Este artículo aborda un estudio metafísico sobre límites en la discusión sobre composición material. Según la tesis nihilista, dos o más objetos nunca componen otro objeto. Los objetos materiales ordinarios y sus límites (superficies) serían entidades fiat, mientras que los objetos simples (sin partes) y sus límites precisos son los únicos componentes bona fide del mundo. Sin embargo, si hay razones para postular la existencia de un límite bona fide que separa una colección de objetos de sus alrededores espaciales, entonces (...) tenemos razones para postular también la existencia de un objeto compuesto bona fide. Si existe un límite, dada su dependencia ontológica, debe existir un objeto al cual pertenece. La emergencia de un límite de un objeto material tridimensional instancia propiedades irreductibles a las propiedades de alguna de sus partes. No obstante, una vez que los límites son introducidos en el mundo, la presencia de vaguedad ontológica en términos modales resulta inevitable. (shrink)

El Tractatus de Wittgenstein es una obra desconcertante para quien la ha leído. Una vez recorridas sus complejas tesis filosóficas, sus últimos pasajes declaran que sus proposiciones se esclarecen cuando son reconocidas como sinsentidos. El libro debe ser leída como una escalera para ser arrojada una vez que hemos subido por ella. Al respecto, hay por lo menos dos posturas al respecto en la literatura: mientras la tesis de inefabilidad sostiene que el propósito del Tractatus es comunicar algún tipo de (...) verdad inexpresable a través del reconocimiento de su sinsentido, de acuerdo con la tesis terapéutica su propósito es exclusivamente identificar el sinsentido de la obra para determinar lo que resulta expresable. En este artículo defiendo una tercera opción según la cual la metáfora de la escalera ―compuesta de tres peldaños sobre la naturaleza del mundo, el lenguaje, y el sujeto― se debe entender desde su significado paradójico. El Tractatus no es una obra que intente comunicar un conocimiento teórico y, sin embargo, arrojar la obra al sinsentido lleva al lector al descubrimiento práctico de una posición ética para ‘ver correctamente el mundo’ a partir de la paradoja de un límite. Palabras clave : Sinsentido; Límite; Sujeto; Lenguaje; Escalera.: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a baffling work for someone who has read it. Once we have gone throughout its complex philosophical thesis, its last two passages claim that its propositions are cleared up by being recognized as senseless. The book must be read as ladder to be thrown away once we have climbed it up. In this respect, there are at least two accounts in the literature: while the ineffability view contends that the purpose of the Tractatus is to communicate some kind of inexpressible truths throughout the recognition of its senselessness, according to the therapeutic view its purpose is exclusively to identify the senseless of the work to determine what really is sayable. This article argues a third view in which the metaphor of the ladder ―having three rungs about the nature of the world, language, and the Self― must be understood from its paradoxical meaning. The Tractatus is not a work trying to communicate a theoretical knowledge and, therefore, throwing it away to the senseless takes the reader to the practical discovery of an ethical position to ‘see the world rightly’ from the paradox of a limit. Key Words : Senseless; Limit; Subject; Language; Ladder. (shrink)

Un objeto simple es un átomo mereológico, es decir, un objeto sin partes. Markosian postula lo que él llama the simple question: ¿bajo qué circunstancias es verdadero para un objeto que no posea partes? Este artículo analiza, primero, las respuestas a esa pregunta y, segundo, la tesis del nihilismo mereológico sobre composición material. Según esta última, en el mundo solo existen objetos simples que nunca componen nada. Esta tesis evita la vaguedad composicional al no existir límites espaciales indeterminados para un (...) objeto sin partes, pero no elimina, considerando los descubrimientos de la física cuántica, la vaguedad modal en su localización. (shrink)

The fact that boundaries are ontologically dependent entities is agreed by Franz Brentano and Roderick Chisholm. This article studies both authors as a single metaphysical account about boundaries. The Brentano-Chisholm theory understands that boundaries and the objects to which they belong hold a mutual relationship of ontological dependence: the existence of a boundary depends upon a continuum of higher spatial dimensionality, but also is a conditio sine qua non for the existence of a continuum. Although the view that ordinary material (...) objects and their boundaries (or surfaces) ontologically depend on each other is correct, it does not grasp their asymmetric relationship: while the existence of a surface rigidly depends upon the existence of the very object it belongs to, the existence of a physical object generically depends upon having some surface. In modal terms, both are two kinds of de re ontological dependence that this article tries to distinguish. (shrink)

The fact that boundaries are ontologically dependent entities is agreed by Franz Brentano and Roderick Chisholm. This article studies both authors as a single metaphysical account about boundaries. The Brentano-Chisholm theory understands that boundaries and the objects to which they belong hold a mutual relationship of ontological dependence: the existence of a boundary depends upon a continuum of higher spatial dimensionality, but also is a conditio sine qua non for the existence of a continuum. Although the view that ordinary material (...) objects and their boundaries (or surfaces) ontologically depend on each other is correct, it does not grasp their asymmetric relationship: while the existence of a surface rigidly depends upon the existence of the very object it belongs to, the existence of a physical object generically depends upon having some surface. In modal terms, both are two kinds of de re ontological dependence that this article tries to distinguish. (shrink)

Is it possible for two material objects to share the very same boundary? Material collocation is a metaphysical thesis that allows for two qualitatively distinct objects to share the same boundary of a matter-filled region of space and, therefore, to be made of the same stuff despite them differing in some metaphysical respects. This article addresses the metaphysical implications of material collocation on a boundary account and how things persist across time. It discusses endurantism and perdurantism in terms of boundaries: (...) while the former postulates physical objects as entities having boundaries along the three spatial dimensions, the latter postulates them as entities having boundaries along four dimensions, considering time as an extra dimension. Finally, the article raises two criticisms against perdurantism: one related to Heller’s commitment to boundary essentialism of four-dimensional objects, and the other to the resemblance argument between spatial and temporal boundaries.vamente diferentes comparten el mismo límite de una región espacial material y, por lo tanto, se componen de la misma materia a pesar de que difieren en algunos aspectos metafísicos. Este artículo aborda las implicaciones metafísicas de la colocación en relación con una tesis sobre límites y persistencia temporal. Se plantea una discusión sobre endurantismo y perdurantismo: mientras el primero entiende los objetos físicos como entidades con límites en las tres dimensiones espaciales, el último los entiende como entidades que poseen límites en cuatro dimensiones, considerando el tiempo como una más. Finalmente, el artículo sostiene dos críticas al perdurantismo y sus compromisos con los límites: una relacionada con consecuencias esencialistas, la otra con una analogía problemática entre límites espaciales y límites temporales. (shrink)

Ilustración tardía y Proyecto de modernidad -- Ensayos criticos sobre tradición y verdad -- Formación para la tolerancia : la filosofía en escena.

Summary A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others such as environments and animals; the bonds (...) and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and authoritative volume, leading scholars engage with the philosophy and writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a key figure in nineteenth-century thought. Their chapters cover his innovative philosophical strategies and explore how they can be understood in relation to their historical situation, as well as presenting incisive interpretations of Dilthey's arguments, including their development, their content, and their influence on later thought. A key focus is on how Dilthey's work remains relevant to current debates around art and literature, the (...) biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, science, culture, history, society, and psychology and the embodied mind. The volume will be important for researchers in hermeneutics, aesthetics, practical philosophy, and the history of German philosophy, providing a valuable introduction to Dilthey's work as well as detailed critical analysis of its ongoing significance. (shrink)

an anarchist critique of Bolshevism, drawing on Walter Benjamin. The translation and commentary published as "Theories of Justice, Profane and Prophetic: Gershom Scholem on the Bolshevik Revolution" in Gershom Scholem: In memoriam, Vol. 2, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, 21, 2007.

ABSTRACT In this article we propose to study the way in which the conceptualization of death carried out by Hegel has been read by a series of authors. In this way, in a first section we will restore Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel to, in a second moment, recover Kojève’s decisive reading of the same author, and end with a replacement of the hermeneutics carried out by Bataille of the German idealist philosopher. Thus, in the conclusion to this article, the existence (...) of repeated and extremely similar motifs present in the three recently named thinkers will be exposed, for whom the figure of Hegel has certainly constituted an unavoidable inheritance. (shrink)

Planteo una lectura del Wallenstein de Friedrich Schiller como una puesta en escena (Darstellung) de las categorías de lo bello y lo sublime, así como de otras categorías poéticas derivadas, como lo ingenuo y lo sentimental, el idilio y la elegía o la sátira patética y la festiva. Este ejercicio artístico también le permite a Schiller experimentar y desarrollar sus propias ideas estéticas y poéticas y, de este modo, se desarrolla un auténtico diálogo entre el arte y la filosofía en (...) la obra de uno de los clásicos alemanes de la modernidad. Una de las conclusiones es que con el Wallenstein se clausura una comprensión idealista del mundo, pues, como señala Villacañas a través de Hegel, no tiene final de teodicea. (shrink)

Presenting a comprehensive portrayal of the reading of Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in early 20th-century German thought, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in early Twentieth-Century German Thought examines the implications of these readings for contemporary issues in comparative and intercultural philosophy. Through a series of case studies from the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, Eric Nelson focuses on the reception and uses of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism in German philosophy, covering figures as diverse as Buber, Heidegger, and Misch. He argues that (...) the growing intertextuality between traditions cannot be appropriately interpreted through notions of exclusive identities, closed horizons, or unitary traditions. Providing an account of the context, motivations, and hermeneutical strategies of early twentieth-century European thinkers' interpretation of Asian philosophy, Nelson also throws new light on the question of the relation between Heidegger and Asian philosophy. Reflecting the growing interest in the possibility of intercultural and global philosophy, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in early Twentieth-Century German Thought opens up the possibility of a more inclusive intercultural conception of philosophy. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/chinese-and-buddhist-philosophy-in-early-twentieth-century-german-thoug ht-9781350002562/#sthash.1lY6OTYj.dpuf. (shrink)

This paper contributes to clarifying Deleuze’s theory of the Idea by a commentary on its technical definition: “a defined, continuous, n-dimensional multiplicity”, presented in chapter IV of Difference and Repetition. This definition implicitly intertwines Deleuze’s own metaphysical view of the Idea as a virtual problem with a series of notions taken from the differential geometry developed by the German mathematician Georg B. Riemann. To clarify this influence, we will reconstruct the fundamental elements of the Riemannian notions used by Deleuze, and (...) show how these elements are presupposed in Deleuze’s concept of Idea. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze’s research during the 1980s focused on the 17th century German thinker G. W. Leibniz. In 1988, Deleuze published Le Pli, which forms part of a series of works on modern philosophy. This book displays Deleuze’s attention to the interpretations of contemporary commentators on modern philosophy, in this case, on Leibniz. In this context, there occurred a brief and important dialogue between Deleuze and Christiane Frémont, the French commentator and translator of Leibniz, with regard to their respective interpretations of (...) the great German philosopher. This article intends to give an account of the main topics present in that conversation. Firstly, we can say they involve 1) the problem of body and the Leibnizian vinculum substantiale, 2) the question of singularities, 3) the principle of economy and incompossibility, and 4) the Deleuzian concept of vice-diction. Our hypothesis in this study is that the readings made by both authors of the German thinker are mutually involved. It is essential, in order to support this hypothesis, to make precise the demarcations of relations between such readings. For this reason, our research will focus on Frémont’s study Singularités, individus et relations dans le système de Leibniz (2003) and on Deleuze’s work Le Pli (1988). We hope to determine the topics that emerge in the relationship, and to specify convergences and divergences of interpretation. (shrink)

Carine Defoort, Mario Wenning, and Kai Marchal offer three ways of engaging with Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought and the philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical issues it attempted to articulate and address.1 This work is historical with a contemporary philosophical intent: to reexamine a tumultuous contested epoch of philosophy’s past in order to reconsider its existing limitations and alternative possibilities. One dimension of this book is the investigation of constellations and entanglements of historical forces and concepts for (...) the sake of articulating critical models and alternatives for the present.2 In the book, I contested the modern self-image of philosophy... (shrink)

a short text on the concept of justice by Walter Benjamin. The text was preserved by Gershom Scholem on 8 October 1916, the same method by which most of Benjamin's early writings have reached us. However, this piece somehow remained undetected by the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften. It first appeared in German and English in Metaphysics of the Profane, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 166-169, with permission of the German publishers Suhrkamp Verlag. It is presented here with (...) a typographical error corrected. (shrink)

Free will has been the object of debate in the context of addiction given that addiction could compromise an individual’s ability to choose freely between alternative courses of action. Proponents of the brain-disease model of addiction have argued that a neuroscience perspective on addiction reduces the attribution of free will because it relocates the cause of the disorder to the brain rather than to the person, thereby diminishing the blame attributed to the person with an addiction. Others have worried that (...) such displacement of free will attribution would make the person with a drug addiction less responsible. Using the paradigmatic literature on the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations, we tested whether neuroscience information diminishes attributions of free will in the context of addiction and whether respondent characteristics influence these attributions and modulate the effect of neuroscience information. We performed a large-scale, web-based experiment with 2,378 German participants to explore how attributions of free will in the context of addiction to either alcohol or cocaine are affected by: (1) a text with a neurobiological explanation of addiction, (2) a neuroimage showing effects of addiction on the brain, and (3) a combination of a text and a neuroimage, in comparison to a control group that received no information. Belief in free will was measured using the FAD-Plus scale and was, subsequent to factor analysis, separated into two factors: responsibility and volition. The investigated respondent characteristics included gender, age, education, self-reported knowledge of neuroscience, substance-use disorder (SUD), and having a friend with SUD. We found that attributions of volition (in the cocaine-subsample) were reduced in the text and neuroimage-treatment compared to the control group. However, respondent characteristics such as education and self-reported knowledge of neuroscience were associated with lower attributions of responsibility for both substances, and education was associated with lower attribution of volition for the alcohol sub-sample. Interaction analyses showed that knowledge of neuroscience was found to generally decrease attribution of responsibility. Further research on attribution of free will should consider the effects of context and respondent characteristics, which appeared surprisingly larger than those induced by experimental treatments. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to review the game concept of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) in his books Logic of Sense (1969) and The fold (1988). As suggested by other authors of contemporary metaphysics, Deleuze's issue with game arises from the evaluation of the philosophical and historical importance that reason represents for Leibniz. In this sense, this article gets the notion of play of principles in which Deleuze attempted, in 1988, to characterize the concept of principle in (...) the German author. Because of the connections with the problem of ideal game, we focussed on establishing links with the principles with which Deleuze describes the game in Logic of Sense. (shrink)

Johann Christoph Gottsched gehört unbestritten zu den zentralen Figuren der deutschen Frühaufklärung. Wie wohl kein anderer vor und nach ihm hat er die Entwicklung der deutschsprachigen Sprach-, Rede-, Dicht- und Bühnenkunst geprägt, geleitet von der festen Absicht, diesen Künsten wo möglich eine wissenschaftliche Begründung, eine überschaubare kritische Historie sowie eine klare und elegante Darstellung zu verleihen. Über diese Bemühungen hinaus, hat sich insbesondere die neuere Forschung weiteren Facetten seines riesigen Werkes zugewendet. So erscheint Gottsched als Vorbild zahlreicher Zeitschriftenprojekte, als wichtiger (...) Popularisator der Leibnizschen und Wolffschen Philosophie, als zentraler Reformer der zeitgenössischen Homiletik, als Drehscheibe bei der Vermittlung europäischer Dichtung und Gelehrsamkeit. Die Beiträge des vorliegenden Bandes tragen der gesamten Breite der Gottsched-Forschung Rechnung, prüfen alte Erkenntnisse und stellen neue Einschätzungen zur Diskussion. Darüber wird die Aufmerksamkeit auch auf weniger bekannte Aspekte des Gottschedschen Oeuvres gelenkt, so etwa auf Beiträge zu den Naturwissenschaften und der Staatslehre, auf die akademische Lehrtätigkeit und auf das zunehmende Interesse an anthropologischen und ästhetischen Fragen. MIT BEITRÄGEN VON: Erich Achermann, Thomas Althaus, Detlef Döring, Frank Grunert, Gerda Hassler, Peter Hesselmann, Hanspeter Marti, Christian Meierhofer, Dagmar Mirbach, Merio Scattola, Oliver Scholz, Tomas Sommadossi, Holger Steinmann, Gideon Stiening, Andres Strassberger, Dietmar Till, Klaus Weimar und Jan-Henrik Witthaus. (shrink)

Gershom Scholem's commentary on Walter Benjamin's "Notes to a Study on the Category of Justice", first published in German and English in Metaphysics of the Profane, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 174-180, with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag.

Hegel remarked in his discussion of the nothing in the Science of Logic that: “It is well known that in oriental systems, and essentially in Buddhism, nothing, or the void, is the absolute principle.” Schopenhauer commented in a discussion of the joy of death in The World as Will and Representation: “The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The (...) Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, i.e., extinction.” It is striking how nineteenth-century German philosophical discourses (from Hegel and Schopenhauer to Mainländer, von Hartmann, and Nietzsche) concerning negativity, nihility, and nothingness explicitly refer to Buddhism, which was initially conceived by Christian missionaries as a “cult of nothingness” and became entangled with European debates concerning pessimism (the Pessimismusstreit) and nihilism. In this article, I reconsider how the interpretation of negativity and nothingness in Schopenhauer and nineteenth-century German thought informed the reception of Buddhism as a philosophical and religious discourse, and trace the ways in which Buddhist emptiness was reinterpreted in the context of the Western problematic of being and nothingness. (shrink)

This lecture explores the political import of Chrysippus' account of why and how one should live as a citizen of the cosmos, and it makes a case for seeing this account as the invention of political cosmopolitanism. (The preprint uploaded here is the final English draft on which the German translation was based.).

This article challenges widespread uncritical portrayals of Rosa Luxemburg. By examining the politics and practices of Luxemburg and her SDKPiL party in Poland, I show that their commitment to proletarian emancipation was undermined by sectarian and doctrinaire tendencies that contributed to the defeat of Poland’s workers’ revolutions in 1905 and 1918–19. A critical analysis of their approaches to the national question, the Polish Socialist Party, German Social Democracy, and the role of the revolutionary party, undermines the prevailing romanticisation of Luxemburg. (...) I argue that the Polish Socialist Party, Luxemburg’s main political rival, posed a viable Marxist alternative for Poland’s revolutionary movement. (shrink)

This chapter examines: (1) the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's political engagement on behalf of the National Socialist regime and his ambivalence toward some but not all of its political beliefs and tactics; (2) his limited "critique" of vulgar National Socialism and its biologically based racism for the sake of his own ethnocentric vision of the historical uniqueness of the German people and Germany's central role in Europe as a contested site situated between West and East, technological modernity (...) and the Asiatic. Heidegger did not break with radical right-wing Germanist thought, as some scholars have argued. He at most placed National Socialism within his narrative of the history of being, metaphysics, and technology, and thereby relativized it without addressing either its uniqueness or its totalitarian structures and practices. Heidegger formulated his own metaphysical and ontological version of Antisemitism during the National Socialist period. This vision was deeply connected with his understanding of the "history of being" and was intensified during and immediately after the Second World War. Heidegger could perceive no difference between the Shoah and the Allied bombing, defeat, and occupation of Germany. Heidegger's post-war philosophy (of home, history and technology) is deeply shaped by, and remained complicit with, his thinking during this period. (shrink)

I consider the intertextuality between Chinese and Western thought by exploring how images, metaphors, and ideas from the texts associated with Zhuangzi and Laozi were appropriated in early twentieth-century German philosophy. This interest in “Lao-Zhuang Daoism” encompasses a diverse range of thinkers including Buber and Heidegger. I examine how the problematization of utility, usefulness, and “purposiveness” in Zhuangzi and Laozi becomes a key point for their German philosophical reception; how it is the poetic character of the Zhuangzi that hints at (...) an appropriate response to the crisis and loss of meaning that characterizes technological modernity and its instrumental technological rationality; that is, how the “poetic” and “spiritual” world perceived in Lao-Zhuang thought became part of Buber's and Heidegger's critical encounter and confrontation with technological modernity; and how their concern with Zhuangzi does not signify a return to a dogmatic religiosity or otherworldly mysticism; it anticipates a this-worldly spiritual or poetic way of dwelling immanently within the world. (shrink)

Between 1933 and 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that brought him into increasingly open opposition to the Hitler regime in Germany. As a result, he was forced to leave Austria in 1938, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo as he fled to Switzerland and later to the United States. Twenty years later, he was invited to Munich to become Director of the new Institute of Political Science at Ludwig-Maximilian University. In 1964, Voegelin gave a series of memorable lectures on (...) what he considered "the central German experiential problem" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, and its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these questions demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans and of the order of German society during and after the Nazi period. _Hitler and the Germans,_ published here for the first time, offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era. Voegelin interprets this era in terms of the basic diagnostic tools provided by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Judeo-Christian culture, and contemporary German-language writers like Heimito von Doderer, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. Responding to publications on National Socialist Germany, Voegelin discusses the historian Percy Schramm's "Anatomy of a Dictator," along with studies of the churches and the legal profession. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide. While most of the lectures deal with what Voegelin called his "descent into the depths" of the moral and spiritual abyss of Nazism and its aftermath, they also point toward a restoration of order. His lecture "The Greatness of Max Weber" shows how Weber, while affected by the culture within which Hitler came into power, has already gone beyond it through his anguished recovery of the experience of transcendence. _Hitler and the Germans_ provides a profound alternative approach to the topic of the individual German's entanglement in the Hitler regime and its continuing implications. This comprehensive reading of the Nazi period has yet to be matched. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 278-279 [Access article in PDF] Frederick C. Beiser. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 726. Cloth, $59.95. With German Idealism Frederick Beiser adds to his already impressive body of work on classical German Philosophy. The aim of his book is to provide a historical account of the various forms the notion (...) of "idealism" took on in the work of Kant, Fichte, Hölderlin, Novalis, Friederich Schlegel, and Schelling. While the ruling picture of the period presents German idealism as the "metaphysics of subjectivity" blown up into mythic proportions, Beiser argues steadily and convincingly that "the development of German idealism consists not in an increasing subjectivism but in the very opposite: a growing realism and naturalism" (3).Nearly two-thirds of the book is devoted to Kant and Fichte. The treatment of Kant weighs in at just under two hundred pages, and is devoted to tracing his struggles with idealism in the pre-critical writings, the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and the Opus postumum. Unresolved Kantian problems serve as the launching pad for Fichte's "practical idealism." Beiser concentrates on Fichte's battles with skepticism and nihilism, his turn to the "primacy of the practical," and his efforts to provide a moral and inter-subjective foundation [End Page 278] for self-consciousness. The rest of the book deals with the ways in which the Kant-Fichte legacy is taken up and transformed into "absolute idealism" by the early Romantics and Schelling. Among the absolute idealists, it is Schelling—"the most inventive, brilliant, and productive" of them all (467)—who receives the most attention.It is a virtue of German Idealism that the trees of interpretive controversy are never mistaken for the idealist forest. In the body of the text, Beiser sticks closely to the task at hand, introducing the reader to the main lines of argumentation and the major philosophical stakes with exceptional skill and clarity. Scholarly debates are carried out mostly in the endnotes. This approach moves things along at a brisk pace, and makes for a refreshingly readable academic tome. It is perhaps inevitable, however, that a book of this scope will crack a little under the strain of its own weight. Three problems stand out. First, rejecting Hegel's self-aggrandizing account of the period is one thing, but it is surely overstating the case to say that the history of German idealism shows us that Hegel "was not the creative and original thinker that his history suggests or that his disciples imply" (11). Beiser's history, at least, does not justify such a claim. Pointing out that Hegelian-sounding ideas were in the air before Hegel started publishing does not suffice. Plato inherited from Parmenides the concern with "being," but this hardly makes him less of a creative and original thinker. Second, Beiser does not live up to his methodological promise to bracket "contemporary philosophical concerns and concepts" (ix). The book is littered with anachronisms. Schlegel is presented as attacking the "myth of the Given" (445-6), for example, while Schelling gives a "transcendental argument" for the self-knowledge of the absolute (589). Beiser also regularly classifies philosophers from the period as either "foundationalist" or "anti-foundationalist" (6-9, 235-9, 444-6), thus putting to work an undeniably contemporary "-ism" for which German, to this day, does not have a direct equivalent.Third, Beiser's treatment of the early German Romantics is too weak to serve as a bridge from Kant and Fichte to Schelling. While he is certainly right to insist that the early Romantics played a crucial role in the development of German idealism, he repeatedly conflates this claim with the less-than-convincing claim that they were philosophers with systematic ambitions. As a result, he seems ill at ease with their work, and has trouble dealing with the form within which they made their contributions. Take Schlegel for example. "For perfectly plausible reasons," we are told, "Schlegel was very skeptical of much... (shrink)

Hitler and the Germans, published here for the first time, offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant Yearbook Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 1 Seiten: 117-142.

Sociologists have long recognized the fragmentation our discipline’s knowledge, but few explanations go beyond “new internalist” studies of practices. Abbott’s scholarship in the topic areas of professions and disciplines is synthesized here to highlight a condition identified as “ajurisdiction,” or, the absence of professional responsibility. Ajurisdiction explains sociological fragmentation by situating the development of sociology within broader historical contexts: first, within the history of the academic profession, in general; and, secondly, within wider systems of professions and power. Beginning with the (...) origins of the social sciences in German legal science, this article tracks the historical interactions between professional and academic knowledge to explain sociology’s ajurisdictional condition. The theoretical framework and concept positions the academic profession in a unique position in relation to abstract knowledge, a relation that affects the internal differentiation of knowledge between and within disciplines and professional faculties as demonstrated by the case of sociology and law. (shrink)

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have a biopolitical aspect: they (...) are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

Peter Blickle, the great scholar of the German Peasants' War of 1525, has asserted that “in the late Middle Ages Europe saw itself confronted with a phenomenon which had been unknown in the previous history of the west—the peasant rebellion.” Is it indeed true that there are no reports of peasant revolts before the fourteenth century and in the early Middle Ages in particular? If one were to answer this question based on the Western scholarship of popular uprisings that has (...) flourished over the last few decades, one might concur with Blickle, since this research has focused almost exclusively on the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Yet there are a few recorded examples of peasant rebellions from the early Middle Ages, although dramatically fewer than in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The early-medieval revolt about which we have the most information is the Saxon Stellinga uprising of 841–42. Gerward, the author of the Annals of Xanten, described this revolt with the following words: “That same year throughout all of Saxony the power of the slaves rose up violently against their lords. They usurped for themselves the name Stellinga [apparently Old Saxon for ‘companions’ or ‘comrades’], and they perpetrated much madness. And the nobles of that land were violently persecuted and humiliated by the slaves.” As the only recorded European popular revolt between the sixth and tenth century, the rebellion of the Saxon Stellinga demands an explanation. (shrink)

Volume 6 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin offers the first translation of the full German text of Anamnesis published in 1966.

In _Archive Fever_, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology—fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic (...) reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling. "Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."—_The Guardian_ "[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."—_Choice_ "Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, _Philosophy in Review_ "Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."—_Library Journal_. (shrink)

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have a biopolitical aspect: they (...) are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

The ideas of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger have been described as an intellectual time bomb, as some of the most revolutionary thought in western history. Despite the enormous amount of secondary scholarship available on Heidegger, it is–due to the complexity of his thought and the density of his writing–difficult for the curious beginner to gain an insight into Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger For Beginners serves as an entry into the ideas of one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers, situating (...) Heidegger’s thought within its philosophical and historical context–alongside such thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl and Sartre. Heidegger For Beginners explicates many of Heidegger’s central ideas, including the Nothing , average everydayness, care, existence, be-in-the-world, the One , the critique of technology, anxiety, and most importantly, Being –a notion which may offer us the key to understanding the very mystery of our own existence. (shrink)

Most Americans believe what our media tell them, that Israel is a nation under attack by Palestinians. That is a lie. The truth is that Israel is a nation bent on driving Palestinians from their land through economic hardship, confiscation, humiliation, intimidation, and by killing them. Israel has maintained a brutal and illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for decades, not unlike the German occupation of Europe during World War II.

In this chapter, I reexamine how the interpretation of nothingness and negativity in Schopenhauer—within the wider nineteenth-century philosophical context, particularly in reference to his perceived rival Hegel and his heir and critic Nietzsche—informed his encounter with “oriental thought,” his reception of Buddhism as a philosophical and religious system centering on negativity, and trace how he construed the central Buddhist concept of emptiness in the context of Western ideas of nothingness. Nineteenth-century German philosophers are inadequately aware of the changing senses and (...) complex argumentative discourses concerning the Sanskrit expression śūnyatā and the Chinese term kong 空 and the problem of translating Buddhist emptiness as nothing or void. Relying on the same range of historical sources that were then becoming available in the German speaking world, Schopenhauer and other thinkers such as Hegel perceived similar philosophical questions in these sources, while arriving at conflicting diagnoses of their philosophical and practical significance. We consequently can trace how the reception of Buddhist emptiness becomes interculturally entangled with and a source in argumentation concerning the nature of being and nothingness in modern German philosophy. (shrink)

Heidegger’s “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man”, one of three dialogues composed by Heidegger after the defeat of National Socialist Germany published in Country Path Conversations explores the being-historical situation and fate of the German people by turning to the early Daoist text of the Zhuangzi. My article traces how Heidegger interprets fundamental concepts from the Zhuangzi, mediated by way of Richard Wilhelm’s translation Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland, (...) such as naturalness, letting/releasement, the unnecessary and the useless in the context of his hermeneutical and political situation. I consider to what extent this dialogue, along with his other discussions of the Zhuangzi and intensive engagement with the Daodejing from 1943 to 1950, constitute a “Daoist turn” in Heidegger’s thinking that helped shape his Postwar thought. (shrink)

After some introductory remarks on the German legal system and German legal politics, the main forms of datanet crime on the Internet are sketched. After that, one of the most important Internet-cases of the last decade, the CompuServe case, is discussed in some detail. One of the main problems of datanet crime is its global reach. The world-spanning nature of the cyberspace significantly enlarges the ability of offenders to commit crimes that will affect people in a variety of other countries. (...) On the other hand, the jurisdiction of national criminal law cannot be expanded at will by any single nation. A transnational criminal law for the Internet is possible but should be restricted to the defence of universally (or nearly universally) accepted interests and values. In effect, it seems that the problems of computer-related crime on the Internet cannot be solved by criminal law alone. (shrink)

Despite decades of detailed work on legal doctrine, significant basic confusion is still evident in the concept of »human dignity« according to article 1 of the German constitution. This confusion threatens to carry over into the guarantee of human rights at the level of the European Union. Thus, it is necessary to subject the concept to methodological inspection. This is the undertaking of this article. The most important result consists in the recommendation, not to seek »the« right interpretation of »human (...) dignity «, but rather to understand the concept as a means which can take definitional form in accordance with our needs and purposes. Those who attribute to human dignity the task of an absolute protection of the core area of the human, will also prefer a narrow concept of human dignity. Such a concept is presented here in the form of the »ensemble-theory of human dignity«. (shrink)

"Men living under the domination of catchwords live in a hell of their own making."The modern university, inspired by the German model envisioned by Wilhelm von Humboldt, is often considered an "ivory tower," since it seems to position itself outside of political and economic influences. By refusing any external impact on its freedom to organize research and teaching, it has the tendency to cut itself off from the rest of society. But it is this very freedom that nurtures the civic (...) model of social apprenticeship. Outside of immediate political or religious interests, outside of economic investments in the formation solely of elites, is the necessary Bildung: edification by the knowledge of individuals who can .. (shrink)

In memoriam Bill ReadingsIt is generally agreed that the modern university originated in early 19th-century Prussia, under the inspiration of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Thus it was stamped with the seal of idealism and of German Romanticism. Today the entrepreneurial model that seems to be imposing itself on universities around the globe confounds this former ideal, particularly by requiring academia to report on its economically quantifiable "impact." But an impact on what, exactly? On knowledge in general? On society at large? On (...) industry? Is it a question of developing the critical acumen of each person in a democratic universe in which the citizen must be formed as well as informed? Or is it a question of favoring .. (shrink)