This user-friendly guide will help students of the 'Star' to be able to discuss at a basic level what, at least conceptually, Rosenzweig intended to say and how all that he says is interrelated.

Die Theorie der menschlichen Gesetze bildet das konzeptionelle Zentrum der gesamten suárezischen Rechtslehre. Sowohl systematische als auch historische Gründe sprechen für diese zentrale Stellung der Theorie zur rechtlichen Ordnung von menschlicher Gesellschaft und Staat. Der Band versammelt nach dem Muster eines kooperativen Kommentars Studien zu den wichtigsten Kapiteln dieser im dritten Buch von 'De legibus' entwickelten Staatsrechtslehre. Dabei werden Fragen der allgemeinen Herrschaftslegitimation ebenso beantwortet wie Suárez' Ausführungen zur Staatsräson, zur Gewissensverpflichtung, zur Volkssouveränität und zum Widerstandsrecht. Mit Beiträgen von Oliver (...) Bach, Norbert Brieskorn, Mariano Delgado, Holger Glinka, Frank Grunert, Franz Hespe, Dieter Hüning, Tilman Repgen, Stefan Schweighöfer, Kurt Seelmann und Gideon Stiening. (shrink)

The book is divided into three sections. The first provides a general historical overview for the Jewish thought that follows. The second summarizes the variety of basic kinds of popular, positive Jewish commitment in the twentieth century. The third and major section summarizes the basic thought of those modern Jewish philosophers whose thought is technically the best and/or the most influential in Jewish intellectual circles. The Jewish philosophers covered include Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Mordecai Kaplan, (...) and Emil Fackenheim. The text includes summaries and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources. (shrink)

This article is a response to the 1994 Star Island conference on the “Decade of the Brain” from a Jewish perspective. After a brief introduction about the logical function of models and maps, I compare and contrast three models of the human: Ezekiel's vision of the chariot in the Hebrew Scriptures, Franz Rosenzweig's geometry of the human face in Der Stern der Erlosung (the Star of Redemption), and a standard anatomical picture of the human brain. Whereas Rosenzweigs face is (...) seen to be compatible with Ezekiel's chariot, both are seen to be radically distinct from the implicit conception of what a human being is in modern medical science. I conclude with a suggestion that the differences are to be understood in terms of their different intended functions and express my hope for some new kind of model that will incorporate the functional advantages of both. (shrink)

A suggestion for research on Rosenzweig and Viktor von Weizsacker, Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophical legacy: Levinas or Strauss?

Vorwort, von R. Loosen und F. Vonessen.--Leibniz und das binäre Zahlensystem, von F. Vonessen.--Das Geheimnis der Schöpfung; Neujahrsbrief an Herzog Rudolph August von Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel, von G. W. Leibniz.--Leibniz und die chinesische Philosophie, von R. Loosen.--Lettre sur la philosophie chinoise à Nicolas de Remond. Abhandlung über die chinesische Philosophie. Von G. W. Leibniz. Anhang: Anmerkungen, Abkürzungen (bibliographical: p. [133-153]--Nachwort: Zur fünftausendjährigen Geschichte des binären Zahlensystems: Fuh-Hi, G. W. Leibniz, Norbert Wiener, von J. Gebser.

This article argues that the life-works of Norbert Elias and Franz Borkenau can best be understood together, as they were developed in close interaction during the 1930s. Deriving inspiration from Freud, they took up the project formulated by Weber at the end of his `Anticritical Last Word'. However, in two significant respects they went beyond the Weberian problematics. First, overcoming the centrality attributed to economic concerns, they rooted the Western civilizing process in the long-term attempt to harness the (...) violence that was escalated by the emergence and then collapse of the Roman Empire. Second, they emphasized the crucial importance of periods of transition that follow an overall dissolution of order and mark the possible future course of events. (shrink)

Originally published in 1985, this is a short meditation by a great old man on people relating to other people who are dying, and the need for all of us to open ...

Tractatus 4.024 inspired the dominant semantics of our time: truth-conditional semantics. Such semantics is focused on possible worlds: the content of p is the set of worlds where p is true. It has become increasingly clear that such an account is, at best, defective: we need an ‘independent factor in meaning, constrained but not determined by truth-conditions’ (Yablo 2014, p. 2), because sentences can be differently true at the same possible worlds. I suggest a missing comment which, had it been (...) included in the Tractatus, would have helped semantics get this right from the start. This is my 4.0241: ‘Knowing what is the case if a sentence is true is knowing its ways of being true’: knowing a sentence’s truth possibilities and what we now call its topic, or subject matter. I show that the famous ‘fundamental thought’ that ‘the “logical constants” do not represent’ (4.0312) can be understood in terms of ways-based views of meaning. Such views also help with puzzling claims like 5.122: ‘If p follows from q, the sense of “p” is contained in the that of “q”’, which are compatible with a conception of entailment combining truth-preservation with the preservation of topicality, or of ways of being true. (shrink)

Introduction and translation of “The Four Phases of Philosophy” by Franz Brentano.

I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is natural to extend it to (...) intentional states. The proposed framework combines a modal semantics with a mereology of contents: imagination operators are understood as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a content-preservation constraint. (shrink)

We give a review and critique of jury theorems from a social-epistemology perspective, covering Condorcet’s (1785) classic theorem and several later refinements and departures. We assess the plausibility of the conclusions and premises featuring in jury theorems and evaluate the potential of such theorems to serve as formal arguments for the ‘wisdom of crowds’. In particular, we argue (i) that there is a fundamental tension between voters’ independence and voters’ competence, hence between the two premises of most jury theorems; (ii) (...) that the (asymptotic) conclusion that ‘huge groups are infallible’, reached by many jury theorems, is an artifact of unjustified premises; and (iii) that the (nonasymptotic) conclusion that ‘larger groups are more reliable’, also reached by many jury theorems, is not an artifact and should be regarded as the more adequate formal rendition of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. (shrink)

Anwander questions "the role that Pogge assigns to benefiting from injustice in the determination of our duties toward the victims of injustice... challenging his claim that there is a negative duty not to benefit from injustice.".

This paper discusses “impartiality thought experiments”, i.e., thought experiments that attempt to generate intuitions which are unaffected by personal characteristics such as age, gender or race. We focus on the most prominent impartiality thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance (VOI), and show that both in its original Rawlsian version and in a more generic version, empirical investigations can be normatively relevant in two ways: First, on the assumption that the VOI is effective and robust, if subjects dominantly favor a certain (...) normative judgment behind the VOI this provides evidence in favor of that judgment; if, on the other hand, they do not dominantly favor a judgment this reduces our justification for it. Second, empirical investigations can also contribute to assessing the effectiveness and robustness of the VOI in the first place, thereby supporting or undermining its applications across the board. (shrink)

Fusing philosophy and theology, the book assigns both Judaism and Christianity distinct but equally important roles in the spiritual structure of the world and ...

Michel Foucault entwickelt sich gegenwartig zweifellos zu einer der neuen Bezugsgrossen des padagogischen Diskurses: Nach einer langen Phase grosser Widerstande innerhalb der deutschsprachigen Erziehungswissenschaft werden jetzt die ...

Unification was originally introduced in automated deduction and term rewriting, but has recently also found applications in other fields. In this article, we give a survey of the results on unification obtained in two closely related, yet different, application areas of unification: description logics and modal logics.

Walter Benjamin was one of the most intriguing and original Marxist cultural theorists of the twentieth-century. He made a precarious living in Berlin as a literary journalist and, partly under the influence of Ernst Bloch and Lukacs, turned toward the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. In the late 1920's, he became a close friend of Brecht, championing his revolutionary "epic theater". Driven from Germany in 1933 by the rise of Nazism, Benjamin settled in Paris where he had close associations (...) with the surrealists. When the Nazis invaded France, Benjamin fled to the Spanish frontier where on being denied entry, he committed suicide rather than risk being delivered to the SS. Benjamin's writings are a curious mixture of esoteric, sometimes mystical Jewish thought, artistic modernism, and unorthodox Marxism. He united an apocalyptic vision of history with a concern for the material, productive basis of art. Fascinated by tradition, yet a radical spokesman for the new technological media, steeped in high German philosophy, but a champion of the proletariat, Benjamin was in turn philologist, literary critic, political commentator, and philosopher of history. Bolz and van Reijen proceed from the standpoint that Benjamin's thought was shaped by his attempt to connect extremes—to make the theological idea of salvation fruitful for political thought. Then, they go on to structure Benjamin's important clusters of themes in light of the radical consequences of this intention. (shrink)

Kant war uberzeugt, dass er das "Wissen aufheben" musste, "um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen". Wie sich der philosophisch begrundete "Vernunftglaube" aber zum Offenbarungsglauben verhalt, ist eine Frage, die bis heute Nachdenkens bedarf. Der Band vergegenwartigt Uberlegungen von der Stoa bis in unsere Zeit. Er verdeutlicht: Wo Philosophie die Fragen der Religion vergisst oder missachtet, verliert sie Rang und Tiefe. Wo religioser Glaube die Beziehung zum philosophischen Fragen vernachlassigt, wird er verlieren und scheitern. Wo jedoch etwas philosophisch gedachtes Absolutes die (...) Beziehung zur Geschichtlichkeit des menschlichen Lebens aus dem Blick verliert und die faktische Absolutheit im Geschichtlichen nicht zu verstehen versucht, verliert die Philosophie ihre Kernaufgaben aus dem Blick. (shrink)

Der Autor legt hier die erste Gesamtdarstellung der antiken Ansätze zu einer vergleichenden Zeichentheorie der Künste (Poesie, Plastik, Malerei, Musik, aber auch darstellendes Verhalten in der Lebenspraxis) vor, die für die Herausbildung und Entwicklung der griechischen Ästhetik, Literatur- und Kunsttheorie konstitutiv waren. Von Simonides über Empedokles, Gorgias, Platon und Aristoteles bis zur Stoa (von Chrysipp bis Poseidonios) und zu den Epikureern (von Epikur bis zu Philodem) werden alle wichtigen Positionen und Debattenlinien zwischen Spätarchaik und Späthellenismus behandelt, eingebettet in eine breit (...) angelegte Analyse des semiotischen Feldes (Zeichen in Medizin, Rhetorik, Geschichtsschreibung, Logik, Epistemologie, Physik und anderen Wissenschaften). Die poetologisch, kunsttheoretisch und musikologisch relevanten Probleme einer vergleichenden Zeichentheorie werden in konkreten Literatur- und Kunstanalysen am Material entwickelt (Euripides, hellenistische Plastik, Philodems Epigramme, Lukrez' De Rerum Natura). (shrink)

"Today, more than three-quarters of a century after it was written, the critique of philosophy in this book is what makes it of such great interest.

Democratic decision-making is often defended on grounds of the ‘wisdom of crowds’: decisions are more likely to be correct if they are based on many independent opinions, so a typical argument in social epistemology. But what does it mean to have independent opinions? Opinions can be probabilistically dependent even if individuals form their opinion in causal isolation from each other. We distinguish four probabilistic notions of opinion independence. Which of them holds depends on how individuals are causally affected by environmental (...) factors such as commonly perceived evidence. In a general theorem, we identify causal conditions guaranteeing each kind of opinion independence. These results have implications for whether and how ‘wisdom of crowds’ arguments are possible, and how truth-conducive institutions can be designed. (shrink)