Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics
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Grenzen der nachmetaphysischen Moralkonzeptionen
Get PDFA review on Herta Nagl-Docekal\u27s book Innere Freiheit. Grenzen der nachmetaphysischen Moralkonzeptionen. (Sonderband der Deutschen Zeitschrift für Philosophie 36). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014, 237 pp
If phrónêsis does not develop and define virtue as its own deliberative goal - what does?
Get PDFThe article discusses relationships and contexts for "reason", "knowledge", and virtue in Aristotle, based on and elaborating some results from Eikeland (2008). It positions Eikeland (2008) in relation to Moss (2011, 2012, 2014) but with a side view to Cammick (2013), Kristjansson (2014), and Taylor (2016). These all seem to disagree among themselves but still agree partly in different ways with Eikeland. The text focuses on two questions: 1) the role or tasks of "reason", "knowledge", and "virtue" respectively in setting the end or goal for ethical deliberation, and more generally, 2) the role of dialogue or dialectics in Aristotle\u27s philosophy, including its role concerning question one. The author argues that phrónêsis needs to be interpreted in the context of the totality of Aristotle\u27s philosophy, and explains how this totality is fundamentally dialectical
Humans, Animals, and Aristotle. Aristotelian Traces in the Current Critique of Moral Individualism
Get PDFThe concept of moral individualism is part of the foundational structure of most prominent modern moral philosophies. It rests on the assumption that moral obligations towards a respective individual are constituted solely by her or his capacities. Hence, these obligations are independent of any ἔθος (ethos), of any shared ethical sense and social significations. The moral agent and the individual with moral status (who is the target of a respective action) are construed as subjects outside of any social relation or lifeworld significations. This assumption has been contested in the last decades by diverse authors with very different approaches to moral philosophy. In the last years, an increasing number of philosophers like Cora Diamond and Alice Crary (with a Wittgensteinian background), but also phenomenologists like Paul Ricœur, Klaus Held, and Bernhard Waldenfels question the presupposition that individual capacities are the agent-neutral and context-neutral ground of moral considerations. This critique of moral individualism in different contemporary discourses shows a striking similarity between Wittgensteinian and phenomenological philosophers as their critical inquiry of prominent theories like the ones by Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Peter Singer or Tom Regan is derived from mostly implicitly efficacious Aristotelian theorems. Telling examples are the ἔθος (ethos) as pre-given normative infrastructure, the ἕξις (hexis) as individual internalization of the ethos, the φρόνησις (phronesis) described as a specific practical know-how in contrast to scientific knowledge, and not at least the definition of the human being as ζῷον πολιτικόν (zoon politikon). However, the Aristotelian sources of this movement have not yet been scrutinized systematically. This paper aims, first, to reveal the significance of these sources to make them visible and, second, to contribute to the notion of the topicality of Aristotelian philosophy in current debates on ethics
Phänomenologie als Antwort und Verantwortung. Von Husserl bis Derrida
Get PDFResponsibility was always a key theme of Husserl and post-husserlian Phenomenology. This theme is related to Husserl\u27s effort to give an answer, i.e. to offer a solution to the crisis of philosophy and the sciences. The article reconstructs the genesis and the successive development of the concept of responsibility in Husserl\u27s work and its reinterpretation in the post-husserlian phenomenologies, especially those of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jan Patočka, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida
The Influence of Herodotus on the Practical Philosophy of Aristotle
Get PDFThe approach of this paper is a retrospective one. It is an attempt to show that many important ideas of Herodotus, a great ancestor of Aristotle, have influenced his practical philosophy. The paper focuses specially on several topics from the Histories of Herodotus, which have found a resonance in the Nicomachean ethics and in the Politics of Aristotle. The main ones in respect of the ethical theory are: the different forms of justice and the just as for example the super-human justice, the just in the family relations, the judicial just and the just in the polis or the larger human community. Book Epsilon of the Nicomachean Ethics is indebted to Herodotus in several points. In respect of Aristotles\u27 political theory, there are two topics in the History of Herodotus which deserve a special interest: firstly, the conversation of the three noble Persians, who discuss the six basic types of political order and organization of power-and-submission in a state or city-state (in book ІІІ, 80-82); this becomes a paradigm for the next typologies of Plato (in the Republic and the Statesman) and Aristotle (in the Politics); secondly, the importance of personal freedom, the equity of the speaking (discussing?) men on the agora, and the supremacy of law for the well-being of any community and its peaceful future. The legacy of Herodotus is obvious in many anthropological and ethical concepts of Aristotle, especially in his most read and quoted ethical writing and in his Politic
The Soul, the Virtues, and the Human Good: Comments on Aristotle\u27s Moral Psychology
Get PDFIn modern moral philosophy, virtue ethics has developed into one of the major approaches to ethical inquiry. As it seems, however, it is faced with a kind of perplexity similar to the one that Elisabeth Anscombe has described in Modern moral philosophy with regard to ethics in general. For if we assume that Anscombe is right in claiming that virtue ethics ought to be grounded in a sound philosophy of psychology, modern virtue ethics seems to be baseless since it lacks or even avoids reflections on the human soul. To overcome this difficulty, the paper explores the conceptual connections between virtue and soul in Aristotle\u27s ethics. It claims that the human soul is the principle of virtue since reflections on the soul help us to define the nature of virtue, to understand the different kinds of virtues, and to answer the question why human beings need the virtues at all.
Paul Ricœurs Suche nach einer Neubegründung der Menschenrechte und der Würde durch die Fähigkeiten und die Anwendung der phronèsis
Get PDFPaul Ricoeur\u27s Search for a New Foundation of Human Rights and Dignity by Means of the Capabilities and his Application of phronesisThe aim of the following article is to reconstruct Paul Ricoeur\u27s concepts of human rights and human dignity by exploring some little-known texts, and to exemplify how these concepts are connected to a specific philosophical conception of human being, which is grounded in a Dialectics between transcendence and incarnation, freedom and dependence, identity and difference, capability and fallibility (fragility). In doing so, I will argue that Ricoeur interprets human dignity, which he has never explicitly defined, through the prism of human capabilities, especially of the capability of being responsible. This interpretation allows him to take a differentiated position in the current bioethical debates on the rights of "potential persons" (Embrio) and to illustrate how the Aristotelian phronèsis can be used in (bio)ethical cases where decisions are difficult to take
Verantwortung für die Fraglichkeit des Menschen? Zum Status der Philosophischen Anthropologie
Get PDFResponsibility means not just to give the right response to a question. It should not necessarily succeed to ask and respond about acts, and to submit them to some discursive rules. In fact, responsibility is related to an indefinite questioning: How could some question-answer-rules, which consequences exceed a situation, be adequately applied to this situation? To give an answer to this questionability, it would be necessary to move in a self-relating language as well as in a distancing intuition. Thus, the author argues that it would be irresponsible if the philosophic-anthropological question about the human being could be answered by the application of some discursive rules.
Back to the Sources of Value Theory and Practical Philosophy
Get PDFEditorial, introducing the issue on Aristotle, 2016/2
Sartres und Beauvoirs Antinaturalismus als Kritik am Geschlechterverhältnis in der Moderne
Get PDFSartre\u27s and Beauvoir\u27s Antinaturalism as Critique of the Concepts of Gender Relations in ModernitySartre\u27s and Beauvoir\u27s antinaturalism can be seen as the rejection of the attribution of some particu-lar "nature" to specific social groups in order to deny essential aspects of their human being or even of their humanity as such. Since the existential approach starts from the lived experience and includes praxis as a crucial factor of becoming oneself, it makes possible to show some phenomena of human being and human relations that remains invisible on the abstract philosophical level. One of these central phenomena is gender, respectively gender relations, and the interconnected mecha-nisms of oppression and social exclusion. The aim of the article is to reconstruct Sartre\u27s and Beauvoir\u27s antinaturalist conceptions and to compare it in order to articulate their consequences for the gender problematic.Sartre\u27s and Beauvoir\u27s Antinaturalism as Critique of the Concepts of Gender Relations in ModernitySartre\u27s and Beauvoir\u27s antinaturalism can be seen as the rejection of the attribution of some particu-lar "nature" to specific social groups in order to deny essential aspects of their human being or even of their humanity as such. Since the existential approach starts from the lived experience and includes praxis as a crucial factor of becoming oneself, it makes possible to show some phenomena of human being and human relations that remains invisible on the abstract philosophical level. One of these central phenomena is gender, respectively gender relations, and the interconnected mecha-nisms of oppression and social exclusion. The aim of the article is to reconstruct Sartre\u27s and Beauvoir\u27s antinaturalist conceptions and to compare it in order to articulate their consequences for the gender problematic