The way that the questions of our symposium are framed causes me some concern. At a general level this is for three reasons. First there is a principle of statutory interpretation – Expressio unius...

Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas produced a large body of work over more than five decades. His early work was devoted to the public sphere, to modernization, and to critiques of trends in philosophy and politics. He then slowly began to articulate theories of rationality, meaning, and truth. His two-volume Theory of Communicative Action in … Continue reading Habermas, Jürgen →.

Computational techniques comparing co-occurrences of city names in texts allow the relative longitudes and latitudes of cities to be estimated algorithmically. However, these techniques have not been applied to estimate the provenance of artifacts with unknown origins. Here, we estimate the geographic origin of artifacts from the Indus Valley Civilization, applying methods commonly used in cognitive science to the Indus script. We show that these methods can accurately predict the relative locations of archeological sites on the basis of artifacts of (...) known provenance, and we further apply these techniques to determine the most probable excavation sites of four sealings of unknown provenance. These findings suggest that inscription statistics reflect historical interactions among locations in the Indus Valley region, and they illustrate how computational methods can help localize inscribed archeological artifacts of unknown origin. The success of this method offers opportunities for the cognitive sciences in general and for computational anthropology specifically. (shrink)

Max Picard (1888-1965) was a Swiss-German writer, who converted to Catholicism from Judaism. A doctor and psychologist, Picard worked in Berlin but retired in the 1920s to Switzerland. He is often regarded as a "wisdom thinker," and his rich and penetrating writings continue to speak to us in the twenty-first century. The Flight from God is an incisive, profound description of many of the problems facing modern culture, and its analysis resonates with us more today than when first published in (...) 1934. Picard illustrates that modern culture is essentially in Flight, and so the individual is under pressure to make a choice; in earlier generations only an individual could be in flight because the culture itself was not in flight but in Faith. The flight does not require courage or guilt; yet it is to be found in, and is often destructive of, many facets of life including human relationships, art, economics, science, entertainment, even religion. Because of this it leaves many in anguish, from which we seek alternative avenues of structure and meaning. Yet, in every person there is a residue that will not yield itself to the flight, and this is bound up with love, which reminds us of God. Picard shows how God is always somehow present in the flight--just when we think we are arriving from the flight, we find that God is already there. Picard's identification and discussion of the roots of the distresses of modern culture, and its attempts to grapple with the spiritual dimension of human experience, along with tensions created by freedom and individuality, are clearly still of the greatest relevance for us today. (shrink)

En su lectura de la Wissenschaftslehre de 1794, Heidegger acusa a Fichte de no ser capaz de concebir la finitud del conocimiento. El argumento esgrimido por Heidegger es que el rechazo fichteano de la noción de “cosa en sí” implica una negación de la ñnitud. En el presente trabajo se defiende la posición opuesta: Fichte no sólo reconoce enteramente la finitud del conocimiento, sino que la funda también en una dimensión práctica cercana a la noción de Heidegger de “cuidado”.

Weber's treatment of the Protestant Ethic in American colonial economic history is indefensible in terms of historical evidence; his ideal-typology of the causal importance of Calvinism in the development of Western capitalism generally is at best a useful fiction. Weber neither understood the economic demands of Puritan doctrine nor appreciated the disparity between ideology and economic reality. Weber's prerequisites for rational capitalism were not satisfied in the colonies, and his contrast between economic development in the North and non-Calvinist South is (...) erroneous. Economic success in the colonies was determined far more by political and social connections than by special religious motivations. (shrink)

In this essay, we focus on Max Weber’s concept of rationalization to understand and make sense of the rise of bureaucratic, corporate governance and online learning in higher education. We reveal the distinct disconnect between human interaction and online platforms and how such disconnection is antithetical to higher learning. We also show how Weber’s analysis helps us recognize the uniquely crass commercialism embedded in the very rationalization that makes online learning in universities thinkable and actionable. Our use of online learning (...) is only one illustration of Weber’s concept of rationalization, but it provides an important understanding of the nefarious effects rationalization has on human interaction. The nexus of marketization, technology, and higher education represents, on our view, a juggernaut against faculty autonomy, academic freedom, and humane learning and should be directly challenged. One difficulty this challenge faces is the degree to which online learning has become ubiquitous and taken-for-granted. It has, as Weber clarifies, been rationalized. (shrink)

L?entreprise philosophique de Scheler se présente comme une application de la phénoménologie des Recherches logiques au domaine des valeurs, et procède pour cela à une transposition de l?objectivisme séman­tique husserlien en un objectivisme axiologique. C?est pourquoi, au premier abord, le statut de la passivité ne semble pas poser problème dans la phénoménologie de Scheler, tant ce dernier insiste sur l?objectivité, l?absolui­té et l?indépendance des valeurs qui ne peuvent être, comme l?affirme le Formalisme, « ni créées, ni détruites », mais « (...) existent indépendamment de toute organisation propre à tel ou tels êtres-spirituels » 1 . La sphère de l?affectivité forme le corrélat subjectif de cette objectivité axiologique et ne peut que se cantonner à un rôle de découverte ou de révélation des valeurs, c?est-à-dire à une dimension essentiellement passive : le sentiment nous donne à voir les valeurs mais il ne les constitue pas, contrairement à ce qui sera le cas par la suite chez Husserl 2 . Ainsi l?intentionnalité schelerienne est-elle structurée comme une réceptivité fondamentale qui se contente d?enregistrer la nature et la hiérarchie des valeurs, et ce, quand bien même Scheler continue de parler d?actes pour désigner les différents vécus affectifs qui nous mettent en relation avec le champ axiologique. À cet égard, Maurice Dupuy, dans son commentaire sur Scheler, souligne que « la. (shrink)

Nach Max Weber ist Politik das "geduldige Bohren harter Bretter mit Augenmass und Geduld". Was hinzukommen muss, sind ethische Orientierungen. Vor allem in einer Zeit rasanter politischer und gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche braucht es dringlich einen ethischen Kompass. Es gilt demnach die Grundlagen der modernen politischen Ordnung sowie ihre Ziele zu reflektieren, um sie dann unter neuen politischen Bedingungen bestmöglich zur Geltung zu bringen. Der vorliegende Band stellt dazu sozialethische Koordinaten bereit, davon ausgehend, dass in einer Demokratie eine Ethik des Politischen alle (...) Bürger und Bürgerinnen angeht. Der erste Teil behandelt wesentliche Eckpfeiler des Politischen in der Moderne: Menschenrechte/Grundrechte - Demokratie - Nation/Internationale Gemeinschaft. Der folgende Überblick über Prinzipien politischer Ethik (Gemeinwohl, Solidarität, Versöhnung) reflektiert grundlegende Massstäbe. Konkretionen zu zentralen Politikfeldern (Friedens-, Flüchtlings- und Religionspolitik) runden den Band ab und regen zum Weiterdenken an"-- Back cover. (shrink)

The Kohlberg Gilligan Controversy has received intermittent but inconclusive attention for many years, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of bridging the two positions. This article explores the published evidence for Gilligan's claims of gender difference, gender identity difference, and role of caring in people's ethics. It seems that the evidence for pronounced gender differences in ethical attitudes within business is weak, even if gender identity is used instead of physical gender. The main propositions of Care Theory and recent advances in its (...) thinking are discussed. Special focus emerges on the notion of Attachment which seems to be the Care Theory ingredient both most able to survive critical scrutiny and most promising for bridging the divide between the Kohlberg and Gilligan paradigms. The Social Bonding Model and other possible bridge building conceptual structures are introduced. Finally, Max Weber's division between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility provides an overarching perspective both of the gap still to be bridged and the need to keep trying to bridge it. (shrink)

The Kohlberg Gilligan Controversy has received intermittent but inconclusive attention for many years, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of bridging the two positions. This article explores the published evidence for Gilligan’s claims of gender difference, gender identity difference, and role of caring in people’s ethics. It seems that the evidence for pronounced gender differences in ethical attitudes within business is weak, even if gender identity is used instead of physical gender. The main propositions of Care Theory and recent advances in its (...) thinking are discussed. Special focus emerges on the notion of Attachment which seems to be the Care Theory ingredient both most able to survive critical scrutiny and most promising for bridging the divide between the Kohlberg and Gilligan paradigms. The Social Bonding Model and other possible bridge building conceptual structures are introduced. Finally, Max Weber’s division between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility provides an overarching perspective both of the gap still to be bridged and the need to keep trying to bridge it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Language, Thought, and LogicGabriele PooleLanguage, Thought, and Logic, by John M. Ellis; x & 163 pp. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993, $29.95.It is John Ellis’s contention that notwithstanding the enormous amount of energy that has gone into language studies not very much progress has been achieved and our theory of language remains vastly fragmented and contradictory. Language, Thought, and Logic is presented as an effort to overcome this (...) impasse. Many ideas are discussed, but the fundamental themes are the following four: the priority of categorization over communication, the functional nature of most categories, the attack on the severance of grammar from meaning which characterizes generative grammarians, and the dismissal of the debate on the relationship between language and thought as a meaningless issue.In chapters two and three, Ellis—after having convincingly argued for the logical priority of (language induced) categorization over communication—proceeds to illustrate the difference between “real” and “functional” categories. He states that a few categories, such as chemical classes, have their base in “reality.” Most categories, however, (Ellis uses the example of poison) are not based on intrinsic characteristics of its members (poisons differ widely in chemical structure) but on the collective purposes of the speakers (identifying dangerous substances). The former are “real” categories, the latter functional ones, and on the basis of this opposition Ellis attacks “naive realists” who claim that most linguistic categories are grounded in the extra-linguistic world. Ellis’s dichotomy however is not fully convincing: reality, of course, includes human beings and their interactions with the world. Once we concede that the chemical structure of a given substance is a real fact, then we have to admit that the interaction of a given substance with the human body is equally “real,” and [End Page 142] that a category based on a given type of interaction is grounded in “reality” just as one based on a given type of chemical structure.Chapter five instead is devoted to the traditional question of the relationship between thought and language. Ellis’s contention is that this discussion is in itself logically absurd, since language is an essential part of thought. This “initial logical misstep” inevitably leads thinkers such as John Lyons, Max Black, Eric Lenneberg, and no doubt countless others, to “astonishing” and “bewildering” statements, pseudoproblems,” and “comic” errors (pp. 56–58). In this case, too, Ellis’s position is not particularly convincing, and one wishes that he had devoted some of his unforgiving examination of the logical integrity of other people’s positions to his own arguments. For readers are bound to ask themselves why on earth does the fact that language is part of thought make it “not possible” to speak of the relationship between the two. Is it logically “not possible” to speak of the relationship of the part to the whole? Is it “not possible,” for example, to speak of the relationship of the heart to the rest of the human body?In general, by denying the possibility of discussing the relationship of thought and language, Ellis ends up completely ignoring the tension between the more standardized and collective aspects of language (grammar, and denotation, in particular) and the various ways it becomes articulated within individuals, through its inevitable enmeshment in their different experiences. This is a pity, because in many ways Ellis is trying to carve a commendable path between the Scylla of “deep structures” and the Charybdis of “linguistic determinism,” between the severance of language from meaning, and their absolute identification. It is perhaps inevitable that in shying away from the latter peril he ends up contradicting himself. After having declared the logical impossibility of speaking of the influence of the structure of language on thought, he subsequently states that it is certainly not true that everything in our mental life is completely determined by the structure of our language” (p. 61).Ultimately one is left with the impression that what would have best been offered as a refinement and integration of other positions has been polemically presented as a radical alternative, with the risk of helping to perpetuate the fragmentation of linguistic studies it was meant to overcome. Thus, as far as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A World for All? Global Civil Society in Political Theology and Trinitarian Theology ed. by William Storrar, Peter Casarella, and Paul Louis Metzger, and: Public Theology for a Global Society: Essays in Honor of Max L. Stackhouse ed. by Deirdre King Hainsworth and Scott PaethJonathan RothchildA World for All? Global Civil Society in Political Theology and Trinitarian Theology Edited by William Storrar, Peter Casarella, and Paul Louis Metzger (...) Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011. 346 pp. $35.00Public Theology for a Global Society: Essays in Honor of Max L. Stackhouse Edited by Deirdre King Hainsworth and Scott Paeth Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 264 pp. $45.00The intersections of globalization, civil society, and public theological reflection remain fluid, contested, and complicated. Two edited volumes that have shared connections to Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry celebrate the contributions of Max Stackhouse (Public Theology for Global Society as a festschrift and A World for All? as a dedication) toward these intersections. Public Theology for a Global Society attends to neo-Calvinist debates about public theology and its applicability to family, finance, and technology, while A World For All? explores religious beliefs and practices in their contexts, the meanings of the Trinity, and the prospects for cultural, political, and religious dialogue within civil society.In Public Theology for a Global Society, the contributors engage Stackhouse’s work in terms of its “global reach and its ecclesial concern” (ix). The essays consider five overarching themes: covenant, natural law, and human rights; social pluralism and social justice; Christian responsibility for society; economic and political realism; and Christian ethics in a global era. One of the book’s strengths is that it ambitiously probes—as Stackhouse’s own work does—the substantive interrelationships of these themes. Harold Breitenberg’s opening essay clarifies the meanings of public theology, but it does not account for recent developments, including comparative interventions that reconstruct modes of public theology.In the second section on key issues in public theology, John Witte speculates on whether Stackhouse would accept sixteenth-century Calvinist thinker Johannes Althusius’s “‘different and ‘even dangerous’” (36) theory of natural law. [End Page 205] Witte’s query, which begs comparisons vis-à-vis Catholic models of public theology frequently neglected in the book, is critically addressed by Don Browning’s essay. Browning’s theology of covenant includes a subordinate theory of natural law because “the concept of covenant cannot stand alone” (49). Other essays include reflections on covenant by Hak Joon Lee (which reconstructs Abraham Kuyper’s theory of sphere sovereignty) and Richard Mouw (which analyzes neo-Calvinist conceptions of law, covenant, and common morality). Similar to Browning’s caution to Stackhouse, Mouw censures a complete rejection of natural law (104); pace Browning’s critique, Mouw applauds Stackhouse’s insistence on the prominence of covenant in neo-Calvinist ethical and social theory. Interrogation of these disagreements by either the editors or the contributors would have strengthened the book.The book’s third section examines public theology in a global context. Differing from Stackhouse, William Schweiker charts the basic anthropological and existential components of a cosmopolitan conscience to overcome the universalist and particularist difficulties within public theology (134–38). Other thinkers appropriate interreligious dialogue as constructive models. Mark Heim contends that, in the face of massive global suffering, interreligious dialogue must promote human flourishing. Scott Paeth similarly sees dialogue as a mechanism for overcoming religiously motivated violence (166). Peter Paris, Shirley Roels, and Deirdre King Hainsworth all point to various features of technology as pathways to new articulations of public theology. In the concluding section, the contributors fittingly focus on the legacy of Stackhouse, namely, his long-standing interests in justification, justice, congregational life, and a “sobered version of Reformed theology vis-à-vis institutional responsibility and the retrieval of its theological substance” (Gabriel Fackre, 247).A World for All?, borne out of a 2005 conference in Edinburgh, approaches globalization within the modern ecumenical movement as illustrated by the affiliations of its three editors: William Storrar (ecumenical Protestant), Peter Casarella (Catholic), and Paul Metzger (Evangelical). The book examines the broader trajectories of globalization in conversation with “examples of churches around the world... playing a vital part... (shrink)

"Max Picard was a Swiss-German writer, who converted to Catholicism from Judaism. A doctor and psychologist, Picard worked in Berlin but retired in the 1920s to Switzerland. He is often regarded as a "wisdom thinker," and his rich and penetrating writings continue to speak to us in the twenty-first century. The Flight from God is an incisive, profound description of many of the problems facing modern culture, and its analysis resonates with us more today than when first published in 1934. (...) Picard illustrates that modern culture is essentially in Flight, and so the individual is under pressure to make a choice; in earlier generations only an individual could be in flight because the culture itself was not in flight but in Faith. The flight does not require courage or gui. (shrink)

Those who wish to claim that all facts about grounding are themselves grounded (“the meta-grounding thesis”) must defend against the charge that such a claim leads to infinite regress and violates the well-foundedness of ground. In this paper, we defend. First, we explore three distinct but related notions of “well-founded”, which are often conflated, and three corresponding notions of infinite regress. We explore the entailment relations between these notions. We conclude that the meta-grounding thesis need not lead to tension with (...) any of the three notions of “well-founded”. Finally, we explore the details of and motivations for further conditions on ground that one might add to generate a conflict between the meta-grounding thesis and a well-founded constraint. We explore these topics by developing and utilizing a formal framework based on the notion of a grounding structure. (shrink)

Much of our behavior is guided by our understanding of events. We perceive events when we observe the world unfolding around us, participate in events when we act on the world, simulate events that we hear or read about, and use our knowledge of events to solve problems. In this book, Gabriel A. Radvansky and Jeffrey M. Zacks provide the first integrated framework for event cognition and attempt to synthesize the available psychological and neuroscience data surrounding it. This synthesis (...) leads to new proposals about several traditional areas in psychology and neuroscience including perception, attention, language understanding, memory, and problem solving.Radvansky and Zacks have written this book with a diverse readership in mind. It is intended for a range of researchers working within cognitive science including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, and education. Readers curious about events more generally such as those working in literature, film theory, and history will also find it of interest. (shrink)

Ground offers the hope of vindicating and illuminating an classic philosophical idea: the layered conception, according to which reality is structured by relations of dependence, with physical phenomena on the bottom, upon which chemistry, then biology, and psychology reside. However, ground can only make good on this promise if it is appropriately formally behaved. The paradigm of good formal behavior can be found in the currently dominant grounding orthodoxy, which holds that ground is transitive, antisymmetric, irreflexive, and foundational. However, heretics (...) have recently challenged the orthodoxy. In this paper, I examine ground’s ability to vindicate the layered conception upon various relaxations of the orthodox assumptions. I argue that highly unorthodox views of ground can still vindicate the layered conception and that, in some ways, the heretical views enable ground to better serve as a guide to reality’s layering than do orthodox views of ground. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay has three goals. The first is to introduce the notion of fundamentality and to argue that physicalism can usefully be conceived of as a thesis about fundamentality. The second is to argue for the advantages of fundamentality physicalism over modal formulations and that fundamentality physicalism is what many who endorse modal formulations of physicalism had in mind all along. Third, I describe what I take to be the main obstacle for a fundamentality-oriented formulation of physicalism: ‘the problem (...) of abstracta’, which asks how physical can accommodate phenomena such as mathematics and universals, and which modal formulations do not face. I canvas three solutions: the inapt for ground solution, the concrete restriction, and the contingency restriction. (shrink)

Agents can think using concepts they do not fully understand. This paper investigates the question “Under what conditions does a thinker fully understand, or have mastery of, a concept?” I lay out a gauntlet of problems and desiderata with which any theory of concept mastery must cope. I use these considerations to argue against three views of concept mastery, according to which mastery is a matter of holding certain beliefs, being disposed to make certain inferences, or having certain intuitions. None (...) of these attitudes is either necessary or sufficient for mastery. I propose and respond to objections to my own recognition view of the conditions under which a thinker has mastery of a concept. (shrink)

OYOLA, Leandro; AGUIRRE, Max; REGGIANI, Federico; ZALAZAR, Fabián; y MOSQUITO, Ángel. Kryptonita. La historieta. Buenos Aires, Reservoir Books, 2019.] [AGRIMBAU, Diego; DELPECHE, Patricio; IPPÓLITI, Gabriel; GINEVRA, Dante; PIETRO; y FERNÁNDEZ, Gato. ¿Quién mató a Rexton? Buenos Aires, Hotel de las Ideas, 2018.

There has recently been much debate about the idea of levying a tax on particular transactions on international financial markets. Economists have argued about how much revenue such an international financial transaction tax would raise and they disagree about what effects it would have on trade volumes, financial stability, and overall growth. Politicians have argued about the feasibility of introducing such a tax internationally and they disagree on its adequacy as a policy response to the current financial and economic crisis. (...) This article contributes to the debate about international financial transaction taxation by bringing the perspective of political philosophy to bear on the politicians’ and economists’ arguments about policy. I shall outline a framework for thinking about justice in finance, and defend the idea of an international financial transaction tax as an instrument for making the international financial system more just. (shrink)

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it (...) is stored in long-term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact. (shrink)

Maxime Chastaing s'étonne de l'embarras manifesté par les philosophes pour s'assurer de l'existence des autres : ne va-t-il pas de soi que nous coexistons depuis toujours avec nos semblables et que nous ne doutons pas de leur présence tant que nous ne spéculons pas? Il s'agit dès lors de dénoncer avec énergie le faux problème philosophique de la connaissance d'autrui, tout en s'employant à rendre compte, grâce à la psychologie, des conditions de notre communauté d'existence. Cette perspective proprement psycho-philosophique est (...) déployée dès 1934, dans un travail inédit à ce jour, La compréhension d'autrui. Essai de psychologie descriptive. Proche à cette époque de Gabriel Marcel et d'Emmanuel Mounier, après avoir été l'élève de Jean-Paul Sartre au lycée du Havre, Chastaing est un des premiers en France à discuter les thèses de la phénoménologie allemande, d'Edmund Husserl à Max Scheler. Il anticipe ce faisant sur la phénoménologie d'autrui que Sartre développera, non sans résoudre par avance des difficultés que ce dernier mettra du temps à apercevoir. (shrink)

Schelling entwirft in seiner Spätphilosophie einen neuen Philosophietypus, der in Konkurrenz zu Hegels Metaphysik tritt. Dabei greift er Hegel nicht nur auf dem Gebiet fundamentaler theoretischen Annahmen an, sondern sucht ihn insbesondere durch einen neuen Begriff von Religion zu überbieten. Die Arbeit untersucht dies im Ausgang von Schellings "Philosophie der Mythologie".

Da metade do século passado em diante, a filosofia da matemática passou por uma importante inflexão que conduziu gradativamente suas linhas de pensamento para o centro das práticas matemáticas. Genericamente, este movimento ficou conhecido na literatura especializada como o giro prático, do qual resultaram diversas expressões de filosofias da matemática prático-orientadas. Dentre estas, consta a de José Ferreirós, que conforme apresentada em The Mathematical Knowledge and the Interplay of Practices (2016), tem como eixo reflexivo e analítico o duplo esquema composto (...) pelos agentes que performam ou fazem matemática e os frameworks em que tais práticas configuram-se. O objetivo central deste trabalho é apresentar em linhas gerais a filosofia da matemática prático-orientada e agente-centrada de Ferreirós. Mais especificamente, com esta apresentação também é visada uma aproximação algo surpreendente com conceitos centrais da analítica da existência de Ser e Tempo (1927), especialmente com o conceito de ser-no-mundo e com o conceito existencial de ciência. A hipótese interpretativa adotada neste trabalho é a de as perspectivas de Heidegger e Ferreirós não são inconsistentes, e que a articulação de uma filosofia da matemática prático-orientada e agente-centrada com o conceito existencial de ciência pode ser mutuamente elucidativa. Palavras-chave: ser-no-mundo. Heidegger. Ferreirós. Filosofia da Matemática. (shrink)

What does syndicalism want? was first published in 1909, when the syndicalist revolt was growing worldwide. Baginski is clear in his call for working class rebellion: the task is not to fight simply for better conditions but ‘to break the chains of wage labor and at the same time the shackles of servitude to the state.’ At the same time, Baginski is no joyless martyr to ‘the cause’: personal freedom joins collective struggle at the core of his anarchism. Max Baginski (...) (1864-1943) was a German-born American anarchist activist and writer. Rudolf Rocker called him “one of the most outstanding human beings I have met in my life”. Nathan Jun’s introduction puts Baginski in his political and intellectual context as writer and anarchist. (shrink)

In his ambitious Schelling's Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel, Peter Dews sets out to reconstruct the fundamental difference between Schelling and Hegel on the basis of two related claims. The first, historical claim is that both are dealing with ‘our current historical situation’, which Dews identifies with ‘modernity’ (Dews 2023: 10). The second, systematic claim is that their mature systematic thinking is characterized by what he calls throughout the book, with reference to a canonical paper by Dieter Henrich (Henrich (...) 1976), their respective Grundoperationen (‘basic operations’). He then walks the reader through major positions that Schelling developed over the course of his philosophical career in order to demonstrate how Schelling arrives at a specific genealogical account of modernity. On this account, modernity is understood as a formation of consciousness, which is supposedly not subject to the Hegelian type of dialectic which, according to Dews, is driven by a rationalism so comprehensive that the very notion of unwarranted constraints on the agency of human beings or of the oppressive shaping of their consciousness has no place. (Dews 2023: 16). (shrink)