Explores the nature and types of mystical experience and discusses the value of mysticism for humanity.

In his “Kant and Finitism” Tait attempts to connect his analysis of finitist arithmetic with Kant’s perspective on arithmetic. The examination of this attempt is the basis for a distinctive view on the dramatic methodological shift from Kant to Dedekind and Hilbert. Dedekind’s 1888 essay “Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?” gives a logical analysis of arithmetic, whereas Hilbert’s 1899 book “Grundlagen der Geometrie” presents such an analysis of geometry or, as Hilbert puts it, of our spatial intuition. This (...) shift in the late ninteenth century required a radical expansion of logic: first by the inclusion of principles for “systems” and “mappings”, but second by a structuralist broadening of axioms and inferential principles. The interaction of mathematics and logic in mathematical logic opened, around 1920, fields of investigation with enormous impact on the philosophy of mathematics, promoting a deeper integration of mathematical practice and philosophical reflection. (shrink)

While the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis has attracted many adherents and undergone a number of variations, in general it suffers from an authority problem with two dimensions. First, it is unclear why the analysis of a concept should have objective authority: why explicating what we mean should express how things are. Second, conceptual analysis seems to lack intersubjective authority: why philosophical analysis should apply to more than a parochial group of individuals. I argue that Hegel’s conception of social (...) ontology, focused on his concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), helps to explain how concepts (and their explication) have both objective and intersubjective authority in the social domain. Hegel claims that modern institutions are the product of self-conscious purposes, so that they are conceptually constituted. Concepts do not just represent these objects and so depend on a contingent relation to them. As many contemporary social ontologists agree, this means that our concepts of these institutions are uniquely epistemically “transparent.” They have objective authority. Concepts have intersubjective authority in the modern world as well, according to Hegel. However, I show that this feature of Hegel’s account does not rely on the solution to a philosophical problem. Rather, since the concepts of modern ethical life are “essentially contested,” their content depends on the practical and political agreement of modern subjects. This means that concepts can only have objective authority if some prior intersubjective agreement has been reached. The role of philosophy as conceptual analysis is thus importantly dependent on political developments. (shrink)

P. KOnig: Einleitung - P. ZIche: Idiographik und allgemeine Wissenschaftlichkeit - Windelband und die Wissenschaftsreflexion um 1900 - G. HArtung: Ein Philosoph korrigiert sich selbst - Wilhelm Windelbands Abkehr vom Relativismus - O. SChlaudt: Philosophie am Leitfaden der Empirie. WIndelbands relativistisches Programm - S. KUft: Windelbands Konzeption von Transzendentalphilosophie und ihr Bezug zur Kulturphilosophie - R. BOnito Oliva: Windelband. KUlturphilosophie und Kulturkrise - P. KOnig: Teleologie und Geschichte bei Wilhelm Windelband - J. BOhr: Im Fortschreiben der Probleme: Windelbands 19. JAhrhundert (...) - T.-H. CHang: Der Wertbegriff beiWilhelm Windelband und sein Konzept der Problemgeschichte - T. KUbalica: Die Geschichte der Philosophie als Problemgeschichte - J. MEhlich: Windelbands Praludien und das Silberne Zeitalter in Russland - G. SChluter: Windelbands italienische Kontakte und Bezugnahmen - D. STefanelli: Notizen uber Karl Vossler und die "Sudwestdeutsche Schule" - C. ZAnfi: Geschichte, Natur und Leben: Windelband und Bergson in der Historismus-Debatte - J.-I. LIndén: Der beseelte Geist: Dilthey als Kritiker der badischen Schule - H. GUndlach: Windelbands Ringen mit der Psychologie - Anhang: Wilhelm Windelband: Blaue Hefte zur Psychologie. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

In recent years, religious studies has undergone an ethnographic turn. More and more, scholars attend to the social location and significance of religious practice. This approach foregrounds the self-understandings of religious communities and practitioners and raises the question of the relation between ethnography and philosophical analysis. For instance, Saba Mahmood, in The Politics of Piety, draws from ethnographic study so as to critique philosophy’s universalizing claims regarding subjectivity, enabling a recognition of the diverse forms feminist subjectivity and political agency may (...) take within religious traditions and practice.2 Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed are the Organized likewise shifts the terrain of .. (shrink)

... dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed.

If within the borders of human life the truth is, as Vico has said, what is made, then the task of a student of human life can be and should be to find out from what human beings have made what manner of makers they are and what sorts of production their circumstance allows.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book, a reevaluation of a major issue in modern philosophy, explores the controversy that grew out of John Locke's suggestion, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), that God could give to matter the power of thought.

A new English translation of Schelling’s unfinished magnum opus, complete with a contextualizing introduction by the translator.

1. bd. Von der renaissance bis Kant.--2. bd. Die blütezeit der deutschen philosophie von Kant bis Hegel und Herbart.

Einleitung, von A. Ruge.--Die prinzipien der logik, von W. Windelband.--Prinzipien der logik, von J. Royce.--Die prinzipien der logik, von L. Couturat.--Die aufgabe der logik, von B. Croce.--Die probleme der logik, von F. Enriques.--Die umgestaltung der bewusstseinsbegriffes in der modernen erkenntnistheorie und ihre bedeutung für die logik, von N. Losskij.

Final Theses freely available via Open Access.

The twentieth century was dominated by political ideologies such as Communism and Fascism. This book argues that these secular ideologies have in the twenty-first century been replaced by religiously-based movements who may prove to be as epoch making to this century as their predecessors were to the last.

Originally published during the early part of the twentieth century, the Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature were designed to provide concise introductions to a broad range of topics. They were written by experts for the general reader and combined a comprehensive approach to knowledge with an emphasis on accessibility. The Moral Life by W. R. Sorley was first published in 1911 and reissued as this third edition in 1920. The volume presents an account of the nature of goodness in (...) humanity, taking the perspective that morality is a spirit manifested in life rather than a body of rules. (shrink)

1. bd. Was ist philosophie? Über Sokrates. Zum gedächtnis Spinozas. Immanuel Kant. Nach hundert jahren. Aus Goethes philosophie. Goethes Faust und die philosophie der renaissance. Schillers transszendentaler idealismus. Über Friedrich Hölderlin und sein geschick. Die erneuerung des Hegelianismus.--2. bd. Über die gegenwärtige lage und aufgabe der philosophie. Über denken und nachdenken. Normen und naturgesetze. Kritische oder genetische methode? Geschichte und naturwissenschaft. Vom prinzip der moral. Pessimismus und wissenschaft. Über wesen und wert der tradition im kulturleben. Bildungsschichten und kultureinheit. Kulturphilosophie und (...) transszendentaler idealismus. Das heilige. Sub specie aeternitatis. (shrink)

L'Afrique se propose de lutter de façon efficace pour la réduction de la pauvreté. La pauvreté en Afrique est certainement matérielle, mais elle est aussi spirituelle. Autant elle est dépourvue des moyens de vivre à la mesure de sa population, autant elle semble manquer de ressort spirituel capable de lui permettre d'assumer de façon responsable son destin. La réduction de la pauvreté matérielle passe par la réduction de la pauvreté spirituelle. Et cette dernière passe par la redécouverte des richesses de (...) l'esprit et de la manière dont ces richesses ont aidé dans le passé et peuvent encore aider dans le présent à prendre en charge le devenir de l'Afrique. Les auteurs voudraient instaurer et explorer un de fondements essentiels de la Renaissance africaine : l'histoire des idées dans l'Afrique traditionnelle. Aussi le présent ouvrage se fixe-t-il pour tâche de présenter les principes, les démarches et une application de cette discipline à la fois ancienne et, dans le contexte de l'Afrique traditionnelle, inédite. (shrink)

From the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood develop an approach they call 'regulative epistemology', exploring the connection between knowledge and intellectual virtue. In the course of their argument they analyse particular virtues of intellectual life - such as courage, generosity, and humility - in detail.