In classical philosophy of time, present time mainly has been considered in its fleetingness: it is transition, in the Platonic meaning of the sudden or in the Aristotelian sense of discreet moment and isolated intensity that escapes possible perception. Through the idea of subjective constitution of time, Husserl’s phenomenology tries to spread the moment. He transcends the idea of linear and empty time in modern philosophy. Phenomenological description of time experience analyses the filled character of the moment that can be (...) detained in the performance of consciousness. As a consequence of the temporality of consciousness, he nevertheless remains in the temporal conception of presence. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, however, is able to grasp the spacial meaning of presence. In his perspective of a phenomenology of perception, presence can be understood as a space surrounding the body, as a field of present things given in perception. Merleau-Ponty recovers the ancient sense of ‘praesentia’ as a fundamental concept of being in the world. (shrink)

This article responds to Barry Maguire's recent attempt to justify partiality within a consequentialist framework.

Abstract“Sign stimuli” elicit specific patterns of behavior when an organism's motivation is appropriate. In the toad, visually released prey-catching involves orienting toward the prey, approaching, fixating, and snapping. For these action patterns to be selected and released, the prey must be recognized and localized in space. Toads discriminate prey from nonprey by certain spatiotemporal stimulus features. The stimulus-response relations are mediated by innate releasing mechanisms (RMs) with recognition properties partly modifiable by experience. Striato-pretecto-tectal connectivity determines the RM's recognition and localization (...) properties, whereas medialpallio-thalamo-tectal circuitry makes the system sensitive to changes in internal state and to prior history of exposure to stimuli. RMs encode the diverse stimulus conditions referring to the same prey object through different combinations of “specialized” tectal neurons, involving cells selectively tuned to prey features. The prey-selective neurons express the outcome of information processing in functional units consisting of interconnected cells. Excitatory and inhibitory interactions among feature-sensitive tectal and pretectal neurons specify the perceptual operations involved in distinguishing the prey from its background, selecting its features, and discriminating it from predators. Other connections indicate stimulus location. The results of these analyses are transmitted by specialized neurons projecting from the tectum to bulbar/spinal motor systems, providing a sensorimotor interface. Specific combinations of such projective neurons – mediating feature- and space-related messages – form “command releasing systems” that activate corresponding motor pattern generators for appropriate prey-catching action patterns. (shrink)

In this chapter, I will address the philosophical ambivalence of the concept of Willkür in and after Kant. The aim of my chapter is to defend it against the charge of irrationality and mere chance, and to rehabilitate it from a historical and analytic point of view. I will analyze Kant’s use of the word “Willkür”, and chronologically follow the semantic and systematic changes in his philosophical work. Finally, I address recent attempts to revitalize the concept of Willkür in the (...) analytic debate by referring to the work of Harry Frankfurt and Robert Kane. I shall argue that we need to distinguish between two kinds of libera arbitria. Whereas the liberum arbitrium indifferentiae can be interpreted in terms of the pejorative sense of “Willkür”—as mere chance—the liberum arbitrium voluntatis equals a reflective kind of Willkür—literal Will-kür —which involves freedom of the will. (shrink)

We give characterizations for the sentences "Every $\Sigma^1_2$-set is measurable" and "Every $\Delta^1_2$-set is measurable" for various notions of measurability derived from well-known forcing partial orderings.

The question of what characterizes feelings of being alive is a puzzling and controversial one. Are we dealing with a unique affective phenomenon or can it be integrated into existing classifications of emotions and moods? What might be the natural basis for such feelings? What could be considered their specifically human dimension? These issues are addressed by researchers from various disciplines, including philosophy of mind and emotions, psychology, and history of art. This volume contains original papers on the topic of (...) feelings of being alive by Fiorella Battaglia, Eva-Maria Engelen, Joerg Fingerhut, Thomas Fuchs, Alice Holzhey-Kunz, Matthias Jung, Tanja Klemm, Riccardo Manzotti, Sabine Marienberg, Matthew Ratcliffe, Arbogast Schmitt, Jan Slaby, and Achim Stephan. (shrink)

A widely held view concerning the justification of associative duties is the so-called relationships view, according to which associative duties within personal relationships arise because of the value of those relationships. Against this view, it has been argued that there can be cases of undemanding friendships, that is, genuine friendships with no associative duties. In this article, I argue that undemanding friendships do not show that associative duties are not grounded in the value of the relationship that gives rise to (...) them by providing an interpretivist account of the normativity of friendships. I argue that friendships are complex values that need to be interpreted in order to determine which response to them would be appropriate, and that understanding one's friendship as undemanding is one valid interpretation of the value of friendship. Subsequently, I demonstrate that this solution is not ad hoc, because friendship is not the only complex value that needs to be interpreted. (shrink)

We show the consistency of ${\frak o} <{\frak d}$ where ${\frak o}$ is the size of the smallest off-branch family, and ${\frak d}$ is as usual the dominating number. We also prove the consistency of ${\frak b} < {\frak a}$ with large continuum. Here, ${\frak b}$ is the unbounding number, and ${\frak a}$ is the almost disjointness number.

Let A[ω]ω be a maximal almost disjoint family and assume P is a forcing notion. Say A is P-indestructible if A is still maximal in any P-generic extension. We investigate P-indestructibility for several classical forcing notions P. In particular, we provide a combinatorial characterization of P-indestructibility and, assuming a fragment of MA, we construct maximal almost disjoint families which are P-indestructible yet Q-destructible for several pairs of forcing notions . We close with a detailed investigation of iterated Sacks indestructibility.

We investigate which filters onωcan contain towers, that is, a modulo finite descending sequence without any pseudointersection. We prove the following results:Many classical examples of nice tall filters contain no towers.It is consistent that tall analytic P-filters contain towers of arbitrary regular height.It is consistent that all towers generate nonmeager filters, in particular Borel filters do not contain towers.The statement “Every ultrafilter contains towers.” is independent of ZFC.Furthermore, we study many possible logical implications between the existence of towers in filters, (...) inequalities between cardinal invariants of filters $,${\rm{co}}{{\rm{f}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$,${\rm{no}}{{\rm{n}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$, and${\rm{co}}{{\rm{v}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$), and the existence of Luzin type families, that is, if${\cal F}$is a filter then${\cal X} \subseteq {[\omega ]^\omega }$is an${\cal F}$-Luzin family if$\left\{ {X \in {\cal X}:|X \setminus F| = \omega } \right\}$is countable for every$F \in {\cal F}$. (shrink)

When a conflict of duties arises, a resolution is often sought by use of an ordering of priority or importance. This paper examines how such a conflict resolution works, compares mechanisms that have been proposed in the literature, and gives preference to one developed by Brewka and Nebel. I distinguish between two cases – that some conflicts may remain unresolved, and that a priority ordering can be determined that resolves all – and provide semantics and axiomatic systems for accordingly defined (...) dyadic deontic operators. (shrink)

Kant’s moral philosophy is challenged by the so-called “Socratic Paradox”: If free will and pure practical reason are to be identified, as Kant argues, then there seems to be no room for immoral actions that are to be imputed to our individual freedom. The paper argues that Kant’s conception of rationalizing helps us to avoid the Socratic Paradox, and to understand how immoral actions can be imputed to our individual freedom and responsibility. In rationalizing, we misuse our capacity of reason (...) in order to construct the illusion according to which we are not bound to the absolute demand of the moral law, but rather subject to exceptions and excuses. Finally, the paper interprets the three rules of “common sense” in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in terms of an antidote to rationalizing. (shrink)

We investigate some aspects of bounding, splitting, and almost disjointness. In particular, we investigate the relationship between the bounding number, the closed almost disjointness number, the splitting number, and the existence of certain kinds of splitting families.

In this article I argue that the method of normative reconstruction that is underlying Freedom’s Right undermines Critical Theory’s aspiration to be a force that is unreservedly critical and progressive. I start out by giving a brief account of the four premises of the method of normative reconstruction and unpack their implications for how Honneth conceptualizes social pathologies and misdevelopments, specifically that these notions are no longer linked to radical critique and normative revolution. In the second part, I demonstrate that (...) abandoning forms of radical critique and normative revolution is internally linked to adopting this method, before arguing that Freedom’s Right entails no resources to account for why abandoning them does not amount to a deficiency. In the final part, I point out two problematic implications of turning away from radical critique and normative revolution for the very project Honneth pursues in Freedom’s Right. I show that Honneth’s own view about the limited scope of application of the method of normative reconstruction and his account of the dangers associated with social misdevelopments give us reasons to consider this method to be incomplete. Finally, I contend that the explanatory power of Freedom’s Right is dubious because methodological premises that form part of normative reconstruction lead Honneth to ignore relevant alternative explanations of processes of deviation and disassociation from norms of social freedom, which he characterizes as social misdevelopments. (shrink)

Die sprachliche und soziale Natur der Erkenntnis ist eine Grundeinsicht der Moderne. Doch welchen Spielraum lässt sie noch der Kritik, der distanzierten Prüfung der eigenen Sprache und Lebensform? Vor dem Hintergrund des Werkes Stanley Cavells fragt dieses Buch nach dem Verhältnis von Lebensform und Selbsterkenntnis. In ungewohnter Weise liest es Wittgenstein und Foucault als komplementäre Antwortstrategien auf dieses Grundproblem: Philosophie muss als eine "Arbeit an sich", als körperliche "Selbsttechnik" verstanden werden. Nicht ethische Programmatik, so kann gezeigt werden, sondern systematische Konsequenz (...) führt zu einer Engführung von Philosophie und Lebenspraxis. (shrink)

Brendle, J., H. Judah and S. Shelah, Combinatorial properties of Hechler forcing, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 59 185–199. Using a notion of rank for Hechler forcing we show: assuming ωV1 = ωL1, there is no real in V[d] which is eventually different from the reals in L[ d], where d is Hechler over V; adding one Hechler real makes the invariants on the left-hand side of Cichoń's diagram equal ω1 and those on the right-hand side equal 2ω and (...) produces a maximal almost disjoint family of subsets of ω of size ω1; there is no perfect set of random reals over V in V[ r][ d], where r is random over V and d Hechler over V[r], thus answering a question of the first and second authors. (shrink)

Ever since the seminal work of Paul Grice, tautologies such as Business is business have been discussed from a number of angles. While most approaches assume that tautological utterances have to do with the operation of conversational maxims, an integrated analysis is still lacking. This paper makes an attempt at analysing tautologies within the framework of Levinson, who proposes a distinction between three pragmatic levels, namely Indexical Pragmatics, Gricean Pragmatics 1, and Gricean Pragmatics 2. It is shown that observations of (...) Ward and Hirschberg on the exclusion of alternatives, the claim of Autenrieth that the second NP in nominal equatives is predicative, and the recent insights of Bulhof and Gimbel on `deep' tautology, may be fruitfully integrated within Levinson's framework. The gist of this paper is to show that tautologies are not as tautological as once thought, because implicatures influence their truth conditions. Data are drawn from the author's corpus of authentic German examples. (shrink)

Consider waiting in lines. On the one hand, they offer an ad hoc illustration of how the scarcity of commodities relates to supply and demand. In this respect, they recall what neoclassical economics posit as the general law of the market. On the other hand, queuing is often referred to as a basic form of social interaction among those who wait. In this perspective, waiting is not about individuals waiting for something, but about waiting together, social gatherings, collectives, or communities. (...) On a more conceptual level, L’empire de la valeur. Refonder l’économie pushes these opposing positions to their extremes and clearly opts for the latter . Rejecting neoclassical frameworks for treating scarcity as a reality prior to exchange it holds that value results from a social process . As indicated by the book’s subtitle, this is not a minor operation. According to André Orléan, economist (Paris School of Economic .. (shrink)

We show that every dominating analytic set in the Baire space has a dominating closed subset. This improves a theorem of Spinas [15] saying that every dominating analytic set contains the branches of a uniform tree, i.e. a superperfect tree with the property that for every splitnode all the successor splitnodes have the same length. In [15], a subset of the Baire space is called u-regular if either it is not dominating or it contains the branches of a uniform tree, (...) and it was proved that Σ21-Kσ-regularity implies Σ21-u-regularity. Here we show that these properties are in fact equivalent. Since the proof of analytic u-regularity uses a game argument it was clear that determinacy implies u-regularity of all sets. Here we show that an inaccessible cardinal is enough to construct a model for projective u-regularity, namely it holds in Solovay's model. Finally we show that forcing with uniform trees is equivalent to Laver forcing. (shrink)

This paper discusses under which circumstances grateful responses can become intrinsically bad. It is argued that gratitude should be understood as an appropriate response to value and that it is subject to the so-called recursive account of intrinsic value, according to which appropriate responses to value are intrinsically good, and inappropriate responses to value are intrinsically bad. As a result, gratitude can become intrinsically bad in two cases: i) when gratitude has the wrong object, i.e., is a pro-response to an (...) intrinsically bad act, ii) when the grateful response is grossly disproportionate, i.e., the intensity of the response does not match the goodness of the act that it is a response to. (shrink)

Contrary to Karl Leonhard Reinhold's theoretical critique of Kant's philosophy, his practical critique has been almost unknown. In my paper, I shall reconstruct Reinhold's practical philosophy after Kant. I will concentrate on the so‐called Reinhold's dilemma, which concerns the problem of moral imputability in the case of immoral actions in Kant. Also, I shall explain how Reinhold tried to escape this dilemma by introducing a new action theory and by sharply distinguishing between reason and will. Finally, I shall evaluate Reinhold's (...) practical significance by relating his conception of individual freedom to recent theories of volitional self‐determination. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question whetherbullshitis a reasonable pragmatic category. In the first part of the paper, drawing on the insights of Harry Frankfurt’s seminal essay, bullshit is defined as an act of insincere asserting where the speaker shows a loose concern for the truth, and does not want the addressee to become aware of condition. The author adds to this definition the condition requiring that the bullshitter expresses morecertaintythan is adequate with respect to condition. In the second part of (...) the paper, it is discussed whether the above definition can cope with special types of bullshit considered to be a challenge to Frankfurt’s definition. These areevasive bullshitting,bullshit lies, andbald-faced bullshitting. It is shown that there is hope for establishing a reasonable pragmatic category of bullshitting if it is related to certain levels of pragmatic description, e.g. conversational implicatures, that can explain the putative challenges. (shrink)

We introduce the property “F-linked” of subsets of posets for a given free filter F on the natural numbers, and define the properties “μ-F-linked” and “θ-F-Knaster” for posets in a natural way. We show that θ-F-Knaster posets preserve strong types of unbounded families and of maximal almost disjoint families. Concerning iterations of such posets, we develop a general technique to construct θ-Fr-Knaster posets (where Fr is the Frechet ideal) via matrix iterations of <θ-ultrafilter-linked posets (restricted to some level of the (...) matrix). This is applied to prove consistency results about Cichoń's diagram (without using large cardinals) and to prove the consistency of the fact that, for each Yorioka ideal, the four cardinal invariants associated with it are pairwise different. At the end, we show that three strongly compact cardinals are enough to force that Cichoń's diagram can be separated into 10 different values. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Sven Danielsson argued that the ‘original paradoxes' of deontic logic, in particular Ross's paradox and Prior's paradox of derived obligation, can be solved by restricting the modal inheritance rule. I argue that this does not solve the paradoxes.

Throughout its history, analytic philosophy has established a decidedly anti-rhetoric self-understanding. Yet the historical development of analytic philosophy, leading from Russell to Quine and Davidson, successively puts this anti-rhetorical ideals in question. Even though the rhetorics of clarity and objectivity remain, the discussions of post-analytic philosophy focus more and more an an understanding of language which is forced to acknowledge its irreducible practical and situational aspects. Analytical philosophy, then, should be seen as a decidedly anti-rhetoric tradition which tries to keep (...) up the spirit of scientific enlightenment in times of growing skepticism -- and which is driven, by the very force of clarity and a better understanding, to develop a picture of language which undermines this ideal at least in some aspects. (shrink)

In this paper, I will reconstruct Kant’s theory of illusion from the perspective of his transcendental philosophy. I argue that it is Kant’s theory of dialectic as the “logic of illusion” that grounds both theoretical and practical error and that traces them back to a common root: the operation of rationalizing by theoretical and practical reason. I analyze different kinds of theoretical and practical errors and show how they are grounded in reason’s general propensity to rationalize. The paper exposes this (...) common root and shows which rules Kant develops in order to avoid rationalizing. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Kant’s theory of error in theoretical and practical terms, not only from a moral-psychological perspective, but also from the broader perspective of his transcendental philosophy. Kant’s theory of error will be interpreted as a central part of his transcendental philosophy, insofar as it is related to his doctrine of reason. For it is precisely Kant’s theory of dialectic as the »logic of appearance« that deals with the reasons that concern theoretical error as (...) well as moral misconduct and that traces theoretical and practical error back to a common root: the phenomenon of rational self-deception. (shrink)

Beim Stichwort ”Kognition“ denken die meisten an das Gehirn, Computermodelle oder Informationsverarbeitung. In der realen Welt treffen wir aber immer nur auf Wesen mit Körpern, die in eine Umwelt eingebunden und in ihr aktiv sind. Kognition findet nicht im Kopf statt, sondern in der Welt. So lautet der Grundgedanke der Philosophie der Verkörperung. Die Hinwendung zu Körper und Umwelt stellt eine der vielleicht weitreichendsten Neuorientierungen der modernen Kognitionswissenschaft und Philosophie dar, die auch unser Verständnis von Wissenschaft und Kultur prägen wird. (...) Der Band versammelt die Grundlagentexte zu diesem Thema zum ersten Mal in deutscher Sprache. (shrink)

The discovery of “molecular chaperones” has dramatically changed our concept of cellular protein folding. Rather than folding spontaneously, most newly synthesized polypeptide chains seem to acquire their native conformation in a reaction mediated by these versatile helper proteins. Understanding the structure and function of molecular chaperones is likely to yield useful applications for medicine and biotechnology in the future.

In this paper I discuss Plato's conception of expertise as a part of the Platonic theory of a good, successful life (eudaimonia). In various Platonic dialogues, Socrates argues that the good life requires a certain kind of knowledge that guides all our good, beneficial actions: the “knowledge of the good and bad”, which is to be acquired by “questioning ourselves and examining our and others’ beliefs”. This knowledge encompasses the particular knowledge of how to recognize experts in a given technical (...) domain. The central element in Socrates’ account of an expert is what I call the truth-and-caring criterion: an expert has to make seeking the truth and avoiding (avoidable) error her supreme epistemic goal and she has to make caring for common goods the supreme goal of practising her expertise. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 16 Heft: 1 Seiten: 115-140.