Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...) as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Caught Between History and ImaginationVico's Ingenium for a Rhetorical Renovation of CitizenshipAlessandra Beasley Von BurgCitizenship is usually thought of as synonymous with nationality and the rights and duties associated with the people who live, work, and participate politically, socially, and economically within the borders of their nation-state. In this conception, the main criterion used to decide who is and who is not a citizen is nationality. As the nature (...) of nation-state governance evolves and the acceleration of citizen mobility hastens interdependence, pressures for new definitions and paradigms of citizenship build. As Joseph Weiler argues, this pressure produces cognitive dissonance because "the traditional, classical vocabulary of citizenship is the vocabulary of the State, the Nation and Peoplehood" (qtd. in La Torre 1998, 1).1 The classical association of citizenship with nationality blocks our ability to grasp new, nonstatist conceptions of citizenship, even as postnational political visions take shape in institutions like the European Union (EU).2 In 1992, EU citizenship was established in the Treaty of Maastricht, which granted some additional rights to citizens of the member states in the same way that single nation-states grant their inhabitants special status as nationals, rights that are not nullified when citizens leave their home country to live and work in other member states.3 [End Page 26]The relationship between nationality and citizenship in the EU context is complicated by the fact that although Maastricht guidelines set postnational membership criteria for EU citizens, they also limit the scope of EU citizenship. In trying to reach beyond the nation while anchoring its very essence to the nation, EU citizenship remains limited as it relies on the traditional language of national membership to found its postnational concept of equality and inclusion for noncitizens. The contradictory elements of EU citizenship are exemplified in its current definition, which includes all member states' citizens and excludes millions who are living in Europe as third-country nationals (TCNs), defined as "any person who is not a citizen of one of the member states" of the EU but permanently and legally resides in one.4 The current debate over the status of legal, long-term TCNs challenges the relationship between citizenship and nationality, as advocates from EU institutions, national governments, nongovernmental organizations and academia argue that TCNs should be granted EU citizenship rather than be naturalized in the member states and push for a new, postnational mode of citizenship based on residency. Advocates for the inclusion of TCNs as EU citizens have to work with the limited vocabulary of national citizenship yet articulate a case for a new kind of citizenship divorced from nationality. They suggest that the EU should be viewed as a deliberative community, in which all long-term residents like TCNs are given an equal opportunity to practice citizenship. The deliberative community rationale is based on an idea of citizenship as performance with residents enacting citizenship by living together and deliberating with each other about common interests and concerns.5This reordering of the concept of community arising out of political practice calls for a full philosophical and rhetorical reimagining of the meaning of citizenship. The act of reimagining citizenship creates a new practice of citizenship and grounds citizenship in a philosophical context as well as a practical one. There is no better philosophical and rhetorical tradition to turn to for this purpose than that of Giambattista Vico. Vico, and to a larger extent the entire tradition of Italian humanism, has been overlooked in modern Western philosophy. Yet Vico embodies a seamless marriage of philosophy and rhetoric. Vico's philosophically grounded rhetoric provides the means in an investigation of EU citizenship as an innovative rhetorical practice beyond nationality, for understanding how new practices become persuasive through imaginative language, until citizens separate citizenship from nationality and accept residence and deliberative practices as legitimate criteria for citizenship. Vico argues that "every study method [End Page 27] may be said to be made up of three things: instruments, complementary aids, and aim envisaged" and notes that "the instruments presuppose and include a systematic, orderly manner of proceeding" (1990, 6). This essay proceeds in this fashion to reveal how a new vocabulary of citizenship... (shrink)

Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable (...) if they occur in other places or times, or if local authorities deem them acceptable. These predictions contrast markedly with those derived from prevailing non-evolutionary perspectives on moral judgement. Both classes of theories predict purportedly species-typical patterns, yet to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated moral judgement across a diverse set of societies, including a range of small-scale communities that differ substantially from large highly urbanized nations. We tested these predictions in five small-scale societies and two large-scale societies, finding substantial evidence of moral parochialism and contextual contingency in adults' moral judgements. Results reveal an overarching pattern in which moral condemnation reflects a concern with immediate local considerations, a pattern consistent with a variety of evolutionary accounts of moral judgement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 241-261 [Access article in PDF] Should We All Be More English? Liang Qichao, Rudolf von Jhering, and Rights Stephen C. Angle [T]he Celestial Empire, with its bamboo, the rod for its adult children, and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants, will never attain, in the eyes of foreign nations, the respected position of little Switzerland. The natural disposition of the (...) Swiss in the matter of art and poetry is anything but ideal. It is sober and practical, like that of the Romans. But, in the sense in which I have thus far used the expression "ideal," in its relation to rights, it is just as applicable to the Swiss as to the Englishman. 1Rudolf von Jhering (1818-92) published Der Kampf ums Recht (The Struggle for Law) in 1872. He was already regarded as one of Germany's most important legal philosophers, and Der Kampf helped to ensure a world-wide reputation. His argument that people should be less like the "adult children" of China and more like the English found audiences everywhere, including China, where Der Kampf was translated between 1900 and 1901. Jhering's doctrines stimulated Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of China's leading thinkers, to publish "Lun Quanli Sixiang (On Rights Consciousness)," in 1902 as part of his manifesto On the New People. Liang tells us that the "essential points" of his essay, which is among the earliest and most sustained treatments of the concept of rights to appear in Chinese, are mostly taken from Der Kampf. 2 We will see that there are indeed certain similarities that make Liang's "quanli" 3 (the standard Chinese translation of "rights") resonate with Jhering's notion of "Recht," and these similarities--chief among which is a kind of individual assertiveness--help to explain [End Page 241] Liang's interest in Jhering. My discussion of the two thinkers will offer at least the beginnings of an explanation of why German conceptions of law and rights were so attractive to Chinese intellectuals.As is often the case with cross-cultural comparisons, we will also see that these similarities mask some less obvious but deeply important differences. For Jhering the relation between following the procedures of the law and exercising one's Recht is crucial; for Liang, in contrast, quanli are deeply related to ethical concerns. This difference in turn colors their respective notions of assertiveness, which thus turn out not to resemble one another as closely as first appeared. When we see Recht and quanli as separate concepts emerging from separate discourse contexts, these differences will make sense.In "On Quanli Consciousness" Liang regularly quotes Jhering, often at some length. One important passage reads as follows: In ancient times, Lin Xiangru scolded the King of Qin saying: "Smash both my head and the jade disk!" 4 Now given the size of the state of Zhao, how could such love be expressed for a tiny thing like a jade disk? He was saying that Qin could smash the disk, kill him, invade his territory, endanger his state, and still he would not surrender. Ah! This was nothing other than "quanli"! Jhering has also said: "If an Englishman traveling to the European continent is one day asked to pay an irrational charge by the hotel's carriage driver, in every case he will resolutely scold [the driver]. If the driver won't heed his scolding, the Englishman will struggle for justice without tiring, always preferring to extend his stay; even if his traveling expenses were to increase as much as ten-fold, he would not cease. Unknowing people all laugh at this great fool, but none of them understand that this person's struggle over a few shillings is in fact a vital part of what allows the nation of England to stand tall by itself in the world. This abundance of quanli consciousness and sharpness of feelings of quanli are the great reasons behind the ability of the English to establish their state. Now let... (shrink)

Stephen Houlgate is one of the leading Hegel scholars of the English-speaking world. In this interview he explains how he became a “Hegelian” while studying in Cambridge, and he offers a fundamental profile of his account of Hegel. The interview addresses the following questions: Why does Houlgate consider Hegel’s philosophy to be the “consummate critical philosophy”? What are the main barriers to a proper access to Hegel’s thought? Why is logic as dialectical logic still indispensable for philosophical thought? And (...) finally, what can both analytical and “continental” philosophers learn from Hegel? (shrink)

Schmidt's main thesis is that Lucretius did not exclusively use the writings of Epicurus in composing De rerurn natura, and that it is emphatically doubtful that Epicurus was even his principal source. Rather, Schmidt argues that it is virtually certain that early Epicurean writings are used in several passages, and that they are the most probable sources for the whole poem. Schmidt sees Lucretius as closely caught up with the current polemics between the Stoic and Epicurean schools of his time. (...) Schmidt is broadly successful in making his case that Lucretius did not exclusively follow Epicurus, but also had early Epicurean sources. The indices are helpful and the survey of competing views is scrupulously inclusive. This book deserves to be seriously considered by future researchers into the sources of De rerum natura inasmuch as it has certainly advanced the discussion. (shrink)

Edited by Thomas A. Shannon, this series provides anthologies of critical essays and reflections by leading ethicists in four pivotal areas: reproductive technologies, genetic technologies, death and dying, and health care policy. The goal of this series is twofold: first, to provide a set of readers on thematic topics for introductory or survey courses in bioethics or for courses with a particular theme or time limitation. Second, each of the readers in this series is designed to help students focus more (...) thoroughly and effectively on specific topics that flesh out the ethical issues at the core of bioethics. The series is also highly accessible to general readers interested in bioethics. (shrink)

Dorion Sagan observes that pioneering ethologist Jakob von Uexküll tends to be read in contrasting ways, as a “humble naturalist” pre-empting current research in biosemiotics, animal perception and agency; and as a “biologist-shaman,” gesturing to a transcendental realm where the life-worlds of animals interconnect in a vast symphony of nature. In both cases the tools of the laboratory are thought to generate complete pictures of the invertebrates that Uexküll studies, in unity with their environments. As Giorgio Agamben points out, these (...) experiments form part of an abstract mechanism that produces the human, by isolating instinctual life as an object for study and management from social and ethical modes of existence. What these readings neglect to consider is that Uexküll imagines his experiments through a Picture Book frame. We argue that for Uexküll there is always something fabulous and child-like about the enterprise of reconstructing the subjective environments of the small animals he works with. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler, we propose the Picture Book as a particular technics, or tertiary memory, that cultivates modes of attention that are associated with childhood and are open to the emergence of partial objects and relations. Considered through the Picture Book frame, the Umwelten of insects and other small animals are no longer fixed but are drawn and redrawn in partial expressive ways, through the uncanny picturing – or what Brian Massumi would call “semblances” – of different configurations of animal, technology, human relations. By considering the Picture Book as a technic for ecological thought and imagination, our paper will explore how the small creatures that Uexküll describes might enable the emergence of new ethical sensibilities and relations. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt den vorläufigen Versuch dar, Wesen und Zweck von Klages’ Charakterologie mittels seiner Grundlagen der Charakterkunde (Bonn: Bouvier 1951) zu bestimmen und mit Bahnsens Beiträgen zur Charakterologie (Leipzig: Brockhaus 1867) zu vergleichen. Sowohl Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881) als auch Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) gelten als eminente Vertreter der Charakterologie. Sie wirkten, zwar nur durch wenige Jahrzehnte getrennt, in verschiedenen Jahrhunderten und mit unterschiedlichen Absichten. Die Unterschiedlichkeit in Bestimmung und Ausführung ihrer jeweiligen Charakterologie kann daher nicht überraschen; für Klages dient (...) sie, wie auch die Graphologie und andere Deutungsstützen, dem Zweck, seine ganzheitliche Schau fest im Anschaulichen zu gründen – oder wenigstens den Eindruck einer solchen Gründung zu vermitteln. Die Eigenheiten die ser Schau lassen sich aber nur aus dem Gegensatz von Geist und Leib/Seele im Sinne Klages verstehen. Daher sind die Grundlagen der Charakterkunde vor allem eine Einführung in das Weltbild Klages, ein Leitfaden, in dem, darauf sei vorab hingewiesen, eher postuliert als aufgeklärt wird. Die folgende Untersuchung stellt zunächst die Charakterologie Klages in ihren weltanschaulichen Grundzügen dar, bevor im zweiten Abschnitt Bahnsens Beiträge zur Charakterologie besprochen werden. Im letzten Abschnitt werden die sich daraus erge benden Rückschlüsse auf die intellektuellen Eigenarten Klages’ und Bahnsens dargelegt. (shrink)

This article summarizes the commentary essay and two research articles comprising the special research forum on “The Social Performance and Responsibilities of Entrepreneurship.” A commentary essay by William J. Baumol addresses the social responsibilities of successful entrepreneurs. A research article by Laura J. Spence examines the social responsibilities of small businesses. A research article by Henning Engelke, Stefanie Mauksch, Inga-Lena Darkow, and Heiko von der Gracht examines scenarios for social enterprises in Germany.

Although there has been some discussion in the literature of Bas van Fraassen's modal interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, it has for the most part been concentrated on difficulties that van Fraassen's viewpoint shares with those of some other authors, including Kochen, Dieks, and Healey. van Fraassen's approach has, however, some problems of its own; in this note we want to focus on what seems to us to be one of the most serious of these. The difficulty concerns immediately repeated non-disturbing (...) measurements of the same observable on a single system. As is well known, von Neumann's Projection Postulate guarantees that such measurements will always give the same outcome; likewise, in the approaches of the “modalists” mentioned above, such ‘consilience of repeated measurements’ is in one way or another built into the formalism. By contrast, we shall argue, van Fraassen's modal interpretation neither guarantees this result nor adequately explains why it is unnecessary to do so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 341-362 [Access article in PDF] Virgin Father and Prodigal Son Stephen Brockmann I IN BOTH THE UNITED STATES and Germany—as well as in much of the rest of the Western world—the baby-boom generation now holds a controlling position in politics, economics, and culture. The election of Bill Clinton (born in 1946) to the Presidency signaled the generational shift in the United States as (...) early as 1992, and that shift was confirmed by the election campaign of 2000, in which both candidates, Al Gore (born in 1948) and George W. Bush (born in 1946), in spite of their differences, represented the same generation. In Germany the political shift in generations did not occur until 1998, when Gerhard Schröder (born slightly before the beginning of the German baby boom, in 1944) defeated Helmut Kohl (born in 1930).Significantly, Kohl is a member of the generation of Germans born during the 1930s and reared during the years of the Third Reich but too young to have played any significant role, either negative or positive, during the Nazi era. No member of this generation born in the 1930s ever became President in the United States, where the generation of World War Two veterans dominated national politics from Eisenhower to George Herbert Walker Bush. However what in America is a "silent generation" has been, in Germany, the generation most closely identified with the success of the Federal Republic of Germany: these were the so-called Flakhelfer (antiaircraft helpers) who had been children during the war. Kohl therefore famously referred to them as having the "grace of late birth," meaning that they, unlike the war veterans, were presumably untouched by any form of collective guilt for Nazi crimes against humanity. Whereas in the United States the Presidency was transferred directly from the World War Two veterans to [End Page 341] baby boomers—and in the case of the two Bush presidencies, literally, albeit indirectly, from father to son—in Germany the transition from the World War Two veterans (particularly former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt) to the baby boomers was interrupted by a long period of domination by the in-between generation of Flakhelfer.In both countries the baby-boom generation represents a significant shift in sensibilities and encompasses the generation involved in student protest and oppositional social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States these included the anti-Vietnam War movement, the feminist and gay-rights movements, the sexual revolution, the civil-rights movement, and the ecological movement, as well as, on the extreme fringes, terrorist groupings such as the Weather Underground and a great many religious sects and cults. In Germany the baby boomers formed many parallel groups and movements, including antiwar, feminist, ecological, and gay segments, as well as a proliferation of sectarian Marxist political groupings (so-called K-Gruppen, with the "K" meaning "Kommunist"). In the United States, Bill Clinton was an antiwar protester in the 1960s and 1970s, while both Gerhard Schröder and his Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (born in 1948) had participated in left-wing political movements during the same period.In both West Germany and the United States the heyday of protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s signaled a generational split, with younger people—the very generation that is now in power in the two countries—accusing their elders of Machiavellian cynicism, imperialism, patriarchy, and worse. Such accusations can be recalled by the formerly popular slogans "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" in the United States and "Unter den Talaren der Muff von tausend Jahren" ("under the academic regalia the stench of a thousand years") in Germany. The latter slogan was a reference not just to a generalized stodginess on the part of elderly German academics but to Hitler's invocation of a "Thousand-Year Reich;" German students were none-too-subtly suggesting that many of their professors had once been Nazis.The difference in these two slogans—one referring to past and the other to present sins—corresponds to a major distinction between the two baby... (shrink)

Martin Heidegger cited him as “the most potent philosophical power... in all of contemporary philosophy.” Ortega y Gasset called him “the first man of genius, the Adam of the new Paradise.” Writing at a crucial time in intellectual history, his influence has extended to persons as diverse as Dietrich von Hildebrand, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karol Wojtyla, Jurgen Habermas, Ernst Bloch, and members of the generation of thinkers that developed in the German universities during the Weimar years. Despite this far-reaching impact, the (...) social theory and philosophy of Max Scheler have never been examined for the significance of their political thought. This book opens the possibility of deriving a contemporary political theory from Scheler’s philosophy and social theory, based on his understanding of the person, the community, and the significant new directions these elements suggest. Standing at some distance from modern liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism, both in their bourgeois and Enlightenment varieties, Scheler’s personalism has its roots in the rich admixture of life philosophy and phenomenology that gave rise to Martin Heidegger’s early philosophy. It is a philosophical anthropology founded on Scheler’s own realist phenomenology, sociology of knowledge, and non-formal ethics. The book considers Scheler’s many works and includes translations and reviews of unpublished materials. It includes an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary name sources. (shrink)

In "Kant on Freedom and the Appropriate Punishment," the author begins by noting that in The Metaphysics of Morals , Kant asserts that a wrongdoer should be given a punishment that is similar to his wrongdoing. He then makes two interpretive claims with regard to this assertion.First, he claims that the best way to understand this assertion in the context of other things Kant says is that the state is obligated to punish a wrongdoer in a way that imposes on (...) the wrongdoer an amount of suffering equal to what he caused and through an action that is similar in type to the wrongdoer's offense. The argument in support of this claim occurs in section II and rests on two more specific interpretive claims about Kant's theory: that state punishment should resemble the wrongdoer's acts and should involve the same level of suffering as was involved in the original wrongdoing and that punishment in accordance with these constraints is an obligatory duty.Second, the author claims that on Kant's theory this principle of appropriate punishment is justified because it restores equality in the distribution of freedom for members of the state. The argument in support of this claim occurs in section III. The argument rests in part on Kant's justification of the state and coercion in terms of the value of equalized freedom. By applying this same justification to Kant's principle of appropriate punishment, the author claims to be able to account for the principle as well as to relate the principle to Kant's political theory. Der vorliegende Beitrag beginnt mit der Feststellung, daß Kant in der Metaphysik der Sitten geltend macht, ein Übeltäter solle eine Bestrafung erleiden, die mit seiner Tat vergleichbar ist. Im Hinblick auf diese Forderung Kants werden zwei Thesen aufgestellt.Erstens wird behauptet, die genannte Forderung sei vor dem Hintergrund sonstiger Äußerungen Kants am besten dahingehend zu verstehen, daß der Staat verpflichtet sei, einen Übeltäter in einer Weise zu bestrafen, die diesem ein Maß von Leid zufügt, das dem von ihm selbst verursachten gleichkommt. Geschehen müsse dies durch eine Handlung, die in ihrer Art dem vom Übeltäter begangenen Verbrechen entspricht. Die Begründung dieser These erfolgt in Abschnitt II und stützt sich wiederum auf zwei mehr in die Einzelheiten gehende Thesen zu Kants Theorie: Staatliche Bestrafung sollte den Handlungen des Übeltäters ähneln und Leid in einer Größenordnung mit sich bringen, wie es auch die ursprüngliche Tat zur Folge hatte. Bestrafung in Übereinstimmung mit diesen Bedingungen ist eine Pflicht.Zweitens wird die Auffassung vertreten, dieses Prinzip angemessenen Strafens sei im Rahmen der Theorie Kants gerechtfertigt, weil es für die Mitglieder des Staates die Gleicheit in bezug auf die Verteilung der Freiheit wiederherstelle. Die Begründung dieser These findet sich in Abschnitt III und beruht zum Teil auf Kants Rechtfertigung von Staat und Zwang durch den Verweis auf den Wert gleichmäßig verteilter Freiheit. Die Übernahme eben dieser Rechtfertigung auch für Kants Theorie angemessenen Strafens soll sowohl dazu dienen, das Prinzip selbst zu begründen, als auch dazu, es in Kants politische Theorie einzuordnen. (shrink)

Weber's writings on action and the explanation of action do not present a particularly coherent view. In his earlier writings, from 1903-1907, he is under the sway of a juristic conception of cause based on the probability doctrines of von Kries, and this is reflected in his writings on action, which de-emphasize problems of interpretation and stress the analytic uses of methods of causal analysis. In the Logos essay, problems of interpretation and problems of cause and probability are discussed on (...) a par. In the "Introduction" to Economy and Society, problems of interpretation, in particular of the application of the ideal-type "rational action," become central. The terminology of the von Kriesian theory disappears, and the requirements for "causal adequacy" are minimized, as is the analytic role of causal reasoning. Weber's various arguments are intelligible solutions to standard problems in the philosophy of action with recent analogues, notably in the work of Donald Davidson. These solutions suggest an alternative account of the significance of "intelligibility" as an aim of sociological approaches to action. (shrink)

Cover -- KIERKEGAARD'S GOD AND THE GOOD LIFE -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction -- List of Abbreviations -- Part I. Faith and Love -- 1 Love as the End of Human Existence -- 2 Love Is the Highest Good -- 3 Erotic Wisdom: On God, Passion, Faith, and Falling in Love -- 4 The Integration of Neighbor-Love and Special Loves in Kierkegaard and von Hildebrand -- 5 Kierkegaard, Weil, and Agapic Moral Fideism -- Part II. (...) Moral Psychology and Ethical Existence -- 6 Kierkegaard's Virtues? Humility and Gratitude as the Grounds of Contentment, Patience, and Hope in Kierkegaard's Moral Psychology -- 7 The Heart of Knowledge: Kierkegaard on Passion and Understanding -- 8 From Hegel to Google: Kierkegaard and the Perils of "the System"--9 An Ethics for Adults? Kierkegaard and the Ambiguity of Exaltation -- Part III. Existence Before God -- 10 Difficult Faith and Living Well -- 11 Kierkegaard and the Early Church on Christian Knowledge and Its Existential Implications -- 12 Thunderstruck: Divine Irony in Kierkegaard's Job -- 13 Kierkegaard and Pentecostal Philosophy -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

Was ist Architektur? Dieses scheinbar einfache Problem ist philosophisch äußerst umstritten. Stephen Griek fragt ausgehend von Nietzsches unerhörter Abschaffung der Wahrheit, ob sie einen Abgesang auf die Architektur bedeutet - oder ob sie im Gegenteil nicht die eigentliche Voraussetzung für ein untrügliches Verständnis von Baukunst ist. In einem Durchgang durch die abendländische Philosophie verfolgt er diesen Gedanken anhand Nietzsches Konzepts des »Willens zur Macht« bis ins »Jenseits von Gut und Böse« der westlichen Kultur, um die ungeheure Aufgabe von Architektur, (...) Kunst und Wissenschaft neu zu formulieren. (shrink)

In der Korrespondenz mit Clarke ist Leibniz' Standardargument gegen die Annahme, daß Raum und Zeit absolut seien, daß Gott sich bei der Wahl des zu erschaffenden Universums gezwungen sähe, gegen das Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes zu verstoßen, wenn diese Annahme richtig wäre: Bloße Unterschiede in räumlicher und zeitlicher Hinsicht ergeben keinen Vorteilsunterschied, und da Gott nur aus Vorteilsgründen handelt, sind solche Unterschiede nicht möglich. Leibniz stellt dieses Argument als ausschließlich abhängig vom Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes dar, eine gängige Interpretation ist (...) aber, daß dies Prinzip determinierte Objekte göttlicher Wahl nur dann ergibt, wenn ein ergänzendes Prinzip von Kontingenz hinzutritt. Diese Auslegung muß falsch sein, wenn Leibniz hier authentisch bleibt, und insofern wäre doch das Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes eher als irgendein Prinzip des Besten Leibniz' Prinzip der Kontingenz. (shrink)

If $\mathcal{A}$ (V) is a net of local von Neumann algebras satisfying standard axioms of algebraic relativistic quantum field theory and V 1 and V 2 are spacelike separated spacetime regions, then the system ( $\mathcal{A}$ (V 1 ), $\mathcal{A}$ (V 2 ), φ) is said to satisfy the Weak Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle iff for every pair of projections A∈ $\mathcal{A}$ (V 1 ), B∈ $\mathcal{A}$ (V 2 ) correlated in the normal state φ there exists a projection C (...) belonging to a von Neumann algebra associated with a spacetime region V contained in the union of the backward light cones of V 1 and V 2 and disjoint from both V 1 and V 2 , a projection having the properties of a Reichenbachian common cause of the correlation between A and B. It is shown that if the net has the local primitive causality property then every local system ( $\mathcal{A}$ (V 1 ), $\mathcal{A}$ (V 2 ), φ) with a locally normal and locally faithful state φ and suitable bounded V 1 and V 2 satisfies the Weak Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle. (shrink)

The main focus of this paper ison ways in which Kantian philosophy can informproponents and opponents of constructivismalike. Kant was primarily concerned withreconciling natural and moral law. His approachto this general problematic was to limit andseparate what we can know about things(phenomena) from things as they are inthemselves (noumena), and to identify moralagency with the latter. Revisiting the Kantianproblematic helps to address and resolve longstanding epistemological concerns regardingconstructivism as an educational philosophy inrelation to issues of objectivity andsubjectivity, the limits of (...) theoretical andpractical reason, and the relation betweenhuman experience and the world. It also servesto address ethical concerns regardingliberation from limited self-interests andcontexts conditioned by localised beliefs andinclinations. In light of revisiting theKantian problematic, both Glasersfeld's radicalview of constructivism and Jardine's socialcritique of constructivism are found wanting.Beyond constructivism, Kant's distinctionbetween phenomena and noumena and the limits ofreason that follow from it are brieflyconsidered in terms of Merleau-Ponty's noveldouble-embodied notion of flesh as anontological primitive – as a matter of beingboth in, and of, the world – with an aim tomore intimate connections between epistemologyand ethics. (shrink)

The essay discusses the March 5, 1944 "Discussion on Sin," an event that was held between French intellectual Georges Bataille and the Jesuit priest and patristics scholar Jean Daniélou, along with other important Christian and non-Christian intellectuals. I argue that the event is the best recorded wartime intellectual encounter between the founders of contestation (subsequently so important in deconstructive thought) and serious practitioners of Christianity. Aspects of the thought of French thinker Maurice Blanchot and Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar (...) are also profiled. (shrink)

Der Artikel hinterfragt neuere Entwicklungen in kognitiven Emotionstheorien und versucht von diesem Ansatz ausgehend eine originelle Theorie zu entwickeln. Es wird insbesondere der Kritizismus in Erwägung gezogen, der Theorien überintellektualisierter Emotionen reduziert auf Einstellungen zu Propositionen und Gefühle ausschließt. Ich bin der Ansicht, dass nur einige wenige Kognitionswissenschaftler die genannte Theorie vertraten, sodass man behaupten kann, dass Emotionen teilweise aus Gefühlen konstituiert sind und dabei im Rahmen der Parameter der kognitiven Theorie bleiben. Dies ist möglich aufgrund der Tatsache, dass Kognitivisten (...) die Meinung vertreten, dass Emotionen aus intentionalen Einstellungen bestehen. Wenn wir das Gefühl als Perzeption der Einstellung zu jemandes Körper definieren, dann kann das Gefühl als eine der intentionalen Einstellungen verstanden werden, neben der Überzeugung, dass die Urteilskraft teilweise jede Emotion konstituiert. Diese Position bezeichne ich als „komplexen Kognitivismus”. (shrink)

In diesem Aufsatz wird die Auffassung entwickelt, daß die Lehre von der Einfachheit Gottes erstens theologisch sinnvoll vertreten werden kann und sich zweitens für die Gotteslehre als hilfreich erweist. Der erste Argumentationsgang weist nach, daß die Kritik an der Lehre von der Einfachheit Gottes, die in den letzten Jahren mehrheitlich vorgetragen worden ist, auf einem Mißverständnis beruht. Es wird unterstellt, daß diese Lehre eine Ontologie voraussetzt, die faktisch in den traditionellen Ausformungen der Lehre von der Einfachheit Gottes gänzlich fehlt. Vor (...) diesem Hintergrund wird gezeigt, daß die Einfachheit Gottes im Rahmen trinitätstheologischer und christologischer Reflexion begründet werden kann. Damit kann diese Lehre dogmatisch sinnvoll vertreten werden – auch im Kontext trinitarischer Theologie. Im zweiten Argumentationsgang wird die Debatte zwischen Realismus und Nominalismus in ihren Konsequenzen für das Verständnis der Eigenschaften Gottes einer erneuten Prüfung unterzogen. Diese führt zu dem Ergebnis, daß scheinbar unlösbare dogmatische Probleme durch die Lehre von der Einfachheit Gottes einer Klärung näher gebracht werden können. Somit erweist sich diese Lehre für die Dogmatik als hilfreich. (shrink)