Book chapter
Vermögen
This encyclopedia entry analyses the notion of a faculty with a special emphasis on the conceptual history of faculties of the soul between Aristotle and Ryle.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason aims to determine boundaries of reason. Reason is a
faculty of the soul. But Kant does not deal explicitly with the question what a faculty of the soul itself may be. The dissertation construes Kant’s implicit notion of a mental faculty in relation to psychological debates in 17th and 18th century Germany. It can be shown that Kant agreed with Christian August Crusius in that faculties are real properties, an assumption that was denied by Christian Wolff. This poses a problem which is fundamental for understanding Kant’s project: How can we have knowledge of mental faculties at all? If knowledge of faculties was empirical for Kant, it would belong to psychology rather than to epistemology which, according to Kant, must not rely on empirical facts. In order to find out whether there can be knowledge a priori about mental faculties, the book provides a close reading of relevant passages from published texts and other sources (lecture transcripts, Reflexionen). The final result is negative: Kant has no conclusive argument for the real existence of mental faculties. Nevertheless, an awareness of Kant’s unwritten “metaphysics of the mental” is essential for understanding implicit premisses of Kant’s thought.
The point of the article is the idea that an activity, an image and a word are the means to spiritualize a body and to externalize spirit. Each o them is a heterogeneous entity: a kind of metaform where both internal and external forms appear. E.g. an activity being considered as an external form includes an image and a word. The same structure is peculiar to a word and an image. Because of such a structure an activity, an image and a word are as much corporeal as they are spiritual. A play of their external and internal forms is extended to interrelationship of the body, the soul and the spirit. It is argued that such a model of reasoning may be of use for psychotherapeutic practices.
As a whole, Augustine and the Disciplines reads well, and it is wise to read first the Vessey introduction and then read it again when one is finished with the essays. His vision of the continuity among the essays helps the reader to 're-imagine' the conference itself and engage in the various essays as a common project aimed at solving some difficult - but important - questions in Augustinian scholorship today.
This contribution to a volume on the“ultimate why-question” discusses ambiguities in Leibniz’s formulation of the question, “[. . . ] pourquoi il y a plus tôt quelque chose que rien”. This formulation poses two problems: Leibniz does not explain how to understand the concepts of “something” and “nothing”. And it is not clear, whether “something” and “nothing” are contradictory opposites, so that there is either nothing or something, or whether both concepts denote principles which are effective in the world at the same time. My analysis rests on the hypothesis that the relevant context for Leibniz’s question is the theology of creation.
Hence, the paper compares eight different approaches to “creation from nothing” (Thomists, Scotists, Taurellus, Lubinus, Timpler, Keckermann, Kircher, Knorr von Rosenroth, van Helmont). Candidates for the nihil the world was created from include absolute non-being, thoughts in God’s mind, unformed matter, imaginary space, or a self-contraction of the Divine spirit. These different approaches can be translated into different versions of the “ultimate why-question”. The paper concludes that Leibniz’s formulation contains a comparison between two Divine acts of creation, because not only “something”, but “nothing” as well owes its subsistence to the Divine will. This rises substantial questions: either God created first an imperfect entity in order to create the world as a whole, or Leibniz subscribes to an emanative understanding of creation that either levels the difference between creation and (natural) generation or is based on misunderstanding God as a material entity.
It turns out, however, that in spite of one basic difference there runs between these two systems a deep and striking parallelism. This parallelism is so close indeed that it makes possible the construction of a vocabulary which would transform characteristic propositions of Wittgenstein's ontology into Aristotelian ones, and conversely. To show in some detail the workings of that transformation will be the subject of this paper.
In this article we review and discuss different explanations of the university tenure presented in the literature. For our analysis both the probation period and the lifelong employment guarantees are important. We analyze different types of models: for the first type of models the information structure is important, for the second type of models the scarcity of job vacancies explains the tenure phenomena.
The description of the elenctic method in the Sophist (230a–e) is often believed to be merely retrospective. However, some parallels with Aristotle’s Sophistical refutations suggest that the dialogue as a whole has a clear elenctic dimension. Having faced an apparent refutation (falsehood paradox), the interlocutors find themselves in an impasse. According to Aristotle, to solve such aporiai one must eliminate ambiguity and homonymy by making distinctions, i.e. recur to the diairesis. The same tactics is applied by the Stranger and Theaetetus.
In the article the analysis of the genesis and existence of the term esoterics is given: from antiquity through the Middle Ages and New time to to the present. Variants of its use and terms substitutes (occultism, esotericism) are considered. The basic modern academic concepts of esoterics and research prospects of esotericism as phenomenon within the limits of religious studies are described.