Raymond Geuss

Humans have a natural tendency to categorise their actions as ›successes‹ or ›failures‹, and to focus on the former. This is true despite that fact that outside some few highly formalised contexts the meanings of these two terms are unclear and also, at best, ambiguous. Furthermore, in very many domains of human life failures turn out to be more interesting and more important than ostensible successes.

Die Möglichkeit des Scheiterns gehört, so scheint es, zur Selbstbestimmung des Menschen. Wer scheitert und woran? Welche Kriterien gibt es dafür? Wann ist etwas, wann ist jemand gescheitert? Was heißt es, über eine Kultur des Scheiterns un [...]

Brauchen wir Weltanschauungen? Wenn ja, wozu? Oft werden Weltanschauungen für politische, gesellschaftliche oder
individuelle Zwecke instrumentalisiert – sie kommen nicht selten in
Gestalt von Verheißungen daher und entpuppen sich e [...]

World views are in the first instance conceptual structures that offer agents an identity, however, they are subject to a continual pressure to become total systems with, purportedly, a place for everything. Historically it has been difficult to give up the search for the identity given by a totalising system, despite the fact that we see through all the systems in fact on offer. Probably, at this moment in time at least, we need to learn to tolerate the tension between our ›need‹ for an identity and our cognitive ability to recognise the illusions on which any such identity rests.