'Philosophische Anthropologie' meint in dieser Studie nicht eine philosophische Subdisziplin, sondern eine besondere Theorierichtung in der deutschsprachigen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, die mit den Namen Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Erich Rothacker, Arnold Gehlen, Adolf Portmann u.v.a. mehr verbunden ist. Der erste Teil erzählt die verwickelte, teils abenteuerliche Entstehungs-, Aufstiegs- und Entfaltungsgeschichte dieser Denkergruppe von 1919 bis 1975 - einschließlich ihrer beachtlichen Wirkungsgeschichte in verschiedenen Disziplinen wie der Soziologie, Psychologie, Biologie und der Philosophie selbst. Im zweiten Teil wird der philosophische Identitätskern (...) dieser Philosophischen Anthropologie als Denkansatz präzisiert. (shrink)

This is a selection of essays on moral responsibility that represent the major components of John Martin Fischer's overall approach to freedom of the will and moral responsibility. The collection exhibits the overall structure of Fischer's view and shows how the various elements fit together to form a comprehensive framework for analyzing free will and moral responsibility. The topics include deliberation and practical reasoning, freedom of the will, freedom of action, various notions of control, and moral accountability. The (...) essays seek to provide a foundation for our practices of holding each other (and ourselves) morally and legally accountable for our behavior. A crucial move is the distinction between two kinds of control. According to Fischer, "regulative control" involves freedom to choose and do otherwise ("alternative possibilities"), whereas "guidance control" does not. Fischer contends that guidance control is all the freedom we need to be morally responsible agents. Further, he contends that such control is fully compatible with causal determinism. Additionally, Fischer argues that we do not need genuine access to alternative possibilities in order for there to be a legitimate point to practical reasoning. Fischer's overall framework contains an argument for the contention that guidance control, and not regulative control, is associated with moral responsibility, a sketch of a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility (that ties together responsibility for actions, omissions, consequences, and character), and an account of the value of moral responsibility. On this account, the value of exhibiting freedom (of the relevant sort) and thus being morally responsible for one's behavior is a species of the value of artistic self-expression. (shrink)

Orientiert an der Frage nach den anthropologischen Gesetzlichkeiten des Sozialen werden jene Ethikentwurfe kritisch gesichtet, die das Eigentliche des Ethischen aus konstitutiven, und als solchen prapositiven, Grundakten menschlicher Interpersonalitat sozialontologisch zu bestimmen suchen. Dabei werden die unterschiedlichen philosophischen Argumentationsansatze dialog-personalen Denkens (Buber, Ebner, Grisebach) und in deren Kontext zwei massgebliche theologische Systematisierungsversuche (Gogarten, Steinbuchel) auf die Tragfahigkeit ihrer handlungsleitenden Vernunft hin uberpruft.".

Der Band zeichnet Kants Weg zur kritischen Ausarbeitung der Gottesfrage nach, reflektiert seinen Übergang von der Physikotheologie zur Ethikotheologie und bedenkt den Zusammenhang von Kants Kritik der Theologie und seinem Gottespostulat. Der Gottesbegriff in Kants "Religionsschrift" wird ebenso durchleuchtet wie die Beziehung zwischen philosophischer Gotteslehre und Offenbarungstheologie sowie die trinitätstheologischen Ansätze in Kants Philosophie.

There are many introductions to the animal ethics literature. There aren't many introductions to the practice of doing animal ethics. Bob Fischer's Animal Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction fills that gap, offering an accessible model of how animal ethics can be done today. The book takes up classic issues, such as the ethics of eating meat and experimenting on animals, but tackles them in an empirically informed and nuanced way. It also covers a range of relatively neglected issues in animal (...) ethics, such as the possibility of insect sentience and the ethics of dealing with pests. Finally, the book doesn't assess every current practice using standard ethical theories, but tries to evaluate some of them using the moral frameworks endorsed by those involved. So, for instance, there is a chapter on the way that animal care and use committees try to justify some of the educational uses of animals, and the chapter on zoos considers the way that international zoological societies justify compromising animal welfare. The book wraps up with a discussion of the future of animal ethics. Each chapter opens with a helpful initial overview of the chapter and ends with a list of suggested readings to help students go further on their own. Key Features Covers animal ethics from an empirically informed perspective, bringing philosophy into conversation with key issues in animal science, conservation biology, economics, ethology, and legal studies, among other fields Provides ample coverage of the most salient current topics, including, for example: Debates about which animals are sentient The suffering of wild animals Research ethics The boundaries of activism Avoids suggesting that animal ethics is simply the practice of applying the right general theory to a problem, instead allowing readers to first work out the specific costs and benefits of making ethical decisions Impresses upon the reader the need for her to work out for herself the best way forward with difficult ethical issues, suggesting that progress can indeed be made Includes summaries and recommended readings at the end of each chapter. (shrink)

In this paper I explore in a preliminary way the interconnections among narrative explanation, narrative value, free will, an immortality. I build on the fascinating an suggestive work of David Velleman. I offer the hypothesis that our acting freely is what gives our lives a distinctive kind of value - narrative value. Free Will, then, is connected to the capacity to lead a meaningful life in a quite specific way: it is the ingredient which, when aded to others, enows us (...) with a meaning over an above the cumulative value erived from ading together levels of momentary welfare. In acting freely, we are writing a sentence in the story of our lives, and the value of acting freely is thus a species of the value of artistic creativity or self-expression (understood appropriately). Finally, I contend that the fact that our lives are stories need not entail that they have endings, or that immortality would necessarily be unimaginable or essentially different from ordinary, finite human life. Yes, a certain sort of narrative understanding of our lives as a whole would be impossible in the context of immortality; but much of what we care about, and value, in our stories might remain. (shrink)

I am going to argue that it is a cost of libertarianism that it holds our status as agents hostage to theoretical physics, but that claim has met with disagreement. Some libertarians regard it as the cost of doing business, not a philosophical liability. By contrast, Peter van Inwagen has addressed the worry head on. He says that if he were to become convinced that causal determinism were true, he would not change his view that humans are free and morally (...) responsible. Rather, he would give up at least one of the formerly-thought-to-be a priori truths that are elements in his argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the relevant sort of freedom. Thus, according to van Inwagen, our status as free and morally responsible agents would not be held hostage to the physicists or hang on a thread I think that van Inwagen’s strategy for securing our freedom and responsibility is unattractive. Somewhat tendentiously, I have called the rejection of an a priori ingredient in the incompatibilist’s argument, contingent upon learning that causal determinism is true, ‘metaphysical fip-flopping.’ -/- And it does seem that van Inwagen’s approach is implausible insofar as he is open to such metaphysical fip-fopping. That he is open to it—that he would fip-fop if he became convinced of the truth of causal determinism—is a problem for his actual philosophical position. Or so I will argue. (shrink)

In his recent book on the problem of evil, Peter van Inwagen argues that both the global and local arguments from evil are failures. In this paper, we engagevan Inwagen’s book at two main points. First, we consider his understanding of what it takes for a philosophical argument to succeed. We argue that while his criterion for success is interesting and helpful, there is good reason to think it is too stringent. Second, we consider his responses to the global and (...) local arguments from evil. We argue that although van Inwagen may have adequately responded to each of these arguments, his discussion points us toa third argument from evil to which he has yet to provide a response. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy’s much-discussed ‘restrictionist’ program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and presents two (...) experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as ‘arguments from hallucination’). (shrink)

In this collection of essays on the metaphysical issues pertaining to death, the meaning of life, and freedom of the will, John Martin Fischer argues that death can be a bad thing for the individual who dies. He defends the claim that something can be a bad thing--a misfortune--for an individual, even if he never experiences it as bad. Fischer also defends the commonsense asymmetry in our attitudes toward death and prenatal nonexistence: we are indifferent to the time (...) before we are born, but we regret that we do not live longer. Further, Fischer argues, that immortal life could be desirable, and shows how the defense of the badness of death and the goodness of immortality exhibit a similar structure; on Fischer's view, the badness of death and the goodness of life can be represented on spectra that display certain continuities. Building on Fischer's previous book, My Way a major aim of this volume is to show important connections between issues relating to life and death and issues relating to free will. More specifically, Fischer argues that we endow our lives with a certain distinctive kind of meaning--an irreducible narrative dimension of value--by exhibiting free will. Thus, in acting freely, we transform our lives so that our stories matter. (shrink)

There are two perspectives from which formal theories can be viewed. On the one hand, one can take a theory to be about some privileged models. On the other hand, one can take all models of a theory to be on a par. In contrast with what is usually done in philosophical debates, we adopt the latter viewpoint. Suppose that from this perspective we want to add an adequate truth predicate to a background theory. Then on the one hand the (...) truth theory ought to be semantically conservative over the background theory. At the same time, it is generally recognised that the central function of a truth predicate is an expressive one. A truth predicate ought to allow us to express propositions that we could not express before. In this article we argue that there are indeed natural truth theories which satisfy both the demand of semantical conservativeness and the demand of adequately extending the expressive power of our language. (shrink)

I seek to reply to the thoughtful and challenging papers by Helen Steward, Saul Smilansky, and John Perry. Steward argues that agency itself requires access to alternative possibilities; I attempt to motivate my denial of this view. I believe that her view here is no more plausible than the view (which she rejects) that it is unfair to hold someone morally responsible, unless he has genuine access to alternative possibilities. Smilansky contends that compatibilism is morally shallow, and that we can (...) see this from the “ultimate perspective.” In reply, I explore the nature of “zooming” arguments, and I contend that even from a somewhat more detached perspective, important features that distinguish us from mere animals can be discerned (even in a causally deterministic universe). Finally, I seek to address Perry’s defense of classical compatibilism. My main objection to his form of compatbilism is that agents must be construed as having a certain kind of “baggage”—even on his own account. (shrink)

In this collection of essays -- a follow up to My Way and Our Stories -- John Martin Fischer defends the contention that moral responsibility is associated with "deep control." Fischer defines deep control as the middle ground between two untenable extreme positions: "superficial control" and "total control."Our freedom consists of the power to add to the given past, holding fixed the laws of nature, and therefore, Fischer contends, we must be able to interpret our actions as (...) extensions of a line that represents the actual past. In "connecting the dots," we engage in a distinctive sort of self-expression. In the first group of essays in this volume, Fischer argues that we do not need genuine access to alterative possibilities in order to be morally responsible. Thus, the line need not branch off at crucial points. In the remaining essays in the collection he demonstrates that deep control is the freedom condition on moral responsibility. In so arguing, Fischer contends that total control is too much to ask--it is a form of "metaphysical megalomania." So we do not need to "trace back" all the way to the beginning of the line in seeking the relevant kind of freedom or control. Additionally, he contends that various kinds of "superficial control"--such as versions of "conditional freedom" and "judgment-sensitivity" are too shallow; they don't trace back far enough along the line. In short, Fischer argues that, in seeking the freedom that grounds moral responsibility, we need to carve out a middle ground between superficiality and excessive penetration. Deep Control is the "middle way."Fischer presents a new argument that deep control is compatible not just with causal determinism, but also causal indeterminism. He thus tackles the luck problem and shows that the solution to this problem is parallel in important ways to the considerations in favor of the compatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Nothing seems more possible to me than that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no copy in the… nervous system which corresponds to a particular thought, or a particular idea, or, memory.WittgensteinIn a recent essay it was emphasized that brain and mind appear to the mind as complementary and reciprocally recursive domains of a hermeneutic circle (Fischer, 1987). An outstanding and not yet recognized feature of this hermeneutic circle is that interpretation within this (...) circle is not rule-governed and hence appears self-organized: individual features of the world (or the brain) become intelligible in terms of the whole context (of the mind)… while the entire context becomes intelligible through individual features (or brain functions). How, or from where then is significance arising? (shrink)

Sympathy for animals is regarded by many thinkers as theoretically disreputable. Against this I argue that sympathy appropriately underlies moral concern for animals. I offer an account of sympathy that distinguishes sympathy with from sympathy for fellow creatures, and I argue that both can be placed on an objective basis, if we differentiate enlightened from folk sympathy. Moreover, I suggest that sympathy for animals is not, as some have claimed, incompatible with environmentalism; on the contrary, it can ground environmental concern. (...) Finally, I show that the traditional concept of anthropomorphism has no coherent basis, and I argue that the attempt to prove that animals lack thoughts is both unsuccessful and irrelevant to sympathy for languageless creatures. (shrink)

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