This essay is about the Wolfgang Köhler’s philosophical ideas expressed in his The Place of Value in a World of Facts of 1938. Köhler, who strongly supports a scientific world view, considers the question as to whether science is able to cope with human values, besides natural facts. Relying upon phenomenological analyses, and on his previous researches in natural philosophy, Köhler introduces his doctrine of “epistemological dualism”. From a historical point of view, this theory exhibits some similarity with the (...) philosophical ideas expressed by Köhler’s Berlin mentor Carl Stumpf. It is argued that Köhler’s epistemological dualism actually supports ontological monism and aims at offering a unified view of natural facts and human values. (shrink)

The Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels published his essay "On 'Gestalt Qualities'" in 1890. The essay initiated a current of thought which enjoyed a powerful position in the philosophy and psychology of the first half of this century and has more recently enjoyed a minor resurgence of interest in the area of cognitive science, above all in criticisms of the so-called 'strong programme' in artificial intelligence. The theory of Gestalt is of course associated most specifically with psychologists of the Berlin (...) school such as Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. We shall see in what follows, however, that an adequate philosophical understanding of the Gestalt idea and of Ehrenfels' achievement will require a close examination not merely of the work of the Berlin school but also of a much wider tradition in Austrian and German philosophy in general. (shrink)

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein cites the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Koehler almost as often as he cites William James in his posthumously published writings on the philosophy of psychology. Yet, few treatments of the Wittgenstein–Koehler relation in the philosophical literature could be called sustained discussions. Moreover, most of them treat Koehler as a mere whipping boy for Wittgenstein, one more opportunity to criticize the practice of psychologists. This article emphasizes how much the two thinkers agreed, and the extent to which (...) some of Wittgenstein’s work not only agreed with but also has a logical structure parallel to some of Koehler’s text. Both thinkers hold that the theoretician should strive to recognize and resist the impulse to step in and purify, distill, streamline, or exclude phenomena: common, everyday experience for Koehler and common, everyday uses of words for Wittgenstein. They both aim to counteract the tendency to discount and disparage what is ordinary and common. (shrink)

The paper presents basic Gestalt psychological concepts of ego and self. They differ from other concepts in the way that they do not comprehend ego and self as fixed entities or as central controlling instances of the psyche, but as one specific organized unit in a psychological field in dynamic interrelation with the other organized units—the environment units—of this field. On this theme, well-known representatives of Gestalt theory have presented some general and special theories since the early days of this (...) approach that could partly be substantiated experimentally. They illuminate the relationship between ego and world in everyday life as well as in the case of mental disorders. Not only the spatial extension of the phenomenal ego is subject to situational changes, but also its place in the world, its functional fitting in this world, its internal differentiation, its permeability to the environment, and much more. The German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger emphasizes the significant functional role that this dynamic plasticity of the phenomenal world and its continuously changing segregation of ego and environment have for human life by designating the phenomenal world as a “Central Steering Mechanism.” In this article, ego and self as part of this field in their interrelation with the total psychological field will be illuminated from the perspective of the thinking of the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Lewin, Wolfgang Metzger, Mary Henle, Edwin Rausch, and Giuseppe Galli. (shrink)

The project of a naive physics has been the subject of attention in recent years above all in the artificial intelligence field, in connection with work on common-sense reasoning, perceptual representation and robotics. The idea of a theory of the common-sense world is however much older than this, having its roots not least in the work of phenomenologists and Gestalt psychologists such as Kohler, Husserl, Schapp and Gibson. This paper seeks to show how contemporary naive physicists can profit from a (...) knowledge of these historical roots of their discipline, which are shown to imply above all a critique of the set-theory-based models of reality typically presupposed by contemporary work in common-sense ontology. (shrink)

Uma pesquisa revisando o pensamento gestáltico se justifica pelo intenso debate em torno da tese emergentista da mente. Sem a pretensão de uma exposição extensiva dos usos de noções emergentistas na análise do conceito de mente, realiza-se uma exposição do conceito com foco nas perspectivas de John R. Searle e de Evan Thompson. Ambos realizam uma defesa da emergência como conceito central na compreensão e explicação da relação mente corpo, mas o primeiro centrado no conceito de propriedades emergentes e o (...) segundo centrado no conceito de processos emergentes. Neste debate entendemos que contribuições da teoria da Gestalt podem se fazer interessantes. Apresenta-se neste contexto o pensamento gestáltico enfatizando o texto “Über ‘Gestaltqualitäten’ ” de 1932, ditado à sua esposa por Chistian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) no ano de sua morte como um comentário a partir da repercussão de seu artigo “Über ‘Gestaltqualitäten’ ”, publicado em 1890 e comentado pelos três autores de maior repercussão da psicologia da Gestalt; Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), Kurt Koffka (1886-1941) e Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967). (shrink)

The term ‘Gestalt’ was introduced into psychology by the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels in an essay entitled “On ‘Gestalt-Qualities’” published in 1890. ‘Gestalt,’ in colloquial German, means roughly: ‘shape’ or ‘structure’ or ‘configuration’, and Ehrenfels demonstrates in his essay that there are certain inherently structural features of experience which need to be acknowledged in addition to simple tones, colours and other mental ‘atoms’ or ‘elements’. His essay thus initiated a reaction against the then still dominant atomism in psychology, a (...) reaction which culminated in the work on ‘cerebral intregation’ of the so-called Berlin school of Gestalt psychology. Max Wertheimer, one of the leading members of this school, was a student of Ehrenfels in Prague. Ehrenfels himself belonged to an impressive list of original thinkers – a list which includes also Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong and Carl Stumpf, the founder of the Berlin school – who were students of Franz Brentano. Each of these thinkers attempted to elaborate, both ontologically and psychologically, the doctrine of intentionality put forward by Brentano. The work of Ehrenfels and of the later Gestaltists, too, may be seen as a contribution to the understanding of this mental directedness, and in particular to the understanding of the directedness of perceptual experience. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the enterprise of evaluating and improving our representational devices. But how should we conduct this enterprise? One increasingly popular answer to this question proposes that conceptual engineering should proceed in terms of the functions of our representational devices. In this paper, we argue that the best way of understanding this suggestion is in terms of normative functions, where normative functions of concepts are, roughly, things that they allow us to do that matter normatively (for example, things in (...) virtue of which we have normative reasons to have these concepts). Not only does this introduce a novel view about functions to the literature. This proposal also fits more naturally than the alternatives with conceptual engineering as a normative enterprise, and it allows functions to play all of the explanatory roles assigned to them in the conceptual engineering literature. Our discussion of the explanatory advantages of normative functions also advances the understanding of the ways in which concepts can be authoritative, what this means for conceptual engineering, and highlights the importance of political philosophy for thinking about conceptual engineering in practice. Furthermore, the paper explicates what kind of role considerations about function can and should actually play in conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Formal principles governing best practices in classification and definition have for too long been neglected in the construction of biomedical ontologies, in ways which have important negative consequences for data integration and ontology alignment. We argue that the use of such principles in ontology construction can serve as a valuable tool in error-detection and also in supporting reliable manual curation. We argue also that such principles are a prerequisite for the successful application of advanced data integration techniques such as ontology-based (...) multi-database querying, automated ontology alignment and ontology-based text-mining. These theses are illustrated by means of a case study of the Gene Ontology, a project of increasing importance within the field of biomedical data integration. (shrink)

Meta-ethical expressivism was traditionally seen as the view that normative judgements are not beliefs. Recently, quasi-realists have argued, via a minimalist conception of “belief”, that expressivism is fully compatible with normative judgements being beliefs. This maneuver is successful, however, only if quasi-realists have really offered an expressivist-friendly account of belief that captures all platitudes characterizing belief. But, quasi-realists’ account has a crucial gap, namely how to account for the propositional contents of normative beliefs in an expressivist-friendly manner. In particular, quasi-realists (...) haven’t yet developed their preferred option, a “minimalist” or “deflationist” account of such contents. This paper aims to close that gap. I argue that expressivists who accepts conceptual role semantics and use an account of that-clauses in their use in belief-attributions based on Wilfrid Sellars’ work can give a deflationary account of the contents of beliefs that is compatible with normative judgements being beliefs, even if expressivism is true. (shrink)

The creation of new institutions and the initiation of new forms of behaviour cannot be explained only on the basis of constitutive rules – they also require a broader commitment of individuals who participate in social practices and, thus, to become members of a community. In this paper, I argue that the received conception of constitutive rules shows a problematic intellectualistic bias that becomes particularly manifest in three assumptions: (i) constitutive rules have a logical form, (ii) constitutive rules have no (...) normative force, and (iii) rules are essentially tied to a sanctioning authority. I discuss these three claims in light of real-life examples. The goal of this discussion is to show that the normative force of constitutive rules is based on the shared commitment of participants who engage in the relevant practices. The inner cohesion and the persistence in time of these practices is possible only because participants continuously calibrate their own forms of behaviour to that of the other members of the community, which underscores the social dimension of constitution. (shrink)

Kendall Walton’s account of make-believe takes the social dimension of imagination into account. In this paper I aim to extend this suggestion and argue that works of fiction allow for encounters with concrete (yet fictitious) persons with a distinct point of view and a discernible perspective. These encounters allow us to contrast the perspective(s) that emerge from the work with one’s own. I will then discuss two moments of the social dimension: imagining fictional scenarios is a social practice, a game (...) we play together and in which we encounter others. Both of these moments shed light on the central role of fiction for the social community in which it is embedded and show how engaging with works of fiction can contribute to the inner cohesion and to the persistence of the group. (shrink)

Background: Ontologies and taxonomies are among the most important computational resources for molecular biology and bioinformatics. A series of recent papers has shown that the Gene Ontology (GO), the most prominent taxonomic resource in these fields, is marked by flaws of certain characteristic types, which flow from a failure to address basic ontological principles. As yet, no methods have been proposed which would allow ontology curators to pinpoint flawed terms or definitions in ontologies in a systematic way. Results: We present (...) computational methods that automatically identify terms and definitions which are defined in a circular or unintelligible way. We further demonstrate the potential of these methods by applying them to isolate a subset of 6001 problematic GO terms. By automatically aligning GO with other ontologies and taxonomies we were able to propose alternative synonyms and definitions for some of these problematic terms. This allows us to demonstrate that these other resources do not contain definitions superior to those supplied by GO. Conclusion: Our methods provide reliable indications of the quality of terms and definitions in ontologies and taxonomies. Further, they are well suited to assist ontology curators in drawing their attention to those terms that are ill-defined. We have further shown the limitations of ontology mapping and alignment in assisting ontology curators in rectifying problems, thus pointing to the need for manual curation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to take a fresh look at a discussion about the distinct existences argument that took place between David Armstrong and Frank Jackson more than fifty years ago. I will try to show that Armstrong’s argument can be successfully defended against Jackson’s objections (albeit at the price of certain concessions concerning Armstrong’s view on the meaning of psychological terms as well as his conception of universals). Focusing on two counterexamples that Jackson put forward against Hume’s (...) principle (which is central to Armstrong’s argument), I will argue that they are either compatible with Hume’s principle, or imply a false claim. I will also look at several other considerations that go against Hume’s principle, such as, for example, Kripke’s origin essentialism and counterexamples from aposteriori necessity. (shrink)

"Self-knowledge" refers to the knowledge a person has about their current mental states. Philosophically, this type of knowledge is intriguing because it appears to be acquired not only through a distinctive process, differing from other forms of empirical knowledge acquisition, but also in a particularly reliable manner. Thus, when I articulate my self-knowledge, I seem to speak with a unique first-person authority. My listeners appear to attribute greater weight to what I say about my own mental states than to what (...) others say about them. As is often the case in philosophical debates, nearly every aspect of this topic is contentious: not only what constitutes the best explanation for the distinctive features of self-knowledge but also whether self-knowledge actually possesses these features at all. This article provides an overview of the most important points of contention. (shrink)

Since humankind’s earliest philosophical inquiries, society has been plagued by the taboos associated with suicide. It has been rebuked without respite, both on moral and religious grounds. This paper comes to the defense of suicide by combating the opprobrious arguments that have been raised against it. It begins by exploring what exactly constitutes ‘suicide’, then follows a historical account of the ethics surrounding it from antiquity to modern times. Specific focus is given to Kant’s deontological secularization of the previously, strictly (...) theological, natural law argument. It claims that Kant is in large part to blame for the stigma around suicide, and by proxy mental health in general in the twenty-first century. Finally, this paper will address said stigma vis-à-vis psychoanalytic ethics and offer a complete restructuring of the concept of suicide in an attempt to change how the western world perceives it. (shrink)

Narrativity is basically linked to the dynamics of the events and actions which are told and it depends on the pragmatic context, mainly on the narrator and his audience, i.e. on the discursive setting. These dynamics ask for an adequate theoretical frame, e.g. in the format of dynamical system theory or vector analysis. Furthermore, narrativity can be manifested in different modalities. We shall present some specimens of analysis in the linguistic modality (spontaneous oral tales, folktales), in the visual modality (painting (...) by Leonardo da Vinci, action movie in the series of Bond films), and in the musical modality (Blues music). The static analyses in the tradition of structuralism are replaced by morphodynamic schemes, by gesture and glance vectors, paths of pursuit and scenarios of conflict in action movies and eventually by harmonic sequences in the Blues. In this dynamic perspective, the notion of narrativity gains a different profile and it is freed from the preference for linguistic or logical categories. (shrink)

Is there an epistemic analogue of moral motivational internalism? The answer to this question has implications for our understanding of the nature of epistemic normativity. For example, some philosophers have argued from claims that epistemic judgement is not necessarily motivating to the view that epistemic judgement is not normative. This paper examines the options for spelling out an epistemic analogue of moral motivational internalism. It is argued that the most promising approach connects epistemic judgements to doxastic dispositions, which are related (...) to motivation in a fairly tenuous sense. It is also argued that this approach currently lacks a plausible and informative account of the nature and workings of these doxastic dispositions, and, hence, an explanation of the range of phenomena internalist theses typically set out to explain. The most promising route for developing such an account, based on recent expressivist work, is investigated and found inadequate for the task. (shrink)

The paper argues that Gareth Evans’ argument for transparent self-knowledge is based on a conflation of doxastic transparency with ascriptive transparency. Doxastic transparency means that belief about one’s own doxastic state, e.g., the belief that one thinks that it will rain, can be warranted by ordinary empirical observation, e.g., of the weather. In contrast, ascriptive transparency says that self-ascriptions of belief, e.g., “I believe it will rain”, can be warranted by such observation. We first show that the thesis of doxastic (...) transparency is ill-motivated and then offer a non-epistemic interpretation of ascriptive transparency by reference to the theory of explicit expressive acts: “I think it will rain” requires attendance to the weather because the utterance expresses a belief about the weather, not about ourselves. This will allow us to avoid what is often called “the puzzle of transparent self-knowledge” while remaining faithful to Evans’ linguistic observations. (shrink)

Every domain-specific ontology must use as a framework some upper-level ontology which describes the most general, domain-independent categories of reality. In the present paper we sketch a new type of upper-level ontology, which is intended to be the basis of a knowledge modelling language GOL (for: 'General Ontological Language'). It turns out that the upper- level ontology underlying standard modelling languages such as KIF, F-Logic and CycL is restricted to the ontology of sets. Set theory has considerable mathematical power and (...) great flexibility as a framework for modelling different sorts of structures. At the same time it has the disadvantage that sets are abstract entities (entities existing outside the realm of time, space and causality), and thus a set-theoretical framework should be supplemented by some other machinery if it is to support applications in the ripe, messy world of concrete objects. In the present paper we partition the entities of the real world into sets and urelements, and then we introduce several new ontological relations between these urelements. In contrast to standard modelling and representation formalisms, the concepts of GOL provide a machinery for representing and analysing such ontologically basic relations. (shrink)

Our senses provide us with information about the world, but what exactly do they tell us? I argue that in order to optimally respond to sensory stimulations, an agent’s doxastic space may have an extra, “imaginary” dimension of possibility; perceptual experiences confer certainty on propositions in this dimension. To some extent, the resulting picture vindicates the old-fashioned empiricist idea that all empirical knowledge is based on a solid foundation of sense-datum propositions, but it avoids most of the problems traditionally associated (...) with that idea. The proposal might also explain why experiences appear to have a non-physical phenomenal character, even if the world is entirely physical. (shrink)

The central idea of this essay is that philosophical thinking revolves around aporetic clusters, i.e., sets of individually plausible, but collectively inconsistent propositions. The task of philosophy is to dissolve such clusters, either by showing that the propositions in question, contrary to first impression, are compatible with each other, or by showing that it is permissible to abandon at least one of the propositions involved. This view of philosophical problems not only provides a very good description of well-understood philosophizing, but (...) is also better suited than others to explain some seemingly strange characteristics of philosophy, most notably its armchair character, the large variety of incommensurable doctrines by which it is characterized, and its concern with its own history. (shrink)

According to the transparency approach, achievement of self-knowledge is a two-stage process: first, the subject arrives at the judgment ‘p’; second, the subject proceeds to the judgment ‘I believe that p.’ The puzzle of transparency is to understand why the transition from the first to the second judgment is rationally permissible. After revisiting the debate between Byrne and Boyle on this matter, I present a novel solution according to which the transition is rationally permissible in virtue of a justifying argument (...) that begins from a premise referring to the mental utterance that is emitted in the course of judging ‘p.’. (shrink)

Inhalt: Vorbemerkung Kommentar Titel Vorrede Erster Teil Zweiter Teil Dritter Teil Benutzte Literatur a)Zeitgenossen und Vorläufer Fichtes b)Moderne Interpreten Sachregister zum Fichte-Text Verzeichnis der zitierten Arbeiten Fichtes.

Many philosophical theories of self-knowledge can be understood as attempts to explain why self-ascriptions enjoy a certain kind of authority that other-ascriptions lack (the Authority Thesis). The aim of this paper is not to expand the stock of existing explanations but to ask whether the Authority Thesis can be adequately specified. To this end, I identify three requirements that must be met by any satisfactory specification. I conclude that the search for an adequate specification of the Authority Thesis leads to (...) a dilemma: it either yields an interpretation under which the thesis is philosophically interesting but false, or it produces an interpretation under which the thesis is actually true but of minor philosophical interest. (shrink)

The present essay seeks, by way of the Austrian example, to make a contribution to what might be called the philosophy of the supranational state. More specifically, we shall attempt to use certain ideas on the philosophy of Gestalten as a basis for understanding some aspects of that political and cultural phenomenon which was variously called the Austrian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Danube Monarchy or Kakanien.

Since their formulation by Keith DeRose (1992), the so-called bank cases have played a major role in the discussion about whether knowledge depends on practical factors. According to the proponents of pragmatic encroachment, the proper conclusion to be drawn from the bank cases and similar examples is that knowledge of a proposition _p_ does not supervene on one’s evidence for or against _p_. In my view, this conclusion is ill-founded. The reason is that the bank cases and similar examples suffer (...) from an ambiguity concerning the known proposition — an ambiguity that has so far been overlooked. When this ambiguity is made explicit, it becomes clear that the conclusion does not follow. (shrink)

Twice in the 2020 term, in Bostock and Comcast, the Supreme Court doubled down on the reasoning of “but-for causation” to interpret antidiscrimination statutes. According to this reasoning, an outcome is discriminatory because of some status—say, sex or race—just in case the outcome would not have occurred “but-for” the plaintiff’s status. We think this reasoning embeds profound conceptual errors that render the decisions deeply confused. Furthermore, those conceptual errors tend to limit the reach of antidiscrimination law. In this essay, we (...) first unpack the ambiguity of this but-for causal reasoning. We then show that this reasoning arises from a misapplication of tort law principles within antidiscrimination law, and that, as a result, it is both conceptually and normatively indeterminate. (shrink)

The ontology of marketing, particularly the question of what products and brands are, is still largely unexplored. The ontological status of brands hinges on their relationship with products. Idealists about brands see perceptual or cognitive acts of consumers grouped under the heading ‘brand awareness’ or ‘brand image’ as constitutive for the existence of brands so that, in their view, tools of the marketing mix can influence relevant mental dispositions and attitudes. Brand realists, on the other hand, reject the view of (...) brands as mere marks or names and interpret them as emergent products with properties that afford branding in the sense of Gibson’s ecological psychology. Brand strength is a function of the degree to which brands occupy defensible niches in product space. Branding as a process involves changing external or internal boundaries of products. Several arguments are proposed in favor of brand realism. The fragments of an ontology of marketing are developed in a broadly Aristotelian framework. Brand realism has significant implications for a new understanding of issues ranging from the effects of advertising to financial brand valuation, the nature of trademarks, and marketing strategy in general. It permits one to treat brand equity as a real phenomenon not dependent on associations, attitudinal states such as brand loyalty, or spurious constructs such as brand character or personality. (shrink)

This article aims to show that Williamson's anti-luminosity argument does not succeed if we presuppose a constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic. In contrast to other luminists, however, my strategy is not to critically focus on the refined safety condition in terms of degrees of confidence that anti-luminists typically use in this context. Instead, I will argue that, given a certain conception of what Chalmers calls ‘direct phenomenal concepts,’ luminosity is guaranteed even if the refined safety condition in (...) terms of degrees of confidence is taken for granted. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to lay the groundwork for extending the idea of transparent introspection to wishes. First, I elucidate the notion of transparent introspection and highlight its advantages over rival accounts of self-knowledge. Then I pose several problems that seem to obstruct the extension of transparent introspection to wishes. In order to overcome these problems, I call into question the standard propositional attitude analysis of non-doxastic attitudes. My considerations lead to a non-orthodox account of attitudes in general (...) and wishes in particular in light of which the problems presented in Sect. 2 disappear. (shrink)

We argue that Wittgenstein’s philosophical perspective on Gödel’s most famous theorem is even more radical than has commonly been assumed. Wittgenstein shows in detail that there is no way that the Gödelian construct of a string of signs could be assigned a useful function within (ordinary) mathematics. — The focus is on Appendix III to Part I of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. The present reading highlights the exceptional importance of this particular set of remarks and, more specifically, emphasises (...) its refined composition and rigorous internal structure. (shrink)

Der vorliegende "philologische" Kommentar beansprucht Kants Critik der reinen Vernunft aus ihren historischen Voraussetzungen zu erklären. Zu diesen gehört an erster Stelle Kants Sprache; sie ist nicht mehr die unsere, was den unvorbereiteten Leser von heute schon an der Semantik und Syntax vieler Sätze scheitern lässt. Neben einer Fülle von sprachlichen Erläuterungen und textkritischen Untersuchungen bringt der Kommentar reichliche Zitate aus den von Kant benutzten Logik- und Metaphysik-Lehrbüchern, die seine Rezeption der "dogmatischen" Philosophie Christian Wolffs und seiner Nachfolger belegen; lateinische (...) Texte werden dabei sowohl im Original als auch in deutscher Übersetzung geboten. Einzelne Motive werden ideengeschichtlich bis in die Antike zurückverfolgt; hieraus eröffnen sich Perspektiven für eine "Metakritik" von einem "vorkritischen" Standpunkt aus, die im Rahmen eines philologischen Kommentars nur angedeutet werden können. (shrink)

This paper aims to support my (2018) skeptical position on the possibility of a correct and philosophically significant specification of first-person authority. For this purpose, I critically examine the proposals presented by Doyle (2021) and Winokur (2022) in response to my position and argue that while these proposals contain some ingenious ideas, they ultimately fall short of providing correct and philosophically significant specifications. Ultimately, the search for an adequate specification of first-person authority remains unresolved.

In the consolidated cases Altitude Express v. Zarda, Bostock v. Clayton County, and R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Although the parties disagree as to the appropriate formulation of a but-for test to determine whether or not there was a discriminatory outcome, all parties do agree to the use of such a test, which asks “whether the evidence (...) shows ‘treatment of a person in a manner which but for that person’s sex would be different.’” City of Los Angeles, Dep’t. of Water and Power v. Manhart, 435 U.S. 702, 711 (1978). However, but-for tests confuse more than they clarify the inquiry; a discriminatory outcome cannot be explained by appeal to just a discrete characteristic of a particular person. Individuals are not discriminated against because of these characteristics per se. Rather, they are discriminated against because of the social meanings and expectations that attach to these characteristics. Beyoncé and Taylor Swift illustrate the difference between individual-level causation and social explanation in two separate songs, “If I Were a Boy” and “The Man.” The explanation for why the counterfactual ‘male’ Beyoncé and Swift are evaluated differently than their current ‘female’ versions does not lie in individual-level features considered apart from the social world, but in social-level roles and expectations associated with those features. For this reason, a social explanation test—one that asks whether the social meanings of sex characteristics, rather than the characteristics per se, explain the outcome in question—is more suitable for determining whether or not Title VII has been violated. (shrink)

The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anticognitivist challenge, according to which works of literary fiction (that contain propositions that are neither literally true nor affirmed by the author) cannot impart (relevant) knowledge to the readers or enrich their worldly understanding. Anti-cognitivists appreciate works of literary fiction for their aesthetic values and so risk to reduce them to mere ornaments that are entertaining, but eventually useless. Many philosophers have reacted to this challenge by pointing (...) at ways in which works of literary fiction can be informative even though they lack worldly reference: it has been argued, for example, that works of fictions are thought experiments; that they add not to our theoretical knowledge, but to our know-how or to our phenomenal knowledge; or that that they help readers to understand the perspectives of others. A stubborn defense of literary cognitivism, however, risks to collapse into an instrumental understanding of literature. In my paper I suggest that both sides in the debate focus too narrowly on semantic features of the works in question that is tied to what I will call the “referential picture” of language. A shift perspective is needed: for one, we ought to fully appreciate that the term “literature” does not refer to a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather to a very heterogeneous and multifarious set of works that are read by many different readers for many different reasons in many different ways. Second, we need to understand that these works have in common much more than the semantic peculiarity of lacking worldly reference: they are a unique means of communication between authors and readers – and in particular the role of the latter is often neglected in contemporary debate. These two points should help us to get a more comprehensive understanding of the practice of literature and the vast range of values we can find works of literary fiction – and the interplay between them. (shrink)

Abstract: Brentano’s conception of scientific philosophy had a strong influence on his students and on the intellectual atmosphere of Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is to expose Brentano’s conception and to contrast his views with that of two traditions he is said to have considerably influenced: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. I will shed light on the question of how and to what extent Brentano’s conception of philosophy as a rigorous science has had an impact (...) on these two traditions. The discussion will show that both took their liberties in the interpretation of the thesis, a move that allowed them to liberate themselves from Brentano’s inheritance and to fully develop their own philosophical positions. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory usually neglects two variables: the changes induced in the environment by the evolving organism, and individual uniqueness in sexually reproducing species. In order to fuel its maintenance and reproduction, an organism must average a positive net energy balance vis-a-v}s its environment. It achieves this via aptations, which consist of information (i.e., the internalization of all that is predictable about the environment, including the machinery to take advantage of this information) and stored energy (to operate the machinery, including a (...) safety margin to deal with events that are unpredictable in principle). Taking advantage of a prediction, however, interferes with what has been predicted; each adaptation by the organism therefore changes its environmental target. Today's organism is adapted to yesterday's environment, and today's predator inherits yesterday's prey image. This paper attempts to show that, over evolutionary time, the persistence of this asymmetric, time-lagged relationship is owed increasingly to genetically unique individuals. Individual uniqueness as resulting from sexual reproduction is janusfaced. It endows an evolving population with both a forward-looking (promethean) and backward-looking (protean) feature. A population made up of genetically unique individuals is promethean (creative) in its ability to exploit non-homogeneous resources and respond serendipitously to environmental change via new genotypes; it is protean (elusive) in presenting a pursuer (predator or parasite) with a scattered target. Furthermore, because of the asymmetry between the winnowing of the target gene pool by the pursuer, and the genetic fixation in the pursuer of an outdated target image, the target keeps evolving away from the pursuer at a speed and in a direction that are a function of the pursuer's success. This mechanism ensures an evolutionary time lag be102 W. Sterrer tween pursuer and target, which explains escalation, the stability of asymmetric coevolutionary systems such as the life/dinner principle, and the pervasiveness of the Red Queen effect. Individuality thus both promotes and retards the speed of evolution. Having probably originated simultaneously with predation, sex-generated individuality is a self-accelerating evolutionary process that may account for much of today's organismic and environmental complexity. (shrink)

The distinction of things in themselves and appearances is an integral part of Kant’s transcendental idealism, yet it has often been met with rather significant hostility. Moreover, what surely has not contributed to the popularity of this Kantian doctrine is that there are, or at least there appear to be, two distinct models, detectable in Kant’s texts, to account for this distinction. Most commonly, these two models are called the “two aspect view” on the one hand and the “two world (...) view” on the other, but it is possible that these labels themselves invite misunderstandings and obscure rather than clarify what Kant had in mind with his distinction. In this paper, I shall first briefly discuss how these two models could be described and labelled in a more suitable manner, namely as the “one composite entity view” and the “two separate objects view”. Subsequently, I will enquire which of the models is pertinent for Kant’s solution to the 3rd antinomy. I will try to show that although the two models appear to be incompatible, it is at least plausible to read Kant as using both of them in this crucial text of his oeuvre. Moreover, Kant’s strategy in solving the freedom problem on the basis of an indirectly realist account of the divine intellect provides the clue to understanding how these seemingly incompatible models can co-exist without forcing Kant into maintaining contradictory claims. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide an account of introspective knowledge concerning visual experiences that is in accordance with the idea of transparent introspection. According to transparent introspection, a person gains knowledge of her own current mental state M solely by paying attention to those aspects of the external world which M is about. In my view, transparent introspection is a promising alternative to inner sense theories. However, it raises the fundamental question why a person who pays attention (...) to something extra-mental should be epistemically justified in holding a belief about something intra-mental. In his Naturalizing the Mind, Fred Dretske solves this problem by conceiving of introspection concerning visual experiences as an inference based on a connecting belief. Although Dretske's account proves defective upon closer inspection, its essence can be salvaged by looking upon introspection as being a game of make-believe. (shrink)

In accordance with the contemporary state of the natural sciences, Wolfgang Sohst here presents an extended ontological model where the process is the first cosmological category, not objects. Her starts with very few primordial categories of becoming that even precede the fundamental concepts of physics and mathematics. Since Democritus, ie. for about 2,400 years, all cultures of European descent rest mainly on the presupposition that substances and their properties provide the inventory of our world. This, however, contradicts the formerly (...) and still today lively intuition (intellectually up to Heraclitus, again in Aristotle and only then resurgent with Hegel) that objects are not the dominating aspect of what we are living in. Rather, the basis of our cosmos is a world process as the result of the complementary relationship of particular objects and their mutual efficiencies. (shrink)

(For the English version, see below) Dieser Band schließt an die "Prozessontologie" von Wolfgang Sohst an. In vorliegenden Buch entwickelt er den Begriff der Emergenz auf der Grundlage einer Schichtenontologie. Kern dieser Theorie ist der Nachweis, dass die Struktur alles Gegebenen (also nicht nur des physischen Universums, sondern auch der irdischen Biosphäre und der aus ihr hervorgegangenen psychischen, sozialen und abstrakten Existenzformen) offen ist; es gibt keine absolute Entwicklungsgrenze der Weltstruktur. Alles Gegebene ist allerdings in Schichten gegliedert, beginnend mit (...) den protophysikalischen Weltzuständen über die quantenmechanische, die makrophysikalische und biologische Ebene bis hin zu den sozialen Strukturen menschlicher Wirklichkeit und den noch über sie hinausgehenden abstrakten Strukturen der reinen Symbolsysteme. -/- Der Begriff der Emergenz spielt hierin eine wichtige Rolle. Seine ideengeschichtliche Entwicklung seit den 1920er Jahren verlief allerdings unglücklich, weil von vornherein auf neue Einzelgegenstände und ihre Eigenschaften fixiert. Dabei ging sowohl die Prozesshaftigkeit der Welt verloren als auch die Einsicht, dass neue Strukturschichten der Welt nicht durch einzelne Gegenstände oder ihre Eigenschaften repräsentiert werden, sondern durch neue Gegenstands-, Zustands- und Prozesstypen. Dieser zunächst unauffällig erscheinende Unterschied zur traditionellen Emergenztheorie eröffnet vollkommen neue Zugänge und Verständnismöglichkeiten zur strukturellen Entwicklung des Weltganzen. (560 Seiten, Hardcover) -/- English version: This volume follows on from Wolfgang Sohst's "Process Ontology". In this book, he develops the concept of emergence on the basis of a layered ontology. The core of this theory is the proof that the structure of everything given (i.e. not only of the physical universe but also of the earthly biosphere and the mental, social and abstract forms of existence that emerged from it) is open; there is no absolute developmental limit of the world structure. However, everything given is divided into layers or strata, beginning with the proto-physical world states over the quantum-mechanical, the macrophysical, and biological level up to the social structures of human reality and the abstract structures of the pure symbol systems still going beyond them. -/- The concept of emergence plays an important role in this. However, its development in the history of ideas since the 1920s was unfortunate, because from the outset it was fixed on new individual objects and their properties. In the process, both the processuality of the world and the insight that new structural layers or strata of the world are not represented by individual objects or their properties, but by new types of objects, states, and processes, were lost. This differs from traditional emergence theory, which at first seems inconspicuous, and opens up entirely new approaches and ways of understanding the structural development of the world as a whole. (560 pages, hardcover). (shrink)

On the consequences of the interplay between the diversity of ethnic, national, cultural and linguistic groupings in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The key message of this book is that we come to know our own mental states, not by peering inward, but by focusing on the aspects of the external world to which we are intentionally related in virtue of having the mental states in question. Though many philosophers think that the idea of transparency, as it is called, may apply to self-knowledge of some mental states, it is often regarded as hopeless to widen its scope to self-knowledge of mental states (...) in general—for it seems that not all mental states make us aware of aspects of the external world. Barz rejects this view and take pains to show that the idea of transparency does apply across the board: not only to beliefs and visual experiences, but also to desires, intentions, bodily sensations and emotions. For this purpose, Barz carefully rethinks the nature of mind. He thereby develops, among other things, an original account of episodic mental states, challenges the orthodox view of propositional content and presents an account of emotions which integrates aspects of both cognitivist and non-cognitivist approaches. (shrink)

The existence of a Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT) is not a given, as arguments contra are in balance with arguments pro. An intellectual tradition consists of a style of thought and of a worldview, as its formal and material modes. The former defines the way knowledge is appropriated, processed, and passed on whereas the latter amounts to its applications to various regions of reality – God, man, morality, society, the Church, etc. A model of the CIT is proposed that consists (...) of principles differentiated by the degree of centrality they have in a topological structure. The paper asserts the existence of a CIT because a non-stipulative, non-trivial, and non-circular case can be made for it. (shrink)

First, I will discuss several reasons as to why there is still almost a reluctance to reading Kant’s philosophy in the context of the scholastic tradition. The focus will be on (i) the label “revolutionary” often attached to Kant’s thought thereby suggesting a radical break with the past, especially with regard to philosophers often perceived as conservative, and (ii) the issue of confessional ramifications (not unrelated to the first point) will also be touched upon, albeit briefly. Then, two examples will (...) be investigated with regard to which a recourse to this context provides important clues to the philosophical points at issue. These are Kant’s claims that on the one hand, existence is not a real predicate, and on the other, that appearances are nothing but representations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that Priest's modal Meinongianism might benefit from joining forces with two-dimensionalism. For this purpose, I propose a two-dimensional solution to a problem for modal Meinongianism that is posed by Beall, Sauchelli, and Milne, and show that, by taking recourse to two-dimensionalism, divergent intuitions about the question of whether fictional characters might exist can be reconciled. Moreover, two-dimensionalism helps to rebut Kroon's argument to the conclusion that modal Meinongianism cannot rule out the odd (...) claim that some non-existent objects have existence-entailing properties at the actual world. (shrink)