Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten gilt mit Fug und Recht als der selbstandigste aller Wolffianer. Doch hat man kaum je systematisch untersucht, worin - uber die Begrundung der Asthetik hinaus - seine denkerische Originalitat besteht. Im vorliegenden Band wird der fur Kant wichtigste Schulautor als Erkenntnistheoretiker, Psychologe und Moralphilosoph erstmals prononciert aus dem Schatten Wolffs herausgeholt. Nach der jungsten Pionierubersetzung der Metaphysica ins Deutsche folgt hier eine interpretatorisch wegweisende Detailstudie zu philosophischen Schlusselthemen des fruhvollendeten Hochaufklarers - gerade recht zu den anstehenden Jubilaen. (...) Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten is regarded justifiably as the most independent of all Wolffians. Up to now however there have been very few systematic studies examining his intellectual originality, apart from his founding of aesthetics. In this volume, the author who was most important for Kant during his school years finally steps out of Wolff's shadow and is revealed to be an epistemologist, a psychologist and moral philosopher. After the recent translation of the Metaphysica into German, a pioneering achievement, what follows here is an interpretively groundbreaking detailed study of the key philosophical subjects of the philosopher of the High Enlightenment, just in time for the current anniversaries. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

Research on the history of ethics has ignored Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten miserably. And that even though Kant based his lectures on moral philosophy on Baumgarten's text books over the course of decades. This article takes up the cudgels for this "in ethicis" most independent follower of Wolff. In addition to Baumgarten's epistemological elevation of perception, which is known to have resulted in the new foundation of aesthetics as an independent discipline, his reception of two lines of tradition was primarily decisive (...) for an original further development of Wolff's basic approach. First, Baumgarten gave his practical philosophy a strong legal flavor through orienting it toward the natural law theory of his Jena teacher Heinrich Köhler. This legal character can be seen mainly in the then resulting predominance of the concept of obligation. Second, Baumgarten secularized the heritage of pietism in Halle by emphasizing the need for lively perception in order to act morally. Both with his orientation toward an ethics of duty, as well as with his highlighting of motivation, he laid the foundation for Kant's seminal transformations in this field.Die ethikgeschichtliche Forschung hat Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten bisher sträflich vernachlässigt, obgleich Kant über Jahrzehnte hinweg dessen Handbücher seiner Vorlesung über Moralphilosophie zugrundegelegt hat. Demgegenüber möchte der vorliegende Beitrag eine Lanze für den auch 'in ethicis' selbständigsten Wolffianer brechen. Neben der erkenntnistheoretischen Aufwertung der Sinnlichkeit, die sich bekanntlich in der Neubegründung der Ästhetik als einer eigenen Disziplin niederschlug, war vor allem die Rezeption zweier Traditionslinien für eine originelle Fortentwicklung des Wolffschen Grundansatzes maßgeblich: Zum einen verlieh Baumgarten seiner praktischen Philosophie durch die Orientierung am Naturrecht seines Jenenser Lehrers Heinrich Köhler ein stark juridisches Gepräge, wie dies vor allem an der nunmehrigen Vorherrschaft des Verbindlichkeitsbegriffs abzulesen ist. Zum anderen säkularisierte er das Erbe des Halleschen Pietismus, wenn er etwa die Notwendigkeit lebendiger Erkenntnis für das sittliche Handeln unterstrich. Sowohl mit der pflichtethischen Ausrichtung als auch mit der Akzentuierung des Motivationsproblems hat er Kants epochemachenden Umwälzungen auf diesem Gebiet entscheidend vorgearbeitet. (shrink)

Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phe- notypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evo- lution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics. Our considerations depend upon dis- cussing the variability of the very ”contexts of life”: the in- teractions between organisms, biological niches and ecosys- tems. These are ever changing, intrinsically indeterminate and even unprestatable: we do not know ahead of (...) time the ”niches” which constitute the boundary conditions on selec- tion. More generally, by the mathematical unprestatability of the ”phase space”, no laws of mo- tion can be formulated for evolution. We call this radical emergence, from life to life. The purpose of this paper is the integration of variation and diversity in a sound concep- tual frame and situate unpredictability at a novel theoretical level, that of the very phase space. Our argument will be carried on in close comparisons with physics and the mathematical constructions of phase spaces in that discipline. The role of symmetries as invariant preserving transformations will allow us to under- stand the nature of physical phase spaces and to stress the differences required for a sound biological theoretizing. In this frame, we discuss the novel notion of ”enablement”. Life lives in a web of enablement and radical emergence. This will restrict causal analyses to differential cases. Mutations or other causal differ- ences will allow us to stress that ”non conservation princi- ples” are at the core of evolution, in contrast to physical dynamics, largely based on conservation principles as sym- metries. Critical transitions, the main locus of symmetry changes in physics, will be discussed, and lead to ”extended criticality” as a conceptual frame for a better understanding of the living state of matter. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

This entirely new work guides the reader through the most basic systems of modal propositional logic up to systems of modal predicate with identity, dealing with both technical developments and discussing philosophical applications.

Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition. Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to “hold onto” the same “sense” of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism to what he calls a “science of reason”, (...) which he says cannot prove the absolute’s existence, what other doctrine does he require in order to prove this? I will answer these questions by tracing the shifts in Schelling’s doctrine of intellectual intuition from the 1790s to the 1830s and drawing out its evolving methodological role within his science of intelligibility. (shrink)