Zusammenfassungen der Referate in französischer Sprache.

"L'espèce humaine est la seule qui sache qu'elle doit mourir, et elle ne le sait que par l'expérience" (Voltaire). Certes, mais que signifie cette "expérience" pour la personne humaine? Et d'abord, que signifie la mort de l'autre, du prochain? Pour Paul-Louis Landsberg, l'appropriation spirituelle de la mort est une tâche décisive pour toute personne humaine. Les voies de cette appropriation sont diverses, mais ce n'est qu'en relation avec une personnalisation progressive du tout de l'existence humaine qu'elle acquiert réellement un (...) sens nouveau. Et c'est dans l'expérience mystique que la proximité avec l'expérience de la mort est la plus forte. Le Problème moral du suicide (1942) est un texte précieux, plus encore aujourd'hui qu'il y a cinquante ans. A l'encontre de ceux qui soutiennent le "droit" à la mort volontaire, P.-L. Landsberg explique que "l'homme est l'être qui peut se tuer et qui ne doit pas le faire", et, en ce sens, le suicide est un " problème spécifiquement humain". (shrink)

L. démontre par une analyse approfondie de la plus importante littérature sur les questions de la race que l'idéologie moderne des races manque de solidité. Celle-ci a quitté la base d'un traitement sérieux et objectif du problème et — en dehors de quelques livres supérieurs — ne sert plus qu'à remplir certaines fonctions politiques et sociales.In an exact analysis of the most important literature on race problems L. demonstrates the scientific untenability of modern race theories. These have completely abandoned serious (...) and factual treatment of the race problem and simply serve to maintain certain political and social functions. (shrink)

Paul Ludwig examines how and why Greek theorists treated political passions as erotic. Because of the tiny size of ancient Greek cities, contemporary theory and ideology could conceive of entire communities based on desire. A recurrent aspiration was to transform the polity into one great household that would bind the citizens together through ties of mutual affection. In this study, Ludwig evaluates sexuality, love, and civic friendship as sources of political attachment and as bonds of political association.

Aristotle argued that citizenship is like friendship, and this book applies his argument to modern society. Modern citizens may lack the concept of civic friendship, but they persist in many practices and passions that were once considered essential to it. Citizens share many similarities with friends: prejudices held in common, favoritism towards each other, and - despite disagreement on specifics - underlying agreement about what is important, such as freedom and equality. Aristotle's theory reminds us that civic friendship is a (...) factual condition of healthy societies, not a pie-in-the-sky ideal. By recognizing when it occurs and understanding it, we can build on it to counteract societal polarization. Civic friendship offers an alternative to populism and nationalism by engaging some of the same passions. In an era increasingly marked by tribalism and identity politics, this timely study will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political science, classics, and philosophy. (shrink)

SummaryWe briefly clarify Tetens’s concept of God and argue that there are some problems regarding both the precise formulation of his panentheism as well as its implications for sin and special divine action.

Panpsychism has become a highly attractive position in the philosophy of mind. On panpsychism, both the physical and the mental are inseparable and fundamental features of reality. Panentheism has also become immensely popular in the philosophy of religion. Panentheism strives for a higher reconciliation of an atheistic pantheism, on which the universe itself is causa sui, and the ontological dualism of necessarily existing, eternal creator and contingent, finite creation. Historically and systematically, panpsychism and panentheism often went together as essential parts (...) of an all-embracing metaphysical theory of Being. The present collection of essays analyses the relation between panpsychism and panentheism and provides critical reflections on the significance of panpsychistic and panentheistic thinking for recent debates in philosophy and theology. (shrink)

This collection of original essays examines the relationship between women and religion in the history of political thought broadly conceived. This theme is a remarkably revealing lens through which to view the Western philosophical and poetical traditions that have culminated in secular and egalitarian modern society. The essays also give highly analytical accounts of the manifold and intricate relationships between religion, family and public life in the history of political thought, and the various ways in which these relationships have manifested (...) themselves in pagan, Jewish, Christian and post-Christian settings. (shrink)

Das Lebensbild seines Vaters P.J. Anselm v. Feuerbach, dargestellt aus dem Briefwechsel und Nachlass, besitzt für die Geschichte der Bürgerlichen Rechts- und Strafrechtstheorie und für die Biographie des berühmten "Kriminalisten" bleibende Bedeutung. Von besonderem Gewicht sind Dokumente zur Reform des Rechtswesens in Bayern während der napoleonischen Zeit und des Befreiungskampfes von 1813, wo sich Feuerbach wegen seiner Forderung nach "Vertretung deutscher Völker durch Landstände" die Ungnade des Bayerischen Hofes und Schmähungen als Kakobiner und Tugendbündler zuzog. Hintergründe des Falles Kaspar Hause (...) werden aus nachgelassenen Aufzeichnungen offenbart, und schließlich werden wichtige Einblicke in staatsrechtliche Abhandlungen und in Entwürfe zu einer vergleichenden Rechtsgeschichte und -wissenschaft vermittelt. (shrink)

A milestone in Wittgenstein scholarship, this collection of essays ranges over a wide area of the philosopher's thought, presenting divergent interpretations of his fundamental ideas. Different chapters raise many of the central controversies that surround current understanding of the Tractatus, providing an interplay that will be particularly useful to students. Taken together, the essays present a broader and more comprehensive view of Wittgenstein's intellectual interests and his impact on philosophy than may be found elsewhere.The thirteen chapters treat topics from both (...) periods of Wittgenstein's work: More than half are devoted to his early thought, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921, reflecting a growing interest today among philosophers in reexamining this seminal book, while three chapters treat the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953. The remaining chapters discuss such "nonstandard" topics as philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and anthropology.Contents: The Early Wittgenstein and the Middle Russell, Kenneth Blackwell; Frege and Wittgenstein, Michael Dummett; Wittgenstein and the Theory of Types, Hide Ishiguro; The So-called Realism of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Brian McGuinness; The Logical Independence of Elementary Propositions, David Pears; The Rise and Fall of the Picture Theory, Peter Hacker; The Picture Theory and Wittgenstein's Later Attitude to It, Erik Stenius; Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy of Mind, Anthony Kenny; A Theory of Language?, G. E. M. Anscombe; Im Anfang war die Tat, Peter Winch; Wittgenstein's Full Stop, D. Z. Phillips; Quote: Judgments from Our Brain, Paul Ziff; Wittgenstein and the Fire Festivals, Frank Cioffi, Index.Irving Block is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at The University of Western Ontario. (shrink)

This book provides a unique overview of and introduction to the work of the German psychologist and philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), an astonishing figure in the history of German ideas. Central to intellectual life in turn-of-the-century Munich, he went on to establish a reputation for himself as an original and provocative thinker. Nowadays he is often overlooked, partly because of the absence of an accessible and authoritative introduction to his thought; this volume offers just such a point of entry. (...) With an emphasis on applicability and utility, Paul Bishop reinvigorates the discourse surrounding Klages, providing a neutral and compact account of his intellectual development and his impact on psychology and philosophy. Part 1 offers an overview of Klages's life, visiting the major stations of his intellectual development. Part 2 examines in turn nine major conceptual 'tools' found in Klages's extensive writings, aiming to clarify Klages's terminology, to demystify his discourse, and to sift through Klages's credentials as a psychological thinker. Part 3 consists of extracts from Klages's writings, thematically oriented; these showcase the aphoristic and lyrical, as well as psychological and philosophical, qualities of Klages's writing, including his interest in aesthetics. Taken together, all three parts constitute a vitalist 'toolkit' -- to build a fuller, richer life. Drawing on previous studies of Klages that have only been available in German, Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life provides a non-polemical account of Klages's life and work, with explanations and commentaries to guide the reader through extracts from his writings. The book accessibly explains the most important ideas and concepts found in Klages's work, including soul, spirit, character, expression, will, and consciousness, and it reveals Klages to be a serious figure whose thought remains relevant to many disciplines today. It will stimulate interest in his work and create a new readership for his remarkable worldview. (shrink)

At the end of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Edinger completed the first comparative survey of the microscopic anatomy of vertebrate brains. He is regarded as the founder of the field of comparative neuroanatomy. Modern commentators have misunderstood him to have espoused an anti-Darwinian linear view of brain evolution, harkening to the metaphysics of the scala naturae. This understanding arises, in part, from an increasingly contested view of nineteenth-century morphology in Germany. Edinger did espouse a progressionist, though not strictly linear, (...) view of forebrain evolution, but his work also provided carefully documented evidence that brain stem structures vary in complexity independently from one another and across species in a manner that is not compatible with linear progress. This led Edinger to reject progressionism for all brain structures other than the forebrain roof, based on reasoning not too dissimilar from those his successors used to dismiss it for the forebrain roof. (shrink)

The Textual Criticism of Sumerian Literature. By Paul Delnero. The Journal of Cuneiform Studies Supplemental Series, vol. 3. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2012. Pp. viii + 230. $89.95. [Distributed by ISD, Bristol, Conn.].

Over the last few decades the arts and humanities have seen an increase in interest in questions surrounding gender. Not only did the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s see the growth of feminism as an academic discipline as well as a political movement, but in recent years there has been a huge expansion of research into Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and LGBT Studies. In essence, these disciplines all offer a critique of the system known as patriarchy, in which the ‘rule of (...) the father’ legitimates the exercise of political power and social control by men. In turn, this critique raises questions about alternatives to the patriarchal system, and it is in this context that some theorists and historians have been interested in the system known as ‘matriarchy’. In so doing, they are linking back to the work undertaken by such late nineteenth-century thinkers as the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan and, in particular, the Swiss legal historian Johann Jakob Bachofen. From 1841 to 1845 Bachofen served as Professor for Roman Law at the University of Basel, and it is with the cultural and intellectual life of this city that his work is most often connected. Now Bachofen’s outlook is well summarized by the title of his 1861 work, Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. In it Bachofen proposed that humankind had undergone four phases of cultural evolution, which he described as hetaerism; matriarchy; the Dionysian; and the Apollonian. The contrast between the Dionysian and the Apollonian exercised an influence on another thinker connected with Basel, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche ; and it was in the Nietzschean circles of the early twentieth century in German-speaking Europe that Bachofen’s work came to the fore. That this happened was due in no small measure to the figure who stands at the centre of Chiara Gianni Ardic’s new study, whose title translates into English as The Flight of the Gods: Myth, Matrarchy, and Fundamentalism in Ludwig Klages. For it was the circle around the charismatic thinker Ludwig Klages, arguably the most significant figure in a group of thinkers and writers known as the ‘Cosmic Circle’, that Bachofen’s ideas found a fruitful reception. The significance of Klages in the history of philosophy has frequently been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or even actively suppressed; so it is extremely welcome that Dr Ardic has undertaken to research so thoroughly the interest in matriarchy demonstrated by Klages and the members of the circle around him. (shrink)

In this book, Livingston develops the political implications of formal results obtained over the course of the twentieth century in set theory, metalogic, and computational theory. He argues that the results achieved by thinkers such as Cantor, Russell, Godel, Turing, and Cohen, even when they suggest inherent paradoxes and limitations to the structuring capacities of language or symbolic thought, have far-reaching implications for understanding the nature of political communities and their development and transformation. Alain Badiou's analysis of logical-mathematical structures forms (...) the backbone of his comprehensive and provocative theory of ontology, politics, and the possibilities of radical change. Through interpretive readings of Badiou's work as well as the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Livingston develops a formally based taxonomy of critical positions on the nature and structure of political communities. These readings, along with readings of Parmenides and Plato, show how the formal results can transfigure two interrelated and ancient problems of the One and the Many: the problem of the relationship of a Form or Idea to the many of its participants, and the problem of the relationship of a social whole to its many constituents. (shrink)

The word 'archaic' derives from the Greek arkhaios, which in turn is related to the word archē, meaning 'principle', 'origin', or 'cause'; the notion of ecstasy, or ekstasis, implies standing outside or beyond oneself, a self-transcendence. How these two concepts are articulated and co-implicated constitutes the core question underlying this edited collection, which examines both the present day and antiquity in order to trace the insistent presence of the ecstatic amid the archaic. Presented in three parts, the contributors to this (...) diverse book take the concept of the archaic in an entirely new direction. Part I, 'Ecstasy and the psychological', covers topics including Jung, Freud, ancient psychotherapy, desire, and theatre. Part II, 'Ecstatic-archaic history', considers Ludwig Klages, Orestes and Dionysus. Finally, Part III, 'Ancient ecstatic in other worlds', examines Luo Guanzhong's Three Kingdoms and Enki at Eridu. The collection offers a distinctive contextualisation of the dimension of the archaic in relation to the ecstatic experience. The Ecstatic and the Archaic will appeal to readers interested in the relationship between ancient and postmodern worlds, and in how the past manifests itself in the present. It will be of great interest to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, classical religions and the history of ideas, as well as practitioners of analytical psychology and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This paper shows how one can respond within truth-theoretic semantics, without appeal to parataxis, to Donald Davidson's objection to the intelligibility of Paul Horwich's statement of the minimalist position on truth.

Paul Kluckhohns Arbeiten zur Romantik orientieren sich an Wilhelm Diltheys Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von ›Erlebnis‹ und dessen Ausdruck in Dichtung. Mit diesem Konzept ist der Wunsch nach der Wiederkehr der Einheit des ›Lebens‹ in der Moderne verbunden. Kluckhohn deutet die Romantik im Rahmen dieser kulturkritischen Vorstellung, indem er für den Bereich intimer Beziehungen die romantische Auffassung von ›Liebe‹, für Staat und Gesellschaft das romantische Ideal von ›Gemeinschaft‹ als Orientierungsmodell für die Gegenwart anbietet. Die Romantik wird dabei als Gegensatz zur (...) französischen und englischen Aufklärung und damit als deren deutsche ›Überwindung‹ interpretiert. Der Beitrag analysiert Kontinuität und Wandel dieser Romantik-Deutung von 1910–1947 und geht dabei auch auf das ambivalente Verhältnis dieses Konzepts zur Ideologie des Nationalsozialismus ein. (shrink)

A year before, at Trinity, Cambridge, Wittgenstein had been involved in a row with Karl Popper, and had reputedly threatened him with a poker. On this evening, too, Wittgenstein's behavior let [sic] to a row, with an elderly philosophy don. No poker was flourished. But the don dropped dead a few days later.