InhaltWilhelm METZ, Christoph ASMUTH: EinleitungChristoph BINKELMANN : Phänomenologie der Freiheit. Die Trieblehre Fichtes im System der Sittenlehre von 1798Wilhelm METZ : Freiheit und Reflexion in Fichtes Sittenlehre von 1798 Jakub KLOC-KONKOŁOWICZ : Der Kantische Spinozismus.Die Gegenwart Spinozas in der Sittenlehre FichtesHartmut TRAUB : Über die Pflichten des ästhetischen Künstlers. Der § 31 des Systems der Sittenlehre< im Kontext von Fichtes Philosophie der ÄsthetikBjörn PECINA : Sittlicher Atheismus. Die Bedeutung der Sittenlehre von 1798 für Fichtes frühe ReligionsphilosophieMarco Rampazzo BAZZAN (...) : Das Ephorat bei J.G. FichteIves RADRIZZANI : Recht und Natur. Das Naturrecht bei FichteRobert MARSZAŁEK : Religion und Ethik beim späten FichteTeresa PEDRO : Die Freiheit und das Böse. Eine Gegenüberstellung von Fichtes früher Sittenlehre und Schellings FreiheitsschriftCristiana SENIGAGLIA : Kausalität und Wirksamkeit in Fichtes Sittenlehren RezensionenTagungsbericht. (shrink)

Flach bringt Kants geltungs- und prinzipientheoretische Freiheitslehre zur Darstellung und sucht zu zeigen, welches Erklärungspotential diese Lehre in puncto Humanität hat. Krijnen bringt Hegels logische und geistphilosophische Freiheitslehre zur Darstellung und sucht zu zeigen, daß und wie in ihr ein fundamentaler Aspekt der Freiheit thematisch wird, der in Kants Lehre unterbeleuchtet bleibt. Die Diskussionsbeiträge zeigen, welchen Stellenwert dem einen und dem anderen Paradigma im aktuellen Urteil zuerkannt wird. Flach presents Kant’s conception of freedom as well as its potential for understanding (...) what it means to be human. Krijnen presents Hegel’s conception of freedom and shows that Kant’s conception underestimates an essential feature of freedom. The contributions of other authors assess the results. (shrink)

Marek J. Siemek’s idea of the transcendental social philosophy seems paradoxical, because it aspires to combine the allegedly “non-historical” and “timeless” transcendental sphere with the social and historical dimension. But the uniqueness of Siemek as a philosopher consists precisely in being Fichtean as well as Hegelian. Siemek’s philosophy is an undertaking to reconstruct the field of rationality in its social and historical dimension. The leading question of this philosophy is not if history is rational, but how it is possible for (...) the rationality to be historical. Siemek seems to maintain, that the noninstrumental rationality has it’s own history: it is a history of self-de-instrumentalization of the initial one-sided instrumental reason. Historical process can be seen as a vehicle of rationality, although not always and necessary rational itself. For Siemek, as well as for Hegel, the historical contradiction is a contradiction of the thing itself, not a development scheme imposed on the history by theoretician from his allegedly external position. On one side: there is no history without the rational interpretation of history. On the other side: the interpretation itself is a part of historical process. (shrink)

In the paper I try to interpret Fichte’s Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters as a reflective self-critique of the Enlightenment. Identifying the ›third historical period‹ of Fichte with the time of Enlightenment, I try to read his lectures as an ambitious and differentiated critique of it. The aim of Fichte’s devastating criticism on dominant characteristics of the Enlightenment is in my opinion not to refuse it entirely. It is rather to continue it with an increased sense of self-criticism. The proposed reading (...) enables to place Fichte’s arguments in the context of today’s debates over issues like the role of religion in civil society, or the meaning and fundamental values of Europe’s integration. For all his critique on modernity, Fichte refrains from treading a conservative, communitarian or collectivist path. This can be seen as the great advantage of his standpoint. What he intends is rather the »enlightenment of Enlightenment«, the continuous differentiation of knowledge and liberating the human being from the constrained form of modern consciousness.Der Beitrag bildet einen Versuch, Fichtes Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters als eine reflexive Kritik der Aufklärung zu deuten. Ich identifiziere Fichtes ›drittes Zeitalter‹ aus den Grundzügen mit der als Aufklärung verstandenen Moderne. Sie bildet, meines Erachtens, den Gegenstand einer anspruchsvollen und differenzierten Kritik: das vernichtende Urteil über die in ihr dominierenden ›Züge‹ des Egoismus, der Oberflächlichkeit und des Selbstinteresses haben keineswegs den Zweck, Modernität als solche zu desavouieren. Vielmehr handelt es sich um eine zukunftsorientierte Fortsetzung der Aufklärung im Sinne einer gesteigerten Reflexivität. Durch eine solche Deutung kann Fichtes Position in die gegenwärtigen Debatten – etwa um die Rolle und Funktion der Religion innerhalb der säkularen Gesellschaft oder um die Grundwerte und den Sinn der europäischen Einigung – einbezogen werden. Aus der Sicht der heutigen Debatten besteht die Originalität des Fichteschen Standpunktes genau darin, dass er, bei aller Kritik der egoistischen Zügen der aufklärerischen Kultur weder auf konservative, noch auf kommunitaristische oder kollektivistische Lösungen zurückgreift. Gemeint ist von ihm eher eine ›Aufklärung der Aufklärung‹, weitere Differenzierung des Wissens, aber auch Befreiung der Menschen von dem zwanghaften Charakter ihres modernen Bewusstseins. (shrink)

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGHegelsche Philosophie wird oft als eine metaphysische Konstruktion angesehen.Demgegenüber wird in dem Beitrag eine Position eingenommen, laut der Hegel,innerhalb seines holistischen philosophischen Rahmens, eine perspektivistischeVorgehensweise verwendet, um immer neue, immer konkretere, weil begrifflichimmer mehr vermittelte, Einsichten zu erreichen. Die perspektivistische Methode Hegels wird anhand des Phänomens des freien Willens gezeigt. Hegel glaubt, dass es sich nicht auf einen Schlag erklären lässt, ob und in welchem Sinne der Wille frei ist. Der Beweis, der diese Versicherung begründen soll, wird erst auf dem (...) Weg der vielschichtigen philosophischen Deduktion geliefert. Einer neuen Auffassung des Trägers der Willensfreiheit entspricht dabei immer ein neues Konzept des Gegenstandbereiches. So impliziert etwa das moralische Konzept des Willens eine völlig neue begriffliche Konstellation, mit welcher der Wille und seine Welt aufgefasst wird, als das rechtliche Konzept des Willens. Im letzten Teil des Beitrags wird analysiert, welche Schlüsse aus Hegelscher Rekonstruktion des freien Willens für heutige Debatten zu ziehen wären. Demgemäß sollte ein hegelianisch gesinnter Denker nicht das von dem Naturalisten entworfene Bild des empirisch determinierten Willens, sondern dessen absoluten Anspruch auf Erklärung desavouieren. Es wird klar, dass empiristische Vorgehensweise im Fall der Willensfreiheit einen gewaltigen Teil unserer sozialen Erfahrung und unseres Diskurses gar nicht erklären kann. Mann sollte die theoretische Ebene vertiefen, auf der die Polemik mit den naturalistischen Gegnernder Willensfreiheit aufzunehmen ist.SCHLÜSSELBEGRIFFE:FREIHEIT, WILLE, PERSPEKTIVE, HOLISMUS, MORALITÄTABSTRACTHegel's Philosophy is often seen as a metaphysical construction. Contrary to that, the author of the paper tries to show that Hegel uses - in the context of his holistic philosophy - a perspectivist strategy which allows him to present newer and more and more detailed insights, which are conceptually richer. This perspectivist strategy of Hegel is demonstrated using the example of the problem of the freedom of will. According to Hegel there is no possibility to show at one blow that, and in what sense, the will is free. The argument that vindicates this assumption can only be given in the context of multi-layered philosophical deduction. A new concept of the subject of the free will always implicates a new concept of the objective sphere. For example, the moral understanding of the will implies a wholly new configuration of concepts to grasp the will and its world than the legal understanding of it. At the end of the paper an analysis is given of what kind of conclusions may be drawn from Hegel's reconstruction of the free will that could bring new insights in the actual debates on the free will. According to this analysis a hegelian thinker should not disavow the naturalist’s picture of the empirically determined will, but should instead disavow the claim of this picture to have an absolute explanatory status. It is suggested that the empirical strategy of the denial of the free will is not able to explain a huge range of our social experience and our social discourse. The theoretical level on which the discussion with a naturalistic opponent to the freedom of will is being undertaken should be deepen, i.e. enriched with moral, legal and social perspectives.KEYWORDSFREEDOM, WILL, PERSPECTIVE, HOLISM, MORALITY. (shrink)

InhaltsverzeichnisChristoph Asmuth: EinleitungAndreas Kubik: Auf dem Weg zu Fichtes früher Ästhetik – Die Rolle der Einbildungskraft in der »Kritik der Urteilskraft« Bernward Gesang: G. E. Schulzes »Aenesidemus« – das Buch das Kant für Fichte »verdächtig« machte Christoph Binkelmann: Die Hand in der Geschichte zwischen Kant und Fichte Patrick Grüneberg: Wie kann die transzendentale Apperzeption ›gehaltvoll‹ werden bzw. die Rezeptivität spontan? Katja Crone: Transzendentale Apperzeption und konkretes Selbstbewusstsein Elena Ficara: »Transzendental« bei Kant und Fichte Björn Pecina: Das dreifache Absolute. Fichtes Kantkritik (...) in der Wissenschaftslehre 1804-II Roderich Barth: ›Der Stifter der Transscendental-Philosophie.‹ Wahrheitstheoretische Implikationen einer Kantwürdigung Fichtes Jakub Kloc-Konkolowicz: Beati possidentes? Eigentum und Freiheit bei Kant und FichteAlessandro Bertinetto: «Wäre ihm dies klar geworden, so wäre seine Ktk. W.L. geworden«: Fichtes Auseinandersetzung mit Kant in den Vorlesungen über Transzendentale LogikRobert Marszałek: Die Unzulänglichkeit des transzendentalphilosophischen Freiheitsbegriffs Rocco Porcheddu: Zweck an sich selbst und Subjektivität. Ein Versuch zu Kants Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten Kazimir Drilo: Offenbarung und Realität des Wissens bei FichteCristiana Senigaglia: Von der Autonomie zur Selbständigkeit: Fichtes Umdeutung der Kantischen Begrifflichkeit Christoph Asmuth: Von der Urteilstheorie zur Bewusstseinstheorie. Die Entgrenzung der TranszendentalphilosophieRezensionenTagungsberichten. (shrink)

While there is a general consensus around the role of religion in the abolition of the Slave Trade, historians continue to give little to no detail on exactly how Christian theology influenced the abolitionist movement. This article seeks to interrogate one major theological factor inherent in the spirituality that underpinned the activism of the British abolitionists, namely their notion of Divine Providence, and particularly its moral-emotive correlate: the fear of God’s wrath. These theological notions are discussed based mainly on the (...) analysis of the primary sources and within the theoretical framework of judicial providentialism, aptly captured by John Coffey among others. (shrink)

This volume on the semantic complexity of natural language explores the question why some sentences are more difficult than others. While doing so, it lays the groundwork for extending semantic theory with computational and cognitive aspects by combining linguistics and logic with computations and cognition. -/- Quantifier expressions occur whenever we describe the world and communicate about it. Generalized quantifier theory is therefore one of the basic tools of linguistics today, studying the possible meanings and the inferential power of quantifier (...) expressions by logical means. The classic version was developed in the 1980s, at the interface of linguistics, mathematics and philosophy. Before this volume, advances in "classic" generalized quantifier theory mainly focused on logical questions and their applications to linguistics, this volume adds a computational component, the third pillar of language use and logical activity. This book is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, logic, AI, and computer science. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

Locke claims that a person’s identity over time consists in the unity of consciousness, not in the sameness of the body. Similarly, the phenomenological approach refuses to see the criteria of identity as residing in some externally observable bodily features. Nevertheless, it does not accept the idea that personal identity has to consist either in consciousness or in the body. We are self-aware as bodily beings. After providing a brief reassessment of Locke and the post-Lockean discussion, the article draws on (...) phenomenological arguments that show the body as lived, that is, lived as one’s own body, but also possibly as “other” or “strange.” Against what has been claimed in recent writing, especially in literature on Merleau-Ponty, the author argues that the “mineness” of the body and its “alterity” are not two mutually exclusive features. In the final part of the article, the author suggests that the becoming strange of one’s own body may legitimately be considered as a prominent experience of what it means to be a person. (shrink)

This book brings together for the first time two philosophers from different traditions and different centuries. While Wittgenstein was a focal point of 20th century analytic philosophy, it was Hegel’s philosophy that brought the essential discourses of the 19th century together and developed into the continental tradition in 20th century. This now-outdated conflict took for granted Hegel’s and Wittgenstein’s opposing positions and is being replaced by a continuous progression and differentiation of several authors, schools, and philosophical traditions. The development is (...) already evident in the tendency to identify a progression from a ‘Kantian’ to a ‘Hegelian phase’ of analytical philosophy as well as in the extension of right and left Hegelian approaches by modern and postmodern concepts. Assessing the difference between Wittgenstein and Hegel can outline intersections of contemporary thinking. (shrink)

The present book has the following structure: it proceeds chronologically in its main outline. Part II summarizes the philosophical background against which the distinction between internal and external relations emerged. Hegel and Bradley are addressed in Chapter 4. Russell and Moore—Wittgenstein's direct teachers—are the subject of Chapter 5. Part III is devoted to Wittgenstein's early writings. Chapter 6 distills the definition of the notions of internal and external relations from these texts. The subsequent chapters deal with the doctrine of external (...) relations, the nature of simple objects and the picture theory. Part IV deals with Wittgenstein's later writings from 1929 up to his death in 1951. Its structure is similar to the previous part. Chapter 10 provides some definitions of internal and external relations in these texts. The following chapters explore various themes from Wittgenstein's later philosophy in which the distinction between internal and external relations is important. Part IV begins with a discussion of intentionality and continues with rule-following, mathematics, colors, the standard meter, aspect-seeing, aesthetics and art. The concluding Part V gives the rationale for Wittgenstein’s method of analysis based on the distinction between internal and external relations. Internal relations do not—in the final analysis—belong to things; they are not constitutive of things. They are the means of representation of things. Internal relations can be—in an unattainable ideal—simply left behind. (shrink)

A key component of the susceptibility to cognitive biases is the ability to monitor for conflict between intuitively cued “heuristic” answers and logical principles. While there is evidence that pe...

According to panqualityism, a form of Russellian monism defended by Sam Coleman and others, consciousness is grounded in fundamental qualities, i.e. unexperienced qualia. Despite panqualityism’s significant promise, according to David Chalmers panqualityism fails as a theory of consciousness since the reductive approach to awareness of qualities it proposes fails to account for the specific phenomenology associated with awareness. I investigate Coleman’s reasoning against this kind of phenomenology and conclude that he successfully shows that its existence is controversial, and so Chalmers’s (...) critique is inconclusive. I then present a critique of panqualityism that avoids this controversial posit, arguing that the panqualityist treatment of awareness faces an explanatory gap, failing to account for the intimate cognitive access to qualities which we are afforded, i.e. for our ‘strong awareness’ of qualities. The real worry for panqualityists is thus not the contested phenomenology of awareness, which Chalmers relies on, but rather the special way in which we are aware of qualities. (shrink)

This article interprets critiques of secularity and the related concept of history as progress in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Judith Butler. At the same time, it defends their approach against the criticism voiced by Gregor McLennan. It shows that the postsecular conception of the politics of both authors is not just an attempt to open public space to a wider range of religious and cultural voices. Rather, it is a critique of the way in which political secularism and (...) the ideology of progress are used by the modern state to legitimize the exercise of its own power. Butler and Chakrabarty's postsecular policy is thus based primarily on coalition building against these legitimization frameworks, which opens up the possibility of forming new postsecular political subjects. It illustrates the theoretical approach of both authors with an example of the church sanctuary movement in Germany. (shrink)

In this paper, we address reports of “selfless” experiences from the perspective of active inference and predictive processing. Our argument builds upon grounding self-modelling in active inference as action planning and precision control within deep generative models – thus establishing a link between computational mechanisms and phenomenal selfhood. We propose that “selfless” experiences can be interpreted as cases in which normally congruent processes of computational and phenomenal self-modelling diverge in an otherwise conscious system. We discuss two potential mechanisms – within (...) the Bayesian mechanics of active inference – that could lead to such a divergence by attenuating the experience of selfhood: “self-flattening” via reduction in the depth of active inference and “self-attenuation” via reduction of the expected precision of self-evidence. (shrink)

The discussion centres around two issues: the issue of meaning, and the question whether the tools of rhetoric viewed as the basic tool in interpersonal communication can be helpful in reading and interpreting meaning. The author understands meaning after G. Frege: […] let the following phraseology be established: A proper name expresses its sense, stands for or designates its reference. By means of a sign we express its sense and designate its reference. The purpose of the discussion is also to (...) answer a much more general question: whether through rhetoric can one say something important about the world, so do they define a philosophical thesis or only, from various perspectives, one searches for the most probable answer to a hypothesis. The presented assumption is a result of the suggestion of Willard van Orman Quine: Rhetoric is the literary technology of persuasion, for good or ill, and it entails something which Randal Marlin defined as referentially translucent expressions. Therefore, the hypothesis I shall try to prove is the following: can the sense of any expression be, using the tools of rhetoric, defined to such an extent so that it becomes a philosophical thesis and not a hypothesis? So that in terms of both the subject and the object the expression could be considered as true. Then and only then can one say that such an expression has/contains some sense. (shrink)

According to some interpreters, Foucault's encounter with the Greek and Roman ethics led him to reconsider his earlier work and to turn away from politics. Drawing mostly from Foucault's last and hitherto unpublished lecture course, this paper argues that Foucault's turn to ethics should not be interpreted as a turn away from his previous work, but rather as its logical continuation and an attempt to resolve some of the outstanding questions. I argue that the 1984 lectures on parrhesia should be (...) interpreted as Foucault's philosophical apology, as an attempt to defend himself against the charges of moral and epistemological nihilism, which were raised in response to his earlier work. In his last lectures, the Nietzschean Foucault somewhat surprisingly describes his earlier work as authentic Socratic philosophy and as ethical practice of freedom. In the conclusion, I assess the plausibility of Foucault's apology and speculate in which direction his work might have developed, had it not been cut off by his death. (shrink)

Philosophical views of habit were deeply influenced by Aristotle. If we understand habit in relation to hexis, to the acquired disposition to act in a certain way, then habit becomes a key phenomenon of ethics. According to the famous quotation, "It makes no small difference, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference."1 And yet we can understand habit also as a dull and (...) rigid mechanism, as something that moves us away from humanity, as we read in Immanuel Kant: "The reason for being disgusted with someone's acquired habits lies in the fact that the animal here predominates over the man."2 Is habit more an expression of our... (shrink)

We examine the verification of simple quantifiers in natural language from a computational model perspective. We refer to previous neuropsychological investigations of the same problem and suggest extending their experimental setting. Moreover, we give some direct empirical evidence linking computational complexity predictions with cognitive reality.<br>In the empirical study we compare time needed for understanding different types of quantifiers. We show that the computational distinction between quantifiers recognized by finite-automata and push-down automata is psychologically relevant. Our research improves upon hypothesis and (...) explanatory power of recent neuroimaging studies as well as provides<br>evidence. (shrink)

Quantifiers in phrasal and clausal comparatives often seem to take distributive scope in the matrix clause: for instance, the sentence John is taller than every girl is is true iff for every girl it holds that John is taller than that girl. Broadly speaking, two approaches exist that derive this reading without postulating the wide scope of the quantifier: the negation analysis and the interval analysis of than-clauses. We propose a modification of the interval analysis in which than-clauses are not (...) treated as degree intervals but as degree pluralities. This small change has significant consequences: it yields a straightforward account of differentials in comparatives and it correctly predicts the existence of hitherto unnoticed readings, viz. cumulative readings of clausal comparatives. Finally, this paper also makes the case that using degree pluralities is conceptually appealing: it allows us to restrict the analysis of comparatives by mechanisms that are postulated independently in the semantics of pluralities. (shrink)

Cognitive architectures have often been applied to data from individual experiments. In this paper, I develop an ACT-R reader that can model a much larger set of data, eye-tracking corpus data. It is shown that the resulting model has a good fit to the data for the considered low-level processes. Unlike previous related works, the model achieves the fit by estimating free parameters of ACT-R using Bayesian estimation and Markov-Chain Monte Carlo techniques, rather than by relying on the mix of (...) manual selection + default values. The method used in the paper is generalizable beyond this particular model and data set and could be used on other ACT-R models. (shrink)

The article’s aim is to clear the ground for the idea of aesthetic archaeology as an aesthetic analysis of remote artifacts divorced from aesthetic criticism. On the example of controversies surrounding the early Cycladic figures, it discusses an anxiety motivating the rejection of aesthetic inquiry in archaeology, namely, the anxiety about the heuristic reliability of one’s aesthetic instincts vis-à-vis remote artifacts. It introduces the claim that establishing an aesthetic mandate of a remote artifact should in the first place be part (...) of a quest after the norms of engagement an artifact’s kind signaled to the intended audience by its appearance. Rather than advocating for a new subdiscipline, the concept of aesthetic archaeology serves to bring into theoretical focus an aesthetic engagement with an artifact’s appearance under circumstances that rule out any acquired competence in distinguishing its aesthetic mandate perceptually—and thus rule out any aesthetic expertise. (shrink)

In the dissertation we study the complexity of generalized quantifiers in natural language. Our perspective is interdisciplinary: we combine philosophical insights with theoretical computer science, experimental cognitive science and linguistic theories. -/- In Chapter 1 we argue for identifying a part of meaning, the so-called referential meaning (model-checking), with algorithms. Moreover, we discuss the influence of computational complexity theory on cognitive tasks. We give some arguments to treat as cognitively tractable only those problems which can be computed in polynomial time. (...) Additionally, we suggest that plausible semantic theories of the everyday fragment of natural language can be formulated in the existential fragment of second-order logic. -/- In Chapter 2 we give an overview of the basic notions of generalized quantifier theory, computability theory, and descriptive complexity theory. -/- In Chapter 3 we prove that PTIME quantifiers are closed under iteration, cumulation and resumption. Next, we discuss the NP-completeness of branching quantifiers. Finally, we show that some Ramsey quantifiers define NP-complete classes of finite models while others stay in PTIME. We also give a sufficient condition for a Ramsey quantifier to be computable in polynomial time. -/- In Chapter 4 we investigate the computational complexity of polyadic lifts expressing various readings of reciprocal sentences with quantified antecedents. We show a dichotomy between these readings: the strong reciprocal reading can create NP-complete constructions, while the weak and the intermediate reciprocal readings do not. Additionally, we argue that this difference should be acknowledged in the Strong Meaning hypothesis. -/- In Chapter 5 we study the definability and complexity of the type-shifting approach to collective quantification in natural language. We show that under reasonable complexity assumptions it is not general enough to cover the semantics of all collective quantifiers in natural language. The type-shifting approach cannot lead outside second-order logic and arguably some collective quantifiers are not expressible in second-order logic. As a result, we argue that algebraic (many-sorted) formalisms dealing with collectivity are more plausible than the type-shifting approach. Moreover, we suggest that some collective quantifiers might not be realized in everyday language due to their high computational complexity. Additionally, we introduce the so-called second-order generalized quantifiers to the study of collective semantics. -/- In Chapter 6 we study the statement known as Hintikka's thesis: that the semantics of sentences like ``Most boys and most girls hate each other'' is not expressible by linear formulae and one needs to use branching quantification. We discuss possible readings of such sentences and come to the conclusion that they are expressible by linear formulae, as opposed to what Hintikka states. Next, we propose empirical evidence confirming our theoretical predictions that these sentences are sometimes interpreted by people as having the conjunctional reading. -/- In Chapter 7 we discuss a computational semantics for monadic quantifiers in natural language. We recall that it can be expressed in terms of finite-state and push-down automata. Then we present and criticize the neurological research building on this model. The discussion leads to a new experimental set-up which provides empirical evidence confirming the complexity predictions of the computational model. We show that the differences in reaction time needed for comprehension of sentences with monadic quantifiers are consistent with the complexity differences predicted by the model. -/- In Chapter 8 we discuss some general open questions and possible directions for future research, e.g., using different measures of complexity, involving game-theory and so on. -/- In general, our research explores, from different perspectives, the advantages of identifying meaning with algorithms and applying computational complexity analysis to semantic issues. It shows the fruitfulness of such an abstract computational approach for linguistics and cognitive science. (shrink)