Living in a province dominated by powerful oligarchs, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) concluded that political philosophy should work to undermine aristocratic authority and prevent political devolution into feudalism. Rejecting the possibility that the free market could successfully instill civil behavior, he advocated for a strong central judicial system to work closely with citizens to promote stability and justice. This study puts Vico in conversation with other Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Mandeville to show how his alternative warrants serious consideration. (...) In contrast to scholars who read Vico's New Science as a defense of the imagination, this study casts his account of poetic wisdom politically as an epistemological critique of the aristocratic mentality. Myth and Authority argues that Vico's depiction of pagan religion is a refined attempt to explain how oligarchy maintains its stranglehold on power. While Western civilization did not follow the path Vico suggested, it may now be more relevant as concerns grow about the increasing influence of the wealthy on civil institutions. (shrink)

This discussion is an analysis of Vico’s account of the imaginative universals in the 1744 edition of the New Science in regard to the origin of number. The origin of number is a difficult problem for Vico because numbers are discursive concepts, yet Vico wants to fi nd their origin in mythical thought. Vico finds the origin of numbers in the power struggle between the heroes and the plebeians. The imaginative universal Mercury is the heroic act of granting bonitary ownership (...) to the plebeians. However, Mercury is also the imaginative universal of marking heroic ownership. Number originates from the heroes emphasizing ownership by marking territory more than once. This explains several peculiar passages in the New Science, including Vico’s claims about the three frogs of France (NS par. 535). (shrink)

This discussion is an analysis of Vico’s account of the imaginative universals in the 1744 edition of the New Science in regard to the origin of number. The origin of number is a difficult problem for Vico because numbers are discursive concepts, yet Vico wants to fi nd their origin in mythical thought. Vico finds the origin of numbers in the power struggle between the heroes and the plebeians. The imaginative universal Mercury is the heroic act of granting bonitary ownership (...) to the plebeians. However, Mercury is also the imaginative universal of marking heroic ownership. Number originates from the heroes emphasizing ownership by marking territory more than once. This explains several peculiar passages in the New Science, including Vico’s claims about the three frogs of France (NS par. 535). (shrink)

This discussion is an analysis of Vico’s account of the imaginative universals in the 1744 edition of the New Science in regard to the origin of number. The origin of number is a difficult problem for Vico because numbers are discursive concepts, yet Vico wants to fi nd their origin in mythical thought. Vico finds the origin of numbers in the power struggle between the heroes and the plebeians. The imaginative universal Mercury is the heroic act of granting bonitary ownership (...) to the plebeians. However, Mercury is also the imaginative universal of marking heroic ownership. Number originates from the heroes emphasizing ownership by marking territory more than once. This explains several peculiar passages in the New Science, including Vico’s claims about the three frogs of France (NS par. 535). (shrink)

This discussion is an analysis of Vico’s account of the imaginative universals in the 1744 edition of the New Science in regard to the origin of number. The origin of number is a difficult problem for Vico because numbers are discursive concepts, yet Vico wants to fi nd their origin in mythical thought. Vico finds the origin of numbers in the power struggle between the heroes and the plebeians. The imaginative universal Mercury is the heroic act of granting bonitary ownership (...) to the plebeians. However, Mercury is also the imaginative universal of marking heroic ownership. Number originates from the heroes emphasizing ownership by marking territory more than once. This explains several peculiar passages in the New Science, including Vico’s claims about the three frogs of France (NS par. 535). (shrink)

This discussion is an analysis of Vico’s account of the imaginative universals in the 1744 edition of the New Science in regard to the origin of number. The origin of number is a difficult problem for Vico because numbers are discursive concepts, yet Vico wants to fi nd their origin in mythical thought. Vico finds the origin of numbers in the power struggle between the heroes and the plebeians. The imaginative universal Mercury is the heroic act of granting bonitary ownership (...) to the plebeians. However, Mercury is also the imaginative universal of marking heroic ownership. Number originates from the heroes emphasizing ownership by marking territory more than once. This explains several peculiar passages in the New Science, including Vico’s claims about the three frogs of France (NS par. 535). (shrink)

Recently, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have developed the capabilities approach to provide a model for understanding the effectiveness of programs to help the developing nations. The approach holds that human beings are fundamentally free and have a sense of human dignity. Therefore, institutions need to help people enhance this dignity by providing them with the opportunity to develop their capabilities freely. I argue that this approach may help support business ethics based on virtue. Since teleology has become problematic, virtue (...) ethics has had difficulty giving itself an ultimate justification. By combining virtue ethics with the capabilities approach, it becomes possible to ground virtue ethics on the basis of the existence of human dignity. This frees virtue ethics of the need for a strict teleology, replacing it with the notion that people must work to develop the capabilities of others although those capabilities are not pointed toward a definite goal. I further suggest that by grounding virtue ethics in capabilities, the actions of a virtuous manager become clearer. Rather than simply charging a manager with serving the public, the manager is charged with serving the stakeholders in a way that develops their capabilities. For example, a manager should not just give their employees what is just but must give them the environment and the encouragement to grow and to find fulfillment in their job. (shrink)

Gianvincenzo Gravina (1664–1718) and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) were two Neapolitan philosophers concerned with the way human society initially formed. They agreed that ancient myths were produced by a mentality that had a powerful ability for acute perception but could not reflect abstractly. They also agreed that wonder (la maraviglia) was an important force that enchanted the first peoples into founding society. They disagreed on how this happened. Gravina argued that early poets could see the truth and used persuasive poetry to (...) teach the people how to live. Vico argued that wonder impelled the first poets to create false divinities that frightened the first bestial people into founding civilization. While the two views differ, they show how Neapolitan Enlightenment thinkers developed radically different answers to questions that Northern Europeans were asking. (shrink)

Gianvincenzo Gravina (1664–1718) and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) were two Neapolitan philosophers concerned with the way human society initially formed. They agreed that ancient myths were produced by a mentality that had a powerful ability for acute perception but could not reflect abstractly. They also agreed that wonder (la maraviglia) was an important force that enchanted the first peoples into founding society. They disagreed on how this happened. Gravina argued that early poets could see the truth and used persuasive poetry to (...) teach the people how to live. Vico argued that wonder impelled the first poets to create false divinities that frightened the first bestial people into founding civilization. While the two views differ, they show how Neapolitan Enlightenment thinkers developed radically different answers to questions that Northern Europeans were asking. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy is a contemporary continental philosopher who argues that the hope of fully unifying a community through work is problematic. This is because people cannot be reduced to their function as workers. Thus, community is, at best, inoperative. This article takes Nancy’s ideas of community and applies them to the notion of teamwork in business. It shows how in some literature on business teamwork, there is a desire to build a team through shared work experiences. It then explains Nancy’s (...) view as to why this cannot work, and it enters into Nancy’s positive account of how a community should be seen as a web of people communicating and sharing with each other in a variety of ways. The practical conclusion the study draws is that team members need to be careful about allowing goal orientation to obfuscate the richness of the relationships that occur among team members. People need to explore all of the ways in which people share with each other rather than just those ways that advance a narrow set of goals. If the richness of those relationships is recognized, many new directions for business and for general human development may appear. (shrink)

Text und Übersetzung -- Arabisch-lateinisch-griechisches Wörterverzeichnis -- Griechisch-arabisches Wörterverzeichnis -- Versio Latina.

This article analyzes some prospects for the economic and political development of the United States and China. The first part of the article is devoted to the consideration of strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. model and of the Chinese one. The second part of the article considers the most probable scenarios of the future struggle for world leadership. The first scenario suggests that China will continue developing at a faster rate in the several coming decades and will be gradually (...) catching up with the United States in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) production. However, after several crises in 2008?2020 the United States will likely regain a number of advantages over China as a result of assimilation of the newest technologies. The second scenario suggests that the United States will come across a whole range of internal social and political problems related to internal political splits. In this case, the United States will have to share its global leadership with China. The article attempts to answer the following questions: What scenario is more probable? Will the old world order change? What are the main conclusions for the European Union and for Russia? (shrink)

Doch was das Spiel in der Ästhetik soll, so die These dieses Buches, klärt sich erst unter voller Berücksichtigung der praktizistischen Tendenz in Kants Ansatz.

Seit dem 2. nachchristlichen Jahrhundert werden die Schriften von Aristoteles kommentiert. Diese Ausgabe enthält griechische Kommentare zu seinem Werk vom 3. bis 8. Jahrhundert n. Chr., u. a. von Alexander von Aphrodiensias, Themistios, Joh. Philoponus, Simplicius in griechischer Sprache.

In recent times, representatives of American management science have been arguing increasingly for a functionalization of ethics to change economic thinking: what they are seeking is the systematic integration of ethics into the economic paradigm. Using the insights developed by Hirschman, I would like to show how one must first expose the rhetoric of those critics of change in order then to implement that which is new. Such an 'unmasking' works particularly well when one can defuse the arguments of the (...) reactionaries — which is precisely what one achieves by strategically integrating ethics into economics. In his work The Rhetoric of Reaction Hirschman examines three basic forms of reactionary thought: the perversity thesis, the futility thesis, and the jeopardy thesis. According to the perversity thesis, intended goals are transformed into their opposites. The futility thesis argues that the setting of goals is useless since history runs its own course independent of those goals. The jeopardy thesis claims to preserve what already exists since change might substantially endanger that which has already been achieved. The importance of Hirschman's ideas for the strategic interplay between the academic disciplines can be seen quite clearly in the example of German business ethics. This will be displayed below with reference to Hirschman's three theses. Finally, implications will be drawn for business ethics in general and for management theory in particular. (shrink)

Explaining how stereotypes and norms influence role-identities during reflected appraisal processes, we develop a theory about diverse groups of minority men—the “minority masculinity stress theory”—and apply it to Asian American men. We conceptually integrate hegemonic masculinity, stereotypes, and mental health to examine how Asian American men experience masculinity and how their experiences are uniquely stressful. We analyze elicited text from an open-ended questionnaire to explain two experiences of masculinity-related stress: trying to live up to the masculine ideal and enacting work-related (...) role-identities. Regarding the former, we discuss four illustrations—toughness, body image, restrictive emotionality, and heterosexuality—and two involving the latter—achiever and provider. We found that Asian American men receive stereotypical reflected appraisals that contradict potentially positive self-concepts and emphasize achievement beyond typical standards of hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, Asian American men’s role-identities contradict hegemonic masculinity, resulting in reflected appraisals that predispose them toward stress. (shrink)

How do words mean? What is the nature of meaning? How can we grasp a word's meaning? The frame-semantic approach developed in this book offers some well-founded answers to such long-standing, but still controversial issues. Following Charles Fillmore's definition of frames as both organizers of experience and tools for understanding, the monograph attempts to examine one of the most important concepts of Cognitive Linguistics in more detail. The point of departure is Fillmore's conception of "frames of understanding" - an approach (...) to (cognitive) semantics that Fillmore developed from 1975 to 1985. The envisaged Understanding Semantics ("U-Semantics") is a semantic theory sui generis whose significance for linguistic research cannot be overestimated. In addition to its crucial role in the development of the theoretical foundations of U-semantics, corpus-based frame semantics can be applied fruitfully in the investigation of knowledge-building processes in text and discourse. (shrink)

Die Phänomenologie hat mittlerweile eine über einhundertjährige Geschichte. Dieses Buch führt auf drei Wegen in die Vielfalt ihrer unterschiedlichen Ansätze ein. Dabei geht es dem Autor nicht nur um eine Darstellung der Geschichte der Phänomenologie. Er führt ausserdem vor, wie ihr Anspruch, die Sachen selbst zu untersuchen, erfüllt wird und auch eine philosophische Strömung wie der Deutsche Idealismus phänomenologisch fruchtbar gemacht werden kann. Zudem trägt Schnell zur aktuellen Debatte um den Neuen Realismus bei. Diese Einführung referiert nicht, was Phänomenologie ist: (...) Sie ist selbst Phänomenologie. (shrink)

Many of my first students at Anzaldúa’s alma mater read Borderlands/La Frontera and concluded that Anzaldúa was not a philosopher. Hostile comments suggested that Anzaldúa’s intimately personal and poetic ways of writing were not philosophical. In response, I created “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” using backwards course design and taught variations of it in 2013, 2016, and 2018. Students spend nearly a month exploring Anzaldúa’s works, but only after reading three centuries of U.S.-American philosophers who wrote in deeply personal and literary (...) ways about self-transformation, community-building, and world-changing. The sections of this chapter: 1) describe why my first students rejected Anzaldúa as a philosopher in terms of the discipline’s parochialism; 2) present Anzaldúa’s broader understanding of herself as a philosopher; 3) summarize my reconstructed Anzaldúa-inspired American Philosophy course and outline some assignments; 4) discuss how my students respond to Borderlands/La Frontera when we read it through the lens of self-culture; and 5) explain my attempt to shape the subdiscipline of American Philosophy by teaching Anzaldúa to specialists at the 2017 Summer Institute in American Philosophy. (shrink)