This book familiarizes the English-speaking reader with the debate on the originality of Gramsci’s thought and its importance for the development of Marxist theory. The contributors present the principal viewpoints regarding Gramsci’s theoretical contribution to Marxism, focussing in particular on his advances in the study of the superstructures, and discussing his relation to Marx and Lenin and his influence in Eurocommunism. Different interpretations are put forward concerning the elucidation of Gramsci’s key concepts, namely: hegemony, integral state, war of position and (...) passive revolution. (shrink)

This essay attempts to confront one of the major problems associated with multiculturalism, namely the hostile divisiveness stemming from newly articulated constructs of difference. Synthesizing hermeneutic concepts derived from Gadamer and Rorty, I develop an approach called xenologica which, unlike the problematic universalism associated with the Enlightenment, values difference but, at the same time, promotes mutual recognition, tolerance and solidarity. Xenologica, for illustrative purposes, is applied to one of the most contentious domains of difference, race, with the aim of overcoming (...) some of the theoretical and practical limitations of classic antiracism. (shrink)

ExcerptIt may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with Israeli society, and especially to those who have been led to believe it composed primarily of European Jews who settled in the Middle East, that roughly half of Israel's Jewish population is made up of Jews who for millennia were deeply rooted in the region, and who were summarily expelled from Arab states after Israel was founded in 1948. In fact, this Arab Jewish population exceeds in number those Palestinians who (...) were displaced, and it possessed substantially greater property that was confiscated without compensation upon expulsion.1The purpose of this…. (shrink)

ExcerptWhen we examine European anti-Semitism during the 1930s, and especially the Shoah, the case of Germany looms so large that the Nazi regime immediately appears as the paradigmatic form of fascism and the manifold policies directed against European Jewry during the 1930s little more than German racial policy writ large. Without in any way trivializing or, worse, relativizing in an ethical sense the German case, one might nevertheless suggest that it occupies too much conceptual space and occludes a more precise (...) comparative understanding of other European cases where anti-Semitic policies had been autonomously generated, relatively independent of direct Nazi pressure. (shrink)

ExcerptMy focus shall be on challenges to civility in Europe raised by the presence of sizable immigrant communities, which, unlike those of earlier times, are significantly different from host populations in terms of national origin, race, religion, ethnicity, and culture. Coming principally from former colonial territories, their otherness additionally bears the deep historical imprint of inferiority and subordination, merited or not, to the degree that to Europeans they sometimes appear to be, at worst, uncivilized, or, at best, to live in (...) another non-European or semi-European world. Though they inhabit the same geographical space as the host population, and have become…. (shrink)

Davidson's account of weakness of will dependsupon a parallel that he draws between practicaland theoretical reasoning. I argue that theparallel generates a misleading picture oftheoretical reasoning. Once the misleadingpicture is corrected, I conclude that theattempt to model akratic belief on Davidson'saccount of akratic action cannot work. Thearguments that deny the possibility of akraticbelief also undermine, more generally, variousattempts to assimilate theoretical to practicalreasoning.

This book provides the reader with a detailed and captivating account of the story where, for the first time, physicists ventured into proposing a new force of nature beyond the four known ones - the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, and gravitation - based entirely on the reanalysis of existing experimental data. Back in 1986, Ephraim Fischbach, Sam Aronson, Carrick Talmadge and their collaborators proposed a modification of Newton's Law of universal gravitation. Underlying this proposal were three tantalizing pieces of (...) evidence: 1) an energy dependence of the CP (particle-antiparticle and reflection symmetry) parameters, 2) differences between the measurements of G, the universal gravitational constant, in laboratories and in mineshafts, and 3) a reanalysis of the Eötvos experiment, which had previously been used to show that the gravitational mass of an object and its inertia mass were equal to approximately one part in a billion. The reanalysis revealed that, contrary to Galileo's position, the force of gravity was in fact very slightly different for different substances. The resulting Fifth Force hypothesis included this composition dependence and also added a small distance dependence to the inverse-square gravitational force. Over the next four years numerous experiments were performed to test the hypothesis. By 1990 there was overwhelming evidence that the Fifth Force, as initially proposed, did not exist. This book discusses how the Fifth Force hypothesis came to be proposed and how it went on to become a showcase of discovery, pursuit and justification in modern physics, prior to its demise. In this new and significantly expanded edition, the material from the first edition is complemented by two essays, one containing Fischbach's personal reminiscences of the proposal, and a second on the ongoing history and impact of the Fifth Force hypothesis from 1990 to the present. <. (shrink)

Considered by many to be one of the major influences on modern Humanistic Judaism, Felix Adler (1851-1933) was a professor of political and social ethics and a social reformer who founded the Ethical Culture movement. First published in 1903 "Life and Destiny" contains quotations from Adler's lectures for the New York Society for Ethical Culture in its early years. It covers such things as the meaning of life, religion, immortality, moral ideas, the ethical outlook, and related topics.

Philosophers and others have often debated whether we have freewill: i.e. whether (in a sense I shall try to elucidate) our power to choose between X and Y is radically undetermined, so that if we choose X we yet might have chosen Y, and vice versa. My concern is not with that question but with a hypothetical one which arises from it: if we had such freewill, what implications, if any, would, that fact have for the sciences. My argument concentrates (...) on the social sciences, since the phenomena with which they deal inevitably involves human choice. (shrink)

According to an oft-repeated narrative, while Kant maintained racist views through the 1780s, he changed his mind in the 1790s. Pauline Kleingeld introduced this narrative based on passages from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and “Toward Perpetual Peace”. On her reading, Kant categorically condemned chattel slavery in those texts, which meant that he became more racially egalitarian. But the passages involving slavery, once contextualized, either do not concern modern, race-based chattel slavery or at best suggest that Kant mentioned it as a (...) cautionary tale for labor practices in Europe. Overall, Kant never explicitly considered chattel slavery as a moral problem to be addressed on its own. Rather, he treated it primarily in terms of its function in human history. If he ended up expressing some qualms about its practices, it was likely because they threatened to deepen intra-European conflicts and undermine the prospect of perpetual peace. The humanity of the enslaved “Negroes” was never part of the reasoning. This was not a casual oversight on Kant’s part. It reflects the complexity of his philosophical system: everything he did or did not say about chattel slavery begins to make sense once we connect his philosophy of history and his depiction of “Negroes” as natural slaves. (shrink)

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how (...) Kant, from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship. (shrink)

A ternary relation [Formula: see text] between subsets of the big model of a complete first-order theory T is called an independence relation if it satisfies a certain set of axioms. The primary example is forking in a simple theory, but o-minimal theories are also known to have an interesting independence relation. Our approach in this paper is to treat independence relations as mathematical objects worth studying. The main application is a better understanding of thorn-forking, which turns out to be (...) closely related to modular pairs in the lattice of algebraically closed sets. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Franklin I. Gamwell offers a defense of transcendental metaphysics, especially in its neoclassical form, and builds a case for its importance as a tool for addressing abiding problems in morality and philosophical theology-including talk about God, human fault, moral decision, and the relationship of politics and religious freedom. In Part I, Gamwell argues against Kant and a wide range of contemporary philosophers, for the validity of transcendental metaphysics designated in the strict sense, i.e., as (...) an explication of the possible as such or existence as such, as the most general features or conditions all possible things have in common. He engages with Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Augustine, and Niebuhr to argue that neoclassical metaphysics, for which the divine whole is itself temporal or forever self-surpassing, provides a more coherent account of God than does classical metaphysics, for which the divine whole is completely eternal. In Part II, Gamwell looks at transcendental metaphysics designated in the broad sense, i.e., as an explication of possible subjectivity as such, as the most general features or conditions all possible subjects have in common. In particular, he takes up the moral opportunity that humans are presented with, and argues that the moral law depends on a comprehensive good, that is, a good defined metaphysically in the strict sense. He then offers an extended discussion of the relation between transcendental metaphysics (in the broad sense) and the meaning of religious freedom and explores Ronald Dworkin's view of the relationship between democracy and religion, the question of whether religious activities are properly exempted from generally applicable laws, and the constitutional debate about national and states' rights. (shrink)

Quantity is the first category that Aristotle lists after substance. It has extraordinary epistemological clarity: "2+2=4" is the model of a self-evident and universally known truth. Continuous quantities such as the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle are as clearly known as discrete ones. The theory that mathematics was "the science of quantity" was once the leading philosophy of mathematics. The article looks at puzzles in the classification and epistemology of quantity.

Preliminary Material /Hans Adler and Rainer Godel -- Formen des Nichtwissens im Zeitalter des Fragens /Hans Adler and Rainer Godel -- Das gewisse Etwas der Aufklärung /Hans Adler -- Zur Prekarität der Aufklärung. Vernunftkritik und das Paradigma der Anthropologie (Taine, Horkheimer / Adorno, Foucault, Lyotard) /Heinz Thoma -- Von den berechenbaren Grenzen des Nichtwissens zur Zeit der Aufklärung /Eberhard Knobloch -- L'effi cace de la raison /Bertrand Binoche -- Aufgeklärtes Nicht-Wissen /Rainer Enskat -- 'Fabelhaft' und 'wunderbar' in (...) Aufklärungsdiskursen. Zur Genese des modernen Mythosbegriffs /Stefan Matuschek -- Un-Möglichkeit der Ausnahme: Die Wunderkritik der Aufklärung /Daniel Weidner -- La sagacité de l'esprit. La conjecture au XVIIIe siècle /Denis Thouard -- Séjourner dans la contradiction. L'idée de «nouvelles Lumières» et les contradictions de l'universalism /Etienne Balibar -- Doing Without Knowing in Kant and Diderot: Experiments in Enlightenment /Claudia Brodsky -- Ways of Being Ignorant: A Field Guide /Arnd Bohm -- Wissenwollen trotz Nichtwissenkönnens. Von den Erkenntnisgrenzen der psychologischen und pädagogischen Wissenschaften des späten 18. Jahrhunderts /Gunhild Berg -- "Ein Abgrund innerer dunkeln Kräfte". Nichtwissen in den Bildungsdiskursen der Aufklärung /Stefan Metzger -- "There is nothing so intrinsically rational as religion is." Zum Versuch einer vernünftigen Entschlüsselung des Nicht-mehr-Wissbaren in der Frühaufklärung /Insa Kringler -- Ein falsches Bild. Oder: Was passiert, wenn Katharsis Form wird? Zu Lessings Emilia Galotti /Ralf Simon -- Die Schattenseiten der Seele: Zu Johann Georg Sulzers Theorie der dunklen Vorstellungen /Élisabeth Décultot -- Arten der Unwissenheit im anthropologischen Diskurs der Aufklärung /Angela Holzer -- Die Zone der Unbestimmtheit - Melancholiediskurs zwischen Wissen und Nichtwissen /Cornelia Bogen -- Die Produktion des Nicht-Wissens vom Selbst: Autobiographie bei Goethe und Hegel /Fritz Breithaupt -- "Charakter" - Die Konkurrenz einer metaphorischen und einer begriffl ichen Erkenntnisform des Nicht-/Wissens vom Menschen /Monika Sproll -- Unzuverlässige Leser - unzuverlässige Erzähler; oder: Literarische Wege aus dem Nicht-Wissen /Rainer Godel -- Labyrinthe der Aufklärung. Goethes Roman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre /Harald Tausch -- Nichtwissen in Johann Gottfried Herders Geschichtsphilosophie /Luca Crescenzi -- Ins Narrenschiff mit Sokrates! Formen des Abderitismus bei Christoph Martin Wieland /Geneviève Espagne -- Zur Interdependenz von Wissen und Nichtwissen. Anthropologie als Aufklärungskritik bei Christoph Martin Wieland /Antonio Roselli -- Nichtwissen und Glaube. Zur Erkenntnistheorie und Ethik Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis /Mark-Georg Dehrmann -- Darstellung und Gegendarstellung von Aufklärung. Handlung, Erzählung und Schein in Schillers Geisterseher /Dirk Oschmann -- Wissen und Nicht-Wissen von anderen Menschen. Das Problem der Gemütererkenntnis von Gracián bis Schiller /Daniel Fulda -- Historische Vaterschaftsprozesse: Nichtwissen, verborgenes und verkehrtes Wissen bei Goethe, Hogarth und Kleist /Alexander Košenina -- Translating Knowledge and Prescribing Taste: English Enlightenment Critics /Sabine Volk-Birke -- Autorenverzeichnis /Hans Adler and Rainer Godel -- Namenregister /Hans Adler and Rainer Godel. (shrink)

Kant develops a concept of savagery, partly characterized by laziness, to envision a program for human progress. He also racializes savagery, treating native Americans, in particular, as literal savages. He ascribes to this “race” a peculiar physiological laziness, a supposedly hereditary trait of blunted life power. Accordingly, while he grants them the same “germs” for perfections as he does the civilized Europeans, he allows them no prospect of actually fulfilling any such perfection. For the road to perfection must be paved (...) through industry, a condition that Kant denies to the “savages” by racializing their alleged laziness. This case will shed new light on the debated relation between Kant’s moral universalism and his racism. (shrink)

A phenomenological account of the forms of life characteristic of late capitalism--including television, celebrity culture, and personal electronics--culminating in an ontology of the gadget-commodity that brings together Marxist theories of commodity fetishism and ideology with Heidegger's attempt to think truth as unconcealment.

Immanuel Kant zum Gedächtnis!--Kant und der Sozialismus.--Die Beziehungen des Marxismus zur klassischen deutschen Philosophie.--Kant und die Soziologie.--Kant und der ewige Friede.

A testimony is somebody else’s reported experience of what has happened. It is an indispensable source of knowledge. It only gives us historical cognition, however, which stands in a complex relation to rational or philosophical cognition: while the latter presupposes historical cognition as its matter, one needs the architectonic “eye of a philosopher” to select, interpret, and organize historical cognition. Kant develops this rationalist theory of testimony. He also practices it in his own work, especially while theorizing about race as (...) a subject of natural philosophy. In three dedicated essays on this subject, he treats race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature (Naturforscher), who (as Kant puts it in the first Critique) learns from nature “like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them.” This view underwrites Kant’s use of travel reports (a type of testimony) in developing and defending his theory of race. (shrink)

Control measures, such as “lockdowns”, have been widely used to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic. Under some conditions, they prevent illness and save lives. But they also exact an economic toll. How should we balance the impact of such policies on individual lives and livelihoods (and other dimensions of concern) to determine which is best? A widely used method of policy evaluation, benefit–cost analysis (BCA), answers these questions by converting all the effects of a policy into monetary equivalents and then summing (...) them up. A different method, social welfare analysis, proceeds by determining the effects of a policy on individual wellbeing and then applying an aggregation formula to them to evaluate the overall effects of a policy. In this chapter, we survey these methods and argue that social welfare analysis has important advantages. One crucial advantage is that it enables ethical considerations relating to the impact of policies on individual wellbeing and its distribution to be incorporated into policy assessments in a transparent way. We illustrate this with a simple numerical model for evaluating pandemic policies that vary in terms of the stringency of the controls that they impose on individual behaviour, showing how the evaluation depends on the ethical significance accorded to their impact on the wellbeing of different age and income groups. (shrink)

What makes a good experiment? Although experimental evidence plays an essential role in science, as Franklin argues, there is no algorithm or simple set of criteria for ranking or evaluating good experiments, and therefore no definitive answer to the question. Experiments can, in fact, be good in any number of ways: conceptually good, methodologically good, technically good, and pedagogically important. And perfection is not a requirement: even experiments with incorrect results can be good, though they must, he argues, be (...) methodologically good, providing good reasons for belief in their results. Franklin revisits the same important question he posed in his 1981 article in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, when it was generally believed that the only significant role of experiment in science was to test theories. But experiments can actually play a lot of different roles in science--they can, for example, investigate a subject for which a theory does not exist, help to articulate an existing theory, call for a new theory, or correct incorrect or misinterpreted results. This book provides details of good experiments, with examples from physics and biology, illustrating the various ways they can be good and the different roles they can play. (shrink)

It is common to think that, in making choices for others, we should consider their values. But do the current interests of people with dementia ever depend on what they used to value? Or do their interests depend solely on what matters to them from now on? Two approaches are especially prominent in the philosophical literature. Some believe that the capacity to value or significantly care about things bestows a certain standing on the person’s present perspective, making it inappropriate to (...) appeal to her former values until the person no longer has this capacity. Others hold that a person’s past attitudes can never affect what is good for him now. On the “Revision Model” I defend, we should ordinarily recognize a person’s current values as authoritative in defining a person’s interests, because these represent his most up-to-date revision of his earlier views. However, if a person has lost the ability to comprehend his former values, then we cannot treat his current perspective as a genuine revision, since he is not answerable for the fact that his values have changed. Having never truly revised those former values, we should recognize their enduring relevance in defining his interests, insofar as they remain relevant to his life. This, however, is consistent with recognizing that the person’s interests may also depend on some of his current values and concerns as well. (shrink)

Was sind 'äußere' und 'innere' Bilder? Wie entstehen sie? Was sind ihre Korrelate? Seit der Antike bewegen diese Fragen Philosophie, Rhetorik, Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaft, gegenwärtig auch die Medien- und Intermedialitätsforschung und Neurowissenschaften. Als Beitrag zu Bild- und Literaturwissenschaften sowie Visual Studies bietet der Band interdisziplinäre Untersuchungen der Bewegung vom Sehen über das An-schauen zu Anschaulichkeit und Anschauung. Die Beiträge zeigen Verflechtungen zwischen Epistemologie und Ästhetik auf, erhellen Fragen von Imagination und Stil, stellen neue Bezüge zwischen unterschiedlichen Künsten, Medien und Ausdrucks-formen (...) her und bieten neue Einsichten in die visuell-imaginativen Dimensionen von Wissen, Erkenntnis und Erfahrung. (shrink)

1. Bd. Allgemeine Grundlegung.--2. Bd. Die statischen und dynamischen Grundbegriffe. 1. T. Die statischen Grundbegriffe.

Guido Adlers Studie über den Stil in der Musik bietet einen tiefgehenden Einblick in die musikalischen Strömungen vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance. Für alle, die ein tiefes Verständnis der Entwicklung von Europas Musikgeschichte gewinnen möchten. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you (...) may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This book is both a history of philosophy of logic told from the Kantian viewpoint and a reconstruction of Kant’s theory of logic from a historical perspective. Kant’s theory represents a turning point in a history of philosophical debates over the following questions. (1) Is logic a science, instrument, standard of assessment, or mixture of these? (2) If logic is a science, what is the subject matter that differentiates it from other sciences, particularly metaphysics? (3) If logic is a necessary (...) instrument to all philosophical inquiries, how is it so entitled? (4) If logic is both a science and an instrument, how are these two roles related? Kant’s official answer to these questions centers on three distinctions: general versus particular logic; pure versus applied logic; pure general logic versus transcendental logic. The true meaning and significance of each distinction becomes clear, I argue, only if we consider two factors. First, Kant was mindful of various historical views on how logic relates to other branches of philosophy (viz. metaphysics and physics) and to the workings of common human understanding. Second, he first coined ‘transcendental logic’ while struggling to secure metaphysics as a proper “science,” and this conceptual innovation would in turn have profound implications for his mature theory of logic. Against this backdrop, I reassess the place of Kant’s theory in the history of philosophy of logic and highlight certain issues that are still debated today, such as normativity of logic and the challenges posed by logical pluralism. In Chapter 1, “Kant and a Philosophical History of Logic – Methodological Reflections,” I discuss certain exegetical challenges posed by Kant’s logic corpus and argue for a “history of philosophical problems” method by which to reconstruct a Kantian theory of logic. In Chapter 2, “The Nature and Place of Logic – A History of Controversies,” I construct a partial history of philosophy of logic that revolves around the (supposedly) scientific status of logic on the one hand and its value or utility on the other. In Chapter 3, “The Making of a Scientific Logic from Bacon to Wolff,” I examine how four representative early modern philosophers – Francis Bacon, John Locke, G.W. Leibniz, and Christian Wolff – approached the four questions mentioned above. In Chapter 4, “Kant on the Way to His Own Philosophy of Logic,” I consider how Kant, in the decade between around mid-1760s and mid-1770s, navigated between existing accounts of logic until he finally found his own voice. I highlight the breakthroughs that would mark his critical departures from previous views and pave the way for the final articulation of his own view. In Chapter 5, “Logic and the Demands of Kantian ‘Science’,” I zero in on Kant’s official theory of logic in his monumental publication, Critique of Pure Reason. I foreground both what makes the theory original and what leaves it vulnerable to criticisms from post-Kantian thinkers. (shrink)