Volume 91, Issue 1

In an earlier article I formalized Anselm of Canterbury's so-called ontological argument, and showed how the argument breaks down over the ambiguity of the two expressions ‘esse in intellectu’ and ‘esse in re’. In the present article, I improve on my earlier formalization, and focus on what proves to be the crucial point of the argument: the phrase ‘quod maius est’.

Alexander Nehamas and others have recently attempted to revive a conception of ethics that is centered on self-formation and the values of aesthetic coherence. This conception faces several difficulties, including the lack of fit between models of aesthetic coherence in literary works and individual lives and an absence of determinate content. The argument of this paper is that both of these defects are absent from the work of one of the earliest and most vocal exponents of this conception of ethics, Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), better known by his pseudonym “Novalis”. The paper begins by reviewing the growing consensus among scholars that Novalis makes a serious contribution to philosophy, and by pointing out the lack of attention paid to his moral philosophy. His conception of moral life as an infinite process of approximation the archetypal unity of the divine is then explicated in detail. Particular attention is paid to the manner in which his model of moral life and conception of aesthetic coherence avoids some of the difficulties faced by more recent theorists.

Bernard Bolzano repeatedly tried to provide an analysis of the concept of time. This paper develops a detailed reconstruction of Bolzano's analysis. Thereby it clarifies the logical form of the analysis and thus discovers its principal problem:While the analysis may well incorporate an important insight on our conception of time, it cannot succeed as an analysis .

“To him who looks at the world rationally, the world looks rational in return. The relation is mutual.” This emblematic sentence illustrates Hegel's philosophy of history as a hermeneutics of history which, opposed to the apriorism explicitly rejected, searches for its “empirical” verification in trying to “accurately apprehend” history. The much-celebrated “end of history” is not so much an empirical assertion about historical reality as a methodological requirement for an interpretative strategy founded upon the logical category of “true” or “genuine infinity”.