The Nature of Sympathy

The Nature of Sympathy
Author: Max Scheler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351478869

The Nature of Sympathy explores, at different levels, the social emotions of fellow-feeling, the sense of identity, love and hatred, and traces their relationship to one another and to the values with which they are associated. Scheler criticizes other writers, from Adam Smith to Freud, who have argued that the sympathetic emotions derive from self-interested feelings or instincts. He reviews the evaluations of love and sympathy current in different historical periods and in different social and religious environments, and concludes by outlining a theory of fellow-feeling as the primary source of our knowledge of one another.A prolific writer and a stimulating thinker, Max Scheler ranks second only to Husserl as a leading member of the German phenomenological school. Scheler's work lies mostly in the fields of ethics, politics, sociology, and religion. He looked to the emotions, believing them capable, in their own quality, of revealing the nature of the objects, and more especially the values, to which they are in principle directed.

On the Eternal in Man

On the Eternal in Man
Author: Max Scheler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 730
Release: 2017-07-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351501844

Max Scheler (1874-1928) decisively influenced German philosophy in the period after the First World War, a time of upheaval and new beginnings. Without him, the problems of German philosophy today, and its attempts to solve them would be quite inconceivable. What was new in his philosophy was that he used phenomenology to investigate spiritual realities. The subject of On the Eternal in Man is the divine and its reality, the originality and non-derivation of religious experience. Scheler shows the characteristic quality of that which is religious. It is a particular essence that cannot be reduced to anything else. It is a sphere that belongs essentially to humankind; without it we would not be human. If genuine fulfillment is denied it, substitutes come into being. This religious sphere is the most essential, decisive one. It determines man's basic attitude towards reality and in a sense the color, extent and position of all the other human domains in life. It forms the basis for various views about life and thought. Scheler was emphatically an intuitive philosopher. In Scheler's work the break between being as the almighty but blind rage and value as the knowing but powerless spirit-has become complete, and makes of each human a split being. Personal experiences may be reflected here. The development of Scheler's work as a whole was highly dependent on his personal experiences. It is this that gives Scheler's work its liveliness and its validity.

Selected Philosophical Essays

Selected Philosophical Essays
Author: Max Scheler
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 1973
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810106191

Included are essays in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology by one of the most important twentieth-century continental philosophers.

On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing

On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing
Author: Max Scheler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 1992-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226736717

Editor Harold J. Bershady provides a richly detailed biographical portrait of Scheler, as well as an incisive analysis of how his work extends and integrates problems of theory and method addressed by Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons, among others.

Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann

Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann
Author: E. Kelly
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2011-08-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400718454

Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann developed ethics upon a phenomenological basis. This volume demonstrates that their contributions to a material ethics of value are complementary: by supplementing the work of one with that of the other, we obtain a comprehensive and defensible axiological and moral theory. By “phenomenology,” we refer to an intuitive procedure that attempts to describe thematically the insights into essences, or the meaning-elements of judgments, that underlie and make possible our conscious awareness of a world and the evaluative judgments we make of the objects and persons we encounter in the world.

Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (Routledge Revivals)

Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Max Scheler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2012-07-16
Genre: Knowledge, Sociology of
ISBN: 0415623340

First Published in 1980, Manfred S. Frings’ translation of Problems of a Sociology of Knowledgemakes available Max Scheler’s important work in sociological theory to the English-speaking world. The book presents the thinker’s views on man’s condition in the twentieth-century and places it in a broader context of human history. This book highlights Scheler as a visionary thinker of great intellectual strength who defied the pessimism that many of his peers could not avoid. He comments on the isolated, fragmented nature of man’s existence in society in the twentieth century but suggests that a ‘World-Age of Adjustment’ is on the brink of existence. Scheler argues that the approaching era is a time for the disjointed society of the twentieth-century to heal its fractures and a time for different forms of human knowledge to come together in global understanding.

Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values

Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values
Author: Max Scheler
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 658
Release: 1973
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780810106208

A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.

Cognition and Work

Cognition and Work
Author: Max Scheler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2020-11-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780810142701

In Cognition and Work, Max Scheler offers an early critique of American pragmatism and demonstrates the dynamic relation that not only the human being but all living beings have to the environment they inhabit.

The Human Place in the Cosmos

The Human Place in the Cosmos
Author: Max Scheler
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 105
Release:
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810164116

Upon Scheler’s death in 1928, Martin Heidegger remarked that he was the most important force in philosophy at the time. Jose Ortega y Gasset called Scheler "the first man of the philosophical paradise." The Human Place in the Cosmos, the last of his works Scheler completed, is a pivotal piece in the development of his writing as a whole, marking a peculiar shift in his approach and thought. He had been asked to provide an initial sketch of his much larger works on philosophical anthropology and metaphysics--works he was not able to complete because of his early demise. Frings' new translation of this key work allows us to read and understand Scheler's thought within current philosophical debates and interests. The book addresses two main questions: What is the human being? And what is the place of the human being in the universe? Scheler responds to these questions within contexts of said two projected much larger works but not without reference to scientific research. He covers various levels of being: inorganic reality, organic reality (including plant life and psychological life), all the way up to practical intelligence and the spiritual dimension of human beings, and touching upon the holy. Negotiating two intertwined levels of being, life-energy ("impulsion") and "spirit," this work marks not only a critical moment in the development of his own philosophy but also a significant contribution to the current discussions of continental and analytic philosophers on the nature of the person.

The Belief in Intuition

The Belief in Intuition
Author: Adriana Alfaro Altamirano
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-04-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0812252934

Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time. The Belief in Intuition shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self. Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces," concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity. According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways.