The study of the peculiarities that the reception of such an essential concept of the philosophical Corpus Dionysiacum Areopagiticum as ὑπερούσιος in ancient Slavic translations has is promising. It allows not only to understand better the internal perspective of the development of philosophical terminology in Rus’-Ukraine, where in the 15th–17th centuries, there existed a significant number of manuscripts of the corpus, but also to strengthen the argument in favor of its dating precisely in the 5th century. According to the conceptual (...) features that are present in the Greek text of De divinis nominibus and are confirmed in the studies of Slavic translations of the Corpus Areopagiticum, this work, preserved also in other languages, could belong to an author, who uniquely combined his Christian views and a philosophical vision of the world that was inspired by his Neoplatonic education at the Alexandrian School of Philosophy under the guidance of the eminent Neoplatonic thinker and mathematician Hypatia, who was well acquainted with the ideas of Plotinus and the whole Alexandrian intellectual tradition. It is possible that this author, who used the ideas of Plotinus and Porphyry and for the first time unfolded the idea of the Christian God as the Hyperousios in the aspect of the Christian Triad in his philosophical hymns and treatises, could be Synesius of Cyrene, Bishop of Ptolemais. (shrink)

Both editors have long been known for their work on Plotinus. Schwyzer has published important articles on the MSS A, V, and D, on the Pseudo-Aristotelian Theology and its relation to Porphyry's edition of the Enneads, on Plotinus' interpretation of Timaeus 35 A, and on the relation of Plotinus' triad of hypostases to his interpretation of Parmenides 139-145 ; and he is the author of the new article on Plotinus in the Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie. Ever since 1933 Henry has been (...) publishing a series of books and articles dealing with the text of Plotinus, its constitution, influence, and transmission. Of these works three books are especially important, since they were meant to constitute a critical introduction to the edition of the Enneads. The first of these, Recherches sur la Préparation Évangélique d'Eusèbe et l'Édition Perdue des Oeuvres de Plotin Publiée par Eustochius, undertakes to establish the fidelity of Porphyry, the first editor of the Enneads, to the autographs of Plotinus from which he made his recension. The second, Études Plotiniennes I: Les États du Texte de Plotin, a detailed study of the indirect tradition, reinforces this conclusion and establishes the authority of the archetype of the direct tradition. That archetype, Henry concludes, was as faithful to the recension of Porphyry as Porphyry was to the original written by Plotinus, and the indirect tradition is rather a guarantee of the faithfulness of the Porphyrian edition reproduced by the archetype than a source of corrections for the text of our MSS. The third volume, Études Plotiniennes II: Les Manuscrits des Ennéades, an exhaustive study of the character and history of the extant MSS, has for its purpose the determination of the necessary and sufficient evidence for the reconstitution of the archetype, the common ancestor of all the MSS of the direct tradition. No attempt is made to establish a stemma leading from the original to the extant MSS. Henry is here concerned rather to identify in the mass of material all the representative elements of the direct tradition and so to establish the apparatus of the critical edition on a basis broad enough to be forever independent of any hypothesis concerning the ultimate relations of the families represented by the extant MSS. In four chapters he studies the MSS of groups w, x, y, z respectively, in a fifth the MSS which Perna used for the editio princeps, and in two Appendices four lost MSS of which some record remains and the fragment of Eusebius in Vaticanus Rossianus 986. The volume is equipped with a detailed inventory of the MSS, a table of water, marks, and an index of proper names. One of the most important results of this study of Henry's is the identification of the MSS derivative from A, several of which had been used as independent witnesses to the arche- typal text but which Henry has shown to have no textual authority whatever. The results of this volume, however, are to be corrected in the light of three pages of "Corrections et Compléments" at the end of the second edition, which save for this list is an exact reimpression of the first. In 1946 Henry and Schwyzer began their collaboration in the preparation of the critical edition, and their study of the variants led them to certain conclusions different from those that Henry had printed in Les Manuscrits. In particular, they decided that D, which Henry had, though with some hesitation, treated as a member of family y, does not belong to y or to any other of the recognized groups of MSS but constitutes a family of its own; and they distinguished in the hand which Henry had hitherto called A1 and Schwyzer A2 two separate hands: one, hereafter to be called A1, which they believe to be that of the scribe of A himself correcting his MS from a source different from any extant MS and different also from the sub-archetypes of these MSS, so that the readings of A1 must represent a separate family or another archetype ; and a second, hereafter to be called A2, the corrections of which appear to be conjectures and so to have no authority for the text. (shrink)

Leopoldo Zea was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Though in English-language scholarship Zea is known primarily as a historian of ideas, his philosophical producti...

In the eleventh of his Antiquarian Letters, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing discusses a phrase from Lucian's description of the painting by Zeuxis called A Family of Centaurs: ‘at the top of the painting a centaur is leaning down as if from an observation point, smiling’. ‘This as if from an observation point, Lessing notes, obviously implies that Lucian himself was uncertain whether this figure was positioned further back, or was at the same time on higher ground. We need to recognize the (...) logic of ancient bas-reliefs where figures further to the back look over those at the front, not because they are actually positioned above them but because they are meant to appear as if standing behind.'1 · 1. The passage is in George Lessing, Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts, p. 81. Panofsky's discussion does not note that the original text of Lucian makes clear that what is described is a copy of the original painting. This means that some of the issues of misunderstanding situated by Lessing and Panofsky in Lucian's court may in principle be attributable to the copyist. This makes no difference to the conceptual thrust of Panofsky's case.—Trans. (shrink)

‘Language and End Time’ is a translation of Sections I, IV and V of ‘Sprache und Endzeit’, a substantial essay by Günther Anders that was published in eight instalments in the Austrian journal FORVM from 1989 to 1991. The original essay was planned for inclusion in the third volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings. ‘Language and End Time’ builds on the diagnosis of ‘our blindness toward the apocalypse’ that was advanced in the first volume of The Obsolescence in (...) 1956. The essay asks if there is a language that is capable of making us fully comprehend the looming ‘man-made apocalypse’. In response to this, it offers a critique of philosophical jargon and of the putatively ‘objective’ language of science, which are both dismissed as unsuitable. Sections I, IV and V introduce this core problematic. The selection of this text for inclusion in this special journal issue responds to present-day realities that inscribe Anders’s reflections on nuclear science and the nuclear situation into new contexts. The critique that ‘Language and End Time’ advances resonates with the way in which the decisions of a few companies and individuals are shaping the future of life on earth. At the same time, the wider stakes of Anders’s turn against the language employed by scientists are newly laid bare by the realities and politics of climate change and fake news. In this new context, the language of science is all too readily dismissed as if it were a mere idiom that can be ignored without consequence. It is against the backdrop of a future that is, if anything, more uncertain than at the time of Anders’s writing, that the essay’s reflections on popularisation, the limits of language and the nature of truth gain added significance. (shrink)

In 1813 Isaak von Sinclair published a poem entitled “The New Acquaintance.” It recounts a meeting between himself, his friend Friedrich Hölderlin, and one other unidentified guest whom Sinclair awaited with keen anticipation. Because of Hölderlin’s well established friendship with Hegel it has been assumed in the past that the unknown acquaintance was in fact Hegel. However, at the time to which the poem refers, Hegel was a relatively obscure and unknown figure with no reputation. If we are therefore to (...) accept that the poem does indeed allude to Hegel then we must assume that Sinclair, as early as 1813, had recognized Hegel’s genius and wanted retrospectively to associate his name with the newly rising star of German philosophy. In that case we must ask why he refrained from mentioning Hegel by name or at least making the character of the unknown unambiguously clear? In translating this poem for the first time into English I offer for consideration another candidate as the “acquaintance,” namely, Wilhelm Heinse. (shrink)

The basic problem affecting humanitarian law today remains that of its implementation. As of now, requests made by individuals before national courts to assess the compatibility of certain acts with international humanitarian law failed. The present case study and commentaries focus on the decision of a German civil court sitting Bonn to deny the victims of a NATO air raid the right to sue Germany and claim compensation for alleged violations of international humanitarian law.

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

Michael Heidelberger's exhaustive exploration of Fechner's writings, in relation to current issues in the field, successfully reestablishes Fechner'...

In European culture the sacred and the secular have existed in a dialectical relationship. Prodi sees the fifteenth-century crisis of Christianity as opening up three paths that eroded this dualism and tended towards modernity: civic-republican religion, sacred monarchy, and the territorial churches. Important counter-forces, which sought to maintain dualism, included the Roman-Tridentine Compromise, and those forms of Radical Christianity which rejected confessionalisation outright. During the Eighteenth Century, all these phenomena tended to contribute to one of two tendencies: towards civic religion, (...) or towards political religion. The former preserved a distinction between conscience and law; the latter comprised a state religion which sought to perfect all of human nature. It was civic religion which become embodied in the early USA, alienating God from worldly power, but leaving him as the guarantor of agreements between humans. Back in Europe, Prodi tracks the relationship between the Catholic Church and the new national states. He then turns to the political religions of the Twentieth Century. Prodi concludes by emphasising that this dualism of sacred and secular power lay at the centre of Western modernity, and expresses his fears about the collapse of civic religion into political religion, especially in the USA. (shrink)

This is a translation of "Socialite et argent", a text by Emmanuel Levinas originally published in 1987. Levinas describes the emergence of money out of inter-human relations of exchange and the social relations - sociality - that result. While elsewhere he has presented sociality as "non-indifference to alterity" it appears here as "proximity of the stranger" and points to the tension between an economic system based on money and the basic human disposition to respond to the face of the (...) other person. Money both encodes and effaces sociality, both designates and disguises social relations. It arises from the way that needs and interests are manifested in exchange relations, in what he calls the "interestedness" of economic life. But interests are always already cut through by the fact that being is always "being with others". Being is always "inter-being". Interestedness is always confronted by disinterestedness, that is, by a sociality marked by the "goodness of giving", attachment to and concern for the poverty of the other person. Levinas concludes with a discussion of sociality and justice, posing questions about the tension between the demand to respond to an Other immediately before me and at the same time to respond to the demands of an other Other (the third person) who also invites a response. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology as well as (...) feminist difference theory , I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot-as in the first assumption-be transformed into symmetry. (shrink)

The book that the French reader holds in his hands is one of the century’s most fascinating and liberating. It does nothing less than instigate the psychoanalytic approach as a universal method of...

Against the usual interpretation, which states that Afrofuturism is unreservedly technophilic, I argue that Afrofuturism is a radical critique of white technology. White technology (be it imperial,...

At this historical moment, few terms are as charged and powerful as the omnipresent term environment. It has become a strategic tool for politics and theories alike, crossed the borders of the disciplines of biology and ecology, and left the manifold field of environmentalism. This article explores the first steps on this path of expansion, in which the term becomes an argumentative resource and achieves a plausibility that transforms it into a universal tool. It is not self-evident to describe ubiquitous (...) media, cinematic spaces, or augmented realities as environments. To understand how the term gained this plausibility, it is necessary to distinguish it from two other terms: the French milieu and the German Umwelt. When these three terms substitute one another and are used as translations, they lose their historical specificity and depth, and three different theoretical and philosophical traditions merge into indifference. Consequently, a conceptual history of the term environment and its relation to milieu and Umwelt—as well as terms such as medium, atmosphere, ambiance, and climate—can help us to understand the potentials and dangers of the term’s plausibility. In this sense, the article argues for a new perspective on epistemologies of surrounding that relate that which surrounds to that which is surrounded. (shrink)

In 1985, Swiss legal philosopher Walter Ott visited Herbert Hart in Oxford and made this record of their meeting, which casts novel light on some of Hart’s ideas. Ott engaged Hart in a fresh encounter with the legal philosophy of Gustav Radbruch, particularly Hart’s and Radbruch’s reasons for a minimum content of justice in law. They also discussed the grudge informer, state responsibility under laws of an earlier régime, and questions of the definition and falsifiability of legal theories. Hart surprisingly (...) reported Hans Kelsen as stating, when they had met at Berkeley in 1961, that Hume (and not Kant, and certainly not Wittgenstein) was the greatest philosopher who had ever lived. The translation is accompanied with annotations explaining references, assumptions and contexts. (shrink)

How much violence can a society expect its members to accept? A comparison between the language theories of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan is the starting point for answering this question. A look at the early stages of language acquisition exposes the sacrificial logic of patriarchal society. Are those forces that restrict the individual to be conceived in a martial imagery of castration or is it possible that an existing society critically questions those points of socialization that leave their members (...) in a state of homelessness? The following considerations should help to distinguish between unavoidable and avoidable forms of violence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism in Comparison with Zen Buddhism” originally appeared as the concluding section of Ueda Shizuteru’s first book, Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur Gottheit: Die mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und ihre Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen-Buddhismus. It was first published in 1965 as an expanded version of Ueda’s doctoral dissertation, which was written under the supervision of Ernst Benz at the University of Marburg. Ueda’s careful analysis not only illuminates important points of affinity (...) between Eckhart and Zen, but also explains why Eckhart’s mysticism cannot be simply interchanged with Zen Buddhism. To allow the reader to read for themselves, I kept all interpretative notes to a minimum. The text is translated from the most recent edition of the German text, published in 2018 by Verlag Karl Alber, and edited by Wolf Burbat. The German pagination is interpolated in bold throughout the text. (shrink)

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific (...) individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)

The processes associated with globalization have reinforced and even increased prevailing conditions of inequality among human beings with respect to their political, economic, cultural, and social opportunities. Yet-or perhaps precisely because of this trend-there has been, within political philosophy, an observable tendency to question whether equality in fact should be treated a as central value within a theory of justice. In response, I examine a number of nonegalitarian positions to try to show that the concept of equality cannot be dispensed (...) with in any adequate consideration of justice. (shrink)

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: that of the logician Gottlob Frege and that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning , to show how philosophy of language (...) can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)