In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology by Gerald McKenny, and: Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth’s Ethics for a World at Risk by David HaddorffVictor ThasiahThe Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology Gerald McKenny New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 310 pp. $120.00Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth’s Ethics for a World at Risk David Haddorff Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010. 482 pp. $54.00Karl Barth’s (...) theology remains a resource for Christian ethics. Let me suggest why. Instead of marginalizing or bracketing out consideration of divine agency, Barth presupposes God’s past, present, and future action; God’s inalienable subjectivity and indissoluble over-againstness in relationship (irreducible, for example, to ecclesial action); and God’s ongoing judgment of good and evil, and thus of moral thought and practice. These presuppositions determine the method, structure, content, and purpose of his theology and ethics. His concept of grace consists of God accomplishing the good in our place and on our behalf, a perspective more substantive than supplementary in nature. Finally, his eschatological view of human freedom involves resistance and responsibility—the freedom to resist evil (having been delivered from the determination of evil by grace) and the freedom to witness to God’s action in faith, love, and hope in the world. Barth’s work serves the field of Christian ethics well, burdened as we are by unprecedented global awareness with its challenges and uncertainties.Two new books on Barth’s theology and ethics seek to increase our understanding of his work and engage contemporary Christian moral thought and practice. Gerald McKenny’s The Analogy of Grace is now the indispensable guide to Barth’s ethics. His exposition is comprehensive, critical, and contextual as it relates Barth’s dogmatics to current academic work in Christian ethics and moral philosophy. The tradeoff, however, is that it pays insufficient attention to the ecclesial, cultural, and political contexts for embodying Barth’s ethics. McKenny makes an important contribution to our understanding of Barth’s work. By closely reading primary texts and secondary literature, McKenny shows that many of Barth’s critics and friends continue to misunderstand [End Page 192] him by resolving the unresolvable, airbrushing ambiguities and thus converting Barth’s “strange” ethics into a more conventional moral theory. McKenny argues that it is precisely the strangeness of Barth’s theology—with all its implications—that continues to challenge and contribute constructively to contemporary Christian ethics.What is so strange and significant about Barth’s work? For McKenny, it is Barth’s claim that “God resolves on the good from eternity in the determination of humanity in Jesus Christ to commission and service as active witnesses of God’s glory; fulfills it in time in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, who performs this commission and service in place of all of humanity; and summons, empowers, and directs human beings in every time to correspond to this fulfillment in their conduct” (288). Thus, our action should be modeled on God’s action; it should be an analogy of grace. “The telos of God’s grace is realized,” McKenny concludes, “when human beings in their action become the image of God” (208). The Analogy of Grace traces the way Barth develops this ontological and analogical vision as McKenny differentiates Barth’s work from modern theories that presuppose that people are relatively capable of knowing and doing the good.McKenny suggests that there is a possible deficiency in the way Barth’s account of divine agency determines the form and content of his theology and ethics. Barth’s consistent opposition to moral theories that emphasize observable signs of moral progress in either self or society results in the “liability” of the “extraordinarily qualified affirmation he gives to visible human goodness” (223). McKenny asks if Barth “does justice to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives” and “can make sense of the participation of our action in God’s action or of the way in which the Holy Spirit accomplishes this participation” (223). In other words, Barth’s “extraordinarily qualified affirmation” might neglect the work of the Spirit in... (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the relevance of the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer for contemporary feminist scholarship on epistemic injustice and oppression. Specifically, I set out to argue for the Gadamerian notion of hermeneutical openness as an important hermeneutic virtue, and a potential remedy for existing epistemic injustices. In doing so I follow feminist philosophers such as Linda Martín Alcoff and Georgia Warnke that have adopted the insights of Gadamer for the purpose of social and feminist philosophy. Further, this (...) paper is positioned in relation to a recent book chapter by Cynthia Nielsen and David Utsler in which they argue for the complementarity, and intersecting themes and concerns of Gadamer's hermeneutics and Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice. However, Nielsen and Utsler solely focus on Fricker's conception of epistemic injustice and the two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, that she identifies. In this paper I expand their analysis by considering other forms of epistemic injustice such as wilful hermeneutical ignorance and contributory injustice. Thus, this paper contributes to the budding literature on the relevance of Gadamer's work for the debates pertaining to epistemic injustice and oppression by expanding such analysis to other forms of epistemic injustice, and by further arguing for the strength of Gadamer's work in terms of offering relevant insights for the reduction and remedy of existing epistemic injustices. (shrink)

Alonso, Ángel Castigo y derecho sin libre albedrío ni responsabilidad Punishment and law without free will and no responsibility López Corredoira, Martín De los metarrelatos a la "muerte de los intelectuales". Una mirada al "Humanismo impenitente" desde la reconstrucción neonietzscheana postmoderna From meta - reports to the "demise of intellectuals". A view of "impenitent humanism" from post-modern neo-Nietzschean deconstruction Mora García, José Pascual Kant y el método de trascender en la filosofía de Karl Jaspers Kant and the transcendental method (...) in the Karl Jaspers philosophy Portuondo Pajón, Gladys L. La creatio ex Nihilo y sus implicaciones fenomenológicas en Levitas La creatio ex Nihilo and it's phenomenology implications in Levinas Ramírez, Gustavo ¿Qué significa meditar? What does it mean to meditate? Ramis Muscato, Pompeyo Sobre la violencia: Orígenes y antídoto Regarding violence: Origens and antidotes Vasquez, Eduardo Interdisciplinares Louis Kahn: Filosofía, arte y arquitectura Louis Kahn: Philosophy, arte and architecture Arellano Spinetti, Leonardo La oligarquía venezolana en el siglo XXI: Del estereotipo al anacronismo The Venezuelan oligarchy in the XXI century: From the stereotype to the anachronism Varela Manrique, Luz Coromoto Traducciones El arte de pensar Maurois, André Friedrich Nietzsche. 1844-1900. (shrink)

This translation provides a Portuguese version of “The History of Dialectics”, written by Herbert Marcuse. The original was published as an encyclopedia entry on “Dialectics”, in Marxism, Communism, and Western Societies: A Comparative Encyclopaedia (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). It starts by presenting a detailed analysis of “The Significance of Dialectics in Ancient Philosophy”, since Zeno, the Sophists and Socrates to Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Plotinus. Further on, Marcuse writes a section on “The Significance of Dialectics in Kant, (...) Fichte and Hegel”; he finally concludes with an approach to “The Meaning and Significance of Dialectics in Marx”, the only philosopher who was bestowed with a whole section. Overall, this text exhibits a very comprehensive, qualified analysis of the history of dialectics and reveals Marcuse as a first-rated philosophical scholar in the concept of dialectics. (shrink)

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans (...) Jonas and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger. (shrink)

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans (...) Jonas and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger. (shrink)

Why was Hensen unsuccesful in the quantification of ecological sampling? No aspect of plankton research itself seems to have hindered quantification; both collecting methods and taxonomy were sufficiently advanced. The reason is probably that at the time he began sampling, Hensen had to devise his own statistical methods for expressing the reproducibility and validity of samples. Hensen might have succeeded in this if he had overcome prevalent nineteenth-century attitudes toward randomness.The statistical literature of medicine and physics with which Hensen was (...) probably familiar gave methods for expressing reproducibility and for comparing differences between means of different sets of observations. For example, a student of Poisson writing on medical statistics advocated using Poisson's limit (standard error 2√2) to test the difference between two means56. Other authors suggested that differences between means were most meaningful if very large numbers of observations were used.57 In his laboratory subsampling, Hensen used the propable error as a limit about means. In this and other ways, he seems most indebted to the physicist Ernst Abbe for statistical methods.58 However, all the methodology available to Hensen had been developed for situations in which errors are a property of the measurement or sampling process, and not of the phenomena themselves. The available methods for measuring reproducibility were based on the assumption that differences from the average were small and that they tended to accumulate about the mean in a bell-shaped pattern. Hensen constantly reinvestigated the distribution of plankton numbers about the average using a different method each time. Westergaard points out that medical statisticians did not make such investigations with their biological data.59To a considerable extent, biological sampling problems forced development of theory because samples afforded the only information on a pattern in water or soil which could not be directly observed. The sampling methods of Laplace and the late nineteenth-century government statisticians contrasted strongly with Hensen's because, either through subjective knowledge of the population sampled or through censuses, they attempted to choose representative or typical samples.60 The high reproducibility and validity of representative sampling is attained by knowing more about a population than a biologist can ordinarily know. The uncertain reproducibility and validity of biological sampling spurred the development of formal sampling theory.A formal sampling theory developed only after change in the general intellectual attitude toward randomness, which was reflected in nineteenth-century statistics.61 The ninteenth-century attitude that randomness is not part of nature changed in the twentieth century to a view of randomness as a property of nature.62 The physicist's incorporation of randomness into physical models in response to this intellectual change late in the nineteenth-century is discussed by Bork.63 In biology, the change was initiated by the attention Darwin focused on morphological variation. The English biometricians — Francis Galton and W. F. R. Weldon, for example — were prominent in developing methods for the analysis of biological variation.64 Most pertinent to the development of sampling theory was Karl Pearson's use of frequency distributions as models of biological variation. In ecology, quantification was brought about by Ronald Fisher more than by anyone else; he incorporated randomness into sampling plans and built upon the methods developed earlier for analysis of individual variation. Fisher's use of random sampling allowed comparison between the sample collections and the collections expected from a model population of known patterning (calculated with a frequency distribution). This is a much more efficient method of determining the validity of a sample than Hensen's comparison of collections with a model uniform collection. Intellectual background and accumulated biological information caused Fisher to find variability where Hensen had seen uniformity.In summary, Victor Hensen became interested in fisheries research because of the economic importance of fishing to Germany. Hensen had considerable understanding of the prerequisites for valid sampling, but the value of his quantitative approach was limited by the general preconceptions shared by most nineteenth-century biologists. Through Hensen's efforts many other biologists were stimulated to undertake quantitative samples, even though the statistical methods for analyzing variation among populations developed only after methods for analyzing variation among individuals had been developed. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402011 00003. (shrink)

Die neue Edition der Vorlesungen über die 'Philosophie der Weltgeschichte' stellt den Versuch dar, eine einzige der gehaltenen Vorlesungen aus drei Manuskripten unterschiedlicher Qualität möglichst authentisch zu rekonstruieren und bietet somit erst die Möglichkeit, sich wissenschaftlich mit der systematischen Konzeption der Hegelschen Geschichtsphilosophie zu beschäftigen. Der Band enthält zusätzlich einen umfangreichen Anmerkungsteil über die orientalische Welt, in dem ausführlich die zum großen Teil schwer zugänglichen Quellen nachgewiesen worden sind, die Hegel als Material für seine Vorlesung benutzt hat.

This paper is a study of the essential property of human existence - transcendence, whose characteristics can be derived from Karl Stern’s works. By criticizing the model of contemporary psychology for its mechanistic character, Stern tries to prove that it is psychoanalysis that enables us to found a humanistic base for understanding human transcendence towards God. In this way, Stern passes over the fact that the humanistic sense of transcendence was established in Victor Frankl’s philosophy of existence. Stern (...) blemishes the basic meanings of Freud’s psychoanalysis, which, as such, is not suitable for Stern’s procedure of humanization. (shrink)

According to Karl Popper, the evolution of science, logically, methodologically, and even psychologically, is an involved interplay of acute conjectures and blunt refutations. Like biological evolution, it is an endless round of blind variation and selective retention. But unlike biological evolution, it incorporates, at the stage of selection, the use of reason. Part I of this two-part paper begins by repudiating the common beliefs that Hume’s problem of induction, which compellingly confutes the thesis that science is rational in the (...) way that most people think that it is rational, can be solved by assuming that science is rational, or by assuming that Hume was irrational (that is, by ignoring his argument). The problem of induction can be solved only by a non-authoritarian theory of rationality. It is shown also that because hypotheses cannot be distilled directly from experience, all knowledge is eventually dependent on blind conjecture, and therefore itself conjectural. In particular, the use of rules of inference, or of good or bad rules for generating conjectures, is conjectural. Part II of the paper expounds a form of Popper’s critical rationalism that locates the rationality of science entirely in the deductive processes by which conjectures are criticized and improved. But extreme forms of deductivism are rejected. The paper concludes with a sharp dismissal of the view that work in artificial intelligence, including the JSM method cultivated extensively by Victor Finn, does anything to upset critical rationalism. Machine learning sheds little light on either the problem of induction or on the role that logic plays in the development of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

According to Karl Popper, the evolution of science, logically, methodologically, and even psychologically, is an involved interplay of acute conjectures and blunt refutations. Like biological evolution, it is an endless round of blind variation and selective retention. But unlike biological evolution, it incorporates, at the stage of selection, the use of reason. Part I of this two-part paper begins by repudiating the common beliefs that Hume’s problem of induction, which compellingly confutes the thesis that science is rational in the (...) way that most people think that it is rational, can be solved by assuming that science is rational, or by assuming that Hume was irrational (that is, by ignoring his argument). The problem of induction can be solved only by a non-authoritarian theory of rationality. It is shown also that because hypotheses cannot be distilled directly from experience, all knowledge is eventually dependent on blind conjecture, and therefore itself conjectural. In particular, the use of rules of inference, or of good or bad rules for generating conjectures, is conjectural. Part II of the paper expounds a form of Popper’s critical rationalism that locates the rationality of science entirely in the deductive processes by which conjectures are criticized and improved. But extreme forms of deductivism are rejected. The paper concludes with a sharp dismissal of the view that work in artificial intelligence, including the JSM method cultivated extensively by Victor Finn, does anything to upset critical rationalism. Machine learning sheds little light on either the problem of induction or on the role that logic plays in the development of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

In this article I argue that there are two different types of understanding: the understanding we get from explanations, and the understanding we get from unification. This claim is defended by first showing that explanation and unification are not as closely related as has sometimes been thought. A critical appraisal of recent proposals for understanding without explanation leads us to discuss the example of a purely classificatory biology: it turns out that such a science can give us understanding of the (...) world through unification of the phenomena, even though it does not give us any explanations. The two types of understanding identified in this paper, while strictly separate, do have in common that both consist in seeing how the individual phenomena of the universe hang together. Explanations give us connections between the phenomena through the asymmetric, ‘vertical’ relation of determination; unifications give us connections through the symmetric, ‘horizontal’ relation of kinship. We then arrive at a general definition of understanding as knowledge of connections between the phenomena, and indicate that there might be more than two types of understanding. (shrink)

The distinction between the body schema and the body image has become the stock in trade of much recent work in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. Yet little is known about the interactions between these two types of body representations. We need to account not only for their dissociations in rare cases, but also for their convergence most of the time. Indeed in our everyday life the body we perceive does not conflict with the body we act with. Are the body (...) image and the body schema then somehow reshaping each other or are they relatively independent and do they only happen to be congruent? On the basis of the study of bodily hallucinations, we consider which model can best account for the body schema/body image interactions. (shrink)

Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics is one of the three volumes of Karl Popper’s Postscript to the Logic of scientific Discovery . The Postscript is the culmination of Popper’s work in the philosophy of physics and a new famous attack on subjectivist approaches to philosophy of science. Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics is the third volume of the Postscript . It may be read independently, but it also forms part of Popper’s interconnected argument in the (...) Postscript . It presents Popper’s classic statement on quantum physics and offers important insights into his thinking on problems of method within science and physics as a whole. (shrink)

Enth.: Pars posterior, secundam editionem et indices continens.

Realism and the Aim of Science is one of the three volumes of Karl Popper’s Postscript to the Logic of scientific Discovery. The Postscript is the culmination of Popper’s work in the philosophy of physics and a new famous attack on subjectivist approaches to philosophy of science. Realism and the Aim of Science is the first volume of the Postcript . Popper here formulates and explains his non-justificationist theory of knowledge: science aims at true explanatory theories, yet it can (...) never prove, or justify, any theory to be true, not even if is a true theory. Science must continue to question and criticise all its theories, even those that happen to be true. Realism and the Aim of Science presents Popper’s mature statement on scientific knowledge and offers important insights into his thinking on problems of method within science. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that unification is neither necessary nor sufficient for explanation. Focusing on the versions of the unificationist theory of explanation of Kitcher and of Schurz and Lambert, I establish three theses. First, Kitcher’s criterion of unification is vitiated by the fact that it entails that every proposition can be explained by itself, a flaw that it is unable to overcome. Second, because neither Kitcher’s theory nor that of Schurz and Lambert can solve the problems of asymmetry (...) and accidental generalizations, it follows that unification is not sufficient to ground explanation. Third, some good explanations are disunifying, which entails that unification is not necessary for explanation either. (shrink)

Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in deterministic scenarios depends on whether the deterministic laws are couched in neurological or psychological terms (Nahmias et. al. 2007), on whether actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression they seem to represent (Nichols & Knobe 2007). Finally, people are more inclined to hold an agent (...) responsible for bringing about bad than for bringing about good side effects that the agent is indifferent about (Knobe 2003). Elsewhere, we have presented an analysis of the everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, and accounts for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. -Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. -Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI -Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions, Noûs 41:4, 663-685. (shrink)

In this long-awaited volume, Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner bring to light Popper's most important unpublished and uncollected writings from the time of The Open Society until his death in 1994. After The Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings reveals the development of Popper's political and philosophical thought during and after the Second World War, from his early socialism through to the radical humanitarianism of The Open Society. The papers in this collection, many of which are available here (...) for the first time, demonstrate the clarity and pertinence of Popper's thinking on such topics as religion, history, Plato and Aristotle, while revealing a lifetime of unwavering political commitment. After The Open Society illuminates the thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is essential reading for anyone interested in the recent course of philosophy, politics, history and society. (shrink)

the three topics named in the title of this book: Christianity, antiquity, and Enlightenment, are not meant merely to describe the contents of the various chapters it contains. a narrative is implied in their selection and arrangement, and embedded ...

Scriven’s paradox of predictability arises from the combination of two ideas: first, that everything in a deterministic universe is, in principle, predictable; second, that it is possible to create a system that falsifies any prediction that is made of it. Recently, the paradox has been used by Rummens and Cuypers to argue that there is a fundamental difference between embedded and external predictors; and by Ismael to argue against a governing conception of laws. The present paper defends a new diagnosis (...) of the roots of the paradox. First, it is argued that the unpredictability has to be understood in the light of Turing’s famous results about computability, in particular his proof that there is no solution to the ‘halting problem.’ This allows us to see that previous analyses of the paradox were either mistaken or not fully adequate. Second, the sense of paradox that nevertheless remains is traced to the idea that rational behaviour is not dependent on contingent environmental circumstances: that it is always up to us to engage in activities such as rational prediction or rational belief. The paradox of predictability teaches us that this idea, natural though it may be, is mistaken. (shrink)

In the paper below the authors describe three super-tasks. They show that although the abstract notion of a super-task may be, as Benacerraf suggested, a conceptual mismatch, the completion of the three super-tasks involved can be defined rather naturally, without leading to inconsistency, by means of a particular kinematical interpretation combined with a principle of continuity.

Die vorliegende Schrift unternimmt eine Revision des vorherrschenden Bildes der Rolle und der Konzeptionen von Moral und Ethik im Wiener Kreis. Dieses Bild wird als zu einseitig und undifferenziert zurückgewiesen. Die Ansicht, die Mitglieder des Wiener Kreises hätten kein Interesse an Moral und Ethik gezeigt, wird widerlegt. Viele Mitglieder waren nicht nur moralisch und politisch interessiert, sondern auch engagiert. Des Weiteren vertraten nicht alle die Standardauffassung logisch-empiristischer Ethik, die neben der Anerkennung deskriptiv-empirischer Untersuchungen durch die Ablehnung jeglicher normativer und inhaltlicher (...) Ethik und der Verfechtung eines extremen Nonkognitivismus geprägt ist. Am meisten entspricht die Standardauffassung den Ansichten Rudolf Carnaps, weniger bereits jenen Karl Mengers, Otto Neuraths oder Philipp Franks. Am weitesten weichen Moritz Schlick, Victor Kraft sowie Herbert Feigl von der Standardauffassung ab. Entgegen dem herkömmlichen Bild weltabgewandter Logiker und Metaethiker wurde im Wiener Kreis sogar Angewandte Ethik betrieben, und dies bereits unter diesem Namen. Neben den ethischen Hauptthemen und Ansichten der jeweiligen Philosophen in ihrer Entwicklung im Rahmen ihres persönlichen und kulturellen Kontextes zeigt die Untersuchung, dass allen Ansätzen eine aufgeklärte und humanistische Version von Moral und Ethik gemeinsam ist. Dieser wissenschaftliche Humanismus, der sich schon in der Programmschrift Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis findet, liegt jedoch in verschiedenen Ausprägungen vor. Was die Abweichungen von der Standardauffassung wesentlich betrifft, ist ihre unterschiedliche Auffassung von Moral als gemeinsames oder individuelles Unternehmen. Carnap führt ein extremer Individualismus zu einem extremen Nonkognitivismus, in dem ihm Menger folgt. Bei Schlick ist die Lage zweideutig, was sich in unterschiedlichen Moralbegriffen widerspiegelt. Bei Kraft und Feigl tritt das Verständnis von Moral als gemeinschaftlich geteilte Praxisform klar hervor. Auf der Basis eines gemeinsamen Begriffs des moralisch Guten, der auch eine Sachkomponente enthält, ist eine Verständigung über moralische Fragen möglich. Von einem extremen Nonkognitivismus kann dort nicht mehr die Rede sein. Mit diesen Ergebnissen verbietet es sich, dem Wiener Kreis allgemein eine Ablehnung normativer Ethik und einen extremen Nonkognitivismus zuzuschreiben. Eine systematische Ethik, die Moral als Gemeinschaftspraxis begreift, steht einigen im Wiener Kreis näher, als das vorherrschende Bild suggerieren möge. Wer meint, mit engem Bezug zur Tradition des Wiener Kreises nur Carnap folgen zu können und Ethik als suspektes Unternehmen betrachten zu müssen, irrt. Ethik war in der Tradition Analytischer Philosophie nicht immer so marginalisiert, wie sie es in manchen ihrer Teilrichtungen heute noch ist und Gegner(innen) der Analytischen Philosophie vorwerfen. Die vorliegende Untersuchung liefert die nötige Revision einer verfänglichen Fehlentwicklung. (shrink)

Auf dem Hintergrund der kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft und der Sprachphilosophie versucht der Autor, die geschichtsphilosophischen Strukturen im Werk Nietzsches sichtbar zu machen. Diese werden erkannt als soziale Strukturen, vermittelt durch sprachliche Kommunikation.

Traditionelle Philosophie und Erziehung, basierend auf den Schulen Diltheys und Heideggers, werden vom philosophischen und pädagogischen Impuls Adornos und der «Frankfurter Schule» aus kritisiert. Traditionelle Philosophie und Pädagogik werden schliesslich aufgehoben in einer auf Zukunft gerichteten Philosophie und Erziehung im Sinne Kants.

Nicht Themen, Schulen und Epochen, sondern der philosophierende Mensch steht im Zentrum von Jaspers' Philosophiegeschichte. Und dazu zahlen nicht nur Platon und Kant, sondern eben auch Jesus und - aus der auaereuropaischen Philosophie - Buddha und Konfuzius. Dieser interkulturelle Ansatz setzt sich in der Behandlung der Metaphysik fort. So portratiert Jaspers neben Plotin und Spinoza auch Laotse und Nagarjuna. Unter Berucksichtigung der im Jaspers-Nachlass vorliegenden Originalmanuskripte erscheint der Text hier in einer um zahlreiche Abschreibfehler bereinigten Form. Im Stellenkommentar werden samtliche (...) Zitate nachgewiesen; hierauf hatte Jaspers bewusst verzichtet, dies spater aber bedauert. Auaerdem sind im Kommentar ausgewahlte Textpassagen des Manuskripts vermerkt, die Jaspers aus Platzgrunden streichen musste. Das kurze "Foreword for the American Reader", das Jaspers 1960 fur die von Hannah Arendt herausgegebene englische Ubersetzung verfasste, wird hier erstmals im deutschen Original publiziert. (shrink)

One of the most important texts for understanding the early work of Karl Barth.

Two apparently mutually exclusive ideas about the relation between contrastive and non-contrastive explanations can be found in the literature. According to contrastivists, all explanation is contrastive explanation and the supposed existence of non-contrastive explanations can be revealed to be an illusion. According to non-contrastivists, on the other hand, contrastive explanation can be fully analysed in terms of non-contrastive explanation, and is thus not of fundamental importance. In the current article, I discuss the main arguments in favour of and against each (...) of the two positions. This discussion leads to the idea that contrastive explanations are to be understood as parts of a bigger, more complete non-contrastive explanation; but that all actual explanations explain only a limited set of contrasts. I conclude that, once the relation between contrastive and non-contrastive explanations is understood correctly, there remains no substantial issue to divide contrastivism and non-contrastivism. (shrink)

Husserl's two notions of "definiteness" enabled him to clarify the problem of imaginary numbers. The exact meaning of these notions is a topic of much controversy. A "definite" axiom system has been interpreted as a syntactically complete theory, and also as a categorical one. I discuss whether and how far these readings manage to capture Husserl's goal of elucidating the problem of imaginary numbers, raising objections to both positions. Then, I suggest an interpretation of "absolute definiteness" as semantic completeness and (...) argue that this notion does not suffice to explain Husserl's solution to the problem of imaginary numbers. (shrink)

Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation is beset by a problem of circularity: the analysis of causes is in terms of interventions, and the analysis of interventions is in terms of causes. This is not in itself an argument against the correctness of the analysis. But by requiring us to have causal knowledge prior to making any judgements about causation, Woodward’s theory does make it mysterious how we can ever start acquiring causal knowledge. We present a solution to this problem by (...) showing how the interventionist notion of causation can be rationally generated from a more primitive agency notion of causation. The agency notion is easily and non-circularly applicable, but fails when we attempt to capture causal relations between non-actions. We show that the interventionist notion of causation serves as an appropriate generalisation of the agency notion. Furthermore, the causal judgements based on the latter generally remain true when rephrased in terms of the former, which allows one to use the causal knowledge gained by applying the agency notion as a basis for applying Woodward’s interventionist theory. We then present an overview of relevant empirical evidence from developmental psychology which shows that our proposed rational reconstruction lines up neatly with the actual development of causal reasoning in children. This gives additional plausibility to our proposal. The article thus provides a solution to one of the main problems of interventionism while keeping Woodward’s analysis intact. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe’s classic paper Causality and Determination claims that causation can be perceived. It also defends causal singularism, the idea that the causal relation is fundamentally between the particular cause and effect, and does not depend on regularities holding elsewhere in the universe. But does the former furnish an argument for the latter? The present paper analyses a special type of causal experience involving emotional reactions to present stimuli; for instance, being frightened by a spider. It argues that such experiences (...) are strongly local, in the sense that they justify belief in a local causal relation independently of our knowledge about events elsewhere in the universe. If this analysis is correct, Humean regularity theories of causation are false; and all other non-singularist theories of causation face a difficult explanatory challenge. This means that the case for causal singularism comes out considerably strengthened. (shrink)

This article picks up on Foucault’s radical reconceptualisation of concept “power”, and presents asignificant challenge to contemporary discourses surrounding instructionist classroom management. We critique his approach to instructionist classroom management on the basis that it conceptualises power as domination in dealing with disruption in the classroom. We argue that power and discourse are interrelated constructs that the teacher uses to perpetuateTaylorism, Fordism andbureaucraticdomination in aninstructionist classroom setting. Drawing on Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s works, this document reviews:1) explores Foucault’s theory of discourse; (...) 2) argues discourse as an instrument of power; 3) captures the philosophical perspectives on instructionist classroom management; and 4) argues a teacher’s power as a tool for social reproduction and domination in instructionist classroom setting. (shrink)

Sometimes Strauss argues as if he thought it possible to understand man without raising questions about his relations to other things, and hence about his place in the whole. But when they are viewed in their broader context, such arguments are seen not to be his final word. Man's humanity cannot be understood in its own terms alone. The human soul differs from everything else in that it is "... open to the whole and therefore more akin to the whole (...) than anything else is." In ordinary usage, "whole" implies completeness and autonomy. But the openness of the soul--i.e., of a part--to the whole can only mean that the whole is open to itself. The whole is, then, not, in the ordinary sense of the term, whole. Nor is the soul which is "open" to it. Stripped of myths, "... the human soul is... more akin to the whole than anything else is" because neither of them is whole. The same conclusion follows when one tries to understand the definition of the philosopher as the man animated by quest for knowledge of the whole. Qua philosopher he knows neither that there is a whole, nor what it might be if there were one. To define the philosopher as the man who knows that he does not know only paraphrases the difficulty. It does not solve it. For "know" is here used equivocally. The same equivocation is at play in the comment "... one cannot know that one does not know without knowing what one does not know". Admittedly "knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance." The philosopher believes and perhaps divines more than he actually knows. All men do. The essential difference between the philosopher and other men may well consist in the fact that the philosopher distinguishes more conscientiously than do others between what he knows and what he believes, and that he strives more single-mindedly than do they to transform as large a share of his beliefs as possible into knowledge. He may conceivably at some point be said to have reached the stage where his aspirations have become reasoned expectations. But that is as far as he can possibly go as long as he remains a philosopher and has not become a wise man or a god. Until and unless the philosopher knows, in the strong sense of the term, he can no more decide whether his aspirations could be fulfilled than he can swim before getting wet. (shrink)