Suhrllekah. Festgabe für Helmut Eimer. Edited by Michael Hahn, Jens-Uwe Hartmann and Roland Steiner. Indica et Tibetica Verlag, Swisttal-Odendorf 1996. xxii, 282 pp. DM48. ISBN 3-923776-28-4.

Vividharatnakarandaka. Festgabe für Adelheid Mette. Edited by Christine Chojnacki, Jens-Uwe Hartmann and Volker M. Tschannerl. Indica et Tibetica Verlag, Swisttal-Odendorf 2000. 540 pp. DM 128. ISBN 3-923776-37-3.

Studien zur Indologie und Buddhismuskunde: Festgabe des Seminars für Indologie und Buddhismuskunde für Professor Dr. Heinz Bechert. Herausgegeben von Reinhold Grüendahl, Jens-Uwe Hartman, Petra Kieffer-Pülz. Indica et Tibetica Verlag, Bonn 1993. 326 pp., 1 photograph, 4 tables. DM 64.00.

Jens Zimmermann suggests that the West can rearticulate its identity and renew its cultural purpose by recovering the humanistic ethos that originally shaped Western culture. He traces the religious roots of humanism, and combines humanism, religion and hermeneutic philosophy to re-imagine humanism for our current cultural and intellectual climate.

Logic diagrams have seen a resurgence in their application in a range of fields, including logic, biology, media science, computer science and philosophy. Consequently, understanding the history and philosophy of these diagrams has become crucial. As many current diagrammatic systems in logic are based on ideas that originated in the 18th and 19th centuries, it is important to consider what motivated the use of logic diagrams in the past and whether these reasons are still valid today. This paper proposes that (...) transcendental philosophy was a key inspiration for the development of logic diagrams and that such diagrams can be employed in transcendental arguments, even after the linguistic turn. (shrink)

This article defends three claims. First, that collection and division in the Phaedrus are described as procedures that underlie human speaking and thinking in general, as well as philosophical inquiry, and are not identified with either. Second, that what sets the dialectical use of these procedures apart from their ordinary use are philosophical suppositions independent of the procedures of collection and division themselves; for that reason, collection and division cannot be identified with dialectic as such. Third, that the second part (...) of the Phaedrus is concerned with the broader question how noble or beautiful speaking, in general, may be said to depend on dialectic as much as it is concerned with the question how rhetoric, as a kind of expertise, is related to dialectic. (shrink)

Since the early 1980s, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the concept of Christian Humanism. A number of official Catholic documents have stressed the importance of 'Christian humanism', as a vehicle of Christian social teaching and, indeed, as a Christian philosophy of culture. Fundamentally, humanism aims to explore what it means to be human and what the grounds are for human flourishing. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned Christian authors from a variety of disciplines in the humanities, Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism (...) recovers a Christian humanist ethos for our time. The volume offers a chronological overview and individual examples of past Christian humanisms. The chapters are connected through the theme of Christian paideia as the foundation for liberal arts education. (shrink)

abstract Can torture be morally justified? I shall criticise arguments that have been adduced against torture and demonstrate that torture can be justified more easily than most philosophers dealing with the question are prepared to admit. It can be justified not only in ticking nuclear bomb cases but also in less spectacular ticking bomb cases and even in the so‐called Dirty Harry cases. There is no morally relevant difference between self‐defensive killing of a culpable aggressor and torturing someone who is (...) culpable of a deadly threat that can be averted only by torturing him. Nevertheless, I shall argue that torture should not be institutionalised, for example by torture warrants. (shrink)

This paper first summarizes two central debates in the field of social scientific Internet research, namely the debate about the so-called ‘social impact of Internet use’ and the debate about the existence of community on the Internet. Early research discussed whether building up a community on the Internet was possible and what the effects of the use of the Internet were for its user. Recent research on the social consequences of Internet use suggests that ‘the’ Internet should no longer be (...) regarded as a constant that has uniform effects for its users. Rather, the consequences of its use depend on a number of contextual conditions. The paper presents some theories that explain which conditions and features of online groups facilitate the finding of solutions to bilateral or group-level problems of cooperation. (shrink)

Das Buch behandelt Kants Versuch, innerhalb seiner Ethik Sittengesetz, Naturgesetz und Freiheit im moralischen Handeln in Einklang zu bringen. Im ersten Teil stehen die Begriffe der Freiheit und des Willens bei Kant im Mittelpunkt. Der zweite Teil untersucht detailliert die Kernpunkte der kantischen Ethik: den (letztlich gescheiterten) Versuch, Freiheit und Naturkausalit t auszus hnen, und die Theorie des Handelns nach Moralgesetzen, deren Wahl den freien Willen als eigentliches Moment ausmacht. Am Ende steht die Einsicht in ein hoch entwickeltes, differenziertes gedankliches (...) System, das unserer Alltagsauffassung von moralischer Verantwortung erstaunlich nahe kommt. (shrink)

Plato’s Sophist and Statesman stand out from many other Platonic dialogues by at least two features. First, they do not raise a ti esti question about a single virtue or feature of something, but raise the questions what sophist, statesman, and philosopher are, how they differ from each other, and what worth each should be accorded. Second, a visitor from Elea, rather than Socrates, seeks to addressed these questions and does so by employing what is commonly referred to as the (...) method of collection and division. Some scholars have argued that this so-called method is value neutral and therefore unable to address the question how philosophy differs from sophistry and statesmanship according to worth. This article contends that the procedures of collection and division does not preclude the visitor from taking considerations of worth into account, but rather helps establish an objective basis for settling the main questions of the dialogue. (shrink)

The digression of Plato’s Theaetetus (172c2–177c2) is as celebrated as it is controversial. A particularly knotty question has been what status we should ascribe to the ideal of philosophy it presents, an ideal centered on the conception that true virtue consists in assimilating oneself as much as possible to god. For the ideal may seem difficult to reconcile with a Socratic conception of philosophy, and several scholars have accordingly suggested that it should be read as ironic and directed only at (...) the dramatic character Theodorus. When interpreted with due attention to its dramatic context, however, the digression reveals that the ideal of godlikeness, while being directed at Theodorus, is essentially Socratic. The function of the passage is to introduce a contemplative aspect of the life of philosophy into the dialogue that contrasts radically with the political-practical orientation characteristic of Protagoras, an aspect Socrates is able to isolate as such precisely because he is conversing with the mathematician Theodorus. (shrink)

This book successfully achieves to serve two different purposes. On the one hand, it is a readable physics-based introduction into the philosophy of science, written in an informal and accessible style. The author, himself a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame and active in the philosophy of science for almost twenty years, carefully develops his metatheoretical arguments on a solid basis provided by an extensive survey along the lines of the historical development of physics. On the other (...) hand, this book supplies one long argument for Cushing´s own attitude in the philosophy of science. While former studies of the author, from which this book draws in part, focused each on one special episode in the history of science, this book gathers case material from many different parts of physics and epochs. The main goal of this book is ”to impress upon the reader the essential and ineliminable role that philosophical considerations have played in the actual practice of science” (p. xv). (shrink)

Provability, Computability and Reflection.

Governing Europe is the first book to systematically link Michel Foucault's hypotheses on power and 'governmentality' with the study of European integration. Through a series of empirical encounters that spans the fifty-year history of European integration, it explores both the diverse political dreams that have framed means and ends of integration and the political technologies that have made 'Europe' a calculable, administrable domain. The book illustrates how a genealogy of European integration differs from conventional approaches. By suspending the assumption that (...) we already know what/where Europe is, it opens a space for analysis where we can ask: how did Europe come to be governed as this and not that? The themes covered by this book include: * the different constructions of Europe within discourses of modernization, democratization, insecurity and 'governance' * the imprint of modernism, liberalism, ordoliberalism, neoliberalism and crime on the identity of the European Community/European Union * the historical relationship between European government and specific technologies of power, technologies as diverse as planning, price control, transparency and benchmarking. (shrink)

If ethics of care deals with the nature of relationships, attentiveness, and understanding particular others, narrativity ought to play a central part. Sometimes, caring simply amounts to working with narratives. In the article I claim that narrativity can even be said to be native to an ethics of care. Through an example, I demonstrate how a narrative ethics of care can discern and grasp some moral problems better than the standard theoretical outlooks.

Die biographischen Dialoge entfalten ideengeschichtliches Denken als eigene Kunst des Verstehens. Sie zeigen Gestalten der Nachdenklichkeit zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft. Karl Jaspers" Buch "Die Psychologie der Weltanschauungen" (1919) entwickelte 1919 ein philosophisches Interesse an der inneren Dynamik moderner Menschen. Seinem interdisziplinären Blick folgen die zwölf Gespräche, die Matthias Bormuth als Ideenhistoriker mit Wissenschaftlern, Künstlern und Schriftstellern führte. Unter anderem in den Werdegängen von Johannes Grützke, Inge Jens, Hartmut Lange, Michael Triegel, Michael Krüger und Martin Warnke verbinden sich individuelle und (...) gesellschaftliche Geschichte. Die biographischen Dialoge entfalten ideengeschichtliches Denken als eigene Kunst des Verstehens. In den Gesprächen entstehen - mit Uwe Johnson gesprochen - "Ich-Geschichten". Sie bieten unterschiedliche Verflechtungen von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Medium von Buch und Bild. Im Vergleich der intellektuellen Lebensläufe zwischen Ost und West spiegeln sich auch die historischen Zäsuren von 1945 und 1989. (shrink)

This chapter examines the dividing line between combatants and civilians during contemporary asymmetric conflicts against nonstate actors, the preeminent type of military conflict in this age of global terrorism. Although the dividing line between combatant and civilian is well explored in both the legal and philosophical literatures, this chapter examines the subject explicitly through the lens of necessity. In particular it conentrates on the difficulty of sorting out civilians from combatants when an individual may cross the line at will, and (...) may be involved in exercises such as serving as a human shield. The chapter concludes that the fundamental element of status, which is the foundation for status-based targeting and status-based detention, is starting to break down in contemporary asymmetric conflicts. (shrink)

The present chapter investigates Heidegger's early understanding of Platonic dialectic in its contrast to sophistry as this comes to expression in his lectures on Plato's Sophist.

At least since Socrates, philosophy has been understood as the desire for acquiring a special kind of knowledge, namely wisdom, a kind of knowledge that human beings ordinarily do not possess. According to ancient thinkers this desire may result from a variety of causes: wonder or astonishment, the bothersome or even painful realization that one lacks wisdom, or encountering certain hard perplexities or aporiai. As a result of this basic understanding of philosophy, Greek thinkers tended to regard philosophy as an (...) activity of inquiry (zētēsis) rather than as a specific discipline. Discussions concerning the right manner of engaging in philosophical inquiry – what methodoi or routes of inquiry were best suited to lead one to wisdom – became an integral part of ancient philosophy, as did the question how such manners or modes of inquiry are related to, and differ from, other types of inquiry, for instance medical or mathematical. In this special issue of History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis, we wish to concentrate in particular on ancient modes of inquiry. (shrink)