To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

August Boeckh, in his Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences provides an account of the methodology of philology (or what otherwise might be called methodological hermeneutics) that is the culmination of the development of the science of philology in the nineteenth century. Boeckh importantly defines philology in relation to philosophy and to history. Philosophy is the knowledge of the truth, gnosis, while philology is the knowledge of what has been known, anagnosis. Boeckh's hermeneutics provide the (...) background for much of the theory and practice of the twentieth and twentieth‐first centuries. Those who have looked for method in hermeneutics have looked to Boeckh. Those, like Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, who have been critical of the methodologism and scientism in nineteenth‐century hermeneutics, have often considered Boeckh a leading example of these features which they would overcome. (shrink)

Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener, Boeckh von August. Dritte Auflage herausgegeben und mit Anmerkungen begleitet von Max Fränkel. 2 vols. Berlin. G. Reimer. 1886. 30 Mk.

1. Bosanquet, who relished paradox, does not disappoint us about history. The late nineteenth century was a golden age of historical inquiry. Historians — Ernst Curtius, J.G. Droysen, Theodor Mommsen in Germany, William Stubbs, E.A. Freeman and F.W. Maitland in England, Jules Michelet and others in France — were establishing history as a credible and esteemed academic discipline. This increasing respectability of the practice of history was matched by a sophisticated theorisation of history, a theorisation which took two directions. On (...) the one hand were Marx’s brilliant and bewitching historical projections. On the other the logic and methodology of history as an autonomously valid form of knowledge and inquiry were being elaborated. This last was largely a process in which the hermeneutic inquiries of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Droysen and Wilhelm von Humboldt came to fruition in the work of such writers as Philip August Boeckh, Wilhelm Dilthey and — not to forget The Presuppositions of Critical History — our own F.H. Bradley. (shrink)

Dans son cours sur L’Encyclopédie de la philologie classique, Nietzsche prend explicitement parti pour August Boeckh dont la conception de sa discipline s’appuie explicitement sur la philosophie hégélienne. On pourra constater par la suite, et bien que Nietzsche ne soit pas disciple de Hegel, que ce choix initial intradisciplinaire a des répercussions notables sur le terrain de la « philosophie » de l’histoire : ce qui opposait, sur un plan méthodologique et tout à la fois philosophique, Boeckh (...) et Schleiermacher – autrement dit, la « philosophie » de l’histoire et l’herméneutique comme « théorie » ou méthode – se retrouve dans la manière dont Nietzsche va concevoir, dans la Généalogie de la morale, par exemple, l’histoire qu’il appelle « essentielle » en l’opposant à l’histoire « universelle », mais aussi dans son rejet partiel de ce qu’il a appelé « l’esprit historien ». (shrink)

Exactitude. The Genesis of an Epistemic Virtue in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’. The article examines the genesis of exactitude as an epistemic virtue in both scholarly and scientific contexts in the 19th century, mainly in Prussia. Starting with an influential historiographic work on ancient metrology three semantic fields of accuracy, exactitude and precision are differentiated and pursued in their etymologies as well as applications. The historic situation between 1790 and 1860 is identified as the crucial period when the exactness of (...) the exact sciences as well as the notion of accuracy in the humanities start to diverge from one another in order to develop an epistemic virtue each on its own. (shrink)

Selections from the most important and representative writings of the philosopher, economist, social reformer and political activist August Cieszkowski (1814 1894).

Although Auguste Comte is conventionally acknowledged as one of the founders of sociology and as a key representative of positivism, few new editions of his writings have been published in the English language in this century. He has become virtually dissociated from the history of modern positivism and the most recent debates about it. Gertrud Lenzer maintains that the work of Comte is, for better or for worse, essential to an understanding of the modern period of positivism. This collection provides (...) new access to the work of Comte and gives practitioners of various disciplines the possibility of reassessing concepts that were first introduced in Comte's writings. Today much of the ordinary business of academic disciplines is conducted under the assumption that the realm of science is essentially separate from the realms of politics and science. A close reading of Comte will reveal how deeply such current ideas and theories were originally embedded in a particular political context. One of his central methodological principles was that the theory of society had to be removed from the arena of political practice precisely in order to control that practice by means of these same sciences. It is in Comte's work that the reader will be able to observe how the forces of social and political reaction began to be powerfully organized to combat the critical forces in its own and later eras. Auguste Comte and Positivism will be of importance to the work of philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, and historians. (shrink)

" Pour devenir un parfait philosophe, il me manquait surtout une passion, a la fois profonde et pure, qui me fit assez apprecier la partie affective de la nature humaine " note Auguste Comte dans ses " Prieres quotidiennes " redigees peu apres 1845, cette " annee sans pareille " au cours de laquelle il rencontre, frequente et voit disparaitre Clotilde de Vaux a laquelle il voue un amour eperdu. Cette relation aussi profonde et intense que physiquement ephemere ne bouleverse (...) pas seulement la vie privee du fondateur du positivisme. La decouverte du role preponderant de l'affectivite dans les relations humaines et sociales inflechit de maniere definitive la doctrine positiviste dont la nouvelle devise devient L'amour pour principe, l'ordre pour base et le progres pour but. L'edifice theorique qu'est le Systeme de politique positive developpe l'idee d'un " nouveau pouvoir spirituel " qui prendra la forme d'une " religion de l'Humanite " a laquelle l'ordre et le progres doivent etre subordonnes, de meme que l'esprit au cur. Ce numero explore sous differents angles les implications de cet inflechissement majeur a l'uvre dans la philosophie positive, et sa complexe actualite. (shrink)

t. 1. Les religions de l'Inde, et Bulletins des religions de l'Inde (1880-1885) -- t. 2. Bulletins des religions de l'Inde (1889-1902) -- t. 3. Comptes rendus et notices (1872-1886) -- t. 4. Comptes rendus et notices (1887-1898) -- t. 5. Comptes rendus et notices (1899-1911). Bibiliographie. Index général.

t. 1.- Cours de philosophie positive. v. 1: Les préliminaires généraux et la philosophie mathématique.--v. 2: La philosophie astronomique et la philosophie de la physique. v. 3: La philosophie chimique et la philosophie biologique.

How do groups of people persist through time? Groups can change their members, locations, and structure. In this paper, I present puzzles of persistence applied to social groups. I first argue that four-dimensional theories better explain the context sensitivity of how groups persist. I then exploit two unique features of the social to argue for the stage theory of group persistence in particular. First, fusion and fission cases actually happen to social groups, and so cannot be marginalized as “pathological.” Second, (...) it is implausible that groups spatially coincide pre-fission. This means that theories that depend on pre-fission spatial coincidence, such as some endurance theories and the worm theory, cannot explain fission cases. All things considered, the stage theory offers the best explanation of how groups persist. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Écrits de jeunesse 1816-1828".

Tome I : 2. L'introduction fondamentale -- tome II. [No special title].

1891. Comte, a French philosopher, was the founder of Positivism. Positivism is a philosophical system of thought maintaining that the goal of knowledge is simply to describe the phenomena experienced, not to question whether it exists or not. Comte sought to apply the methods of observation and experimentation, as was beginning to be used in the hard sciences, to a field that we now know as sociology. This is one of his later works. Contents: Explanation of the Worship; Explanation of (...) the Doctrine; Explanation of the Regime, or System of Life; and General History of Religion. (shrink)

In A General View of Positivism French philosopher Auguste Comte gives an overview of his social philosophy known as Positivism. Comte, credited with coining the term 'sociology' and one of the first to argue for it as a science, is concerned with reform, progress and the problem of social order in society. In this English edition of the work, published in 1865, he addresses the practical problems of implementing his philosophy or doctrine, as he also refers to Positivism, into society. (...) He believes that society evolves through a series of stages that are ruled by social laws and culminate in a superior form of social life. During this reorganisation of society, which will find its greatest supporters among women and the working class, a 'new moral power' will emerge. Under the motto 'love, order and progress' Comte wishes humanism to replace organised religion as the object of spiritual worship. (shrink)

Orthodoxy holds that the difference between weakness of will and compulsion is a matter of the resistibility of an agent's effective motivation, which makes control-based views of agency especially well equipped to distinguish blameworthy weak-willed acts from non-blameworthy compulsive acts. I defend an alternative view that the difference between weakness and compulsion instead lies in the fact that agents would upon reflection give some conative weight to acting on their weak-willed desires for some aim other than to extinguish them, but (...) not to their compulsive desires. This view allows identificationist theorists of moral responsibility to explain why weak-willed actions, but not compulsive actions, are attributable to agents such that they can, in theory, be praised or blamed for them. After motivating and presenting the view in detail, I show how it has unique resources for explaining the ethics of managing one's compulsions. (shrink)

In this revolutionary work, the author sets the stage for the science of the 21st Century, pursuing an unprecedented synthesis of fields previously considered unrelated. Beginning with simple classical concepts, he ends with a complex multidisciplinary theory requiring a high level of abstraction. The work progresses across the sciences in several multidisciplinary directions: Mathematical logic, fundamental physics, computer science and the theory of intelligence. Extraordinarily enough, the author breaks new ground in all these fields. In the field of fundamental physics (...) the author reaches the revolutionary conclusion that physics can be viewed and studied as logic in a fundamental sense, as compared with Einstein's view of physics as space-time geometry. This opens new, exciting prospects for the study of fundamental interactions. A formulation of logic in terms of matrix operators and logic vector spaces allows the author to tackle for the first time the intractable problem of cognition in a scientific manner. In the same way as the findings of Heisenberg and Dirac in the 1930s provided a conceptual and mathematical foundation for quantum physics, matrix operator logic supports an important breakthrough in the study of the physics of the mind, which is interpreted as a fractal of quantum mechanics. Introducing a concept of logic quantum numbers, the author concludes that the problem of logic and the intelligence code in general can be effectively formulated as eigenvalue problems similar to those of theoretical physics. With this important leap forward in the study of the mechanism of mind, the author concludes that the latter cannot be fully understood either within classical or quantum notions. A higher-order covariant theory is required to accommodate the fundamental effect of high-level intelligence. The landmark results obtained by the author will have implications and repercussions for the very foundations of science as a whole. Moreover, Stern's Matrix Logic is suitable for a broad spectrum of practical applications in contemporary technologies. (shrink)

In Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead, Frances Kamm seeks to make sense of people’s widely variant choices about which lives they would choose to continue living. She does this by defending the Prudential Prerogative, which, in analogy to the Moral Prerogative, holds that in a fairly wide range of conditions we are under no intrapersonal rational obligation to choose either to die or to live on. I argue against Kamm's case for the Prudential Prerogative in favor of Life Holism, the (...) view that you ought to live the life that would be best for you as an individual when each potential life is considered as a whole. I argue that the features of the Moral Prerogative that make it an attractive principle do not transfer to the Prudential Prerogative, and that Life Holism can better account for the perspectival and non-summative features of the normative phenomena Kamm wants to capture while retaining a tight connection between reasons and goodness. (shrink)

The moral responsibility literature frequently relies on both explicit and implicit claims about “ideal” or “normal” agency that import unjustified normative assumptions into our theorizing. In doing so, it both fails to reckon with and misconstrues the reality of agential diversity. In this article I diagnose the root of this problem, which I trace back to the confluence of two factors: the search for fundamental agential capacities, and systemic discrimination toward psychological variance. I then preview three socially and politically important (...) domains of inquiry that have been obscured by this paradigm as a way of motivating the need for and value of applying a neurodiversity perspective to moral responsibility and the ethics of blame. (shrink)

August, John Review(s) of: Contempt of court: Unofficial voices from the dogs Australian high court case 1981, by Jean Ely, Dissenters Press, West Melbourne 2011 $29.95.

Le fondateur du positivisme ne s'est pas contente d'exposer ses theories dans deux series de grandes oeuvres constructives, il en a presente aussi des sortes de syntheses, de resumes exoteriques, destines a un public plus large. Le Discours sur l'esprit positif (1844), discours preliminaire au Traite philosophique d'astronomie populaire, avait ainsi ete concu par Comte comme une sorte de manifeste systematique de la nouvelle ecole. La grande loi sur l'evolution intellectuelle de l'humanite vers l'esprit positif y est developpee jusque dans (...) ses consequences sociales, educatives et emancipatrices. C'est dans les lois des phenomenes que consiste reellement la science, a laquelle les faits proprement dits, quelques exacts et nombreux qu'ils puissent etre, ne fournissent jamais que d'indispensabes materiaux. Or, en considerant la destination constante de ces lois, on peut dire, sans aucune exageration, que la veritable science, bien loin d'etre formee de simples observations, tend toujours a dispenser, autant que possible, de l'exploration directe, en y substituant cette prevision rationnelle qui constitue, a tous egards, le principal caractere de l'esprit positif. (shrink)