The aim of this study was to explore the existence of moral distress among nurses in Lilongwe District of Malawi. Qualitative research was conducted in selected health institutions of Lilongwe District in Malawi to assess knowledge and causes of moral distress among nurses and coping mechanisms and sources of support that are used by morally distressed nurses. Data were collected from a purposive sample of 20 nurses through in-depth interviews using a semi-structured interview guide. Thematic analysis of qualitative data was (...) used. The results show that nurses, irrespective of age, work experience and tribe, experienced moral distress related to patient/nursing care. The major distressing factors were inadequate resources and lack of respect from patients, guardians, peers and bosses. Nurses desire teamwork and ethics committees in their health institutions as a means of controlling and preventing moral distress. There is a need for creation of awareness for nurses to recognize and manage moral distress, thus optimizing their ability to provide quality and uncompromised nursing care. (shrink)

The importance of communities in strengthening the ethics of international collaborative research is increasingly highlighted, but there has been much debate about the meaning of the term ‘community’ and its specific normative contribution. We argue that ‘community’ is a contingent concept that plays an important normative role in research through the existence of morally significant interplay between notions of community and individuality. We draw on experience of community engagement in rural Kenya to illustrate two aspects of this interplay: (i) that (...) taking individual informed consent seriously involves understanding and addressing the influence of communities in which individuals’ lives are embedded; (ii) that individual participation can generate risks and benefits for communities as part of the wider implications of research. We further argue that the contingent nature of a community means that defining boundaries is generally a normative process itself, with ethical implications. Community engagement supports the enactment of normative roles; building mutual understanding and trust between researchers and community members have been important goals in Kilifi, requiring a broad range of approaches. Ethical dilemmas are continuously generated as part of these engagement activities, including the risks of perverse outcomes related to existing social relations in communities and conditions of ‘half knowing’ intrinsic to processes of developing new understandings. (shrink)

The problem of the electromagnetic coupling for spin-3/2 particles is discussed. Following supergravity and some previous researches in the field of classical supersymmetric particles, we found that the electromagnetic coupling must not obey a minimal coupling in the sense of coupling the electromagnetic potential, but some kind of an electromagnetic field strength.

The geometry of the state space of a finite-dimensional quantum mechanical system, with particular reference to four dimensions, is studied. Many novel features, not evident in the two-dimensional space of a single spin, are found. Although the state space is a convex set, it is not a ball, and its boundary contains mixed states in addition to the pure states, which form a low-dimensional submanifold. The appropriate language to describe the role of the observer is that of flag manifolds.

One of the most important and most interesting questions of the history of Christian thought is that of the influence of Platonism on Patristic and Scholastic speculation. Today, perhaps more than ever before, this question of the influence of Plato--and that of his later, more faithful disciples, the Neo-Platonists--presents itself as a fascinating issue. Ivánka is a historian, and the shorter essays and studies of a thirty-year research career are here recast and integrated into a unified book, focussing on some (...) major figures and problems of Christian Platonism. After a lengthy and highly interesting general reflection on Platonism and its historical fortunes, we have chapters on Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine, representing the culmination of Platonism in the Greek East and the Latin West respectively. The second part of the book is devoted to speculative mystical theology: Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus Confessor, the pre-Thomistic West, and at the end a fascinating chapter on the Platonic core of the spiritual doctrine of the late Byzantine centuries.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This is certainly one of the most beautiful books in philosophy published in the last couple of years. It comprises eighty-four essays, carefully selected, well-translated, covering almost the full range of Croce's immense literary production. Croce is certainly one of the most important and influential thinkers of this century and in this huge anthology the English-speaking reader is given an incomparable instrument to get acquainted with him. The list of the headings which classify the eighty-four essays are: The Logic of (...) Philosophy; Philosophical Criticism; Aesthetics; The Philosophy of Art and Language; The Theory of History; Economics and Ethics; Essays in Criticism and Literary History; Moral and Political History. But first one should read the late Cecil Sprigge's excellent introduction.—M. J. V. (shrink)

This little booklet is a reprint of an important article of the Zeitschrift für neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älten Kirche, 42, pp. 69-104. Through a superior command of Hellenistic sources the author analyzes St. Paul's two well-known utterances of a natural knowledge of God. The author uses the Epistle to the Romans to show that even though the Apostle's Greek terminology is borrowed from the Stoics, the ideas behind it, especially that of the "law," remain profoundly Jewish. On (...) the other hand, the famous discourse on Areopagus closely follows Poseidonius' views and probably comes not from Paul himself but from Luke, the writer of the Acts.—M. J. V. (shrink)

The author of a significant treatise on the philosophy of religion, Wagner is one of the few younger German philosophers who have managed to attain to prominence despite the crushing figure of Martin Heidegger. The present volume is an unchanged second edition of Wagner's best-known book. It is the fruit of patient scholarship as well as of sustained, creative intuition, a book which offers both modes of, and material for, thought.--M. J. V.

The present "Studienausgabe" is the fruit of over 40 years of labor on Paracelus [[sic]]. While Sudhoff's monumental edition continued by K. Goldhammer is intended to serve the specialist, Peuckert's aim is simply to make Paracelsus accessible to the philosopher and to the historian of ideas. Like Luther's, Paracelus's [[sic]] German is hardly comprehensible today; hence the editor had to "rewrite" it. The result is sound and easily understandable German. This welcome "vulgarization" should, however, have been compensated by notes: as (...) a matter of fact there are no critical or commenting notes in any of the volumes published as of now. We are promised a glossary at the end of the fifth volume, but even this will not mend the edition's essential shortcoming: a complete lack of any kind of scholarly apparatus. The first two volumes contain the major "medical" writings in chronological order. These earlier texts witness Paracelsus's emancipation from the ballast of medieval science: Galen, Avicenna, etc., and a significant turn towards a new conception of natural science in which speculation and experience are intimately interwoven. In the first volume there are several writings on Alchemy, among them the short treatise on the Three First Principles which was so heavily to influence the "pansophy" of the seventeenth century and even the great mystic of Görlitz, Jacob Boehme. The second volume contains the mature medical texts including the "Opus Paramirum," this herald of later bio-chemical thought. Obviously the real interest of the so-called medical texts lies in their speculative elements and they should be read together with the philosophical texts, making up the third volume. This third volume is rightly centered around the monumental "Philosophia Sagax," the major work of Paracelsus. This is the treatise whose influence reached far beyond the twilight of pansophy until the early and late Goethe and Romantic philosophy. Better than any other, this text demonstrates the uninterrupted continuity of German speculation throughout three centuries. If the resolution of the remaining two unpublished volumes turns out to be as fortunate as those reviewed here, these well-printed books should find their way to the shelves of any library, private or public, orientated towards the study of German philosophical thought.—M. J. V. (shrink)

C. G. Carus was the last and perhaps—besides G. H. Schubert—the most important representative of late Romantic philosophical anthropology. The present book is a welcome reprint of his most popular writing, a fascinating, imaginative, more speculative than experimental treatise on the different psychic functions. Carus' main thesis—avowedly inspired by the Schellingian Naturphilosophie—is the living unity of the body and the soul, which is itself, however, only a superior manifestation of a life-penetrated Universe. Like the other Romantic "scientists" gravitating around Schelling, (...) Carus was entirely forgotten during the second half of the nineteenth century; but he is now being read again.—M. J. V. (shrink)

The author is one of the greatest contemporary authorities on Classical Jewish philosophy. He applies his vast scholarship to probe into the inter-relationship between medieval Jewish philosophy and the cabala. The profound and daring speculation of the theosophists of the early cabala did not fail to provoke a violent reaction on the part of Jewish scholasticism, and the two long studies in the present volume try to analyze two cases of such antagonistic relationships. The first of the studies is a (...) comparison of the philosophico-theological treatise of Samuel Judah Ibn Tibbon, "The Reconciliation of Philosophy and the Religious Law," with a treatise on the Spanish cabalist Jacob ben Seset. While in this study we see the confrontation of the spirit of Averroes with the cabalistic inspiration, the second essay is devoted to a treatise from the fourteenth century, written by Joseph ben Abraham Ibn Waquar, in which philosophical and cabalistic elements are intimately interwoven in one and the same work. To the two major studies are added ten highly interesting short treatises on cabalistic notions and texts, making the present books together with the writings of Gershon Scholem the most important monument to cabalistic scholarship available in a Western language.—M. J. V. (shrink)

After the post-war insistence on Schelling's middle philosophy, his late speculation is becoming again the focus of Schelling-studies--but now from a genuinely transcendental viewpoint. The origin of this shift in perspective can be traced back to W. Schulz's celebrated work on Schelling's late philosophy as the culmination of German idealism. The present study unmistakably displays the mark of Schulz's influence. Its thesis is that the early and late philosophies, are similar in that both have a double structure. In Schelling's Early (...) philosophy because the ego must represent itself at a certain stage of its development as matter, transcendental philosophy necessarily refers to the philosophy of nature. In his Late philosophy because finite knowledge has as its principle absolute freedom which manifests itself in history, negative philosophy necessarily refers to positive philosophy. Philosophy of nature and positive philosophy are privileged realms for the thinker to show the active presence of experience in reflection, i.e. to insist on the role of facticity in reason's self-founding and self-mediating enterprise. All this is presented in a clear, correct and competent way; however the style and expression are too abstract, and the reader is left with a feeling of narrow precision.--M. J. V. (shrink)

After some decades of eclipse, the thought of Schleiermacher has again become the subject of an ever growing number of studies and specialized monographs. The present one deals with one of his principal yet somewhat neglected works, his Christian Ethics. After some discussion of the history of the influence and of the interpretation of the treatise, Birkner analyzes the systematic presuppositions of its teaching within the framework of Schleiermacher's entire doctrine. The author then undertakes the treatment of its major themes. (...) It is a well-written, not over-ambitious yet substantial contribution to the Schleiermacher literature.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This is the first good book on the early Schelling since Metzger's study in 1911. What is more, it is an entirely novel interpretation of this first and most productive decade of Schelling's philosophizing. The central thesis is that Schelling's fundamental intuition had always been that of the concrete and particular character of all reality. Reality is a whole and everything real is a whole: an actual closed totality. Even in this most Fichtean period, Schelling did not really accept the (...) transcendental position, and the philosophy of nature allowed him to expand his vision of the concrete into rich and complex constructions. This is a view which one occasionally encounters in other critical writings on Schelling, but it is usually overpowered by the accumulated Hegelian prejudice concerning Schelling's "dogmatism" and "abstract formalism." It is therefore heartening to see the author, without any polemics, challenging the Hegelians on their own favorite hunting-ground: the arid pastures of the philosophy of identity. Although the author does not fully document her findings, and although the System of Transcendental Idealism is almost totally neglected, the book is undoubtedly an important event. It may even signal the opening of new research into the early Schelling. It is immensely useful--and encouraging--for a number of scholars working on the Ages of the World and on the positive philosophy: it helps them to see the continuity in the six decades of Schelling's philosophizing.--M. J. V. (shrink)

Once more these annals offer the reader a substantial collection of varied articles and studies, mostly pertaining to issues of medieval philosophy and metaphysics. The contributors are from Austria, West Germany, and South Korea. Especially interesting are: the study on Kant's early writing, "The Only Possible Proof of God," by J. Bauer; a very strict analysis of the thirteenth chapter of Cusanus' book, De Visione Dei, by the Proclus specialist W. Beierwaltes; and an attempt at the "reconciliation" of metaphysics and (...) positivism by R. Wohlgenannt. There are a number of shorter book reviews and a lengthy instructive review article on R. Berlinger's recent book on Augustine's dialectical metaphysics. This review article is at least as interesting and inspiring as the major articles making up the bulk of the book.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This is a monumental work. The author's aim is to follow the destiny of the self-explicitation [[sic]] of western thought from the concept of substance to that of structure. Authentic philosophical thinking has always been ontological, and structure, no less than substance is a form or species of being. System too is a species of being which leads from substance to structure. Structure is only an articulation and intensification of substance. The concept of structure is the central notion of contemporary (...) thought; it is at the focus of the natural as well as of the social sciences and it alone can bridge the gap between the "two cultures." It alone can pave the way for a new philosophical humanism which, without abandoning the claim to universality and "objectivity," retains the thinking man as its focus. The author's contention is that the concept of structure is far from being a newcomer on the scene but it has been rather ripening slowly throughout the great systems of the last six centuries. Without being in any way a treatise on the history of philosophy and on the history of science, the present book describes with great competence and persuasiveness the evolution of "structure" from Nicholas of Autrecourt via Cusanus and early modern science to Descartes. Next comes an extraordinarily rich and insightful analysis of the world of Pascal. Finally the conclusion is reached through a discussion of Leibniz and Kant. This is a difficult book, a long and complex one. It might well belong to those writings which reshape our understanding of the past, and through it, contribute to our expectations of the future.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This recent monograph on the famous head of the Protestant theological school of Tübingen is a mature and well-documented writing, despite a certain circularity and many repetitions in its argument. What Geiger tries to expound above all is Baur's speculative basis—or bias. Baur began with Schleiermacher, but the major and striking influence on Baur's thinking was exerted by Hegel. His books on the history of dogma are a theological counterpart of Hegel's phenomenology. But in his last writings, the speculative schemas (...) are quietly effaced, and we read suddenly that the essence of Christianity is the "pure moral conscience and the autonomy of the subject."—M. J. V. (shrink)

Wölfel's study is a very technical enterprise, profusely endowed with footnotes and making little attempt if any at reaching the nonspecialist. Yet the subject matter of the work must be of concern to anyone interested in philosophical theology and the history of Christian speculation. Two seemingly very distant topics, those of the Trinity and of natural theology are brought together by the author and the point of departure for this rapprochement is the univocal concept of being, one cornerstone of Scotism. (...) This is why a book almost entirely devoted to an investigation dwelling on the inner structure of the being of God can have relevance to general ontology.--M. J. V. (shrink)

More than six centuries of Christian and non-Christian reflection and admiration of Meister Eckhart are the subject matter of this very scholarly yet very readable work. Philosophers like Nicolas Cusanus and Hegel, great scholars like H. Denifle and a number of lesser men are examined in order to determine what they thought about Eckhart, what they learned from him, how much they knew of him. The medieval condemnations and Cusanus' admiration issued into a period of relative neglect of Eckhart, broken (...) only by the deserving attempts of Daniel Sudermann to collect Eckhart's manuscripts. The great Dominican did not come into his own until the beginning of the last century. Franz von Baader was the one who "discovered" him and who drew Hegel's attention to some of his texts. With the monographs by C. Schmidt and Bishop Martensen, Eckhart had become known to the philosophical public as a forerunner of nineteenth-century speculation and this image had not been shattered until Denifle shifted the focus of attention to the Latin texts with their more orthodox formulations. In this century there has been a renewal of interest in the German writings which continue to have a certain popular appeal, but now, thanks to the monumental edition of the complete works, a more objective and more scholarly atmosphere pervades the literature on Meister Eckhart.--M. J. V. (shrink)

Chuang Chou is counted among the greatest of the classical, Chinese philosophers. His thought, strongly inspired by the father of Taoism, Lao Tzu, is a reaction against the ritualized and ossified Confucianism of his own time. He shows little interest in legal matters and moral casuistry, and his whole work, i.e., the collection of texts attributed to him since ancient times, is centered around the deepest metaphysical and religious problems. God, and the way to Him, are the real subject matter (...) of his writings. But Chuang Chou attempted to write no treatise on systematic theology: he preferred to clothe his ideas in short stories, tales, and magnificent aphorisms. Practically no knowledge of the history of Chinese civilization is needed to understand and to love this book, which manages to preserve, after twenty-three centuries, its marvellous freshness.—M. J. V. (shrink)

This book is an interesting entry in the vast and ever expanding field of secondary literature on Hegelian ontologically grounded analysis of the relationship between theory and praxis. It is interesting and slightly unusual for it neither treats Hegel simply as the predecessor of Marx nor does it ignore the more contemporary problems of political philosophy arising from the Hegelian heritage. There is a balance between erudition and speculation and the thorough study of the texts always remains firmly subjected to (...) the broader problems of a philosophy of praxis. This book offers a general interpretation of Hegel and a judgment on the very locus of Hegelianism in the history of modern philosophy. Finally, one should not forget to commend the excurses: there are a number of them, they are short and concentrated, and some of them quote from unpublished student notes taken at Hegel's lectures.--M. J. V. (shrink)

Histories of philosophy generally jump from Kant directly to Fichte without mentioning Salomon Maimon; yet even Fichte wrote about his "unbounded admiration" toward the Jewish thinker. The present volume is a most welcome reprint of Maimon's principal work, out of print for over a century and a half, in which he tries to refute the very idea of a Ding-an-sich. It can be claimed that this same enterprise had been carried out more spectacularly and with greater originality and depth by (...) Fichte; but it remains Maimon's great merit to have exorcised the spectre of the noumena operating from within the very framework of the Critique.—M. J. V. (shrink)

One of the forgotten "small masters" of German Romanticism is the aesthetician Solger. Besides his famous Erwin, his only major writing is the Lectures on Aesthetics. It displays a coherent and original theory of the beautiful and of art, even though a continuous polemical relationship to Schelling, Fichte and Hegel is ever present in its pages. Solger's sensitive theorizing reconciles the norms of classicism with the aims of romanticism and at the same time points beyond them towards the fundamental principles (...) and attitudes of the coming realistic aesthetic. This book is a posthumous one, based upon lectures which Solger never intended to publish. As a matter of fact, he strongly opposed the practice of printing university courses as such. Yet, these texts are perhaps most representative of the subtle and harmonious thought of this man who died at the height of his creative life. Their reprinting is an important literary event.—M. J. V. (shrink)

The present reprint of Reinhold's principal work is a great service to anybody undertaking a genetic study of the evolution of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre from Kant's Critique. Reinhold was by no means an original and creative mind. His major importance lies in his systematic formulation of some central problems in the Kantian philosophy in an attempt to overcome the latter's major weakness: the rigid separation of the knowing faculties from each other. But the unified "faculty of representation" proposed by Reinhold shifted (...) the focus of epistemological considerations into an overtly psychological direction which only Fichte was to correct. All the same, among the epigons [[sic]] and half-Kantians of the outgoing eighteenth century, Reinhold alone can still be read with interest and genuine appreciation.—M. J. V. (shrink)

In the mushrooming literature on the late Heidegger, Pugliese's book stands with the distinction of an immense and sometimes almost exasperating amount of learned notes and excurses [[sic]]. On the other hand, the speculative core of the work is a highly original one. It treats the famous "Kehre" in the continuity of Heidegger's thought and proves quite convincingly that it can be organically developed from the original thesis of "historicity" as it stands in Sein und Zeit. Making use of the (...) earliest texts as well as of a number of unpublished lecture-notes, Pugliese tries to back those interpretations which claim that the "Kehre" is indeed a turning-point in the history of metaphysics--even though it represents no break or revolution in Heidegger's own thought. This is a difficult book but fortunately devoid of the affected mannerism of so many Heidegger admirers, and a telling example of the frequent success of French and Spanish "translations" of German speculation.--M. J. V. (shrink)

These intentionally loose reflections on the different aspects of motherhood certainly give food for sustained thought; but they fall short of being the promised metaphysics. It is strange that no one has ever tried to write a philosophical monograph on motherhood before, even though the subject is "in the air." Schapp, by making use of historical, sociological, and psychological observations limited to Western cultures, gives an unpretentious yet insightful sketch for a more definitive work which remains to be written. The (...) most interesting part of the book is the author's attempt to show that fatherhood is historically posterior to and metaphysically dependent upon motherhood. However, this alleged metaphysical dependence is not demonstrated conceptually and the reader is tempted to conclude that even the contemporary evolution of the role of the woman in marriage and the family might not fully fit into what the author supposes to be the temporally unfolding yet eternal essence of motherhood.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Benz is a most prolific writer on the history of speculative theology and theosophy and he is especially well-known for his studies on Oetinger and Swedenborg, but at the beginning of his long career he devoted several books to earlier doctrinal developments. There have been many other serious attempts at a comprehensive exposition of the evolution of the different branches of Franciscan theology but the present one is especially interesting because of its strong speculative foundations. Although speculative, these foundations do (...) not prevent a continual elaboration of the political context of the genesis of ideas. From the "predecessor" Joachin da Fiore through Saint Francis himself, to the little known figures of Angelo Clareno, and Olivi and Arnoldo da Villanova, we see the unfolding of the eschatologically orientated theories of the "spiritual church," the challenge which they represented to the "official" theology of the late middle ages, and the ways they were neutralized by the Church of Rome. The book is dealing with more than obscure heresies of remote ages: it expounds issues and ideas which foreshadow and anticipate German Idealism's philosophy of history.--M. J. V. (shrink)

The great value of this book does not lie in any new discovery but in its being the most comprehensive monograph to date on the major ideas of Jacobi's thinking as well as on the relationship of the "philosopher of faith" to the leading German thinkers of his time. The first chapters are devoted to a subtle analysis—focussing mainly on his novels—of the moral aspirations underlying his philosophical oeuvre. The next major theme is the well-known polemics with M. Mendelssohn on (...) Lessing's alleged Spinozism—and this is a good pretext for Prof. Verra to display his vast learning by passing in review the views of Herder, Gœthe, and Hegel on Spinoza and continuously referring to the highly important book of Heydenreich. The last three chapters deal with Jacobi's "mature" thought centered around the problem of an intuitive knowledge of reality and his violent polemics against philosophical demonstration as such, which leads necessarily—according to him—to Spinozistic pantheism, i.e., atheism. It is in these chapters that Jacobi's criticism of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling is treated. The footnotes are at the end of the chapters, and they should be read separately. They are sheer delight for anyone a little at home in this period of German intellectual history. There is also a forty page appendix: the bibliography of Jacobi's letters of which not less than 1291 are known to Prof. Verra.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Goethe said that he had a high opinion of Franz von Baader, but unfortunately he could not understand what the Bavarian thinker wrote. Despite the efforts of Franz Hoffmann in the last century and of Eugene Susini in our days, Baader remained a closed book, even though his complete works have been recently reprinted. The extraordinary interest of Baader's oeuvre lies in his complex historical position: though he belongs to the world of speculative idealism, this Catholic thinker fundamentally rejects its (...) monistic inspiration. The present author treats Baader's conception of transcendence as rooted in an existential metaphysics of the will, through a very contemporary philosophical language which does not always successfully blend with Baader's own complicated parlance.—M. J. V. (shrink)

This is the second volume of the author's ambitious attempt at outlining the history of the dogma of original sin from its beginning to our days. The reader of the first volume witnessed a concerted attack against the dogma and especially against its Augustinian formulation. The second volume deals with perhaps the most obscure period of this dogma's development: the one between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. In the West—thanks to Augustine's undisputed authority—the dogma became accepted as an integral (...) part of Christian theology, even though those theologians of the Dark Ages tried to "humanize" its original, savage formulation. The Christian East, however, would never have accepted it, and took a rather ambiguous position towards the meaning of the "curse of Adam." This is, briefly, the author's thesis, and to prove it he marshals an impressive array of quotes and references, fruits of a wide and often really impressive scholarship. Yet, the whole book is written in the same spirit of crusading, shallow rationalism as was the preceding volume. The speculative issues are not really treated and the whole work lacks that synthetical approach which is so indispensable for an enterprise of such magnitude.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Author of a short study on Franz von Baader Klaus, Hemmerle presents us now with a longer study on the last philosophy of Schelling. The book sets out to be an exercise in Mitdenken. Instead of accumulating footnotes and going through the usual painstaking ways of a scholarly exegesis of texts, Hemmerle tries to think with Schelling, along the lines of Schelling's thought; and he does this a rather original way. Motivated by a genuine enthusiasm for Schelling, Hemmerle paraphrases and (...) comments on the difficult notions of the so-often enigmatic Spätphilosophie in a freely flowing, dynamic and truly suggestive language. He manages to keep the abstractions fascinating and the difficult arguments attractive. Yet in his admiration for his chosen author he becomes somewhat less than critical, expounding the most questionable constructs of the old Schelling as self-evident products of human thinking; and he does all this without any attempt at situating the teacher of the negative and positive philosophies in the general framework of the history of philosophy--or even in that of his own previous systems. The central theme of the book is God, the God to whom philosophy cannot reach out by itself but who descends to the philosophical thinking. How this God still remains a God for philosophy is the central problem of the late Schelling. Visibly inspired by the provocative studies of W. Schulz yet displaying a real originality, this book seems to us a rather unusual contribution to the growing literature on the late Schelling.--M. J. V. (shrink)

Though Joseph Nadler published the definitive, critical edition of Hamanns' complete works, the hermetic character of these texts warrants only too strongly a publication of at least the major texts with commentaries. The annotated edition is planned to comprise eight volumes. From the viewpoint of the history of ideas, Vol. IV is undoubtedly the most interesting, since it contains the important texts on the origin of language. These were directly provoked by Herder's famous Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache; "the (...) Magician of the North" fights the spirit of the Aufklärung even when it is clothed in the more attractive, pre-romantic setting of Herder's prose. Besides a fantastic amount of notes and commentary, Miss Büchsel, the editor of Vol. IV, offers a comprehensive and penetrating introductory study. Especially important are the chapters on the "pre-history" of Hamanns' Herder-interpretation and its influence on the later development of German intellectual life from the early Goethe to the old Schelling Vol. V contains the so-called mystery-writings directly pertinent to the Christian doctrine of the revelation of the Incarnated Son of God. These texts are truly esoteric, and even the multitude of notes accompanying them cannot always fully overcome their terrible obscurity. And here arises the only objection against this edition. The notes and commentaries are a mine of detailed information, and they "unconceal" the meaning of every word. Yet perhaps their very abundance impedes their stated purpose. They do help in understanding the words, but they make sustained reading of the texts themselves impossible. The encyclopedical character of the notes is cause for both exasperation and for growth in knowledge and inspiration.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Hegel's philosophy of history used to be interpreted mainly in terms of what it is supposed to say about the direction and the end of history, yet the central historical category is, after all, the present, "the spiritual midday." True historicity is in the concrete moment--and this is the thesis that so many commentators of the Phenomenology of the Spirit neglect to emphasize. Hence, after a dutiful examination of the concept of history in this first major work of the philosopher, (...) the author engages in a detailed and interesting history of the interpretations of the Phenomenology. From Feuerbach to Rohrmoser, via Marx, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger we see the radiation of this great work; then comes a discussion with Kojève. In this Auseinandersetzung one definitely senses a sort of aversion toward the brilliant French interpreter but even here the historian's objectivity and expository purpose prevail.--M. J. V. (shrink)

The present book is a reprint of a classical study of Hegel, the first important work marking the renewal of interest in Hegel initiated by Dilthey's Hegels Jugendgeschichte. Rosenzweig's monograph is a still unsurpassed treatment of Hegel's political and social philosophy: a monument of scholarship, of broad vision and patient analysis. Proceeding in chronological order, the first volume concludes with the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Especially interesting are the two long chapters dealing with the less-known yet quite voluminous literary production (...) of the Jena-period. The second volume treats Hegel's "reconciliation" with his time and his unceasing effort to "cover" or better, to "ground" the legal system, the family, society, state, and constitution. The author manages to do justice to the historico-political conditioning of Hegel's metaphysics of the state without allowing himself to fall into the simplistic "sociology of knowledge" practiced with so much zeal by more modern, especially Marxist, authors. The book is written in the characteristically beautiful German prose of Rosenzweig, untouched by the sorry obscurities of so many "learned" interpretations of Hegel's system.--M. J. V. (shrink)

Hamann is one of the greatest religious writers of the eighteenth century in Germany. He is the person whom Schelling, Hegel, and Kierkegaard admired, read, and quoted. This book treats the major themes and insights of Hamann. Texts of Hamann are represented by a large number of quotations. Hamann never wrote a systematic treatise; he wrote short, devastating, illuminating essays and criticisms, as well as letters. Especially interesting are the chapters dealing with Hamann's criticism of contemporary philosophy, and his views (...) concerning the relation of philosophy and faith. This is a fine study which helps the reader to gain some orientation and perspective on Hamann's subtle and obscure writings.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This is a complicated and ingenious study of one of the famous friendships of German intellectual history. Miss Knoll's aim is not so much to analyze philosophical ideas as to find the major structural elements of this highly emotional literary friendship between Hamann and Jacobi. The book begins with a short review of Hegel's and Dilthey's treatment of the "subject," Hamann-Jacobi. The author objects to these treatments which, like practically all other students of the question viewed the letters from an (...) exclusively philosophical and speculative viewpoint, and never tackled the deeply personal structure of this metaphysical-religious correspondence. This is exactly what the present author attempts to do. The analysis of Hamann's highly complex reactions to Jacobi's famous book on Lessing's Spinozism reveals to us how strongly and on how many levels the "magician of the North" criticized Jacobi—and through him any attempt to combat the Enlightenment which does not reject it in integro. On the other hand Hamann continuously sent his manuscripts to Jacobi to be read and criticized, and, in this way, he sought to help the latter to grow by making him contribute to works of a dimension and depth completely alien to his own thought But the destiny of Hamann was to be misunderstood by Jacobi, and this misunderstanding was recognized and corrected only by Schelling. Though H. Fuhrmans has already forcefully pointed out what Schelling owed to Hamann, the present book is the first to do justice to Schelling's Hamann-interpretation, until now entirely overshadowed by that of Hegel.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Friedrich Schlegel is known above all as a man of letters and political interests, while his philosophical opus has received as yet a very limited interest and attention. Perhaps this new critical edition will enable him to carve a small niche for himself in forthcoming histories of philosophy. He was certainly not the most significant thinker; but his imagination, many-sidedness, sharpness, and his unmistakable speculative gift qualify him to be in the second rank of Romantic philosophers immediately after Schelling and (...) Baader. The young Friedrich Schlegel was thoroughly under the spell of Fichte, but his later development—notwithstanding personal antipathy—carried him close to Schelling. The ethical pathos of Fichte's doctrine could not make Schlegel overlook the injustice done to nature, art, and religion. Though his celebrated conversion to Catholicism in the Dom of Cologne did not take place until 1838, Schlegel read Jacob Boehme and was a close friend of Schleiermacher, and thus was absorbed by religious problems years before. Already in his Cologne lectures he goes beyond the vague idealistic concept of the "divinity" in favor of a personal and transcendent God. These two volumes of the critical edition contain the following texts: Transzendentalphilosophie, lectures in Jena from 1800-1801. The text is the one published by J. Körner in 1935. The Development of Philosophy in Twelve Books and Propedeutic and Logic. The texts in Propedeutic and Logic are of a general introductory character. But in The Development of Philosophy a tremendous effort is made to give, if not an entirely systematic, at least a quasi-all-embracing, encyclopedic sketch of philosophy and its history. Here again we read nothing substantially new. The editor follows the text published by Windischmann in 1836 but does complete it with variants from other manuscripts. Métaphysique. These lectures were delivered in French to Madame de Staël. In addition to an already known text published by J. Körner the editor makes use of a manuscript in the hand of Schlegel which was found only after the last war. The preface of J.-J. Anstett is ascetically short and even the commentary consists only of sober and learned notes at the end of the second volume.—M. J. V. (shrink)