This paper examines the relation between ἀρετή (excellence) and ἔργον (function) in Aristotle, proposing an aretological reading of his natural philosophy with environmental implications. It argues that excellence consists in the proper realisation of a teleologically determined function, extending beyond human ethics to the broader natural world. By comparing neo-Aristotelian naturalism and ecofeminist virtue ethics, the paper explores attempts to universalise “virtue” across human and non-human domains. It defends a terminological distinction between moral virtue and biological excellence, while suggesting that Aristotle’s teleology allows for a non-anthropocentric environmental perspective grounded in functional fulfilment.

Philosophie ist sich selbst Problem. Wer philosophiert, bezieht nicht bloß einen Standpunkt, sondern muss ihn vor allem auch rechtfertigen. So trägt denn Hönigswalds ‚Selbstdarstellung‘ auch keine Lehre im herkömmlichen Sinn vor, sondern erörtert die Idee eines Systems von Gründen, in welchem sich der Begriff der Philosophie bestimmt. Mein Essay beschränkt sich auf Hönigswalds Schriften im Umkreis seiner ‚Selbstdarstellung‘; auf die nach ihr verfasste ‚Philosophie der Sprache‘ gehe ich nicht ein.

Down through the ages, a true African would say, “You are who you are” only in relation to the community in which you live. It means that you cannot be without identifying yourself with others. Hence, the search into the nature and attributes of “being” has been a primary task of philosophy, beginning from the ancient times and down to the present era. However, as there are various conceptualizations of “being” from various schools of thought and from unique continental philosophical traditions, so also there is the unique understanding of “being” from the point of view of African communalism, which is the foundation of personhood in African philosophical thought. This paper seeks to discuss the contextual understanding of being in the theory and practice of African Communalism especially as Western individualism has taken over the core African communal living thereby causing the geometric speed erosion of African communality. Accordingly, in an attempt to proffer solutions to the above-stated problem, this article adopts the methods of hermeneutics and critical analysis which strategically digs into a typical metaphysical attribute of African understanding of man, not just as an inherently individual person, but also as that person whose life and purpose can only attain meaning and fulfillment as an intrinsic member of the community whose collective decisions and actions contribute to defining one’s existence here on earth, and in the after-life. The paper concludes that an assessment of the inventions fueled by Westernization, especially “individualism,” is necessary, since it is the only way the African community can bring back her core traditional practice of communal living.

In the reception of Hermann Cohen’s Deutschtum und Judentum (1915), particularly after the Second World War, it has become common to charge Cohen with naivety and self-delusion. Scholars ranging from Gershom Scholem to Jacques Derrida have regarded his thesis of a unity between ‘Germanism’ and Judaism as little more than fiction. While these approaches rightly identify problematic nationalist elements in Cohen’s wartime writing, they often overlook both the historical context and the systematic philosophical foundation of his argument. Through contextualization within the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” (1879–1881) and the Bauch Affair (1916), and by drawing on Ernst Cassirer’s response to Bruno Bauch, this paper argues that Cohen’s thesis of German-Jewish kinship does not represent an essentialist claim about given affinities, but a normative project grounded in his theory of reason and his hypothesis-theorem. Read in this way, Cohen’s work can still provide important insights into contemporary debates on universality, difference, and identity.

This paper examines Richard Hönigswald’s contribution to a philosophy of concrete subjectivity. Its starting point is the tension between the transcendental subject and the empirically situated human being. Central to this is Hönigswald’s critical concept of objectivity: objects are not things in the world, but normative conditions for valid judgements, which are polymorphic in nature depending on the domain of reference. The general meaning of objectivity therefore lies not in an abstract form, but in the given reality of the here and now. This gives rise to anthropological implications: psychological experience, the physical organism, intersubjectivity, language and historical community appear as concretisations of transcendental subjectivity.