Private law governs our most pervasive relationships with other people: the wrongs we do to one another, the property we own and exclude from others' use, the contracts we make and break, and the benefits realized at another's expense that we cannot justly retain. The major rules of private law are well known, but how they are organized, explained, and justified is a matter of fierce debate by lawyers, economists, and philosophers.

Chapter One THE MAN-APES A Lesson for Thomas Hobbes Probably the most exciting development in modern anthropology is the discovery of the australopithecines ...

This volume of essays deals with the problem of relativism, in particular cultural relativism. If our society knows better than other societies, how do we know that it knows better? There is a profound irony in the fact that this self-doubt has become most acute in the one civilisation that has persuaded the rest of the world to emulate it. The claim to cognitive superiority is often restricted, of course, to the limited sphere of natural science and technology; and that (...) immediately raises the second main theme of this volume - the differences between the human and natural sciences. These essays reach towards a new style and mode of enquiry - a mixture of philosophy, history and anthropology - that promises to prove more revealing and fruitful. (shrink)

Problems in normative ethics paradigmatically concern what it is obligatory or permissible for an individual to do. Yet sometimes, each of us ought to do something individually in virtue of what we ought to do together. Unfortunately, traversing these two different levels at which a moral obligation can arise – individual and collective – is fraught with difficulties that easily lure us into conclusions muddying our understanding of collective obligations. This paper seeks to clearly lay out a systematic problem central (...) to the relation between collective and individual duties in view of alleviating some such confusion and facilitating more concerted attempts at resolving it: Collective duties require individuals to act in order for the collective duty to be fulfilled. Yet typically, a collective duty does not entail any one set of individual duties that would prescribe such contributory actions: The work we need to do in order to fulfil a duty can be allocated differently to the individuals collectively bearing it. Much like in matters of distributive justice, then, deriving individual duties from a collective one requires us to employ a distributive scheme, which raises separate normative concerns that have rarely taken centre stage in the debate so far. (shrink)

From its beginning, Critical Theory aimed to explore the laws governing social life as a formational totality and the forces shaping and driving its historical evolution. So the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of ‘society’ encompassing both its structural as well as its cultural components can be considered one of the defining hallmarks of Critical Theory through all its theoretical and generational variations. But what, then, is Critical Theory’s conception of society? To answer this question, the authors make use (...) of a three-tiered heuristic model distinguishing synthesis (what is society?), dynamis (what are the driving forces of social change?) and praxis ((how) can social change be motivated or influenced by social actors?). In this way, they are able to reconstruct not only the divergences and controversies between the different versions and approaches in Critical Theory across the four generations of authors writing in this tradition, but also four core points of convergence which can serve to differentiate between Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and other critical theories. These four points, we suggest, should be seen to form the backbone of any valid conception of society in contemporary Critical Theory. (shrink)

(Sudhoffs Archiv; Beiheft 61) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2013. 493 S., zahlr. Abb. u. Tab., kart., € 74,00. ISBN 978‐3‐515‐10468‐5.

This article is based on German and Japanese sources and shows how around 1900 European psychiatric concepts and practices embedded themselves into emerging scientific Japanese discourses. The article argues that now forgotten German–Japanese exchanges in the field of psychiatric pathology, together with the historical development of psychiatric care, were central mechanisms for the establishment of a distinctly psychiatric discourse in Japan prior to its broad institutionalization. Three discursive strategies were key: Japanese and German experts from a range of medical fields (...) reinvented a body of traditions loosely related to actual pre-modern cultural practices; they engaged in comparative evaluations of psychiatric conditions; and, through the simple but effective transformation of specific concepts and termini at the margins of European psychiatry, these experts contributed to the transfer not only of a psychiatric discourse but also affected the power relations on a national and international scale as European psychiatry permeated into new territory, namely the Japanese landscape of emerging modern scientific disciplines. (shrink)

Introduces the phenomenology of the Other, taking into account the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Schutz, and Derrida, but mostly going back to things themselves.

Wie kaum ein Philosoph in akademischen Amt und Wurden zuvor hat Ludwig Wittgenstein damit kokettiert, sich in der Geschichte seines eigenen Faches bestenfalls rudimentar auszukennen. Diese ironische Selbstcharakterisierung hat, ebenso wie Wittgensteins wesentlich ahistorische Art des Philosophierens, dazu gefuhrt, dass seine oftmals subtile Auseinandersetzung mit Autoren der Philosophiegeschichte wenig beachtet wurde. Der Band sucht diese Lucke zu schliessen und untersucht exemplarisch wesentliche Bezuge Wittgensteins zur Philosophiegeschichte von Platon uber Kant und Kierkegaard bis Heidegger.

In reference to the paradoxical classification of art in Kafka’s Josefine story, religious aspects of the artist’s performances and their effect on the audience are scrutinized. The leading question is to what extent it evokes an allusion to the primal scene of divine revelation, following Stéphane Mosès’ commentary in his readings of the Bible. Josefine’s singing with a “nothing of a voice”, reduced to “the slightest of nullities”, the zero-point of signification, nevertheless affects an experience of presence and community that (...) touches the listeners’ entire being. From the perspective of the artist, her song recitals are manifestations of supreme art of which she claims a soteriological significance in respect of her audience who belongs in Kafka’s portrayal obviously to the Jewish people. Around such a tension between maximal restraint of an utterance (the voice onset of the aleph of the word anokhi/i) and all-encompassing meaning (the name of God and all Commandments whose acceptance is constitutive for the Jewish people) circle the theological exegeses of the Sinai-scene (esp. Ex. 20,1) in the tradition of Rashi and Maimonides, in modernity e.g. of Gershom Scholem in dispute with Walter Benjamin on Kafka. It will be shown that the depicted paradoxes of Josefine’s art performances unfold the mentioned tension as an original literary reflection on revelation and language under the conditions of modernity. (shrink)

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Auch als originar politischer Denker ist Karl Jaspers reich an Einsichten: Ausgehend vom Ethos der Freiheit jedes Einzelnen richtet er seinen Blick auf die konkrete politische Gestaltung einer Freiheitsordnung. Dabei steht fur ihn im Hinblick auf die noch junge Bundesrepublik die Selbsterziehung in Freiheit im Zentrum seiner oft mahnenden Worte. Ganz im sokratischen Sinne fordert er intellektuelle Redlichkeit und politische Wahrhaftigkeit ein, um den beiden grossen Gegenwartsherausforderungen gewachsen zu sein: einer atomwaffenbestuckten Welt, die sich jederzeit selbst ausloschen kann, und dem (...) modernen Totalitarismus, der in seiner Verherrlichung des Antipolitischen allen politischen Ordnungsbestrebungen die Vernichtung androht. Jeder Frieden, der mehr ist als die Friedhofsruhe eines Waffenstillstands, grundet fur Jaspers in der politischen Freiheit handelnder Burgerinnen und Burger, die gemeinsam Sorge fur die Integritat ihres politischen Gemeinwesens tragen. Mit Beitragen von Karl-Heinz Breier, Alexander Gantschow, Anton Hugli, Annabelle Petschow, Kurt Salamun, Reinhard Schulz, Bernhard Sutor, Bernd Weidmann. (shrink)

This essay is an inquiry into the relevance of psychology to morality-particularly, the relevance of a capacity to treat nature with respect and restraint to a responsibility to do so. I begin with a presentation of Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” (which I also designate with the term ecological morality). I then examine two notions of moral psychology that have recently attracted the interest of moral philosophers: first, “the moral sense,” a concept that has gained prominence, in part, through the recent (...) work of the philosopher, John Rawls; and second, Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of the development of moral cognition. Finally, I consider how these prospectives on moral psychology might apply to ecological morality. (shrink)

Originally published in 1971. The three contributions collected in this volume deal with different aspects of a single theme—the logical status of scientific theories in their relation to observation. These lectures, authored by different thinkers, treat this theme in connection with some controversies in the philosophy of science. A nonspecialist who reads these lectures should realize that the theme itself is a perennial one with an ancient lineage. It has concerned philosophers from the earliest era of philosophy on down through (...) the centuries. A central philosophical issue at stake in the lectures is the question of whether scientific theories are testable in terms of our observations such that we can know whether some theories are true and others false. Although differing in their emphases, all three contributors seek a more plausible and nonskeptical philosophical account of the status of scientific theories in relation to observation. (shrink)