The teaching of deification has long been emphasized as a peculiarity of Eastern Orthodox theology, which is unmatched by Latin fathers. Protestanttheologians reduced this teaching to the influence of paganism and explained it asone of the indicators of the unhealthy Hellenization of Gospel science. Accordingto the general agreement of contemporary scholars, St. Augustine not only speaksof deification but deification occupies a significant place in his theological system.We will try to analyze the most significant aspects of Augustine’s teaching on dei-fication in (...) the context of his general theological position. (shrink)

This book offers a unique analysis of the contradictions and pathologies of the modern international order and develops a new cosmopolitan alternative.

Zuerst stellt man das Problem der Gesellschaft und der gesellschaftlichen Ordnung als spezifisches neuzeitliches Problem (in diesem Sinne, der klassischen Welt fremd) dar. Der Antwort, der die Neuzeit auf diese Frage gefunden hat, ist die Idee (hegemonisch im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert) des Markts als ein durch Antagonismus und Reziprozität charakterisiertes, von jedem Außenhalt unabhängiges und völlig autonomes Interaktionsystem. Wir analysieren in diesem Rahmen das Kantische Gemeinschaftsmodell, das mit dem Newtonsche Modell viele Änlichkeiten hat, und daran suchen wir die Spuren (...) dieser selbstregulierende Mechanismus. Wir fangen mit Kants Konzept des commerciums der Substanzen an, und werden wir einen Überblick von der Allgemeinen Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels von 1755 bis zur Transzendentalphilosophie geben. Dann wenden wir uns der Logik der Kantischen Rechtsgemeinschaft zu, um abschließend uns mit dem ethischen Gemeinwesen, das Kant in seiner Religionsschrift von 1793 beschrieben hat, zu beschäftigen. (shrink)

: Most contemporary attempts to draw inspiration from Kant's cosmopolitan project focus exclusively on the prescriptive recommendations he makes in his article, ‘On Perpetual Peace’. In this essay, I argue that there is more to his cosmopolitan point of view than his normative agenda. Kant has a unique and interesting way of problematizing the way individuals and peoples relate to one another on the stage of world history, based on a notion that human beings who share the earth in common (...) ‘originally’ constitute a ‘commercium’ of thoroughgoing interaction. By unpacking this concept of ‘commercium’, we can uncover in Kant a more critical perspective on world history that sets up the cosmopolitan as a specific kind of historical-political challenge. I will show that we can distinguish this level of problematization from the prescriptive level at which Kant formulates his familiar recommendations in ‘Perpetual Peace’. I will further show how his particular way of framing the cosmopolitan problematic can be expanded and expatiated upon to develop a more critical, reflexive, and open-ended conception of cosmopolitan thinking. (shrink)

This paper engages with the topic of hospitality in its reading of Kant as a thinker of ‘globality’; that is, as one who is keenly attuned to the various and complex ways humans strive to ‘hospitalize’ this planet in their attempts to transform it into a working and living environment. Despite having no illusions about actual international traders’ practices, who all too often perpetuate injustices and commit crimes, he sets out a project for a different conception of commercium as (...) a cultural practice which should remind us of the finite nature of our planet and its resources, and of our own vulnerable dependence on it. This account of a more enlightened ‘spirit of trade’, which is sensitive to cultural difference and environmental issues, is the product of a mobile way of thinking which would favour a more fluid communication with people on the move. (shrink)

El concepto de "comunidad" en Kant es mucho más complejo de lo que un pensamiento político apresurado nos sugiere. De las dos posibles acepciones que dicho concepto comporta, communio y commercium, referidas respectivamente a una comunidad sustancial predominante sobre el individuo y a una interacción recíproca entre individuos en sí mismos sustanciales, Kant se decanta por la segunda de ellas. Sin embargo, de ello no puede deducirse que la posición kantiana sea asimilable sin más a la de los defensores (...) del liberalismo, enfrentados a las posturas comunitaristas. Kant aspira también a la formación de una esfera de lo común en la cual quedarían englobadas las nociones de justicia, verdad, belleza y bondad. Sin embargo, dicha esfera común no preexiste a la interacción entre los individuos en el marco de la sociedad civil; por el contrario, se conforma a partir de los encuentros morales exitosos en ese mismo marco. La posición de Kant podría ser definida como un republicanismo crítico, que aspira a la formación de lazos de civilidad entre los ciudadanos al tiempo que somete a crítica las formas dogmáticas de expresión de la comunidad. Este tipo de comunidad dinámica de seres racionales establece sus nexos mediante la formación de un sentido común capaz de fundamentar los consensos, sin lo cual la racionalidad crítica sería una actividad puramente destructiva. Kant´s notion of community is more complex than what is suggested by a hasty political thought. In the alternative between the two possible meanings of this notion, communio and commercium , Kant advocates for the latter. However, we cannot deduce from this that the kantian stance should be equated without further ado with that of those who defend liberalism, as opposed to the communitarians. Kant aims also at the formation of a sphere of commonness which encompasses the concepts of justice, truth, beauty and the good. Nevertheless, such a sphere doesn't preexist to the interaction of individuals in the context of civil society; on the contrary, it springs from the successful moral encounters in that same context. Kant´s stance could be described as critical republicanism, one that aims at the formation of civil links among citizens at the same time that criticizes all forms of dogmatic expression of community. Such a type of dynamic community of rational beings establishes its links through the construction of a common sense able to lay the foundations of consent. Without this, critical rationality would be a purely destructive activity. (shrink)

The decision of some provinces of the Anglican communion to extend to women the threefold ordained ministry has compromised the possibility of the recognition of Anglican orders by the Catholic church: they were declared invalid by pope Leo XIII in the bull Apostolicae Curae of 1896. The refusal to recognise as valid the sacrament of Order , administered in the Anglican church, does not signify, however, denial of efficacy on account of the grace present in the ordained minister of the (...) Anglicans. By taking up the formal distinction, introduced by Vatican II, between the church of Christ and the Catholic church , it is possible to reinterpret the question of the relationship between grace and order in the light of the ecclesiological implications of sacrum commercium - which occurs in baptism, ministry and eucharist - between the Catholic church and other ecclesial communities. (shrink)

Das "Ideal des hobbes", der Kampf und die Anerkennung : Kants und Hegels Auseinandersetzung mit Thomas Hobbes -- Carl Schmitt und Thomas Hobbes -- "... das einzig taugliche Princip ein beharrliches Ganzes unter wiedersinnischen Köpfen möglich zu machen ..." : Kants Gemeinschaftsphilosophie vom commercium der Substanzen bis zum ethischen Staat -- Immanuel Kants Geschlechtertheorie : Vom ästhetischen Gegenverhältnis der Geschlechter zum rechtlichen Besitzverhältnis in der Ehe -- Sittliche Erkenntnis, die "moralische Möglichkeit des Erlaubten" und die Moralwahl : Themen der (...) frühen praktischen Philosophie Reinholds -- Die Wirklichkeit des Sittlichen : Hegels Kritik der Moralphilosophie -- Kelsen und Aristoteles -- Zur philosophischen Begründung der Strafe : Historische Skizzen und systematische Probleme -- Macht und Moral : Über das ethische Dilemma der Politik -- Nietzsche, Foucault und die Lebenskunst. (shrink)

This article explores the bases of Kant’s cosmopolitanism in his more systematic writings on freedom, judgment, and community. My argument is that, if we peer beneath his more explicitly normative prescriptions for achieving “perpetual peace,” we find the tools not just of a cosmopolitan vision but what we might call a “cosmopolitical method.” While many assume Kant’s political thought descends directly from his moral philosophy, a look back at relevant passages in the first Critique reveals an alternative reading that points (...) toward his theory of reflective judgment, which combines practical freedom with judgments based on theoretical concepts. Of particular importance is Kant’s conception of community as commercium, through which Kant discerns all matters of right to concern the way free actors are constrained to share the earth in common. These considerations allow for a broader way of thinking about Kantian cosmopolitanism, one that is responsive to the reflective judgment of world citizens as they encounter new challenges. (shrink)

While the concept of hospitality involves paradoxes, Kant’s theory of cosmopolitanism partly overcomes them by transforming the ethical requirement of hospitality into a condition for realizing any right. Because exchange, commerce (commercium), and the mutual recognition of freedoms are at the basis of any political association, as they are on a larger scale of any coexistence of political communities, they constitute the primary relationship on which the duty of hospitality is based. Therefore, the Kantian theory of cosmopolitanism is a (...) theory of the institutionalization of hospitality. Nevertheless, while the institutionalization of moral requirements generally implies a loss of their critical force, Kant offers a legal theory of hospitality that reinforces its critical and political dimension. Beyond Kant, hospitality can be developed as justifying protests from citizens against any policy pursued by their governments when the latter contravenes the principle of reciprocity through practices of domination both at the domestic and international levels. Linked to a sense of justice on a global scale, hospitality opens a reflection on the obligations and responsibilities that members of society have when their rulers pursue imperial agendas. Kant’s cosmopolitanism can thus be developed as a critical cosmopolitanism or a critical politics of hospitality. (shrink)

Although the eighteenth century is not a chief interest of historians of psychology, nor is the history of psychology a main topic of Enlightenment studies, the era has long qualified as what a textbook of modern philosophy called "the century of psychology". The present article examines such a historiographical paradox, and asks in what senses eighteenth-century might deserve that label. For the general historian of the Enlightenment, as for historians of logic, esthetics, moral philosophy, or education, the label is justified (...) by the psychologization experienced by those domains and others. The historian of the human sciences can agree because, especially in Germany, empirical psychology became during the eighteenth century an autonomous field of academic investigation. Psychology, under that name or otherwise, gained throughout Europe the highest rank in the hierarchy of the sciences. Moreover, insofar as its object was the soul united to, and interacting with the body, and to the extent that human beings were defined precisely by such a union and "commerce", psychology became the crucial anthropological science, on which all other branches of the "science of man" were said to depend. Finally, the development during the Aufklärung of a historical discourse about empirical psychology reveals the self-consciousness attained within the emerging field by the end of the eighteenth century. Weder ist das achtzehnte Jahrhundert für die Geschichte der Psychologie ein Schwerpunkt der Forschung, noch ist die Geschichte der Psychologie ein Hauptthema der Arbeiten über die Aufklärung. Trotzdem wurde diese Ära doch lange Zeit als das qualifiziert, was ein Textbuch der modernen Philosophie als "das Jahrhundert der Psychologie" bezeichnet. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht dieses historiographische Paradoxon, und fragt, inwiefern das achtzehnte Jahrhundert die Bezeichnung "Jahrhundert der Psychologie" verdient.Für den "allgemeinen" Historiker der Aufklärung genauso wie für die Historiker der Logik, der Ästhetik, der Moralphilosophie oder der Erziehung rechtfertigt sich die Bezeichnung aus der Psychologisierung, die diese und andere Gebiete erfahren haben. Der Historiker, der sich mit den Geisteswissenschaften beschäftigt, kann ihr ebenfalls zustimmen, da die empirische Psychologie, insbesondere in Deutschland, während des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts ein eigenständiges Feld auf dem Gebiet der akademischen Forschung wurde.Die Psychologie, sei es nun unter diesem oder einem anderen Namen, erreichte in der Hierarchie der Wissenschaften in ganz Europa den höchsten Rang. Darüber hinaus wurde sie zu einer kritischen anthropologischen Wissenschaft, von der gesagt wurde, daß alle anderen "Humanwissenschaften" auf ihr beruhen. Denn ihr Gegenstand war die mit dem Körper eine Einheit bildende und mit ihm zusammen agierende Seele, und in dem Umfang, in dem die Menschen präzise durch diese Einheit und durch das "commercium" beschrieben wurden. Letztendlich spiegelt die Entwicklung eines historischen Diskurses über die empirische Psychologie während der Aufklärung das Selbstbewußtsein wieder, das innerhalb dieses aufstrebenden Bereichs gegen Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts erlangt wurde. (shrink)

Drops Dripped - WKCD - What Does It Do? - Techne - Faux Year Zero - Commercium as Ethics - Fictitious Space - The Module - The Image - Art, Love, Revolution. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 285-306.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence by Ezio VailatiJan A. CoverEzio Vailati. Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 250. Cloth, $45.00.When Leibniz received the 1710 issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in early 1711, he read John Keill’s public charge that he had stolen the calculus from Newton. Leibniz twice sought amends (...) from the Society in the form of a retraction, in response to which a committee was formed to investigate and issue a report. The resulting Commercium epistolicum, written by the good Isaac Newton himself and condemning Leibniz, was published in early 1713. In Vienna at the time, Leibniz learned of its contents in a June letter from Johann Bernoulli, who complained about this “scarcely civilized way” of holding what was in effect a tribunal from which the chief witness was absent. By year’s end Leibniz had enlisted Wolff to see into print Leibniz’s anonymous statement—overstatement, in fact—of his case, and nine months later Keill replied with an equally overstated rejoinder. Late autumn of 1714 found Leibniz back in Hannover, suffering from gout and the tiresome pressure to advance his work on the history of the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg. If only he felt better and had more free time, he could collect his mathematical papers and set an end to the dispute by writing his own Commercium epistolicum: as it was (Leibniz told Wolff in the spring of 1715), he had no intention of giving Newton’s cronies the luxury of his time.The Leibniz-Clarke exchange began in the shadows of this dispute, contributing to Leibniz’s already established distaste for parts of British philosophy. Already in 1690 he was describing (to Huygens and others) Newton’s gravitational attraction as “inexplicable.” Soon after Leibniz was surprised to discover that Locke had accepted Newtonian attraction in the second edition of the Essay—surprised, at least, until he came to see it as part and parcel of the dangerous idea that God could attach any old property whatever to matter if He chose, including thought. Materialism and frequent miracles [End Page 533] were just around the corner, and from there it was a short distance to the mortality of the soul, and a mean view of God’s power; the decay of natural theology itself could only follow. Leibniz’s misgivings didn’t see the light of day in the early 1700s, when he penned them in the Preface to the Nouveaux Essais; but he went out of his way to work an explicit complaint about Mr. Newton and Mr. Locke into the Théodicée of 1710 (§19 of the Preliminary Discourse). The calculus dispute followed. By the time Leibniz got round to writing Princess Caroline about the dispute in a letter of May 1715, he was insisting that the Newtonians deserved public censure, and that the Britons deserved Leibniz as historiographer of England. For her own part, Caroline now wondered if Samuel Clarke, who had translated Newton’s Opticks into Latin, would in the end be unbiased enough to translate Leibniz’s Théodicée into English. Moreover Caroline doubted that Clarke’s notion of the soul was theologically innocent. Replying in November, Leibniz summarized his view that natural religion was in great decline in England, and the famous exchange began.Despite there being no monograph devoted to it until now, the Correspondence ıs (and was) famous. If a book-length study is overdue, so perhaps are three reminders—that a significant portion of the Correspondence is devoted to issues other than space and time and gravitation, that the depth to which its issues are pursued was compromised by impatience on the side of both parties, and that Clarke’s philosophical views aren’t so well-understood as Leibniz’s own. Nowhere does Vailati set out to make these points explicitly, but they emerge over the course of his book, and together with exegetical soundness are its chief contributions. While this volume makes no historical or philosophical waves, it indirectly (perhaps unwittingly) explains why none are readily forthcoming in a book... (shrink)

This book is the revised version of a dissertation defended at the University of Chicago. It is also volume 3 of the series “North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy.” Its impressive title refers backward to Laywine’s purpose of showing “why Kant came to the view that sensibility and pure understanding are radically different faculties of knowledge governed by different principles—a view of central importance to the Critique of Pure Reason”. Such a research object is in itself not new. What (...) is new, however, is Laywine’s seeing Kant’s late elaborations on sensibility and understanding as an attempt to provide an answer to the problem of the commercium between body and soul, a problem that was the subject of many discussions within post-cartesian philosophy and received a great deal of attention by Kant too, especially at the beginning of his scientific career, as testified by the presentation of a system of real interaction in his 1755 writing, Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio, whose details are investigated in chapter 2 and in chapter 3. But it is in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, published in 1766, that Laywine sees the “key moment” that gives momentum to her interpretation and are thus made the subject of chapter 1. Laywine dismisses some of the most renowned interpretations of this satirical and at the same time enigmatic writing of Kant’s. She maintains that most interpretations have been failures, and that we can understand the Dreams in a more fruitful way only if we understand the reason for this failure. The reason of the failures, says Laywine, is not having been able to “explain why Kant associates the question of spirits and spirit-seeing with the status and future of metaphysics”, and the more fruitful understanding of the Dreams centers in their connection to Kant’s earlier work in metaphysics, in particular to “his efforts during the mid-1750s to lay the foundation of a credible system of real interaction to supplant the system of pre-established harmony favored by Wolff and Leibniz”. Chapter 4 contains some remarks on the source of Kant’s Dreams, for example, Swedenborg’s Arcana coelestia, while chapter 5 provides a careful analysis of the Dreams, which, according to Laywine, contains not only a critique to Swedenborg, but also a critique to Kant’s Nova dilucidatio in so far as both falsely represent the realm of intelligible substances as though it were subject to the conditions of the sensible world. Chapter 6 is dedicated to Kant’s 1770 dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, which, Laywine remarks, contains the method for correcting the error of Kant’s early metaphysics, namely a method for avoiding false representation of immaterial substances as determined by the conditions of sensibility. Detailed conclusive remarks round out the volume by indicating the direction toward the critical philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 443-445 [Access article in PDF] Martin Schönfeld. The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 348. Cloth, $55.00. Kant's precritical philosophy has often been judged as lacking continuity, originality, and, indeed, philosophical relevance. Martin Schönfeld's impressive new study disputes this assessment, claiming instead that "the philosophy of the young Kant reveals (...) a greater unity and a more interesting coherence than previously assumed" (245). The author further argues that Kant's precritical thought is philosophically interesting in its own right. Schönfeld is to be commended for his successful refutation of the standard caricature and for deftly defending his reading of this formative period in Kant's thought. Recent years have seen a number of similar attempts to rehabilitate Kant's precritical thought, but Schönfeld's study will no doubt become the standard against which future scholarship is measured. [End Page 443]Schönfeld locates the unity of Kant's precritical philosophy in his purported "grand synthesis of the Newtonian model of nature with three assumptions of metaphysics: the purposive development of nature, the possibility of a morally relevant freedom, and the existence of God" (209). Schönfeld divides Kant's precritical philosophy into three periods comprising (1) Kant's initial failure during the 1740s to formulate a non-Newtonian philosophy of nature, (2) his conversion to Newtonianism in the 1750s (and the constructive philosophizing of this period), and (3) the period of intense self-criticism in the 1760s leading to the collapse of the precritical project. The originality of Schönfeld's typology is evident since many scholars claim that Kant was a Newtonian ab initio. In addition, Schönfeld claims that the precritical project ends with the "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer" (1766), a departure from the orthodox extension of the project to the "Inaugural Dissertation" (1770).Such readings are driven by the author's generally trenchant analyses of Kant's attempt to construct a unified philosophy of nature. In this regard, Schönfeld's analysis of Kant's attempt to reconcile physical processes and purposiveness in the "Universal Natural History" (1755) is particularly insightful; and Kant's attempts to account for the compatibility of determinism and human freedom in the "New Elucidation" (1755) and to formulate a theory of active matter in the "Physical Monadology" (1766) receive readings of a similarly high caliber. In addition, Schönfeld's extensive bibliography and his many references to thinkers now long-forgotten—yet indispensable for understanding Kant's early thought (e.g., Georg Bilfinger, a Wolffian thinker and source for Kant's lifelong strategy of seeking a via media between opposing positions)—are invaluable research tools.Also deserving mention is Schönfeld's examination of the "Dreams" essay. Once thought to be a mere critique of Swedenborg's mysticism, this work actually marks the beginning of Kant's doubts regarding the very possibility of speculative metaphysics. The precritical philosophy is largely concerned with the nature of real interaction between substances—contra occasionalist and pre-established harmony theories—and with Kant's interpretation of physical influx that grounds the same. Yet Kant realizes in the "Dreams" that his own account of a commercium of substances (as well as his claims regarding the soul) seems to lead quite naturally to the notion of a divine influx governing the interaction of disembodied spirits (regarding which Swedenborg purported to have first-hand experience). This realization, Schönfeld argues, motivates the collapse of the precritical project and Kant's recognition that an examination of mental capabilities must precede any speculation regarding nonsensible objects. It is to Schönfeld's credit that he takes this text, which is usually either ignored or ridiculed, seriously and presents a comprehensive and cogent reading of the same.Though generally successful in defending his reading of the precritical Kant, some of Schönfeld's positions are rather suspect. Indeed, Schönfeld claims that "in the 1740s, Kant either rejected Newtonian ideas out of hand, or he... (shrink)

In 1538–39 Francisco de Vitoria delivered two relections:De IndisandDe iure belli.This article distills from these writings the topic of free trade as a “human right” in accordance withius gentiumor the “law of peoples.” The right to free trade is rooted in a more fundamental right to communication and association. The rights to travel, to dwell, and to migrate precede the right to trade, which is also closely connected to the rights to preach, to protect converts, and to constitute Christian princes. (...) This has significant repercussions on the field of business ethics: the right to free trade is ultimately founded directly on natural law and indirectly on divine law; trade is not independent of ethics; and trade is presented as an opportunity to develop the virtues of justice and friendship, among other repercussions. Vitoria is portrayed as a defender of private initiative and free markets. (shrink)