This edition illustrates Gottfried Salomon-Delatour's lifelong engagement with his former teacher Ernst Troeltsch. Salomon-Delatour's memorial-lecture from 1963 given at the University of Heidelberg is a rare and lengthy document, in which a sociologist tries to understand the idea of history from a methodological point of view. The text offers an intelligent and lucid defense of Troeltsch's concept of historicism in the age of scepticism after WorldWar II. The document forms part of the Gottfried (...) class='Hi'>Salomon-Delatour papers at the University Archive in Bielefeld. This is the first publication of material from this collection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ethics of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) DAVID BAUMGARDT* SALOMON MAIMON is now generally considered the most acute mind among the earliest critics of Kant. Kant himself had praised his acumen,1 though later qualifying his regard decisively.2 Johann Gottfried Herder called * We have just learned of the death of the author. David Baumgardt, born in Germany on April 20, 1890, studied in Vienna and in Berlin (...) and taught philosophy at the University of Berlin from 1924 to 1935 as Privatdozent, Extraordinarius and Ordinarius, until he was forced by Germany's racial laws to resign, but after the end of the war the Free University of Berlin appointed him honorary professor. From 1935 to 1939 he taught at the University of Birmingham; after his arrival in the United States he first joined the staff of the Pendle Hill School and, from 1941 to 1954, he served with the Library of Congress as a consultant in the field of philosophy. In 1955-56 he was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. After his retirement he continued to publish and at present there are five publications by him in the press. The number of books and articles written by him probably well exceeds two hundred. Just in the last months of his life he was presented with a Festschri[t (Horizons of a Philosopher), indicative of a wide range of friends, students, and fellow-scholars who wanted to express their appreciation of the man and his work. On the continent Baumgardt was perhaps best known for two books: Franz yon Baader (1927) and Der Kampf um den Lebenssinn unter den Vorliiufern der Modernen Ethik (1933). The former threw full light on an important but unduly neglected figure of the German romantic school of philosophy; the latter confronts Kant's rationalistic ethics with the irrationalism of a Herder, Hemsterhuis, and Jacobi. In the United States he published, among others, Bentham and the Ethics of Today (1952) and Great Western Mystics (1961), originally delivered as Matchette Lectures, but enriched, for publication, by voluminous notes containing a wealth of information on mystics, some of whom, especially Jewish ones, are familiar only to the expert. At the time of his death he was working on a book which would probably have become his opus magnum: an attempt to reconcile what he called the ethics of force with the ethics of love. Baumgardt described his own philosophic position as that of a Benthamian hedonist, asserting that only hedonism, when carried to its conclusions, would permit such a reconciliation. Systematic, ethical and religious problems underlay all his historic research; thus his loss will be felt keenly and widely. (PHILIP MERLAN) t See Kant's Gesammelte Schri[ten, ed. K6nig. Preuss. Akad. Wissenschaften, Vol. XI, Abt. II, Kant's Briefwechsel (1900), Vol. II, p. 49, letter to Marcus Herz, May 26, 1789: "Nicht allein" hat "niemand yon meinen Gegnern reich und die Hauptfrage so wohl verstanden, sondern nur wenige... mochten zu dergleichen tiefen Untersuchungen so viel Scharfsinn besitzen... als Hr. Maymon." 2See ibid., p. 476, letter to Carl Leonhard Reinhold, March 28, 1794: "Was aber z. B. ein Maimon mit seiner Nachbesserung der critischen Philosophie... eigentlich wolle," habe ich "nie recht fassen k6nnen." The noticeable change in Kant's judgment of Maimon's work is hardly due to the fact that his praising remarks were addressed to a Jewish friend and the disapproving ones to a gentile disciple. The reason for this shift in his evaluation of Maimon's later writings 099] 200 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Maimon's Versuch iiber die Transzendentalphilosophie "profound" and "comprehensive.''~ Even Goethe and Schiller mentioned him with esteem in their correspondence;~ and Johann Gottlieb Fichte explicitly' warned that coming centuries would ridicule us bitterly for disregarding this "immensely great talent." It may, therefore, not be out of place if, even more than 150 years after Maimon's death, some attention is paid to his generally neglected criticism of Kant's categorical imperative. Maimon's acute critical observations on Kant's ethics may claim to be of interest even to the analysis of some basic issues of contemporary moral philosophy. In an autobiography, culturally of general interest, edited by the psychologist and esthetician Karl... (shrink)

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION T JLJe1bn1z was above all things a metaphysician. That does not mean that his head was in the clouds, or that the particular sciences ...

Gottfried Achenwall, _Prolegomena to Natural Law_, ed. Pauline Kleingeld, trans. Corinna Vermeulen. Groningen: University of Groningen Press, 2020. Open Access, available via the 'direct download' link below. This is the first English translation of _Prolegomena iuris naturalis_ by Gottfried Achenwall (1719–1772). In this book, Achenwall presents the philosophical foundation for his comprehensive theory of natural law. The book is of interest not only because it provides the basis for a careful, systematic, and well-respected eighteenth-century theory of natural law (...) in the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition, but also because it sheds important light on the work of Immanuel Kant. Achenwall’s work influenced Kant’s legal and political philosophy as well as his ethics, and it is indispensable for understanding Kant’s _Feyerabend Lectures on Natural Law_ and his _Metaphysics of Morals_. The present volume complements the translation of Achenwall’s handbook, _Natural Law_ (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). (shrink)

Controversies are boiling these days among distinguished men over true and false ideas. This is an issue of great importance for recognizing truth—an issue on which Descartes himself is not altogether satisfactory. So I want to explain briefly what I think can be established about the distinctions and criteria that relate to ideas and knowledge. [Here and in..

Beyond the world, i.e. beyond the collection of finite things, there is some one being who rules, not only as the soul is the ruler in me (or, to put it better, as the self is the ruler in my body), but also in a much higher way. For the one being who rules the universe doesn’t just •govern the world but also •builds or makes it. He is above the world and outside it, so to speak, and therefore he (...) is the ultimate reason for things. ·That follows because •he is the only extramundane thing, i.e. the only thing that exists out of the world; and •nothing in the world could be the ultimate reason for things. I now explain that second premise·. We can’t find in any individual thing, or even in the entire collection and series of things, a sufficient reason why they exist. Suppose that a book on the elements of geometry has always existed, each copy made from an earlier one, ·with no first copy·. We can.. (shrink)

1. A substance is a being that is capable of action. It is either •simple, meaning that it has no parts, or •composite, meaning that it is a collection of simple substances or monads. (Monas is a Greek word meaning ‘unity’ or ‘oneness’.) Any composite thing—any body—is a multiplicity, ·a many, but simple substances are unities, ·or ones·. There must be simple substances everywhere, because without simples there would be no composites—·without ones there could not be manies·. And simple substances (...) are lives, souls, minds—·where there is a simple substance there is life·—and the world’s being full of such substances means that the whole of nature is full of life. (shrink)

"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."-Johann Gottfried Herder Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's Plastik (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist (...) thought with a wide range of sources-from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible-to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture. Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, Sculpture is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory. Jason Gaiger's translation of Sculpture includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text. (shrink)

Religion has returned as a political and cultural factor. After the political ideologies, whose secular and worldly promises of salvation had influenced the history of the 20th century in such a radical manner, had been invalidated, the reappearance of religion on a global level cannot be overlooked: as a focal power as to how to conduct one’s life, as a guarantor of cultural identity, and as religious-political creativity. We cannot understand the current state of the world, its crises, conflicts and (...) wars, but also the selfperception and self-awareness of non-European cultures and peoples anymore, if we do not also realise that religion as a “power of life” has returned. In addition to sketching this process, this essay raises the question: what are the cultural and political challenges which especially the secular societies of the West are to face? (shrink)

Religion has returned as a political and cultural factor. After the political ideologies, whose secular and worldly promises of salvation had influenced the history of the 20th century in such a radical manner, had been invalidated, the reappearance of religion on a global level cannot be overlooked: as a focal power as to how to conduct one’s life, as a guarantor of cultural identity, and as religious-political creativity. We cannot understand the current state of the world, its crises, conflicts and (...) wars, but also the selfperception and self-awareness of non-European cultures and peoples anymore, if we do not also realise that religion as a “power of life” has returned. In addition to sketching this process, this essay raises the question: what are the cultural and political challenges which especially the secular societies of the West are to face? (shrink)

Copyright ©2010–2015 All rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth.

This volume follows Heidegger’s development chronologically and provides a wide contextualization of his philosophy within late nineteenth and twentieth century culture. Imagine that you take the book in your hands and you want to check how Safranski deals with Heidegger’s Being and Time. He does this relatively late, in chapter 9, because of the historico-genetic approach he has chosen, which is fine. Yet Safranski begins his exposition of Being and Time with some biographical remarks about Heidegger’s having been a Catholic, (...) goes forth with a hint to Dilthey’s position about history, summarizes events from Heidegger’s academic life between 1918 and 1927, recollects a testimony by Heidegger’s friend Hermann Mörchen, adds a reference to Salomon Mainonides’s Guides for the Perplexed, and eventually introduces the work itself by explaining a series of Lapalissian truths such as, “Man has a relationship with his own Being. This Heidegger calls ‘Existence.’... The term ‘ontic’ designates everything that exists. The term ‘ontological’ designates the curious, astonished, alarmed thinking about the fact that I exist and that anything exist at all”. Safranski closes the chapter by referring to Adolf Hitler’s writing of his Mein Kampf two years earlier, by quoting a poem by Walter Mehrig and the popular novel Grand Hotel as well as another poem by Gottfried Benn. Evidently, this book does not target scholars, it rather targets the learned public at large in so far as it may have an interest in a passionate and well documented intellectual biography. In a word, philosophy students will enjoy reading it as a way of being introduced to Heidegger’s philosophy, but will nonetheless be aware of the fact that the book’s aim reduces itself to summarizing the contents of Heidegger’s writings while putting them into the context of other summarized writings that were contemporary to them. (shrink)

Leibniz’s De incerti aestimatione, which contains his solution to the division problem, has not received much attention, let alone much appreciation. This is surprising because it is in this work that the definition of probability in terms of equally possible cases appears for the first time. The division problem is used to establish and test probability theory; it can be stated as follows: if two players agree to play a game in which one has to win a certain number of (...) rounds in order to win the pool, but if they break the game off before either of them has won the required number of rounds, how should the pool be distributed? Our article has two aims: it provides the readers with the first published English translation of De incerti aestimatione, and it also gives them a brief commentary that explains Leibniz’s philosophical and mathematical concepts necessary in order to understand this work. The translation is as literal as possible throughout; it shows how Leibniz struggled at times to find a solution to the division problem and how he approached it from different angles. The commentary discusses Leibniz’s views on four key concepts: fairness, hope, authority and possibility. The commentary then outlines how Leibniz attempted to solve the problem of division. (shrink)

Die Religion ist in die Position des politischen und kulturellen Faktors zurückgekehrt. Nachdem die politischen Ideologien, deren säkulare und diesseitige Erlösungsversprechen die Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts durchgreifend bestimmt haben, entkräftet worden sind, kann die Wiedererscheinung der Religion auf der globalen Ebene nicht vernachlässigt werden: als brennende Lebensmacht in puncto Führung des Eigenlebens, als Garant der kulturellen Identität sowie als religiös-politische Kreativität. Wir können die aktuelle Weltlage, ihre Krisen, Konflikte samt Kriegen, aber auch die Selbstperzeption und das Selbstbewusstsein außereuropäischer Kulturen und (...) Völker nicht mehr begreifen, ohne zeitgleich einzusehen, die Religion sei als Webers „Lebensmacht“ wiedergekehrt. Im Anhang zur Skizzierung dieses Prozesses stellt dieser Artikel die Frage: Welche sind die kulturellen und politischen Herausforderungen, mit denen insbesondere die säkularen Gesellschaften des Westens konfrontiert werden? (shrink)

Religija se vratila na mjesto političkog i kulturnog čimbenika. Nakon što su političke ideologije, čija su sekularna i svjetovna obećanja spasenja utjecala na povijest 20. stoljeća na radikalan način, obesnažena, ponovna pojava religije na globalnom nivou ne može biti zanemarena: kao žarišna sila po pitanju vođenja vlastitog života, kao jamac kulturnom identitetu i kao religijsko-politička kreativnost. Ne možemo više razumjeti trenutno stanje u svijetu, njegove krize, konflikte i ratove, ali također i samopercepciju i samosvjesnost izvaneuropskih kultura i naroda, ako isto (...) tako ne shvatimo da se religija kao »moć života« vratila. U dodatku skice ovog procesa ovaj članak postavlja pitanje: koji su kulturni i politički izazovi s kojima se posebno suočavaju sekularna društva Zapada? (shrink)

L’œuvre immnse de Max Weber est resté fragmentaire. Qui plus est, les innombrables interprétations de Weber n’ont pas réussi jusqu’à présent à établir une unité intrinsèque de son œuvre. Le présent article se propose de montrer très succinctement que, pour Weber, la question cruciale est celle de la force formatrice historique et culturelle de la religion. Revenant souvent dans l’ensemble de son œuvre, cette question aide à déceler son unité intrinsèque. Sans la force de la religion, il est impossible, selon (...) Weber, de comprendre la naissance de la modernité occidentale laïque. Le «désenchantement» du monde occidental est le résultat d’un processus millénaire dans l’histoire de la religion. En même temps, la tragédie de la religion procède du fait qu’elle s’est résorbée elle-même au cours de ce processus de désenchantement. Bien qu’elle ne soit pas définitivement morte, elle n’est plus une force formatrice culturelle. (shrink)

Max Webers riesiges Werk blieb Fragment. Insbesondere ist es den zahllosen Weber-Interpretationen bislang nicht wirklich gelungen, eine innere Einheit des Werkes aufzuweisen. Dieser Aufsatz versucht in höchst kompremierter Form zu zeigen, dass für Weber die Frage nach der geschichts- und kulturbestimmenden Kraft der Religion eine Schlüsselfrage ist, die das ganze Werk durchzieht und dessen innere Einheit zu entziffern hilft. Ohne die Macht der Religion ist für Weber die Entstehung der säkularen westlichen Moderne nicht zu verstehen. Insbesondere ist die „Entzauberung“ der (...) okzidentalen Welt selbst das Ergebnis eines jahrtausend alten religionsgeschichtlichen Prozesses. Dabei ist es die Tragödie der Religion, dass sie in dem Prozess der Entzauberung, dessen Trägerin sie war, selbst sich aufhob. Sie kam, wenn auch nicht an ihr faktisches historisches Ende, so doch an ihr Ende als kulturbestimmende Lebensmacht. (shrink)

Le terme de culture est utilisé à l’heure actuelle, dans le discours intellectuel comme dans la langue courante, pour ainsi dire de façon excessive. Mais, en l’employant à tort et à travers, à la fois la notion et la chose perdent leur puissance diagnostique et analytique. Cet exposé essaie de montrer – en s’appuyant sur l’oeuvre de Max Weber et sur la nouvelle anthropologie philosophique, notamment celle d’Arnold Gehlen – que la culture constitue un fait social fondamental et anthropologiquement établi, (...) sans lequel ni la vie de l’individu ni la compréhension de l’histoire ou le développement des peuples, des nations et des sociétés, ne seraient possibles. En toile de fond d’une telle nouvelle évidence par rapport à la compréhension de la culture se trouvent des questions liées à l’actualité comme par exemple : le Choc des cultures ? Les sociétés multiculturelles sont-elles possibles ? Les sociétés, les peuples et les nations ont-ils besoin pour survivre d’une « culture de référence » ? (shrink)

U današnje vrijeme doživljavamo, kako u intelektualnom diskursu tako i u jeziku svakodnevice, jednu zapravo inflacijsku upotrebu pojma ‘kultura’. No, ako se baš sve može nazivati kulturom, tada i pojam i stvar gube svoju dijagnostičku i analitičku snagu. Članak pokušava – posežući za djelom Maxa Webera i novijom filozofskom antropologijom – pokazati da kultura predstavlja jednu antropološki utemeljenu, društvenu temeljnu činjenicu bez čije moći nije moguć ni život pojedinca niti je razumljiva povijest i razvoj naroda, nacija i društava. U pozadini (...) takvog ponovnog osvjedočenja glede razumijevanja ‘kulture’, stoje aktualnošću određena pitanja, kao npr.: Borba kultura ? Mogu li postojati multikulturalna društva? Potrebuju li društva, narodi, nacije jednu »vodeću kulturu« kao uvjet njihova opstanka. itd. (shrink)

Wir erleben gegenwärtig im intellektuellen Diskurs ebenso wie in der Alltagssprache eine geradezu inflationäre Verwendung des Begriffes Kultur. Wenn aber alles und jedes Kultur heißen kann, verlieren Begriff und Sache ihre diagnostische und analytische Kraft. Der Aufsatz versucht – unter Rückgriff auf das Werk Max Webers und auf die neuere philosophische Anthropologie – zu zeigen, daß Kultur eine anthropologisch begründete, gesellschaftliche Grundtatsache darstellt, ohne deren Macht weder die Lebensführung des Einzelnen möglich noch die Geschichte und Entwicklung von Völkern, Nationen und (...) Gesellschaften verstehbar ist. Im Hintergrund einer solchen Neuvergewisserung des Verstehens von Kultur stehen aktualitätsbestimmte Fragen wie: Kampf der Kulturen ? Kann es multikulturelle Gesellschaften geben? Bedürfen Gesellschaften, Völker und Nationen als Bedingung ihres Überlebens einer „Leitkultur”? usw. (shrink)

Through present time we’re experiencing, as in intellectual discourse also in everyday language, one truly inflationary use of the notion of culture. If almost everything can be marked by the name of culture, then the notion and the object lose their diagnostic and analytical ground. This elaboration attempts – through the work of Max Weber and the recent philosophical anthropology – to explain that culture is one anthropologically founded, socially basic fact without whose involvement there is no possibility of individual’s (...) life nor is understandable history of development of people, nations and societies. In the background of such re-defining, regarding the understanding of culture, with their actuality, are certain questions, e.g.: clash of cultures ? Can there be any multicultural society? Is there a need among societies, peoples, nations for one “dominant culture” as a necessity for their survival? etc. (shrink)

(1977). VON SIEBEN INKUNABEL-AUSGABEN DES “THALMUT-OBIECTIONES…” UND VON DER FRAGE NACH DEM VERFASSER DIESER SCHRIFT. Bijdragen: Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 431-444.