Jürgen Mittelstrass

The Future of the University

I am not a prophet, nor can I look into the future – not even at the end of this productive conference on essential changes in the higher education system. When the work situation of the academic profession, its diversification and academic freedom are at issue, the university as a whole is called into question, at least the university as we have known and appreciated it for a long time. Will that university have a future? This is not clear at all, especially when we consider the managerial university and the ever increasing marketisation of all aspects of university life. In the following, I present a few remarks about the continuously fading theory of the university, centred on the keywords education, university, universality, and quality.

The impact of the New Biology on ethics

Developments in biology have raised important questions concerning the ethical basis on which these developments can be applied to human life and to the ecology of the world. This article explores these questions.

The unity of science

Abstract The paper addresses the question of how the unity of science can adequately be characterized. A mere classification of scientific fields and disciplines does not express the unity of science unless it is supplemented with a perspective that establishes a systematic coherence among the different branches of science. Four ideas of this kind are discussed. Namely, the unity of scientific language, of scientific laws, of scientific method and of science as a practical‐operational enterprise. Whereas reference to the unity of scientific language and of scientific laws does not provide a viable basis for the unity of science, the methodological and practical unity might. The unity of science can be characterized by the way in which methodological criteria enter into the assessment or evaluation of theories, and, moreover, by a transdisciplin‐ary approach to problems. Accordingly, the unity of science is not expressed by theoretical uniformity but by the unity of scientific practice.

World Pictures: The World of the History and Philosophy of Science

Science is not an external aspect of rational cultures. On the long road from their highly praised discovery of the scientific mind by the Greeks, these cultures first learned to define their rationality primarily in terms of the concept of the scientific, and later also in terms of the technical. Rational cultures in this sense are technical cultures supported by science. As such they constitute the modern world.

Leibniz and Kant on Mathematical and Philosophical Knowledge

Kant’s comments on Leibniz are often marginal in form, but always essential in substance. It is in these comments that Kant distances himself from the philosophical tradition and establishes a new orientation in philosophy in an important way. This is also true of the reference to Leibniz in the (pre-critical) Prize Essay (An Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Fundamental Principles of Natural Theology and Morals, 1764), Kant’s answer to the problem of the application of mathematical proof to the field of metaphysics posed by the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences. The reference is of epistemological significance with respect to the system of the sciences. Here, Kant makes in a pragmatic form the distinction between mathematical and philosophical knowledge, which when it is later presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, in a systematically more elaborated form, forms an essential part of the ‘transcendental doctrine of method’. The opposing party is, as Kant makes clear, Leibniz with his Identification of both kinds of knowledge. From a systematic point of view, different ideals of knowledge and their realization in different disciplines -- paradigmatically given in conceptions of Leibniz and Kant --are at stake.