Accessing knowledge of a single knowledge source with different client applications often requires the help of mediator systems as middleware components. In the domain of theorem proving large efforts have been made to formalize knowledge for mathematics and verification issues, and to structure it in databases. But these databases are either specialized for a single client, or if the knowledge is stored in a general database, the services this database can provide are usually limited and hard to adjust for a (...) particular theorem prover. Only recently there have been initiatives to flexibly connect existing theorem proving systems into networked environments that contain large knowledge bases. An intermediate layer containing both, search and proving functionality can be used to mediate between the two. In this paper we motivate the need and discuss the requirements for mediators between mathematical knowledge bases and theorem proving systems. We also present an attempt at a concurrent mediator between a knowledge base and a proof planning system. (shrink)

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

kant famously rules out the possibility of any knowledge of God’s existence or non-existence.1 In denying the possibility of knowledge about God, Kant departs from his rationalist sources, and from his own earlier position. Leibniz, Wolff, Locke, Crusius, Meier, and Baumgarten all assert that we can have knowledge of the existence and properties of God.2 Although he finds that there is an absence of evidence sufficient for knowledge about God’s existence, or non-existence, this is not, for Kant, a disordered (...) or regrettable deficit. Indeed, Kant finds it “providential” that God has not permitted such knowledge. Kant even tells us that we should “thank heaven”... (shrink)

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...

Etablir l'art de l'interprétation comme science, tel est l'objectif de l'Essai de G. Fr. Meier, publié à Halle en 1757. Il s'agit du traité systématique d'herméneutique le plus abouti du rationalisme des Lumières dans son effort pour dégager des principes généraux de l'interprétation, dont le principe d'équité est le coeur. Les règles méthodologiques dégagées permettent de justifier la prétention de l'interprétation à être une connaissance, favorisant ainsi tant la culture que la lutte contre la superstition. La traduction de l'Essai (...) en français permet d'introduire l'herméneutique des Lumières, sa prétention à l'objectivité, son rapport avec la logique et la théorie du langage, dans un paysage marqué par la philosophie herméneutique de Heidegger et Gadamer. (shrink)

Innerhalb des Gedankenexperiments eines natürlichen Zustandes bewegt sich Meier in der für seine Zeit üblichen Weise der Grundlegung einer Naturrechtslehre mit der Suche nach dem obersten Prinzip, aus dem alle weiteren Grundsätze und Regeln abzuleiten sind. Berücksichtigt man die naturrechtliche Tradition von Christian Wolff und Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, in die sich Meier mehrfach ausdrücklich stellt, würde man nun hier das Gebot des Strebens nach Vollkommenheit erwarten. Doch überraschenderweise legt Meier seinem Recht der Natur ein anderes Prinzip zu (...) Grunde, nämlich: „beleidige niemanden äusserlich in dem natürlichen Zustande.“ Sämtliche natürlichen Rechte und Pflichten des Menschen im Naturzustand folgen für Meier aus diesem ersten Grundsatz, der nun weniger an das Vollkommenheitsgebot des Christian Wolff erinnert als vielmehr eine systematische Parallele zu dem Bereich der für den äußeren Frieden förderlichen Handlungen des justum von Christian Thomasius aufweist, dessen Regel „Behindere andere nicht in der Ausübung ihrer Rechte“ aus den Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium dem Meierschen, „keinem andern Menschen das Seine“ zu nehmen, entspricht. Within the thought-experiment of a natural condition, Meier follows the usual method of his age by basing a doctrine of natural law on the search for a highest principle from which all further principles and rules are to be derived. Considering the tradition of Christian Wolff’s and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in defining natural law, a tradition in which Meier several times expressly places himself, we would expect to find here the commandment to strive for perfection. But, surprisingly, Meier bases his natural law on a different principle: “offend no-one outwardly in the natural condition.” For Meier, all natural laws and duties of mankind in the natural condition follow from this first principle, which now seems less an echo of Christian Wolff’s precept of perfection than a systematic parallel to the sphere of actions required four outward oeace, the justum of Christian Thomasius, whose rule of “Do not hinder others in the exercise of their rights,” from the Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium correspondes to Meier’s rule not to take “from any other man what is his.”. (shrink)

The coherence objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that it is impossible for one individual to have both the attributes of God and the attributes of a human being. This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s answer to this objection. I challenge the dominant, mereological interpretation of Aquinas’s position and, in light of this challenge, develop and defend a new alternative interpretation of Aquinas’s response to this important objection to Christian doctrine.

We investigated the competition between automatic and controlled processes in a word stem completion task. Prime-display duration and the prime-target interval were manipulated. On each trial a masked prime was displayed briefly, followed either immediately or after a delay by a word stem. The subjects were required to complete each stem with the first word that came to mind, to report any prime they could identify, and not to give as completion any identified prime. By the assumption that automatic processes (...) require less stimulus input and can be completed faster than consciously controlled processes we expected a stronger performance contribution from automatic processes with the shorter prime-display durations and in the immediate stems condition. The results confirmed this expectation. The findings highlight that consciously controlled processes require more time to run their course than unconscious automatic processes. (shrink)

In this book Heinrich Meier takes on the question of the meaning of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which has long proven controversial among readers. Meier closely examines the work to find a coherent structure and uncover the meanings in the figure of Zarathustra. By showing the unity in Zarathustra's life and teaching, Meier argues that the hidden architecture of the work reveals the development of self-knowledge for the philosopher. What Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? A Philosophical Confrontation makes clear (...) in its careful attention to the text that Nietzsche's deepest concern is with understanding himself and the world, rather than with a view of himself as a prophet. (shrink)

The ethics of autonomous cars and automated driving have been a subject of discussion in research for a number of years :28–58, 2016). As levels of automation progress, with partially automated driving already becoming standard in new cars from a number of manufacturers, the question of ethical and legal standards becomes virulent. For exam-ple, while automated and autonomous cars, being equipped with appropriate detection sensors, processors, and intelligent mapping material, have a chance of being much safer than human-driven cars in (...) many regards, situations will arise in which accidents cannot be completely avoided. Such situations will have to be dealt with when programming the software of these vehicles. In several instances, internationally, regulations have been passed, based on legal considerations of road safety, mostly. However, to date, there have been few, if any, cases of a broader ethics code for autonomous or automated driving preceding actual regulation and being based on a broadly composed ethics committee of independent experts. In July 2016, the German Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, Alexander Dobrindt, appointed a national ethics committee for automated and connected driving, which began its work in September 2016. In June 2017, this committee presented a code of ethics which was published in German and in English. It consists of 20 ethical guidelines. Having been a member of this committee, I will present the main ethical topics of these guidelines and the discussions that lay behind them. (shrink)

A reappraisal of Ecce Homo and The Antichrist within Nietzsche’s oeuvre. Nietzsche's Legacy takes on the most challenging and misunderstood works in Nietzsche’s oeuvre to illuminate his view of what a philosopher is and what constitutes a philosophic life. Interpreting Ecce Homo and The Antichrist as twin books meant to replace the abandoned Will to Power project, Heinrich Meier recovers them from the stigma of Nietzsche’s late mental collapse, showing that these works are, above all, a lucid self-assessment. The (...) carefully written pair contains both the highest affirmation—the Yes of the “revaluation of all values”—and the most resolute negation—the No to Christianity. How the Yes and the No go together, how the relation between nature and politics is to be determined, how Nietzsche’s intention is governing the political-philosophical double-face: this is the subject of Nietzsche’s Legacy, which opens up a new understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and (...) I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

English summary: This book concerns a metaphysical definition of artifacts, taken as a key term of the philosophy of technology. Due to the fact that classical determinations are not only insufficient at explicating the term but also inapplicable to real artifacts, the work tries to develop a concept of artifacts using the thought of truth given by Martin Heidegger. In so far as a hermeneutic interpretation of his oeuvre shows us, truth actually is an object-generating happening. That is why an (...) analysis of forms of judgments allows the description of factic things. Assuming that there are theoretical judgments concerning technique - wherefore technique is an historically contingent kind of metaphysics - artifacts are given as geometrical universals, meaning terms, without being able to subsume thought-independent of individuals, unless artifacts exceptionally are known as subjects of practical philosophy. German description: Diese Studie befasst sich mit der metaphysischen Bestimmung des Gegenstandes Artefakt, der fur die Technikphilosophie zentral ist. Da klassische Bestimmungen weder eine zureichende Explikation des Begriffes noch die eindeutige Identifikation solcher Sachen erlauben, greift der Autor dazu auf das Denken der Wahrheit bei Martin Heidegger zuruck. Eine hermeneutische Deutung von dessen Werk zeigt, dass Wahrheit als ein Geschehen zu betrachten ist, das Gegenstande generiert. Demzufolge ermoglicht die Analyse von Urteilsformen, faktisch begegnende Sachen zu bestimmen. Nimmt man an, dass es spezifisch technik-theoretisches Urteilen gibt - weshalb Technik als ein historisch kontingenter Metaphysiktyp aufgefasst werden muss -, zeigt sich, dass Artefakte als geometrische Universalien begegnen. Sie sind also Begriffe, unter welche keine denkunabhangigen Einzeldinge subsumiert werden konnen, es sei denn man fasst Artefakte ausschliesslich als Gegenstande der praktischen Philosophie auf. (shrink)

This paper is built around a single, simple idea. It is widely agreed that there is a distinctive kind of awareness each of us has of his own bodily actions. This action-awareness is different from any perceptual awareness a subject may have of his own actions; it can exist in the absence of such perceptual awareness. The single, simple idea around which this paper is built is that the distinctive awareness that subjects have of their own mental actions is a (...) form of action-awareness. Subjects’ awareness of their own mental actions is a species of the same genus that also includes the distinctive awareness of bodily actions. More specifically, I claim. (shrink)

How does good combine with bad? Most creatures are neither so blessed as to only enjoy good nor so cursed as to only suffer bad. Rather, the good and bad they receive throughout their lives combine to produce their overall quality of life. But it’s not just whole lives that have combined good and bad. Many stretches within contain both positive and negative occurrences whose value is joined to form the overall quality of that span of time. In a single (...) morning someone might wake up, brush their teeth, stub their toe groggily lumbering down the stairs, and have a sip of coffee that’s tasty but so hot they burn their tongue. These events are good and bad for them to various degrees, and their value comes together to form an overall value for them of that morning. A single moment, even, can have combined value from distinct pockets of good and bad that occur simultaneously. The tastiness of the coffee is good, but the pain of the heat is bad. They combine to form an overall value of the sipping moment – negative if the pain outweighed the flavor. Thus, wellbeing and illbeing combine. But how? How can someone rightly chastise themselves for sipping the overly hot coffee when it was, in fact, good because it was tasty? To pose the question starkly, a life can be bad, even so bad to not be worth living, and yet it can have many instances of good, where these goods are, in themselves, pure of any negativity. But how can good make something bad? (shrink)

A number of cases involving self-locating beliefs have been discussed in the Bayesian literature. I suggest that many of these cases, such as the sleeping beauty case, are entangled with issues that are independent of self-locating beliefs per se. In light of this, I propose a division of labor: we should address each of these issues separately before we try to provide a comprehensive account of belief updating. By way of example, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order (...) to accommodate these issues. Then, putting these other issues aside, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order to accommodate self-locating beliefs. Finally, I propose a constraint on updating rules, the "Learning Principle", which rules out certain kinds of troubling belief changes, and I use this principle to assess some of the available options. (shrink)

Forms and Concepts is the first comprehensive study of the central role of concepts and concept acquisition in the Platonic tradition. It sets up a stimulating dialogue between Plato s innatist approach and Aristotle s much more empirical response. The primary aim is to analyze and assess the strategies with which Platonists responded to Aristotle s (and Alexander of Aphrodisias ) rival theory. The monograph culminates in a careful reconstruction of the elaborate attempt undertaken by the Neoplatonist Proclus (6th century (...) AD) to devise a systematic Platonic theory of concept acquisition.". (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to develop a novel virtue reliabilist account of justified belief, which incorporates insights from both process reliabilism and extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Like extant virtue reliabilist accounts of justi- fied belief, the proposed view takes it that justified belief is a kind of competent performance and that competent performances require reliable agent abilities. However, unlike extant versions of virtue reliabilism, the view takes abilities to essentially involve reliable processes. In this way, the proposed takes (...) a leaf from process reliabilism. Finally, I will provide reason to believe that the view compares favourably with both extant versions of virtue reliabilism and process reliabilism. In particular, I will show that in taking abilities to essentially involve reliable processes, the view has an edge over extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Moreover, I will argue that the proposed view can either solve or defuse a number of classical problems of process reliabilism, including the new evil demon problem, the problem of clairvoyant cases and the generality problem. (shrink)

Essentialists claim that at least some individuals or kinds have essences. This raises an important but little-discussed question: how do we come to know what the essence of something is? This paper examines Aristotle’s answer to this question. One influential interpretation (viz., the Explanationist Interpretation) is carefully expounded, criticized, and then refined. Particular attention is given to what Aristotle says about this issue in DA I.1, APo II.2, and APo II.8. It is argued that the epistemological claim put forward in (...) DA I.1 differs from that put forward in APo II.2 and II.8, contrary to what has been claimed by Explanationists, and that each of these distinct epistemological claims rests on a distinct non-epistemological thesis about essence. Consequently, an ‘Enriched Explanationist Interpretation’ is developed which takes into account both of the aforementioned elements in Aristotle’s epistemology of essence. The paper concludes by highlighting an insight the preceding exegetical discussion offers to contemporary essentialists seeking to explain how we come to know what something’s essence is. (shrink)

We can hardly know for certain how strongly a scholarly discipline like history is able to affect politics and society, popular views and morals. Whatever its impact, it's influence also varies from epoch to epoch. During a few decades of the nineteenth century, historians were overwhelmed by so many questions and by such high expectations that there existed a large public space for them that they merely had to occupy. At other times, they have had to conquer this space first (...) if they wanted to gain continued attention.To be sure, a differentiation has to be introduced: any society has particular interests, e.g., in parts of its more recent past or in events that society sees as having something like a “mythical quality” about then, events that represent a major divide, that are deeply imprinted on that society's memory, that have attained a special role through tradition. There is, of course, always a space commanding wider public attention for these aspects. However, they are no more than small specks on the large canvas of history. (shrink)

A critical interrogation of elements of Hobbes's political and natural philosophy and its capacity to enrich our understanding of the natural of democratic life.

This book offers a broad-based critical survey of recent anti-realist arguments in the philosophy of science, cultural theory, hermeneutics, the sociology of knowledge and the interpretation of quantum-mechanics.

An epistemic agent A is a false epistemic authority for others iff they falsely believe A to be in a position to help them accomplish their epistemic ends. A major divide exists between what I call "epistemic quacks", who falsely believe themselves to be relevantly competent, and "epistemic charlatans", i.e., false authorities who believe or even know that they are incompetent. Both types of false authority do not cover what Lackey (2021) calls "predatory experts": experts who systematically misuse their social-epistemic (...) status as a cover for predatory behavior. Qua experts, predatory experts are competent and thus could (and maybe sometimes do) help their clients. But should we count them as genuine epistemic authorities? No, I argue, they are false epistemic authorities because, in addition to their practical and moral misconduct, such experts systematically deceive their clients, thereby thwarting the clients’ epistemic ends. (shrink)