Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie: Heft 37.2/2012

Abhandlungen:

• Gunter Gebauer: Wie können wir über Emotionen sprechen?
  Abstract

  In this article, a philosophical conception of the relationship of language to emotions is developed. Based on a conceptual analysis, the language-game of emotions is described, the core of which is the interchangeability of „I» and «thou». A series of insights is derived from empirical observation: The first-person perspective expresses the experience of an emotion in its singularity. The second-person perspective allows the speaker to participate in the emotional situation of the «thou». In children’s acquisition of language, the child’s natural emotional experience is re-configured in language through the involvement of the second person. The second person forms the crucial precondition enabling a general understanding of emotions. With its «outside» viewpoint the second person can also consider emotional states from the perspective of observation — a perspective that can be expanded to the third person.
• Henrik Jäger: Konfuzianismusrezeption als Wegbereitung der deutschen Aufklärung
  Abstract

  In 1711 the «Sinensis Imperii libri Classici Sex», a latin translation of the Confucian classics by Father François Noël SJ, were published in Prague. Christian Wolff, the most influential philosopher in the era of Early Enlightenment, began to study this translation of the core texts of Confucian thought soon after its publication. The most important result of his study was Wolff’s «Lecture on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese» held in 1721 at the University of Halle. In this lecture Wolff tried to show the complete inner conformity of his philosophy with the Confucian tradition. Chinese Philosophy appeared as a new legitimation for an ethics completely independent of any «revealed» or «natural religion“. Wolff’s Chinese background is rarely discussed in the field of the history of Enlightenment. This paper aims to make a first step to fill this gap and to show that Chinese Philosophy had, in fact, an enormous impact on the way toward an enlightened modern consciousness in Europe.
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Berichte und Diskussionen:

• Stephan Schick: Exzentrischer Humanismus? Die Transformation des Humanitätsbegriffs zum Ethos in der Philosophie Plessners
  Abstract

  This paper analyzes Helmuth Plessner’s concept of humanity and humanism and its relation to the tradition of European humanistic thought. It tries to demonstrate that Plessner’s idea of humanism is based on his own concept of human nature as an excentric one. As an essential consequence he understands humanism neither in a confuse or vague manner as the pursuit for tolerance and human dignity nor as the affirmation of specific philosophical contents, but as a certain anthropologically grounded attitude or ethos, which is characteristic for all types of European humanism.

Buchbesprechungen:

• Volker Rühle: Intellektuelle Atomzertrümmerung (zu Theodor W. Adorno: Einführung in die Dialektik, hg. v. Christoph Ziermann, Berlin 2010)Buy article
• Peter Grönert: Lebensformen, Handlungsformen (zu Michael Thompson, Leben und Handeln. Grundstrukturen der Praxis und des praktischen Denkens, Berlin 2011).