Michael Förster

According to this chapter, it is J. G. Herder (1744–1803) who makes the first explicit commitment to the doctrine that meaning is use. It provides a history of the development of this idea within the German tradition from Herder to Wittgenstein. Although Herder never explicitly justifies this doctrine, he is emphatic about what meaning is _not_ (not the referent of a name, a Platonic Form, or a subjective mental ‘idea’). The chapter takes up four topics in order to determine which of the many meaning-as-use theories is best: a comparison of an atomistic versus a holistic version of the doctrine, the role and character of rules of usage, the role of society in constituting meaning, and the role of psychological processes. In the end, The chapter prefers the less theoretically developed but, to its mind, more plausible version of the doctrine found in Herder.

Herder was very familiar with the concept of human rights (in his German, “Menschenrechte”), strongly shared the moral ideals of protecting people at which the concept aims, but tended to avoid using the concept himself. Why this ambivalence? The present article argues that a number of well-founded concerns about the concept underlie, or at least may underlie, his reservation, including concerns about the _legal_ rather than _moral_ nature of the very concept of “rights,” the undue restriction of the focus of “human rights” to protecting people against threats that emanate from their own governments rather than against those from outside (imperialism, colonialism, etc.) as well, and the concept’s dubious restriction of protections to human beings to the exclusion of animals. The article also argues, however, that these concerns are not insurmountable, and that indeed Herder himself has provided some of the most important theoretical tools for surmounting them.

A common misconception about the German romantics, that they were theoretical lightweights, confronts an especially powerful counterexample in the case of their views about language. Building on their Herder’s revolutionary views about language—especially, his principles that thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language, that meanings/concepts consist in word-usages, and that thoughts, concepts, and language vary profoundly between periods, cultures, and even individuals—the leading romantics Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel made vitally important new contributions to the philosophy of language, linguistics, hermeneutics, and translation theory.

Nietzsche wrote in 1870 while preparing The Birth of Tragedy (1872), “Science, art, and philosophy are now growing into one another so much in me that I shall in any case give birth to a centaur one day.” The project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art that Nietzsche adumbrates here actually gets realized in The Birth of Tragedy, explaining the work’s distinctive character. It is a project whose origins lay with Friedrich Schlegel, the leading German Romantic philosopher, at the beginning of the 19th century. Schlegel had warded off the obvious objection to incorporating art into philosophy/science that this would falsify the latter by championing a radical general skepticism about the veracity of cognition. Nietzsche takes over this aspect of Schlegel’s project as well. Moreover, this whole project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art in light of a radical general skepticism survives after The Birth of Tragedy to reappear in different, more refined permutations throughout Nietzsche’s later works, constituting an indispensable key both to their character – in particular, their metaphysical-epistemological framework – and to their development. The article concludes with an assessment of the viability of the project, especially concerning the question of whether or not the radical general skepticism on which it rests is coherent.

This article continues a recent tradition of interpreting the Zhuangzi as a fundamentally skeptical work (Chad Hansen) and more specifically as a work similar in spirit to ancient Greek skepticism, especially Pyrrhonism (Chung-ying Cheng, Paul Kjellberg, Lisa Raphals, Christoph Harbsmeier). The article argues that the resemblance between the Zhuangzi and ancient Pyrrhonism is considerably broader and deeper than has been recognized. It also argues that the major residual differences that have been alleged by the secondary literature (e.g. by Kjellberg) are in fact illusory. Finally, in light of all this, it considers the question of whether influence was involved. A positive answer is suggested: not indeed an influence of the Zhuangzi on Pyrrhonism or vice versa, but a common influence of Indian Buddhism on both.

In this paper I want to sketch an account of the role of skepticism in Kants critical philosophy. The critical philosophy set forth in the Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth: the Critique) grew from and responds to a complex set of philosophical concerns. Among these two of special importance are concerns to address skepticism and to develop a reformed metaphysics. This much is widely recognized. However, it is a fundamental thesis of this paper that those projects belong tightly together, in the following sense: The types of skepticism which really originated and motivate the critical philosophy are ones which target metaphysics; and what originated and motivates the critical philosophy's reform of metaphysics is above all the goal of enabling it to withstand skepticism.

Der Band "Idealismus und Romantik in Jena" nimmt die Jenaer Blütezeit zwischen 1794 und 1807 in den Blick und interpretiert sie als ein Neben- und Gegeneinander der beiden einflussreichsten Geistesströmungen um 1800. In Jena entstehen zwischen 1794 und 1807 zwei geistesgeschichtliche Strömungen von Weltgeltung: der Idealismus und die Romantik. Die rasante Entwicklung immer neuer Ideen ist durch eine beträchtliche Anzahl junger, kreativer Geister geprägt, die in fruchtbarem Austausch und gegenseitiger Kritik um ein neues, angemessenes Verständnis der Moderne ringen. Im Fokus des Bandes stehen Fragen zu einzelnen Autoren genauso wie zum Verhältnis beider Strömungen zueinander. The volume Idealism and Romanticism in Jena focuses on the period between 1794 and 1807 in which creative and original minds developed new ideas for understanding the modern world. The contributions examine the relationship between German Idealism and Early Romanticism: What distinguishes/combines Idealism and Romanticism? What common aspects, synergies and goals arise? And what does the opposition between the two movements means for the question of modernity?

This volume is a comprehensive Handbook of Russian thought that provides an in-depth survey of major figures, currents, and developments in Russian intellectual history, spanning the period from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Written by a group of distinguished scholars as well as some younger ones from Russia, Europe, the United States, and Canada, this Handbook reconstructs a vibrant picture of the intellectual and cultural life in Russia and the Soviet Union during the most buoyant period in the country's history. Contrary to the widespread view of Russian modernity as a product of intellectual borrowing and imitation, the essays collected in this volume reveal the creative spirit of Russian thought, which produced a range of original philosophical and social ideas, as well as great literature, art, and criticism. While rejecting reductive interpretations, the Handbook employs a unifying approach to its subject matter, presenting Russian thought in the context of the country's changing historical landscape. This Handbook will open up a new intellectual world to many readers and provide a secure base for its further exploration.

For the purpose of this article, "hermeneutics" means the theory of interpretation, i.e. the theory of achieving an understanding of texts, utterances, and so on (it does not mean a certain twentieth-century philosophical movement). Hermeneutics in this sense has a long history, reaching back at least as far as ancient Greece. However, new focus was brought to bear on it in the modern period, in the wake of the Reformation with its displacement of responsibility for interpreting the Bible from the Church to individual Christians generally. This new focus on hermeneutics occurred especially in Germany.1..

This article explains a new ‘foreignizing’ approach to translation that was invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, especially by Herder and Schleiermacher, and that has since become the predominant approach in translation theory. The article argues that despite the great virtues of this approach, it was based on an unduly narrow restriction to Indo-European languages, which leaves considerable room for further improvement. Greater attention to Hebrew has since made up this deficit to a certain extent. But Chinese holds the potential for even more important refinements of the original theory. The article explains the original theorists’ failure to exploit this case in terms of a certain prejudice against Chinese language and culture that had arisen at the time, and for which these theorists were themselves partly responsible. It then tries to show in some detail how deeply enriching for the theory a consideration of Chinese can be.

This paper begins with an overview of some of the central principles of the “Romantic” hermeneutics that Ernesti, Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Boeckh developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as of some of the differences between their versions of it. It then argues that this new hermeneutics - both in general and in Schleiermacher’s version of it - had a massive beneficial impact on the development of the human sciences in the long nineteenth century, including classics, Bible scholarship, general historiography, historiography of philosophy, historiography of literature, comparative literature, historiography of law, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and art history. This massive beneficial impact is not only remarkable in its own right but also constitutes a prima facie case for the correctness of “Romantic” hermeneutics, a case with which alternative approaches to hermeneutics (such as Gadamer’s and Davidson’s) cannot compete.

Hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, is an essential and valuable branch of philosophy. Hermeneutics is also a central component of the methodology of the social sciences and the humanities, for example historiography, anthropology, art history, and literary criticism. In a sequence of accessible chapters, contributors across the human sciences explain the leading concepts and ideas of hermeneutics, the historical development of the field, the importance of hermeneutics in philosophy today, and the ways in which it can address contemporary concerns including intercultural relations, relations between subcultures within a single society, and relations across race and gender. Clearly structured and written in non-technical language, this Companion will be an important contribution to a growing field of study.

In a previous article in this journal, “Genealogy,” I offered a sort of “genealogy of genealogy,” an account of the method’s development, according to which it mainly grew, not from English or French antecedents, but out of a German tradition that began with Herder and then continued with Hegel before eventually culminating in Nietzsche himself. [...] Presupposing this account of the method of genealogy, the present article will consider the method in relation to one of its most important areas of application: morality.

Nietzsche and Foucault famously employ a philosophical method of “genealogy” and apply it to the realm of morality in particular. In this article I would like to do two main things: I will begin by offering a contribution toward a sort of “genealogy of genealogy,” that is, toward an account of how the method emerged historically. I will then give an explanation of how the method is supposed to work. In a subsequent, companion article in this journal, “Genealogy and Morality,” I will discuss the method’s application to morality in some concrete ways.

Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later works often implies commitment to a doctrine of the autonomy or arbitrariness of grammar. This chapter discusses the conception of grammar that is presupposed in this doctrine and then explains the doctrine itself. The chapter also explains a sense in which grammar is not autonomous or arbitrary for Wittgenstein and discusses some possible criticisms of the doctrine. It should be noted at the outset that this whole area of exegetical concern is one in which the fairly widespread conception in the secondary literature that the later Wittgenstein is a complete “quietist” in philosophy ‐ i.e., someone who advances no positive doctrines of his own, although encouraged by some of his own statements, seems impossible to sustain. Wittgenstein's doctrine of the autonomy or arbitrariness of grammar presupposes a highly distinctive conception of grammar, one which at least prima facie has little to do with our everyday conception of grammar.