Blockchain Papers

Paul J. Ennis

This chapter provides a general overview of Ethereum as a world computer. It provides a snapshot of Ethereum that emphasises the core technologies of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Ethereum&s;s blockchain, called the Beacon Chain. It then turns to the characteristics of technical decentralisation that a blockchain enables before turning to the broader topic of political decentralisation. It concludes with a brief overview of the core applications to be found in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Christopher Rennig

Berhrungsangst mit Superlativen existiert in der Kryptoszene nur selten. Deshalb verwundert es nicht, wenn Decentralized Finance (DeFi) -ein auf der Blockchain-Technologie basierendes Finanzsystem, das ohne zentrale Intermedire auskommen soll -als "the most automated and transparent financial system in human history" 1 bezeichnet wird -nicht mehr, aber auch nicht weniger! Das berthema der Konferenz 2 gibt Anlass fr eine eingehendere Auseinandersetzung mit dieser Aussage: Geht es bei DeFi tatschlich transparenter zu als in traditionellen, zentralisierten Finanzsys temen? Dem soll vorliegend nach einer Einfhrung in DeFi (B.) sowohl aus technischer (C.) als auch aus rechtlicher Sicht (D.) nachgegangen wer den.

Paul T. Berghaus

Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology is the third of a three-volume collection exploring Nietzsche's relationship to the Kantian legacy in philosophy. This volume examines his relationship to Kant's aesthetic and anthropological views, focusing on the traces of Kant's third Critique and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View that can be found in Nietzsche's published and unpublished works. In this review, I offer a summary of each of its chapters, with some brief commentary, and underscore its major themes, contributions, and omissions.In their introduction, Maria Branco and Katia Hay signal that the scope of this volume goes well beyond a strict understanding of aesthetics as the evaluation of works of art. They highlight several of its broader themes, such as the nature and validity of reflective judgments, Nietzsche's transformation of Kant's notions of the beautiful and the sublime, the role of pleasure in aesthetic judgments, the paradox of genius, the relationship between reason and aesthetic experience, and the prospects of an improved human situation. A close reading brings other themes to light, such as the role that conflict or struggle plays in the moral and aesthetic life, the perspectives of artist and spectator, and the relationship between the human individual and the species, as well as more existential themes like the reconstruction of human subjecthood, dignity, and meaningful living in response to the loss of their traditional grounding in the wake of Kant's critical project.Herman Siemens opens the book with an essay on Nietzsche's comparison, in UM, of the problem of originality in cultural development with the problem of producing a genuinely original work of art given our inescapable openness to traditional values, norms, and practices. Siemens interprets Nietzsche as transforming Kant's model of “creative succession,” where originality is inspired by an exemplar yet still rule governed (since succession entails imitation in Kant's view), into a model of “agonal mimesis” wherein the exemplar provokes the would-be genius to surpass tradition, thereby creating a new rule for art.However, Siemens defends this reconstruction of Nietzsche's view using two passages from the Nachlass of the 1880s rather than UM itself. As such, it remains unclear whether Nietzsche's treatment of the problem of originality in UM should be construed similarly. Given the large amount of subject matter covered over the course of this chapter, it is equally difficult to determine whether Nietzsche's own relationship with Kant on the problem of originality was merely coincidental or its own case of agonal mimesis. Nevertheless, Siemens offers a novel and engaging account of agonal mimesis, its role in Nietzsche's aesthetic views, and its mediation of his relationship to the Kantian legacy.Ekaterina Poljakova's essay turns on the question, raised by Kant and Nietzsche, of whether it is possible to live a meaningful life in a world of pervasive illusion. According to Poljakova, Kant sees artistic practice as evidence of our inability to attain the truth of the world as it really is. In contrast, Nietzsche sees artistic practice as pushing us beyond the category of truth altogether. She traces the evolution of Nietzsche's thought from BT, where he sees art as a way of justifying the world, to GS, where he sees it as a way of making the world bearable (GS 107), perhaps even beautiful. Considering the last possibility, a discussion of Nietzsche's notion of amor fati (GS 276) is conspicuously absent here.Poljakova then moves quickly, and without much textual support, to defend the view that Nietzsche's answer to the question of how it is possible to live in illusion can be found in his notion of tragic knowledge, a condition arising from the unresolvable conflict between the will to truth and the delight in illusion. She concludes her chapter with the intriguing observation that although this conflict is unresolvable it need not be vicious, since attempts to resolve it generate works of art, to include the creation of our own selves. By bringing out this existential theme, Poljakova highlights the breadth and significance of Kant's aesthetic views and the way in which this aspect of his legacy manifests itself in Nietzsche's early and later works.João Constâncio examines some contextual issues at stake in interpreting Nietzsche's famous question in GM III:6, “Who is right? Kant or Stendhal?” Constâncio focuses directly on the question of whether Nietzsche defends a “reductionist” view in which beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder and the effect of a drive or desire to discharge power. He concludes that such is not the case. Nietzsche's primary foil in the GM passage is Schopenhauer, whose own view amounts to a reductionist one. Moreover, Nietzsche's obvious endorsement of spiritualization (BGE 257) is incompatible with reductionism since spiritualization entails, somewhat ironically given Nietzsche's mocking of Kant in GM III, a Kantian form of reflective judgment wherein the imagination creates concepts and symbols that expand one's relationship to an object of experience beyond its potential to satisfy a desire.Constâncio traces many lines of comparison between Nietzsche, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Stendhal in his essay. However, they are difficult to follow, and the central question of the chapter, whether Nietzsche defends a reductionist view of beauty, becomes increasingly obscured in the process. For instance, there is a long excursus through Nietzsche's discussion of the “vanity of the species” in TI “Skirmishes” 8–9. The discussion is on topic but lacks a justification for the significance Constâncio assigns to the passage as the strongest textual evidence against his thesis.Barbara Stiegler takes up the following questions in her chapter: Has Nietzsche appropriated Kant's concepts of beautiful and sublime? What is Nietzsche's place in the history of modern metaphysics? The latter question is a towering one in Nietzsche scholarship and could not be adequately addressed in a single essay. Nevertheless, it is entailed by the former question, and I imagine Stiegler feels obliged to address it.No discussion of Kant's concept of the beautiful would be adequate without some explanation of what it means for a judgment of beauty to be disinterested, and Stiegler's own description strikes me as the most interesting contribution of her essay. In her view, the experience of the beautiful is disinterested because the subject is free not only from desire, a standard interpretation, but also from the characteristically modern desire to constitute objects in order to “master” them. By drawing out this link between beauty and mastery in Kant, Stiegler uncovers a significant part of the Kantian legacy worthy of further examination especially as it might relate to Nietzsche's notion of amor fati and becoming “one of those who make things beautiful” (GS 276) as a form of self-mastery.David Puche Díaz argues that Nietzsche's use of “aesthetic” refers to a way of thinking that functions as a hermeneutic device guided by his own metaphysical commitments. He cites BT “Attempt” 5 as proof of Nietzsche's positive metaphysics, asserting that the passage is “quite obviously” metaphysical. However, he does not support this interpretation exegetically or defend it against opposing ones based on passages like BT 18 or TL 1 (see R. Kevin Hill, Nietzsche's Critiques [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], 101–4). Furthermore, Díaz seems to undermine his own interpretation by reminding the reader of Nietzsche's dismissal of metaphysics given its association with Christianity or, more precisely, its function as a system of consolation, leaving the reader to wonder if they missed something in Nietzsche or Díaz, or if either author is being inconsistent. Nevertheless, those interested in whether Nietzsche offers a positive account of metaphysics will find Díaz's interpretation to be novel and informative.Elaine Miller argues that Kant's and Nietzsche's aesthetics are more alike than they have traditionally been seen to be, especially by Nietzsche himself. She sees Nietzsche as transforming rather than rejecting Kant's aesthetics by reformulating his ideas of aesthetic quantity, willed necessity, and purposiveness without a purpose, supporting this interpretation with examples from Nietzsche's early and late works.Miller discusses Nietzsche's amor fati as an example of his reformulation of willed necessity, and hers is the only contribution to this volume that discusses this notion in any detail. This is surprising given the significance of amor fati in Nietzsche's own evaluation (EH “Wise” 10, “Books: CW” 4) and, arguably, its manifestation of the Kantian legacy of both the beautiful and sublime through Nietzsche's wish to be “one of those who make things beautiful” (GS 276). Miller understands the act of making things beautiful as consisting in willing backward, interpreting this passage based on Nietzsche's Z, “On Redemption,” such that the act of willing backward can be seen as transforming one kind of necessity (fate) into another (love of fate).Turning the reader's attention to Nietzsche's earliest writings, Anthony Jensen explores the Kantian legacy in Nietzsche's dissertation. Jensen hypothesizes that Nietzsche's central question in his dissertation—why rational agents propose teleological explanations for the growth of organisms—is one that historical scientists in Germany during the 1860s found they could not ignore and, therefore, that Nietzsche's dissertation should be seen as a response to this imperative and his own attempt to develop a nonteleological account of historical change.Despite Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical starting point, Jensen points out some apparent inconsistencies arising later in the dissertation where Nietzsche claims that the forces of nature are “blind” or purposeless, and in the Nachlass of 1888 where he claims that there is neither harmony nor progress in nature or history. (Jensen sees Kant as committing a similar logical error by implicitly ascribing noumenal properties to objects when conceptualizing them in terms of purposiveness.) This allegation of inconsistency strikes me as a bit facile, however, and is contradicted by Nietzsche's published works around the same time periods that clearly repudiate metaphysical commitments (see, for example, BT 4, 18, and TL 1, from his early works, and GS 354 from 1887).Carlo Gentili's essay addresses Nietzsche's anti-Kantian, anti-Asian, metaphor in BGE 210, where he calls Kant “the great Chinese of Königsberg.” Gentili is particularly interested to clarify why Nietzsche uses the metaphor of a “worker” to differentiate Kant from the “philosophers of the future.” In the process, he draws a remarkable inference from Nietzsche's use of this metaphor, namely, that Kant plays a subservient role to philosophy insofar as his critical method can only disclose how previously held “truths” reflected certain values created by philosophers of the future (BGE 211).Gentili's argumentative strategy is difficult to follow. After a brief discussion of Nietzsche's view of philosophers of the future as creators of values, he changes topics to Nietzsche's assessment in GS 357 of the role of doubt and the centrality of causation in Kant's metaphysical views. He then changes course again by defending Nietzsche's rendering of Kant's transcendental idealism but also criticizing Kant for being inconsistent by not ridding his thought of anthropomorphisms altogether. What the reader is supposed to conclude from this line of argument is unclear. At a minimum, Gentili seems to be showing that in an odd way Nietzsche's early criticism of Kant is fair but becomes less so over time.Katia Hay's fascinating look at the relationship between reason and laughter in Kant and Nietzsche opens part 2 of the volume, “On the Anthropology.” Her aim in this chapter is to show how Kant's and Nietzsche's views on laughter reflect distinctive features and major differences in their philosophical projects. Hay identifies a supposed flaw in Kant's view of laughter arising from his description of the kind of pleasure characteristic of laughter and its cause. The pleasure is strictly physical even though it is “excited by ideas of the mind” (as Kant says in a “Remark” on §53 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment). But this is problematic for Hay, who asks “how can a certain play of thought or a series of playful connections and associations of the representations of the understanding awaken in us a feeling of pleasure that has absolutely nothing to do with our mind?” (200).I worry that Hay is overstating the problem. It is not obvious that Kant is claiming that the feeling of pleasure has nothing to do with the mind, especially since he describes it as being “excited” by the mind's ideas. Indeed, the same type of pleasure and the same causal relationship seems to be in play in judgments of beauty. Yet as far as I can tell a similar problem has not been identified in Kant's account of these judgments. Perhaps it is there to be found or perhaps drawing an appropriate analogy between laughter and the experience of the beautiful would dissolve the problem Hay has in mind.For this reader, the most insightful and enjoyable chapter of the volume is Maria João Mayer Branco's engaging essay on the philosophical significance of the sense of hearing in the works of Kant and Nietzsche. Branco argues that both Kant's and Nietzsche's accounts of hearing function as more nuanced and substantive metaphors than the traditional one of sight for understanding the significance of thought in a way that better appreciates its capacity for freedom.According to Branco, Kant privileges sight over all the other senses, even though hearing and sight belong, with touch, to the same class of senses that are objective, as opposed to smell and taste, because they remain more detached from objects and serve cognition rather than enjoyment. Nevertheless, Kant acknowledges that hearing is indispensable because of its connection with language and thus with the dialogue between persons and oneself that serves as a condition for thinking. Nietzsche sees the value of the social aspect of this discourse differently, in Branco's view. Instead of creating the conditions for thought, social discourse primarily communicates human needs, for the purpose of satisfying them, instead of enhancing the human spirit, which is something only solitude and inner dialogue can cultivate (GS 354).Based on this interpretation, it might seem that Nietzsche thinks isolation, not just solitude, is necessary for the human spirit to thrive—that there is no positive role for social discourse. However, Branco claims that such an inference is unwarranted given Nietzsche's understanding of the relationship between language and freedom. Unfortunately, she fails to develop this claim much further and her defense of Nietzsche on this point falls short.Matthew Dennis discusses the ways in which Kant and Nietzsche blend anthropology and moral philosophy, much like contemporary work in moral philosophy incorporates the insights of moral psychology. He argues that the disagreement between Kant and Nietzsche over the role of maxims in practical reasoning can only be understood in terms of the differences between their anthropological accounts of the nature and development of moral character. Moreover, this disagreement comes into focus only by understanding the philosophical significance of their anthropologies. Both claims seem unnecessarily strong, and it might have been more sensible to assert that this difference is better explained and comes into sharper focus through such an understanding. Nevertheless, the chapter is insightful and informative and should be of particular interest to those working in moral philosophy and character education.This volume makes several important contributions to the study of Nietzsche's relationship to Kant's aesthetic and anthropological views and is an essential resource for those interested in the influence of Kant's aesthetics and anthropology on the mature philosophy of both Nietzsche and Kant. It also helps fill some gaps in the literature such as the influence of Kant's notions of the beautiful and the sublime across Nietzsche's early and later works. Nevertheless, there are notable omissions, which future scholarship on the Kantian legacy in Nietzsche should remedy, such as the paucity of thorough treatments of Nietzsche's notion of amor fati despite its pride of place in Nietzsche's mature thought. The present volume also gives too little attention to the question of the normative status of aesthetic judgments and the competence necessary to make them. Its most significant achievement is to give students of Nietzsche good reason to appraise him as a post-Kantian rather than an anti-Kantian. I hope it inspires similar collections examining Nietzsche's relationship to the views of other post-Kantians, like Hegel.

John H. Smith

Die Gretchenfrage: Goethe and Philosophies of Religion around 1800 John H. Smith Already in the Urfaust version, Gretchen poses her eponymous question to Faust, raising the issue of belief in God: Margarete: Wie hast du’s mit der Religion? Du bist ein herzlich guter Mann, Allein ich glaub, du hältst nicht viel davon. Faust: Laß das, mein Kind! Du fühlst, ich bin dir gut; Für meine Lieben ließ’ ich Leib und Blut, Will niemand sein Gefühl und seine Kirche rauben. Margarete: Das ist nicht recht, man muß dran glauben! Faust: Muß man? (3415–22) He continues with his well-known tirade, or cunning seduction, or philosophical panegyric to Sturm und Drang anti-linguistic feeling, culminating with the exclamations: Nenn es dann, wie du willst, Nenn’s Glück! Herz ! Liebe! Gott! Ich habe keinen Namen Dafür! Gefühl ist alles; Name ist Schall und Rauch, Umnebelnd Himmelsglut. (3453–58) A very different view of the divine is expressed the opening Prologue in Heaven when the Lord himself speaks about the nature of things: Der Herr: Des Menschen Tätigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen, Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh; Drum geb’ ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu, Der reizt und wirkt und muß als Teufel schaffen.— Doch ihr, die echten Göttersöhne, Erfreut euch der lebendig reichen Schöne! [End Page 183] Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt, Umfass’ euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken, Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt, Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken. (340–49) In the time these lines were written and published, the 1770s, 1790, around 1800, and 1808, major revolutions—a Kantian and a post-Kantian—took place in conceptions of nature, God, and religion. These two passages capture some of the rethinking that occurred during this period. In the first, especially in Faust’s “muß man?” we hear the question that motivates key debates, namely: is there a necessity behind faith? And in the second, we hear a new emphasis on human activity and a confidence in the ability to grasp in thought a God defined as “das Werdende.” One can highlight the relevant issues by varying Gretchen’s question slightly and having her ask more academically: “Was ist der Grund deines Glaubens?” or “Bist du atheistisch?” These were burning questions in the turn from Kant-Reinhold to Fichte to Schelling-Hegel between 1790 and 1815. One can think of the lasting echo of the debate about Spinoza and pantheism, the impact that Kant’s Critical Philosophy had on traditional proofs of the existence of God (as Reinhold stressed in his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie), the Atheismusstreit around Fichte and Foberg in Jena in 1799, Schleiermacher’s lectures Über die Religion, and the exchange between Schelling and Jacobi in 1811–12.1 Although these incidents show that the Gretchenfrage was a dicey one, and that matters of religion and belief were central to the debates raging in those extraordinary decades from 1790–1815, they became less central in the literature dealing with the turn to idealism.2 This essay will argue that the intersection of Goethe and idealism needs to be considered in light of theological and religionsphilosophische motivations.3 Once we take them into account, it makes more sense that Goethe would have been in the thick of this philosophical transition. He had a stake—political, philosophical, and literary—in a conception of God, religion, and life that was different from both that of traditional Christianity and the one that emerged out of Kant’s critiques. That the answer Faust gave in the 1770s was insufficient by 1800 helps explain how his thought, including the reworking of Faust I, and that of his philosophical contemporaries developed in tandem as they sought to provide a fuller answer to this question. The reason for focusing on Faust is that it has a special relationship to idealism. As Rüdiger Scholz says of Schelling’s and Hegel’s interpretations: “Das Drama erscheint vom philosophischen System her gedeutet, und umgekehrt wird das philosophische Gebäude durch den Faust verständlich” (Scholz 11).4 The ideas that were being explored—What and why must...