The papers collected in this volume explore the richness of Adolf Reinach's short but penetrating philosophical work. Basically, three topics are covered; one group of papers deals with ontology broadly construed, covering the ontological status and nature of Reinach's realism, his contribution to the contemporary understanding of states of affairs, and his ontology of legal objects. The second group of papers deals with social acts and their products, focusing on the structure of social acts and their nature as social encounters, (...) promises and normativity, and contracts and exchanges. A final paper in this issue covers the contemporary concerns in the philosophy of feelings, emotions and values from the perspective of Reinach and his interlocutors. In this way, the contributors, with varying types of emphasis, stress the continuing relevance of Reinach's ideas, and with novel contributions to our understanding of him, they establish vistas for further research in dialogue with contemporary accounts of the respective phenomena. (shrink)

I claim that Heisenberg’s notion of a closed theory and its analysis by Erhard Scheibe fit well with the philosophy of later Wittgenstein or its generalization. The notion of a closed theory corresponds to the notions of a form of life and rule/concept. I suggest the possibility of reconciling the views of Heisenberg, Dirac, and Bohr about inter-theoretical relations within a rational naturalistic pragmatism à la Wittgenstein and Robert Brandom’s analytic interpretation of Kantian synthetic unity of apperception. In particular, (...) I explain why a “closed theory” is “closed”, “accurate” (and even “perfect”), and “final” (as Heisenberg claims), and why it is also “open” and “approximate” in Dirac’s sense. That being said, unlike Alisa Bokulich (2004, 2006, 2008), I rather favour Heisenberg’s philosophical position. (shrink)