This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

The aim of this book is to provide a comparative study of the concepts of freedom in existential philosophy and liberalism. To this end, it presents a detailed examination of the works of two of the most prominent thinkers of the respective notions of freedom in the 20th century, Karl Jaspers and Friedrich August von Hayek. Their ideas of freedom are developed both independently and in relation to each other, from their foundational principles. In the political conclusion, (...) the possibility of a conception of freedom that integrates both approaches is explored. Although Jaspers himself made an explicit reference to Hayek in one of his books, such a comparative study has not yet been undertaken in the literature. In many respects—both historically and systematically—this work breaks new ground, opening up new philosophical discourses and interpretations of both authors' works in research and teaching. (shrink)

While Alexis de Tocqueville described America as the 'absolute democracy,' Karl Marx saw the nation as a 'defiled republic' so long as it permitted the enslavement of blacks. August J. Nimtz argues that Marx, unlike Tocqueville, not only recognized that the overthrow of slavery and the cessation of racial oppression were central to democracy's realization but was willing to act on these convictions. This potent and insightful investigation into the approaches of two major thinkers provides fresh insight into (...) past and present debates about race and democracy in America. (shrink)

Panentheism is an often-discussed alternative to Classical theism, and almost any discussion of panentheism starts by way of acknowledging Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832) as the person who coined the term.1 However, apart from this tribute, Krause's own panentheism is almost completely unknown. In what follows, I first present a brief overview of Krause's life and correct some misconceptions of his work before I turn to the core ideas of Krause's own panentheistic system of philosophy. In brief, Krause (...) elaborates a scientific holism that is anchored in intellectual intuition of the Absolute as the one principle of being and recognition. The task of philosophical speculation consequently is twofold: the analytic-ascending part of philosophy proceeds by way of transcendental reflection and according to Krause enables us to obtain intellectual intuition. The synthetic-descending part of philosophy starts by way of showing that science as a whole is an explication of the original union of the Absolute as apprehended in intellectual intuition. Once this is achieved, Krause argues that the emerging philosophy of science is most adequately referred to as “panentheism” since everything is what it is “in and through” the Absolute, while the Absolute itself is not reducible to anything in particular. I end by showing how to relate Krause's panentheism to recent philosophical discussion. (shrink)

The book provides the first analysis of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause_s system of philosophy and his panentheism in English. Karl Christian Friedrich Krause has bequeathed to us a system of philosophy which is little recognised in contemporary philosophy. This is both surprising and unfortunate, because Krause_s philosophical system has much to offer: Through transcendental reflection on the nature of the human, Krause understands God as the one infinite and unconditioned reality, and the ultimate necessary condition of (...) knowledge. God makes humanity, nature, and reason ultimately comprehensible as the essential categories of the divine Essence. God is thus the single, primary, object of science that is already logically presupposed even before His discovery. Science presupposes theology, and theology is best read as panentheism. (shrink)

Karl Christian Friedrich Krause war ein bemerkenswerter Denker des Deutschen Idealismus. Seine Schriften können ohne Zweifel mit denen Hegels, Schellings und Fichtes konkurrieren. Gerade im Bereich der theoretischen Philosophie bietet das Krausesche Œuvre eine Fundgrube an Einsichten und Argumenten, die der heutigen, oftmals betont postmodernen oder atheistischen Philosophie eine dringend benötigte Kontrastfolie sein können. Sinn und Zweck der Arbeit ist es, den Panentheismus Krauses zeitgemäß darzustellen und Brückenschläge zur heutigen religionsphilosophischen Debatte aufzuzeigen.

After a brief introduction to Krause’s life and work this article investigates the impression, based of the available sources, that Krause had an important influence on Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It then provides a concise systematic analysis of central elements of Krause’s and Schopenhauer’s thinking and thereby substantiates the claim that Krause did indeed have a significant influence on the development of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (July 28, 1804 - September 13, 1872) was a German philosopher and anthropologist. He was the fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were strongly influenced by Feuerbach's atheism, though they criticised him for his inconsistent espousal of materialism. Not only, Marx also (and correctly) saw some divinization of the man substituting god.

FROM THE INSTITUTE OF MARXISM-LENINISM The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique. Against Bruno Bauer and C0. is the first joint work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. At the end of August 1844 Marx and Engels met in Paris ...

Karl Christian Friedrich Krause left an impressive oeuvre consisting of 256 books and articles, covering numerous branches of philosophy, the humanities, and science.[1] His Urbild der Menschheit, his Vorlesungen über das System der Philosophie and his Vorlesungen über die Grundwahrheiten der Wissenschaft are of particular pertinence for philosophers today. [1] See: E. M. Ureña and E. Fuchs, “Einführung in das Gesamtwerk”, in Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. Band 1: Entwurf des Systems der Philosophie, ed. T. Bach and (...) O. Breidbach. (shrink)

Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832) develops a fascinating cosmopolitanism against the background of his panentheistic metaphysics. In Krause's panentheistic cosmopolitanism, every individual, every family, every friendship, every nation, every league of peoples, and finally, the global civil society itself is called upon to realize the ideals of virtue, law, beauty, and divinity. Because in Krause's panentheistic system of philosophy, humanity is at the centre of the Absolute, as the union of Reason and Nature, humanity is, in effect, called (...) upon, and is capable of establishing the league of humanity as the image of the Absolute, in and by freedom for excellence. (shrink)

Edited in this contribution are eighteen of August Tholuck's letters to Friedrich Lücke from 1827 to 1854, which were recently discovered in Göttingen's municipal archives. In addition, ten of Lücke's replies that were made available by the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle now receive their necessary supplementation. In its introduction and critical commentary the paper focuses on and elucidates the exegesis of St John's Gospel, theological Hegelianism and Lücke's appointment from Göttingen to Halle in 1838.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Raphael PAUL BAROLSKY The essence of all appreciation and analysis of art is the translation of visual perceptions into compelling verbal form. —Ralph Lieberman cultural unity Horace Walpole, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Balzac, Friedrich Hegel, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Renoir, Nathaniel Hawthorne, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Grillparzer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Wilhelm Heinrich (...) Wackenroder, George Eliot, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Roger Fry, Bernard Berenson, Theodor Hetzer, Roberto Longhi, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Stendhal are among the many essayists, critics, novelists, poets, painters and art historians who have responded to Raphael’s work as painter, architect or archeologist over the centuries. I can well imagine all of those listed above, among many others, united in an imaginary painting similar to the School of Athens—in other words, a vision that reconciles their various views of the world in a harmony analogous to the unity of philosophers in Raphael’s great fresco. Raphael is a towering figure in the history of European culture. The year 2020 was the 500th anniversary of the death of the great painter in Rome at the age of thirty-seven. In the wake of recent exhibitions that commemorated the artist’s achievement, I propose to touch briefly and lightly on a few aspects arion 28.2 fall 2020 100 reflections on raphael of Raphael’s life and works. Please think of these remarks as a series of suggestions, not attempts at definitive interpretation. I think of this essay as a rather experimental piece. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS i should like to begin with a few brief remarks on what must be Raphael’s most famous work of art. I mean his School of Athens (fig. 1), which is, like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Last Supper or like Michelangelo’s David and Creation of Adam, an image widely known and admired. What more is there to say about The School Of Athens, one of the central images in the Stanza della Segnatura? You might spend the rest of your life reading about this great work and never understand it fully. Nevertheless, I want to focus for a moment on a central detail of the work and, on the basis of my description, point to a significant aspect of the fresco that has been universally overlooked. First the description, then the aperçu. Fig. 1. School of Athens. Ca. 1510–1512. Photo Credit : Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Paul Barolsky 101 At the center of the School of Athens we behold the two great philosophers of classical antiquity: Plato and Aristotle. Plato holds a copy of his Timaeus, a dialogue that concerns the harmony of the heavens; Aristotle holds a copy of his Ethics, a work that pertains to human relations in this world. It was the goal of Renaissance thinkers to create a harmony or concord of the thought of these philosophers: a Concordia Platonis et Aristotelis. Raphael’s fresco, as is well known, presents the visual ideal of such harmony. Whereas Aristotle gestures downward, alluding to this world, in which his Ethics matter, Plato points heavenward, evoking the order of the cosmic realm described in Timaeus. Raphael makes visible the ideal of concordia when he movingly pictures the way in which the two philosophers gaze into each other’s eyes, as if to suggest this harmony. Borrowing from the language of Raphael ’s friend, Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael renders “the joining” of their souls. The monumental architecture of the scene, which echoes Bramante and has taproots in Piero della Francesca and Perugino, consists of three barrel-vaults beyond which we see patches of blue sky and puffs of cloud (fig. 2). The grandiose architecture of the image magnifies Raphael’s philosophers. Within this architectural framework, Plato’s gesture is deeply meaningful, since it prompts the viewer to look up and thus ascend toward the perfection of the celestial realm, beyond the imperfections of the physical world. Above the first barrel vault in the fresco we behold a section of the drum of a dome which is open to the sky. Within this section of drum there are two columns that are lined up directly... (shrink)

The readings collected here—of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Antonio Gramsci— reflect the experience of the labor, socialist, and communist movements that did so much to shape modern history. A dedication to working-class revolution gives coherence to the influential philosophical, economic, sociological, and historical works of these writers. Paul Le Blanc's introductory essay probes the structure and dynamics of Marxism as a political orientation, tracing connections among components that can be (...) found in the readings: the theory of capitalist development, the theory of the labor movement, the strategy of revolution, the conception of the transition to socialism. Others identified with the Marxist tradition—such as Plekhanov, Kautsky, Stalin, Mao—are also discussed, and attention is given to perspectives of such varied critics of Marxism as Sidney Hook, Bertram D. Wolfe, James Burnham, Daniel Bell, Robert Heilbroner, and C. Wright Mills. Historical reflections are blended with discussion of the durability of capitalism, the disappointment of hopes for workers' revolution, the "collapse of communism," issues of race and gender, the environment, and challenges of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Pre-Socratic -- Socrates (469-399 B.C.) -- Plato (429-347 B.C.) -- Existentialism -- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) -- The ship of Theseus -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626) -- The cow in the field -- David Hume (1711-1776) -- Hedonism -- Prisoner's dilemma -- St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) -- Hard determinism -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) -- The trolley problem -- Realism -- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) -- Dualism -- Utilitarianism -- John Locke (1632-1704) -- Empiricism versus Rationalism -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) -- (...) René Descartes (1596-1650) -- A-Theory -- The liar paradox -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) -- Philosophy of language -- Metaphysics -- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) -- Free will -- Philosophy of humor -- The Enlightenment -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) -- The Sorites paradox -- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) -- Aesthetics -- Philosoph of culture -- Epistemology -- Twin Earth -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) -- Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) -- Voltaire (1694-1778) -- Relativism -- Eastern philosophy -- Avicenna (980-1037) -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) -- Phenomenology -- Nominalism -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) -- Ethics -- Philosophy of science -- Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) -- Philosopy of religion. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars, artists and politicians have accused each other of "historicism." But what exactly did this mean? Judging by existing scholarship, the answers varied enormously. Like many other "isms," historicism could mean nearly everything, to the point of becoming meaningless. Yet the questions remain: What made generations of scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences worry about historicism? Why did even musicians and members of parliament warn against historicism? And what explains this remarkable career of the term (...) across generations, fields, regions, and languages? Focusing on the "travels" that historicism made, this volume uses historicism as a prism for exploring connections between disciplines and intellectual traditions usually studied in isolation from each other. It shows how generations of sociologists, theologians, and historians tried to avoid pitfalls associated with historicism and explains why the term was heavily charged with emotions like anxiety, anger, and worry. While offering fresh interpretations of classic authors such as Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss, this volume highlights how historicism took on new meanings, connotations, and emotional baggage in the course of its travels through time and place. (shrink)

A keen student of theology, August Friedrich Gfrörer became professor of history at the University of Freiburg and also sat as a representative in the Frankfurt parliament, agitating for the reunification of Protestantism and Catholicism. His academic work marked the modern period in the Christian study of Judaism, making full use of primary sources without pursuing an obvious apologetic or polemical agenda. This two-volume work, published in 1831, is a critical study of early Christianity and the influence that (...) Judaism had on the New Testament. Volume 1 provides a thorough exposition of Philo of Alexandria's philosophy and theology. Gfrörer also offers a biographical sketch of Philo and gives an informative overview of his writings and his time. (shrink)

A keen student of theology, August Friedrich Gfrörer became professor of history at the University of Freiburg and also sat as a representative in the Frankfurt parliament, agitating for the reunification of Protestantism and Catholicism. His academic work marked the modern period in the Christian study of Judaism, making full use of primary sources without pursuing an obvious apologetic or polemical agenda. This two-volume work, published in 1831, is a critical study of early Christianity and the influence that (...) Judaism had on the New Testament. Volume 2 is devoted to substantiating the thesis that the core principles of Philo's theology were already discernible among the Alexandrian Jews. Gfrörer traces how Philo's theology and philosophy were transplanted to Palestine via such sects as the Therapeutae and the Essenes as well as through the historian Josephus. The Apocrypha serve as Gfrörer's main primary source. (shrink)

A keen student of theology, August Friedrich Gfrörer became professor of history at the University of Freiburg and also sat as a representative in the Frankfurt parliament, agitating for the reunification of Protestantism and Catholicism. His academic work marked the modern period in the Christian study of Judaism, making full use of primary sources without pursuing an obvious apologetic or polemical agenda. This two-volume work, published in 1831, is a critical study of early Christianity and the influence that (...) Judaism had on the New Testament. Volume 1 provides a thorough exposition of Philo of Alexandria's philosophy and theology. Gfrörer also offers a biographical sketch of Philo and gives an informative overview of his writings and his time. (shrink)

The paper deals with Karl Christian Friedrich Krause's (1781-1832) Panentheism and argues for an holistic philosophy of science based on idealistic premisses.

I summarize and critically respond to Raphael Lataster and Purushottama Bilimoria’s paper on panentheism. I show that their suggested concept of panentheism is useless for academic discourse because it refers to contradictory positions.

Contrary to many of the standard histories of German Idealism, the most recent research suggests that it did not grow smoothly and seamlessly from Kant's critical philosophy into Hegel's mature system, nor did it proceed without serious challenges launched from a wide variety of alternative philosophical perspectives. Probably the most sustained and trenchant assault upon this tradition came from a group of already well-established philosophers and intellectuals who referred to their project as "metacritique," a critical movement spearheaded by such luminaries (...) as J. G. Hamann, S. Maimon, F. H. Jacobi, and J. G. Herder. Employing approaches and arguments clearly prefiguring much later critiques, like those of ordinary language philosophy, logical positivism, and even cognitive psychology, the metacritics attempted to refute the transcendental pretensions of the German idealists through a rigorous linguistic critique of idealist philosophical discourse. This linguistic challenge and its response from the idealist party also drew into its ambit such important figures of the early Romantic movement as August and Friedrich Schlegel and August Ferdinand Bernhardi. Although this extended discussion between the early idealists and their linguistic metacritics formed an important episode of European intellectual history, neither the crucial texts nor an interpretive discussion of them have to date been available to the English-speaking student. The present work fills this important gap in our understanding of the period by offering an extensive interpretive and critical overview of the metacritical challenge and the responses to it, together with English translations of the key texts, each with its own introduction and commentary. This outstanding collection will be useful for any class on German idealism and for providing an accurate historical context for some of the later philosophical charges leveled against this tradition. (shrink)

The first part of the correspondence between Friedrich August Tholuck, the leading theologian of the German Revival Movement, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, later the head of the Anglo-catholic Oxford-Movement, shows Pusey as a “pupil” of his German friends Tholuck, August Neander and Karl Heinrich Sack, whom he met while studying in Germany. In his “Enquiry into Theology” he wrote a remarkably liberal refutation of Hugh James Rose's confessionalistic high-church criticism of the “State of the protestant religion (...) in Germany”. Based on the protestant “sola scriptura” Pusey rejected any “check and restraint over the human mind” and took the stance of what he called an “animated science” mediating between free scientific enquiry and pious belief in one's personal need of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ. Thus Tholuck's and Pusey's standpoint came to somewhat unclearly oscillate between personal experience as the fundamentum inconcussum of their belief and the endeavour to base this belief on the authority of the historically secured messianic understanding of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the factual credibility of the gospel history. (shrink)

Pythagoras -- Confucius -- Heracleitus -- Parmenides -- Zeno of Elea -- Socrates -- Democritus -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Mencius -- Zhuangzi -- Pyrrhon of Elis -- Epicurus -- Zeno of Citium -- Philo Judaeus -- Marcus Aurelius -- Nagarjuna -- Plotinus -- Sextus Empiricus -- Saint Augustine -- Hypatia -- Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius -- Śaṅkara -- Yaqūb ibn Ishāq aṣ-Ṣabāḥ al-Kindī -- Al-Fārābī -- Avicenna -- Rāmānuja -- Ibn Gabirol -- Saint Anselm of Canterbury -- al-Ghazālī -- (...) Peter Abelard -- Averroës -- Zhu Xi -- Moses Maimonides -- Ibn al-'Arabī -- Shinran -- Saint Thomas Aquinas -- John Duns Scotus -- William of Ockham -- Niccolò Machiavelli -- Wang Yangming -- Francis Bacon, Viscount Saint Alban (or Albans), Baron of Verulam -- Thomas Hobbes -- René Descartes -- John Locke -- Benedict de Spinoza -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz -- Giambattista Vico -- George Berkeley -- Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu -- David Hume -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Immanuel Kant -- Moses Mendelssohn -- Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet -- Jeremy Bentham -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -- Arthur Schopenhauer -- Auguste Comte -- John Stuart Mill -- Søren Kierkegaard -- Karl Marx -- Herbert Spencer -- Wilhelm Dilthey -- William James -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege -- Edmund Husserl -- Henri Bergson -- John Dewey -- Alfred North Whitehead -- Benedetto Croce -- Nishida Kitarō -- Bertrand Russell -- G.E. Moore -- Martin Buber -- Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Martin Heidegger -- Rudolf Carnap -- Sir Karl Popper -- Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno -- Jean-Paul Sartre -- Hannah Arendt -- Simone de Beauvoir -- Willard Van Orman Quine -- Sir A.J. Ayer -- Wilfrid Sellars -- John Rawls -- Thomas S. Kuhn -- Michel Foucault -- Noam Chomsky -- Jürgeb Gabernas -- Sir Bernard Williams -- Jacques Derrida -- Richard Rorty -- Robert Nozick -- Saul Kripke -- David Kellogg Lewis -- Peter (Albert David) Singer. (shrink)

Awareness of the apocalyptic dimensions of Paul's theology enables the interpreter to deal satisfactorily with passages that otherwise appear to contradict one another.

In Paul's understanding of the Christian faith, it would be unthinkable that a Christian could properly confess, “I have been saved.” At the most the Christian can assert that he is in the process of being saved.

Aus dem Inhalt: J. Rupke, Religion und Wissenschaft - religionswissenschaftliche PerspektivenR. Elior, Enoch Son of Jared and the Solar Calendar of the Priesthood in QumranM. Fishbane, The Song of Songs and Ancient Jewish Religiosity: Between Eros and HistoryR. Goetschel, Les trois piliers du monde d'apres le Maharal de PragueW. Frey, Ein geborner Jud von Jerusalem. Uberlegungen zur Entstehung der Ahasver-FigurD. Krochmalnik, Kynisches in der rabbinischen LiteraturM. Voigts, Unterirdisch - oberirdisch. Verstreute Gedanken zu einem verbreiteten ToposH.O. Horch, Die Neugier des Satirikers. (...) Zum Judenbild des Hans Jacob Christoffel von GrimmelshausenS. Gilman, A Dream of Jewishness on the Frontier: Kafka's Tumor and "The Country Doctor"u.v.a. (shrink)