Oswald Spenglers Denken bleibt kontrovers. Nichtsdestoweniger regen die Ansichten des Zeitdiagnostikers und Kulturphilosophen, trotz der Gefahrlichkeit, die man ihnen ofters nachsagt, bis heute zum Nachdenken an. Die hier versammelten Studien bemuhen sich, den Stellenwert seiner Philosophie im Kontext des Historismus zu vergegenwartigen und Aspekte der zeitgenossischen Rezeption zu beleuchten.".

Although to what extent Oswald Spengler served as a forerunner or precursor of National Socialism remains controversial, scholars unanimously agree that he was a virulent antidemocratic thinker. Indeed, the mere mentioning of his name immediately conjures up among students of German political philosophy associations of intense antidemocratic sentiment. The epithet of virulent opponent of democracy is certainly well-deserved for the period in his political-philosophical development when he was famous, spanning 1919, the year the heated controversy surrounding his major work The (...) Decline of the West erupted, to his untimely death in 1936. Yet what about the little-known, but important phase in the evolution of Spengler's political thought, the years immediately before the shocking military collapse of Imperial Germany and the outbreak of socialist revolution in the fall of 1918 aroused the hostility of the entire right against Germany's first democracy? These were years when Spengler, as an unknown private scholar industriously composing his chef-d'oeuvre, was politically inactive. Was Spengler passionately anti-democratic before he became an embittered man? The following investigation of this rather obscure but important period in his thought, which draws heavily upon his private papers in the Spengler Archives, surprisingly reveals that he was not vehemently antidemocratic during this time and was, in fact, a cynical and opportunistic conservative advocate of the idea of the quasi-democratization of the Second Reich. Spengler scholars, it should be noted, including among others Anton Mirko Koktanek, Gilbert Merlio, H. Stuart Hughes, Klemens von Klemperer, Horst Moller, Walter Struve and Detlef Felken, do not argue this novel position as they are not of the opinion that any significant changes in his attitude towards democratization in Germany took place in his intellectual career. (shrink)

I have been supposing that for the theory of reasoning, explicit belief is an all-or-nothing matter, I have assumed that, as far as principles of reasoning are concerned, one either believes something explicitly or one does not; in other words an appropriate "representation" is either in one's "memory" or not. The principles of reasoning are principles for modifying such all-or-nothing representations. This is not to deny that in some ways belief is a matter of degree. For one thing implicit belief (...) is certainly a matter of degree, since it is a matter of how easily and automatically one can infer something from what one believes explicitly. Furthermore, explicit belief is a matter of degree in the sense that one believes some things more strongly than others. Sometimes one is only somewhat inclined to believe something, sometimes one is not sure what to believe, sometimes one is inclined to disbelieve something, sometimes one is quite confident something is not so, and so forth. (shrink)

I begin by summarizing the first two chapters of (Harman 1986). The first chapter stresses the importance of not confusing inference with implication and of not confusing reasoning with the sort of argument studied in deductive logic. Inference and reasoning are psychological events or processes that can be done more or less well. The sort of implication and argument studied in deductive logic have to do with relations among propositions and with structures of propositions distinguished into premises, intermediate steps, and (...) conclusion. Deductive logic is not a particular psychological subject and is not a particularly normative subject, although one might attempt to develop a logic of belief or a deontic logic, for example. (shrink)

BonJour offers two main reasons for supposing that there is such a thing as rational insight into necessity. First, he says there are many examples in which it clearly seems that one has such insight. Second, he argues that any epistemology denying the existence of rational insight into necessity is committed to a narrow skepticism. After commenting about possible frameworks for epistemological justification, I argue against these two claims in reverse order.

I am concerned with values in the descriptive rather than in the normative sense. I am interested in theories that seek to explain one or another aspect of people's moral psychology. Why do people value what they value? Why do they have other moral reactions? What accounts for their feelings, their motivations to act morally, and their opinions about obligation, duty, rights, justice, and what people ought to do? A moral theory like utilitarianism may be put forward as offering the (...) correct normative account of justice, or of the good, or of what people ought morally to do. The answers such a theory offers may be surprising in suggesting that what people ought to do is quite different from what they think they ought to do. I am not concerned with normative moral theories of this revisionary sort. Indeed, I am interested in less revisionary normative theories only to the extent that they can be reinterpreted as offering potential explanations of people's actual moral reactions. (shrink)

Theories of causation may imply that your birth causes your death, which seems odd in the way that it is not odd to say that your birth precedes your death. Theories of knowledge may imply that the object of knowledge is the same as the object of belief, although we know but do not believe facts and we can know a proposition without knowing whether it is true.

Thinking skills pedagogies like those employed in a community of inquiry (COI) provide a powerful teaching method that fosters reconstruction of thinking in both teachers and students. This collaborative, dialogic approach enables teachers and students to think deeply about the thinking process within a supportive, structured learning environment, by fostering the transformative potential of lived experience. This paper explores the potential for cognitive dissonance (genuine doubt) during students’ experiences of inquiry to be transformed into impetus for the acquisition and improvement (...) of social and intellectual inquiry capabilities and thinking behaviours across the curriculum. (shrink)

Here are some of the ways in which some philosophers and psychologists have taken the emotion of guilt to be essential to morality. One relatively central idea is that guilt feelings are warranted if an agent knows that he or she has acted morally wrongly. It might be said that in such a case the agent has a strong reason to feel guilt, that the agent ought to have guilt feelings, that the agent is justified in having guilt feelings and (...) unjustified in not having guilt feelings. It might be said that it would be immoral of an agent not to have feelings of guilt after realizing that he or she has acted morally wrongly or that only an agent with bad character would not have such feelings. (shrink)

The most basic theme in Davidson’s writings in philosophy of language in the 1960s is that we are finite beings whose mastery of the indefinitely many expressions of our language must somehow arise out of our mastery of finite resources. Otherwise, there would be an unbounded number of distinct things to learn in learning a language, which would make language learning..

This article inquires into that which articulates the two texts brought together by Heidegger in Identity and Difference. It sets out from the indications provided in the Preface of the work concerning the “harmony” that reigns between what is at stake at the heart of the two texts, namely what Heidegger respectively calls the Ereignis (event of appropriation) and the Austrag (reconciling difference). The understanding of this harmony makes it possible to approach that which unveils itself as the articulation of (...) Being, but in so doing also raises the difficult problem of the very possibility of thinking Being setting out from its essential withdrawal. (shrink)

Comment la Francophonie est-elle perçue dans l'Algérie d'aujourd'hui ? Certes, comme ailleurs, Francophonie n'y est pas francophilie, car l'Algérie a développé depuis longtemps, et encore plus depuis 1830, des racines du côté d'une identité arabo-islamique. Toutefois le français, langue d'oppression coloniale, y est aussi langue d'ouverture à la modernité, de libération des tabous traditionnels. Le pouvoir politique a utilisé cette quête légitime d'une identité autre que française pour tenter d'imposer un monolinguisme arabe. La tendance actuelle de retour au français, dans (...) l'écrit et dans l'oral, se fait dans une perspective multilingue, qui rend sa place au français, mais aussi aux langues maternelles berbère et arabe parlé. Toutefois la francophonie sera d'autant mieux acceptée qu'elle saura laisser sa place à la langue arabe internationaleHow is Francophony perceived in the Algeria of today? Admittedly, like in other parts of the world, Francophony is not a kind of “francophilia” because Algeria has long developed the roots of its Arabo-Islamic identity and to an even greater extent since 1830. However for Algerians, while French is the language of colonial oppression, it is also the language of modernity and of a liberation from traditional taboos. The political authorities have used this legitimate search for a non-French identity to try to impose an Arabic monolingualism. The current tendency to return to French, both written and spoken, is carried out from a multilingual standpoint which gives French is its place back alongside the country’s native languages, Berber and spoken Arabic. However Francophony will be accepted more favourably if it is able to leave its place to the international Arabic language. (shrink)