Als geronnene Wiederholungen prägen Rituale unseren Alltag und unser Zusammenleben maßgeblich. Nicht von ungefähr galten sie lange Zeit als Inbegriff des Konservativen, Starren und Förmlichen. Eine gänzlich durchritualisierte Welt wäre zweifellos eine unfreie Welt. Im Zeitalter der Deregulierung, der Hyperaktivität und des Aufmerksamkeitsdefizits wird nun ihre Halt gebende und strukturierende Seite wiederentdeckt.Die AutorInnen reflektieren gesellschaftskritisch Theorien und psychoanalytische Erfahrungen rund um das Thema Rituale und widmen sich den folgenden Fragen: Werden Rituale zu Widerstandsnestern gegen die allgemeine Flüchtigkeit? Können sie als (...) Angelpunkte des Innehaltens und als Wegbahner unbeirrten Denkens eine neue kritische Potenz erhalten?Mit Beiträgen von Thomas Dietzel, Gesa Foken, Dirk Hofmeister, Katharina Lacina, Konrad Paul Liessmann, Nina Reis Saroldi, Elisabeth Rohr, Jochen Schade, Hans-Ernst Schiller, Edgar Weiß, Laura Wolf und Carsten Wonneberger. (shrink)

Das Gewissen gilt heute als eines der vorrangigen Kennzeichen der menschlichen Person. Bis heute sind die Bestimmungen des Thomas von massgeblicher Bedeutung fur sein Verstandnis. Der fur seine Gewisssenslehre bedeutendste Text de verritate 16-17 wird hier erstmals in einer vollstandigen zweisprachigen Ausgabe vorgelegt.

Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over (...) the interests of the present generation. Non-additive axiologies, on the other hand, need not assign great importance to large changes in population size. We show, however, that when there is a large enough `background population' unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with additive axiologies—for instance, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from the scale of potential future populations for the astronomical importance of avoiding existential catastrophe, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may succeed in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle. (shrink)

Now available in a Harper Colophon edition, this classic book has revolutionized thinking throughout the Western world about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. Book jacket.

Abstract:This essay explores key values of John Lachs's work, especially freedom, diversity, and human flourishing, when applied to the history of the philosophy of education as well as to the practical problems of policy and implementation today in American schools. I consider the importance and tensions involved in these values in the thinking of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Dewey. Next, I examine necessary and then avoidable challenges of operationalizing freedom and diversity in schools, especially in tensions with recent policy (...) initiatives that threaten freedom and diversity for human flourishing. The aim here is to note the central importance of the values that Lachs has long championed, while attending also to the risks and dangers that misunderstanding and narrow thinking pose about them when applied to American public schools. Ultimately, I argue that while advocacy for liberty sometimes raises profound problems in the sphere of public education, democratic education is enriched immeasurably when it enables and empowers freedom to pursue diverse forms of flourishing. (shrink)

Thomas Sattig develops a novel philosophical picture of ordinary objects such as persons, tables, and trees. He carves a middle way between classical mereology and Aristotelian hylomorphism, and argues that objects lead double lives. They are compounds of matter and form, and each object's matter and form have different qualitative profiles.

Dans sa violente charge contre la Révolution française, Edmund Burke avait élevé le débat politique à un niveau philosophique. Son argument le plus profond consistait à reprocher aux révolutionnaires de pécher par apriorisme, en cherchant à déduire, comme des géomètres, une nouvelle constitution à partir des principes abstraits énoncés dans la Déclaration des droits de l’homme. Reprise par les disciples allemands de Burke, cette critique de la méthode adoptée par la Constituante tirait des postulats empiristes des Lumières anglo-écossaises toutes les (...) implications conservatrices que recelaient déjà les textes politiques et historiques de Hume. Or c’est d’emblée sur ce terrain spéculatif que se joue, chez Fichte, la défense du droit de révolution. Reprochant à l’empirisme de réduire l’esprit au « mécanisme aveugle de l’association des idées », passivement déterminé par une extériorité en soi, Fichte entend au contraire fonder l’expérience elle-même sur l’activité d’un « Moi-en-soi », absolument indépendant. Conçu comme causalité libre, pouvant donc s’affranchir des « conjonctions coutumières » humiennes pour commencer une nouvelle série dans l’ordre des phénomènes, l’homme, pour Fichte, n’a pas seulement la « faculté de se perfectionner », mais la loi de sa liberté lui en fait même un devoir. Au regard de cet impératif catégorique de perfectionnement, il n’y a pas de Common Law qui tienne. Aussi Fichte ne recule-t-il pas devant la révolution, si les institutions du passé font obstacle à la destination de l’homme. (shrink)

With each of our three criminal-law topics—defining offenses, apprehending suspects, and establishing punishments—we feel, I believe, strong moral resistance to the idea that our practices should be settled by a prospective-participant perspective. This becomes quite clear when we look at how the “reforms” suggested by institutional viewing might combine once we consider all three topics together: imagine a more extensive and swifter use of the death penalty in homicide cases coupled with somewhat lower standards of evidence; or think of backing (...) a strict-liability criminal statute with the death penalty. Of course, such “reforms” would increase the execution of innocents; but, their proponents will tell us, any penal system involves the punishment of some innocents, and, if it provides for the death penalty, the execution of some innocents. Moreover, why is it worse for innocents to be punished than for innocents to suffer an equivalent harm in some other way? Formulated from a prospective-participant perspective: Why not run a small risk of being innocently executed in exchange for reducing, much more significantly, the risk of dying prematurely in other ways? (shrink)

Thomas Sattig develops a comprehensive framework for doing philosophy of time, and offers an original three-dimensionalist picture of the material world. He brings together a variety of different perspectives, linking our ordinary conception of time with the physicist's conception, and linking metaphysical questions about time with questions in the philosophy of language.

In the face of longstanding philosophical debates on the nature of hatred and an ever-growing interest in the underlying social-psychological function of group-directed or genocidal hatred, the peculiar affective intentionality of hatred is still very little understood. By drawing on resources from classical phenomenology, recent social-scientific research and analytic philosophy of emotions, I shall argue that the affective intentionality of hatred is distinctive in three interrelated ways: it has an overgeneralizing, indeterminate affective focus, which typically leads to a form of (...) collectivization of the target; short of a determinate affective focus, haters derive the indeed extreme affective powers of the attitude not in reaction to any specific features or actions of the targets or from some phenomenological properties of the attitude but, rather, from the commitment to the attitude itself; finally, in sharing this commitment to hate with others, hatred involves a certain negative social dialectics, robustly reinforces itself and becomes entrenched as a shared habitus. (shrink)

This paper examines H.A. Prichard's defense of the view that moral duty is underivative, as reflected in his argument that it is a mistake to ask “Why ought I to do what I morally ought?”, because the only possible answer is “Because you morally ought to.” This view was shared by other philosophers of Prichard's period, from Henry Sidgwick through A.C. Ewing, but Prichard stated it most forcefully and defended it best. The paper distinguishes three stages in Prichard's argument: one (...) appealing to his conceptual minimalism, one an epistemological argument that parallels Moore's response to skepticism about the external world, and one arguing that attempts to justify moral duties on non-moral grounds distort the phenomena by giving those duties the wrong explanation or ground. The paper concludes by considering Prichard's critique of ancient ethics and in particular the ethics of Aristotle. The paper is broadly sympathetic to Prichard's position and arguments; its aim is partly to make a case for him as a central figure in the history of ethics. (shrink)

Immunology is central to contemporary biology and medicine, but it also provides novel philosophical insights. Its most significant contribution to philosophy concerns the understanding of biological individuality: what a biological individual is, what makes it unique, how its boundaries are established and what ensures its identity through time. Immunology also offers answers to some of the most interesting philosophical questions. What is the definition of life? How are bodily systems delineated? How do the mind and the body interact? In this (...) Element, Thomas Pradeu considers the ways in which immunology can shed light on these and other important philosophical issues. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

This article develops a social epistemological analysis of Web-based search engines, addressing the following questions. First, what epistemic functions do search engines perform? Second, what dimensions of assessment are appropriate for the epistemic evaluation of search engines? Third, how well do current search engines perform on these? The article explains why they fulfil the role of a surrogate expert, and proposes three ways of assessing their utility as an epistemic tool—timeliness, authority prioritisation, and objectivity. “Personalisation” is a current trend in (...) Internet-delivered services, and consists in tailoring online content to the interests of the individual user. It is argued here that personalisation threatens the objectivity of search results. Objectivity is a public good; so there is a prima facie case for government regulation of search engines. (shrink)

Thomas Wheatland examines the influence of the Frankfurt School, or Horkheimer Circle, and how they influenced American social thought and postwar German sociology.

Kant speaks repeatedly about the relations between ends or aims and scientific research, but the topic has mostly been ignored. What is the role of ends, especially (though not exclusively) practical ones, in his views on science? I will show that while Kant leaves ample space for recognizing a function of ends both in the definition and the pursuit of inquiry, and in the further practical application of scientific cognition, he does not claim that science is simply an instrument for (...) achieving practical ends. I explain his complex conception, pointing out that Kant argues (1) that the sciences require ends for their very definition, (2) that ends come in fundamentally different kinds, (3) that the relation between science and ends requires the rational determination and hierarchization of all our ends, with “wisdom” as the highest, and (4) that this determination and hierarchization – which ought to be done by metaphysics – has itself to be carried out in a “scientific way”. I show further that (5) Kant gives sui generis weight to the epistemic aims and standards of science and to the autonomy of science from our practical lives. This places his position between separatism and anti-separatism with regard to the relation between science and our ends or values. (shrink)

To get an initial grip of what is and, in particular, what is not at stake in the Phenomenology of SE, it is helpful to distinguish four dimensions of the sociality of emotions. As we shall see, the Phenomenology of emotions, in the sense in which I will [aut]Walther, Gerda’s account, is primarily, though certainly not exclusively, concerned with the fourth dimension. Roughly, the three first layers or levels in which social relations and facts come into play in the affective (...) life of individuals and groups are i) the interpersonal, ii) the Group and intergroup, and iii) the sociological and sociocultural dimensions. Whereas most phenomenologists, and [aut]Walther, Gerda, touch upon the interpersonal and Group-level dimensions and analyzing various collective and GroupPhenomena), the intergroup and sociological and sociocultural levels have been mined extensively by sociologists, as well as cross-cultural and social psychologists. Here is how the social [aut]Parkinson, Brian, [aut]Fischer, Agneta[aut]Manstead, Antony S. R. concisely delineate these dimensions. (shrink)

There is a close conceptual relation between the notions of religious disenchantment and scientific naturalism. One way of resisting philosophical and cultural implications of the scientific image and the subsequent process of disenchantment can be found in attempts at sketching a reenchanted worldview. The main issue of accounts of reenchantment can be a rejection of scientific results in a way that flies in the face of good reason. Opposed to such reenchantment is scientific naturalism which implies an entirely disenchanted worldview. (...) However, one of the main problems of scientific naturalism are placement problems. A reenchanted worldview does have the conceptual resources to avoid placement problems, yet seems to throw out the baby with the bathwater. A dilemma results: the Scylla of an undesirable scientific naturalism and the Charybdis of a rampant, seemingly prescientific reenchanted worldview. In this article I argue that there is a safe middle passage between these two options, i.e. the recently proposed liberal naturalism which allows for a moderate normative reenchantment. Liberal naturalism lets us have it both ways: avoiding the placement problems while retaining a necessary and reasonable adherence to science, thereby avoiding both an all-too restrictive scientific naturalism. (shrink)

Lookism refers to discrimination based on physical attractiveness or the lack thereof. A whole host of empirical research suggests that lookism is a pervasive and systematic form of social discrimination. Yet, apart from some attention in ethics and political philosophy, lookism has been almost wholly overlooked in philosophy in general and epistemology in particular. This is particularly salient when compared to other forms of discrimination based on race or gender which have been at the forefront of epistemic injustice as a (...) topic of research. This paper argues that lookism is associated with various forms of epistemic injustice. In the specific case of lookism, hermeneutic injustice takes the shape of the taboo of acknowledging that unattractive people are unattractive. This, on the one hand, results in a hampered understanding of one’s own situation insofar as one is deterred from seeing one’s looks as one major factor for one’s social position. On the other hand, this hermeneutic injustice serves as the backdrop of instances of a special kind testimonial injustice in which the ugly person’s burgeoning realization that their looks influence their social standing detrimentally is discounted due to the pejorative nature of ascribing someone the property of being unattractive or ugly. (shrink)

The purported fact that geometric theories formulated in terms of points and geometric theories formulated in terms of lines are “equally correct” is often invoked in arguments for conceptual relativity, in particular by Putnam and Goodman. We discuss a few notions of equivalence between first-order theories, and we then demonstrate a precise sense in which this purported fact is true. We argue, however, that this fact does not undermine metaphysical realism.

Naturalism is the current orthodoxy in analytic philosophy. Naturalism is the conjunction of the (ontological) claim that all that truly exists are the entities countenanced by the natural sciences and the (epistemological) claim that the only true knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge. Drawing on some recent work in Critical Theory, this article argues that naturalism qualifies as an ideology. This is the case because naturalism meets three key aspects shared by paradigmatic cases of ideology: (i) naturalism has practical consequences and implications (...) of a specific kind, (ii) those endorsing naturalism fall prey to a dual deception: having false meta-level beliefs about naturalism as being without alternative, and (iii) naturalism has a tendency towards self-immunisation. The article ends by suggesting we pull naturalism out of our collective cognitive backgrounds onto the main stage of critical discourse, making it a proper topic for philosophical critique again. (shrink)

This scenario-based study examines the perceptions of university students in the United States and Australia regarding the ethics and acceptability of various sales practices. Study results indicate several significant differences between U.S. and Australian university students regarding the perceptions of ethical and acceptable sales practices. These differences centered on company-salesperson and salesperson-customer relationships. The findings are significant for the employer, and have consequences for customers and competitors. They also have implications for recruiters and managers of salespeople, academics with an interest (...) in understanding cross-national differences in sales ethics, and educators preparing students for future careers as business professionals. (shrink)

Thomas Williams presents the most extensive collection of John Duns Scotus's work on ethics and moral psychology available in English. This accessible and philosophically informed translation includes extended discussions on divine and human freedom, the moral attributes of God, and the relationship between will and intellect.

Visual self-recognition is often controversially cited as an indicator of self-awareness and assessed with the mirror-mark test. Great apes and humans, unlike small apes and monkeys, have repeatedly passed mirror tests, suggesting that the underlying brain processes are homologous and evolved 14-18 million years ago. However, neuroscientific, developmental, and clinical dissociations show that the medium used for self-recognition (mirror vs photograph vs video) significantly alters behavioral and brain responses, likely due to perceptual differences among the different media and prior experience. (...) On the basis of this evidence and evolutionary considerations, we argue that the visual self-recognition skills evident in humans and great apes are a byproduct of a general capacity to collate representations, and need not index other aspects of self-awareness. (shrink)

Theron Pummer's impressive new book The Rules of Rescue seeks to defend effective altruism without taking on the controversial moral theoretical commitments. Through an exploration of the framework of requiring reasons and permitting reasons that is the backbone of his argument, this article raises some doubts about how successful Pummer's strategy of avoidance can be.

[ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY 2023 ESSAY PRIZE WINNER] I argue that the term ‘naturalism’ is so empty of meaning that it is not suitable for serious theorizing in philosophy. In particular, I argue that the question of whether or not some theory or thesis should count as naturalistic is an empty verbal dispute with no further theoretical significance. I also discuss naturalism construed as a methodological thesis and argue that any plausible version will collapse into triviality. Lastly, I briefly discuss (...) the idea that naturalism is not a thesis at all but rather a ‘stance’ and suggest that this too succumbs to the charge of emptiness. I conclude that we should stop talking about naturalism altogether. (shrink)

The Reformed theological tradition has maintained that faith consists in trust, with that trust involving belief of certain doctrinal propositions. This paper has two aims. First, it contributes towards rehabilitating this conception of faith. I start, accordingly, by setting out the Reformers’ basic case: faith consists in trust because faith is a response to the promises of God, by which the Christian receives God’s forgiveness and is united with God. This argument is independent of any commitment to nondoxasticism or doxasticism (...) about faith. Second, it argues for a methodological commitment which the Reformers’ conception of faith-as-trust complies with, which I think is independently compelling, and which has significant implications for contemporary debates on faith: the kind of faith that matters is that which enables the individual to stand justified, or righteous, before God. Philosophical accounts of faith are unavoidably entangled with theological disputes about justification. (shrink)

The major point of contention among the philosophers and mathematicians who have written about the independence results for the continuum hypothesis (CH) and related questions in set theory has been the question of whether these results give reason to doubt that the independent statements have definite truth values. This paper concerns the views of G. Kreisel, who gives arguments based on second order logic that the CH does have a truth value. The view defended here is that although Kreisel's conclusion (...) is correct, his arguments are unsatisfactory. Later sections of the paper advance a different argument that the independence results do not show lack of truth values. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel conceptualization of a type of untruthful speech that is of eminent political relevance but has hitherto been unrecognized: epistemically exploitative bullshit (EEB). Speakers engaging in EEB are bullshitting: they deceive their addressee regarding their unconcern for the very difference between truth and falsity. At the same time, they exploit their discursive victims: they oblige their counterparts to perform unacknowledged and emotionally draining epistemic work to educate the speakers about the addressees' oppression, only to discredit their (...) epistemic trustworthiness. I argue that EEB is irreducible to various recently discussed untruthful speech, and in particular to Frankfurtian bullshit, as well as to epistemic exploitation or other epistemic injustices. Taking inspiration from Sartre's analysis of anti-Semitic discourse, where bullshitting and epistemic exploitation are essentially interlinked, I instead suggest that recognizing the distinctiveness of EEB allows for a more refined conceptualization of these discursive phenomena. Specifically, I show how bad faith and the ensuing collective diffusion and delegation of epistemic responsibility play a so far neglected but key role here. I ultimately demonstrate that with Sartre's help, we can grasp how the existential, interpersonal and institutional dimensions involved in the negotiation of truth seamlessly intersect better than we would with the lens of analytic or critical epistemology alone. (shrink)

Loneliness is commonly conceived of as a topic under the purview of psychology. Empirical research on loneliness utilizes a definition of psychology as essentially subjective, i.e. as a first-personal mental property an individual can have. As a first-personal mental property, subjects have, as it were, privileged access to their state of being lonely. Rehearsing some well-known arguments from later Wittgenstein, I argue that loneliness – contrary to an unargued assumption present in several academic engagements – is not subjective in the (...) sense that whether or not a person is lonely does not in all cases hinge on that person’s subjective mental states. This becomes apparent when considering cases of alienation from self-knowledge (Moran 2001). Using Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world and being-with I argue that such cases from alienation point towards the notion that loneliness is not merely a subjective feeling, but a categorically different privation of the fundamental mode of being with others. (shrink)

This paper considers Aquinas's accounts of the end of human action and the structure of human action, examines the debate between intellectualist and voluntarist interpretations of Aquinas, and corrects mistaken accounts of Aquinas's views on freedom, necessitation, and causation.

While Wittgenstein’s work has been extensively investigated in relation to many other important and influential philosophers, there is very little scholarly work that positively investigates the relationship between the work of Wittgenstein and Wilhelm Dilthey. To the contrary, some commentators like Hacker (2001a) suggest that Dilthey’s work (and that of other hermeneuticists) simply pales or is obsolete in comparison to Wittgenstein’s own insights. Against such assessments, this article posits that Wittgenstein’s and Dilthey’s thought most crucially intersects at the related topics (...) of scientism on the one hand and scientific and philosophical method on the other. In reconstructing Dilthey’s conceptions of understanding versus explaining and central points of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, it becomes apparent that they share a staunch rejection of scientism and use the notion of understanding as a means to prevent methodologies from the natural sciences encroaching onto the human sciences (in Dilthey’s case) and philosophy (in Wittgenstein’s case). Notwithstanding a number of central ways in which these thinkers differ, this article closes by suggesting that there is some evidence according to which Wittgenstein, like Dilthey, can reasonably be understood as championing some central tenets of the hermeneutical tradition. (shrink)

In der 1970 gegründeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien veröffentlicht. Gründungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe (Herausgeber bis 1991), Günther Patzig (bis 1999) und Wolfgang Wieland (bis 2003). Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von Jürgen Mittelstraß mitherausgegeben.

The cross-fruition between analytical philosophy and continental philosophical traditions has stimulated a wide-ranging debate about the role of philosophy and the use of argument and reason in culture. Through a discussion of salient themes in the analytical tradition, in the work of the later Wittgenstein, and in critical theory,Transformative Philosophy articulates a novel conception of philosophy as a transformative care for self and others.

Collects several works covering a variety of political subjects, including independence from Britain for the American colonies, service in the Continental army, ...

There is an unresolved stand-off between ontological naturalism and phenomenological thought regarding the question whether normativity can be reduced to physical entities. While the ontological naturalist line of thought is well established in analytic philosophy, the phenomenological reasoning for the irreducibility of normativity has been largely left ignored by proponents of naturalism. Drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Schütz, Stein and others, I reconstruct a phenomenological argument according to which natural science (as the foundation of naturalization projects) is itself (...) a part of the essentially normative life-world to the effect that ontological naturalism faces a bootstrapping problem. I aim to demonstrate that this stand-off is grounded in a deep disagreement about the possibility of reduction. I close by arguing that this deep disagreement turns on the question which conception about the nature of (natural) science is true. This result pits a perfectionist model of science (implied by ontological naturalism) against a pragmatist conception of science (in favour of the phenomenological argument). The motivation is that transforming the disagreement about the controversial principle into a disagreement about conceptions of science may help to offer a foundation for different attempts at solving the stand-off. (shrink)

There is an unresolved stand-off between ontological naturalism and phenomenological thought regarding the question whether normativity can be reduced to physical entities. While the ontological naturalist line of thought is well established in analytic philosophy, the phenomenological reasoning for the irreducibility of normativity has been largely left ignored by proponents of naturalism. Drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Schütz, Stein and others, I reconstruct a phenomenological argument according to which natural science (as the foundation of naturalization projects) is itself (...) a part of the essentially normative life-world to the effect that ontological naturalism faces a bootstrapping problem. I aim to demonstrate that this stand-off is grounded in a deep disagreement about the possibility of reduction. I close by arguing that this deep disagreement turns on the question which conception about the nature of (natural) science is true. This result pits a perfectionist model of science (implied by ontological naturalism) against a pragmatist conception of science (in favour of the phenomenological argument). The motivation is that transforming the disagreement about the controversial principle into a disagreement about conceptions of science may help to offer a foundation for different attempts at solving the stand-off. (shrink)

Il est difficile, après avoir écrit tout un livre sur le thème de la différence sexuelle, d’apporter de nouvelles preuves pour défendre les points de vue qu’Annick Jaulin met en question dans le numéro 14 de CLIO, Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés. Elle a raison d’affirmer que l’usage que je fais de la catégorie de « genre » dans l’examen des sources prémodernes, est confus et peut-être inapproprié. J’ai moi-même essayé de le suggérer autant que faire se peut. Le mot lui- (...) même a longtemps été util... (shrink)