Hans-Jørgen Schanz (1948-2022) har i mere end 50 år været en af de mest tænksomme og væsentlige danske intellektuelle, og han var samtidig som professor den bærende og ikke mindst samlende kraft på Idéhistorie ved Aarhus Universitet. Forskningsmæssigt spændte han meget vidt over områder som metafysik, modernitet, politisk filosofi, kunstfilosofi, religionsfilosofi og teologi. Han har begået omkring 40 bøger og et utal af artikler, og han havde en uforlignelig beundringsværdig evne til at tænke selv og insisterede gennem hele sit (...) årelange virke på, at tænkningen skulle være båret af ånd. Han var derudover en meget skattet foredragsholder på højskoler, sognegårde, Folkeuni-versitetet, teologiske konventer og efter- og videreuddannelsesregi. (shrink)

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

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)

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)

Der Band führt die Beiträge einer Reihe namhafter soziologischer Theoretiker zusammen, die sich mit dem Werk über die "Grundlagen der Sozialtheorie" von James S. Coleman auseinandersetzten. Die Edition dokumentiert die Vielzahl der Themen, denen Colemans Theorieentwurf neue und wichtige Anregungen verdankt. Besonders nachdrücklich diskutieren die Kommentatoren Colemans Bedeutung für die Weiterentwicklung der Theorien sozialer Normen, der Mikro-Makro-Problematik, der Theorie des Vertrauens, der Herrschaft und der Erziehung. Alle Beiträge nehmen Stellung zur Theorie rationalen Wahlhandelns, die James Coleman zur Fundierung seiner Handlungssystemanalysen (...) benutzt und die in jüngster Zeit zunehmend Raum und Beachtung gewinnt. (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)

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)

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)

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 considers the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on touch as a model for a conception of the musical body. More than a re-emphasizing of the tactile, though, it is possible to show that Nancy’s work enables an understanding of music as touch. The significance of this re-thinking lies in the counterweight it provides to the degradation of music entailed in its digitalized de-materialization. Hegel is seen to be complicit in this degradation.

Though Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) elaborated his philosophical anthropology independently of the classical pragmatisms, there are many parallels with them. He combined a phenomenology of living beings (a parallel with William James) with a semiotic reconstruction (a parallel with Charles Sanders Peirce) of what we are already using whenever we specify living beings, among them ourselves as human living beings in nature, culture, and society. In Plessner’s distinction between having a body (Körperhaben) and being (or living) a body (Leibsein), there is (...) a parallel with George Herbert Mead’s “Me” (taking over the perspective of others) and “I” (spontaneous actions/reactions of an organism in a situation). Dewey and Plessner elaborated a public procedure for overcoming the old dualism of matter and idea in a process of learning better habits. Their historical conceptions of communication involve the primacy of interactions on three levels (discursive, conscious, pre-conscious living). Facing the plasticity of human conduct, both approaches open the door to a pluralistic self-understanding that includes value-conflicts and that therefore needs civilized forms to solve such conflicts. With regard to the limits of human conduct, Plessner proposed a phenomenology (of laughing and crying) that seems to have no equivalent in pragmatism. (shrink)

Why has the global West (North America, Europe) handled the covid-19 pandemic and the corresponding economic crisis so much worse than the global East (East Asia)? The crises demonstrate the degree to which the West is shaped by its forms of competition and the East by its forms of cooperation. In the West, we have become habitualised to American neoliberalism over the last two generations. In the East, varieties of neo-Confucianism and neo-Buddhism have been transformed into national cultures. The way (...) humans understand their position in the world intellectually and react to crises according to corresponding habit makes an effective difference. The present comparison between global East and West makes use of Hannah Arendt’s conception ofpoliticsand theshared worldas well as of Helmuth Plessner’s conception ofmediated immediacyin forms ofmodern biopower. The pandemic is a catalyst within the decline of the West and the rise of the East. (shrink)

Abstract 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)

Scientific policy advice is usually perceived as a formalized advisory process within political institutions. Politics has benefited from this arrangement because the science-based rationalization of policy has contributed to its legitimacy. However, in Western democratic societies, scientific expertise that is routinely mobilized to legitimate political positions has increasingly lost its power due to controversial expertise in the public sphere in particular within the mass media. As a consequence of the medialization of science, political decision makers are increasingly confronted with mass-mediated (...) expertise. Empirical results of a qualitative survey among decision makers in the German political and administrative system, presented in this article, support the hypothesis that mass-mediated expertise has a significant impact on policy processes. Five functions of media coverage on science-based issues for policy making were identified. Mass-mediated expertise has therefore altered the established relations between scientific policy advisors and political decision makers and can be seen as informal policy advice complementing institutionalized advisory arrangements. (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)

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)

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)

Die Theorie der ethischen Gefühle erfährt seit einigen Jahren zunehmende Beachtung, die den bisher vornehmlich als Nationalökonomen bekannten Adam Smith als eigenständigen Moralphilosophen würdigt. Die vielfältigen Perspektiven, aus denen seine Theorie heute besonderes Interesse verdient, dokumentiert der vorliegende Band mit Beiträgen namhafter Moralphilosophen und Adam Smith-Forscher.

This volume presents a selection of Professor Rickman's essays published over a period of 40 years. They reflect his view of philosophy and defend it against attacks on two fronts. On one side the assault comes from a substantial proportion of professional philosophers particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, who treat philosophy as a purely academic, highly technical subject, dealing merely with the clarification of concepts, the solving of logical puzzles and the refutation of similarly abstruse theories of fellow philosophers. On (...) the other side there is the widespread popular view of philosophy as dealing with abstract problems remote from everyday life and invented by philosophers in their ivory towers. Both sides share a common premise: the uselessness of philosophy. (shrink)

Gegenstand dieser Studien ist eine moglichst umfassende Darstellung und Deutung des Naturrechtsgedankens bei Leibniz. Es wird versucht, unter Verzicht auf ein bestimmtes philosophisches Vorverstandnis Leibniz' Naturrechtsgedanken aus dem vorhandenen Quellenmaterial vom Text her zu erschliessen, zu ordnen und im historischen Zusammenhang zu verstehen.