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[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Philosophy of Religion – III. Fundamental Theology – IV. Dogmatics – V. Ethics – VI. Practical Theology and Psychology of Religion …

[German Version] Philosophy of Art, a subdivision of philosophical aesthetics (I), inquires into the properties and effects of art as the outstanding domain of aesthetic experience. The question (both practical and metaphysical) of the status and value of things fashioned by human beings in the totality of the world is exemplified in the case of art as the hermeneutical question of the conditions associated with the production and understanding of meaning (Hermeneutics). The philosophy of art begins with Plato, whose De re …

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[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Church History – III. Philosophy – IV. Fundamental Theology – V. Ethics – VI. Culture, Art, and Religion – VII. Practical Theology

[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Practical Theology I. Philosophy Irony (from Gk εἰρωνεία/ eironeía, “dissimilation,” attested since the 4th cent. bce; Lat. dissimulatio…

[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Philosophy of Religion – III. Ethics – IV. Power of Imagination I. Philosophy Imagination or fantasy (Gk φαντασία/ phantasía, Lat. phantasia; Lat./Eng./Fr. imaginatio[n], “appearance, mental image, idea”; cf. also Gk φάντασμα/ phántasma, “appearance, dream image, vision”) is the primarily pictographic conception of things that dominates in memory and recreation (as in dreams). Its elementary activity also contributes to academic insights, technical inventions, and artistic production. Ever since Classical Antiquity, philosophy has concerned itself with imagination in the context of epistemic and aesthetic issues: how reliable and how important is the role of imagination in the processing of sensory perceptions? Since Philostra…

[German Version] is a term and concept developed by Karl-Otto Apel in the context of his conception of morality based on intersubjectivity; it denotes philosophical reflection on the validity conditions of argumentation. In transcendental pragmatics, a “transformation” of transcendental arguments takes place through a theory of linguistic and symbolic action: in the transcendental philosophy of I. Kant with its “Copernican revolution,” the question of the a priori conditions that make experience (I) possible aims at constant involvement on the part of the subj…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies Use of the Greek word σύμβολον/ sýmbolon in a sense relevant to religio…

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[German Version] I. Philosophy A value judgment is a judgment by which something is assessed as valuable or valueless. In contrast to the judgment of fac…

[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Ethics – III. Psychology – IV. Law I. Philosophy Judgment (Lat. iudicium, Fr. jugement, Ger. Urteil) is the intellectual decision (I) that concludes the process of opinion formation or cognition. It may (but need not) include an utterance of the matching proposition. Philosophically, judgment is one of the most important problems of logic, epistemology, practical philosophy, and aesthetics (discrimination). In …

[German Version] I. Philosophy The expression the sublime (Ger. das Erhabene) refers to our experience of objects that by virtue of their greatness (physical or metaphysical), power, or perfection make us conscious of our own exaltation, often with an accompanying awareness of the limits of our own capacity. In the debate with poetic enthusiasm (I) in antiquity, the sublime was discussed using the term ὕψος ( hýpsos, “height”) as a category of poetics and rhetoric (I): in …

[German Version] (Lat. gustus/ sapor; Fr. goût; Ger. Geschmack) is the ability to discern pleasure and displeasure. Originally limited to the physical sense of tasting, since antiquity the term has been applied figuratively to perception, judgment, speech, and conduct (e.g. M.T. Cicero). In the mid-17th century, it was discussed in ethics (Gracián, French moralist lite…

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[German Version] According to I. Kant, the categorical imperative stands for the unconditionally valid moral commandment to heed the general appropriateness of one's actions: “Act only according to that maxim that you could also want to become a universal law” ( Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [1785], Akademie-Ausgabe [AA] IV, 421; ET: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1997). As early as the 1760s, Kant had already put forward the idea (crucial for his ethics of autonomy) that the free will of a rational being is subject only to the law that it imposes upon itself as a result of its own insights. It was not until after he had completed the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; ET: Critique of Pure Reason, 1998) that Kant endeavored to develop this idea in his Groundwork (AA IV, 385–463*). He did so by iden…

[German Version] I. Cultural History The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga identified play as a fundamental cultural phenomenon and thus a defining feature of human life. His thesis of homo ludens supplements the anthropological theories of homo sapiens and homo faber and other explanations of culture grounded in reason and fabrication (Labor). Huizinga posits the following definition: “Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules that are freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’ ” (Huizinga, 28). Using this definition, he cites early cultural evidence to describe the roots of law, war, knowledge, poetry, philosophy, and art in play. Contest, ceremonial, and the sociology of cultic behavior are the primary issues. At the end, he turns to criticism of modern culture, maintaining that what he holds to be the “true” element of play has been lost in the “puerilism” dominant today. Huizinga’s thesis and especially t…

[German Version] (Lat. ingenium/genius; Fr. génie) is the capacity for creative discovery and production. In analogy to G.W. Leibniz's notion of the divine choice of possible worlds, genius was characterized in the 18th century as the releaser of unrealized possibilities. Through the concept of genius with its productive power of imagination (Imagination, Power of), the aesthetics (I) of the 18th century valued the naturally given, spontaneous and emotionally accented facility for creativity above th…

[German Version] from Greek κρίνειν/ krínein, “distinguish, decide, judge,” is methodical evaluation based on well-founded criteria. In everyday usage, the word is identified with negative assessment; in philosophical usage, however, it denotes the weighing of both positive and negative v…

[German Version] is an artificial technical term coined by I. Kant to characterize his methodological approach to a critique of reason. While the earlier expression transcendental derived from the transcendentals, the fundamental properties of reality in medieval ontology, transcendental philosophy refers to a form of philosophical cognition, between epistemology and ¶ ontology, “that is occupied not with objects but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them” ( KrV, 21787, 43). As a philosophy of “pure, merely speculative reason” ( KrV, 45), transcendental philosophy examines the a priori conditions of possible experience, inasmuch as they are also the …