Fritz Plasser

Nicolai Hartmann

Contemporary philosophy has reasserted the belief that philosophy has practical tasks. This turn reflects an understanding that the life of the individual and the community is not molded merely by personal needs and fortunes but also by the strength of dominant ideas. For Nicolai Hartmann, ideas are spiritual powers belonging to the realm of thought, but thought has its own strict discipline and critique of events. In his view, theory must include within its scope problems of the contemporary world and cooperation in work that needs doing. New Ways of Ontology stands in opposition to the tradition of Heidegger. With deep appreciation of the history of philosophical controversy, Hartmann divides mistakes of the old ontology into those related to its method and those concerning its content. Hartmann finds a common mistake behind methodological approaches inspired by late German romanticism in attempts to develop a complete systematic account of the categories of being�not only of the ideal, but of real being. The main task of New Ways of Ontology is to reveal and analyze interdependences and interconnections. The divisions of being and becoming, of the separation of existence and essence, as well as the old view that the real and the ideal exclude each other, require revision. For Hartmann, whose ideas take us close to modern social science research, ontology is the neutral category that includes subject and object, and gets beyond old realism and modern idealism alike.

New Ways of Ontology

Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus: T. Hegel

Ethik

Ethics

Nicolai Hartmann's Possibility and Actuality is the second volume of a four-part investigation of ontology. It deals with such questions as: How do we know that something is really possible? Is the possible only the actual? Is the actual only the possible? What is the difference between ideal and real possibility? This groundbreaking work of modal analysis describes the logical relations between possibility, actuality, and necessity, and it provides insight into the relations between modes of knowledge and modes of being. Hartmann reviews the history of philosophical concepts of possibility and necessity, from ancient Megarian philosophy to Aristotle, to Medieval Scholasticism, to Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. He explains the importance of modal analysis as a basic investigative tool, and he proposes an approach to understanding the nature of human existence that unifies the fields of ontology, modal logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. This brilliant and fascinating work is relevant to many topics of debate in contemporary philosophy, including the ontology of possible worlds, the metaphysics of modality, the logic of counterfactual conditionals, and modal epistemology. It illuminates the nature of real, ideal, logical, and epistemic possibility.

Possibility and Actuality

It is no exaggeration to say that of the early 20th century German philosophers who claimed to establish a new ontology, former neo-Kantian turned realist Nicolai Hartmann is the only one to have actually followed through. "Ontology: Laying the Foundations" deals with "what is insofar as it is," and its four parts tackle traditional ontological assumptions and prejudices and traditional categories such as substance, thing, individual, whole, object, and phenomenon; a novel redefinition of existence and essence in terms of the ontological factors Dasein and Sosein and their interrelations; an analysis of modes of "givenness" and the ontological embeddedness of cognition in affective transcendent acts; and a discussion of the status of ideal being, including mathematical being, phenomenological essences, logical laws, values, and the interconnections between the ideal and real spheres. Hartmann’s work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy. Hartmann’s work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy.

Nicolai Hartmann

Books

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