Religionsphilosophie hat sich nach Jörg Splett mit einer Fundamentalfrage zu befassen: Woher stammt die Idee des Guten, deren Sollensanspruch den Menschen unmittelbar trifft und ihm als Grund zur Mitliebe und Dankbarkeit aufleuchtet? Die vorliegende Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag des Jubilars versammelt Beiträge im Spannungsfeld von Vernunft, Glaube und Liebe, die den Menschen in welthaften Symbolbeziehungen – z. B. des Spiels, der Ehe, der Personalität, der Individualität, des Mutterseins, der Theodizee, der Sinnfrage, der „Grenze der Sprache“ und der Suche nach (...) Transzendenz – denken. Im Mitlieben der Welt symbolisiert sich der Ursprung des Guten. (shrink)

Ultimately this book provides a theory of intergenerational justice that is both intellectually robust and practical with wide applicability to law and policy.

English summary: This book is both a study about the Socratic-Platonic conception of a good life, and an analytical study on self-knowledge, self-determination, and moral motivation.

This book is an anthology with the following themes. Non-European Tradition: Bussanich interprets main themes of Hindu ethics, including its roots in ritual sacrifice, its relationship to religious duty, society, individual human well-being, and psychic liberation. To best assess the truth of Hindu ethics, he argues for dialogue with premodern Western thought. Pfister takes up the question of human nature as a case study in Chinese ethics. Is our nature inherently good (as Mengzi argued) or bad (Xunzi’s view)? Pfister ob- (...) serves their underlying agreement, that human beings are capable of becoming good, and makes precise the disagreement: whether we achieve goodness by cultivating autonomous feelings or by accepting external precepts. There are political consequences: whether government should aim to respect and em- power individual choices or to be a controlling authority. Early Greek Thinking: Collobert examines the bases of Homeric ethics in fame, prudence, and shame, and how these guide the deliberations of heroes. She observes how, by depending upon the poet’s words, the hero gains a quasi- immortality, although in truth there is no consolation for each person’s inevi- table death. Plato: Santas examines Socratic Method and ethics in Republic 1. There Socrates examines definitions of justice and tests them by comparison to the arts and sciences. Santas shows the similarities of Socrates’ method to John Rawls’ method of considered judgments in reflective equilibrium. McPherran interprets Plato’s religious dimension as like that of his teacher Socrates. McPherran shows how Plato appropriates, reshapes, and extends the religious conventions of his own time in the service of establishing the new enterprise of philosophy. Ac- cording to Taylor, Socrates believes that humans in general have the task of helping the gods by making their own souls as good as possible, and Socrates’ unique ability to cross-examine imposes on him the special task of helping others to become as good as possible. This conception of Socrates’ mission is Plato’s own, consisting in an extension of the traditional conception of piety as helping the gods. Brickhouse and Smith propose a new understanding of Socratic moral psychology—one that retains the standard view of Socrates as an intellectualist, but also recognizes roles in human agency for appetites and passions. They compare and contrast the Socratic view to the picture of moral psychology we get in other dialogues of Plato. Hardy also proposes a new, non-reductive understanding of Socratic eudaimonism—he argues that Socrates invokes a very rich and complex notion of the “Knowledge of the Good and Bad”, which is associated with the motivating forces of the virtues. Rudebusch defends Socrates’ argument that knowledge can never be impotent in the face of psychic passions. He considers the standard objections: that knowledge cannot weigh incom- mensurable human values, and that brute desire, all by itself, is capable of moving the soul to action. Aristotle: Anagnostopoulos interprets Aristotle on the nature and acquisition of virtue. Though virtue of character, aiming at human happiness, requires a complex awareness of multiple dimensions of one’s experience, it is not properly a cognitive capacity. Thus it requires habituation, not education, according to Aristotle, in order to align the unruly elements of the soul with reason’s knowledge of what promotes happiness. Shields explains Aristotle’s doctrine that goodness is meant in many ways as the doctrine that there are different analyses of goodness for different types of circumstance, just as for being. He finds Aristotle to argue for this conclusion, against Plato’s doctrine of the unity of the Good, by applying the tests for homonymy and as an immediate cons- equence of the doctrine of categories. Shields evaluates the issue as unresolved at present. Russell discusses Aristotle’s account of practical deliberation and its virtue, intelligence (phronesis). He relates the account to contemporary philo- sophical controversies surrounding Aristotle’s view that intelligence is neces- sary for moral virtue, including the objections that in some cases it is unnecessary or even impedes human goodness. Frede examines the advantages and disadvantages of Aristotle’s virtue ethics. She explains the general Greek con- ceptions of happiness and virtue, Aristotle’s conception of phronesis and compares the Aristotle’s ethics with modern accounts. Liske discusses the question of whether the Aristotelian account of virtue entails an ethical-psy- chological determinism. He argues that Aristotle’s understanding of hexis allows for free action and ethical responsibility : By making decisions for good actions we are able to stabilize our character (hexis). Hellenistic and Roman: Annas defends an account of stoic ethics, according to which the three parts of Stoicism—logic, physics, and ethics—are integrated as the parts of an egg, not as the parts of a building. Since by this analogy no one part is a foundation for the rest, pedagogical decisions may govern the choice of numerous, equally valid, presentations of Stoic ethics. Piering interprets the Cynic way of life as a distinctive philosophy. In their ethics, Cynics value neither pleasure nor tradition but personal liberty, which they achieve by self-suffi- ciency and display in speech that is frank to the point of insult. Plotinus and Neoplatonism: Gerson outlines the place of ordinary civic virtue as well as philosophically contemplative excellence in Neoplatonism. In doing so he attempts to show how one and the same good can be both action-guiding in human life and be the absolute simple One that grounds the explanation of everything in the universe. Delcomminette follows Plotinus’s path to the Good as the foundation of free will, first in the freedom of Intellect and then in the “more than freedom” of the One. Plotinus postulates these divinities as not outside but within each self, saving him from the contradiction of an external foundation for a truly free will. General Topics: Halbig discusses the thesis on the unity of virtues. He dis- tinguishes the thesis of the identity of virtues and the thesis of a reciprocity of virtues and argues that the various virtues form a unity (in terms of reciprocity) since virtues cannot bring about any bad action. Detel examines Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of normativity : Plato and Aristotle (i) entertained hybrid theories of normativity by distinguishing functional, semantic and ethical normativity, (ii) located the ultimate source of normativity in standards of a good life, and thus (iii) took semantic normativity to be a derived form of normativity. Detel argues that hybrid theories of normativity are—from a mo- dern point of view—still promising. Ho ̈ffe defends the Ancient conception of an art of living against Modern objections. Whereas many Modern philosophers think that we have to replace Ancient eudaimonism by the idea of moral obligation (Pflicht), Ho ̈ffe argues that Eudaimonism and autonomy-based ethics can be reconciled and integrated into a comprehensive and promising theory of a good life, if we enrich the idea of autonomy by the central elements of Ancient eudaimonism. Some common themes: The topics in Chinese and Hindu ethics are perhaps more familiar to modern western sensibilities than Homeric and even Socratic. Anagnostopoulos, Brickhouse and Smith, Frede, Liske, Rudebusch, and Russell all consider in contrasting ways the role of moral character, apart from intellect, in ethics. Brickhouse / Smith, Hardy, and Rudebusch discuss the Socratic con- ception of moral knowledge. Brickhouse / Smith and Hardy retain the standard view of the so called Socratic Intellectualism. Shields and Gerson both consider the question whether there is a single genus of goodness, or if the term is a homonym. Bussanich, McPherran, Taylor, and Delcomminette all consider the relation between religion and ethics. Pfister, Piering, Delcomminette, and Liske all consider what sort of freedom is appropriate to human well-being. Halbig, Detel, and Ho ̈ffe propose interpretations of main themes of Ancient ethics. (shrink)

Der Band präsentiert die Akten des Schleiermacher-Kongresses 2017 zum Thema,,Reformation und Moderne". Dabei geht es nicht nur um Schleiermacher als Denker der Transformation des reformatorischen Erbes in die Moderne im Gebiet des Religiösen, sondern auch um Wechselbezüge weiterer Bereiche des sozio-kulturellen Lebens zwischen Geselligkeitsformen, Politik, Kunst und Philosophie. Die Beiträge stehen unter den Leitbegriffen,,Pluralität",,,Subjektivität" und,,Kritik", die als Schlüsselkonzepte der Moderne gelten können.

In Western intellectual history faith is usually subordinated to knowledge. Ideally, mere faith is to be overcome by knowledge. However is this view appropriate to the Christian self-understanding? Do we not need to assume that faith always includes some knowledge, that faith and knowledge are directly intertwined? But what kind of knowledge would that be? And what does it mean for the idea of an eschatological knowledge of God? The study examines this issue with reference to the Bible, Thomas Aquinas (...) and Hans Urs von Balthasar. (shrink)

Analyses Balthasar's idea of human freedom as a participation to Divine Freedom.

English summary: According to a current prejudice, the God of reason does not have a home in Protestantism. On the basis of model studies on the connection between biblical, Platonic and Aristotelian themes in the development of the Christian concept of God in late antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the authors of this volume show that the reformers did not at all flatly dismiss the rationality of faith. The articles focus on the modern transformations of the concept of (...) God in the 18th and 19th centuries. The volume, a collection of case studies of the history of the problem of the Christian concept of God, concludes with prominent syntheses of revelation and reason in the 20th century. German description: Einem gangigen Vorurteil zufolge hat der Gott der Vernunft im Protestantismus keine Heimat. Nach exemplarischen Studien zur Verbindung von biblischen mit platonischen und aristotelischen Motiven bei der Entfaltung des christlichen Gottesgedankens in Spatantike, Mittelalter und Renaissance zeigt der vorliegende Band aber, dass die Reformatoren der Vernunft des Glaubens keineswegs pauschal den Abschied gaben. Der Schwerpunkt der Beitrage liegt auf den neuzeitlichen Transformationen des Gottesgedankens im 18. und 19. Jh. Prominente Synthesen von Offenbarung und Vernunft im 20. Jh. schliessen den Band ab, der Fallstudien zu einer Problemgeschichte des christlichen Gottes-Denkens versammelt. Mit Beitragen von: Martin Arneth, Christine Axt-Piscalar, Ulrich Barth, Markus Buntfuss, Jorg Dierken, Douglas Hedley, Thomas Kaufmann, Dietrich Klein, Dietrich Korsch, Martin Laube, Jorg Lauster, Friederike Nussel, Bernd Oberdorfer, Joachim Ringleben, Friedemann Voigt, Dorothea Wendebourg, Gunther Wenz. (shrink)

Der Band präsentiert die 21 wichtigsten Enzyklopädie- und Lexikonartikel des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts zum Themenfeld "Gedächtnis, Gedächtnislehre, Gedächtniskunst" mit Kommentaren, Übersetzungen, ausführlicher Bibliographie und einem Nachwort, das das Verhältnis von frühneuzeitlicher Mnemonik und Enzyklopädik erörtert. Eröffnet wird hiermit eine mehrbändige Reihe »Documenta Mnemonica«, die die wichtigsten einschlägigen Zeugnisse seit der Antike bis zum Ende der Frühen Neuzeit in mehrsprachigen, kommentierten Quelleneditionen, Quellenverzeichnissen und Forschungsbibliographien dem internationalen Wissenschaftsdiskurs bequem und verläßlich zugänglich macht.

This book explores solving the problem of complexity for science in the 21st century.

This study intends to vindicate Thomas Aquinas' theory of perception as a key element which is systematically constituent for his theory of knowledge generally. The causal conditions for perception, the physical framework and the resulting perceptual knowledge are analysed.

Ludwik Fleck, Edmund Husserl : on the historicity of scientific knowledge -- Gaston Bachelard : the concept of "phenomenotechnique" -- Georges Canguilhem : epistemological history -- Pisum : Carl Correns's experiments on Xenia, 1896-99 -- Eudorina : Max Hartmann's experiments on biological regulation in protozoa, 1914-21 -- Ephestia : Alfred Kähn's experimental design for a developmental physiological -- Genetics, 1924-45 -- Tobacco mosaic virus : virus research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Biochemistry and Biology, 1937-45 -- The concept of (...) the gene : molecular biological perspectives -- The liquid scintillation counter : traces of radioactivity -- The concept of information : the writings of François Jacob -- Intersections -- Preparations -- The economy of the scribble. (shrink)