In this paper, I outline the historical context of C.C.E. Schmid's doctrine of intelligible fatalism. By doing so, I show the development of this influential doctrine and sketch Schmid's apparent revision of it in light of contemporary criticisms.

In den Jahren nach 1794 erlebt die Universität Jena eine polemisch geführte Kontroverse zwischen Fichte und Carl Christian Erhard Schmid. Im Verlauf der Auseinandersetzung kommt es zu einer unübersichtlichen Verschachtelung verschiedener Themen und Argumentationsebenen; auch stehen die von Fichte und Schmid teils versteckt, teils unverhohlen geführten persönlichen Attacken einer sachlichen Rekonstruktion im Wege. Bislang wurde diese Kontroverse vornehmlich im Kontext der von Reinhold angestoßenen Debatte um einen ersten Grundsatz in der Philosophie behandelt. Durch diese Fragestellung (...) wird eine Problemdimension verdeckt, die sich als argumentativer Kern der Fichte-Schmid-Debatte erweisen lässt: vor dem Hintergrund des Paralogismus-Kapitels der Kantischen Vernunftkritik tritt als eigentlicher Streitpunkt die Frage hervor, ob das Selbst Thema der Philosophie oder einer Einzelwissenschaft sein muss. Das Verhältnis von Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Wissenschaften wird bei Fichte und Schmid zur Folie, auf der die Frage nach dem menschlichen Selbst überhaupt verhandelt werden kann. - Wir vertreten die These, dass die Begründung der Psychologie als empirische Wissenschaft, wie Schmid sie vorschlägt, vor dem Hintergrund von Kants Paralogismus-Kritik nicht aussichtsreich ist. Zugleich ist zu sehen, dass Fichtes Argument, die WL würde Psychologie als Wissenschaft überflüssig machen, eine unzulässige Verkürzung des Problems ist, das er bei Schmid sieht. Die Fichte-Schmid-Kontroverse dokumentiert so eine anthropologisch-psychologische Grundlagenkrise, die im Ausgang von Kants Paralogismus-Kapitel entsteht. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will ed. by Jörg Noller and John WalshDai HeideJörg Noller and John Walsh, editors. Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xlvii + 297. Hardback, $105.00; paperback, $32.99.This volume collects new (and in many instances the first) English translations of eighteen works—by Johann Fichte, Salomon Maimon, Karl Reinhold, August Heydenreich, and Hermann Pistorius, among (...) others—that engage with Kant’s critical theory of freedom as it is encountered in his three Critiques and other writings from the late 1780s and early 1790s. The essays were written between 1786 and 1800. Noller and Walsh open the volume with a thorough and penetrating introduction to Kant’s historical context, Kant’s theory of freedom, and the newly translated essays themselves. Given how central Kant’s theory of freedom is to every aspect of his systematic philosophy, and how intensely scholars have focused upon it in recent decades, this volume is a welcome addition to the existing literature. Not only is it important to have these essays translated into English, but it is also helpful to have them collected in a single volume. This volume will thus be an invaluable resource, and not merely for English-speaking scholars of Kant. For considerations of space, I cannot discuss every essay in the volume. Instead, I emphasize those contributions that strike me as especially noteworthy or relevant to contemporary discussion.The standout of the first group of essays, on “Freedom and Determinism,” is the contribution by Hermann Andreas Pistorius (1730–98), which reinforces his status as one of Kant’s most trenchant Leibnizian critics. Pistorius subjects Kant’s account of “the concept of freedom itself, its origin, its content, and its objective validity” to a withering critique, contending that this is “the most obscure aspect of his system” (5). Pistorius raises the now familiar worry that Kant’s relegation of transcendental freedom to things in themselves violates his own epistemic strictures. He goes on to argue that even if this worry can be evaded, we must “assume that the human being’s actually free actions (which likewise are things in themselves) appear as necessary to him, as a thing in itself ” (8). In other words, our representations of deterministic sequences are representations of things in themselves “obscured and distorted by the fog of sensibility,” which renders Kant’s philosophy ultimately a version of “the Leibnizian idealism which the author so strongly rejects” (8). Also of note here is the set of careful objections by Johann August Heinrich Ulrich (1746–1813) to the notion of timeless agency that appears to be required for Kant’s account of transcendental freedom, an issue that remains alive and well in contemporary discussions of transcendental freedom.The section on “Freedom and Imputability” begins with two contributions by Carl Christian Erhard Schmid (1762–1812), who contends that only morally good actions are imputable, a claim he takes to be grounded in the doctrine of intelligible fatalism: “the [End Page 669] assertion of the natural necessity of all actions of a rational being according to laws of the causality of things in themselves” (78). Johann Christoph Schwab (1743–1821) responds directly to Schmid’s intelligible fatalism in two essays published in the Philosophisches Archiv. The first essay criticizes Schmid’s endorsement of Kant’s appeal to “a supersensible I in addition to the empirical I” (84, emphasis in original). He contends that this requires Schmid “to attribute predicates to the rational I that elevate it to the rank of the deity” (86). In the second essay, Schwab responds directly to Schmid’s intelligible fatalism, arguing that intelligible fatalism is not superior to ordinary determinism. He concludes by speculating that Schmid’s intelligible fatalism is “at bottom identical with Leibnizian-Wolffian determinism” (91). This section of the book concludes with the attack moved by Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823) against intelligible fatalism, which Reinhold sees as incompatible with fundamental aspects of the critical philosophy.Each of the essays in the third section, on “Freedom and Consciousness,” takes up Kant’s discussion of the “fact of reason” in his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 447-448 [Access article in PDF] Brigitte Sassen, translator and editor. Kant's Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 331. Cloth, $54.95. Brigitte Sassen has translated and edited an extremely useful collection of texts dating from the years 1782 to 1789. Most of the texts were written by Kant's empirically minded (...) critics, but a few are the work of defenders of the Critical philosophy. Although some have been translated before—e.g., the notorious Feder/Garve review of the first Critique that prompted Kant's vitriolic response in the Prolegomena, the original Garve review that served as the basis of the Feder/Garve review, and Jacobi's critique of Kant's transcendental idealism—the entire anthology is the first ever to be devoted exclusively to English translations of some of the first reactions to and defenses of Kant's theoretical philosophy. All of this makes for an exciting event in Kant studies.Sassen identifies three major trends in Kant criticism that began in 1782. The first is the empiricist reaction to Kant's theoretical writings. Sassen considers the year 1789 the endpoint of this trend, since critical attention, she argues, shifted around that time to the rationalist reaction to Kant's writings. The initial wave of rationalist criticism, which constitutes the second trend, lasted until 1793. The third and final trend, she says, is the more forward-looking one that eventually blossomed into the systems of post-Kantian thought.Given such a wealth of material, Sassen has focused on Kant's empiricist critics, choosing the writers and topics most representative of the overall empiricist critique of the 1780s. The selections are divided into five sections. The first consists of the Feder/Garve and Garve reviews (from 1782 and 1783, respectively). Since these were the very first reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason, they helped to formulate many of the classic objections to it. For example, not only does the standard charge of Berkeleyan idealism originate in these reviews, but Feder and Garve also express concerns about Kant's ability to distinguish between reality and illusion if nothing in sensation itself determines the understanding to combine sensations in one way as opposed to another. The second section contains discussions of the Transcendental Aesthetic, including an early version of the "neglected alternative" charge more famously made by Trendelenburg in the nineteenth century. Hermann Andreas Pistorius, one of the most sophisticated of Kant's empiricist critics, argues that Kant has not ruled out the possibility that space and time are both forms of sensibility and properties of things in themselves. The third section (especially Jacobi's famous critique) explores the relationship between appearances and things in themselves, the problem of affection, and other topics touching on the very nature of Kant's idealism. The fourth section deals with various issues involving the table of categories. For example, Kant's critics had doubts about its completeness, and they were also puzzled as to how a priori concepts could be applied to ordinary experience. The fifth and final section looks at the contrast between empiricism and purism, that is, the overall adequacy of empiricist and Kantian approaches to issues in metaphysics and epistemology. Here we find Pistorius once again writing thoughtfully about the Critical philosophy, this time in response to Carl Christian [End Page 447] Erhard Schmid, the author of a dictionary for the "easier use" of Kant's writings that went through several editions in the late 1780s and 1790s.This brief sketch of Sassen's book gives only an inadequate idea of its richness and usefulness. Her introduction, which is thorough and informative, patiently sorts out the various players in the debates of the 1780s, outlines their arguments with Kant and one another, and even describes the nature of periodical publication in late eighteenth-century Germany. The editorial apparatus includes short biographies of the participants in the debates as well as the other authors mentioned throughout the book... (shrink)

Kant proclaimed that all theodicies must fail in ?On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy?, but it is mysterious why he did so since he had developed a theodicy of his own during the critical period. In this paper, I offer an explanation of why Kant thought theodicies necessarily fail. In his theodicy, as well as in some of his works in ethics, Kant explained moral evil as resulting from unavoidable limitations in human beings. God could not create (...) finite beings without such limitations and so could not have created humans that were not prone to committing immoral acts. However, the work of Carl Christian Eberhard Schmid showed Kant that given his own beliefs about freedom and the nature of responsibility one could not account for moral evil in this way without tacitly denying that human beings were responsible for their actions. This result is significant not only because it explains an otherwise puzzling shift in Kant's philosophy of religion, but also because it shows that the theodicy essay provides powerful evidence that Kant's thinking about moral evil and freedom underwent fundamental shifts between early works such as the Groundwork and later works like the Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be impacting all industry sectors, while becoming a motor for innovation. The diffusion of AI from the civilian sector to the defense sector, and AI’s dual-use potential has drawn attention from security and ethics scholars. With the publication of the ethical guideline Trustworthy AI by the European Union (EU), normative questions on the application of AI have been further evaluated. In order to draw conclusions on Trustworthy AI as a point of reference for responsible research (...) and development (R&D), we approach the diffusion of AI across both civilian and military spheres in the EU. We capture the extent of technological diffusion and derive European and German patent citation networks. Both networks indicate a low degree of diffusion of AI between civilian and defense sectors. A qualitative investigation of project descriptions of a research institute’s work in both civilian and military fields shows that military AI applications stress accuracy or robustness, while civilian AI reflects a focus on human-centric values. Our work represents a first approach by linking processes of technology diffusion with normative evaluations of R&D. (shrink)

Developing countries face numerous barriers to conducting effective and efficient ethics reviews of international collaborative research. In addition to potentially overlooking important scientific and ethical considerations, inadequate or insufficiently trained ethics committees may insist on unwarranted changes to protocols that can impair a study's scientific or ethical validity. Moreover, poorly functioning review systems can impose substantial delays on the commencement of research, which needlessly undermine the development of new interventions for urgent medical needs. In response to these concerns, the Drugs (...) for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an independent nonprofit organization founded by a coalition of public sector and international organizations, developed a mechanism to facilitate more effective and efficient host country ethics review for a study of the use of fexinidazole for the treatment of late stage African Trypanosomiasis. The project involved the implementation of a novel ‘pre-review’ process of ethical oversight, conducted by an ad hoc committee of ethics committee representatives from African and European countries, in collaboration with internationally recognized scientific experts. This article examines the process and outcomes of this collaborative process. (shrink)

Les Journées maliotes organisées à l'École française d'Athènes les 2 et 3 novembre 2007 portaient sur l'organisation des espaces et l'exploitation des ressources, thèmes qui permettaient d'unir les approches effectuées ces dernières années selon deux échelles différentes, celle de l'agglomération et de l'urbanisme d'une part, celle de l'organisation du territoire d'autre part. Les contributions portent toutes sur des recherches en cours, dont la publication est récente ou proche. Elles sont publiées ici sous forme de résumés argumentés et reflètent fidèlement les (...) discussions qui les suivirent. (shrink)

Under normal circumstances, saying that you have a thought, a belief, a desire, or an intention differs from saying that somebody (who happens to be you) has that attitude. The former statement comes with some form of first person authority and constitutes commitments that are not involved in the latter case. Speaking with first person authority, and thereby publicly committing oneself, is a practice that plays an important role in our communication and in our understanding of what it means to (...) be a person. In their Group Agency, Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that some corporations are agents with attitudes of their own, and they claim that they are persons. The question on which this paper is focused is: Can corporations (groups with attitudes and the capacity for linguistic communication) participate in this practice, that is, can they express their attitudes with first person authority, and thereby enter first person commitments? The first section of the paper gives a rough (and, I hope, ecumenical) account of some features of first person authority and commitment. The second section examines if and how this account of first person authority carries over to corporations. It is argued that the possibility for groups to express their attitudes with straightforward first person authority, and thus to enter first person commitments, are extremely limited. The third part of the paper argues that while under normal circumstances, a member’s expression of her group’s attitudes in first person plural terms does not constitute straightforward first person authority, it does come with something resembling some aspects of the first-personal commitments encountered in the singular case. (shrink)

“It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies,” Richard Hofstadter famously wrote, “but to be one.” Defining that “American ideology” or “American creed” obsessed scholars of the consensus era, who celebrated Americans’ allegiance to a limited liberal vocabulary of rights, freedoms, and markets. The cultural transformations begun in the 1960s seemed to question the very idea of a unitary culture or creed, but some historians responded by exploring alternative ideological founding myths to the liberal consensus. Over (...) the ensuing decades scholars mounted formidable efforts to support republicanism or millennial Christianity as challengers, but liberalism proved a resilient foe. And it seemed to have contemporary history on its side: during the Reagan revolution of the century's final decades the classic liberal combination of scaled-down government and free markets carried the day as Americans’ ideal if not their reality. The Lockean liberal tradition that Louis Hartz described a half-century earlier still appeared the only game in town, although scholars continued to argue over its terms, history, and boundaries. (shrink)

Study which takes seriously both the moral revelation of Christianity and the ethical alternatives of speculative philosophy.

ObjectiveIn this study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate whether motor imagery of handwriting and circle drawing activates a similar handwriting network as writing and drawing itself.MethodsEighteen healthy right-handed participants wrote the German word “Wellen” and drew continuously circles in a sitting and lying position to capture kinematic handwriting parameters such as velocity, pressure and regularity of hand movements. Afterward, they performed the same tasks during fMRI in a MI and an executed condition.ResultsThe kinematic analysis revealed a general (...) correlation of handwriting parameters during sitting and lying except of pen pressure during drawing. Writing compared to imagined writing was accompanied by an increased activity of the ipsilateral cerebellum and the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. Executed compared to imagined drawing revealed elevated activity of a fronto–parieto-temporal network. By contrasting writing and drawing directly, executed writing induced an enhanced activation of the left somatosensory and premotor area. The comparison of the MI of these tasks revealed a higher involvement of occipital activation during imagined writing.ConclusionThe kinematic results pointed to a high comparability of writing in a vertical and horizontal position. Overall, we observed highly overlapping cortical activity except of a higher involvement of motor control areas during motor execution. The sparse difference between writing and drawing can be explained by highly automatized writing in healthy individuals. (shrink)

¿Qué significa realmente estar centrado en la persona? ¿Es una cuestión de preferencias (“postmoderna”) sobre lo que te gusta y lo que crees? ¿ Cuáles son los límites? ¿ Es posible definir lo esencial ? Y si es así, ¿qué es? ¿Sería posible combinar las orientaciones, integrar métodos y agregar técnicas? ¿Existe actualmente un “más allá de Carl Rogers”? ¿Cuáles son las posibilidades del desarrollo y el impacto de lo que alguna vez fue considerado un paradigma radical? ¿A dónde (...) va y cuál será su futuro? ¿Dónde está su lugar y su reto en el dominio de la psicoterapia y consultoría? Se analiza el tema de si es posible nombrar las condiciones necesarias y suficientes del éxito de la terapia centrada en la persona La pregunta sobre qué significa estar centrado en la persona, por último, es una pregunta ética. (shrink)

Should society care about Christian morality? Are Christians out of touch with complex moral decision-making? Christian Morality: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Thinking about Contemporary Moral Issues provides readers with a framework for identifying and applying Christian moral principles to divisive issues. First, readers learn of the theological and philosophical foundations of Christian ethics. Two additional chapters explain how personal and social factors influence our capacity to think critically and Christianly about morality. Second, readers will learn about (...) forming Christian moral judgments by seeing how different thinkers address six contemporary moral issues: abortion, same-sex relationships, equal treatment of men and women in the workplace, sex education, and racial bias in incarceration polices. (shrink)

The absoluteness of Christianity is a predicate of the God of the eschatological kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, a kingdom embracing the power of a universal future which also includes the entire sweep of the history of religions.

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul. C. Wolff placed psychology under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Scottish thinkers placed it within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct). Several Germans sought to establish an autonomous empirical psychology as a branch of natural science. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and (...) to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. These investigators typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Religion und Christentum in Fichtes Spätphilosophie 1810-1813" verfügbar.

Abstinence from meat has been a subject of much controversy and friction from the dawn of Christian history. Relatively widespread in the early Church, it was praised when it formed part of a temporary ascetic fasting regimen, but condemned if it amounted to a permanent rejection of animal flesh, as it would be associated with heretical ideas found in various dissident groups, gnostic sects, and pagan philosophical schools. Nevertheless, several patristic authors put forth a number of compelling arguments in (...) defense of a meatless diet, all of which would be revisited by future generations of Christian thinkers. Laying the emphasis upon the ethical incentives for abstaining from animal flesh, as well as upon enduring ambivalent attitudes toward vegetarian dietary practices, this article offers a brief overview of abstinence from meat throughout Christian history. (shrink)

Today, every attempt at a self-understanding ultimately proves to be a situating oneself by means of the philosophy of history or a utopian self-dislocation. Today, all human beings who plan and attempt to unite the masses behind their plans engage in some form of philosophy of history. They accept the existence of the means of extermination, which modern science provides to every person in power. But the question as to what kind of people these means are to be reasonably applied (...) to is obviously no natural scientific question. For a long time now, it is also no longer a moral…. (shrink)

Enric F. Gel has recently argued that classical theism enjoys a significant advantage over Graham Oppy's naturalism. According to Gel, classical theism – unlike Oppy's naturalism – satisfactorily answers two questions: first, how many first causes are there, and second, why is it that number rather than another? In this article, I reply to Gel's argument for classical theism's advantage over Oppy's naturalism. I also draw out wider implications of my investigation for the gap problem and Christian doctrine along (...) the way. (shrink)

There can be little doubt that, over the last decade or so, the work of Carl Schmitt has emerged as a central point of reference, in both positive and negative terms, for many debates within contemporary political theory. Despite Schmitt's notoriously controversial and complex position within the intellectual field of modern political thought, a growing interest, for instance, in his critique of parliamentary democracy and his conceptualization of partisan warfare can be felt not only among political movements with revolutionary (...) agendas, but it can also easily be observed in main-stream political thought on both sides of the Atlantic.1 With the…. (shrink)

Publication of The Alchemy of the Word in 1979 brought the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida into the arena of theological discourse & marked the end of theology as it had been understood by many. This work, revised & reissued as The End of Theology, is an important contribution to understanding the possibilities of a creative postmodern secular theology. The first chapter examines the aims & the shortcomings of language analysis as used in the examination of religious & theological statements. (...) The second chapter investigates the broader spectrum of modern theories about the nature of language. The third chapter recapitulates the rudiments of Heidegger's thought. The fourth chapter moves out of Heidegger & toward a resolution of the problems of meaning & interpretation in proposing a "radical hermeneutics." The fifth chapter discusses the way in which a radical hermeneutics must undermine conventional theological procedures & secure a view of religious speech that is prior to "God-language" or to the "Word of God." Such a view is directed to what Heidegger takes as the "ordinary" logos that is both a pre-Christian & a post-Christian context of "revelation." The final chapter criticizes Heidegger's own "mystifications" about language & endeavors to take his thought one major step beyond. Carl Raschke is professor of religious studies at the University of Denver & senior editor of the Journal for Cultural & Religious Theory. His major books include The End of Theology, Fire & Roses: Postmodernity & the Thought of the Body, The Engendering God, Painted Black & Theological Thinking. (shrink)

“Christ died for us” is the sine que non of every doctrine of the atonement.

Alchemy is central to Jung's hypothesis of the collective unconscious. In this volume he begins with an outline of the process and aims of psychotherapy, and then moves on to work out the analogies between alchemy, Christian dogma and symbolism and his own understanding of the analytic process. Introducing the basic concepts of alchemy, Jung reminds us of the dual nature of alchemy, comprising both the chemical process and a parallel mystical component. He also discusses the seemingly deliberate mystification (...) of the alchemists. Finally, in using the alchemical process as providing insights into individuation, Jung emphasises the importance of alchemy in relating to us the transcendent nature of the psyche. (shrink)

The frame concept from linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence is a theoretical tool to model how explicitly given information is combined with expectations deriving from background knowledge. In this paper, we show how the frame concept can be fruitfully applied to analyze the notion of mathematical understanding. Our analysis additionally integrates insights from the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy as well as Schmid’s ideal genetic model of narrative constitution. We illustrate the practical applicability of our theoretical analysis through a (...) case study on extremal proofs. Based on this case study, we compare our analysis of proof understanding to Avigad’s ability-based analysis of proof understanding. (shrink)