This title from the De Gruyter Book Archive has been digitized in order to make it available for academic research. It was originally published under National Socialism and has to be viewed in this historical context. Learn more. >.

Johann Gottfried von Herder is one of the most important German philosophers of the eighteenth century, who had enormous influence on later thinkers such as Hegel, Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. His wide-ranging ideas were formative in the development of linguistics, hermeneutics, anthropology and bible scholarship, and even today they retain their vitality and relevance to an extraordinary degree. This volume presents a translation of Herder's most important and characteristic philosophical writings in his areas of central interest, including philosophy of language, (...) philosophy of mind, philosophy of history and political philosophy, as well as his general philosophical program. An introduction sets the writings in their historical context and examines their philosophical achievement. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is most famous for his work on color theory, but he was also an accomplished all-round scientist, studying and writing on anatomy, geology, botany, zoology and meteorology. This book draws together, in Goethe's own words, his key ideas on nature, science and scientific method. Goethe believed that we should study our world and nature as people at home in it, rather than removedly, as if we were aliens from another planet. He adopted a qualitative approach (...) to science at odds with Newton's quantitative methods that were so popular in his day. His is a sensitive science which does not ignore our relationship to nature. The extracts in this book are fascinating and essential reading for anyone who feels that we've lost our spiritual connection to nature. (shrink)

During the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, and he is now considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the United States and had yet to write his best-known books, _From Caligari to Hitler_ and _Theory of Film_. Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual and (...) political context shaped Kracauer’s seminal contributions to film studies and shows how, in turn, Kracauer’s American writings helped shape the emergent discipline. Using archival sources and detailed readings, von Moltke asks what it means to consider Kracauer as the New York Intellectual he became in the last quarter century of his life. Adopting a transatlantic perspective on Kracauer’s work, von Moltke demonstrates how he pursued questions in conversation with contemporary critics from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt, from Clement Greenberg to Robert Warshow: questions about the origins of totalitarianism and the authoritarian personality; about high and low culture; about liberalism, democracy, and what it means to be human. From these wide-flung debates, Kracauer’s own voice emerges as that of an incisive cultural critic invested in a humanist understanding of the cinema. (shrink)

Context: Von Foerster’s concept of eigenbehavior can be recognized against the broader context of enactivism as it has been advocated by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, by Noë and recently by Hutto and Myin, among others. This flourishing constellation of ideas is on its way to becoming the new paradigm of cognitive science. However, in my reading, enactivism, putting stress on the constitutive role of action when it comes to mind and perception, faces a serious philosophical challenge when attempting to account (...) for the way we actually perceive our environments, most importantly for the fact that we perceive things or objects. Von Foester’s eigenbehavior is understood here as a concept supposed to take on this challenge. Problem: In this article I tackle the following issues: Enactivism must be able to account for the apparent stability of the perceived world: this is not a realm of a never-ending flux of stimuli; it is a realm of stable things. Enactivism is committed to the anti-Cartesian endeavor seeking to bridge the gap between the inner and the outer; between the subjective and the objective. Now, these two points constrain each other so that one cannot address simply by regarding the apparent stability of things as a projection that springs out of the internal machinery binding inputs with outputs. This is because the very idea of such an internal machinery opposes, i.e., it employs the Cartesian dichotomy. So, enactivism is in need of an account of that would not oppose its anti-Cartesian commitment. Method: I introduce the ontology of location and niche theory, as it has been brought forth by Varzi, Casati, and Smith, and develop it so that it can be used in the philosophy of mind. This is a conceptual, semi-formal philosophical analysis. Results: I shall come up with the idea of object conceived of a product of action, and - drawing on von Foerster’s central idea - as a product of coordination of perceptions. Yet, it is not coordination of stimuli but coordination of cognitive connections. The notion of connection is thus articulated in the article and cast as the central concept in my proposal. Implications: We are able to account for both and (2. The apparent stability of the perceived world is due to the setting up and maintaining of connections between the perceiver and the things perceived, resulting in the establishment of what I call a cognitive niche. Constructivist content: Constructivism, broadly construed, takes, in my reading, a negative stance in the first place. Namely, it opposes what I call the metaphysics of the ready-made world. So, it holds that there is no ready-made reality; however it remains open when it comes to positive claims: a mind-independent reality does not exist at all or it does exist but it is not ready-made and as such it must be brought to completion, so to speak, or enacted, as Varela et al. would say, by a cognitive subject. In this article, I follow the latter and address one specific issue: how the enacted world gains its relatively stable architecture. (shrink)

Die folgenden BHitter enthalten eine Reihe von Gedanken, die sich mir bei einer von frtihester J ugend bis auf den heutigen Tag erstreckten Beschaftigung mit Musik auf- gedrangt haben, einer Beschaftigung, die zwar keine berufs- maBige gewesen ist, der aber doch in meiner ganzen Lebens- ftihrung ein erheblicher Raum gegonnt war. Der AnlaB, solchen Gedanken ernsthafter nachzugehen, war £tir mich schon dadurch gegeben, daB die der Musik entstammenden Eindrticke zu den hochsten Gemtitswerten gehoren, die mir das Leben tiberhaupt gewahrt hat. (...) Dazu kam, daB die sich hier bietenden Erwagungen aufs engste mit Fragen der Sinnesphysiologie und der Psychologie zusammenhangen, mit denen mich zu 1;Jefassen ich durch andere Umstande ver- anlaBt war. - Die groBe Zahl derer, die der Musik ein warmes und lebhaftes Interesse entgegenbringen, konnte wohl ermutigen, mit solchen Dberlegungen an die Offentlich- keit zu treten. So wendet sich dies Schriftchen denn auch nicht bloB an den Musiker von Beruf, an den Psychologen von Fach, sondern an jeden Musikfreund, an aIle, denen die Tonkunst eine Quelle der Freude, Erquickung und Erhebung geworden ist. Freilich hat sich gewiB sehr vielen von ihnen in Stunden besinnlicher Ruhe gleich mir der AnlaB geboten, tiber die Beziehungen der Musik zu allen moglichen Seiten un seres Seelenlebens nachzudenken. Und so laBt sich er- warten, daB jeder, der dies Btichlein zur Hand nimmt, der eine hier, der andere dort, manchem begegnen wird, was ihm wohlbekannt ist oder selbstverstandlich dtinkt. Indessen ist doch die Ftille dessen, was tiberhaupt der Psychologie Vorwort. (shrink)

Konrad Feiereis (1931-2012) hat mit Glaubenden wie Nichtglaubenden über Religion und Gesellschaft diskutiert. Der Christliche Philosoph verfügte über die Gabe, selbst im kämpferischen Atheisten den suchenden Anderen, Nachbarn und Dialogpartner zu erkennen - dabei entwickelte er im Weltanschauungsstaat DDR herausragende hermeneutische Fähigkeiten. Die Herausgeber möchten an diesen bedeutenden katholischen Intellektuellen erinnern und laden dazu ein, Feiereis in seinen Texten zu begegnen.

This article examines transnational patterns and compares national specificities of new right reading practices and literary politics in Germany and the United States. It focuses on questions of canonization, politicization, and self-victimization and studies the performance of reading as ›metapolitical‹ cultural technique in online book clubs on both sides of the Atlantic.

Protestant Ethics can supply Orientierungswissen as well as Verfügungswissen. Beyond that it can and must also formulate »Evangeliums«-Wissen, a knowledge about the condition of life that precedes all notions of what we can and should do. There is no reason why this knowledge should not be a fundamental part of the cosmos of sciences. For Protestant Ethics this mode of reasoning is interesting because Protestant Ethics can thus operate in an area of its own while at the same time being (...) more than a pseudo-science of politics, economics or medicine. (shrink)