Priebe Maximilian

The German philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hans Blumenberg have thought differently about the role of the ‘image’ in thought. This article presents Cassirer as the philosopher of ‘reading’, whereas Blumenberg appears as the philosopher of ‘seeing’. Cassirer wants to show that each act of figurative-pictorial inner representation in thought can be deconstructed into smaller elements of signs that need to be “read” before they can be “seen.” In turn, Blumenberg bases the very act of conceptual thinking on rhetoric, namely on the figurative images that are literally ‘visible’ in the structure of metaphors. In his underground of thought, “seeing” precedes “reading”. By situating these two approaches in the context of the post-Kantian quarrel over the use of images in 20th century physics, this article uncovers some of the pre-history of what has today become known as the “visual turn” in the humanities.

This work offers the first comprehensive comparison between the philosophy of Adam Smith and that of his successor, Thomas Reid. It looks at Reid’s and Smith’s remarkably similar accounts of human perception and judgement, and at their different moral and economic theories. In this way, this paper offers not only a new perspective on Reid’s critique of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, but also new insights into the intellectual roots of the genuinely Scottish debates about sense perception and the task of scientific philosophy. “Reiding” Smith can thus offer a unique vantage point from which to understand the connections between epistemological and economic issues in Smith’s work. With a focus that is at once historical and philosophical, this undertaking serves three purposes: a) to familiarise economists with the philosophical and economic works of Thomas Reid, b) to sharpen our understanding of Adam Smith’s intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment, and c) to better understand the paradoxical role that individual human judgement plays in Adam Smith’s analysis of the economy.

The following article is a portrait of the French sociologist, philosopher, Systems thinker and public intellectual Edgar Morin. It aims to present the life and works of Edgar Morin to a German speaking audience. Introductory in nature, it does not claim to offer more than a concise, contemporary, and, where needed, critical summary of Edgar Morin’s main theoretical tenets. It proceeds by offering, first,abrief overview of Morin’sbiography and a loose sketch of his position in the landscape of French 20th century philosophy. Based on a close reading of Edgar Morin’s chief theoretical oeuvre, La Méthode, it subsequently reconstructshis thought in four steps, payingattention toa) to the context of Morin’s specific intellectual concerns and his new cosmological »method«, b) to his theory of nature, c) to his theory of society, and d) finally to his ethics. The profile which should emerge from this procedure is one of an intellectual who is grapplingwithawide-spanning, holistic thinking; whose working style is transdisciplinary and directed against academic specialisation; and whose philosophical concerns centre around the normativeexpectations of classical humanism. EdgarMorin is a thinker who invites us to think with him through matters of the contemporary world, and his viewpoints are herediscussed and critically evaluated with particular reference to the relevance of his thought for the ecological discourse, and for the current challenges of ›knowledge societies.‹