Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Band 58

I will discuss Aristotle’s phenomenology of giving. I try to point out the relations between virtues such as liberality, magnificence and magnanimity. These virtues deal with different domains, i. e. with the right flow ofmoney, with expenditure and finally with political and spiritual greatness. I argue, however, that they share a common structure, the friendship with oneself.Aristotle’s concept of friendship with oneself means a personal integration, an achieved harmony of individual faculties, which represents the core of the different virtues. It can be recognized in its most accomplished form in the case of magnanimity, a secondlevel virtue that is not primarily about economic goods and deals rather with self-knowledge and self-realization. Friendship with oneself is actually the result of a long process of maturation, made possible by practice, imitation of good models, teachings and personal reflection. During this process the natural individuality, with its attachments and cravings, is regenerated and adjusted to higher goals: the ethical and political life. Accordingly, I try to make clear that both the liberal and the magnificent man have gone through this long and challenging path. Both the liberal and the magnificent citizen can give to others in the right way as they do not rob themselves of the good they deserve. The consequence of Aristotle’s theory of virtuous giving is intriguing: one can give to other people in a virtuous way only if one is friend of himself and recognizes himself the right to the goods he is truly worth of.

The paper examines the definitions of the concept ›philosophy‹ resp. ›the philosopher‹ in Florentine renaissance Platonism, namely Marsilio Ficino and his scholar Francesco di Zanobi Cattani da Diacceto. Following Socrates and Pythagoras, Ficino distinguishes between mundane philosophy and divine sapientia. In contrast to his teacher, Diacceto’s Aristotelism rejects the Pythagoreanism and connects philosophy with sapientia. In order to show how the differences between Ficino and Diacceto emerge, three more contemporaries are taken into consideration: Christoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. As a result of this examination, it can be said that the definition of ›philosophy‹ in Florentine renaissance Platonism tends either to Pythagoreism or to Aristotelism or to both. Closely connected with the debate on philosophy are topics and maxims such as meditatio mortis, theologia negativa, docta ignorantia, scio ne scio, nosce te ipsum, ne quid nimis et al.

In this paper the history of (mathematical) formulas and their role in philosophy is discussed. The historical analysis of the first and second part considers both the phaenomena and the terminology. The first part tries to define orrather classify formulas, the second to identify first occurrences of formulas in different contexts. The third part studies some examples of the use of ›formulas‹ and formulas – in the work of Descartes, Kant, Frege, Adorno, and Lacan.

This essay reconstructs the profound transformations of the concept of the extreme, particularly in the wake of the French Revolution. While ancient ethics of moderation and virtue excluded the extreme from the just order of things, modern disciplines of knowledge conceive of the concept of the extreme as a force that is both integrating and disintegrating, constantly shifting the borders of the existing order. These conceptual transformations often follow political fault lines. At the same time, the increasing differentiation of the semantics of the extreme indicates a general trend towards normalizing the state of exception, a trend that makes it increasingly difficult to separate the middle from the extreme.

This paper is devoted to the systematic place and function of divine providence in Kant. The main focus is put on the connection between the highest good as the ultimate object of morality and the different conceptions of providence. The paper is divided into three sections. First, it discusses Kant’s critical answer to question of the compatibility of mechanism and teleology. Second, it addresses the role of providence in the context of the highest moral good. Third, it draws attention to the theodicy-problem and asks how providence is connected with the highest political good in the philosophy of history.

At the end of the Critique of Judgement, Kant returns to his discussion of the doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason. He there describes the justification for these judgements of faith as ›moral arguments‹. In the course of this, he resolves a hitherto unanswered question, namely what exactly the ›increment‹, as it is already mentioned in the Critique of Practical Reason, consistsi n, when the immortality of the human soul, the freedom of our will and the existence of God are postulated. The paper shows that the underlying ideas of pure theoretical reason shed their subjectivity in the postulates and extend to a certain objectivity. And it explains how this objectivity has to be understood in opposition to that of judgements of experience.

Arendt speaks of responsibility throughout her work in important contexts. Surprisingly, there exists no thorough study on responsibility in Arendt’s writings to date. This analysis attempts to take the concept of responsibility in her books and papers from 1945 to 1970 philologically-historically into account. Against the backdrop of these reflections one can assume thephilosophical relevance of the term ›responsibility‹ for Arendt’s think ing about guilt, forgiveness, politics, morality, totalitarianism, education, profession, and role of the intellectual. However, the philosophical dimension of responsibility in Arendt’s work can only be sketched in the following and needs to be articulated in another paper.

In this article, I explore historical lines in the development of the language of political culture (politische Kultur). The usage between the end of the eighteenth and middle of the twentieth century will be outlined in a first section. The Civic Culture, a classic in Political Culture Research, and selected developments following this book will be the subject of the second section. The article closes with some considerations on recent philosophical usages of the term in question.