Let S2S [WS2S] espectively be the storn [weak] monadic second order theory of the binary tree T in the language of two successor functions. An S2S-formula whose free variables are just individual variables defines a relation on T (rather than on the power set of T). We show that S2S and WS2S define the same relations on T, and we give a simple characterization of these relations.

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits (...) of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing _per se_ does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts. (shrink)

No one in philosophy has paid much attention to the virtue of honesty in recent years. Here is a trait for which it is easy to find consensus that it is a virtue, and furthermore, a very important virtue. It also has obvious relevance to what we see going on in contemporary politics, for instance, or in sports, the entertainment world, and education. Yet as far as I can tell, only one article in a philosophy journal has appeared in several (...) decades which discusses this virtue at any length. -/- In this chapter I have two central aims: (i) to sketch some of the conceptual parameters of the virtue of honesty in general, as well as its subordinate virtues, and then (ii) to draw on leading work in psychology to determine, at least in a preliminary way, whether we should think that most people instantiate this virtue or not. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper I draw, on a purely conceptual level, a distinction between two kinds of reasons: content-related and attitude-related reasons. The established view is that, in the case of the attitude of believing something, there are no attitude-related reasons. I look at some arguments intended to establish this claim in the second section with an eye to whether these argument could be generalized to cover the case of preferences as well. In the third section I (...) argue against such generalizations and present a case in favour of accepting attitude-related reasons for preferences. In the fourth section I present an objection to which I react in the fifth section where I try to strengthen my case for attitude-related reasons for preferences. Finally, I discuss and reject criticisms raised by two opponents of the view defended here. (shrink)

One cannot scrutinize mediality in a pre-media age without referring to the complex issue of Christology. The idea of Christ as medium and mediator concerns not only particular theological questions but also general issues of translation and transference, as well as models of word and image. This paper sketches first the notion of Christ′s mediality up to early Scholasticism and then highlights the new conceptual patterns developed by Bonaventure (Collationes in Hexaemeron) and Nicolas of Cusa (De visione dei).

The aim of the paper is to illuminate some core aspects of Leibniz’s conception of judgement and its place in his conception of the mind. In particular, the paper argues for three claims: First, the act of judgement is at the centre of Leibniz’s conception of the mind in that minds strive at actualising innate knowledge concerning derivative truths, where the actualising involves an act of judgement. Second, Leibniz does not hold a judgement account of predication, but a two-component account (...) that distinguishes between predication and alethic evaluation. Third, Leibniz understands the act of affirmative judgement in terms of establishing active dispositions, i.e. strivings, to make reasons available for future reasoning that aims at answering whether-questions. Correspondingly, he understands the act of negative judgement in terms of establishing dispositions to ban propositions from future reasoning that aims at answering whether-questions. In the final analysis, the acts of affirmative as well as of negative judgement turn out to be acts of changing memory dispositions. (shrink)

In an earlier article I argued that individuals are obligated not to exceed their fair share of emissions entitlements, that many exceed their fair share at present and thus ought to reduce their emissions as far as can reasonably be demanded. The peer commentators raised various insightful and pressing concerns, but the following objections seem particularly important: It was argued that the fair share argument is insufficiently justified, that it is incoherent, that it would result in more far-reaching duties than (...) acknowledged by me, that it is unable to provide a clear account of individual duties, and that duties to reduce individual emissions are not Kantian imperfect duties. This reply aims at clarifying the fair share argument and at addressing the major challenges. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 3 Seiten: 515-525.

The question of why Nietzsche writes as he does defines his philosophy—much more so than for almost any other thinker. Let me begin with the following claim: Nietzsche does not primarily write books. Rather, he edits them from a huge reservoir of different kinds of notebooks. In the process, the “I” that is the subject of the “writing” becomes increasingly unstable. This is of course an intended philosophical effect. Take the case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche considered to be (...) his most important and long-lasting book. Most philosophers, when they engage with it at all, still take it more or less at face value. Zarathustra’s speeches are quoted as if they were enunciations of Nietzsche himself... (shrink)

In the third century b.c.e., Eratosthenes of Cyrene made a famous measurement of the circumference of the Earth. This was not the first such measurement, but it is the earliest for which significant details are preserved. Cleomedes gives a short account of Eratosthenes’ method, his numerical assumptions, and the final result of 250,000 stades. However, many ancient sources attribute to Eratosthenes a result of 252,000 stades. Historians have attempted to explain the second result by supposing that Eratosthenes later made better (...) measurements and revised his estimate or that the original result was simply rounded to 252,000 to have a number conveniently divisible by 60 or by 360. These explanations are speculative and untestable. However, Eratosthenes’ estimates of the distances of the Sun and Moon from the Earth are preserved in the doxographical literature. This essay shows that Eratosthenes’ result of 252,000 stades for the Earth’s circumference follows from a solar distance that is attributed to him. Thus it appears that Eratosthenes computed not only a lower limit for the size of the Earth, based on the assumption that the Sun is at infinity, but also an upper limit, based on the assumption that the Sun is at a finite distance. The essay discusses the consequences for our understanding of his program. (shrink)

I start by explaining what attitude-related reasons are and why it is plausible to assume that, at least in the domain of practical reason, there are such reasons. Then I turn to Raz’s idea that the practice of practical reasoning commits us to what he calls exclusionary reasons. Being excluded would be a third way, additional to being outweighed and being undermined, in which a reason can be defeated. I try to show that attitude-related reasons can explain the phenomena Raz (...) appeals to equally well. Attitude-related reasons, however, are weighted against other reasons and, thus, don’t determine a third relation of defeat. On this basis, I voice some doubts about Raz’s conception of exclusionary reasons. (shrink)

In this essay I point out parallels between Kant’s theory of aesthetics and Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule following. Although Wittgenstein did not write an aesthetics and Kant did not discuss Wittgensteinian rule-following problems, and although both Kant and Wittgenstein begin at very different starting points and use different methods, they end up dealing with similar issues, namely issues about rules, particularity, exemplarity, objectivity, practice, and as-if statements.

New Breeding Techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 are revolutionizing plant breeding and food production. Experts believe that the social debate about these technologies could be similar to those on green genetic engineering: emotional and highly controversial. Future debate about Genome Editing could benefit from a better understanding of the GMO (genetically modified organism) controversy. Against this background, this paper (a) presents results of a content analysis of position papers criticizing green genetic engineering in Germany. In particular, (b) it focuses on the (...) controversy as a place where normative concepts of nature are debated and become visible. Hence, the study complements existing interpretations by showing that the emerging concepts are more diverse than the familiar reductionist breakdown of the debate into anthropocentric vs. non-anthropocentric conceptions suggests. (shrink)

A central problem of democracy is the aggregation of divergent individual inputs into overall collective decisions. Social-choice-theoretic impossibility results famously demonstrate the intractability of a large class of such aggregation problems. This paper develops a taxonomy of two concepts of agreement, agreement at a substantive level and agreement at a meta-level, and discusses the escape-routes these concepts open up from the impossibility problems of social choice. Specifically, two contexts of democratic aggregation are addressed: first, the familiar context of preferences, and (...) second, the largely unexplored context of sets of judgments over multiple interconnected propositions. Drawing on some recent developments in social choice theory and democratic theory, I will defend the view that, when agreement is conceptualized in democratic theory and when it is sought in democratic practice, more emphasis should be placed on agreement at a meta-level than is commonly done. Finally, I will address the more general question to what extent it is acceptable for the stability of institutions for democratic aggregation to be dependent on specific empirical contingencies. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas’ Werk Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (1992) verdient aus zwei Gründen besonderes Interesse: Erstens gehört es zu den Hauptwerken dieses bedeutenden Philosophen, der darin eine neue Begründung der Prinzipien des demokratischen Rechtsstaats, zugleich aber auch eine Summe seiner sozialtheoretischen und ethischen Denkens (Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns und Diskursethik) präsentiert; und zweitens ist dieses Werk ein herausragender Beitrag zur neueren Rechtsphilosophie, da darin in systematischer Weise eine innovative Theorie des Rechts entwickelt wird, (...) die das Erfordernis der Faktizität des Rechts mit dessen normativer Sollgeltung in Einklang zu bringen versucht. Die Bedeutung dieses Werks für die gegenwärtige Sozial-, Rechts- und Politikphilosophie legt es nahe, ihm einen Band der Reihe „Klassiker Auslegen“ zu widmen, in dem es einer eingehenden kritischen Erörterung und Würdigung unterzogen wird. Der Band hat entsprechend der Konzeption der ganzen Reihe die Form eines kritischen Kommentars, in dem nach einer Einleitung der Herausgeber die Kapitel des Werks sukzessive von renommierten Autoren resümiert, interpretiert und kritisch diskutiert werden. (shrink)

We investigate the long-term evolution of degree-degree correlations (assortativity) in functional brain networks from epilepsy patients. Functional networks are derived from continuous multi-day, multi-channel electroencephalographic data, which capture a wide range of physiological and pathophysiological activities. In contrast to previous studies which all reported functional brain networks to be assortative on average, even in case of various neurological and neurodegenerative disorders, we observe large fluctuations in time-resolved degree-degree correlations ranging from assortative to dissortative mixing. Moreover, in some patients these fluctuations (...) exhibit some periodic temporal structure which can be attributed, to a large extent, to daily rhythms. Relevant aspects of the epileptic process, particularly possible pre-seizure alterations, contribute marginally to the observed long-term fluctuations. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that physiological and pathophysiological activity may modify functional brain networks in a different and process-specific way. We evaluate factors that possibly influence the long-term evolution of degree-degree correlations. (shrink)

In this essay I to do three things. First, I discuss a statement from the Tractatus which says that our free will consists in our ignorance of future actions: “The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical inference.” (5.1362) I think this statement might well be inspired by a claim Moore made in connection with free (...) will in his 1912 book Ethics: “We can hardly ever know for certain beforehand, which choice we actually shall make”. But I think Moore’s claim in favor of free will is not convincing. Second, I discuss a question raised in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein asks what remains if we “subtract” the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm, and he adds in brackets: “Are the kinaesthetic sensations my willing?” (621) This added reflection is a reaction to ideas put forward by William James. Wittgenstein opposes these ideas. He argues that we should not think of the will as a cause at all, kinaesthetic or not, but rather as something embedded in, and constituted by, certain contexts of learning, expectation, practice, and lack of surprise. This is a strong claim. He also returns to the question about the predictability of the future: “When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge of the future they always forget the fact of the prediction of one’s own voluntary movements” (629). The question is whether Wittgenstein has solved, or dissolved, the problem of free will. Some think that this is the case. I doubt it is. This is the third point I wish to discuss. (shrink)

La contre-utopie 1 est le double inversé de l’utopie. Elle délivre l’image d’une société de cauchemar là où l’utopie faisait le tableau d’une société de rêve. Les utopies décrivaient des communautés ordonnées et prospères. Elles donnaient à penser que la conjonction de l’abondance2 et de la tranquillité est possible, que les hommes pourraient enfin parvenir..