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[German Version] (c. 185 – c. 109 bce). Born on Rhodes to an influential family, Panaetius did not pursue the political career expected of him but devoted himself to philosophy as a student of Crates of…

[German Version] (Poseidonius of Apameia; c. 135– 51 bce), the most important representative of Middle Stoicism (Stoics). As a student of Panaetius he lived in Athens, which he left after Panaetius’s death to form ¶ his own Stoic school on Rhodes. Poseidonius’s most famous student was Cicero. His work has survived only in fragments and quotations in the works of others. He appears to have been a polymath comparable only to Democritus and Aristotle. In the spirit of Stoicism, he had a universal vision of philosophy as a search for causes in all questions, human and divine, on the grounds that knowledge of causes enables knowledge of the Logos, which encompasses all individual causes. In his understanding of philosophy, Poseidonius, like Panaetius, went beyond the Stoic tradition, incorporating Platonic and Aristotelian ideas (Platonism) and teachings of the Pythagorean school (Pythagoreans). Follow Stoic tradition, he divided philosophy into the disciplines of logic, physics, and ethics, asserting that all parts were of equal rank and mutually dependent. Almost nothing has survived of the content of his logic, but it is clear that for him logic functioned as more than a tool of philosophy. Poseidonius modified earlier Stoic teaching by giving up the identification of reason (Logos) with nature (Physis) as the absolute good, so that people should not simply live by the dictates of nature but also by the dictates of reason. Under the sign of nature and reason, Poseidonius also revised the emphasis on individual ethics favored by the early Stoa: he understood the total cosmos as a living being and asserted a harmonious unity of everything that has being, functioning organically under the guidance of the divine Logos. For Poseidonius sympathy was the central, universal concept in explaining the world. In contrast to traditional Stoic monism, Poseidonius argued…

[German Version] The term philosophy of history was coined by Voltaire, who published in 1765 his Philosophie de l’histoire (ET: The Philosophy of History, 1766). He was determined to present an objective, ¶ phenomenal study of history, based on natural human reason, instead of the hitherto dominant theology of history (History, Theology of), for which J.-B. Bossuet had created a monumental apotheosis in his Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681; ET: Discourse on Universal History, 1976), conceived to reflect God’s guidance of history. Bossuet was the foil agains…

[German Version] The humanities, or the humane sciences (Ger. Geisteswissenschaften), represent, according to W. Dilthey, the “other half of the intellectual globe” (GS 1, 5), referring to everything that is not a natural science. But this criterion of demarcation by no means gains the intended clarity of classification. For humanities, like “social science (sociology), moral and historical study of culture, all these terms suffer from the same error of being too restricted in reference to the subject they are designed to express” (GS 1, 6). The spectrum o…

[German Version] The concept of ontotheology stems from I. Kant and characterizes, along with cosmo­theology, the second branch of transcendental theology. The task of ontotheology is “to recognize its (i.e. the primal being’s) existence by concepts, without the assistance of the slightest degree of experience” ( …

[German Version] In line with its Greek origin, phenomenon still primarily denotes what reveals itself to sensory vision, or is present as object to the senses. In antiquity phenomenon had a double meaning. On the one hand, phenomenon meant that which is given to the senses as it is, and hence was mostly synonymous with appearance or manifestation. On the other hand, phenomenon also denoted being in the sense of what is apparent. Thus for Plato, phenomenon indicates terminologically what is deceptively …

[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Ethics I. Philosophy In the context of action theory, intention/ intentionality (from Lat. intentio…

[German Version] I. Fundamental Theology – II. Philosophy I. Fundamental Theology …

[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Fundamental Theology – III. Ethics – IV. Practical Theology I. Philosophy Because the term life-world (Ger. Lebenswelt) usually refers to the concrete world of our everyday life experiences, it has sometimes been equated with everyday life. This interpretation overlooks the fact that it is a highly ambitious concept of theoretical philosophy, which has, however, taken on greatly different forms. H…

[German Version] I. Philosophy Historically, the term phenomenology has been used in various different ways. It is first found in the Novum Organon (1764) of Johann Heinrich Lambert. Here phenomenology studies appearance, in order to clarify its influence on the correctness or falsehood of human cognition, and to overcome this influence in the interests of truth. The term phenomenology was passed on in this sense by J.G. Herder, I. Kant, and J.G. Fichte, among others. The term became widely known only through G.W.F. Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; ET: Phenomenology of Mind…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Bible – III. Fundamental Theology and Dogmatics – IV. Philosophy – V. Philosophy of Religion – VI. Natural Sciences – VII. Ethics I. Religious Studies Religious ideas and rituals focus fundamentally on life in this world and the next (Here and now, and the hereafter), i.e., coping with life and death (I). Through an immense range of variations, certain returning e…