Im Verlauf vieler Diskussionen über die sowjetische Philosophie am Osteuropa Institut der Universität von Fribourg wurden immer wieder zwei Probleme berührt. Erstens die Schwierigkeiten, denen der sowjetische Diamat bei der Beantwortung der sogenannten 'Grundfrage der Philo sophie' begegnet. Zweitens das Pro blem der Abhängigkeit der sowjetischen Philosophie von vorausgehenden Philosophien in der Geschichte: man kann in der heutigen sowjetischen Philosophie vor allem hegelianische und aristotelische Tendenzen unterscheiden. Diese Diskussionen wurden zur direkten Anregung für die vorliegende Arbeit. Zunächst wollte ich vor (...) allem die aristotelischen Tendenzen in der sowjetischen Philosophie untersuchen. Beim Studium der sowjetischen Literatur über die 'Grundfrage' wurde es aber immer klarer, daß gerade die neuere sowjetische Philosophie auf diesem Gebiet unter einem so starken Einfluß Hegels steht, daß die aristotelischen Tendenzen ver schwindend klein sind. Daher wurde die Arbeit zur Untersuchung dieses sehr grundlegenden Teils der sowjetischen Philosophie unter dem Ge sichtspunkt der Abhängigkeit von und Ähnlichkeit mit Hege!. Für die in vielen Diskussionen erhaltenen Anregungen möchte ich den Mitgliedern des Instituts danken. Mein ganz besonderer Dank gilt Professor J. M. Bochenski, unter dessen Leitung diese Arbeit entstanden ist. Nicht nur was das Verständnis der sowjetischen Philosophie, sondern auch besonders was die Interpretation Hegels betrifft, verdanke ich ihm viel mehr, als durch direkte Bezugnahmen im Text ausgedrückt werden konnte. Professor M. D. Philippe möchte ich für viele Anregungen und Ratschläge danken, die ich auch für diese Arbeit von ihm erhalten habe. (shrink)

Summary In this article the authors seek to broaden the scope of the methodological debates now underway in Germany between proponents of a critical theory of society — principally the late T. W. Adorno and J. Habermas — on the one side and proponents of an analytical theory of social science — principally Karl Popper and Hans Albert — on the other. An attempt is made to formulate and systematize some of the fundamental epistemological and methodological principles which are (...) basic to Habermas' philosophy of social science and to bring them into a critical confrontation with some of the relevant counter-positions which have today a wide currency in analytic circles. (shrink)

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGDer Einfluss Heinrich Barths auf die diastatische Auffassung der Gott-Mensch-Beziehung in der »dialektischen Theologie« seines Bruders Karl scheint bedeutend gewesen zu sein. Der Autor des vorliegenden Beitrags vertritt jedoch die Ansicht, dass sowohl Karl Barth wie auch eine gängige Einschätzung des Sachverhalts im Blick auf Heinrich Barths Position Opfer eines Missverständnisses geworden sind, demgegenüber diese Position in ihrem dauerhaft haltbaren Sinn zu rekonstruieren und zu rehabilitieren ist. Die für Heinrich Barths philosophisches Werk insgesamt in der Tat kennzeichnende Akzentuierung (...) der Transzendenz muss mit Bezug auf die Platonische Idee des Guten in erster Linie als Transzendenz gegenüber einer theoretischen Gesamtschau verstanden werden, welche die ethische Lebensproblematik bedenkenlos vereinnahmt und damit um ihre Aktualität bringt. So verstanden bedeutet Heinrich Barths Betonung der Transzendenz nicht das Aufreißen einer kaum mehr überbrückbaren Kluft, sondern verweist vielmehr auf die Aufgabe, das Gott-Mensch-Verhältnis, den Begriff einer »Gotteserkenntnis« und letztlich die Problematik der Transzendenz als solche von einem Gesichtspunkt aus neu zu bestimmen, für den die ethische Lebensproblematik im Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit steht.SUMMARYHeinrich Barth's influence on the diastatical conception of the God-man-relationship in his brother Karl's Dialectical Theology seems to be important. The author of the following contribution however suggests the opinion, that both Karl Barth himself and a common view of the matter have been victims of a misunderstanding of Heinrich Barth's position, in contrast to which this position has to be reconstructed and rehabilitated in its durable sense. The accentuation of transcendence, relative to the transcendental principles respectively God, which is indeed significant of Heinrich Barth's work as a whole, has to be understood, in reference to Plato's Idea of the Good, first of all as transcendence in relation to a theoretical view of the whole, which does not hesitate to integrate the problematic of life and ethics by eliminating its actuality. In this understanding Heinrich Barth's emphasis of transcendence does not mean to tear open a gap which is hardly ever to be bridged, but refers to the task of a redefinition of the God-man-relationship, the notion of “Gotteserkenntnis” and, in last terms, the problem of transcendence as such, starting from a point of view for which the problematic of life and ethics is in the centre of attention. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 1 Seiten: 90-131.

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body (...) of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, I will make use of epistemic permissivism to provide a general recipe for generating so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge. I will call this class of cases permissive divergence cases. While other divergence cases have been discussed in the literature, permissive divergence cases prove themselves to be less susceptible to many of the worries raised against their competitors, while being directly built on an often-defended epistemological thesis. (shrink)

This classic remains one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history.

Kant's Reason develops a novel interpretation of Kant’s conception of reason and its philosophical significance, focusing on two claims. First, it argues that Kant presents a powerful model for understanding the unity of theoretical and practical reason as two manifestations of a unified capacity for theoretical and practical understanding (or “comprehension”). This model allows us to do justice to the deep commonalities between theoretical and practical rationality, without reducing either to the other. In particular, through it, we see why the (...) activities of both theoretical and practical reason are governed by a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, while also seeing why reason is essentially autonomous. At the same time, Kant's Reason also reads Kant as presenting us with a compelling picture of the role that reason (as a capacity or power) should play in a systematic approach to foundational philosophical questions. In doing so, it argues for an account of the fundamental norms that apply to rational beings that treats as fundamental neither substantive reasons or values nor merely structural rationality, but instead a robust conception of reason as a power or capacity — namely, the capacity for theoretical and practical understanding. The result is a form of “rational constitutivism” – one which contrasts both with the forms of “reasons fundamentalism” that are currently fashionable and the forms of “agency-first constitutivism” that have dominated much of Kantian metaethics. In this sense, the aim of the book is to vindicate Kant’s insistence that his philosophy represents nothing more or less than reason’s implicit self-understanding coming to explicit and systematic self-consciousness. (shrink)

Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside The Open Society and Its Enemies as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.

Dieses Buch ist die erfolgreichste Einführung in die Philosophie der Nachkriegszeit. Ein klassischer Text eines bedeutenden Philosophen dieses Jahrhunderts. Ausgehend von der Strittigkeit der Philosophie werden in 12 Vorträgen Grundlagen und Bedingungen des Philosophierens entfaltet. Im Anhang werden Lektürevorschläge zum eigenen philosophischen Studium gegeben. (Ec).

First published in French, Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) was composed during his years in Brussels, when he was developing his economic views and, through confrontations with the chief leaders of the working-class movement, establishing his intellectual standing. In this classic work, which laid the foundation of ideas later developed in Capital, Marx polemicized against then premier French socialist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon wanted to unite the best features of such contraries as competition and monopoly. He hoped to save the (...) good features of economic institutions while eliminating the bad. Marx, however, declared that no equilibrium was possible between the antagonisms in any given economic system. Social structures were transient historical forms determined by the productive forces: "The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the stream mill, society with the industrial capitalist.". (shrink)

First published in French, Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) was composed during his years in Brussels, when he was developing his economic views and, through confrontations with the chief leaders of the working-class movement, establishing his intellectual standing. In this classic work, which laid the foundation of ideas later developed in Capital, Marx polemicized against then premier French socialist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon wanted to unite the best features of such contraries as competition and monopoly. He hoped to save the (...) good features of economic institutions while eliminating the bad. Marx, however, declared that no equilibrium was possible between the antagonisms in any given economic system. Social structures were transient historical forms determined by the productive forces: "The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the stream mill, society with the industrial capitalist.". (shrink)

Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of ‘crisis’ tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept’s constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept of crisis (...) is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of ‘downfall’ and ‘decline’, or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis’s outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography. (shrink)

Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto has become one of the world’s most influential political tracts since its original 1848 publication. Part of the Rethinking the Western Tradition series, this edition of the Manifesto features an extensive introduction by Jeffrey C. Isaac, and essays by Vladimir Tismaneanu, Steven Lukes, Saskia Sassen, and Stephen Eric Bronner, each well known for their writing on questions central to the Manifesto and the history of Marxism. These essays address the Manifesto's historical background, its impact on (...) the development of twentieth-century Communism, its strengths and weaknesses as a form of ethical critique, and its relevance in the post-1989, post-Cold War world. This edition also includes much ancillary material, including the many Prefaces published in the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, and Engels's "Principles of Communism.". (shrink)

Die Evolutionstheorie hat sich in den letzten 150 Jahren von einer speziellen naturwissenschaftlichen zur universellen wissenschaftlichen Theorie entwickelt.

In kritischer Distanz zu etablierten religiosen Institutionen suchen sie auf ihre spezifische Weise Lebenssinn zu generieren. Insoweit sind sie selbst zentrale Akteure der modernen Religionsgeschichte.

This book addresses the endangerment of children’s bodies in affluent societies. Bodily integrity is an important part of a child’s physical and mental well-being, but it can also be violated through various threats during childhood; not only affecting physical health but also causing mental damage and leading to distortions in the development of the self. The authors give an account of three areas, which present different serious dangers: (1) body and eating, (2) body and sexuality, and (3) body and violence. (...) Through an in-depth examination of the available theoretical and empirical knowledge, as well as a thorough ethical analysis, the central injustices in the mentioned areas are identified and the agents with responsibilities towards children displayed. The authors conclude by providing invaluable insight into the necessity of an ethical basis for policies to safeguard children and their bodies. (shrink)

Karl Pfeifer attempts to present a coherent view of panentheism that eschews Pickwickian senses of “in” and aligns itself with, and builds upon, familiar diagrammed portrayals of panentheism. The account is accordingly spatial-locative and moreover accepts the proposal of R.T. Mullins that absolute space and time be regarded as attributes of God. In addition, however, it argues that a substantive parthood relation between the world and God is required. Pfeifer’s preferred version of panpsychism, viz. panintentionalism, is thrown into the (...) mix as an optional add-on. On this account, God is conceived of as a “spiritual field” whose nature can be made more intelligible by regarding “God” as having a mass-noun sense in some contexts. Pfeifer closes with the suggestion that we look to topology and mereology for further development of the position outlined in his paper. (shrink)

On its publication in 1957, _The Poverty of Historicism_ was hailed by Arthur Koestler as 'probably the only book published this year which will outlive the century.' A devastating criticism of fixed and predictable laws in history, Popper dedicated the book to all those 'who fell victim to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.' Short and beautifully written, it has inspired generations of readers, intellectuals and policy makers. One of the most important books on the (...) social sciences since the Second World War, it is a searing insight into the ideas of this great thinker. (shrink)