Despite our common self-conceptions, we philosophers have our myths, heroes, and guiding narratives. Our work may emphasize conceptual clarity and deductive arguments, but these more sober and discursive elements of our work always occurs within the context of a broader, often implicit, and frequently illusive orientation, within the scope of some particular vision of our vocation, our history, and our place within the contemporary world. These visions are meta-philosophical: they precede and frame philosophical work, and they engender the most intractable (...) philosophical disputes. Thus, for the sake of self-knowledge and rational discussion, we should constantly struggle to articulate and scrutinize these myths and narratives. Which predecessors do we continue to read? Why? What repeated stories and anecdotes generate our common and competing identities? What do past episodes in the history of philosophy mean, and how do they direct our current endeavors? Like every community, we philosophers sustain our collective work through stories, through the celebration of our heroes, and through repeated reference to paradigmatic arguments and texts. We should reflect upon these sustaining elements of our community, even if this requires modes of thought that lie beyond conceptual analysis, deductive argument, and the careful interpretation of canonical texts. -/- In this paper, I excavate and criticize the contours of one narrative that still guides us, the common celebration of Kant’s critical philosophy as a radical, farsighted, disruptive, irresistible, and irrevocable break with the religious and metaphysical dogmatism of its age. In Section 2, I briefly sketch two complementary versions of this narrative, the accounts provided by the Hegelian philosopher Eduard Gans and by the poet Heinrich Heine. Drawing various parallels with the French Revolution, these thinkers significantly overemphasize the skeptical, destructive, anti-metaphysical, anti-religious and historically discontinuous aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy, which they portray as the inauguration of a new and robust philosophical movement, one that rapidly vanquished its intellectually beleaguered and reactionary opponents. In Sections 2–4, I then turn to consider three of the more active and vociferous opponents of the Kantian movement: Basilius von Ramdohr, Friedrich Nicolai, and Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob. Contrary to the standard version of events, these men had little sympathy for metaphysics, religion, rationalism, and dogmatic certitude. In fact, they principally opposed the Kantian movement as the unwelcome resurgence of an outdated form of quasi-religious enthusiasm, as a form of philosophical Schwärmerei that threatened to appropriate the banner of reason and hinder the progress of enlightenment. -/- Drawing upon a wide range of late eighteenth-century German texts on the dangers and varied manifestations of Schwärmerei, I reconstruct Ramdohr’s, Nicolai’s, and Jakob’s vision of the Kantian movement. I argue that the charges of philosophical Schwärmerei highlight three meta-philosophical disputes that pitted these anti-Kantians against many proponents of the Kantian movement. These disputes involved: (a) the social role of the philosopher and her relation to the general public; (b) the place of internal and/or private experience within the open and polyphonic domain of public discourse; and (c) the merits of philosophical systematicity, technical neologisms, and more hermetic versions of semantic holism. -/- A consideration of these meta-philosophical disputes allows us to position Kant’s critical philosophy more accurately within its historical context, to highlight its significant continuities with the intellectual assumptions of the Berlin Enlightenment, those assumptions that largely inform Ramdohr’s, Nicolai’s, and Jakob’s attacks on the so-called Kantian movement. These continuities then reveal the meta-philosophical distance between Kant and “the Kantian movement”, between the texts of the critical philosophy and the projects of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. This challenges the traditional account. We often celebrate Kant’s critical philosophy as a radical break with the past, as the inauguration of new and fundamentally modern assumptions, which were then developed and elaborated by the post-Kantian Idealists. By contrast, I argue for a series of complex, ambivalent, and often unintended breaks: while occasionally celebrating his intellectual achievements as an epochal “Copernican Revolution”, Kant largely remains true to the guiding assumptions and philosophical values of his age, only occasionally deflecting them in minor but portentous ways. By contrast, while Reinhold and Fichte at least initially proclaimed their fidelity to the “spirit” – if not the letter – of Kant’s philosophy, they nonetheless managed to release a new and strange philosophical spirit, a potent, quasi-secularized, and post-Enlightenment form of Schwärmerei. (shrink)

book I. The nature of the state.-- book II. The social foundations of the state.-- book III. The constitution of the state.-- book IV. The administration of the state.-- book V. The state in international intercourse.

Reprint. Originally published: T'ubingen: C.F. Osiander, 1822.

"Die Grundlage... ist... ein Programm, welches ich im vorigen Jahre unter dem Titel: "Historische und philosophische Beitr'age zur Erl'auterung des Spinozismus' ausgegeben habe. Aber... hier... sehr erweitert.".

On cover: Zusammenhang des Spinozismus mit der Cartesianischen Philosophie.

Model-theoretic proofs of functional completenes along the lines of [McCullough 1971, Journal of Symbolic Logic 36, 15–20] are given for various constructive modal propositional logics with strong negation.

It is shown that the constructive four-valued logic N4 can be faithfully embedded into the modal logic S4. This embedding is used to obtain complete, cut-free display sequent calculi for N4 and C4, the modal logic of consistency over N4. C4 is a natural monotonic base system for semantics-based non-monotonic reasoning.

It is shown that every displayable propositional logic enjoys strong cut-elimination. This result strengthens Belnap's general cut-elimination theorem for Display Logic.

Text: Reproduktion nach Scan der Ausgabe von 1934, Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) in Tübingen. - Von dem kleinen Buch, das ich hier der Öffentlichkeit übergebe, bitte ich den Leser, nichts anderes zu erwarten, als das, was sein Titel ausdrücklich sagt. Es handelt sich in ihm nicht etwa um die Grundlinien eines Systems der Philosophie, sondern ausschließlich um dessen Probleme, und wenn diese sich auch nicht darlegen lassen, ohne die Richtung anzudeuten, in der das System bei der (...) Ausführung sich zu bewegen hätte, so sollen doch in dieser Schrift hauptsächlich Fragen gestellt, nicht Antworten gegeben werden. Oft brechen die Darlegungen dort ab, wo mancher Leser glauben kann, daß die größten Schwierigkeiten noch ungelöst sind. Ja mehr: nur die Grundprobleme der Philosophie werden erörtert, und das Eingehen auf Sonderfragen ist fast überall vermieden. Einzelheiten sind dann allein herangezogen worden, wenn es zur Verdeutlichung der Hauptbegriffe wünschenswert erschien. [Auszug aus dem Vorwort des Buches]. (shrink)

In this paper it is suggested to generalize our understanding of general (structural) proof theory and to consider it as a general theory of two kinds of derivations, namely proofs and dual proofs. The proposal is substantiated by (i) considerations on assertion, denial, and bi-lateralism, (ii) remarks on compositionality in proof-theoretic semantics, and (iii) comments on falsification and co-implication. The main formal result of the paper is a normal form theorem for the natural deduction proof system N2Int of the bi-intuitionistic (...) logic 2Int. The proof makes use of the faithful embedding of 2Int into intuitionistic logic with respect to validity and shows that conversions of dual proofs can be sidestepped. (shrink)

We consider a labelled tableau presentation of constant domain first-order S5 and prove a strong cut-elimination theorem.

Achievement test differences between boys and girls and between young men and young women, mostly favoring males, extend far beyond mathematics. Such pervasive differences, illustrated here, may require an explanatory theory broader than Geary's.