The amplitude and the diversity of Ricoeur’s philosophical production is astonishing. Three factors shed light upon this fact. First, his philosophical career covers seventy years wherein he witnessed the rise and the decline of tlve philosophical -isms. Further, he is a typical dialogical thinker: in conversation with the great classical and modern philosophers, and eager to listen to the methods and results of human an linguistics sciences. A third reason, particularly of differentiation, stems from his double conviction and commitment. On (...) the one hand, he wants to be a rigorous philosopher, even keeping on a methodic agnosticism. On the other hand, however, he is a convinced Christian, and so he also likes to think critically – a rigorous philosophizing here is inappropriate – on religion, belief, and biblical language and topics. Nevertheless, it is only since 2000 that he is getting fully aware of the disintegrated impression many readers have from his publications. In his opinion, this impression is perfectly understandable: a reading public and myself are on completely different wavelengths. From reading my books people spontaneously nurture their own expectation with regard to coming publications, whereas my concern always was: am I answering your questions? So, in four recent articles Ricoeur speaks of his technical philosophy composed of eleven books: from The voluntary and the Involontary to the Course of Recognition . He argues that the continuity of his basic philosophical writings is, each time, determined by a residue, a question the preceding publication left open. But, where to situate then his twenty-two other books into a global and consistent picture? All these other works are explorations of specific philosophical issues, and reflections and topics as prophecy, tragedy and religion bordering philosophy. For this matter, a fully rigorous philosophical discourse is not always possible. These writings, however, find their setting around the hard core of his philosophy. Ricoeur himself only mentions two genres: volumes of articles for a larger audience as History and Truth and university lectures as Lectures on Ideology and Utopia . But other headings need to be added to umbrella other publications: historical and autobiographic writings, collection of articles on political topics, on the sacred and biblical language, on philosophy of law, and on medical ethical issues. On a more remote distance from the heart of his philosophy are located hundred of articles and interviews on philosophical topics, reflections on actual themes, an even some homilies. To amazement of many, two eminent Ricoeur commentators recently characterized his philosophy as “An Ontology of Life”. This is not as strange as it looks! Already in The voluntary and the Involontary. Ricoeur offers a phenomenology of “life, to be in life and birth”. To him, life also is a lived and hard-won value. In fact, belief in life is related to his main category of “originative affirmation” and of “hope”. Hope, however, is never a knowledge but only the regulative idea of my metaphysical thinking, and it remains inextricably bound up with the anguish for a senseless totality. “Nothing is closer to the anguish of nonsense than timid hope.”. (shrink)

This book is the 1906 second edition of the Hulsean Lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge between 1901 and 1902. In these four lectures, F. R. Tennant challenges conventional teachings on Original Sin and the story of the Fall, arguing that his contemporaries had misinterpreted the biblical presentation of sin and its manifestations. Tennant aims to redefine the sin of both the race and the individual, and in doing so engages with traducianism and the philosophies of Malebranche, Kant and (...) Hegel. He argues that action predates modern conceptions of right and wrong, and that transgression is only sin if the actor is aware of what is morally right. Of course, these theories were met with great opposition, an opposition which Tennant uses the preface of this second edition to confront. These fascinating lectures and their appendages will be of great interest to scholars of Christian theology and the fin de siècle alike. (shrink)

This Companion provides a fresh and comprehensive account of this outstanding work, which remains among the most frequently read works of Greek philosophy, indeed of Classical antiquity in general. The sixteen essays, by authors who represent various academic disciplines, bring a spectrum of interpretive approaches to bear in order to aid the understanding of a wide-ranging audience, from first-time readers of the Republic who require guidance, to more experienced readers who wish to explore contemporary currents in the work’s interpretation. The (...) three initial chapters address aspects of the work as a whole. They are followed by essays that match closely the sequence in which topics are presented in the ten books of the Republic. Since the Republic returns frequently to the same topics by different routes, so do the authors of this volume, who provide the readers with divergent yet complementary perspectives by which to appreciate the Republic’s principal concerns. (shrink)

- How can anthropology improve our understanding of the interrelationship between nature and culture? - What can anthropology contribute to practical debates which depend on particular definitions of nature, such as that concerning sustainable development? Humankind has evolved over several million years by living in and utilizing 'nature' and by assimilating it into 'culture'. Indeed, the technological and cultural advancement of the species has been widely acknowledged to rest upon human domination and control of nature. Yet, by the 1960s, the (...) idea of culture in confrontation with nature was being challenged by science, philosophy and the environmental movement. Anthropology is increasingly concerned with such issues as they become more urgent for humankind as a whole. This important book reviews the current state of the concepts of 'nature' we use, both as scientific devices and ideological constructs, and is organised around three themes: - nature as a cultural construction; - the cultural management of the environment; and - relations between plants, animals and humans. (shrink)

Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential A Theory of Justice, this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy” is “to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed R. G. Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp (...) of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities. (shrink)

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge. These experiences of (...) rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth. (shrink)

The vocabulary of representation is better suited to an understanding of historiography than the vocabularies of description and interpretation. Since both art and historiography represent the world, they are closer to science than are criticism and the history of art because the interpretation of meaning is the specialty of the latter two fields. Historiography is less secure in its attempt to represent the world than art is; historiography is more artificial, more an expression of cultural codes than art itself. Historiography (...) is a suitable paradigm for studying certain philosophical problems, particularly epistemology, or codified representation. Representation always requires the presence of two sets of non-referential logical dummies; disturbing the symmetry between these logical dummies gives rise to the position of realism and idealism. Epistemology is strongly inclined to disturb this symmetry. The parallels between recent developments in art and those in historiography demonstrate how much historiography is part of the contemporary cultural world. The deficiencies of modern philosophy of history can largely be explained by its tendency to neglect the cultural significance of the writing of history. (shrink)

All logic instruments and tools in possession of, and used by researchers are generally considered as the results of bivalent logic. A common error to people interested in science is that, usually, they don’t known with certainty which things are true and which are false. But they are sure that things are true or false. No ways in the middle. The fuzzy principle asserts that this is completely a question of measure. Fuzziness is the opposite concept to bivalency, while fuzzy (...) quality means polyvalency. Fuzzy logic is able to manage uncertain knowledge and, more precisely, to manage those rules difficult to formalize. In many cases, such rules haven’t got, or cannot have, the necessary precision, required for a whole formalization. (shrink)

We no longer have any texts, any past, but just interpretations of them. The evident multi -interpretability of a text causes it gradually to lose its capacity to function as arbiter in the historical debate. It is necessary to define a new link with the past based on a complete and honest recognition of the position in which we now see ourselves placed as historians. In recent years, many people have observed our changed attitude towards the phenomenon of information. For (...) postmodernism, science and information are independent objects of study which obey their own laws. Language and art are not situated opposite reality but are themselves a pseudo-reality and are therefore situated within reality. Because of the relation between the historiographical view and the language used by the historian to express his view - a relation which nowhere intersects the domain of the past -historiography possesses the same opacity and intensional dimension as art. The essence of postmodernism is precisely that we should avoid pointing out essentialist patterns in the past. There is reason to assume that our relation to the past and our insight into it will in future be of a metaphorical nature rather than a literal one. (shrink)

The narrativist philosophy of history and the epistemological philosophy of history are opposed to each other and have remarkably little in common. Within the epistemological philosophy, the debate between the coveringlaw model advocates and the analytical hermeneutists has always been moving towards synthesis more than towards perpetuation of the disagreement. But the revolution from epistemological to narrativist philosophy of history enacted in Hayden White's work made the philosophy of history finally catch up with the developments in philosophy since the works (...) of Quine, Kuhn, and Rorty. White stresses the "making" or "poetic" function of narrative at the expense of the "matching" function so dear to the mimetic epistemology of positivism. Philosophers of history should shake off this positivistic past and make history narrativist. (shrink)

Plato presents us with two versions of the "third man" argument in the "parmenides": they occur in a tightly-knit passage of reasoning containing four arguments against the theory of forms (130e-133a). The orthodox interpretation is that both versions are attempts to show that certain basic tenets of the theory, including a one-over-many principle, form an inconsistent set. The author argues that this interpretation cannot be correct, since it renders incoherent the train of thought in the wider passage and is unable (...) to explain the occurrence of certain perceptual expressions within the first version of the "third man" argument. The author proposes an alternative reading of this version which avoids these difficulties. (shrink)

Sans perdre de vue la centralité des luttes handies dans l’élaboration d’une pensée anti-validiste l’article détaille les mutations sociotechniques qui affectent les corps humains et en fixent la validité et la disponibilité : il explore les tensions politiques et épistémiques s’éveillant au contact des expériences d’indisposition, d’indisponibilité, et d’indisposabilité. Mais ces corps indociles produisent plus qu’une usure de ce système de mise à disposition : ils développent un autre imaginaire du corps, et de son usage, que nous qualifions de passage (...) de la fRiction, à la fiction. (shrink)

First published in 1912, this book by F. R. Tennant was intended to redress the vague and inconsistent conceptions of sin that were popularly held at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tennant maintained that for any ongoing debate to remain meaningful, it was imperative that definitions of key terms should keep pace with discussion. Therefore his study aimed at providing a clear, logical definition of what sin in Christian doctrine represented, whilst also bringing to bear the importance of ethics (...) and psychology to any modern understanding of the subject. (shrink)

For the philosopher Ivan Illich, society became a set of systems rather than a group of people. As such, society depersonalizes life and brings the need for open non-systematized spaces where people can act and interact outside their typical roles. On the other hand, an absence of formal structures may simply open spaces for the informal reproduction of society’s already well-established structures. Given this conjuncture, can systems be designed to foster personal expression? The answer I found in cybernetics is self-organization, (...) a process of adaptation to a context that can grow different organizations depending on what this context provides. This implies that personal expression is a concern in society’s emergent organizations, calling for meta planning to design the context of some of society’s self-organization processes. The cybernetician Gordon Pask argued that depersonalization follows from non-conversational communications, like the ones that develop in large committees. In response, Pask’s fellow cybernetician Stafford Beer proposed a meeting protocol called Team Syntegrity allowing large groups to subdivide into small integrated discussion groups. While Beer’s work has been extensively discussed in existent literature, this article presents the results of four experiments conducted by using variations of Beer’s protocol to understand both the ease with which it can be adapted to different situations, and the implications of its conversational structure on personal expression. The experiment’s realization demonstrates that the protocol’s preparation is laborious and hard to adapt in a timely manner in situations where participant numbers fluctuate. Automation of these processes, however, offers possibilities to use the approach in loosely organized groups. Automation can also help choosing the most appropriate protocol for particular situations through the manipulation of its configuration. Despite difficulties, the protocol offers promise for different purposes, encouraging personal expression in a way that reverberates with others’ personal perspectives. (shrink)

The preceding paper described how all-pervasive was the influence that Paracelsus designated ‘astral’. In what sense, then, is it true that he placed restrictions, on astrological powers? The restriction applies to the more limited and usual sense of astrology, referring to the control of events on earth by the stars in the sky. Paracelsus was not prepared to hand over our fates entirely to a distant autocracy of the stars quite beyond our control.

References to the stars permeate the writings of Paracelsus ; yet modern authorities comment on the way he restricted astrological influence. The contradiction is only apparent, and disappears when the significance he attached to the relevant vocabulary is understood. He had in mind a kind of influence rather different from that usually thought of in connection with astrology, and the astrological jargon he bandied about had a metaphorical more often than a literal meaning. In his major works, signs of detailed (...) interest in the movements of the actual stars are few; the ‘astrological’ terminology hides a system of natural explanation by virtues or forces largely immanent in earthly objects. (shrink)