The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy

There are many different ways of dealing with the conditions of justice. In this paper I raise some basic questions about the foundations of justice, including whatare its central requirements and, especially, what it is about justice that underlies or explains its mandatoriness: why it is that justice is regarded as so morally necessary that any violation of it calls for the most severe condemnation and correction.

La metaphysique-dogmatique pose des structures essentielles, des valeurs absolues qui existent "en soi et pour soi", et qui surpassent l'homme, tout en s'appuyant sur la dichotomie des valeurs. Nietzsche, au contraire, se tient dans rimmanence et pour cela il s'appuie sur le concept de Volonte de puissance. Autrement dit, i l se rattache ä des penseurs comme Heraclite d'Ephese, dans sa tentative de reintegrer l'homme dans le tout /nature iphusis) duquel i l est sorti. Et pourtant, cette realite, due au fait qu'il est toujours en devenir, ne se laisse pas emprisonner dans ces cadres. Et c'est dans ce sens que la dimension esthetique apparait comme essentielle: l'existence s'affirme comme creation et seulement en tant que telle. En conclusion, la Volonte de puissance est en elle-meme artiste, pouvoir de transfiguration du reel, que Nietzsche justement designe sous le nom de dionysiaque. Ces premisses etant donnees, il ne sera pas difficile d'etablir des rapports entre les concepts nietzscheens et la production artistique actuelle dans le but de tracer une nouvelle vision et/ou une nouvelle perspective de la realite comme un tout.

In this paper, I explore a set of moral questions about the portrayal of evil characters in fiction: might the portrayal of evil in fiction ever be morally wrong? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons? What kinds of portrayals are morally wrong and what kinds are not? I argue that whether or not imagining evil is morally wrong depends on the formal and structural properties of the work.

In meinem Aufsatz möchte ich die Ästhetik auf ihre Möglichkeit hin überprüfen, eine grundlegende Theorie des „Sinnlichen" innerhalb der menschlichen kulturellen Tätigkeiten zu sein. Dieses Vorhaben werde ich damit beginnen, Heideggers Kritik an der traditionellen Ästhetik zu behandeln. Dem überlieferten Ästhetikverständnis liegt nach Heidegger offenbar diesselbe vorstellend-vergegenständlichende Denkweise zugrunde, die der ganzen abendländischen Geschichte eigen ist. Doch lässt sich nach Heidegger mittels der auf dem metaphysischen Denken basierenden Ästhetik das Wesen der Kunst niemals erschöpfend behandeln, da die Kunst als das Ins-Werk- Setzen der Wahrheit verstanden werden muss.Freilich nimmt Heidegger immer eine kritische Haltung gegenüber der sogenannte „Ästhetik" ein, aber man kann dadurch auch die Möglichkeit einer anderen erweiterten Ästhetik finden, die die anfängliche Wahrheitsfunktion der aisthesis als Wahr-nehmung ins Auge zu fassen versucht. Von diesem grundlegenden Standpunkt aus möchte ich mich mit einem gegenwärtigen Versuch des ästhetischen Denkens (Wolfgang Welsch) und mit einer nicht-europäischen traditionellen Ästhetik (Shüzö Kuki) beschäftigen.

This essay deals with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the history of ideas, that of irrationalism. It emerged to full consciousness in mid-eighteenth century thought. Irrationalism was a logical consequence of individualism which in turn was a direct outcome of the Cartesian self-reflective subject. In time these tendencies produced the "critical" Zeitgeist and the "epoch of taste" during which Kant began thinking about such matters. Like Alfred Bäumler, I argue that irrationalism could not have arisen in ancient or medieval philosophical discourse, as they both lacked a certain type of rationalism required as its conceptual antipode. Only after the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the ensuing reason vs. passion debate acknowledging for the first time both human powers as equal contenders, did the specter of irrationalism arise and become a focus. Kant's revolution in thought produced "transcendental psychology" reconciling "pure" sensibility and "pure" reason and provided, I argue, the conceptual wherewithal to grant aesthetic feeling and irrationalism a philosophical niche.

In the Critique of Judgement Kant develops a theory of taste, according to which taste is the ability to make judgements concerning beauty, beauty in nature and in art. These judgements are based on a particular reflective activity, an activity in which the understanding is driven into a never-ending play with the imagination.In my paper I will try to show the actuality of Kant's aesthetic theory as a general theory of aesthetic experience, not only in connection with art, but as a particular kind of experience possible in other areas as well. Aesthetic experience is, as I read Kant, a peculiar kind of setting free, of detaching the connection between our experience and objective reality, a connection presupposed in every non-aesthetic discourse. This disconnection from the empirical world, which is essential in aesthetic reflection, I will call an aesthetic emancipatedness.To experience something aesthetically means to set it free, to embody it in the aesthetic emancipatedness, to set it free from the boundaries of normality and make it something extraordinary; a deviation. But a deviation would only exist in contrast to that which it deviates from. Emancipatedness can only exist in contrast to a not yet emancipated condition. This explains why the aesthetic experience also affects the moral and the cognitive aspects of reality.

This paper interrogates Hölderlin's effort to deconstruct the speculative matrix of tragedy, with a particular focus on his "Remarks on Antigone," which are appended to his translation of the Sophoclean tragedy. In focus are, firstly, the separative force of the caesura, which stems tragic transport and is here analyzed, in terms of Hölderlin's understanding of Greece in relation to "Hesperia," as an incipiently Hesperian poetic gesture. Secondly, Hölderlin's key thought of the mutual "unfaithfulness" of God and man is at issue: the god here is revealed as sheer time, while man is thrown back upon the bare moment. This "unfaithfulness" must be tempered by a striving that turns back from the quest for transcendence to the measures of fmitude and to this world. By attentiveness to the singular (which is not the particular), the tragic poet, unlike the speculative philosopher, reveals time's agonal spacing.

Hegel's philosophy of literature, in the Aesthetics and other texts, gives no extended discussion of the novel. Hegel's predecessor Friedrich Schlegel had produced a philosophy of literature with a central position for the novel. Schlegel's discussion of the novel is based on a view of Irony which allows the novel to be the fusion of poetry and philosophy. Hegel retained a place for art, including poetry, below that of philosophy. The Ironic conception of the novel has themes, which also appear in Hegel, of the unity of opposites. However, for Hegel Irony does not allow the unity of artistic form and does not allow art to be guided by law and science. Therefore Hegel's philosophy of literature owes much to Schlegel but needs to attack Irony and minimise the role of the novel. Irony is criticised as a purely negative position of a 'beautiful soul', which cannot act and in its absolutely subjective resistance to evil in the world becomes evil itself. Hegel gives great importance to Epic which foreshadows the emergence of philosophy in its unity, but it is a unity based on conflicting individuality and lawlessness. In the modern world Heroic lawlessness can only be approached as nostalgia, the novel cannot integrate individuality and law, only religion and philosophy above aesthetics, including the novel.

The underlying premise of this essay is that the essential contribution of the hermeneutic turn in contemporary philosophy is the acknowledgment of a historical criterion of thinking, whereby the philosophical tradition is claimed by the question of its own truth. Philosophy, historically established by founding experience in truth, thus finds itself facing the open experience of truth, i.e. the truth as the coming about of the openness. Philosophical hermeneutics, as differing from hermeneutic philosophy, cannot limit itself solely to interpretative criticism. Rather, it must follow the opening of truth primarily happening in transit from thinking to language. And the moment of this transit is the question of ourselves.

En regardant en arriere ä l'itineraire philosophique de Ricceur, nous sommes tentes d'y saisir une logique de developpement qui semble decrire un mouvement en Spirale. C'est pourquoi dans des ouvrages les plus tardifs nous trouvons un retour de cette recherche sur la volonte - inscrite en fait dans le cadre d'une anthropologic philosophique - qui avait inspire son projet de jeunesse. Appelons-le 'mouvement en Spirale' et non : retour circulaire aux origines, car entre le debut et la fin i l n'y a pas de coincidence mais enrichissement apres un long detour ä travers l'univers du langage et de la textualite. II ne s'agit pas pour autant d'imaginer une suite du genre : Philosophie de la volonte, hermeneutique, ä nouveau Philosophie de la volonte ou de Taction. Le terrain de l'hermeneutique, une fois conquis, n'est en realite jamais abandonne, dans la mesure oü i l est impossible de se passer de la mediation du langage. Le phenomene se donnant grace au pouvoir revelatif du langage nous permet de saisir les multiples aspects de l'homme agissant et souffrant. La Philosophie de Ricceur, est, plus qu'une "Philosophie du langage", une "philosophie ä travers le langage", c'est-ä-dire qu'elle traverse le phenomene du langage dans toute sa richesse sans jamais oublier qu'ä travers le langage nous parlons de quelque chose et que le langage ne doit pas devenir - si non pour une abstraction deliberee et consciente - un Systeme clos en lui-meme sans reference au monde et aux interlocuteurs du discours : cette consideration reste valable meme par rapport au dernier ouvrage oü la dialectique entre memoire et histoire est toujours liee ä la dialectique entre discours oral et discours ecrit et done au double travail de l'ecriture et de la lecture. Notre hypothese de travail est qu'on pourrait retrouver dans cette traversee du langage une sequence ä la fois historique (selon l'ordre de la decouverte) et theorique (selon un certain ordre hermeneutique) de trois paradigmes : Symbole, texte, traduction, qui nous donnent une sorte de boussole pour nous orienter au cours du long voyage.

The purpose of this paper is to point out the logical priority of the existential grounds of picturing reality by means of scientific representations, hypotheses as such. Also, to clarify the meaning of the inscribing and reading of the picture in terms of the existential conditions and facts of the human being who acts and reacts for survival, and who interprets its surroundings in connection with the train of consequences that connects up with this human action. The surrounding world thus is recognized and interpreted in terms of playing and operating with signs, the significations of which make up the horizons of the world of the human being. This clarification is needed to throw light on how concepts mean in the application of words in language. And the clarity reached at this stage helps for us to clarify further the meaning of thinking and its relation to language-use in terms of playing and operating with signs in the conditions of the surrounding world, the action of the human body in its existential situation. Hence, the logical priority of the human condition in terms of the use and application of signs in the existential world of human being differs from the analytical representations of the world in science for scientific purposes. Which means that the representations of science are tools of the language, and that they are to be treated and interpreted as signs used to represent reality only in the scientific contexts, for the purposes of the language of science and scientific culture. Without such clarity, representations of science, scientific descriptions of reality are open to misinterpretation even by scientists and philosophers, let alone layman, to be so generalized to extend the bounds of its meaningful application in the scientific context of explaining or describing phenomena experimented, or observed under certain experimental conditions.

In Soi-meme comme autre Ricoeur defines personal identity as singularity, this being the manner in which each individual structures a deposit of common experiences and ways of being-in-the-world in a space-time, and as such as a personalized manner of responding to the challenges of circumstances. For what is common and shared, the other is an alter ego. Identity is a holon that can't be divided into atoms, as the puzzle cases and Musil's L'Homme sans qualites seek to do. Ricoeur divides identity into sameness and ipseity. Sameness designates a cumulative center of experiences; ipseity designates the other of oneself, i.e. the historical and changing quality of sameness. With the theories of Bremont and Greimas, Ricoeuer finds in literary narration the best examples of the dialectic between sameness and ipseity. In adddition he considers, with Mclntyre, that it is the best medium for formulating ethical judgments on the basis of discrete experiences.