Hegel’s Law: Rechtsphilosophie nach Hegel 200 Jahre Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts

“Menschenwürde”, a widely used term in German philosophy, political science and ethics, is a term with no exact English equivalent. It correspondends in general to “Human Dignity”, sometimes “sanctity of life”, or “security of person”, or “personal security” to denote the inalienable autonomy of human beings. The use of “personal security” is frequently found in books on the Philosophy of Law, e.g. by Roscoe Pound ([15]; cf. also [7]), while the term “Human Dignity” is quite generally used in ethical discourse, especially in social and political ethics. Politicians use it as does the International Commission of Jurists and other groups and agencies affiliated to the United Nations. Here it is used as though it were an ethical technical term with a distinct meaning which, however, is not really the case. Still, the use of the term “Human Dignity” in these circles represents more or less the meaning of “Menschenwürde” in the German language. Finally, the term “sanctity of life” is — contrary to a wide-spread opinion — not of theological origin. Helga Kuhse has recently used it in the title of her book [11]. In the following we will use the term “Human Dignity”, although this translation denotes only a part of what the German term “Menschenwürde” means in post-war usage.

The starting point of this essay is the question “Under what conditions is the legal practitioner justified in ignoring the economic point of view?”. This question leads to an inquiry of the relation between the disagreements economists have with the law and theoretical disagreements. The essay makes two main claims. First, the disagreements economists have with the law can originate a particular kind of theoretical disagreement – an interdisciplinary theoretical disagreement. Interdisciplinary theoretical disagreements pre- suppose the solution of a translation problem from economics into law. The translation problem is solved when a proposition of economics becomes part of the external justification of a legal norm. It makes sense to use the expression «interdisciplinary translation» because meaning is moved from one practice to another. Second, the various positions with regard to the relation between law and morality are also a problem of interdisciplinary translation – this time from morality to law. In light of this insight, the essay concludes with the hope of more interest by philosophers of law and legal theorists for the relation between law and economics.

354 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Hegel-Studien, vol. 10. Ed. Friedhelm Nicolin and Otto POggeler. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975. Pp. 459. Paper.) These Hegel studies are sponsored by the Hegel Committee of the Rheinisch- Westfalische Akademie der Wissenchaften and the editors connected with the publication of the first historic -critical edition of Hegel's Gesammelte Werke by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, (of which volumes 4, 6, and 7 have been released). Not only this ambitious venture, but also the publication of the Hegel-Studien, give conclusive evidence of a great Hegel renaissance in West Germany and elsewhere. The current volume contains four valuable texts and documents, five essays, a contribution to a critical discussion, and, finally, quite a number of reviews of current publications on Hegel. But this is not all: the volume ends with a bibliography briefly describing essays on Hegel research, 1973 (collected and edited by Joseph Wachter), where we find additional material outlining new and original ideas. Among the documents, the most important ones are Nicolin's findings about Hegel's early concepts of constitutional monarchy and Manfred Baum's and Kurt Meist's amazing discoveries concerning the fledgling philosopher's political opinions, culled from his editorial work with the Bamberger Zeitung in 1807 and 1808. From Nicolin's material, which he calls "a fragment from the first lecture on legal philosophy" (ein Splitter aus der ersten Rechtsphilosophie - Vorlesung), it clearly appears that the young Hegel had quite liberal ideas about constitutional monarchy far remote from any admiration of the Prussian state that later was considered as the epitome of the legal power system. In the original version, we do not find the unilateral declaration that the power of the prince forms "the summit and the starting point of the whole system." The early version of Rechtsphilosophie only recently was made available for publication; the text concerns a hand-written copy left by the jurist Carl Gustav Homeyer who had heard the lecture delivered by Hegel in his first Berlin semester, that is, during the winter 1818/1819. Its title was Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft (Natural Law and Political Science). The manuscript has two parts: a paragraph dictated by Hegel and written down word by word by Homeyer; and explanations following it, jotted down in loose keywords. This material was published by Karl-Heinz Ilting as the "original version" of Rechtsphilosophie . Nicolin connects it with two small fragments from Hegel's first lecture on legal philosophy given a year before the Berlin course. They convey the same notions as those developed in Ilting's interpretative thesis. According to Ilting, for reasons of adjustment to the Prussian regime, Hegel's liberal political concepts were concealed in the printed text of Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, published in 1820. Therefore, one could not consider this famous textbook as the authoritative description of his philosophy of law, since earlier and later lectures had different versions. It is interesting that in lectures delivered in Heidelberg in 1817 and 1818 on his philosophy of law, Hegel had given the following dictation : "In a nation that has developed into a society of citizens, altogether into the consciousness of the infinity of the free self, only a constitutional monarchy is possible" (Nicolin's emphasis). This proposition was omitted in the two editions of Natural Law published in 1821 and 1833. Baum and Meist, in their essay "Politics and Philosophy at the Bamberger Zeitung: Documents on Hegel's Editorial Activity, 1807-1808," rightly claim that, except for one publication by Wilhelm R. Beyer, Hegel scholars have paid very little attention to the political ideas expressed in his articles and editorial work at the Bamberger Zeitung. Yet the year of Hegel's editorship of a political daily was of great significance for Germany and Europe because Napoleon, through the defeat of Prussia at the battlefield and in the peace treaty of Tilsit, established at that time a temporary stabilization of his hegemony on the European continent. Hegel did not conceal his admiration for Napoleon and his legislative efforts (his dubbing him the "Weltgeist on horseback" is well-known), and he confessed to his friend Niethammer that he "was following the world events with curiosity." He also made...

The Tendencies of Technical Terminology Development in Modern German: (The material of electric and technical terms in German, French and Russian)

184. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1980 The Hume literature from 1925 to 1976 has been thoroughly covered in my book Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship : A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; /7.00), which also lists the main earlier writings on Hume. Publications of the years 1977 to 1979 were liste in Hume Studies for the last three Novembers. What follows here will bring the record up to the end of 1980. Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions , and to send me offprints of their own articles and reviews. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography covering the previous year, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. References to recently-appearing reviews (of books from earlier lists) are given at the end. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQAmerican Philosophical Quarterly JHIJournal of the History of Ideas JHPJournal of the History of Philosophy JPJournal of Philosophy PASProceedings of the Aristotelian Society PBPhilosophical Books PQPhilosophical Quarterly PRPhilosophical Review RIPRevue Internationale de Philosophie RMReview of Metaphysics TLSTimes Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly follow the British Standard (no. 4148) . ALTMANN, R. W. 'Hume on Sympathy', Sth. J. Phil. 18, 123-36. ANDERSON, R. F. 'In Defense of Section V: A Reply to Professor Yolton', Hume Studies 6, 26-31. AYER, A. J. Hume. (viii, 102 pp.) Oxford. [TLS (9 May 1980) , 531] 185. BAIER, A. 'Master Passions', in A. 0. Rorty, Explaining Emotions , 403-23. BAIER, A. 'Hume on Resentment', Hume Studies 6, 133-49. BAIER, A. 'Helping Hume to "compleat the union"', Phil. & Phenomenological Research 41, 167-86. BERMAN, D. 'Hume and Collins on Miracles', Hume Studies 6, 150-4. BLONDEL, E. '"Wohin?", "Wozu?": Ein Kulturproblem. Wahrheit und Leben bei Hume und Nietzsche' [in French], Perspektiven der Philosophie 6, 70-89. BOTWINICK, A. Ethics, Politics and Epistemology : A Study in the Unity of Hume's Thought. (xii, 185 pp.) Lanham, Md. BREDE, W. Der Unterschied der Lehren Humes in Treatise und im Inquiry. (50 pp.) Hildesheim & New York. (unaltered repr. of orig. publication, Halle 1896) BRICKE, J.' Hume's Philosophy of Mind. (vi, 176 pp.) Edinburgh. BURCH, R. 'Bayesianism and Analogy in Hume's Dialogues ' , Hume Studies 6, 32-44. CALHOUN, C. C. H. 'The Humean Moral Sentiment: A Unique Feeling', S. -west. J. Phil. 11, 69-78. CHARRON, W. C. 'Convention, Games of Strategy, and Hume's Philosophy of Law and Government', APQ 17, 327-34. DAUER, F. W. 'Hume's Skeptical Solution and the Causal Theory of Knowledge', PR 89, 35 7-7 8. DOORE, G. 'The Argument from Design: Some Better Reasons for Agreeing with Hume', Religious Studies 16, 145-61. DUSSINGER, J. A. 'David Hume's Denial of Personal Identity: The Making of a Skeptic', Image 37, 334-. FEINBERG, J. Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty, 307-14. Princeton, (repr. of Feinberg 1977) FLAGE, D. E. 'Hume's Identity Crisis', Mod. Schoolman 58, 21-35. FRANKLIN, J. 'More on Part IX of Hume's Dialogues ' , PQ 30, 69-71. 186. GAWLICK, G. 'Zwischen Empirismus und Skeptizismus: Neue Literatur zu David Hume (II) ' , Philosophische Rundschau 27, 59-84. (on Carabelli 1972, Mercer 1972, Roberts 19 73, Harrison 1976, Wayne & Colver 1976.) GILARDI, R. 'La natura epistemologica delle considerazioni humiane di Treatise , III, I, 1 su essere e dover essere', Rivista di Filosofia neoscolastica 72, 243-73. GRIFFIN-COLLART, E. 'Le bon David, âme républicaine, entre deux révolutions', Etudes sur le XVIIIe siècle 8, 35-46. HALL, R. 'The Hume Literature for 1979', Hume Studios 6, 162-8. HAMBOURGER, R. 'Belief in Miracles and Hume's "Essay"', Nous 14, 587-604. HEISMANN, G. 'Addenda to the Hume Bibliography: Austrian, German and Swiss Dissertations', Hume Studies 6, 168-70. IMMERWAHR, J. "Hume's Self Criticism', Sth. J. Phil. 18, 169-76. MacCORMAC, E. R. 'Hume's Embodied Impressions', Sth. J. Phil. 18, 447-62. MACKIE, J. L. Hume's Moral Theory. (viii, 166 pp.) London, etc. McRAE, R. 'The Import of Hume's Theory of Time', Hume Studies 6, 119-32. MALHERBE, M. Kant...

BOOK REVIEWS 417 Hermann Cohen. Werke. Edited by Helmut Holzhey. Vol. 7, System der Philosophie, Teil 2: Ethik des reinen Willens. Introduction by Steven S. Schwartzschild. Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1981. Pp. xxxvii + 7o7 . DM xl8.oo. Hermann Cohen (1842--1918), the founder and leader of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism, stands out as one of the main figures in German philosophy in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cohen's interpretation of Kant and his own systematic thought made the name of the city of Marburg synonymous with a version of transcendental philosophy. Today, Cohen's philosophy of religion is more widely known than his systematic works; his Religion out of the Sources of Judaism is his only major work available in English translation. His attempt to establish the primacy of ethics over the dialectics of history has also insured him a place in the history of social democratic thought. But Cohen's interpretation of Judaism and his conception of socialism are themselves aspects of a philosophical conception which has been neglected since the decline of Neo-Kantianism as a movement . Most of Cohen's writings have been out of print for decades. The need to make Cohen's work available again has now been optimally met with the publication for the first time of his complete works in a single edition. The Werke reproduces the last editions that Cohen hiimself corrected, supplementing them with new introductions and critical appendixes. An exception to this rule is Cohen's foundational work Kants Theorie der Erfahrung which, because of significant changes in the expanded second edition, will be reprinted in both its first and final forms. Volumes 1-4 will include Cohen's critical writings on Kant, volumes 5-9 writings on his own "system of philosophy," and volumes lo-11 the philosophy of religion. Volumes 12-x6 will contain all Cohen's smaller writings in chronological order. To illustrate Cohen's influence the two Festschriften published in celebration of his seventieth birthday will appear in a supplementary series to the Werke. The Ethik des reinen Willens, along with the Logik der reinen Erkenntnis and Aesthetik des reinen Gefi~hls, is part of Cohen's own system of transcendental philosophy. The ethics pursues the monumental task of justifying the validity of the Hebrew-Christian tradition of ethics within the framework of the secular state as a legal community by means of a transcendental philosophy of the pure will and virtue. The ethics combines what Kant treated separately in his works on the pure principles of morality and in the doctrine of law and doctrine of virtue in the Metaphysic of Morals. Steven Schwarzschild concentrates in his introduction, which is in English, on Cohen's union of ethics and the philosophy of law. He also provides a helpful discussion of the work's reception and points to its bearing on contemporary work in ethics. Cohen's ethics employs what he calls the "transcendental method." This seeks to generalize Kant's basic insight by conceiving every Faktum of experience as a construction depending upon a priori determinations. Cohen eliminates everything static or assumed in Kant's philosophy. Neither sensibility, the categories, nor the self as the giver of the moral law can be regarded as "given"; each depends upon a priori generation . Cohen calls this constructive element of experience Reinheit (purity). For this operational interpretation of transcendental philosophy the gegeben (given) is always 418 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY aufgegeben (a task). "Pure will" is a name for the task of forming moral self-consciousness , inherent in the orientation towards the future found in any law. The derivation of an ethics of the pure will begins with the Faktum of law. Jurisprudence for Cohen is the study of the normative, not merely the legal as it was for Kant. The pure will develops through the law towards an a priori end. This is Kant's "Kingdom of Ends" which Cohen interprets as the Hebrew prophets' "Messianiac Kingdom" of the unity of mankind and the secular socialist vision of society free of exploitation. The ought is not an abstraction for Cohen, a "mere ought" as Hegel would say...

Even before Kant, says Hegel in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (Lectures on the History of Philosophy), the “principle of liberty” had ascended in Rousseau’s Contrat social. After all, according already to Rousseau, man has “liberty in his spirit as the altogether absolute” (in seinem Geist die Freiheit als das schlechthin Absolute).1 And it is that breakthrough of the idea of freedom and the reason of laws based on it “as the final absolute obligation” (“als letzte absolute Verbindlichkeit”) in the drafting of the constitutions of the French Revolution that Hegel celebrates in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History as a “glorious mental dawn.” Kant reflects upon this dawn with the lapidary principle of his philosophy of law and state: “There is only one innate right, the birthright of freedom…it is the one sole original, inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity” (Das angeborene Recht ist nur ein einziges—Freiheit…ist dieses einzige, ursprüngliche, jedem Menschen kraft seiner Menschheit zustehende Recht).2 Thus, it is not freedom that requires a special legal title in order to be exercised, but its limitation that requires a reason. Consequently, Kant does not name individual basic rights.KeywordsSocial ContractFrench RevolutionPhilosophical LifeIdeal CitizenNatural FreedomThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Arabic is one of the six major world languages. It originated in the area currently known as the Arabian Peninsula. Arabic is the joint official language in Middle Eastern and African states. Large communities of Arabic speakers have existed outside of the Middle East since the end of the last century, particularly in the United States and Europe. So finding a quick and efficient Arabic machine translator has become an urgent necessity, due to the differences between the languages spoken in the world's communities and the vast development that has occurred worldwide. Arabic combines many of the significant challenges of other languages like word order and ambiguity. The word ordering problem because of Arabic has four sentence structures which allow different word orders. Ambiguity in the Arabic language is a notorious problem because of the richness and complexity of Arabic morphology. The core problems in machine translation are reordering the words and estimating the right word translation among many options in the lexicon. The Rule-Based Machine translation (RBMT) approach is the way to reorder words, and the statistical approach, such as Expectation Maximisation (EM), is the way to select right word translations and count word frequencies. Combining RBMT with EM plays an impotent role in generating a good-quality MT. This paper presents a combination of the rule-based machine translation (RBMT) approach with the Expectation Maximisation (EM) algorithm. These two techniques have been applied successfully to word ordering and ambiguity problems in Arabic-to-English machine translation.

기계 번역에서 나타나는 한국어의 중의성 문제에 대해 종합적으로 살펴보고, 중의성 해소 방안에 대한 방법론을 제시하였다. 한국어의 기계 번역에서 중의성은 언어 분석의 각 단계별로 발생한다. 본고에서는 전처리, 형태소 분석, 구문 분석, 의미 분석의 4단계에서 각각 나타나는 중의성을 해결하고자 하였는데, 특히 의미 분석에서의 중의성은 기계 번역의 대역어 생성 절차에서 해소할 수 있었다. 본고에서는 한국어의 기계 번역에서 중의성 문제를 처리하기 위하여, 사전에서 중의성을 가진 올림말에 중의어임을 나타내는 속성을 표시해서 각 중의성 처리 모듈과 표제어를 연결하는 표지로 활용하는 전략을 세웠다. 각 단계별 중의어 처리 모듈은 독립적으로 구성되겠는데, 이러한 방법론은 기계 번역의 효율성을 높이는 데 많은 도움이 될 것이다.

Although the problem of full machine translation (MT) is unsolved yet, the computer aided translation (CAT) makes progress. In this field we created a work environment for monolingual translator 1. This package of tools generally enables a user who masters a source language to translate texts to a target language which the user does not master. The application is for Hebrew-to-Russian case, emphasizing specific problems of these languages, but it can be adapted for other pairs of languages also. After Source Text Preparation, Morphological Analysis provides all the meanings for every word. The ambiguity problem is very serious in languages with incomplete writing, like Hebrew. But the main problem is the translation itself. Words’ meanings mapping between languages is M:M, i.e., almost every source word has a number of possible translations, and almost every target word can be a translation of several words. Many methods for resolving of these ambiguities propose using large data bases, like dictionaries with semantic fields based on θ-theory. The amount of information needed to deal with general texts is prohibitively large. We propose here to solve ambiguities by a new method: Accumulation with Inversion and then Weighted Selection, plus Learning, using only two regular dictionaries: from source to target and from target to source languages. The method is built from a number of phases: (1) during Accumulation with Inversion, all the possible translations to the target language of every word are brought, and every one of them is translated back to the source language; (2) Selection of suitable suggestions is being made by user in source language, this is the only manual phase; (3) Weighting of the selection’s results is being made by software and determines the most suitable translation to the target language; (4) Learning of word’s context will provide preferable translation in the future. Target Text Generation is based on morphological records in target language, that are produced by the disambiguation phase. To complete the missing features for word’s building, we propose here a method of Features Expansion. This method is based on assumptions about feature flow through the sentence, and on dependence of grammatical phenomena in the two languages. Software of the workstation combines four tools: Source Text Preparation, Morphological Analysis, Disambiguation and Target Text Generation. The application includes an elaborated windows interface, on which the user’s work is based.Keywordsmachine translationmonolingual usertranslator workstation

This article examines the issue of education from the point of the system theory of the modern German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. The main goal was to present arguments in favor of the possibility of education as a system, to describe its main functions and to highlight the problem of the medium. Firstly, the problem of translation of the German term Erziehung and its English counterpart Education was described; the existence of ambiguity, due to which it is possible in the context of the system theory to talk about both education and upbringing. Against this background, it was decided to use both terms as synonyms, bearing in mind their common meaning and the possibility of reverse translation. Then, by describing the main terms, Luhmann’s general understanding of the system theory and the system as a whole was given. Was mentioned such concepts as: distinguishing between the system and Umwelt, the phenomenon of self-reference and form. This gives rise to the second term – autopoiesis. The term was taken by Luhmann from the Chilean scientist Humberto Maturanа, the main point is in the special ability of systems to reproduce themselves from their own parts and to reproduce the parts themselves. A specific feature of autopoiesis is that it does not affect the final form. The phenomenon that provides autopoiesis is communication. It is possible because it is based on understanding and misunderstanding, which is found when distinguishing between message and information. From this constant distinction, sense is born. The possibility of understanding sense by a human, which is a psycho-physical system, is provided by structural coupling, openness of the system to external information. Based on this, we can describe the educational system. It is aimed at the formation and editing of the Person – a social symbol of communication. By providing each pupil with the same necessary knowledge, the education system thus increases the success of future communication. The medium that enables the system is the Pupil. However, significant social changes led to its reinterpretation and the emergence of a new term Lebenslauf, which causes problems in translation and interpretation.

The article is devoted to the problem of medical translation of non-equivalent terms from German into Russian. The purpose of the article is to identify the most frequent non-equivalent medical terms when translating into Russian in the most popular online medical journals in German. Research methods include a content analysis of the scientific literature on the research topic, classification of non-equivalent medical vocabulary and methods for its translation from German; frequency-functional analysis of medical terms in the German language. Research objectives include: content analysis of scientific linguistic literature on the topic of research; identification of the main features and methods of translation of medical texts; conducting an empirical study to identify the most frequent ones without equivalent lexical units in German texts of a medical orientation. The author of the article analyzes the historiography of the problem in Russian linguistics. The materials for empirical research were articles in 10 non-German medical popular scientific journals; the total volume of texts was 50 articles in German. The expected results of the study are obtaining new information about the frequency of medical German terms, the translation of which into Russian requires a descriptive translation.

Video-guided machine translation, as one type of multimodal machine translation, aims to engage video contents as auxiliary information to address the word sense ambiguity problem in machine translation. Previous studies only use features from pre-trained action detection models as motion representations of the video to solve the verb sense ambiguity and neglect the noun sense ambiguity problem. To address this, we propose a video-guided machine translation system using both spatial and motion representations. For the spatial part, we propose a hierarchical attention network to model the spatial information from object-level to video-level. We investigate and discuss spatial features extracted from objects with pre-trained convolutional neural network models and spatial concept features extracted from object labels and attributes with pre-trained language models. We further investigate spatial feature filtering by referring to corresponding source sentences. Experiments on the VATEX dataset show that our system achieves a 35.86 BLEU-4 score, which is 0.51 score higher than the single model of the SOTA method. Experiments on the How2 dataset further verify the generalization ability of our proposed system.

The Novel and Prejudice Sarah Winter (bio) In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that since "all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice," modern historicism suffers from a fundamental hermeneutic blindness: "historicism, despite its critique of rationalism and of natural law philosophy, is based on the modern Enlightenment and unwittingly shares its prejudices. And there is one prejudice of the Enlightenment that defines its essence: . . . the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power."1 Gadamer's critique alludes to the Enlightenment attack on prejudice, defined as an automatic prejudgment based on customary or habitual patterns of thinking. For Gadamer, such "provisional" judgments (273) are fundamental, as they inevitably involve the Heideggerian "fore-conception" [Vorgriff], or the interpretive expectations that we bring to a text or experience.2 By implementing an Enlightenment critique of prejudice to foreground the constructed and changing status of human knowledge, modern historicism attempts to evade both the effects of what we know in advance of each interpretive act and the historical status of our "anticipatory ideas" (272), thus paradoxically exhibiting its own anti-historicist predisposition. Gadamer's German term Vorurteil lends itself to his attack on Enlightenment historicism because, as Gerhard Joseph points out, "the term means both 'prejudgment' and 'prejudice'" as negative bias, and has commonly been translated both ways since the eighteenth century.3 In English, however, these alternative meanings of prejudice coexist less comfortably because the Enlightenment philosophical connotation has fallen into abeyance.4 Gadamer's critique of modern historicism draws our attention to a set of tensions within the concept of prejudice that, in turn, help us to align the history of the novel and the history of human rights in new ways. I want to make the case that the novel participated in transforming an [End Page 76] Enlightenment empiricist notion of prejudice as automatic prejudgment into the more familiar modern notion of prejudice as an unjust bias against certain persons or groups of people. By characterizing the psychological states and plotting the damaging results of traditional social biases, the subgenre that I will identify and characterize here as the novel of prejudice played an important early role in framing the experience of prejudice as a significant epistemological, political, and ethical problem of modernity. This type of novel, I will argue, taught readers that specific prejudices could be isolated and extracted from the customary ways of thinking and behaving in which they had been embedded. Once recognized, such instances of bias could be examined and rejected when they failed the tests of reason, experience, justice, or morality. Conceiving of traditional prejudices as negative and exclusionary requires questioning the necessity of certain kinds of ideas and judgments. In order to be corrected, prejudices must be viewed as historically and culturally contingent, even irrational. The novel's characterization of prejudice as complicit with social injustices and thus as morally compromising was also based on an empiricist presupposition that because they are merely automatic and often irrational assumptions instilled through education and custom, prejudices can be overcome through counter-evidence, concerted mental retraining, or the activation of a just conscience. According to this skeptical empiricist perspective, certain customs can be quarantined from their larger context so that the abuses they have come to justify can be rectified, or, as has happened more frequently, so that local traditions can be discredited based on universal moral or legal principles. Because the attack on the legitimacy of biases against groups and persons displaces the value of the traditions or history within which such biases have arisen, however, it appears paradoxically anti-historicist. It is this tension between an historicist method that is fully cognizant of cultural differences and its accompanying normative critique of unjust biases within particular mentalities and institutions that the novel of prejudice both explores and makes recognizable as a characteristic modern dilemma of understanding and political commitment. This tension also inheres in liberal conceptions of human rights. Jack Donnelly has pointed out that "liberals, from Locke to today, have been champions of rights-based political change . . . . [Liberals'] principal use [of human rights] is to demand that old ways, however convenient or time-honored, give way to the legitimate demands of the equal...

The following paper provides a historical and biographical introduction to the reading of the translation of Kant’s essay Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie. It consists of three parts. In the first one, called Introductory remarks, I point out the specific role of Kant’s polemical writings in his work. In the second, Protagonists, I outline the biographies of both of Kant’s opponents: J. G. Schlosser and Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolber. Finally, in the third one, I discuss a number of translation problems with the terms “Ahnung” and “ahnen”.