This book is a translation into English of La religion grecque by Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, described by Dr Simon Price as 'an excellent book, by far the best introduction to the subject in any language'. It is the purpose of the book to consider how religious beliefs and cultic rituals were given expression in the world of the Greek citizen - the functions performed by the religious personnel, and the place that religion occupied in (...) individual, social and political life. The chapters cover first ritual and then myth, rooting the account in the practices of the classical city while also taking seriously the world of the imagination. For this edition the bibliography has been substantially revised to meet the needs of a mainly student, English-speaking readership. The book is enriched throughout by illustrations, and by quotations from original sources. (shrink)

La conjonction des planètes était certes aisée à décrypter, d'une part, la montée inéluctable de l'histoire du genre, d'autre part l'intérêt plus ancien pour l'histoire biologique ­ qui ne se dément pas ­ et, dans leur sillage, d'autres objets nouveaux (nouveaux, surtout en histoire ancienne et médiévale à un moindre degré) : l'enfant, l'adolescent et autres âges de la vie…, bref, tout cela annonçait assez clairement l'avènement du corps comme nouvelle frontière du territoire historien...

Spécialiste du polythéisme hellénique (notamment, en collaboration avec Pauline Schmitt Pantel, La religion grecque, Paris, Colin, 1989) et de l'histoire des femmes (comme « Le temps des jeunes filles dans la cité grecque », CLIO, 1996, 4, pp. 33-50), Louise Bruit Zaidman croise volontiers ses deux centres de recherche. Un exemple parmi d'autres : « Les filles de Pandore. Femmes et rituels dans les cités », le chapitre consacré aux pratiques religieuses féminines en pays grec dans Hist...

This book is a translation into English of La religion grecque by Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, described by Dr Simon Price as 'an excellent book, by far the best introduction to the subject in any language'. It is the purpose of the book to consider how religious beliefs and cultic rituals were given expression in the world of the Greek citizen - the functions performed by the religious personnel, and the place that religion occupied in (...) individual, social and political life. The chapters cover first ritual and then myth, rooting the account in the practices of the classical city while also taking seriously the world of the imagination. For this edition the bibliography has been substantially revised to meet the needs of a mainly student, English-speaking readership. The book is enriched throughout by illustrations, and by quotations from original sources. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), Professor für Staats- und Völkerrecht, bewegt nach wie vor die Gemüter. Die Reaktion auf seine Schriften, Handlungen und Ausstrahlungen ist vielfältig; die Spanne reicht von entrüsteten, für die er der Teufel in Person bleibt, über viele Zwischenstufen bis zu jenen Lesern, die ihn für einen der subtilsten, noch keineswegs ausgeloteten Geistern dieses Jahrhunderts halten. Sein Leben lang war Carl Schmitt ein passionierter Schreiber von Briefen. Meist handelte es sich um handschriftlich verfasste, die für den Schreibenden (...) die Fortsetzung eines konkreten Gespräches mit anderen Mitteln war. Das macht das authentische und die Spontanität der Schmitt-Briefe aus. Als erste Edition einer umfangreichen Korrespondenz wird in dem Buch die Korrespondenz zwischen Carl Schmitt und Armin Mohler veröffentlicht. Der Briefwechsel umfasst die Zeit von 1947 bis 1980 und enthält 280 Briefe und Karten von Carl Schmitt an Armin Mohler. Von dem Briefpartner und Herausgeber wird in der Regel aus den eigenen Briefen nur auszugsweise zitiert, sofern es für das von Carl Schmitt Geschriebene notwendig ist. Armin Mohler (1920 bis 2003), ist einer der bekanntesten rechtskonservativen Schriftsteller, Kritiker und Historiker in Deutschland. Sein Handbuch zur Konservativen Revolution ist ein Standardwerk. In der Zeit des Briefwechsels war Mohler von 1949 bis 1953 Sekretär Ernst Jüngers, danach Korrespondent großer Zeitungen in Paris und von 1964 an Geschäftsführer der Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, in der er sehr beachtete Symposien zu aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Themen organisierte. Der Briefwechsel ist für die Deutung Carl Schmitts in der Nachkriegszeit in seinem Sauerländer "Exil" grundlegend, gleichzeitig enthält er pointierte Schlaglichter auf das politische und kulturelle Geschehen der frühen und mittleren Bundesrepublik sowie auf Werk und Leben von Ernst Jünger. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt and the Problem of the Realization of Law 1. The famous pithy aphorisms that Carl Schmitt used to open his major works - 'the sovereign is he who decides on the exception', 'the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political', etc. - have become a part of the common discourse of contemporary scholarship on politics and the law. The theoretical framework that animates these slogans, however, has remained somewhat opaque. It has often been (...) argued that there is no such framework, that Schmitt was a situational thinker whose works are best understood as interventions in concrete political debates that do not add up to a grand theoretical vision. (shrink)

Kempner. You do not have to testify, Professor Schmitt, if you do not want to, and if you think you are incriminating yourself. But if you do testify, then I would be grateful if you would be absolutely truthful, would neither conceal nor add anything. Is that your wish? Schmitt: Yes, of course. Kempner: And if I come to something you might find self-incriminating, you can simply say you prefer to remain silent. Schmitt: I have already been (...) interrogated by the C.I.C. and in the camp. I would be glad to tell you all I know. However, I would like to know what I am being blamed with. (shrink)

In this work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism's basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state.

Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, Political Theology develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial ...

In Stability and Justification in Hume’s Treatise, Louis Loeb ascribes to Hume a naturalistic account of justified belief, one on which Hume is fundamentally concerned with the question whether stable belief can be achieved. Loeb’s interpretation is systematic, richly explanatory, and powerfully argued. He makes a compelling case that stability plays a central role in Hume’s epistemology. Loeb’s case is so compelling indeed that anyone who wants to defend an alternative interpretation will now have to assimilate or deflect the massive (...) textual evidence in favor of the stability interpretation. I will argue here that, for some passages Loeb cites in favor of the stability interpretation, a veritistic interpretation explains the text at least as well as the stability interpretation does. (shrink)

Socializing Epistemology: An Introduction through Two Sample Issues Frederick F. Schmitt Social epistemology is the conceptual and normative study of the ...

This article marks a decisive step towards the recovery of the French woman writer, journalist, and aviation pioneer Louise Faure-Favier, who today is virtually forgotten. The article begins by sit...

Does the real difference between non-consequentialist and consequentialist theories lie in their approach to value? Non-consequentialist theories are thought either to allow a different kind of value (namely, agent-relative value) or to advocate a different response to value ('honouring' rather than 'promoting'). One objection to this idea implies that all normative theories are describable as consequentialist. But then the distinction between honouring and promoting collapses into the distinction between relative and neutral value. A proper description of non-consequentialist theories can only (...) be achieved by including a distinction between temporal relativity and neutrality in addition to the distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality. (shrink)

Wie ist es philosophisch zu erklären, dass Menschen frei und selbstbestimmt Entscheidungen treffen, die durch das klassische Begründungsmuster der Eigennützlichkeit und Selbsterhaltung unverständlich bleiben? Der Autor rekonstruiert und erweitert mit seiner neuartigen Konzeption - der autoeidetischen Struktur - Möglichkeitsbedingungen der praktischen Vernunft. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die eigene Existenz. Das Streben nach Selbsttreue bedingt das Wollen des Gesollten. Urteil und Praxis werden hierdurch nachvollziehbar zu Bedingungen gelingenden Lebens."--Publisher's website.

Carl Schmitt, the author of such books as Political Theology and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, was one of the leading political and legal theorists of the twentieth century. His critical discussions of liberal democratic ideals and institutions continue to arouse controversy, but even his opponents concede his uncanny sense for the basic problems of modern politics. Political Romanticism is a historical study that, like all of Schmitt's major works, offers a fundamental political critique. In it, he defends (...) a concept of political action based on notions of good and evil, justice and injustice, and attacks the political passivity entailed by the romanticization of experience. The book has three strands. The first is an attack on received notions of the origins of the Romantic Movement. Schmitt argues that this movement represents a secularization, subjectification, and privatization in which God is replaced by the emancipated, private individual of the bourgeois social order. The second is an assault on political romanticism that includes a broader attack on the new European bourgeoisie, which Schmitt characterizes as the historical bearer of the movement. The third strand is a defense of political conservatism and a refutation of the view that political romanticism is intrinsically linked with romanticism. Here Schmitt argues that the political romantic is tied not to positions but to aesthetics, and can therefore as easily become a Danton as a Frederick the Great. Guy Oakes's introduction places the book in historical context and also suggests its continuing relevance through his discussion of the latest outcropping of political romanticism in the late 1960s, intriguingly brought out in his example of Norman Mailer as a political romantic. (shrink)

Frederick F. Schmitt offers a new account of Hume's epistemology in A Treatise of Human Nature, which alternately manifests scepticism, empiricism, and naturalism. Critics have emphasised one of these positions over the others, but Schmitt argues that they can be reconciled by tracing them to an underlying epistemology of knowledge and probability.

One of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt is a deeply controversial figure who has been labeled both Nazi sympathizer and modern-day Thomas Hobbes. First published in 1938, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes used the Enlightenment philosopher’s enduring symbol of the protective Leviathan to address the nature of modern statehood. A work that predicted the demise of the Third Reich and that still holds relevance in today’s security-obsessed society, this volume (...) will be essential reading for students and scholars of political science. “Carl Schmitt is surely the most controversial German political and legal philosopher of this century. . . . We deal with Schmitt, against all odds, because history stubbornly persists in proving many of his tenets right.”— Perspectives on Political Science “[A] significant contribution. . . . The relation between Hobbes and Schmitt is one of the most important questions surrounding Schmitt: it includes a distinct, though occasionally vacillating, personal identification as well as an association of ideas.”— Telos. (shrink)

I question the notion that we need to understand affordances in terms of Rylean non-factualist dispositions. This is not because I disagree with Herlas-Escribano’s analysis; on the contrary, I ….

Concern about two problems runs through the work of davidson: the problem of accounting for the "explanatory force" of rational explanations, and the problem posed for materialism by the apparent anomalousness of psychological events. davidson believes that his view of mental causation, imbedded in his theory of "anomalous monism," can provide satisfactory answers to both questions. however, it is argued in this paper that davidson's program contains a fundamental inconsistency; that his metaphysics, while grounding the doctrine of anomalous monism, makes (...) impossible a successful response to the problem of explanatory force in terms of a causal theory of action. (shrink)

A translation of Carl Schmitt's classic explanation of the nature and historical/sociological significance of political Catholicism.

Carl Schmitt kept diaries throughout his life, several of which he specifically selected for academic publication. These are the recordings made in the early years after World War II, when Schmitt lost all his positions. After his release from the prison he returned to his home in small town of Plettenberg, where he remained until his death. Schmitt ordered these diaries to be published only after his death, because, even several decades after the war, they remained ideologically (...) dangerous. In this issue we continue to publish fragments of translation of the “Glossarium”. In the fragments prepared for present publication, Schmitt argues on several important topics. First, he writes about utopia — paradise located in a remote, but achievable future. The ability to think future located at long distance decreases in modern times. Therefore, in the 19th century they have to move from utopia to positive science. Those who write on future must say that heaven can come tomorrow. Schmitt goes further to compare the utopian ideas of Thomas More with the utopias of the 19th century. More was not a cleric; he was just a clerk, an intellectual, a writer, not a priest. Schmitt questioned the rightfulness of the canonization of More and compared him with another Catholic thinker of that time, Fr. Vitoria. Another important topic — the problem of legality and legitimacy. Schmitt once again handles it in connection with the events in Czechoslovakia in 1948. These events he contrasts with the situation in Germany in 1929-1932. (shrink)

In this, his most influential work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism’s basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state—a critique as cogent today as when it first appeared. George Schwab’s introduction to his translation of the 1932 German edition highlights Schmitt’s intellectual journey through the turbulent period of German history leading to the Hitlerian one-party state. In addition to analysis by Leo Strauss and a foreword by (...) Tracy B. Strong placing Schmitt’s work into contemporary context, this expanded edition also includes a translation of Schmitt’s 1929 lecture “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” which the author himself added to the 1932 edition of the book. An essential update on a modern classic, The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, (...) the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative (...) approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world. (shrink)

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We show (...) that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)