Brady Bowman

In his essay "The Ethical Life", Axel Honneth distinguishes between two forms of social normativity: mere social validity (Geltung) and normative validity (Gültigkeit). According to Honneth, the objective validity of social norms must be distinguished from the mere validity of social conventions, insofar as validity designates the morally universal form of normativity, whereas mere validity emerges only through individual and communicative self-determination within a concrete social situation. Although Honneth explicitly formulates this distinction, he does not pursue the enigmatic difference between these two terms. Yet this difference, which contains an implicit philosophical implication, becomes palpable when one attempts to translate the following sentence into another language: “Das gleich Gültige genießt nicht immer die gleiche Geltung.” In English, this formulation risks sounding like a cliché of postmodern pseudo-depth: “What is equally valid does not always enjoy equal validity.” This paper therefore asks a simple question: how can we understand the relation between Geltung and Gültigkeit? It seeks to draw from this relation several consequences for the legal principle of modern equality.

Post-Kantian philosophers historicize the world soul, reconceiving it as an implicitly rational, progressive, yet impersonal agency, at work throughout nature as a formative principle, more especially, however, in the progressive liberation and self-determination of spirit in human history. This chapter outlines the concept’s career in the thought of Kant, Maimon, Schelling, and Hegel, focusing especially on the overlapping functions they accord to the world soul. On the one side, it serves to mediate within nature between the opposing spheres of mechanism and organic life; on the other, between those of unconscious currents of historical development and self-consciously free human action. In thus tasking the world soul with mediating between nature and the history of human freedom, German idealists are faithful to their Platonic source of inspiration, even as they refashion the concept in a distinctively modern, post-Enlightenment spirit.

Despite his commitment to the thesis that the essence of the moral world is the same as the essence of nature, Schelling’s philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with naturalism as commonly conceived. He rejects the notion that freedom is nothing but a natural capacity, declaring “the highest goal” of his philosophical pursuit to be the “reduction of the laws of nature to mind, spirit, and will”. This paper explores Schelling’s idealistic conception of nature in _Philosophie und Religion_ and the Freedom Essay by focusing on his reception of Kant’s idea of an “eternal choice” or “intelligible deed” at the root of personality and the way Schelling deploys that idea in developing a theory of time. He sees the natural order’s most basic features, e.g. its spatio-temporal self-externality and the existence of (externally) necessitating “laws of nature” as grounded in an essentially _free_ and _morally pertinent action_ on the part of the individual.

In The Ages of the World Schelling elaborates an alternative to Spinoza’s philosophical theology that is free of the ambiguity that marked his earlier efforts in this direction. Schelling’s advance rests on the superior rigor of his revised ontology of “potencies”, detailed in the paper’s first half. Comparison with Goethe’s derivation of three primary colors reveals how Schelling deploys a polarity of “affirmative” and “negative” powers to derive his third basic potency, rather than merely “postulating” it as he had previously done. As the paper’s second half explains, Schelling thereby gains room to distinguish God’s actual, dynamically constituted essence from its non-causal, axiological condition of possibility. On this basis Schelling elaborates a conception linking natural vitality, value realism, moral freedom, and (divine) creativity - elements lacking in Spinoza. The result is a persuasive reinterpretation of two key Spinozist notions: divine self-creation (causa sui) and the identification of God’s power with his essence.

Das Eröffnungskapitel von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes hat wegen der Tragweite ihrer Behauptung, das Wahre der sinnlichen Gewißheit sei identisch mit dem nur in der Sprache zu erfassenden Allgemeinen, und wegen der äußersten Komprimiertheit der Argumentation, mit der Hegel seine These darzulegen beansprucht, eine Vielzahl verschiedener Interpretationen hervorgerufen. Abweichend von bisherigen Ansätzen betont Brady Bowman in seiner Studie die positive Funktion der sinnlichen Gewißheit des Absoluten als Ausgangspunkt von Hegels "Darstellung des erscheinenden Wissens". Indem er die Analyse der z.T. stark rekonstruktionsbedürftigen Argumentation zu den philosophiehistorischen Referenzen und zum Gesamtzusammenhang der Phänomenologie des Geistes in Beziehung setzt, liefert er eine umfassende Interpretation des Textes. Dabei beleuchtet der Autor zugleich die Hintergründe in der antiken Philosophie, im klassischem Empirismus, in der Philosophie des Common Sense sowie im Umfeld der klassischen deutschen Philosophie; zugleich jedoch verfolgt er systematische Bezüge bis in die Sprachphilosophie der Gegenwart.

© 2016 International Society for Microbial Ecology All rights reserved.Over the past decade, high-throughput short-read 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing has eclipsed clone-dependent long-read Sanger sequencing for microbial community profiling. The transition to new technologies has provided more quantitative information at the expense of taxonomic resolution with implications for inferring metabolic traits in various ecosystems. We applied single-molecule real-time sequencing for microbial community profiling, generating full-length 16S rRNA gene sequences at high throughput, which we propose to name PhyloTags. We benchmarked and validated this approach using a defined microbial community. When further applied to samples from the water column of meromictic Sakinaw Lake, we show that while community structures at the phylum level are comparable between PhyloTags and Illumina V4 16S rRNA gene sequences, variance increases with community complexity at greater water depths. PhyloTags moreover allowed less ambiguous classification. Last, a platform-independent comparison of PhyloTags and in silico generated partial 16S rRNA gene sequences demonstrated significant differences in community structure and phylogenetic resolution across multiple taxonomic levels, including a severe underestimation in the abundance of specific microbial genera involved in nitrogen and methane cycling across the Lake's water column. Thus, PhyloTags provide a reliable adjunct or alternative to cost-effective iTags, enabling more accurate phylogenetic resolution of microbial communities and predictions on their metabolic potential.

Hegel's doctrines of absolute negativity and 'the Concept' are among his most original contributions to philosophy and they constitute the systematic core of dialectical thought. Brady Bowman explores the interrelations between these doctrines, their implications for Hegel's critical understanding of classical logic and ontology, natural science and mathematics as forms of 'finite cognition', and their role in developing a positive, 'speculative' account of consciousness and its place in nature. As a means to this end, Bowman also re-examines Hegel's relations to Kant and pre-Kantian rationalism, and to key post-Kantian figures such as Jacobi, Fichte and Schelling. His book draws from the breadth of Hegel's writings to affirm a robustly metaphysical reading of the Hegelian project, and will be of great interest to students of Hegel and of German Idealism more generally.

Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This tradition offers important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it.

Hegel's project of elaborating a "speculative logic" is representative of a distinctively post-Kantian trend.2 Hegel shares his like-minded contemporaries' critical assessment that Kant had failed to offer a proper deduction of the cornerstone of his philosophical edifice, the so-called 'categories' or 'pure concepts of the understanding'.3 Kant does of course offer what he calls a deduction of the categories, namely, an argument for his claim that, in cognizing the matter passively given to it in sensibility, the finite subject's activity necessarily manifests itself through the "functions of synthetic unity" that constitute the structure...

This work brings together, for the first time in English translation, Hegel's journal publications from his years in Heidelberg, writings which have been previously either untranslated or only partially translated into English. The Heidelberg years marked Hegel's return to university teaching and represented an important transition in his life and thought. The translated texts include his important reassessment of the works of the philosopher F. H. Jacobi, whose engagement with Spinozism, especially, was of decisive significance for the philosophical development of German Idealism. They also include his most influential writing about contemporary political events, his essay on the constitutional assembly in his native Württemberg, which was written against the background of the dramatic political and social changes occurring in post-Napoleonic Germany. The translators have provided an introduction and notes that offer a scholarly commentary on the philosophical and political background of Hegel's Heidelberg writings.