How do religions refer to reality in their language and symbols, and which reality do they envisage and encounter? on the basis of some examples of an understanding of religion without reference to reality, I first answer the question of what ”realism’ is. realism has been an opposite concept to nominalism, idealism, empiricism and antirealism. The paper concentrates especially on the most recent formation of realism in opposition to antirealism. In a second section the consequences for philosophy of religion and (...) theology are considered. How the reality, as it is considered in philosophy of religion and in theology, has to be characterised, if and how this reality is relevant for human beings, and what its relation is to everything else, can only be answered and clarified in a presentation in a language that is specific for this reality, the reality of God. (shrink)

The concept of fairness as mutual advantage has been developed in the tradition of social contract theory. In this framework society is seen as an enterprise that coordinates the activities of its members in order to advance their interests. All acceptable social rules are in the interest of each member of society. Rules are agreed unanimously – no rules can be enforced against the interest of someone. It is assumed that individuals are basically self-interested and rational. Radical libertarianism claims that (...) individuals do not have to accept any a priori constraints on their behavior. “Libertarianism focuses on negative freedom”. (shrink)

Giuseppe Franco hat mich mit süditalienischer Liebenswürdigkeit dazu eingeladen, einen kleinen Beitrag zum vorliegenden Hommage-Band zu schreiben, in dem ich von meiner „intellektuellen Beziehung“ zu Dir und „von der Bedeutung des Kritischen Rationalismus“ für meinen „eigenen Denkweg“ berichte. Kennengelernt haben wir einander vor inzwischen 53 Jahren kurz nach Deinem Dienstantritt an der Mannheimer Wirtschaftshochschule. Ich studierte damals in Wien, vor allem bei Bela Juhos, der in einer Art Dachkammer der Alten Universität seine Seminare, z. B. eines über „Wissenschaftstheorie und Quantenmechanik“ (...) mit maximal zehn älteren Studenten und bereits habilitierten Wissenschaftsphilosophen abhielt, sowie beim Altmeister Victor Kraft, dessen Privatissime-Veranstaltungen in seiner Wohnung in der Walfischgasse von noch weniger, handverlesenen Geistesschaffenden besucht wurden. (shrink)

If one takes seriously the idea that a scientific language must be extensional, and accepts Quine’s notion of truth-value-related extensionality, and also recognizes that a scientific language must allow for singular terms that do not refer to existing objects, then there is a problem, since this combination of assumptions must be inconsistent. I will argue for a particular solution to the problem, namely, changing what is meant by the word ‘extensionality’, so that it would not be the truth-value that had (...) to be preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions, but the state of affairs that the sentence described. The question is whether or not elementary sentences containing empty singular terms, such as ‘Vulcan rotates’, are extensional in the substitutivity sense. Five conditions are specified under which extensionality in the substitutivity sense of such sentences can be secured. It is demonstrated that such sentences are state-of-affairs-as-extension-related extensional. This implies that such sentences are also truth-value-related extensional in Quine’s sense, but not truth-value-as-extension-related extensional. (shrink)

Hans Peter Riegel zählt zu den wenigen Künstlern, die gleichzeitig als Autor tätig sind. Aus dieser Position schreibt er kenntnisreich und kritisch über den Kunstmarkt sowie Künstlerinnen und Künstler. Während der Recherchen zu seinen erfolgreichen Biographien über Joseph Beuys und Jörg Immendorff hat er viele Gespräche geführt, die bislang nur in Auszügen veröffentlicht wurden. Immer wieder hat er auch für namhafte Medien geschrieben, Künstler und Kreative interviewt. Jetzt hat Hans Peter Riegel eine Auswahl dieser Texte in (...) diesem Buch zusammengefasst. Unter anderem mit Beiträgen zu Marina Abramovic, Helge Achenbach, Joseph Beuys, Tina Brown, Jörg Immendorff und Eva Presenhuber sowie Interviews mit Jörg Immendorff, Diane Keaton, Marc Spiegler und Klaus Staeck. (shrink)

Kaum ein anderer lebender Naturwissenschaftler besitzt die Fähigkeit, mit solcher Geistesklarheit die tiefsten Einsichten von moderner Quantenphysik mit dem uralten spirituellen Menschheitswissen zu verknüpfen wie - Hans-Peter Dürr! Es gelingt Dürr scheinbar mühelos, eine Synthese zwischen den meditativen Einsichten der Weisen des Ostens und den aktuellen Erkenntnissen der modernen Naturwissenschaften herzustellen. Dabei verliert er sich niemals in langatmigen akademischen Erläuterungen, sondern hat stets den Menschen und die gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit des 21. Jahrhunderts im Blick. Ein Brückenschlag zwischen zwei Welten, (...) der vielleicht niemals notwendiger war als zurzeit. Eine kleines Meisterwerk, das in einleuchtender Weise aufzeigt - alles Leben ist EINS! (shrink)

The importance of Dilthey Why read Dilthey today? Why study the ideas of a nineteenthcentury German philosopher some seventy years after his death? ...

In the first part the text specifies Hannah Arendt's philosophical approach in three dimensions: a) She used Max Scheler's new phenomenology of living beings . b) She transformed Karl Jaspers' extraordinary limit situations of human conduct into anthropological conditions. c) Such conditions are questions that do need answers in forms of "vita active" and of "vita contemplative". Arendt moved from Max Scheler's Philosophical Anthropology to her own historical conception of the human condition inside the heterogeneity of our Occidental tradition. The (...) second part of this paper gives an overview about her network of concepts that enables a comparison of Occidental cultures via the change of dominance in relations of vita active and vita contemplative. The third part situates her approach between those of Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor in a debate that is needed at present. Her historic-phenomenological anthropology allows her a critique of modernity without a hermeneutic circle and without an anthropological circle. (shrink)

Two disciplines claim to provide justification of action. Ethics gives you moral reasons to act upon, whereas economics exploits the concept of rationality. The paper discusses two theories of interdisciplinarity of ethics and economics in order to clarify the relationship. The traditional view of a hierarchical ordering of ethics and economics is rejected, and it is claimed that there are substantial economic contributions to ethical justification.

English summary: Thinking about God is theology's main task and the philosophy of religion's most noble. Like almost no other theologian and philosopher of religion, Ingolf U. Dalferth's devotion to it has made the paradigms of current philosophical and theological theory construction fruitful. God, in whom people believe and place their trust, is revealed as the First and the Last, as the beginning without end, and the end that renews everything. This Festschrift's twenty-four studies pick up from Dalferth's work by (...) thinking about God in their own way. The richness of the questions they pose, the plurality of the answers, and the diversity of the religious-philosophical and theological perspectives affirm the worthiness of thinking God. German description: Gott zu denken, ist die zentrale Aufgabe der Theologie und die vornehmste der Religionsphilosophie. Wie kaum ein anderer Theologe und Religionsphilosoph hat sich Ingolf U. Dalferth dieser Aufgabe gewidmet und dafur die aktuellen Paradigmen philosophischer und theologischer Theoriebildung fruchtbar gemacht. Gott, an den Menschen glauben und auf den sie ihre Hoffnung setzen, kommt dem Denken als Erstes und Letztes in den Blick, als Anfang, der noch kein Ende gefunden hat, und als Ende, das alles neu macht.Die vierundzwanzig Studien dieser Festschrift nehmen Dalferths Beitrage auf, indem sie je auf ihre Weise Gott nachdenken. Der Reichtum der von ihnen diskutierten Fragestellungen, die Pluralitat der Antworten und die Vielfalt der religionsphilosophischen und theologischen Perspektiven bekraftigen die Denkwurdigkeit Gottes. (shrink)

This essay is a consideration of Hegel's account of the voice. Responding, in the first instance, to Derrida's discussion of what he terms Hegel's 'semiology,' the article attempts to map out complexities in Hegel's account of voice that tend to resist absorption into the trajectory that Derrida has outlined. Hegel's discussion of music in the Aesthetics will be the focus, and an attempt is made to link the emergence of the musical voice to the fundamental determinations of time and of (...) sound in the Philosophy of Nature . Finally, the essay will connect Hegel's understanding of music with the primordial appearance of voice in the anthropology of the Philosophy of Spirit. (shrink)

John McDowell argues for minimal empiricism via using the notion of second nature of human beings. I should like to invite him to discuss Helmuth Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology in order to elaborate a more substantial conception of second nature. McDowell seems to think that it is adequate for his more epistemological aim to remind us of second nature as though it were to be taken for granted. But I think, following Plessner, that this right reminder needs a therapeutic elaboration in (...) Kant's sense of propaedeutics. What had been called our second nature found itself being questioned in order to limit the range of ways of treating the self we can authorize. (shrink)

IntroductionAlthough a few studies suggest that young overweight to obese children and adolescents may have impaired postural control compared to young normal-weight peers, little information exists about how these two groups differ in the quality of the underlying balance strategies employed. Hence, the aim of the present study was a first comprehensive examination of the structural complexity of postural sways in these two cohorts during quiet bilateral standing.MethodsNineteen YO secondary school students were carefully matched to YN controls for age, sex, (...) height, and school. Mediolateral and anteriorposterior acceleration signals were recorded with an inertial measurement unit positioned at the trunk while standing barefoot in two conditions: firm and foam support surface. The magnitude of postural fluctuations was obtained using the root mean square. The temporal structure of the signals was analyzed via sample entropy, largest Lyapunov exponent, and detrended fluctuation analysis algorithm. Reliability was assessed using a test–retest design.ResultsIn both groups, foam standing caused higher postural fluctuations and reduced structural complexity. In comparison to YN, YO exhibited a higher RMSAP. Especially in ML direction, the acceleration signals of the YO had higher repeatability, greater long-range correlations, and lower local stability. However, these observations were largely independent of the task difficulty. Except for α-DFAAP, the IMU approach proved reliable to characterize posture control.DiscussionOur outcomes confirm postural control deficits in YO compared to their YN peers and indicate impaired regulatory mechanisms reflected as rigidity. Such less complex patterns usually reflect diverse pathologies, are detrimental to compensate for internal or external perturbations, and are attributed to lower adaptability and task performance. Without targeted balance stimuli, YO likely end in a lifelong vicious circle of mutually dependent poor balance regulation and low physical activity. (shrink)

A gradual intertwinement of beauty and concept can be seen to determine, in no small measure, the direction of the first half of the Critique of Judgment. This paper considers the decisive influence of this intertwinement on the work of Hölderlin. Links are forged between the productive indeterminacy of the “aesthetic ideas” and the development of Hölderlin’s poetics, particularly in regard to his understanding of the relation between the natural world and its naming. The focus of attention will be on (...) certain passages of the novel Hyperion, and later, too, on the emergence of the figure of Empedocles. (shrink)

In the following the details of a state-of-affairs semantics for positive free logic are worked out, based on the models of common inner domain - outer domain semantics. Lambert's PFL system is proven to be weakly adequate (i.e., sound and complete) with respect to that semantics by demonstrating that the concept of logical truth definable therein coincides with that one of common truth-value semantics for PFL. Furthermore, this state-of-affairs semantics resists the challenges stemming from the slingshot argument since logically equivalent (...) statements do not always have the same extension according to it. Finally, it is argued that in such a semantics all statements of a certain language for PFL are state-of-affairs-related extensional as well as salva extensione extensional, even though their salva veritate extensionality fails. (shrink)

In Popper's Logik der Forschung, a theoretical system is a set of sentences that describe a particular sub-area of science, in particular of empirical science. The goal of axiomatizing a theoretical system is to specify a small number of "axioms" describing all presuppositions of the sub-area under consideration, so that all other sentences of this system can be derived from them by means of logical or mathematical transformations. The paper discusses two philosophical interpretations of these proper axioms. First, proper axioms (...) stipulate the use of the signs for the basic concepts of the system. Consequently, the proper axioms turn out to be analytic relative to a class of interpretations of the underlying logic. Hence, they cannot be falsified by refuting their logical consequences because these consequences are analytic as well. Secondly, proper axioms are synthetic, falsifiable and uncertain sentences. Hence, they are not immunized against falsification by refuting their logical consequences. (shrink)

The search for the extensions of sentences can be guided by Frege’s “principle of compositionality of extension”, according to which the extension of a composed expression depends only on its logical form and the extensions of its parts capable of having extensions. By means of this principle, a strict criterion for the admissibility of objects as extensions of sentences can be derived: every object is admissible as the extension of a sentence that is preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions. (...) The question is: what are the extensions of elementary sentences containing empty singular terms, like ‘Vulcan rotates’. It can be demonstrated that in such sentences, states of affairs as structured objects (but not truth-values) are preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions. Hence, such states of affairs are admissible (while truth-values are not) as extensions of elementary sentences containing empty singular terms. (shrink)

Often overlooked is the fact that postmodern theory brought to the fore a crisis in the humanities. The implied universalism of the current “iconic turn” in postmodern thinking is a blow to the traditional sciences grouped around national literatures and cultures. In the 1980's, postmodern practitioners in the United States began to assault the discursive practices of the mainstream under the banner of cultural studies. The current crisis in the humanities surfaced in the emancipation of the various studies from their (...) traditional fields in the humanities. The German Studies practiced today in the United States for instance, has no counterpart in Germany's traditional departments of Deutsche Philologie. Whereas the icon in the United States has become an object of investigation for the various studies, it has not yet displaced the littera in Germany's literary sciences. However in the 1990's, the historical sciences in Germany responded to the challenge of the various studies by directing their attention not to cultural studies, but to cultural history, with its well-defined set of methodologies. But what kind of cultural history is it? Is it built on 19th century German foundations, or is it grafted to current North American notions of post-industrial culture? In this paper I show that the supposed opposition between cultural studies and cultural history is artificial. Through a close reading of Hayden White's extremist questioning of historical practice in Metahistory (1973), I demonstrate that there is no opposition between the icon and the littera in this recent radical critique of mainstream humanistic science. The vehement German reaction to his North American assault on European Kultur is based on a misunderstanding of White's premises. Rather than being constructed on a hodgepodge of postmodern approaches, I show that White's postmodern history is in fact conventionally grounded in 19th century Nietzschean thinking. 1 Hans-Peter Söder, Junior Year in Munich Program (Wayne State University). (shrink)

In diesem Buch wird eine Strategie gegen zwei skeptische Tendenzen entwickelt, deren eine den Sonderstatus von Personen bestreitet und deren andere" wahr"für ein Prädikat ausgibt, das schlicht gewissen Verwendungsregeln unterworfen und instrumentalistisch zu interpretieren sei. Die antiskeptische Strategie soll dadurch zum Erfolg führen, dass die beiden von der Skepsis bedrohten Sachverhalte sich gegenseitig stützen. Gezeigt wird, dass die Aufgabe des Sonderstatus von Personen die Leugnung der Bedeutung von" wahr"impliziert und umgekehrt. Positiv gewendet: Die Bedeutung von" wahr"ist in Beziehung auf Subjektivität (...) zu explizieren, und Subjektivität erschließt sich theoretisch durch die Beziehung auf Wahrheit. Die Vorgehensweise ist im wesentlichen negativ; ihr positiver Aspekt besteht in der systematischen Zuordnung der negativen Ergebnisse. Zu Gegenständen der Kritik werden dabei der Naturalismus in der reduktiven wie der eliminationistischen Variante sowie ontologisierende Ansätze, d. h. Versuche, philosophische Probleme durch das Postulat von Entitäten sui generis zu lösen. In der Ablehnung von Ontologisierungen und im negativen Charakter der philosophischen Tätigkeit ergeben sich Berührungspunkte mit dem späten Wittgenstein. Die Differenz liegt in der erwähnten Zuordnung der Resultate der Kritik, die es erlaubt, die intendierte Position als eine transzendentalphilosophische zu charakterisieren. (shrink)

Gödel’s slingshot-argument proceeds from a referential theory of definite descriptions and from the principle of compositionality for reference. It outlines a metasemantic proof of Frege’s thesis that all true sentences refer to the same object—as well as all false ones. Whereas Frege drew from this the conclusion that sentences refer to truth-values, Gödel rejected a referential theory of definite descriptions. By formalising Gödel’s argument, it is possible to reconstruct all premises that are needed for the derivation of Frege’s thesis. For (...) this purpose, a reference-theoretical semantics for a language of first-order predicate logic with identity and referentially treated definite descriptions will be defined. Some of the premises of Gödel’s argument will be proven by such a reference-theoretical semantics, whereas others can only be postulated. For example, the principle that logically equivalent sentences refer to the same object cannot be proven but must be assumed in order to derive Frege’s thesis. However, different true (or false) sentences can refer to different states of affairs if the latter principle is rejected and the other two premises are maintained. This is shown using an identity criterion for states of affairs according to which two states of affairs are identical if and only if they involve the same objects and have the same necessary and sufficient condition for obtaining. (shrink)