Judaism and Christianity are religions whose theological epistemology is based on revelation. The primary source of revelation is Holy Scripture. However, history has also been recognised as a source of revelation, particularly the history of Israel and the Jewish people. Because they understood history as a source of revelation, many religious Jews altered their understanding of Jewish statehood in Eretz Israel during the twentieth century, from distinctly averse to increasingly supportive. On the same principles, the Catholic Church made arguably the (...) most profound change in its theology in the twentieth century, concerning its understanding of Jews and Judaism. This was prompted by an­­other major historical event, the Shoah. While in Judaism the historical phenom­enon of the State of Israel profoundly influenced theology, another historical phenomenon, the Shoah, was theologically approached with far more unease and ambiguity. In the Catholic Church, in contrast, the historical phenomenon of the Shoah prompted a serious reconsideration of certain tenets of theology, includ­ing soteriology, while the historical phenomenon of the State of Israel did not. This article addresses this apparent contradiction comparatively. (shrink)

In this, the first published collection of writings by Hippolyte Havel (1871–1950), Nathan Jun brings a crucial, yet largely forgotten revolutionary figure back into historical focus. Havel was a Czech anarchist at the center of New York’s political and artistic circles at the turn of the twentieth century. He was an editor of numerous publications, including Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth and his influence on several writers, artists, and intellectuals (including Eugene O’Neill, Joseph Stieglitz, and Sadakichi Hartmann) helped shape (...) American modernism. Proletarian Days provides an illuminating introduction to the man and his times. (shrink)

“It is certainly no accident that precisely here, in this region of continual threats to, and continual defence of one's own identity — whether personal, cultural or national identity — there is such a long tradition of the idea of truth, a truth for which one must pay, the truth as a moral value. One constantly runs up against this tradition, from Cyril and Methodius to Hus and Masaryk, Stefanik and Patocka”. This citation from a lecture entitled “Morality and Politics” (...) provides a brief sketch of the background to the thought of the current Czech president, Vaclav Havel.Though lacking any academic training in philosophy, Havel was strongly influenced by the ideas of the philosophy professor from Prague, and founder of Charta 77, Jan Patocka. Inspired by some of Patocka's last writings, in 1978 Havel wrote an essay on Charta 77 which was dedicated to Patocka. The title of this essay was taken from one of Patocka's central statements: Attempt to Live in the Truth. Patocka's influence is also clearly evident in `Letters to Olga', in his speeches as president and in his thinking on Europe.Havel's thought, via the thought of Patocka, must be situated within a dual tradition. On the one hand it is rooted in Czech history. Patocka had already in his early writings thematized the ideas of Thomas Masaryk. The work of Masaryk, who became the first president of the new Czech republic after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, is characterized by an awareness of the crisis of rationality, like in the later Husserl. On the other hand Havel's thought, again by way of Patocka, is rooted in a phenomenology that is primarily oriented toward Germany. Patocka is often regarded as the interpreter par excellence of the dialogue between Husserl and Heidegger.This article is based on a speech given by President Havel during the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, in Geneva, March 16, 1998. (shrink)

Certain cognitive and philosophical aspects of the concept of conceivability with intended or established diversion from reality are discussed. The “coherence gap problem” arises when certain fragments of the real world are replaced with imaginary situations while most details are ignored. Another issue, “the spectator problem”, concerns the participation of the conceiver himself in the world conceived. Three different examples of conceivability are used to illustrate our points, namely thought experiments in physics, a hypothetical world devoid of consciousness , and (...) virtual reality. (shrink)

This guest column amounts to a conversation between two of the crucial figures in the world of Soviet bloc dissidents about developments in their part of the world since the overthrow of communism there in 1989. They agree that a “creeping coup d'état” is underway, in which not only the government administrations of their countries have changed, but also their systems of governance—for the worse. “It is not,” they agree, “what the democratic opposition spent twenty-five years fighting for.” Their apprehension (...) is that, under new forms, the old authoritarian impulses are returning to East-Central Europe as well as Russia. (shrink)

This guest column amounts to a conversation between two of the most crucial Soviet bloc dissidents about developments since the 1989 overthrow of communismin their part of the world. They agree that a “creeping coup d’état” is underway in which not only the government administrations of their countries have changed but also their systems of governance—and changed for the worse. “It is not,” they agree, “what the democratic opposition spent twenty-five years fighting for.” Their apprehension is that, under new forms, (...) the old authoritarian impulses are returning to East-Central Europe as well as to Russia. (shrink)

The volume collects classics of Marxist historiography of science, including a new translation of Boris Hessen's “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's ...

Boris Kment takes a new approach to the study of modality that emphasises the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. He argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in counterfactual reasoning, which allows us to investigate explanatory connections. Contrary to accepted views, explanation is more fundamental than modality.

Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil.In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our (...) assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good?Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value. (shrink)

At the core of this article is an interview to Boris Uspenskij, in which the well-known protagonist of the Tartu-Moscow School (currently Head of the Laboratory of Linguistics and Semiotics at the National Research University ``Higher School of Economics'' in Moscow) develops on semiotics and the sense and aims of semiotic research, communication and its central role in human consciousness, semiotic theory and methodology, in general and specifically referring to his personal approach. The interview is introduced by a brief (...) essay, in which, by presenting and outlining the main thesis of Ego Loquens (one of the most recent works by Uspenskij, which so far has not appeared in English) and its articulations, Uspenskij's reflections on the semiotics of communication emerge. (shrink)

Starting from the idea that functions are formally similar to actions in that they are described and explained in a similar way, so that both admit of an accordion effect, I turn to Anscombe’s insight that the point of practical reasoning is to render explicit the relation between the different descriptions of an action generated by the accordion effect. The upshot is, roughly, that an item has a function if what it does can be accounted for by functional reasoning. Put (...) differently, a part of a system has a function if what it does is a functional part of what the system does. (shrink)

As part of his program to unify linear algebra and geometry using the language of Clifford algebra, David Hestenes has constructed a (well-known) isomorphism between the conformal group and the orthogonal group of a space two dimensions higher, thus obtaining homogeneous coordinates for conformal geometry.(1) In this paper we show that this construction is the Clifford algebra analogue of a hyperbolic model of Euclidean geometry that has actually been known since Bolyai, Lobachevsky, and Gauss, and we explore its wider invariant (...) theoretic implications. In particular, we show that the Euclidean distance function has a very simple representation in this model, as demonstrated by J. J. Seidel.(18). (shrink)

The aim of Modality and Explanatory Reasoning (MER) is to shed light on metaphysical necessity and the broader class of modal properties to which it belongs. This topic is approached with two goals: to develop a new and reductive analysis of modality, and to understand the purpose and origin of modal thought. I argue that a proper understanding of modality requires us to reconceptualize its relationship to causation and other forms of explanation such as grounding, a relation that connects metaphysically (...) fundamental facts to non-fundamental ones. While many philosophers have tried to give modal analyses of causation and explanation, often in counterfactual terms, I argue that we obtain a more plausible, explanatorily powerful and unified theory if we regard explanation as more fundamental than modality. The function of modal thought is to facilitate a common type of thought experiment – counterfactual reasoning – that allows us to investigate explanatory connections and which is closely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science. Necessity is defined in terms of explanation, and modal facts often reflect underlying facts about explanatory relationships. The study of modal facts is important for philosophy not because these facts are of much metaphysical interest in their own right, but largely because they provide evidence about explanatory connections. (shrink)

On the received view, counterfactuals are analysed using the concept of closeness between possible worlds: the counterfactual 'If it had been the case that p, then it would have been the case that q' is true at a world w just in case q is true at all the possible p-worlds closest to w. The degree of closeness between two worlds is usually thought to be determined by weighting different respects of similarity between them. The question I consider in the (...) paper is which weights attach to different respects of similarity. I start by considering Lewis's answer to the question and argue against it by presenting several counterexamples. I use the same examples to motivate a general principle about closeness: if a fact obtains in both of two worlds, then this similarity is relevant to the closeness between them if and only if the fact has the same explanation in the two worlds. I use this principle and some ideas of Lewis's to formulate a general account of counterfactuals, and I argue that this account can explain the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence. The paper concludes with a discussion of some examples that cannot be accommodated by the present version of the account and therefore necessitate further work on the details. (shrink)

Antihaecceitists believe that all facts about specific individuals—such as the fact that Fred exists, or that Katie is tall—globally supervene on purely qualitative facts. Haecceitists deny that. The issue is not only of interest in itself, but receives additional importance from its intimate connection to the question of whether all fundamental facts are qualitative or whether they include facts about which specific individuals there are and how qualitative properties and relations are distributed over them. Those who think that all fundamental (...) facts are qualitative are arguably committed to antihaecceitism. The goal of this paper is to point out some problems for antihaecceitism (and therefore for the thesis that all fundamental facts are qualitative). The article focuses on two common assumptions about possible worlds: (i) Sets of possible worlds are the bearers of objective physical chance. (ii) Counterfactual conditionals can be defined by appeal to a relation of closeness between possible worlds. The essay tries to show that absurd consequences ensue if either of these assumptions is combined with antihaecceitism. Then it considers a natural response by the antihaecceitist, which is to deny that worlds play the role described in (i) and (ii). Instead, the reply continues, we can introduce a new set of entities that are defined in terms of worlds and that behave the way worlds do on the haecceitist position. That allows the antihaecceitist to formulate antihaecceitist friendly versions of (i) and (ii) by replacing the appeal to possible worlds with reference to the newly introduced entities. This maneuver invites an obvious reply, however. If the new entities are the things that play the role we typically associate with worlds, as partially described by (i) and (ii), then it is natural to conclude that they really are the entities we talk about when we speak of worlds, so that haecceitism is true after all. (shrink)

The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics. Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze (...) of the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity--a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the presentation (or lack thereof) of "facts," Groys launches a timely study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's worldview. (shrink)

In this paper, I make a contribution to a naturalistically-minded theory of truthmakers by proposing a solution to the nasty problem of truthmakers for negative truths. After formulating the difficulty, I consider and reject a number of solutions to the problem, including Armstrong's states of affairs of totality, incompatibility accounts, and JC Beall 's polarity view. I then defend the position that absences of truthmakers are real and are responsible for making negative truths true. According to the positive account of (...) absences I offer, absences of contingent states of affairs are causally relevant mind-independent features of the physical world, located within space and time, and capable of being discovered by scientific inquiry. Recognition of the reality of absences strengthens truthmaker theory as a naturalistic metaphysics, as truth and falsity of each and every contingent proposition finds an ontological grounding in some region of the physical universe. (shrink)

The leading art theorist takes on art in the age of the Internet In the early twentieth century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. The notion of works of art as sacred objects was decried and subsequently they would be understood merely as things. This meant an attack on realism, as well as on the traditional preservative mission of the museum. Acclaimed art theorist Boris Groys argues this led to the development (...) of “direct realism”: an art that would not produce objects, but practices (from performance art to relational aesthetics) that would not survive. But for more than a century now, every advance in this direction has been quickly followed by new means of preserving art’s distinction. In this major new work, Groys charts the paradoxes produced by this tension, and explores art in the age of the thingless medium, the Internet. Groys claims that if the techniques of mechanical reproduction gave us objects without aura, digital production generates aura without objects, transforming all its materials into vanishing markers of the transitory present. (shrink)

We construct and study structures imitating the field of complex numbers with exponentiation. We give a natural, albeit non first-order, axiomatisation for the corresponding class of structures and prove that the class has a unique model in every uncountable cardinality. This gives grounds to conjecture that the unique model of cardinality continuum is isomorphic to the field of complex numbers with exponentiation.

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) revolutionized the study of language, signs, and discourse in the twentieth century. He successfully reconstructed the proto-Indo-European vowel system, advanced a conception of language as a system of arbitrary signs made meaningful through kinetic interrelationships, and developed a theory of the anagram so profound it gave rise to poststructural literary criticism. The roots of these disparate, even contradictory achievements lie in the thought of Early German Romanticism, which Saussure consulted for its insight into (...) the nature of meaning and discourse. Conducting the first comprehensive analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, Boris Gasparov links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. In particular, several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of "progressive" cognition and child cognitive development. Consulting a wealth of sources only recently made available, Gasparov casts the seeming contradictions and paradoxes of Saussure's work as a genuine tension between the desire to bring linguistics and semiotics in line with modernist epistemology on the one hand, and Jena Romantics' awareness of language's dynamism and its transcendence of the boundaries of categorical reasoning on the other. Advancing a radical new understanding of Saussure, Gasparov reveals aspects of the intellectual's work previously overlooked by both his followers and his postmodern critics. (shrink)

Much of the modern philosophy of causation has been governed by two ideas: (i) causes make their effects inevitable; (ii) a cause is something that makes a difference to whether its effect occurs. I focus on explaining the origin of idea (ii) and its connection to (i). On my view, the frequent attempts to turn (ii) into an analysis of causation are wrongheaded. Patterns of difference-making aren't what makes causal claims true. They merely provide a useful test for causal claims. (...) Moreover, what justifies us in using them as a test is idea (i). That's how (i) and (ii) are connected. (shrink)

Many firms, especially transnational corporations, find it increasingly difficult to predict and handle conflicts with external interest groups. In addition to a set of established stakeholders, they face a complex arena of newly emerging “stakeseekers” who also claim to have a stake in the corporation's decision making. Corporations seek to establish relationships with such groups to anticipate and prevent conflicts that could otherwise wreak havoc on their reputation. Through stakeholder engagement, stakeseekers may be turned into stakeholders. It has been argued (...) that in the process, critics are simply co-opted. However, corporate objectives are not necessarily monolithic. Conceived as a political coalition of various interests, the structure of the corporation often reflects societal divisions. Parts of the corporation can thus serve as sounding boards for external claims. Referring to the case of Royal Dutch/shell in particular, this article shows how a political coalition perspective on the corporation may help to understand and analyze the politics of stakeholder influence. (shrink)

Although Descartes is often said to have coined the modern notion of ‘consciousness’, he defines it neither explicitly nor implicitly. This may imply (1) that he was not the first to use ‘conscientia’ in its modern, psychological sense, or (2) that he still used it in its traditional moral sense. In this paper, I argue for the latter assumption. Descartes used ‘conscientia’ according to the meaning we also find in texts of St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and later scholastics. Thus the (...) Cartesian conscientia is, technically speaking, a shared knowledge of the specific value of our thoughts as thoughts and at the same time the cause of this value. This means that it is not itself a kind of individual knowledge, awareness, or a particular thought. Rather, ‘conscientia’ refers to the evaluative knowledge of an ideal observer. (shrink)

If definitive evidence concerning treatment effectiveness becomes available from an ongoing randomized clinical trial, then the trial could be stopped early, with the public release of results benefiting current and future patients. However, stopping an ongoing trial based on accruing outcome data requires methodological rigor to preserve validity of the trial conclusions. This has led to the use of formal interim monitoring procedures, which include inefficacy monitoring that will stop a trial early when the experimental treatment appears not to be (...) working. For participants, inefficacy monitoring is especially important as it ensures that they are not being treated worse than if they had not enrolled on the trial. We discuss the importance of reporting with trial results the formal interim inefficacy monitoring guidelines that were utilized, and, if none were used, the reasons for their absence. A survey of two leading medical journals suggests that this is not current practice. (shrink)

Eric Watkins argues that according to Kant, causation is not a relation between two events, but a relation between the “causality” of a substance and an event. It is shown that his arguments are partly based on a confusion between causation and interaction. Further, Watkins claims that for Kant, causes cannot be temporally determined. If this were true, it would follow that there can be no causal chains, and that all factors that determine the time when an effect occurs do (...) not belong to its cause. However, it is not true. In order to understand Kant, one must distinguish between causation, action, and interaction. When two substances interact, each of them does something (an event), which causes something to happen to the other one. (shrink)

When we discuss skepticism, we generally mean a certain philosophical movement with a fundamental basis in doubt. At the same time, the history of philosophy gives us another highly productive, met...

Although Descartes is often said to have coined the modern notion of 'consciousness', he nowhere defines the according Latin term (conscientia), neither explicitly nor implicitly. This may either imply that he used the word in a sense that he did not make sufficiently clear, that he was not the first to use 'conscientia' in its modern psychological sense, or that he still used it in its traditional sense. I argue for the third assumption: Descartes used 'conscientia' according to the traditional (...) meaning that we also find in the writings of St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and later scholastics. Thus for Descartes, conscientia is not a kind of speculative self-knowledge, inner observation or reflexive awareness. Rather, it is a kind of practical knowledge. This is a bold claim. I will argue for it (1) by closely examining the key passages in the Cartesian writings and (2) by re-evaluating the traditional use of the Latin 'conscientia'. Then I will (3) draw some consequences. 1. Descartes makes rather clear what consciousness (conscientia) is not. To take only the most likely candidates. Consciousness is not a thought (cogitatio), since every thought must be accompanied by consciousness. Further, it is not a disposition. Descartes claims that the object of our consciousness never is a possible, but always must be an actual thought. It would be difficult to see how a disposition could be about an actual thought rather than a possible one. But consciousness is also not an attribute of a thought, since Descartes always ascribes it to the thinker herself. 2. In classical and mediaeval Latin, 'conscientia' did not mean 'consciousness', but also not exactly the same as 'moral conscience'. Three aspects are involved in the traditional meaning of the term. First, conscientia is shared knowledge. At least since Augustine, this knowledge is said to be shared between particular human agents and God. Second, conscientia concerns the specific (moral) value of an action. Even more, as Aquinas maintains, actions acquire their rationality and normativity only by being subject to conscientia. On this basis, later scholastics thirdly defined conscientia as a kind of practical knowledge. As such, conscientia is in some sense the cause of what it understands. Put in late scholastic terms, it is the formal cause of its moral being (esse morale). This account of the meaning of 'conscientia' will be shown to be largely compatible with the Cartesian use of the term; the only change to be made being that it deals with thoughts (cogitationes) and their specific value rather than with actions. Hence for Descartes, consciousness is a kind of practical knowledge about thoughts that is shared with an ideal observer (God) and that causes the specific value of the thought that is its object. 3. This reading has several important implications. For instance, it provides us with a reason for the claim that the consciousness is not itself a thought of the thinker who has it. Our the consciousness turns something into a thought by taking it as its object and thereby endowing it with the specific value that it has as a thought. This value might be truth, correctness, adequacy or something along these lines. Now every particular judgment of value can itself be false, incorrect, or inadequate. Hence, every particular reflexive thought would itself be subject to a further consciousness. The only conscientia that can stop this regress is Gods knowledge of our thoughts. This knowledge cannot be wrong. As a consequence, the suggested reading directs us away from the assumption that the mind contains only incorporeal thoughts that are privately known to the thinker. As for the first, Descartes himself claims that most of our thoughts depend on the body. The object of our consciousness may then be some event happening in our brain. Consciousness turns this event into something that is also in some respect incorporeal by endowing it with a value. As thought, it is then not a mere corporeal thing. (The modern reader may add: as thought, but not as bodily event, it is equivalent with other brain events.) As for the second part of the above claim, the Cartesian mind must be radically public, since we always share our conscientia with an ideal observer. Finally, we come to see why Descartes proceeds so easily from his cogito, sum to a proof of the existence of God. Since every thought must be subject to a conscientia, there must always have been an ideal observer. God's existence can be shown because it must already have been presupposed. In fact, the Cartesian meditator was never alone. (shrink)

The paper deals with the question of the attribution to Epicurus of the classification of pleasures into 'kinetic' and 'static'. This classification, usually regarded as authentic, confronts us with a number of problems and contradictions. Besides, it is only mentioned in a few sources that are not the most reliable. Following Gosling and Taylor, I believe that the authenticity of the classification may be called in question. The analysis of the ancient evidence concerning Epicurus' concept of pleasure is made according (...) to the following principle: first, I consider the sources that do not mention the distinction between 'kinetic' and 'static' pleasures, and only then do I compare them with the other group of texts which comprises reports by Cicero, Diogenes Laertius and Athenaeus. From the former group of texts there emerges a concept of pleasure as a single and not twofold notion, while such terms as 'motion' and 'state' describe not two different phenomena but only two characteristics of the same phenomenon. On the other hand, the reports comprising the latter group appear to derive from one and the same doxographical tradition, and to be connected with the classification of ethical docrines put forward by the Middle Academy and known as the divisio Carneadea. In conclusion, I argue that the idea of Epicurus' classification of pleasures is based on a misinterpretation of Epicurus' concept in Academic doxography, which tended to contrapose it to doctrines of other schools, above all to the Cyrenaics' views. (shrink)

Although the brain enables us to perceive the external world and our body, it remains unknown whether brain processes themselves can be perceived. Brain tissue does not have receptors for its own activity. However, the ability of humans to acquire self-control of brain processes indicates that the perception of these processes may also be achieved by learning. In this study patients learned to control low-frequency components of their EEG: the so-called slow cortical potentials (SCPs). In particular ''probe'' sessions, the patients (...) estimated the quality of the SCP shift they had produced in the preceding trial. The correspondence between the recorded SCP amplitudes and the subjective estimates increased with training. The ability to perceive the SCPs was related to the ability to control them; this perception was not mediated by peripheral variables such as changes in muscle tonus and cannot be reduced to simple vigilance monitoring. These data provide evidence that humans can learn to perceive the neural activity of their brain. Alternative interpretations are discussed. (shrink)

Descartes’ metaphysics lays the foundation for the special sciences, and the notion of consciousness (conscientia) belongs to metaphysics rather than to psychology. I argue that as a metaphysical notion, ‘consciousness’ refers to an epistemic version of moral conscience. As a consequence, the activity on which science is based turns out to be conscientious thought. The consciousness that makes science possible is a double awareness: the awareness of what one is thinking, of what one should be doing, and of the possibility (...) of a gap between the two. (shrink)

Im 2009 erschienenen Buch "Philosophie des Leidens" versucht Boris Wandruszka, jene immanente Lebensstruktur und Lebensdynamik aufzudecken, die zu den einfachsten und fundamentalen Strukturmomenten des Leidens vorstosst; diese erste "Wissenschaft vom Leiden" transzendierte daher nicht die Grenzen der Anschaubarkeit, sondern verblieb in der "Immanenz des 'inneren Lebens' bzw. des Erlebens". Im aktuellen Buch "Metaphysik des Leidens" werden die "realen Bedingungen der Moglichkeit von Leiden" ermittelt: Wie muss eine Welt beschaffen sein, damit darin ein leidendes Wesen erscheinen konne? Welche Rolle hat (...) das Leiden in Bezug zum fundamentalen Widerfahrnis-, Resonanz- und Responsivitatscharakter des Lebens? Es wird gezeigt, dass menschliches Leben, das einer plural-agonalen Welt ausgesetzt ist, nicht leidfrei moglich ist, dass aber andererseits das Leid nicht das letzte Wort sein kann, sondern notwendig auf Ganzheit, Reifung, Erlosung und Harmonie bezogen ist. Nur auf dem Hintergrund der Spannung zwischen absoluter Seins-, Sinn- und Lebensfulle und der stets problematischen und fragilen Teilhabe von Menschen am "absoluten und leiduberwindenden Urleben" kann Leiden entstehen, durchlitten, verstanden, aber auch uberwunden werden. Hier erreicht der "Opfergedanke", in dem das unvermeidliche Leid frei angenommen und dadurch transformiert wird, seine reinste und hochste Ausformung. Erst nach Klarung dieser Verhaltnisse wird die "Theodizeefrage" als "das Problem der Probleme" angegangen und am Leitfaden der Hiob-Erzahlung diskutiert. Letztlich erweist sich, dass trotz allem Schmerz, Mangel, Unrecht und Unsinn ein "Potential des Unendlichen" im Leiden verborgen liegt, das auf seine Uberwindung durch Sein-, Sinn- und Werterfullung, durch Tat, Erkenntnis und Liebe verweist und dass diese drei "Machte" der Leidensherausforderung bedurfen, um ihre Weite, Tiefe und Hohe auszuloten. (shrink)