It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological (...) aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something. (shrink)

Largely neglected today, the work of Karl Philipp Moritz was a highly influential source for Early German Romanticism. Moritz considered the form of myth as essential to the absolute nature of the divine subject. This defence was based upon his aesthetic theory, which held that beautiful art was “disinterested”, or complete in itself. For Moritz, Myth, like art, constitutes a totality providing an idiom free from restriction in the imitation of the divine. This examination offers a consideration (...) of Moritz’s aesthetics and mythography, before turning briefly to consider his influence on the authors of Early German Romanticism. An understanding of the role of Moritz’s thought supports a number of recent claims that challenge the conventional reading of Romanticism. At the same time it allows us to see Romanticism’s unconventional realist theological programme, permitting us to overcome the problematic secularising readings of the movement. I would like to thank Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, as well as Fredrick Beiser and Lars Fischer for their help with this project. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on three aspects of Nietzsche’s art of living that have become relevant today especially in the United States (but not only here): first, regarding some facets of the economic-political conditions of any contemporary art of living; second, the widespread adoption of Nietzsche’s notion of self-overcoming and artistic self-design in entrepreneurship and individual’s lives; and third, how his notion of ‘incorporation’ has been further developed in current approaches to habit design. Eventually I will show via the example of (...) Anthony Robbins that some notions of Nietzsche’s art of living have become most popular outside of academia, namely in the commercial industries of what has been called ‘self-growth’ or ‘self-development.’. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders David Hume’s thinking on the fate of the British Empire and the future of established religion. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the development of Hume’s views on Britain’s successive attempts to impose or regain its authority over its North American colonies and compares these views with the stance taken during the American Crisis by Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker. Fresh light is shed on this area of Hume’s later political thought by a new letter, appended to (...) the essay, which at the same time provides an illuminating glimpse of his abiding preoccupation with the future of established religion. It is argued that this evidence of Hume’s privately held views belies the notion that his thinking on political and religious matters was fundamentally opposed to that of his friends among the philosophes. It is consequently misleading to regard Hume as an opponent of the more radical wing of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This article provides a re-evaluation of David Hume's intensive reading of the classics at an important moment of his literary and intellectual career. It sets out to reconstruct the extent and depth of this reading as well as the uses – scholarly, philosophical and polemical – to which Hume put the information he had gathered in the course of it. The article contends that Hume read the classics against the grain to collect data on a wide range of cultural information (...) which he could utilise for a number of literary and philosophical projects he was engaged in during the early 1750s. This reading soon came to pervade almost all aspects of Hume's literary activities of that period and resulted in what is here described as a fragmentary history of classical antiquity. As a result Hume's reading of the classics emerges from this article as both more extensive and more significant than has so far been acknowledged. (shrink)

We argue that the need for commentary in commonly used linear calculi of natural deduction is connected to the “deletion” of illocutionary expressions that express the role of propositions as reasons, assumptions, or inferred propositions. We first analyze the formalization of an informal proof in some common calculi which do not formalize natural language illocutionary expressions, and show that in these calculi the formalizations of the example proof rely on commentary devices that have no counterpart in the original proof. We (...) then present a linear natural deduction calculus that makes use of formal illocutionary expressions in such a way that unique readability for derivations is guaranteed – thus showing that formalizing illocutionary expressions can eliminate the need for commentary. (shrink)

The traditional use of the expression 'pseudoproblem' is analysed in order to clarify the talk of pseudoproblems and related phenomena. The goal is to produce a philosophically serviceable terminology that stays true to its historical roots. This explicative study is inspired by and makes use of the method of logical reconstruction. Since pseudoproblems are usually expressed by pseudoquestions a formal language of questions is presented as a possible reconstruction language for alleged pseudoproblems. The study yields an informal theory of pseudoproblems (...) whose presuppositions are critically investigated right away. At least one result remains: Claims of pseudoproblemship and their refutations must not be voiced casually - they are to be relativized and need substantial interpretive effort. (shrink)

Climate change, pollution, and deforestation have a negative impact on global mental health. There is an environmental justice dimension to this challenge as wealthy people and high-income countries are major contributors to climate change and pollution, while poor people and low-income countries are heavily affected by the consequences. Using state-of-the art data mining, we analyzed and visualized the global research landscape on mental health, climate change, pollution and deforestation over a 15-year period. Metadata of papers were exported from PubMed®, and (...) both relevance and relatedness of terms in different time frames were computed using VOSviewer. Co-occurrence graphs were used to visualize results. The development of exemplary terms over time was plotted separately. The number of research papers on mental health and environmental challenges is growing in a linear fashion. Major topics are climate change, chemical pollution, including psychiatric medication in wastewater, and neurobiological effects. Research on specific psychiatric syndromes and diseases, particularly on their ethical and social aspects is less prominent. There is a growing body of research literature on links between mental health, climate change, pollution, and deforestation. This research provides a graphic overview to mental healthcare professionals and political stakeholders. Social and ethical aspects of the climate change-mental health link have been neglected, and more research is needed. (shrink)

The philosophy of the art of living asks the age-old question of orienting one’s own life: ‘How can I live well?’ An art of living is always called for when people do not know what to do and how to go on, when the ways of life are no longer self-evident, when traditions, conventions, rules, and norms lose their plausibility and individuals begin to worry about themselves. The art of living and of its philosophy has a practical aim: It is (...) not concerned with ethical principles, but with the concrete practice of people’s everyday life, with their individual and successful lives. Friedrich Nietzsche, as he often did, pushed the problem of the art of living to the extreme, making it palpable both in its dignity and in its force. For him, the modern uncertainty of human orientation caused by nihilism pointed to art and aesthetics, which, he supposed, makes life if not justifiable, at least bearable. The arts open up a multi-perspectival seeing and hearing, they experiment with alternative forms and techniques, and create the finest sensibilities for both – Nietzsche himself, with his rich forms of philosophical writing, is an outstanding example of this. -/- The volume we present here, entails contributions of German-speaking scholars on Nietzsche and the ways of living he proposes, especially, but not alone in Dawn. The papers are selected from a book series on the common issue “Critical Art of Living,” edited by Günter Gödde, Jörg Zirfas, and others, and translated on behalf of the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation. (shrink)

What is Understanding? This is the first of a series of Chats with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Chat). The main goal is to obtain Chat’s response to a series of questions about the concept of ’understand- ing’. The approach is a conversational approach where the author (labeled as user) asks (prompts) Chat, obtains a response, and then uses the response to formulate followup questions. David Deutsch’s assertion of the primality of the process / capability of understanding is used as the starting point. (...) Understanding is posited as a major step in the Big Picture description of emergence in the Universe. Understanding follows the emergence of Brains and Minds, culminating in Power Over the Universe. My evaluation suggests that Chat does indeed offer utility, but also has limitations manifested by overly general responses that do not focus tightly on the questions asked. Chat does yield some gems that could be easily missed. The approach used here includes creating Metaprompts, wherein Chat is asked to create more efficient prompts based on initial promptsThis approach appears to hold significant promise, and will likely be of benefit to those exploring various facets of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs) and designers of Advanced General Intelligence (AGI). Other findings include the need for creating new metrics and ways of discussing intelligence, and various adjacent areas and subprocesses associated with intelligence. Discussions of future directions is also included. (shrink)

Building on the work of Peter Hinst and Geo Siegwart, we develop a pragmatised natural deduction calculus, i.e. a natural deduction calculus that incorporates illocutionary operators at the formal level, and prove its adequacy. In contrast to other linear calculi of natural deduction, derivations in this calculus are sequences of object-language sentences which do not require graphical or other means of commentary in order to keep track of assumptions or to indicate subproofs. (Translation of our German paper "Ein Redehandlungskalkül. Ein (...) pragmatisierter Kalkül des natürlichen Schließens nebst Metatheorie"; online available at http://philpapers.org/rec/CORERE.). (shrink)

Building on the work of Peter Hinst and Geo Siegwart, we develop a pragmatised natural deduction calculus, i.e., a natural deduction calculus that incorporates illocutionary operators at the formal level, and prove its adequacy. In contrast to other linear calculi of natural deduction, derivations in this calculus are sequences of object-language sentences which do not require graphical or other means of commentary in order to keep track of assumptions or to indicate subproofs.

According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the ‘principle of minimal rationality’ in de Sousa’s monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important (...) respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality. (shrink)

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “the philosophy and psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays only a little more attention to the former.” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But there (...) still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumenical approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work and draws crucially on Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by these authors. In this article, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject. (shrink)

Often philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians employ a notion of intended structure when talking about a branch of mathematics. In addition, we know that there are foundational mathematical theories that can find representatives for the objects of informal mathematics. In this paper, we examine how faithfully foundational theories can represent intended structures, and show that this question is closely linked to the decidability of the theory of the intended structure. We argue that this sheds light on the trade-off between expressive power (...) and meta-theoretic properties when comparing first-order and second-order logic. (shrink)

Memetic Science is the name of a new field that deals with the quantitativeanalysis of cultural transfer.The units of cultural transfer are entities called "memes". In a nutshell, memes are to cultural and mental constructs as genesare to biological organisms. Examplesof memesare ideas,tunes, fashions, and virtuallyany culturaland behavioral unit that gets copiedwitha certaindegree of fidelity. It is arguedthat the under standing of memes is of similar importance and consequence as the understanding of processes involving DNA and RNA in molecular biology.Thispaperpresentsa (...) rigorousfoundation fordiscussion ofmemes and approaches to quantifying relevantaspects of memegenesis, inter action, mutation, growth,deathand spreadingprocesses. It is also argued inthispaper that recombinant memetics is possible incomplete analogy to recombinant DNA/ genetic engineering. Special attention is paid to memes in written modern English. (shrink)

Introduction au Numéro spécial de la Revue Philosophique de Louvain.

Problems in normative ethics paradigmatically concern what it is obligatory or permissible for an individual to do. Yet sometimes, each of us ought to do something individually in virtue of what we ought to do together. Unfortunately, traversing these two different levels at which a moral obligation can arise – individual and collective – is fraught with difficulties that easily lure us into conclusions muddying our understanding of collective obligations. This paper seeks to clearly lay out a systematic problem central (...) to the relation between collective and individual duties in view of alleviating some such confusion and facilitating more concerted attempts at resolving it: Collective duties require individuals to act in order for the collective duty to be fulfilled. Yet typically, a collective duty does not entail any one set of individual duties that would prescribe such contributory actions: The work we need to do in order to fulfil a duty can be allocated differently to the individuals collectively bearing it. Much like in matters of distributive justice, then, deriving individual duties from a collective one requires us to employ a distributive scheme, which raises separate normative concerns that have rarely taken centre stage in the debate so far. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the (...) level of intentional mode or attitude. I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non-epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non-epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values. (shrink)

Goethe's objections to Newton's theory of light and colours are better than often acknowledged. You can accept the most important elements of these objections without disagreeing with Newton about light and colours. As I will argue, Goethe exposed a crucial weakness of Newton's methodological self-assessment. Newton believed that with the help of his prism experiments, he could prove that sunlight was composed of variously coloured rays of light. Goethe showed that this step from observation to theory is more problematic than (...) Newton wanted to admit. By insisting that the step to theory is not forced upon us by the phenomena, Goethe revealed our own free, creative contribution to theory construction. And Goethe's insight is surprisingly significant, because he correctly claimed that all of the results of Newton's prism experiments fit a theoretical alternative equally well. If this is correct, then by suggesting an alternative to a well-established physical theory, Goethe developed the problem of underdete... (shrink)

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it (...) specifies on this basis analytically–normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core (populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political authority by elections. Surprisingly, it does not need a separate anti-pluralist or exclusionary commitment: it entails it. Third, this normative model allows a response to a contested question in the theoretical discussion, namely, whether populism (properly specified) can be democracy-enhancing. The article defends the negative answer in virtue of the normative core alone and does so as much vis-à-vis a minimal (purely electoral) as vis-à-vis a normatively ambitious (liberal) conception of democracy. The reconstruction of the normative core of populist ideology enables a novel argument to show that populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’, not just with ‘liberal democracy’. Assuming a normatively more ambitious concept of democratic legitimation in terms of political autonomy, the model also produces an extremely direct argument showing that populists cannot fulfil their promise of ‘taking back control’ over political decision-making to the population. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that emotions are evaluative. Moreover, many authors suppose that emotions are important or valuable as evaluations. According to the currently dominant version of cognitivism, emotions are evaluative insofar as they make us aware of value properties of their intentional objects. In attributing to emotions an epistemic role, this view conceives of them as epistemically valuable. In this paper, I argue that proponents of this account mischaracterize the evaluative character of emotions and, a fortiori, their value. Moreover, (...) I propose an alternative view of emotional evaluation, according to which emotions are practically rather than epistemically important. As I argue, emotions are ways of acknowledging their intentional objects as (dis)valuable. As such, they do not apprehend values but make them count. I elaborate this idea by drawing an analogy with legal and political sanctions. The resulting view has it that emotions are practically important in that they affirm the cares and concerns which serve as standards of emotional evaluation. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties like the fearsome or admirable (or so-called ‘affective properties’) is constituted by the corresponding emotion. I argue that this view is incompatible with a widely held meta-ethical view, according to which affective properties have deontic force. More specifically, I argue that this view cannot accommodate for the requirement that deontic entities provide guidance. If affective properties are to guide the formation of the corresponding emotion, our primary (...) access to them cannot be provided by that same emotion. (shrink)

Nietzsche and Shaw are famous and infamous: famous for their innovative and influential forms of writing, but infamous for their apparent support of totalitarianism and Nazism. However, while it has long been shown that Nietzsche’s provocative language about “breeding” and “masters and slaves” was intended to enhance culture through competition, it is still an open question how and when Shaw supported biological eugenics. Via Nietzsche’s “philosophical breeding,” this article presents a new reading of Shaw’s Man and Superman: on the one (...) hand, it contrasts Nietzsche’s philosophical Übermensch with Shaw’s eugenic Superman; and on the other hand, it connects Nietzsche’s agonistic enhancement of culture with Shaw’s philosophical reflections in “Don Juan in Hell.” In contrast to Tanner’s support of eugenic breeding in his Revolutionist’s Handbook, Shaw’s Don Juan remarkably resembles Nietzsche’s notion of “philosophical breeding” toward a more competent, truthful, and autonomous orientation that is needed in increasingly complex global politics. (shrink)

There is a wide range of things we do out of emotion. For example, we smile with pleasure, our voices drop when we are sad, we recoil in shock or jump for joy, we apologize to others out of remorse. It is uncontroversial that some of these behaviors are actions. Clearly, apologizing is an action if anything is. Things seem less clear in the case of other emotional behaviors. Intuitively, the drop in a sad person’s voice is something that happens (...) to her, rather than something she actively performs. Perhaps more interestingly, even jumping for joy can seem a problematic case: although its execution involves the active performance of certain movements, it has been argued to contrast, e.g., with an act of apology, in that it is not performed in order to achieve some end, such as repairing a relationship. This can make this behavior seem considerably different from paradigm actions. Our central concern in this paper is with which emotional behaviors should be classed as actions and why... (shrink)

Ziel dieses Papiers ist es die Ordnungsethik – einen bereichsethischen Ansatz, der derzeit vor allem für wirtschaftsethische Fragestellungen benutzt wird – als eine universelle Methode zur Analyse von bereichsethischen Fragestellungen vorzustellen. Um das Vorhaben handhabbar zu machen, muss es in zweierlei Hinsicht eingeschränkt werden. Zum einen kann es sich hier natürlich nicht um eine voll ausgearbeitete Methodologie für die Analyse von bereichsethischen Fragestellungen handeln, sondern nur um eine methodische Skizze. Zum anderen soll es in diesem Papier im Wesentlichen um solche (...) bereichsethischen Fragestellungen gehen, deren Lösung die Implementierung von formellen wie informellen Regeln erfordert. (shrink)

This essay investigates, via the concepts of the philosophy of orientation, Annie Duke’s decision-making theory in "Thinking in Bets" and scrutinizes as to what extent one can universalize the 'orientation skill' of decision-making with regard to our everyday and professional life.

Article presenting basic methodological tenets in Goodman's philosophical development with their mutual connections, like the new riddle of indutcion, counterfactual conditionals and his use of reflective equilibrium as a methodological basis.

This article analyzes whether Brandom’s ISA (inferential-substitutional-anaphoric) semantics as presented in Making It Explicit (MIE) and Articulating Reasons (AR) can cope with problems resulting from inferentialism’s near-implied meaning holism. Inferentialism and meaning holism entail a radically perspectival conception of content as significance for an individual speaker. Since thereby its basis is fixed as idiolects, holistic inferentialism engenders a communication-problem. Brandom considers the systematic difference in information among individuals as the „point“ of communication and thus doesn’t want to diminish these effects (...) of inferentialism. Instead, explains communication with a model of “navigating among perspectives without sharing contents”. The crucial element in this navigation-model is the functioning of anaphoric connections between tokens uttered in discourse that can be used by every individual speaker in their own perspectival semantic substitution-economies. The heart of Brandom’s semantics is the thesis of the purely inferential, hence non-referential nature of anaphora, coupled with the claim that anaphoric-inferential semantic mechanisms yield sufficient conditions for mutually successful “information-extraction” or interpretation. This article disputes the thesis and denies the claim. Regarding the former it is observed that all of Brandom’s plausible reconstructions of anaphoric discourse-structures rely on covert “reference-infiltrations” that can’t be eliminated. Regarding the latter, a new argument based on context-sensitive semantic phenomena in anaphoric settings shows that the crucial distinction between initiator or anaphoric antecedent and anaphoric dependent cannot be drawn according to Brandom’s own premises without overt and irreducible referential premises. The article concludes that either Brandom’s semantics can offer determinate contents, but then must accept genuinely referential semantic primitives, or else it leaves utterance-contents undeterminable and hence cannot explain communication. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on the pragmatic presuppositions involved in the use of general terms in inductive practices. The main thesis is that the problem of characterizing the assumptions underlying the projection of predicates in inductive practices and the ones underlying the classification of crtain general terms as «natural kind terms» coincide to a good extent. The reason for this, it is argued, is that both classifications, «projectibility» and «natural kind term», are attempts to answer to the same (...) semantico-epistemological phenomenon, viz. underdertermination. It is proposed a «deflationary» reading of the so-called «theory of direct reference» as to enable an evaluation of its contribution to epistemological problems associated with this kind of phenomena, as well as it is argued that a purely de facto account of projectibility is not viable. The resulting hypothesis is that the conception of «natural kind terms» is only interesting insofar as they are seen as a kind of projectible general terms and thus as parts of classifications used in natural science, more generally, in inductive practices, and that this is a perspective that makes undue metaphysical readings avoidable. (shrink)

I present three versions –Grimm, Offe and Streeck—of a general argument that is often used to establish that the EU-institutions meets a legitimacy-disabling condition, the so called “no demos” argument (II), embedding them in the context of the notorious “democratic deficit” suspicions against the legal system and practice of the EU (I). After examining the logical structure behind the no-demos intuition considered as an argument (III), I present principled reasons by Möllers and Habermas that show why the “no demos” argument (...) fails to have bite in discussions of the legitimacy and status of the supranational level in the multi-level EU-architecture. These are complemented by another principled reason arising from John Dewey’s conception of the “public” as a clearer alternative for the “popular” requirement of democratic legitimation (IV). I conclude that all three conceptions together suggest that the hunt after pre-politically existing peoples as foundations of democratic legitimacy expresses no more than methodological nationalism without any footing in the material and conceptual requirements of democratic legitimation. Given the absence of a principled problem with the legitimacy of the priority and interference of supranational EU-law in the national legal and political orders, there are thus also no principled reasons to abandon or discredit the European project in the absence of a European nation or society. (shrink)

Quine claims that holism (i.e., the Quine-Duhem thesis) prevents us from defining synonymy and analyticity (section 2). In Word and Object, he dismisses a notion of synonymy which works well even if holism is true. The notion goes back to a proposal from Grice and Strawson and runs thus: R and S are synonymous iff for all sentences T we have that the logical conjunction of R and T is stimulus-synonymous to that of S and T. Whereas Grice and Strawson (...) did not attempt to defend this definition, I try to show that it indeed gives us a satisfactory account of synonymy. Contrary to Quine, the notion is tighter than stimulus-synonymy – particularly when applied to sentences with less than critical semantic mass (section 3). Now according to Quine, analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy, if synonymy were to make sense: A sentence is analytic iff synonymous to self-conditionals. This leads us to the following notion of analyticity: S is analytic iff, for all sentences T, the logical conjunction of S and T is stimulus-synonymous to T; an analytic sentence does not change the semantic mass of any theory to which it may be conjoined (section 4). This notion is tighter than Quine's stimulus-analyticity; unlike stimulus-analyticity, it does not apply to those sentences from the very center of our theories which can be assented to come what may, even though they are not synthetic in the intuitive sense (section 5). Conclusion: We can have well-defined notions of synonymy and analyticity even if we embrace Quine's holism, naturalism, behaviorism, and radical translation. Quine's meaning skepticism is to be repudiated on Quinean grounds. (shrink)

This paper explores a currently popular view in the philosophy of emotion, according to which emotions constitute a specific form of evaluative aspect-perception (cf. esp. Roberts 2003, Döring 2004, Slaby 2008). On this view, adequate or fitting emotions play an important epistemic roe vis à vis evaluative knowledge. The paper specifically asks how to conceive of the adequacy or fittingness conditions of emotion. Considering the specific, relational nature of the evaluative properties disclosed by emotions, it is argued that a suitable (...) standard of fittingness has both a world-involving and person-involving aspect: Fitting emotions require both a fundamentum in re as well as a fundamentum in persona. (shrink)

Dieser Forschungsbericht gibt einen Überblick über die aktuelle Debatte über motivierende Gründe in der Handlungs- und Erkenntnistheorie. Folgende drei Fragen werden schwerpunktmäßig behandelt: a) Was für eine Art von Entität sind motivierende Gründe? b) Welche Beziehung besteht zwischen einer Handlung oder Einstellung und ihren motivierenden Gründen? c) Welche kognitiven Bedingungen gelten für die Zuschreibung motivierender Gründe?

Emotions, Values and Agency. By Tappolet Christine.

Aim Excellent organization of the internal processes is essential for a well-functioning health care system. Particularly, the process of treatment and interaction with the patients is important because the perception of treatment and interaction has a direct relation to the patients’ satisfaction. The latter has a strong influence on the recovery of the patients. The impact of the maturity level of the treatment and interaction process on patient orientation is investigated at the example of an extensive survey of hospital managers (...) in Ukraine. -/- Method The analysis is based on an empirical data collection conducted with hospital managers and their deputies in a large Ukrainian city, which is acknowledged as a ‘model city’ with regard to a comprehensive health care reform in the country. By means of the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) we have tested our hypothesis that a high level of process maturity leads to a high level of patient orientation. For this purpose, we have developed a scale for measuring the level of process maturity and have checked the method on validity and reliability. A total of 79 hospital managers and deputies, who represent all public health care facilities of the city (hospitals, primary care clinics, etc.), participated in the study. -/- Results The study reveals a clear relationship between the level of maturity of the treatment and interaction process and the level of patient orientation of the respective health care facility. The variance, which is explained by the independent variable process maturity level, is 16.3 %. All formative dimensions have a strong significant influence on the construct “patient orientation”. Likewise the maturity level of the treatment and interaction process shows a strong significant influence on patient orientation. -/- Conclusion For health care facilities it is of great importance to achieve a high maturity level of the treatment and interaction process to live up to the claim of being patient oriented. The maturity of the process can be tested using the questionnaire developed in the course of our study. (shrink)

Yleensä Wienin piirin loogista empirismiä kannattaneet filosofit mielletään antirealisteiksi. Tässä artikkelissa kuitenkin argumentoidaan, että piirin johtohahmo Moritz Schlick oli eräänlainen realisti myös nykystandardien valossa. Näin ollen – niin yllättävältä kuin se kuulostaakin – positivismi ja realismi ovat yhteensovitettavissa. Schlick tosin erotti kannattamansa empiirisen realismin jyrkästi metafyysisestä realismista, jota hän piti merkityksettömänä. Schlickin realismin esittelyn lisäksi artikkelissa tarkastellaan yleisellä tasolla hänen epistemologiaansa, kielifilosofiaansa ja metafysiikan kritiikkiään. Tekstissä pohditaan myös Schlickin suosiman realismin asemaa ja relevanssia nykyisessä realismikeskustelussa.

Moritz Geiger (1880–1937) in Phänomenologische Ästhetik paper postulates aesthetics to become an autonomous science. The new science is intended to analyze aesthetic values and to discover the rules of their regulations. It tends to be separated from aesthetics as the sub-discipline of philosophy (especially under the influence of metaphysics) and aesthetics as a field of applying other sciences (mainly psychology). It may be achieved by the usage of a phenomenological method.

Moritz Schlicks Plädoyer für ein empirisches Fundament unserer Erkenntnis enthält weder reduktionistische noch phänomenalistische Extrempositionen. Seine Beispiele für Fundamentalsätze haben allesamt die Form: Hier jetzt so und so; aber nicht alle diese Sätze sind Fundamentalsätze. Was muss man für die letzten drei Wörter dieses Schemas einsetzen, um wirklich beim Fundament anzukommen? Ich schlage vor, die Frage durch Rückgriff auf das interpretationstheoretische Prinzip des Wohlwollens zu beantworten. Demzufolge sind diejenigen Sätze (der Form Hier jetzt so und so) Fundamentalsätze, über die (...) kein inhaltlicher Streit aufkommen kann; wer bei solchen Sätzen – unter denselben Umständen – zu einem anderen Urteil kommt als wir, der bezeugt dadurch keine Meinungsverschiedenheit in der Sache, sondern nur einen anderen Gebrauch sprachlicher Ausdrücke. Bei welchen Ausdrücken funktioniert dieses Kriterium besonders gut? Einerseits bei Ausdrücken, die mit Gesichtsfeldern zu tun haben; noch besser bei Ausdrücken aus dem eindeutig phänomenalistischen Bereich unserer Sprache. (shrink)

Review of Jean Moritz Müller, The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling.

Review of Simplicius: On Aristotle, On the Heavens 3.1-7, trans. Ian Mueller, London: Duckworth, 2009.

Die Frage des Weiterlebens nach dem Tod ist sinnvoll, selbst im Lichte des strengen Sinnkriteriums der logischen Empiristen. Schlick schlägt folgende Verifikationsmethode fürs postmortale Weiterleben vor: "Warte, bis Du stirbst". Da Schlick diesen Gedanken nicht ausgearbeitet hat, spiele ich verschiedene Versionen der vorgeschlagenen Verifikation durch: Weiterleben mit einem fremden Körper und körperloses Weiterleben. Um die Identität des Weiterlebenden zu sichern, braucht der Weiterlebende Erinnerungen, intellektuelle Aktivität, Willensentscheidungen und kontinuierliche Erlebnisse ohne Bruch. Ob diese Aspekte unseres mentalen Lebens allesamt für Schlicks (...) Zwecke erforderlich sind, werde ich nicht entscheiden; doch Schlicks Chancen steigen, je mehr Aspekte des mentalen Lebens auch nach dem körperlichen Tod im Spiel bleiben – sicher ist sicher. (shrink)

Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Herbert Feig are the most prominent of the positivists to formulate views on the mind-body problem (aside from Hempel’s one-off treatment in 1935). While their views differed from each other and changed over time they were all committed to some form of scientific physicalism, though a linguistic or conceptual rather than ontological form of it. In focus here are their views during the heyday of logical positivism and its immediate aftermath, though some initial scene-setting (...) of Schlick’s and Carnap’s pre-positivist views will help to understand the final opposing positions of Carnap and Feigl. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the *Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung*, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, (...) the Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of the American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) American philosophical discussions about meaning and significance and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism. (shrink)

With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, there emerged two controversies related to the responsibility of philosophical ideas for the rise of German militarism. The first, mainly journalistic, controversy concerned the influence that Nietzsche’s ideas may have had on what British propagandists portrayed as the ruthlessly amoral German foreign policy. This soon gave way to a second controversy, waged primarily among academics, concerning the purportedly vicious political outcomes of German Idealism, from Kant through to Fichte, Schelling, and (...) Hegel. During the autumn of 1914, and at the cusp between the two controversies, Moritz Schlick was to deliver a lecture series on Nietzsche’s life and work at the University of Rostock. Responding to both debates, Schlick penned an introduction in which he sought to defend philosophy against all those who would embroil it in warfare. Schlick offers a series of arguments defending Nietzsche against his accusers. He also argues that, though their contributions to the History of Philosophy often amounted to no more than ‘beautiful nonsense’, the German Idealists’ philosophical views cannot be held responsible for the rise of German nationalism. Finally, Schlick mounts a general defense of the search for truth, both in philosophy and in Wissenschaft, as a type of activity which presupposes peace. Though Schlick’s metaphilosophical views change, as this paper shows, he remains constant both in his favourable appraisal of Nietzsche, as well as his separation between politics on the one hand, and both philosophy and Wissenschaft on the other hand. (shrink)

Originally published in PhilosophyNews, July 19, 2022. -/- This new series, What’s Happening in Philosophy (WHiP)-The Philosophers aims to provide a monthly snapshot of various trends and discussions happening across the discipline. -/- In this inaugural post, we begin with a harrowing tale from David Edmonds involving the murder of the German philosopher Moritz Schlick. Schlick was a Vienna Circle guiding spirit and logical positivist thinker. Next up is Steven Nadler’s take on several biographies of the ‘father of modern (...) philosophy’ in his new paper, The Many Lives of René Descartes. Lastly, questions around AI in academia come up in an article from Scientific American. (shrink)

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity, profoundly influencing contemporary intellectual and artistic currents. While Bergsonism was fashionable, L. Susan Stebbing, Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap launched different critical attacks against some of Bergson’s views. This book examines this series of critical responses to Bergsonism early in the history of analytic philosophy. Analytic criticisms of Bergsonism were influenced by William James, who saw Bergson as an ‘anti-intellectualist’ ally (...) of American Pragmatism, and Max Scheler, who saw him as a prophet of Lebensphilosophie. Some of the main analytic objections to Bergson are answered in the work of Karin Costelloe-Stephen. Analytic anti-Bergsonism accompanied the earlier refutations of idealism by Russell and Moore, and later influenced the Vienna Circle’s critique of metaphysics. It eventually contributed to the formation of the view that ‘analytic’ philosophy is divided from its ‘continental’ counterpart. (shrink)