Homo aestheticus -- The Greeks -- The Age of Enlightenment -- A time of consolidation -- A period of expansion -- The present : the use of music : the transformation of aesthetics.

This five-volume edition of Aristotle's works in Greek is (with the exception of Vol. III) a photomechanical copy of the standard edition of Aristotle's works from 1831-1870. Vols. I And II contain Aristotle's works. VOlume III presents O. GIgon's revision and supplementation of Aristotle's fragments. VOl. IV Presents a selection of the most important sections of Classical commentaries on Aristotle, together with a concordance with the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca. VOl. V Contains a copy of H. BOnitz' Index Aristotelicus.

Written in political exile during the Second World War and first published in 1945, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemiesis one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Hailed by Bertrand Russell as a 'vigorous and profound defence of democracy', its now legendary attack on the philosophies of Plato, Hegel and Marx exposed the dangers inherent in centrally planned political systems. Popper's highly accessible style, his erudite and lucid explanations of the thought of great philosophers (...) and the recent resurgence of totalitarian regimes around the world are just three of the reasons for the enduring popularity of The Open Society and Its Enemies, and for why it demands to be read both today and in years to come. This is the second of two volumes of The Open Society and Its Enemies. (shrink)

Student behavioural disengagement is a problem in many schools. This paper aims to explain why students’ behavioural disengagement occurs and reoccurs in Swedish classrooms in terms of two mechanisms. Mechanisms that explain student disengagement are tested quantitatively and illustrated qualitatively with primary data consisting of 74 video-recorded classroom lessons from three compulsory schools in Sweden. The regressions suggest that peer encouragement and the school subject curriculum are central for explaining student behavioural disengagement. Qualitative analysis decomposes how the mechanisms of peer (...) encouragement and school subject curriculum increase the risk of behavioural disengagement in real time using transcripts and images. In conclusion, this study shows how both mechanisms provide complementary explanations for students’ behavioural disengagement. (shrink)

This book explores the ethical dimensions surrounding the development of education for sustainable development within schools, and examines these issues through the lens of ethical literacy. The book argues that teaching children to engage with nature is crucial if they are to develop a true understanding of sustainability and climate issues, and claims that sustainability education is much more successful when pupils are treated as moral agents rather than being passive subjects of testing and assessment. The collection brings together a (...) range of fresh and creative perspectives on how issues around ethical literacies can be elaborated and expanded with regard to democratic sustainability education. The use of children's books in teaching about sustainability is carefully explored, as are the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of environmental education. Including an afterword by Arjen Wals, Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability, the book will be of great interest to students and researchers in the field of sustainability education. (shrink)

Karl Raimund Poppers (1902-1994) Hauptwerk, die Logik der Forschung (1934), gilt als Grundlagenwerk des kritischen Rationalismus. Der kritische Rationalismus zeigt, warum unser Wissen fehlbar ist und versteht den Erkenntnisfortschritt als Resultat von Hypothesenbildung und -widerlegung. Der Sammelband orientiert sich an der Gliederung der Logik der Forschung. Seine Beiträge kommentieren die jeweiligen Themen nach aktueller Forschungslage.

Karl Jaspers gehört zu den Ziehvätern der Psychopathologie, einer der Grundlagenwissenschaften der Psychiatrie. In diesem Zusammenhang wird gemeinhin auf sein systematisches Lehrbuch verwiesen, die Allgemeine Psychopathologie von 1913. Die wesentlichen Züge seiner Methodologie und den Gegenstand der neuen Wissenschaft fixierte Jaspers jedoch schon in den hier versammelten Arbeiten, die zwischen 1909 und 1913 erschienen: Seine Kritik am dominanten Reduktionismus und an der damals noch jungen Psychoanalyse sind in diesen Texten bereits gültig formuliert, ebenso - und nicht zuletzt - die (...) Dichotomie zwischen Erklären und Verstehen. Neben der Dissertation “Heimweh und Verbrechen” enthält der vorliegende Band unter anderem den bahnbrechenden und wirkungsvollen Aufsatz “Die phänomenologische Forschungsrichtung in der Psychiatrie” sowie die bis heute kontrovers diskutierte Abhandlung “Kausale und 'verständliche' Zusammenhänge zwischen Schicksal und Psychose bei der Dementia praecox (Schizophrenie)”. Der Kommentar verortet die einzelnen Beiträge sowohl im wissenschaftshistorischen als auch im werkgeschichtlichen Kontext. (Quelle: buchhandel.de). (shrink)

This book presents a number of fundamentally challenging perspectives that have been brought to the fore by the national tests on religious education (RE) in Sweden. It particularly focuses on the content under the heading Ethics. It is common knowledge that many teachers find these parts difficult to handle within RE. Further, ethics is a field that addresses a range of moral and existential issues that are not easily treated. Many of these issues may be said to belong to the (...) philosophical context, in which "eternal questions" are gathered and reflected upon. The first chapters highlight the concepts of ethical competence and critical thinking. In the following chapters the concept of ethical competence is analyzed with regard to teachers' objectives and to students' texts, respectively. These chapters pursue a more practice-related approach and highlight specific challenges identified from both teacher and student perspectives. Next, the book raises the issue of global responsibility. What kind of critical issues arise when handling such matters at school? Further, can contemporary moral philosophers contribute to such a discussion? In turn, the book discusses the role of statistical analyses with regard to national tests, while the closing chapters present international perspectives on the book's main themes and concluding remarks. The book's critical yet constructive approach to issues regarding assessment in ethics education makes a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate among researchers as well as to the everyday communication on testing in schools and classrooms. As such, it will appeal to scholars in ethics education and researchers in the field of assessment, as well as educators and teachers interested and engaged in the task of testing ethics in school contexts where curricular demands for valid and authoritative evaluation may provide important guidelines, but may also pose challenges of their own. (shrink)

Nästan alla bekänner sig till idealet om oberoende forskning. Men i praktiken är den vetenskapliga friheten begränsad av både politiken och marknaden. Vilken är egentligen vetenskapens roll i det öppna samhället?

The Swedish Jewish historian Hugo Valentin (1888–1963) founded the field of Swedish Jewish history in the 1920s. Valentin was also a prominent and public figure in Swedish Jewish affairs, as a writer, Zionist and refugee activist. This article focuses on Valentin’s analysis of antisemitism, from the 1920s to the early 1950s. It pays equal attention to the continuity and change of his writings on the topic, analysed in relation to such political contexts as the ‘Jewish question’, Zionism and anti-Nazi responses, (...) and advances within scholarly research on antisemitism. It shows that Valen­tin staked out a new approach to the topic of antisemitism, in which Jewish characteristics and the so-called Jewish question, while not completely absent, were placed within parentheses. Instead, he presented antisemitism and individual antisemites as problems in their own right, which, given Nazi German expansionism and the outbreak of the Second World War, seemed to be a greater and more urgent issue than whatever questions might have pertained to Jews and their place in modern society. (shrink)

This paper treats the problem of which type of units, individuals or whole societies, should be used when explaining societal phenomena. It is argued that factors operating at the individual level in principle form societies, and that societal phenomena therefore should ideally be explained at this level. However, it is also argued that many societal phenomena cannot in practice be analyzed at the individual level in a clear and strict way, but rather must be analyzed holistically, because it is not (...) known how they are related to individual factors due to the complexity of societies. For societies to be described and analyzed in a clear and strict way, they must as a rule be much simplified, and such simplification is often made easier by abandoning the individualistic perspective. If researchers still wish to describe a connection between individual factors and a societal phenomenon, they often must do so in vague terms. There are also other problems with the individualistic perspective that make it difficult to use. However, using the holistic perspective may be risky, as shown by two hypothetical examples. (shrink)

Constitutivism explains norms in terms of their being constitutive of agency, actions, or certain propositional attitudes. However, the shmagency objection says that if we can be shmagents – like agents, minus the norm-explaining features of agency – we can avoid the norms, so the explanation fails. This paper extends this objection, arguing that constitutivists about practical norms suffer from it despite their recent attempts to solve it. The standard response to the objection is that it is self-defeating for agents to (...) become shmagents. I agree, but the response ignores the possibility of shmagents who consider whether to be agents while already standing outside agency. Another response says that we ought to be agents because agency is, in some sense, normatively valuable, and if so, we can explain norms in terms of this valuable form of agency. But then the norms that our constitutions are supposed to explain are underdetermined because it is unclear how much we ought to care about this value. I conclude that the shmagency objection has yet to be answered. (shrink)

In recent discussions of the Humean Theory of Motivation (HTM), several authors – not to mention other philosophers around the proverbial water cooler – have appealed to the simplicity of the theory to defend it. But the argument from simplicity has rarely been explicated or received much critical attention – until now. I begin by reconstructing the argument and then argue that it suffers from a number of problems. Most importantly, first, I argue that HTM is unlikely to be simpler (...) than even close competing theories, and second, it is unlikely that a plausible version of the theory will be very simple. Moreover, I argue that a convincing case for HTM is likely to have to show that it is more virtuous than defenders have done so far. (shrink)

Realists about group agency, according to whom corporate agents may have mental states and perform actions over and above those of their individual members, think that individual agents may switch between participating in individual and corporate agency. My aim is, however, to argue that the inescapability of individual agency spells out a difficulty for this kind of switching – and, therefore, for realism about corporate agency. To do so, I develop Korsgaard's notion of plight inescapability. On my take, it suggests (...) that individual agents are continuously faced with fully exercising their own individual agency (absent external limits at the time of its exercise). But then individual agents may not switch to acting as members of corporate agents, in the sense of taking on irreducible mental states that differ from their own. As it nevertheless is possible to participate fully in the action of a corporate entity, this incompatibility between individual and corporate mental states suggests a challenge for group agent realism. (shrink)

Why be moral? According to constitutivism, there are features constitutive of agency, actual or ideal, the properties of which explain why moral norms are normative for us. I aim to investigate whether this idea is plausible. I start off critically. After defining constitutivism and outlining its attractions and problems (chapter 1), I discuss the theories of various features of agency that are supposed to ground morality according to the leading constitutivists in the literature. I find these theories wanting. They are (...) based on implausible assumptions about agency (chapter 2), and they fail to make sense of moral (and other) norms because the so-called shmagency objection, according to which we can shirk from our normative commitments by being ‘shmagents’ rather than agents, appears in new ways for them (chapter 3). Then I get more constructive. I defend a two-tiered form of constitutivism. The first tier captures practical rationality, and the second tier captures reasons for action. Starting with the first tier, I defend a Humean theory of agency (chapter 4) and add a principle of instrumental rationality to it (chapter 5). Appendices A and B supplement these chapters with replies to criticisms of the Humean picture. In chapters 6 and 7, I put this conception of agency to work to reach the second tier of the view. I start by defending a form of reasons internalism which treats practical reasons as grounded in the desires of ideal agents (chapter 6). Then I extend this theory to moral reasons, arguing – unexpectedly for a Humean – that we have universally prescriptive reasons to cooperate with other cooperative agents to satisfy our other respective desires (chapter 7). Hence, the constitutive features of ideal agency ground a morality of cooperation. I conclude by summarizing the case for constitutivism (chapter 8). (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of appetite in Plato’s Timaeus, Republic and Phaedrus. In recent research is it often suggested that Plato considers appetite (i) to pertain to the essential needs of the body, (ii) to relate to a distinct set of objects, e.g. food or drink, and (iii) to cause behaviour aiming at sensory pleasure. Exploring how the notion of appetite, directly and indirectly, connects with Plato’s other purposes in these dialogues, this dissertation sets out to evaluate these ideas. (...) By asking, and answering, three philosophically and interpretatively crucial questions, individually linked to the arguments of the dialogues, this thesis aims to show (i) that the relationship between appetite and the body is not a matter of survival, and that appetite is better understood in terms of excess; (ii) that appetite is multiform and cannot be defined in terms of a distinct set of objects; and (iii) that appetite, in Plato, can also pertain to non-sensory objects, such as articulated discourse. -/- Chapter one asks what the universe can teach us about embodied life. It argues that Plato, in the Timaeus, works with an important link between the universe and the soul, and that the account of disorder, irrationality and multiformity identifying a pre-cosmic condition of the universe provides a key to understanding the excessive behaviour and condition of a soul dominated by appetite. -/- Chapter two asks why the philosophers of the Republic’s Kallipolis return to the cave, and suggests that Plato’s notion of the noble lie provides a reasonable account of this. By exploring the Republic’s ideas of education, poetry and tradition, it argues that appetite – a multiform and appearance oriented source of motivation – is an essential part of this account. -/- Chapter three asks why Socrates characterizes the speeches of the Phaedrus as deceptive games. It proposes that this question should be understood in the light of two distinctions: one between playful and serious discourse and one between simple and multiform. It argues that the speeches of the Phaedrus are multiform games, and suggests that appetite is the primary source of motivation of the soul addressed, personified by Phaedrus. -/- . (shrink)

A debate has recently appeared regarding whether non-naturalism is better than other metaethical views at explaining moral progress. I shall take the occasion of this debate to present a novel debunking dilemma for moral non-naturalists, extending Sharon Street's Darwinian one. I will argue that moral progress indicates that our moral attitudes tend to reflect contingent sociocultural and psychological factors. For non-naturalists, there is then either a relation between these factors and the moral facts, non-naturalistically construed, or there is not. If (...) there is no relation, the contingent factors are unlikely to lead to moral knowledge. If there is a relation, they must be likely to lead to non-naturalist-style moral knowledge, but no theoretically virtuous explanation of moral progress is likely to accommodate non-naturalist commitments. It follows that non-naturalist moral realism cannot explain our moral knowledge. I call this a contingentist challenge to non-naturalism. (shrink)

I argue against group agent realism, or the view that groups have irreducible mental states. If group agents have irreducible mental states, as realists assume, then the best group agent realist explanation of corporate agents features only basic mental states with at most one motivational function each. But the best group agent realist explanation of corporate agents does not feature only basic mental states with at most one motivational function each. So corporate agents lack irreducible mental states. How so? I (...) defend the conditional with an argument from disagreement. On cognitivist approaches to desire, desires function to both motivate and represent the world. Yet such desires are subject to a significant amount of disagreement. Reflection on the folk-psychological properties of desire and belief suggest that this disagreement is better explained by a non-cognitivist approach to desire where they do not have both functions. I then defend the claim that realists are committed to at least some cognitivist motivational states. Using the example of fire brigades, I argue that the best realist explanation of group agents involves mental states with both representational and motivational functions. By modus tollens, corporations then lack irreducible mental states, period. (shrink)

How should we understand the relation between corporate agency, corporate moral agency and corporate moral patienthood? For some time, corporations have been treated as increasingly ontologically and morally sophisticated in the literature. To explore the limits of this treatment, I start off by redeveloping and defending a reductio that historically has been aimed at accounts of corporate agency which entail that corporations count as moral patients. More specifically, I argue that standard agents are due a certain type of moral concern, (...) but corporate agents are not due that type of concern, so they are not agents of, at least, the standard type. Diagnosis: because corporations plausibly lack qualia, they are ‘zombie agents’ that mimic real agents. This explains why they are neither standard agents nor standard moral patients: they are not standard agents because they lack mental states, and because they lack experiences, they are, at best, morally notable rather than morally respectable. However, I then argue that we nevertheless have instrumental reasons to include them in our moral responsibility practices, both because that is what notability involves and bluffingly, and both when it comes to treating them as moral agents and as moral patients. Hence, we may treat corporations as part of our moral responsibility practices to a limited extent anyway. (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.

Lippenbekenntnisse und Zitatenversatzstücke zur antiken Philosophie gibt es in der rechts- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Literatur zur Genüge. So wird aber oft der wesentliche Gehalt und die andauernde wirkungsgeschichtliche Bedeutung dieses Denkens verstellt. Eine elementare Einsicht ist die, dass jeweils unsere Herkunft mitbestimmt, zu welcher Gegenwart und Zukunft wir fähig sind. Dabei ist die antike Philosophie die Plattform einer gemeinsamen intellektuellen Herkunft von seither sich kontinuierlich wiederholenden Frage- und Problemstellungen.

The central theme in the discussion of how education about religion can, and should, be developed in pluralistic societies concerns challenges and opportunities involving intercultural religious education (RE). One example is Robert Jackson’s report Signposts, commissioned by the Council of Europe, in which various aspects of intercultural competence are captured and made visible regarding a religious didactic context. Here, different dimensions of what can be described as ‘ethical competence’ appear to be central. In this article, the interpretive approach, strongly connected (...) with Jackson, is considered to be in need of a development of a theoretical framing of forceful strategies for handling ethical challenges taking place in multicultural, multireligious and multi-confessional classrooms. It is argued that such strategies will depend on a careful analysis of the concept of ethical competence. A theoretical platform for the argument is presented with reference to James Rest’s analysis of ethical competence, which is shown to be relevant to an examination of how the concept of ethical competence can contribute to the development of strategies for teaching intercultural RE. As a basis for this examination, the Danish, Finnish and Norwegian syllabuses for compulsory school RE are analysed regarding how they express conceptions of ethical competence. This selection shaped the curricular arena of the investigation as being non-confessional, whilst simultaneously, more or less explicitly, resting on a shared historical Protestant anchorage. This twofold interpretation is shown to allow for an analysis of ethical competence, in relation to which an identification of certain prerequisites for developing strategies for teaching intercultural RE is possible. (shrink)