Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on contradictions and paradoxes have been met with incomprehension and have fueled the widespread and long-standing prejudice that his later thoughts on the foundations of logic and mathematics are the “surprisingly insignificant product of a sparkling mind” (Kreisel, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 9:135–158, 1959, p. 158). This paper disagrees; it argues that Wittgenstein’s remarks on semantic paradoxes suggest an account of the Liar and its kin that is not only of historical interest but also (...) represents a hitherto unnoticed paraconsistent alternative to established approaches to the Liar. In what follows, a reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks will be offered according to which Wittgenstein subscribes to a form of dialetheism (that is, the view that there are sentences that are both true and false). In contrast to modern dialetheist approaches to the Liar, however, some of Wittgenstein’s remarks suggest combining a dialetheist position with what is called ‘logical nihilism’ (that is, the view that there are no universally valid inference rules). (shrink)

Der erste der auf vier Bände angelegten Sichtungen der Bestimmung,Leben' stellt in chronologischer Folge wichtige Grundkonstellationen des Begriffsfeldes Leben von Aristoteles bis Schelling vor. Exemplarisch wird herausgearbeitet, wie in der europäischen Kulturgeschichte vom Leben geredet wurde, wann und weshalb der Lebensbegriff an Bedeutung gewann und warum die Rede vom Leben mit einer eigenen Konfliktgeschichte verbunden ist. Von besonderem Interesse sind dabei jene Diskussionen, die für christliche Traditionen direkt oder latent relevant wurden. Damit soll den Lebensdiskursen innerhalb der bioethischen Debatten ein (...) diese anregendes Gegengewicht gegeben werden. Denn um entscheiden zu können, was zum Wohl von Lebewesen mit Lebendem getan und gelassen werden sollte, dürfte hilfreich sein, zu klären, was genau gesteigert, geschützt, renaturalisiert, kultiviert oder in Frieden gelassen werden soll. Mit Beiträgen von:Petra Bahr, Christoph Ellsiepen, Matthias Freudenberg, Gerald Hartung, Christina Hoegen-Rohls, Tom Kleffmann, Dietrich Korsch, Christof Landmesser, Christoph Markschies, Peter McLaughlin, Jörn Müller, Hanns Nissing, Enno Rudolph, Stephan Schaede, Konrad Schmid, Christian Senkel, Joachim von Soosten, Philipp Stoellger. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to offer a reconstruction of a challenge to intuition-based armchair philosophy that has been put forward by experimental philosophers of a restrictionist stripe, which I will call the 'master argument'. I will then discuss a number of popular objections to this argument and explain why they either fail to cast doubt on its first, empirical premise or do not go deep enough to make for a lasting rebuttal. Next, I will consider two more promising (...) objections, the grounding objection and the expertise objection, which aim at the second, epistemic premise of the argument. Against this background, I will then suggest what I call 'conservative restrictionism' as the most reasonable default reaction to the experimentalist challenge, which is a combination of the two views of local restrictionism and methodological conservativism. (shrink)

Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay (...) intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus. (shrink)

In recent work, E. J. Lowe presents an essence-based account of our knowledge of metaphysical modality that he claims to be superior to its main competitors. I argue that knowledge of essences alone, without knowledge of a suitable bridge principle, is insufficient for knowing that something is metaphysically necessary or metaphysically possible. Yet given Lowe's other theoretical commitments, he cannot account for our knowledge of the needed bridge principle, and so his essence-based modal epistemology remains incomplete. In addition to that, (...) Lowe's account implies a psychologically unrealistic reconstruction of how we ordinarily acquire knowledge of metaphysical modalities. The discussion of Lowe's suggestive essence-based account is also intended as a case study that illustrates a more general problem in the epistemology of modality: the great difficulty of explaining our modal knowledge in terms of a single overtly nonmodal kind of knowledge. The failure of Lowe's account suggests that such a sweeping reductive explanation of our modal knowledge might simply not be available. This should be good news for those philosophers who champion less reductive or more pluralistic accounts of our modal knowledge. (shrink)

Der Weg zum Werk, von U. Schöndorfer.--Von Augustinus bis zu Pascual Jordan, von B. Bavink.--Begriff der Potenz und neue Physik, von H. Conrad-Martius.--Zur Terminologie der Naturphilosophie, von A. Dempf.--Die Elementenlehre des Platon und Demokrit, von P. Wilpert. Prinzipielle Subjecktivierungsgrenzen, von A. Konrad.--Zur Fritz Mauthners Sprachkritik, von Stürmann.--Positivismus und gefährdete Humanität, von F. Joachim v. Rintelen.--Zum Problem der sittlichen Sanktion, von A. Wilmsen. Das existenzielle Denken. Sein Wert und seine Grenzen, von A. Guggenberger.

There is a line of reasoning in metaepistemology that is congenial to naturalism and hard to resist, yet ultimately misguided: that knowledge might be a natural kind, and that this would undermine the use of conceptual analysis in the theory of knowledge. In this paper, I first bring out various problems with Hilary Kornblith’s argument from the causal–explanatory indispensability of knowledge to the natural kindhood of knowledge. I then criticize the argument from the natural kindhood of knowledge against the method (...) of conceptual analysis in the theory of knowledge. A natural motivation for this argument is the following seemingly plausible principle: if knowledge is a natural kind, then the concept of knowledge is a natural kind concept. Since this principle lacks adequate support, the crucial semantic claim that the concept of knowledge is a natural kind concept must be defended in some more direct way. However, there are two striking epistemic disanalogies between the concept of knowledge and paradigmatic natural kind concepts that militate against this semantic claim. Conceptual analyses of knowledge are not affected by total error, and the proponents of such analyses are not subject to a priori conceptual obliviousness. I conclude that the argument from natural kindhood does not succeed in undermining the use of conceptual analysis in the theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is one of the most recent and controversial developments in philosophy. Its basic idea is rather simple: to test philosophical thought experiments and philosophers’ intuitions about them with scientific methods, mostly taken from psychology and the social sciences. The ensuing experimental results, such as the cultural relativity of certain philosophical intuitions, has engaged – and at times infuriated – many more traditionally minded "armchair" philosophers since then. In this volume, the metaphilosophical reflection on experimental philosophy is brought yet (...) another step forward by engaging some of its most renowned proponents and critics in a lively and controversial debate. In addition to that, the volume also contains original experimental research on personal identity and philosophical temperament, as well as state-of-the-art essays on central metaphilosophical issues, like thought experiments, the nature of intuitions, or the status of philosophical expertise. -/- This book was originally published as a special issue of Philosophical Psychology. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis von Glauben und Denken kann als Angelpunkt und Motor der neuzeitlichen Geschichte begriffen werden. Walter Falks Werk zeigt in singulärer Weise, auf welchen teilweise verdrängten Fundamenten der wissenschaftliche Fortschrittsglaube beruhte und bietet eine kritische Analyse der 'Legitimität der Neuzeit', die ebenbürtig neben den großen Arbeiten von Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault oder Joachim Ritter bestehen kann. Walter Falk geht anhand der Metapher von der Weltmaschine, die sich seit 1770 in verschiedenen Texten und in Modifikationen findet, der Fortschrittsgeschichte und (...) ihrer Kritiker nach. So entwirft er, vor dem Hintergrund einer neuartigen Epochendeutung ein geistesgeschichtliches Panorama, das von Comte und Schlegel und Kleist bis zu Kafka und Heidegger reicht. Das Buch zeigt vor dem Hintergrund der Wissenschaftsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, wie die Gestalt des personalen Gottes in den großen geistes- und naturwissenschaftlichen Innovationsschüben der Moderne zunehmend wieder in den Blick genommen wurde. Dabei erfahren die Ansätze von Foucault, Konrad Lorenz oder René Girard eine eigenwillige und profilierte, Natur- und Kulturwissenschaften innovativ miteinander verbindende Deutung. Das eigentliche Interesse des Buches ist aber nicht historischer Natur. Falk demonstriert eindrucksvoll, wie Glauben und Denken in der Gegenwart zugleich differenziert und integriert werden müssen, um auf der Höhe der Moderne wieder fruchtbar in ein Gespräch kommen zu können. (shrink)

Two crucial questions, if unanswered, impede our understanding of Aristotle’s account of pleasure inenx.4-5: (1) What are the activities that pleasure is said to complete? (2) In virtue of what does pleasurealwaysaccompany these activities? The answers fall in place if we read Aristotle as responding to the Delian challenge that the finest, best and most pleasant are not united in one and the same thing (eni.8). I propose an ‘ethical’ reading ofenx.4 according to which the best activities in question are (...) those integral to the exercise of virtue. (shrink)

The Swamping Problem is one of the standard objections to reliabilism. If one assumes, as reliabilism does, that truth is the only non-instrumental epistemic value, then the worry is that the additional value of knowledge over true belief cannot be adequately explained, for reliability only has instrumental value relative to the non-instrumental value of truth. Goldman and Olsson reply to this objection that reliabilist knowledge raises the objective probability of future true beliefs and is thus more valuable than mere true (...) belief. I argue against their proposed solution to the Swamping Problem that the conditional probability of future true beliefs given knowledge is not clearly higher than given mere true belief. (shrink)

Kant famously argued that, from experience, we can only learn how something actually is, but not that it must be so. In this paper, I defend an improved version of Kant's argument for the existence of a priori knowledge, the Modal Argument , against recent objections by Casullo and Kitcher. For the sake of the argument, I concede Casullo's claim that we may know certain counterfactuals in an empirical way and thereby gain epistemic access to some nearby, nomologically possible worlds. (...) But I maintain that our beliefs about metaphysical necessities still cannot be justified empirically. Furthermore, I reject Casullo's deflationary thesis about the significance of such justification. Kitcher's most troublesome objection is that we can gain any modal justification whatsoever through testimony , i.e. in an experiential way. This can be countered by distinguishing between productive sources of justification, like perception, and merely reproductive sources, like testimony. Thus, some productive a priori source will always be needed somewhere. (shrink)

The expression pain refers to a phenomenon intrinsic to individuals. The object of the language of pain is restricted to an individual experience which excludes any form of direct access by others. Speaking about pain is thus one of the most difficult forms of linguistic activities, as has been repeatedly pointed out by Wittgenstein. The difficulties involved in this type of communication are not only dependent upon individual linguistic ability but are also clearly reflected in the state and structure of (...) the linguistic means which are at the disposal of the speakers of a language. Linguistic means vary in status and complexity with respect to the ends which they can be used for.In this paper, I discuss two aspects of communicating pain : types of expression which are involved in speaking about pain, and linguistic activities which are carried out when speaking about pain. The two aspects are interrelated. My analysis makes use of categories belonging to the theory of linguistic activity and to the extended field theory of language. (shrink)

We investigate some logics with Henkin quantifiers. For a given logic L, we consider questions of the form: what is the degree of the set of L–tautologies in a poor vocabulary (monadic or empty)? We prove that the set of tautologies of the logic with all Henkin quantifiers in empty vocabulary L*∅ is of degree 0’. We show that the same holds also for some weaker logics like L ∅(Hω) and L ∅(Eω). We show that each logic of the form (...) L ∅ (k)(Q), with the number of variables restricted to k, is decidable. Nevertheless – following the argument of M. Mostowski from [Mos89] – for each reasonable set theory no concrete algorithm can provably decide L (k) (Q), for some (Q). We improve also some results related to undecidability and expressibility for logics L(H4) and L(F2) of Krynicki and M. Mostowski from [KM92]. (shrink)

In this brief introduction, we would first like to explain how these two special issues of Philosophical Psychology ( 23.3 and 23.4 ) actually came about. In addition, we will provide an outline of their overall structure and shortly summarize the featured papers.