Welt und Unendlichkeit sind nicht nur Grundbegriffe der Philosophiegeschichte, sondern stehen auch im Zentrum gegenwartiger Debatten um die Moglichkeit und Grenzen von Metaphysik uberhaupt. Versteht man unter Welt die Gesamtheit dessen, was ist, dann stellt sich die Frage nach dem ontologischen Status dieser Seinstotalitat selbst. Wie, wenn uberhaupt, kann die Existenz der Welt sinnvoll gedacht werden? Der Begriff der Unendlichkeit konturiert und verscharft diese ontologische Frage dadurch, dass wir die Ganzheit namens Welt als unendlich erfahren, d. h. so, dass sie (...) unsere in epistemischer Hinsicht endlichen Weltbezuge grundsatzlich ubersteigt. Mit Welt und Unendlichkeit ist daher ein begrifflicher Spannungsraum eroffnet, bei dem es im wortlichen Sinne ums Ganze geht. Einen der bedenkenswertesten Gegenwartsbeitrage zu dieser durch die Begriffe Welt und Unendlichkeit abgesteckten Grundfrage der Philosophie hat Laszlo Tengelyi (1954-2014) geleistet. Der vorliegende Band versammelt insgesamt elf im Andenken an Laszlo Tengelyi und in Anlehnung an sein letztes Buch Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phanomenologischer Metaphysik (2014, 32015) verfasste Beitrage deutscher und ungarischer Philosophinnen und Philosophen. Mit Beitragen von Bianka Boros, Gabor Boros, Michael N. Forster, Markus Gabriel, Anton Friedrich Koch, Csaba Olay, Sebastian Ostritsch, Inga Romer, Sandor Sajo, Andras Schuller und Tamas Ullmann. (shrink)

My “Letter” collects some facts concerning the 20th century history of Hungarian Philosophy as a basis for understanding its situation now. Progressive and conservative systems of thought dominated the first half of the century alternately, until the post-war communist regime refused to tolerate independent thinking. The new regime after 1956 was unpredictably hostile or tolerant towards philosophical dissenters. All this resulted in a multifaceted philosophical life in the period after 1989. Its basic tendency has been a historical approach issuing in (...) various disciplines like phenomenology and hermeneutics, analytical philosophy, postmodern thought, philosophy of religion, while ethics and aesthetics became disciplines in their own right. The “Letter” maps out some of the institutional bases of philosophizing as well as some of the dangers threatening independent philosophy. (shrink)

Providing an in-depth and extensive analysis of the concept of power as articulated by Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (1935-2010), this case study analyses the systemic conceptualization of power and his argumentation of sacralizing Islamised power. The volume also offers a quick overview of how the concept was understood and articulated by other Shiʻite jurists such as Ayatollah Khomeini. Examining Fadlallah's oeuvre, in particular his seminal book Islam and the Logic of Power [al-Islam wa-mantiq al-quwwa], this book focuses on the narrative itself, (...) which played a central role in the radical transformation that occurred in the Shiite concept of empowerment and its recognition as a necessity. The analysis of Fadlallah's conceptualization and argumentation illustrates the mechanism of sacralizing righteous power as well as the means of gaining it. Fadlallah reinterpreted Shiʻism as a project of empowerment to initiate and sustain an "impulse of power" amongst the Lebanese Shiʻites in the most critical moment of modern Lebanese history. Dealing with the concept of power in Shiʻite political thought from a theoretical perspective, the study has an innovative approach that offers an insight into how the transformative narrative is constructed and what makes it convincing. Shedding light on the content and logical structure of Fadlallah's argumentation, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students researching contemporary politics, Islam and the Middle East. (shrink)

Scholarship on gender mainstreaming in the European Union consistently highlights the disappointing implementation of gender mainstreaming. This article contributes to that discussion through the analysis of the first policy frame on gender equality in the work programmes of the EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Development, Horizon 2020, from 2014 until 2016. This article analyses how GM as a transformative strategy is contextualised by advisory group experts, and what is being achieved within Horizon 2020 work programmes. In opposition to the (...) Commission’s rhetorical commitment to GM, this article demonstrates that Horizon 2020 work programmes exemplify a failure of implementing GM, further depoliticising gender equality in the Commission’s neoliberal context. (shrink)

Over the course of only a few decades during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, part of mainstream Buddhist education underwent a striking shift in China. From being a secluded practice within monastery walls taught by monastics for monastics with a strict focus on Buddhist scripture, it became one where monastics and laypeople study together, guided by teachers, both monastic and lay, studying a curriculum of both Buddhist and secular subjects. Although general reforms within the Buddhist community of the (...) times received considerable scholarly attention, the topic of education development was discussed in only a few instances. Therefore, the present article sets out to explore why this radical methodological shift happened, and more concretely, how the individual learning trajectories of the reforms’ leading actors, and their involvement in specific communities, influenced the way the reforms unfolded. The author analyses the work and life of three generations of Buddhist reformers, namely the layman Yang Wenhui, and the monastic masters Taixu, Hsing Yun and Cheng Yen, employing Étienne Wenger’s social theory of learning. The theory’s main assertion that communities of practice provide the main fora of learning for individuals, and its description of the concrete ways in which this learning takes place can provide new insights regarding the specific unfolding of late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century Buddhist education reforms in China. (shrink)

Collection of papers presented at the First Budapest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy.

Posicionando-se como “filósofo natural” no tratamento das paixões, Descartes dá início a uma secularização dos afetos ou emoções. Nisso ele é seguido por Spinoza. Em ambos os casos a abordagem filosófica dos afetos tem como consequência desvinculá-los da perspectiva moral, secularizando as emoções: separadas da moral, sua explicação desvincula-se ao mesmo tempo da religião, já que a moral encontra seus fundamentos no deus transcendente. Nesse ponto, Spinoza vai mais longe que Descartes, na secularização das emoções, pois nele o deus é (...) naturalizado, Deus sive natura. A generosidade, por exemplo, não depende mais de um deus dotado de boa vontade, mas sim do exercício natural do homem dotado de razão como parte da Natureza racionalizada. De modo que nem mesmo o amor intelectual de Deus seria substituto do impulso moral religioso: em Spinoza, tal amor, assim como a generosidade e a amizade, inscrevem-se na ordem necessária da natureza, não dependendo de uma vontade livre divina, mas também não se reduzindo a uma vontade humana. (shrink)

Eine aus der Zusammenarbeit der Herzog August Bibliothek mit der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften hervorgegangene Tagung beschaftigte sich mit einem sehr komplexen Traditionszusammenhang, der unter der Leitmetapher Einfluss thematisiert wurde. Ausgehend von Philosophen wie Hegel und Dilthey, die insbesondere die philosophiegeschichtliche Rolle des Stoizismus eingehender untersucht hatten, setzen sich die zehn Beitrager dieses Bandes mit dem Wesen einer sich wiederholenden Geschichte, mit bestimmten geschichtsphilosophischen Schemata auseinander. Sie legen Grenzen des zu untersuchenden Feldes fest und beziehen neue Stromungen in die Untersuchung (...) ein. Zugleich werden neue Quellen fur die fruhneuzeitliche Philosophie nutzbar gemacht, die durch ihre kaum beachteten Interpretationen des ursprunglich hellenistischen Gedankengutes den Neuanfang der Philosophie im 17. Jahrhundert massgeblich beeinflussten. (shrink)

The article deals with the notion of générosité, an important concept of the 17th century moral philosophy, as well as with the metamorphosis of the meaning of this passion and/or virtue. The starting point of this metamorphosis is générosité as a virtue of the late medieval and early modern French noble man, whereas the end point is générosité as the passion/virtue of Descartes’ rational beings. The paper analyses this phenomenon in Molière’s play Don Juan, and in Descartes’ and Spinoza’s texts.

This paper focuses on a neglected part of Dilthey’s œuvre that consists of papers on 16th–17th century philosophical issues. These papers are closer to interpretive articles than to original works, and so they are neither considered Dilthey’s original contributions to his own philosophy nor studied as part of the secondary literature. One of the most characteristic features of Dilthey’s philosophic style is the historical-systematic method mostly repudiated as concealing the real statement of the author “between the lines,” i.e. behind historical (...) analyses. Therefore these papers are not reckoned among Dilthey’s great works of enduring significance. This paper aims to make the reader more sensitive to the world and claims of these papers by way of an intermediary approach to them that acknowledges their intermediary position between a historical description and a systematic analysis. This is to be accomplished by having a look at the “pantheism” of Georg Misch, Dilthey’s largely forgotten pupil and son-in-law. (shrink)

Am Beispiel der im dritten Teil der Abhandlung über die Methode entworfenen "provisorischen Moral" soll gezeigt werden, wie Descartes den Versuch unternimmt, die zwei wichtigsten zeitgenössischen Denkanstöße, die mechanistische Philosophie und die traditionelle christliche Moral, zu Ende zu denken, ihren Gegensatz scharf hervorzuheben und sie miteinander zu versöhnen. Die Analyse des Sinns der Vorläufigkeit, des Vorwurfs des Konformismus, der traditionellen Unterscheidung von Negation und Privation - auch mit Blick auf ihre weitere Entwicklung im Briefwechsel zwischen Spinoza und Blyenbergh - führt (...) zu dem Ergebnis, daß der Versöhnungsversuch, dessen Ziel die Ausarbeitung einer "definitiven" Ethik war, am Ende gescheitert ist. Descartes leitet eine Ära ein, in der nach Maßstäben und Beweggründen nur noch innerhalb einer provisorischen Ethik - dessen wahrer Gegensatz eine providenzielle Ethik ist - Ausschau gehalten werden kann. (shrink)

The paper’s main task is to show how much Hume’s philosophy of passions is indebted to and continues the tradition of the philosophy of affects of the 17th century, in spite of the obvious fact that he departed from the main philosophical project of the 17th century, the tripartite unity of mathematics, metaphysics, and mechanical physics. A restructuring of Hume’s order of passions and its comparison to the order followed by Descartes will show up a special „cognitivist” character of Hume’s (...) thinking on emotion, even if the special experimental framework of Hume’s theory of passions prevents him from theorizing about the free will’s distinguished role in our lives or about the will’s grounding in the concept of a providentially active biblical God. (shrink)

Surprising artistic interventions in the landscape of the public everyday are psychologically, socially, and politically beneficial to individuals as well as their communities. Such interventions enable their audiences to access moments of surprising inspiration, self-reflection, and revitalization. These spontaneous moments may offer access to the experience of distance from the rational “self,” allowing the irrational and purely emotive that resides within all of us to assert itself. It is this sensual instinct that all we too frequently push aside, particularly in (...) the public realm, for the sake of our responsibilities. Urban communities in particular are persistently accosted by visual and aural advertisements and consumerist lures, that further discourage individuals from accessing their non-rational selves. Yet, I argue that it would improve the health and vibrancy of our communal lives if we encountered among others in public, even for a moment, the strong feelings of sudden elation or confusion that we generally consider to be private. I also argue that an addition could be made to the already diverse oeuvre of artistic approaches that comprise the realm of “sound art” and that it may be termed “musical intervention art” – or, simply put, music played in a circumscribed area in the form of an outdoor installation, that is designed to accost, surprise, overwhelm, and through this, actively engage. This article will describe an imaginary example of musical installation art. (shrink)

Collection of papers presented at the 2nd and 3rd Budapest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy.

This paper takes a look at seventeenth-century theories of emotion, and their influence on contemporary philosophical and psychological approaches to the subject. Although at a first glance some of these seventeenth-century theories may seem to be outdated, this is often a result of a simplistic reading, and in fact there are promising ways to “update” these theories. Reading seventeenth-century theories from our own perspective reveals new aspects of the work of our predecessors, which, in turn, can inspire further contemporary developments.

This article examines how the Stoic ideals of impassivity and repression gave way to favourable treatments of the emotions, particular passion. It suggest that one of the trademarks of philosophy in the early modern period is the renewal of the theory of passions on the basis of the new mechanical-corpuscular philosophy which René Descartes regarded as his signal contribution to ethics. It also discusses the systematic character of the theories of passions, the theologico-philosophical approaches to the emotions, and the conception (...) of love as a counterweight to solipsism. (shrink)