The aim of this paper is to offer a classification of particulars in terms of their relations to spatiotemporal and spatial regions. It begins with an examination of spatiotemporal particulars, and then explores the extent to which a parallel account can be offered of continuants, or spatial particulars that can endure and change over time, assuming such particulars exist. For every spatial particular there are spatiotemporal particulars that can be described as its life and parts thereof. But not every time-slice (...) of a spatiotemporal particular yields a spatial region suitable for hosting a corresponding spatial particular. Events are spatiotemporal particulars though not all spatiotemporal particulars are events. Objects and states are spatial particulars though not all spatial particulars are objects or states. Spatial and spatiotemporal particulars can be either bare regions, or the contents or material contents of such regions, or property instantiations. It is left open whether events are contents of regions, property instantiations, or both. But it is argued that objects are material contents of spatial regions while states of objects are property instantiations. Spatiotemporal particulars can be changes or nonchanges. Events and states can be instantaneous while objects cannot. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the dispute between necessitarians and contingentists, mainly addressing the issue as to whether laws of nature are metaphysically necessary or metaphysically contingent with a weaker kind of necessity, commonly referred to as natural, nomological, or nomic necessity. It is assumed here that all fundamental properties are dispositional or role properties, making the dispute a strictly verbal one. The existence of categorical intrinsic properties as well as dispositional properties is also assumed and the relationship between them examined. (...) Finally, the chapter concludes by returning to the debate between necessitarians and contingentists under the assumption that both dispositional and categorical fundamental properties exist. It is argued here that necessitarian positions can be recast as contingentist, but that there are unequivocally contingentist positions preferred because they are less mysterious despite being ontologically more complex. (shrink)

What values, if any, would be undermined by determinism?[i] Traditionally this question has been tackled by asking whether determinism is compatible with free will or whether it is compatible with moral responsibility. Compatibilists say that determinism would not threaten free will or moral responsibility, and hence that people’s values should not be influenced by whether or not they believe in determinism. Incompatibilists say that determinism would undermine free will or moral responsibility, and hence that a belief in determinism should have (...) a considerable impact on one’s values, precluding many popular evaluative beliefs. (shrink)

When performing an action of a certain kind, an agent typically has se- veral reasons for doing so. I shall borrow Davidson’s term and call these rationalising reasons (Davidson 1963, 3). These are reasons that allow us to understand what the agent regarded as favourable features of such an action. (There will also be reasons against acting, expressing unfavour- able features of such an action, from the agent’s point of view.) I shall say that R is a rationalising reason of (...) agent X’s for K-ing iff R consists of (i) a desire of X’s to L and (ii) a belief of X’s that K-ing promotes L-ing (to be discussed shortly). It is frequently said that when an agent X is K-ing and has several rationalising reasons for K-ing, not all of those reasons are reasons for which X is K-ing, that motivate X’s K-ing, or that explain X’s K-ing. In this paper I challenge this view. (shrink)

Mounting empirical evidence underscores the health benefits of the arts, as recently reported in a scoping review by the World Health Organization. The creative arts in particular are acknowledged to be a public health resource that can be beneficial for well-being and health. Within this broad context, and as a subfield of participatory arts, the term social arts (SA) specifically refers to an art made by socially engaged professionals (e.g., artists, creative arts therapists, social workers, etc.) with non-professionals who determine (...) together the content and the final art product (in theater, visual arts, music, literature, etc.) with the aim to produce meaningful social changes. SA can enhance individual, community, and public health in times of sociopolitical instability and is an active field in Israel. However, SA is still an under-investigated field of study worldwide that is hard to characterize, typify, or evaluate. This paper presents a research protocol designed to examine a tripartite empirically-based model of SA that will cover a wide range of SA training programs, implementations, and impacts. The findings will help refine the definition of SA and inform practitioners, trainers, and researchers, as well as funding bodies and policymakers, on the content and impact of SA projects in Israel and beyond. (shrink)

Wars and crises worldwide force millions of people to flee and seek refuge, often outside their countries of origin. What moral responsibilities do states have towards refugees? In this Ethical Annotation, Dr Jos Philips and his co-authors zoom in on the responsibilities of EU countries. They consider arguments in favour of and against admitting refugees and argue that EU countries must do at least at much as they can do at little cost, and perhaps even more.

Noa Naaman-Zauderer’s book aims to bring to light the ethical underpinnings of Descartes’ system: on her view, in both the practical and the theoretical spheres Descartes takes our foremost duty to lie in the good use of the will.The marked ethical import of Cartesian epistemology takes the form of a deontological, non-consequentialist view of error: epistemic agents are praised/blamed when they fulfill/flout the duty to not assent to ideas that are less than clear and distinct.Extra-theoretical realms admitting of no clear (...) and distinct perceptions are subject to ‘softer’ duties of acting on the basis of the best available reasons. Since Cartesian epistemology involves ethical considerations,and since the late Cartesian ethics of virtue crucially depends on metaphysical knowledge about the nature and function of the will, Descartes’ ethics is not just a fruit of his tree of knowledge but it also nourishes its own roots. (shrink)

This paper documents a dispute involving the freedom of the press that captivated the attention of the Berlin intelligentsia in the 1780s. The dispute provides the socio-historical background for the section in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit entitled “The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition.” (GW, VI.B.II.488-522) The section can also be read as Hegel’s critique of Jacobi. The latter’s presence in the Phenomenology, although not pervasive, is at least conspicuous.

This article examines Jacobi's two novels, Allwill and Woldemar indirectly showing how much Allwill prefigures Kierkegaard's Seduce in Either/Or and the plot of Woldemar Hegel's final scene of Section VI of his Phenomenology of Spirit.

Philosophical reflections about the complex relationship between Jacobi and Fichte on realism and idealism.

In presenting the key theoretical notions in Jacobi’s philosophical work, this paper shows how these notions are operative in Schellings late philosophy and in Kierkegaard. It is argued that Jacobi’s criticism of Spinozist rationalism is echoed in Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegelian speculation as it is shown that Jacobi’s distinction between two different kinds of knowledge, i.e. demonstration and illumination, is also at the very heart of Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s philosophy. On this background the article finally discusses some important (...) similarities between Schelling and Kierkegaard, stressing the importance of the concept of the will as well as the relation between negativity and positivity. (shrink)

Der letzte Teil der ‚Moralität‘ in der Enyzklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften behandelt das ‚Gewissen‘ als eine dialektische Instanz. Die Bestimmung dieser Dialektik als Äußerung des ‚Objektiven Geistes‘ stellt eine Neuheit in Hegels Denken dar. Mein Beitrag will die Relevanz der Heidelberger Schriften Hegels für die Genese dieser Theorie verdeutlichen. Zu diesem Zweck wird die Rezension zum dritten Band der jacobischen Werke zusammen mit der ersten Ausgabe der Enzyklopädie in Betracht gezogen. Die entsprechende Analyse soll zeigen, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit Jacobi (...) für Hegel wichtig war, um den Begriff einer Dialektik des Gewissens überhaupt zu bestimmen. Gleichzeitig wird sich daraus die Eigenheit der hegelschen Lösung dieser Dialektik erweisen. (shrink)

While it is now accepted in the secondary literature to treat Frühromantik - early German Romanticism - as a philosophical movement in its own right, the exact determination of the philosophical nature of this movement still remains one of the central stumbling blocks faced by interpreters. At the heart of this debate is the question of the relationship between the early romantics and Fichtean idealism. One point of rupture with Fichte and his theory of nature seems particularly obvious at first (...) glance: Novalis's substitution of the pronoun "you" for the Fichtean "Not-I". This occurs in one of Novalis’s most famous expressions: "(You). Instead of the Not-I – You.” ((Du). Statt Nicht-Ich – Du). For most commentators, when analyzing the romantic relationship between the human being and nature, this substitution becomes the clearest expression that Novalis rejects the supposed subjectivism of Fichte's philosophy. Here the Nicht-Ich, the Not-I, - i.e. nature – is often read in Fichte as something negative, as an abstract antithesis of the I - as everything that is not human or the subject. - Whereas Novalis, on the other hand, reinjects the human element, the "you", back into nature. It is furthermore argued by these commentators that this radical substitution is motivated by the romantic call to realize not only the inseparability of the human being and nature, but to recognize their equal value. It indicates a necessary departure from transcendental idealism in favor of a rapprochement with Schelling's philosophy of nature. However, could such an interpretation be based on a preconception, or even on a prejudice? I argue that it is; and that it is based on the assumption that Novalis breaks with Fichte’s philosophy. In contrast, I defend the view that the idea of Nature as a “You” is already to be found implicitly in Fichte and that Novalis’s above well-known expression should be read as in continuity with Fichte’s transcendental epistemology and as an original dialogical extension of it. To see this, one needs to retrace the context and the philosophical chain of events from Novalis back to Fichte, and from Fichte back to Jacobi. (shrink)

The paper presents the idea of cross‐cultural philosophy, which have inspired the organizers of the cyclic global conferences held at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, USA, since 193 First, the author discusses some definitions of the comparative method applied in contemporary philosophy and promoted, among others, through the project of the “East‐West Philosophers’ Conference”. Then, she reports the major themes and panel topics raised during the eleventh conference organized in Honolulu, May 25–31, 2016.

Hegel uses the term Einsicht (‘insight’) throughout several key subsections of Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit (notably in ‘Faith and Pure Insight’ and ‘The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition’). Nowhere else in his work does the term enjoy such a sustained treatment. Commentators generally accept Hegel’s use of the term in the Phenomenology as simply referring to the type of counter-religious reasoning found in the French Enlightenment. I show how Hegel derives the term, through the lens of (...) Kant’s essay, ‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ from the Pantheismusstreit, the philosophical debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi about knowledge of God. The Aufklärung provenance of Einsicht shows how a deep complicity between faith and reason, in the form of immediate knowing, leads beyond the Terror to a happier outcome in the Morality section. Finally, passing reference to Einsicht in the Vorbegriff of the Encyclopaedia Logic confirms its role in the ethical and political vocation of Hegel’s Science. (shrink)

While the idea that philosophy requires self-transformation is historically pervasive, it exerts considerable influence on the post-Kantians who first aim to systematize Kant’s idealism by grounding it on a first principle. In the 1790s, Fichte and Schelling offer competing accounts of the self-transformation that they regard as essential to positing a first principle. Their accounts raise two central questions. First, what makes this kind of self-transformation possible? Second, are there different possible expressions of philosophical self-transformation? In what follows, I will (...) articulate the Fichtean and Schellingian answers to these central questions. For Fichte, the one who summons me to posit a first principle makes possible my philosophical self-transformation, although the latter has an exclusively idealist expression in that I can only genuinely posit the I as first principle, which is to say that philosophical self-transformation depends on mutual recognition and vindicates precisely one philosophical system (Section 1). For Schelling, a brute act of will makes possible my philosophical self-transformation, although the latter has either an idealist or a realist expression in that I can genuinely posit either the I or the not-I as first principle, which is to say that philosophical self-transformation does not depend on mutual recognition and vindicates one of two possible philosophical systems (Section 2). Thus, whereas Fichtean self-transformation is recognitive and non-pluralistic, Schellingian self-transformation is pluralistic and non-recognitive. I conclude with a discussion of how Jacobi poses a challenge to Fichte’s and Schelling’s answers to the two central questions (Section 3). (shrink)

Abstract: This study explores some theoretical issues in scientific research such as, the nature of experimentation and problems of methodology in scientific practice as well as the question of truth, rationality, objectivity and utility of scientific discoveries. The paper discusses a number of theorizing that have emerged in response to the challenge raised by the above concerns. Epistemological models of science from critical rationalists, like Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and the neo-pragmatic methodological orientation of Arthur Fine’s Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA) to (...) Science, have been adopted as points of discussion on what science as an empirical discipline entail. The paper concludes that a rigorous epistemological discussion on the methodology of scientific inquiry is a desideratum for the progress of science. (shrink)

This is the second chapter of my book Transformation of the Self. It concerns Schleiermacher's understanding of the principle of individuation, in dialogue with Kant, Jacobi, Leibniz and Spinoza.

This is a rebuttal to the wrong notions of Sarah H Jacoby.

In the following thesis, we will claim that Kant’s concept of a thing-in-itself is both a metaphysical and a critical concept. Accordingly, the thing-in-itself must be understood as a real transcendental object that grounds phenomena. Thus, we maintain – contrary to F.H. Jacobi’s and G.E. Schulze’s harsh objections – that this assertion does not violate the structures of critical philosophy. Indeed, this particular claim is arrived at through analogical cognition, which does not transgress the boundaries of human knowledge: as a (...) matter of fact, analogical cognition allows us to point towards and assert the existence of something the nature of which may remain problematic. Thus, we believe that Kant’s metaphysical commitment with regard to the existence of the thing-in-itself as ground of phenomena can be fully justified within the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)

This article investigates the original meaning of dependent arising in the Buddha’s teaching, by focussing on the imasmi" sati formula. Modern scholars such as the Rhys Davidses, K.N. Jayatilleke and Paul Williams have interpreted it as a princi- ple of causation, comparable to a scientific conception of causation. I argue instead that this formula implies that the Buddha held that causation is nothing more than the correlation of causes and effects, and that it commits the Buddha to a Humean regularity (...) thesis about causation. I draw a distinction between the Buddhist and scientific concepts of causation, and then summarise an alternative approach made by more recent scholars such as Sue Hamilton, Noa Ronkin and Eviatar Shulman, who present dependent arising in terms of conditionality in the causal structure of subjective experience. I conclude by presenting the argument that the imasmi" sati formula does not express a principle of causation but is rather a formula for the method of discovering and presenting causation as conditionality in experience. (shrink)

Fichte assigns ‘intellectual intuition’ a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte’s doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the ‘spirit’ of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte’s redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads (...) only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte’s three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. (shrink)

In the Vocation of Man, Fichte makes the striking claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature in general and of death in particular. How can we make sense of this claim? I argue that the public lectures that compose the Vocation are a popular expression of Fichte’s pre-existing commitment to what I call immortalism, the view that life is the unconditioned condition of intelligibility. Casting the I as an absolutely self-active or living (...) power enables his philosophical account of both the intelligibility of objects and of what it means to die. This explains his characterization of the Wissenschaftslehre as a system in which ‘all is act, movement, and life’. In Sect. 1, I explain the context of Jacobi’s use of ‘caput mortuum’ as a term for the thing in itself. In Sects. 2 and 3, I reconstruct two immortalist arguments from Fichte’s Jena period. The first is that the I’s self-activity rules out the existence of the thing in itself and thereby vanquishes ‘death’s head’. The second is that, insofar as the I charges us with the moral perfection of nature, it is the final cause of our entire life, including its end. This is to say that the I puts our every moment into question, even our last. In Sect. 4, I use these immortalist arguments to interpret the striking claim from the Vocation. (shrink)

Abstract: This essay addresses three specific moments in the history of the role played by intuition in Kant's system. Part one develops Kant's attitude toward intuition in order to understand how ‘sensible intuition’ becomes the first step in his development of transcendental idealism and how this in turn requires him to reject the possibility of an ‘intellectual intuition’ for human cognition. Part two considers the role of Jacobi when it came to interpreting both Kant's epistemic achievement and what were taken (...) to be the outstanding problems of freedom's relation to nature; problems interpreted to be resolvable only via an appeal to ‘intellectual intuition’. Part three begins with Kant's subsequent return to the question of freedom and nature in his Critique of Judgment. With Goethe's contemporaneous Metamorphoses of Plants as a contrast case, it becomes clear that whereas Goethe can embrace the role of an intuitive understanding in his account of nature and within the logic of polarity in particular, Kant could never allow an intuition of nature that in his system would spell the very impossibility of freedom itself. (shrink)

A precursor to the hard problem of consciousness confronts nihilism. Like physicalism, nihilism collides with the first-personal fact of what perception and action are like. Unless this problem is solved, nature’s inclusion of conscious experience will remain, as Chalmers warns the physicalist, an “unanswered question” and, as Jacobi chides the nihilist, “completely inexplicable". One advantage of Kant’s Copernican turn is to dismiss the question that imposes this hard problem. We need not ask how nature is accompanied by the first-person standpoint (...) because “I think” is an apperceptive form of thinking that must be able to accompany any cognition of nature. Kant’s formal conception of apperception worries Fichte in his Nova Methodo lectures. This conception arguably cannot exhaust the ground of experience, for it does not show why we posit objects “at all". For Fichte, it is our agency that first opens a world of objects, viz., as subjects, means, ends, and obstacles. In what follows, I argue that, for Fichte, the I poses no hard problem because it collides exclusively with nihilistic views like Spinozism, which are refuted by a properly transcendental idealist conception of apperception, according to which the first-person standpoint is the absolute ground of our experience of nature. If transcendental idealism refutes nihilism, nature is no more explicable than that there is something it is like for me to perceive and act. In Section 1, I show why Kantian apperception is necessary for possible experience. In Section 2, I reconstruct Fichte’s argument that a modified conception of apperception refutes guises of nihilism, thereby solving the hard problem of consciousness. In Section 3, I suggest that transcendental idealism undermines Chalmers’ proposed solution to and Dennett’s dismissal of this problem. (shrink)

This chapter aims to examine parallels between two ancient Indian philosophical schools, Jaina (Jainism) of Mahāvīra and Ajñāna (Unending Agnosticism) of Sañjaya Belaṭṭhiputta. Jaina and Ajñāna traditions were a part of the Non-Vedic larger Śramaṇa movement of seventh to sixth-century BCE India, where Śramaṇa were monastics, who dwelled in forests and lived a retired life, focussing themselves in the search of discovering the knowledge of truth, reality and existence. Sañjaya and Mahāvīra were contemporaries and were a prominent and well-known Śramaṇa (...) of their time. The chapter is broadly divided into two parts, with two sections each. The first part aims to discuss Sañjaya’s ajñānavāda (epistemological method) and Mahāvīra’s doctrine of anekāntavāda (metaphysical pluralism) and saptabhanginaya (sevenfold predication). The second part aims to explore the logical relationship and similarities between ajñānavāda and anekāntavāda and its metaphysical consequences, and conclusively the major part of the paper will discuss the claim first made by the German Jaina scholar Hermann Jacobi, about the possible influence that Sañjaya’s ajñānavāda had on the establishment of Mahāvīra’s anekāntavāda. In brief, the chapter intends to present and discuss the contemporary scholarship claims on Sañjaya and his possible influence it had on the development of the Jaina thought. (shrink)

This paper explores the reception of Kant's understanding of consciousness by both Romantics and Idealists from 1785 to 1799, and traces its impact on the theory of religion. I first look at Kant's understanding of consciousness as developed in the first Critique, and then looks at how figures such as Fichte, Jacobi, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schleiermacher received this theory of consciousness and its implications for their understanding of religion.

Is quantum mechanics about ‘states’? Or is it basically another kind of probability theory? It is argued that the elementary formalism of quantum mechanics operates as a well-justified alternative to ‘classical’ instantiations of a probability calculus. Its providing a general framework for prediction accounts for its distinctive traits, which one should be careful not to mistake for reflections of any strange ontology. The suggestion is also made that quantum theory unwittingly emerged, in Schrödinger’s formulation, as a ‘lossy’ by-product of a (...) quantum-mechanical variant of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. As it turns out, the effectiveness of quantum theory qua predictive algorithm makes up for the computational impracticability of that master equation. (shrink)

In 1797, subsequent to Jacobi’s (1787) and Schulze’s (1792) objections against Kantian criticism, Fichte intends to “save” critical philosophy by evacuating the thing in itself of theoretical discourse. By doing this, Fichte sets out to develop a coherent – and definitive – version of critical philosophy, which amounts to a radicalised account of transcendental idealism. Yet, two years later (1799), Kant publicly dismisses Fichte’s project, refusing to characterise it as “critical.” What Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is missing, is precisely a foundation grounded (...) on a “real object”. As we shall see, it is the status of the thing in itself which is highly problematic. This paper intends to show that Kantian criticism can coherently claim, thanks to a specific use of philosophical analogy, that the thing in itself transcendentally grounds phenomena. (shrink)

This paper examines the problem of poor orientation of most Nigerian citizens, especially the rural dwellers, occasioned by the dearth and failure of modern media in rural Nigeria; a phenomenon that has led to a major setback in participatory governance and national development in a country. The objective of the paper is to investigate the causes of modern media failure in national orientation and development in Nigeria and to examine the need to adopt traditional African media as a viable alternative (...) in Nigeria’s national orientation and development programme especially at the grassroots. This paper assumes that African traditional communication media as effective tools have been ignored in the national orientation programmes despite their relevance to national development. The paper adopts an analytical research method to examine secondary sources of data on the constraints of modern media in rural Nigeria and the viability of African traditional media in Nigeria’s national orientation and development’s efforts. Findings reveal that most Nigerian citizens, especially rural dwellers, do not understand national orientation messages because they are broadcast in English rather than their respective languages and the broadcasts are made on modern media channels that exist in urban areas. Findings also reveal that that government’s lack of political will, high cost of setting up community media, absence of professional journalists and selfish interests of Nigerians are factors responsible for the non-existence of modern media channels in rural Nigeria. Findings also reveal that African traditional media is very compatible to the communication needs of rural Nigerians. The paper concludes that the National Orientation Agency (NOA) in Nigeria has had reduced effectiveness and therefore, recommends the use of African traditional communication media in addition to the use of modern media such as television, radio and print materials to accord Nigerians the necessary orientation that will commit the citizens towards the task of national development. (shrink)

Abstract (German) Dieses Buch faßt meine Forschungen zur Semiotik Giordano Brunos und zu deren Grundlagen in der Kosmologie und in der Gedächtnistheorie zusammen, wobei sowohl die Heterogenität als auch der Universalität des Denkers den Charakter dieses Buches geprägt haben. Es wird kein glattes Bild seiner Person oder seines Werkes angeboten, kein bejahender Jubel über eine epochale Leistung; wichtiger war mir die bis ins Detail gehende, manchmal mühselige Interpretation seiner Systementwürfe, wobei ich versucht habe, auch deren formales und technisches Niveau deutlich (...) zu machen. Nicht seine Weltanschauung soll dargestellt werden, sondern sein Versuch, eine Vielfalt von Detaillösungen in eine wohlproportionierte, wenn auch ins Unendliche reichende Wissensarchitektur zu integrieren. Als Startsignal mag folgende Frage dienen: Inwiefern ist Giordano Bruno Semiotiker? Der Philosoph Bruno wird von Jacobi als Beispiel spinozistischer Tendenzen wieder ins Gespräch gebracht; später wird er für die spekulative Naturphilosophie, die aus Kants Schatten heraustritt, z.B. für Schelling und Hegel, interessant, und schließlich wird er als Märtyrer der Freiheit von den Antiklerikalen im Risorgimento hochgehoben. Der Heroenkult um die „Kopernikanische Wende" weiß mit Bruno nichts anzufangen, er ist kein Naturwissenschaftler, wie man ihn sich im 20 . Jh . wünscht. Von Yates ( 1964 ) wird er als Hermetiker und Ahnherr der Rosenkreuzer entdeckt, und plötzlich soll er auch noch ein Semiotiker sein ? Die Etikette „Semiotiker" ist allerdings weniger riskant als jene früher an Bruno herangetragenen. Bruno ist Philosoph, in einem allgemeinen Sinn , insofern er alle wesentlichen Aspekte: metaphysische, natur philosophische, ethische, semiotische, poetologische zum Entwurf eines möglichst kohärenten Bildes vereint, und er ist ein Renaissance-Philosoph, d .h. das antike Erbe, besonders jenes in den orientalischen Tiefen der Kulturgeschichte (Ägypten und Chaldäer) ist sein Ausgangspunkt. Selbst den Entwurf des Copernicus versteht Bruno in erster Linie als eine Wiederentdeckung antiker Einsichten. Es gibt jedoch in Brunos Schaffen einen roten Faden: die Architektur unseres Wissens, das Gedächtnis der Kultur- und Wissensgemeinschaft und natürlich desjenigen, der wie Bruno dieses Wissen zu einer Synthese vereinigen will . Seine Philosophie versucht, wie jede große Philosophie, alles, was wir wissen und was wir daraus an weiterem impliziten Wissen erschließen können, in einer Einheit zu denken, und diese Einheit ist notwendigerweise nur als Zeichensystem (begrifflich, argumentativ, bildhaft, als imaginierte Welt) zu realisieren. -/- Abstract (English) This book summarizes my research on Giordano Bruno's semiotics and its foundations in cosmology and memory theory, whereby both the heterogeneity and the universality of the thinker have shaped the character of this book. No smooth picture of his person or his work is offered, no affirmative jubilation over an epochal achievement; What was more important to me was the sometimes laborious interpretation of his system designs, which went down to the last detail, and I also tried to make their formal and technical level clear. It is not his worldview that should be presented but his attempt to integrate various detailed solutions into a well-proportioned, albeit infinitely reaching, architecture of knowledge. The following question may serve as a starting signal: To what extent is Giordano Bruno a semiotician? Jacobi brings up the philosopher Bruno again as an example of Spinozist tendencies; later, he becomes important for the speculative natural philosophy emerging from Kant's shadow, e.g., for Schelling and Hegel. He is finally extolled as a martyr of freedom by the anticlericals in the Risorgimento. The hero cult around the "Copernican turn" does not know what to do with Bruno; he is not a natural scientist as one would wish in the 20th century. Yates (1964) discovered him as a hermetic, even an ancestor of the Rosicrucians. The etiquette "semiotic" is certainly less risky than the associations that Bruno used to have. Bruno is a philosopher, in a general sense, in that he combines all the essential aspects: metaphysical, natural philosophical, ethical, semiotic, poetological to project a picture that is as coherent as possible, and he is a Renaissance philosopher, i .e . the ancient heritage, especially that in the oriental depths of cultural history (Egypt and Chaldeans) is his starting point. Bruno sees even the draft of Copernicus primarily as a rediscovery of ancient insights. However, there is a common thread in Bruno's work: the architecture of our knowledge, the memory of the cultural and knowledge community and, of course, of those who, like Bruno, want to unite this knowledge into a synthesis. His philosophy, like every great philosophy, tries to think of everything that we know and what we can deduce from it as further implicit knowledge as a unit, and this unit is necessarily only available as a system of signs (conceptual, argumentative, pictorial, as an imagined world). to realize. 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This reviewer had earlier had the misfortune of reviewing Sarah Jacoby's puerile book on Sera Khandro for Prabuddha Bharata. Jacoby had nearly made this reviewer puke. Same is the case with Bihani Sarkar's monograph. On the basis of this monograph she might win academic brownie points but it is a study which should have been dumped. The existence of the monograph is not only an insult to Hinduism and the Sanatana Dharma; it is technically wrong in its structuralist, (...) iterative hermeneutics which derives from the likes of Mircea Eliade. The reviewer knows that Sarkar will one day be a biggie in the first world peddling Hinduism ; she should have confined herself only to Sanskrit literature and not try to pass herself as a (faux) Hindu theologian. This book does no credit to the publisher. (shrink)

Spinoza ’s letter of June 2, 1674 to his friend Jarig Jelles addresses several distinct and important issues in Spinoza ’s philosophy. It explains briefly the core of Spinoza ’s disagreement with Hobbes’ political theory, develops his innovative understanding of numbers, and elaborates on Spinoza ’s refusal to describe God as one or single. Then, toward the end of the letter, Spinoza writes: With regard to the statement that figure is a negation and not anything positive, it is obvious that (...) matter in its totality, considered without limitation [indefinitè consideratam], can have no figure, and that figure applies only to finite and determinate bodies. For he who says that he apprehends a figure, thereby means to indicate simply this, that he apprehends a determinate thing and the manner of its determination. This determination therefore does not pertain to the thing in regard to its being [esse]; on the contrary, it is its non-being [non-esse]. So since figure is nothing but determination, and determination is negation [Quia ergo figura non aliud, quam determinatio, et determinatio negatio est], figure can be nothing other than negation, as has been said. Arguably, what is most notable about this letter is the fate of a single subordinate clause which appears in the last sentence of this passage: et determinatio negatio est. That clause was to be adopted by Hegel and transformed into the slogan of his own dialectical method: Omnis determinatio est negatio. Of further significance is the fact that, while Hegel does credit Spinoza with the discovery of this most fundamental insight, he believes Spinoza failed to appreciate the importance of his discovery. The issue of negation and the possibility of self-negation stand at the very center of the philosophical dialogue between the systems of Spinoza and Hegel, and in this paper I will attempt to provide a preliminary explication of this foundational debate between the two systems. In the first part of the paper I will argue that the “determination is negation” formula has been understood in at least three distinct senses among the German Idealists, and as a result many of the participants in the discussion of this formula were actually talking past each other. The clarification of the three distinct senses of the formula will lead, in the second part of the paper, to a more precise evaluation of the fundamental debate between Spinoza and Hegel regarding the possibility of self-negation. In this part I will evaluate the validity of each interpretation of the determination formula, and motivate the positions of the various participants in the debate. (shrink)

This was a draft written in a hurry for a submission somewhere. Like all submissions done in a hurry this is not the perfected work. This paper shows how modernist Yogic praxes are totalitarian in the sense in which Hannah Arendt discusses totalitarianism. Further it attacks structuralist critiques of Yoga and comments on the state of Hindu and even, Buddhist studies today. One has to be cautious in reading this paper since the author ranges through many references which have not (...) been brought out fully. (shrink)

The impermanence of human affairs is a major theme in Spinoza’s discussions of political histories, and from our present-day perspective it is both intriguing and ironic to see how this very theme has played out in the evolving fate of Spinoza’s association with atheism. While Spinoza’s contemporaries charged him with atheism in order to impugn his philosophy (and sometimes his character), in our times many lay readers and some scholars portray Spinoza as an atheist in order to commemorate his role (...) as a founder of modern secularism. In this paper, I will argue that Spinoza deserves neither vilification nor praise for being an atheist, for the simple reason that he was not one (unless one employs the term ‘atheism’ in a very peculiar sense). I have chosen the current topic as my contribution to a volume focused on the TTP, the Ethics, and their interrelations because it is precisely these two books which brought about the common reactionary accusation of atheism by Spinoza’s contemporaries. Addressing Spinoza’s 1663 book, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, Bayle writes: “Spinoza appears as orthodox in that book about the nature of God.” As we shall shortly see, Descartes too was accused of atheism by some of his contemporaries (though not so by Bayle). The latter designates his target quite explicitly: “[Spinoza’s] Tractatus Theologico Politicus, printed in Amsterdam, in the year 1670, is a pernicious and execrable book which contains all the seeds of the Atheism he plainly discovered in his Opera Posthuma.” François Lamy, in his 1696 Le nouvel athéisme renversé, also focused on the Ethics and the TTP in his attack on Spinoza’s atheism. Bayle’s reference to the Opera Posthuma is ostensibly targeting the Ethics at least primarily, if not uniquely. Even the most suspicious and distrustful mind would have to labor hard in order to find atheism in the Hebrew Grammar, or even in the Tractatus Politicus where Spinoza argues that it is not within the power, and hence right, of the commonwealth to induce people to adopt utterly absurd beliefs, such as “that the whole is greater than its part or that God does not exist.” The TTP and the Ethics are the works where Spinoza launches his merciless attack on anthropocentric thinking and anthropomorphic religion. Spinoza’s panentheism (“quicquid est, in Deo est”) constitutes the metaphysical foundation of the Ethics, and it is repeatedly and clearly alluded to in the TTP. Since it is these two elements – (1) Spinoza’s open assertions of panentheism and (2) his critique of andromorphic conceptions of God – which are the historical grounds for the atheism charge, it seems natural that the merit of this charge should be decided primarily by examination of these two foundational works. I will proceed in the following manner. In the first part of the paper, we will make our first acquaintance with the imputation of atheism by Spinoza’s contemporaries and Spinoza’s response to the charge (or lack thereof). In the second part, I discuss three broad strategies, or hermeneutic avenues, that have been pursued to impute atheism to Spinoza. The first of the three was dominant in Spinoza’s time, while the latter two were employed more recently. These strategies are not mutually exclusive and we can find occasionally various combinations of different shades of these three strategies. In this part, I will also raise some preliminary questions about the cogency of the hermeneutics employed by each strategy. In the third and fourth parts of the paper, I will discuss a small selection of key texts from the Ethics and the TTP, respectively, and argue that the atheist readings fail to make sense of these key passages (unless one adopts an extreme hermeneutics of suspicion which could allegedly find any view harbored in any text). Let me stress that this selection of passages is far from comprehensive, and that dozens of other passages can be adduced to establish the very same point. I hope by the end of the fourth part to convince the reader of the deep problems besetting the atheist readings. In the fifth and last part, I show that both panentheism and the critique of anthropomorphic religion and anthropomorphic conceptions of providence were quite common within rabbinic discourse. Thus, I will argue that if we are not in the business of announcing that both Maimonides and the Kabbalists were atheists, we should avoid the same imputation to Spinoza. Underlying my argument in this final part is the claim that at least some perceptions of Spinoza as an atheist are instances of what could be termed conceptual colonialism, i.e. the enforcement of the categories of a hegemonic culture (in this case, Western Christianity ) on minority cultures (in the current case, rabbinic Judaism). To be clear, this attitude need not be motivated by ill intentions or racism. It is always tempting and easy to explain the unfamiliar through the familiar, but conceptual stagnation and insistence on imposing the categories of the familiar on other cultures may quickly lead to deep distortion and blindness, despite one’s best intentions. Unless one is exceedingly careful to avoid the – completely natural – temptation to impose one’s own categories on a foreign culture (and to look for the coin only under the street light), one is likely to end up with distorted conceptions of the relevant alien culture, despite one’s best intentions. (shrink)

This is the penultimate version of the entry for the forthcoming Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon (pp. 404–6).

This chapter deals with German philosophy from Leibniz to Fichte, which formed an important part of Kierkegaard's intellectual background. In this period German philosophy came to dominate Danish philosophy. However, Kierkegaard's attitude toward his German predecessors is generally ambivalent, involving both critique and admiration. Although Kierkegaard was fluent in German and very familiar with classic German philosophy, his use of this philosophy is somewhat eclectic and assimilated to his own ends. Kierkegaard uses his German predecessors to develop a distinction between (...) the spheres of existence and thought and to reinforce what he took to be genuine Christian faith. (shrink)

In this paper, I study one aspect of the philosophical encounter between Spinoza and Hegel: the question of the reality of time. The precise reconstruction of the debate will require a close examination of Spinoza's concept of tempus (time) and duratio (duration), and Hegel's understanding of these notions. Following a presentation of Hegel's perception of Spinoza as a modern Eleatic, who denies the reality of time, change and plurality, I turn, in the second part, to look closely at Spinoza's text (...) and show that Hegel was wrong in reading Spinoza as denying the reality of duration and change. Ironically, Hegel's misreading of Spinoza as denying the reality of duration and change has been compensated for by a reading of Hegel as denying the reality of time by one of Hegel's most prominent followers, John Ellis McTaggart. I discuss McTaggart's reading of Hegel's Logic in the final part of the paper. (shrink)

This is the third chapter of my book Transformation of the self, which covers Schleiermacher's reception of Kant on the problem of personal identity.

El objetivo de este artículo es realizar una historización del sistema sanitario de Neuquén, concretamente atendiendo a los programas de salud aplicados en esta provincia desde su surgimiento hasta el año 2020. En este marco, en primer lugar, me enfocaré en los lineamientos políticos que definieron las bases ideológicas de las políticas públicas llevadas a cabo en la atención sanitaria neuquina, y, en segundo lugar, examinaré las variables estadísticas publicadas por el sistema de salud provincial referidas a las condiciones materiales (...) de atención médica de la población en general, y de las mujeres indígenas mapuce en particular. Para efectuar dicho abordaje, analizaré específicamente la localidad de Las Coloradas. -/- . (shrink)