Do the grand and intricate moral theories spun out by philosophers have much to do with the everyday ethical quandaries we grapple with? Just how do humans make ethical decisions anyway? With Claudette Jones, Nat Heiner, and Natash Kyburg.

Do the grand and intricate moral theories spun out by philosophers have much to do with the everyday ethical quandaries we grapple with? Just how do humans make ethical decisions anyway? With Claudette Jones, Nat Heiner, and Natash Kyburg.

What duties, if any, do we the living have to future generations regarding the quality of the environment we shall bequeath to them? Does our responsibility diminish as we look further into the future? Do we have such a claim on those came before us? With Nat Heiner and Nikki Roy.

This book is the first to explore in detail the role that symbolic representation plays in the architecture of Kant's philosophy. Symbolic representation fulfills a crucial function in Kant's practical philosophy because it serves to mediate between the unconditionality of the categorical imperative and the inescapable finiteness of the human being. By showing how the nature of symbolic representation plays out across all areas of the practical philosophy - moral philosophy, legal philosophy, philosophy of history and philosophy of religion - (...) Heiner Bielefeldt offers a unique perspective on how these various facets of Kant's philosophy cohere. (shrink)

This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing “ordinary language philosophy”. Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forcefully developed by Avner Baz, who attempts to show that a substantial chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally (...) misguided. I describe Baz’s project and argue that while there is reason to be skeptical of its radical conclusion, it conveys an important truth about discontinuities between ordinary uses of philosophically significant expressions (“know”, e.g.) and their use in philosophical thought experiments. I discuss some evidence from experimental psychology and behavioral economics indicating that there is a risk of overlooking important aspects of meaning or misinterpreting experimental results by focusing only on abstract experimental scenarios, rather than employing more diverse and more ecologically valid experimental designs. I conclude by presenting a revised version of the critical argument from ordinary language. (shrink)

Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.). In this paper, I show how the (...) most sophisticated analysis of color adjectives within the explanatory framework of compositional truth conditional semantics--recently developed by Kennedy and McNally (2010)--needs to be modified to handle the full range of contextual variation displayed by color adjectives. (shrink)

Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based (...) on presupposition accommodation, that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives ("tall", "wide") behave in ways that are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key role. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist methodology fail, the lesson of his proposal is that there is good (...) reason to pay close attention to several subtle aspects of the design of context shifting experiments. (shrink)

There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliases—in particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title (...) of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention. (shrink)

In this article we refine the design ofcontext shifting experiments, which play a central role in contextualist debates, and we subject a large number of scenarios involving different types of expressions of interest to contextualists, including ‘know’ and color adjectives like ‘green’, to experimental investigation. Our experiment (i) reveals an effect of changing contexts on the evaluation of uses of the sentences that we examine, thereby overturning the absence of results reported in previous experimental studies (so‐callednull results), (ii) uncovers evidence (...) for a ‘truth bias' in favor of positive over negative sentences, and (iii) reveals previously unnoticed distinctions between the strength of the contextual effects displayed by scenarios involving knowledge ascriptions and scenarios concerning color and other miscellaneous scenarios. (shrink)

This paper considers ways that experimental design can affect judgments about informally presented context shifting experiments. Reasons are given to think that judgments about informal context shifting experiments are affected by an exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments and by experimenter bias. Exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments may produce experimental artifacts by obscuring important differences of degree between the phenomena being investigated. Experimenter bias is an effect generated when, for example, experimenters disclose (even unconsciously) their own beliefs (...) about the outcome of an experiment. Eliminating experimenter bias from context shifting experiments makes it far less obvious what the “intuitive” responses to those experiments are. After it is shown how those different kinds of bias can affect judgments about informal context shifting experiments, those experiments are revised to control for those forms of bias. The upshot of these investigations is that participants in the contextualist debate who employ informal experiments should pay just as much attention to the design of their experiments as those who employ more formal experimental techniques if they want to avoid obscuring the phenomena they aim to uncover. (shrink)

This paper concerns the philosophical significance of a choice about how to design the context shifting experiments used by contextualists and anti-intellectualists: Should contexts be judged jointly, with contrast, or separately, without contrast? Findings in experimental psychology suggest (1) that certain contextual features are more difficult to evaluate when considered separately, and there are reasons to think that one feature--stakes or importance--that interests contextualists and anti-intellectualists is such a difficult to evaluate attribute, and (2) that joint evaluation of contexts can (...) yield judgments that are more reflective and rational in certain respects. With those two points in mind, a question is raised about what source of evidence provides better support for philosophical theories of how contextual features affect knowledge ascriptions and evidence: Should we prefer evidence consisting of "ordinary" judgments, or more reflective, perhaps more rational judgments? That question is answered in relation to different accounts of what such theories aim to explain, and it is concluded that evidence from contexts evaluated jointly should be an important source of evidence for contextualist and anti-intellectualist theories, a conclusion that is at odds with the methodology of some recent studies in experimental epistemology. (shrink)

When experimental participants are given the chance to reflect and revise their initial judgments in a dynamic conversational context, do their responses to philosophical scenarios differ from responses to those same scenarios presented in a traditional static survey? In three experiments comparing responses given in conversational contexts with responses to traditional static surveys, we find no consistent evidence that responses differ in these different formats. This aligns with recent findings that various manipulations of reflectiveness have no effect on participants’ judgments (...) about philosophical scenarios. Although we did not find a consistent quantitative effect of format (conversation vs. static survey), conversational experiments still provide qualitative insights into debates about how participants are understanding (or misunderstanding) the scenarios they read in experimental studies, whether they are replacing difficult questions with questions that are more easily answered, and how participants are imagining the scenarios they read in ways that differ from what is explicitly stated by experimenters. We argue that conversational experiments—"Socratic questionnaires"—help show what is going on “under the hood” of traditional survey designs in the experimental investigation of philosophical questions. (shrink)

This paper sets out the felicity conditions for metalinguistic proposals, a type of directive illocutionary act. It discusses the relevance of metalinguistic proposals and other metalinguistic directives for understanding both small- and large-scale linguistic engineering projects, essentially contested concepts, metalinguistic provocations, and the methodology of ordinary language philosophy. Metalinguistic proposals are compared with other types of linguistic interventions, including metalinguistic negotiation, conceptual engineering, lexical warfare, and ameliorative projects.

According to the predictive coding theory of psychosis, hallucinations and delusions are explained by an overweighing of high-level prior expectations relative to sensory information that leads to false perceptions of meaningful signals. However, it is currently unclear whether the hypothesized overweighing of priors represents a pervasive alteration that extends to the visual modality and takes already effect at early automatic processing stages. Here, we addressed these questions by studying visual perception of socially meaningful stimuli in healthy individuals with varying degrees (...) of psychosis proneness. In a first task, we quantified participants’ prior for detecting faces in visual noise using a Bayesian decision model. In a second task, we measured participants’ prior for detecting direct gaze stimuli that were rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression. We found that the prior for detecting faces in noise correlated with hallucination proneness as well as delusion proneness. The prior for detecting invisible direct gaze was significantly associated with hallucination proneness but not conclusively with delusion proneness. Our results provide evidence for the idea that overly strong high-level priors for automatically detecting socially meaningful stimuli might constitute a processing alteration in psychosis. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to define and study a particular variety of Montague-Scott neighborhood semantics for modal propositional logic. We call this variety the first-order neighborhood semantics because it consists of the neighborhood frames whose neighborhood operations are, in a certain sense, first-order definable. The paper consists of two parts. In Part I we begin by presenting a family of modal systems. We recall the Montague-Scott semantics and apply it to some of our systems that have hitherto (...) be uncharacterized. Then, we define the notion of a first-order indefinite semantics, along with the more specific notion of a first-order uniform semantics, the latter containing as special cases the possible world semantics of Kripke. In Part II we prove consistency and completeness for a broad range of the systems considered, with respect to the first-order indefinite semantics, and for a selected list of systems, with respect to the first-order uniform semantics. The completeness proofs are algebraic in character and make essential use of the finite model property. A by-product of our investigations is a result relating provability in S-systems and provability in T-systems, which generalizes a known theorem relating provability in the systems S 2° and C 2. (shrink)

On postmodernism; papers presented at a symposium organized by Tamil̲iyal Tur̲ai, Man̲ōn̲maṇiyam Cuntaran̲ār Palkalaikkal̲akam, Tirunelvēli.

Stanley Cavell’s account of aesthetic judgment has two components. The first is a feeling: the judge has to see, hear, ‘dig’ something in the object being judged, there has to be an ‘emotion’ that the judge feels and expresses. The second is the ‘discipline of accounting for [the judgment]’, a readiness to argue for one’s aesthetic judgment in the face of disagreement. The discipline of accounting for one’s aesthetic judgments involves what Nick Riggle has called a norm of convergence: the (...) judge aims to get one’s audience to taste see or hear what the judge tastes or sees or hears in the object being judged. Because of the unmistakable difficulty in reaching agreement in aesthetic judgment, Riggle has denied that aesthetic judgment requires a convergence norm and has proposed instead that it requires ‘a kind of harmony of individuality’ (which Riggle calls ‘vibing’). We argue that Cavell offers a version of the convergence norm that is distinct from those that Riggle criticizes, namely Kant’s demand for agreement and Andy Egan’s presupposition of similarity in dispositions in ‘non-defective’ aesthetic conversations. Cavell’s version of the convergence norm is ‘the hope of agreement’. One can hope that one’s audience will agree with one’s aesthetic judgments even when one isn’t in a position to demand agreement or to presuppose similarity in the dispositions that would make agreement more likely. Cavell’s distinct convergence norm avoids Riggle’s criticisms and contributes to a richer account of what’s going on when we disagree about aesthetic matters. (shrink)

This paper concerns the central method of generating evidence in support of contextualist theories, what we call context shifting experiments. We begin by explaining the standard design of context shifting experiments, which are used in both quantitative surveys and more traditional thought experiments to show how context affects the content of natural language expressions. We discuss some recent experimental studies that have tried and failed to find evidence that confirms contextualist predictions about the results of context shifting experiments, and consider (...) the criticisms of those studies made by DeRose (forthcoming). We show that DeRose's criticisms are incomplete, and we argue that the design of context shifting experiments he proposes is itself subject to some of the same problems as the studies he criticizes. We propose a refined approach to the design of context shifting experiments that addresses these problems and which allows us to to investigate the effect of context on both positive and negative sentences. This aspect of our design allows us to control for several forms of bias, including a particular form of "truth bias" that favors positive over negative sentences. We then deploy our improved design in an experiment that tests a large number of scenarios involving different types of expressions of interest to contextualists, including "know" and color adjectives like "green". Our experiment (i) reveals an effect of changing contexts on the evaluation of uses of the sentences that we examined, thereby overturning the absence of results reported in previous experimental studies (so-called null results) and (ii) reveals previously unnoticed distinctions between the strength of the contextual effects we observed for scenarios involving knowledge ascriptions and for scenarios concerning color and other miscellaneous scenarios. (shrink)

An important challenge to color objectivists, who hold that statements concerning color are made true or false by objective facts, is the argument from interpersonal variation in where normal observers locate the unique hues. Recently, an attractive objectivist response to the argument has been proposed that draws on the semantics of gradable adjectives and which does not require defending the idea that there is a single correct location for each of the unique hues Noûs 50: 3–40),. In ), I argued (...) that the recent objectivist response doesn’t apply to comparative occurrences of color adjectives, so a revised, comparative, version of the argument from interpersonal variation remains a powerful objection to certain types of objectivism. In this paper, I address several unsatisfactory objectivist replies to the comparative version of the argument from interpersonal variation, and offer what I think is a more plausible objectivist reply to the comparative argument from interpersonal variation. (shrink)

Kant’s practical philosophy revolves around the concepts of pure reason, autonomy, law and obligation. But for them, terms such as humanity and self-mastery (Selbstherrschaft) are also of great importance. According to Kant, these terms concretize the reason and goal of our ethical and legal-political actions. In a first step, the meaning of these terms at the end of the four Kantian questions (What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope? What is man?) is explained. In a (...) second step, Martin Heidegger’s criticism of humanism (and thus also of Kant) is presented and in a third step the consequences that his view of thinking has for law and politics are discussed: Heidegger’s thinking stands with his negation of philosophy, ethics and science in the service of a politics of immaturity. (shrink)

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers (...) were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper, I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success. (shrink)

Bei transzendenten Erfahrungen treten Aspekte und Dimensionen der vertrauten Wirklichkeit hervor, die normalerweise verborgen sind. Gewohnte Deutungsmuster und Erklarungskategorien versagen. Kognitive Spannungen sind die Folge. Das Bedurfnis nach ihrer Losung fuhrt oft zu vorschnellen Interpretationen und Erklarungen oder gar zur apriorischen Abwertung und Ignorierung transzendenter Erfahrungen. Sorgfaltige und umsichtige wissenschaftliche Studien sind daher immer noch ein Desiderat. Die Beitrage basieren auf einer Ringvorlesung an der Universitat Basel. Sie thematisieren an einschlagigen Beispielen die Phanomenologie transzendenter Erfahrungen, ihre biographischen Wirkungen, ihr Zusammenspiel (...) mit kunstlerischem Schaffen und Erleben, die Schwierigkeit ihrer Deutung und Beurteilung und ihre Abwertung und Pathologisierung durch Aufklarung und Wissenschaft. Inhalt: Heiner Schwenke: Einleitung: Was sind und zu welchem Ende erforscht man transzendente Erfahrungen? Heiner Schwenke: Begegnungen mit Personen aus anderen Welten Jorg-Andreas Botticher: Wo das Unsagbare horbar wird - Musik und Transzendenz David-Marc Hoffmann: Rudolf Steiner als Lehrer der Transzendenz Heiner Schwenke: Swedenborg und Kant - Zur Schwierigkeit, transzendente Erfahrung zu verstehen Saskia Wendel: Unterscheidung der Geister - Zur Kriteriologie religioser Erfahrung Andreas Sommer: Geisterglaube, Aufklarung und Wissenschaft - Historiographische Skizzen zu einem westlichen Fundamentaltabu. (shrink)

J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of (...) his `donkey stories', that `mistake' and `accident' apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as `intentionally' and `deliberately'). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments. (shrink)

This article objects to two major economistic shortcomings of Philippe Van Parijs’s Real Freedom for All: (1) Van Parijs claims that market prices are the best metric for equal real freedom. This is challenged. Market prices admittedly are the best instrument for distributive purposes at hand. They are, however, a means of transport for supply and demand contingendes. Hence market prices are to be considered as an insufficient metric for equal freedom. (2) Van Parijs claims that Real Freedom for All (...) is all there is to social justice. This claim is rejected. Despite its demanding egalitarian ambition, Real Freedom for All fails to protect a flourishing human life. Basic human rights like the right to social recognition and, in part, the right to health care are violated. Curiously even the right to autonomy is in want of full protection. These lacks are caused by the monetarism and the Straightforward market optimism of Real Freedom for All. (shrink)

Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J. L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context-invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or (...) finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning. (shrink)

In 1871, the German philosopher Gustav Teichmüller (1832-1888) moved from his Basel chair to the much better paid chair in Tartu, and taught there until his untimely death. Besides philosophy, he had studied various disciplines, including the natural sciences. In the preparation of his own philosophy, he explored the history of philosophy for more than twenty years and made pioneering contributions to the history of concepts. Only by the early-1880s did he begin to elaborate his "new philosophy", an original version (...) of personalism, both anti-idealist and anti-materialist. He did this in three major works ( Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt 1882, Religionsphilosophie 1886, Neue Grundlegung der Psychologie und Logik , posthumous 1889) which built upon each other. Unwritten remained the keystone of his philosophy, the Philosophie des Christentums , in which Teichmüller wanted to show that the philosophical contents of Christianity were encapsulated by his own personalism. One major objective of his philosophy, as I see it, was regaining reality---in particular the reality of the person---after it had been lost in the wake of the failure of modern representationalism. Notwithstanding its coherentist elements, I see Teichmüller's philosophy as a precursor of direct realism. Although he fell into oblivion soon after, his thoughts were received throughout Europe, notably by Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleksey Kozlov and Nicholas Lossky. His extensive literary remains, which are kept in Basel, remain to be explored. (shrink)

Odd and memorable examples are a distinctive feature of Charles Travis's work: cases involving squash balls, soot-covered kettles, walls that emit poison gas, faces turning puce, ties made of freshly cooked linguine, and people grunting when punched in the solar plexus all figure in his arguments. One of Travis's examples, involving a pair of situations in which the leaves of a Japanese maple tree are painted green, has even spawned its own literature consisting of attempts to explain the context sensitivity (...) of color adjectives ("green", e.g.). For Travis, these examples play a central role in his arguments for occasion-sensitivity, which he takes to be a pervasive feature of how we understand natural language. But how, exactly, do these examples work? My aims in this paper are to put Travis’s examples under the microscope, using recent experimental studies of Travis-style cases to raise worries about aspects of the way Travis's cases are informally presented, but then show how his examples can be redesigned to respond to these doubts. (shrink)

I describe a new, comparative, version of the argument from interpersonal variation to subjectivism about color. The comparative version undermines a recent objectivist response to standard versions of that argument (Gómez-Torrente 2014).

Twenty-first century agoras, unlike their historical counterparts, are not comprised of villages populated by individuals who know each other and share the same past, environment, and culture. Contemporary agoras are diverse and global. Their dialogue is often conducted across geographical and cultural boundaries. Additionally, they often address challenges and issues that are far more complex than those of the early agoras. This article seeks to identify such challenges and summarize a variety of appropriate dialogue methodologies.

Die Frage, ob und wie der universale Geltungsanspruch der Menschenrechte sich mit dem Pluralismus der Religionen und Kulturen vermitteln läßt, ist ein zentrales Thema innerhalb der gegenwärtigen Menschenrechtsdebatte. Die Kantische Philosophie kann einen Beitrag zu dieser Debatte leisten, indem sie dazu verhilft, einige vielfach beschworene Dichotomien kritisch auszuräumen, durch die die interkulturelle Verständigung über Menschenrechte nicht selten schon im Ansatz blockiert wird. Nach Kant zielt eine kosmopolitische rechtliche Rahmenordnung nicht auf globale Uniformierung, sondern auf die politisch-rechtliche Gestaltung der faktisch erreichten (...) und vermutlich irreversiblen politischen und wirtschaftlichen Globalisierung. Wenn menschenrechtliche Freiheit jedem einzelnen Menschen zukommt, so steht der darin implizierte Individualismus als ein genuin ethischer Individualismus keineswegs, wie oft behauptet, in Gegensatz zu kommunitären Ansprüchen auf Solidarität, sind doch Menschenrechte an der der Würde des Menschen als der inneren Quelle jeder moralischen Solidarität orientiert. Schließlich widerspricht die in der sittlichen Autonomie begründete Menschenwürde zwar einem politisch-rechtlich durchsetzbaren materialen Gottesrecht; sie ist gleichwohl aber offen für theologische Ausdeutungen der Menschenwürde über die anthropozentrische Perspektive hinaus. (shrink)

One of the most radical dimensions of Davis’s critique of American democracy is her exposure of the vestiges of slavery that remain in the contemporary criminal justice system. I discuss this aspect of her critical project, its roots in Du Bois’s critique of Black Reconstruction, and the way that it informs her prison abolitionism and her two-pronged program for the formation of a genuine “abolition democracy.” I conclude by reflecting upon Davis’s reticence about abolition as a constructive enterprise and assessing (...) some of the challenges faced by the contemporary abolitionist movement. (shrink)

Kant und die Alternativen Heiner F. Klemme Manfred Kühn, Dieter Schönecker. H . Klemme / M. Kühn / D. Schönecker (Hg.) Moralische Motivation Kant und die Alternativen Meiner KANT-FORSCHUNGEN Begründet von Reinhard Brandt und ...

This monumental work features the most important German philosophers, jurists, pedagogues, literary critics, doctors, historians, and others whose work has philosophical significance who lived and wrote in the eighteenth century, covering the period between 1701 and 1801. The Dictionary includes work by philosophers whose mother tongue was German, were published in German or who lived in Germany for an extended period of time. Since historic borders are different from today's, the Dictionary includes authors born or who lived in places such (...) as Strasbourg, Danzig, Koenisberg, or Austria. Swiss philosophers are also covered. These philosophers published in German, Latin, French, and Hebrew. Since German philosophy cannot be understood without the influence of French and English philosophers, the work also includes translators and editors. Each entry aims to give the reader insight into the philosophers' life and contribution to the world of thought. Bibliographical references will help with further research. The entries include a biographical sketch, analysis of doctrines with emphasis on historical context, subsequent influences, and bibliography of further works and secondary literature. (shrink)

Following Snyderman and Rothman, we surveyed expert opinions on the current state of intelligence research. This report examines expert opinions on causes of international differences in student assessment and psychometric IQ test results. Experts were surveyed about the importance of culture, genes, education, wealth, health, geography, climate, politics, modernization, sampling error, test knowledge, discrimination, test bias, and migration. The importance of these factors was evaluated for diverse countries, regions, and groups including Finland, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Europe, the Arabian-Muslim (...) world, Latin America, Israel, Jews in the West, Roma, and Muslim immigrants. Education was rated by N = 71 experts as the most important cause of international ability differences. Genes were rated as the second most relevant factor but also had the highest variability in ratings. Culture, health, wealth, modernization, and politics were the next most important factors, whereas other factors such as geography, climate, test bias, and sampling error were less important. The paper concludes with a discussion of limitations of the survey. (shrink)

What is the role of religion(s) in a human rights culture and in human rights education? How do human rights and religion relate in the context of public education? And what can religious education at public schools contribute to human rights education? These are the core questions addressed by this book. Stimulating deliberations, illuminating analyses and promising conceptual perspectives are offered by renowned experts from ten countries and diverse academic disciplines.