I argue that curiosity about the world deserves attention as a moral virtue, even apart from the role it may play in (the more generally praised) love of wisdom. First, close relationships and caring are reasonably considered part of a well-lived life, and curiosity is important for caring both about people and about things in the world. Second, curiosity helps us to define an appropriate way for persons to be affected by certain situations. Perhaps most important, curiosity can help one (...) to live well because it addresses the most fundamental existential task humans face, the need to see their lives as meaningful. I argue that curiosity is a distinctive virtue but suggest that related virtues (e.g., receptivity, reverence) may contribute to different kinds of worthy engagement with the world. (shrink)

In this paper I shall debate the thesis according to which in the Aristotelian treatise On Soul the sense of touch works as a kind of knot for the knowledge faculties and, implicitly, as a unity for the entire treatise: it has a primitive function in the feeding process, it also represents a starting point for both the faculty of motion and knowledge, then relates itself symmetrical to the sense of vision through the typology of the intermediaries and to the (...) intellect through the criterion of nonbeing, and finally reveals to the receiver a kind of truth that has no more the false as an alternative. On the other hand, the intellect recovers in its own faculty the sense of touch by recreating its functions in the connection between intellect and the indivisible intelligibles. Given these relations, the sense of touch represents the main connection of the treatise's large themes from the question of motion to that of knowledge and it is also literally (certain aristotelian remarksover the theme of earth being taken into consideration here) related to the living body. (shrink)

The Question of Hieronymus. Notes on the Literary Structure of the Treatise De divina omnipotentia by Peter Damianus. In the present study I intend to argue that there is a literary consistency of the central problem of Petrus Damianus’s treatise, De divina omnipotentia. This coherence is made up of analogies between the different levels of language. With this view in mind, I shall underline: the existence of a graduality of the message, the presence of some historical sources of the treatise (...) and the endurance of the author’s personal solution to the medieval issue of whether God can undo the past. In conclusion, my main point would be that this famous treatise is not only relevant to the history of logic, but also to literary history. (shrink)

This article investigates the original meaning of a passage of Plotinus’ Enneads, the treatise On Fate (Enneads, III, 1, 5). The thesis of the article envisagesthe understanding of the passage in the light of a Plotinian critic of astrology and argues that the understanding and the modern translations of the passage did not exactly detect neither the Plotinian doctrine nor how Plotinus represents his polemical opponents. We argued in this article that, for criticizing the contemporary astrology of his time, Plotinus (...) elusively calls Anaxagoras’ astronomy, claiming exclusive minerality of the heaven in perfect circular movement. In addition, I correlated this observation with a broader conclusion on the grounding of the heaven as a significant space in the horizon of a hermeneutic conversion of the Plotinian philosophy. (shrink)

German description: Wie wird das schlechthin Undarstellbare sinnlich darstellbar? Petra Bahr zeigt in ihren Studien zur historischen Semantik des Darstellungsbegriffs zwischen 1750 und 1800, dass diese Frage das 18.

This paper reinterprets Kant’s argument that conscience cannot err, in light of assessing the influence of Baumgarten’s opposite argument about an erring conscience. I thereby argue that, contra Kant and in agreement with Baumgarten, we have a duty to acquire the capacity of conscience and that we must develop our acute awareness of handling unwelcome events precisely because conscience is involved in deciding the inherent goodness of an action and yet prone to make mistakes. In substantiating this argument, (...) I demonstrate that it is helpful to demarcate self-judgment as a separate faculty in Kant’s theory of conscience. (shrink)

Music is an ancient and ubiquitous form of human expression. One important component for which music is sought after is its aesthetic value, whose appreciation has typically been associated with largely learned, culturally determined factors, such as education, exposure, and social pressure. However, neuroscientific evidence shows that the aesthetic response to music is often associated with automatic, physically- and biologically-grounded events, such as shivers, chills, increased heart rate, and motor synchronization, suggesting the existence of an underlying biological platform upon which (...) contextual factors may act. Drawing on philosophical notions and neuroscientific evidence, I argue that, although there is no denying that social and cultural context play a substantial role in shaping the aesthetic response to music, these act upon largely universal, biological mechanisms involved with neural processing. I propose that the simultaneous presence of culturally-influenced and biologically-determined contributions to the aesthetic response to music epitomizes Baumgarten’s equation of sensory perception with taste. Taking the argument one step further, I suggest that the heavily embodied aesthetic response to music bridges the cleavage between the two discrepant meanings—the one referring to sensory perception, the other referring to judgments of taste—traditionally attributed to the word “aesthetics” in the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

In this chapter, I demonstrate the several fundamental and original aspects of Bamgarten's concpetion of metaphyics that have been overlooked or at least insufficiently investigated. Baumgarten departs from his predecessors, and from many of his contemporaries, by regarding metaphysics as a uniquely human science whose essential purpose is to provide the best instruments for knowing and realising perfection in human life, given that we are subject to essential limitations. This instrumental view of metaphysics leads him to develop seveal Leibnizian (...) ideas regarding perfection and the best possible world into highly articulated metaphysical doctrines that are able to serve as universal guiding principles for all other sciences. In the final part of the chapter, I illustrate three ways in which metaphysics plays this role through an examination of the foundations of Baumgarten's own practical philosophy. (shrink)

Reseña de: Baumgarten, A. G., & Kant, I.. Baumgarten’s Elements of First Practical Philosophy. A Critical Translation with Kant’s Reflections on Moral Philosophy. Edición y traducción: C. D. Fugate y J. Hymers. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. ISBN: 978-1-4742-8265-9, 375 pp.

Abstractabstract:I argue that Baumgarten's rich and once influential Metaphysica contains an ontology that pushes him toward a Spinozistic conclusion, one that he fiercely sought to avoid. After examining Baumgarten's distinctive account of the core of Spinozism, I present his path as a series of independently motivated steps, focusing on his general ontology and his accounts of the world and God. Baumgarten himself would not be happy with these results, and I concede that some of his efforts to (...) thwart Spinozism look promising. But there is one route to Spinozism that he fails to block, and at a key juncture, he inadvertently aids the Spinozist's cause. I conclude with an epilogue on how Baumgarten's path also foreshadows the next Spinozism flare-up heading into the German pantheism controversy. (shrink)

In the presentation of his project about ‘somaesthetics’, Richard Shusterman claimed that the recurring neglect of the body in aesthetics was disastrously introduced by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) in his first formulation of aesthetics as a discipline in the mid-eighteenth century. In the present essay I aim to call this thesis into question, investigating for the first time the role of the body in Baumgarten’s thought and focusing on its significance for the founding of aesthetics. First, I consider (...) Baumgarten’s doctrine of the body in general and of the human body in particular, in its relationship with the soul. I then turn to discuss Baumgarten’s resumption of the scholastic discipline of ‘somatology’ as a philosophical investigation of the body in both its theoretical and practical – namely, dietetical, side. On these bases, I deal with two examples of dietetic embellishment of the body, one presented by Baumgarten himself (cosmetics) and the other put forward by his pupil and co-founder of disciplinary aesthetics Georg Friedrich Meier (physical exercise and somatic fine arts). Subsequently, I explore the ways in which Meier and Baumgarten use dietetics to foster beautiful thinking. Finally, I conclude that nascent aesthetics is concerned with the aesthetic care of the body both insofar as the body can be a stage of aesthetic value and insofar as the body is a necessary presupposition for beautiful thinking. (shrink)

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s ethics had a significant influence on the formation of Kant’s ethics. The extent of this influence, however, has not been sufficiently investigated by existing Kant scholarship. Filling this gap, this paper aims to reveal Baumgarten’s substantial influence on the formation of Kant’s ethics, particularly the complex ways in which Kant’s ethics retains the concept of God as crucial for ensuring that his ethics persist under the scrutiny of reason. In a systematic comparison of the ethics (...) of the two philosophers, I argue that Kant alters and yet accommodates several aspects of Baumgarten’s ethics in his own version of the system of ethics more thoroughly than has previously been perceived. More specifically, I argue, first, that Kant’s rejection of Baumgarten’s conception of “duties towards God” and his alternative notion that duties are recognized as if they were divine commands unveil his criticism of Baumgarten’s conception of how religion is situated in ethics. Second, I argue that Kant’s argument for the extension of pure reason for practical purposes discloses his critical response to Baumgarten’s optimistic assumption about the entirety of pure reason. (shrink)

En este breve comentario discuto algunos aspectos de la interpretación de la epistemología de Davidson que sugiere Willian Duica en su reciente libro. Luego de una presentación somera del libro me centro en tres asuntos centrales de la interpretación de Duica. En primer lugar, argumento que su lectura de la crítica de Davidson al dualismo esquema/contenido es muy restrictiva y deja abierta la posibilidad de un realismo directo empirista. En segundo lugar, argumento que en su lectura el propio Duica se (...) compromete inadvertidamente con un empirismo de este tipo y, de este modo, su interpretación entra en tensión con el coherentismo de Davidson. Finalmente, discuto algunos aspectos de la interpretación que hace Duica de la tesis davidsoniana de la triangulación. In this short comment I discuss some aspects of William Duica's interpretation of Davidson's epistemology in a recent book. After a brief review of the book, I focus on three central issues of Duica's interpretation. First, I argue that his reading of Davidson's criticism of the scheme/content dualism is too restrictive and leaves open the possibility of an empiricist direct realism. Second, I argue in his reading Duica inadvertently commits himself to an empiricism of this sort and, as a result, his interpretation is in tension with Davidson's own coherentism. Finally, I discuss some aspects of Duica's interpretation of Davidsonian triangulation. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss Baumgarten’s neglected doctrine of taste. In particular I investigate his definition of taste as the judgment of the senses against the backdrop of the philosophical debate of his day, pointing out the biblical and classical sources of the idea of a judging aisthesis. In addition, I analyse the radical change that the definition of taste as the judgment of the senses brings about in the idea of both taste and the judgment of the senses (...) with regard to Wolff. Highlighting the link with the issue of analogon rationis and beauty, I conclude that the concept of taste is at the core of Baumgarten’s new aesthetic project. (shrink)

This paper draws on Alexander Baumgarten, the founder of modern aesthetics (1714- 1762), to tackle two fundamental questions: What is an image or representation “of violence”? And what makes an image violent, in the sense that it can provoke acts of political violence? In the mediatized environment we inhabit, I argue, our perception has become damaged by generalized logics of image-exchange and -sharing, so that we have become immunized against perceiving concrete particularity. Baumgarten’s notion of clear and “con-fused” (...) or “fused” (“verworren”) representations describes well how certain images – “violent” images – can break through these mediatized logics and capture the concrete particular in its qualitative singularity. The complexity and plurivocity of such images defeat our cognitive capacity to determine truth/untruth univocally, provoking a fear of ambiguity, which is one of the small beginnings of violent political acts and events. (shrink)

In this study an analysis is presented of the bonding and structural properties of dehydrogenated and hydrogenated doped cylindrical diamond nanowires calculated using the Vienna Ab Initio Simulation Package, employing density functional theory within the generalized-gradient approximation. The dopants studied here have been inserted substitutionally along the axis of an infinite one-dimensional diamond nanowire and include the single-electron acceptor boron and the single-electron donor nitrogen. The doped nanowires have then been re-relaxed, and properties compared with the undoped structures. The structural (...) properties of relaxed nanowires considered here include an examination bonding via the electron charge density, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the effects of dopants on the stability of diamond nanostructures and nanodevices. (shrink)

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In this study an analysis is presented of the bonding and structural properties of dehydrogenated and hydrogenated doped cylindrical diamond nanowires calculated using the Vienna Ab Initio Simulation Package, employing density functional theory within the generalized-gradient approximation. The dopants studied here have been inserted substitutionally, equidistant along the axis of an infinite diamond nanowire. These dopants include aluminium, phosphorus, oxygen and sulphur. The doped nanowires have then been re-relaxed, and properties compared with previously calculated results for undoped, boron-doped and nitrogen-doped (...) structures. Structural properties of relaxed nanowires considered here include an examination bonding via the electron charge density, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the effects of dopants on the stability of diamond nanostructures and nanodevices. (shrink)

Yang Guorong is a contemporary philosopher with little need for introduction—and not only because he has been introduced here before.1 Professor Yang’s decades of prolific scholarship cover nearly...

In this paper I propose to shed new light on the role of feeling in Kant’s psychology of moral motivation by focusing on the concept of an incentive (Triebfeder), a term he borrowed from one of his most important rationalist predecessors, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. I argue that, similar to Baumgarten, Kant understands an incentive to refer to the ground of desire and that feelings function as a specific kind of ground within Kant’s psychology of moral action, namely as (...) the ‘impelling cause’ of desire. I claim that this interpretation has several advantages over the alternatives currently on offer in the literature. (shrink)

The laws of social development are objective in content and, in contrast to the laws of nature, are manifested and function only through the activity of human beings. The development of all spheres of human activity, in turn, cannot be conceived of as independent of the will, consciousness, moods and beliefs, propensities and preferences of human beings, nor as independent of the effectiveness of forms of social organization, etc. The social specificity of laws of social development in turn defines another (...) feature of these laws, namely, their statistical nature. History and social practice persuasively demonstrate that the laws of social development in turn defines another feature of these laws, namely, their statistical nature. History and social practice persuasively demonstrate that the laws of social development, functioning either in all socioeconomic formations or in only some of them , or laws operating within only one of these formations are of a statistical nature. Even when the conditions of life of societies within a particular socioeconomic formation are the same, the results of the operation of any law of social development are never absolutely identical. This is graphically evident in an analysis of the operation of the law of surplus value, the laws of class struggle, or the law of social revolution, especially its operation under the conditions of the contemporary world revolutionary process. We need only point out the variety of nuances in the ultimate results of the operation of the law of social revolution after the Second World War, when socialist countries and countries with a socialist orientation emerged. (shrink)

t. 1. Putʹ dukhovnogo obnovlenii︠a︡ ; Osnovy khristianskoĭ kulʹtury ; Krizis bezbozhii︠a︡ -- t. 2, kn. 1-2. Nashi zadachi -- t. 3. Shleĭermakher i ego "Rechi o religii" : religioznyĭ smysl filosofii : tri rechi, 1914-1923 ; I︠A︡ bgli︠a︡dyvai︠u︡sʹ v zhiznʹ : kniga razdumiĭ ; Poi︠u︡shchee serdt︠s︡e : kniga tikhakh sozert︠s︡aniĭ ; Putʹ k ochevidnosti -- t. 4. Poni︠a︡tii︠a︡ prava i sily ; Obshchee uchenie o prave i gosudarstve ; O suchnosti pravosoznanii︠a︡ ; O monarkhii i respublike -- t. 5. (...) Osnovnoe Nravstvennoe protivorechie voĭny ; O sopotivlenii zlu siloi︠u︡ ; Statʹi, Pisʹma -- t. 6, kn. 1. O li︠u︡beznosti sot︠s︡ialʹno-psikhologicheskiĭ opyt ; Osnovy khudozhestva, o sovershennom v iskusstve ; O tʹme i prosvetlenii : kniga khudozhestvennoĭ kritiki, Bunin, Remnozov, Shmelev -- t. 6, kn. 2. O Rossii ; Russkie pisateli, literatura, teatr, muzyka ; Khudozhnik i khudozhestvennostʹ -- t. 6, kn. 3. O Rossii i russkoĭ dushe ; Genii Rossii -- t. 7. O bolʹshevizme i kommunizme ; Muchenichestvo t︠s︡erkovʹ v sovetskom gosudarstve ; Sovetskiĭ soi︠u︡z ne Rossii︠a︡ ; O nat︠s︡ionalʹnom prievanii Rossii ; Tvorcheskai︠a︡ idei︠a︡ nashego budushchego -- t. 8. Bolʹshevist︠s︡kai︠a︡ politika mirovogo gospodstva ; Vzgli︠a︡d vi︠a︡alʹ ; Kniga razmyshleniĭ i upovaniĭ -- t. 9-10. Dnevnik ; Pisʹma ; Dokumenty (1903-1938) -- [t. 10.] Pisʹma ; Memuary (1939-1954) -- [t. 11. kn. 1] Perepiska dvukh Ivanov (1927-1934) -- [t. 11. kn. 2.] Perepiska dvukh Ivanov (1935-1946) -- [t. 11. kn. 3.] Perepiska dvukh Ivanov (1947-1950) godov -- [t. 12.] Stat·i, lekt︠s︡ii, vystuplenii︠a︡, ret︠s︡enzii (1906-1954) -- [t. 13.] Kto my?; O revoli︠u︡t︠s︡ii ; O religioznom krizise nashikh dneĭ -- [t. 14. kn. 1.] Filosofii︠a︡ Gegeli︠a︡ kak uchenie o konkretnosti Boga i cheloveka : uchenie o Boge -- [t. 14. kn. 2.] Filosofi Gegeli︠a︡ kak uchenie o konkretnosti Boga i cheloveka : uchenie o cheloveke -- [t. 15. kn. 1.] Aksiomy religioznogo opyta : issleovanie -- [t. 15. kn. 2.] Aksiomy religioznogo opyta issledovanie -- [t. 16. kn. 1.] Mir pered propastʹi︠u︡ -- [t. 16. kn. 2.] Mir pered propastʹi︠u︡ ; Analiticherskie zapiski i publit︠s︡istika -- [t. 17.] Gitler i Stalin. Publit︠s︡istika 1939-1945 godov -- [t. 18.] Spravedlivostʹ ili ravenstvo? ; Publit︠s︡istika 1918-1947 godov -- [t. 19.] Russkiĭ kolokol : zhurnal volevoĭ idei [No special title]. (shrink)