The argument from faultless disagreement against moral realism is based on the alleged possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement, CFD. This possibility contradicts the pre-theoretic intuition that moral truth is knowable, in principle, the so-called epistemic constraint on moral truth, EC. In this paper, I discuss the realist’s two options to cope with this argument. First of all, I point out the realist’s strategies to explain the possibility of cognitively faultless error, which is implied by CFD. Then I discuss one (...) promising option to respond to the argument from faultless disagreement: accepting both CFD and EC but blocking the ensuing contradiction by invoking an equivocation as regards the notion of knowability. After pointing out the drawbacks of this solution I discuss the other promising option: rejecting CFD by drawing on an agnostic stance on the part of cognitively blameless thinkers as regards moral propositions they cannot agree on. Yet this option faces the problem that EC has to be denied. In concluding the paper, I outline the prospects of an attractive objectivist shape of moral antirealism, which is also affected by the argument from faultless disagreement. (shrink)

Meta-ethical realism faces the serious epistemological problem of how to explain our epistemic access to moral reality. In the face of this challenge many are sceptical about non-naturalist realism. Nonetheless, there is good reason to acknowledge moral objectivity: morality shows all the signs of a truth-apt discourse but doesn’t exhibit the typical relativity inducing features. This suggests a middle-ground position, a theory that embraces the virtues of realism but does avoid its vices: objectivist antirealism. In this paper, I’ll discuss, mainly (...) following Crispin Wright’s account of moral truth as superassertibility, a promising version of objectivist antirealism and show how to cope with notorious problems, notably those arising from the thought that moral disagreement might be possible in which nobody is guilty of a cognitive shortcoming, which contradicts the antirealist claim that moral truth is not beyond our epistemic reach. The solution is to deny the possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement by arguing that cognitively blameless thinkers either agree or stay agnostic and, therefore, never disagree about any moral proposition. Since assuming an agnostic stance on the part of such thinkers contradicts the antirealist’s conception of truth—even within the limits of intuitionistic logic—I’ll propose an alternative logical revision for the moral discourse: a three-valued logic with epistemically construed truth-values. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to connect the current debate on relative truth to the discussions of theories of truth in general, in which the so-called platitudes about truth have recently played a prominent role. Truth-relativists propose adding to the standard truth predicate an argument-place for an extra parameter over and above a possible world and they presume that the predicate that results from this relativization is a truth predicate. Yet this relativization arguably isn't just an innocuous extrapolation of (...) the Lewis-Kaplan line in semantics that naturally conserves the predicate's status as a truth predicate. This status has to be specifically established. I'll discuss arguments to the effect that truth-relativists fail on that score since relative truth doesn't satisfy certain basic platitudes about truth, in particular the Equivalence Schema and the normativity of truth. This suggests that a relativized truth predicate cannot play the role required of a truth predicate. I shall discuss the relativist's defensive strategies in detail, the most promising of which is to claim that it is legitimate to deny the Equivalence Schema by arguing that relativism introduces a revisionary concept of truth and so fundamentally revises semantics. However, I'll point out that solely invoking semantic revision doesn't suffice to justify a denial of the Equivalence Schema and that any further justification of such a denial is ad hoc or question begging. Moreover, I suggest that with respect to the normativity of truth the prospects of truth-relativism are equally dim. (shrink)

Meta-ethical realism faces the serious epistemological problem of how to explain our epistemic access to moral reality. In the face of this challenge many are sceptical about non-naturalist realism. Nonetheless, there is good reason to acknowledge moral objectivity: morality shows all the signs of a truth-apt discourse but doesn’t exhibit the typical relativity inducing features. This suggests a middle-ground position, a theory that embraces the virtues of realism but does avoid its vices: objectivist antirealism. In this paper, I’ll discuss, mainly (...) following Crispin Wright’s account of moral truth as superassertibility, a promising version of objectivist antirealism and show how to cope with notorious problems, notably those arising from the thought that moral disagreement might be possible in which nobody is guilty of a cognitive shortcoming, which contradicts the antirealist claim that moral truth is not beyond our epistemic reach. The solution is to deny the possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement by arguing that cognitively blameless thinkers either agree or stay agnostic and, therefore, never disagree about any moral proposition. Since assuming an agnostic stance on the part of such thinkers contradicts the antirealist’s conception of truth—even within the limits of intuitionistic logic—I’ll propose an alternative logical revision for the moral discourse: a three-valued logic with epistemically construed truth-values. (shrink)

In this article, various objections will be discussed that have been put forward against ethical relativism, but which haven’t been considered seriously enough on the part of relativists and have been overrated on the part of their opponents. The objections will be concentrated into three arguments: the action-theoretic, the epistemological and the truth-theoretic argument. The article will discuss whether they can be rebutted by proponents of the two main types of relativism: indexical relativism and truth-relativism. The conclusion will be as (...) follows: one version of indexical relativism, the analytical version, gets into serious troubles by the action-theoretic argument, while its revisionary version will remain unaffected, the epistemological argument fails with respect to indexical relativism and stands on shaky ground as regards truth-relativism, the truth-theoretic argument puts considerable pressure on truth-relativism. (shrink)

Using game theory and examples of actual games people play, Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler show how the elements of chance and rules underlie ...

T. 1. Wortschatz -- T. 2. Überlieferung, Textkritik, Grammatik.

We present new axiomatic characterizations of the proportional Shapley value, a weighted TU-value with the worths of the singletons as weights. The presented characterizations are proportional counterparts to the famous characterizations of the Shapley value by Shapley and Young. We introduce two new axioms, called proportionality and player splitting, respectively. Each of them makes a main difference between the proportional Shapley value and the Shapley value. If the stand-alone worths are plausible weights, the proportional Shapley value is a convincing alternative (...) to the Shapley value, for example in cost allocation. Especially, the player splitting property, which states that players’ payoffs do not change if another player splits into two new players who have the same impact to the game as the original player, justifies the use of the proportional Shapley value in many economic situations. (shrink)

Discusses how the conscious self is created by the brain, explains brain structure, and explores the mind-body connection.

People everywhere search for answers by using the resources of their traditions. They wish to do so in a legitimate way, and so they consult official institutions, specialists, and skilled individuals for their opinions; regardless of religious or cultural contexts, the common aim of these experts is to produce security, unity, and trust. Therefore, the norm-finding processes in Islamic and Western contexts share fundamental similarities: the problem of finding a final ground for judgment, the strategies of constructing coherence and of (...) organizing consensus, and the difficulties of obtaining legitimacy. What makes one debate "Islamic" and the other one "Western" is the different semantic materials, the different authorities, the different languages, and the different juridical frameworks. In my comparison of Muslim and Western discourses and practices, I conclude that Muslim and non-Muslim scholars tend to overemphasize the uniqueness of Muslim legal and practical responses to bioethical challenges, because they restrict their purview to legal opinions, ignoring larger dynamics of legitimization. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Freiburg (Breisgau), Universitèat, 1996.

Die vorliegende Arbeit, die als Diplom-Arbeit verfasst und im September 1980 bei Johannes Agnoli eingereicht wurde, war das Resultat einer Auseinandersetzung mit Michel Foucault, der man sich in Berlin Ende der 1970er Jahren nur schwer entziehen konnte. »Jeder Aussage, gleichgültig, ob sie als Affirmation, als Kritik oder als Negation gemeint ist, liegt ein positiver Gehalt zugrunde. Die Reflexion auf diesen, meist unbewußten Gehalt gibt anderen erst die Möglichkeit, aber auch sich selbst, abgegebene Urteile auf ihren Wirklichkeitsgehalt hin zu überprüfen. Letzteres (...) will nichts anderes besagen, als daß ein konsequent durchgeführter Skeptizismus sich über die eigene Positivität ebenso hinwegtäuscht, wie jede Form von Partikularismus (Empirismus, wissenschaftlicher Rationalismus und auch der Positivismus à la Foucault) darüber stolpert – und hiermit benenne ich das versteckte Problem in Foucaults Machtbegriff auf allgemeinster Ebene – daß auch noch so vereinzelte Aussagen immer auf eine, in letzter Instanz positiv beschreibbare Totalität verweisen. Die weitgehende Mißachtung dieses Aspektes einer jeden Reflexion auch im Marxismus ist der Punkt, den ich für die Entstehung der Krisen des Marxismus (mit-)verantwortlich mache.«. (shrink)

Da nur der einzelne Mensch, nicht aber etwas ihn (seinen individuellen Leib im Sinne Jean Amérys) Überschreitendes frei sein kann, darum, so lautet Sartres logisch nicht zu widerlegendes Urteil, kann keinem Objekt eine in diesem selbst angelegte Fähigkeit, Entscheidungen zu fällen, zugesprochen werden. Wenn ein Subjekt einem ihm Äußeren – etwa Gott, der Natur, dem Staat, dem Kapital oder dem Schönen, dem Glück oder sonst etwas –, eine derartige Autonomie zuschreibt, belügt es sich, meint Sartre: um der Angst vor seiner (...) Freiheit Herr zu werden und sich für seine Taten nicht verantwortlich fühlen zu müssen. Wenn man Adornos Ästhetik dieser Subjektbestimmung konfrontiert, läßt sich jedoch zeigen, daß, so sehr Sartre logisch im Recht sein mag, die Kritik im Grunde darauf zielen muß, genau jenes für Sartre Unmögliche dennoch zur Darstellung zu bringen: um die Verkehrungen erkennen zu können, dank derer das Kapital als automatisches Subjekt, als Souverän, agieren kann. (shrink)

Dieser Band ist der erste von drei Bänden kleiner Schriften Manfred Baums, die auch schwer zugängliche oder bisher unveröffentlichte Vorträge, Aufsätze und Artikel zur Geschichte der Philosophie versammeln. Er enthält Arbeiten zur theoretischen Philosophie Kants und zu ihrer Rezeption.

At the centre of discussion lies the reception of Plato’s philosophy, particularly his theory of Ideas, in Kant’s moral philosophy, his ethics and his doctrine of right. Kant saw himself as a follower of Platonism insofar as its anti-empiri­cist principles of human conduct are concerned, although his own version of practical rationalism differs considerably from Plato’s. This is also true of Kant’s conception of freedom and of human rights. The greatest impact on Kant’s moral philosophy is due to the doctrine (...) of the two worlds, the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilis, which did not originate in Plato himself, but in the Jewish Platonist Philo of Alexandria. Kant reinterpreted this doctrine by taking the intelligible world as a moral world consisting of free rational agents who ought to transform the empirical world of human society and history according to the norms and standards of moral laws. This was meant to be a programme for a moral reform of the human world, both with regard to individual moral­ity and to the cosmopolitical task of the establishment of an international order of legal institutions. Kant’s practical Platonism insists on the creation of a moral world order through human actions that take their lead from pure practical reason. (shrink)

Joseph Schumpeter's work has been all too selectively appropriated by public choice theorists. Schumpeter criticized the high level of rationality the classical model of democracy imputes to citizens, and he provided an alternative theory, inspiring rational choice theory and allowing for diverse forms of irrationality. Following in Schumpeter's footsteps I will discuss four problems: the deficient rationality of voters, politicians as ?political entrepreneurs,? leadership in democracy and the rise of the ?political class,? and the affinity between democracy and capitalism.

Pulvermüller assumes that words are represented as associations of two cell assemblies formed according to Hebb's coincidence rule. This seems to correspond to the linguistic notion that words consist of lexemes connected to lemmas. Standard examples from theoretical linguistics, however, show that lemmas and lexemes have properties that go beyond coincidence-based assemblies. In particular, they are inherently disposed toward combinatorial operations; push-down storage, modelled by decreasing reverberation in cell assemblies, cannot capture this. Hence, even if the language capacity has an (...) associationist characterization at some level, it cannot just be co-occurrence-based assembly formation. (shrink)

Buddhist meditation practices presuppose that the abstract doctrines of Buddhist teachings can be transformed into individual experiences. In contrast to the assumption of a merely solipsistic phenomenology which focuses on first-person perspectives alone, we would like to propose a sociological extension of this perspective to a relational perspective that includes specific world- and selfreferences. With the empirical case of a long-time practitioner of Theravada Buddhism, we show how the primary focus on individual experiences may be misleading in terms of Buddhist (...) training and how shifts in the first-person perspective only occur through social friction. In this way, we are able to present empirical insights into how individual qualities of meaning become linked to social qualities of meaning, which then can be understood as a process of co-production of individual and social meaning. The empirical basis of this contribution is part of the research project 'Buddhism in the West'. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the meaning of life became clear to them have been unable to say what constituted that meaning?) -- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1974, Proposition 6.522) However it is, however it is he touches the arising-and-passing of aggregates: he gains rapture and joy: that, for those who know it, is deathless, the Deathless. --Dhammapada (373/374, Translation: Venerable Thanissaro). (shrink)