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Platons Frühdialoge enden alle in der Aporie, in vollständiger Ratlosigkeit. Man hat sich darüber immer gewundert. Der Verfasser vertritt die These, dass diese kleinen Kunstwerke für den Unterricht in Platons Akademie gedacht waren, dass Fragen offen bleiben mussten, um Unterrichtsstoff zu haben, um Diskussionen zu ermöglichen, um die Schüler im Denken/Fragen zu üben etc.

Immortality is one of the themes of this issue, and thus I would like to talk about two Graeco-Egyptian ceremonies promising the overthrow of death, one of them actually bearing the title apathanatismos, to render immortal. The detailed texts of both ceremonies can be found among the Greek papyri. The standard edition is Karl Preisendanz’ Papyri Magicae Graecae, and they are thus clearly regarded as magical.

Forthright and realistic, [this book] discusses the inevitability of social conflict, the brutal behavior of human collectives of every sort, the inability of ...

Arguably his most famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society is Reinhold Niebuhr's important early study (1932) in ethics and politics. Widely read and continually relevant, this book marked Niebuhr's decisive break from progressive religion and politics toward a more deeply tragic view of human nature and history. Forthright and realistic, Moral Man and Immoral Society argues that individual morality is intrinsically incompatible with collective life, thus making social and political conflict inevitable. Niebuhr further discusses our inability to imagine (...) the realities of collective power; the brutal behavior of human collectives of every sort; and, ultimately, how individual morality can mitigate the persistence of social immorality. This new edition includes a foreword by Cornel West that explores the continued interest in Niebuhr's thought and its contemporary relevance. (shrink)

This 1935 book answered some of the theological questions raised by Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and articulated for the first time Niebuhr's theological position on many issues.

“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America (...) came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace. “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times “Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society “Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft.... The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction. (shrink)

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women's colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld. Reinhold Martin argues that (...) the material infrastructures of the modern university-the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans-reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason. (shrink)

_The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness_, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy. Written and first read during the prolonged, tragic world war between totalitarian and democratic forces, Niebuhr’s book took up the timely question of how democracy as a political system could best be defended. Most proponents of democracy, Niebuhr claimed, were “children of (...) light,” who had optimistic but naïve ideas about how society could be rid of evil and governed by enlightened reason. They needed, he believed, to absorb some of the wisdom and strength of the “children of darkness,” whose ruthless cynicism and corrupt, anti-democratic politics should otherwise be repudiated. He argued for a prudent, liberal understanding of human society that took the measure of every group’s self-interest and was chastened by a realistic understanding of the limits of power. It is in the foreword to this book that he wrote, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” This edition includes a new introduction by the theologian and Niebuhr scholar Gary Dorrien in which he elucidates the work’s significance and places it firmly into the arc of Niebuhr’s career. (shrink)

This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s account of (...) the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air. (shrink)

ObjectivesResearch has linked mindfulness to improved mental health, yet the mechanisms underlying this relationship are not well understood. This study explored the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies and sleep in the relationship between mindfulness and symptoms of depression, anxiety and psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsAs detailed in this study’s pre-registration, a cross-sectional research design was used to investigate the impact of mindfulness on mental health and the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies and insomnia. A total of 493 (...) participants from the general population answered an online survey and were included in the final analysis. The online survey consisted of the short form of the Five-Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire, the Impact of Event Scale-revised, the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, the short form of the Rumination Response Scale, and the Insomnia Severity Index.ResultsStructural equation modelling revealed that mindfulness was related to lower symptoms of depression, anxiety and psychological distress, both directly and indirectly. Mindfulness was negatively associated with rumination and insomnia. As hypothesised, models revealed that the associations between mindfulness and depression, anxiety and psychological distress were significantly mediated by its negative associations with rumination and insomnia. Our findings also demonstrated that rumination was related to increased insomnia symptoms, which in turn was associated with increased mental health problems, indicating a mediated mediation. Mindfulness was also positively associated with cognitive reappraisal and negatively associated with suppression, which were, respectively, negatively and positively associated with depressive symptoms, and thus functioned as specific mediators of the association between mindfulness and depression.ConclusionOur findings suggest that rumination and insomnia operate transdiagnostically as interrelated mediators of the effects of mindfulness on mental health, whereas cognitive reappraisal and suppression function as specific mediators for depression. These insights emphasise the importance of targeting emotion regulation and sleep in mindfulness interventions for improving mental health. Limitations and implications for practice are discussed. (shrink)

This self-contained essay collection is published to commemorate half a century of Bell's theorem. Like its much acclaimed predecessor "Quantum [Un]Speakables: From Bell to Quantum Information" (published 2002), it comprises essays by many of the worlds leading quantum physicists and philosophers. These revisit the foundations of quantum theory as well as elucidating the remarkable progress in quantum technologies achieved in the last couple of decades. Fundamental concepts such as entanglement, nonlocality and contextuality are described in an accessible manner and, alongside (...) lively descriptions of the various theoretical and experimental approaches, the book also delivers interesting philosophical insights. The collection as a whole will serve as a broad introduction for students and newcomers as well as delighting the scientifically literate general reader. (shrink)

G. H. V. Wright möchte die 'typische' Erklärung des Historikers als andersartig gegenüber der subsumptionstheoretischen Auffassung betrachten. Neu dabei ist sein Bemühen, das Schema des praktischen Schlusses als Basis der 'intentionalen Erklärung', die seiner Ansicht nach für die Geschichtswissenschaft charakteristisch ist, in den Vordergrund zu stellen. Doch scheitert sein Versuch, von der Handlungstheorie her ein Erklärungsschema aufzubauen, das logisch als Syllogismus erscheinen, aber ohne generelle Prämissen (über Korrelationen von 'Motivationshintergrund' und Handlung) auskommen soll. Die in der weiteren Diskussion (W. Stegmüller (...) u.a.) herausgestellte Möglichkeit, 'Erklären' in der Historie als eine Art Motiv-Analyse aufzufassen und von der Kausalanalyse zu trennen, kann m.E. zu einer Beschränkung der Forschungs- und Argumentationsmöglichkeiten in der Geschichtswissenschaft führen. (shrink)