Giuseppe Franco hat mich mit süditalienischer Liebenswürdigkeit dazu eingeladen, einen kleinen Beitrag zum vorliegenden Hommage-Band zu schreiben, in dem ich von meiner „intellektuellen Beziehung“ zu Dir und „von der Bedeutung des Kritischen Rationalismus“ für meinen „eigenen Denkweg“ berichte. Kennengelernt haben wir einander vor inzwischen 53 Jahren kurz nach Deinem Dienstantritt an der Mannheimer Wirtschaftshochschule. Ich studierte damals in Wien, vor allem bei Bela Juhos, der in einer Art Dachkammer der Alten Universität seine Seminare, z. B. eines über „Wissenschaftstheorie und Quantenmechanik“ (...) mit maximal zehn älteren Studenten und bereits habilitierten Wissenschaftsphilosophen abhielt, sowie beim Altmeister Victor Kraft, dessen Privatissime-Veranstaltungen in seiner Wohnung in der Walfischgasse von noch weniger, handverlesenen Geistesschaffenden besucht wurden. (shrink)

Kaum ein anderer lebender Naturwissenschaftler besitzt die Fähigkeit, mit solcher Geistesklarheit die tiefsten Einsichten von moderner Quantenphysik mit dem uralten spirituellen Menschheitswissen zu verknüpfen wie - Hans-Peter Dürr! Es gelingt Dürr scheinbar mühelos, eine Synthese zwischen den meditativen Einsichten der Weisen des Ostens und den aktuellen Erkenntnissen der modernen Naturwissenschaften herzustellen. Dabei verliert er sich niemals in langatmigen akademischen Erläuterungen, sondern hat stets den Menschen und die gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit des 21. Jahrhunderts im Blick. Ein Brückenschlag zwischen zwei Welten, (...) der vielleicht niemals notwendiger war als zurzeit. Eine kleines Meisterwerk, das in einleuchtender Weise aufzeigt - alles Leben ist EINS! (shrink)

Often overlooked is the fact that postmodern theory brought to the fore a crisis in the humanities. The implied universalism of the current “iconic turn” in postmodern thinking is a blow to the traditional sciences grouped around national literatures and cultures. In the 1980's, postmodern practitioners in the United States began to assault the discursive practices of the mainstream under the banner of cultural studies. The current crisis in the humanities surfaced in the emancipation of the various studies from their (...) traditional fields in the humanities. The German Studies practiced today in the United States for instance, has no counterpart in Germany's traditional departments of Deutsche Philologie. Whereas the icon in the United States has become an object of investigation for the various studies, it has not yet displaced the littera in Germany's literary sciences. However in the 1990's, the historical sciences in Germany responded to the challenge of the various studies by directing their attention not to cultural studies, but to cultural history, with its well-defined set of methodologies. But what kind of cultural history is it? Is it built on 19th century German foundations, or is it grafted to current North American notions of post-industrial culture? In this paper I show that the supposed opposition between cultural studies and cultural history is artificial. Through a close reading of Hayden White's extremist questioning of historical practice in Metahistory (1973), I demonstrate that there is no opposition between the icon and the littera in this recent radical critique of mainstream humanistic science. The vehement German reaction to his North American assault on European Kultur is based on a misunderstanding of White's premises. Rather than being constructed on a hodgepodge of postmodern approaches, I show that White's postmodern history is in fact conventionally grounded in 19th century Nietzschean thinking. 1 Hans-Peter Söder, Junior Year in Munich Program (Wayne State University). (shrink)

Menschenaffen erganzen ihr Instinkt- und Triebleben positivistisch durch individuelle Intelligenz, Sozialitat und Kulturalitat.

If one takes seriously the idea that a scientific language must be extensional, and accepts Quine’s notion of truth-value-related extensionality, and also recognizes that a scientific language must allow for singular terms that do not refer to existing objects, then there is a problem, since this combination of assumptions must be inconsistent. I will argue for a particular solution to the problem, namely, changing what is meant by the word ‘extensionality’, so that it would not be the truth-value that had (...) to be preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions, but the state of affairs that the sentence described. The question is whether or not elementary sentences containing empty singular terms, such as ‘Vulcan rotates’, are extensional in the substitutivity sense. Five conditions are specified under which extensionality in the substitutivity sense of such sentences can be secured. It is demonstrated that such sentences are state-of-affairs-as-extension-related extensional. This implies that such sentences are also truth-value-related extensional in Quine’s sense, but not truth-value-as-extension-related extensional. (shrink)

Während seit einiger Zeit im Feuilleton ein Kulturkampf zwischen Vertretern des "Gehirns" und des "Geistes" ausgefochten wird, haben führende Neurobiologen und Philosophen – unter Beteiligung einer Soziologin, eines Mathematikers und zweier Physiker - in der "Deutschen Zeitschrift für Philosophie" eine Sachdiskussion zu den Grenzfragen der Hirnforschung geführt. Neben der hier vorgelegten vollständigen Neuedition dieser Auseinandersetzung umfasst ca. ein Drittel des Bandes sämtliche Beiträge einer bisher unveröffentlichten Schlussrunde, die eine vorläufige Bilanz zieht, die strittig bleibt. Alle Diskussionsteilnehmer sind sich in der (...) Intention einig, dass weder der reduktive Naturalismus noch der ontologische Dualismus von Gehirn und Geist überzeugen können. Uneins bleiben aber nicht nur die Neurobiologen und Philosophen gegen einander, sondern auch die Philosophen und die Neurobiologen jeweils untereinander. Der Dissens betrifft die Frage, wie ihre schwache Gemeinsamkeit methodologisch und geschichtlich, ontologisch und ontisch so durchgeführt werden kann, dass keine Selbstwidersprüche eintreten: Für die Erfüllung des eigenen Anliegens wird noch etwas Anderes in Anspruch genommen, als man selbst zugleich zu erklären vermag. Personale Lebewesen bzw. lebende Personen vollziehen sich anders, als dualistisch konzipiert werden kann. (shrink)

J. Dewey and H. Plessner both and independently of one another treated the central question of what new task philosophy must set itself if the assumption is correct that the life-form of mind, i.e., the mental life-form of humans, arose in nature and must also sustain itself in the future within nature. If nature has to reconceived so as to make the irreducible qualities of life and mind truly possible, then it can no longer be restricted to the role of (...) physical material. Conversely humans cannot no longer take on the role of God outside and independent of nature. Instead these philosophers distinguish between three “plateaus” or “stages”, between physical nature, psycho-physical nature and the nature that is mental life. This distinction is drawn such that a connection between the plateaus is truly possible. The third level, that of the mental form of life, answers mentally within conduct to the break with the first two levels. Hence it depends in the future as well on the continuously renewed difference in our experience of nature. Within this difference nature as a whole remains an open unknown, which is why we can credit Dewey with a philosophy of diversified and negative holism, Plessner with a differential philosophy of the negativity of the absolute. (shrink)

Globalism is probably the most frequently used term describing our current age. Found in many contexts, it is often a vague concept referring to a host of different figurations of post-industrial society. European expansion, the growth of the global economy, mass immigration and the planetary expansion of international relations are merely some of the phenomena associated with globalism. Yet globalism taken in its most neutral form of global history is not merely a trendy catch-all phrase for the challenges of our (...) age but has its origins in the efforts of the enlightenment—to rewrite the theological universal histories of the Middle Ages. There is a close relationship between the historiography of universal history and the current ideology of globalism. By juxtaposing the two main strands of universal history (the universal history of mankind vs. the cyclical history of individual peoples) to the problem of European identity, I show that the theoretical problems which caused the demise of universal history continue to plague globalism. Such an analysis of the ideological foundations of globalism is central not only to the current debate on the (re-) construction of European history, but also in the discussion on what constitutes European ideas. ☆ This essay is a revised version of a talk held at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, in the Fall of 2005. I would like to thank Dominick LaCapra, Leslie Adelson and Davydd Greenwood for the opportunity to give this talk at Cornell. I thank Louis N. Kurs of St. John's College for his stimulating conversation on the matter. (shrink)

This article compares Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s foundation of the Frankfurt Critical Theory with Helmuth Plessner’s foundation of Philosophical Anthropology. While Horkheimer’s and Plessner’s paradigms are mutually incompatible, Adorno’s „negative dialectics“ and Plessner’s „negative anthropology“ (G. Gamm) can be seen as complementing one another. Jürgen Habermas at one point sketched a complementary relationship between his own publicly communicative theory of modern society and Plessner’s philosophy of nature and human expressivity, and though he then came to doubt this, he (...) later reaffirmed it. Faced with the „life power“ in „high capitalism“ (Plessner), the ambitions for a public democracy in a pluralistic society have to be broadened from an argumentative focus (Habermas) to include the human condition and the expressive modes of our experience as essentially embodied persons. The article discusses some possible aspects of this complementarity under the title of a „critical anthropology“ (H. Schnädelbach). (shrink)

The conceptual distinction between what it is to be a body and what it is to have a body was first construed by the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner.This article deals with two common problems within the German discourse on the theme.The first derives from a misunderstanding that the 3 categories body, living body, and person signify distinct entities, whilst what Plessner is actually referring to is the various modes in which a person′s life is led. Neither the modes of body (...) nor living body has primacy per se, and the person lives by doubling itself into a public and private person situated in a shared world outside of centric correlations .The second point of contention relates to Plessner′s methodology in developing the distinction between Leib and Körper. He believed in combining a plurality of methods in accordance with the phenomenon, its understanding, and the stances or positionings taken up by living persons. The indeterminacy and unfathomability of persons in the leading of their lives emerges from the variety of their perspectives and changing historical aspects. It is only the invalid extension of these perspectives and aspects to the whole of the future that leads to false promises – to the animal ideologicum who is unable to endure its questionability. The homo absconditus, by contrast, lives in scepticism of positive absolutisms. The questionability of his form of life keeps him open. (shrink)

The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers is the father of a discourse on the spiritual consequences of the Holocaust. First addressed as the Schuldfrage (the question of guilt) by Jaspers immediately after the Second World War in his famous Heidelberg lecture, it has reappeared in various forms in German life and letters. Post-unification Germany has witnessed the valorization of the German experience of the Second World War. This ongoing re-evaluation has its antecedents in the generational literature of the 1970s and 1980s. (...) Whereas the Vaterliteratur of the 1970s (by authors such as Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, and Peter Henisch) was often embedded in a left-wing critique of the establishment, recent contributions to this growing genre (by Marcel Beyer, Stephan Wackwitz, Wibke Bruhns, and Ulla Hahn among others) speak to the issue of collective identity and transgenerational family trauma outside distinct left- and right-wing interpretations of National Socialism. The current writings on the life during the Third Reich (filtered through the experiences of discrete generations) are a confluence of historical writing, memorial literature, biography, and fiction. They are closely related to the discussions that W. G. Sebald initiated in his 1997 lecture series on the silence of German postwar literature with respect to German suffering. The subsequent debate on how to bring closure to this ?German suffering? was intensified by Günter Grass's widening of the concept of German victimization beyond the air war controversy in his book Crabwalk (2002). As Grass distinguishes clearly between the various post-World War II generations (and their different perspectives on historical events), the question becomes whether these recent writings will bring about a final so-called ?zero hour? in German postwar history. (shrink)

Wie kann die Entstehung des kritischen Potentials der Hegelschen Philosophie historisch verständlich werden? In der Beantwortung dieser Frage wird Hegels Transformation der "Arbeit des Republikaners für das Allgemeine" (1795) über die "allgemeine Arbeit des Krieges" (1802) bis zur "Arbeit des Begriffes" (1807) rekonstruiert. Diese Transformation erfolgt in Hegels Teilnahme an revolutionshistorischen Heroismusformen, die Citoyen-Substitute für die bourgeoise Hegemonie begründen. Für Hegels Übergang vom jakobinischen zum napoleonischen Substitut spielt zunächst die "höhere Aufklärung" der "Vereinigung" (Hölderlin) die Schlüsselrolle, sodann die durch Schellings (...) "Anschauung" ermöglichte Rezeption der manufakturbürgerlichen Ökonomie (A. Smith) im Unterschied zur handelsbürgerlichen Ökonomie (J. Steuart). Mit der Arbeit des Geistes beginnt die genuin Hegelsche Objektivierung des heroischen Idealismus durch die spekulativ-systematische Selbstbegründung des Begriffs. Daran konnte Marx in seiner Frage nach der Überwindung des Gegensatzes zwischen abstrakter und konkreter Arbeit durch Formen der "allgemeinen Arbeit" und der "unmittelbar gesellschaftlichen Tätigkeit" anschließen. (shrink)

In classical physics, the world is considered as a matter-based reality, the arrangement of whose parts in time is uniquely determined by certain dynamic laws. By contrast, modern quantum physics reveals that matter is not composed of matter, but reality is merely potentiality. The world has a holistic structure, which is based on fundamental relations and not material objects, admitting more open, indeterministic developments. In this more flexible causal framework, inanimate and animate matter are not to be considered as fundamentally (...) different but as different order structures of the same immaterial entity. In a stable configuration, effectively all the uncertainties are statistically averaged out, thus the unique and deterministic behavior of ordinary inanimate matter is exhibited; whereas in the case of statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations, the “lively” features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the mesocopic level and to be connected with what we observe as the phenomenon of life. This supposition can be more explicitly treated and clarified by identifying the electric dipole moment of biomolecules as the ordering parameter of the corresponding macroquantum system. This has important consequences for biology and medicine. In particular, it suggests the existence of a quantum-based “software,” essential perhaps for the logistics of biological processes, which are hidden behind the matter/energy-based “hardware” that alone is considered in the conventional approach. In medicine it opens an opportunity to build bridges between conventional medicine based essentially on the classical paradigm, and the various forms of complementary medicine, which have strong affinities with the new features of the modern holistic worldview. (shrink)

This paper develops a model of political consensus in order to explain the missing link between inequality and political redistribution. Political consensus is an implicit agreement not to vote for extreme policy proposals. We show that such an agreement may play an efficiency-enhancing role. Voters anticipate that voting for extremist parties increases policy uncertainty in the future. A political consensus among voters reduces policy uncertainty because self-interested politicians propose non-discriminatory policies. We study how much inequality can be sustained in a (...) democracy and how the limits to redistribution vary with initial inequality. The bounds of the set of political equilibria may react in a fundamentally different manner to changes in exogenous variables than do the policy variables in the one-dimensional, one-shot game. More initial inequality need not lead to more redistribution from the rich to the poor. The maximum amount of redistribution decreases with inequality if (and only if) agents are sufficiently patient. In this case inequality is politically self-sustaining. (shrink)