Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. Criticism is furthermore said to refute dogmatism, by (...) which Fichte means Spinozism. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s position in his Philosophical Letters by reviving Kant’s distinction. First, ‘critique’ for Schelling names a canon that is valid for all systems—including Spinozism—and thus favours none—not even the Wissenschaftslehre. Second, Schelling coins ‘dogmaticism’ to refer to what Kant calls ‘dogmatism’: reason’s uncritical claim to doctrine. Hence, he says all systems—even Fichte’s—are susceptible to the ‘enthusiasm’ of mistaking themselves for doctrines or ‘objects of knowledge’, instead of subjectively valid ‘objects of freedom’. I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for reviving Kant’s distinction, while noting two consequences for German idealism. First, if criticism favours no system, a system’s origin cannot be an act of knowledge, e.g., intellectual intuition, but only an act of endorsement. Second, if dogmaticism entails enthusiasm, a system’s goal cannot be absolute knowledge, but only infinite striving. Hence, by retrieving Schelling’s notion of dogmaticism, we can both gain a better understanding of the Letters and register the impact of a core Kantian distinction on the German idealist project. (shrink)

In the context of item response theory, linking the scales of two measurement points is a prerequisite to examine a change in competence over time. In educational large-scale assessments, non-identical test forms sharing a number of anchor-items are frequently scaled and linked using two− or three-parametric item response models. However, if item pools are limited and/or sample sizes are small to medium, the sparser Rasch model is a suitable alternative regarding the precision of parameter estimation. As the Rasch model implies (...) stricter assumptions about the response process, a violation of these assumptions may manifest as model misfit in form of item discrimination parameters empirically deviating from their fixed value of one. The present simulation study investigated the performance of four IRT linking methods—fixed parameter calibration, mean/mean linking, weighted mean/mean linking, and concurrent calibration—applied to Rasch-scaled data with a small item pool. Moreover, the number of anchor items required in the absence/presence of moderate model misfit was investigated in small to medium sample sizes. Effects on the link outcome were operationalized as bias, relative bias, and root mean square error of the estimated sample mean and variance of the latent variable. In the light of this limited context, concurrent calibration had substantial convergence issues, while the other methods resulted in an overall satisfying and similar parameter recovery—even in the presence of moderate model misfit. Our findings suggest that in case of model misfit, the share of anchor items should exceed 20% as is currently proposed in the literature. Future studies should further investigate the effects of anchor item composition regarding unbalanced model misfit. (shrink)

For their deployment in human societies to be safe, AI agents need to be aligned with value-laden cooperative human life. One way of solving this “problem of value alignment” is to build moral machines. I argue that the goal of building moral machines aims at the wrong kind of ideal, and that instead, we need an approach to value alignment that takes seriously the categorically different cognitive and moral capabilities between human and AI agents, a condition I call deep agential (...) diversity. Domestication is the answer to a similarly structured problem: namely, how to integrate nonhuman animals that lack moral agency safely into human society and align their behavior with human values. Just like nonhuman animals, AI agents lack a genuinely moral agency; and just like nonhuman animals, we might find ways to train them to nevertheless assist us, and live and work among us – to “domesticate” them, in other words. I claim that the domestication approach does well in explaining many of our intuitions and worries about deploying AI agents in our social practices. (shrink)

Das Fundament der Rawls’schen Gerechtigkeitstheorie ist die moralische Gleichheit aller Gerechtigkeitssubjekte. Die symmetrische Positionierung der Parteien bei den Urzustands-Deliberationen stellt sicher, dass Subjekte mit gleichem moralischen Status das gleiche Recht auf faire Interessenberücksichtigung haben. Dabei fällt allerdings auf, dass Rawls nicht per se gegen unverdiente Ungleichheit argumentiert, sondern gegen unverdiente Ungleichheit zwischen moralisch Gleichen. Hier stellt sich die Frage: kann es Gerechtigkeit zwischen moralisch Ungleichen geben? Und wenn ja: ändert ein ungleicher moralischer Status der Gerechtigkeitssubjekte auch den Inhalt der, und (...) die Ansprüche auf, Gerechtigkeit? Wenn man annimmt, Gerechtigkeitsbeziehungen bestünden ausschließlich zwischen Menschen, dann erscheinen diese Fragen offensichtlich unsinnig. Ich argumentiere allerdings, dass die exklusive Anwendung von Gerechtigkeitstheorien auf Personen begrifflich kontingent ist – und dass die Einbeziehung von nichtmenschlichen Akteuren Rawls’ Gerechtigkeitstheorie zwar vor schwierige, aber möglicherweise produktive Herausforderungen stellt, die ich in diesem Beitrag untersuchen möchte. (shrink)

Il saggio si propone di mostrare la compresenza di aspetti collaborativi e competitivi all'interno della pratica del dialogo. Risalendo al di qua dell'esempio di Socrate, cui si riconosce in qualche modo l'invenzione di una ‘tecnica' del confronto tra interlocutori interessati alla ricerca della veritÀ, l'autrice intende mostrare le radici conflittuali della forma-dialogo e le implicazioni meno rassicuranti della dialettica discorsiva. Il tema del dialogo indica certo l'emergere di una possibilitÀ evolutiva nel cammino politico della civiltÀ: dalle passioni distruttive degli eroi (...) omerici all'impegno a perfezionare se stessi esponendosi a un pacifico confronto. Senza dimenticare, perň, che la natura dell'uomo si rispecchia in molti animali diversi e che il dialogo con lupi e sparvieri resta difficile. (shrink)

We would be wrong to state that Plato’s approach to the Golden Age in the Statesman occurs through nostalgia, even if he stresses the immense distance between our world and that blessed time. After evoking the shepherd-god as a ruler, Plato shows that the completely abandoned disposition of the ruled is only justifiable in presence of an unbridgeable chasm between the two, such as that between gods and men, or men and beasts. The real question in the Statesman is how (...) to single out the peculiar form of knowledge possessed by the few men that are truly capable to rule. (shrink)

What can international courts say when criminals ask, by what right do you try me? Some authors attempt to draw a connection between humanity's responsibility to call offenders to account and the harm humanity has suffered as a consequence of the offender's crimes. Others have argued that there need not be a special connection between those calling to account and the offenders, as the right to punish offenders is a general right each and every person has. Both lines of argument (...) are ultimately unconvincing. Instead, I argue for a modified version of the second position which proposes a democratically based theory of responsibility for punishment held by international criminal law institutions. (shrink)

This essay argues that secrets and lies are not forms of withholding information but forms by which information is valorized. Lies are constructed: what is to be lied about, what a lie is to consist of, how it is to be told, and whom it is to be told to, all reveal a social imaginary about who thinks what and what constitutes credibility. Secrets are negotiated: continual decisions about whom to tell, how much to tell, and whom not to tell (...) describe social worlds, and the shape and weight of interactions therein. All of this makes lies and secrets extraordinarily rich historical sources. We might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden by a secret, but we see the ideas and imaginings by which people disclose what should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another. Such insights involve a step back from the project of social history, in which an inclusive social narrative is based on experience and individuals' ability to report it with some reliability, and suggests that historians need to look at social imaginings as ways to understand the ideas and concerns about which people lie and with which people construct new narratives that are not true. The study of secrets, however, links the study of social imaginings with the project of social history, as the valorization of information that results in the continual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of events. (shrink)

På en let tilgængelig og anvendelig måde forsøger bogen Viden, videnskab og virkelighed at forklare studerende på videregående uddannelser, hvad det er de skal vide om videnskaben. Hvad er videnskab? Hvad er de videnskabelige idealer og normer? Hvordan fungerer videnskaben i samfundet i netværk af læreanstalter, virksomheder og andre institutioner? Hvordan vil de studerende selv komme i berøring med videnskaben og hvordan skal de forstå det videnskabelige i det som de laver? -/- Viden, videnskab og virkelighed forsøger at indkredse det (...) særlige ved moderne videnskab og præsenterer derfor også forskellige opfattelser af viden, virkelighed og videnskab inden for filosofi, videnskabsteori og samfundsvidenskab. Men samtidig giver bogen altså konkrete bud på, hvordan man som studerende mestrer refleksion, omsætter viden til praksis og samarbejder på tværs af faggrænser. -/- Bogen henvender sig til alle studerende på videregående uddannelser og til undervisning i videnskabsteori. (shrink)

Contribution for book symposium on Andrea Sangiovanni's Humanity without Dignity.

This essay is broadly conceived as a study of how the emotional experience of shame can play an important role in the construction of personal identity. It considers, on the one hand, the way in which Greek culture conceives the social meaning of this emotion and, on the other, the double representation that Plato provides in the Symposium of two very different forms of pedagogy of shame. Using the Platonic text as a phenomenological source, the author discusses the general validity (...) and relevance to the Greek world of the anthropological scheme that opposes «shame cultures» to «guilt cultures», attributing evolutionary primacy to the latter in terms of the acquisition of individual moral autonomy. (shrink)

Meillassoux seeks knowledge of transcendental reality, blaming Kant for the ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being. For Meillassoux, correlationism blocks an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. I examine three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. I reject these charges: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, (...) for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it. (shrink)