Brings together the key writings of Ferdinand Christian Baur across theology, biblical studies, early Christian history, and philosophy, showing his crucial role in the development of 19th-century thought.

In the modern period, the most original and influential theories about law and politics were developed in connection with a set of far-reaching, interrelated questions about the definition of law, the purpose of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the existence of natural law and natural rights. In this entry I summarize the contributions of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu; William Blackstone; Jeremy Bentham; and Immanuel Kant as exemplars of the history of modern (...) thought on law and politics. (shrink)

Aquinas's account of law as an ordering of reason for the common good of a community depends on the mereology that covered his theory of parthood relations, including the relations of parts to parts and parts to wholes. Aquinas argued that 'all who are included in a community stand in relation to that community as parts to a whole', and 'every individual person is compared to the whole community as part to whole'. Aquinas held that the perfection of wholes through (...) the proper ordering of their parts does not entail the elimination of diversity, but in many cases requires diversity. Aquinas argued that there are two ways of ordering parts within a whole. Firstly, the parts are ordered with respect to one another, and secondly, the parts are ordered toward an end. The ordering of a whole's parts to one another is always for the sake of the ordering of the whole to its extrinsic end. Aquinas argued that the good toward which the law directs a community is called the 'common good' of that community. The common good or common end toward which members of a community are ordered can be the sort of end that the agents bring into existence through their own actions such as justice within a community, or the sort of end that can exist apart from the actions of the agents. (shrink)

This chapter explores how the non‐dualistic metaphysics endorsed by Star Wars and Spinoza provides an important lesson about what it means to have a true idea about something. According to the non‐dualistic metaphysics of the Jedi, power‐seeking ultimately isn't a matter of domination or destruction, but of “balance”. Living things are like all other things: they strive to maintain and increase their power. But they're unique because their manner of power‐ seeking demonstrates in an especially clear way how non‐dualistic metaphysics (...) is true: how independence and dependence, activity and passivity, aren't simply opposed but in fact interpenetrate and codetermine one another. The non‐dualistic interplay of activity and passivity, self‐assertion and receptivity, independence and dependence, is further demonstrated through the psychological lives of human beings. (shrink)

The potential public and individual health consequences of unequal access to digital technologies have been recognized in the United States for at least a decade. Unequal access to the Internet and related technologies has been characterized as a ; naturalistic trends toward broader access across the population and targeted intervention to increase access are described as progress toward The problem of the digital divide has been characterized as one of healthcare justice. The idea that everyone should have access to the (...) telecommunications gridis a central tenet of the U.S. universal service policy. With the diffusion of broadband technologies, the issue of digital access includes not only access to the Internet but also access to new levels of service, such as broadband, to support a wide range of emerging applications. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Kant's Anti‐Cartesianism Kant on the Highest Good and the Practical Necessity of Belief in God's Existence The Moral Proof at the Tübinger Stift and Its Fate Self‐Positing and the “Only True and Thinkable Creation out of Nothing” The Way to Absolute Knowing in Hegel's Phenomenology.

Kühn, U. Thomas von Aquin und die evangelische Theologie.--Rahner, K. Über die Unbegreiflichkeit Gottes bei Thomas von Aquin.--Pieper, J. Kreatürlichkeit.--Kluxen, W. Metaphysik und praktische Vernunft.--Oeing-Hanhoff, L. Gotteserkenntnis im Licht der Vernunft und des Glaubens nach Thomas von Aquin.--Zimmermann, A. Der Begriff der Freiheit nach Thomas von Aquin.--Baur, J. Fragen eines evangelischen Theologen an Thomas von Aquin.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is considered a philosopher of the Tradition, both in the sense that his work is rooted in the political, artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions of European culture and in the sense that he takes up the notion of tradition as an object of philosophical investigation. This collection examines Hegel's philosophy as it bears on the meaning and relevance of tradition - historical, legal, aesthetic, religious, and philosophical. The thirteen original essays draw upon and celebrate the (...) work of H.S. Harris, who is considered by many to be the most influential interpreter of Hegel in the English-speaking world. The collection as a whole examines Hegel's rich and nuanced relation to his own traditions, including his creative reworking of the legacies of Greece, Rome, Christianity, the Middle Ages, early modernity, and his immediate predecessors. It also shows how Hegel's thought has direct relevance for us today as we seek to understand ourselves in relation to our inherited traditions. The volume concludes with an afterword by H.S. Harris and a comprehensive bibliography of Harris's published works. This important anthology represents the first rigorous and systematic effort to apply Harris's seminal and innovative style of Hegel scholarship to a wide variety of philosophical and historical issues. It functions both as a study of Hegel's philosophy and as a commentary on Harris's vast contribution to Hegel scholarship. (shrink)

Since its origin bioethics has been a specialized, academic discipline, focussing on moral issues, using a vast set of globalized principles and rational techniques to evaluate and guide healthcare practices. With the emergence of a plural society, the loss of faith in experts and authorities and the decline of overarching grand narratives and shared moralities, a new approach to bioethics is needed. This approach implies a shift from an external critique of practices towards embedded ethics and interactive practice improvement, and (...) from a legal defence of rights towards fostering interdependent practices of responsibility. This article describes these transitions within bioethics in relation to the broader societal and cultural dynamics within Western societies, and traces the implications for the methodologies and changing roles of the bioethicist. The bioethicist we foresee is not just a clever expert but also a relationally sensitive person who engages stakeholders in reciprocal dialogues about their practice of responsibility and helps to integrate various sorts of knowledge (embodied, experiential, visual, and cognitive-scientific). In order to illustrate this new approach, we present a case study. It concerns a project focusing on an innovation in elderly care, based on the participation of various stakeholders, especially older people themselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 134-135 [Access article in PDF] Allen Speight. Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 154. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95. Hegel's notorious use of literary references in his Phenomenology of Spirit has been a source of numerous interpretive difficulties, sparking disagreements not only about the actual referents of Hegel's literary allusions, but also—and (...) more importantly—about the meaning and purpose of such allusions. In this insightful, highly readable new book, Allen Speight challenges the stale orthodoxies that have pitted the Phenomenology's systematic/philosophical readers against its literary/historical ones, and offers an innovative interpretation that takes seriously the work's literary structure and allusions, while also giving due consideration to its systematic philosophical aims. Combining the rich sensibility of a literary mind with the careful rigor of a philosophical mind, Speight deftly shows how Hegel's Phenomenology is a work whose very aim, in part, is to transcend the traditional, but often limiting, dichotomy between philosophy and literature.As Speight explains it, the general purpose of this book is to make "a contribution to understanding the philosophical project of the Phenomenology and why that project requires Hegel's appropriation of literary works and forms as it does" (9-10). The book's philosophical point of departure is the critical mass of recent scholarship that sees Hegel's epistemological task in the Phenomenology as essentially Sellarsian in its critique of the "Myth of the Given." For Speight, the Hegelian critique of the myth of the given implies that all knowledge claims are essentially corrigible and socially mediated, and this implies—in turn—that any attempt to draw rigid lines of demarcation between a purely "systematic" and a purely "historical" or "anthropological" approach to philosophy and its problems must ultimately fail. From this interpretive vantage point, Speight holds, a strong case can be made for the essentially literary character of Hegel's Phenomenology, and the essentially philosophical purpose of his literary allusions. As Speight is careful to acknowledge, his own distinctive approach to the Phenomenology is not meant to rule out other, divergent emphases or interpretations, but only to provide "a way of better understanding the role that literature plays within the philosophical enterprise of the work as a whole" (18).Speight begins to deliver the details of his promised "better way" by investigating what he calls the "literary turn" or the seemingly sudden "eruption of the literary" that starts to motivate the Phenomenology's transition from the section on "Reason" to the section on "Spirit." For Speight, the shapes of Active Reason that are crucial in this transition begin to raise a new set of problems concerning human agency. Furthermore, it is not at all a coincidence that Hegel's heightened concern with agency at this juncture of the Phenomenology [End Page 134] is accompanied by an unmistakable burst of literary references. Rather, it is an indicator of Hegel's careful, deliberate, and self-conscious strategy of using literature to make a philosophical point about agency, since it is literature—according to Speight's Hegel—that gives us privileged access to the philosophical problems of agency and their potential resolution.For Speight, Hegel's use of tragedy gives us special insight into the retrospectivity of all human action; his use of comedy points to the theatricality (or what we might call the socially mediated expressivity) of all human action; and his use of the romantic novel points to the necessity (and eventually opens up the possibility) of the forgiveness implied by all human action. While Hegel had already made use of both tragedy and comedy in the Reason section of the Phenomenology, it is only in the Spirit section, Speight argues, that these literary-philosophical shapes are taken up (e.g., in Antigone and Rameau's Nephew) in a historically self-conscious way that can lead (via the "beautiful soul" novel) to the possibility of forgiveness and thereby instigate the transition to the Religion section.Speight's "better way... (shrink)

In the history of philosophy, Fichte's thought marks a crucial transitional stage between Kant and post-Kantian philosophy. Fichte radicalized Kant's thought by arguing that human freedom, not external reality, must be the starting point of all systematic philosophy, and in Foundations of Natural Right, thought by many to be his most important work of political philosophy, he applies his ideas to fundamental issues in political and legal philosophy, covering such topics as civic freedom, rights, private property, contracts, family relations, and (...) the foundations of modern political organization. This volume offers a complete translation of the work into English, by Michael Baur, together with an introduction by Frederick Neuhouser that sets it in its philosophical and historical context. (shrink)

More and more companies are publicly taking a stand on social and political issues such as gay marriage legislation. This paper argues that this type of engagement, which can be called “corporate political advocacy,” raises new conceptual and normative challenges especially for theories of corporate responsibility. Furthermore, it poses practical challenges for managers who are confronted with it. This paper addresses all three challenges: first, it defines and conceptualizes corporate political advocacy and distinguishes it from other forms of corporate political (...) involvement. Second, it makes normative sense of corporate advocacy as an element of corporate responsibility. Third, it reflects on the practical implications for managers dealing with this issue. (shrink)

This paper presents a report on the first Swiss Master Class in Corporate Social Responsibility, which was held between the 8th and 9th December 2006 at HEC Lausanne in Switzerland. The first section of the report introduces the topic of the master class – ‚Corporations as Political Actors – Facing the Postnational Challenge’ – as well as the concept of the master class. The second section gives an overview of papers written by nine young scholars that were selected to present (...) their research. The brief summary of each paper also includes a summary of comments from the masters, practitioners, and NGO representatives at the event. The third section brings in the perspectives of one master and one NGO representative on the discussed issues. The final section offers a brief wrap-up of the discussed topics and outlines ways to structure future conceptual and empirical research. (shrink)

This paper presents a report on the first Swiss Master Class in Corporate Social Responsibility, which was held between the 8th and 9th December 2006 at HEC Lausanne in Switzerland. The first section of the report introduces the topic of the master class – ‚Corporations as Political Actors – Facing the Postnational Challenge’ – as well as the concept of the master class. The second section gives an overview of papers written by nine young scholars that were selected to present (...) their research. The brief summary of each paper also includes a summary of comments from the masters, practitioners, and NGO representatives at the event. The third section brings in the perspectives of one master and one NGO representative on the discussed issues. The final section offers a brief wrap-up of the discussed topics and outlines ways to structure future conceptual and empirical research. (shrink)

Participation of older people in designing and improving the care and services provided in residential care settings is limited. Traditional forms of democratic representation, such as client councils, and consumer models are management-driven. An alternative way of involving older people in the decisions over their lives, grounded in notions of care ethics and deliberative democracy, was explored by action research. In line with this tradition older people engage in collective action to enhance the control over their lives and those of (...) others. In this article the theoretical background of altruistic action is presented and illustrated by a case example of a group of older women who changed the food policies within their residential home. Altruistic action is the joint and coordinated action by a group of clients based on their agenda. Such action is given in by a shared dissatisfaction and search for connections. Altruistic action may enhance the sense of self, belonging and ownership, and create a transformative movement enhancing the wellbeing and community life in residential settings. (shrink)

Client participation in elderly care organizations requires shifting traditional power relations and establishing communicative action that involves the lifeworlds of clients and professionals alike. This article describes a particular form of client participation in which one client was part of a team of professionals in a residential care home. Their joint remit was to plan the implementation of a new personal care file for residents. We describe the interactions within this team through an ethnodrama, based on participant observations and the (...) embodied presence of the researcher (first author). The narratives and voices of all team members are dramatized in this ethnodrama. Throughout the project the team members experienced confusion relating to the confrontation between lifeworld and system, as experienced by the client and professionals in the team. We analyze these tensions by making use of a Habermasian theoretical framework. We conclude that forms for collective client participation in residential care homes should be developed based on communicative action between clients and professionals, with room for emotional engagement. (shrink)

This companion provides original, scholarly, and cutting-edge essays that cover the whole range of Hegel’s mature thought and his lasting influence. A comprehensive guide to one of the most important modern philosophers Essays are written in an accessible manner and draw on the most up-to-date Hegel research Contributions are drawn from across the world and from a wide variety of philosophical approaches and traditions Examines Hegel’s influence on a range of thinkers, from Kierkegaard and Marx to Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida (...) Begins with a chronology of Hegel’s life and work and is then split into sections covering topics such as Philosophy of Nature, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Religion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Partnerships between companies and NGOs have received considerable attention in CSR in the past years. However, the role of NGO legitimacy in such partnerships has thus far been neglected. We argue that NGOs assume a status as special stakeholders of corporations which act on behalf of the common good. This role requires a particular focus on their moral legitimacy. We introduce a conceptual framework for analysing the moral legitimacy of NGOs along three dimensions, building on the theory of deliberative democracy. (...) Against this background we outline three procedural characteristics which are essential for judging the legitimacy of NGOs as potential or actual partners of corporations. (shrink)

Media outlets, industry researchers, and policy-makers are today busily extolling new robotic advances that promise to transform agriculture, bringing us ever closer to self-farming farms. Yet such techno-optimist discourse ignores the cautionary lessons of past attempts to mechanize farms. Adapting the Social Construction of Technology framework, we trace the history of efforts to replace human labor with machine labor on fruit, nut, and vegetable farms in California between 1945 and 1980—a place and time during which a post-WWII culture of faith (...) in the beneficence of technoscience applications to agriculture reached an apex. The degree to which and forms whereby mechanization gains momentum hinges on whether, how, and among whom a technological frame for mimicking human capabilities and supplanting workers coalesces. These frames, we find, vary considerably across crops, reflecting complex interactions of biology, farmer and farm worker behavior, industry supply chains, agricultural research and development, financial flows, and beliefs about labor, race, gender, and immigration. To tease out these complex dynamics, we draw directly from archival evidence to follow the development of cultivation and harvest machines through four cases spanning a spectrum of outcomes—tomatoes, nuts, peaches, and lettuce. In comparing across these cases, we find that although agricultural engineers, scientists, and their boosters framed mechanization as a triumphal narrative of progress in ‘human vs. nature’ conflicts, this techno-optimist rhetoric camouflaged deeper ‘human vs. human’ conflicts, particularly among agribusiness, farmers, and farm workers. We conclude with several insights that this historical study brings to the study of agricultural automation today. (shrink)

Previous research indicates that the depletion of self-regulatory resources can promote unethical behavior that benefits the self. Extending this literature, we focus on norm-transgressing behavior that is intended to primarily benefit others. In particular, we predicted a differing effect of self-regulatory resource depletion on dishonesty that benefits one’s group, depending on the degree of identification with the group. Following a dual process approach, we argue that if identification with the group is strong, then people may have an automatic inclination to (...) benefit their group even perhaps by lying. In contrast, if identification with the group is weak, then the default, uncontrolled impulse may be to tell the truth. Accordingly, identification with the social group should interact with self-regulatory resource depletion in predicting group-benefiting dishonesty. Focusing on pro-organizational dishonesty, we tested our hypotheses in one field study with 1269 employees and in one experimental study with 71 university students. As predicted, the results revealed a highly significant interaction of organizational identification and self-control strength: Depletion of self-regulatory resources increased the level of pro-organizational dishonesty among those who identify highly with the organization, but decreased the level of such behavior among those who identify less. (shrink)

Acknowledgment section of the work "Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S. Harris".

Contributors section of "Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S. Harris".

Contents section in "Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S. Harris".

Frontmatter for "Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S. Harris".

This section contains a list of Hegel's works and their corresponding abbreviations used throughout the book.

An emerging discourse about automated agricultural machinery imagines farms as places where farmers and workers do not need to be, but also implicitly frames farms as intolerable places where people do not want to be. Only autonomous machines, this story goes, can relieve farmers and workers of this presumed burden by letting them ‘farm at a distance’. In return for this distanced autonomy, farmers are promised increased control over their work-life balance and greater farm productivity from letting ‘smart’ robots assume (...) control over the operational environment. Drawing upon the ways that these machines are promoted by manufacturers in various media, we trace the nascent contours of what we term a liberatory sociotechnical imaginary for agricultural automation across three cases—automated milking systems, self-driving tractors, and robotic strawberry pickers. We show how promises for new freedoms and autonomy are flexibly deployed to respond to distinct frictions that farmers, workers, and even farm animals experience in different modes of industrial agriculture. However, underlying these promises is the purposefully understated self-interest of manufacturers, who stand to gain further control over farms if automated technologies assume a central role in agriculture. Through the liberatory rhetoric, we contend, the imaginary seeks to enroll farmers into a socio-technical network that creates new relations of dependence upon the companies who design, sell, maintain, and often retain ownership over automated technologies. While potentially powerful, this imaginary may nonetheless fail to coalesce as farmers, workers, and agroecosystems exert their own agency on automated imaginaries and technological futures for agriculture. (shrink)

According to Immanuel Kant’s well-known account of his own intellectual development, it was the skeptic David Hume who roused him from his dogmatic slumber. According to some popular accounts of post-Kantian philosophy, it was the soporific speculation of the idealists that quickly returned German philosophy to the Procrustean bed of unverifiable metaphysics, where it dogmatically slept for half of the nineteenth century. This popular picture of post-Kantian German philosophy receives some apparent support from the relevant evidence. After all, Kant had (...) allegedly demonstrated the illegitimacy of all metaphysical speculation that transcends the bounds of experience, and the writings of the German idealists - filled as they are with references to what is putatively “absolute” and “unconditioned” - seem to violate Kant’s strictures. In place of this popular conception, I seek to sketch out a rather difference picture of German idealism. The development of post-Kantian German idealism is best described, not as a turning away from skepticism, but rather as a radicalization of it. The radicalization of skepticism from Kant through Fichte to Hegel, however, does not lead away from systematic philosophy. The movement of thought from Kant to Hegel coincides with the gradual realization that skeptical thought is not external to systematic philosophy, but is in fact internal to, or even identical with it. This thesis concerning the progressive “radicalization” or “internalization” of skepticism in German idealism receives some prima facie support form the relevant writings of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. (shrink)

When it comes to understanding the genesis and development of Heidegger’s thought, it would be rather difficult to overestimate the importance of the “Aristotle-Introduction” of 1922, Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle.” This text is both a manifesto which describes the young Heidegger’s philosophical commitments, as well as a promissory note which outlines his projected future work. This Aristotle-Introduction not only enunciates Heidegger’s broad project of a philosophy which is both systematic and historical; it also indicates, in particular, why (...) a principal (or fundamental) ontology can be actualized only through a destruction of the history of ontology. This text anticipates several central themes of Being and Time (e.g., facticity, death, falling), and also foreshadows some of the issues which were to occupy the later Heidegger (e.g., “truth” as a heterogenous process of unconcealment). There is no doubt that much can – and will – be written on the meaning and implications of this important text. But instead of making my own, early contribution to such a secondary literature, I have decided to limit myself in this “Preface” to a few brief remarks concerning the historical background to Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle.”. (shrink)

This article discusses the challenging context that health care professionals are confronted with, and the impact of this context on their emotional experiences. Care ethics considers emotions as a valuable source of knowledge for good care. Thinking with care ethical theory and looking through a care ethical lens at a practical case example, the authors discern reflective questions that shed light on a care ethical approach toward the role of emotions in care practices, and may be used by practitioners and (...) facilitators for care ethical reflection on similar cases, in the particular and concrete context where issues around emotional experiences arise. The authors emphasize the importance of allowing emotions to exist, to acknowledge them and to not repress them, so that they can serve as a vehicle for ethical behavior in care practices. They stress the difference between acknowledging emotions and expressing them limitlessly. Formational practices and transformational research practices are being proposed to create moral space in care institutions and to support health care professionals to approach the emotionally turbulent practices they encounter in a way that contributes to good care for all those involved. (shrink)

Marx’s theory of historical materialism seeks to explain human history and development on the basis of the material conditions underlying all human existence. For Marx, the most important of all human activities is the activity of production by means of labor. With his focus on production through labor, Marx argues that it is possible to provide a materialistic explanation of how human beings not only transform the world (by applying the “forces of production” to it) but also transform themselves in (...) transforming the world (by entering into “relations of production” with one another). For Marx, the productive labor of human beings – and the resulting interplay between the forces and relations of production – function together as the engine which drives all historical change and development. By understanding how the productive activities of human beings give rise to the division of labor and class conflict, it becomes possible, according to Marx, to understand how different historical epochs succeed one another, and how the trajectory of human history points towards a communist society within which the division of labor and class conflict will be abolished. (shrink)

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) was not a philosopher. In fact, Winckelmann had a strong interest in distancing himself from academic philosophy as he knew it. As Goethe reports, Winckelmann “complained bitterly about the philosophers of his time and about their extensive influence.” Still less was Winckelmann a Kantian philosopher; the first edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason did not appear until 1781, thirteen years after the fifty-year-old Winckelmann was shockingly murdered in Trieste. Nevertheless, many of Winckelmann’s ideas were (...) philosophically rich and suggestive and interestingly relevant to the philosophical problems that were later to be addressed by Kant and his philosophical contemporaries. It is no wonder, then, that Winckelmann’s influence can be detected in the works of some of the most important philosophically oriented thinkers of Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to Kant himself, these thinkers included Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 57 Heft: 1 Seiten: 138-154.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Michael Baur, "Situating Hegel: From Transcendental Philosophy to a Phenomenology of Spirit," in the Palgrave Hegel Handbook, edited by Marian Bykova and Kenneth Westphal (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

This paper offers a brief account of Finnis' Natural Law Legal Theory (NLLT), primarily as it is presented in Natural Law and Natural Rights, and then defends Finnis' NLLT against the recent legal positivist criticism made by Matthew H. Kramer.

Kant’s “transcendental” or “critical” philosophy is an instance of what can be called the “critique of immediacy.” As part of his critical project, Kant argues that one cannot merely assume that there is a reestablished harmony between thought and being. Instead, one must effect a “return to the subject” and examine the forms of thought themselves, in order to determine the extent to which thought and being are commensurable. As a result of his “transcendental turn,” Kant concludes that what at (...) first appears as immediately given to thought is always already (at least partly) the result of some kind of activity or mediation on the part of the thought itself. Hegel approves of Kant’s critical orientation: Kant correctly demanded to know “how far the forms of thought were capable of leading to the knowledge of truth,” and correctly concluded that “the forms of thought must be made into an object of investigation.” However, for Hegel, the problem with Kant was that he aimed to examine the forms of thought as if they were necessarily separated from being itself. Thus the Kantian strategy, for Hegel, led to a twofold absurdly. (shrink)

By way of engagement with the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Heidegger, Lonergan, and neo-Thomism more broadly, Michael Baur and Gadamer discuss historicity, the Enlightenment and scientism, the epistemic implications of hylomorphism, and the nature of human finitude and death.

According to some critics, the putative superficiality of Winckelmann's appropriation of the Greek legacy is just one instance of the emptiness that characterizes the appropriation of the Greeks by the Germans in general. Thus Eliza Maria Butler has spoken of the 'tyranny of Greece over Germany': 'If the Greeks are tyrants, the Germans are predestined slaves ... The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly; they have been obsessed by them more utterly, and they have assimilated them less than any (...) other race.” Not coincidentally, the putative freedom or unfreedom of one's appropriation of the Greek ideal is one of the basic problems at issue in this chapter. In the following pages, I argue that Winckelmann not only understood this basic problem but also touched on its actual solution, albeit in an inadequate, aesthetic manner. I go on to suggest that Hegel articulated this solution in an adequate and properly philosophical manner. (shrink)