Volume 11, Issue 1

The aim of this paper is to investigate, if there is a principal disagreement between Husserl's early concept of expression and his later discussions on gestures. In the early work Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Husserl quite bluntly excludes gestures from the category of meaningful expressions; thirty years later (1928), in the second volume of Ideas , he argues to the contrary that gestures are meaningful and expressive in the very same way as linguistic units, words and sentences. The question of this paper is: What happened in Husserl's thinking in the two decades between Investigations and the last versions of Ideas II ? I argue that the disagreement between Husserl's early statement and his later discussion on gestural expressions is due to a refinement in his account of embodiment. I claim that Husserl did not abandon his concept of expression, but dismissed his early analysis of embodiment as simplistic and as motivated by a certain preconception about the relationship between nature and spirit. This change became possible for him as he developed conceptual and methodic tools for distinguishing between different meanings of the body: the physical thing or the mere material body, the perceived body, and the sensuous body. The difference between the body as a physical thing and the body as a sensuous-spiritual unit proves to be crucial to the understanding of gestural expressions.

Im Denken von Albert Camus spielen moralische und ethische Überlegungen eine entscheidende Rolle, da von einer gelingenden Humanität der Wert und der Sinn des gesamten Lebens abhängen. Die Handlungsethik Camus' umgreift den individuellen ebenso wie den gesellschaftlichen Bereich, indem sie auf allen Stufen des Menschseins ihre Bedeutung entfaltet – vom Zustand der Natürlichkeit über den der Absurdität bis hin zur Revolte. Unter Zuhilfenahme des Modells dreier Bewußtseinsstufen sollen der Zusammenhang von Individuum und Gesellschaft bei Camus einerseits sowie seine teleologische Maßethik andererseits analysiert werden. In Camus' thought moral and ethical reflections are of great importance as they are the necessary conditions for giving the life worth and sense by the means of a successful humanity. Camus' ethics of acting include the individual as well as the whole society, because no stage of human life could work without them; the corresponding rules are valid for the state of naturalness, the state of absurdity, and also the state of revolt. By using the model of three levels of consciousness the correlation between individual and society will be analyzed to understand Camus' ethics of measure.

It is argued that natural kind terms are much closer to indexicals than is commonly realised. I start by examining Putnam's claim that natural kind terms might be indexical or ‘contain an indexical component’. This is a suggestion Putnam eventually dismisses, and it tends to be summarily dismissed by others. It is argued that such dismissals are based on reasoning that is clearly fallacious, and that a theory that treats natural kind terms as indexical can survive all these attacks. This view would, however, have to find an analogue to the public ‘linguistic meaning’ of indexicals. The subjective ‘concept’, or mental representation associated with the term by a speaker, will not do. I argue that there is a public ‘linguistic meaning’ associated with natural kind terms and that this linguistic meaning ultimately renders natural kind terms indexical in a deep sense.

My idea is to (i) sketch the basic assumption upon which rests or seems to rest Plato's theory of how to construct the ideal city-state before (ii) letting him put forth arguments against the possibility of constructing such a state on the basis of purely theoretical presuppositions, and (iii) then questioning what seems to have been his basic premisses. My aim is to show that there is ample evidence in Plato's text that he realizes that the problem of how to translate theory into practice cannot be solved theoretically, i.e. the project of constructing the empirically ideal city-state cannot be implemented.

Can human subjects be constructed and yet ethical? If it is language that speaks, rather than the author, how can we claim authorship over our utterances and actions? In this article, I struggle with these questions and try to develop a view of the ethical subject between an essentialist position that pictures the subject as unitary, and a postmodern position depicting the subject as fragmented. On this middle ground, I argue that a viable view of the ethical subject presents it as fundamentally an accountable reason giver, but I also point to some important limitations concerning accountability. Drawing in particular on the recent works of Sabina Lovibond and Judith Butler, I explore the resources for thinking of the subject within what has been called the practical reason approach to ethics, arguing that a subject should be thought of as existing in a normative space – a ‘space of reasons’.

This article examines the accommodation of diversity on the premises of value pluralism. It focuses on a claim according to which value pluralism entails the accommodation of maximal diversity. The article argues that a principle of maximal diversity is problematic, and that it should be abandoned as the central guideline for value pluralist diversity accommodation. Nevertheless, the article suggests that the characteristics of value pluralism point towards a capacious political society the primary aim of which is to secure the co-existence of consensual ways of life.