Volume 59, Issue 4 -

Philosophers and laymen alike have traditionally assumed that whether you can reason well, make valid inferences, avoid logical mistakes and so forth is entirely a matter of how well the cogs in your head are fashioned and oiled. Partner to this is the assumption that careful reflection is always the method by which we discover whether an inference or reasoning process is correct. Against this, I argue that good reasoning needs constant empirical support; conceptual clarity is not an a priori , but a deeply empirical matter. Moreover, clear thinking is possible only as embedded in a cooperative external world.

There is hardly an analogy in the history of philosophy that has been referred to as often as the one that Kant himself draws in the second preface of the Critique of pure reason between Copernicus′ revolution in astronomy and his own revolution in metaphysics; and yet there is to the present day no detailed analysis thereof. The analogy is much more complex than meets the superficial eye: In the first passage (B XVI f.), Kant does not draw a simple comparison to Copernicus′ famous heliocentric hypothesis (if he refers to it at all). In the second passage (B XXII, Anm.), Kant connects the reference to Copernicus with a reference to Newton by drawing an extremely rich analogy between the law of gravitation and the moral law of freedom. The revolution in metaphysics is related to the revolution in ethics; that famous analogy of Kant really is a Copernican-Newtonian analogy.

The question in the background of this article is what kind of epistemology can emerge on the basis of the philosophy of life. To answer this question, the theories of Georg Misch (1878–1965) and Josef König (1893–1974) have been analysed. Both authors differentiate between the analytic discourse of theoretical (scientific) approaches to the world and the synthetic discourse of non-theoretical (non-scien¬tific) objectifications of life which create a human semantic environment. For Misch, the former is constituted with “discursive” and the later with “evocative” utterances. For König as developed in his work “Sein und Denken”, “determining” and “modifying” predicates oppose each other as cardinally different cognitive and epistemological entities. The article focuses on König′s analysis of the genesis and logics of “determining” and “modifying” predication following the strategy of his book. In conclusion some controversies between Misch′s and König′s conceptions of a language constitution of the world are represented and discussed.

After tracing some of the different interpretations of the Körper/Leib distinction in German phenomenology and philosophical anthropology, this paper compares these philosophical accounts of embodiment to the pragmatist approach of somaesthetics and its core concept of soma. Helmuth Plessner′s theory of embodiment gets particular attention because of its similarities to somaesthetics in terms of their shared emphasis on 1) the value of functional phasing between immanent spontaneity of simply living one′s body and more critically distanced somatic reflection, 2) the way somatic consciousness is essentially shaped by the roles one plays in a social world, and thus 3) on the variety of culturally styled bodies and forms of consciousness. The paper concludes with a discussion of the soma′s ontological status.

This article scrutinizes the concepts of the body from Descartes through to Hermann Schmitz. The definition the author himself gives is an existential one in the sense of Kierkegaard: To be a body is the task of performing corporeal existence as a commitment.

As a rule, mental illnesses are connected with increased self-observation, a narrowing of attention to one′s own person, and with the backward turn of thinking to what has already been done or has happened. These phenomena can be summed up in the concept of hyperreflexivity. In this paper, this concept is interpreted against the background of Plessner′s distinction between the lived and the objective body (Leib and Körper) as implying always already a component of self-alienation. This will be illustrated in a number of psychopathological conditions such as insomnia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypochondria and schizophrenia.

The conceptual distinction between what it is to be a body (Leibsein) and what it is to have a body (Körperhaben) was first construed by the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner. This article deals with two common problems within the German discourse on the theme. The first derives from a misunderstanding that the 3 categories body, living body , and person signify distinct entities, whilst what Plessner is actually referring to is the various modes in which a person′s life is led. Neither the modes of body nor living body has primacy per se, and the person lives by doubling itself into a public and private person situated in a shared world (Mitwelt) outside of centric correlations ( ex-centric ). The second point of contention relates to Plessner′s methodology in developing the distinction between Leib and Körper. He believed in combining a plurality of methods in accordance with the phenomenon, its understanding, and the stances or positionings taken up by living persons. The indeterminacy and unfathomability of persons in the leading of their lives emerges from the variety of their perspectives and changing historical aspects. It is only the invalid extension of these perspectives and aspects to the whole of the future that leads to false promises – to the animal ideologicum who is unable to endure its questionability. The homo absconditus , by contrast, lives in scepticism of positive absolutisms. The questionability of his form of life keeps him open.

The living body (Leib) in the phenomenological tradition tends to be thought of as the living body of the acting and perceiving subject, which is then analyzed by way of subjective self-reflection. Plessner′s concept of the living body differs in two ways from this view predominant in phenomenology. First, Plessner does not approach the living body in terms of a reflection of subjective experience, but rather he seeks to understand from the outside the fact that there is an ego that experiences his or her living body. Second, Plessner′s theory of excentric positionality regards the structure of bodily experience from the perspective of the Shared world (Mitwelt), i.e., the relationship to the other. Thus the starting point of his analysis of experience is not the living body, but the living body as shaped by the Shared world (Mitwelt). Plessner′s theoretical program can serve as a foundation for integrating social theory and the analysis of the history of the living body, as developed in Hermann Schmitz′ work on the history of bodily experience as well as in Barbara Duden and Thomas Laqueur′s work on the history of the body.

The disease status of mental disorders has been hotly debated and is still highly relevant for ethical and economic considerations regarding the human rights of psychiatric patients. Here we critically discuss traditional evolutionary and degenerative concepts of mental disorders and propose instead the differentiation between independent dimensions of mental health resources on the one hand and mental disorders on the other. We suggest that impairments of a minimal set of mental functions (e. g. concentration and memory) can serve as indicators of exogenous and endogenous psychoses, while other mental disorders (e. g. neuroses and personality disorders) cannot be diagnosed without a reference to setting and culture (Lebenswelt).

Zusammenfassung Guido Kreis: Cassirer und die Formen des Geistes. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010, 504 S.

Zusammenfassung Isabell Lorey: Figuren des Immunen. Elemente einer politischen Theorie. Verlag diaphanes, Zürich 2011, 343 S.

Zusammenfassung Christian Barth: Objectivity and the Language-Dependence of Thought. A Transcendental Defence of Universal Lingualism. Routledge, New York 2011, 258 S.

Zusammenfassung Johannes Rohbeck: Aufklärung und Geschichte. Über eine praktische Geschichtsphilosophie der Zukunft, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2010, 247 S.

Zusammenfassung Giorgio Agamben: Signatura rerum. Zur Methode. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2009, 146 S. Giorgio Agamben: Nacktheiten. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2010, 200 S. Giorgio Agamben: Herrschaft und Herrlichkeit. Zur theologischen Genealogie von Ökonomie und Regierung (Homo sacer, II.2). Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010, 368 S. Giorgio Agamben: Das Sakrament der Sprache. Eine Archäologie des Eides (Homo sacer, II .3), Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010, 98 S.