Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Band 54

It is a commonplace to sum up Plato’s dialectical method under the formula logon didonai, which means to account for one’s belief. The expression along with its genuine meaning (that of a plea) seems to have originated at Greek courts of law, and Plato’s Socrates, having adopted this formula to describe his philosophical method, seems to be the best advocate of the idea that to know means to be able to render an account. This paper aims to give a critical discussion of these traditional views. First, there is no hint of any offspring of the expression logon didonai at Greek courts of law. Second, in pre-Socratic contexts the expression had not one but several meanings. And third, Plato, through the voice of Socrates, criticizes the unclear meaning of this expression in epistemological contexts.

Aristotle declares that happiness (›eudaimonia‹) persists in living well (›euzên‹) and in doing well (›eu prattein‹). From a philological standpoint, these two definitions appear to mean the same thing, and some philosophers accept this opinion as true. In the Nicomachean Ethics as well as in the Eudemian Ethics, in the Magna Moralia and in the Rhetoric, we discover that there are numerous external goods and other benefits related to the body that are necessary for a good life. Yet, Aristotle identifies happiness with actions and activities. Understood as an activity, happiness cannot be a state or condition wherein one is provided with external goods, but must be a practice in acting well. Hence, Aristotle makes a conceptual distinction between living well and doing well. For this reason his ethics is no eudaemonism in the classical sense, as Kant insinuates, for example. Rather, the ethics of Aristotle and Kant do not contradict each other strictly speaking, but rather have much in common.

The Christian concepts of justice and justification were deeply influenced by the Latin Vulgate, which coined a specific interpretation of the Hebrew concept of justice, contained in the root ›sdq‹. In the four Middle Low German Bible translations printed before the Reformation (1478–1522), these specific problems of translation became visible and led to an unsystematic use of the terms available in secular law: ›(ge)rechticheyt‹ and ›rechtferticheyt‹. This article analyzes the different translations of the Latin ›iustitia‹ and its synonyms and antonyms in the Middle Low German Bibles. They contain a concept of justice which adopts several aspects from the Hebrew Bible that differ from the Vulgate: the close connection of justice and mercy, the strong orientation towards the legal community, and justice as a mutual duty of God and humans rather than a hierarchic virtue. But most striking is the lack of a codification of the content of the different available variants in Middle Low German: a sign of the ongoing semantic mobility of a central religious concept, and consequently of the lack of control the Church had over religious discourses in the vernacular.

The paper examines attempts to define philosophy as a discipline in early modern Spanish Aristotelianism. Such definitions served primarily didactical goals :a definition of philosophy conveyed first impressions of what philosophy was in order to facilitate the subsequent detailed apprehension of philosophical doctrines. But even though such definitions should not be misunderstood as ›metaphilosophical‹ in the contemporary sense, they gave rise to quite detailed debates on the nature of philosophy, its relation to wisdom, or the domain of objects philosophy is concerned with. Whereas the canon of problems discussed in the texts is quite homogeneous, the answers given differ considerably. These differences concern e. g. the status of philosophical knowledge, the relation between theoretical and practical philosophy or the role of mathematics in the canon of philosophical disciplines.

Drawing on a rich digitalized corpus of early modern texts, Hans-Juergen Diller argues that the concepts expressed by the English words ›passion‹ and ›emotion‹ are different in that the former in contrast to the latter has moral connotations: ›emotion‹ stands for an a-moral category. Focusing on the example of Descartes, I take issue with Diller’s method. Diller claims that his distinction applies to Descartes’ use of the French equivalents to ›passion‹ and ›emotion‹. But there are two concepts of a concept. According to the first, the meaning of a word expressing a concept is not sharply distinguished from the complete discourse in which it figures. According to the second, meaning is more narrow. For instance, it is restricted to the explicit definition an author provides. I show that Descartes provides an explicit definition of passion and emotion in purely physical, a-moral terms. So Diller’s method is not apt to trace concepts in the second, more restricted sense which Descartes himself has in mind.

German teacher of romance language and literature Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956) is mainly known for his opus magnum European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages from 1948 (engl. 1953). In the preface of this work he declares, that it is not motivated by scientific interests only, but by care for the understanding of the western tradition, which, for him, means humanistic tradition. His concept of humanism he had developed sixteen years earlier in his book Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (German Spirit in Danger). Its core idea is that because what we are to a wide extent is the result of the past; understanding of our past means understanding of ourselves. Its aim is – in a broad sense – an ethical one: orientation of one’s life conduct, which must be open to a religious perspective. Its result is a more intense experience of reality, which means joy.

The Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur at Mayence, founded in 1949, installed a project for a Dictionary of concepts under the direction of Erich Rothacker, who, during the 1920s, had planned such a dictionary for the terminology of the Geisteswissenschaften in various approaches. The drafts and presentations of the project, among them a lecture, held in 1927 at the Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, are presented here for the first time. It is shown in which way Rothacker’s dictionary project failed, was substituted by the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte and finally by Joachim Ritter’s Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Though originally not linked with Rothacker, Ritter’s Wörterbuch was 1974 until its completion as well institutionally supervised and fostered by the Academie Mayence and its Commission for Philosophy. In this institutional perspective the connections between the protagonists of the rising history of concepts in philosophy come out in their complexity. Hans Blumenberg’s role for the history of concepts as Rothackers successor in the Academie is here documented for the first time.

The purpose of this analysis is to shed light on the hitherto underresearched influence – particularly during Rothacker’s time as a scholar and teacher in Bonn in the early 1950s – of Erich Rothacker on those of his students who later came to academic fame in their own right. Using the historicist strain of Rothacker’s thought as a starting point this article scrutinizes the gradual development of Karl-Otto Apel’s ›linguistic turn‹ as well as Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory of science and Hermann Schmitz’s systematic subjectivisation of cognisance. A comparative reading of these thinkers allows the establishing of terminological and conceptual echoes among these texts and Rothacker’s major works, offering ample evidence for Rothacker’s influence on his former students. Nevertheless, it is hard to speak of a »Rothacker School« in modern German philosophical thought: despite the visible impact of Rothacker’s work on his students, the transformative mode in which Rothacker was received, and the lack of social ties between the teacher and his students, limit Rothacker’s sphere of influence to an initial academic education that was later neutralized, albeit in a dialectical manner.

In 1953, Richard McKeon (Chicago) contacted Hans-Georg Gadamer (Heidelberg) with the proposal to conduct a joint conference on the nature of philosophic controversies, their relation with ideological conflicts and the possible ways to handle and solve them. He suggested to treat this subject in the concrete by discussing problems connected with the opposed views and standpoints of philosophers concerning freedom. Gadamer was given a free hand to select the German participants, and the meeting finally took place in the following year in a small castle near Darmstadt. There were 18 German philosophers attending and McKeon himself as the sole non German discussant. The paper explores the background of McKeon’s initiative, the aims and results of the conference, and the way the discussions proceeded, using some yet unpublished material and documents. Whereas the conference seemed to have been a rather disappointing event for both parties, the German and the American, showing all the deficiencies of philosophical communication that McKeon wanted to analyze, it might have played a minor role in the genesis and development of the »begriffsgeschichtliche Forschung« in years following the meeting from 1954. Herbert G. Wells, explicitely in his 1920 edition for the British reader in which he states: »Human history is in essence a history of ideas« (p. 596, col. 2). From here the article follows the further use and development of the concept by British (R. G. Collingwood, I. Berlin), American and European scholars.

This entry contains the German text of Reinhart Koselleck’s response to the papers given at the meeting in December, 1992 at the German Historical Institute, Washington to commemorate the completion of the lexicon, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Published in English translation, Koselleck’s Offene Fragen an die ›Geschichtlichen Grundbegriffe‹, presented inter alia, the fi rst major confrontation between German Begriffsgeschichte, as practiced by Koselleck, and J. G. A.Pocock, speaking for the Cambridge School dominant in the English-speaking world, Koselleck’s German text is accompanied by a Note summarizing his reply to the critique by Pocock, who invoked arguments previously made by Quentin Skinner. Also included are the views on Begriffsgeschichte now held by Skinner and Pocock twenty years later.