Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. Yet it needs to be stressed that not all prominent German bourgeois writers endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national-cultural ‘protest (...) at the West’. By 1918 an array of voices could come to discern another kind of salient work of contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg. The thesis defended in this article is that in sophisticated humanistic writing of the era, a German mood of antagonism with the West represents not a regressive ideology but the productive and intelligent outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about European world pictures and their claims to universal validity on the stage of world history. A range of statements are shown here to anticipate debates of the present day about ‘late’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘post-Eurocentric’ conditions of Western modernity. (shrink)

Helmuth Plessner’s Levels of Organic Life and the Human [Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 1928] is one of the founding texts of twentieth century philosophical anthropology. It is argued that Plessner’s work demonstrates the fundamental indispensability of the qualitative humanities vis-à-vis the natural-scientific study of man. Plessner’s non-reductionist, emergentist naturalism allots complementary roles to the causal and functional investigations of the life sciences and the phenomenological and hermeneutic interpretation of the phenomenon of life in its successive levels and (...) stages. Within this context, human agency can be understood as a higher-order property of organic life, which act by the selective activation of lower-level psychophysical powers. Plessner’s three ‘anthropological laws’ are used to situate the notion of practical self-understanding in between two extremes: deterministic views that deny human freedom and responsibility and views that ascribe an unrealistic amount of autonomy to human beings. (shrink)

The article deals with the development of the philosophy of France Veber, the pupil of Meinong and a main Slovene philosopher. One of the most important threads of Veber’s philosophy is the consideration of knowledge and factuality, which may be seen as a driving force of its development. Veber’s philosophical development is usually divided into three phases: the object theory phase, the phase when he created his philosophy of a person as a creature at the crossing of the natural and (...) the spiritual world, who as an active, not merely passive subject possesses her own causal powers, and the third phase, when he supplemented his earlier philosophy with the theory of a special side of our experience which he called hitting-upon-reality. It is a direct experience of reality, a special kind of intentionality, which is however fundamentally different from presentational intentionality, which alone is taken into account by object theory or phenomenology. The questions of knowledge and factuality are closely connected in Veber’s philosophy since, pace Veber, knowledge is a kind of, we may say, justified experience the object of which is a factual entity. Hence, if we want to understand what knowledge is, we must face the challenge of comprehending factuality. There are five stages to be noted in the development of his epistemology. The first two belong to his object theory phase, the third to his person phase, the fourth is characterised by his distinguishing and exploring truth and validity with regard to the thought about God, and the basis of the fifth phase lies in his theory of hitting-upon-reality. In Introduction to Philosophy and The System of Philosophy, that is in the year 1921, Veber believed that factuality was a property of the object, which we do present, but we do not present the factuality of this factuality. In 1923, in The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy and in the work Science and Religion, he already rejected such a view. There is something that makes things factual, but that is a complete unknown X. Therefore we cannot even say what kind of an entity this factuality is. Some people would probably demand the following formulation: if X is an ultimate mystery, we should not claim even that it is an entity. In The Problems of Presentation Production Veber claimed that factuality is not a property since this would lead to a regressum ad infinitum. Philosophy related internally correct experience to personal will. In T he Book about God he developed the thesis that factuality depends on the act of God. In The Question of Reality he importantly modified, developed and enriched the thesis that we do not present reality with his theory of immediate experience of factuality. (shrink)

Ferdinand Pöhlmann argues that a sense of one’s own basic abilities to move is a constitutive condition on the ability to perceive the world spatially. This constitutive relation explains why egocentric spatial representation is to be regarded as a kind of self-representation. In arguing for these claims, conceptual as well as empirical questions are discussed and an overview of accounts that take action as a constitutive condition on spatial representation is given. The picture that emerges is linked to the phenomenological (...) (Scheler) as well as to the analytic (Evans) tradition in the Philosophy of Mind.​. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant hat wie kein anderer Denker die Philosophie der Neuzeit geprägt. Aufgrund seiner überragenden Bedeutung liegen inzwischen mehrere Bände zu seinen Schriften in der Reihe "Klassiker Auslegen" vor. Kant ist im wahrsten Sinne ein universeller Denker, der sein Interesse auf nahezu alle Bereiche des menschlichen Lebens richtet. Nach ihm lässt sich dieses Interesse in drei Fragen bündeln: Was kann ich wissen? Wie soll ich handeln? Und: Was darf ich hoffen? Der Antwort auf die dritte Frage geht Kant in seiner (...) Schrift Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793) nach. Hier, in seiner Religionsphilosophie, setzt er, gemäß der Grundüberzeugung der Aufklärung, seine Moralphilosophie fort. Gott ist für Kant nicht mehr wie etwa in der mittelalterlichen Philosophie, auch noch bei Descartes ein Gegenstand des Wissens, sondern des Hoffens: Der moralisch handelnde Mensch hofft auf eine sinnvolle Ordnung des Weltganzen, auf einen Gott, dessen Existenz zusammen mit der Unsterblichkeit der Seele die notwendige Voraussetzung für das letzte Ziel des praktischen Handelns, für das höchste Gut, ist. Diese originelle Verbindung von zunächst als gegensätzlich Erscheinendem, von einer Moral der Autonomie mit dem Glauben an einen übernatürlichen Gott, bildet jedoch nicht das einzige Thema der Schrift. In ihr entwickelt Kant darüber hinaus eine differenzierte Theorie des moralisch Bösen und erörtert das Verhältnis zwischen einem bloßen Kirchenglauben (die "sichtbare Kirche") und dem moralischen Religionsglauben (die "unsichtbare Kirche"). Dieser thematisch reichhaltige Text wird im von Otfried Höffe herausgegebenen Band in Form eines kooperativen Kommentars von international renommierten Autoren interpretiert und somit aktuell erschlossen. Alle Beiträge wurden für die 2. Auflage anlässlich des 300. Jubiläums Immanuel Kants überarbeitet und auf den neuesten Forschungsstand gebracht. Mit Beiträgen von Jochen Bojanowski, Johannes Brachtendorf, Andrew Chignell, Katrin Flickschuh, Maximilian Forschner, Otfried Höffe, Christoph Horn, Eberhard Jüngel, Douglas McGaughey, Reza Mosayebi, Burkhard Nonnenmacher, Friedo Ricken, Allen Wood. (shrink)

The pair-bond model of human origin proposed by Lovejoy in his “Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus” combines fossil records with the unique sexual behavior of modern humans. This construct, however, seems to lack an emotionally important element. By connecting ovulatory crypsis with frontal copulation and face-to-face contact, the transition to the complexity and subtlety of human emotional life becomes more evident. Reproductive success and emotional representation are considered as two interacting levels in the phylogenetic scale. Thus, the (...) behavioral frame of sociobiology is extended to psychobiological phenomena and a bridge is built between natural sciences and philosophy. Light from both sides will be thrown on the origin of man, including his unique cultural history. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The study aims to substantiate philosophical anthropology as a space for the development of biopolitics, which is a relatively new synthetic scientific knowledge of the political in the biological and the biological in the political, which, however, has its roots in the era of antiquity. The analysis of biopolitics in the context of contemporary global challenges, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, is carried out, which allows to actualize a new direction of biopolitics – microbiopolitics. _Theoretical basis._ The study is (...) based on an understanding of the initial, in relation to biopolitics, the nature of philosophical anthropology. While philosophical anthropology seeks an answer to the question – who is _Homo sapiens_, given the biosocial nature of man, biopolitics specifies the question in the form – who is _homo politicus_ in modern socio-political space with a focus on the imperative of a human-centred approach in the social sciences. The study is based on scientific works by specialists in philosophical anthropology and biopolitics. _Originality._ The authors substantiate the expediency and relevance of considering philosophical anthropology as a contextual space for the evolution of biopolitical knowledge from the natural philosophy of Antiquity to modern microbiopolitics. _Conclusions._ Philosophical anthropology is seen as a specific epistemological landscape in which fields of scientific knowledge are formed and developed that are in one way or another involved in the philosophical problems of man: philosophical psychology, social anthropology, philosophy of medicine, humanology, philosophy of education, ethics, as well as biophilosophy, bioethics, and, in particular, biopolitics. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

After describing the disorder of psychopathy, I examine the theories and the evidence concerning the psychopaths’ deficient moral capacities. I first examine whether or not psychopaths can pass tests of moral knowledge. Most of the evidence suggests that they can. If there is a lack of moral understanding, then it has to be due to an incapacity that affects not their declarative knowledge of moral norms, but their deeper understanding of them. I then examine two suggestions: it is their deficient (...) practical reason or their stunted emotions that are at fault. The evidence supports both explanations. I conclude with an overview of the debate concerning whether they are morally or legally responsible for their actions. (shrink)

Purpose. Philosophy of culture is an extremely multifaceted field, which includes the anthropological segment as well. In particular, we can talk about the role of man in cultural progress in a particular period of development of the society. To some extent, this problem may also apply to the theory of archetypes, which is rapidly developing today, being used not only in philosophy but also in other fields, deeply penetrated into the methodology of humanities knowledge. Therefore, we used interdisciplinary tools for (...) this study. The purpose of this work is to study the influence of personality on the development of Ukrainian culture in a global, comprehensive dimension, based on the experience and works of famous figures that carried out cultural activities in a certain historical period. In this case, we can appeal to the archetype of the Wise Old Man, which contains a set of permanent features that connect its projections with both the "foretype" and at the same time the "accumulation" of experience. Theoretical basis. Based on the work of famous researchers in the field of philosophy, anthropology, analytical psychology, ethnophilosophy, the authors note the insufficient elaboration of the topic regarding the distinction of anthropological dimensions of different cultural periods of Ukraine in chronological order. Originality. The authors of the article prove that the continuity of the accumulation of anthropocentric features in individuals gives them transcendence, elevate to the archetype of the Wise Old Man, which can be perceived as a universal process against the ethnic development background. Conclusions. As a result of the study, we can say that the role of individual key figures in the development of national culture is quite noticeable. This can be traced both at the local level and at the national level, when we should talk about individuals who in a certain period of development of society and culture were leading and became a kind of embodiment of universal experience accumulated in an individual with a certain identity, which is the "personality" required in "that place" and "that time". For this reason, we turn to the archetype of the Wise Old Man as an "invariant", a "conductor", which reflects the most realized and individualized personality in a particular chronotope. (shrink)

Purpose. Based on the anthropocentric approach to the analysis of visual self-presentations of Artemisia Gentileschi in paintings, to present the artwork as self-objectifications of the artist, which give rise to a new cultural reality and are at the same time a means of knowing the essence of man. Theoretical basis. The principles and methods of philosophical and anthropological research in combination with biographical, historical and comparative, iconographic, figurative and stylistic methods were used when writing the article. Among philosophical and anthropological (...) methods the principle of anthropological reduction was used, based on which the works by Artemisia Gentileschi were analyzed as her self-objectification, principle of extrapolation of a separate fact of the painter’s life and anthropological interpretation of art evolution, when an attempt is made to know their creator through a series of chronological consistent works as figurative objectification. The biographical method was used when working with data on the painter’s life, iconographic and figurative stylistic – when analyzing the art visuals: self-portraits, allegories and narrative paintings. The analytical work was carried out in stages as transition from an iconographic interpretation of paintings with gradual elimination of art and style characteristics as extra-anthropological cultural constants with subsequent anthropological reduction of cultural image. Originality consists in the author’s method of analyzing the works of visual art in terms of anthropocentric approach, as well as in considering the artwork by Artemisia Gentileschi as her self-objectification as such that give rise to a new cultural reality. Conclusions. The artworks by Artemisia Gentileschi in diachronic deployment can be seen as the painter’s self-objectification, which traces the evolution of self-expression from a person with traditional self-perception by social gender stereotypes to the phenomenon of personal life, which will determine further evolution of her self-identification and extirpation of sense of shame through virtual revenge, repentance, guilt, and formation of component of the painter’s identity as exemption from social gender prejudices and stereotypes on roles and standards of behavior socially assigned to women. (shrink)

Purpose. Research of the phenomenon of human destructiveness in the context of metaphysical images and violence practices of late Modernism. Theoretical basis. The problem is that the philosophical reflection of violence as objectified, realized destructiveness of man is usually contextual in nature and is on the periphery of understanding its external manifestations. Accordingly, anthropological crisis remains behind the scenes, as evidenced by the devaluation of the humanistic potential of modern culture. That is why one should turn the focus from the (...) obvious, objectively conditioned incarnations of violence in the XXI century to the internal factors that are in the realm of existential. The departure from the consideration of violence as an abstract, faceless or ideologically colored evil allowed us to focus on man, his way of thinking, life and social orientations, feelings and internal contradictions, which find their expression in one or another form of destructiveness. Originality. Based on the works of M. Scheler and E. Fromm defining for philosophical anthropology and psychoanalysis, for the first time the conceptualization of positive and negative forms of manifestation of human destructiveness against the background of sociocultural transformations of late Modernism was carried out. It has been proved that its ontological principles are rooted in specifically human existence and relations with other members of society, while anthropological ones are directly connected with the endless struggle of the life, the vital with the spirit in man. Conclusions. Violence is a tool and a product of man’s transition to more mature and complex forms of existence. The interdependence of the violence and nonviolence practices ensures the progressive movement of humanity towards society humanization. This progress is accompanied by a natural internal conflict of personality, which can be both progressive and regressive. At the metaphysical level, destructiveness appears as a connection between the entropy of world existence as a whole and the instability of human existence itself, which is a complexly organized and open to the world system. Self-transcendence as an anthropological prerequisite for human destructiveness has a dual nature and combines negative and positive characteristics, the content and significance of which were revealed in the study. The authors are convinced that there is no other way to overcome the negative, malignant destructiveness, except for the incessant, daily gathering of life meanings around them and their development. After all, the loss of such core structures of the existence as the meaning, purpose and value of life has become a truly global problem for the modern world. Emphasis is placed on the need to keep in harmony the trinity of body-soul-spirit, which will allow a person in any social transformation to preserve and increase his integrity. (shrink)

The article aims to provide a general framework for assessing and categorizing the cognitive systems of human and non-human animals. Our approach stems from biosemiotic, ethological, and phenomenological investigations into the relations of organisms to one another and to their environment. Building on the analyses of Merleau-Ponty and Portmann, organismal bodies and surfaces are distinguished as the base for sign production and interpretation. Following the concept of modelling systems by Sebeok, we develop a concentric model of human and non-human animal (...) cognition that posits three intertwined spheres: corporeity, social communication, and culture. The model explicitly works with the pluralistic perspective that views the communication and cognition of humans as distinct, but not superior to those of non-human animals. Our position is substantiated by two case studies: the first one focuses on the acquisition and spread of nut-cracking technique among the chimpanzees in the Täi forest, the second one on the communication and cognition of deafblind persons. From an epistemological perspective, our paper is a contribution to contemporary attempts to link biosemiotics and ethology with phenomenological concepts of agency, living bodies, and lifeworld. (shrink)

Purpose. The research is aimed at understanding the philosophical and journalistic heritage of M. Scheler during 1914-1919. "The philosophy of war" is regarded as the middle link between the phenomenological and anthropological stages of its philosophical evolution. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is the philosophical legacy of Max Scheler, as well as the work of domestic and Western researchers devoted to this issue. Problems of Weltkriegsphilosophie become comprehensible based on the historical, logical and comparative principles of historical (...) and philosophical analysis, which allowed to theoretically reconstruct the cultural and historical context, philosophical sources and ideological intentions of the German philosopher. Originality. For the first time in domestic historical and philosophical thought, it proved that the works by Max Scheler of the First World War played an outstanding role in the formation of philosophical anthropology as a separate philosophical trend. Conclusions. The basis of the Weltkriegsphilosophie by Max Scheler is the philosophical comprehension of the war in which the thinker tries to see the high sacral meaning, where the sacrifices that the nation brings to the altar of victory are not in vain: the nation is rallying this sacrifice, its readiness for it. According to Scheler, war is the most effective means of forming the so-called "love communities", to which he refers combat brotherhood, family and nation as a "collective personality", which recognizes itself through war. The philosopher is disappointed to some part with militaristic enthusiasm in his later military journalistic works and calls for a spiritual and moral renewal of Europe, fed from Christian roots. At the heart of this renewal should be the principle of personal solidarity, based on the Christian idea of love. However, Catholic universalism is an insufficient means for the formation of a "love community" and a new man who is co-creator of God that constitutes the main core of the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler, which emerges in the 20s of the twentieth century. Based on this, the article affirms the existence in Sheler’s works of an intermediate stage between his phenomenology and philosophical anthropology – Weltkriegsphilosophie. (shrink)

Medicine does not usually consider the human body from an aesthetic point of view. This article explores the notion of the lived body as aesthetic object in anthropological medicine, concentrating on the views of Buytendijk and Straus on human uprightness and gracefulness. It is argued that their insights constitute a counter-balance to the way the human body is predominantly approached in medicine and medical ethics. In particular, (1) the relationship between anthropological, aesthetic and ethical norms, (2) the possible danger of (...) a naturalistic fallacy, (3) the implications for the care of disabled people and (4) the intrinsic aesthetic quality of the human body are dealt with. (shrink)

Moral judgements are based on automatic processes. Moral judgements are based on reason. In this paper, I argue that both of these claims are true, and show how they can be reconciled. Neither the automaticity of moral judgement nor the post hoc nature of conscious moral reasoning pose a threat to rationalist models of moral cognition. The relation moral reasoning bears to our moral judgements is not primarily mediated by episodes of conscious reasoning, but by the acquisition, formation and maintenance (...) ? in short: education ? of our moral intuitions. (shrink)

Based on Aristotelianism, philosophies in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and traditional phenomenology, Martin Heidegger and late Max Scheler, shared a conceptual understanding of the soul. The plant’s soul – a worldly stage of the individualization of universal creativity - unfolds via the animal towards the human and beyond. The Phenomenology of Life philosophy (Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka) enmeshed the ontopoiesis of the vegetative beingness into the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, thereby overcoming the discommunicative hierarchization of the soul. An eco-cosmological following of „the plant’s“ ontopoiesis will have (...) to base its understanding not only on the communicative creativity of „the plant“ but on its inseparable interwovenness into the web of life, thereby also taking into consideration newest botanical studies which brought to light insights into so far unknown „intelligence“ of plants. (shrink)

This paper analyses the relatively neglected topic of hierarchy in the philosophical foundation of human rights. It develops a transcendental-discursive approach. This approach develops the idea that all human rights could be derived from a small set of fundamental rights that are interconnected and that incorporate all ulterior possible specific rights. This set is then applied to an analysis of human rights as they have been formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The claim is that this prior set (...) of transcendental rights is discursively implied whenever we talk about human rights. Thinking about the hierarchy of rights pragmatically means thinking about prioritising their implementation. Some consequences for practical philosophy and politics concerning the role of states, enterprises and world citizenship are then discussed. (shrink)

Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed.

The article is an attempt at a philosophical interpretation of the literary text. Its task is to identify the principles of the human self, which are presented in classical literature, in Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. The study provides an analysis of the archetypal narrative structure to which the model of human development with three components is applied. The correspondence of the heroes to this typology, which is not the final measure of the human, but resembles the (...) “ideal types” according to Max Weber, has been traced in the research. The dynamics of the development of the inner world of a human being, which corresponds to the plot of the journey, is analyzed. That is not a journey only in physical space, but an inner path too that a person overcomes in a gradual process of self-awareness. It has been found that the works of Homer and Dante can be interpreted as not implying a developed and independent personality. On the other hand, the characters demonstrate the key factors of change that occur within the one who forms the traits of self-sufficiency. The study succeeds in constructing a psychological map that allows outlining not a stable type, but rather different personality horizons. There are certain human aspirations of the man to be the creator of the self. However, such motivations involve not only a number of arbitrary manifestations of human beings but also the establishment of a measure for themselves. Initially, these intentions are carried out without self-absorption, reflection, and self-assessment. After all, unrestrained and unbalanced human temperament for a long time remains subject to higher forces and is significantly limited by this supreme power. Nevertheless, a human eventually comes to the need for self-knowledge and establishes a balance between rational and unconscious manifestations. People succeed in getting out of the circle of self-forgetfulness by overcoming various forms of alienation, loneliness, narcissism, self-contradiction, negligence, arrogance. Self-control is achieved by truth about oneself, overcoming fear, recognizing the effects of temptation and passion. The human attitude to the Other becomes possible due to freedom and love as cardinal manifestations of the active component of the self. (shrink)

The paper deals with the ontological questions related to tradition, especially focusing on Gadamer and Dilthey. It is argued that tradition should be regarded not that much as a limitation, but rather as an enabling finitude that gives access to reality. This ontological structure concerns several aspects of human existence, nomothetic science included. Historical background thus has an ontological impact that surpasses objectivistic approaches. A short discussion of causality in natural science traces the genealogy of the causal scheme and compares (...) the notion of effect with the Wirkung in the sense of effective history. In this context the difference between the modern scientific concept of nature and the natura of the elder tradition appears to be important in order to understand the specificity of Diltheyan philosophy of life. There seems to be a complementary relation between hermeneutics and philosophy of life insofar as both currents are trying to reinstall the modern subject in reality, Gadamers main concern being the historical incarnation in a process, profoundly marked by language and Dilthey still trying to save part of nature in history. These two aspects can be regarded as almost direct answers to the inverse Cartesian tendency to liberate the subject from its history and from its bodily nature. Experience and lived experience thus seem less contradictory than some passages in Gadamers Truth and Method would suggest. (shrink)

The Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger is best known for his existential analysis (Daseinsanalyse) presented in a series of case studies in the 1940s, but his existential anthropology of mania of the early 1930s has received less attention. He introduced this new existential science as a disciplinary hybrid of existential philosophy and clinical psychiatry, and, in doing so, transformed the genre of narrow medical case study into a broader discourse of philosophical anthropology. The very ambitiousness of his method, however, tended to (...) eclipse the individuality of his manic patient; its delineation of the conditioning structures of manic experience rendered the patient’s life-history and her functional state as secondary to these structures. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology emerges, partly at least, by dissatisfied and critical followers of Husserl’s phenomenology, such as Max Scheler and the young Martin Heidegger. They were dissatisfied with what they saw as a disregard of the concrete human being as an essential part of phenomenological analysis. They tried instead to claim that philosophy must search for, and anchor, its foundations exclusively in the human being, not as an abstract entity, but as an existential, concrete, physical being. In this specific philosophical, as (...) well as historical, context this paper suggests to locate Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical project by reconstructing his unique version of philosophical anthropology. The main aim of the paper is to describe and understand the way Blumenberg combines his theory of metaphors together with his anthropological considerations regarding the origin and emergence of human culture into his own version of philosophical anthropology. A version that can be seen as joining the original attempt of philosophical anthropology to overcome the deficiency in Husserl’s phenomenological project. (shrink)

Plessner’s Stufen des Organischen questions both the conditions of possibility as well as the consequences of a self-understanding of life. Originally written against the background of urbanisation, industrialisation and colonisation, the strength of Plessner’s work lies in his combination of an analyticalphilosophical conceptualisation, the introduction of materiality and the body as well as his historical–ethical dimension. As a re-sult of this combination, Plessner’s approach is well suited to contribute to the current inter-national discourse on the relationship of sociality and materiality. (...) This article provides an overview of the reception of Plessner in Germany and embeds his approach into current de-bates, discussing its value with regard to the sociality-materiality relationship. The focus is on three issues: the definition of the boundaries of the social, the relationship between the social and the body as well as the cultural historic-ethical situation. Finally, Plessner’s Steps of the Organic are related to the current issues of ecologisation and digitalisation, allowing us to see what a Plessnerian perspective on the materiality-sociality relationship can do with-in applied social theory. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer niederländische Tierpsychologe Frederik J. J. Buytendijk (1887–1974) entwickelte in seinen Forschungen der 1920er und 1930er Jahre in Abgrenzung zum Behaviorismus eine antireduktionistische Zugangsweise auf Verhaltensexperimente. So bezog er in seinen Experimentalpraktiken explizit die subjektive Erfahrung des Versuchsleiters mit ein. Damit entwarf Buytendijk eine Wissenschaftstheorie, die methodologisch auf die Phänomenologie, Hermeneutik wie auf gestalttheoretische Ganzheitskonzepte zurückgriff, quantitative Datenerhebungen aber dennoch nicht aufgab. Vielmehr untersuchte Buytendijk auf der Grundlage des Biotheoretikers Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) in seinem physiologischen Institut in Groningen konkret (...) die These einer „Tier-Umwelt-Einheit“. Der vorliegende Beitrag ermittelt anhand der institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen und zweier Experimente (1924 und 1931), inwiefern Buytendijk seine Aussage, dass das Tier „mit und in seiner Umwelt geboren [ist]“, die zugleich sein wissenschaftsphilosophisches Konzept stützte, zu verifizieren wusste. Dass die Umwelt dem Tier ein Organ ist, ist bei Buytendijk dementsprechend nicht nur metaphorisch, sondern ganz real zu verstehen. (shrink)

From his earliest published writings to his last, Roman Ingarden displayed an interest in theoretical biology and its efforts to clarify what distinguishes living organisms from other types of entities. However, many of his explorations of such issues are easily overlooked, because they don’t appear in works that are primarily ontological, metaphysical, or anthropological in nature but are “hidden” within his works on literary aesthetics, where Ingarden sought to define the nature of living organisms in order to compare literary works (...) to such entities. This article undertakes a historical textual analysis that traces the evolution of Ingarden’s thought regarding the nature of the literary work of art as an organism-like entity and uncovers its links with the simultaneous development of his systems theory and its central concept of the “relatively isolated system”: for Ingarden, a literary work and an organism are each a systematically transforming, “living,” functional-structural whole that comprises a system of hierarchically arranged and partially isolated elements whose harmonious interaction allows the literary work or organism to fulfill its chief function. Having completed that historical analysis, we test Ingarden’s assessment of works of art as organism-like entities in a novel context by investigating the organism-like qualities of the contemporary computer game; insofar as their AI-driven behavior displays a form of agency, such games might appear to be even more “alive” than traditional works of art. We show that Ingarden’s conceptual framework provides a useful tool for understanding the “organicity” of such games as works of art, despite the fact that they differ qualitatively from those art forms with which Ingarden was directly familiar. (shrink)

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Beitrags zu Grundlagen der psychiatrischen Anthropologie steht die spezifische Vulnerabilität der psychischen Organisation des Menschen. Diese wird anhand von zwei Leitfragen untersucht, die sich auf die Entgleisungsmöglichkeiten der psychischen Struktur und auf problematische und überfordernde Bedingungen der menschlichen Existenz beziehen. Als wichtige Komponenten dieser Vulnerabilität werden die besondere Offenheit, Ungesichertheit und inhärente Widersprüchlichkeit der Organisations- und Daseinsform des Menschen identifiziert. Demnach sind die höheren Freiheitsgrade, die die psychophysische Organisation des Menschen mit sich bringt, zugleich auch wesentliche Gründe (...) für die Prekarität und Verletzbarkeit der menschlichen Existenz. Ziel des Beitrags ist ein vertieftes Verständnis der leidvollen Widersprüche und Konflikte im Leben insbesondere psychisch kranker Menschen. (shrink)

The architect who plans and designs our living environment in town and country can neither think exclusively technologically nor act completely independently. Rather, his designs and actions are always in moral relation to the environment, i. e. to nature and landscape as well as to the city/town or the people who live daily with and within the built space and thus have a kind of effective group affiliation. But to what extent does architecture – in the sense of Hegel’s phrase (...) the “sensuous in the meaningful” – already possess ethical implications? (shrink)

The essay “Was ist der Mensch?” appeared for the first time in December 1944 in the German magazine with a hundred years of tradition edited by the publisher J. J. Weber Illustrierte Zeitung Leipzig [Illustrated Magazine Leipzig]. This special cultural edition, entitled Der europäische Mensch [The European Man], which was distributed exclusively abroad, was to be the last volume of the magazine after its final regular issue in September 1994 (No. 5041). Only in 1947, the text was republished, with the (...) same pagination, in a compilation made by J. J. Weber, Vom Wahren, Schönen, Guten. Aus dem Schatz europäischer Kunst und Kultur [On the True, the Beautiful, the Good. From the Treasury of European Art and Culture]. The publisher was expropriated in 1948, and three years later the company was finally removed from the German commercial registry. “Was ist der Mensch?” has never been released in any of Gadamer’s books or separately published in a journal; it also does not appear within the 10 volumes of his Gesammelte Werke [Collected Works]—the only exception is an Italian translation included in a volume devoted to Gadamer’s views on education and the notion of Bildung (cf. Gadamer 2012). The aim of this translation is to make accessible this Gadamer’s quest for the occidental interpretations of human self-consciousness, which has until now been almost unknown and in which, for the first time, Gadamer shows, from a theoretical standpoint, not only his early—although implicit—keen interest in Max Scheler’s anthropology (particularly Scheler’s considerations on the basic historical types of the occidental man’s self-perception in accordance with the basic and underlying concept of human history that still have powerful effectiveness in modern times), but also—at the historical threshold of the imminent ending of World War II—his own concern regarding possible philosophical answers to the question: “What is man?” Cf. especially Scheler 1926 (GW 9, 120–144); 1928 (GW 9, 7–71); 1929 (GW 9, 145–170). All commenting annotations to Gadamer’s text are authored by the editor and translator. (shrink)

The idea to utilise cognitive neuroscientific research for educational purposes is known as Mind-Brain Education or Educational Neuroscience. Despite some calls for an uncritical endorsement of such an agenda, a growing number of educational scholars argue that it must remain impossible to translate neurological descriptions into mental or educationally relevant descriptions. This paper takes these well-established arguments further by not only focusing upon these different levels of description but going beyond this issue to assess the theoretical foundations of cognitive science (...) as a functional theory of the mind. With relevance to education it is argued that because of its functional character a cognitive-psychological approach to education suffers from an inherent blind spot regarding the actor’s feelings and motivations. The paper concludes with the claim that, because of this experiential poverty, any cognitive neuroscientific approach must face severe limitations when utilised for educational purposes. (shrink)