The article seeks to elucidate the status of transcendence in the historiography of secularization through the perspective of collective memory. It discusses two typological models dealing with the basic metaphysical problem concerned with the presence and meaning of transcendence in real human existence. According to the first, the historical reality of secularization causes a break from the collective memory whose roots are in religion. In contrast, the second model considers that despite the deep transformations in the status of religion in (...) a reality of secularization, an experience of historical continuity may also occur there. These models denote the two poles in the argument about the meaning and value of history for modern people. The article suggests a phenomenological analysis of the two models and criticizes their deficiencies. Finally, the “tension model” is outlined as a third alternative that aims at overcoming the binary situation created by the first two in favor of a perspective that necessitates and contains both immanence and transcendence. (shrink)

This volume, the first of its kind written in English, interprets the realistic-phenomenological philosophy of Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888-1966). She was a prominent figure in the Munich-Göttingen Circle, the first generation of phenomenology after Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and was known as the “first lady of German philosophy”.The articles included in this collection deal with the two main themes constituting her realistic-metaphysical phenomenology: Being and the I. The new edition includes an additional chapter opening a new path into the study of Conrad-Martius (...) with Heidegger. In addition, the collection includes a comprehensive Introduction that describes the personal background and the social and philosophical contexts behind Conrad-Martius’s thought, with an emphasis on the mutual influence and fertilization of the group of early phenomenologists in the Munich-Göttingen Circle. The book is aimed at scholars of philosophy and educated readers. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between philosophy and science in the writings of Karl Jaspers and with its reception in the wider scholarly literature. The problem discussed is how to characterize the relationship that exists between science—defined on pure Kantian grounds as a universally valid knowledge of phenomenal objects—and philosophy—conceived by Jaspers as the transcending mode of thinking of personal Existenz rising towards the totality and unity of Being. Two solutions to that problem arise from Jaspers’s writings. The oppositionist (...) view is based in his earlier philosophy of Existenz. It describes the discrepancy between determinateness, bestowed by science to its objects, and freedom of self-determination, which is both a synonym and a condition of possibility for Existenz. The reciprocal view is based in Jaspers’s later works, where he focuses on exploration of his concept of Being (das Umgreifende). By contrast with most of Jaspers’s commentators, the present interpretation is anchored in a developmentaland contextual understanding of Jaspers’s thought. Showing the transcendental background of this topic, the proposed interpretation allows us to abstain from viewing the two solutions as incoherent or contradictory and instead to see them as constitutive of a single philosophical course. (shrink)

_Husserl and Other Phenomenologists_ addresses a fundamental question: what is it in the thinking of the founding father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, that on the one hand enables the huge variety in the phenomenological discourse and, at the same time, necessitates relying on his phenomenology as a point of departure and an object before which philosophizing is conducted. The contributors to this volume, each with his or her own focus on a specific figure in the phenomenological school vis-à-vis Husserl's thinking, (...) demonstrate that every reference to Husserl is necessarily bound up with modifying his ideas and crossing the boundaries of his phenomenology. In this sense, and given the insight that Husserlian phenomenology is already imbued with the potential modifications and revisions, the post-Husserlian phenomenologies may be included together with Husserl in one so-called ‘Phenomenological Movement’. The discussions in the book open for philosophers and intellectuals a window upon phenomenology, which has been one of the richest and most influential cultural phenomena since its very appearance at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book also conveys the complex interpretive dynamic within which a given framework of ideas becomes a sort of magnetic field, with attracting and repelling forces acting on its participants, and thanks to which the great ideas of modernity maintain their vitality and relevance a hundred years after their first appearance. This book was originally published as a special issue of _The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms. _. (shrink)

This article addresses a basic question: what elements in Husserl’s phenomenology can account for the variety of post-Husserlian phenomenologies? The answer, I suggest, is that Husserl’s idea of reality, particularly his notion of givenness vis-à-vis self-givenness, facilitated the work of his followers by offering them at once a firm ground and a point of departure for their inquiries. However, adopting Husserl’s phenomenology as their starting point did not prevent his followers from developing their own independent phenomenological theory. Moreover, despite the (...) elusive particulars that shape one’s individual experience of the world, so it transpires, Husserl’s thinking which was different and beyond their own observations and actual experiences, namely, transcendent, appears to have been a genuine guide along their path to achieve meaning. This interpretation thus gives precedence to a metaphysical point of departure, that is, to Husserl’s idea of reality as ‘givenness’, in launching phenomenol... (shrink)

This is a study of the work of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), from his beginnings as a young psychiatrist to his mature days as an existentialist philosopher. This critical study of Jasper's philosophy traces his effort to instill meaning into the human quest for self-understanding and reveals the difficulties and frustrations inherent in this search. The book presents to the reader Jasper's attempts to deal with these difficulties by means of a philosophical approach to the concept of being (...) as a whole, beyond the individual – the other, the world and transcendence. In this book the author conducts an ongoing dialogue with existing research on Jasper's works and proposes a new reading for them. Along with a critical interpretation, the author reveals the challenges that the figure of Jaspers posed to his readers. Unlike most researchers, who ignored Jasper's early writings dealing with psychiatry and psychology, this book proposes a philosophical reading of these works, revealing the unity of the world in which Jaspers created – first as a psychologist and later as a philosopher. This approach enables the reader to discover in Jasper's work a daring effort to formulate an original philosphy regarding two basic concepts central to philosophy and human culture throughout all times – "selfhood" and "being". (shrink)

This volume, the first of its kind written in English, interprets the realistic-phenomenological philosophy of Hedwig Conrad-Martius. She was a prominent figure in the Munich-Göttingen Circle, the first generation of phenomenology after Edmund Husserl, and was known as the “first lady of German philosophy”. The articles included in this collection deal with the two main themes constituting her realistic-metaphysical phenomenology: Being and the I. In addition, the collection includes a comprehensive Preface that describes the personal background and the social and (...) philosophical contexts behind Conrad-Martius’s thought, with an emphasis on the mutual influence and fertilization of the group of early phenomenologists in the Munich-Göttingen Circle. The book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy and educated readers. (shrink)

This article seeks to extricate and explicate the unique vocabulary that was consolidated by the realistic phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius in her establishing book Realontologie, published in 1923. Among the concepts are: “Essence”, “Bearer”, Self-adherence, Capability, Tangentiality, Incorporation, Internality, “Quiet,” Fullness, Depth, Layeredness, Abyss, and others. CM does not always coin them as distinguished concepts, but they function as philosophical concepts due to the meaning she pours into them and the way she uses them. The author suggests that these terms can (...) inaugurate the realistic discourse on reality, which is noticeably almost absent in the modern philosophy that has been almost sweepingly conquered by the literal and advanced idealistic discourse. (shrink)

The widely accepted approach in scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition emphasizes its political meaning and implications while neglecting its ontological dimensions. Against this trend, in this article I seek to uncover the implicit ontology that underlies her conception of the human condition. This human ontology appears to be comprised of five realms – the private, the public, intimacy, the social and the self. While Arendt explicitly bases her conception upon the first two, the paper shows that the (...) remaining three, although not defined as realms, are explored by her as such. These appear as autarchic contexts of human activity, which are not supposed to refer to each other. The problematic of this split between the different realms is widely discussed in the paper. Yet, the split of the self from the two pivotal realms – the private and the public – acquires a special interest, for it undermines the entire project of the human condition. (shrink)

Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the woman pioneer of the realistic phenomenological school, describes the reality to which her philosophizing is addressed as “totally non-material corporeality”. With this contradictory expression she seeks to affirm two foundational aspects regarding reality: the spatial that achieved material realization in real existents and the concealed non-spatial that is at the cradle of the establishing of reality and remains present behind its phenomenal and material appearing. This article focuses on three ontological elements in HCM’s idea of reality—“essence”, “abyss”, (...) and “self”—whose meaning both implies and raises the issue of the non-spatiality of Being in a complex manner. Moreover, the three seek the same objective of coming to terms with the force in real beings that will never ever be able to shine in its entirety. By means of philosophical explication of the mentioned elements and the illumination of the dialectic of each of them with the corresponding spatial aspects, this article demonstrates the evolution of HCM's understanding of the issue of spatiality that mirrors her metaphysics as a whole. (shrink)

This article discusses the main arguments of Hedwig Conrad-Martius against the worldview of idealism in connection to her phenomenological idea of reality. The discussion focuses on her most far-reaching critical argument concerning the damage caused by idealism to the possibility for metaphysics by turning the real into the ideal, thereby reducing reality to an idea. This article analyses Conrad-Martius’ understanding of the evolution of idealism and of her criticism regarding the metaphysical absolutizing of the ideal in idealism. Her subsequent response (...) to idealism attempts to rehabilitate the facticity of real reality within metaphysics. (shrink)

In response to an accusation of having said something inappropriate, the accused may exploit the difference between the explicit contents of their utterance and its implicatures. Widely discussed in the pragmatics literature are those cases in which arguers accept accountability only for the explicit contents of what they said while denying commitment to the implicature. In this paper, we sketch a fuller picture of commitment denial. We do so, first, by including in our discussion not just denial of implicatures, but (...) also the mirror strategy of denying commitment to literal meaning and, second, by classifying strategies for commitment denial in terms of classical rhetorical status theory. In addition to providing a systematic categorization of our data, this approach offers some clues to determine when such a defence strategy is a reasonable one and when it is not. (shrink)

How can finite creatures know an infinite God? How do the limits of our intellect and language impact how we know God and talk about God? This book explores a doctrine called divine incomprehensibility in hopes to seek how a proper understand of God's incomprehensibility protects us from both a theological despair in which there is no hope for Christian theology and a theological idolatry in which we are tempted to believe we can capture the essence of God with our (...) thoughts or words. (shrink)

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation. In addition to theoretical and methodological reflections by leading scholars in their fields, the book contains studies of the relationship between language and argumentation from two different viewpoints. While some chapters take a specific argumentative move as their point of departure and investigate the ways in which it is linguistically manifested in (...) discourse, other chapters start off from a linguistic construction, trying to determine its argumentative function and rhetorical potential. The Language of Argumentation documents the currently prominent research on stylistic aspects of argumentation and illustrates how the study of argumentation benefits from insights from linguistic models, ranging from theoretical pragmatics, politeness theory and metaphor studies to models of discourse coherence and construction grammar. (shrink)

In this paper we adopt the hypothesis that languages are mechanisms for interaction, and that grammars encode the means by which such interaction may take place, by use of procedures that construct representations of meaning from strings of words uttered in context, and conversely strings of words are built up from representations of content in interaction with context. In a review of the systemic use of ellipsis in dialogue and associated split-utterance phenomena, we show how, in Dynamic Syntax, words give (...) rise to a range of procedures for the building of representations of the content of some utterance, which both speakers and hearers use. We then extend the discussion to take account of adjuncts, showing how they contribute to content construction both in single utterances and across speakers. The same mechanisms are then shown to underlie the building of inferential extensions of meaning in context, giving rise to the creation of the ad hoc concepts expressed by phrases or single words in relation to the utterance context and ultimately to the creation of metaphorical uses of language. (shrink)

This accessible introduction to formal, and especially Montague, semantics within a linguistic framework, presupposes no previous background in logic, but takes students step-by-step from simple predicate/argument structures and their interpretation to Montague's intentional logic.

In this study, we analyzed the academic integrity policies of colleges in Ontario, Canada, casting a specific lens on contract cheating. We extracted data from 28 individual documents from 22-publicly-funded colleges including policies and procedures (n = 27) and code of conduct (n = 1). We analyzed the characteristics of the documents from three perspectives: (a) document type and titles; (b) policy language; and (c) policy principles. Then we examined five core elements of the documentation including (a) access; (b) approach; (...) (c) responsibility; (d) detail; and (e) support. Key findings revealed that specific and direct language pertaining to contract cheating was largely absent from the policy documents, that underlying policy principles lacked clear definition, and that exemplary policy has yet to be developed in this context. We conclude with recommendations for increased policy research in the area of academic integrity and a call for policy revision in Canadian higher education institutions to more explicitly address the issue of contract cheating, as well as provide more support to students and other campus stakeholders to better understand how contract cheating impacts and impedes teaching and learning. (shrink)

El presente estudio aborda el nacimiento como problema filosófico desde una perspectiva intersubjetiva y corporeizada derivada del análisis del Cuerpo y el Otro presente en la Fenomenología de la Percepción de Merleau-Ponty. A partir de lo anterior, se discuten las limitaciones que tendría la coexistencia (Mitdasein) de Heidegger y la Otredad de Lévinas enmarcada en la relación del rostro en su intento de aproximarse a una filosofía del nacimiento desde una perspectiva de mundo compartido (madre-padre-hijo). Además, se plantea la necesidad (...) de incorporar al problema filosófico sobre el nacimiento tres etapas: embarazo-nacimiento-puerperio, ya que estas son fundamentales para ilustrar de manera profunda la dimensión relacional y corporeizada de este proceso que exhibe temporalidad e historicidad. (shrink)

Chinese Philosophy: Overview of Topics If Chinese philosophy may be said to have begun around 2000 B.C.E., then it represents the longest continuous heritage of philosophical reflection. Trying to mention each philosopher or every significant thinker is not possible. This article is highly selective by choosing philosophers according to two basic principles: Those who … Continue reading Chinese Philosophy: Overview of Topics →.

Daoist Philosophy Along with Confucianism, “Daoism” is one of the two great indigenous philosophical traditions of China. As an English term, Daoism corresponds to both Daojia, an early Han dynasty term which describes so-called “philosophical” texts and thinkers such as Laozi and … Continue reading Daoist Philosophy →.