In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 307-308 [Access article in PDF] Mayer, Paola. Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas, no. 25. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 242. Cloth, $65.00. Paolo Mayer sets out to revise the accepted image of the influence of Jakob Böhme, the sixteenth-century mystic and theosophist, on (...) the romantic poets and philosophers who congregated at Jena in the years 1798-1803. She convincingly argues that, except for the philosophers and critics Friedrich Schlegel and F. W. J. Schelling, Böhme's direct influence was negligible, more a matter of the self-proclaimed new religion of romanticism making ideological use of a controversial, in some sense subversive, forerunner in German literary history. In the hands of Ludwig Tieck, for instance, or Novalis, Böhme becomes a symbol of the new religion of Poesie and the hostile reception afforded by the orthodox evangelical pastors of his time becomes an allegory for the hostility that the new, "let it all hang out" aesthetic of romanticism encountered in the more classical and form-loving members of the literary culture. In Mayer's terms, Böhme's reception among the poets was hagiographic; he was the romantics' poster child.Böhme lived from 1575 to 1624. The son of peasants, but by no means unlettered, the "mystic shoemaker of Görlitz" claimed the source of his teachings was direct divine revelation. He claimed to have visions in 1600 and 1610, whose content he translated into his unusually graphic writings, interspersed with Pietist attacks on reason and on outward religious observances. This unusual 'theology' blended themes that F. Schlegel and Schelling, at least, found attractive: (a) the idea of a self-generating or developmental God, (b) an approach to the problem of evil that logically seems to place responsibility on God, and (c) a large systematic role for desire and will, rather than reason, in the origin of the world and in human salvation. Notable also is the physicalism of Böhme's theology, and the assignment of a wrathful nature to God the Father. Böhme's reception in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, determined largely by a first biography written in 1652 by a disciple named von Furstenburg, was generally warm in pietist circles, cool in rationalist quarters, e.g., in that of Lessing and Leibniz.The established story is that all the major romantic writers, poets as well as philosophers, were influenced through a direct study of Böhme's texts. Mayer takes issue with that, especially in the case of the poets Tieck and Novalis and the scientists J. W. Ritter. Though each of them writes glowingly of Böhme as a poet—in fact a persecuted poet, a near-martyr for the religion of Poesie—Mayer finds no sound evidence for a direct transmission, either of ideas or of terminology, from Böhme to these figures. What other literary critics have advanced as evidence is, she argues, a body of ideas and vocabulary common to the Neoplatonic, mystic tradition and to Christian thinking in general. If a stricter standard of proving "reception" than mere similarity of language is adopted, it seems that Tieck, Novalis, and Ritter had a slim acquaintance with Böhme's writings, but nonetheless advanced a hagiographic view of the "folk poet." Others among the Jena circle—Schleiermacher, A. W. Schlegel, Dorothea and Caroline Schlegel—took a skeptical view of this propagandistic ploy. Only the more philosophical minds, F. Schlegel and Schelling, read Böhme in any depth or ventured elaborate appropriations. Mayer argues that both these figures went [End Page 307] through an initial phase of enthusiasm for Böhme, to be later followed by personal reservations about him and, eventually, by public criticism from a philosophical or orthodox theological stance. Mayer obviously relishes the irony, in this case, of an initial idolization of Böhme as a representative of the 'new religion... (shrink)

As one of the bare handful of scholars working on Schelling, I should heartily like to accept Professor Harris's argument, for all these black cows hang around one's neck more heavily than did the albatross on the ancient mariner's. I find myself obliged, however, to closely test his argument. I regret that, viewed in the context of the whole of the Phenomenology's Preface, Harris's argument is not fully convincing. I shall argue that, since the Preface's plain intent is to contrast (...) the vitalism of a method of thought that is spirit's coming into its own with all styles of fixated propositional thinking, the “formalism” Hegel attacks is a loose aggregate of the philosophical styles of Fichte, Schelling, Reinhold and Bardili. Hegel is content to leave the label loose and unspecified and not to name names. It is not strictly fair to let the scope of the term resonate upon Schelling's “first scientific grasp of the idea”, at least not for an author who knew Schelling's work so well. But as Harris points out, it is not fair to Hegel for his public to read him with the sole, simplistic question of what positions he supports and what positions he rejects. (shrink)

_Makes Schelling’s dialogue Bruno readily accessible to the English-language reader, with valuable commentary on the work itself, which details Schelling’s account of his differences from Fichte._.

Hegel's first major philosophical work is one of philosophy's true masterpieces. Despite its notorious difficulty, it is one of the most influential philosophical works ever written. The Phenomenology is not only the first presentation of Hegel's system; it also is an account of the historical development of Geist from Greek tragedy to the triumph of philosophy as science in Hegel's own time. This volume of essays offers an interpretation of the spirit of Hegel's Phenomenology as well as a concise reading (...) of the main text. It discusses also the historical and philosophical background of Hegel's main work and takes note of its reception. Since the essays were written by philosophers from different countries—both established Hegel scholars and promising young researchers—this volume presents the reader with an international overview of recent Hegel research. The main goal of the collection is to offer students a hermeneutical tool for the reading of Hegel's masterpiece while opening up new fields of research for those who know Hegel and German philosophy well. The contributors are Christoph Asmuth, Klaus Brinkmann, Paul Cobben, Alfred Denker, Richard Findler, Jeffery Kinlaw, Angelica Nuzzo, Tom Rockmore, Dale Snow, Mike Vater, Ludovicus De Vos, Robert Williams, and Holger Zaborowski. (shrink)

The 1790’s were a time of upheaval, and every thinker in Europe was moved by the events of France, by the measure of fear or of promise they offered. In Germany the reaction to the political tumult was intense; the seeds of French radicalism found a ground nurtured by idealistic moral ideology, on the one hand, and actual political backwardness on the other. The cultural result of the completed Kantian philosophy was - as Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education testify - (...) a preoccupation with the notion of freedom and its paradoxical invisibility. If one could not touch upon freedom to violate it, neither could one grasp it in order to nurture, establish or institutionalize it. This proved a quandary not for theoretical or philosophic reason alone. History had taken up the Kantian problematic, and as the progress of the Revolution through ‘the Terror’ indicated, made its solution most urgent. (shrink)

This volume contains the papers delivered at the International Schelling Conference in Zürich, 1979, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Schelling’s death. The theme of the conference, as enunciated by the editor, was “taking Schelling seriously.” It is Hasler’s view that our age, which has learned by experience that both idealism and materialism are dead-end world-views, has much to learn from the philosopher who early in his career insisted that the human is just as much a natural being (...) as a spiritual one, and who late in his career attempted to make human freedom the determinative power in history, both on a human and on a cosmic scale. Accordingly, the conference was organized around two themes, nature and history, and was divided into three colloquia, the first considering Schelling’s early philosophy of nature, its relation to empirical science, and its philosophical significance. The second colloquium considered the large theme of Schelling’s view of history, and discovered three crucial transitions in his career-long meditation on that theme, a turn from the interpretation of freedom as human reason to a scheme wherein freedom pertains to divine history, the territory of mythology and revelation, a turn from an idealistic approach to history towards a materialistic one, and a general transition from absolute philosophy to a philosophy of finitude. A third colloquium, devoted to Schelling’s political philosophy, confined itself to the period of his collaboration with Hegel in Jena. While Hasler acknowledges the superiority of Hegel’s political philosophy, especially in his concrete grasp of economics, jurisprudence and politics, he notes that both philosophers entered upon the path of philosophy through their respective attempts to criticize religion as an ideological power. I will mention here only those articles which state new views in Schelling scholarship or which would be particularly of interest to students of Hegel. (shrink)

The tendency in recent Schelling studies has been toward massive, all-encompassing interpretations, e.g. Harold Holz’ Spekulation und Faktizität, J.-P. Marquet’s Liberté et existence, and M. Veto’s Le Fondement selon Schelling. Werner Marx, in the three essays collected here, chooses to focus on two important turning points in Schelling’s speculative career - the System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 and the 1809 Essay on Human Freedom. The narrow focus is motivated not by historical interest alone, but by Marx’s assessment of the (...) situation of philosophy today. Says Marx. (shrink)

The history of Hegel’s philosophical maturation has itself been a matter of tumult and sharp polemic since Rosenkranz laid down his pen. Less than two decades after Kimmerle’s revision of the chronology of the Jena writings, working with either scant or refractory materials, Henry Harris has managed to fashion an account of these vital years in Hegel’s development that is both historically convincing and philosophically articulate. He has, as he intended, here lashed together the crossbeams of history and philosophical consciousness (...) and proved himself capable of the next and final act, a full critical interpretation of the Phenomenology. (shrink)

The famed author of Systematic Theology, the vast synthesis of philosophy of culture and existentialist anthropology, of the history of religions and of the Christian Churches’ dogmatics, often acknowledged his debt to the philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling. With the translation of these his Schelling dissertations, his philosophy thesis at Breslau in 1910 and his theology thesis at Halle in 1912 respectively, the American scholar will be able to better assess Tillich’s rehabilitation of the post-Kantian idealists’ notion of ‘philosophical (...) religion.’ In these early works, one sees Tillich formulating notions that will remain central to his thought, viz. revelation as an historical process, mediated through mythology and the history of religions; being and revelation as a progression of stages or ‘potencies’; and the concept of human spirituality as a dialectic of freedom and being, in which freedom is meant to definitively win out over the unfreedom of nature and take command over being. (shrink)

The 1790’s were a time of upheaval, and every thinker in Europe was moved by the events of France, by the measure of fear or of promise they offered. In Germany the reaction to the political tumult was intense; the seeds of French radicalism found a ground nurtured by idealistic moral ideology, on the one hand, and actual political backwardness on the other. The cultural result of the completed Kantian philosophy was - as Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education testify - (...) a preoccupation with the notion of freedom and its paradoxical invisibility. If one could not touch upon freedom to violate it, neither could one grasp it in order to nurture, establish or institutionalize it. This proved a quandary not for theoretical or philosophic reason alone. History had taken up the Kantian problematic, and as the progress of the Revolution through ‘the Terror’ indicated, made its solution most urgent. (shrink)

This volume contains the papers delivered at the International Schelling Conference in Zürich, 1979, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Schelling’s death. The theme of the conference, as enunciated by the editor, was “taking Schelling seriously.” It is Hasler’s view that our age, which has learned by experience that both idealism and materialism are dead-end world-views, has much to learn from the philosopher who early in his career insisted that the human is just as much a natural being (...) as a spiritual one, and who late in his career attempted to make human freedom the determinative power in history, both on a human and on a cosmic scale. Accordingly, the conference was organized around two themes, nature and history, and was divided into three colloquia, the first considering Schelling’s early philosophy of nature, its relation to empirical science, and its philosophical significance. The second colloquium considered the large theme of Schelling’s view of history, and discovered three crucial transitions in his career-long meditation on that theme, a turn from the interpretation of freedom as human reason to a scheme wherein freedom pertains to divine history, the territory of mythology and revelation, a turn from an idealistic approach to history towards a materialistic one, and a general transition from absolute philosophy to a philosophy of finitude. A third colloquium, devoted to Schelling’s political philosophy, confined itself to the period of his collaboration with Hegel in Jena. While Hasler acknowledges the superiority of Hegel’s political philosophy, especially in his concrete grasp of economics, jurisprudence and politics, he notes that both philosophers entered upon the path of philosophy through their respective attempts to criticize religion as an ideological power. I will mention here only those articles which state new views in Schelling scholarship or which would be particularly of interest to students of Hegel. (shrink)

Correspondence and texts by Fichte and Schelling illuminate their thought and the trajectory of their philosophical falling out.

"Schelling has undergone his philosophical education before the public" - so G. W. F. Hegel in criticism of the novel systematic projects which his philosophical ally and later rival F. W. J. Schelling successively made public. Today, however, Hegel's derisive judgment can be seen not to hold: Instead, it is much rather the case that Schelling's productivity expresses the genuine continuity of his thought. Moreover, his thought is attractive precisely because it embodies an inconclusive - perhaps the never-ending - search (...) for an abiding philosophical orientation in an ever more complex world. The title both emphasizes the singularity of Schelling's thought and recognizes its profound relation to that of his contemporaries. This volume, which connects the latest work in Fichte-, Hegel- and Schelling-studies, contains original contributions in English and German on Schelling's philosophy from international group of researchers. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a na.

In this chapter, we explore the role of habit in giving shape to conscious experience and importantly to our pre-reflective awareness of ourselves which includes the sense of mineness that accompanies our conscious experience. For the most part, discussions in philosophy of mind and phenomenology concerning pre-reflective self-awareness are focused on determining the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and selfhood. For this reason perhaps, the existence of pre-reflective self-awareness is usually appealed to as evidence for a form of selfhood that appears (...) within conscious experience as a component of its synchronic unity. In this chapter, however, we will concern ourselves with the pre-reflective sense of ourselves that appears in conscious experience as it pertains to the diachronic unity of the self—that is the sense of a unitary self as existing over the course of multiple episodic experiences. Our aim is to provide a phenomenological account of the relationship between the minimal, pre-reflective sense of self and what is often termed the ‘narrative self.’ We will argue that habits play a role in preserving the significance of our past in our present experience and in unifying our experience as a self for whom the world is present across disparate episodes of experience. (shrink)

This article engages with Julian Culp’s Democratic Education in a Globalized World from the perspective of political philosophy in a global world. The focus is on liberalism. From this angle, Culp’s book entails three important claims. The first is that a right to basic education on the global level exists, i.e. a right to education for everybody independent of one’s nation state. The second claim is that the implementation of this right is not a task for each nation state alone (...) but of world society as a whole. This implies that countries that are able to provide more than basic education to its citizens have a duty to redistribute part of their excess resources to help poor countries secure basic education for their citizens. Culp’s third claim, relevant to the liberal project, is on the kind of education that is supposed to go global. This education should be free-standing, that is, based on political as opposed to perfectionist arguments. This contribution agrees with the first claim, is sceptical regarding the second one, and disagrees with the third one. (shrink)

Keine Denkungsart kann es in Sachen Wandlungsfähigkeit mit dem Liberalismus aufnehmen. Ohne diese Eigenschaft hätte der Liberalismus kaum über Jahrhunderte hinweg einflussreich bleiben können. Zugleich ergeben sich aus dieser Wandelbarkeit zwei wichtige Implikationen für ein tieferes Verständnis des Liberalismus. Erstens erschwert sie die Herausarbeitung dessen, was am Liberalismus eigentlich zentral ist. Welche Prinzipien und Werte sind partout nicht verhandelbar? Zweitens legt seine Wandelbarkeit nahe, ihn in Krisenzeiten – wie heute und nicht zum ersten Mal –nicht voreilig abzuschreiben. Welche Art des (...) Wandels aber müsste der Liberalismus durchlaufen, um die gesellschaftlichen Probleme unserer Zeit zu meistern? Diese beiden Fragen fungieren als Ankerpunkte des Handbuches: Einerseits will es zum Kern des Liberalismus vordringen, indem es Prinzipien und Werte des Liberalismus auslotet, und andererseits dessen Stellung bezüglich aktueller Herausforderungen beleuchten. Auf dem Weg dorthin werden klassische Vertreterinnen und Vertreter sowie wichtige historische Ereignisse vorgestellt, in denen der Liberalismus eine wichtige Rolle gespielt hat, Konkurrenten und Varianten des Liberalismus besprochen sowie „über den Westen hinaus“ geschaut. (shrink)

This volume draws together leading theologians and Christian ethicists from across the globe to critically engage with and reflect upon Gerald McKenny, widely acknowledged as one of the most original and important Christian ethicists working today. The essays highlight the significance of McKenny's interventions with a range of important debates in contemporary theological ethics, ranging from analyses of the Protestant conception of grace to bioethics and medicine. The Ethics of Grace is the first volume to facilitate critical engagements with a (...) number of key themes in McKenny's work, not in the least his interpretation of Karl Barth. Among the contributions, Jennifer Herdt discusses McKenny's Barthian interest in the relationship between nature and grace; Angela Carpenter uses his Barthian understanding of grace and human action as a framework to discuss Jonathan Edwards; Stanley Hauerwas pushes McKenny's theology beyond Barth. Economic, political, and technological themes are also discussed in depth, for instance in Robert Song's chapter on the phenomenology of biotechnological enhancement. Reaching far beyond the work of Gerald McKenny, this multifaceted volume is a high-level resource for students and scholars of theological and philosophical ethics. (shrink)

Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief—the first of its kind to represent rational requirements on agents who undergo certainty loss.

The present collection of translations arises from our work within Writing Urban Places, a network of researchers interested in the different ways citizens appropriate meaningful built environments through stories, and in doing so are also better able to integrate with others. A key locus in this respect is what our network has termed the ‘mid-sized’ [or ‘intermediate’] European city. Often afforded only cursory attention in the discussion of both culture and society, overlooked in favour of more usual suspects, such urban (...) places allow for a more de-centred, and on occasions regionally focused, view of urban practices, even as they play host to a significant element of contemporary European life and experience. The quest for meaningfulness and appropriation of the urban environment through co-creative, adaptive, and transformative processes (many of which have a textual quality) became central to the theoretical framework of this initiative. Between the individual places in which such processes could be observed and documented, we hypothesized, arises the problem of intermediation – the move from place to place, and its techniques. Translation, more than a textual practice among others, emerged as a structuring consideration of the project at a European scale. Other Destinations is the outcome of this collective process presented here, offering entry into this work to an English-language readership for the first time. We hope that, even as they bring their cities of origin somewhat closer to a new readership, those readers will be uprooted and moved some distance in the direction of these ‘other destinations.’ -/- The edited volume Other Destinations. Translating the Mid-sized European City thus features English translations of 15 21st century (mainly) literary texts published in different media (books, podcasts, journals, online/social media) originally written in languages other than English and that have not previously been translated into English. The selected texts cover the topic of mid-sized European cities, where mid-sized does not solely refer to the size in terms of geographical scope or the number of inhabitants, but also to their socio-historical context of urban identity where these cities are neither metropolises nor small towns, but “other”, lesser-known European cities. The texts selected to be translated in this edited volume cover cities like Volos, Canakkale, Varna, Plovdiv, Durres, Tirana, Porto, Den Haag, Osijek, Salzburg, Naples, Zrenjanin, Loule and others…. The publication intends to enhance the dissemination and accessibility to an international readership of texts about overlooked urban contexts, “other”, lesser-known European cities, their stories and signifying practices in order to develop a better awareness of these cities, their self-constructions, and their responses to the challenges of the present. (shrink)

A common objection to sense-datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind-independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I point out that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sense-datum theories.

This article defends the Fixed Point Thesis: that it is always a rational mistake to have false beliefs about the requirements of rationality. The Fixed Point Thesis is inspired by logical omniscience requirements in formal epistemology. It argues to the Fixed Point Thesis from the Akratic Principle: that rationality forbids having an attitude while believing that attitude is rationally forbidden. It then draws out surprising consequences of the Fixed Point Thesis, for instance that certain kinds of a priori justification are (...) indefeasible and that misleading all-things-considered evidence about rational requirements is impossible. Finally, the Fixed Point Thesis is applied to defend the Right Reasons position on peer disagreement, according to which an agent who has drawn the correct conclusion from her evidence should retain belief in that conclusion even in the face of disagreeing peers. (shrink)