In the course of the 20th century, many phenomenologists tried to develop a novel philosophical understanding of Europe. Departing from Edmund Husserl, they defined Europe as a culture of rationality whose origins are to be found in the Ancient Greece of the 7./6. century B.C. where a novel and unprecedented universal-critical attitude towards the world originated. Although many of the big proponents of phenomenology followed this interpretation in their own respective ways, this mono-genealogy is far from being without doubts. In (...) raising the question about the “spiritual shape” of Europe, which determined its spiritual life, activity and creation, Europe’s religion seems to be distinctly missing in this mono-genealogy. In taking a closer look at Edmund Husserl, Jan Patočka, María Zambrano and Jacques Derrida, this article seeks to problematize the genealogy of rationality as the sole birthplace of Europe and investigates the problematic tension between reason and religion in the aforementioned thinkers. Viewed against this background, this article argues that Europe has more but one “origin” and that Europe is rather the effect these conflictual relations, their stratifications and sedimentations than the single child of a universal and selftransparent rationality of Ancient Greek imprint. (shrink)

Der Mythos von der Sintflut wird erstmals im mesopotamischen Atrachasis-Epos im frühen 2. Jahrtausend literarisch greifbar. Das Epos bietet ein fein austariertes Stück Theodizee unter den Bedingungen des Polytheismus: Menschliche Kontingenzerfahrung wird auf die in sich widersprüchlichen Willensentscheidungen innerhalb der Götterversammlung bezogen. Die alttestamentliche Nacherzählung verlagert die widersprüchlichen Gottesbilder in die eine, höchst spannungsvolle Gottheit Jahwe und erzählt im Mythos des sich wandelnden Gottes die Geburt des prophetischen Gottesbildes.

Cette étude formule l'hypothèse critique d'une opération de remythologisation par une réactualisation théologico-politique de la tragédie chez Heidegger. Cette opération ne saurait simplement coïncider avec une revalorisation " irrationnelle " du mythe, car elle procède d'abord d'une mise en question, non moins problématique, de la dualité supposée entre muthos et logos pour culminer dans ce qu'une note des années 1950 appellera la " mytho-logie de l'événement ". La réélaboration de la notion de mythe s'accomplit à partir du poème de Hölderlin (...) qui doit préfigurer les dieux de l'" autre commencement " post-judéo-chrétien, selon le projet spéculatif d'une " religion " censée relier le peuple à ses dieux nouveaux via l'être comme événement. L'hypothèse d'une remythologisation théologico-politique doit ainsi permettre d'éclairer non seulement le rôle matriciel de Hölderlin pour la pensée de l'être, mais aussi le surinvestissement illusoire du national-socialisme censé donner lieu au " peuple de Hölderlin ". Pour interroger cette réactualisation théologico-politique du mythe, l'étude se concentre sur les cours que Heidegger consacra à Hölderlin, tout en sollicitant l'intégralité du corpus des années 1933-1945, c'est-à-dire les cours fribourgeois, les traités inédits rédigés dans le sillage des Contributions (Beiträge) et les Cahiers noirs (Schwarze Hefte). (shrink)

Die in diesem Band als 'Beilagen' wiedergegebenen Manuskripte gehören formal wie systematisch zu demselben Konvolut aus dem Nachlaß, dessen grundlegenden Teil über Basisphänomene (s. ECN 1) Cassirer ebenfalls in seiner Schrift über Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis (s. ECN 2) nutzt. Cassirers wechselseitige interne Verweisungen vom Manuskript zur Geschichte auf einzelne dieser Lagen und vice versa rechtfertigen den Abdruck dieser Manuskripte zu einzelnen Kategorien des in den Geschichts- und Mythos-Manuskripten behandelten Zusammenhangs. Inhalt: Der Begriff der Form als Problem der (...) Philosophie (Vortrag, Berlin 1924); Über Sprache und Denken (Vortrag, London 1927); Entwürfe und Vorarbeiten zur Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: a) Prägnanz, symbolische Ideation; b) Präsentation und Repräsentation; c) Allgemeines zur Gestaltpsychologie (1927-1929); Zum Symbolproblem (Vortrag, Zürich 1932 / Utrecht 1935); Vom Einfluß der Sprache auf die naturwissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung (Vortrag, London 1935); Beilage: Grundprobleme der Sprachphilosophie (Vorlesung, Hamburg SS 1922, Nachschrift von Dr. Willi Meyne). (shrink)

Welche - nicht nur philosophischen - Konzeptionen des Rationalen gibt es? Wie manifestiert und determiniert die Rationalität die soziale Praxis? Wie ist unser alltägliches Handeln in Rationalitätsstrukturen eingebettet und lässt sie sich auf andere Bereiche wie Religion, Kunst, Alltagssprache oder Mythos anwenden? Auf wie viel Irrationalität beruht das, was wir heute als wahr akzeptieren? Und wie ist das Wechselverhältnis zwischen Rationalität und menschlichen Emotionen? Was steckt hinter der oft als «neutral» ausgewiesenen Rationalität, welche Interessen, Akteure, sozial-historischen Strukturen, welche Bedingungen (...) und Voraussetzungen hat Rationalität? Wie gehen wir mit einem Pluralismus verschiedener Rationalitäten um? Diese Fragen versucht das 2. Symposium der philosophischen akademie mit Vortragenden unterschiedlicher kultur-, sozial- und geisteswissenschaftlicher Disziplinen zu beantworten. (shrink)

This book argues that natural law - when construed as an epistemological and trans-cultural lingua franca, adjudged capable of legitimating the rational intelligibility and universal applicability of specific Christian moral principles within contemporary "secular" discourse - has failed. Through a detailed analysis of the contributions of three prominent natural law theorists who are located within a shared philosophical-theological tradition, namely, John Finnis, Jean Porter, and John Milbank, the text will seek to illuminate the extent to which this failure is (...) as much intramural as it is extramural. (shrink)

Part I. Re-discovering a Christian understanding of reality. Two views of reality -- The Christian Platonism of Lewis and Tolkien -- Bridge -- Part II. Christian Platonism and the history of Western ideas. The mythos of modernity -- Platonist ideas in the New Testament -- How Christian is Christian Platonism? -- So what went wrong? -- Is modern truth, without wisdom, believable? -- Part III. Applied Christian metaphysics. Returning to reality.

Joseph Gikatilla's early works, composed during the 1270s, have been understood by many scholars as a fusion of Kabbalah and philosophy—an approach that he abandoned in his later compositions. This paper argues that Gikatilla's early works are in fact consistent with his later works, and that the differences between the two can be explained by the polemical engagement during his early period with Jewish philosophy and Christian missionizing. By subtly drawing Jewish students of philosophy away from Aristotelian speculation and (...) towards Kabbalah, Gikatilla sought in his early works to lay the foundation for an understanding of Judaism based on kabbalistic mytho-poesis and ecstatic mystical experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanticism and Coleridge’s Idea of HistoryMichael John Kooy*Romantic historiography is widely understood in methodological terms as a subjectively determined treatment of the human past, according to which historical knowledge is grounded in imaginative activity. That ambition was amply fulfilled in Scott’s historical novels, as Georg Lukacs once demonstrated. 1 Writing in broader terms, Hayden White characterized that whole creative enterprise as an “effort at palingenesis,” the striving to recreate (...) or relive the past in individual consciousness. 2In more recent years, as the approach to the period has become more historicist, criticism has begun to separate the historical and the aesthetic aspects of this romantic sensibility, usually emphasizing one at the expense of the other. The result has been a standoff in critical thinking about the way Romanticism represents the past. One side is occupied by some new historicists who claim to find a precedent for their own methodology among prominent figures of the period. Heyne, Wordsworth, and Keats, it turns out, not only were engaged actively in their own contemporary history, but they also demonstrated in their sophisticated evocation of the past the impossibility of overcoming historical difference by reference to natural law. 3 Arguments advanced on the other side of the controversy insist that the Romantics were not nearly such good historicists as supposed. In these accounts, often allied to post-structuralism, the aesthetic absolutism implicit in the high romantic argument is undiminished by the burgeoning historical consciousness in the period. Indeed, Romanticism’s aesthetic [End Page 717] retrieval of the past appears to be an instance of how subjectivity, rather than admit its own historicity, again asserts mastery over the object through its own self-will. 4Each of these accounts commands a considerable following, and a peace between them seems unlikely, indeed undesirable. On one matter they do agree, though, and that is in their distrust of Coleridge. His historiography—the notion that ideas make history and that the way to get at these ideas is aesthetically—is too idealist for today’s historicists and too monumentally subjective for the post-structuralists. I think both judgments are hasty. Coleridge, more than most contemporaries, reflected for many years upon the difficulties that arose in his own attempts to interpret historical knowledge (which appeared as a subjective, aesthetic construct) in systematic terms (as the reflection of natural order); and a good look at the record will show that his thought is not quite so anti-historical as some believe, and his subjective approach not nearly so absolutist.The goal of this essay is to rehabilitate Coleridge’s idea of history, considering what it tells us about Romanticism and how it foreshadows current debates about methodology. 5 More specifically, I want to show how in different contexts Coleridge treats, with varying degrees of success, history as an ideational field that is both created and then interpreted by an inquiring subject. First, at the literary and cultural level, history is conceived as the object of imaginative reconstruction, where subjectivity provisionally orders the mass of material according to an idea found nowhere within history itself. Here the anti-positivist bias of Coleridge’s idealist historiography dominates a project that is, both in orientation and achievement, not so much cognitive as aesthetic. Secondly, at the level of religion, history is conceived in mythic terms, the past being revealed only symbolically to the discerning inquirer who must interpret the Christian mythos as recorded in the inspired biblical account of the nation of Israel. Here it is the application of certain interpretive or hermeneutic strategies that determines success or failure. Finally, as a single idea, history is conceived as the process of humanity seeking consciousness of itself, and this Coleridge expresses in a narrative of universal proportions, beginning in apostasy and ending in grace. Here teleology dominates, but as Coleridge discovers, this providential [End Page 718] history is a story that cannot be fully told, thought, or even, it turns out, imagined. It can only be postulated as an idea of reason or, in religious terminology, held as an article of faith. In a curious return to aesthetics Coleridge argues that for the grand historical narrative, just as for art... (shrink)

Martin Foss tells us that the job of the mature man is to use his gifts of reason and imagination to confront the world and death, and the job of philosophy is to replace for adults the myths which satisfy children. In our times, when, "absurdity, loneliness, death and isolation are the sinister themes," our lack of reflective insight into life and our failure to understand the interplay of process and structure result in a despair for which modern man must (...) blame himself. Foss is replying directly to the message of the poets and artists of the absurd, and to the challenge of existentialism that death is indispensible to authentic existence. His philosophical position owes much to Hegel, even more to the Christian mythos and symbolism. The author calls on a lifetime of familiarity with Western philosophy and literature to provide the vocabulary and illustrations of his theses: Emptiness and meaninglessness are the only death we can possibly experience; the essence of mortality is the exhaustion of the physical in spiritual sublimation; the free decision of the sacrificial act as the destiny of man has changed self and world; sacrifice as a creative element in human life is of fundamental importance.—M. B. M. (shrink)

Schleiermacher's Copernican revolution in theology is effected through his presentation of the Christian mythos in terms of a phenomenological anthropology of self-consciousness. Moreover, as Niebuhr shows in this apt study of some features of Schleiermacher's theological thinking, the principles which determine the shape of that revolution can be deduced neither from a biblical dogmatics allegedly purified of philosophical presuppositions nor from a philosophy uninformed by theological experience. In the first part of the book, Niebuhr discusses Schleiermacher's little-known work (...) The Christmas Eve: A Dialogue, affording us a picture of the author's starting-point in the experience of a salvation or potentiated self-consciousness which is historically and socially mediated. The subsequent analysis of the lectures on hermeneutics and ethics discloses the object of Schleiermacher's inquiry to be not the supernatural being that posits the cosmos, but the creative Logos indwelling the individual and all men by means of the common, organic media of human existence in which the self both comes to be and comes to create history and culture. Finally, The Christian Faith is reviewed by Niebuhr in terms of the expression it gives to the mature Schleiermacher's theology and christology. The primordial consciousness of being-in-relation reveals the historical, societal, worldly context of the self and the various polarities of the self's existence such that religion emerges as a phenomenon coterminous with man's affective response to the relationships in which the whole of human nature is bound, and theology, the "daughter of religion," becomes the methodology by which the articulation of an affective determination of self-consciousness is achieved. The rigorously pursued explicitation [[sic]] of the forms and determinations of self-consciousness is interpreted by Niebuhr with a penetration and a sympathy at once acute and comprehensive. By giving us a series of insights into Schleiermacher's "thinking in motion," Niebuhr has contributed a cogent testimony to the nineteenth-century theologian's central importance in the fields of hermeneutical theory, philosophical ethics, philosophy of religion and culture, and theology. One would have welcomed a more critical appraisal of Schleiermacher's view of the formal and material compatibility of philosophy and theology, understanding and feeling, inasmuch as the scope of theological inquiry appears to be limited by the boundaries of reason set forth in the ethics, and philosophical anthropology is apparently reduced to a rather sophisticated phenomenology of religious experience. In any case, Niebuhr's scholarly treatment of the material should lead the reader to an informed examination of Schleiermacher's text.--J. M. S. (shrink)

Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead—an age that claims mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents. The western— or Christian Platonist—tradition, he argues, tells us that man is (...) an intellectual animal, born to pursue the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in beauty. Wilson begins by reconceiving the intellectual conservatism born of Edmund Burke’s jeremiad against the French Revolution as an effort to preserve the West’s vision of man and the cosmos as ordered by and to beauty. After defining the achievement of that vision and its tradition, Wilson offers an extended study of the nature of beauty and the role of the fine arts in shaping a culture but above all in opening the human intellect to the perception of the form of reality. Through close studies of Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Maritain, he recovers the classical vision of beauty as a revelation of truth and being. Finally, he revisits the ancient distinction between reason and story-telling, between mythos and logos, in order to rejoin the two. Story-telling is foundational to the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form—a story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson’s book invites its readers to a renewal of the West’s intellectual tradition. (shrink)

According to Christian theology, after being properly judged, bad souls are damned to Hell for eternity after being judged. Supernatural differs in that some of the souls in Hell weren't even judged, they just made very bad deals. But regardless of whether you think the mythos of Supernatural is even correct on this point, the fact that we recognize these are very bad deals should tell us something about the choices that land us in Hell. Our attitudes toward (...) the experience of punishment highlight an interesting feature about Hell in Supernatural—a person in Hell might not be there because they lived a bad life, but because they made a really bad deal with a demon. There is a problem with justifying Hell's existence this way, which our “deals with demons” examples from Supernatural make clear. Without a doubt, Hell is fundamental to Supernatural, but is definitely not a justifiable punishment. (shrink)

Platons „Phaidon“ stellt eindringlich dar, wie Sokrates angesichts des Todes seine philosophische Lebensführung und seine Überzeugung von der Unsterblichkeit der Seele rational rechtfertigt. Im Dialog wird nahezu das gesamte Spektrum platonischen Philosophierens entfaltet, das Psychologie, Naturphilosophie, Epistemologie, Ontologie, Metaphysik und Mythos miteinander verzahnt. Die existenziell-dramatische Gestalt und der argumentativ-philosophische Gehalt des Werks erfordern verschiedene Interpretationszugänge zur sachgerechten Erschließung des Textes. Der vorliegende Band liefert einen kooperativen Kommentar, in dem in komplementärer Weise philosophische, philologische und religionswissenschaftlich informierte Zugänge zum „Phaidon“ (...) zu Wort kommen. Der Leser erhält so einen fundierten Einblick in alle Facetten dieses vielschichtigen und wirkmächtigen Klassikers. MIT BEITRÄGEN VON: Michael Bordt, Kenneth Dorter, Michael Erler, Dorothea Frede, Lloyd P. Gerson, Christoph Horn, Filip Karfík, Theo Kobusch, Bernd Manuwald, Jörn Müller, Christian Schäfer und Benedikt Strobel. (shrink)

In his book, The Frankfurt School and the Dialectics of Religion: Translating Critical Faith into Critical Theory, Dustin J. Byrd argues that at the core of the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory is a secularized theology. Unlike their predecessors, especially Feuerbach, Marx, Lenin, Freud, and Nietzsche, who argued for an abstract negation of religion, the first generation of Critical Theorists followed Hegel's logic and attempted to rescue and preserve the revolutionary, emancipatory, and liberational aspects of religion in their secular non-conformist philosophy. (...) They saw in both Judaism and Christianity certain conceptual and semantic elements that could be enlisted into their struggle for a future reconciled society, one beyond the slaughterbench of history. In order to rescue religion, theological concepts had to go through the process of determinate negation, wherein such materials migrate from the depth of the religious mythos into publicly accessible reasoning, thus making the revolutionary impulse of prophetic religion accessible to the secular world. Byrd also argues that this determinate negation of religion remains relevant to today's post-secular societies, especially in regard to religious Muslims attempting to find their place in Western countries, which are often hostile to religion and religiosity. Examining the strengths and weaknesses of Habermas' famous "translation proviso," he argues that both religious and secular citizens of the West can learn from the Frankfurt School's dialectical approach to religion in order to find a space wherein both religious faith and secular reason can not only co-exist, but also join together in the process of creating a more reconciled future society. (shrink)

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis by training mosquitofish to discriminate two items from three in three different conditions. In one condition, continuous variables were controlled while numerical information was available; in another, the number was (...) kept constant and information relating to continuous variables was available; in the third condition, stimuli differed for both number and continuous quantities. Fish learned to discriminate more quickly when both number and continuous information were available compared to when they could use continuous information only or number only; there was no difference in the learning rate between the two latter conditions. Our results do not support the hypothesis that processing numbers imposes a higher cognitive load than processing continuous variables. Rather, they suggest that availability of multiple information sources may facilitate discrimination learning. (shrink)

Numinous spaces in British literature from William Wordsworth to Samuel Beckett -- Jesus figures in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Edward Albee -- Using Bakhtin's definitions to discover ethical voices in Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy -- René Girard's categories of scapegoats in literature of the American South -- Hopkins's metaphysics of nature as sacred disclosure -- The book of job as mirrored in Hopkins's metaphysics -- Beckett's mythos of the absence of God.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana ReadingDonald G. LuckThe Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading. By John P. Keenan. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995.This is the latest effort of society member John Keenan to “pass over” (as John Dunne puts it) from one tradition to another in order to return to one’s point of departure with fresh perspective and heightened awareness. This book reflects impressive scholarship and builds on (...) the theological indebtedness to Madhyamika [End Page 210] and Yogacara thought that shaped Keenan’s earlier work, The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology, also published by Orbis. The noses of academic purists may be put out of joint by what some might construe as a blurring of boundaries between Buddhism and Christianity, but Keenan places himself right in the thick of current hermeneutical discussions to establish the fruitfulness of Mahayana perspective in interpreting the “charter document of the Christian Gospel” (p. 4). He finds methodological legitimization both in the arguments of narrative criticism and in the lines of connection he discerns between deconstruction and the Mahayana recognition of emptiness. And in so arguing, he finds himself able to account for forms of New Testament criticism such as those advanced by John Dominic Crossan and Werner Kelber that not only undermine forms of essentialism but also resort to conventional modes of thinking and discourse without justifying the latter.What is unwittingly going on, argues Keenan, is parallel to the Mahayana identification of emptiness (shunyata) with dependent co-arising (pratitya samutpada). Like deconstructionist hermenuetics, emptiness destablizes all fixed views by recognizing that ultimate truth is ineffable and silent. However, unlike deconstruction, emptiness avoids the vertigo of a text lost in the interplay of interpretations doubling back on themselves. “That is emptiness ineptly apprehended as itself an essentialist viewpoint that there are no viewpoints” (p. 7). Instead, Mahayana analysis connects recognition of the total otherness of ultimate meaning with the affirmation of worldly convention in its limitation. The result is a hermeneutic of nonabsolutizing suggestiveness shaped by upaya, which leads the reader to the possibility of enlightenment —or, in the case of Mark, disclosure.According to Keenan, this Mahayana recognition of the identity of emptiness and dependent co-arising not only has hermeneutical legitimation but also is the key for unlocking a fresh appreciation of Mark’s contents. Accounting for this is the fact that “the Marcan rhetoric of indirection and irony is the narrative analogue to the Madhyamika dialectical rhetoric employed in Nagarjuna’s Stanzas on the Middle” and the fact that “Mahayana eschews precisely those clarifying elements that Matthew and Luke have added to domesticate Mark’s story and discourse, preferring the opacity of ultimate meaning to the full explication of stated truths, opting for the emptying of all themes and ideas in order to reclaim them with an awakened mind” (p. 4).Keenan’s approach is coherent with Crossan’s observation that while mythos creates a universe of meaning, parable undermines established cosmoi. In this respect, Jesus not only speaks parable, he is parable. Utilizing the Mahayana identification of emptiness with dependent co-arising as a heuristic device and paying close attention to the Greek text, Keenan traces the simultaneously destablizing and restorative effect that Jesus has on his hearers—and that the evangelist potentially can have on his readers. Jesus’ “desert spirituality,” that is, his radically unconventional vision, undermines the expectations and securities of both hearer and reader. But it also reconnects those effected by the liberation he works “not to the ultimate glory of a false kingdom imagined by the disciples and the readers, but to the conventional realm of human living in which alone the kingdom may be established” (p. 73; italics added). Indeed, Jesus’ crucifixion makes clear that the transformation wrought [End Page 211] by the Gospel is an existential reappropriation of ordinary life in the face of ultimate mystery, not some supernatural deliverance within or from it. Appropriately, Mark ends with the women being confronted by both the jarring and ineffable mystery of Jesus’ empty tomb and the promise that he will see the disciples again in the familiar—and open-ended—context of life in Galilee.Keenan has done more... (shrink)

In this essay, I interrogate the nature and grounds of Milbank's understanding of taste as it applies to differing mythic sensibilities, arguing that it is insufficiently responsive to the priority of God's action and so inadequate to a Christian theological account of the interplay of mythoi. By reading Milbank in light of The Song of Songs and Jean-Louis Chrétien's phenomenology of prayer, I suggest that rather than the subject embracing a mythos, it is instead the mythos which (...) first embraces the subject. Thus one no longer requires recourse to the implicitly violent language of ‘out-narration’, but can speak instead of willing seduction by God. By approaching taste in this way, especially in relation to ‘mythic sensibilities’, a more truly Christian approach to difference becomes possible. (shrink)

Introduction Indéniablement moins facile à intégrer que celles de Saint Simon ou de Proudhon, l’œuvre de Fourier tient une place pour le moins marginale dans la manière dont les sciences sociales pensent leur histoire. On peut même dire que les écrits de « l’inventeur social » ont plus souvent été envisagés comme des « objets » d’investigations (par exemple pour des recherches sur l’imaginaire) qu’ils n’ont été intégrés par ces disciplines en tant que moments de leurs déploiements temporels....

The object of my dissertation is to demonstrate that the conceptual thrust of Nietzsche's philosophical activity is a sustained endeavor to negate the Socratic basis of Western ontology through the re-implementation of the Aeschylean tragic paideia. Nietzsche's most consequential objection against Socrates is the latter's neutralizing of Hellenic mythos with the "cold edge" of reason and the "naive optimism" of science. Accordingly, we may most properly understand Nietzsche's effort as a movement against aesthetic Socratism, since it is with its (...) "supreme law," "To be beautiful everything must be intelligible," that Socrates--from behind his "Euripidean mask"--quelled the Dionysian spirit in Attic aesthetics, ipso fact put into operation an impulse-taming didacticism, and thus made ready the social climate for the institutionalization of the Judeo-Christian moral system. ;Nor, as I urge, is this a mere intellectual position, a philosophical exercise for Nietzsche. Just as the Platonic Socrates saw the need for a new moral and aesthetic direction, so does Nietzsche regard the culturo-political reformulation of Western society as a practical goal. Two interrelated themes of his appear to speak in favor of this observation: his regard of the composer Richard Wagner as the new Aeschylus who would reanimate the Dionysian spirit within German culture, and his persistent call for the somato-intellectual overcoming of humankind as we know it. That is, Wagner's musical dramas would at once transform Western/Socratic aesthetics and prepare the socio-cultural mentality for the rise and establishment of the Ubermensch as a new and profoundly "superior" "species" of human beings. That the younger Nietzsche did indeed regard Wagner as useful toward the achievement of such an artistic and cultural inversion may be noticed from the fact that he terminated their friendship virtually immediately after the composer signalled that he was turning to a more traditional and acceptable subject--Christianity. ;Despite this loss, Nietzsche ineluctably presses on his vision of the future "masters" of the earth. Indeed, in The Will to Power he implicitly offers at least two dissimilar "blueprints" whereby that goal could be realized. Only one of these plans of action, however, could ultimately prove useful in the establishment of the Ubermensch, while the other could at best permit only isolated communities of Ubermenschen to exist for a relatively short time, before succumbing to the rabble's socio-cultural levelling tendency. Only after the rabble's lifestyle would have become intolerable even to themselves, such that they would collectively rise up to transcend their mass-identity in all its manifestations, could the emergence and future of the Ubermensch as a phenomenal being be assured. (shrink)

It was the integration of mythos, ethos and logos that determined the unity of Hellenic culture. The mythos of ways of being in the world gave determination to the ethos of ways of acting in community and the logos of accounting for what went on in the world. The primary expressions of this integration were the divine enlightenments of the poesis of interpretation which were acted out in public performance. The disintegration came with the pluralization of cultures in (...) the Hellenistic period, when there were acknowledged multiple cultures, and even as early as Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle, rhetoric and argument displaced mythos as the basis for logos and ethos. In the century gone by we have seen several anti-mythical movements that have been adversarial to cultural integration. Religious fundamentalism rejects mythos in favor of literalism. Positivism rejects mythos in favor of empiricism. Existentialism rejects mythos as “bad faith”. But, as Jaspers’ critique of Bultmann’s de-mythologicalization project made clear, each of these moves amounted to an attempt at re-mytholization of our ways of being in the world. Alasdair MacIntye early exposed how the integration of mythos, ethos and logos were rooted in performance. Later, in After Virtue, he lamented their disintegration. Berdyaev’s retreat to The New Middle Ages and Tillich’s embracing of the notion of a “broken myth” offer their resolutions, but no comprehensive plan. The Jew who continues to enact “we were together in the land of Egypt” and the Christian who “sups with the risen Lord” still ritualistically cling to a performance of a mythos in our secularized post-modern age, but find little carry-over to ethos and logos. The search for meaning remains the task of integrating mythos, ethos and logos in performance. (shrink)

Summary The article deals with the concept of religion in the contemporary theology of religions. Many theologians in the current debate work with a general concept of religion. Such a conception of religion unifies the distinctive religious diversities. This article argues that against the background of the previous debate, a theology of religions must proceed from a concept of religion as communication. This concept emerges out of the Christian religious tradition: it carries a particular meaning and hence should not (...) be treated as universally applicable. Starting with a concrete concept of religion, a theology of religion has the task neither to give a foundation for other “religions”, nor that of Christianity. Only this could be a basis for a real pluralistic conception. From this starting point follows the question on how other religions understand religion. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to ground the notion of cyberethics of co-operation. The evolution of modern society has resulted in a shift from industrial society towards informational capitalism. This transformation is a multidimensional shift that affects all aspects of society. Hence also the ethical system of society is penetrated by the emergence of the knowledge society and ethical guidelines for the information age are needed. Ethical issues and conflicts in the knowledge society are connected to topics of ecological (...) and social sustainability. For information ethics and cyberethics, the sustainable design of society, social, and socio-technological systems is important. In this context the notions of sustainability and co-operation are discussed. Based on these categories, the approach of cyberethics of co-operation can be theoretically grounded. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking by Stephen CritesLawrence S. StepelevichStephen Crites. Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 572. Cloth, $65.00Unlike either Wittgenstein or Heidegger, or his contemporary, Schelling, there is really no “Early” or “Later” Hegel. The fundamentals of his system were, if not always fully articulated, nevertheless present from the (...) very beginning of his career. There is, in Hegel, a remarkable consistency in the development of his thought, in which the elements that comprised his final system can be detected in his earliest efforts—and it is only in this sense that one can speak of an “Early” or a “Later” Hegel. That his final expression was indeed the result of an effort, a struggle to fuse and clarify seemingly disparate elements, is the thesis of Professor Crites. In this case, the specific disparate elements that are considered are those which confronted Hegel from his earliest days as a student of theology, those elements expressed in the “Christian Drama.” Crites sets out the eight revered acts of this drama: the creation, the fall, God’s covenant with Israel, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church, and the last judgment. It is his contention that Hegel “critically engaged the claims of this mythos and the social practices associated with it.” And so, the essence of Crites’s well-written and well-researched study is to set out how this drama served as a “template that affected the way he framed other topics in the ever-widening range of his philosophical inquiry.” It is to his credit that Crites does not consider his own explication of Hegel’s preoccupation with the gospels as some sort of a “secret” key that could unlock the full meaning of Hegel’s philosophy, but nevertheless, as he rightly stresses, this preoccupation cannot be ignored—for it ultimately exercised a crucial role in the formation of that which is now taken as Hegel’s mature thought.Unlike most studies of Hegel’s development—and there are more than a few—Crites avoids taking a retrospective posture, a concluding a priori stance which would allow him to point out where and why this or that particular element was rejected or retained by Hegel, His method is historical, intent upon following Hegel’s own sometimes tortured development, until, finally in this course, we reach a point where we suddenly see that Hegel “shows clear signs of becoming what we can only call a Hegelian—or better still, he shows signs of being Hegel!”The source of this inner development begins, and is traced from, Hegel’s initial appearance as “The Model Pupil of Stuttgart” to that moment in when he stands revealed as embodying that Absolute Knowledge which concludes the Phenomenology. This path from Stuttgart to Jena, which Hegel himself might have had in mind when he spoke of the philosophical “highway of despair” is detailed by Crites with a sure hand. Every stumbling block is noted, and every new resolution ıs marked, from those first essays composed during the bitter days as Hauslehrer, through the steady advances [End Page 540] of “the Jena ‘Philosophy’ ” until the passage completes itself in the Phenomenology and its termination in the “Recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.”More than half of Crites’ extensive study is devoted to explicating how the subject of religion is dealtwith in the course of the Phenomenology. In this survey of Hegel’s most well-known work, its fundamental leitmotif emerges clearly into focus: the identification of the “portentous power of the negative” with the Death of God. This death, which is philosophically reflected in dialectical negativity, is the central moment of the gospel drama. In this act, Absolute Spirit must itself suffer and die, for “Not only the Christian God incarnate, but the absolute spirit suffers, suffers its Golgotha and dies.” It is only from this sacrifice that new life can arise—for out of it comes “the resurrection of a new human-divine totality.” What Hegel has retained of the gospel... (shrink)

This article introduces the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP), a first systematic method for identifying irony in natural discourse. The first section discusses previous operationalizations of irony and demonstrates that these are not explicit about which criteria were used to separate irony from non-irony. The second section argues why irony can be defined as an “utterance with a literal evaluation that is implicitly contrary to its intended evaluation.” This section also explains why ironic utterances can be placed on an evaluation scale. (...) In the third section, clauses are proposed as a good unit of analysis when looking at irony in natural discourse. The different steps of the VIP are then introduced in the fourth section and subsequently applied in a sample analysis of a natural text in the fifth section. The sixth section discusses a reliability analysis of the VIP protocol. The article ends with an outlook on how future research on verbal irony might benefit from applying the VIP. (shrink)

T. 1. Préface-Einleitung, 1705-1710 -- T. 2. 1711-1718 -- T. 3. 1719-1724 -- T. 4. 1725-1731 -- T. 5. Supplemente Register.