach schoolchildren and adults alike about the incalculable importance of this irreplaceable, universal heritage and about the need to respect and protect it. (shrink)

Social scientists have not integrated relevant knowledge from the biological sciences into their explanations of human behavior. This failure is due to a longstanding antireductionistic bias against the natural sciences, which follows on a commitment to the view that social facts must be explained by social laws. This belief has led many social scientists into the error of reifying abstract analytical constructs into entities that possess powers of agency. It has also led to a false nature-culture dichotomy that effectively undermines (...) the place of biology in social scientific explanation. Following the principles of methodological individualism, we show how behavioral explanations supported by data and theory from the neurosciences can be used to correct the errors of reificationist thinking in the social sciences. We outline a mechanistic approach to the explanation of human behavior with the hope that the biological sciences will begin to find greater acceptance among social scientists. (shrink)

Mounting evidence suggests that the human impact on the planet is reaching the point where the Earth's ecosystems will not be able to support the level of human occupation. The global economy also seems to be generating income disparities that threaten the social stability of even the most developed economies. Although both these trends are rooted in the operation of the global market economy, standard economics has surprisingly little to offer in the way of policies that might allow us to (...) survive the twenty-first century with our current social and environmental systems intact. This article examines our current predicament from the point of view of neoclassical welfare economics and the alternative framework of ecological economics. We argue that ecological economics, by placing the study of economics squarely within human society and ecosystems, can lead the way to make economics both scientifically credible and policy relevant. (shrink)

Geprägt von metaethischen Fragestellungen hat sich die philosophische Diskussion wieder intensiv mit der ontologischen und erkenntnistheoretischen Dimension von Werten befasst und der Phänomenologie zu einer Relecture verholfen. Zugleich hat die Tugendethik eine Renaissance erfahren. In die Schnittstellen dieser aktuellen moralphilosophischen Debatten arbeitet dieses Buch den originären Ansatz Edith Steins zu einer Ethik des christlichen Glaubens heraus. Auf der Grundlage des Personbegriffs entwickelt Edith Stein eine innovative Tugenderkenntnistheorie, deren Bezugspunkt die Wahrheitsfrage ist. Es geht ihr dabei um eine intersubjektiv, in personaler (...) Kommunikation vermittelte Erkenntnis des sittlich Guten, d. h. aber zugleich um eine unmittelbare Konnaturalität mit dem Guten. (shrink)

Many virtue epistemologists conceive of epistemic competence on the model of skill —such as archery, playing baseball, or chess. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic competences and skills are crucially and relevantly different kinds of capacities. This, I suggest, undermines the popular attempt to understand epistemic normativity as a mere special case of the sort of normativity familiar from skilful action. In fact, as I argue further, epistemic competences resemble virtues rather than skills—a claim that (...) is based on an important, but often overlooked, difference between virtue and skill. The upshot is that virtue epistemology should indeed be based on virtue, not on skill. (shrink)

Epistemic constitutivism (EC) holds that the nature of believing is such that it gives rise to a standard of correctness and that other epistemic normative notions (e.g., reasons for belief) can be explained in terms of this standard. If defensible, this view promises an attractive and unifying account of epistemic normativity. However, EC faces a forceful objection: that constitutive standards of correctness are never enough for generating normative reasons. This paper aims to defend EC in the face of this objection. (...) I do so in two steps. First, I dispute a crucial assumption underlying the case against EC: that constitutive standards of correctness in general are ‘reason-giving’ only if and because there is also a prior reason to comply with them. Second, I outline a strategy of how EC can meet the challenge of explaining what’s special about the activity of believing such that, unlike other standard-governed activities, it is capable of generating normative reasons. (shrink)

Someone acts in a morally worthy way when they deserve credit for doing the morally right thing. But when and why do agents deserve credit for the success involved in doing the right thing? It is tempting to seek an answer to that question by drawing an analogy with creditworthy success in other domains of human agency, especially in sports, arts, and crafts. Accordingly, some authors have recently argued that, just like creditworthy success in, say, chess, playing the piano, or (...) archery, creditworthy moral success is a matter of getting things right by way of manifesting a relevant skill. My main aim in this paper is to bring out an important structural difference between moral creditworthiness and creditworthiness in sports, arts, and craft, undermining attempts to use examples of the latter as a model for understanding the former. As an alternative, I propose an account of morally creditworthy action, according to which such action is a matter of manifesting virtue, not skill—a claim that's based on an important, but underappreciated, difference between the sorts of excellences constituting virtues and skills. The paper thus contributes to a more nuanced picture of normative achievements across different domains of human agency, highlighting largely overlooked structural dissimilarities among them. (shrink)

Aufgrund sorgfältiger Untersuchung in phänomenologischer Erkenntnishaltung können die Struktur des Lysis, die künstlerisch-ideelle Gedankenbewegung und damit die Einheit von philosophisch-künstlerischer Gestalt und philosophischem Gehalt des Dialoges in einer strengeren Weise erfasst werden als bisher. Dadurch werden ganz neue Beziehungen zu Gestalt und Gehalt der Politeia sichtbar. Sie erlauben im Verein mit grundsätzlichen Überlegungen zur Methode der datierenden Sprachstatistik und weiteren Beobachtungen, den Lysis chronologisch nach der Politeia anzusetzen - in der Trilogie Phaidros - Lysis - Euthydemos. So können die interpretatorischen (...) Einschränkungen durch das Vorurteil, der Lysis sei ein Frühdialog, überwunden werden. Die positive Interpretation des Dialoges und ihre Vertiefung durch die platonische Prinzipienlehre werden damit auf ungewohnte Weise stärker begründet. (shrink)

Fifty years ago Hartman studied the barrier transmission time of wave packets (J Appl Phys 33:3427–3433, 1962). He was inspired by the tunneling experiments across thin insulating layers at that time. For opaque barriers he calculated faster than light propagation and a transmission time independent of barrier length, which is called the Hartman effect. A faster than light (FTL or superluminal) wave packet velocity was deduced in analog tunneling experiments with microwaves and with infrared light thirty years later. Recently, the (...) conjectured zero time of electron tunneling was claimed to have been observed in ionizing helium inside the barrier. The calculated and measured short tunneling time arises at the barrier front. This tunneling time was found to be universal for elastic fields as well as for electromagnetic fields. Remarkable is that the delay time is the same for the reflected and the transmitted waves in the case of symmetric barriers. Several theoretical physicists predicted this strange nature of the tunneling process. However, even with this background many members of the physics community do not accept a FTL signal velocity interpretation of the experimental tunneling results. Instead a luminal front velocity was calculated to explain the FTL experimental results frequently. However, Brillouin stated in his book on wave propagation and group velocity that the front velocity is given by the group velocity of wave packets in the case of physical signals, which have only finite frequency bandwidths. Some studies assumed barriers to be cavities and the observed tunneling time does represent the cavity lifetime. We are going to discus these continuing misleading interpretations, which are found in journals and in textbooks till today. (shrink)

Expulsion of senses. Acustic spaces: call and listening in interpretive sociology. Following the 'mental constructs' that are illustrative for Max Weber's Idealtypologie, the 'acustic spaces' in the cultural concept of education are developed. The study is an analysis of the organization of command and obedience in Weber's sociology of domination. His interpretive sociology is taken from Martin Heidegger. Another subject of the paper is an excursion into the sociology of music of Weber and Adorno. In the acoustic sounds of music, (...) especially in the organ and piano works, we find the process of rationalization of the Western culture. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this (...) implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds. (shrink)