Dieses Buch ist ein Klassiker der philosophischen Anthropologie und Arnold Gehlens wichtigstes Buch. Es fasst Gehlens Modell vom Menschen als eines auf Handlung und kulturelle Kompensation angewiesenen und sich damit eigentatig von der ihn bedrohenden Umwelt entlastenden "Mangelwesens" gultig zusammen. Auch wurde in "Der Mensch" 1950 erstmals Gehlens Institutionenlehre skizziert, die er aus der Revision seiner ursprunglichen Theorie "oberster Fuhrungssysteme" entwickelte. Gehlens Hauptwerk war "ohne Zweifel der fortgeschrittenste Versuch, die Philosophische Anthropologie an die Erkenntnisse empirischer Disziplinen zu binden". Diese (...) Ausgabe bringt die textkritische Edition der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe mit dem Text der 4. Auflage von 1950, der die letzte tiefgreifende Umarbeitung darstellt, die Gehlen an dem erstmals 1940 erschienenen Text vornahm. (shrink)

One of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth-century, Jacques Derrida’s ideas on deconstruction have had a lasting impact on philosophy, literature and cultural studies. Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings is the first anthology to present his most important philosophical writings and is an indispensable resource for all students and readers of his work. Barry Stocker’s clear and helpful introductions set each reading in context, making the volume an ideal companion for those coming to Derrida’s writings for the (...) first time. The selections themselves range from his most infamous works including Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference to lesser known discussion on aesthetics, ethics and politics. (shrink)

: Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, "resignifying" disability involves a "democratizing contestation" of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die (upon which mutuality is based), are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others, that is wonderfully possible.

Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, “resig-nifying” disability involves a “democratizing contestation” of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die, are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others that is wonderfully possible.

This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time—for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about spatialized mental time travel is elaborated on. The following novel distinctions are offered: external versus internal viewing of time; ‘‘watching” time versus projective ‘‘travel” through time; (...) optional versus obligatory mental time travel; mental time travel into anteriority or posteriority versus mental time travel into the past or future; single mental time travel versus nested dual mental time travel; mental time travel in episodic memory versus mental time travel in semantic memory; and ‘‘seeing” versus ‘‘sensing” mental imagery. Theoretical, empirical, and applied implications are discussed. (shrink)

This comprehensive Handbook presents the major perspectives within philosophy and literary studies on the relations, overlaps and tensions between philosophy and literature. Drawing on recent work in philosophy and literature, literary theory, philosophical aesthetics, literature as philosophy and philosophy as literature, its twenty-nine chapters plus substantial Introduction and Afterword examine the ways in which philosophy and literature depend on each other and interact, while also contrasting with each other in that they necessarily exclude or incorporate each other. This book establishes (...) an enduring framework for structuring the broad themes defining the relations between philosophy and literature and organising the main topics in the field. Key Features • Structured in five parts addressing philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophical aesthetics, literary criticism and theory, and main areas of work within philosophy and literature • An Introduction setting out the main concerns of the field through discussion of the major themes along with the individual topics • An Afterword looking at the interactions between philosophy and literature through itself enacting philosophical and literary writing while examining the question of how they can be brought together The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature is an essential resource for scholars, researchers and advanced students in philosophy of literature, philosophy as literature, literary theory, literature as philosophy, and the philosophical aesthetics of literature. It is an ideal volume for researchers, advanced students and scholars in philosophy, literary studies, philosophy and literature, cultural studies, classical studies and other related fields. (shrink)

Stocker intends this book to redress the common failures of contemporary moral philosophers to see the importance of emotions for their field. His aim is not merely to point out deficiencies in current thinking about emotions and their place in ethics, however. It is also to show how emotions are important for ethics. The book is divided into ten chapters, four of which are written in collaboration with Elizabeth Hegeman, an anthropologist and psychoanalyst. The first seven present criticisms of (...) current thinking and argue for some general theses about the way emotions are related to values. The last three examine specific emotions, notably, compassion, pity, pride, shame, and anger. They serve to substantiate the general theses about the way emotions are related to values that the first seven chapters promote. In this review I will concentrate on the material in these first seven chapters. Though some of it is jointly authored, I will for convenience' sake mostly refer just to Stocker as the author. (shrink)

Auch seine letzte Monographie Moral und Hypermoral sah Gehlen in der direkten Nachfolge seines anthropologischen Hauptwerkes Der Mensch. Insofern verstand er seinen Entwurf einer pluralistischen Ethik als Konkretisierung seiner Lehre vom Menschen. In diesem Buch, das eine Genealogie der Moralen entwickeln will, stellte sich Gehlen die Aufgabe, Anthropologie, Verhaltensforschung und Soziologie so zu verbinden, dass vier voneinander nicht ableitbare Ethosformen empirisch freigelegt werden konnten: von einem aus der aGegenseitigkeit entwickelten Ethos uber Eudaimonismus und Humanitarismus bis hin zu einem Ethos der (...) Institutionen einschliesslich des Staates. Gehlen wollte der abstrakten Ethik der Aufklarung widersprechen, wie sie beispielsweise in Voltaires Diktum zum Ausdruck kam, nach welchem es nur eine Moral gebe, so wie es nur eine Geometrie gibt. Systematisch geht es in erster Linie um eine anthropologische Begrundung der Ethik, d.h. um eine Mehrheit moralischer Instanzen und Sozial-Regulationen. Diese werden nicht evolutionar interpretiert, d.h. als Fortschritt von der Nahethik zu einer schliesslich weltumspannenden Moralitat. Manche Moralen konnen als instinktnah angenommen werden, andere ergeben sich aus den Notwendigkeiten bestimmter Institutionen. Immer jedoch sind sie kulturell geformt und zugleich auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen der Abstraktion angesiedelt. Es bleibt im Zuge einer neuerlichen Rezeption von Moral und Hypermoral die These zu prufen, ob die Modellvorstellung eines unversohnlichen Pluralismus moralischer Normen eine Dimension des Ethischen zum Ausdruck bringt, die in den evolutiven Konzepten der ethischen Anpassung an je hohere gesellschaftliche Synthesen unterschatzt wird. Insofern gehort dieses Buch in den Zusammenhang einer philosophisch-soziologischen Grundlagenforschung, wie sie seit Max Scheler und Helmuth Plessner als Philosophische Anthropologie durchgefuhrt wurde und welche Arnold Gehlen - von den Elementarbestanden der menschlichen Existenz bis zur Analyse der modernen Malerei - mit so viel Sachhaltigkeit weiterverfolgt hat. (shrink)

Plural and conflicting values are often held to be conceptually problematic, threatening the very possibility of ethics, or at least rational ethics. Rejecting this view, Stocker first demonstrates why it is so important to understand the issues raised by plural and conflicting values, focusing on Aristotle's treatment of them. He then shows that plurality and conflict are commonplace and generally unproblematic features of our everyday choice and action, and that they do allow for a sound and rational ethics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Educational Imperative: A Defense of Socratic and Aesthetic LearningMark StockerThe Educational Imperative: A Defense of Socratic and Aesthetic Learning, by Peter Abbs; x & 250 pp. Bristol, Pennsylvania: Taylor & Francis, 1994, $29.00 paper.O tempora! o mores! Peter Abbs begins by deploring “the cultural catastrophe” of British education in the mid-1990s. He states in his always lucid and accessible prose: “I want to come clean; I want (...) to place the general argument of the book in the current arena of public debate, and to do so without apology and without equivocation.” He bemoans today’s massive denial of spiritual energy, of intellectual enquiry, of aesthetic beauty and public virtue. In a better world, he says, education would serve, “willingly and lovingly... the transcendent ends” of culture and society. Abbs decisively rejects the “Cato” model where teachers are unquestioning skill-based technicians who employ [End Page 393] “managerial” language. Instead, he advocates a Socratic view, which is “to reaffirm that education should be primarily concerned with critical reflection, with personal development and with the sustained enquiry into the various forms of meaning.”Subsequent chapters apply this approach to the arts curriculum. Its failure to gain proper recognition and the absurd and continued conflation of Dance and Physical Education are indicted. Abbs convincingly attacks the notion of “self-expression” in art and language long upheld by educationalists. Its application at the expense of reason, abstract thinking, and the study of “the truly significant writers through the centuries” has in his view helped to trivialize and to marginalize the arts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in so-called “educational drama.” For three generations it has denied “the aesthetic field of drama, the symbolic field of its own form,” and has elevated one genre, improvisation, and made it the totality.Abbs is committed to reconciling “the creative energies of the individual and the creative energies of the culture.” Who would argue with that? And who could deny the value of critical reflection or indeed public virtue? He declares, rather ponderously: “The vested interests of Coca-Cola manufacturers or political missionaries have to be seen as too ‘recent and relevant’ to be allowed” to shape education. The Abbs academy requires “a formally protected place, an institutional space more like the theatre than Tesco [a supermarket chain], more like the cathedral than the Stock Exchange.” For all this patent seriousness and sincerity, here is an educationalist irrevocably and irreconcilably out of joint with the present. The austere modernism of Herbert Read profoundly influenced Abbs in his teens; he also admires F. R. Leavis, Richard Hoggart, and David Holbrook, whose writing at its most influential spans the 1930s and the 1960s. Abbs’s most recent source of inspiration is the art critic Peter Fuller, whose abiding legacy was a romantic nationalism that eloquently celebrated an “essentially symbolic and figurative” tradition in British art from J. M. W. Turner to Henry Moore.Modern Painters, which Fuller edited, could afford to eschew popular culture and its connections with “higher” arts. Fine for a periodical, but how could such a fastidious approach be applied to the classroom experience? Abbs describes an experiment that he performed on student-teachers at the University of Sussex to understand their aesthetic responses. Among the events and objects that the students were asked to consider were John Constable’s The Haywain, Richard Strauss’s The Four Last Songs, a visit to Claude Monet’s garden and a performance of Coriolanus. Abbs’s list does not, however, contain Pulp Fiction, a Courtney Love concert, or an S. E. Hinton novel. What place, if any, do the latter have in the arts curriculum? Must they be ruled out for being too “recent and relevant”? Can student responses to them be brought to bear on their comprehension of higher culture? Or is there a great and ultimately irreconcilable divide? Abbs never faces these issues and instead, in his fogyish [End Page 394] coda, denounces once more “the consumer society” which has “trivialized on an unprecedented scale” and has “tarnished whatever it has touched.”Mark StockerUniversity of Canterbury, New ZealandCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This article introduces the theory of cognitive spacetime. This account allows us to go beyond the space–time dichotomy that is commonly employed in psychology and cognitive science. Linguistic analysis and experimental review is provided to support the notion that what is commonly referred to as spatial cognition (or mental space) in the cognitive sciences always contains time, and that what is commonly referred to as temporal cognition (or mental time) always contains space. For “spatial cognition” the term object-spatiotemporal cognition (or (...) object spacetime) and for “temporal cognition” the term event-spatiotemporal cognition (or event spacetime) is introduced. In order to exemplify the virtue of the new spacetime account (with its two subdomains, object spacetime and event spacetime) with a specific example, it is investigated how this new notion can substantially refine our understanding of space–time conceptual metaphor. A new conceptual-metaphor spacetime typology for cognitive processing underlying fictive motion and non-fictive motion is also proposed. Implications of the new spacetime account are discussed for metaphorically mapped mental perspective, metaphorically mapped embodiment, and cognitive science in general. Finally, specific reasons are given why the current proposal of cognitive spacetime cannot be equated with the concept of spacetime in modern physics. (shrink)

This 1996 book is the result of a uniquely productive union of philosophy, psychoanalysis and anthropology, and explores the complexity and importance of emotions. Michael Stocker places emotions at the very centre of human identity, life and value. He lays bare how our culture's idealisation of rationality pervades the philosophical tradition and leads those who wrestle with serious ethical and philosophical problems into distortion and misunderstanding. Professor Stocker shows how important are the social and emotional contexts of ethical (...) dilemmas and inner conflicts, and he challenges philosophical theories that try to overgeneralise and over-simplify by leaving out the particulars of each situation. In offering a realistic account of emotions and an in-depth analysis of how psychological factors affect judgments of all kind, this book will interest a broad range of readers across the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

In this book, Arnold Davidson elaborates a method for considering the history of concepts and the nature of scientific knowledge, a method he calls "historical epistemology." He applies this to the history of sexuality, with consequences for our understanding of desire, abnormality, and sexuality.

Most people will agree that if my brain were made to have within it precisely the same pattern of activity that is in it now but through artificial means, as in its being fed all its stimulation through electrodes as it sits in a vat, an experience would result for me that would be subjectively indistinguishable from that I am now having. In ‘The Story of a Brain’ I ask whether the same subjective experience would be maintained in variations like (...) these: The hemispheres are in different vats but interacting with each other through radio transmission. Smaller chunks - and eventually the individual neurons - are interacting in this way. The hemispheres or the smaller chunks undergo internally the same pattern of activity but without interacting with each other. (shrink)

From social media to search engines to Wikipedia, the internet is thoroughly embedded in how we produce, locate, and share knowledge around the world. Who Should We Be Online? provides an account of online knowledge that takes seriously the role of sexist, racist, transphobic, colonial, and capitalist forms of oppression. Frost-Arnold argues against analyzing internet users as a collection of identical generic people with smartphones. The novel epistemology developed in this book recognizes that we are differently embodied beings interacting (...) within systems of dominance. Our social identities and global inequalities shape who we are, who we can be online, and what we know. Tackling problems of online content moderation, fake news, and hoaxes, Frost-Arnold shows that oppressive online structures and practices help fuel ignorance. But she also reveals how the internet provides opportunities for marginalized people and activists to share knowledge online. Drawing on feminist accounts of objectivity, veritistic social epistemology, epistemologies of ignorance, virtue epistemology, and the epistemic injustice literature, this book argues for a social epistemology that values truth and objectivity, while recognizing that inequalities shape our collective ability to attain these goals. Timely and interdisciplinary, Who Should We Be Online? weaves together internet studies scholarship from across the humanities, social sciences, and computer science. Presenting case studies of moderators, imposters, tricksters, fakers, and lurkers, this book both explains the problems with our current internet ecosystem and imagines liberatory online futures. (shrink)

I critically examine Nietzsche’s argument in The Will to Power that all the detailed events of the world are repeating infinite times (on account of the merely finite possible arrangements of forces that constitute the world and the inevitability with which any arrangement of force must bring about its successors). Nietzsche celebrated this recurrence because of the power of belief in it to bring about a revaluation of values focused wholly on the value of one’s endlessly repeating life. Belief in (...) recurrence would bring joy to those who had achieved excellence in this life and crush those who had not. I point out, however, that this significance of recurrence must be spoiled by the consideration that within each of the long cycles of recurrence there would have to be, as well, countless variations of this life. And I consider the issue of personal identity within such recurrences. Is it the same person or merely resembling but distinct persons in the recurrences or the variations? If it is the same person in precise recurrences, should the subjectively identical experience be thought of as really additional for that person? (shrink)

Experience with electronic communication in ethics committees at two hospitals is reviewed and discussed. A listserver of ethics committee members transmitted a synopsis of the ethics consultation shortly after the consultation was initiated. Committee comments were sometimes incorporated into the recommendations. This input proved to be most useful in unusual cases where additional, diverse inputs were informative. Efforts to ensure confidentiality are vital to this approach. They include not naming the patient in the e-mail, requiring a password for access to (...) the listserver, and possibly encryption. How this electronic communication process alters group interactions in ethics committees is a fruitful area for future investigation. (shrink)

Public health agencies regularly survey randomly selected anonymous students to track drug use, sexual activities, and other risk behaviors. Students are unidentifiable, but a recent project that i...

Classical Soviet Marxism-Leninism is in the process of dissolution, with some parts of the ideology being rejected, others retained in one form or another, and new components being adopted. At the same time, a wide-ranging pluralism of new objectives and forms of consciousness has emerged in Soviet intellectual life. Since both the motives for restructuring and also the braking effects acting on the process of perestrojka are significantly dependent upon intellectual and ideological developments, attentive observations of these developments is of (...) particular importance for the assessment of the evolutionary propects of the Soviet Union. At present the situation on the ideological-intellectual front can be characterized as follows: 1. Although official changes in the ideology did not begin until 1989 they have caught up to the initial perestrojka in political and cultural life. 2. Perestrojka has continually waned in importance as an ideological by-word largely under the influence of Gorbachv's 'new thinking' which has turned attention to the dramatic history of the Soviet Union and the plight of the human individual in a society with few prospects for the future. 3. In philosophy the new textbook published in 1989/90 introduces a series of crucial innovations that put paid to a number of classical shibboleths of the Marxist-Leninist world view. 4. Academic philosophy has shifted more and more to a reexamination of the history of philosophy as well as to a reappraisal of pre-revolutionary Russian thought. 5. The critique of Stalinism has gradually given way to a critique of Marxist principles generally, and even Lenin has become the subject of criticism. 6. Fast on the heels of the new thinking and the ideological deconstruction come the voices of political orientations whose differences are so pronounced as to have warranted the compilation of an 'Atlas of ideologies'. 7. The search for a new moral identity has concentrated on three sources: the reestablishment of links with classical Russian culture, the renewal of links with Europe, and the deep-seated need to commit oneself to some ideal for sacrifice. 8. The economic crisis has produced attitudes hostile to individual gain and speculation. 9. Given the nature of the Soviet crisis intellectual cooperation with the West has to take forms which promote the rekindling of a sense of all-human awareness of the transcendent and reinforce the experience of common humanity. 10. The establishment of all-European academic institutions designed in their very structure to engage in mutual cooperation could have a catalytic effect on the reconfiguration of Europe. (shrink)

The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor, 'entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem': entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A problem with Ockham's razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this 2002 monograph examines simplicity (...) by asking six questions: what is meant by simplicity? How is simplicity measured? Is there an optimum trade-off between simplicity and goodness-of-fit? What is the relation between simplicity and empirical modelling? What is the relation between simplicity and prediction? What is the connection between simplicity and convenience? The book concludes with reflections on simplicity by Nobel Laureates in Economics. (shrink)

I argue that a certain type of naturalist should not accept a prominent version of the no-miracles argument (NMA). First, scientists (usually) do not accept explanations whose explanans-statements neither generate novel predictions nor unify apparently disparate established claims. Second, scientific realism (as it appears in the NMA) is an explanans that makes no new predictions and fails to unify disparate established claims. Third, many proponents of the NMA explicitly adopt a naturalism that forbids philosophy of science from using any methods (...) not employed by science itself. Therefore, such naturalistic philosophers of science should not accept the version of scientific realism that appears in the NMA. (shrink)

I provide an account of the cognitive attitude of trust that explains the role trust plays in the planning of rational agents. Many authors have dismissed choosing to trust as either impossible or irrational; however, this fails to account for the role of trust in practical reasoning. A can have therapeutic, coping, or corrective reasons to trust B to ${\phi}$ , even in the absence of evidence that B will ${\phi}$ . One can choose to engage in therapeutic trust to (...) inspire trustworthiness, coping trust to simplify one’s planning, or corrective trust to avoid doing a testimonial injustice. To accommodate such types of trust, without accepting doxastic voluntarism, requires an account of the cognitive attitude of trust broader than belief alone. I argue that trust involves taking the proposition that someone will do something as a premise in one’s practical reasoning, which can be a matter of believing or accepting the proposition. I defend this account against objections that it (i) provides insufficient rational constraints on trust, (ii) conflates trust and pretense of trust, and (iii) cannot account for the rationality of back-up planning. (shrink)

During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard, holding regular private meetings, with Carnap, Tarski, and Quine. Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall for their conversations. Carnap took detailed notes during his year at Harvard. This book includes both a German transcription of these shorthand notes and an English translation in the appendix section. Carnap’s notes cover a wide range of topics, but surprisingly, the (...) most prominent question is: If the number of physical items in the universe is finite, what form should scientific discourse take? This question is closely connected to an abiding philosophical problem: What is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the material realm? Carnap, Tarski, and Quine’s attempts to answer this question involve issues central to philosophy today.This book focuses on three such issues: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. In short, the book reconstructs the lines of argument represented in these Harvard discussions, discusses their historical significance (especially Quine’s break from Carnap), and relates them when possible to contemporary treatments of these issues. (shrink)