Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 61 Heft: 3 Seiten: 388-413.

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction that illuminates the field of theory through a variety of useful and relevant examples. Covering all key theories and theorists, this book looks at the relation of theory to form, discourses, subjectivity, media and networks, and environments. Organized thematically, Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory illuminates the field by focusing on the concepts and methodologies of key thinkers, while also providing historical introductions that contextualize the latest (...) developments with regard to forms; discourses; subjectivities and embodiments; media, networks, and machines; and animals, affects, objects, and environments. Each chapter includes examples from a canonical novel, a contemporary text, and a new media artefact, while textboxes regularly introduce additional emerging or overlooked theorists of interest. An ideal guide for undergraduates studying literary theory, this book will give readers the background they need to continue their own fruitful explorations of this vibrant field of study. (shrink)

Ausgehend von der Unterscheidung von Wissenschaft und Popularitat beiJ. G. Fichte und seinen Zeitgenossen schlagt die Studie einen Bogen zu der fundamentalen Unterscheidung von Wissen und Leben. Dabei werden Fichtes Theorie der Liebe, seine Stellung zum Christentum, seine Sprachphilosophie sowie die Wissenschaftslehre selbst erortert. Anschliessend kommt der Kontrast zur Position Schellings zur Sprache.'Der Verfasser hat die Grundphilosophie Fichtes zwischen 1800 und 1806 ausgezeichnet nachbeschrieben und dargestellt [.] und bereitet damit den schwierigen, aber lohnenden Gedanken Fichtes den Boden. Das ist das (...) zweifellose Verdienst des Verfassers. Moge diese Arbeit viele kompetente Leser finden.' Gunther Keil, Theologische Literaturzeitung. (shrink)

Mit diesem Buch tritt ein Autor, der mit der sprachanalytischen Philosophie ebenso vertraut ist wie mit den modernen Entwicklungen der theoretischen Sprachwissenschaft, der gängigen Meinung entgegen und versucht zu zeigen, daß die Wittgensteinsche Auffassung von der Sprache, der zufolge die Sprache eine Form sozialen Lebens ist, nicht unverträglich ist mit einer kognitiven Sprachtheorie, der zufolge die Sprache eine Form biologischen Lebens ist und in Analogie zu einem Organ gesehen werden kann. Bei dem Versuch, die scheinbar konträren Sprachauffassungen Chomskys und Wittgensteins (...) miteinander zu versöhnen, werden der Erklärungsanspruch Chomskys und der Beschreibungsanspruch Wittgensteins auf komplementäre Problemstellungen und unterschiedliche wissenschaftliche Verfahren relativiert. (shrink)

‘Language and End Time’ is a translation of Sections I, IV and V of ‘Sprache und Endzeit’, a substantial essay by Günther Anders that was published in eight instalments in the Austrian journal FORVM from 1989 to 1991. The original essay was planned for inclusion in the third volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings. ‘Language and End Time’ builds on the diagnosis of ‘our blindness toward the apocalypse’ that was advanced in the first volume of The Obsolescence in 1956. (...) The essay asks if there is a language that is capable of making us fully comprehend the looming ‘man-made apocalypse’. In response to this, it offers a critique of philosophical jargon and of the putatively ‘objective’ language of science, which are both dismissed as unsuitable. Sections I, IV and V introduce this core problematic. The selection of this text for inclusion in this special journal issue responds to present-day realities that inscribe Anders’s reflections on nuclear science and the nuclear situation into new contexts. The critique that ‘Language and End Time’ advances resonates with the way in which the decisions of a few companies and individuals are shaping the future of life on earth. At the same time, the wider stakes of Anders’s turn against the language employed by scientists are newly laid bare by the realities and politics of climate change and fake news. In this new context, the language of science is all too readily dismissed as if it were a mere idiom that can be ignored without consequence. It is against the backdrop of a future that is, if anything, more uncertain than at the time of Anders’s writing, that the essay’s reflections on popularisation, the limits of language and the nature of truth gain added significance. (shrink)

Can Marxism still serve the American left? "History and Subjectivity" answers this question by synthesizing the conflict perspectives of traditional Marxism, Western and neo-Marxism, socialist-feminism, and various minority political movements into a comprehensive and original social theory. Roger Gottlieb argues convincingly that a properly transformed Marxism must understand how socialisation processes and political structures and experiences have joined the mode of production as socially primary. Drawing on resources from Marxist philosophy, political economy, feminism, Western Marxism, and from detailed historical (...) studies of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and the American left, Gottlieb has produced a sweeping synthesis of existing Marxist thought and an original and compelling social theory. In this edition, Roger Gottlieb has added a new introduction addressing the central questions that have emerged since the book's first publication. These include the effect on Marxist theory of the fall of communism, the theoretical challenge of postmodernism, the environmental crisis, and the rise of modern spiritual movements. The book is challenging and complex, yet clearly written and accessible to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. It will provoke a strong response from any scholar concerned with the present status and future possibilities of Marxist theory. (shrink)

This anthology brings together new essays by leading figures in contemporary philosophy, scholars whose work is well known not only to the entire community of academic philosophy, but to many in the associated fields of sociology, women's studies, literary theory, and political science. Defining for the first time the boundaries and accomplishments of a body of work deeply critical of both the philosophical and the social dimensions of domination, the collection draws on diverse traditions and social movements. These include feminism, (...) critical theory, Marxism, deconstruction, democratic socialism, theories of race and ethnicity, deep ecology, and politicized spirituality. The contributors use these resources to comprehend and indict the present social order and to help us imagine a more just, liberating, and fulfilling society. In his lucid Introduction, Roger S. Gottlieb describes the formative contexts, achievements, and dilemmas of radical philosophy. Essays in Part I, Tradition, challenge the pretensions of philosophy in epistemology, ethics, and the theory of human nature. These articles unveil the social oppression hidden behind self-proclaimed attempts at Grand and Unbiased Philosophical Reason. In Part II, Counter-Tradition, the contributors engage with today's dominant critical perspectives and show how multi-faceted, rich, and sometimes confusing these perspectives are. Their topics include issues of exploitation, democracy, and justice; the current status of Marxism; the impact of deep ecology on radical theory; and some dilemmas faced by cultural feminism. Part III, Politics, addresses questions about contemporary North American political and cultural life. The essaysexamine relations among varying types of oppression, the experience of community and communities, the possibilities of fundamental political change, and the representation of difference in popular culture. (shrink)

This unique anthology brings together readings from the works of the most significant post-Leninist Marxist thinkers. The selections reflect the diversity and high intellectual accomplishment of twentieth-century Marxism and show how these theorists have transformed traditional Marxism's general philosophical orientation, interpretation of historical materialism, models of socialist political practice, and conception of human liberation. The writings reveal the evolution of a sophisticated and democratic Marxism with a theoretical emphasis on class consciousness and subjectivity, a resistance to all forms of domination--including (...) sexism--and a belief in the political power of consciousness-raising. The selections include the work of forerunners Karl Korsch, George Lukacs, and Antonio Gramsci; figures from the 1930s, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Wilhelm Reich; post-war and New Left thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Gorz, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas; and contemporary socialist-feminists Sheila Rowbotham, Juliet Mitchell, Barbara Ehrenreich, Heidi Hartmann, and Ann Ferguson. Gottlieb places the readings in historical and theoretical context, providing a clear and insightful account of the intellectual problems and historical events that gave rise to the Western Marxism, and describing how it both anticipated and influenced contemporary radical movements. Each selection is prefaced by a biographical sketch and the book concludes with a bibliography suggesting further research. (shrink)

Following decades of neglect, the work of the German Jewish philosopher, literary author, cultural critic, and poet Günther Anders (1902–1992) is gaining increasing recognition in the English-speaking world. This translation of “Résistance heute” (Resistance Today) makes one of Anders’s most programmatic and polemical short texts available. Published at the height of his anti-nuclear activism, “Resistance Today” is the written version of a speech Anders delivered in November 1962 upon acceptance of the northwest Italian city of Omegna’s Resistance Prize (other notable (...) recipients included Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon). It first appeared in print in the West German left-wing journal Das Argument in November 1963. Clearly written for the occasion, the text condenses (and often further radicalizes) key premises about the end of history, the amoral character of work, and the continuity between Nazi totalitarianism, the nuclear age and the world of consumerism that are developed in great nuance across a range of books that Anders had recently published. Key co-ordinates include: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1 (The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1, 1956), his groundbreaking critique of technology; Der Mann auf der Brücke (The Man on the Bridge, 1959), a philosophical travel diary occasioned by Anders’s 1958 visit to Japan and his participation at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Tokyo; Burning Conscience (1961), a correspondence with the American reconnaissance pilot Claude Eatherly, who scouted the target area before the Enola Gay went on to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. It seems likely that Burning Conscience, which turned into an international bestseller, occasioned the award of the prize. (shrink)

Is morality intuitive or deliberative? The distinction can obscure the role of folk moral theories in moral judgment; judgments may arise 'intuitively' yet result from abstract theoretical and philosophical commitments that participate in 'deliberative' reasoning.

Communication is defined as an interaction between at least two living agents which share a repertoire of signs. These are combined according to syntactic, semantic and context-dependent, pragmatic rules in order to coordinate behavior. This volume deals with the important roles of soil bacteria in parasitic and symbiotic interactions with viruses, plants, animals and fungi. Starting with a general overview of the key levels of communication between bacteria, further reviews examine the various aspects of intracellular as well as intercellular biocommunication (...) between soil microorganisms. This includes the various levels of biocommunication between phages and bacteria, between soil algae and bacteria, and between bacteria, fungi and plants in the rhizosphere, the role of plasmids and transposons, horizontal gene transfer, quorum sensing and quorum quenching, bacterial-host cohabitation, phage-mediated genetic exchange and soil viral ecology. (shrink)

The present debate in legal theory is dominated by an unfruitful schism. On the one hand, analytical theories are concerned with the positivity of law, running the risk of missing the law's relation to society. On the other hand, sociological approaches analyze all sorts of social interactions of law, but have developed no conceptual tools to do justice to the autonomy of law. The theory of autopoiesis offers law a chance of getting round the falsely posed alternative between an autonomous (...) rule system or a socially conditioned decision-making process. It is a theory of law that sees the law's autonomy in the self-reproduction of a communication network and understands its relation to society as interference with other autonomous communication networks. Building on the ideas of Humberto Maturana, Heinz von Foerster and Niklas Luhmann, Gunther Teubner uses the concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis to develop a concept of law as a hypercyclically closed social system. This book will stand as a landmark in legal theory and become a standard point of departure in the sociology of law. (shrink)

In the twenty-second series of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze references a remarkable essay by Günther (Stern) Anders. Anders’ essay, translated here as ‘The Pathology of Freedom’, addresses the sickness and health of our negotiation with the negative anthropological condition of ‘not being cut out for the world’.

Günther Buck legt in dieser Studie eine phänomenologisch-hermeneutische Theorie des Lernens, des Beispiels und der Analogie vor, die für Pädagogik sowie für Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften von grundlegender Bedeutung ist. Der Prozess der Erfahrung im Lernen wird in drei Momenten entfaltet: der epagogischen Gangstruktur, der antizipatorischen Horizonthaftigkeit und der dialektischen, „negativen“ Umwendung auf sich selbst. Lernen wird als Lernen aus Erfahrung und als Erfahrung kenntlich. Im zweiten und dritten Teil gelingt Buck eine Neubestimmung des Beispiels in seinen hermeneutischen, bildenden und didaktischen (...) Funktionen. Unterschiedliche Typen der Analogie werden identifiziert und deren Funktionsweisen differenziert. Mit dieser Neuausgabe kann nach 30 Jahren das bekannteste und wirkungsmächtigste Buch von Günther Buck wieder zugänglich gemacht werden. (shrink)

The Wisdom We're Born With explores the desire to live that we carry with us from birth. While some people may believe that it's impossible to acquire perspective like Gottlieb's without a similarly catastrophic life experience, the fact is that every infant possesses a raw need to keep on going. Gottlieb's book awakens us to the idea of our natural perspective, traces the growth and diminishment of that perspective over the years, and brings us back to advanced age, (...) where it recurs once more. If we are aware of this capacity in ourselves, we can actively nurture it, enabling ourselves to embrace the desire to live and grow every day, whether we're joyful or in the grip of a powerful depression. In a time of anxiety and worry, Gottlieb's words provide comfort and strength-if we can remember the wisdom we're born with, we can possess a limitless energy to keep fighting. (shrink)

_Contents:_ Translator's Introduction_ Selected Bibliography Note on the Text _ The Vocation of Man__ Preface Book One: Doubt Book Two: Knowledge Book Three: Faith.

The article investigates one of the key contributions to modern structural mathematics, namely Hilbert’sFoundations of Geometry and its mathematical roots in nineteenth-century projective geometry. A central innovation of Hilbert’s book was to provide semantically minded independence proofs for various fragments of Euclidean geometry, thereby contributing to the development of the model-theoretic point of view in logical theory. Though it is generally acknowledged that the development of model theory is intimately bound up with innovations in 19th century geometry, so far, little (...) has been said about how exactly model-theoretic concepts grew out of methodological investigations within projective geometry. This article is supposed to fill this lacuna and investigates this geometrical prehistory of modern model theory, eventually leading up to Hilbert’sFoundations. (shrink)

When two or more people coordinate their actions in space and time to produce a joint outcome, they perform a joint action. The perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes that enable individuals to coordinate their actions with others have been receiving increasing attention during the last decade, complementing earlier work on shared intentionality and discourse. This chapter reviews current theoretical concepts and empirical findings in order to provide a structured overview of the state of the art in joint action research. We (...) distinguish between planned and emergent coordination. In planned coordination, agents' behavior is driven by representations that specify the desired outcomes of joint action and the agent's own part in achieving these outcomes. In emergent coordination, coordinated behavior occurs due to perception action couplings that make multiple individuals act in similar ways, independently of joint plans. We review evidence for the two types of coordination and discuss potential synergies between them. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a unified account of conditionals inspired by Frank Ramsey. Most contemporary philosophers agree that Ramsey’s account applies to indicative conditionals only. We observe against this orthodoxy that his account covers subjunctive conditionals as well—including counterfactuals. In light of this observation, we argue that Ramsey’s account of conditionals resembles Robert Stalnaker’s possible worlds semantics supplemented by a model of belief. The resemblance suggests to reinterpret the notion of conditional degree of belief in order to overcome a (...) tension in Ramsey’s account. The result of the reinterpretation is a tenable account of conditionals that covers indicative and subjunctive as well as qualitative and probabilistic conditionals. (shrink)

Recent work by philosophers of mind and psychology on nonconceptual content.

Mystik und Romantik sind Gegenmodelle einer stets fremder werdenden Moderne. Die Romantik als eine Kulturepoche nimmt das überzeitliche religiöse Phänomen der Mystik in sich auf. Der vorliegende Band geht auf zahlreiche Beispiele ein, insbesondere auf die Rezeption Jacob Böhmes in der Romantik. Mysticism and Romanticism are counter-models of an ever stranger modernity. Romanticism as a cultural epoch absorbs the supra-temporal religious phenomenon of mysticism. This volume deals with numerous examples, specifically the reception of Jacob Böhme in Romanticism.

_Political Poetry across the Centuries_ aims to give a concise yet wide ranging overview of political poetry from antiquity to the immediate past spanning from Europe to East Asia.

ZusammenfassungDer finale Dialog zwischen Kriemhild und Hagen in der Schlussszene der 39. Aventiure im Nibelungenlied – von der Forschung bis heute irreführend als »2. Hortforderungsszene« bezeichnet – wird als eine psychologisch basierte Finte Hagens gedeutet, die nicht nur eine individuelle Innensphäre der Figur Kriemhilds verifiziert, sondern zugleich das furiose Ende der burgundischen Nibelungen kohärent motiviert. Das Nibelungenlied erscheint in diesem Kontext als literarisches Zeugnis eines zeitgenössischen Ringens um politische Stabilität und traditionelle Wertvorstellungen, das besonders über die Figurenrolle Dietrichs im Spannungsfeld (...) heroischer Gewaltverherrlichung und höfischer Interessenwahrung problematisiert ist.The final dialogue between Kriemhild and Hagen in the closing scene of the Nibelungenlied’s 39th Aventiure – to date falsely designated as the second »Hortforderungsszene« – is here interpreted as a psychological feint of Hagen, which not only verifies the individual interior life of Kriemhild but also provides a coherent motivation for the stirring end of the Burgundian Nibelungen. In this context, the Nibelungenlied appears as a literary testimony of a contemporary struggle about politically stability and traditional moral concepts, which is problematized, first and foremost, via the figure of Dietrich, caught in a conflict between the heroic glorification of violence and the protection of courtly interests. (shrink)