Daniel Dahlstrom

Morning Hours is the first English translation of Morgenstunden by Moses Mendelssohn, the foremost Jewish thinker of the German Enlightenment. Published six months before Mendelssohn's death on January 4, 1786, Morning Hours is the most sustained presentation of his mature epistemological and metaphysical views, all elaborated in the service of presenting his son with proofs for the existence of God. But Morning Hours is much more than a theoretical treatise. It also plays a central role in the drama of the Pantheismusstreit, Mendelssohn's "dispute" with F. H. Jacobi over the nature and scope of Lessing's attitude toward Spinoza and "pantheism". In Morning Hours Mendelssohn attempts to set the record straight regarding his beloved Lessing in this connection, not least by demonstrating the absence of any practical difference between theism and a "purified pantheism".

This paper concerns Hegel’s much-neglected discussion of the rational observation of nature in the first part of the chapter on reason in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The paper focuses, in particular, on the themes of nature’s inexhaustibilit y, animal life’s holistic character, and the earth’s individual distinctiveness insofar as Hegel appeals to them to challenge a certain kind of self-understanding of what it means to observe nature rationally. In addition to examining the significance and trenchancy of this challenge, the paper inquires whether these same themes have implications for Hegel’s own philosophical understanding of reason as spirit.

This paper addresses puzzling issues concerning the ontological status of dispositions. Following review of debates about a traditional conditional analysis as well as Lewis’s “reformed conditional analysis” of dispositions, the paper analyzes attempts to solve the problem of what makes the relevant conditional true. Reasons are presented for rejecting attempts to locate the relevant truth-maker in a causal basis that allegedly dispenses with dispositions or in properties that are universally dispositional. In this way the paper argues that neither “eliminativism” nor “pandispositionalism” provides a successful account of dispositions’ ontological status, and that ontology must find a way to countenance the reality of both dispositional and non-dispositional properties.

This engaging work explores how Hegel's philosophy both entails and is entailed by a certain conception of Christianity. What distinguishes Burbidge's exploration is the emphasis that he places on an interpretation of Hegel's logic, in which a central role is assigned to the understanding. The first set of essays elaborates the operation of the understanding in relation to the operations of dialectic and speculative reason in Hegel's logic. The first essay concentrates on Hegel's attempt to display the universal movement of pure thought in terms of all three operations. Complementing his earlier work, On Hegel's Logic, Burbidge argues that, given the appropriate interpretation of these operations, the absolute difference between "being" and "nothing" can be said to be sustained, even as these concepts are held together in "becoming," which in turn disappears into "a being". Burbidge's second essay presents an interpretive sketch of Hegel's logic as a whole, based upon a consistent, thorough, and self-referential application of the understanding. The essay's title "Transition or Reflection" refers to the distinction, characteristic of dialectical development, between inherent and posited concepts. The movement of thought between members of the first set of concepts is immediate and hence a "transition," while that between members of the second set is mediated by "reflection." Burbidge argues that the logic of concepts in Part 3 of Hegel's logic, construed as the understanding applied to itself, specifies within itself these two contradictory moments. The same theme informs Burbidge's third essay as he identifies the understanding, not as the beginning, but as the culmination of Hegel's logic, holding together in the disjunctive judgment of the logic of concepts both the dialectic emphasized by the left wing of Hegel scholars and the speculation championed by the right wing. Burbidge argues for what might be called the ironic interpretation of Hegel's claim to an absolute method, namely, the understanding that "no immediate transition, no comprehensive vision, and no philosophical wisdom will ever be the last word". The final essay of this first part discussed the necessity of contingency in the context of Hegel's logic.

Commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit are hardly novel. Several attempts exist to supply readers with sometimes critical, sometimes historical explanations of difficult passages and transitions and occasionally with an interpretation of the work as a whole. Curiously German scholars, unlike their French and English speaking counterparts, had not produced an extensive commentary before the appearance of Scheier's impressive undertaking. Rightly convinced that neither its architectonic nor the need to which it responded had been adequately treated in previous studies of the Phenomenology, Scheier's commentary single-mindedly attempts to pursue Hegel's employment of "die einfachen Bestimmungen, z. B. des Ansichseins, des Fürsichseins, der Sichselbstgleichheit usf.," described by Hegel in the Vorrede. The result is quite aptly labelled an "analytic commentary," one that refrains from the temptation either to pass over passages or to "explain" them in terms of extraneous considerations or possibly relevant historical detail. Such reflections are useful, perhaps even necessary to comprehending Hegel's most baffling work, but interpretation must begin with the sort of careful textual analysis Scheier has undertaken. Scheier's approach makes for rather dry reading and it is certainly flawed by being too uncritical, even slavish. He often takes positions on controversial matters of interpretation without entering into the reasons elaborated for and against that position by other commentators. Yet Analytische [[sic]] Kommentar remains a valuable contribution to study of the Phenomenology of Spirit, as a clearly written and tenacious pursuit of its logic, both in detail and in general outline.

There are several difficulties, largely the product of the distinctive question and paths of Heidegger's thinking, that beset any attempt to determine his philosophical heritage. In the first part of the following paper, after reviewing these difficulties, the author argues that Heidegger is, nonetheless, singularly and quite rightly preoccupied with the heritage of his thinking. In the second part an attempt is made to show how a particular understanding of being, namely, being as presence and absence, motivates various paths taken by his thinking, paths which, indeed, have given rise to several appropriations of his thinking in the present: pragmatic, religious, hermeneutical as well as in the philosophy of art and technology. In the final part of the paper the author identifies some of these ongoing "Heideggerian heritages," but with the aim of underscoring their dependence upon what for the author is the principal heritage of his thinking, a way of thinking about being that recovers its fundamentally historical character. /// Existem várias dificuldades, as quais são em larga medida produto da questão distintiva e dos diversos caminhos do pensamento de Heidegger, que condicionam toda e qualquer tentativa de determinar a sua herança filosófica. Na primeira parte do presente artigo, o autor, depois de mencionar as sobreditas dificuldades, argumenta que Heidegger, apesar de tudo, está singularmente, e apropriadamente, preocupado com a herança do seu pensamento. Na segunda parte, é feita uma tentativa no sentido de mostrar até que ponto uma compreensão particular do ser, nomeadamente do ser como presença e ausência, deu lugar a diversas apropriações do pensamento heideggeriano no presente: apropriação pragmática, religiosa, hermenêutica, bem como no âmbito da filosofia da arte e da tecnologia. Finalmente, na sua última parte, o presente artigo identifica algumas das "heranças heideggerianas" correntes, mas com a intenção de sublinhar a sua dependência em relação àquilo que para o autor constitui a principal herança do seu pensamento, nomeadamente, um modo de pensar acerca do ser que recupera o seu carácter fundamentalmente histórico.

The "conceptual story" told by Kisiel neatly divides into three parts, reflecting the genesis of SZ respectively "as a topic, as a program, and as a text". Part 1 begins with the 1919 War Emergency Semester and Heidegger's transformation of Husserlian phenomenology into a "pretheoretical science" of pretheoretical origins, leading to the elaboration of a hermeneutics of facticity and its methodological problematic in concert with the demands of a phenomenology of religion. Part 1 is the lengthiest of the three parts, but with good reason. By securing extant transcripts of courses, Kisiel is able to provide illuminating material not found in the published editions. The paraphrase of lectures of the winter semester 1920-21 "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," based upon four extant student transcripts, is particularly valuable since Heidegger's autograph of this course is missing and, hence, the lectures presumably will not find their way into the Gesamtausgabe. Kisiel relates how the course undergoes an abrupt change in focus from methodological considerations to the examination of concrete religious phenomena, a change apparently prompted by students' complaints over the lectures' "lack of religious content".

For much of contemporary ethical theory, the universalizability of the motive of a contemplated action forms a necessary part of the basis of the action’s moral character, legitimacy, or worth. Considering the possibility of resentment springing from the performance of an action also serves as a means of determining the morality of an action. However, considerations of universalizability and resentment are plainly inconsistent with the performance of some unselfish moral actions. I argue that the sphere of the moral adequacy of considerations of universalizability and resentment is limited. I profile key elements of “conformist” or “consensus-driven” ethical thinking modelled on Nagel’s ethical theory. Then, I elaborate the measure of validity of the profiled ethical thinking as well as its limitation, suggesting that its proper domain is located in an ethics of honor, delimited by an ethics of love and friendship.