Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Band 45

In his two pivotal essays from 1970 and 1971, Gadamer treated conceptual history solely in the context of hermeneutical philosophy. Alternatively, the present discussion shows how, with respect to the subtitle of »Truth an Method«, conceptual history may be considered in the context of philosophical hermeneutics. In that perspective, questions of method shift into the forefront of conceptual history. Taking centre stage is the question of how conceptual history can contribute to illuminating the dimension of truth in the three spheres of art, the human sciences and language.

Apart from Heidegger, Husserl and Yorck Dilthey ranks as the deciding stimulator, but also as one of the most important opponents of »philosophical hermeneutics« founded by Gadamer. Nevertheless, Gadamer’s »philosophical hermeneutics« sees itself as decisive radicalness and as the overcoming of Dilthey’s philosophy of human sciences. Inspired from Heidegger’s thinking the criticism of Dilthey and the construction of his historical philosophy of life mirror – as the essay wants to show in detail – Gadamer’s adoption of keywords like lived experience, expression and understanding in Dilthey’s theory of human sciences. According to Gadamer Dilthey is a leading representative of historical enlightenment that follows a wrong ideal of historical knowledge which can be traced in his terms, too. Gadamer’s knowledge of the interpreter’s affinity to his text as a necessary condition of understanding takes the place of Dilthey’s naive methodologism and objectivism criticised by Gadamer.This leads to a transformation of Dilthey’s world of concepts in his philosophy of life into terms which cannot deny their roots in philosophy of existence

The comparative study of the philosophical terminologies can be considered as an important contribution to the intercultural discussion in the contemporary philosophy. The main goal of such terminological investigations is to recognize different philosophic traditions and to found the basis for their dialog. The author examines the Slavic word for the truth »resnica«, which remains present only in the Slovenian language. The Slovenian language as well as the Slovenian philosophical terminology was only partly influenced by the Cyril-Methodian tradition and has retained a lot of terminological possibilities, which take their origins from pre-Cyril-Methodian time. The word »resnica« is examined first by etymology as well as by its historical presence in some other Slavic languages. The grammatical and semantic characteristics of the word are important to understand its philosophical context. In the last part of the article, the author analyses the terminological use of »resnica« by some Slovenian philosophers.

The military term sacramentum (oath) and the juridical technical term sacramentum (bail) have their origins in the central meaning of sacrare, consecrare, and indifferent functions of the suffix -mentum. Therefore, both meanings are independent of each other. The hypothesis, that the Christian word sacramentum has developed from the meaning of military oath, no longer has any adherents. However, the explanationsof sacramentum arising from mystherion either start from supposed meanings of sacramentum and mystherion or look for matching meanings of these two words in a too late period. The military technical term sacramentum originally indicated a kind of initiation in the army, a meaning of sacramentum that still was understood in the period of classic Latin. It was this aspect of sacramentum, that translators in North Africa used to render the newtestamentary mystherion in the synoptic gospels, in which this Greek word, spoken by Jesus himself, approaches to the meaning initiation. Hence it could be used in other occurrences of mystherion in the New Testament.Translating mystherion/-ia in the gospels as words like mysterium/-ia, sacra, arcana, initia, is incompatible with Christian vocabulary for several reasons. Eventually, sacramentum appears to be the least burdened and the least unfit word to translate this newtestamentary musthvrion.

A well-known rule of exegesis holds that the Holy Scriptures must not be interpreted eisegetically, according to the interpreter’s own spirit (spiritus proprius or sensus proprius) but according to the spirit in which they are written. Luther quotes this rule in his Assertio omnium articulorum (1521) and develops it further to become the scriptural principle by which Protestantism identifies itself (sola scriptura). In this paper, the origins of the denial of sensus proprius shall be pointed out (the fight against heresy and deviation from the church’s authority, the concept of humility in the monastic tradition, denial of the self in mysticism). Thus, the changes that this concept underwent within the development of Luther’s criticism will become clear. He radicalizes the denial of sensus proprius in such a way as to incorporate the exclusion of every conceivable human merit towards salvation, thereby producing the dialectical dynamic of sensus proprius being found exactly within the effort to avoid it.

While up to the 19th century there were philosophers within Judaism, these sages neither perceived themselves as Jewish philosophers nor did the Jewish community categorized them under this term. This situation changed with the rise of historicism. The first academically trained scholars in Judaism faced a new challenge: almost all leading contemporay German philosophers operated with a concept of a Christian philosophy which left no room for an acknowledgement of Jewish contributions to the history of philosophy. Zunz was the first Jewish scholar who took issue with this Christian challenge when he coined the term Jewish philosophy. Zunz followed Boeckh when he drew a distinction between Philosophy within Judaism and Jewish philosophy. Zunz used the first term for the historical contributions of Jews in the history of philosophy. If the modern scholar does examine the Jewish sources properly with the historical-critical method, the conclusions will lead him to a Jewish philosophy. Since Jewish philosophy for Zunz did not represent the Jewish Volksgeist, he did not elaborate further upon it. After Zunz, Geiger preferred a different approach. Since Geiger understood himself as a theologian who was closer to Schleiermacher, he described an alternative dialectical relationship by confronting the histoical-critical examination of Jewish philosophical sources now with Jewish theology. Munk’s Esquisse set the standard for all subsequent histories of Jewish philosophy. He was not interested in a contemporary Jewish philosophy but focussed exclusively on what Zunz had rendered philosophy within Judaism. His aim was to give back Jewish philosophy its rightful place as an integral part of the history of Western philosophy. Munk’s groundbreaking studies were triggered by Ritter. Even though Munk’s conception still has a certain heuristic value, the deficiency of this approach is obvious as well.

Mainly two fields designate the mostly negative concept of ›mass(es)‹ in the nonphysicalistic sense until the mid-20th-century: cultural pessimism and political morphology on the one hand as well as crowd-psychology in the 20th-century on the other hand. – Gustave Le Bon took up the view of criminologists like Enrico Ferri and Scipio Sighele who stated that an individual within a crowd is apriori likely to become criminal due to the lack of responsibility. While after him Sigmund Freud believed in the regressive ›wildness‹ of being (with)in the masses Wilhelm Reich on the contrary pointed at the difference between fascist masses and liberal masses on the basis of a sexual economy. Social masses have hardly ever been accepted as such until Elias Canetti (who was introduced to Reichs insight by Hermann Broch) discovered the inner richness and divergence of masses, which cannot be gathered under a common moral judgement. Thus the second half of the 20th-century then brought about a reevaluation of mass-movements and the acceptance of their dynamics (Klaus Theweleit). Recently a pessimistic turnabout of the discussion (Peter Sloterdijk) has to be considered.

The German term Grenze (and its equivalents in other Western European languages) have become omnipresent in both the everyday and scientific language ofmodern societies. History and the social sciences up to now have not given enough attention to this fact. Indeed, they have not sufficiently dealt with the question of whether this term ought to be considered a fundamental concept for the self image and the analysis of modern societies. Parting from historical and international comparative research in the field of concept history and social history, the study gives a cautiously positive answer to this question. It assumes that the generalised use of border terminology in modern societies is closely linked to the main social features of these societies, both in a historical and an analytical perspective. This strong convergence between concept history and social history refers first of all to the political-territorial and cultural organisation of modern societies as nation states, but also to their internal differentiation along functional borders.