Berthold-Bond (philosophy, Bard College) traces the project through Hegel's epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of history. Paper edition ($18.95) not seen. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The idea of “place” has become a topic of growing interest in environmental ethics literature. I explore a variety of issues surrounding the conceptualization of “place” in bioregional theory. I show that there is a necessary vagueness in bioregional definitions of region or place because these concepts elude any purely objective, geographically literal categorization. I argue that this elusiveness is in fact a great meritbecause it calls attention to a more essential “subjective” and experiential geography of place. I use a (...) reading of Aldo Leopold’s Sand Country Almanac as an example of the value of a non-literalistic geography for the understanding of place. (shrink)

Background The German Diagnosis-Related Groups (G-DRG) system has led to a revenue-orientated hospital financing system. This article examines the ethical implications and consequences of this system using the example of reconstructive measures (defect care) in patients with oral cavity carcinoma. At the same time, the interplay between the G‑DRG system and guideline development must also be scrutinized. This is preceded by introductory information on oral cavity carcinoma and the existing treatment options: conventional reconstruction techniques versus cost-intensive high-end surgery. Methods The (...) case scenario “treatment of medium-sized defects after tumor resection” forms the methodological basis and argumentative reference point of the study. Results and discussion The G‑DRG system and the economic incentives lead to far-reaching ethical implications concerning the demand-orientated treatment of patients and lead to multidimensional interactions. The existing tendency towards high-end surgery harbors the risk of overuse and misuse and, therefore, runs counter to the principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence. The one-sided indication in favor of high-end surgery also suggests that patient information is given in a directive manner (violation of respect for patient autonomy). Moreover, costly high-end procedures counteract the principle of economic efficiency and, thus, touch on issues of distributive justice. Finally, the clinical favoring of high-end procedures also affects logic within medicine, namely the publication landscape (publication bias), the design of the relevant guidelines, and surgical expertise. Conclusions There is a need to raise the awareness of all those working in the field of surgery (surgeons, guideline experts, reviewers). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Live or TellDaniel BertholdTwo of the more notoriously elusive authors writing in the first half of the nineteenth century—a century noteworthy on the European continent for producing more than its fair share of elusive authors—are the German idealist Georg Hegel and his posthumous tormentor, the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Their elusiveness is such that to read either of them is much like taking a Rorschach test: what we find (...) tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Kierkegaard or Hegel themselves. But to think through the relationship between the two is a yet more challenging task, perhaps like seeking to align the ink-blotted lenses of a Rorshachian kaleidoscope. Some commentators have found no alignment of the lenses to produce anything resembling a meaningful picture, and have concluded, as Niels Thulstrup puts it in his study of Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel, that, "Hegel and Kierkegaard have in the main nothing in common." 1 With equal forthrightness, Richard Kroner suggests in his essay on "Kierkegaard's Understanding of Hegel" that "Hegel and Kierkegaard are separated from each other by an abyss which no agreement can ever succeed in bridging." 2Such a reading of the Kierkegaard-Hegel relation is in fact made tempting by Kierkegaard's own construction of the relation as one of radical difference. Hegel is the archetypal Other, the perpetual foil whose philosophic values and whole way of thinking and writing Kierkegaard devotes his own authorship to perfectly inverting. If Kierkegaard's Hegel is the philosopher of the "objective spirit" and the champion of reason, more interested in the logical relations between concepts than in the actual reality of existing individuals, Kierkegaard presents himself as the adherent of subjectivity, of faith, of existence.In what follows, I wish to explore one of the most recurring of [End Page 361] Kierkegaard's representations of his difference from Hegel, the contrast between action and thinking about action, existing and contemplating existence, living and philosophizing about living. "In the objective [Hegelian] sense," Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus writes, "thought is understood as being pure thought,... [and] this objective thought has no relation to the existing subject; and while [it is difficult to know] how the existing subject slips into this... pure abstraction,... it is certain that the existing subjectivity tends more and more to evaporate." 3As the contrast gets developed, we will come to focus on Kierkegaard's phrasing of the difference in terms of the role of language. Kierkegaard portrays himself as speaking (writing) in order to act: "to be an author is to act." 4 Hegel, on the other hand, is presented as writing so as to merely speak about acting; hence Hegel is a "mere scribbler" and his philosophy occurs "only on paper" (CUP, p. 176, 375f). In many ways, Kierkegaard understands his contest with Hegel in terms of the ultimatum of the tormented diarist of Jean-Paul Sartre's novella Nausea, Roquentin: "you have to choose: live or tell." 5 Roquentin is doubly cursed, first by a need to write so as to escape his sense of the nausea of existence by distancing himself from the cloying taste of reality, but second, by a recognition that his writing removes him from the possibility of truly existing. His ultimatum, "live or tell," is the constant reminder he carries with him of his inability to reconcile his fear of existence and his self-disgust at his escapism.The contrast between action and thinking leads to a question about the ethics of authorship: how is one to use words, to write, in such a way as to act—and to elicit action from one's reader? I will suggest that a readjustment of Kierkegaard's alignment of the kaleidoscope lenses which display the image of his relation to Hegel allows for a more rewarding dialogue between the two. In this altered image, there is as much telling as living in Kierkegaard as in Hegel (indeed, as we will see, in some respects more so), and as much a choice for living in Hegel as in Kierkegaard. Perhaps most importantly, this reorientation invites us to see the either/or construction of "living... (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

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.

A unitary transformation replaces the given description of a quantum system by an equivalent one. It is observed, however, that not all members of a set of unitarily equivalent Hamilton operators are equally well suited for identifying the corresponding classical systems. A criterion is proposed for recognizing the privileged representatives of the set. A few explicit examples are reported that show the criterion at work.

Plato’s statements on art have met with countless commentators and almost as many different interpretations. In most cases, comments and hints that are scattered through various dialogues are taken out of context and played off against each other – depending on whether the intention is to portray Plato as a modern art lover or as an ageing political reactionary. In the face of the confusing range of contending opinions, there is an urgent need to examine and clarify the textual basis (...) in Plato. For this purpose, a meticulous analysis of Book 10 of the Politeia is initially carried out – the only part of the corpus of Plato’s works that is concerned with art in detail and exclusively. The results are surprisingly clear. The corrupting and dangerous aspect of art is not attributed to individual artists or a specific artistic orientation, nor to the style of the depiction, nor to the content that is narrated or presented; instead, it is ascribed to its essential nature as the μίμησις of a μίμησις. Since even the objects of sense perception are imitations of the archetypal Ideas, which are ultimately accessible only to rational cognition, the artist is an imitator of something imitated. He merely touches on the appearance of a reality that is in turn already a defective, mutable and ephemeral imitation of the only true, immutable and eternal archetypal Ideas. As the imitation of an imitation, art is insurmountably distant from truth and knowledge, ontologically and therefore also epistemologically worthless and useless – and also damaging, because it attempts to shackle us and domesticate us at a level three steps below truth. However, it not only holds us captive, but also corrupts us even further by appealing not to reason, but to the lower part of the soul with its desires and affections. It is because of this that it is corrupting and dangerous, initially for the individual character and individual spiritual welfare, and ultimately – through the individual – also for human society as a whole. Art thus creates precisely the situation which for the philosopher represents the fundamentally distorted condition from which he is attempting to liberate people. Art is constantly re-fastening the shackles that the philosopher releases. This is why art has to be excluded from Plato’s ideal state, with philosophy alone taking its place. The condemnation of all forms of art could not be expressed more clearly. Despite this, repeated efforts have been made to weaken the condemnation or even disprove its existence, either in order to save art from Plato or, conversely, to save Plato from condemning art. To achieve this, alleged contradictions between Books 10 and 3 of the Politeia have been pointed out ; a differentiation or alteration in Plato’s understanding of the concept of μίμησις has been postulated; and reference has been made to passages in Plato’s works in which, it is claimed, the philosopher concedes that art has direct access to the world of the Ideas or in which he speaks of the artist’s divine inspiration , as well as the numerous passages that discuss Beauty . Finally, it is claimed that Plato did not condemn all art, but only a certain contemporary trend in art , or more generally, only illusionistic art in contrast to an abstract form of art – namely Egyptian art . In the second part of the study, these lines of argumentation are discussed individually and in detail and their content is tested. In each case, the findings obtained initially in the analysis of Book 10 of the Politeia are confirmed. The present study does not offer any new hypotheses; instead, its goal is to use a detailed and differentiated examination of the relevant texts to clearly distinguish Plato’s view of art from later neo-Platonic views, as well as from obfuscations created by modern interpreters, in order to obtain a secure basis for future investigations of Plato’s view of art in particular, as well as of ancient aesthetics in general. The extensive review of the secondary literature also documents part of the history of twentieth-century scholarship. (shrink)

This brief survey of Professor Karl LOwith's analysis of the modem histori cal consciousness is the outgrowth of a year's study at the University of Heidelberg while Professor L6with was still an active member of the faculty. An early version, in the form of a dissertation, was submitted to the History Department of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A. Numerous friends and colleagues have helped me at various stages of this work and I am indebted to them even though I (...) cannot name them all indi vidually. However special thanks must be accorded to Professor W. J. Bos senbrook of Wayne State University for introducing me to the entire prob lem of anti-historicism and to Professor LOwith's work. I am also greatly indebted to Professor John Barlow of Indiana University for his patient assistance with the translations, however the final responsibility for all renditions rests, of course, solely with the author. (shrink)

Order and change in nature have been for a long time understood in philosophy and theology as founded in divine reason. In the neo-Darwinist theory of evolution, their explanation is reduced to material change without reason. Molecular biologists like M. Behe and W. Demski argue that any reductionist explanation of living beings must be wrong. The evolution of irreducible complex structures is impossible on the basis of random variation and natural selection alone, and must be the result of intelligent design. (...) The article argues that ID-theory, unlike Biblical Creationism, is a challenge for neo-Darwinism and for modern theology as well—for, unlike the Roman magisterium, many Catholic theologians try to harmonize reductive explanation with the notion of creation. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy there has been a widespread reaction against the cartesian subjective-individualist conception of a person being normative to any understanding of human personality. Looking back to early greek tragedy we find another model such as the objective-participant conception which also dominates the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.

While ideals of racial purity may be out of fashion, other sorts of purity ideals are increasingly popular in the United States today. The theme of purity is noticeable everywhere, but it is especially prominent in our contemporary fixation on health and hygiene. This may seem totally unrelated to issues of racism and classism, but in fact, the purveyors of purity draw upon the same themes of physical and moral purity that have helped produce white identity and dominance in the (...) US. Historically, this is where the purity rhetoric gets its power. To invoke purity ideals in the US is to mobilize this genealogy of racialized associations. Today's zealous preoccupation with hygiene is part of our living heritage in a racist culture.Just as ideas of race and racial purity were debunked by biologists long before the public would begin to question them, ideals of extreme hygienic purity linger with us, even flourish, despite scientific evidence of their futility and harm. Why are we still so enamored with purity? Because, to some extent, our very self-conceptions are at stake. Other scholars have described how our process of self individuation is based upon exclusion. The unique contribution of a genealogical approach to this issue is that, instead of merely locating the problem in ideologies held by others, it can evoke self-recognition and self-transformation. We will tend to assume the problem lies elsewhere until we learn to recognize ourselves in practices that reproduce cultural ideals. As inheritors of this racist culture, we are all lovers of purity, and we are all responsible for rethinking this value. (shrink)

In Flip Thinking, Berthold Gunster, the founder of the Dutch omdenken--or flip thinking--philosophy, presents fifteen strategies to transform your thinking away from limitations and negativities and towards possibilities and opportunities. From disrupting (turn all the rules upside down) to flaunting (play up what you want to hide) and from importing (get the enemy on board) to amplifying (do more of what works), Gunster's strategies and stories will have you approaching even the most challenging problems--from an annoying neighbor to an (...) angry colleague to an unhappy partner--in a whole new way. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Das German Diagnosis Related Groups (G-DRG)-System hat zu einem weitgehend erlösorientierten Krankenhausfinanzierungssystem geführt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die ethischen Implikationen und Folgen dieses Systems am Beispiel rekonstruktiver Maßnahmen (Defektversorgung) bei Patient*innen mit Mundhöhlenkarzinomen herausgearbeitet. Dabei gilt es zugleich, das Wechselspiel von G‑DRG-System und Leitlinienentwicklung zu beleuchten. Vorangestellt werden einführende Angaben zum Mundhöhlenkarzinom und den bestehenden Behandlungsoptionen: konventionelle Rekonstruktionstechnik versus kostenintensive High-End-Chirurgie. Methodische Grundlage und argumentativer Bezugspunkt der Arbeit ist das theoretische Fallszenario „Versorgung mittelgroßer Defekte nach Tumorresektion“. Das G‑DRG-System und (...) die dadurch geschaffenen ökonomischen Anreize haben weitreichende ethische Implikationen in der bedarfsorientierten Behandlung von Patient*innen und führen zu mehrdimensionalen Wechselwirkungen. Die bestehende Tendenz zur High-End-Chirurgie birgt das Risiko der Über- und Fehlversorgung und läuft demnach den Prinzipien Benefizienz und Nonmalefizienz zuwider. Die einseitige Indikationsstellung zugunsten der High-End-Chirurgie lässt zudem auf eine direktive Patientenaufklärung schließen (Verstoß gegen das Prinzip des Respekts der Patientenautonomie). Kostspielige High-End-Verfahren konterkarieren überdies das Wirtschaftlichkeitsgebot und berühren somit zugleich Fragen der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit. Schließlich wirkt die klinische Bevorzugung von High-End-Verfahren auch auf die innermedizinische Logik, namentlich auf die Publikationslandschaft (publication bias), die Ausgestaltung der betreffenden Leitlinien sowie auf die chirurgische Expertise. Zu fordern ist eine Sensibilisierung aller in der Chirurgie tätigen Akteur*innen (Chirurg*innen; Leitlinienexpert*innen, Gutachter*innen). (shrink)

Faber, W. Martin Buber über Erziehung.--Bohnsack, F. Das Problem der pädagogischen Absicht bei Martin Buber.--Simon, S. Martin Buber, der Erzeiher.--Klafki, W. Dialog und Dialektik in der gegenwärtigen Erziehungswissenschaft.--Faber, W. Reale Bildung.--Caselmann, C. Martin Buber als Erzieher.

Apparitions takes a new look at the critical legacy of one of the 20th century's most important and influential thinkers about music, Theodor W. Adorno. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the book offers new historical and critical insights into Adorno's theories of music and how these theories, in turn, have affected the study of contemporary art music, popular music, and jazz. The essays review the impact of Philosophy of New Music a fter World War II, examine Adorno's struggle (...) to adapt his aging philosophy to the new music of the 1950s and 1960s, and trace his influence on recent composers. Several essays in this volume also re-evaluate Adorno's controversial contribution to the study of popular music and jazz, as well as his theories of mass media and mass culture in the context of an increasing consolidation of corporate and political power in the entertainment industry. This volume will be indispensable for both scholars and students of Adorno, who seek a historical context and a critical assessment of some of his most influential as well as most contested writings on music. (shrink)

The mid-twentieth century saw a change in paradigms of art history: iconology. The main claim of this novel trend in art history was that renown Renaissance artists created imaginative syntheses between their art and contemporary cosmology, philosophy, theology and magic. The Neo-Platonism in the books by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola became widely acknowledged for their lasting influence on art. It thus became common knowledge that Renaissance artists were not exclusively concerned with problems intrinsic to their work, but (...) that their artifacts encompassed a much larger intellectual and cultural horizon. This volume brings together historians - both those concerned with the history of their own discipline and also those whose research is on the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance itself - with historians from a wide variety of specialist fields, in order to engage with the contested field of iconology. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, Renaissance studies, historiography, philosophy, theology, gender studies, and literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Talking Cures, the Clinic, and the Value of the IneffableDaniel Berthold (bio)KeywordsMadness, disease, the normal, the abnormal, the ineffable, Hegel, Kierkegaard, LacanI am most grateful to my readers, James Phillips and Louis Sass, who have led me to several new insights by suggesting ways of complicating my reading of a Lacanian approach to Hegel's and Kierkegaard's conceptions of madness. I am a Kierkegaard and Hegel scholar, with very (...) little pretense to expertise about Lacan and regrettably even less about the theory and practice of psychiatry. In submitting my essay to Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Philosophy, I was hoping to entice a community of practitioners and theoreticians I have great respect for to consider the musings of a philosopher on topics which engage them as thinkers and actors in their professions. I could not possibly have hoped for more intelligent and provocative replies than I have been given by my two respondents.Phillips' framing of his response in terms of the distinction between the "madness of the philosophers" and the "madness of the clinic" is very helpful. It is a distinction that is indeed central to the question of the possibility of dialogue between philosophers and clinicians—so central, in fact, that it is generous of Phillips not to reproach me for failing to mention it. On the one hand, the challenge for philosophers is to show that their descriptions are not merely metaphoric and that their preoccupation with the dark side of human experience connects in some way with the reality of disease, so that there is some way for clinicians to translate their language into the language of psychiatry. Otherwise, philosophers will have only poetic or literary interest for the psychiatrist or psychologist.On the other hand, the challenge for clinicians is the extent to which they are open to moving beyond a reduction of "mental illness" to a purely biological conception of disease. One needn't go so far—nor should we—as Thomas Szasz or Michel Foucault in seeing "mental disease" as itself merely a metaphor. But granting the evidence of underlying organic disorder, symptoms nevertheless display themselves as mental and behavioral states (what Hegel calls "shapes of consciousness") that, as Hegel argued, are paralleled in "normal" experience, so that the distinction between disease and normality (and hence illness and metaphor) is often elusive. Madness "has the healthy consciousness for its presupposition," Hegel writes, because the healthy mind is still grappling with the same sorts of contradictions and feelings of alienation, the same "infinite pain" which characterizes insanity. Madness is not the absolute "other" of rationality, but an echo of it (1978, 3:382, 408).Hegel himself accepted the medicalization of madness that began to occur in the late eighteenth [End Page 325] century, and rejected the metaphysical and theological categories of what was called "romantic medicine." But he also cautioned against the narrowness of the "somatic" school which he felt lacked sufficient explanatory value if not connected to a "speculative" (i.e., philosophic) framework (see Berthold-Bond 1995, ch. 2).It might even be argued that every person seeking therapy is first of all suffering from "philosophic" madness, at least in the sense that initially she does not understand her own suffering as "disease," but experiences her torment in the vocabulary of the philosopher. Thus the philosopher's descriptions are the closest to the subject's own self-understanding, and while the therapist must seek to rephrase these descriptions into the vocabulary of the clinic (just as Hegel, for example, translated his own philosophic description of the madness of his friend Hölderlin in the Phenomenology as the "lost soul" whose "light dies away within it" into the medical category of Wahnsinn—mania or frenzy, which today we would call schizophrenia—in the classificatory scheme of mental disorder he gives in the Encyclopaedia; 1977, 400; 1978, 408)—there is a real question about which vocabulary is a metaphor for the other.The second main point Phillips addresses, which is taken up in different ways by Sass as well, has to do with the relation between speech and silence in madness. Phillips finds that Kierkegaard offers a more complex and subtle view than... (shrink)

Aufsteigen oder verarmen, Beschleunigung oder Stillstand - im Werk des französischen Soziologen Pierre Bourdieu spielt Zeit eine grosse Rolle. Die Wochenzeitung Nr. 10/2009. Wir danken Berthold Vogel für die Erlaubnis, diesen Text zu reproduzieren. Der Begriff der Prekarität avancierte in den vergangenen Jahren zum Signalwort neuer sozialer Ungleichheiten. Das gilt insbesondere mit Blick auf die Arbeitswelt. Im Begriff der Prekarität geht es aber nicht nur um den Zuwachs von - Sociologie – Nouvel article.

When Humpty-Dumpty had his great fall nobody could put him together again. A vastly more moderate challenge is to reunite the two partial beams of a Stern-Gerlach apparatus with such precision that the original spin state is recovered. Nevertheless, as we demonstrate, a substantial loss of spin coherence always occurs, unless the experimenter is able to control the magnetic field's inhomogeneity with an accuracy of at least one part in 105.

I argue that not only do Nietzsche and Camus share a sense of the world as fundamentally “strange,” but that each adopts an authorial position as stranger to the reader as well. The various strategies of concealment, evasion, and silence they employ to assure their authorial strangeness are in the service of what Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault would later call “the death of the author,” the disappearance of the author as authority over his or her own text. I argue (...) further, however, that within this largely shared commitment, Nietzsche and Camus finally have quite different conceptions of the goals of their respective authorships and different manners of pursuing their deaths as authors. These contrasts leave us, finally, with distinct constructions of the author as stranger. (shrink)