Rieser, M., ‘The Aestetics of Guido Calogero’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 30 (1971),.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 281 g. The Problematics of History. Two types are distinguished: the more general neoidealism, especially the Italian, which will be treated in subsequent volumes; and the more technical examination of historical knowledge by Dilthey, Simmel, Spengler, Windelband, Rickert, M/insterberg, Weber, Troeltsch, Meinecke, and Huizinga. Without exaggerating it, Lamanna points to the strain of "inquietude" and restlessness which shows itself in much of the early twentieth-century philosophizing, especially (...) in its attacks on rationalism, and which serves to foreshadow the greater anxieties that will be portrayed in the second volume of the trilogy. I add only two small observations, not by way of criticism, but merely to supplement the expositions (which seem to me to be excellent) of two men whom I happen to know well. Giuseppe Prezzolini appears with Papini (as he should) as a founder and leader o[ the pragmatist periodical Leonardo. Whereas Papini's adventures in philosophical romance were quite extravagant, Prezzolini's contributions were satirically ironical His L'Arte di persuadere, which to a hasty reader might well appear as a "manuale per i bugiardi" (p. 308), really appears, in view of his subsequent career in La Voce and in his Vita di Macehiavelli as a brilliant Macchiavellian satire. Similarly there is an undercurrent of genial satire in the pragmatisms of James and Schiller. The criticism in Dewey's social philosophy of what he refers to as the bourgeois Utilitarian liberalism and individualism of early nineteenth-century Britain appears in Lamanna 's pages (as in other scholarly European works) as a criticism of "Americanism." Dewey called his political philosophy a "new individualism" which was about the same as the doctrines of European social democrats. It was very democratic in contrast to the liberalism of the early utilitarians. But this early individualistic liberalism is no more American than it is European. Certainly Dewey's democracy is at least as American as the "Americanism" which he criticized. If we must use these terms, we could say that the socalled "Americanization of Europe" coincided with the Europeanization of America. James was politically an individualist and Dewey was a socialist; both were equally American and equally concerned to be cosmopolitan. These terminological problematics are not intended as a criticism of Lamanna's exposition of Dewey's philosophy, which seems to me one of the very best of the many I have read. On p. 245 "Cominger" should be Commager. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Aus den A nfiingen der Psychoanalyse. Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess. A bhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887-1902. By Sigmund Freud. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1962. Copyright, Imago Publishing Co., London, 1950.) This selection of the letters, notes and treatises sent to the Berlin physician and biologist Wilhelm Fliess makes fascinating reading today, twenty-five years after Freud's death. Most of this material originates in the years 1893-1901 and therefore covers not only the period of Freud's shift from neurology to psychology but also the period of his most vigorous creativity in psychoanalysis itself, namely the publication together with his predecessor, Josef Breuer, of Studien iiber Hysterie. It is the period of his self-analysis which laid the groundwork for psychoanalytic therapy, the years during which he conceived and published his basic work Interpretation of Dreams. It is also the time when he wrote Sexuality in the Etiology of Neuroses, Ueber den Traum, and Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. 282 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Included in this volume of papers sent to Fliess is The Draft of a Psychology written in a burst of enthusiasm during three weeks in the autumn of 1895 (pp. 305-384 of the text). This important paper deals not only with emotive life but with the origin of cognitive thought, a topic which went in part into Chapter 7 of the Interpretation of Dreams. In this paper Freud still tries to combine his ideas of the physiology of the brain with his psychological and psychopathological findings. It is therefore a watershed of his intellectual endeavors, although Freud abandoned on the whole the effort to incorporate a theory of cognitive thought into his writings. Some rudiments of the Draft reappeared, however, in Das Ich und das... (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

HJ EIKMEYER AND H. RIESER Word Semantics from Different Points of View. An Introduction to the Present Volume /. Possible Worlds Possible worlds have turned ...

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...