Este artículo se propone analizar la crítica de Eric Voegelin a Max Weber acerca de la relación entre ciencia y valores, para ver sus implicaciones en la historia del concepto de política en Occidente. A comienzos del XX, Weber rompe con el concepto clásico de política aristotélico al señalar que lo específico de la política no son los fines que busca, imposibles de definir objetivamente, sino los medios con que opera (violencia). Voegelin verá en ese postulado una expresión (...) del positivismo dominante hacia la segunda posguerra, y se propondrá restaurar la noción clásica de política, afincada la reunión de lo que Weber había separado, verdad y política. Según Voegelin, Weber fracasa en su intento de edificar una ciencia libre de valores, y ello lo vuelve recuperable para su proyecto de elaborar una ciencia del orden. (shrink)

RESUMENEste artículo busca abordar una cuestión que parece cobrar relevancia política en sociedades postmodernas y secularizadas: las implicaciones que para la ética política puede tener el considerar el mundo como un lugar vacío de sentido inherente o, por el contrario, como una realidad moral. Para ello se recupera la crítica que autores como Leo Strauss y Eric Voegelin, apoyados en una visión clásica de la política que reunía verdad y política, hicieron de Max Weber, cuya reflexión partía de la (...) imposibilidad de fundamentar objetivamente los valores y, por tanto, de conciliar verdad y política. La cuestión que se abre es si una perspectiva que, como la clásica, busca reunir verdad y política, no puede resultar paradójicamente menos consistente para dar cuenta de la especificidad de la ética política que otra que, como la weberiana, da por sentado la imposibilidad de tal reunión.PALABRAS CLAVEPOLÍTICA, VERDAD, ÉTICA, VALORES, VIOLENCIA, WEBER, STRAUSS, VOEGELINABSTRACTThis article deals with an issue that seems to become relevant in postmodern and secularized societies: the implications for political ethics of considering the world as a place without any essential and inherent meaning or, on the contrary, as a moral reality. In order to do this, we recover the criticism made by authors like Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin –based on a classical concept of politics, joining truth and politics together–of Max Weber’s point of view, starting from the impossibility of objectively founding values and thus, of reconciling truth and politics. The question that arises is, if one perspective looks to join truth and politics together, as does the classical one, it cannot be paradoxically less able to portray the particularity of political ethics than another, like the Weberian one, which supposes the impossibility of the union of truth and politics.KEY WORDSPOLITICS, TRUTH, ETHICS, VALUES, VIOLENCE, WEBER, STRAUSS, VOEGELIN. (shrink)

¿Cuál es la relación entre política y verdad? ¿Es la verdad la realización de la política o más bien su negación? ¿La política sólo puede aspirar a tener un contenido ético si persigue y proclama la verdad? ¿Si no existe tal cosa como la Verdad, la política es entonces una pura lucha egoísta por el poder? ¿O cabe pensar que la inexistencia de la Verdad es el requisito de la democracia, el pluralismo y el carácter creativo e imaginativo de la (...) política? Estas preguntas son las que guían las reflexiones de este libro sobre el complejo y largamente discutido vínculo entre política y verdad. A través de sus páginas, distintos autores muestran cómo ha sido pensado el problema de la verdad en la historia de la teoría política occidental y cómo puede ser pensado en la actualidad, recorriendo un camino que va de Platón a Derrida, pasando por Kant, Weber, Schmitt, Strauss, Arendt, Berlin y Habermas. (shrink)

While Nietzsche's influence on philosophy, literature and art is beyond dispute, his influence on sociology is often called into question. A close textual analysis of Nietzsche's works and those of important sociologists - Max and Alfred Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, Rosa Mayreder - provides the first comprehensive account of their study and use of Nietzsche's writings. Above all, Nietzsche's critique of modernity, morality and culture are shown to have had a decisive influence on the development of sociology and the work (...) of its leading thinkers at the end of the 19thcentury and the beginning of the 20th. (shrink)

A paradigm shift occurred in musical culture in the early nineteenth century, whereby revered old works—newly called “classics”—began to rival contemporary ones as the guiding authority over taste. This article explores the less well-known composers found on programs in the period when classical repertories were becoming established. A kind of professional collegiality developed during this period on concert programs among pieces of diverse age and taste, reaching far beyond the iconic composers (now seen by most of us to have been (...) Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn). Many of the “other” composers came from Italy, France, or Britain and became famous for opera selections and songs, some termed “popular,” and a substantial number of their pieces were performed throughout the nineteenth century. The present-day narrative of music history has canonic blind spots for composers then widely performed—Louis Spohr, Thomas Arne, Giovanni Viotti, Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, George Onslow, Louise Farrenc, and Robert Franz, for example. To understand musical life of that time, it is necessary to rethink the language of canon and canonization. The concept of canonization and the concept of the masterpiece have narrowed musical thinking harmfully. We need to look back at the fruitful collegiality that existed between canonic and contemporary music in the early nineteenth century, involving as it did a wide array of composers and tastes not yet bound by rigid assumptions about supposed “levels” of taste. (shrink)

This paper shall give a review of some recently published and some older books, which were published as second or third edition, on Information Ethics and Internet related topics: - Brennan, Linda L. & Victoria E. Johnson : Social, Ethical, and Policy Implications of Information Technology. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing, 2004. – 304 pages, paperback, $59.95 - Capurro, Rafael: Ethik im Netz. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2003. 278 pages, paperback, €26.00 - Cavalier, Robert J. : The impact of the (...) Internet on our moral lives. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. – 249 pages, paperback, $26.95 - Johnson, Deborah G.: Computer Ethics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, third edition, 2001. – 240 pages, paperback, $40.67 - Kuhlen, Rainer: Informationsethik. Umgang mit Wissen und Informationen in elektronischen Räumen. Konstanz: UVK , 2004. – 444 pages, paperback, €24.95 - Nyíri, Kristóf: Vernetztes Wissen. Philosophie im Zeitalter des Internets. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2004. – 179 pages, paperback, €19.95 - Spinello, Richard A.: Case Studies in Information Technology Ethics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, second edition, 2003. – 252 pages, paperback, $54.67 - Spinello, Richard A. & Herman T. Tavani : Readings in Cyberethics. Sudbury, NJ: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, second edition, 2004. – 697 pages, paperback, $54.95 - Tavani, Herman T.: Ethics & Technology. Ethical Issues in an Age of Information and Communication Technology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004. 344 pages, paperback, $53.95. (shrink)

The State of the Political challenges traditional interpretations of the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. Focusing on their adaptation of a German tradition of state-legal theory, the book offers a scholarly, contextualized account of the interrelationship between their political thought and practical political criticism. Dr Kelly criticizes the typical separation of these writers, and offers a substantial reinterpretation of modern German political thought in a period of profound transition, in particular the relationship between (...) political theory and conceptual change. Alongside its focus on German political and juridical thought, the book contributes significantly to the history of European ideas, discussing parliamentarism and democracy, academic freedom and cultural criticism, political economy, patriotism, sovereignty and rationality, and the inter-relationships between law, the constitution and political representation. (shrink)

Because of its characterization of National Socialism as a form of 'totalitarian monopoly capitalism', many critics of Franz Neumann's pioneering book of 1942, Behemoth, have rejected what they see as a crude Marxist analysis of the subject. This not only does little justice to the richness of Neumann's book, it also distorts its central focus. By contrast, this paper suggests that a proper appreciation of the impact of Max Weber in general, and Carl Schmitt in particular, on the (...) development of Neumann's thought permits a more detailed assessment of both the merits and the shortcomings of his most famous analysis. (shrink)

Although it is well-recognized that Max Weber was of central importance to many of the emigre social scientists who fled Hitler, commentators have overlooked both Weber’s attempt to found a new dynamic political science that would test partisan commitments and the endeavors of emigre political scientists to develop this project. This article lays out this new Weberian political science and assesses the fate of the various attempts on the part of the emigres to translate it into their new (...) setting. It shows that Weber forged a notion of political science that combined an existential notion of politics as inexorable power struggle with a sociology of the business of politics that provided the setting in which that struggle was to take place. It also shows that the central purpose of this political science was to aid political partisans in clarifying the meaning of their political commitments by forcing them to view these commitments as they are shaped in the socio-political context that determines the struggle for power. I then show that Mannheim sought to radicalize this approach to political science by seeking to construct the political backdrop for the testing of political ideas out of a political field not out of parties, politicians, and state institutions but out of competing ideologies, each of which could be shown to have some insight into the dynamics of political conflict. For Mannheim we could now test political ideas against political reality by playing them off against each other. I call this project of testing political ideas against existential and sociological notions of the political field the Weber–Mannheim project. I then show how three emigre political scientists – Arnold Brecht, Hans Morgenthau, and Franz Neumann – sought to carry on the Weber–Mannheim project in their new setting. I argue that, of the three, Franz Neumann in his great work Behemoth, was most successful in staying true to that project. For he was able to find in his analysis of the Weimar Republic and the fascist regime a way of demonstrating the dynamics under which democracy and dictatorship fail or succeed while still maintaining openings for political will. Both Brecht and Morgenthau seem to have flattened the dynamic aspect of the Weberian and Mannheimian notions of a prudential political science – though it was Morgenthau who had the most successful reception in political science. (shrink)

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)

Terstenjak, A. Franz Webers philosophisches Gedankengut im Umriss.--Wolf, K. Franz Veber und Graz.--Ilc, M. Näheres zur Verdinglichung und Veranschaulichung in Webers Wirtlichkeitsfrage.--Pirjevec, D. Franz Webers ästhetisches Denken.--Urbančič, I. Philosophische Grundanschauungen bei Franz Weber.--Trofenik, R. Franz Weber.--Weber, F. Meine Beziehungen zu Meinong.--Weber, F. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Persönlichkeit.--Weber, F. Die Frage der Wirklichkeit.

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.

The recent literature on causality has seen the introduction of several distinctions within causality, which are thought to be important for understanding the widespread scientific practice of focusing causal explanations on a subset of the factors that are causally relevant for a phenomenon. Concepts used to draw such distinctions include, among others, stability, specificity, proportionality, or actual-difference making. In this contribution, I propose a new distinction that picks out an explanatorily salient class of causes in biological systems. Some select causes (...) in complex biological systems, I argue, have the property of enabling coherent causal control of these systems. Examples of such control variables include hormones and other signaling molecules, e.g., TOR (target of rapamycin), morphogens or the products of homeotic selector genes in embryonic pattern formation. I propose an analysis of this notion based on concepts borrowed from causal graph theory. (shrink)

Max Weber (1864-1920), generally known as a founder of modern social science, was concerned with political affairs throughout his life. The texts in this edition span his career and include his early inaugural lecture The Nation State and Economic Policy, Suffrage and Democracy in Germany, Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order, Socialism, The Profession and Vocation of Politics, and an excerpt from his essay The Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia, as well as other shorter (...) writings. Together they illustrate the development of his thinking on the fate of Germany and the nature of politics in the modern western state in an age of cultural 'disenchantment'. The introduction discusses the central themes of Weber's political thought, and a chronology, notes and an annotated bibliography place him in his political and intellectual context. (shrink)

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)

Logical paradoxes – like the Liar, Russell's, and the Sorites – are notorious. But in Paradoxes and Inconsistent Mathematics, it is argued that they are only the noisiest of many. Contradictions arise in the everyday, from the smallest points to the widest boundaries. In this book, Zach Weber uses “dialetheic paraconsistency” – a formal framework where some contradictions can be true without absurdity – as the basis for developing this idea rigorously, from mathematical foundations up. In doing so, (...) class='Hi'>Weber directly addresses a longstanding open question: how much standard mathematics can paraconsistency capture? The guiding focus is on a more basic question, of why there are paradoxes. Details underscore a simple philosophical claim: that paradoxes are found in the ordinary, and that is what makes them so extraordinary. (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)

Several authors have used the notion of causal specificity in order to defend non-parity about genetic causes (Waters 2007, Woodward 2010, Weber 2017, forthcoming). Non-parity in this context is the idea that DNA and some other biomolecules that are often described as information-bearers by biologists play a unique role in life processes, an idea that has been challenged by Developmental Systems Theory (e.g., Oyama 2000). Indeed, it has proven to be quite difficult to state clearly what the alleged special (...) role of genetic causes consists in. In this paper, I show that the set of biomolecules that are normally considered to be information-bearers (DNA, mRNA) can be shown to be the most specific causes of protein primary structure, provided that causal specificity is measured over a relevant space of biological possibilities, disregarding physical as well as logically possible states of the causal variables. (shrink)

This is the first book in which contemporary scientists and mystics share with us-in their own words-their views on space, time, matter, energy, life, consciousness, creation and on our place in the scheme of things. The book is also the story of an American philosopher who-with these dialogues-ventures into ground-breaking territory, and of her search in America, Europe, India and Nepal for people whose work is at the center of our understanding of reality.

I examine different arguments that could be used to establish indeterminism of neurological processes. Even though scenarios where single events at the molecular level make the difference in the outcome of such processes are realistic, this falls short of establishing indeterminism, because it is not clear that these molecular events are subject to quantum mechanical uncertainty. Furthermore, attempts to argue for indeterminism autonomously (i.e., independently of quantum mechanics) fail, because both deterministic and indeterministic models can account for the empirically observed (...) behavior of ion channels. (shrink)

There are several theses in political science that are usually explicitly called ‘laws’. Other theses are generally thought of as laws, but often without being explicitly labelled as such. Still other claims are well-supported and arguably interesting, while no one would be tempted to call them laws. This situation raises philosophical questions: which theses deserve to be called laws and which not? And how should we decide about this? In this paper we develop and motivate a strategy for thinking about (...) laws in political science which integrates two core concepts: spatio-temporal stability and social mechanisms. The proposed strategy is a set of guidelines that political scientists can use to reflect on and argue about specific cases within their discipline, not a clear-cut demarcation criterion. We defend and motivate this strategy and apply it to two cases (one with respect to state repression, one about parliamentary elections). After we have developed and motivated our strategy for political science, we show that our proposal is relevant for other disciplines in the social sciences. We explain how our views fit into critical realism and embed them in the debate on laws in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of the social sciences. (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 ...

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.

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.