Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Band 46

What do we mean, when we claim that something is »refuted«? The present essay deals with the evolution of the notion of refutation. Nowadays, refutations do not enjoy that high estimation in intellectual life as formerly – a lost of credit that is due to the removal of the Aristotelian pattern of refutation and its having been replaced by a more demanding pattern during the 16th – 18th centuries. On the one hand, the modern pattern pushed the Enlightenment culture, on the other hand, it ended up in a sceptical crisis. At first, this crisis concerned only philosophy. Finally, even the conclusiveness of empirical refutations was disputed. The philosophical way of doing Begriffsgeschichte, whereof the present essay is a specimen, centers on the long-term impact of definitions and distinctions. From this point of view, special attention is called to the contribution of the 18th-century Wolffianism.

This article investigates the history of the concept of the will in the middle ages and the early modern period. At this time, the concept developed through theological challenges, considering different types of the will, i. e., the divine will and the human will and their interaction. The relation of intellect and will likewise receives further elaboration. In the early modern period, these scholastic concepts are applied to political philosophy, notably by Hobbes and Rousseau. I. Kant finally relocates these questions again in the individual, but transforms the dialectic between intellect and will into a confrontation between objective reason and subjective motivations. The will itself is absorbed into the legislation of practical reason. Generally, the theological implications of this legislation and the dynamic of the will are at this time relocated within the individual or the political community, which might be one of the reasons for the peculiar dynamic of the modern age.

How is the one, which according to Aristotle is convertible with being, related to the numerical one? Does it embrace individual and quantitative-categorial unity or can it be reduced to one of these unities? In the course of the reception of Aristotle in the Middle Ages Arabic and Latin authors discuss these questions in order to explain the nature and ontological importance of unity as a property of being as such. The controversies give rise to a comprehensive investigation, which appears in Suárez’ Disputationes metaphysicae in its most systematic form. Suárez brings together elements from the thomistic, the scotistic and the nominalistic tradition in a new differentiated view. According to this view invididuality and quantitative unity are modal explications of transcendental unity.

From the early 18th century on, new knowledge domains that focus on organic order develop within natural history. The problem of organic order is also one of the major themes that characterize the transition from early modern philosophy and its scholastic traditions to the Enlightenment. In this article, both transitions are part of a single historic change that is related to the notion of organismic unity. Charles Bonnet, Spinoza and Leibniz are part of this historic change.They refer to the order of natural individuals that exist as organized or organismic bodies. The notion of organismic unity becomes thus the connecting thread to reconsider the structure of the epistemic shift that Michel Foucault has described at the turn of the 19th century.

The employment of the cell-concept is examined in the context of some selected cell-theories (R. Hooke, 1665; F. J. Meyen, 1830–39; Th. Schwann, 1839; H. F. Link,1839; M. J. Schleiden, 1842; C. Nägeli, 1845); for these cases it is argued that the logical structures of their respective cell-concepts are strongly interrelated, e. g., insome respect the theory of Schwann is an inversion of that of Meyen. Nevertheless, Meyen’s theory is distinguished by operating with an idealized cell-structure that is considered to compromise the necessary constituents for maintaining the diverse cell-functions, whereas in Schwann’s theory this clear ›cell-structure-to-cell-function‹ relationship is preserved only for the very beginning of cell-formation; the remaining segments of the cell’s life-cycle are modelled according to both a naturalhistorical and a physicochemical atomistic research programme; thus, this hybrid conception cannot be classified to be a pure cell-physiological one.Other cell-theories from between 1840 and about 1900 – among which are the theories of the »Energide« or the »Mikromer« – do not add to the beforehand elucidated logical structure of those earlier concepts. As a complement to all these (quasi-) cell-theoretical conceptions a more precise understanding of protoplasmatic theories may be obtained. Since, basically, they assumed the possibility of a substance (i. e. protoplasm) endowed with morphogenetic functions they got into the historically well documented conflict with cell-theories relating structure to function. Finally, the four-fold mode of meaning of the cell-concept is summarized and its relevance for fundamental problems in the biological debate or for questions concerning the reality of biological objects is discussed.

The discussion about imagination and fancy in XVIIIth century Spain was influ-enced by the national tradition as well as by other European countries. The termsfantasía, imaginación, imaginativaand caprichoand their various meanings in thedictionaries and literature of the Spanish Enlightenment are systematicallyanalysed. The term fancy, for example, can refer to an innate faculty of the soul or apersonal characteristic, to human creativity or to works of art. Other interesting aspects are the physiological explanations of fancy, the relationship between fancyand madness or melancholy, the theories of female fancy and the influence of thematernal imagination on the unborn child, and also the assumption that fancy canhave an epistemological function. Typical of the Spanish discussion is a higher ap-preciation of fancy as a creative faculty independent of reason and rules. Goya’sCapricho 43(›El sueno de la razón produce monstruos‹) is a famous example ofthis concept.

The notion of contentment (lat. acquiescentia), nowadays nearly forgotten as a philosophical term, was of some importance during the 18th century. Its origin liesperhaps in the 16th and 17th-century theology, where it signifies modesty and frugality, generally the assent to the divine will and providence. Within the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff contentment follows from the theory that all things are combined to a great harmony of the world; men therefore may be content with teleology, where all is turned to a good end. Some writers, like A. Rüdiger, argue that contentment is the state possible to men on earth, as there can be no complete happiness. Others, like J. A. Hoffmann, argue that activity and industry are as well wholesome for men as quiet and calm. Towards the end of the 18th century the notion is more and more understood as being only an inner state of man, his happy subjectivity and feeling of his own existence (Rousseau). It therefore plays a certain role in anthropology and medicine. Within the philosophy of the 19th and 20th century it is only mentioned a few times and it mostly becomes a pejorative concept.

From the early writings up to his late lectures on revelation and mythology, Schelling emphazises that human guilt and culpability have a transcendental as wellas an empirical structure. Guilt is prior to all experience (as »original sin« or fatum) and yet must also be defined as part of the self-positing act that actually constitutes freedom. The »Ich« has to (re-)produce its a priori guilt in order to gain full autonomy. Based on this concept, Schelling develops through different stages of his philosophical career an anthropological and finally a logos-theological approach to a fundamental theory of guilt. His late version of this theory stands on the threshold of idealism and post-idealistic philosophy and is to be seen in comparison to Kierkegaard’s concept of dread and repentance. This essay argues that Schelling’s seemingly obsolete and premodern concept of guilt and culpability nonetheless implies a distinguished, albeit hidden concept of Verantwortung that could have a strong bearing upon contemporary theories of responsibility.

In this article are treated, in general strokes, the methodological foundations of the Diccionario de conceptos políticos y sociales de la España de los siglos XIX y XXwhich has been published recently under the direction of the above mentioned editors. This dictionary in which nearly 200 authors of different Spanish universitiesand centres of research have collaborated collects more than 100 articles. It is partly inspired by the German Begriffsgeschichte. Its editors, however, have also taken into account the contribution of the famous school of Cambridge by adapting the influences of several methodological currents to the specific claims of their work, i. e. to the elaboration of a dictionary which, on the basis of a huge volume of sources, pretends to cartograph, in an alphabetical order, the principal ideological lines – the discoursive and conceptual ones – of the Spanish 19th century. The article ends with a discussion of certain difficulties and aspects which are treated controversally in the intellectual history. It also claims to give a reflexion on the suitability and meaning which can – in the actual situation of the social sciences – pretend to determine the studies of political languages, especially the basic essays concerning the comparative history of political and social thinking under a conceptual perspective.