The debate about the nature of modernity and postmodernity has become central to intellectual culture today. In this work, two distinguished social theorists make a distinctive contribution to this continuing discussion.

INTRODUCTION Is there a * Renaissance ideal of man'? The consciousness that man is a historical being is a product of bourgeois development ; the condition ...

Psychological studies of touch and blindness have been fraught with controversy. Within this field there remains an important theoretical divide. Many researchers have taken a cognitive approach to the study of touch and blindness, relating these to higher order processes, such as memory and concept formation. Others adopt a theoretical perspective, arguing that it not necessary to consider the 'internal representation' of the stimuli, when investigating touch - thus people make use of information from the physical biomechanical properties of their (...) limbs as they assess the physical properties of objects. In addition, psychologists differ in the relative importance they place on the modality of sensory stimulation for subsequent perceptual experiences. Some psychologists argue that touch can do many of the things that are accomplished by vision, and claim that the mode of sensory stimulation is not critically important for perception, arguing that much information can be obtained through non-visual modalities. Others suggest that there are important consequences of a lack of visual experience, arguing for the importance of multiple forms of sensory input for conceptual development. New to the Debates in Psychology series, Touch, Representation, and Blindness brings together the leading investigators in these areas, each presenting the evidence for their side of the debate. An introductory chapter sets the theoretical and historical stage for the debate, and a concluding chapter draws together the different views and ideas set forth by the contributors, summarizing and resolving the discussion. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 182-215.

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy and twentieth-century thought. They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian (...) theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of _dynamis_ and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”. (shrink)

Arisztotelész korai etikái.--Hobbes Leviatánja.--Mandeville és a Méhek meséje.--Spinoza Etikája.--Rousseau és az Új Héloïse.--Kant etikái.--A szerencsétlen tudat fenomenológiája.--Ludwig Feuerbach redivivus.--Az istenek szomjaznak.--Lukács György és Seidler Irma.--A lelki szegénységről.

The species concept is one of the oldest and most fundamental in biology. And yet it is almost universally conceded that no satisfactory definition of what constitutes a species has ever been proposed. The present article is devoted to an attempt to review the status of the problem from a methodological point of view. Since the species is one of the many taxonomic categories, the question of the nature of these categories in general needs to be entered into.

In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations. Erich Heller's lifelong study of modern European literature necessarily returns again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche prided himself on having broken with all traditional ways of thinking and feeling, and once even claimed that he would someday be recognized for having ushered in a new millennium. While acknowledging Nietzsche's radicalism, Heller (...) also insists on the continuity of the story in which he does indeed occupy a central place. By considering Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Yeats, and others, Heller shows the philosopher's ambivalence toward the tradition he inherited as well as his profound effect on the thought and sensibility of those who followed him. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, as Heller does in his first essay, that Nietzsche is to many modern writers and thinkers—including Mann, Musil, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Jaspers, Gide, and Sartre—what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: the categorical interpreter of a world, which they contemplate imaginatively and theoretically without ever much upsetting its Nietzschean structure. Thus it is Nietzsche's thought, so pervasively present in the themes of modernity, that gives coherence and unity to Heller's essays. What emerges from them is that, despite his iconoclastic declarations and unorthodox philosophical practices, Nietzsche deals with the human spirit's persistent concerns. His questions remain urgent, and even the answers, in all their contradictoriness, possess the commanding force of his inquiry. An example is the incompatibility of the famous extremes, the teaching of the _Übermensch_ and the Eternal Recurrence of All Things. These cancel each other out and yet grow from the same intellectual and spiritual roots, as is shown lucidly and cogently by one of Heller's most forceful essays, "Nietzsche's Terrors: Time and the Inarticulate." In fathoming the depth of this contradiction, Heller at the same time reveals the importance of Nietzsche for those who seek to understand the wellsprings of the epoch's disquiet, turmoil,_ and_ creativity. (shrink)

This study examines interactions in which students help each other with their learning during classroom instruction, forming groups in the process. From a conversation analytic perspective, helping is assumed to be a sequentially organized activity jointly accomplished by the participants. As an activity that proceeds alongside other ongoing classroom activities, helping can be conceived as part of a multiactivity that poses students with multi-faceted interactional and moral challenges. While previous research on helping in educational contexts has primarily focused on the (...) influence of helping on learning outcomes and social dynamics in helping interactions, the present study investigates how students cope with the intricacies of moral commitments inherent in helping as a concurrent activity. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we aim to elaborate on how students’ dual involvements – i.e., their involvement in classroom activities while simultaneously providing help – manifest in the ways in which groups are constituted, maintained, and dissolved. The analyses reveal that both the compatibility of helping with the activity already in progress as well as the students’ problem definition are consequential for the sequential and bodily-spatial unfolding of the help interaction, inducing different arrangements that constitute a continuum, at each end of which there is a dominant orientation toward the shared space of helping or toward the individual/collective space. Furthermore, from a methodological perspective, our study aims to demonstrate the extent to which multimodal interaction analysis is applicable when examining naturally occurring groups, in this case, in interactive processes of helping. The study is based on a data corpus that comprises video recordings of mathematics and German lessons from two fifth-grade classrooms. (shrink)

This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our (...) continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

: A rich array of twelfth to fifteenth century Arabic texts captures the advent of a supererogatory prayer known as ṣalāt al-raghā’ib, on the eve of the first Friday of the month of Rajab in late eleventh-century Jerusalem, and its wide dissemination. This corpus offers an unusually vivid picture of the formation and the transformation of a medieval bid’a, or, of an ‘invention of tradition’. Combining our expertise in Islamic law and in Ayyūbid and Mamluk era history, we use this (...) corpus for an in-depth study of popular piety, power politics, scholarly polemics and legal discourse. Twenty eight translated excerpts of various texts are presented in this paper, preceded by a detailed introduction. Exploring legal reasoning in its concrete political and social context provides a nuanced understanding of the development, mass proliferation and ensuing debate over a highly controversial and extraordinary potent religious practice. (shrink)

The founding motto of philosophy in science is “tracking down big philosophical problems in contemporary science.” Knowing the basic history of philosophy and the history of science, we more or less know what “big philosophical topics” mean. The most representative topics of this kind include: time, space, causality, matter, life, consciousness, thinking... The tables of contents of philosophy textbooks could be copied to continue this list. These topics are big not only when they remain at a high level of generality, (...) but also when they get down to special cases and particular sub-problems. Sometimes it is only then that they fully reveal their big format. (shrink)

J’examinerai ici le problème inépuisable de la signification de l’homogénéité sociale pour la démocratie politique, essentiellement à travers une analyse précise des concepts, et uniquement du point de vue politique, et non du point de vue social, économique ou éthique.Comme n’importe quel autre type de domination politique, le type..

L’État européen est actuellement confronté à une crise difficile et dangereuse ; sa forme et son contenu ont un besoin urgent de renouvellement. Ce qui s’offre à nous pour cette réforme de la tête et des membres, à côté du bolchevisme dont les plans de révolution mondiale ne font plus aujourd’hui beaucoup parler d’eux, c’est avant tout l’exemple du fascisme. Nous avons..

In the 20th century the infiltration of scientific elements into philosophical currents not only reached its maximum, but also science itself became a "philosophical factor". We look at these processes in physics starting from the fall of mechanistic philosophy. The advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics has changed physics as science and raised a host of philosophical questions. Traditionally philosophical questions concerning space, time and causality cannot be any longer considered with no help of these theories. Relativistic cosmology and (...) its observational successes in the last decades of the century, for the first time in the history of human thought, provided a global framework for both science and philosophy. And the current search for the final unifying theory of physics leads directly to the most foundational questions of an ontological character. We argue that the success of the 20th century physics strongly suggests a kind of structuralist ontology. /// No século XX, a infiltração de elementos científicos nas correntes filosóficas não só alcançou o seu máximo, mas também é verdade que a própria ciência se tornou um "factor filosófico". O presente artigo considera estes processos na física, a começar com a decadência da filosofia mecanicista. O advento da teoria da relatividade e da mecânica quântica transformou a física enquanto ciência e levantou uma plêiade de questões filosóficas. Questões tradicionais acerca do espaço, do tempo e da causalidade não podem mais ser consideradas sem o contributo destas teorias. A cosmologia relati-vista e os seus sucessos observacionais nas últimas décadas do século passado, e isso pela primeira vez na história do pensamento humano, fornecem um esquema global tanto para a ciência como para a filosofia. Além disso, a busca corrente de uma última teoria unificadora da física conduz directamente às questões mais fundacionais de carácter ontológico. O autor do artigo defende que os sucessos da física do século XX sugerem fortemente uma espécie de ontologia estruturalista. (shrink)

In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations.

Das Buch von den Ursachen, eine im 9. Jhdt. bei Bagdad entstandene, im 12. Jhdt. ins Lateinische ubersetzte und zunachst Aristoteles zugeschriebene neuplatonische Schrift, gehort zu den zentralen philosophischen Texten, die an den Universitaten des 13. Jhdts. gelesen werden. Ihr anonymer Autor entwickelt darin eine an Proklos angelehnte, jedoch zugunsten der Schopfungstheologie der monotheistischen Religionen abgewandelte Ontologie. Der Kommentar bildet eine wichtige Quelle fur Erkenntnisse zu Entstehung und Inhalt des Buches. Auch zeigt er die Arbeitsweise eines der grossten Denker des (...) lateinischen Mittelalters und ist ein wichtiger Baustein fur das Verstandnis des philosophischen und theologischen Werkes Thomas von Aquins, in dem er immer wieder auf das Buch von den Ursachen zuruckgreift. (shrink)

"This volume is concerned with how we ought to evaluate the individual and collective actions on which the existence, numbers and identities of future people depend - discussed here as the "problem of contingent future persons." For it seems that those future persons who are brought into existence by such actions cannot benefit from or be harmed by them in any conventional sense. This is a relatively novel problem in ethics and as yet there is simply no consensus on how (...) we ought to evaluate such actions or, indeed, on whether we can. However, the pursuit of a solution to the problem has been interestingly employed by moral philosophers to press the limits of ethics and to urge a reconsideration of the nature and source of value at its most fundamental level. Intended for professional ethicists, policy researchers, and graduate students, this volume explores the theological implications of the problem and advances the investigation of it both philosophical and in theological terms." --Book Jacket. (shrink)

Written by philosophers, cosmologists, and physicists, this collection of essays deals with causality, which is a core issue for both science and philosophy. Readers will learn about different types of causality in complex systems and about new perspectives on this issue based on physical and cosmological considerations. In addition, the book includes essays pertaining to the problem of causality in ancient Greek philosophy, and to the problem of God's relation to the causal structures of nature viewed in the light of (...) contemporary physics and cosmology. [Subject: Philosophy, Cosmology, Physics, Religious Studies]. (shrink)