In A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century , Christian Delacampagne reviews the discipline's divergent and dramatic course and shows that its greatest figures, even the most unworldly among them, were deeply affected by events of their time. From Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose famous Tractatus was actually composed in the trenches during World War I, to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger -- one who found himself barred from public life with Hitler's coming to power, the other a member of the (...) Nazi party who later refused to repudiate German war crimes. From Bertrand Russell, whose lifelong pacifism led him to turn from logic and mathematics to social and moral questions, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who made philosophy an occasion for direct and personal political engagement, to Rudolf Carnap, a committed socialist, and Karl Popper, a resolute opponent of Communism. From the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School to the contemporary work of philosophers as variously minded as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam. The thinking of these philosophers, and scores of others, cannot be understood without being placed in the context of the times in which they lived. (shrink)

In the summer of 1943 Edgar Zilsel resigned from his membership in the exile organization of Austrian Social Democrats, a political movement he had joined as a young man back in Vienna. Zilsel is known as an innovative scholar bridging philosophy, history and sociology of science, and belonging to the so-called left wing of the Vienna Circle of Logical Emipricism. Details of his political convictions are less recognized. A recently detected manuscript illuminates his worldview: His resignation letter had been accompanied (...) by a short exposition of his interpretation of socialism near the end of World War II. The article introduces Zilsel, his life and work and publishes for the first time Zilsel’s statement from 1943. (shrink)

In Germany students sometimes complain that they have to learn too much about National Socialist Germany 1933-1945. They are born after the war and are not responsible for what happened and therefore they have no special responsibility to concern themselves with this darkest part of German history, or so it is complained. In this article I argue that responsibility as accountability should be distinguished from responsibility as care-taking. Although later-born generations certainly are not accountable for what happened before they were (...) born, they can have a special responsibility to care about those events, for instance to remember them for what they were. I claim that in the case of the Third Reich there are two different grounds for ascribing this kind of responsibility: German citizenship and identifying strongly with Germany as a nation. (shrink)

The article discusses the historical background and transnational context of the dialogue between East-European communist philosophy and Western existentialism. It does so by first outlining the exchanges between Lukács, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. Subsequently three major forums of East–West philosophical dialogue are surveyed, that took place during the 1960s: the ‘Morals and Society’ colloquium, organized by Instituto Gramsci in Rome in May 1964; the Korčula summer school, organized by the Praxis group between 1964 (...) and 1975; and the International Congress for Philosophy organized in Vienna in September 1968. This series of events and the dialogue and confrontations that they engendered prove that, contrary to the exclusively negative reception of existentialism in the socialist camp in the 1950s, but also contrary to the distorted representation, which can be found in dissidents’ recollections and which became dominant after the fall of communism, which excluded any possibility of dialogue between the two sides during socialism, such a dialogue has taken place, and led to mutual appropriations on both sides. (shrink)

During the Third Reich, state‐sponsored violence was linked to scientific research on many levels. Prisoners were used as involuntary subjects for medical experiments, and body parts from victims were used in anatomy and neuropathology on a massive scale. In many cases, such specimens remained in scientific collections and were used until long after the war. International bioethics, for a long time, had little to say on the issue. Since the late 1980s, with a renewed interest in the Holocaust and other (...) Nazi crimes, a consensus has increasingly taken hold that research on human tissues and body parts from the Nazi era is inadmissible, and that such specimens should be removed from scientific collections and buried. The question of what to do with scientific data obtained from these sources has not received adequate attention, however, and remains unsolved. This paper traces the history of debates about the ethical implications of using human tissue or body parts from the Nazi period for scientific purposes, primarily in the fields of anatomy and neuropathology. It also examines how this issue, from after the war until today, influenced the establishment of legal and bioethical norms on the use of human remains from morally tainted sources, with a particular emphasis on Germany and Austria. It is argued that the use of such specimens and of data derived from them is unethical not only because of potential harms to posthumous rights of the victims, but also because such use constitutes a moral harm to society at large. (shrink)

This essay asks why Chinese and North Vietnamese agricultural scientists in the 1950s and 1960s willingly adopted the Soviet agricultural sciences represented not only by agronomists Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko but soil scientist Vasili Williams. The answer, I argue, is that they were fascinated by the promise of Soviet agrobiology that I conceptualize as a combination of dialectical materialism and voluntarist productivism: if one masters the interconnectivity between plants, microbes, organic and inorganic materials, and soil, one can overcome the (...) given biological and environmental limits, manipulate and optimize the material flow, and ceaselessly maximize agricultural production. Engaging the historiographical debate about Lysenkoism—which has mostly paid attention to the Euro-American cases, genetic controversies, and geopolitical specificities of each locale—as a global phenomenon, I shed fresh light on the understudied Chinese and North Vietnamese cases, the intersection between Lysenko’s theories and Williamsian soil science, and epistemic commonality across national differences. (shrink)

Increased participation in public affairs by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops during the highly contentious 2012 Presidential election has seemingly brought the traditions of Catholic social teaching and socialism into a high profile conflict. While it is clear that President Obama is not what most academics would consider a “socialist,” modern discourse still presents what I argue is a false dichotomy- one can be either endorse natural law (especially of the Catholic variety) or socialism, but not both. (...) While my goal in this article is to refute the alleged incompatibility, not to determine its historical roots, some speculation about its origin may be illuminating. Recent work on religious identity in the United States suggests that Americans largely identify Christianity with the right wing of the American culture war. Additional research is required to fully grasp where this perception comes from, but one can venture several guesses: the rise of the “Christian Right” in Republican Party politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the concept of “social justice” being lampooned by Right-wing talk show hosts, and decades of a Catholic Church that firmly opposed Cold War-era Soviet Communism. The contrast between left-wing and right-wing thought on social issues (same-sex marriage, abortion, etc.) is very well documented and widely discussed. Differences between leftists and natural lawyers on economic issues, however, are more often assumed than argued for. Perhaps this is a matter of “guilt by association,” with those arguing that leftist social policy is at odds with natural law simply assuming that the same must be the case with leftist economic policy as well. Thus, natural law, long tied to Christianity throughout its history, is gratuitously appropriated by right-wing political ideology. Against this claim of incompatibility, I argue that one can rationally hold both socialism and natural law to be true. In his landmark Natural Law and Natural Rights, John Finnis offers what is arguably the twentieth century’s most complete theory of natural law. I will argue that the conception of socialism laid out by G.A. Cohen in hisWhy Not Socialism? is compatible with Finnis’s account of the human goods, and that natural lawyers can therefore reasonably endorse Cohen’s prescription for socialism. (shrink)

This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in Christian (...) Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of alternative contemporary versions of the concept as outlined by Karl Rahner, René Girard and William P. Alston, as well as within Indian philosophy. By bringing Christian Platonist thought into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and theology, the volume systematically reveals the relevance of Hedley's work to current debates in religious epistemology and metaphysics. It offers a comprehensive appraisal of the historical contribution of imagination to religious understanding and, as such, will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians and historians alike. (shrink)

The Book „Economy, Democracy, and Liberal Socialism“ is a milestone in combining Rawlsian thought and critical theory in order to argue for market socialism with a strong form of economic democracy. This introduction gives an overview over the articles in the special issue discussing this proposal.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 105-107 [Access article in PDF] Richard H. Popkin. The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle. Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiv + 415. Cloth, $74.00. Paper, $24.95. Richard Popkin tells the story that once a long time ago when he asked a question at a conference that made reference to late-eighteenth-century skeptics like Maimon (...) and Platner, Myles Burnyeat turned to the audience and asked, "Does anyone else read these people that Popkin reads?" The answer, by the time we get to this, the fourth edition of a book that first appeared in 1960, is that lots of people are reading the people that Popkin reads. Now [End Page 105] Myles Burnyeat is quoted on the cover of this volume for graciously saying "I regard it as one of the seminal books in the history of ideas." In one of the three Festschriften that have been published in Popkin's honor, David Katz even reports that some of those who work in areas Popkin pioneered refer to themselves as "Popkinites" (James E. Force and David S. Katz, eds., Everything Connects [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999], ix).Popkin was also founding editor of this journal, and his name has been footnoted in numerous articles over the years, so it will not be unknown to many. But readers will want to know what is new in this latest version of the classic work. For openers, it is roughly fifty percent longer, now 18 chapters instead of the 12 chapters of the last version. The original book was subtitled "From Erasmus to Descartes" and the later California edition subtitle became "From Erasmus to Spinoza." This edition pushes the envelope in both directions: back to Savonarola and forward to Pierre Bayle.The Savonarola connection comes from the unlikely discovery that the famous monk collected manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus and was planning to have them translated as tools for use against pagan philosophy and in favor of revealed religion. This brings out one of Popkin's favorite points: that what we think of as philosophical skepticism was part and parcel of religious debate early on. Among other new findings in this edition, Popkin finds clues that Leone Ebreo (Judah Abravanel) may have helped Gianfrancesco Pico read anti-Aristotelian Hebrew texts. Jews could use this sort of skepticism against the dogmatic Christians who tried to refute them.The religious connection is fundamental throughout the text. In his new introduction, Popkin admits that "I am more in sympathy with those who used the sceptical and fideist views of the nouveaux pyrrhoniens for religious rather than secular purposes" (p. xxiii). He has developed this sympathy into research on millenarianism in volumes such as Popkin and David S. Katz, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998) and Popkin, et al., eds., Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, 4 vols. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001).Other new materials follow the discussion of Descartes with a chapter on Henry More, Pascal, and the Quietists and another one on Hobbes's political and practical answer to skepticism. There are new chapters on Wilkins, Boyle, and Glanvill of the Royal Society, and on late seventeenth-century metaphysics. New material on Simon Foucher and Pierre-Daniel Huet is followed by the concluding chapter on Pierre Bayle as a "super sceptic."The book has never been uncontroversial. Although they could follow the skeptical undercutting of the Bible in Spinoza, many scholars could not see how the master of the geometrical method in ethics could be anything but a dogmatist in the final analysis. (Popkin has an answer.) The same doubt will now apply to the treatment of Pierre Bayle in this version. To Popkin, as we have seen, Bayle is a "super sceptic" who "carried scepticism to its ultimate extreme" (300); to Gianluca Mori (Bayle philosophe, Paris: Champion, 1999) and others, he is a dogmatic philosophical atheist as well as moral rigorist. To his credit... (shrink)

The prediction defended in this paper is that over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of “universal history”; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods. Until the end of the nineteenth century, universal history of some kind seems to have been present in most historiographical traditions. Then it vanished as historians became disillusioned with the search for grand (...) historical narratives and began to focus instead on getting the details right through document-based research. Today, however, there are many signs of a return to universal history. This has been made possible, at least in part, by the detailed empirical research undertaken in the last century in many different fields, and also by the creation of new methods of absolute dating that do not rely on the presence of written documents. The last part of the paper explores some of the possible consequences for historical scholarship of a return to a new, scientific form of universal history. These may include a closer integration of historical scholarship with the more historically oriented of the sciences, including cosmology, geology, and biology. Finally, the paper raises the possibility that universal history may eventually be taught in high schools, where it will provide a powerful new way of integrating knowledge from the humanities and the sciences. (shrink)

This paper analyses the early history of David Bohm’s mechanics from the perspective of Ludwik Fleck’s thought-collectives and shows how the thought-style of the scientific community limits the possible modes of thinking and what new possibilities for the construction of a new theory arise if these limits are removed.

Two essential periods may be identified in the early stages of the history of vitamin D-resistant rickets. The first was the period during which a very well known deficiency disease, rickets, acquired a scientific status: this required the development of unifying principles to confer upon the newly developing science of pathology a doctrine without which it would have been condemned to remain a collection of unrelated facts with very little practical application. One first such unifying principle was provided by the (...) notion of hygiene; while the blanket explanations provided by this notion alone were much too general to enable rickets to achieve scientific status, it did point out the need to look for specific external causes for the disease and to examine the life-style and dietary habits of the patients. The second phase of the conceptualization of the disease was the assumption of a specific cause — that is, using concepts developed in the area of infectious diseases. This was made possible by fundamental similarities between deficiency and infectious diseases, in spite of their apparent differences. Both types of illness have some of the characteristics of what Georges Canguilhem calls the ontological representation of disease as opposed to dysharmonic representations, which primarily concern the endocrine diseases. It is precisely this shift from one to the other manner of perceiving ill health that enabled the identification of the vitamin D-resistant rickets. Conceptualization of the notion of vitamin D resistancy required that the conditions causing the disease be looked for within the organism rather than outside it; this was thus the first time that endocrine concepts were applied to studying the physiology of vitamin D.The history of resistant rickets therefore represents an interesting model for understanding the growth of biomedical knowledge. It allows the development of a number of more general ideas on the question of the relationship between biology and medicine and on the thorny problem of specificity in medical thinking. As far as this topic is concerned it can be seen that there was an ongoing exchange between medical and biological thinking during the initial period up until 1937, and that one could deny any such specificity in medical thinking during this same period. Albright, for example, used human diseases as spontaneously produced models for experimental biology. It was also more feasible for an experimental biologist to administer toxic doses than for a clinician to do so.What, then, if any, is the place of the specificity of medical thinking in this history? The fact that medicine is characterized not only by it ccognitive content78 but also by its final aim, which is to restore health, makes it necessary to take factors other than objective knowledge into consideration. This is particularly evident in two aspects of medicine, therapeutics and nosology, and in approaching the notion of pathological individuality.Therapeutic activity has a largely empirical approach. Many drugs, such as cod-liver oil, were discovered empirically. Treatment often in the past, and still now, has proceeded by trial and error, upon no established theoretical basis. At this level the relationship between biology and medicine is roughly comparable to that between science and technology79 \3- that is, it is impossible to reduce either therapeutics or technical activities to the simple application of basic science. In this sense, the application of vitamin D to vitamin-resistant rickets is quite typical. Further-more, in the case studied here, the therapeutic activity heralds a definite breaking away from the medicatrix naturae of conventional medicine dating back to ancient times, and it embodies a new concept of the organism and of disease: no longer can the diseased organism be thought of as merely having a perturbed equilibrium requiring restoration by means of a natural style of medicine. On the contrary, vitamin D resistance is an obstacle that indicates profound biological dysfunction, to be rectified only by means of an extremely aggressive and therefore dangerous therapy. The therapy thus serves to reveal the severity of the dysfunction, thereby leading inevitably to conceptual innovation. This sheds light on the theoretical innovations of which the therapeutic activity is capable.Therapeutic activity is also influenced by notions of health and illness, normal and pathological states, none of which may be determined entirely objectively. For example, the term healing as used by Albright in the case of resistant rickets that he described may be discussed in this light.Nosology, or the classification of diseases, depends largely on the description of clinical syndromes, which are themselves mainly based on subjective elements (discomfort, disability, or the extent of a patient's suffering). The advent of pathological anatomy at the beginning of the nineteenth century disrupted classification by introducing the concept of localized anatomical lesions81-and, hence, an element of material objectivity \3- into nosology. Radiological examination further complicated matters by enabling the equivalent of an autopsy on living matter. Lastly, biological examination complicated nosology by showing that biological anomalies may exist in human beings without necessarily leading to a pathological condition. Medical thinking can choose to combine all these elements to describe a disease, but can also separate them and retain only a few, or a single one, according to requirements - as did Albright.The notion of biological and pathological individuality is fundamental to the development of medical thinking. Whatever its theoretical origin, medical thinking has since ancient times incorporated the idea that each individual reacts differently to the same treatment and his own specific pathological tendencies. I mentioned earlier that in the history of vitamin D-resistant rickets the notion of rachitic tendency reflected this type of thinking. After 1937, this history progressed by successively separating new individual entities, affecting smaller and smaller groups of individuals in each case. In other words, the need to understand and to define individual illness more closely required the development of new concepts and the construction of new individual categories of disease linking these concepts to older clinical, radiological, and biochemical elements. (shrink)

Part 1. Lecture 1. What is big history? ; Lecture 2. Moving across multiple scales ; Lecture 3. Simplicity and complexity ; Lecture 4. Evidence and the nature of science ; Lecture 5. Threshold 1, Origins of Big Bang cosmology ; Lecture 6. How did everything begin? ; Lecture 7. Threshold 2, The first stars and galaxies ; Lecture 8. Threshold 3, Making chemical elements ; Lecture 9. Threshold 4, The earth and the solar system ; Lecture 10. The early (...) earth, a short history ; Lecture 11. Plate tectonics and the earth's geography ; Lecture 12. Threshold 5, Life -- Part 2. Lecture 13. Darwin and natural selection ; Lecture 14. The evidence for natural selection ; Lecture 15. The origins of life ; Lecture 16. Life on earth, single-celled organisms ; Lecture 17. Life on earth, multi-celled organisms ; Lecture 18. Hominines ; Lecture 19. Evidence on hominine evolution ; Lecture 20. Threshold 6, What makes humans different? ; Lecture 21. Homo sapiens, the first humans ; Lecture 22. Paleolithic lifeways ; Lecture 23. Change in the Paleolithic Era ; Lecture 24. Threshold 7, agriculture -- Part 3. Lecture 25. The origins of agriculture ; Lecture 26. The first agrarian societies ; Lecture 27. Power and its origins ; Lecture 28. Early power structures ; Lecture 29. From villages to cities ; Lecture 30. Sumer, the first agrarian civilization ; Lecture 31. Agrarian civilizations in other regions ; Lecture 32. The world that agrarian civilizations made ; Lecture 33. Long trends, expansion and state power ; Lecture 34. Long trends, rates of innovation ; Lecture 35. Long trends, disease and Malthusian cycles ; Lecture 36. Comparing the world zones -- Part 4. Lecture 37. The Americas in the later Agrarian Era ; Lecture 38. Threshold 8, the modern revolution ; Lecture 39. The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500-1350 ; Lecture 40. The Early Modern Cycle, 1350-1700 ; Lecture 41. Breakthrough, the Industrial Revolution ; Lecture 42. Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900 ; Lecture 43. The 20th century ; Lecture 44. The world that the modern revolution made ; Lecture 45. Human history and the biosphere ; Lecture 46. The next 100 years ; Lecture 47. The next millennium and the remote future ; Lecture 48. Big history, humans in the cosmos. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 5-56.

Maps and libraries are ways of externalising memory and knowledge, making them not only concrete, visible and accessible, but also durable, reproducible, communicable and socially active. Both are linked to processes of totalisation. Maps add together and incorporate individual, particular and partial experiences of a space: they provide a summary and synthesis of points of view concerning a given territory, obscuring their empirical content in order to construct a coherent degree of visibility and intelligibility. Libraries represent the sum of the (...) reading and knowledge of the individual readers who frequent them. A library is one of the places that embody the intellectual, literary and spiritual heritage of a community; it is here that written memory, with its importance as a foundation for identity, can be seen in complete and tangible form. (shrink)

The paper argues that the history of technology proves some common assumptions of the theological treatment of technology to be wrang. Therefore both the relation of technology to the Christian culture and the place of technology within Christian doctrine have to be reconsidered. As technology does not merely Substitute but supplements the existing the idea of the concursus divinus is a more adequate expression for a theological understanding of technology than the doctrine of creation. In terms of method the ethics (...) of technology deals with the different perceptions of a given technique, which is tobe evaluated with respect to its many places in contemporary culture. (shrink)

In contemplating fundamental questions about history and the Western legacy, the noted classical historian Christian Meier offers a new interpretation on how we ...

Brings together the key writings of Ferdinand Christian Baur across theology, biblical studies, early Christian history, and philosophy, showing his crucial role in the development of 19th-century thought.

English summary: This volume looks at the so far little studied connections between the philosophy of Schelling and the historiographic waves in theological, philosophical and historical discourse during the first half of the 19th century. The reception of Schelling in theology, philosophy and history relates primarily to his writings around 1800. The essays in this volume firstly analyze the considerable impact that these texts had on the structure of contemporary debate. Secondly, they analyze the interdependence of the historical theology that (...) was beginning to take root and Schelling's emerging later philosophy. Thirdly, they examine the reception of Schelling's philosophy of history from the perspective of Friedrich Schleiermacher and historical academic discourse, as well as David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Landhut Romantics. German description: Der vorliegende Band thematisiert die bislang nur wenig erforschten Zusammenhange zwischen der Philosophie Schellings und den Historisierungsschuben in den theologischen, philosophischen und geschichtswissenschaftlichen Diskursen der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Rezeption Schellings in Theologie, Philosophie und Geschichtswissenschaft bezieht sich vor allem auf dessen Schriften um 1800. Die Beitrage des Bandes untersuchen sowohl die breite Wirkung dieser Texte in den zeitgenossischen Debattenkonstellationen sowie die Wechselwirkungen zwischen der sich etablierenden historischen Theologie und der Herausbildung von Schellings Spatphilosophie als auch die Rezeption der Geschichtsphilosophie Schellings bei Friedrich Schleiermacher sowie in den geschichtswissenschaftlichen Diskursen, bei David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur sowie in der Landshuter Romantik. Mit Beitragen von: Christopher Arnold, Ulrich Barth, Christian Danz, Georg Essen, Malte Dominik Kruger, Christof Landmesser, Michael Murrmann-Kahl, Georg Neugebauer, Jan Rohls, Oliver Wintzek, Johannes Zachhuber. (shrink)

This paper investigates the justification of the concept of a balance of nature in population ecology as a case of model based reasoning. The ecologist A.J. Nicholson understood balance as an outcome of intraspecific competition in populations. His models implied density dependent growth of populations oscillating around an equilibrium state. Today the assumption of density dependence is tested statistically by using models that represent certain data dynamics. This however, does not test for density dependence in the sense suggested by Nicholson. (...) From a suggested mechanism in nature equilibrium has become a property of a data set. I call this a change of reference of the term equilibrium . The new equilibrium is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the old equilibrium. However, some ecologists suggest using the new definition instead of the old one. I argue that the new definition of equilibrium points to a change in justification of the assumption of a balance in nature. This change has to be seen in relation to modeling strategies pursued by the scientific community. I argue that there is an interdependence between models, data, values, and evidence. Model based reasoning, though abstract and idealizing, has to be considered in a historical, philosophical, and social context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist MonkChristian P. B. HaskettThe Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. By Georges B. J. Dreyfus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 445 + xv pp.Georges Dreyfus is a uniquely valuable contributor to the academic study of Tibetan Buddhism. He is the first Westerner to have received the Geshe degree, signifying (...) a thorough mastery of the curriculum of the Geluk (dge lugs) school, and in his latest work, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping, he not only displays the critical acumen produced by that education, but also candidly reveals the personal details of life as a monk in a Buddhist monastic university. This alone should commend this project to the attention of readers seriously interested in Buddhism; however, Dreyfus also gives us a work of scholarship of religion that is exemplary in its capacity to use a single topic as a starting point to explain vast swathes of religion and culture. A brief overview of the chapters precedes my assessment of the book's successes and its importance for Buddhist-Christian studies.The first chapter gives a brief historical overview of Tibetan Buddhism. Those with a passing acquaintance with Tibetan history will find little new information here, but Dreyfus does manage to succinctly and accurately present 1300 years of religious history in a mere fifteen pages. Chapter 2, "Tibetan Monasticism," takes up the context in which most Buddhist scholastic activity occurs, "describing...some of its characteristics and discussing its strengths without hiding its drawbacks" (p.33). Dreyfus moves from a depiction of the Indian precedents and textual foundations of monasticism in general to a discussion of the mass monastic movement in Tibet. His assessment is unsparing but nonjudgmental as he describes monks as tax collectors, ritual actors, priests, and even "punk-monks." In the third chapter "Becoming a Monk," the personal and autobiographical nature of Two Hands Clapping begins to emerge as Dreyfus relates his own personal experience of entering [End Page 192] monastic life interwoven with accounts of both the normative Tibetan standards and the present-day situation of Tibetan monastics. These vivid reports detail the sleep deprivation, poor diet, and rigorous lives of exiled monks, and the genuine affection that those who endure these circumstances feel for one another. This chapter also examines the differing roles of teachers as housemasters, scholastic preceptors, and gurus, and begins introducing several teachers with whom Dreyfus studied. These three chapters comprise the first section, "The Context."Despite the title and cover picture of a debating monk, this book is a study of the full range of scholastic monastic practices. Dreyfus begins his far-ranging comparisons to other religious educational traditions such as yeshivas and medieval European monasticism in the second section, "Tibetan Scholastic Practices." Chapter 4 looks at reading and memorization, considering literacy and education in Tibet first. His discussion of memorization comprises details of memorization practices and a good but not overwhelming discussion of modern psychological theory on memorization and mind. Chapter 5 presents the curriculum followed by Tibetan monks and identifies a key element of scholasticism: commentary. The section on comparative perspective is particularly good, comparing Shi'ite, Christian, and Tibetan models and citing theorists including Foucault and Halbertal to elucidate how commentary is used to create sectarian positions out of shared canonical texts. While the sixth chapter begins by comparing curricula and practices followed by both Ge-luk and non-Ge-luk monasteries, it concludes with a detailed section on the role of scholasticism in the production of authority and orthodox, accounting for the emergence of sectarian divisions within Tibetan Buddhism within a sociopolitical context. This return to the history provided in chapter 1 explains the history of sectarian divisions in Tibet and demonstrates both the centrality and scope of the impact of scholasticism in Tibetan religion. In chapter 7, "Scholasticism and Orality," Dreyfus gives the sort of detailed and nuanced testimony that only a long and careful observer of and participant in Buddhism could. He carefully dissects the role of orality in memorization and recitation on the one hand, and of oral commentary in pedagogy on the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Stories in One: Literature as a Hidden Door to the History of Seventeenth-Century FranceChristian Jouhaud (bio)Translated by Cynthia J. Koepp (bio)I would like to take you into the history of seventeenth-century France through a narrow door—a door that is not only narrow but hidden. Why should we struggle to squeeze through this passage? Well, there are at least two reasons. First, it is an attempt to experience a (...) disorienting perspective on a landscape that we believe we already know completely; and second, the narrowness of the path underlines its particularity and in that way elicits a comparison with other paths elsewhere. This narrow passage is a text, perhaps an insignificant one, written by a seventeenth-century author. After making a few observations concerning its mechanics, I will use this text as a model to interpret something else, to understand it as something that stimulates thinking about historiographical hypotheses: as a convenient tool to shake up the political history of seventeenth-century France. In other words, I propose to utilize literature as a hidden door in order to enter the arena of political history, where we usually do not find any door at all.Deux histoires en une, or Two Stories in One, is a brief text by Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, a work of uncertain status, published among dozens of other pieces in a collection known by two titles: Moral Treatises and Conversations. Guez de Balzac, who lived between 1595 and 1654, does not appear on the short list of the most celebrated writers of seventeenth-century France: Molière, Racine, Corneille, La Fontaine, Sévigné, Bossuet. At the time, however, he occupied center stage in French literary life. He was perhaps the first author recognized as a grand écrivain; he was widely admired, celebrated, criticized. At the center of protracted literary debates, Guez de Balzac exercised an immense critical authority in the world of belles lettres.Since I first began working on the question of the birth of literature as a specific social space in seventeenth-century France, I have not stopped reading and rereading Balzac’s Two Stories in One. This text resists interpretation—even comprehension. It gives the reader the feeling—to be honest, an exasperating feeling—of extraordinary richness and also of an extraordinary capacity to steal away from view. The importance of this text for the comprehension of something other than itself, however, has become clear to me. This leapt out at me, by chance, when I was reading it for the nth time—at nearly the same time that I was rereading several pages of Marcel Proust. Not that the author of À la recherche du temps perdu had any connection at all to Guez de Balzac. Rather, it was Proust’s evoking, in his way, two stories in one—or rather one story in two parts—that for me rendered suddenly palpable something of the force of Balzac’s text.At the beginning of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Proust meditates on the story of Swann before and after his marriage. He emphasizes our incapacity to think of two successive states in the history of our life at the same time: for example, that of a jealous lover and that of an appeased husband. If one succeeds in thinking both things at once, the two moments then cease to appear distinct to us, and are mixed up one in the other. If the [End Page 92] mind wants to distinguish them, it loses the ability to think them both at once. I would like to propose an hypothesis that the import of Balzac’s Two Stories in One, contrary to Proust, is an attempt to open up to speculation an improbable space, a space imperceptible to sensory experience. This space lies at the interstice of “both at once” and “separately.” Thus Balzac attempts to escape the dilemma of superimposition (that is to say, fusion) or of succession (that is, separation). He attempts to subvert the elementary rule of logic that states that “a” is either different from “b” or is the same as “b.”What is striking when one first reads Two Stories in... (shrink)

This article examines approaches to early socialism from an intellectual history viewpoint, focussing on British Owenite socialism. It assesses the author's own research in the field over the past thirty-five years in an effort to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches he initially adopted to the field. It attempts to balance insights associated with the so-called “Cambridge School” with those gained in particular from the standpoints of the history of religion and the history of emotions, and (...) a theory of group identity which can in part be associated with the history of utopianism. (shrink)

In this essay, I shall attempt to shed light on central practical concepts, such as action and decision, in Heidegger’s existentialism and in Fichte’s idealism. BothFichte and Heidegger, though from different philosophical frameworks and with different results, address the practical moment by developing [1] a non-epistemic concept of certainty, in connection with [2] a temporal analysis of the conditions of action, which leads to the primacy of future in their analyses. Both [1] and [2] shed light on their concept of (...) the self, and on the concept of freedom. In addition, my paper offers a further clarification of what was called before Fichte’s “proto-existentialism” (G. Zöller, D. Henrich). The ontological framework of both philosophies and their concept of the practical self, finally, leads to the proposal to merge both perspectives into what I would like to call “existential idealism.” Fichte’s and Heidegger’s practical philosophies can be taken as two sides of the same coin. (shrink)

Einleitung -- Grundthemen des Diskurses um die Philosophenbiographien im christlichen Milieu -- Das Leben der Philosophen im Urteil der griechischen Kirchenväter -- Pagane und christliche Philosophenbiographien in byzantinischer Zeit -- Diogenes Laertios unter den Griechen in Byzanz und Italien.

The Studies in Religious History and Philosophy cover the entire field of theology, especially the history of Christianity and the philosophy of religion.

Also in the latest versions of the Science of Knowledge Fichte considers explanation of the structure of consciousness a central task of philosophy. In his late explanation of consciousness, the concepts of life and image (or schema) play a central role – two concepts that in Fichte’s account are inseparable and mutually elucidate each other. By interpreting the 1810 Science of Knowledge and Fichte’s introductory lecture The facts of Consciousness from 1810/11, this article aims to show that the pair of (...) concepts “life” and ‘image’ occur on two different theoretical levels in Fichte’s late philosophy: first, in the formulation of a view of consciousness that Fichte characterizes as ‘idealist’ and that he considers to be in continuity with Kant’s transcendental philosophy; and, second, in the exposition of the conception of consciousness as an image of a non-constructible absolute that goes beyond the idealist explanation without, however, denying its validity within its own sphere. The second step, which occupies the major part of the 1810 Science of Knowledge, can be understood as Fichte’s late reply to Jacobi’s critique of the Science of Knowledge as a ‘nihilism’. Its final step is the introduction of the concept of ‘sober- mindedness’, in the sense of a self-interpretation of moral consciousness which goes beyond any constructible content. The concluding part of the article interprets and discusses the conception of sober-mindedness as involving Fichte’s final reply to Jacobi’s criticism. (shrink)

The State reform is at the root of a deep mutation of institutions in Wallonia. Indeed, the regionalist trend has increased. With this renunciation of the French speakers from Brussels, the two political parties, FDF and PRL, have decided to join their efforts in order to safeguard their interests. A lot of Walloons get worried about federal Belgium Kingdom. Being anxious to demonstrate their attachment to Belgium, they organize a unitary demonstration and thus show their affection to late King Baudouin, (...) symbol of national unity. 1993 is also theyear of "juridical affairs". With the investigations about the murder of André Cools, some socialist politicians are harassed. Misappropriation of stolen securities, corruption, murder are the headlines in the newspaper almost wholeyear. From an economic point ofview, the province of Hainaut region highly reached by the economic crisis gets some help from the European Community being called "Objective I Europe". In the educative field, the French speaking teaching is deeply modified. (shrink)

Our methods of research, duly elaborated hereafter, would benefit from being applied to the realm of the East. For that matter, the examination of Syriac, Armenian, Coptic or Arabic manuscripts does not differ in the least from that of a Greek or Latin manuscript. The rules developed by classical philologists are just as valid for the study of the Maxims of Phtahhotep and the Precepts of Kagemeni…Alphonse Dain (1975), Les Manuscrits (Paris, Les Belles Lettres)One of the objects of a comparative (...) history of the scholarly practices in the West, the Far East, the Arab world and classical antiquity is the role of libraries in the constitution, transmission and transformations of the great textual corpora. To the institutional and social aspects of the politics of social memory should be added the range of intellectual and technical practices which have as their aim the conservation of this inheritance: material conservation and transmission - copying texts, restoring them, transferring them from one medium, one script and one language to another - but also work on the literal level and the meaning, the content and the form. (shrink)

Offering a new intellectual history of ideas about reforming capitalism from within, this book traces the emergence of different value systems in the American context, offering a fresh perspective on debates about capitalism in the late 19th century and 20th century.

Since the editio princeps, PSI XI 1215 has been recognized as a fragment of a Socratic dialogue. After the first studies on its philological aspects and probable authorship, however, the text has not drawn the attention of historians of ancient philosophy, and this important Socratic evidence has long been totally neglected. This paper reviews the history of scholarship on the Florentine fragment and presents a new critical edition, on the basis of which it tries to give for the first time (...) a historico-philosophical reading of the text. This interpretation aims to demonstrate: a) that the Socratic philosopher who is writing had not a low cultural level, and the fragment presupposes an accurate knowledge of Plato’s political thought, as Medea Norsa and Girolamo Vitelli already supposed with regard to Book 8 of Plato’s Republic; b) that the fragment in question can be attributed to a Socratic dialogue which was most likely composed in the first half of the 4th century BC; c) that both philosophical and textual arguments support the attribution of the fragment to a dialogue of Antisthenes. (shrink)

The following text analyses the essays Cassirer made in his published articles and in his manuscripts of the exile period in order to dismiss the possibility of a unique science based on the physical causality (Wiener Kreis) and thus to assert the autonomy and specificity of the Kulturwissenschaft. In the same time, it guards against the identification of cultural knowledge and historical knowledge (Windelband, Rickert). The specific way to build concepts within the Kulturwissenschaften targets the objective relation between the Particular (...) and the General and is to be found in the consideration of the form or stylebased on the experience of the expression (Ausdruckserleben). History or biology offers fruitful analogies to the understanding of the concepts or methods of Kulturwissenschaft. (shrink)