In this foundational study, originally published in 1880, Heinrich Kihn, professor of theology at Würzburg, compared the exegetical work of two significant figures in late antiquity. Theodore, born at Antioch and a friend of John Chrysostom, was an influential bishop of Mopsuestia from 392 to 428. His work was widely regarded as heretical in the centuries following his death. A century later Junillus Africanus served as chief legal minister to the Byzantine emperor Justinian and wrote a handbook of biblical (...) exegesis that became important in the medieval Latin West. Kihn argued that Junillus' Instituta, the text of which he included in this study, showed the direct influence of Theodore's writings. All subsequent scholarly work on Junillus, and much on Theodore, depends on Kihn's edition and analysis, even when disagreeing with important aspects of his interpretation. This indispensable but hard-to-find work is now reissued in its entirety. (shrink)

If one compares Hans Blumenberg with the dominant contemporary German-speaking characters of philosophy and heads of their own schools, Husserl, Heidegger and Adorno, then one sees that Blumenberg’s understanding of philosophy proves tobe emphatically unemphatic, withdrawn, and deeply stacked. He exchanges the big bills of those philosophies for small coins: Philosophy is attention first, thoughtfulness second, consolation third, and memory fourth. – An introduction is evidence of the reorientation that Blumenberg undertook in the 1950s with regard to his Catholic-theological and (...) Heideggerian philosophical beginnings. This led him to redefine the modern age from one of crisis to one of overcoming the crisis. (shrink)

Cette contribution apporte des éclaircissements sur le rôle du médecin et psychanalyste Heinrich Meng dans les réseaux de l’Institut de recherche sociale, en particulier sur sa perspective hygiéniste en santé mentale. Directeur adjoint de l’Institut de psychanalyse de Francfort au côté de Karl Landauer, Meng fut le porteur d’un programme de réformes sociales et de prévention appelé Psychohygiene, une conception de l’hygiène mentale adossée à la psychanalyse. Ce cadre de référence explique pourquoi et comment Meng a surtout été force (...) de propositions en prophylaxie plutôt qu’en théorie, à l’unisson avec les pédagogues et les associations engagées dans la prévention en santé mentale. Même si Meng fut l’éditeur de nombreux ouvrages de psychanalyse appliquée aux institutions sociales, il est resté en marge de la Théorie critique, à la fois à l’écart des sciences sociales et en dehors des premiers cercles de l’institut en exil. (shrink)

Maas hat einfach den von Heinrich Kirn im Jahr 1880 edierten Text („Theodor von Mopsuestia und Junilius Africanus als Exegeten. Nebst einer kritischen Textausgabe von des letzteren Instituta regularia divinae legis“, Freiburg i. B.) ohne jede eigene Bearbeitung und weitere Aufbereitung abgedruckt (S. 118–234; S. 266–269 Kirns Zitatenregister übernommen; doch keine Berücksichtigung des Textes im Sach-und Autorenregister S. 275–280). Selbst die seit 1947 bekannten zusätzlichen neun Handschriften (M. L. W. Laistner: Harv. Theol. Rev. 40, 1947, 19–31), hat Maas (...) nicht auf ihre Qualität und Bedeutung geprüft, sondern sie S. 116f. nur aufgezählt. Nützlich ist die beigefügte englische Übersetzung, doch hatte bereits J. F. Collins im Jahr 1998 eine solche Übersetzung im Internet zugängig gemacht (ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/junillus.trans.html). Rückverweise vom Text auf die Einleitung oder erläuternde Sachanmerkungen zu Text und Übersetzung finden sich nicht. Und auch die Bezüge der Einleitung auf den Text sind nicht präzis. Der Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Untersuchung liegt also nicht auf Text und Übersetzung der Instituta, sondern auf der Einleitung zum Text (S. 1–115), was ja schon die Titelgestaltung des Buches vermuten läßt. (shrink)

Quine’s classical classic interpretation succinctly characterized characterizes Carnap’s Aufbau as an attempt “to account for the external world as a logical construct of sense-data....” Consequently, “Russell” was characterized as the most important influence on the Aufbau. Those times have passed. Formulating a comprehensive and balanced interpretation of the Aufbau has turned out to be a difficult task and one that must take into account several disjointed sources. My thesis is that the core of the Aufbau rested on a problem that (...) had haunted German philosophy since the end of the 19th century. In terms fashionable at the time, this problem may be expressed as the polarity between Leben and Geist that characterized German philosophy during the years of the Weimar Republic. At that time, many philosophers, including Cassirer, Rickert and Vaihinger, were engaged in overcoming this polarity. As I will show, Carnap’s Aufbau joined the ranks of these projects. This suggests that Lebensphilosophie and Rickert’s System der Philosophie exerted a strong influence on Carnap’s projects, an influence that is particularly conspicuous in his unpublished manuscript Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit. Carnap himself asserted that this manuscript could be considered “the germ of the constitution theory” of the Aufbau. Reading Chaos also reveals another strong but neglected influence on the Aufbau, namely a specific version of neutral monism put forward by the philosopher and psychologist Theodor Ziehen before World War I. Ziehen’s work contributed much to the invention of the constitutional method of quasi-analysis. -/-. (shrink)

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

Einleitung.--Die begriffliche Erkenntniss der Körperwelt.--Natur und Geist.--Natur und Geschichte.--Die historische Begriffsbildung.--Naturphilosophie und Geschichts-Philosophie.

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a cultural philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and historian of music who, along with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, founded the Frankfurt School. Against Epistemology is one of his most important works.

Aristotelian metaphysics is a change in the form of metaphysics, which seems to be extraneous to it but in reality co‐determines it in the most intimate way. Descartes’ Meditations are intellectual exercises that extend over six days. On almost every new day, a reference is made to the results or intermediary results of the previous day, or the spiritual experiences of the last days. This division into days, as well as the physical back‐references, mentioned in the First Meditation and repeated (...) in the Third, the repetitions, the monologue form, and other elements, point to the fact that Descartes’ Meditations must be understood within the tradition of philosophy in the sense of spiritual exercises. The knowledge of God must be considered as the highest stage of freedom. Descartes himself described the true path to the truth as the path a facilioribus ad difficiliora [from easier to more difficult things]. (shrink)

This essay applies the concept of “fuzzy thinking” to geopolitics, using a curious turn of phrase in a 1914 policy paper (“the Islamic-Israelite world”) to explore paradoxes of German strategy in World War I. To find the origins of this phrase, the article explores the language of prewar Orientalism, especially the potent German variety that was notoriously neglected by Edward Said in his 1979 study decrying Orientalism as the handmaiden of European imperialism. But many prominent German Orientalists were also ignored (...) in Robert Irwin's recent book-length critique of Said's Orientalism, despite the centrality of the German case to Irwin's argument. Just as Said ignored scholarly titans of the German-speaking world such as Carl Heinrich Becker, Ignaz Goldziher, and Theodore Nöldeke — presumably because Germany, unlike France and Britain, never colonized Islamic lands in the Middle East — so, too, did Irwin ignore more worldly German Orientalists such as Max von Oppenheim and Curt Prüfer, whose covert activities on behalf of Berlin did not fit his own counterthesis that Orientalism, pace Said, “in its most important aspect was founded upon academic drudgery.” The “hack” German Orientalists who concocted a Turco-German “jihad” against the Entente Powers in World War I — accompanied by a simultaneous plan to unleash Zionism to destroy tsarist Russia — may not have been scholars of the highest caliber, which helps explain how they could tolerate a fuzzy phrase like “the Islamic-Israelite world.” The essay concludes that, nevertheless, we may learn from and even be inspired by their ideas, however illusory these proved to be in practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of PicturesSachiko KusukawaIf not for the attractive plant with overhanging flute-like flowers that was named after him, Leonhart Fuchs (1501–66) is best known today as one of the pioneers of accurate representations of plants in histories of scientific illustrations.1 The pictures in Fuchs’s Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants (1542) have been appreciated usually for their “naturalistic” features (i.e., pictures drawn from observing (...) a plant specimen), as well as for their tendency to discard individual blemishes and portray a universal or ideal “type” of a plant where several varieties of species could be incorporated into one bush, or where various stages of the same plant may be depicted in one figure.2 On the other hand no historian of botany who has examined the text these pictures accompanied has found that such qualities as observation from nature or a sense of “ideal type” contributed to Fuchs’s theoretical understanding of [End Page 403] plants: he lacked any sense of the family genera or Linnean classification, for he had simply adopted an alphabetical ordering.3Fuchs himself considered his pictures remarkable—as he was at pains to point out—and he believed his pictures were absolutely crucial for his commentary on plants. My immediate aim in this paper, therefore, is to offer an interpretation of Fuchs’s Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants which does not split the work into artistically positive and botanically negative elements. As I shall argue, the uniqueness and so the controversial nature of Fuchs’s enterprise lies in the kind of argument and procedure he believed to be valid for an academic study of plants. More generally, I hope to use this reassessment of Fuchs’s work to show how pictures could be as controversial as texts and how the uses of texts and pictures together form past acts which require historical explanation. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.The Artists. Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542, verso of last folio page. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.In 1542 Fuchs published his Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants Belaboured with Great Expense and Vigilance with More than Five Hundred Live Images of Plants Attached. It begins with a picture of Fuchs, the author, at the age of forty-one and ends with that of the artists (fig. 1). Although the division of labor depicted here seems to have been a standard one for printing illustrated books in this period,4 it is unusual that we know their names. Albrecht Meyer did the drawings from life, Heinrich Füllmaurer transferred the drawings to woodblocks, and Veit Rudolf Speckle cut those woodblocks.5 Fuchs was proud of one of the artists in particular: “the woodcutter [sculptor] Veit Rudolf Speckle, by far the best in Strasbourg, excellently imitated the admirable industry of painters: he has so skilfully expressed the outlines of each picture by carving [sculpendo] that he seems to compete with the painter for glory and victory.”6 A comparison between the painter and the sculptor had been a favorite topic in the Renaissance genre of paragone—Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Castiglione, and Michaelangelo composed treatises on it—where the [End Page 404] relative merits of various mimetic arts were discussed.7 Fuchs’s comment on Speckle is more nuanced, however, than a polite competition between the arts over their mimetic skills: Fuchs announces that Speckle is worthy of praise in producing a picture—normally the domain of the painter (pictor)—with the specialized skill of carving of the cutter (sculptor). This is surely an appreciation of the particular skill involved in producing replicable pictures for printed books, just as Erasmus had, a generation earlier, acknowledged in Albrecht Dürer’s prowess at engraving the potential for reproducibility in a print culture.8 Indeed, of the artists involved in printing, it was the woodcutter who could expect to be paid most in this period—nearly fifteen times more than the artist who originally drew the pictures.9 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Atriplex. Theodore Dorsten, Botanicon, 1540, fol. 35r. Reproduced... (shrink)

Die Psychologie hat sich im zweiten Viertel des 19. Jahrhunderts langsam zu einer autonomen Disziplin entwickelt. Im Unterschied zu den anderen Figuren in dieser Entwicklung, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Ernst Heinrich Weber und Gustav Theodor Fechner, hat Lotze in seiner Medicinische Psychologie (1852) von Anfang an die neue Disziplin, die Psychologie, konsequent in enger Verbindung mit der Philosophie entwickelt. Damit hat er die Hoffnung gebremst, die Psychologie völlig experimentellen Untersuchungen zu überlassen, die um diese Zeit schon viele gepflegt haben. (...) Lotze scheute sich jedoch, diese Disziplin „philosophische Psychologie“ zu benennen. Sie war für ihn nur physiologische Psychologie, herausarbeitet mit Hilfe der Philosophie. Sie stellt nur Tatsachen fest, untersucht wie Körper und Seele sich zueinander verhalten und dies nicht nur empirisch, sondern auch „metaphysisch“. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of the fragility of Western liberal democracies, the divisions in Western society as a whole and within particular countries, and the loss of faith in the Western model of civilization. My focus will be (1) on the initial enchantment of the Eastern European countries (with special emphasis on Romania) with the West European models of freedom, democracy, lifestyle, and living standards, which explains why these countries overwhelmingly voted in favor of joining the European Union after (...) the fall of Communism; and (2) on their subsequent disenchantment with how far liberal democracies could go, and their general discontent with the restrictions and preconditions imposed on them for obtaining EU funding for their economic development. In dealing with the issue of globalism, nationalism and identity, I will elaborate on the role of identity, personal and national, in the creation of roots, stability, self-esteem, hard work and progress, with reference to the manifestations of populism in Europe. Finally, I will consider the positive effects Eastern countries with their traditionalism and religious values could have on their Western counterparts, in order to revive and sustain their initial enchantment and diminish their disenchantment with Europe, the European Union, and Western civilization. (shrink)