Heinrich Heine had not only many places of residence during his years in Germany, but he also made numerous journeys throughout Europe. Thus, during his time in France, he got to know the country substantially better and furthermore he would have liked to undertake a detour to Spain. Since his student days, Spain was for him as a German Jew the epitome of a Jewish- Christian-Islamic symbiosis despite many differences and difficulties. He slipped into the role of the Moors to (...) express his own outsider role within the German Christian majority society. Heine admired the great Jewish achievements and remained critical of Christian claims, although he had become a Protestant after being baptized at the end of his law studies. His tragedy Almansor, poems from the Buch der Lieder, texts in prose and epic poems from the Parisian years as well as in his literary bequest and above all the last collection of poems called Romanzero with their moving “Spanish” texts, namely the stories about Jews, Christians and Muslims, are the most important poetic evidences of religious coexistence and its problems. (shrink)

Heine is one of Germany's most renowned poets. His Jewish heritage and his Christian baptism have informed both his life's work as well as its reception. He was an expert and a passionate reader of the Bible. Despite his criticism of the official system of churches and religious communities, he greatly appreciated religion and its symbolic language, which speaks especially to the poet – even in its silences.

How should you decide what to do when you’re uncertain about basic normative principles? A natural suggestion is to follow some "second-order:" norm: e.g., obey the most probable norm or maximize expected choiceworthiness. But what if you’re uncertain about second-order norms too—must you then invoke some third-order norm? If so, any norm-guided response to normative uncertainty appears doomed to a vicious regress. This paper aims to rescue second-order norms from the threat of regress. I first elaborate and defend the claim (...) some philosophers have made that the regress problem forces us to accept normative externalism, the view that at least one norm is incumbent on all agents regardless of their normative beliefs. But, I then argue, we need not accept externalism about first-order norms, thus closing off any question of how agents should respond to normative uncertainty. Rather, we can head off the threat of regress by ascribing external force to a single second-order norm: the enkratic principle. (shrink)

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the vast (...) differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

Decision-making under normative uncertainty requires an agent to aggregate the assessments of options given by rival normative theories into a single assessment that tells her what to do in light of her uncertainty. But what if the assessments of rival theories differ not just in their content but in their structure -- e.g., some are merely ordinal while others are cardinal? This paper describes and evaluates three general approaches to this "problem of structural diversity": structural enrichment, structural depletion, and multi-stage (...) aggregation. All three approaches have notable drawbacks, but I tentatively defend multi-stage aggregation as least bad of the three. (shrink)

The perception of meaningful patterns in random arrangements and unrelated events takes place in our everyday lives, coined apophenia, synchronicity, or the experience of meaningful coincidences. However, we do not know yet what predicts this phenomenon. To investigate this, we re-analyzed a combined data set of two daily diary studies with a total of N = 169 participants (mean age 29.95 years; 54 men). We investigated if positive or negative affect (PA, NA) predicts the number of meaningful coincidences on the (...) following day (or vice versa). By means of a cross-lagged multilevel modelling approach (Bayesian estimation) we evaluated with which of two theoretical assumptions the data are more in line. First, if meaningful coincidences are facilitated by a broader and more flexible thinking style, PA should positively predict meaningful coincidences at the following day. However, if the experience of meaningful coincidences signifies a strategy to cope with negative feeling states, NA should predict the experience of meaningful coincidences during the following day. In favour of a more flexible thinking style, we found that PA predicted the number of perceived coincidences the following day. We did not find any effect for NA, and therefore, no evidence arguing for the coping mechanism hypothesis of meaningful coincidences. (shrink)

Nudge is a popular public policy tool that harnesses well-known biases in human judgement to subtly guide people’s decisions, often to improve their choices or to achieve some socially desirable outcome. Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) methods new possibilities emerge of how and when our decisions can be nudged. On the one hand, algorithmically personalized nudges have the potential to vastly improve human daily lives. On the other hand, blindly outsourcing the development and implementation of nudges to (...) “black box” AI systems means that the ultimate reasons for why such nudges work, that is, the underlying human cognitive processes that they harness, will often be unknown. In this paper, we unpack this concern by considering a series of examples and case studies that demonstrate how AI systems can learn to harness biases in human judgment to reach a specified goal. Drawing on an analogy in a philosophical debate concerning the methodology of economics, we call for the need of an interdisciplinary oversight of AI systems that are tasked and deployed to nudge human behaviours. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

Franciscus de Prato hat sich immer wieder mit der Philosophie Ockhams auseinandergesetzt. Diese Arbeit zeigt auf, wie bedeutsam fur beide Philosophen die Sprachtheorie ist. Der Angelpunkt ist dabei die Annahme entweder eines Satzes im Geiste oder einer Proposition, die aus Dingen besteht. Diese Entscheidung wirkt sich dann auf verschiedenste Gebiete der Philosophie aus. Am Beispiel der Kategorienlehre wird dies deutlich: Kategorien sind Aussagbares. In Satzen aussagbar sind aber fur Ockham nur mentale Begriffe, keine Dinge. Also ist fur ihn die Kategorienordnung (...) keine Ordnung von extramentalen Dingen, sondern nur von mentalen Zeichen. Anders Franciscus: Fur ihn sind Gegenstande, nicht Zeichen primar aussagbar. Also ist fur ihn die kategoriale Ordnung eine reale Hierarchie. Welches Licht wirft diese Auseinandersetzung auf das Verstandnis der Philosophie Ockhams und der des Franciscus? Weitaus wichtiger als der universalientheoretische Unterschied zwischen Nominalismus und Realismus ist fur beide Denker ihre satztheoretische Ausrichtung. Ausgezeichnet mit dem Preis an Studierende der Ruhr-Universitat Bochum. (shrink)

At its heart, The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is a plea not to take doubt at its word—a plea for the return of a vanished philosophical intelligence..

In this paper, we advance a novel conception of normative ethics and draw out its implications within the domain of professional ethics. We argue that all moral agents, and thus professionals, share a fundamental and constitutive normative interest in correctly conceiving of their ends. All professionals, we claim, by virtue of their positions of social power, have special role responsibilities in cultivating and sustaining societies oriented by this shared ideal of practically oriented ethical understanding. We defend this conception against a (...) familiar opponent of a philosophical approach to professional ethics: the morally skeptical student. By taking the skeptic’s challenge seriously, we clarify the conditions for a sound account of normative ethics and then provide a response that meets this test. Against this type of skeptic, we claim that a fundamental commitment to the ideal of understanding our ends ought to be included within any curriculum of professional et... (shrink)

Gestalt theory is discussed as one main precursor of synergetics, one of the most elaborated theories of self-organization. It is a precursor for two reasons: the Gestalt theoretical view of cognitive order-formation comes dose to the central ideas of self-organization. Furthermore both approaches have stressed the significance of non-linear perceptual processes (such as multistability) for the solution of the mind-brain problem. The question of whether Gestalt theory preferred a dualistic or a monistic view of the mind-body relation is answered in (...) that there was a preference for dualism in epistemological questions and for monism in the mind-brain relation. The latter was attained by the concept of psychophysical isomorphism. This concept, although widely misunderstood in many respects, was criticized on the basis of neurobiological findings. One main objection was the neglect of the importance of the elementary neurophysiological processes. A distinction between macroscopic and microscopic brain processes seemed to be required. This idea was taken up in synergetics which postulates a bottom-up and top-down interaction between these two levels. Macroscopic order emerges from elementary brain processes and, at the same time, has a backward slaving effect to the microscopic level In the light of such holistic emergentism, the question whether macroscopic order states might be attractors for psychological meanings is discussed. (shrink)

Contrary to a widespread belief, this book establishes that ontological and epistemological reductionism stand or fall together.

Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure of the world back to the classical spacetime of GR. The present essay investigates how spacetime is lost and how it may be regained in one major approach to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity.

We report the results of an experimental test of whether preaching the normative appeal of the sure-thing principle leads decision-makers to make choices that satisfy it. We use Allais-type decision problems to observe the incentive-compatible choices of 147 subjects, which either violate the sure-thing principle or adhere to it. Subjects are presented with normative arguments that support the counterfactual behaviour and then repeat their decisions. We observe violations of the sure-thing principle are robust to its normative justification. This result replicates (...) a famous small-sample observation using hypothetical tasks that was published by Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky almost half a century ago. We argue that this finding is as relevant now as it was then and that their design can be usefully applied to address contemporary issues in behavioural economics. (shrink)

Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict — perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism. To that (...) end, I develop two simple models for comparing ‘longtermist’ and ‘neartermist’ interventions, incorporating the idea that it is harder to make a predictable difference to the further future. These models yield mixed conclusions: if we simply aim to maximize expected value, and don’t mind premising our choices on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, the case for longtermism looks robust. But on some prima facie plausible empirical worldviews, the expectational superiority of longtermist interventions depends heavily on these ‘Pascalian’ probabilities. So the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism. (shrink)

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality psychologists on morally (...) relevant thought and action. -/- This entry briefly examines four recent empirical approaches to moral character. It will draw on the psychology literature where appropriate, but the main focus will be on the significance of that work for philosophers interested in better understanding moral character. The four areas are situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five model, and the VIA. The remainder of this entry devotes a section to each of them. (shrink)

The Continuum Companion to Ethics offers a definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Fourteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, the exciting new directions (...) the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to moral methodology, moral realism, ethical expressivism, constructivism and the error theory, morality and practical reason, moral psychology, morality and religion, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, moral particularism, experimental ethics, and biology, evolution, and ethics. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including important technical terms in ethics, a historical chronology, an extensive overview of contemporary meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, a detailed list of internet resources for research in ethics, and a thorough list of recommended works for further study, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in contemporary philosophical ethics. (shrink)

The problem of free will as it is know in Western philosophical traditions is hardly known in China. Considering how central the problem is in the West, this is a remarkable fact. We try to explain this, and we offer insights into discussions within Chinese traditions that we think are related, not historically but regarding the issues discussed. Thus we introduce four central Chinese concepts, namely: (1) xīn 心 (heart, heart-mind), (2) xìng 性 (human nature, characteristic tendencies, inborn capacity), (3) (...) mìng 命 (lifespan, fate, command, allotment, endowment), and (4) zìrán 自然 (self-so, so of itself, nature, spontaneity), and we indicate how these concepts and their discussions can be related to discussions on free will. (shrink)

This handbook article reviews the situationist movements in psychology and philosophy, before turning to possible implications for issues about free will and moral responsibility. Particular attention is paid to possible threats to reasons-responsiveness and to agency.

Legal theorists have proposed several theories to justify statutes of limitations in the criminal law, but none of these normative theories is generally accepted. This chapter investigates the related descriptive question as to whether ordinary people have the intuition that legal punishment becomes less appropriate as time passes from the date of the offense and, if they do, what factors play a role in these intuitions. Five studies demonstrate that there is an intuitive statute of limitations on both legal punishment (...) and moral criticism, and that these intuitions arise, in part, from judgments about changes in psychological connectedness over time. (shrink)