Filosofische beschouwingen

Introduction The sentence "Die Alternative Kapitalismus-Sozialismus ist keine wirkliche Alternative. Dies sind gleiche Brüder mit ungleichen Kappen" of Hannah Arendt  should not be read as a partisan anti-left aphorism, nor as a facile Cold War equivalence between market society and Soviet-style planning. In the interview with Adelbert Reif , first published in the New York Review of Books in 1971 as “ Thoughts on Politics and Revolution ,” Hannah Arendt makes a narrower and more structural claim: the opposition “capitalism versus socialism” is false insofar as both terms can name different phases or variants of the same modern process - expropriation, concentration of control over production, dissolution of intermediary bodies, and the reduction of politics to economic administration. In the German Piper edition of Macht und Gewalt , the line occurs in the appended interview section, not in the main essay on violence itself. Distinction between property and wealth Hannah Are...

 Introduction The scientific work of Charles Darwin, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Ilya Prigogine shares a common explanatory form, even though each worked in a different domain. Charles Darwin explained the adaptive fit and diversification of living beings through heritable variation, struggle, and natural selection; Ludwig Boltzmann explained thermodynamic behavior by relating macroscopic regularities to the statistical behavior of molecular populations; Ilya Prigogine showed that open systems far from equilibrium can generate stable, organized patterns through irreversible processes and fluctuations. What unites them, therefore, is not a single theory, but a common style of explanation: in each case, order is not imposed from outside by a designer or guaranteed by timeless essences, but arises from the dynamics of many interacting elements over time. Charles Darwin Charles Darwin’s significance is philosophical as well as biological. His theory of natural selection provided, as the Stan...

 Introduction The contingent, contestable, and institutionally limited character of constitutions and laws is not an accidental defect of political life. It follows from the kind of thing law is and from the kind of beings we are. Scientific laws, on standard philosophical accounts, aim to describe regularities or necessities in nature; human laws, by contrast, are part of a normative order that depends on social facts, institutions, interpretation, and enforcement. Constitutionalism itself is the project of legally limiting political power, while the rule of law names a set of formal and procedural ideals - clarity, publicity, stability, prospectivity, and regular administration - through which such limitation is pursued. Human constitutions therefore do not stand outside history like laws of physics; they are artifacts of collective agency, designed to govern persons who disagree, speak imperfect languages, pursue conflicting ends, and wield power under conditions of uncertainty....

Introduction R. G. Collingwood ’s mature philosophy is often read through two interconnected theses: (i) inquiry is irreducibly question-governed (a statement’s meaning and standing depend on the question to which it is offered as an answer), and (ii) every mode of inquiry rests on presuppositions that are not themselves straightforwardly testable propositions. In An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) Collingwood radicalizes these theses into a program for “reforming” metaphysics: metaphysics is not an ontology of supersensible entities, but a reflective, historically informed discipline whose subject matter is the absolute presuppositions that make determinate questions - hence determinate sciences and practices - possible. In this essay I (1) make an attempt to articulate the contemporary significance of Collingwood’s approach and (2) reconstruct the fundamental philosophical principles advanced in An Essay on Metaphysics , with special attention to presuppositional analysis and Collingwoo...