A wide-ranging collection of philosophical essays in honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this (...) question, we tested the good true self theory against two potential boundary conditions that are known to elicit different beliefs about the self as a whole. Study 1 tested whether individual differences in misanthropy—the tendency to view humans negatively—predict beliefs about the good true self in an American sample. The results indicate a consistent belief in a good true self, even among individuals who have an explicitly pessimistic view of others. Study 2 compared true self-attributions across cultural groups, by comparing samples from an independent country and a diverse set of interdependent countries. Results indicated that the direction and magnitude of the effect are comparable across all groups we tested. The belief in a good true self appears robust across groups varying in cultural orientation or misanthropy, suggesting a consistent psychological tendency to view the true self as morally good. (shrink)

The central focus of this book is the concept of higher education reform in the light of an international and global comparative perspective. After decades of far-reaching reform, higher education around the world has profoundly changed and now has to face the challenges of the present. This volume takes a close look at these changes, the drivers of change, their effects and possible future scenarios. In their contributions the authors discuss a variety of basic concepts: learning and teaching in higher (...) education; financing and quality assurance; governance change; massification vs. equity and equality; internationalization and mobility, the implementation of lifelong structures in higher education. (shrink)

Hermeneutics can be understood on the one hand as the art of interpretation, and on the other hand as a medium for dealing with the past, for conveying events, contexts or even writings in new ways of speaking for new recipients. The interpretation of writings, however, places special demands on hermeneutics: it does not take place in a sterile vacuum, but is rather embedded in a social and cultural context that shapes the interpretation or mediation and is an expression of (...) a time, a fashion or a specific requirement of modernity. The question therefore arises as to what role reason and experience, science and/or social ideas, tradition(s) and/or community play in interpretation. Using Thomas More's masterpiece Utopia as an example, various resulting interpretative approaches to a concrete writing will be presented. Through the hermeneutic design of a historical horizon in relation to Thomas More's time as well as through the development of a historical awareness of the work, the possibility of an understanding of this world-famous, still controversial writing as well as the efficiency of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics will become recognisable. (shrink)

Die Autoren berichten über die erste kontrollierte Psychotherapiestudie, die psychoanalytische und kognitiv-verhaltenstherapeutische Langzeitpsychotherapien mit randomisierter und präferierter Zuweisung mit­einander vergleicht. In vier Behandlungszentren wurden 554 chronisch depressive Patienten interviewt, von denen 252 in die Studie aufgenommen werden konnten. In den Selbsteinschätzungen der Patienten zeigten sich große und stabile Veränderungen. Die vollständige Remissionsrate (für BDI) lag nach einem Jahr bei 34 % und stieg auf 45 % nach drei Jahren. Analoge Ergebnisse zeigten sich in den Einschätzungen der unabhängigen, bezogen auf die (...) Therapieverfahren verblindeten Rater (QIDS). Entgegen ihrer Hypothesen fanden die Autoren aber keinen statistisch signifikanten Unterschied zwischen den Verfahren und auch keine Effektunterschiede zwischen randomisierter Therapiezuweisung und Behandlung mit der präferierten Psychotherapie. Besser als in anderen Studien sind die erzielten Remissionsraten, die zeigten, dass chronisch depressive Patienten von Langzeitpsychotherapien profitieren. (shrink)

In der systematisch-theologischen Studie wird am Beispiel des Werkes von Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) die Frage der Verhältnisbestimmung von Theologie und Naturwissenschaft untersucht und systematisch entfaltet. Im Zuge einer Übersetzung von Grundstrukturen "objektiver" Weltbetrachtung in Kategorien eines sprachlich-hermeneutischen Wirklichkeitsverständnisses ermöglicht Hamann die Verbindung von Schöpfung als Kommunikationsgeschehen mit einer ihre "grammatischen" Strukturen erschließenden Naturerkenntnis.

This paper summarizes (in German) recent tendencies in the philosophy of the life sciences.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 316-319.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Maturana?Hans Ulrich GumbrechtWhy would a German scholar specializing in pedagogical thought travel thousands of miles to Santiago de Chile for an interview with a aging scientist who, it seems, has created for himself a solid reputation in the field of "biology of vision" without being hailed by his peers as a path-breaking innovator? In the German intellectual context, the answer to this question could be as laconic (...) as it would be superfluous: it consists in a deictic reference to the name and, implicitly, to the work of Niklas Luhmann. American readers, in contrast, may need some introductory explanation in order to understand the epistemological triangle between contemporary pedagogical thought, Maturana's biology, and Luhmann's philosophy—and, above all, in order to assess and even to appreciate its intellectual potential.Niklas Luhmann is certainly difficult to read, at least for starters, and to those who met him during his lifetime he invariably appeared to be a dead-serious person. But today, more than five years after Luhmann's death, we begin to discover traces of a sometimes uncanny irony—one may want to call it a "practical irony"—in his writing. One of the discursive gestures that characterized Luhmann's texts were references to academic authors who nobody had ever heard of (let alone read), presented with the same seriousness and with the same attitude of intellectual reverence that we normally reserve for the classics: for example, to the logician Gotthart Guenter, the philosopher Fritz Heider, the biologist Humberto Maturana, or the mathematician George Spencer Brown. There is no doubt that, in each case, a specific concept or a specific thought developed by one of these authors had turned out to be truly important within Luhmann's own work, and yet the "effects of authority" that his very serious quotes produced were nothing short of hilarious. For Luhmann's readers, with that self-flagellating attitude in which we academics so like to indulge, quite regularly attributed the experience that they had never heard of those seeming "authorities" to their own lack of intellectual cosmopolitanism. This is why, until the present day, some departments of sociology or philosophy in Germany have Spencer Brown or Guenter specialists on their payrolls, and this also explains why some of those authors have had moments of intense reception [End Page 22] in the world of the humanities and social sciences at German universities. Among them, Humberto Maturana, together with his co-author the late Francisco Varela, seem to be the exception confirming the rule that none of those Luhmann references had the intellectual power to survive Luhmann himself.Now why should one trust Luhmann's trust in Maturana? The debate about the importance of Luhmann's thought (he labeled it a "theory of social systems") in the larger context of contemporary Western philosophy has barely begun to become serious, and we are certainly many years away from a definitive consensual evaluation. But there are two—very different—features about Luhmann's work that make him fascinating at first glance. One lies in the simple fact that, probably, no other thinker since Hegel has managed to develop a restrained set of basic concepts and premises into a systematically coherent philosophical edifice of similar proportions. In this sense, entering the dimension of Luhmann's thought offers the patient reader a possibility to view many familiar positions and questions from sometimes radically different innovative angles. Less obvious, however, and more intriguing is Luhmann's intellectual bet to develop his systemic thought under strict avoidance of notions such as "subject," "subjecthood," or "agency." It was this very bet (about whose existential and political motivations he only left some rather vague remarks) that explains Luhmann's fascination for much theoretical thinking emerging from biological research, above all for Humberto Maturana's work. For from a biological perspective, subjecthood and agency are highly marginal attributes in the realm of living organisms. I believe that this (almost hidden) component in Luhmann's thinking can explain the particularly strong affinity of contemporary pedagogical thought in Germany with his work. Of course, such an affinity will not necessarily lead to a pedagogical theory that, in orthodox reliance on Luhmann, will... (shrink)

Inhalt "Rund um Sokrates" Thomas Alexander Szlezak: Platon und die Pythagoreer: Das Zeugnis des Aristoteles Eva-Maria Kaufmann: Reconsidered: Gigons Abschied von Sokrates. Das Buch "Sokrates. Sein Bild in Dichtung und Geschichte" Detlef Thiel: Sokrates der Idiot." Friedlaender/Mynonas Rehabilitation Ulrich Kuhn: Das Liebesverhaltnis zwischen Alkibiades und Sokrates. Der platonische Bericht Heinz-Gerd Schmitz: Alkibiades, die Athener und die politische Torheit "Wissen und Skepsis" Rebecca Paimann: Beim Wissen ist jeder der erste. Zur Stellung der Individualitat in der spaten Wissenschaftslehre Fichtes Jurgen-Eckardt Pleines: (...) Philosophieren oder eine letzte Wahrheit. Das anhaltende Problem eines Neuplatonismus Klaus Neugebauer: Dasein und ewiges Sein. Wie Edith Stein Martin Heidegger liest Jurgen Grosse: Radikalskepsis und Philosophiekritik. Zum 100. Geburtstag von E. M. Cioran Jutta Georg: Traumlose Zeiten. Das Unbewusste im Kernspin "Gluck und Erfullung" Edgar Fruchtel: Gluck allein macht nicht glucklich. Was fuhrt zu einem erfullten Leben? Tim Gollasch: Adieu Welt"? Die vermeintliche Abkehr vom Diesseits in der Barocklyrik Georges Goedert: Vom zweifelhaften Gluck der Utilitaristen. Eine kritische Untersuchung utilitaristischen Denkens "Buchbesprechung" Harald Seubert: Vom Geist - die Wiederkehr des vergessenen Grundes der Philosophie. Aus Anlass eines bedeutenden Sammelwerke. (shrink)

Kann ein Werk, das vor allem Handbuch zu den Vorlesungen sein sollte, mit seinen Kurzfassungen von Logik und Phanomenologie die in den entsprechenden Buchern vorgelegten Entwurfe uberhaupt adaquat wiedergeben? Wie sind die Veranderungen bezuglich der Einleitungsfunktion der Phanomenologie zu bewerten? Wie schliesslich sind die auch sonst nur in Vorlesungsmitschriften uberlieferten Systemteile zur Philosophie der Natur und zur Philosophie des Geistes im Gesamtzusammenhang des Systems zu deuten? - Dies sind nur einige der Fragen, die der vorliegende Band aufgreift, um gleichzeitig eine (...) umfassende Einfuhrung in die Probleme des Hegel'schen Systems bzw. seiner einzelnen Teile zu liefern. Mit Beitragen von H.-Ch. Lucas, J. D'Hondt, N. Waszek, O. Poggeler, U. Rameil, G. Baptist, M. Bykova, W. Bonsiepen, R. Wahsner, M. Bienenstock, F. Hespe, B. Tuschling, A. Th. Peperzak, H. Schneider, M. Alvarez-Gomez, K. J. Schmidt, K. Dusing, A. Nuzzo und H. F. Fulda. (shrink)

Die Arbeit war von der Lykienforschung lange erwartet worden. Denn die wichtigen Entdeckungen lykischer Kirchen und Klöster durch M. R. Harrison in den 60er Jahren des vergangenen Jahrhundert boten nur eine kursorische Dokumentation dieser Denkmäler, die noch viele Fragen offen ließ. Daher versprachen die 1976 und 1977 durchgeführten Surveys der beiden Autoren entscheidende „Nachbesserungen“ und neue Erkenntnisse. Leider blieb das Manuskript ganze 20 Jahre liegen, ehe es zum Druck gegeben wurde, der dann noch einmal sechs Jahre auf sich warten ließ. (...) Es fußt auf einem Forschungsstand von 1997. Damit konnte der in den letzten Jahren erfolgte Schub jüngerer Forschung zu frühbyzantinischen Denkmälern Lykiens nicht mehr berücksichtigt werden. Es sei daher hier jeweils auf die jüngsten relevanten Arbeiten verwiesen. (shrink)