Susanne K. Langer is best known as a philosopher of culture and student of Ernst Cassirer. In this chapter, however, I argue that this standard picture ignores her contributions to the development of analytic philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s. I reconstruct the reception of Langer’s first book *The Practice of Philosophy*—arguably the first sustained defense of analytic philosophy by an American philosopher—and describe how prominent European philosophers of science such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Herbert (...) Feigl viewed her as one of the most important allies in the United States. In the second half of this chapter, I turn to Langer’s best-selling *Philosophy in a New Key* and reconstruct her attempts to broaden the scope of the, by then, rapidly growing U.S. analytic movement. I argue that her book anticipated various developments in analytic philosophy but was largely ignored by her former colleagues. I end the chapter by offering some clues as to why New Key did not incite the same laudatory responses from analytic philosophers as her earlier work. (shrink)

Susanne Langer’s idea of the primary apparition of music involves a dichotomy between two kinds of temporality: ‘felt time’ and ‘clock time’. For Langer, musical time is exclusively felt time, and in this sense, music is ‘time made audible’. However, Langer also postulates a ‘strong suspension thesis’: the swallowing up of clock time in the illusion of felt time. In this essay, we take issue with the ‘strong suspension thesis’, its philosophic foundation and its implications. We (...) argue that this thesis is overstated and misdirecting insofar as it purports to describe what we experience when we hear music with understanding, and that it rests on a contested presupposition concerning the conceptual primacy of memory-time. (shrink)

Susanne Langer was a student at Radcliffe College between 1916 and 1926---a highly transitional period in the history of American philosophy. Intellectual generalists such as William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce had dominated philosophical debates at the turn of the century but the academic landscape gradually started to shift in the years after World War I. Many scholars of the new generation adopted a more piecemeal approach to philosophy---solving clearly delineated, technical puzzles using the so-called “method of (...) logical analysis”. Especially at Harvard, the intellectual climate rapidly changed. The department hired several philosophers who had contributed to the development of symbolic logic---H. M. Sheffer, C. I. Lewis, and A. N. Whitehead---and Harvard quickly began to be viewed as a central hub for analytic philosophy in the United States. This chapter contextualizes Langer’s earliest work by reading it through the lens of this shifting academic environment. Though Harvard did not allow women to take its courses until 1943, Langer is one of the most significant fruits of this period. Her dissertation “A Logical Analysis of Meaning” and her first publications are all illustrations of the approach that came to dictate the American philosophical conversation. By exploring the increased focus on the logical-analytic method and Langer’s attempts to expand the new approach to what she later called “non-discursive” symbolisms, I situate her publications in the intellectual context of the 1920s. (shrink)

Susanne Langer is mainly known as the American philosopher who, starting from her famous Philosophy in a New Key, worked in aesthetics and famously saw art as the product of the human mind’s most important, distinctive and remarkable ability, i.e., the ability to symbolise. But Langer’s later consideration of the connection between art and symbol is propagated by an early interest in the logic of symbols themselves. This rather neglected early part of Langer’s thought and her (...) early interests and lines of reasoning, which she somehow abandoned later on to dedicate herself exclusively to the study of art, are the topic of this paper. (shrink)

Susanne Langer’s idea of the primary apparition of music involves a dichotomy between two kinds of temporality: “felt time” and “clock time.” For Langer, musical time is exclusively felt time, and in this sense, music is “time made audible.” However, Langer also postulates what we would call ‘a strong suspension thesis’: the swallowing up of clock time in the illusion of felt time. In this paper we take issue with the ‘strong suspension thesis’ and its implications (...) and ramifications regarding not only musical meaning, but also the purported metaphysics of music construed as essentially inhering in felt time. We argue that this thesis is overstated and misdirecting insofar as it purports to describe what we experience when we hear music with understanding. We discuss a selection of examples of repetitive formations, from mediaeval music to contemporary music, which show that persistent, motion-inhibiting repetition undermines the listener’s ability to identify order and coherence due to a relative inability to anticipate the next occurrence of a differentiating musical event. We argue that Langer’s one-sided view of musical temporality, which patently relies on the conceptual framework of memory time and the specious present, exemplifies what we propose to call ‘the searchlight model of musical understanding,’ wherein the constant span of illumination of the searchlight (representing the span of the specious present) moves continuously parallel to, and along, its postulated target, i.e., the music heard, as it ‘illuminates’ it. We argue that, in the last analysis, memory time conceptually presupposes the publicly identifiable means of chronometric length. One maintains the ‘strong suspension thesis’ on pain of conceptual confusion. (shrink)

An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature with culture is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal (...) relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer’s theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her “new key” in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day, it has rarely been doubted that whenever formal aesthetic methods meet their iconological counterparts, the two approaches appear to be mutually exclusive. In reality, though, an ahistorical concept is challenging a historical analysis of art. It is especially Susanne K. Langer´s long-overlooked system of analogies between perceptions of the world and of artistic creations that are dependent on feelings which today allows a rapprochement of these positions. Krois’s (...) insistence on a similar point supports this analysis. - I - Unbestritten bis heute gilt, formwissenschaftliche und ikonologische Methoden scheinen sich grundsätzlich auszuschließen, da die ersteren auf ahistorischen und die letzteren auf historischen Grundlagen aufbauen. Dem entgegen soll mit diesem Beitrag gezeigt werden, wie insbesondere die Forschungen Susanne K. Langers und ergänzend diejenigen von John M. Krois eine Annäherung beider Positionen ermöglichen. (shrink)

In The World as Will and Representation (Vol. I, Book 3, § 52) by Arthur Schopenhauer we find the following, striking words: It is just this universality that belongs uniquely to music, together with the most precise distinctness, that gives it that high value as the panacea of all our sorrows. (p. 262) Accordingly, music ... is in the highest degree a universal language ... Yet its universality is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but is of quite (...) a different kind; it is united with thorough and unmistakable distinctness. (p. 262) ... music expresses in an exceedingly universal language, in a material, that is, in mere tones, and with the greatest distinctness and truth, the inner being, the in-itself, of the world, which we think of under the concept of will (p. 264). These quotations contain an outright paradox: the meanings of music should be at the same time universal in the highest degree and characterised by the greatest distinctness. As it turns out this paradox does not follow merely from Schopenhauer's liking for brilliant, rethorical formulations. For it occurs in many contexts concerned with the expressive meaning of art, and especially music. Other occurrences of the dilemma are to be found in the writings of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and in the aesthetic theory of Susanne Langer formulated in chapter VIII, >On the Significance in Music of her book Philosophy in a New Key and it would be possible to quote many other sources. The persistently recurring nature of this paradox confirms that the issue will be central to any attempt at a complete theory of musical meaning. Furthermore, it may be essential for it to be resolved first if one aims to make sense of the relationship between musical and linguistic forms of meaning and, consequent upon this, to address the much debated question of whether music itself can be considered to be a language of the emotions. An attempt at a solution to the paradox in question constitutes the subject of this paper. For this purpose the framework and some notions of Langer's theory are used. The solution which I propose takes the form of distinguishing between two distinct notions of generality (which I will term 'generality' and 'abstractness'), as well as two distinct notions of particularity (which I will term 'specificity' and 'concreteness'), and involves assigning technically precise meanings to these with a view to constructing two relatively independent oppositions: on the one hand the concrete versus the abstract and, on the other, the specific versus the general. (Hints at such a solution are to be found both in Schopenhauer and in Langer). With the help of these notions it is, I believe, then possible to show that the arguments often quoted to the effect that musical meanings possess a certain generality in fact justify no more than their abstractness, while arguments usually thought to demonstrate that they possess a certain particularity in fact show only their specificity (but not concreteness). Consequently, musical meanings are shown to be abstract but specific, which does not entail any contradiction since these notions are independent and not opposed to each other. At the same time, musical meanings may then be contrasted with linguistic meanings, which themselves are abstract and general. If, however, each of the notions of abstractness and generality is understood as also permitting gradations, it will be the case that whereas linguistic meanings may be said to be more general (i.e. less specific) than musical ones, the latter are without any doubt more abstract than the former. (shrink)

Everyday media consumption leaves no doubt that the perception of moving images from various media is characterized by experience and understanding. Corresponding research in this field has shown that the stimulus patterns flooding in on us are not only processed mentally, but also bodily. Building on this, the following study argues that incoming stimuli are processed not only visually, but multimodally, with all senses, and moreover affectively. The classical binding of a sensory organ to a medium, on whose delimitation the (...) common understanding of multimodality is based, is thus abolished. Can arguments for this assumption be found? Building on the research of cultural anthropologist Ernst Cassirer and his successors, the two American philosophers Susanne K. Langer and John M. Krois, and supported by research from the life sciences in which, in parallel, the arts also play an important role in understanding image formation, as in the work of Heinz Werner and, following on from this, in the more recent research of the child psychologist Daniel N. Stern in collaboration with mirror neuron research by the group of neuroscientists around Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, justifications for this will be provided. What the multimodal processing of film images is concretely based on will finally be made clear by means of an exemplary analysis of a video film by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. It aims to prove, that the prerequisites for the thesis can only lie in the fact, that both the modes of perception (visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory) as well as the medially conditioned modes of image formation are based on non-discursive, formal-abstract structures that are also processed affectively. At the same time, the analysis thus shows how the selection and composition of the vital experienced forms can provide information about the socio-culturally shaped self-image of the producer and the viewer. (shrink)

Is it true that there is an analogy between modes of creation and such of perception? Respective to the cultural anthropological research of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne K. Langer and John M. Krois and by the analysis of a tape of the Swiss video-artist Pipilotti Rist this initial thesis of Formal Aesthetics shall be supported. - I - -/- Lässt sich die Behauptung stützen, dass zwischen Gestaltungsweisen und Wahrnehmungsweisen eine Analogie besteht? Aufbauend auf den kulturanthropologischen Forschungen von Ernst Cassirer, (...) Susanne K. Langer und John M. Krois sowie der Analyse eines Tapes der Schweizer Videokünstlerin Pipilotti Rist gilt es diese ursprünglich von der formalen Ästhetik aufgeworfene These zu untermauern. (shrink)

To what extend is there a relevance of aesthetics for life? By postulating a non-discursive and emotional relevance of forms Cassirer, Langer and Krois open the door for this idea. -/- Inwieweit spielt die Ästhetik im Leben eine Rolle? Indem sowohl Cassirer, Langer und Krois eine nicht-diskursive und emotionale Relevanz von Formen unterstellen, öffnen sie die Türen für diese Idee.

The ability to form „images“ of our experiences with the world (imaging effect) and to adjust our drive and determination in accordance with those images (action effect) is what characterises men, as stipulated by Cassirer and subsequently confirmed by Langer and Krois. Special techniques are required to communicate to others the images of life and how we interpret them. The art as a technique does this masterly by presenting us the views of others on their experiences and wishes through (...) aesthetic experience. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse images not only with respect to their historical aspects based on experiences with the world but to emphasise their power to shape the future by their potential to affect our actions. - / - Die Fähigkeit „Bilder“ unserer Erfahrungen mit der Welt zu formen (Bildkraft) und unser Streben und Wollen (Tatkraft) nach ihnen auszurichten, das ist es, was den Menschen nach Cassirer – und nachfolgend auch nach Langer und Krois – auszeichnet. Voraussetzung dafür die Bilder des Lebens und das, was wir von ihnen halten, zu objektivieren und Anderen zu kommunizieren, bilden Techniken. Die Kunst als Technik ist darin eine Meisterin, indem sie uns über die ästhetische Erfahrung Anschauungen Anderer von ihren Erfahrungen und Wünschen, lebendig vor Augen zu führen vermag. Bei der Analyse von Bildern gilt es insofern nicht nur deren geschichtsträchtigen, auf Erfahrungen mit der Welt beruhenden Aspekte zu untersuchen, sondern vor allem auch deren zukunftsprägendes und damit unsere Tatkraft ansprechendes Potential. (shrink)

What, if anything, is aesthetically distinctive about sculpture? Some think that sculpture differs from painting in being a specially tactile art. Different things might be meant by this, but it is anyway unhelpful to focus on our means of access to sculpture’s aesthetic properties, rather than those properties themselves. A more promising idea is that, while painting provides its own space, sculpture exists in the space of the gallery. To pursue this thought, I expound and develop the views of (...) class='Hi'>Susanne Langer. Sculpture organizes the surrounding space when we see that space as defined by the potential for action of the sculpted object. (shrink)

With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular attention was paid to contributions that clarify how the structural features - the modes - of the arts, their perception, and their signifying potential in terms of content are interrelated and (...) how they are to be understood in communicative and thus socioculturally relevant terms. Thus, in addition to neuroscientific contributions, those from cultural anthropology, art history, image and art studies, and literary studies were included. -/- Articles -/- 8 Martina Sauer and Christiane Wagner - Introduction -/- 11 Giada Lombardi and Giuseppe Di Cesare - From Neuroscience to Art: The Role of ‘Vitality Forms’ in the Investigation of Multimodality -/- 25 Martina Sauer - Abstract - Affective – Multimodal: Interaction between Medium and Perception of Moving Images from the Viewpoint of Cassirer’s, Langer’s and Krois’ Embodiment Theories -/- 49 Göran Sonesson - The Secrets of Plastic Language Revealed: Multimodality, Polysemiosis, and Iconicity -/- 71 Natalia Igl - Making Sense of the Material: Multisensory Reader Involvement in Contemporary Multimodal Novels -/- 87 J. Philippe Thompson - Art is All: Proust’s Life Lessons Through Perception and Art -/- 107 Hans Dieter Huber - Philippe Parreno and the Exhibition as a Multimodal Aesthetic Experience -/- 135 Jörg U. Lensing - The Performing Human Being in a Media Interaction Space: Multi- and intermodal productions by the Düsseldorf Theater der Klänge (Theatre of Sounds) . (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue including papers about Susan Stebbing, Susanne Langer and Maria Kokoszyńska.

Door de eeuwen heen hebben talloze vrouwen zich verdiept in een veel-heid aan filosofische thema’s, maar vaak zijn deze denkers onzichtbaar gebleven. Van de 17e-eeuwse filosofe Anna Maria van Schurman zullen sommigen wel hebben gehoord, maar wie kent haar tijdgenote Anne Conway? Uit de 20e eeuw is Hannah Arendt inmiddels wereldberoemd, maar de namen Susanne Langer, Gloria Anzaldúa en Werewere Liking zullen misschien alleen de specialisten bekend in de oren klinken. Vele vrouwelijke denkers waren uitgesloten van officiële onderwijsin-stellingen (...) en namen hun toevlucht tot andere vormen van filo so fie -beoefening, zoals briefwisselingen en essays. En dat levert een onschat-bare rijkdom aan filosofische bronnen op. In dit nieuwe standaardwerk worden 67 vrouwelijke denkers bij elkaar gebracht; van de Oudheid tot onze eeuw; van islamitische en katholieke mystica’s, een 18e-eeuwse Nederlandse logica tot een Nigeriaanse politiek filosofe. (shrink)

MICHELLE MARDER KAMHI offers an in-depth response to The Aesthetics Symposium. In addition to answering many of the contributors’ objections to What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, she offers a critique of their own theses—in particular, Barry Vacker’s claim that chaos theory is implicit in Rand’s aesthetics, Jeff Riggenbach’s argument that much of Rand’s theory was anticipated by Susanne Langer and Stephen Pepper, and Roger Bissell’s suggestion that the concept of a microcosm be applied to (...) Rand’s view of the function of art. (shrink)

In a historiographical and methodological comparison of Formal Aesthetics and Iconology with the method of Affordance, the latter is to be introduced as a new method in Visual Cultural Studies. In extension ofepistemologically relevant aspects relatedtostyle and history of the artefacts, communicative and furthermoreaction and decisionrelevant aspects of artefacts become important. In this respect, it is the share of artefacts in life that the new method aims to uncover. The basis for this concern is the theory and methodological tools of (...) Visual Semiotics, which I have already presented. A direct comparison of the three methods based on the same example should clarify the points of contact and the respective performance of the methods. For this purpose, theChrist among the Doctorsof Albrecht Dürer from 1506 will be used, which was already examined in 1905 and indirectly in 1915 by the prominent representative of Formal Aesthetics Heinrich Wölfflin,and in 1914 and finally in1943by the founder of Iconology Erwin Panofsky. With the new method thecommunicative-actionand decision relevant aspects and thus their share in life should be shown. (shrink)

A review of the recent exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky's artworks at the Guggenheim Museum, with interest in Kandinsky's career-wide separation of form from content.

The form of an action has a strong influence on the interaction between humans. According to their mood, people may perform the same gesture in different ways, such as gently or rudely. These aspects of social communication are named vitality forms by Daniel Stern, represent a mean to establish a direct and immediate connection with others. Indeed, the expression of different vitality forms enables us to communicate our affective states and at the same time the perception of these vitality forms (...) enables people around us to understand how we feel in that moment. In the last years of research, different fMRI studies have been carried out to investigate the neural correlates of vitality forms recognition and execution. Moreover, recent psychophysics studies conducted from our research group have demonstrated the presence of an affective contagion effect, during which vitality forms expressed by an agent affect the action perception and the motor response of the receiver. This means that vitality forms expressed by others can influence our mood positively or negatively, modulating as consequence our behavior. Note that vitality forms pervade our lives in a continuous manner and thus they are not expressed and perceived only during social interactions. For example, when we observe an artistic representation at the theatre, the dynamic postures of dancers, together with an alternation of acceleration and deceleration in their movements, communicate to us different affective states. Also when we are in a museum in front of a painting, lines, colors and shapes used by the artist can elicit in us different sensations and modify our attitude. In this view, with the aim to extend the concept of vitality forms from neuroscience and psychology to other disciplines of study, we dedicate part of this review to discuss how art, in all its forms, can be considered a pure expression of vitality forms. (shrink)

This reference essay addresses how sculpture may be defined, the nature of sculptural representation and content, the distinctive forms of tactile and bodily experience to which sculpture can give rise, and the ontology of sculpture. It addresses both sculptures whose form is largely fixed and contemporary sculptural practices incorporating found objects and variable presentation.

Do we communicate with pictures? If so, the text asks, what about their complex, dynamic appearances? Are they part of the communication process? By analysing a cover image of the journal Jugend from 1896 and by consulting the research on the logic of pictures (“Eigenlogik”) in Bildwissenschaft, Iconology and Cultural Anthropology these questions shall be persued. The analysis suggests, that instead of consenting the results of epistemological aesthetic research a new understanding of pictures shall be implemented: They can be considered (...) as parts of cultural semiotic processes. That means, it is not the view of something (epistemology) but the view of someone (culture) that is shown by the pictures. - I - -/- Kommunizieren wir über Bilder? Falls das zutrifft, stellt sich die Frage, ob daran auch deren komplexe dynamische Erscheinungsweise Anteil hat? Über die Analyse eines Titelblatts der Zeitschrift Jugend von 1896 und die Betrachtung der Forschungen zur Eigenlogik von Bildern in Bildwissenschaft, Ikonologie und Kultureller Anthropologie soll diesen Fragen nachgegangen werden. Die Auswertung veranlasst, sich von der klassischen, erkenntnisorientierten, ästhetischen Theorie zu distanzieren und sie als kulturtheoretische, semiotische Theorie neu zu fassen. Die Neuausrichtung wird im Verständnis des Gehalts der Bilder im medialen Transfer greifbar: Statt in einer Ansicht von etwas (Erkenntniswert), so eröffnet sich, liegt er in einer Ansicht über etwas (Meinung/Kulturwert). (shrink)

This book contains a selection of papers from the workshop *Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy* held in October 2019 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. It is the first volume devoted to the role of women in early analytic philosophy. It discusses the ideas of ten female philosophers and covers a period of over a hundred years, beginning with the contribution to the Significs Movement by Victoria, Lady Welby in the second half of the nineteenth century, and ending with Ruth (...) Barcan Marcus’s celebrated version of quantified modal logic after the Second World War. The book makes clear that women contributed substantially to the development of analytic philosophy in all areas of philosophy, from logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science, to ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. It illustrates that although women's voices were no different from men's as regards their scope and versatility, they had a much harder time being heard. The book is aimed at historians of philosophy and scholars in gender studies. (shrink)

Do have pictures an impact on future? Yes, say theories of embodiment by making perceptual foundations in place of representational arrangements responsible for it. -/- Wirken sich Bildern auf die Zukunft aus? Ja sagen Verkörperungstheorien und machen dafür weniger Repräsentationsmodelle als Wahrnehmungsweisen verantwortlich.

A common method for warranting the historical adequacy of philosophical claims is that of relying on historical case studies. This paper addresses the question as to what evidential support historical case studies can provide to philosophical claims and doctrines. It argues that in order to assess the evidential functions of historical case studies, we first need to understand the methodology involved in producing them. To this end, an account of historical reconstruction that emphasizes the narrative character of historical accounts and (...) the theory-laden character of historical facts is introduced. The main conclusion of this paper is that historical case studies are able to provide philosophical claims with some evidential support, but that, due to theory-ladenness, their evidential import is restricted. (shrink)

The professionalization of the study of history in the Nineteenth Century made possible a new way of thinking about the history of philosophy: the thought emerged that philosophy itself might be relative to time, historical culture, and nationality. The simultaneous demise of speculative metaphysics scattered philosophers’ confidence that the historical variance of philosophical systems could be viewed in terms of the teleological self-realization of reason. Towards the late Nineteenth Century, philosophers began to explicitly address the worry that all philosophical systems (...) might have only relative validity. This paper compares two key figures in late-nineteenth-century debates concerning historical relativism: Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey. Beneath the deep disagreements between these two authors, it reveals their common concern to immunize philosophy from the threat of historical relativism. The paper traces how both philosophers sought to fend off relativism by defending the idea of an ahistorical and permanent stratum of philosophical thinking. And it argues that although they succeeded in blocking historical versions of relativism, they did so at the cost of incurring a relativism vis-à-vis philosophical systems. This relativism turned out to be rooted not in the historicity of philosophy but in the timeless essence of philosophical reasoning itself. (shrink)

This paper seeks to re-assess Dilthey’s descriptive psychology in light of the charge of “psychologism”. The paper has two goals. First, I seek to give a fine-grained reconstruction of Dilthey’s foundational project. I provide a systematic account of how Dilthey sought to ground the knowledge claims of the human sciences in inner experience. I place special emphasis on Dilthey’s concept of “articulation” which mediates between inner experience and psychological knowledge, as well as between individual psychology and knowledge about the socio-historical (...) world. Second, I re-assess the allegedly “psychologistic” aspects of Dilthey’s philosophy. I reconstruct how Dilthey’s critics Husserl, Windelband and Rickert understood psychologism, highlight commonalities between them and explain why Dilthey’s approach seemed “psychologistic” from their perspective. At the same time, I show that Dilthey’s philosophical thinking goes against the very presuppositions that the “psychologism”-charges are usually based upon. The paper concludes with some reflections on the transition from Dilthey's descriptive psychology to his mature hermeneutics. (shrink)

This chapter traces the development of relativist ideas in nineteenth-century debates about history and historical knowledge. It distinguishes between two contexts in which these ideas first emerged. First, the early-to-mid nineteenth-century encounter between speculative German idealism and professional historiography. Second, the late nineteenth-century debate between hermeneutic philosophy and orthodox Neo-Kantianism. The paper summarizes key differences between these two contexts: in the former, historical ontology and historical methodology formed a unity, in the latter, they came apart. As a result, the idea (...) of universal history became increasingly problematic. In light of these differences, the paper seeks to (partially) explain why it was only towards the late-nineteenth century that historical relativism became an explicit concern. (shrink)

Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these “stakeholders' desiderata”) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying stakeholders' desiderata. This paper discusses the main classes of stakeholders calling for explainability (...) of artificial systems and reviews their desiderata. We provide a model that explicitly spells out the main concepts and relations necessary to consider and investigate when evaluating, adjusting, choosing, and developing explainability approaches that aim to satisfy stakeholders' desiderata. This model can serve researchers from the variety of different disciplines involved in XAI as a common ground. It emphasizes where there is interdisciplinary potential in the evaluation and the development of explainability approaches. (shrink)

This paper presents a survey of the literature on the problem of contingency in science. The survey is structured around three challenges faced by current attempts at understanding the conflict between “contingentist” and “inevitabilist” interpretations of scientific knowledge and practice. First, the challenge of definition: it proves hard to define the positions that are at stake in a way that is both conceptually rigorous and does justice to the plethora of views on the issue. Second, the challenge of distinction: some (...) features of the debate suggest that the contingency issue may not be sufficiently distinct from other philosophical debates to constitute a genuine, independent philosophical problem. And third, the challenge of decidability: it remains unclear whether and how the conflict could be settled on the basis of empirical evidence from the actual history of science. The paper argues that in order to make progress in the present debate, we need to distinguish more systematically between different expressions that claims about contingency and inevitability in science can take. To this end, it introduces a taxonomy of different contingency and inevitability claims. The taxonomy has the structure of an ordered quadruple. Each contingency and each inevitability claim contains an answer to the following four questions: (how) are alternatives to current science possible, what types of alternatives are we talking about, how should the alternatives be assessed, and how different are they from actual science? (shrink)

This paper analyzes the shifts in Wilhelm Windelband’s ‘critical philosophy of values’ as it developed hand in hand with his understanding of relativism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by analyzing the role that relativism played in his philosophical project, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Windelband's intellectual development in the context of historicism and Neo-Kantianism. On the other hand, by highlighting Windelband’s contribution to the understanding of relativism, it sheds light on an important (...) episode in the history of that problem. The paper distinguishes between three phases in Windelband’s thinking and shows that his views about relativism changed in close connection with his conception of history. The early Windelband thought that historicism was compatible with absolute validity because he was firmly convinced of historical progress. The mature Windelband rejected progress as a means for justifying validity and put the problem of relativism into sharp relief. In response to the failure of his mature philosophy to fend off relativism, the later Windelband strengthened the role of history again. The paper concludes that Windelband’s significance lies not in his arguments against relativism, but rather in having furthered philosophical understanding of the problems at stake. (shrink)

Although artificial intelligence has been given an unprecedented amount of attention in both the public and academic domains in the last few years, its convergence with other transformative technologies like cloud computing, robotics, and augmented/virtual reality is predicted to exacerbate its impacts on society. The adoption and integration of these technologies within industry and manufacturing spaces is a fundamental part of what is called Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The impacts of this paradigm shift on the human operators (...) who continue to work alongside and symbiotically with these technologies in the industry bring with it novel ethical issues. Therefore, how to design these technologies for human values becomes the critical area of intervention. This paper takes up the case study of robotic AI-based assistance systems to explore the potential value implications that emerge due to current design practices and use. The design methodology known as Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is proposed as a sufficient starting point for designing these technologies for human values to address these issues. (shrink)

There is a trade-off between specificity and accuracy in existing models of belief. Descriptions of agents in the tripartite model, which recognizes only three doxastic attitudes—belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment—are typically accurate, but not sufficiently specific. The orthodox Bayesian model, which requires real-valued credences, is perfectly specific, but often inaccurate: we often lack precise credences. I argue, first, that a popular attempt to fix the Bayesian model by using sets of functions is also inaccurate, since it requires us to (...) have interval-valued credences with perfectly precise endpoints. We can see this problem as analogous to the problem of higher order vagueness. Ultimately, I argue, the only way to avoid these problems is to endorse Insurmountable Unclassifiability. This principle has some surprising and radical consequences. For example, it entails that the trade-off between accuracy and specificity is in-principle unavoidable: sometimes it is simply impossible to characterize an agent’s doxastic state in a way that is both fully accurate and maximally specific. What we can do, however, is improve on both the tripartite and existing Bayesian models. I construct a new model of belief—the minimal model—that allows us to characterize agents with much greater specificity than the tripartite model, and yet which remains, unlike existing Bayesian models, perfectly accurate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper offers a generic revenge-proof solution to the Sorites paradox that is compatible with several philosophical approaches to vagueness, including epistemicism, supervaluationism, psychological contextualism and intuitionism. The solution is traditional in that it rejects the Sorites conditional and proposes a modally expressed weakened conditional instead. The modalities are defined by the first-order logic QS4M+FIN. (This logic is a modal companion to the intermediate logic QH+KF, which places the solution between intuitionistic and classical logic.) Borderlineness is introduced modally as (...) usual. The solution is innovative in that its modal system brings out the semi-determinability of vagueness. Whether something is borderline and whether a predicate is vague or precise is only semi-determinable: higher-order vagueness is columnar. Finally, the solution is based entirely on two assumptions. (1) It rejects the Sorites conditional. (2) It maintains that if one specifies borderlineness in terms of the ‒suitably interpreted‒ modal logic QS4M+FIN, then one can explain why the Sorites appears paradoxical. From (1)+(2) it results that one can tell neither where exactly in a Sorites series the borderline zone starts and ends nor what its extension is. Accordingly, the solution is also called agnostic. (shrink)

In this paper I revisit nineteenth-century debates over historical objectivity and the political functions of historiography. I focus on two central contributors to these debates: Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen. In their takes on objectivity and subjectivity, impartiality and political engagement I reveal diametrically opposed solutions to shared concerns: how can historians reveal history to be meaningful without taking recourse to speculative philosophy? And how can they produce a knowledge that is relevant to the present when the project (...) of “exemplary” history has been abandoned? I put a special focus on the relativist themes in Ranke’s and Droysen’s answers to these questions. Ranke’s demand for impartiality leads him to think of all historical epochs as equally valid, while Droysen’s emphasis on the historian’s subjectivity relativizes historical truth. In order to explain why Ranke and Droysen nevertheless remained unfazed by the problem of historical relativism, I analyze their normative conceptions of the historian’s disciplinary ethos. I show that Ranke and Droysen think of objective impartiality and subjective partiality not only in methodological terms, but also in terms of justice and ethic duty. This normative element secures the professional study of history an ethical-political relevance for the present. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Recently a bold and admirable interpretation of Chrysippus’ position on the Sorites has been presented, suggesting that Chrysippus offered a solution to the Sorites by (i) taking an epistemicist position1 which (ii) made allowances for higher-order vagueness. In this paper I argue (i) that Chrysippus did not take an epistemicist position, but − if any − a non-epistemic one which denies truth-values to some cases in a Sorites-series, and (ii) that it is uncertain whether and how he made allowances (...) for higher-order vagueness, but if he did, this was not grounded on an epistemicist position. (shrink)

The professionalization of the study of history in the Nineteenth Century made possible a new way of thinking about the history of philosophy: the thought emerged that philosophy itself might be relative to time, historical culture, and nationality. The simultaneous demise of speculative metaphysics scattered philosophers’ confidence that the historical variance of philosophical systems could be viewed in terms of the teleological self-realization of reason. Towards the late Nineteenth Century, philosophers began to explicitly address the worry that all philosophical systems (...) might have only relative validity. This paper compares two key figures in late-nineteenth-century debates concerning historical relativism: Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey. Beneath the deep disagreements between these two authors, it reveals their common concern to immunize philosophy from the threat of historical relativism. The paper traces how both philosophers sought to fend off relativism by defending the idea of an ahistorical and permanent stratum of philosophical thinking. And it argues that although they succeeded in blocking historical versions of relativism, they did so at the cost of incurring a relativism vis-à-vis philosophical systems. This relativism turned out to be rooted not in the historicity of philosophy but in the timeless essence of philosophical reasoning itself. (shrink)

In this extended essay, I argue that Frege plagiarized the Stoics --and I mean exactly that-- on a large scale in his work on the philosophy of logic and language as written mainly between 1890 and his death in 1925 (much of which published posthumously) and possibly earlier. I use ‘plagiarize' (or 'plagiarise’) merely as a descriptive term. The essay is not concerned with finger pointing or casting moral judgement. The point is rather to demonstrate carefully by means of detailed (...) evidence that there are numerous (over a hundred) and extensive parallels both in formulation and --more importantly-- in content between the Stoics and Frege, parallels so plentiful that one would be hard pressed to brush them off as coincidence. These parallels include several that appear to occur in no other modern works that were published before Frege’s own and were accessible to him. Additionally, a cluster of corroborating historical data is adduced to support the suggestion, showing how easy it would have to been for Frege to plagiarize the Stoics. This (first) part of the essay is easy to read and vaguely entertaining, or so I hope. -/- (Corrigendum: At school, Frege likely had seven, not ten, years of intensive Latin and four years of intensive ancient Greek courses.). (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The 3rd BCE Stoic logician "Chrysippus says that the number of conjunctions constructible from ten propositions exceeds one million. Hipparchus refuted this, demonstrating that the affirmative encompasses 103,049 conjunctions and the negative 310,952." After laying dormant for over 2000 years, the numbers in this Plutarch passage were recently identified as the 10th (and a derivative of the 11th) Schröder number, and F. Acerbi showed how the 2nd BCE astronomer Hipparchus could have calculated them. What remained unexplained is why Hipparchus’ (...) logic differed from Stoic logic, and consequently, whether Hipparchus actually refuted Chrysippus. This paper closes these explanatory gaps. (1) I reconstruct Hipparchus’ notions of conjunction and negation, and show how they differ from Stoic logic. (2) Based on evidence from Stoic logic, I reconstruct Chrysippus’ calculations, thereby (a) showing that Chrysippus’ claim of over a million conjunctions was correct; and (b) shedding new light on Stoic logic and – possibly – on 3rd century BCE combinatorics. (3) Using evidence about the developments in logic from the 3rd to the 2nd centuries, including the amalgamation of Peripatetic and Stoic theories, I explain why Hipparchus, in his calculations, used the logical notions he did, and why he may have thought they were Stoic. OPEN ACCESS LINK. (shrink)

In this 2 1/2 page piece(ling) I introduce the terms 'to maleappropriate', 'maleappropriation', 'maleappropriator', etc., for a familiar phenomenon and pattern of behaviour, following a couple of autobiographical remarks and followed by some brief suggestions about how to handle the phenomenon. That's all. (Nothing of philosophical depth here.).

NOTE: The English translation is listed separately. ABSTRACT: A general interpretation and close textual analysis of Kant’s theory of the categories of freedom (or categories of practical reason) in his Critique of Practical Reason. My main concerns in the paper are the following: (1) I show that Kant’s categories of freedom have primarily three functions: as conditions of the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be comprehensible as free and (iii) to be morally evaluated. (2) I show (...) that for Kant actions, although qua theoretical objects they are always already constituted by means of the theoretical categories, qua practical objects (objects of reason in its practical use, i.e. objects qua possibly good or bad) they are constituted by means of the categories of freedom; and that it is only in this way that actions, qua phenomena, can be a consequence of freedom, and can be understood and evaluated as such. (3) Since Kant's presentation of his theory of the Categories of Freedom is extremely brief, Kant's parallel theory of the theoretical categories in his Critique of Pure Reason is used as a guide for the interpretation of the practical categories and their systematic relevance. (shrink)